Trial by Execution

by T. M. E. Walsh

  ‘The scum we help put away don’t always come from a bad background, child abuse or poverty, or whatever else the do-gooders like to add to justify why someone turned out bad. You know that.’

  ‘No need to lecture me about it, Fletch, I know.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But… I can’t help thinking that Ivy and Rupert Knox must have known something was going on with their son. There must have been warning signs and I think their arrogance to that fact made them ignore it. Knox himself was in possession of other pornography – torture porn - need I remind you of that?’

  Stefan held her gaze. ‘It was legal.’

  ‘Barely.’ She shook her head and gave him the look that he knew so well by now. Think of Melody. Your daughter.

  When she saw the look of acknowledgement register on his face, she rose from her seat and swiftly changed the subject. ‘Danika’s been on the phone. Said Tilly’s postmortem will take place early tomorrow morning, so I’ll be late in.’

  Her face fell at the realisation she’d have to see Tilly’s wounds again, up close and personal.

  The feeling of dread left her feeling raw inside.

  CHAPTER 25

  As Adam Crowley headed up the drive towards his house, his girlfriend, Debbie, opened the front door before he could put the key in the lock. She brandished the wireless house phone at him, clearly in a rush.

  ‘Your editor’s on the phone,’ she said, irritation in her voice. ‘Said she’s been trying your mobile for the last fifteen minutes.’ She backed away from the front door, allowing him over the threshold.

  ‘I was driving,’ he said, shutting the front door behind him.

  Debbie shoved the phone at him. ‘Whatever it is, she says it can’t wait, and I’m now late for work,’ she said, and disappeared down the hall to retrieve her shoes.

  ‘Where’s the fire, Shelia?’ Crowley said, pressing the phone to his ear.

  ‘Answer your phone next time!’ She paused a beat. ‘I’ve only had Rupert Knox on the phone, haven’t I?’

  Crowley started. ‘Shit.’ He grabbed a pen from his jacket pocket, poised to write on the back of his hand, securing the phone between his shoulder and ear. ‘I’ve been leaving him messages all day. Figured it was a lost cause. What did he say?’

  Debbie brushed past him, left a fleeting kiss on his cheek and disappeared out the door.

  ‘He said he finally wanted to give his side of the story, now that Ivy’s gone,’ Shelia said.

  Crowley smiled. ‘He asked for me personally?’

  ‘He did… surprisingly.’

  ‘Great!’ He scribbled on his hand to get the ink flowing. ‘When and where?’

  She paused. ‘Here’s the thing… he wanted to do it at your house.’

  Crowley’s brow furrowed. ‘What?’

  ‘Yes, unconventional, but you did interview The Three at your house, and Rupert Knox insisted.’

  ‘You didn’t give him my address, did you?’

  A heavy sigh came down the phone.

  ‘Shelia, tell me you didn’t give out my address?’

  She bristled. ‘Look, that was the deal-clincher. Otherwise it was a no-go and he takes his story elsewhere.’

  ‘Bloody hell…’

  ‘Take it or leave it, Crowley.’ She listened to his breathing down the line and her voice softened. ‘This will be the scoop of the year, it’s going to take you places… and I confess, I’m all eaten up with jealousy right now.’

  Crowley allowed a smile to pull at the corners of his mouth. ‘When you put it like that… What time is he coming?’

  ‘He just said to expect him early tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Not tonight?’

  ‘Jesus, Crowley, ten seconds ago you were about to bust my balls over giving the man your address, and now you’re chomping at the bit… Don’t forget, he’s just lost his wife, too.’

  ‘He lost Ivy years ago, the day Knox was sent down, and I don’t want anyone else to get in there first. I’ve been chasing Rupert Knox for nearly two years. I’m damned if I’m going to get sloppy now.’

  He chewed on the end of the pen, and his insides pulled tight as the realisation took hold of his body. The scoop of the year, he thought. Maybe even the next decade.

  After he’d ended his call with Shelia, he warmed up the meal Debbie had made him earlier in the microwave, but barely ate a thing. He was just too excited. He sat in the living room afterwards, glass of water in hand – not wine. He wanted to be completely fresh and ready for when Rupert Knox came knocking the next day.

  After an hour of preparing his notes, he went up to bed. Debbie was on the night shift and he usually missed having her beside him, but tonight was different. Tonight he relished having the whole bed to himself as he drifted off to sleep, content in the certainty that he was at the start of something big.

  *

  19th April

  Crowley needn’t have set his alarm because he was wide awake at 5:30 am, a good hour before he was due to get up. He stayed in bed, going over his notes and checking the latest updates on the news on his laptop for another hour.

  He pulled on his thick dressing-gown and flipped the heating on before heading downstairs. The morning was colder than usual for the middle of April. When he entered the kitchen he saw through the window that a light frost lay on the grass outside and he shivered involuntarily.

  He made himself a coffee and let himself outside for a cigarette. Debbie had banned smoking in the house in a vain attempt to make him give up.

  The light was hazy, but it looked like it would be another bright, if crisp, day. He jumped as a crow squawked from somewhere in the garden.

  Crowley’s house was an end-of-terrace that backed on to a small alleyway, just five feet wide, that allowed access to his back garden and those of his neighbours. Rows of back gardens belonging to houses in the next street lined the other side.

  Two large trees marked the entrance to the alley, and it was those trees that caught Crowley’s eye right now.

  The thick branches of one always hung over his six-foot garden fence. When his five-year-old niece came over, she always asked when he was going to install a hammock in it, just for her. He wasn’t sure his sister would approve of her little princess swinging from a tree.

  But something swung from that tree today.

  Something that Crowley tried hard to focus on as he began to walk closer, discarding what remained of his cigarette on the frost-bitten ground.

  He saw the crow he had heard earlier land on something, its beak pecking, feathers ruffling.

  The air was still, no noise except what came from the bird ahead of him, feathers the colour of tar.

  No other noise except for a tree branch that slowly creaked under a dead weight.

  At first Crowley thought someone had slung a black bin sack of rubbish in the tree and it’d got caught in the branches that hovered over the garden fence.

  Then the rubbish bag turned, stirred by the crow and its relentless pecking.

  It was then Crowley saw.

  His icy fingers lost their grip on the handle of the coffee mug. It shattered at his feet. Large, sharp edges of china crunched under his slippered feet as he drew closer to the tree, his lips parted, not quite believing what he was seeing.

  What he thought was a black bin sack became a long black coat, all that covered a figure that was stiff and tinged blue and purple.

  Crowley stopped at its feet, which dangled not far from his head, and looked up.

  He hadn’t been mistaken second time around, despite wishing he had been.

  It was a body of a man.

  He hung from a makeshift noose fashioned from rope fastened to a thick branch above. The crow was perched on the man’s shoulder, claws digging all the way through the cloth and piercing flesh.

  Crowley took a step forward and the crow cawed at him, angry to have been disturbed. It flew to another branc
h higher up, splayed feet pushing off the hanging body, so it swayed in its wake.

  As the body swung around to face him, Crowley took a step back when he realised who it was.

  He stared up into half-eaten dead eyes that bulged from the sockets. He stared at a dark, bloated tongue that hung out from the lopsided mouth that belonged to Rupert Knox.

  Crowley looked him over from head to toe. Rupert’s bare legs were a marbled mix of white and blue, save for a strip of blood that had run down and dried on one leg. Wherever the wound, it was hidden under the long coat.

  Crowley shuddered to think where the cut had been made.

  When he had called the Heart of Haverbridge office the day before, Rupert had promised it was time to give his side of the story and it had to be for Adam Crowley’s eyes and ears only.

  Rupert had kept his word in a very macabre sense.

  The last thing he had done before letting himself drop from the tree was to pin a handmade sign to the front of his coat.

  A message written by his own hand in his own blood.

  A message just for Crowley.

  It read, Here is my story…

  CHAPTER 26

  The incident room was fairly quiet for this time in the morning, Claire’s colleagues having not long since taken over from the night team.

  Elias had been particularly subdued after he’d returned with Claire from Tilly Hartley’s postmortem. He’d stared at Tilly’s body laid out on the cold slab in front of him and it had brought home to him the extent of cruelty of the killer they were dealing with and he had regretted his outburst the previous day.

  Claire had remained largely silent while the PM was taking place, her eyes rarely leaving the carved flesh of Tilly’s mouth and cheeks. Photographs of Tilly’s face were pinned up on the boards at the front of the incident room, but even looking at them didn’t truly bring home the horror of the act. You had to see it to really feel the extent of the savagery of it.

  It was something that would stay with Claire for a long time, and never really leave her. Now she understood what it must have been like for Simon when he was SIO on the Dahlia Rapist investigation.

  At the thought of her ex-husband, Claire found herself softening towards him, a sensation she’d never really felt during their brief marriage. Some of his faults, his mannerisms that she’d once put down to him being somewhat eccentric, she now appreciated were a direct result of catching Raymond Knox and seeing the horror of his depraved mind.

  Claire felt Elias’s presence beside her before she turned to look at him.

  ‘Just when I think I’ve seen the worst in front of my eyes, that nothing will ever top it,’ he said, ‘something else comes along and just…’ He trailed off. ‘I’m sorry about what I said yesterday.’

  Claire looked at him.

  ‘I was out of line… I’ve never seen anything like what was done to Tilly… not up close and personal like that.’

  Claire nodded, silently accepting his apology, but couldn’t bring herself to speak. As much as she tried to put aside personal feelings in this job, sometimes she was severely tested. She wanted this killer more than she’d ever wanted anyone. The killer had sent out a message to the masses that when the law doesn’t work the way you think it should, then violence is the only option. As much as she understood that anger, it went against everything she believed in as an officer.

  She turned to her team and began the brief.

  ‘Until Tilly’s mother formally IDs the body, we have yet to confirm to the press who she is.’

  An expectant silence fell on the room.

  ‘Tilly Hartley died of mass haemorrhaging caused by the lacerations to her face,’ Claire said. Many of her team looked to the photographs on the board behind her.

  ‘The likely instrument used is consistent with something like a Stanley knife. This murder bears many similarities to the Knox crime scene.’

  ‘It was committed by the same person,’ Harper said.

  Claire nodded. ‘Aside from the fact that the cuts to Tilly’s face were almost identical to those on Knox, undoubtedly inflicted by the same blade, a boot print was found at the park just outside the entrance to the children’s play area where we believe Tilly was taken.’

  She paused. ‘It was made by the same shoe that made the print that was found beside Knox’s body in Haverbridge wood.’

  A few low murmurings rose among the team.

  ‘Knox was violently stabbed first,’ Stefan said. ‘He was incapacitated before his face was cut. Tilly wasn’t.’

  ‘Tilly was slight in stature,’ Claire said. ‘Knox was stronger, physically more of a threat. The killer wouldn’t have taken the risk that Knox could have fought back, and easily escaped. The killer had to put Knox down, allowing them time to carve up his face. Tilly had ligature marks around her wrists. She was likely restrained when her face was cut, and those restraints were clearly adequate.’

  Elias felt uneasy beside her. He shifted on his feet. ‘She was likely awake when it was done, too,’ he said.

  ‘The poor girl,’ Jane said. ‘Would’ve been a small mercy if she’d passed out from the shock and the pain.’

  A few nodded in reflection at her words.

  ‘There were no defence wounds on Tilly,’ Claire continued, ‘although there’s evidence she struggled against the bonds at her wrists, breaking the skin. She experienced the fear of what was to come.

  ‘We have one more piece of evidence. Chalk residue was found on Tilly’s clothes. Samples have been taken but we’ll have to wait a few weeks for the results to come back in. Her mother assures us there is no chalk in the house, so we need to find where this came from.’

  Claire turned her attention to Matthews at the side of the room. ‘Is the CCTV footage still being reviewed?’

  He nodded. ‘We picked Tilly up at the local shops before she headed in the direction of the park. That’s all we have so far.’

  ‘Keep an eye out for vehicles in the area of the park and neighbouring streets around the time she disappeared. Carry on with the door-to-doors.’

  The phone in Claire’s office started to ring and Stefan went to answer it while Claire carried on.

  ‘He’s done what?’

  Stefan’s raised voice travelled from her office and everyone paused. Claire saw that Stefan’s face was pale. He looked up at her then, gestured for her that she needed to take the call.

  ‘Elias,’ she said, turning to face him. ‘Can you continue, please?’

  She thrust her notes into his hands and, when she went into her office, shut the door after her.

  A few minutes later, when Claire and Stefan came out of her office, everyone in the team looked expectant.

  Claire sighed heavily and rubbed her forehead as a headache began to surge through her temples.

  ‘Rupert Knox,’ she said. ‘His body has been found.’

  Nobody in the team spoke for several seconds.

  ‘His body?’ Elias said. ‘Tell me he hasn’t been…’

  ‘Murdered?’ Claire cut in. ‘No… He committed suicide in the early hours of the morning. Hung himself… from a tree overlooking Adam Crowley’s garden.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Are we sure it’s a suicide?’ Matthews said.

  Claire nodded. ‘He left Crowley a message.’ When she explained, none of them looked too surprised.

  ‘What do we do? It can’t be a coincidence this happened on Crowley’s property,’ Elias said.

  Claire paused. ‘We’ll liaise with the coroner’s office and we’ll need to take a statement from Adam Crowley, collect any evidence. Looks like Rupert Knox gave Crowley his biggest story yet.’

  CHAPTER 27

  20th April

  It was 7 am, the sky a dark mass of grey, when Sylvie Broadbent stifled a yawn as she walked down her garden path. Her dressing gown was wrapped tight around her aching body, a brown wheelie bin thudding against the uneven
concrete behind her.

  Her thin, bony fingers clutched the recycling bin handles tight as she struggled with the weight of the garden waste inside.

  The air felt heavy, damp, and Sylvie stopped at the boundary to her house to pull a tissue from her dressing-gown pocket and blew her nose. ‘Bloody weather,’ she said, as her neighbour to the right of her house appeared, pulling his brown bin.

  ‘Morning,’ Clive Marshall said, as he edged his bin to the boundary at the end of his front garden. ‘Hay fever?’

  Sylvie’s eyes flicked towards him, and he gestured towards her tissue.

  ‘The damp.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘And muggy with it. Plays havoc with my breathing.’ She batted a fly as it whizzed around her head. ‘And I’m sick of the flies we get with the new fortnightly collections.’

  Clive grinned. ‘Council cuts for you.’ He gestured towards the house the other side of Sylvie’s. ‘She putting her bin out or what?’

  Sylvie sniffed, pocketed her tissue and pulled a face. ‘That bin’s been there since last Monday. I think she got the week’s collection mixed up, silly bint.’

  Clive glanced at the boundary of the other woman’s house and frowned. ‘Do you think I should wheel it down for her?’

  Sylvie pulled a face and waved her hand in indifference. ‘It’s down to Helena if she wants her bin emptied. I’m sick of telling her.’

  Clive’s eyes moved away from Sylvie’s, back to the brown bin standing beside Helena Daniels’ side gate.

  He pulled a face at the number of flies that were swarming around the top of the closed lid. Then his eyes swept over the rest of the front of the house. The curtains were drawn; no windows were open that he could see. An eerie stillness seemed to lie over the house.

  ‘Is she on holiday?’ he said at length.

  Sylvie shrugged. ‘Don’t know. Maybe, but who would she go away with? I tried knocking when the flies started appearing – they keep coming in my kitchen window – wrote her a note and put it through her door in the end. She doesn’t even speak to me any more, not since I told her what for.’