A Passion To Kill (DI Matt Barnes Book 5)

by Michael Kerr

  “Danielle decided that we didn’t have enough of the same aspirations for the relationship to move forward. That’s it in a nutshell.”

  “So she dumped you, and you didn’t accept that, did you?” Marci said.

  “That’s a rather harsh and impolite way to put it, but sadly true,” Nigel replied. “I was slightly aggrieved for a while. I’m not used to women dropping me like a hot potato.”

  “Do you recall visiting her place of work to badmouth and threaten her?” Marci pushed.

  “To my everlasting shame, yes. I’d had a few vodkas, and needed to vent my feelings. But it was purely a one-off episode. I’m now in a very serious relationship with someone else. But why all the fuss? I was under the impression that Danielle had committed suicide.”

  Pete shook his head. “No, Mr French, she was murdered, as was Jeff Goodwin previously. And we have footage of the killer entering and leaving both addresses.”

  “Then what you have on film is obviously piss poor, or you wouldn’t be here harassing me; you would know what the supposed killer looked like, and would already have him under lock and key.”

  “Our boffins are enhancing the images as we speak,” Pete said.

  “That’s bollocks,” Nigel said. “You’ve had weeks to enhance whatever footage you have from when Cooper died. This is just a witch hunt. Give me the times and dates that I seem to need an alibi for, and then you can fuck off and lean on someone else. I did not, repeat, I did not harm either of them.”

  Pete gave him the relevant times and dates, and made a note of the places he said he had been, and took the names of those that he claimed could corroborate it. He would have liked it to have been French that was responsible, but had the feeling that they were wasting their time.

  “You don’t seem to be bothered that Danielle was murdered,” Marci said as she got up to leave.

  “I’m not,” Nigel said. “Life is about moving on and getting past things. She was a blip in mine, and made the choice to cut me out of hers. It’s history. I had nothing to do with it, and so I choose to not give a rat’s arse.”

  Marci would have loved to kick him in the groin and give him something else to get past and put behind him. She gritted her teeth and held off. He would get his comeuppance; everyone did, sooner or later.

  “You didn’t take to him,” Pete said as they got back in the Mondeo.

  “He’s a narcissist with too much money. I’m sure he thinks he’s God’s gift to women.”

  “Do you think he’s the killer?”

  “No. When Danielle canned him, his pride will have been hurt. But I’m sure he’ll have decided that it was her loss and quickly got past it. The only person he really loves is the guy that smiles back at him from mirrors.”

  “That leaves us without a viable suspect.”

  “I still think it has to be someone that they worked with. If it had been a gangland hit they’d have just been shot as they got in or out of their cars, or outside their homes. A pissed-off gangster wouldn’t need to make it look like suicide.”

  Marci was right. At eleven p.m. The Suicide Killer was standing in shadow near New Segue Studios, waiting for Dominic Wilson to leave. The researcher always took a late tube from Warren Street Station on Euston Road to Golders Green on the northern line, where he rented a flat just a five minute walk from the station.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THERE were only a couple of dozen commuters standing on the platform when Dominic reached the bottom of the steps and walked towards them. He was distracted, hardly aware of his surroundings, going through the motions on automatic. He was thinking about the job he’d been given; to investigate a Tory MP who was allegedly the silent partner of a slum landlord that rented out hundreds of substandard flats and houses to those who couldn’t afford anything else.

  Cyril Brent-Soames was an Old Etonian, with no qualms whatsoever over being party to anything quasi-legal. He thought that there were no links back to him from several shady ventures that he was involved with. He needed much more than a lowly member of parliament’s salary and expenses to provide for the lifestyle that he and his wife and two daughters enjoyed. Back at the beginning of the nineties his father had lost the family fortune as a Lloyd’s name, and Cyril’s inheritance had become nonexistent.

  Dominic had started digging into the MP’s life, and had leads to follow that if backed up with evidence would ruin the politician’s life and probably put him in prison for tax evasion at the very least.

  The rumble of the approaching train became louder, and a blast of warm air preceded its appearance as it thundered out from the mouth of the tunnel and began to slow down, its brakes screeching on the rails.

  Dominic took a step nearer to the edge of the platform, and was then struck a heavy blow to his lower back that caused him to shoot forward, arms flailing as he was propelled out into thin air, to experience a moment of sheer terror before the impact with the front of the train drove him forward, to land on a live rail, with organs burst and bones broken, a second before wheels of steel decapitated him, and his head rolled along the side of the gravelled track like a plastic ball on a windy beach.

  “He jumped,” a female voice screamed, and some of the people looked to see what had happened, as others turned their heads away, not wishing to have the horrific scene recorded in their memories. None of them took any notice of the tall figure wearing a red parka who ambled back to the stairs and headed up them, to emerge from the underground maze into the fresh air and vanish into the night.

  It was the next morning when the SCU got an outside call put through to them that would subsequently be traced back to a public phone in Ilford.

  “DC Patel,” Tam said. “Who’s calling?”

  “Just a concerned member of the public. I’d like to speak to the officer in charge of what the daily rags are calling The Clown Killer case. And please do not jerk me around Officer Patel. I’m on a public phone and shall be disconnecting in less than two minutes.”

  Matt was standing in front of the whiteboards, sipping coffee and thinking of a way forward with either of the current cases.

  “Boss, it’s for you,” Tam said as held the phone up. “A guy in a phone box who wants to discuss The Clown.”

  Matt took the phone from Tam, placed his coffee mug on the desk and said, “How can I help you, sir?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Detective Inspector Barnes. Who are you?”

  “Doesn’t matter who I am. I just thought that you’d be interested to know that another pervert that escaped justice has been properly punished for his sins. I’m going to give you the address and then hang up. I also apologise for the collateral damage. The old woman just picked the wrong time and place to make an appearance.”

  Matt wrote down the address that he was given, and was told that the bodies could be found on the ground floor in a bedsit at the end of the hall that had been rented by Craig Danby. The caller then hung up.

  “Do you think that was him?” Tam said.

  “Positive,” Matt said, turning to Pete. “Get the call traced. If it is a public phone, have it sealed off and arrange for a forensic techie to go over it.”

  Tam drove Matt out to the address in Romford and parked outside the house. They both pulled on latex gloves as they walked up to the front door. Matt turned the handle and it opened.

  The hallway was murky and smelled of damp. The room at the end of it on the left had the plastic numeral 2 screwed to the door. Matt turned the handle and slowly pushed it open, to be met by the cloying smell of blood and other more offensive odours. He flicked the light on and took a couple of steps into the room, with Tam by his side.

  It was a still-life scene, by definition of everything in the room being totally inanimate, save for the two cops viewing it, as though they were standing in front of a grisly tableau in the chamber of horrors at Madame Tussauds. The naked, bloody corpse tied and taped to a chair was the main event. It was a mesmerising sight, due to the
stunning mask that covered its face; beauty and ugliness combined to cause both shock and awe.

  Tam used his smartphone to take photos of the corpses and the room, so that the team would have firsthand images to work with and not have to wait for official shots to be sent to them.

  A dull lifeless death stare met Matt’s gaze as he looked through the eyeholes of the mask. He had the urge to remove it and see the face of the victim, but refrained. He noted that the throat had been cut, and that the man’s penis had been severed and now lay in the blood that had pooled around the legs of the chair, which he walked around to see the now dry lines of blood that ran down from the letters that had been carved in the pale and mole-spotted skin of the corpse’s back.

  The woman lying face down on the bed was elderly, and from the amount of blood soaked into the bedding it was obvious that she had also had her throat cut.

  “Call it in,” Matt said to Tam. “We need it processing, and a pathologist here ASAP.”

  Tam made calls and jacked it up. Matt walked out of the room and along the hall, to step outside and breathe in the fresh, cold air to dispel some of the stench that had filled the bedsit. He wanted a cup of coffee and a cigarette. His mouth was dry, and the renewed craving to smoke made him realise that he was always going to want one; although he hoped that he had the strength of will to stay off them. Long-term habits were extremely hard to break, and lurked in the mind like old friends, ever insistent that you become reacquainted. He decided that The Clown was becoming addicted to murder. The initial crime may have been committed because it was in some way personal to him, but he was now escalating, finding pleasure in seeking out and killing those that he thought deserved it. And the murder of the old woman was a worrying development. The Clown would probably excuse it by telling himself that it had been an unavoidable act, but he had illustrated that he was in some ways as bad as the people he targeted. That he had contacted the SCU was a small step in the right direction, though. It demonstrated that he wanted to interact, and that was a mistake on his part. Matt’s only real concern was that innocent members of the public would be slain if they posed a threat to him. They needed to identify him, and fast.

  Nat Farley turned up an hour later; ten minutes after a CSI team had arrived to process the scene.

  “I heard somewhere that violent crime was on the decline,” Nat said as lifted his heavy ‘Portamorgue’ out of the rear seat of his car and carried it over to where Matt and Tam were standing next to the VW, which had been the only decent pool car available that didn’t stink of cigarette smoke and junk food.

  “It’s like any other statistics,” Matt said. “They can be adjusted and interpreted to look how the powers that be want them to. Rape and murder are common events, as are many other crimes that are either not investigated, never get to court, or are put in the wrong category to hoodwink a naïve public, that in the main seems to believe the garbage that TV or newspapers feed them.”

  “What are you saying?” Nat said. “That your lot aren’t doing your jobs?”

  “Funny man,” Tam said. “You should do stand-up. You’re almost as comical as John Bishop. It was only last month you were saying that your department couldn’t cope with the cadavers you had stacked up in cold storage.”

  Nat gave them both a crooked grin. “You’re right. This increasing austerity means more cutbacks every year. The country is going to shit. I remember when Britain was great, but it’s been almost run into the ground by politicians, bankers and an assortment of other wankers. All the major industries have gone, and most of everything that’s left is being eroded, and I think it’ll get a hell of a lot worse.”

  “Well, before everything goes to hell in a wheelbarrow, will you look at the two recently departed?” Matt said.

  Nat entered the room and started by examining the body of the woman, taking her liver temperature and checking for any stage of rigor to give him an approximate time of death. After a couple of minutes he said, “She has a little bruising to the nape of her neck, but no other injuries that I can see, apart from the fact that her throat was cut and she suffered massive arterial blood loss, which was the cause of death. I’m pretty sure that she has been dead for over twelve hours, but don’t quote me on anything that I say before I do the autopsy.”

  Nat then set to work inspecting what was in a sense the main event. He noted slight bruising to the DB’s lower back, and the word guilty carved out of the flesh higher up between the shoulder blades. The penis on the carpet had obviously been severed from the corpse. He then carefully removed the mask from the face and placed it on a piece of plastic that he had taken from his case and unfolded to lay on the carpet, away from the area covered with blood.

  Matt and Tam had looked at Craig Danby’s file on computer before leaving the Yard. The mug shot of him matched the now slack face that was smeared with blood.

  “There are signs of blunt force trauma to the left temple and forehead,” Nat said. “And the nose has been broken. Due to the visible amount of blood loss I’m almost certain that the injuries were inflicted before his throat was cut.”

  Manipulating the head and tilting it back, Nat determined that the windpipe had been severed, but that the arteries had not been compromised. “He died due to a severely deficient supply of oxygen, combined with choking on his own blood,” he said. “Cause of death was asphyxia.”

  “Same killer, but a different MO,” Matt said. “This is a primary crime scene, whereas the other two were secondary; just dump sites. He kept the other victims’ bodies for a while before leaving them to be found.”

  “What does that tell us?” Tam asked.

  “God knows,” Matt said as he stared at the mask on the floor. It was not a cheap mass-produced plastic product, but a seemingly expensive item that could have been handmade.

  Leaving Nat at the scene, Matt and Tam headed back to base, stopping once at a café so that Matt could get a cup of coffee. Tam drank sparkling water.

  “This one isn’t going to stop, is he, boss?” Tam said.

  “No, we’ve got a serial on a mission,” Matt said. “He probably believes that he’s providing a public service by torturing and killing known paedophiles, rapists or murderers.”

  “Killing the old woman puts him in their league,” Tam said.

  “True. But he’ll probably rationalise that by reasoning that it was necessary to protect his anonymity.”

  “How?”

  “If a 747 was approaching London off course and Heathrow could not make radio contact with it, then in this age of terrorism, fighter jets would be sent up to evaluate the situation. There will be plans in place to ensure that a repeat of 9/11 doesn’t happen here. If necessary the jumbo would be blown out of the sky. The big picture being that a few hundred passengers and the crew are expendable when measured against the catastrophe and loss of life that a plane being purposely crashed on the city would generate.”

  “The analogy being that this head case will kill innocent people to keep doing what he does?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And we haven’t even got a viable suspect yet.”

  “No, Tam, but I think he’s sticking to his patch. And I still believe that there’s a link to the first victim. He will have a connection to the parents of the girl that Neil Connolly murdered.”

  “We’ve interviewed all the relatives and friends that knew David and Nancy Madsen back then.”

  “What about any male co-workers of Madsen?”

  “He gave us a list of several guys he got on really well with, and we interviewed those that we could trace. Two are deceased, one is now living in Canada, and the others didn’t look good for it. Only one of them couldn’t furnish an alibi that we could check out, but he’s a short obese guy that chain smokes and can hardly walk to the end of his garden. There’s no way that he could be the guy from the CCTV, and he wouldn’t have been able to manhandle bodies in and out of a vehicle.”

  “What if David Madsen didn’t
give us a full list?”

  “Why wouldn’t he?”

  “He was probably overjoyed that his daughter’s killer was murdered. If he knew who did it, or suspected a friend of doing it, I don’t think he would have told us.”

  “That would make him an accessory after the fact.”

  “Hard to prove, unless he admitted it.”

  “We could interview him again,” Tam said.

  “I’ll go and talk to him later. You can dig deeper and find the names of everyone that he worked with. It could be someone that he didn’t even know sixteen years ago.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  DI Tony Underwood was only too happy to be kept in the loop. Matt met him at the police station in Barking, and Tony drove them to the Madsen’s house in Romford.

  Tony knocked at the front door and Nancy Madsen opened it and he introduced Matt to her and asked if her husband was in.

  They were led into the lounge. David was watching Sky News on a big screen TV. He turned his head and gave each of them a hard look. “What now?” he said, not standing up.

  “I want a private word with you, Mr Madsen,” Matt said. “Let’s go out back.”

  “And if I refuse and ask you to get the fuck out of my house?” David said in a low voice spiked with open dislike for the police.

  “Then we’ll have to do it formally at the station,” Matt said. “Your choice.”

  David got up and walked through to the kitchen, opened the back door and stepped out onto the patio. Matt followed him, and Tony stayed in the lounge with Nancy.

  “This is out of order,” Nancy said. “We haven’t got past what happened to Josie, and we never will. But we’d come to terms with it in our own way. Now it’s all being dredged up again. We’ve had reporters at the door and on the phone. There was even a photo of Josie in the newspapers. David looks and acts strong, but he can hardly cope with it all.”