Murder Of Angels - a crime thriller (Detective Inspector Declan Walsh Book 2)

by Jack Gatland

  ‘Apparently she returned to the Mission when she was fifteen, demanding to know the address of the other family that were there the night she was born. She was claiming she’d done one of those ancestry DNA tests and it’d come out wrong. They called the police, she got violent. She was held overnight.’

  ‘She’d realised that Danny Martin wasn’t her father,’ Declan mused. Kendis looked up from the page at this.

  ‘You knew already?’ She asked. Declan shrugged.

  ‘Suspected, more like.’

  ‘Ah, so you don’t know everything,’ Kendis said with a grin. ‘You should check out the Mission House. There was a scandal there a while back.’

  ‘What sort of scandal?’

  ‘Something to do with a nun who died there, after an apparently bona fide Virgin Birth.’

  ‘Which actually means she was too scared to say who the father was,’ Declan smiled in return. Kendis shook her head.

  ‘You’d think so, but no,’ she replied. ‘The nun in question, Sister Nadine stated that Saint Etheldreda’s vicar, Father Barry Lawson was the, well, the father. Said he came to her one night and then disappeared by morning.’

  ‘That doesn’t really sound that Virgin-y.’

  ‘Well yeah, but the problem here is the dates,’ Kendis continued. ‘The only time that Father Lawson could have conceived the child matched with a three-month stint of missionary work that he had in South Africa.’

  ‘So Father Lawson appears as a vision, while he’s thousands of miles away and impregnates the nun,’ Declan nodded. ‘Okay, I can see why they’d start screaming Holy Ghost at that. So what happened with the baby?’

  ‘Died with the nun in childbirth, the same day as Danny Martin arrived,’ Kendis said. ‘Father Lawson himself was there to help. Which was another miracle, because apparently he was in Milton Keynes that same day at a Spring Festival food drive?’

  She rose from the table, finishing her glass.

  ‘I really have a deadline,’ she said apologetically. ‘But you should talk with Derek Salmon’s wife before you speak with him again.’

  And with that she left, leaving Declan alone at the table, a new list of confusing clues laid out in front of him.

  And what was worse; he’d lost his appetite.

  13

  Revelations

  Returning to Temple Inn, Declan found that Anjli and Billy were back at their desks, whereas Monroe’s office was empty.

  ‘Where’s the Guv?’ he asked. Billy looked up from his screen.

  ‘Birmingham,’ he replied. ‘Went with our mental Doctor to go look at this new body.’

  Declan sat at his desk, staring down at the little ‘British Bobby’ Funko toy that Jessica had bought him a while back. It stared back lifelessly at him.

  ‘You look like the problems of the world are on your shoulders,’ Anjli said. Declan nodded.

  ‘I was just wondering whether there are any coppers in London who aren’t working for the bloody Lucas twins,’ he muttered, his eyes still glued on the figure. If he’d looked up at that moment, he would have seen Anjli falter at the statement.

  ‘Like who?’ she asked. Declan now glanced up at her, but the moment had passed and Anjli had composed herself.

  ‘Derek Salmon apparently worked at various times for both The Twins and also the Seven Sisters,’ he said. ‘My father knew, but did nothing about it.’

  ‘That was then,’ Anjli returned to her desk, relieved. ‘Things are different now.’

  ‘DCI Ford would like to differ.’

  ‘Ford was a degenerate gambler who couldn’t stop betting on greyhounds,’ Anjli snapped. ‘I’m nothing like her.’

  Declan stared in confusion at Anjli.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he eventually said, ‘I didn’t mean to imply anything.’

  ‘And I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap,’ Anjli replied, looking away. ‘I’m still a little off after the chat with Danny.’

  ‘Understandable,’ Declan looked back to his desk. Growing up in the area made it far closer for Anjli. ‘Did you find anything out? On your stroll through Mile End?’

  Anjli nodded, sitting up. The worries on her face from a moment earlier were gone.

  ‘We both have,’ she said, pointing to Billy who now turned in his own chair to face Declan and Anjli.

  ‘The body dug up in the Lickey Hills has a name now,’ he said. ‘Apparently the witness who showed them the body claimed it was a local girl named Gabrielle Chapman.’ He turned his monitor to show Declan. On it was an image of a young girl, of around nine years old. ‘This is her, an old school photo. It’s the only record we have for her.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Declan examined the photo. The image could have been a young photo of Angela Martin, but without a similar one to compare to, it could be anyone.

  ‘Exactly what I said,’ Billy replied. ‘There are no official records of Gabrielle Chapman after Year Four. Her parents were in and out of trouble with the police, she was being bullied because of this, and so they took her out to home school her.’

  ‘Rather than perhaps stopping whatever they did that brought them into trouble with the police?’ Declan mused. ‘Great parents.’

  ‘Well, they didn’t do it for long.’ Billy brought up a newspaper clipping on his screen. On it was an image of a house fire, with the fire brigade on scene, the house a smouldering ruin behind them. The headline read

  SELLY OAK HOUSE FIRE KILLS TWO

  ‘This was the only thing I could find on her parents,’ Billy continued. ‘Six years ago. Gabrielle would have been about twelve, maybe thirteen here. But after their deaths there’s no note from Social Services, no adoption from family, nothing. It’s as if she wasn’t there. In fact, we see nothing else about Gabrielle until about two-and-a-half years ago, when she’s arrested while with Macca Byrne at an illegal rave.’

  ‘Eighteen months before her death.’ Declan stared at the image of the fire. ‘If they hadn’t found a body, I’d have said that this was a fake identity scam.’

  ‘Funny you should say that,’ Anjli said, looking to Billy. ‘Tell him what you also found.’

  ‘I need Doctor Marcos to confirm this when she comes back from Birmingham, but I asked DC Davey to check Angela Martin’s fingerprints to Gabrielle Chapman’s ones,’ Billy said. ‘They’re a hundred percent match.’

  ‘Do twins have the same fingerprints?’ Declan asked. Billy shook his head.

  ‘No,’ he replied. ‘They have the same DNA and appearance and all that, but fingerprints are unique.’

  ‘Which means that the Angela Martin that was arrested in London has to be the same person as the Gabrielle Chapman who was arrested in Birmingham,’ Anjli said.

  Declan whistled at this. ‘So we are talking identity theft.’

  ‘It’s the strangest bloody identity theft I’ve heard of.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Declan agreed. ‘Angela Martin died at what age?’

  Billy checked the notes. ‘Seventeen years, four months.’

  ‘And the Chapmans were the other family that gave birth that day?’ Declan leaned back. ‘I think there’s more here than we’re seeing right now.’

  ‘Like what?’ Anjli was leaning across the desk now, listening intently. Declan shrugged.

  ‘Well, we know from Danny that Cheryl Martin only had one child,’ Declan thought to himself. ‘That’s not something you can fake, especially with records existing from beforehand. All we need to do is check the hospital ultrasounds.’

  ‘Likewise, Craig and Emma Chapman,’ Billy brought up an image on his screen. ‘they only had one child too.’ He frowned. ‘Came a month early, too. Looks like it was induced.’

  ‘I think where’s a third option here,’ Declan rose, pacing as he worked it through in his head, speaking the process out loud. ‘Apparently, when she was about fifteen years old, Angela Martin went back and confronted the Mission after doing one of those ancestral DNA tests, and having it come up wrong.’

 
‘Wrong?’ Billy looked confused.

  ‘It would have shown her she wasn’t a Martin,’ Anjli said in reply. ‘So if she wasn’t Danny’s kid, who was daddy?’

  ‘I would have said Craig Chapman, but they only had one child. But I think there may have been another birth that day. A nun, claiming a Virgin birth, but who died during it.’

  ‘You think it could have been twins?’

  Declan stopped pacing around, stretching his arms, feeling his shoulders click tight from the hours of driving. ‘I think it’s the only plausible answer here,’ he said.

  ‘Then the twin girls go to different families, each unaware they’re a cuckoo,’ Billy walked over to the kitchen area, turning the kettle on, noting his colleagues' confused expressions to this. ‘It’s what they do. Cuckoos put their eggs in other birds' nests so that the other birds raise their chicks and they don’t have to. Anyone want a coffee?’

  ‘Cuckoos sound like dicks,’ Anjli muttered. ‘And I’ll have a tea, no sugar.’

  ‘Billy’s right,’ Declan continued. ‘Not about the cuckoos, but about The Twins. Coffee, white.’

  ‘I’m right about cuckoos too,’ Billy grumbled as he poured coffee into two of the mugs.

  ‘Fine, then as well as cuckoo birth practices, Billy is also possibly correct about the hypothetical twins,’ Declan repeated. ‘But if there were twins, and these became Gabrielle and Angela, then what happened to the other two babies?’

  ‘If they both died, then it’s a simple swap,’ Anjli nodded. ‘Nobody would be the wiser, unless one of the visitor’s babies was visibly a distinct race. We need to find a nun who can confirm this. Going on the more believable thread that it wasn’t God, who was the father?’

  ‘That’s the problem,’ Declan said. ‘We don’t know. According to my source, the nun claimed it was the Vicar, but he was apparently doing missionary work on another continent.’

  ‘Well, this explains how similar girls can be in two places, but it doesn’t explain how they had the same breaks, the same tattoos, the same fingerprints and even the same apparent death,’ Billy frowned, passing Declan and Anjli their drinks. ‘That states more of a connection than just shared parentage.’

  Declan sipped at his coffee, nodding approvingly at Billy. ‘Hypothetically, let’s say that Angela Martin learns that she has a possible twin sister at fifteen. Shortly after that, Gabrielle Chapman appears again in Birmingham. We know that there are two people as we have two bodies, but we also know it’s one person as we’ve got the police reports and fingerprints that state Angela and Gabrielle were the same person. We’re missing something and it’s annoying.’

  ‘Angela could have used her sister’s identity,’ Anjli suggested. ‘And as nobody had seen the real Gabrielle Chapman for years…’

  Billy considered this, but then shook his head. ‘That doesn’t explain the tattoos, or the broken arm.’

  Anjli slumped. ‘Oh, yeah.’

  She then looked up with a smile.

  ‘Christ, I’m an idiot,’ she said, air-punching, rising and performing a victory jog around her desk before sitting back down in her chair and turning to the others. ‘An utter idiot!’

  ‘Let me guess, you have something,’ Billy laughed.

  ‘Oh yeah, I’d say so,’ she said. ‘Craig Chapman.’

  ‘The Birmingham father?’

  Anjli nodded. ‘I was so busy thinking about twin girls, I’d forgotten about something I heard today. I spoke to… Well, to someone I know in Mile End earlier today. They mentioned to me that Johnny and Jackie Lucas had a guy who worked for them called Chapman, and that he was poached over to Birmingham by George Byrne. They never gave me his first name, and I didn’t click until just now.’

  Billy was already typing into the HOLMES2 network, pulling up a file. ‘Clifford Craig Chapman. Must have used his middle name. Did some time in the nineties. Not much, though. Shortly after, he moved to Selly Oak, in South Birmingham.’

  ‘The house fire that killed two,’ Declan leaned back. ‘Anjli was right on the button.’

  ‘So Chapman left The Twins for Byrne. That’s got to be something worth following,’ Anjli said.

  ‘More than that,’ Billy looked up from his computer’s screen. ‘Says here that we arrested him for burglary at eighteen with a Daniel Martin.’

  Declan almost shot out of his chair. ‘Danny Martin knew Craig Chapman?’

  ‘Enough to perform a criminal act with him.’

  ‘Yet he didn’t recognise him a few years later,’ Anjli was unconsciously playing with her hair, twirling a strand around her finger as she spoke. ‘I mean, they may not have even seen each other during the births, but what are the chances of the two of them turning up at the same place, at the same time?’

  ‘I’ll look into it,' Billy said. ‘I can add it to the list.’

  Declan picked up the Funko ‘Bobby’ figure from his desk, staring down at it. There was a feeling in his gut, a hole in the pit of his stomach.

  ‘Who was the arresting officer?’ he asked. ‘On the job that Danny and Craig were caught on?’

  Billy tapped on the screen, pulling up the details - and then froze.

  ‘Detective Constable Derek Salmon,’ he breathed. Declan almost threw the Funko policeman across the room in anger, but stopped himself.

  ‘I need to speak to Derek,’ he hissed. ‘I think he’s played us all.’

  ‘But why?’ Anjli asked. ‘That makes no sense! He’s dying!’

  Declan went to reply to this, but suddenly remembered something insinuated by Kendis in the Nellie Dean. He turned to Billy. ‘Amanda Salmon. Is there anything on her?’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Billy was already tapping at his laptop. ‘Criminal record? Something else?’

  ‘I genuinely don’t know,’ Declan replied apologetically. ‘I just know that there was something off with his wife.’

  Billy started searching through browsers as Anjli looked to Declan.

  ‘You knew him,’ she said. ‘How well did you know his family?’

  ‘I didn’t, really,’ Declan replied. ‘They were falling apart when I arrived and divorced within a year or so. For most of the time I was with him, Derek was a very bitter divorcee.’

  ‘Guys, I’ve got something.’

  Declan and Anjli looked over to Billy as he pulled up a website on his screen. It was a local newspaper.

  ‘Yeah, you definitely need to speak to Derek. He said he’d done this to gain money for his family, right?’ Billy asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Declan warily said. Billy turned to face him.

  ‘Amanda Salmon won the National Lottery two years ago,’ he said. ‘Not millions, but enough to pay off a mortgage and live comfortably.’

  ‘So all of this is bollocks,’ Declan indicated the files on his desk. ‘Derek didn’t need the money, so why did he take the fall?’

  ‘You need to ask him that,’ Anjli said. ‘He was your partner. Maybe he’ll come clean.’

  ‘And we still don’t have a connection to Janelle Delcourt yet,’ Declan muttered. ‘I don’t think this second body was in the Delcourt game plan.’

  ‘We have one thing,’ Anjli added. ‘Moses was apparently dating Angela Martin. It was on the sly, but they knew it around Mile End. That could be enough for us to use as an excuse to visit the Delcourts. Also, I got the impression from my source that Moses was usually into the other sex.’

  ‘Usually or always?’ Billy asked.

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘There’s a distinction. If he goes both ways, then she could date him while he dated men. If it’s a singular direction, then she wasn’t dating him. She was his beard.’

  ‘Beard?’

  ‘You know, his fake girlfriend to keep his appearance up.’

  ‘Why do they call it a beard?’ Anjli asked. Billy shrugged.

  ‘Because sixty years ago, having a homosexual relationship was still criminal in a lot of places. A fake partner needed a term that could be passed about
and giving some kind of plausible deniability.’ He thought for a moment. ‘There’s been a lot of unknowing beards out there. Girls that simply didn’t know that the man they were dating liked men, but most of the time it was a business transaction, of a kind. The man needed to seem straight, and so did the woman. I did it myself when I was trying to stay in with my family.’

  ‘So what, Angela Martin was gay too?’ Anjli looked into the briefing room, where the image of Angela was still on the screen. ‘Could this be why the Seven Sisters killed her? Or, maybe she wasn’t, and then she learned about Moses?’

  ‘We don’t know that they killed her yet,’ Declan corrected. ‘All we know is that someone connected to the Seven Sisters knew where the body was. They could have been told in the same way that Derek was.’

  The three officers sat quietly for a moment, each working out the next step in the investigation.

  'Do we have anything on the iPad?' Declan asked. Billy shook his head.

  'We got into it using the fingerprint scanner, but it's been offline for so long, there's like a dozen OSXs that need to be updated before we can get into it,' he replied.

  ‘While we wait, we need to find and speak to Father Lawson,’ Anjli said. Declan nodded.

  ‘And we need to find out whether Angela Martin ever met Gabrielle Chapman, or just stole her identity,’ he added. Billy was already tapping on the keyboard of his computer. Declan’s computer dinged, and an image popped up onto the screen. Two photos linked, they were both police identification images of a seventeen-year-old girl. One half was Angela Martin, taken in Mile End. The other was apparently Gabrielle Chapman, taken in Moseley, South Birmingham. There was only half an image of both, however–the two photos stitched together to show both sides of one face.

  The same face.

  ‘Definitely identical, and with the fingerprints matching, we’re most likely looking at the same person,’ Declan said. ‘Known associates for Gabrielle Chapman?’

  Billy tapped on the keyboard again, and an image of Macca Byrne appeared on his monitor, as well as the blond boy that Declan had seen in the photo that had been in Angela's drawer. Seeing them, Declan glanced to Anjli, who nodded.