Sycamore Gap: A DCI Ryan Mystery (The DCI Ryan Mysteries Book 2)

by LJ Ross

  The High Priest turned on her.

  “Whom we choose to take into our fold is exclusively my decision to make.”

  Freeman smiled a wide, cat-like smile. How the man had succumbed to the power of his position, she thought. It wouldn’t be long, now, before she could contest it.

  “Of course,” she said meekly. “I merely thought that his personality might be suited to it.”

  Gregson snorted derisively.

  “I hear that Lowerson is awake,” the High Priest moved onto the next pressing matter. “That gives me sleepless nights, Arthur.”

  “He has no memory of what happened.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “I’ve had eyes and ears on him, ever since he went into hospital. He hasn’t so much as breathed a word of anything which might give us cause for concern.”

  “Yet.”

  Gregson sighed. He could sense the direction that the conversation was taking.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  There was a rustle, from somewhere in the grass and the three fell silent, their ears straining for any further sound to indicate the presence of a fourth person.

  “We cannot afford any slip-ups, not so soon after the events on Holy Island,” the High Priest considered the possibilities. “In which case, it’s better to be safe than sorry.”

  Gregson felt some measure of sadness when he thought of the young detective constable who lay in a hospital bed miles away. Still, who was he to argue against the wishes of his Master?

  “It can only be done when the timing is right,” he said. “Too many accidents or missing persons will draw unwanted attention. Ryan isn’t a fool; he may already suspect something amiss in the department. But, as soon as an opportune moment arises, I’ll see to it.”

  Their resolution decided, they bade farewell and turned their minds to the future.

  * * *

  Claire Burns had missed the last sodding bus. Her feet were aching in the four-inch heels, which were a necessary part of her uniform as an American-style waitress at the new All American Diner in Newcastle. Even on a Sunday night, there had been a busy crowd. Maybe because it was summer, she thought. People never realised how late it was getting until they suddenly looked up from their root floats or alcohol-laced milkshakes. The Diner was the latest venture from a group of dubious entrepreneurs who had colonised Newcastle with rebranded and refreshed bars and clubs which could take people seamlessly from day through to night.

  She hated it.

  Claire wanted to be a nurse. She had planned for it, studied hard at school and spent hours as a volunteer in respite and nursing homes from the age of fifteen, in the hope of securing a place on the Nursing degree course at Newcastle University. You needed a degree, these days, not just a diploma. The diploma might have been affordable, but now that she needed to do the full degree, even with a student loan she just couldn’t manage it. Not when her family needed all the help they could get, after her dad had been made redundant. They had been forced to move away to the Isle of Man to stay with her grandparents, to take whatever work they could find. Still, she was determined not to give up. For the past three years, she had deferred her place on the course to earn money the best way she could, squirreling away as much as possible.

  That was how she found herself waitressing six days a week and most nights too. She rented a room in one of the old Victorian terraces in the part of Newcastle known as Jesmond. It was popular with students because of its close proximity to the centre of town and the university, as well as the nightlife. She liked being amongst them; it reminded her of what she was working towards.

  Tonight, she was struggling to keep that goal in mind. The warmth of the day had given way to a cold breeze as the sun dipped in the sky and she was exhausted after nine hours on her feet. Her skin felt sweaty from the hot air in the kitchen, her dark hair was greasy and her muscles protested with every step she took.

  Missing the bus wasn’t a disaster, she told herself, but it wasn’t ideal. The metro closed early on a Sunday evening and she couldn’t justify the expense of a taxi when the walk home would only take fifteen minutes, so she might as well suck it up and carry on. Maybe she should have accepted a lift, but … well, she didn’t want to face the inevitable attention from her boss.

  So, she had two choices: either take a circuitous route home, along well-lit roads, or take a short-cut skirting around the edge of the Town Moor, the large area of common parkland which lay in the centre of the city.

  She warred with herself and wished that she had remembered to bring flat shoes.

  She was so tired.

  The moor beckoned.

  CHAPTER 6

  Monday, June 22nd 2015

  “I don’t believe this.”

  Ryan stood with his feet planted slightly apart and his arms folded while he stared ferociously at the television screen.

  “Problem?” Anna listened while she collected her house keys and scooped up her leather satchel, a half-bitten slice of toast clamped between her lips as she hurried around the house.

  “Look,” he continued to stare at the television, which cheerfully blared out the local morning news. Anna stopped beside him and watched a journalist interview an attractive blonde woman standing outside the visitors’ centre at Housesteads Fort. It didn’t take much to figure out what had happened.

  Anna studied the woman on the screen. “That’s Jane Freeman.”

  “You know her?”

  “The world of academic history is a small one.”

  “What do you think of her?”

  It was a big mental leap for him, Anna knew, to seek help from another person. For, in Ryan’s mind at least, to ask for help would be to make himself vulnerable.

  She cocked her head while she watched Freeman schmooze with the journalist.

  “I knew Jane when she was finishing her doctorate in Durham. She was older than the average – and I don’t say that to be snide – simply that, I think she did her first degree in something fairly scientific elsewhere, then followed it up with archaeology at Durham. I only knew her for a couple of terms, while she was tutoring.”

  “What did she teach?”

  “Let me see,” Anna thought back, to nearly ten years ago. “I would have been eighteen or nineteen, in the first year of my degree. Methodologies!” she remembered suddenly. “She taught a class called ‘Methods’, which gave you an overview of several approaches to looking at historical texts. She taught the class to first year undergraduates while she studied towards her doctorate.”

  She glanced across and saw that a fixed, glazed expression was beginning to form on Ryan’s strong face.

  “Anyway,” she gestured with the toast. “I remember her being competent, but I have to say that physically, she looked very different ten years ago.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “She was very … well, I guess you would say she was quite mousy back then. Not really somebody that you would pick out of a crowd.”

  One dark eyebrow flicked up as Ryan digested that snippet of information. Professor Freeman had definitely undergone some sort of overhaul in the intervening years, if her current image was anything to go by. Now, the world would see a polished, sleek woman with an expert dye job and good bones.

  “I wonder what prompted the makeover,” he murmured.

  Anna shrugged and finished the last of her toast.

  “Could be nothing more than the simple fact that she fancied a change. On the other hand, she was always submitting papers, constantly researching and looking for the next opportunity to progress in her field. She was a competent teacher, but I don’t think her heart was ever really in it. She struck me as quietly determined and very ambitious.”

  “Had her goals in mind and went for them in her own quiet way until she decided to go for the ‘big reveal’?”

  Anna laughed.

  “Yes, something like that. She’s done well for herself, to rise so high in a relatively short ti
mescale.” Anna reflected briefly on her own career path and found herself content with exactly where she was.

  “Have you had any other dealings with her?”

  “No, not really. She crossed over to archaeology quickly, so I had very little interaction with her after that. I know that to the layman ‘history’ is ‘history’, but there are different fields of study.” She struggled to think back, with half an eye on the time. She was now running very late. “Look, why don’t you leave it with me? I’ll have a think and see if I can remember anything else about her.”

  “Thanks,” he pulled her in for a farewell kiss and watched her run out of the front door.

  Looking back at the screen, he pinched the bridge of his nose with thumb and forefinger as he watched the end of the interview.

  “Naturally, the police have deferred to our team of experts to assist them in the excavation of the site where the body of Amy Llewellyn was found.”

  Nicely done, he acknowledged. Professor Freeman had managed to make his team of experienced detectives sound like a bunch of amateurs whilst simultaneously claiming oversight of the excavation, thereby solidifying her own sterling reputation.

  He had learned a few interesting titbits about the good professor this morning, he thought, and the most important was the fact that she was an operator.

  “Our hearts go out to her family. Of course, it is significant that she was found inside this ancient wall, which has been the stuff of myth and legend for thousands of years. Who knows what other secrets may be revealed, in time?”

  Ryan could feel his temper rising, inch by inch. He had made it very clear that any media communication would be handled by his department. As the Senior Investigating Officer, it was for him to decide what information should be divulged to the general public and he was never in favour of the kind of sensationalist commentary that Professor Freeman seemed happy to dole out to the press.

  He felt his mobile phone vibrating inside his trouser pocket and placed odds on it being either Phillips or Gregson. He glanced at the screen.

  Phillips.

  He slipped the phone back inside his pocket. Frank would be calling to break the good news to him – ha ha – but since he already knew about the Professor’s busy-work that morning, that chat could wait until he was back in the office.

  He turned to face another day.

  * * *

  Ryan’s stride through the corridors of CID Headquarters slowed only briefly to pour some indifferent coffee into a mug emblazoned with a picture of himself and Phillips, superimposed onto the bodies of Batman and Robin.

  It had been a novelty Christmas present.

  He carried it with him along the long, familiar corridors with their industrial-beige walls, cheap linoleum floors and faint scent of bleach, into the open-plan Incident Room that housed his team. They had done their best to cheer up the ugly décor of the conference space; there were dying ferns on the windowsills and framed photographs of family on a few of the desks. In a surprising move, he had softened the starkness of his own desk by the addition of a small, silver-framed portrait of Anna and him, taken on a trip to his parents’ home on the south coast. It had been a perfect day, balmy sunlight shimmering over the harbour in St Ives and his mother – ever the paparazzo – had caught their laughter as they stood looking out to sea. The memory of it softened the day job and he found himself glancing at the little frame whenever the relentlessness of murder, or rape, or some other violence threatened to engulf him.

  As he muscled through the double swing doors he assessed the people already sitting at their desks, which were scattered in a rough semicircle facing the large board at the front.

  MacKenzie was absent, which was no surprise. She would be up at Sycamore Gap, giving the Professor a few choice words regarding her little performance on the breakfast news, then supervising further excavation with hawk-eyed concentration. He had favoured the Professor with a few expletives of his own, over the telephone on his way into the office. He wasn’t entirely convinced that his authority was accepted, which was a mild irritation. It wasn’t that he needed the ego boost; he needed to be sure that each and every member of his team read from the same page. Judging from the news report, Freeman must have contacted the reporters as soon as the police staff had packed up yesterday and that kind of underhand manoeuvre didn’t sit well with him. It added to the burden of their investigation, knowing that he would need to keep her on a short leash.

  Phillips was tapping away on his desk computer with two forefingers. Slow, but methodical, that was Frank. Sensing that he was under observation, he looked up, ventured a cheerful ‘Morning!’ and raised his own coffee cup in salute. Frank’s choice of tie – a garishly bright blue speckled with large red ladybirds – led Ryan safely to presume that he had managed to patch things up with MacKenzie since the previous day’s mishap.

  “Take it you caught the news?” Phillips bellowed across the room, uncaring of conversations carrying on around him.

  Ryan grunted and took a swallow of his coffee.

  “Pain in the arse,” Phillips added, for good measure.

  “That’s putting it lightly. I doubt the victim’s family will take kindly to their daughter’s remains being used as a promotional tool for National Heritage.”

  “Aye, it’s bad taste. What do you plan to do about it?”

  Ryan opened his mouth to answer and then heard his desk phone begin to shrill. He wove his way through the other desks and caught the receiver.

  “Ryan.”

  “It’s MacKenzie,” Denise began, her lyrical accent sounding down through the wires. “I think you’ll want to head up here. There’s been a major development.”

  Ryan frowned and his eyes swung up to the clock on the wall above the door.

  Eight-forty. The excavation team were due to continue prospecting from eight-thirty. What could have happened, in a mere ten minutes?

  “There’s another body,” Denise answered his unspoken question without preamble.

  “Where?”

  “In the wall cavity.”

  Ryan automatically brought the image of the wall cavity back into his mind. It had been fully excavated, the day before.

  “You mean, further along?”

  “No, I mean we’ve found another body inside the same cavity,” MacKenzie reiterated. “And this one is as fresh as they come.”

  “Secure the scene, contact Pinter and Faulkner. No – I repeat – no leaks to the press. No access, no interviews, I want it locked down. Tell Freeman to halt excavation work because this one takes priority for the moment. I’m leaving now.”

  Ryan replaced the receiver slowly, his mind working overtime. Overnight, once the ground team had packed up their gear, person or persons unknown had snuck up there to make another deposit, taking advantage of the momentary lack of police presence. Was it a case of opportunism? Had somebody decided to broadcast their own foray into crime, taking advantage of the expected media interest?

  Whoever it was, they moved fast.

  There was one thing Ryan was forced to admit: there was no way that Keir Edwards could have decamped from his snug home in the confines of HMP Frankland to kill and deposit a body, in the space of a few hours. Still, it bore his theatrical style, so Ryan took an extra couple of minutes to put a call through to his contact at the prison.

  All prisoners were present and accounted for, including Edwards.

  Face thunderous, he gestured to Phillips, who had been listening to the telephone exchange with interest.

  “Another drive into the country, then?”

  “Yeah. Bring your boots and cancel any lunch plans.”

  * * *

  Less than an hour later, MacKenzie had taken a thorough approach to securing the scene. After making short work of dispatching Professor Freeman, she had ensured that the area remained cordoned off and had issued strict instructions that there should be no access to the press. That didn’t stop local journalists swarming around the ent
rance to Housesteads Fort, clamouring for a sound bite in time for the lunchtime news, nor the intrepid few who had taken a circuitous route to Sycamore Gap from the other direction. That was dedication to one’s trade, Ryan supposed.

  Luckily, police constables manned the entry points, armed with logbooks and serious faces. It was enough to deter even the most hardened hacks, for the time being. As Ryan donned his polypropylene overalls, he could see Faulkner and his team of CSIs were ready to make a start with Jeff Pinter, the pathologist, in tow. Yesterday had been all about searching for clues to the past, with most of the police contingent feeling the silent frustration of having to rely on the expertise of archaeological specialists who weren’t usual members of their team. In other words, they were outsiders, to be distrusted until they proved themselves trustworthy. However, today was a chance for Faulkner to shine. With conditions overnight having been dry and clear, if there was anything to find, he would find it.

  With a distinct sense of déjà vu, they made the familiar journey from Housesteads Fort towards Sycamore Gap. It was another fine morning: cottony white clouds moved slowly across the blue skies overhead, pushed along by gentle winds. Only the rustle of their overalls broke the peaceful hush as they made ready to inspect the wall.

  As before, they descended into the dip of the landscape. Almost immediately, the scent of death, which had been noticeably absent the day before, assaulted their nostrils as it wafted upwind. Only mild, but definitely there. Ryan felt an uncomfortable clutch in the pit of his stomach.

  Moving closer, being careful to leave a few metres between themselves and the wall cavity, they rounded the corner. A few early-hatched maggots had begun to feast on what had formerly been a woman with long dark hair, but now was mere body parts stuffed inside a makeshift tomb. Ryan forced himself to observe and to look upon the waste with dispassion.

  God, it was hard.

  Like a series of shuttered photographs, which his mind would later recall as nightmares, he took in the scene. The body parts were all an ashen, waxy shade of pale grey, which – together with the fact that there was little blood to be seen around the wall cavity – indicated that she had bled out elsewhere before being transported. Experience told him that the millions of bacteria that lived on inside the body long after it had died had begun the process of putrefaction. This caused the scent of methane and sulphide that carried faintly on the air.