‘Mrs Gibbs?’ Morton said.
‘I’m Lucy Gibbs. You must be the police.’
‘Detective Chief Inspector Morton. This is Detective Inspector Rafferty. Could we have a moment in private?’
The headmistress followed Morton’s line of vision over to the unknown woman. ‘This is Belinda Powell, my deputy. Anything you have to say to me can be said in front of her too.’
‘Very well, ma’am. How well did you know Ms Hogge?’
‘I didn’t, really. She wasn’t employed here,’ Gibbs said curtly.
‘She wasn’t?’ Rafferty said disbelievingly.
‘No. She was a cover supervisor. She did a few days here and there for us, whenever we needed a substitute.’
‘When did she last work here?’ Morton asked.
‘I don’t know. It was a while back. Six or seven months, I’d say?’ The headmistress looked over to her deputy, who looked put out at being dragged into the conversation.
Belinda Powell pursued her lips, deep in thought. ‘It was the term before last. She covered for Dobson when he broke his ankle, remember?’
‘So it was, Ms Powell. So it was.’
‘Why hasn’t she worked since?’ Morton asked. ‘Surely you’ve needed cover since?’
The deputy headmistress looked like she wanted to say something, but Gibbs cut in. ‘She was sick. Poor dear.’
‘Too ill to teach? For months at a time?’
‘She was a deathly little lamb,’ Powell said. ‘Who could possibly work while suffering like that? Such a shame it was, too. She was so young.’
‘We’ll need a copy of any employment records you might have for her.’
‘We don’t have any,’ said Gibbs. ‘She worked through an agency. We called them, they sent her. I’m sure if you call them, they’d be happy to supply you with the details. Now, if you don’t mind, I have things to be getting on with.’
‘Very well. If you think of anything else, either of you, here’s my card.’ Morton handed one to each of them. As he handed one to the deputy headmistress, he saw something in her expression. She was hiding something.
Chapter 37: Lonely
Tuesday April 14th 09:00
Olivia Hogge’s home was less than five hundred feet from St Balthere’s Academy, in a six-storey walk-up built as affordable living for the city’s key workers: teachers, nurses, and other essential professionals who would otherwise be priced out of the local market.
She owned the ground floor flat on the south side of the building, facing towards an alleyway which ran down to the main road. Her doorway, which was not shared with any other flat in the building, was guarded by a narrow front garden with roses running around a wooden arch halfway down a gravel path.
‘It’s eerily quiet here, isn’t it, boss?’ Rafferty said as they walked along the path, the only sound in the vicinity the crunch of gravel underfoot.
‘I imagine it would be louder if the school were not out for the day,’ Morton said. ‘We’re well within earshot of the front playground.’
The front door was locked. Once again Rafferty looked over to Morton, silently enquiring as to whether she should pick the lock. Morton nodded, and thirty seconds later they were inside.
Morton flicked the light on and turned to examine the door. ‘Automatic lock. No sign of struggle. Lead on.’
Rafferty edged inside. The flat was small. The front room held little more than a low table and a ragged old armchair. Bills were piled up on the table, many of them angrily stamped with Overdue or Late. Hogge had left a well-thumbed Bible and rosary beads beside the mountain of bills.
The bedroom was to the rear of the flat. Like the lounge, it was barely big enough to swing a cat in, with a single bed pushed up against the radiator on the back wall, and clothes heaped in a pile at the foot of the bed. A small bedside dresser was the only luxury. There was a vanity mirror in the middle of the dresser, and the drawers were filled with boxes.
Morton drew out one of the boxes. It appeared that, just like Primrose Kennard, Olivia Hogge had been a fan of You Shop We Drop! TV.
‘She managed to buy tat, but not pay the bills. Rafferty, can you see a laptop or computer of any kind?’ Morton said.
Rafferty began to rifle through the room. Eventually she found a small netbook tucked underneath the pile of dirty clothing. She placed it on the dresser and booted it up.
‘Password?’ she asked Morton.
‘God knows. I guess we’ll have to leave that to Zane to crack. Bag it and tag it. I want to take a look in the bathroom.’
Morton left Rafferty to deal with the paperwork and edged open the bathroom door. Compared to the rest of the flat, it was excessively oversized, with a large bathtub and a mirrored cabinet over the basin. Morton opened the cabinet to find the usual array of sundries as well as a stack of pills. He picked up the nearest pack of pills. The label read cyclosporine. Morton had no idea what it was for, so he bagged it to show the pathologist before turning his attention to the rest of the bathroom.
The room was much cleaner than the lounge and bedroom. Too clean.
‘Rafferty, come in here.’
Rafferty trudged into the bathroom, squeezing past Morton’s larger frame to look around in bemusement. ‘What am I looking at, boss? I don’t see anything.’
‘Exactly. Look out there’ – Morton gestured back to the rat’s nest that was Olivia Hogge’s bedroom – ‘and then back in here.’
‘It’s too clean.’ Rafferty crouched down and sniffed. ‘Is that bleach?’
‘I think so. Someone has cleaned up in here,’ Morton said.
His words hung in the air. He didn’t need to add the obvious – that, just like Primrose Kennard, Olivia Hogge had probably been murdered in her own home.
‘I’ll call forensics, then,’ Rafferty said.
Chapter 38: An Autopsy – Sort Of
Wednesday April 15th 12:00
Morton’s stomach rumbled as he made his way down to the morgue. He had skipped breakfast while out at the crime scene, and it didn’t look like he’d have time for lunch before Olivia Hogge’s autopsy was complete.
Her body was covered when Morton arrived, a modesty sheet in place up to her neck. The only clue that the autopsy was complete was the samples that Doctor Chiswick had arranged in a metal tray alongside the autopsy table.
Chiswick looked unusually sullen. His usually businesslike demeanour had been replaced by a furrowed brow and red eyes that spoke of tears.
‘You OK, Larry?’ Morton asked.
The pathologist shook his head, his thick grey hair swooshing behind him. He swallowed and then said in a choked-up voice, ‘She looks a lot like my daughter.’
‘I’m sorry, Larry. It’s never easy when they’re young.’
‘No, it’s not. Ms Hogge was twenty-two years old, and they were tough years. I pulled her medical history. Ms Hogge has been in and out of hospital for practically all of her adult life.’
‘I found medicine at her flat. Here.’ Morton handed over the box of pills marked cyclosporine.
‘They’re immunosuppressants, and they fit with my findings. She had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which necessitated a bone marrow transplant. The cyclosporine would have been administered to prevent her body rejecting that transplant.’
‘Does that mean her transplant was recent?’
‘Transplant patients have to take immunosuppressants for life. Given this dosage, I’d say her operation was sometime earlier this year.’
‘Would she have died without the bone marrow transplant?’
Chiswick nodded gravely. ‘Certainly.’
‘And with the transplant?’
‘Her prognosis would have been good. There’s a risk of kidney damage with cyclosporine, and anyone who is immunosuppressed risks all sorts of infections, but she probably wouldn’t have died from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She appears to have been in full remission.’
‘Like Primrose Kennard, then,’ Morton said.
‘Why would someone wish to kill those who had just been saved? Both victims had transplants to save them, seemed to have had success with those transplants, and were subsequently murdered.’
‘Beats me. You’re the copper. What do you think?’
‘It sounds like they cheated death for a while, but that death got them in the end.’
‘Religious nut job?’
‘Maybe. What else does her body tell us? How was she murdered?’ Morton reached for the sheet covering Olivia Hogge, expecting the pathologist to go through his usual routine of pointing out everything that was abnormal about the deceased.
‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you. Ms Hogge... is not a pretty sight.’
It’s not like him to be squeamish, Morton thought. ‘Why? She looked fine when I saw her in situ.’
‘That’s because you didn’t have to move her. She’d been propped against the bench with her handbag next to her when the caretaker found her. When we got there, she was slumped over. It wasn’t until we moved her that we realised...’
‘Realised what?’
‘There’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just going to come out and say it. Your killer deboned her.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Whoever killed her cut out every major bone except for the skull, spine and ribcage, and then sewed her right back up. She was a big sack of organs and fat when we moved her.’
‘Fuck.’ That’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard. ‘Why?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine. There’s no medical reason for it.’
‘Post-mortem, I hope?’ Morton asked.
‘No. Sadly not. She was alive, but unconscious. I found a needle mark in her neck, just like–’
‘Just like Primrose Kennard.’
‘Exactly,’ Dr Chiswick said. ‘I’ve sent samples off to trace to confirm, but I think you’re looking at the same guy. She was knocked out cold, deboned, and then bled out while he put her back together. Her body was then dressed in all her finery and propped up on that bench to be found.’
‘That has to be a message. But to say what? That she’s spineless, a coward?’ Morton shook his head, flummoxed.
‘There’s one other thing.’
‘Hit me with it.’
‘She was pregnant.’
Chapter 39: Footprints
Wednesday April 15th 16:30
The victim’s phone and laptop took no time at all to crack open once Zane in the Met’s Forensic Technology Department got hold of them.
The laptop revealed little that Morton hadn’t already known: Olivia Hogge was a cover supervisor, not a supply teacher. She’d had no qualifications yet, but had been working her way towards the post-graduate certificate in education she needed to become a qualified teacher.
Between studies and medical appointments, Olivia Hogge had undertaken little work through South London Cover Supply Co. She had SLCS – Balthere’s down in her calendar as her last contract gig a little under four months ago, at the start of January.
It was little surprise, then, when Olivia Hogge’s background check showed that she had mere pennies in the bank and a credit rating that a bankrupt would not envy.
To say that Olivia Hogge had lived was an overstatement. As Ayala had not so politely put it, she had merely existed. Like a ship without an anchor, Olivia had drifted along with no money, no friends and no life.
Even her mobile phone, which Morton had expected to find brimming with social media notifications, unread emails, and a million messages on her various apps, was decidedly old-school. She had no contacts listed except for work, and nearly all of her call history had been long, drawn out conversations with just one telephone number.
The anonymous number brought Morton to a two up, two down house in Sangley Road in Catford.
It was an old-fashioned area of London. Little had changed over the last decade, despite the general gentrification of central London. Traffic-laden and carved up by railway lines, Catford was a place that few who could afford to live elsewhere would choose to live. And yet it held a certain charm. The houses were certainly beautiful enough, and the schools were decent too, as the proximity of St Balthere’s in Deptford to the north showed. Catford, for all its attractions, seemed impervious to the crush of middle-class hipsters flooding to the capital in search of work.
Morton didn’t know who he was there to see. The phone which Olivia Hogge had called so frequently was unlisted, a cheap pay-as-you-go sim with no personal data attached, a ‘burner’ in police parlance.
The data never lied. It had taken Zane and Purcell mere minutes to triangulate the phone’s location, and so Morton found himself on the doorstep in the pouring rain, banging on the door and hoping that whoever was home would answer.
His knock was eventually answered by an elderly woman who looked none too happy to have a visitor on her doorstep. She shuffled slowly, leaning on a walking stick, until she was perched against the doorframe, and then she lifted her cane to tap a sign to the left of the door which read No Solicitors. I do not buy goods or services at the door.
‘I’m not here to sell anything, Mrs...?’ Morton said.
‘Gould. Katrina Gould. What do you want?’
‘I’m DCI Morton with the Metropolitan Police, ma’am. May I come in?’
She sized Morton up, checked his ID, and then lumbered inside. Once they were seated, she exhaled deeply. ‘It’s about my grandson, isn’t it?’
‘Your grandson?’
‘You’re not here for me, are you, love? So, it must be Carter,’ Mrs Gould said with absolute certainty. ‘Is he in hospital or in trouble this time?’
‘We’d like to speak with the owner of a mobile phone. Is this his number?’ Morton produced his own mobile phone and opened up the contact details of the traced phone.
‘Hang on, love. I’ll need to get me glasses.’ Mrs Gould delved into her handbag, rummaged through a drawer to the right of her armchair, and then, with a chuckle, realised her glasses were around her neck. She put them on, squinted at Morton’s phone, and then produced her own phone from her pocket. ‘Sorry, love. I don’t know the number off by heart. I’ve got to check my phonebook... Yep. That’s Carter’s number. Now, are you going to tell me what he’s done?’
‘Does Carter know an Olivia Hogge?’ Morton asked.
‘I don’t know her surname, but he’s mentioned a Livvy a few times, one of his girlfriends. That could be her. What’s he done to her?’
‘She was found murdered. The last number she called was Carter’s.’
Katrina Gould clapped her hands to her mouth. ‘And you think my Carter did it? He’s had his problems, Inspector, but he’s a good boy, really. By Catford standards.’
‘Is he here, Mrs Gould? I’d like to speak to him.’
‘No. He ain’t. He’s gone out somewhere, don’t ask me where, and I don’t know what time he’ll be back.’
Without his phone? ‘Would you mind if I go upstairs and check? We know his mobile phone is here.’
Mrs Gould folded her arms. ‘Damned right I do mind. I think it’s time for you to leave, Mr Morton.’
Morton rose. ‘Very well. Thank you for your time, Mrs Gould.’
Chapter 40: Ephebophilia
Thursday April 16th 09:30
If Katrina Gould wouldn’t play ball, Morton would have to make contact with her grandson, Carter Gould, while he was out of the family home. Now that they had a name, it was easy to confirm how Carter Gould and Olivia Hogge had met: she had been his teacher.
Morton reflected on the awkward look on the deputy head’s face during the first meeting at St Balthere’s. She had known something was amiss, but had remained silent.
Did everyone know the dead woman had been sleeping with one of her students?
Carter Gould was an ‘old’ sixteen. His birthday had been way back in September, while Olivia Hogge, at twenty-two, was five and a bit years his senior. That gap se
emed like an eternity for someone so young, and yet Morton had to remind himself that his own wife, Sarah, was three years his junior.
Morton and Ayala made the call to intercept Carter Gould at school. There were only a few weeks left in the summer term before Carter would be sitting his GCSE exams; that morning he was due to sit in on a maths revision session. Upon their arrival at St Balthere’s Academy, Morton successfully commandeered the use of Belinda Powell’s office. Ayala sat in the opposite corner, notepad in hand, ready to observe only.
He was sitting behind the deputy head’s desk sipping from a rancid cup of coffee when Ms Powell appeared in her doorway with Carter in tow.
The kid was perhaps a little over six feet tall, and almost as broad. If Morton had not known his age, he would have guessed the boy to be eighteen or nineteen at least. He had designer stubble on his chin and lip, and sat down with a swaggered confidence born of captaining the school’s rugby team.
‘Mr Carter Gould, Detective,’ Powell said, and bowed back out of the room.
‘Have a seat,’ Morton directed him. ‘Can I offer you a drink?’
‘Nah.’
‘You know why you’re here?’ Morton said.
Carter set his bag on the floor beside him. ‘Because Ms Hogge is dead, right?’
‘When did you last see her?’
‘Last night.’
Morton exchanged a glance with Ayala. The boy could have been the last one to see her alive.
‘What time?’
Carter’s expression turned to panic. ‘Ten, half past ten? Something like that. She was alive and well when I left her, honest. I went home straight after. Just ask Nan.’
‘Where did you see her?’
‘Her place. Just around the corner from here.’
‘And what were you doing there?’
‘What do you think I was doing?’ Carter stood and motioned crudely with his hips.
‘Sit back down, Mr Gould.’
He did.
‘You were having sex with Ms Hogge?’
‘Damned right I nailed her. She was my missus.’ Carter extended his fist, offering up a so-called fist-bump, and then withered under Morton’s glare.
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