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

by LJ Ross

  Just lately, though, the memories hadn’t been enough. He had re-opened Pandora’s Box and was unable to close it. Only a few days would pass before he needed to look inside the cabinet again. He recognised that it was time to choose his next project, because if he waited much longer, he would be unable to execute with the finesse for which he was known.

  He had standards to uphold.

  Besides, there was just one bracelet left to gift to one lucky recipient, whom he had already selected. She was not his usual type; perhaps she was a little older and worldlier than he would have wished, but she was connected to Ryan. It would make his triumph all the sweeter and surely then the Chief Inspector could not deny his supremacy.

  CHAPTER 16

  Wednesday, June 24th 2015

  “He’s done a bunk.”

  “What’s that?” Ryan wedged his mobile phone between his ear and his shoulder as he shrugged into a pale blue summer shirt. Phillips’ beleaguered voice boomed out of the headset and Anna raised a finely arched eyebrow from her position on the other side of the bedroom.

  “Colin Hart. He’s not at his house.”

  “That hardly signals that he’s ‘done a bunk’. He could be at the supermarket, for all we know.”

  “Not likely, guv.”

  “Frank, we’ve had eyes on him all through the night. If he left his house, somebody would have seen him.”

  “Nope.” Phillips shook his head at the other end of the line, in a manner reminiscent of the bulldog used to advertise a popular brand of insurance. “The DCs tailed him all the way home after he left the station last night and they’ve been on shift ever since. They never saw him leave his house, but when they knocked on the door to bring him back in for questioning less than ten minutes ago, there was nobody there.”

  “OK, let me see if I’ve grasped this.” Ryan could feel a headache coming on. “Despite being under constant surveillance, our main suspect in the murder of at least one woman has vanished. Are you having me on?”

  “Wish I were.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Shit and bollocks,” Phillips added.

  Ryan flipped the last button on his shirt and made a grab for his boots.

  “Have the DCs entered the premises?”

  “Yes, guv. They had the appropriate warrants, I saw to that.”

  “Right. I’ll meet you there.”

  * * *

  The detective constables assigned to the surveillance team for Colin Hart looked sheepish when Ryan and Phillips found them hovering on the driveway of Number 32.

  “You,” Ryan waved a hand in the direction of the nearest one. “Report.”

  “Sir. Having received the message from DS Phillips that we had a ‘go’, we exited our vehicle and approached the property. The suspect, Colin Hart, entered the house at around eight-fifteen last night, after being dropped off by his solicitor. He stood outside the property for several minutes before entering, but since then we’ve had no sight of him.”

  “Other exits?” Ryan asked.

  “None, sir. The garden to the rear is inaccessible except through the house itself, and is walled off from the neighbours.”

  “At what time did you gain entry?”

  “We received DS Phillips’ message approximately thirty minutes’ ago, at eight-fifteen. We acted upon it immediately, intending to bring the suspect into police custody. We knocked at the door and identified ourselves several times. Believing the suspect to be inside the house and ignoring us, we forewarned the suspect that we had the appropriate warrant to enter his property and DC Fowler retrieved the battering ram from the boot of the car to force entry if necessary.”

  Ryan flicked a glance towards the front door, which remained intact, then back to the reporting constable.

  “No, sir,” he answered the unspoken question. “There was no need to force the door. We tried the handle and found it was unlocked.”

  “Then?”

  “We conducted a search of the property and found it to be in some state of disarray, at least downstairs. There is one awkward issue, sir, which is that the suspect’s mother …” he consulted his notebook to find her name, “… a Mrs Geraldine Hart, appears to be asleep in one of the bedrooms upstairs. We tried to be quiet, so as not to wake her …” He trailed off, clearly unsure of himself.

  Ryan and Phillips exchanged a look.

  “We’ll be careful not to wake Sleeping Beauty,” Ryan couldn’t help the sarcasm. “Meantime, I want an All Ports Warning out on her blue-eyed boy. We’ve got the local lads watching out for a man who matches his description in the vicinity. Is that his car?” He eyed the blue Honda sitting on the driveway.

  “That car’s the only one registered to his name,” Phillips chimed in.

  “So he’s unlikely to have transport, unless he’s hired something. No pick-ups, no deliveries?”

  “No sir, no visitors at all to the property during our surveillance.”

  “So he’s likely on foot. See if you can get the traffic helicopter involved – we can cover a wider area that way. Make a start on tracing his mobile phone.”

  “Shall I contact Gregson?”

  Ryan should have been in regular contact with his Chief Superintendent.

  “He can wait,” he said shortly, and then turned towards the house. They pulled on plastic shoe coverings, nitrile gloves and wished they had full body overalls to complete the ensemble.

  As they stepped into the grand old house, there was a thick scent of lavender permeating the air, just as MacKenzie had described. It clung to the nostrils and brought to mind funeral parlours or nursing homes, depending upon one’s degree of optimism. The hallway was clean and tidy and, beyond it, they glimpsed the reception rooms and the kitchen. They bypassed those and made directly for the stairs because it seemed obvious to both men that, in order to have slept through that level of commotion, Geraldine Hart would have to be souped up on sleeping pills, or dead.

  Upon closer inspection, it turned out that she was dead.

  “Did they come in on the banana boat, or what?” Phillips shook his head in disbelief at the younger generation of detectives rising in the ranks. How they could have mistaken the state of Geraldine Hart’s body as being anything other than dead as a door knob, was beyond him.

  “First thing on Monday, they’re on a refresher training course,” Ryan muttered.

  The room stank. There was no other word for it. The heady mixture of food matter gone off and fruit-flavoured medication was nothing in comparison with the scent of raw sewage, which pervaded the airspace. Geraldine’s body had evacuated itself either before or after it died; that much was clear from the sticky brown mess on the bedclothes beneath where she lay.

  The television was turned down low and the theme tune to some facile morning show invaded the room. Ryan wished he could have touched the volume control, to silence the jingle, but training held him steadfastly in his place by the door.

  “Just when you think you’ve seen it all –”

  “You realise you haven’t. Not by a long shot,” Ryan finished Phillips’ sentence.

  “Don’t know how she could let herself get into that state,” Phillips said, but with a trace of pity rather than judgement. He was a fair man.

  Ryan said nothing. He knew from his background checks into the lives of Colin Hart and his mother that she suffered from a number of illnesses, all of which were attributable to her being drastically overweight. Diabetes, osteoporosis, high blood pressure, to name a few. Apparently, she’d had a stroke a few years back. If she had been his own mother – hard to imagine, when he thought of Eve Finlay-Ryan – he might have found it hard to broach the taboo subject of her increasing weight gain. There was, most likely, a psychological basis to it all and he knew better than most how prickly a subject one’s own psychology could be.

  “We don’t know enough about the ‘whys’ and the ‘wherefores’,” Ryan said simply.

  They continued to take in the scene, staying away
from the body, as much in self-preservation as not to contaminate any evidence.

  “No obvious signs,” Phillips remarked eventually.

  “No trauma that I can see,” Ryan agreed.

  “I’ll contact Pinter,” Phillips said, but made no move to retrieve his phone.

  Ryan waited a beat, considering.

  “It looks as though Colin’s our man, doesn’t it?”

  “Well, if he hasn’t offed his own mother, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” Phillips said roundly.

  Ryan’s lips twitched.

  “I’ll get onto Pinter,” Phillips turned away to call in the pathologist.

  Ryan spent another minute or two with the body of Geraldine Hart, conducting his own version of a private memorial service, which he afforded each of his victims regardless of the way they looked, or how they had behaved in life. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t any deity, to be casting judgement on the lives of others. He certainly wasn’t infallible, which was another good reason not to be pointing the finger. Having said that, he thought as he dipped down to the floor to look under the bed, the manner in which people lived could be relevant to the way they died.

  In this case, it would appear from the discarded syringe on the far underside of the bed that Geraldine Hart’s medical condition meant that her body had likely succumbed to massive heart failure after the administration of a strong dose of chemicals. He would leave it to the experts to confirm it.

  Ryan stood up again, his body unfolding like a concertina. It was time to see what else was lurking inside the walls of the Hart household.

  * * *

  Pinter arrived promptly, as Ryan and Phillips congregated in the hallway downstairs, preparing to do a walk-through of the scene with the CSIs.

  “Morning!” Pinter was, as usual, unrelentingly cheerful.

  “Jeff.”

  Ryan’s sharp ear detected an odd note to Phillips’ voice. It was remarkable, really, how much could be conveyed in one word.

  “I guess there’s no time for idle chit-chat. Our girl’s up here, is she?” Pinter didn’t wait for confirmation and he practically skipped up the stairs before turning right along the landing in the direction of Geraldine Hart’s bedroom.

  Phillips’ beady brown eyes watched his progress until he was out of earshot, then he unravelled a stick of nicotine gum and shoved it in his mouth with a little more gusto than was necessary.

  “What’s eating you? Apart from nicotine withdrawal,” Ryan added.

  “I was just asking myself, ‘Frank, how could that pathologist have known where to find Geraldine Hart’s body?’” Phillips mused. “Considering that I never breathed a word of it on the phone twenty minutes ago.”

  Ryan folded his arms across his chest and rocked back onto the balls of his feet.

  “You trying to tell me something, Frank? You know how I enjoy our little tête-à-têtes but I’m currently pressed for time.”

  “Last night,” Phillips’ voice lowered a fraction. “He was hanging around the cop shop after hours. Said he was looking for you.”

  “He hasn’t mentioned anything.”

  “Uh huh,” Phillips nodded. “Well, he told MacKenzie that’s why he was lurking around CID after ten o’clock. He scared the bloody life out of her.”

  Ryan tried to be reasonable.

  “He could have popped in on his way home,” he offered. “Thinking he’d find me there. But, yes, I’ll agree that it’s not usual behaviour from him. He usually prefers that we come to him.”

  “It’s not like MacKenzie to be melodramatic,” Phillips continued.

  “Agreed. Do you think there’s anything in it?”

  Phillips shifted uncomfortably.

  “I know that everything points to Colin … maybe a bit of it concerns Edwards, but …” Phillips rolled his shoulders and shifted uncomfortably. “It’s been playing on my mind, what you said yesterday, about it being somebody with inside knowledge.”

  “Colin had inside knowledge, if Edwards told him the location,” Ryan supplied.

  “I know, that makes sense, but …”

  “Spit it out, Frank.”

  “Pinter’s been based at the RVI for over fifteen years; he would surely have come across Amy Llewellyn, in one of his teaching groups. He would know how to dissect with the kind of precision we saw on Claire’s body.”

  “That’s a big statement, Frank.”

  Phillips nodded.

  “I don’t even like thinking it,” he confessed. “I’ve got nothing to suggest Pinter is connected in any way, other than the fact he happens to work at the hospital. It’s hard to imagine someone you’ve worked beside for years, turning out to be a killer. Still, I’m thinking about it.”

  Ryan remained silent. He didn’t need to tell Phillips that longevity did not prevent a man from killing. Murderers had family, friends, work colleagues; all the trappings they needed to make themselves appear ‘normal’. Besides, he had his own niggling sense of unease whenever he thought of Jeff Pinter and his excitement over Claire Burns’ body.

  “I can’t get it out of my mind – the way MacKenzie looked last night,” Phillips’s face drooped into concerned lines, the skin falling into comfortable grooves as he spoke. “To tell you the truth, I’m worried.”

  Ryan hadn’t heard this from Phillips before. Denise MacKenzie was a strong, self-sufficient woman and an experienced detective. She could handle herself. Yet, if Frank was worried, there must be some basis for it.

  “I – ah – I’ve been seeing Donovan,” Ryan began clumsily. “I’ve actually found the couple of times I’ve seen him to be … I guess they’ve been useful. Just to clear out some headspace,” he qualified swiftly. “I don’t want you, or more importantly, MacKenzie, to think that I’m pressing her to go running to a psychiatrist after one or two bad days at work but, on the other hand, it could be a boost.”

  Unlike Ryan, who could be stubborn at the best of times, Phillips was far more broad-minded. He chewed reflectively and gave the suggestion serious thought.

  “Paddy Donovan knows Denise,” Phillips said. “He’s a decent bloke, he might be able to clear a few things up for her.” It was a source of sadness that he hadn’t been able to offer her that kind of emotional balm himself, but he could handle the knock-back.

  “I’ll suggest it,” he concluded. “No idea how she’ll react, but it’s worth a shot.”

  Ryan opened his mouth to say more, but was distracted by the sight of Faulkner and his small team of CSIs arriving at the house.

  He made a thorough assessment of Tom Faulkner. He looked exhausted, which was highly unusual for a man of his character. Faulkner wasn’t the kind to work hard, play hard; only the work hard part of that adage applied to him. He didn’t look hung-over; he looked wrung out. Ryan watched as Faulkner tugged on his white overalls and gave a couple of brief instructions to his team before he ducked into the hallway.

  He met Ryan’s direct stare with a sort of dull recognition.

  There was a protracted silence, until Ryan snapped.

  “Well? Are you going to stand there like an ostrich, or are you going to explain to me why I wasn’t informed immediately after you matched Colin Hart’s DNA to one of the unidentifieds on Amy’s bracelet? By the time I found out, we’d let him go without charge because we had nothing to hold him. Now, he’s flown and we’ve got another dead body on our hands.”

  “Boss –” Phillips started to interrupt, but snapped his jaw shut at a single, deadly look from his SIO. He pursed his lips and wondered if he should make himself scarce before the situation turned nuclear.

  “Sometimes, there’s more to life than just blood, guts and human waste,” Faulkner replied with simmering anger.

  “Is that so? Well, my mistake. I was under the impression that you were employed by the Northumbria Police Constabulary to perform a service. I understand now that it’s more of an ad hoc thing, where you get to pick and choose when you help us to investigate serious crimes.”


  Ryan’s voice dripped with sarcasm.

  “I have never, in over fifteen years, let this department down.”

  “Why the bloody hell are you starting now, then?” Ryan exploded, his grey eyes cutting into Faulkner like shards of ice.

  “I am entitled to my privacy, as much as you,” came the controlled response.

  Ryan gave Faulkner another long look and tried a different tack.

  “Tom,” he gentled his voice as much as humanly possible. “Is there anything I need to know? Are you in some kind of difficulty?”

  “There’s nothing you need to know.”

  Ryan’s patience had limits.

  “That’s where you’re wrong. I need to know that I have the full co-operation of my team. I need to know that you’re on board with this. As it is, I’m going to have a hell of a job explaining the situation to Gregson.”

  “Then, don’t bother,” Faulkner shrugged. “I’ll tender my resignation, if that will solve the problem.”

  He turned on his heel and made to leave, just like that.

  Ryan and Phillips gawked at one another, in shock, for a full five seconds before Ryan galvanised himself.

  “Now, you just wait a sodding minute, Faulkner!” Every member of staff within range looked up at the sound of Ryan losing his temper. It was unheard of. Ryan’s anger was cold and sometimes he got frazzled, but he never lost control. Ever.

  This was worth the price of a ticket.

  Ryan stormed out of the house after Faulkner, who was unzipping his overalls on the driveway outside.

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re playing at, but the joke’s over. If you’re in the middle of a mid-life crisis, you’re going to have to shelve the histrionics because we’ve got more important things to think about. Such as lives already lost and lives which could be lost if we don’t find this fruitcake.”

  Faulkner pushed his spectacles higher on his nose, nonplussed.

  “I’ve given my working life to this department, along with a pretty big chunk of my personal life. I’ve lost a wife because she couldn’t handle the hours I put into this job, or the memories I take home. I think I’ve given enough.”