The Gordian Knot (Stone & Randall 2)

by Ellis, Tim

  ‘Just slithered out. I couldn’t stand to spend another minute in that bed without you.’

  She wrapped her arms around him.

  They kissed.

  She smelled of strawberries.

  The inside of his mouth felt like a dog’s anus.

  Her white hair looked as though a god had reached down and snapped a bright red ladybird clamp at the back of her head on whatever strands had been caught up on the breeze.

  She collected hair clamps – had so many she could have opened a hair clamp emporium. On a Sunday morning, they’d catch the tube to a flea market. She’d spend ages rummaging on the stalls for hair clamps. He was just content to be with her – had learned the hard way what was important in life. Afterwards, they’d find a pub and have lunch. He’d savour a bottle of lager while she showed him what she’d bought. The excitement in her eyes made him smile. In the afternoon they’d make love and fall asleep in each other’s arms. Sometimes, he felt guilty that he was sharing his life with her and not his dead wife and children, but he was gradually coming to terms with the guilt that not long ago used to overwhelm him.

  She smiled. ‘I can understand that.’

  ‘We could go back to bed now and make love all morning. They’d have to separate us with a crowbar.’

  ‘How disgusting.’

  He licked his lips. ‘Just say the word.’

  ‘Breakfast is ready.’

  ‘There’ll be other breakfasts.’

  ‘I need to open the cafe.’

  ‘There’ll be other cafes.’

  ‘Customers will be waiting.’

  ‘There’ll be other customers.’

  ‘Don’t you have work to do?’

  ‘There’ll be other work.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said.

  ‘You don’t mean that.’

  She wriggled from his grasp. ‘I knew you weren’t being serious. I nearly got excited.’

  ‘I meant every word.’

  ‘Until it came to putting those words into action.’

  ‘There’ll be other words.’

  They laughed.

  ‘Lots of them, I’m sure,’ she said. ‘Come and get your breakfast before it goes cold. I’m going downstairs to open up.’

  ‘I miss you already.’

  She kissed him again. ‘And I miss you as well, Cole Randall.’

  He followed her out of the bedroom.

  She left the flat to walk down the stairs to the cafe.

  After making himself a coffee, he took his breakfast to the window that overlooked King Street and sat there eating it. Looking out of a window at the world was a luxury he didn’t have in the basement room they’d given him at Springfield Psychiatric Hospital. Now, he liked nothing more than watching people hurrying to and fro, wondering who they were, where they were going and what the future held for them.

  He really should have gone to visit Molly, or at least called, but he’d had his own issues to resolve. Like him, she needed time to come to terms with being damaged goods. Nothing he could say or do would help her, and he wasn’t much of a friend – never had been. He’d quickly learned that friends in need were a pain in the arse.

  So, she was back at work. Was it too soon? What had happened at the church? A death – obviously, but whose? Would she ring him for help? Should he ring her and offer his services?

  He was working a case himself at the moment. Jim and Colleen O’Connor had driven into the northern approach of the Blackwall Tunnel two days ago at ten-thirty in the morning and simply disappeared. Their car – a three year old Ford Focus – was found blocking the left-hand lane of the tunnel when maintenance workers went in to find out what was causing the bottleneck. The doors were open, the lights were on, the keys were still in the ignition and the engine was idling, but the O’Connors were nowhere to be found.

  Unravelling an enigma was certainly up his street, and the two families were happy to pay the daily fee and any expenses he might incur, to find out what had happened to the couple. As Athena had said when she’d asked him if he wanted the job: ‘Sounds easy enough, Mr Randall.’

  She was probably right. ‘Now that we’re business partners, you can call me Cole.’

  ‘I’m more comfortable calling you Mr Randall.’

  He shrugged and said, ‘Okay, I’ll take the job.’

  ‘Do you need any people?’

  ‘Not at the moment. Let me do some research first and then I’ll see where I am.’

  The police weren’t interested. They had their own ideas about what had happened, and weren’t prepared to waste any more of their meagre resources on a dubious missing persons’ case. How many people turned their backs on an unsatisfactory life each year he wondered? He could certainly understand people getting up one morning and deciding “enough was enough”, walking away from their lives without a backwards glance and becoming someone new. Is that what had happened here?

  There were a number of possibilities, and he began to make a list in his notebook – some habits were hard to break. As a copper he’d always used a notebook – he knew from bitter experience the fallibility of memory. He wrote each possibility on a separate page.

  Illness – could the O’Connor’s have developed an illness such as dementia in the middle of the Blackwall Tunnel? They were too young. Jim was twenty-nine and Colleen was twenty-seven. Not only that, the possibility of them both developing the illness at the same time was astronomically impossible. He wrote some notes and then crossed it off the list.

  Accident – could they have had an accident that had caused amnesia? There was no damage to the car, no blood, and the odds of them both getting amnesia at the same time were off the scale. However, he couldn’t rule out drug-induced amnesia yet. As far as he knew there were no drugs found in the car, but he needed more information on their lifestyle.

  Kidnapping – could someone have stopped the O’Connors car and kidnapped them? No ransom demand or any other communication had been received from kidnappers. Could they have been kidnapped for another purpose such as human trafficking? By the security services? Or by persons unknown in order to murder them? There was no evidence of a struggle, but it was a distinct possibility.

  Could they have walked away from their lives? It certainly looked as if that’s what they’d done. It’s what the police believed had happened. Jim and Colleen might have had debts they couldn’t see a way through. They could have disappeared to avoid being arrested for a crime, joined a cult or other religious organisation.

  As soon as he began turning over the possibilities in his mind he realised that he needed to find out everything he could about Jim and Colleen O’Connor. Who were they? What were their lives like? Was it feasible that they had simply walked away without a backwards glance? He had a lot of questions he needed answers to, but that’s how investigations began.

  The question at the forefront of his mind was: How had the O’Connors got out of the tunnel? He needed to go in there to take a look. Driving into the tunnel and stopping was likely to cause an accident. There were only two lanes in each of the northern and southern tunnels. If someone parked up to sightsee . . . Well, it wouldn’t take a genius to guess the likely consequences.

  Which left walking into the tunnel along the maintenance walkway. The problem, of course, was that permission to enter the tunnel on foot was required from Greenwich Council. Health and safety rules stipulated that no pedestrians were permitted to enter the tunnel without written authority from the council, and the person must be accompanied by an escort.

  That was where he was going today. He was meeting his escort – a Mr Bradley Bath – at ten o’clock on the A102 outside the Tunnel Coffee Shop, and he’d be taken into the tunnel on foot.

  It was time to get ready and make tracks. He finished his breakfast, washed up and went to get a shower.

  Chapter Three

  ‘I was beginning to get worried, Gov,’ Tony said as she walked into the squad room at twenty past nine.


  ‘Well, here I am. So, you can stop worrying about me now. A coffee wouldn’t go amiss though.’

  ‘Coming right up.’ It didn’t matter what she threw at him, he took everything in good heart.

  The other members of her team crowded round to welcome her back with cheek kisses and pats on the back.

  ‘Thanks,’ she mumbled. She wasn’t very good when people were being nice to her. They’d sent her a card with stupid comments from everyone and a pot plant that she’d put on her windowsill. It would probably die like all the others. She just didn’t have the time or inclination to look after plants.

  She had hardly slept. As well as everything else, she kept thinking about what Dr Lytton had told her in the hospital – that Richard Stone wasn’t her father.

  The man she’d called “dad” for twenty-nine years had been released from Springfield Psychiatric Hospital two years ago into the safekeeping of his wife – Molly’s mother – with a rucksack full of medication to control his paranoid schizophrenia. He would have been fine if he’d been taking the drugs, but he wasn’t taking them, and he wasn’t fine. After he’d killed her mum, he went out and killed an old woman, a nine year old girl on a bike, and then paralysed a father of four with a baseball bat. He thought they were aliens. They locked him up and forgot about him until he died a year ago. She cried herself to sleep for six months and never saw her father again.

  Except, he wasn’t her father. She hadn’t done anything with the information. What the hell was she meant to do with it? She’d put off going to see Dr Lytton, and she’d avoided the garage with all her parents’ possessions inside as if it contained all the demons from hell – and maybe it did.

  It was bloody freezing outside and kept promising to snow. In the station it was like a friggin’ sauna. No wonder people got ill. She squirmed out of her jacket and tossed it onto her desk.

  They were all waiting for her to begin. She felt like a presenter on Play School.

  Here's a house,

  Here's a door,

  Windows, one, two, three, four,

  Ready to knock?

  Turn the lock

  It's Play School.

  She perched on a desk facing the incident boards. It wasn’t her turn to start.

  Tony brought her coffee.

  ‘So, what have the mice been up to while the cat’s been away, Frank?’

  The corner of his mouth went up. DS Frank Lowen was all sharp angles. He used Brylcreem on his dark brown hair and looked for all the world like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. Instead of changing career to become a celebrity lookalike, he had transferred to Homicide from Robbery in Kensington nineteen months ago. Married with three teenage children, he had been a copper for fifteen years, but had stalled at DS. When Molly had asked him what his plans for the future were he said he didn’t have any, which was probably why he wasn’t going anywhere.

  ‘Abbey and I are heavily involved with the Gideon case. We’ve arrested Mark Gideon for murdering his wife, but he insists she was killed by an intruder. We’re making sure we’ve got all the bases covered.’

  ‘Did he kill her?’

  Frank nodded. ‘We’ve found no evidence to suggest there was an intruder, but we don’t want to make any mistakes.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Paul and Lucy are investigating the murder of Suzanne Devlin. She was found battered to death in her flat three days ago.’

  She glanced at Lucy. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘Early days yet, Gov. We’ve got her ex-boyfriend in the cells downstairs. We have witnesses that put him at her flat at the right time, but nothing else.’

  ‘Thanks, Lucy. Well, it looks like we’re on our own, Tony. Tell the good people what Santa brought us last night.’

  He stood up and described what they’d found at St Peter-in-Chains church. ‘No photographs yet, but we’ll get them up today.’

  ‘You two get all the good murders,’ Abbey said.

  Although beautiful with lush dark hair, Abby had a bent nose and no breasts. Molly was convinced that if she underwent a nose job and acquired two 34B implants she could have been on the catwalk in Milan, or on the red carpet in Hollywood.

  ‘We’re just lucky, aren’t we, Tony?’

  He grinned. ‘I’ll say.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Remember, we said we’d go and see the Archbishop at eleven o’clock.’

  ‘He can wait. The bastard kept us waiting long enough. Right, I suppose I’d better go and say hello to the Chief. How’s she been, Frank?’

  ‘Not seen much of her to be honest.’

  ‘Oh well. I’m going in, wish me luck.’

  ‘Good luck, Gov,’ they chorused.

  She walked along the corridor and knocked on the Chief’s door.

  ‘Enter.’

  She opened the door and went in.

  ‘DI Stone, I’ve been expecting you. Take a seat. Coffee?’

  Chief Superintendent Avril Smart was probably the ugliest woman she’d ever seen. She was squat with short brown hair, a face like a man’s, a high-pitched voice and large breasts hanging down to her waist.

  ‘No thanks, Ma’am, I’ve just had one.’

  ‘You’ve caught up with your team?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what about the priest?’

  Molly told the Chief what they’d found, about the post mortem tomorrow morning, and about their planned visit to torture the Archbishop.

  ‘No idea what it’s all about?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘Seems a bit strange to call a priest godless, especially in Greek. Why not simply carve it in English?’

  Molly shrugged.

  ‘Child abuse seems to be the flavour of the month. Could it be related?’

  ‘There’s no indication that’s what it might be.’

  The Chief seemed to lose interest in the investigation. ‘Anyway, I’m sure you’ll get to the bottom of it. What I’d like to talk to you about is the David Haig case.’

  She had to dredge her memory for the name. ‘That was over five years ago. DI Randall was in charge. I was only a Sergeant then.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘What about the case?’

  ‘Haig has asked for a review by the Criminal Cases Review Commission.’

  ‘Obviously got too much time on his hands. He was as guilty as sin. I hope they’ve fed the request into the shredder?’

  ‘They’re thinking there might have been a miscarriage of justice.’

  ‘He raped and murdered Chelsea Mey. She was only eighteen years old for Christ’s sake. There was a ton of evidence that put him behind bars.’

  ‘He’s arguing that the evidence was contaminated.’

  ‘No way in hell . . .’

  ‘That it was all circumstantial . . .’

  ‘We found his DNA in her vagina for fuck’s sake.’

  ‘He’s saying that the police lied . . .’

  ‘Don’t they always?’

  ‘That he’s such a wonderful man there’s absolutely no way in a month of Sundays he could have done it . . .’

  ‘He’s a fucking low-life that deserved a lethal injection. Excuse my French, Ma’am.’

  ‘That the eye-witness who placed him at the scene of the crime deliberately lied . . .’

  ‘What the hell for? The old woman didn’t know him from a hole in the head.’

  ‘That his so-called confession was extracted under duress . . .’

  ‘What a load of crap.’

  ‘He’s now saying he had an alibi . . .’

  ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’

  ‘The CCRC think he’s got a case. It’s just gone into the review stage.’

  ‘What! They’re a bunch of imbeciles. Don’t they have any respect for his victim? Chelsea Mey can’t ask for a fucking review.’

  ‘Haig is also being supported by a journalist called Kelly Upshaw from the Hammersmith Herald. She’s been running a campaign in the newspaper and has a website linked to the Misca
rriage of Justice site.’

  ‘What is wrong with people today? Well, as I said, Randall was the Senior Investigating Officer.’

  ‘Who isn’t a serving police officer anymore.’

  ‘Which means what?’

  ‘You’re it.’

  ‘But . . . Fucking hell. Don’t those bastards at the CCRC know we have murderers to catch?’

  ‘It’s their job to review possible miscarriages of justice, DI Stone.’

  ‘Putting rapists and murderers back on the streets, you mean? Christ, sometimes I hate this job.’

  ‘That’s why they brought in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) in 1984, and the Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act (CPIA) in 1996, so that we would get it right first time.’

  ‘We did get it right, Ma’am. All the interviews were recorded, we maintained the chain of evidence, we disclosed everything relevant to the defence – it was by the book.’

  ‘Let’s hope so, Inspector. Haig’s request for a review could simply be malicious, but justice has to be seen to be done.’

  ‘Justice was done. It’s now being undone by those idiots at the CCRC.’

  ‘We’ll have to wait and see, won’t we? A George Swash – the Records Manager at the CCRC – will meet you at the Margravine Gardens evidence storage warehouse at four this afternoon. Sign over the evidence to him . . . and be polite.’

  She stood up. ‘I’ll give him one of my winning smiles as I thrust my knee in his bollocks.’

  ‘That should do it. Before you go . . .’

  ‘Yes, Chief?’

  ‘How are you feeling? Are you sure you’re ready to come back to work?’

  ‘I’m feeling fine, Ma’am. To be honest, I’d rather be at work than rattling around in an empty flat. I could do without the CCRC review though – that kind of stress I don’t need.’

  ‘Well, there it is. Nothing we can do about it except grin and bear it. Oh, and let’s have briefings a bit earlier in future – half past eight tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Yes, Ma’am.’ Three bags full, Ma’am. Would you like me to lick your boots while I’m grovelling on the floor, Ma’am?