“What kind of thing?” I pushed, feeling sick and agitated. It took most of my self-control not to get up and pace.
“There’s blood on it. All over it.” Her breathing hitched. “Oh god, it’s from the- It’s got the words on it, Darren. ‘E-everyone crawls in the end’, oh god.”
I swore under my breath. “Take a breath, honey, okay? Deep breath. We’ll sort it out. It’ll be alright.”
“It’s from the bakery,” she said, softer.
“Bakery? What bakery?”
“The one I went to yesterday. God, they’re following me. They followed me there.”
“We’ll find them,” I promised, my hand clenched around the phone hard enough that the plastic creaked. “I’ll come right over there now. Just sit tight. I won’t be ten minutes, alright?”
I heard her take a deep breath. “Forget what I said, I-I’ll bring it to the station, the lab. You don’t need to-”
“Sam, hey, easy. I’ll come and pick you up, okay? You don’t have to do it on your own.”
“I’m okay, I’m okay,” she said, seeming to try to convince herself too. “I’ll take a minute, and then I’ll be fine. I’m sorry for-”
“Don’t apologise.” I checked the time on my watch, seeing how close to the end of the day it was. It was near three. “Look, I can talk to my boss. I’ll meet you when you get to the station, and we’ll take the afternoon off, okay?”
Stephen was giving me a pointed look that I knew the meaning of immediately. No way would Gaskell approve of that.
“No, no.” I could hear Sam moving around on the other end of the line. “I’ll be okay. I just panicked. I’m sorry. It’s one thing to deal with it at work… I never expected to find it at home.”
“It came through the letterbox, right?” I checked, feeling cold at the thought that the killer knew where Sam lived and wanted to threaten her. But I didn’t have time to pick through the implications before Sam spoke again.
“Yeah, yes, it did. I’m really okay. We’ll meet up tonight, if you’re free?”
“Of course. I’ve got no plans, but I’d cancel them all if I did,” I promised, wishing that we could skive off for the afternoon and I could make sure that she was really okay.
“You’re sweet,” she told me fondly. “I better go. Thanks, Darren, really.”
“Anytime.”
She hung up, and I looked at the phone as I lowered it from my ear. Already my head was spinning with thoughts of the killer sending threats to Sam. I didn’t know what it said, of course, if anything, but just the fact that it had turned up at her house was worrying.
First, Keira and Robbie in danger, now Sam. I would do all I could to keep them safe. I only hoped that it would be enough.
Seventeen
I was barely awake when the station called and certainly not braced for any more bad news, though perhaps I should’ve expected it.
“Another one?” I repeated blankly. It sunk in slowly, and I swore, dropping a hand to cover my face.
“What’s wrong?” Sam said, stirring at my side.
I dragged myself up to seated. “I’ll be right there, sir. We’ll need to get the- the blood tested against- Aye, that. Alright. Yes, sir.”
I hung up, resting my phone against my chest for a minute as I tried to drag myself into the waking world, which was significantly less pleasant than the warm comfort Sam and I had cocooned ourselves in.
“Another murder?” She propped up on her elbow and looked at me, already more awake than I was.
“Aye,” I sighed, pinching the bridge of my nose. “People are dying, Sam, and I’m not- it feels like we haven’t done anything. Just… useless. We haven’t-”
“Hey, hey,” she interrupted with infinite gentleness and leaned over to hold me. “Let’s get up and get some coffee, okay? Everything seems worse when you’re tired.” She kissed me gently. “You’ve made progress. No-one could’ve done a better job than you and Stephen. You’re close to cracking it, I know you are.”
I smoothed her rumpled hair down and tucked it behind her, appreciating her support more than I could say. I wasn’t sure I believed her, though.
“We’re too slow,” I said, dragging myself out of bed and moving over to the wardrobe to pull out my work clothes. I needed to do some more washing, but there was a clean shirt for today, at least.
“The killer’s left you nothing to work with,” Sam countered, the bed creaking as she got up, too.
“You could have another half an hour in bed.”
“I know. I want to eat breakfast with you.” She gave me a peck on the cheek before heading off to the bathroom, and I watched her go with a fond smile.
It was more than the bodies that kept turning up, as awful as it was, I thought as I hurried downstairs to get the coffee on. After that threat had turned up, and what she had told me about it, I was afraid for Sam. The thought of her being in danger left me agitated, worrying that through my imperfect actions, I’d put her in harm's way, and it would be my fault if anything happened to her.
Sam and I couldn’t linger over breakfast as usual since I had to get to the station as soon as possible, but we shared a couple of minutes before I headed out. Frost had come down in the night, and I wasted several minutes scraping the windows of the car before I could leave for work.
The body had been found by the river early in the morning by a jogger out before dawn. Forensics had already surveyed the scene and taken the victim away by the time Gaskell had called me, so he’d ordered me to come straight to the station.
“The PM will be rushed through,” he told me grimly. He was standing behind his desk, leaning over to rest his hands on it. I’d never seen him looking so uneasy. “I want your full attention, your absolute full attention on this, Mitchell, d’you hear me?”
“Yes, sir.”
A knock on the door made Gaskell and I turn, and Stephen showed himself in. His eyes were puffy, like he’d been asleep only minutes ago, and he clearly hadn’t managed to run a comb through his hair yet. I expected I didn’t look much better.
Gaskell looked at Stephen for a long moment, before his gaze turned to me. He seemed on the edge of saying something more, but finally shook his head.
“Go on, then. Get on with it.”
We saw ourselves out. I wished badly that I’d had the time to fit in a hard, fast run this morning, because right now, I was so agitated that I was struggling to think straight. But we didn’t have the time; there wasn’t time for any damn thing. If the pattern continued the same, it was only a matter of time before another dead body, heralded by the bloody threat sent to Sam, and I couldn’t bear there being a fifth. Four was far, far too many innocent people already.
“What do you want to do?” Stephen asked, looked tired and frayed.
I rubbed my hands together and gave up trying to sit still, getting up to pace back and forth in front of my desk. My aches and pains from Friday were still there, but it helped to keep moving and not let them seize up.
“The PM is happening later today, but I’m not holding out hope for that,” I thought aloud. “We need to confirm that the bottle of blood we received-”
“Matches the body’s DNA, yeah,” Stephen finished, already nodding.
“Give Leeds a call and get them to put the DNA in the system as soon as possible, okay? Our lab can compare the blood in the bottle against it from here.”
Stephen did as I asked him, and I continued to walk back and forth. We’d need an ID for the new body, though I could guess what sort of person it would be; middle-aged, male, successful.
“I let them know. They said they’d hopefully have it on the system by midday,” Stephen told me, and I made a noise of acknowledgement.
“The threat that Sam got yesterday, she took it to the lab,” I carried on my train of thought aloud. “We’ll have a look at it, see whether they’ve had a go at analysing it.”
“There was blood on it, wasn’t there?”
“Aye,” I
said, wishing it wasn’t so.
Sam and I hadn’t ended up talking much about it when I finally got to see her in the evening, and I was struggling to think about why it had been sent to her, rather than the station, even though I knew that I needed to.
At first glance, the lab seemed deserted, and I sighed. It was still early, and I knew that Sam wasn’t in yet, though she’d be driving over now. But her colleague, whose name I had never found out, was there, moving around quietly in the dim light. He seemed to work on something, and I shared a glance with Stephen before knocking lightly on the door.
He looked up, and I was sure his expression went cold when he looked at me.
“DCI Mitchell,” he said flatly, only then glancing over at Stephen. “DI Huxley.” He didn’t ask how he could help us, and I cleared my throat, stepping into the room despite the lack of invitation.
“The threat that was delivered to Sam- uh, Ms Rosanes yesterday, have you had chance t-”
“Not yet. I do have other work to get done, you know.”
“Well, make it a priority,” I said, struggling not to snap at him. “We’re looking at another murder.”
“Fine.”
“Can I see it?” I asked, when he didn’t seem inclined to offer anything else.
He grudgingly moved away, gesturing me impatiently over to the bench where he put the letter down with his gloved hands. It said the same as the other threats, but someone had liberally painted it with blood rather than the smear present on the others.
Everyone crawls in the end.
Reading it still sent a chill down my back, which was precisely what the killer wanted, I thought grimly. As Sam had told me, it was printed on a used paper bag from the bakery round the corner.
“The handwriting, does it-?”
“I’m not a handwriting expert.”
“Okay,” I said, exasperated. “Is there anything you can tell us?”
“No,” he said, after a long pause. “Not until I’ve put the blood through analysis.”
“Wonderful,” I muttered, and walked away, fed up with his attitude. I heard Stephen say something to the bloke before he followed me out.
“You didn’t have to be rude.”
“Me? Rude? What about him?”
“Be the bigger man, Mitch,” Stephen admonished.
“Thanks a bunch.” I shook my head and focused back on the case. “We could look at the bakery cameras, but we don’t have the foggiest idea who we’d be looking for, do we?”
“No,” Stephen said, after a pause of hesitation.
“I need more coffee,” I concluded, after I failed to come up with something else we could crack on with.
In the break room, I moved about, fetching ground coffee and a tea bag to make Stephen a drink too. The ritual, even more than the boost of caffeine I got from actually drinking the coffee, helped unstick my thoughts when I reached a block.
“Alright,” I said, putting his mug down a bit too hard and sloshing some tea over the edge. He sent me a reproachful look and mopped it up with his hankie while I went on. “I’m going to call the hospital, see if they have any news for us on Keira’s brother, or that nurse who was caught on the cameras.”
“And me?”
“I want you to do a bit of ringing around. Try Abe Muldoon at Exeter, okay? Just be straight with him and see if he’ll tell you anything useful.”
“Really? You think he’ll say something?” Stephen said, looking doubtful.
“I don’t know, but I think it’s worth a shot,” I pushed on. “After that, try some of the victims’ relatives, anyone an officer hasn’t spoken to. This threat to Sam, whoever sent it knew she went to that bakery.” My mouth twisted in a grimace as I spoke, and I wished that she hadn’t gotten dragged into this. “They were following her. See whether any of the victims mentioned being followed before they died, okay?”
“Alright.” Stephen had been making a brief note of my instructions on his notepad, but he looked up now. “Why did they send a threat to Sam?” His expression was hesitant, like he knew I’d been trying not to think about it.
“They must know I’m the DCI of the case, and that I care for her,” I said grimly, which I knew Stephen had guessed for himself. “I was at the press conference, wasn’t I? That was shown on the local news.”
“Or maybe they found out that she works in the lab. She helped with identifying the blood on the first threat, I would think.”
“Or that,” I agreed. Though, narcissistic as it might be, I was inclined to think that the threat against Sam had really been a threat against me, telling me to stop the investigation or else Sam would get hurt.
“What about my family?”
I looked up sharply. “What d’you mean?”
“If the killer is targeting your loved ones, why shouldn’t they target mine?”
“Aye, you’re right.” I swore quietly. “We can get an officer put outside your door, I should hope?”
“Alright. We’ll talk about it later. Annie’s not at home today, and the kids are at school. They should be fine.”
“I’m sure there are,” I agreed, though Stephen’s worry was bleeding into my own. How much of our lives was this case going to invade? I thought wearily.
But we had work to do, and if I spent my time worrying about the repercussions of things I couldn’t change, I’d never help anyone at all. The next hour was taken up with talking on the phone to the hospital, being passed between various different staff as I persisted with my questions until I got some answers. Perhaps it would have been quicker, all in all, if I’d drive over to speak to them in person, but I hadn’t wanted to waste time on driving with so much at stake.
Stephen had finished up with his phone call to Muldoon sometime earlier and had moved on to talking to the victims’ families and friends, when he could get hold of them.
“Any news?” he asked me after he’d finished one of his calls.
“Aye,” I said distractedly as I made a hurried note of all that the hospital had told me before I forgot it. “They identified what caused the seizure in Robbie Adams.”
“Really? What?”
“Bleach.”
“What?” Stephen repeated. “Seriously?”
“It was injected straight into his IV, a lethal quantity of it. It’s been dripping into him since Sunday,” I explained grimly. “It would’ve caused him a lot of pain, but it was mixed with a sedative, so he wasn’t awake to raise the alarm.”
“That’s what he was given, then, and what triggered the seizure. Wasn’t he poisoned with it hours before he had the seizure, though?”
“Almost twelve hours earlier, yeah, but the reaction was delayed. He’s not doing well.”
“Hell, we didn’t call Keira this morning, did we?”
“No. Robbie’s got liver failure. He might not make it.”
Silence sat between us as I went back to making notes, and Stephen processed what I’d said.
“They’ve identified that the nurse wasn’t an employee,” I went on, after a while. “They don’t know who he is yet, though. He keeps his head down, and they haven’t got his face on camera. He’s got dark hair, but that could’ve been dyed.”
“And, he could be an accomplice, not the killer himself,” Stephen added, rubbing a hand over his face.
I turned towards him. “What about you? Did Muldoon say anything?”
“Not as such. He was reluctant to say anything, really, just like when we were there.”
“But?” I asked, sensing that there was more.
“But, once I told him about the new killings, he seemed to change his tune. He said he was sorry about the murders, and he sounded like he meant it. He still didn’t want to talk, so I told him about his wife, about how she couldn’t believe he’d done it, and how we didn’t think he’d done it either.” Stephen sent me a glance, seeming to ask if it was alright that he shared so much with a convicted killer.
“I told you to be straight with him,
” I reassured him. “Did that make a difference?”
“He started crying. He kept saying that he didn’t want to. I tried to get more out of him, but he kept saying he was scared, and that he couldn’t. He was talking so quietly at this point that I could hardly hear him. He seemed terrified that someone would overhear him.”
“Blackmailed,” I said, as Stephen and I shared a significant look. Stephen nodded, agreeing with me.
“That’s what I think. I don’t know if he did the killings, but was blackmailed into it, or if he just confessed wrongly to them, but he was clearly scared out of his skin about someone coming after him.”
“If someone blackmailed him, the nurse could’ve been too,” I concluded.
“And Robbie.”
“But, equally, either of them could be the actual killer. We don’t know how involved they are in it all. Are they visiting the bakery to get the paper bag themselves? Did they go to Cornwall to get the pasty bag for the first threat in person?”
“I could check the CCTV outside the York bakery?” Stephen offered. “See if there’s a bloke with dark hair hanging around.”
“Before you do that, did anything come from talking to the relatives?”
“No, sorry. They didn’t know anything about the victims being followed, if they were.”
“Alright,” I sighed. “Try that CCTV, then.”
“The nurse’s shape and height would roughly match the riverside CCTV,” Stephen mused. “I mean, not that that’s conclusive, since we never saw a face on either set of cameras.”
“Correct on both points,” I agreed after a pause. “I guess it all helps.” We kept getting these small pieces of information, I thought irritably, when what we really needed was a solid breakthrough.
My desk phone rang before I could get started on something else, and I picked it after the first ring, hoping for something that could help us. The call was from Leeds, and I listened closely, finishing it up in under a minute.
“What was that?” Stephen's attention was on me, and I gave him a tentative smile.
“Hopefully good news, for once. The full postmortem is still not due till this afternoon, but a brief look found something under the victim’s nails. They’re analysing it now, but it could be the killer’s skin.”
Snakes in the Grass (A DI Mitchell Yorkshire Crime Thriller Book 5) Page 18