by LJ Ross
Ryan’s anger started to dissolve. He could see from Faulkner’s face that he was serious.
“Tom, listen to me. I know how you feel –”
“Sure, you do,” Faulkner said, dully.
“You know I do,” Ryan rammed the point home. “It’s no fun, the work we do. It’s fucking hard, most of the time. Every man and woman you see here takes it home with them at the end of the day.” He cast his eyes around at the spectators, who busied themselves in work as soon as he looked up. Usually, it would have brought a smile.
“The forensic work you do is what usually helps us to find them, in the end.” He referred to the perpetrators of all the violence they saw on a daily basis. “Without you and your team, we would be a bunch of suits following hunches and hearsay. If I don’t say it enough, then I’m sorry. But, you’re valued, Tom. By your colleagues, by the victims and their families and by me.”
Faulkner looked taken aback. He swallowed and looked down at the ground, searching for his voice.
“Thank you for that,” he said brokenly.
“Whatever’s on your mind, you can tell me. Surely, you know that by now.”
Faulkner listened to Ryan and was tempted, oh so tempted, to tell him. Yet, he couldn’t seem to find the words.
Instead, he re-zipped his overalls.
“Let’s just get back to work.”
Ryan knew that was as good as he could hope for right now. It wasn’t a resolution, not by a long stretch, but it would have to do.
CHAPTER 17
Ryan gave instructions for immediate checks into Colin Hart’s bank and credit card usage, methods of transportation, phone records – both landline and mobile – in addition to the foot patrol which was already underway. The techies were poring over Colin’s computer and any other electronics in the house. MacKenzie had oversight of the Incident Room, in the event that there were any incoming developments, while she continued to dig deeper into the life of Claire Burns.
Ryan and Phillips remained at Number 32, awaiting initial observations from the pathologist and the CSIs.
Agonising minutes slipped by as they stood on the gravel driveway, both men imagining where a desperate man with Colin’s personality might choose to hide himself, until Jeff Pinter’s rangy form emerged from the front door, out into the overcast day once more.
“Looks pretty cut and dry, to me,” he shrugged out of his overalls while he spoke. “Looks like Geraldine was injected with a massive dose of Lorazepam and my bet would be cardiac arrest following that, although I can’t say for sure until I’ve completed a post-mortem.”
“You’re sure she was injected, though? Did she inject herself?”
“Yes, I’m sure she was injected. Her usual medicinal injections were given to the side of her hip, judging by the old puncture sites there, whereas this injection was administered to the side of her neck, almost directly into her carotid artery, which would have given maximum impact. As for whether she injected herself, I can’t rule that out from my end. It’s impossible to tell without checking the syringe for prints – it’s perfectly possible that she could have. That’ll be a question to ask Faulkner.”
“How long has she been dead?”
Pinter puffed out his cheeks, then let the air wheeze out through his teeth in a manner that made Phillips’ fists clench.
“You’re looking at anywhere up to fifteen hours. She’s definitely on the turn.”
Phillips’ nose wrinkled at the description. The poor woman wasn’t a piece of fruit gone bad. She had been a person.
Ryan seemed more capable of ignoring the pathologist’s flippancy.
“So we’re looking at anytime after six p.m. yesterday,” he surmised, pushing back some of the dark hair which blew into his eyes. “That puts Colin within the timescale, considering he returned to the house around eight p.m.”
“Thirteen hours would certainly still be a realistic timescale,” Pinter added.
“Anything else we need to know?”
Pinter scratched one bony finger against the side of his ear.
“Nothing that isn’t immediately obvious to a layperson,” he gestured with the same bony hand, with the complacent manner of someone expert in his field. “She was clearly massively overweight, with all of the health problems associated with that. You can see the cocktail of medications labelled to her in the fridge downstairs, including vials of Lorazepam.”
Ryan nodded thoughtfully. Claire Burns was also drugged with a large quantity of Lorazepam, which had been injected into the side of her neck before she was abducted.
“Phillips, we need to check the quantities prescribed by Geraldine Hart’s doctor. In fact, let’s take a look at her medical notes, if we can.”
“Already on it,” Phillips nodded, making a short, scribbled note on the miniature notepad with its worn leather cover. “Might get lucky and find some of her medical info in the house, so we don’t have to get a separate warrant.”
At that moment, one of the technical support staff jogged out of the front door, making a beeline for Ryan.
“Jasmine? What have you got for me?”
“A bit of a goldmine,” she said, with a touch of excitement mingled with nerves. She didn’t have too much interaction with DCI Ryan but, when she did, she wished she wasn’t wearing baggy overalls.
“Oh?”
“We started with his computer, sir, thinking that would be the most protected item and might take longer to crack. Actually, it had barely any safeguards and the entry password was pretty easy – it was ‘CLAIRE’.”
Ryan exchanged a look with Phillips.
“What did you find?”
“Well, it’s clear that the suspect has tried to delete some of the files, but unfortunately he didn’t make it past the desktop ‘trash’. No effort had been made to delete the files permanently, which is pretty amateurish, considering their content, sir.”
“What are we talking about, here?”
“A lot of images,” she replied. “There are some historic files on one or two women who aren’t either of our recent victims and we’ve already confirmed they are both still alive and well. Then, there’s a massive file dedicated solely to Claire Burns.”
“Nudity? BDSM?”
“No, sir, these images are opportunistic in nature. Photographs taken of Claire out and about, some of her while she was in her own home, at work, on the street. I would say that the victim was not aware of her picture having been taken.”
“Standard,” Phillips grunted. It wasn’t the first time they had dealt with a stalker, or a sexual predator.
“When was the last image taken?”
“Most recent was Sunday night,” Jasmine responded, causing both men to wake up and lean forward. “Just a shot of her at work, in her uniform. It looks like an image taken from his smartphone, transferred onto the computer afterwards.”
“Does it record a time?”
“Yes, sir. The original image was taken at nine-seventeen p.m. on Sunday evening, then uploaded onto his home computer at six-thirty-two the following morning.”
“Unluckily for Colin, the electronic file doesn’t rule out the possibility of him being up at Sycamore Gap with Claire’s dismembered body.”
“Yes, thank you, Frank,” Ryan noticed that the technician was turning a bit pasty at the thought of dismemberment. That was why she was an electronics technician and not a CSI.
“Anything else you’ve found?”
Ryan pinned her with a stare, forcing her eyes to focus on him rather than thinking about body parts.
Jasmine collected herself.
“Yes, sir. There may not have been any sexualised content in the files he holds on real women, but we found a mountain of sexual content in separate files saved directly from the web.”
“What kind?”
Jasmine blushed a bit.
“Just – ah – normal stuff sir, nothing too kinky. No extreme violence like we’ve seen with some others.”
&nb
sp; It didn’t fit, Ryan thought. Usually, where a man or woman had committed extreme violence, there was wider evidence of their fondness for it.
“There’s quite an online history of him logging onto three sex chat-rooms in particular,” Jasmine listed their names. “And he goes by the same username in each one.”
“What’s that?”
“DoctorKeir37,” she said.
“He’s not exactly the most subtle man in the world, is he?” Phillips muttered.
“It ties in with his obsession,” Ryan said, turning back to Jasmine. “What was his activity like under that username?”
Jasmine looked away, embarrassed to talk about some of the content she had seen, even though it was her job to wade through it.
“Well, um, he seems to write confidently about how, um, masterful he is in the bedroom. There was a lot about how he’d like to dominate the women he spoke to.”
“All right, Jasmine. Forward the transcripts through to us and we’ll take a closer look.”
Relief crossed the technician’s face.
As she headed back into the house to continue her search and help with the transportation of Colin’s computer back to CID Headquarters, she paused and turned back, clearly worried.
“There was one other thing, sir. We found another folder, all about you.”
Ryan was silent for a long moment then he offered the girl a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes.
“Thanks for letting me know. Just forward the content to my office desktop and I’ll take a look at it.”
Phillips opened his mouth to say something, but Ryan had already taken out his phone to place a call.
“Steve? Yeah, this is Ryan. How’s your subject today?”
“Hasn’t moved from the house, sir, since you left this morning.”
“Nobody in, or out?”
“Not yet, sir.”
“OK, thanks. Keep a sharp look-out and let me know if there are any developments.”
Ryan let the phone fall into the back pocket of his jeans before he turned to face the inevitable criticism from his sergeant.
Phillips regarded him steadily.
“Look, I don’t need any more nagging from you,” Ryan said sharply.
“Aye, that’s because you already know what I’m going to say.”
“That I should tell Anna that she’s under observation. I know. I agree with you, on one level. On another more important level, I have to think about her safety. If I tell her she’s being watched, she’ll kick off, exactly like she did the last time. This way, she can carry on as usual, but I get peace of mind.”
“She knows Colin is AWOL.”
“Yes, I’ve told her that much. She knows to be on her guard, just like every other woman in Newcastle and Durham. The only difference is, she has more protection than most.”
* * *
Faulkner looked done in by the time he emerged from the scene at Number 32. Before heading across to where Ryan and Phillips stood huddled, deep in discussion, he swigged a few gulps of water and wished that it were something stronger.
Eagle-eyed, Ryan zoomed in on Faulkner’s progress across the gravel driveway.
“What have you found?”
There would be no pleasantries, no building up to the incisive questions which needed to be asked. Faulkner understood that.
“Only one set of prints on the syringe, or murder weapon as I’m minded to call it, and they’re not Geraldine Hart’s. Can’t check remotely with the database, so I’ll have to cross-check when we get back to CID, but I’ll venture to say the prints will belong to Colin Hart since there are matching prints all over the house.”
“Looking less like suicide by the minute,” Phillips observed.
“Indeed,” Tom agreed, shaking his mop of mid-brown hair out of its protective cap. He enjoyed the feel of cool air washing over him, washing away some of what he had just seen.
“On the understanding that you’re looking for any indication that Colin’s house had been a kill site for Claire Burns before transportation, I have to tell you that we’ve gone through each room with UV sensors. There’s no large-scale blood spatter, or any blood spatter at all.”
“Would you be able to pick it up, even if he’d cleaned the place thoroughly?” Phillips asked.
“Yes, chemical cleaning seldom removes all traces. It soaks into the fibres.”
Ryan moved onto the next point of information.
“So, you’re telling me there’s no obvious kill site. What about his car?”
Faulkner shook his head.
“Still going over it, so I can’t say for certain, but I can tell you there’s no large blood loss anywhere around it. The interior is clean, but not freshly cleaned, which I would have expected to be the case if he’d recently transported a body.”
“Prints?”
“Of course,” Faulkner affirmed. “The car is covered with the same two sets of prints as the house, but also a third set of older prints which look different. I’ll need to check the database, because they don’t match anything we’ve got for any of the victims.”
“That’s interesting,” Ryan said.
“That’s not all,” Faulkner said. “The remnants of medical tape we found on Claire’s body matched a common brand of surgical tape known as ‘Micropore’. It’s widely available –”
“I know it,” Ryan interrupted him. It was the same brand favoured by Keir Edwards to restrain his victims.
“Well, it’s looking like Colin used the same brand to hold his mother’s bandages in place. There’s a stock of it in the house and the bin is full of discarded medical waste, including bandages and tape. We’ll check the samples to make sure none of the DNA matches our victims, but my working theory would be they all belong to Geraldine Hart.”
“OK, he had access to a supply of medical tape of the same kind found on Claire Burns, but that must be balanced against the fact that anybody could buy the same kind of tape from a local pharmacy. Is that it?”
“In one.”
“OK,” Ryan watched a grey squirrel run up the bark of the large tree and he was reminded of another leafy tree, miles away from here.
“We’ve confiscated any potential weaponry we could find, which comes down to a few kitchen knives and a pair of scissors, and we’ll test those in depth, but if you were hoping we’d find a bloodied surgical knife, I’m sorry to tell you that we’ve come up nil.”
“Understood. There must be quite a lot left to go over, so let me know if anything else crops up.”
* * *
Behind locked doors, Colin sat huddled in the corner of the room, in a borrowed shirt that was a size too large for him and the same trousers he had worn the day before.
Clutched to his chest was a carrier bag containing Claire Burns’ uniform.
“I didn’t kill her. I couldn’t have killed her.”
His teeth still chattered and his wan blue eyes were haunted as they stared fixedly at the wall ahead.
“I – maybe I did kill her. I don’t know.” He started to cry, big, blubbering tears which rocked his body.
Against the bare wall, his mind conjured up wild dreams, crazed imaginings where Claire still lived; where his mother was thirty years younger, still the vibrant, younger woman she had been before she had allowed life to get on top of her.
“Mother will be worrying about me,” he whispered, but he could not dispel the sight of her lying on the bedclothes, her eyes unblinking and beginning to film with white.
His mind retreated, to a place where reality could not touch him. In that safe cocoon, he was no longer Colin; he felt immortal.
He looked down at the postcard he held in his hand and knew where he belonged.
CHAPTER 18
Anna looked up from her computer screen when a knock sounded at the front door. Wednesday was her day off from teaching, a time when she preferred to work from her home office undertaking research for her next paper.
She skipped down t
he narrow flight of stairs in her cottage and opened the door to a friend, not minding the fact that her hair was piled into a messy knot, or that she had a half-gnawed red biro tucked into it.
“Mark!”
Doctor Mark Bowers, her former history mentor and the man she considered a surrogate father stood on the doorstep with an enigmatic smile. He was tall, in his early-fifties and possessed of a year-round tan, which came from working outdoors wherever possible.
“Got some time for a weary traveller?”
Anna grinned.
“Come in, come in!” She ushered him inside, happy to receive a visitor. Usually, she relished the opportunity to enjoy a few quiet hours to herself, never needing to fill the silence with background noise, but after her experience the day before, the empty house had suddenly seemed too empty. Now, she turned off the radio, happy to have real company instead.
She made tea for them both and they settled in the living room.
“How have you been?”
Mark considered the question as he sipped his tea. Trust a northerner to drink hot fluid even on a warm day. The sun beamed gentle rays through the bay window behind him, casting his face in shadow, for which he was grateful. There had been too many sleepless nights of late.
“It’s been a busy time, with lots of change,” he replied.
Since the events of last Christmas, he had had his work cut out for him as manager of the National Heritage Visitor Centre on Holy Island. There had been an influx of tourists, some of whom visited the island not for its historic credentials, but in ghoulish curiosity to see where a cult circle had operated.
“How is everyone coping?” Anna referred to the families of the victims and those who had survived. It shamed her, but for her own sanity she had avoided going back to the island. Everyone needed time to heal and she, very much like DC Lowerson, had no desire to rush back and remember things she would rather forget.
“It’s a tight-knit community,” Mark said. “People come together when the chips are down.”
There was a pause.
“We’ve missed you, Anna,” he admonished. “I thought you might have stopped by to see us.”