No Place to Die

by Donoghue, Clare

  Lockyer was standing a little way off, talking to one of the perimeter officers. She remembered that first visit to Elmstead. She had not known what to say to him, aware that he was staring into his own abyss. She remembered his face: his eyes hollow with guilt and grief. As the image faded he looked over at her. He pointed to a white paper suit in his hand, gave her the thumbs up and smiled. Things were different this time. He was coming down into the tomb with her. They were a team again.

  ‘Do you want to wait for Jeanie?’ Dave asked, taking Jane’s arm. He had been here last time too and, just like then, he seemed to sense her unease. For someone who spent the majority of his time with corpses he possessed an empathy and understanding that Jane admired.

  She squeezed his hand as a silent thank you. ‘How long do you think she’ll be?’

  ‘An hour maybe,’ Dave said, looking at his watch. ‘She was up in Camden when I spoke to her. It’ll take her a while to get across town.’

  Jane nodded. ‘Okay, then I think I’d rather get down there and see what we’ve got. I’ve got a suspect in custody, and so far I don’t have enough to charge him.’

  ‘Yes, I heard,’ Dave said, tipping his head in Lockyer’s direction. ‘If it’s any consolation, he thinks you’re doing an amazing job.’ She started to argue, but he cut her off. ‘Now there’s no need to get all self-deprecating on me. He doesn’t dish out compliments very often, and I wouldn’t be passing it on if I didn’t know it was true.’ Dave smiled and put his arm around Jane’s shoulders. It was a simple gesture, a sign of his faith in her, but Jane found herself stepping away, rejecting the intimacy. She had spent a lot of her career trying to blend in with the guys. She knew Dave didn’t see her as girlish or weak, but she wasn’t about to risk the rest of her team even contemplating it.

  ‘Thanks, Dave. I’m just glad he’s talking. The catatonic-boss routine was getting a bit old.’ She could see he was taken aback by her attitude. ‘Sorry. I just want to get this done and get back to the station.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me twice,’ Dave said with a shrug of his shoulders. ‘Mike,’ he called over to Lockyer, ‘we’re ready.’

  Lockyer walked towards them, pulling on the arms of his white suit, the legs flapping behind him like a snake’s discarded skin. ‘Did I mention that I suffer from claustrophobia?’ he said. ‘Are all three of us really going to fit down there?’

  ‘Normally I’d say yes,’ Dave replied, stepping into his own suit, ‘but considering the length of your legs, I’m not so sure. You might have to leave them outside, you lanky git.’

  Jane laughed under her breath, letting the banter wash over her. Any and all distractions were welcome. ‘Come on, you two,’ she said, zipping up the front of her suit, the paper rustling beneath her fingers. ‘Dave, you go down first. Mike, you can follow. I’ll come down last.’

  ‘You’re going to pull us out if we get stuck, are you?’ Dave asked, smiling.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I just want to be able to get the hell out of there if you two get wedged.’ Both men turned their heads away as they laughed. Jane covered her smile with the back of her hand. The press were arriving en masse. The last thing any of them wanted was to see their pictures on the front page of a newspaper with stupid grins on their faces. Humour would help them deal with what they were about to see, but the public was unlikely to see it that way.

  Dave put his foot on the top step of the ladder. ‘Joking aside, this one is smaller, so watch your heads and keep your arms and elbows in.’ He started to climb down.

  ‘I’m not looking forward to this,’ Lockyer said in a whisper. ‘I really don’t like confined spaces.’

  ‘You’ll be fine once you’re down there,’ Jane said, and then she added, ‘I don’t think anyone likes confined spaces.’

  He stepped onto the ladder. Dave’s back was visible below them. ‘See you in there.’

  Jane watched Lockyer climb down and bend into a crouch to crawl through the covered entrance. She patted her pocket to check the little torch was still there, attached to her keys. It was a ‘Be safe’ gift from her mother. Satisfied, she turned and took hold of the ladder. Her legs shook on the first step, but by the second and third they had steadied. She could hear Lockyer and Dave talking, their voices muted by the mass of mud and rock surrounding them. She was prepared for what she was about to see. Or as prepared as she could be. But she couldn’t stop seeing Lebowski’s face. She paused and leaned against the ladder for support, a bead of sweat rolling down the back of her neck.

  This morning’s interview had been as she had expected. His lawyer had put a stop to almost every line of questioning, but it was the change in Lebowski’s behaviour after a night in custody that had surprised Jane. He was like a different person. He was cold, indifferent. Even when he was talking about Maggie, about their relationship, his voice remained on a monotone. His version of events hadn’t changed. In fact it was almost word for word what he had told her on Tuesday.

  She felt again for the torch. This time she took out her keys and put her finger through the keyring, holding them in her hand as she turned the torch on and off a couple of times. Lebowski’s reason for being in Elmstead was laughable in its simplicity. ‘I went for a walk.’ That was all he said. He didn’t elaborate and, when Jane pressed him, his lawyer intervened and told her to move on.

  She lowered herself from the final rung and dropped onto her knees. As she pushed aside the plastic sheeting she had one final thought, but it wasn’t about Lebowski. It was about Mort. He had told her and Lockyer that Maggie had refused to tell him whom she was seeing behind his back. Was that true? She sat back on her haunches as an idea took shape. Maggie’s tomb was prepared, the entrance hatch dug out, an air-hose and CCTV installed. Maggie was drugged, attacked, transported to Elmstead, carried through the woods and manhandled into the tomb. For Lebowski to achieve all that, unseen and without help, was no mean feat.

  ‘You need to see this, Jane,’ Lockyer called.

  She looked up. Dave and Lockyer were both on their hands and knees, facing away from her. Only the soles of their shoe covers and their white-papered backsides were visible. She crawled in, struck by how much smaller the space was, compared to the tomb where Maggie had been found. She remembered how cramped it had felt and how terrifying it must have been to be trapped there, in the dark. But this place was even worse. It was more like an oversized coffin, a yard or so high and not more than two, or maybe three, yards square. The three of them pretty much filled the space once she was alongside. Again she found herself thinking about Lebowski and Mort, and Maggie, seeing her lying there in her pyjamas, her hair covering her face, her feet bare.

  ‘We should have waited for Jeanie,’ Dave said.

  Jane followed Dave’s eye-line to the body. The legs and feet were tucked into the corner of the tomb, the torso and head stretched out in front of Lockyer. Jane tried to lean forward, but her back struck the ceiling, limiting her view. She could see tufts of hair. They looked fragile and dry, like hay left to bake in the sun. The skull beneath was like white marble. ‘How long has it been here?’ she asked, staring at the skeleton in front of them.

  ‘A long time,’ Dave said. ‘A very long time.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  1st May – Thursday

  ‘I’m not going to be able to charge him,’ Jane said, kicking a stone across the gravel. They were standing in the small car park on the edge of Elmstead Woods waiting for Jeanie to arrive.

  ‘You don’t know that yet,’ Lockyer said, leaning against a squad car.

  ‘Really?’ She pulled the band out of her hair, snapping it in the process. ‘What are the chances of there being any useable trace evidence down there?’ she said, pointing to the woods and the tent that was being erected as she spoke, the sun bouncing off the white plastic. ‘I don’t need Jeanie to tell me that those remains have been there for years. Dave won’t even confirm the sex of the victim at this stage. It’s going to take weeks
to examine the whole area.’

  ‘We’ll just have to go back and speak to Lebowski again,’ he said, pinching the bridge of his nose. ‘Try something else. See if we can’t work in this scenario. What are the team doing?’

  She sighed. ‘Whitemore and Franks are going over Lebowski’s background – everything and anything. I told them to go back five years initially, but I think today’s discovery might mean pushing that back further. Penny’s got six of the PCs that Roger signed off running second interviews with all of the students and tutors, and she and Aaron are doing Lebowski’s family, ex-wife, et cetera. Who else?’ she said, looking up at the cloudless sky. ‘Sasha’s reviewing Lebowski’s financial history and overseeing the search of his home address. I’ve got some of the PSs looking at cold-cases and talking to Missing Persons about today’s body. The Exhibits team are re-examining all the original evidence, preparing to add today’s samples, cross-referencing any similarities . . . blah-blah-blah.’ She stopped talking, shaking her head when she realized Lockyer was laughing at her.

  ‘Not much fun being at the top, is it?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I can feel this case slipping away from me and, to be quite frank, I’m shitting myself.’ She didn’t swear very often; it was a lazy use of language, or so her mother told her, but the main reason was Peter. He picked up everything and stored it like a computer. She remembered saying the F-word when she dropped the hoover on her foot. Peter had been three, but he repeated the word and put it in every sentence for about a month before he got bored. Even thinking about him made her chest ache. She had not spent more than an hour with him all week. He had been fast asleep when she picked him up from her mother’s on Tuesday night after her ‘chat’ with Lockyer. She had managed breakfast with him on Wednesday morning, but Lebowski’s arrest and the discovery of the second tomb meant she hadn’t got home until gone midnight. She had crept into Peter’s room to kiss him goodnight and found her mother sleeping next to him, both of them cramped beneath his dinosaur duvet on the tiny single bed. She had left the house at six to give herself time to prepare for the interview with Lebowski. So all in all she had no idea how her mother was, let alone her son; and she had no idea what trauma had caused his grandmother to forgo the comfort of the spare bedroom.

  ‘Peter?’ Lockyer asked.

  ‘Stop doing that,’ she said, frowning. ‘It freaks me out.’ She tried to maintain a cross expression, but couldn’t. It was unnerving when he read her mind like that, but part of her was relieved. It felt more like ‘old times’ between the two of them.

  ‘Oh, come on – you know I love doing it,’ he said. ‘Mind you, if you’d have asked me last week what you were thinking, I wouldn’t have had a clue. But this week,’ he said, hooking his thumbs under a pair of imaginary braces, ‘ta-dah, I can read you like a book, Jane.’

  ‘Good for you,’ she said, wishing she could say the same about him. He had changed in the past few days, regained some of his old self, but she still didn’t know what he was thinking. Not when it came to things that mattered. ‘What am I going to do about Lebowski?’ she asked. ‘I don’t think I’ve even got enough to keep him for the full forty-eight hours. That means he’ll be out by tonight. His lawyer’s been calling me all morning asking if I have any new evidence to support the arrest.’

  ‘Have you spoken to her?’

  ‘No, because I don’t have anything to tell her. She’s already provided an affidavit from his doctor saying he has no health issues or reason to be prescribed morphine, so that’s blown that one. Dave told me just now that he can’t say whether the pills were crushed up in food or taken orally in the normal manner. All he can say is that the fragments are consistent with digestion. We can’t prove they were crushed. Even if we could, I can’t prove Lebowski drugged her food, because her meal was eaten at least three days before her body was found. There’s no trace of the chilli con carne Lebowski claimed they ate. So unless Sasha turns up a chilli-mix laced with morphine in Lebowski’s kitchen, I’m up that infamous creek without a paddle.’

  ‘So let him go,’ Locker said.

  She looked at him. ‘What? Just like that?’

  ‘What more can you do? As you say, unless the house search turns up something linking him to the morphine, or the blow to the back of Maggie’s head, your evidence won’t hold up.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, dropping down on the bonnet next to him. ‘Even the arrest has worked in his favour.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’ he asked.

  ‘Because it means the Exhibits team has nothing to do, again,’ she said, turning to face him. ‘Think about it. He was dating Maggie; saw her the night she died; admitted to sexual intercourse, to cooking her dinner, to arguing. That makes all the physical evidence on the body, and whatever we turn up at his house, worthless. Everything we find he’s told us about already. Now Elmstead: if the Exhibits team finds traces of soil on his shoes, in his car or on his sodding kitchen floor, we could place him at the scene of Maggie’s murder. Not any more,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘He likes to go for walks in Elmstead Woods. Of course he has soil on his shoes.’ When Lockyer didn’t respond she opened her hands. ‘So where does that leave my investigation?’ She put the toe of her shoe into the gravel and swept it from side to side. The realization hit her as if someone had slapped her face.

  ‘That’s it,’ she said, slowing her breathing as the pieces fell into place. ‘He knew we were going to arrest him. That’s why he told me everything – everything that had happened between him and Maggie. He wanted me to know about Mort, about the fights. He wanted to put himself at the top of the suspect list. He knew the tox screen would tell us about the morphine and that it would be enough to arrest him. He also knew it was only a matter of time before the other body was found. So he took himself off to Elmstead, made a show of scrabbling around in the dirt, knowing that the neighbourhood would be on full alert after the discovery of Maggie’s body, knowing someone would call it in. It’s almost like he engineered this whole thing to prove just how clever he is.’

  ‘There is some good news,’ Lockyer said.

  Jane almost choked on the laughter that wanted to come. ‘There is?’

  ‘Yes,’ he continued, pushing himself up off the car. ‘He might know how to skew your investigation, but he doesn’t know you. He doesn’t know how you think. We let him go and see what he does. It won’t end here. If he’s anything like the man you’re describing, then he won’t stop. Right now he has our attention, but in order to keep it – to really prove his superiority – he’ll have to do more, he’ll have to take risks.’ Jane took her phone out of her trouser pocket. ‘Who are you calling?’ he asked.

  ‘Phil Bathgate,’ she said, already dialling the number. ‘Lebowski might be clever, but no one knows the workings of a psycho’s mind better than Phil. And . . . ’ she said, holding the phone to her ear, ‘I’m starting to think Lebowski might not be alone in this. There are too many things, too many coincidences. You’ll probably think I’m stretching a point with this, but I still think Mort is involved. He knows more than he’s told us. I think it’s possible that he and Lebowski know each other. They both seem to relish their own brilliance. They’d be the perfect team.’ She saw the doubt on Lockyer’s face. ‘It’s my case. Maggie is my responsibility. I’m not about to let Lebowski run the show. I need to show him that you don’t have to have a PhD to mess with people’s heads. I won’t let him make a fool out of me . . . again.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  1st May – Thursday

  ‘I’m happy to come to you,’ Jane said, looking at her watch. ‘About three-thirty?’ She listened as Phil rattled off all the important things he had to do, debating aloud whether he had time to squeeze her into his hectic, life-altering schedule. She took a deep breath and waited. The last time they had spoken she had wanted to physically injure him. Today appeared to be no different. How could someone so useful be so annoying? ‘Fine, four-fifteen works for me. Tha
nk you, Phil,’ she said, not feeling any gratitude at all. She ended the call and dropped her mobile onto the desk. She looked at her watch. It was two-thirty. Another five hours and Lebowski would be out.

  How could she have been so gullible? It felt as if everything had been tailored, from his phone call on Monday night to his arrest yesterday, and she had fallen for it. Her office phone started ringing. She picked it up as she scrolled through her emails, clicking on a new message from Penny. ‘DS Bennett,’ she stated, double-clicking on the document attached to Penny’s email.

  ‘Hello, darling. Am I disturbing you?’ her mother asked.

  ‘No, Mum. I was just about to call you,’ she said, her cheeks heating at the lie.

  ‘I just wondered if you might have time to pick Peter up from school this afternoon.’

  Jane started to read the document. She looked at her watch again. ‘Well, I’ve got a meeting just after four, so I’d be a bit pushed to get there and back. Why?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I was going to take your father to . . . Never mind, I shouldn’t have called. Not to worry. I’ll do it. What time do you think you’ll be home?’

  ‘No, no,’ Jane said. ‘I can sort something out. It’s fine.’ She tried to disguise the sigh that accompanied her statement.

  ‘No, honestly, darling. I’m sorry I bothered you. What time did you say you’d be home?’

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ she said. ‘I’ll need to check.’ She stopped and stared at the name in front of her. ‘Sorry,’ she said, looking on her desk for Mark’s case file. ‘Listen, can I call you back in a second?’

  ‘Of course, of course. I’ll speak to you later.’