Class Murder

by Leigh Russell

  ‘Yes. We were at school together.’

  She explained that she and her flatmate had moved to York only three months earlier. Geraldine and Ian already knew much of what she told them, but neither interrupted her. Geraldine wondered if Stephanie had been running away from someone. Three months might be enough time for a stalker to track her down.

  ‘What brought you to York?’ she asked.

  ‘Stephanie was moving here so I applied for a transfer to York, and came here with her. We got this two-bedroomed flat. It was supposed to be fun… we were going to have fun…’

  ‘What made her decide to come here?’

  Ashley shrugged. Ian frowned as though Geraldine was posing the wrong questions, but she pressed on with her enquiry.

  ‘Is it possible she was trying to get away from someone?’

  Ashley looked startled by the suggestion, but she just shook her head.

  ‘Can you think of anyone she knew before she came to York who might have wanted to harm her?’ Geraldine persisted.

  Ashley shook her head. ‘No. She would have said. She did mention…’ she hesitated.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s probably nothing, but she did mention she had a violent boyfriend once, but that was a few years ago.’

  ‘What was his name?’

  Ashley shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. She didn’t say. We were comparing notes, you know.’

  ‘We’re studying her phone and computer records,’ Ian said. ‘Would you recognise the name if you saw it? There might be a record of him somewhere.’

  Ashley nodded. ‘I’ll try, but I don’t think she ever mentioned anything else about him. It was just a casual conversation, you know.’

  It seemed there was nothing more she could tell them. Urging her to contact them if she thought of anything else, they left her with a constable. The only possible lead they had was that the victim might have had a violent ex-boyfriend at some time in the past. It wasn’t much to go on, but it was better than nothing.

  Leaving the technical team to examine the dead girl’s laptop and smart phone, Ian and Geraldine sat down in Ian’s office to discuss the case before completing their decision logs. They both had the impression the attack had been personal. Certainly they hoped it had been. In a random assault, the killer might be more difficult to trace. Scene of crime officers were busy searching the apartment and the body was being examined by a pathologist. While they were waiting for more evidence, Ian wanted to speak to everyone who had been close to Stephanie. Her parents had been on holiday out of the country, but they had been contacted and were on their way back to England.

  ‘They were only in France,’ the borough intelligence officer told them, as though that made any real difference.

  The years seemed to roll back as Geraldine found herself working on a murder case with Ian at her side once again.

  ‘At least we have the murder weapon,’ he said. ‘And we know where it came from.’

  ‘Which hasn’t helped us. In fact, it’s made things more difficult for us.’

  ‘How so? We know the forensic team have confirmed the killer was wearing gloves, and they’ve found no match for the partial DNA sample they were able to find on the knife, but that would be the same with any murder weapon, and at least this way we don’t have to spend time and resources searching for it.’ He smiled. ‘No time wasted lifting floorboards and digging up gardens.’

  ‘But knowing it was already there means we don’t know whether this was an unpremeditated attack by someone who was in the flat anyway, or an attack planned by someone who knew in advance that the set of knives was to hand in the kitchen, or a killer who turned up already armed and chose to use a knife that was there instead of the weapon he had brought with him.’ Geraldine tried to conceal her impatience, but she couldn’t help feeling that Ian was prioritising deployment of manpower over detection. ‘Come on, you’re not thinking about this, Ian. A weapon that was already there gives us no clues at all to the killer’s identity.’

  Ian frowned. Accustomed to being the senior officer in their working relationship, Geraldine hoped she hadn’t been insolent. She needed to adapt to the fact that she was now Ian’s sergeant, and she needed to make that adjustment quickly. She wondered if it had crossed his mind that relations between them could become awkward, if they weren’t both careful. But he merely acknowledged her concerns with a nod and said nothing about her patronising tone.

  He was keen to follow up the suggestion that the dead girl had once had a violent boyfriend. Having set a constable to look into the victim’s past contacts, he ordered Geraldine back to her desk to write up her decision log. She was slightly taken aback by his peremptory tone and tried to remember if she had been similarly imperious towards him when she had been his inspector. She thought she had done her best to treat him as an equal, but when he had worked as her sergeant she had been older and more experienced than him. Now that their roles were reversed, she remained older and more experienced. Perhaps he was feeling insecure. All she could do was bite her tongue and behave as though she had never worked with him before.

  Before they left the police station at the end of the day, Ian asked Geraldine to be present when the dead girl’s parents identified the body the following morning. She was happy to agree. Although invariably painful, meeting bereaved family members sometimes revealed information about the victim’s life which could make the encounter useful. Having finalised the arrangements, she packed up her things and left, relieved to return to the quiet solitude of her new flat.

  Looking around her living room, she liked the fact that she had not yet accumulated any clutter. She had abandoned her few ornaments when she had moved, determined to keep her new flat as orderly as possible. It was part of her resolution to leave her life in London behind her. The solitary photograph she had of her mother was hidden away in the drawer beside her bed, and the one frame containing pictures of Celia and her family was displayed in the living room mainly for their satisfaction should they visit. Other than those few pictures and a small collection of books, everything in the flat was as functional and impersonal as it had been on the day she had taken up residence there.

  Having seen numerous homes crammed with possessions, she was still surprised by the quantity of junk other people hoarded.

  ‘Why do you keep all this?’ she had asked her sister, Celia, one day.

  ‘What?’

  ‘All this stuff.’

  Genuinely curious, Geraldine had pointed to a wall of shelving filled with vases, photos, books, magazines, random teapots and decorative plates, ornamental bookends, half-finished knitting, fossils and shells presumably collected from various beaches, a plastic box that Chloe must have made at school, together with all sorts of other bric-a-brac. Visibly indignant, Celia had been quick to point out that everything Geraldine dismissed as rubbish in fact had significant sentimental value, from their mother’s favourite teapot, to Chloe’s discoveries and handiwork.

  ‘I couldn’t part with any of it,’ Celia had insisted.

  Looking around her own sparsely furnished flat Geraldine felt pleased. She had the view through her window to look at; the river and sky were enough for her. She didn’t need anything else. But her gaze moved to the photograph of her sister and her niece, and her thoughts drifted to the picture of her dead mother, hidden away beside her bed. She sighed. She was no different to other people who hoarded memorabilia from their lives. It was just that she had spent most of her adult life focusing on dead strangers who left her no souvenirs.

  4

  People made such a fuss, as though it was something out of the ordinary, when in reality anyone with a modicum of sense must realise that murders were commonplace. It just suited the authorities to hush them up. Their puppets in the media were no better. Most of the population were happy to buy into the fiction that, by and large
, criminals were caught and locked up. It made everyone feel safe, which was good for maintaining order and helped protect the status quo. He didn’t mind. He had no interest in exposing the truth. Far better to let people carry on believing the police had the situation under control. It meant people were less vigilant, and that made life much easier for him.

  It didn’t take long for the police to turn up, lights flashing and sirens blaring. Men and women in uniform leapt out of their vehicles, scurried in and out of the house, stopped passersby, and put up a cordon across the street. From an upstairs window a few doors away across the road, he had a clear view of what was going on. The following day he would be gone. He had only been using the place for the weekend, watching and hoping for an opportunity to find his victim at home alone. The owners of the house he had broken into could be back at any time, but he was banking on them being away for the weekend. In the meantime he had been careful. He hadn’t removed his gloves, or touched anything in the place for fear of leaving a record of his presence. He had held his breath as he raced up the stairs and now stood by an open window, to minimise his breathing inside the house. Hopefully no one would ever discover he had been there, and the police would have no cause to search for a trace of the DNA he had inevitably left behind, in spite of his prudence.

  The uniformed officers were irrelevant. He was only interested in the plain clothes detectives. They were the ones who would be hunting for him. A few of them had been and gone. Before he had time to slip away, a new investigating team appeared: a man and a woman, both tall; the man blond, the woman dark-haired. The man arrived first. Young, broad-shouldered, with a powerful physique, from across the road he looked more like a construction worker than a police officer as he marched up the path to the front door, exuding energy. The woman arrived shortly after him. From a distance her face looked pale and beautiful, but there was something daunting about her air of authority as she strode along the pavement and up the path to the front door. Clearly she was there on business. And what other business could take her into that house just hours after a young woman had been stabbed to death there? No doubt she was a police detective come to poke about at the scene of the crime, searching for clues.

  He smiled as she disappeared through the front door. If she thought she was going to find anything that would lead her to the girl’s killer, she was going to be disappointed. Although it was true that many murderers killed to vent their feelings, not everyone was that stupid. Ordinary murderers were quickly apprehended because they lost control of their emotions and made mistakes. The cunning killers, the ones who got away with it, were the ones who plotted their actions deliberately and carefully, leaving nothing to chance. So far everything had gone according to plan, but it was important not to become complacent. The slightest slip could lead to discovery.

  As long as the police were looking for him, he had to stay one step ahead of them. He wondered how much they knew. From his post along the road, he was able to see everyone who entered and left the house. There was a period of commotion, then the front door closed for a while. After the flurry of activity, he grew bored sitting in the window for hours with the lights off, watching and waiting, but his vigilance paid off because at last the front door opened and the two detectives emerged. The man went rapidly back to his car but this time the woman walked along the drive slowly, no longer in a hurry. When she reached the gate she lingered for a moment. It looked as though she was going to turn round and go back in the house. Appearing to make up her mind, she carried on through the gate, back towards her car. Dashing down the stairs, he barely had time to leap into the car he had hired before she turned the corner and disappeared. He put his foot down.

  On the face of it, stalking a police detective was a dodgy strategy, crazy even. But in addition to superior intelligence, boldness was a characteristic ordinary killers lacked. As was patience, for that matter. Although his plan might involve many more hours of tedious watching and waiting, it would be worth it. If she was not on her way there already, eventually the dark-haired detective would go home. The more information he discovered about her, the easier it would be to find out how much the police knew about him. If his plan worked, she was going to end up helping to protect the very person she was trying to arrest for murder.

  5

  Geraldine would never have left London had the move not been forced on her. She had been confronted with a stark choice: accept a demotion and move to another police force, or resign. She had chosen to accept the offer to relocate. Although this was hardly her ideal career path, she had broken the law in an attempt to protect her twin sister, hoping to rescue her from a life of addiction. Given the choice, she would do the same again. She felt she had no choice. Helena was her twin sister, and Geraldine had promised her dying mother she would take care of her. So far Geraldine’s sacrifice appeared to have succeeded, and her sister had come through a rehabilitation programme. But Geraldine was aware that as a recovering user, her sister lived at constant risk of falling victim to her addiction again.

  Now Geraldine was making the best of her new situation as a sergeant on a new team. The next morning she went to the police station to check in with Ian and attend a briefing.

  ‘Well?’ Eileen barked. ‘You were there, Ian. Bring us all up to speed. What was your impression of Stephanie’s flatmate?’

  Ian cleared his throat. Geraldine was surprised to see he looked nervous. She had never noticed such hesitation in his demeanour when he had been working with her. They had always got on too well for that. Dismissing a flutter of anxiety, she hoped the same level of trust would develop between him and Eileen. Briefly Ian reported what he had discovered at the crime scene. He turned to Geraldine. She understood that he was waiting for her to comment but before she could start, a constable spoke.

  ‘I’ve questioned the next-door neighbours on both sides,’ she said.

  Geraldine turned to look at the speaker. In her twenties, Detective Constable Naomi Arthur was blond and slender. Although they had only been briefly introduced, somehow Geraldine wasn’t surprised to hear Naomi speak out without being asked. Young enough to be Geraldine’s daughter, she displayed an air of forceful efficiency, and had already struck Geraldine as overtly confident. Ian didn’t interrupt Naomi, and Geraldine had to wait in silence until the constable had finished her report. Naomi was succinct and clearly bright. She would probably soon be promoted to sergeant. Doing her best to suppress her bitterness at herself being demoted to sergeant, Geraldine felt a flicker of resentment at the prospect of being the same rank as a colleague so much younger and less experienced than herself. But it couldn’t be helped. She had brought her disgrace on herself and had to put up with the consequences stoically.

  After the briefing, Geraldine collected an unmarked police car and set off for the mortuary. Ian had told her only that the pathologist was pleasant and professional. Geraldine was happy to know very little about him. It would be easy to let Ian fill her in on everyone, but it was better to make up her own mind about the people she met. She found the hospital easily and made her way to the back entrance which led straight to the mortuary. A young blond woman let her in. Introducing herself as Avril, she led Geraldine along the corridor, chatting cheerfully.

  ‘Jonah’s not quite finished, but I’m sure he won’t mind you coming along to see the victim now. He’s very relaxed about things like that. He never objected to Ian coming along anyway, but everyone gets on well with Ian, don’t they? Will he be coming along later?’

  Geraldine gave a non-committal grunt.

  ‘Don’t worry about the parents,’ April went on. ‘They haven’t arrived yet, but I’ll look after them until Jonah’s ready to let them view the body. She was quite young, you know, and I think she’d only been in York for a few months. Here we are.’

  Geraldine drew her own conclusions about what Avril thought of Ian, as the young woman handed her a mask and pushed open the door. The for
ensic pathologist was humming to himself as Geraldine entered. He was a plump man in his forties, with ginger hair and pale freckled skin. When he glanced up, his blue eyes twinkled brightly at her above his pug nose.

  ‘No Ian?’ he greeted her.

  Geraldine tried not to feel peeved that both Avril and the pathologist seemed disappointed to see her in place of her colleague.

  ‘No, he was busy, but he sends his greetings,’ she fibbed.

  She knew that Ian avoided attending post mortems if he could. For a detective working on murder investigations he was surprisingly squeamish.

  ‘Oh well,’ the pathologist replied, smiling at her, ‘he wouldn’t have sent you along if you weren’t up to the job. Jonah Hetherington, at your service.’

  His tone implied that although he was prepared to make do with Geraldine, he would have preferred to see Ian.

  ‘Geraldine Steel, Ian’s sergeant,’ she replied, stopping herself just in time from introducing herself as a detective inspector. ‘So,’ she went on, turning to the cadaver, ‘what have you got for us?’ There was a slight hiatus, as though she had spoken out of turn.

  ‘We’re looking at a young woman, barely out of her teens,’ he began.

  ‘She was twenty-two.’

  ‘Exactly. She had no physical problems as far as I’ve been able to ascertain, and had suffered no serious injuries before this.’

  He pointed to the white chest, scored with several lacerations.

  ‘These are deep incisions,’ he said. ‘The murder weapon wasn’t razor sharp, so it didn’t slice easily through her chest. Whoever attacked her went at it with a will.’

  ‘Would you describe it as a frenzied attack?’ Geraldine asked, remembering her earlier conversation with Ian.

  Jonah frowned. ‘That’s a very emotive word, and I’m afraid it’s not for me to draw any conclusions about the motivation driving the attack. The blows the killer struck were extremely powerful, but it’s impossible to say whether her attacker had been whipped up into a rage, or was just determined to make sure he killed her.’