by Michael Kerr
“You sad cow!” She said it out loud, almost a shout, before jerking backwards in the chair, standing up and walking to the sink to empty the brandy down the plug hole. Christ, she was pushing forty and looked on life as a half empty glass, not half full. Some imbecile had dreamed up the saying: ‘life begins at forty’, which was a crock of shit. Life was well ripe by then, and most people were on the down curve, like her, wondering what the hell they’d done with the most precious commodity of all, which was time, and angry with themselves at dreams not realised or even pursued, and surprised at how fast it had all gotten away from them.
Laura went upstairs and dressed in T-shirt, sweater, Levi’s and Nikes, then returned downstairs and left the cottage by the back door to enter the woods that crowded up to the boundary of its small rear garden.
The sun was low in a dull, red sky as she walked along what she imagined to be a deer trail, tramping noisily over a carpet of dry twigs and pine needles, with the scent of conifers heavy in the evening air. A grey squirrel ran up the deeply fissured bark of a cone-laden fir as she stopped to light a cigarette. She watched, and the rodent headed up into the green canopy, bushy tail flicking with irritation at her presence, its movements jerky and comical. She had entered the woods to clear her mind, and found herself reassessing priorities and looking for answers to the enigma of existence, however pointless the exercise.
On a personal level, it all came down to the job. She was painfully aware that if she wanted Jim, she would have to jack it in and go to him. He had turned his back on the bureau and started over, finding a life outside the world of crime that she had steeped herself in. Walking on, she lost track of time, hardly aware as dusk sapped the heavens of light. She stopped by the side of a small brook to sit on the grassy bank, hugging her knees and staring at the still water and the black clouds of midges swirling senselessly above its surface. With a sudden clarity, the weight lifted from her, calmness pervaded her mind and lightened her spirit. She would see this case through, and then resign from a police force that was already looking to hang her out to dry over the Tacker. She had the deeds to the cottage, plus a couple of decent insurance policies and a healthy building society account. If Jim wanted a crack at being with her, then she would go to him, begin afresh, open a bloody florists or gift shop in Windsor and start to savour each day; take time out to smell the flowers. Christ! She had been little more than a fucking hamster, frantically running on the spot in a caged wheel and getting nowhere fast. It was time to jump off and get a life.
A crime scene team was searching Cox’s smallholding while he was being questioned. He had raised no objections, and not even insisted on being present; just asked them to respect his property.
The forensic team arrived in two transit vans, stepping out of them wearing hooded coveralls, overshoes and latex gloves. Two of them carried bright aluminium cases, and the sunlight bounced off the reflective metal surfaces. Curious villagers were kept back by uniformed PCs, their apprehension combining with anger as whispers of contaminated waste or some deadly virus spurred them into confrontational mood.
“We’re not bloody stupid,” Stanley Price, the landlord of the Plough Inn, said to the constable nearest to him. “Those buggers are wearin’ protective clothin’. An’ last month there were crop circles in the field behind us. Somethin’s up. We’re not daft, lad.”
“Do you think we’d be standing here if there was any danger?” PC Alan Fraser said, smiling cheerfully at the surly little man, who he thought capable of inciting the group of mainly pensionable-aged wrinklies and droolies into civil unrest. Jesus! That could result in embarrassing arrests of senior citizens, or at least bring about the odd heart attack, stroke, or both, judging by the look of some of them, who were all well past their sell by dates.
“You’re paid to do what you’re told, son, dangerous or not,” Stanley retorted. “It’s a copper’s lot. So don’t try to fob us off. Those buggers are dressed up to deal with some sort of catastrophe, and we have a right to know what it is.”
Alan bit his lip. It was a hot day, and his shirt and underpants were sticking to him under the black uniform that soaked up the heat. The leather band inside his helmet was also sodden, and his hair and scalp were itching with sweat. The shifty-eyed little shit and his geriatric band of cronies were getting on his tits. Too many daft twats were watching repeats of the sodding X-Files and assorted Star Trek spin-offs nowadays. He would love to tell these yokels that a UFO had crash-landed, and that the forensic guys were really a team from Area 51 in the States, flown in to recover the craft and the little green aliens that occupied it. Having not won the lottery, and still needing his salary to pay the bills, Alan took a deep breath and pinned the pain-in-the-arse publican with a withering stare. “If you look closely, sir,” he replied tersely. “You’ll see that the buggers in question are not wearing fishbowl helmets, and haven’t got oxygen tanks strapped to their bloody backs. This may or may not be a crime scene, and they are dressed in protective clothing because they do not want to contaminate any evidence that might be here.”
Stanley glared, then coughed up some phlegm from his clotted lungs and spat it out through a convenient gap in his discoloured teeth, where a front tooth had been dislodged by the fist of a local farmer fifteen years previously: Stanley’s attitude was not always suffered gladly. And had the viscous substance settled on Alan’s highly polished boot instead of on the grass next to it, then the dour landlord might have been grabbed by his scrawny neck and nicked for assault. As it was, Alan counted to ten and refused to be drawn any further.
The house and outbuildings were clean. The only trace of human occupation, apart from that of Derek Cox, was an assortment of head and pubic hairs, mainly found in the bed and the bathroom. A few of them were blonde and would be analysed, but were short and most likely his. A vast collection of gay magazines and videos were discovered, and the bedside cabinet drawer held a healthy stock of condoms and tubes of KY jelly. Cox was obviously gay, and the only blue-eyed blondes that he was likely to be interested in would be of the male gender. The one item of dubious significance was a short coil of blue nylon rope found hanging from a bracket in the garage. It was bagged and taken, to be sent for comparison with the length that had been used to suspend Shelley Stroud. It was a routine procedure, not thought too significant, when taken into account that the product was generic and as commonplace in garages, garden sheds and car boots as knives and forks are in a kitchen drawer. The guy was a fruit, and it appeared that he would soon be eliminated as a suspect from their list of one.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
IT was forty-eight hours later that Laura got a call from the Forensic Science Services in Leeds.
“The two pieces of nylon rope are a match, Laura,” Dr Miles Atherton said. “Both are from the same length.”
“Christ, Miles! Is that categorically and without doubt a hundred percent certain?” she asked, reaching for her cigarettes with her free hand, adrenaline pumping with the anticipation of what this bolt from the blue meant.
“Under the evil eye of the electron-microscope, no fibres can conceal their individual characteristics, my dear. In a world of uncertainty, this is unambiguous; beyond conjecture. This baby was cut with a serrated blade at a fifteen degree angle. The fibres are a perfect match. Also, the density and dye signatures are identical. And there are traces of blood on both pieces that are AB positive, which is the same as that of the Stroud girl. DNA matching will no doubt confirm that it is her blood.”
“I think you’ve just wrapped up the Tacker murders for us, Miles. A mere thank you seems a little inadequate,” Laura said, her hand clenching the receiver in a finger-aching grip, and her heart beating like a big bass drum.
“So buy me a malt whisky the next time you’re in the neighbourhood, a large one. I’ll have this paperwork hand delivered to you before lunch.”
“If we get a conviction, I’ll buy you a bottle of Scotland’s finest, Miles.”
Laura ground her cigarette butt out in the ashtray, slid the drawer closed and headed out of the office, down the corridor to a much larger office that they were using as an incident room for this case. Hugh and DCs Neil Abbott, Jack Mercer and Clem Nash were sifting through the case files again, searching for new leads, now that their suspect was looking whiter than white.
“We’ve got him! It is Cox,” Laura said as she entered the room like a stormtrooper out of a Star Wars movie. “Arrange to have him lifted by an armed response team. If he thinks we’re on to him he may go for broke. Forensic checked the rope, and guess what? It matches. It’s even almost certainly got Shelley’s blood on it. He doesn’t appear to be stupid, but he has a licensed shotgun, so let’s assume that he’d use it if push came to shove.”
It took the Chief Superintendant’s clout to pull strings and sanction an Armed Response Unit to be unleashed. What was commonplace in London seemed to be a big deal and take an interminable length of time to organise in the Vale of York. It reminded Laura that the overall pace of life in the sticks was several gears below the frenzy of the big city. Usually, that was no bad thing. But at times such as this she felt as though she was trying to operate in some foreign land with a ‘mañana’ mentality, where easy-going procrastination was the rule of thumb.
Derek was twenty-five yards from the house, knelt, planting seed potatoes, his bronzed body bathed in a sheen of perspiration. He wore only frayed-cuffed denim shorts, wrangler work boots and garden gloves. He thought he would make a prime candidate for a raunchy gardeners’ calendar, though the picture that came to mind of a semi-nude Alan Titchmarsh or Monty Don reclining on a potting shed table amid spring bulbs and plant pots was, to say the least, off-putting. He froze as a distorted, magnified voice sounding like a Dalek, said: “Derek Cox. We are armed police officers. Put your hands behind your head, fingers interlaced...NOW.”
He looked up, around him, and saw what appeared to be several SAS men, all in black, and all pointing what looked like submachine guns in his direction. He let go of the potato he was gripping and placed his hands behind his neck. It was a broiling August day, but he was suddenly very cold. The skin over his entire body tightened, and gooseflesh spread over him like a rash.
“Lay flat, face down. Keep your hands where they are,” the disembodied voice crackled through an unseen bullhorn.
“The cheques in the post, whoever you are,” Derek shouted, even as he obeyed the command, a second before being circled by a ring of armed police.
A gruff voice. “Shut the fuck up,” followed by a knee digging in his back as his hands were roughly jerked down behind him and his wrists were cuffed. “You are being taken in for questioning. Anything that you say can and will―”
“Okay, enough. I’ve heard it all on TV shows. Cut the crap and help me up, this soil tastes nearly as bad as you heroes smell.”
The knee ground down again, hard into his right kidney this time, making him cry out as he was yanked up by the ratchet cuffs with such force that he thought his arms would be popped from their sockets.
As Laura and Hugh interviewed Cox again, the Chief Superintendent stood behind a one way mirror, silent, content to watch and listen. As chief, he wanted to keep up to speed on what appeared to be the solving of the serial killings. He needed to be au fait with what he would step in at the right time and take the lion’s share of credit for.
Derek could feel the pressure. It was the same as pre-storm static that quieted birdsong and weighted the air. A growing sense of impending doom flash-froze his spine. They had decided that he was the killer. Even the vibes from his solicitor – who had told him to answer nothing without his consent – did not inspire confidence. The dapper little geek might be representing him, but had already made up his mind that he was defending a murderer.
“The rope, Derek,” Laura said. “It was in your garage. How do you explain that?”
He shook his head slowly. “I can’t. It doesn’t belong to me. I’ve never seen it before.”
“Among the thousands of items that fill your garage, you expect us to believe that you can identify a piece of nylon rope as definitely not being your property. Is that what you’re saying?”
Derek swallowed hard. “I’ve never owned any blue nylon rope. Somebody must have put it there.”
Laura paused to exploit silence as a weapon, slowly taking a cigarette from the pack in front of her and hesitating for long seconds before lighting up. She inhaled deeply, tilted her head back and blew the smoke out and up into the air, to watch it rise and spread across the ceiling; a diaphanous cloud.
“Let’s get this straight, Derek,” she continued, eventually. “The killer picks you out at random, breaks into your garage and hangs a length of rope over a bracket, trusting to luck that for some reason we will suspect you and search your property. Does that sound plausible?”
“Don’t answer that,” the sallow-faced solicitor said. And to Laura. “My client isn’t in a position to know what the killer did, and doesn’t expect you to believe anything other than his innocence. He has never seen the rope that you allegedly found in his garage, and if all you intend to do is harass him over the same point, then I suggest that this interview be terminated. You are going to have to charge Derek with what you have, or release him. And we both know that you haven’t got a case that’ll stand up.”
Over the following two days, the smallholding of Derek Cox was turned into a building site. The lab boys used the latest sonic tomography equipment, which enabled them to scan beneath the ground and search for human remains.
“What exactly are you doing with this hi-tech gizmo?” Laura asked Dr Ed Wells, who looked remarkably like a younger version of Bruce Willis, though was not follically challenged and wore his long red hair in a ponytail that hung down between broad shoulders to the middle of his back.
“Sure can, er, sir...ma’am.”
“Make it Laura. You don’t work for me, so there’s no need to be formal.”
“Okay, Laura. This is a sophisticated radiography scanner. We bounce shock waves at a predetermined depth in the ground, and bingo, we have an image on a monitor in the van of any details within the selected plane. This will show us everything from a buried pitchfork or unexploded bomb, to a skeleton. It saves guessing, and more importantly, saves digging.”
The scanner found the remains of a dog that had presumably been buried by a previous owner of the property, but nothing more sinister. And the house and Cox’s car were clean. A lot of man hours and expenditure left them with the piece of rope as the only incriminating evidence against him. Then it all went down the pan. Odontology contacted Laura with results that put them back to square one. Their suspect, who was still being held in custody, much to his and his brief’s annoyance, got a break.
“It wasn’t Cox,” Laura advised the team. “He may be an accomplice, but he didn’t do it alone. His teeth don’t match the bites. If he sticks to his guns, he’s home free. We don’t have enough to merit holding him for another second.”
“He did it, I know he did,” Hugh said, cracking his knuckles as he paced the office. “He could have worn special dentures over his own teeth to bite off the nipples. He’s a clever bastard, but he fits the profile that your FBI buddy came up with. And finding the rope, well that ties it up for me...no pun intended.”
“We needed a body, or bodies. At least some hard forensic evidence. We’ve got nothing but the bloody rope, that he denies owning,” Laura said. “Put that together with his known sexual preference, and there’s not enough to work with.”
“More good news, if your name happens to be Derek Cox,” Neil Abbott said, racking the phone that he had been talking on. “They checked his online times. When the first two girls were lifted, he was playing the market on the Internet.”
“You mean, someone was online using his computer,” Hugh snapped.
Laura shook her head. “Give it up, Hugh. We need more.”
Derek had an irritating smirk on
his face. “Any time,” he said when they completed the paperwork, told him not to leave the area without informing them of his plans, and cut him loose. “Only don’t send the bloody SAS lookalikes in again. Just give me a bell and I’ll drive down.”
Hugh wanted to drive his fist into the man’s face. “If we lift you again, Cox, it’ll be because we’ve got enough to put you away for the rest of your natural,” he said. “You’re guilty in my book, and I aim to prove it. So be aware that you’re on a short leash.”
“Are you threatening me?” Derek said, smiling contemptuously, and even stepping up close to Hugh, so that their faces were only inches apart.
Hugh fought to keep his cool. He leaned forward until their noses were almost touching. “Yeah, you murdering little queer,” he whispered. “I’m on your case, big time.”
Derek sighed. “It’s a shame you feel that way. I like macho types, and you’ve got a lovely arse. If you ever want to have a really good time and try a little bit of something that I know you’d like, give me a call.”
As Hugh’s face flared red and his fists balled, Derek withdrew, blowing him a kiss as he hastily stepped out onto the street and vanished.
“You’ll get yours,” Hugh muttered. “All bad things come to those who wait.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN