by Michael Kerr
A woman had run down the stairs wearing nothing but a flimsy nightie that was almost see-through. She found it hard to speak through the split lips that her husband had given her, but managed to shout, ‘Leave, Duke. Leave’, and the dog had let go of Robin, backed-up a few feet and sat down.
Now Matt knew what it was like to be on the receiving end of an aggressive dog. It wasn’t just postmen that got bitten.
“There you go,” Beth said, fastening the bandage in place with a safety pin.
“Thanks,” Matt said, encircling her bottom with his arms and pulling her close to him.
“Back off, Barnes,” Beth said, smiling, “unless you plan on being very late for work.”
“Okay, I’ll take a rain check till I get home tonight. Plan on us going to bed early, and not to read books or sleep.”
“Sounds promising,” Beth said, then gasped as he buried his face into her at groin level and blew against the material of her robe; holding her tightly so that she couldn’t pull away.
He eventually came up for air and begrudgingly let go of her.
“That’s made me feel weak at the knees,” Beth said. “I think you should do that again tonight, when I’m not wearing anything to hinder you.”
“Hold that thought all day,” Matt said.
They left the cottage in their own cars. Matt was never happy at them parting. He was so much in love that on one level he wanted to be with Beth 24/7. He was basically a loner, so didn’t feel the need to share his time with others. Apart from the job, he would be a semi recluse without Beth. All that he had experienced in life had not made him a sociable animal. He’d played golf at one time, but had never been good enough at it to become obsessed with the game. And since being shot by Gary Noon his clubs had gathered dust and cobwebs, and even though he was now fit again he had no desire to go back to it. You either needed to bounce off other people in a social context or you didn’t. He rarely went on the old desktop computer in the den at home, unless it was work related, or if he wanted to order a few paperbacks that stores didn’t sell, due to his choice of authors being those that had written potboilers way back in the forties and fifties. Maybe he was in most ways old before his time. He had grown up enjoying the music, reading material and watching movies that his dad had. He had never needed to be different just because he was of the next generation. He had even become a copper because Arthur Barnes had been one. A lot of people have heroes, and he had come to know that his had been his dad. He saw a lot of what went down in black and white, and had learned to recognise that most stuff was not important in the greater scheme of things. The very few things that mattered to him took up all his time, and so he was in the main content with his lot.
Most of the team were in the squad room. He checked the whiteboards, spoke to each of them in turn, had a cup of coffee, and then went upstairs to see Tom.
“Morning,” Matt said as he tapped on the open door to Tom’s office and went in.
“I’m glad you didn’t say good morning,” Tom said, tossing a file onto his desktop. “You didn’t follow procedure with Steven Muir, so he’ll probably walk.”
“What procedure didn’t I follow?”
“You entered his house without just cause or a warrant. That means the pot he was growing is inadmissible as evidence. And he intends to prosecute you personally for shooting his dog. He maintains that you forced your way into his house and the dog was defending him and the property against an intruder.”
“That’s a load of bollocks, Tom, and you know it.”
“What I know doesn’t change a damn thing. He’s got a hotshot legal beagle waiting to make us look like idiots if this goes to court, which I know it won’t.”
“Whatever,” Matt said. “Our paperwork covers what happened. If the Crown Prosecution Service wants to throw it out, fine. I’m not interested in some dummy growing weed; I’m looking for two serial killers.”
“And no nearer to finding them, right?”
“True. But we will.”
“What percentage of that is wishful thinking?”
“We’ll keep turning stones over till we get a result. In the meantime when do I get my firearm back? I don’t want to come face to face with The Clown without it”
“I’ll see what I can do. Just don’t go flipping those stones over without one of the team in tow.”
Matt took the stairs back down to the squad room.
“Kenny Ruskin just called,” Marci said. “He told me he may have something re the suicide killings for you to look at.”
“Did he say what?”
“No. You know what he’s like. I expect he’ll want to bore you to death with geeky computer stuff before he actually gets to the point.”
Matt poured a cup of coffee to go and headed to Computer Science Section. Kenny wouldn’t have wanted him down there if he didn’t have something worthwhile.
Kenny was in a small office at the rear of a large room divided into bullpens for operators to work at. His office was separate and afforded more privacy, although the door was wide open. The room was jam-packed with computers and hardware that was alien to Matt. There were wafer thin monitors, and keyboards and other gizmos crowding what could have been the flight deck of a spacecraft, and a sixty-inch plus plasma screen on one of the walls that was cabled or scarted-up to various black boxes.
“Hi,” Kenny said. “I see you’ve brought your own java down with you. Is my blend too sophisticated for your palate?”
Matt smiled. Kenny was wearing a faded Arctic Monkeys tee ‒ that he’d no doubt bought at one of their gigs ‒ a pair of baggy blue jeans and air Nikes that looked antique. His hair had grown long enough to be pulled back in a short ponytail, and he wore Lennon-style tinted specs.
“Your coffee is always mint or some other weird flavour, and far too weak for my liking, Kenny. What gold nugget have you got for me? Is it a case breaker?”
“Maybe not that golden, but more than we had. I spent time pulling video footage from cameras in the areas of the three supposed suicide scenes. Images of the guy in the red parka can be followed to and from all of them, but only for short distances. He at no time looks up or gets in a vehicle, so there’s no major lead. What I did find was an anomaly.”
Matt said nothing. He just watched as Kenny pressed buttons and a video in colour began to play on the big screen.
“This is from Warren Street station,” Kenny said. “You can see him come into view, walk along the passage and then down the stairs to the platform.”
Matt watched the guy make his way along the platform to where a group of people including Dominic Wilson were standing, waiting for a train.
Dominic was apparently pushed, and the figure in the parka strolled away, to climb the stairs again.
It was as he was picked up on another camera, walking towards it, that he took gloves off and stuffed them in a pocket.
Kenny pressed a button and reversed the video a frame at a time, to freeze it at a point when one of the gloves was removed. “I’ve pulled a still of that,” he said to Matt, and the screen was suddenly filled with a slightly blurry close up of the killer’s hands.
“What am I looking at?” Matt asked.
“The finger ends of his left hand.”
Matt studied the now gloveless hand. It took him a second or two to spot anything out of the ordinary. “The nails?” he said.
“Yeah,” Kenny said and grinned. “Apart from looking manicured, there appears to be a discolouration at the base of them: just a trace between the skin and the cuticles.”
“And that tells you what?”
“That in my humble opinion it’s nitrocellulose, a film-forming polymer that is the main ingredient in most nail polishes. So the suspect is either a woman or a guy who likes to varnish his nails.”
Matt took a swig of his cooling coffee and studied the fingernails again. Kenny was right; the slivers of red looked artificial and could only be varnish.
“That’s magic,�
� Matt said. “It gives us a new direction to look in.”
“I can also tell that he or she is approximately five-eleven, based on background objects that have a known size for comparison.”
“Thanks, Kenny. Can you run me off a couple of copies of the hands, and half a dozen of the clearest you have of the full figure.”
Two minutes later, Matt was heading back up to the squad room. Kenny had done good. As usual he had overlooked nothing, and had come up with a small but hopefully vital piece of evidence.
Matt showed the team the photocopies and pointed out the fingernails and told them the height of the person in the parka. Spirits were reignited with new leads to follow.
“So we’re looking for a homicidal transvestite,” Marci said.
“Or an extremely tall woman with shabby fingernails and a penchant for wearing a false moustache,” Pete suggested.
Matt smiled. It was good to see the team bubbling again. They had been getting nowhere, and had really needed this. “Whichever,” he said. “It’s a major breakthrough. We can basically eliminate all suspects under five foot eleven, and consider the perpetrator to be a man or a woman.
“Anyone particular spring to mind?” Marci said to Matt.
“Yeah, the agent, Rhonda Gould,” Matt said. “She’s a tall woman and had motive, but I wasn’t considering that the killer could be a female. My bad. Once I get warrants to search her agency and home, we’ll go and talk to her.”
“And with any luck we’ll find a red parka, a grey baseball cap, the gloves that she wore, Timberland boots and a stick-on moustache,” Marci said.
Matt nodded. “If we do there’ll be trace from at least one of the scenes.”
Back upstairs in Tom’s office, Matt told him what Kenny had found.
“A woman?” Tom said.
“Maybe. If it is, then I’m one hundred percent positive that it’s the agent that represented Danielle Cooper and Jeff Goodwin. They were both looking for new representation.”
“What proof have you got that she did it?”
“None yet. I need warrants to search her office and home.”
“That’s a big ask if you haven’t got anything—”
“She’s a bloody suspect, Tom. She had motive. We need to search for anything that will link her to the murders.”
“I’ll see Grizzly and make a case. But it’ll probably be tomorrow before you get the paperwork.”
“Adams will push it through, because he needs a result more than we do. The buck stops on his desk.”
Tom poured Matt a cup of coffee. Told him that his wife, Jean, had virtually ordered him to retire. She was still harping on about going to live in Spain, even if it was only during the winter months.
“Are you going to do it?” Matt asked.
“Hell, no. I’ll jack the job when I wake up one morning and feel too knackered to carry on. Or wait till they drag me out screaming. I don’t think I’d be good at retirement. What would I do, go for walks and read crime fiction written by authors who get their ideas from newspapers, TV and Movies?”
“You could write a book,” Matt said. “You’ve got decades of real life crime under your belt to play with.”
“I have enough trouble writing reports and all the other bookwork that finds its way to my desk. I don’t have any real hobbies. I just look after my fish and cut the grass when I’m not in here. Don’t ever let that happen to you, Matt. You and Beth should have a kid and have a future with someone else’s life in it to be wrapped up in when you get older.”
The phone rang before Matt could say that he was shit-scared of the responsibility that having a child would be to him.
“I’ve got The Clown on the line,” Phil said to Tom. “He wants a word with DI Barnes.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
GABRIEL had driven the Merc home, reversed it into his driveway and opened the lid of the boot. Dewey was still laid on his side, but was conscious and turned his head to stare up at Gabriel with a look of pure undiluted hatred. The moon was reflected in his almost black irises.
“Get up on your knees, and then roll out of the boot,” Gabriel ordered.
“I could break my neck doing that,” Dewey said. “I thought we had a deal.”
“We haven’t struck a deal yet,” Gabriel said, drawing the razor from his pocket with his left hand and flicking the blade out, to slice through the tape between Dewey’s ankles. It would have been a total waste of time and effort if he had fallen from the boot and broken his neck. “Climb out, walk along the side of the bungalow and into the workshop at the end of the garden.”
Dewey got out of the boot awkwardly and stretched his aching legs before walking in the direction that Gabriel indicated with the barrel of the handgun.
“Stand up close to the bench,” Gabriel said, following him in and shutting the door behind him. He then made a wide berth around Dewey and pulled back one side of the duvet to disclose the body of Rascal.
Dewey stared at the dead dog, but said nothing.
“This is Rascal,” Gabriel said. “You hit him so hard with that branch that he got blood clots on the brain and died.”
“I was out jogging and you pulled a gun on me,” Dewey said. “I ran for my life, and you set the dog on me. I only hit it to get it off me.”
“I believe you,” Gabriel said. “Unfortunately that doesn’t alter the fact that my faithful friend is now dead.”
“I’m sorry,” Dewey said, positive that he was dealing with a man who should be in a padded cell at some special hospital for the criminally insane. “Just tell me what you want.”
“I want you to lay face down on the floor. Do it now.”
Dewey stepped to the left of the bench and eased himself down onto his knees, then as slowly as possible he dropped to the floor onto his left shoulder to break the fall, which was inevitable with his hands taped behind his back.
Gabriel quickly taped Dewey’s ankles together again, and then opened the door of a wall unit, moved a can of varnish aside and took out a pint-size bottle made of green glass, which also had a glass stopper in the top and a faded paper label on the front that advertised the contents as diethyl ether.
Placing the gun on the bench, he removed the stopper and poured some of the ether onto a folded piece of cloth that smelled of furniture polish.
Straddling Dewey, he lifted his head back with one hand and pressed the wet cloth to his mouth and nose with the other.
Dewey twisted his head from side to side and attempted to roll over, but Gabriel held him tightly and increased the pressure of the anaesthetic-soaked cloth.
Choking, and with the inside of his nostrils and his lips burning, Dewey slowly lost consciousness and became limp.
Time for a much needed cuppa, Gabriel decided as he counted the money he had amassed from the wallets he had emptied, pleased to find that the total came to well over a thousand pounds.
He brewed tea and sat down in the kitchen, relieved that the evening had gone so well, but not relishing the thought of having to finish making Rascal’s coffin and burying his pal in the grave behind the garage.
When he came round he was on his back, freezing cold, facing the ceiling, firmly secured to the wooden work bench, and naked. He felt sick and was in no doubt that the madman intended to kill him.
“You’ve been snoring like a pig for hours,” Gabriel said from where he was sitting on a wooden chair with a fresh, steaming mug of tea cupped in both hands. “It’s almost daybreak and I’ve been a busy beaver all night.”
Gabriel finished the tea, then lit an old oil heater, not to give Dewey any comfort, but because he needed to raise the temperature in the workshop before carrying out his next job.
As he warmed his hands in front of the heater, he talked: “I drove your Mercedes over to a deserted factory yard about a mile from here,” he said. “I parked it in a loading bay, wiped it and left it. It would have been a shame to torch such a nice motor. And I’ve buried Rascal, so we can get d
own to business soon. First I’m going to get rid of some incriminating evidence that I wouldn’t want the police to find.”
“What are you going to do to me?” Dewey asked.
“I’m planning on making a plaster cast of your face, and then a latex mask from it. I’ve got a thing about masks. Just relax and stay as sweet as you are.”
He stuffed a duster in Dewey’s mouth, taped it securely in place and went back inside the bungalow to clear out the hidey-hole in the bottom of the credenza. He would feel safer when the list and notes were burned, along with the cast he had made for the lovely Venetian mask he had created for Craig Danby. After dealing with his new guest, he would ensure that the bungalow, garage and workshop were totally cleaned; sanitized to such a degree that there would be no residue of anything that could link him to the murders. He would keep the gun, though. From now on he would not bring anyone back home to deal with, so would need the gun to persuade future victims to comply with his instructions. The only problem would be where to dump the other two guns he now had. He thought about that as he burned the other items in a bin behind the garage, next to where Rascal was in an unmarked grave. He had replaced the sods of turf and used the garden roller to level the area. And then it came to him. He would place the guns in a weatherproof pouch and bury it; choose a spot away from any footpath in the local park, perhaps a few yards behind a bench, under a tree he would select amid the screen of shrubbery. He would probably never need them, but they were backups.