Basic Element: A dark gipping detective thriller (Crane and Anderson Book 2)

by Wendy Cartmell

  On the kitchen table was evidence of her nocturnal wanderings; the cool bag containing the sandwiches she’d not eaten and the empty flask. The wig lay like a small cat curled into itself on the chair and her large bag was slung over the back of the other chair, the unread paperback hanging halfway out of it. Theresa grabbed the lot and dumped it in the bin.

  Realising what she’d done and retrieving her handbag and double checking it, she saw her purse was in there, which she rescued, but she decided the rest of it could go, diary and all. She just wasn’t cut out to be a private eye, or female sleuth, or whatever the hell they called them these days. It was by turns too stressful and too boring and too expensive a pastime, which had led her absolutely nowhere. Anyway, she had a more pressing problem. She decided the kitchen needed cleaning again. There were water stains on the draining board, and she could see a scattering of crumbs where she’d missed the bin when dumping her uneaten toast yesterday morning. That was something she could control. A situation she could change and more importantly, make better. Once she’d had her tea, she’d better get to it.

  Wandering into the front room, holding her mug, she stayed standing and picked up the television remote. Clicking it on, the familiar face of the breakfast programme presenter was relaying the headline news story. As Theresa watched transfixed, the mug slipped out of her fingers and fell to the floor, cascading scalding hot tea in its wake.

  It was the burning on her legs that brought her round and she yelped at the pain. Running into the kitchen she grabbed a couple of tea towels. Hopping from one leg to the other and squeaking, she returned to the lounge and put a tea towel down on the carpet to try and blot up the tea and then running back to the kitchen, rinsed the other under the cold water tap. After squeezing it out she returned to the television, sitting down on the sofa and placing the cool, damp towel against her hot skin.

  She had to wait ten minutes before the headline story was repeated, during which time she stared at the flat screen on the wall, afraid to take her eyes away for even a moment, just in case she missed the piece again. She was sure she’d just heard a third body had been found. Another victim of the Choker. A young woman dead. This time in Southampton.

  Holly

  Holly’s eyes had lit up at the laptop brought in by Crane and Anderson earlier. Her fingers were flying over the keys. But she didn’t seem to be getting very far.

  “Please, please,” she kept muttering as she grappled with cracking the machine’s password. Charlie’s password had been found on the list taped to his computer desk. Sally’s had been relatively easy to find out as she’d used her surname. But Dawn’s was proving slightly trickier.

  “Ciaran,” she shouted.

  “I’m only here, Holly,” he admonished.

  “Oh,” Holly looked up and saw him sitting opposite her. “So you are, sorry. Can you just pass me the file you’ve got on Dawn Murray, please?”

  “Having trouble?”

  “Just a tad. But it’s nothing I can’t handle,” she said defensively.

  “I know, I know, chill. Here it is.”

  “Thanks, and um, sorry,” Holly said before she buried her nose in the file. There weren’t many things she couldn’t crack and she wasn’t going to be beaten by a password. Most people used names of family, pets, houses, work, mates etc., as passwords. And if numbers were required as well, they tended to use their house number, or date of birth, or even their National Insurance number. It wouldn’t take long, she was sure of it.

  She’d already poked around a lot in Sally and Charlie’s S-Dates accounts. So far she hadn’t found any friend matches on both those accounts, but there were a few people that Sally, at least, had become rather involved with. She didn’t really expect to find details of liaisons, she was sure their killer was more sophisticated and mindful of laying a trail than that. No doubt any further chats would have been moved to other means of communication and the telling private messages deleted as soon as they were read.

  She was counting on the company behind S-Dates giving her details of any users she identified as being of interest to them, thereby falling under suspicion in a murder investigation.

  “Come on!” she shouted as she succeeded in unlocking the laptop and there on the home screen of Dawn’s computer, was the beautiful S-Dates logo.

  Looking up she saw the DI, Ciaran and Crane walking towards her desk.

  “Oh, sorry,” she said. “I shouted that out loud didn’t I?”

  Ciaran nodded. “Well?”

  “Dawn has an S-Dates account.”

  “Thank God for that,” the DI said. “Right, get on that first, Holly. I want a full search warrant request pulled together as soon as possible with names of users we are interested in. He must bloody well be in there somewhere, it’s the only point of reference we have so far between all three of them.”

  Holly had every intention of ‘getting on it’ as the DI had put it. She didn’t need to be told. But putting her bruised ego aside she smiled and said, “Yes, guv.”

  “In the meantime,” he said turning to Crane, “you and I need to fashion a press release about the third victim and I think we’ll also release the fact that this S-Dates app thingy is common to all of them.”

  “So we can ascertain if other users have been approached for this type of sexual pleasure through the site?”

  “Exactly.”

  The DI was telling Ciaran to continue with the search for Suzuki Jeeps as Holly tuned out their voices and dove once more into the shark infested pool that was S-Dates.

  Aldershot Mail Online

  Local Murder Update

  Aldershot Police have issued an update on the murder of local girl Sally Smith. They have revealed she was a member of the dating site S-Dates. Billed as the ‘go to site’ for sensual and sexual encounters, police believe this might be how Sally met her killer. No further information was forthcoming, despite repeated questioning by this newspaper. We have been drawing comparisons between Sally Smith’s murder and the killing of Charlie Keating in Portsmouth, and Dawn Murray in Southampton, but are still awaiting official confirmation there is now a serial killer on the loose in the Hampshire area.

  Needless to say we urge all our readers to stay away from S-Dates for the foreseeable future, until the Major Crimes team find this sadistic lunatic. However, if anyone has met someone through the S-Dates site that wanted sex involving auto erotic asphyxiation, then please contact the team via Crime Stoppers on 0800 111 222. They would be happy to hear from you and you could be doing your community the greatest service of all, by helping the police find and apprehend a serial killer.

  Theresa

  Even though she was expecting him, the scraping sound of Tim’s key in the door made her jump and a small, “Oh,” escaped her lips. Clamping her mouth shut, she continued scrubbing the pans in the sink.

  “Hi,” he called from the hall.

  “I’m in here,” Theresa managed to reply.

  Tim ambled into the kitchen, his hands in the pockets of his corduroy trousers and peered over her shoulder.

  “What are you doing?”

  “What does it look like? I’m washing the pans.” Theresa passed the back of her hand over her hot forehead, pushing away tendrils of hair that were sticking to her clammy skin.

  “Um, Theresa, they’re clean now.”

  Theresa lifted the one she was scrubbing out of the hot soapy water. Peering inside it she said, “No, there’s still stuff stuck on the sides.”

  “I can’t see anything.”

  “Well I can and it’s why I do the cleaning and washing up and not you,” she said, banging the pan down on the drainer.

  Seeing the look on Tim’s face made her realise he’d not seen her clean lately, as she normally had everything done before he arrived home. But after learning of the third murder that morning, this time in Southampton, the need to clean the house had been stronger than ever. Once that was finished, she’d decided to check all the pans in the cupb
oard, after needing one to make a curry and had found them in a terrible state. But she hadn’t kept track of the time. Hadn’t realised the day had slid by without her really noticing.

  Grabbing a tea towel to dry the pan and her hands, she said, “Sorry, I got a bit carried away,” and tried a smile, but was sure it came out more of a scowl, as she was having difficulty looking at her husband, never mind meeting his eye. “Anyway the curry is ready, as is the rice. Just let me just pop some bread into the oven and I’ll come through.”

  Tim looked at her askance but left the kitchen as she suggested. He returned in a few minutes with a glass of red wine.

  “I thought you might need this,” he said putting it down on the kitchen table, then left her alone once more.

  Jesus, she’d have to be more careful, she thought, as she grabbed the glass and took a larger than normal swig, which made her cough instead of calming her. But how to appear normal was the conundrum. For she had no idea what normal was anymore.

  Going through to the lounge, she was relieved to find Tim engrossed in his netbook, so she turned on the television and watched a quiz show for ten minutes until the bread was ready. She was very glad of the silence and at the lack of conversation.

  Over their meal, eaten in the kitchen as she’d never got round to laying the table in the dining room, Tim rambled on about his evening in Southampton. Talked about some social sciences study that was being done about policing and young people, which was apparently the whole point of the meeting. Theresa doubted this was true. Not that she doubted the study was real. It was just she sensed the meeting was fabricated. Either that or it could have been a meeting that had taken place at some other time.

  At last, Tim pushed away from the table and declared he was stuffed. “I fancy a bath,” he said.

  “Go on then,” Theresa said, trying not to sound too eager to have him out of the way, although she was. “I’ll clear up.”

  As she stacked the dishwasher she heard his footsteps overhead, the taps being turned on and then, finally, his exclamation of relief as he lowered himself into the hot water. Moving as quietly as possible, like a jewel thief after a prize, she entered the lounge, leaving the door open, so she could still hear Tim splashing around. Her target was his netbook. She doubted it would still be there. But it was, on the seat of the chair and open.

  She knelt down, facing the netbook nestling on the seat. The screen was dark, but as she clicked the space bar, the screen lit up. She’d often seen Tim put in his password, but had never known what it was. This time it wasn’t needed. The screen revealed his desktop. Nestled in between the icons for Word, Adobe and his internet security provider, was a symbol she had only seen once before. On the television news. It was a large capital S with smiling faces peering around it. It was the S-Dates logo.

  Theresa tried her best to stifle the scream. She stuffed her fist into her mouth and practiced the technique for controlling her breathing, whilst gnawing on her knuckles. In - two three, out - two three, in - two three, out - two three. Then she stopped and took her hand out of her mouth, afraid she was going to be sick.

  Scrabbling away from the chair, she managed to get to her feet and backed away from the netbook as though it were a ticking bomb about to explode. In fact, that was a pretty fair approximation of how she was feeling - as though her life was about to be blown to smithereens.

  She was afraid to go anywhere near it. She was afraid of what she would find if she clicked on the logo. She was afraid if she touched anything, Tim would know. And punish her for it. If he could kill others, then he could kill her. The thought made her sway on her feet.

  She glanced at the telephone. She could call 999. But then when they asked what her emergency was, she wouldn’t really know what to say. Please come and arrest my husband, I think he’s a killer but I have absolutely no evidence whatsoever. Yeah. Right. That would work. She audibly sighed. Then looked up, just in case Tim had heard her from the bathroom. That wasn’t likely, she berated herself. She had to try and hold it together.

  Still backing away from the small laptop, she found the sofa and sat down, her legs no longer able to hold her up. She sat on her hands to try and stop them trembling. She supposed she could ring the young detective; he’d always been nice to her. Not that he’d believed a word she’d said, but at least he’d never actually laughed at her. Glancing at her watch she saw it was 9pm. He wouldn’t be at work now. Didn’t the detectives work during the day? She thought so, at least from the television programmes she’d watched.

  Finally realising she was on her own and facing a night of sleepless terror, she did the only thing she could think of. As she walked upstairs, doing a pretty fair impression of a zombie, she met Tim on the landing.

  Swathed in towels he looked at her, a frown furrowing his brow. “You alright, love?”

  “No, must be a migraine or something. Thought I’d take some tablets and go to bed.”

  “Good idea, you look rather pale. And didn’t you say you’d been cleaning all day? You shouldn’t work so hard. I keep telling you that.”

  Theresa just about managed to mumble some sort of acknowledgement of his words and stumbled into the steamy bathroom. Opening the cupboard on the wall, she found her sleeping pills. On the odd occasion she’d used them, she’d only taken one. Sometimes it had worked quickly and other times it hadn’t. She needed to make sure this time, so she shook two tablets out of the tube and swallowed them with water cupped in her hands from the tap.

  Once back in the bedroom, she ignored the damp towels Tim had left all over the bed, just glad that he wasn’t still in the bedroom. Stripping off, she let her clothes fall to the floor and climbed in under the duvet. Shaking uncontrollably, as though she had a high fever, she waited for sleep to claim her.

  She could hear a buzzing sound. It had woken her up. She waved a hand around her head in case it was an insect. But it didn’t help. The buzzing persisted. Her eyes fluttered open. As the light hit them and her pupils contracted, she groaned. What had she done to her head? She felt as though she’d been on a giant alcohol bender, something she’d not done since her student days. She had a headache that felt like Thor’s hammer was pummelling her skull. She squinted in light as harsh as in any desert. Her mouth felt as though she’d completely and utterly dehydrated and had not one ounce of moisture left in her body. Then she remembered what she’d done. It was the sleeping pills. It seems she shouldn’t have taken two after all.

  But the good thing about it was she had slept through the whole night and into the next morning. She put out her arm and felt the space behind her. Tim wasn’t there. Thank goodness. The buzzing had stopped. It must have been her mobile phone. At the moment she couldn’t cope with reading any message, or returning any phone call.

  She swayed with the vertigo that gripped her as she stood and made her grope for the furniture. It took several minutes for her to get downstairs and once in the kitchen she fell on a bottle of water from the fridge, downing it in one. The water helped clear her head a little and she decided the next thing she needed was caffeine.

  Turning to the percolator she found a piece of paper propped up against it. It was from Tim.

  Didn’t want to wake you. Hope you’re feeling better!

  “Not really,” she said to the cheery note. “And I won’t do until you’ve been arrested.” Crumpling it up she put it where it belonged - in the bin.

  Despite her fumbling fingers she managed to get the coffee maker going and while she was waiting for the restorative brew to percolate, she padded into the lounge and put the television on. But she’d missed the breakfast news programme and was treated to one about doing-up houses. Snapping it to the 24 hour news channel she turned up the volume and went to get her coffee.

  But it seemed the media had moved on to bigger and better stories since yesterday and there was only the smallest of items about the murder in Southampton, which merely said the police were still looking for clues as to the identity
of the killer and anyone with any information should contact the Major Crimes Unit at Aldershot. They were particularly interested in hearing from anyone who had experience of the dating site S-Dates.

  Thinking that contacting the police was very good advice indeed, she climbed the stairs with the aid of the bannister and went to get dressed. Her limbs were still heavy and her brain fuzzy from the sleeping pills, but she managed to dress herself in jeans, a tee-shirt and a jacket and look reasonably respectable. But driving was altogether another matter. She ended up crawling along at 30 mph from her house on the outskirts of Reading to Aldershot, her hands clamped to the steering wheel, a journey which should have taken half an hour and ended up being nearer an hour.

  Managing to park in the small shopping centre car park she had to stop and buy a bottle of water before she went to the police station. Jesus, she mustn’t do that again, she thought. She hadn’t realised how potent the innocuous little pills were. No wonder people who wanted to commit suicide took them. A mouthful of those and you’d definitely go to sleep and never wake up.

  Anyway, back to the matter in hand. She now had to persuade someone to listen to her. And, more importantly, believe her.

  She walked into the building housing Aldershot Police Station with its drab, grey, concrete façade and asked for DC Ciaran Douglas, her diary clutched in one hand and her handbag in the other. She’d managed to find the diary in one of the rubbish bags in the bin outside the back door. For once she thanked the local council’s policy of only collecting the waste once every two weeks.