by Lisa Cutts
Hazel didn’t expect a reply to her text and turned her concentration to what she was going to wear to work for her first day and packing the correct stuff in her bag. Uniform officers had the advantage of not having to pick an outfit – one less thing to worry about. At least she wasn’t going to have the added bother of picking stray dog hairs from her clothes.
She stacked the bedding into a neat pile and left it at the end of the sofa. Something told her that before the week was out she would have use for it.
Chapter 32
Monday 8 November
Monday morning had started a little earlier than usual for Detective Constable Pierre Rainer. He and his other half had been away for a week, soaking up the sunshine in the Canary Islands, and he wasn’t officially due back on duty until 8 a.m.
He had a reputation for being very conscientious and keen, always ready to help out even after twenty years as a police officer. Harry Powell had immediately thought of Pierre when he had to pick someone who would not only answer their phone on a Sunday when off duty, but also be prepared to spend a long day on a very sensitive and important enquiry, possibly being required to stay overnight.
Pierre knew he had been picked for those reasons and Harry knew that Pierre was aware he was one of the most reliable on the team. It was something that Pierre took for granted with no hint of arrogance or self-importance, despite usually landing the best roles on the most interesting enquiries.
As he got ready for whatever was about to be heaped upon his workload, Pierre swiped his access card through the security door and headed for his desk. He took a good look around the incident room, ran an eye over the wire post trays screwed to the wall, the box files and heaps of paperwork strewn over the desks, and checked the whiteboards for the latest official and unofficial updates. It was reassuring to see that nothing had changed. It was its normal, messy, chaotic, familiar jumble of evidence with a hint of policing’s human side, borne out by the mock-up photographs of members of the team stuck to the whiteboards complete with sarcastic comments underneath each one.
Usually, he would spend the first hour or so back at work checking through his emails and any post that had made its way to him. Today, he knew that he didn’t have the time.
Despite it being 5.30 in the morning, Harry Powell was in his office, waiting for Pierre’s arrival.
He heard the door swing shut as Pierre made his way out of the incident room, the computers in idle mode, hardly a light on in the entire area.
‘Morning, boss,’ said Pierre as he leaned one of his broad shoulders against the door frame of his detective inspector’s office. ‘Don’t see you here very often before even the cleaners have put in an appearance.’
‘Morning, P. How was the holiday?’
‘We had a brilliant time, thanks. And it’s always great to be back at work.’
‘Did you miss us?’
‘No.’
‘Got to admire your honesty. Look, get yourself a coffee or something, grab a notebook and I’ll give you the heads-up about this enquiry.’
‘Well, you’ve certainly got me intrigued,’ said Pierre as he walked off in the direction of the kitchen, putting caffeine before making notes.
‘Very much a need-to-know basis,’ called Harry after Pierre.
Once Pierre was back in Harry’s office, he glanced up at the open door. He thought briefly about shutting it but knew that anyone coming into the incident room through the only entrance would make enough noise for him to be able to hear them long before they heard one word of what he was about to say.
‘I take it that this has something to do with last week’s murder?’ guessed Pierre.
‘In a roundabout way,’ said Harry. ‘You’re aware that a male called Albert Woodville was murdered in his own home? Found with a plastic cable-tie around his neck and another bound around his wrists, hands behind his back.’
‘Suicide was out then,’ said Pierre as he looked up from his notebook.
‘It’s funny that you should say that,’ replied Harry. ‘Actually, it’s not fucking funny at all.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry. I—’
‘No, no,’ said Harry. “I’m not giving you a bollocking. It’s that there’s been another couple of deaths that looked like suicide, but one or two aspects of them appeared a little bit odd.’
‘Odd?’
Harry broke eye contact to scratch the stubble on his cheek, and to give himself a few extra seconds to get the words out in the correct order. He wasn’t a man who struggled to find the right thing to say, but his bluntness wasn’t one of his best characteristics.
‘One was so badly decomposed, it was difficult to tell. The pathologist couldn’t even give a definitive cause of death. Nothing had been stolen and there was no other DNA, fingerprints or sign of anyone else having been inside the flat. That wouldn’t have been so unusual had it not been for the neighbours saying he had a lot of visitors. I won’t go into lots of details about that one at the moment but you get the idea. It’ll be looked at again and we’ll see if it’s linked to these latest ones. For now, you only need to get the gist of it.’
This was the point where Pierre knew to keep quiet and contemplate what was coming his way.
‘I want you to deal with this,’ said Harry as he pushed a folder across the desk to him.
Pierre raised an eyebrow at him.
‘Yeah, yeah. All right, I know it’s like a bad detective series to pass you a file or an envelope rather than pointing you in the direction of the computer database, but there’s a reason. I can’t get you access to it until the rest of the HOLMES staff come in so I’ve printed you off what you need to know.’
He watched as Pierre opened the file, ran a manicured fingernail down the front page and once again raised an eyebrow.
After leafing through several sheets of paper, he sat staring for some time before he placed the open file on the desk. Both men looked at the full-page colour photograph of the corpse hanging from a tree.
‘This one’s not suicide either?’ said Pierre.
‘You’ve got it in one,’ said Harry. ‘You’ve got the bare bones there of the murder investigation into Dean Stillbrook’s death.’
‘Why do we say it wasn’t suicide after all?’
‘This is Dean Stillbrook,’ said Harry. ‘He was found in the woods, hanged two weeks after he was acquitted in Crown Court of the rape of an eleven-year-old girl.’
The eyebrow-raisings were now replaced by a look of cynicism from beneath a fringe of black hair, smatterings of grey all the more prominent against his tan.
Harry gave a sigh and said, ‘It’s a bit sensitive. It happened in Sussex and there’s no criticism of them. For all intents and purposes, this looked like a suicide. The thing is, if the offenders are the same as Albert Woodville’s killers, we need to take the lead. The decomposing body was found on us too. It’ll have to be a cross-county investigation and I know I can rely on you to go to another county and be discreet. You know, not upset them. I’ve told them that you’ll be on your way today and to expect you.’
Pierre stared straight at him with a look that Harry interpreted as that of an over-worked detective, used to having tasks piled upon him merely because he was capable and competent.
‘I reckon, P,’ said Harry, not missing a beat, ‘that your money’s on the little girl’s family. Mine was too to begin with. It didn’t take very long to rule them out completely, but I still want you to go and see them again. Find out anything you can, especially as we now know that it could no longer be a suicide.’
Harry paused to make sure he had his colleague’s undivided attention.
‘Go on.’
‘Next page,’ said Harry pointing at the file. He gave Pierre a few moments to register what was on the sheet of paper.
‘It’s a suicide note,’ said Pierre. ‘What’s unusual about that?’
‘It was another reason the little girl’s family were ruled out. They were well aware that Dean St
illbrook couldn’t read or write a single word.’
Chapter 33
Someone was causing Toby Carvell a great deal of anxiety, and that someone was his best friend, Leon Edwards.
There had been occasions too numerous to count over the last few years when Leon had told him of a desire to hunt down Albert Woodville and teach him a lesson; each time Leon’s hatred spilled out and seeped into Toby’s very core.
Once Toby had prepared himself for Monday morning and what his working week would bring, he got out of bed, kissed his sleeping wife on the side of the head and crept out of the pitch-black bedroom to the bathroom.
Habit meant that despite knowing he would be sweaty and grimy in a few hours, he stepped into the shower and began his morning ritual. He needed to rid himself of a layer of dirt invisible to the naked eye: it was cathartic more than anything. He tried to give very little thought to the death of Albert Woodville as his life was worth next to nothing. He justified what had happened by telling himself that there was not a soul alive who would lament Woodville’s death; Toby had nothing to feel bad about.
That was what he kept telling himself.
He picked up the bottle of shower gel from the corner of the bath and squeezed some of the contents into the palm of his hand before rubbing the blue gloop over his body. Despite the warmth of the water and his need to scrub away an invisible dirtiness, he shuddered. He could never help the involuntary reaction that getting clean brought out in him. He knew that he could avoid showering in the mornings by waiting until he finished his window-cleaning round in the afternoons, so why didn’t he?
Eyes screwed shut under the stream of water, he wondered, not for the first time, whether it was some sort of self-flagellation he put himself through in an attempt to atone for what he had allowed Woodville to do to him all those years ago.
Rational thought told him that a child couldn’t stop a fully grown man from stroking him and caressing him, but still he couldn’t shower without having his back to the wall. The buggery might have stopped decades ago, but the darkness hadn’t gone away.
Now, Toby was happily married with two fantastic children, he had a job and a comfortable lifestyle, but not a day went by when he wasn’t aware of how much lighter his mind would feel without the burden, the pressure, of knowing he was dirty.
He had only been seven years old when it happened the first time. Cornered and alone in the bedroom he shared with Leon, Toby had returned to get the marble collection hidden underneath his bed. He hadn’t wanted the other boys in the home to know where he kept it so he had practically crawled under his single wooden bed frame to dig it out from behind his suitcase. His marble collection was one of the few possessions he had been allowed to bring with him, and one of the few that hadn’t been stolen since his arrival.
No sooner had his fingers gripped the coarse brown twine knotted around the cloth bag than he was aware that someone was in the room with him.
At first, as he wiggled out from under the bed, moving backwards on his belly, he thought it was Leon come to see what he was doing.
Something made him freeze and the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. Perhaps it was the noise of the door being locked. Perhaps it was a trick of his mind.
Most seven-year-olds wouldn’t have been as astute as Toby, but most seven-year-olds didn’t dread their father coming into the room. He had become attuned over his very short existence to the change in the air, the anticipation of a hiding, meted out according to his dad’s mood.
One too many times Toby had appeared at school with a black eye, bruising around his throat, finger marks on his arms. Eventually he was admitted to hospital with a broken wrist.
Social services saw fit to remove Toby from harm.
So they placed him with a paedophile.
Toby turned off the shower and stepped out onto the mat to dry himself. He rubbed vigorously with the towel and tried as hard as he could to park thoughts of his tragic childhood, something he wouldn’t wish on anyone.
It was how he had justified to himself what he and Leon had planned to do to Woodville and how he had managed to get to sleep over the last three nights.
If no one else was prepared to hand out justice, he had no hesitation about doing it himself.
He rubbed the bathroom mirror with the towel and looked at his reflection, complete with reddened eyes underlined with heavy dark rings.
The death of Albert Woodville had been a necessity. It was all that was standing between Toby and madness. Over the years he had tried to imagine what he would say to him if he ever saw him, how he would react. His tortured mind played scenes out where he was driving his van and saw Woodville cross the road, his own face pressed up against the windscreen as he mowed him down. Or he would be waiting for a train and see Woodville at the edge of the platform, minding his own perverted, disgusting thoughts, and Toby would time it to perfection and push him under the train.
He knew he would never do any of those things, and that was for one reason only – he would get caught. So instead, he bided his time and planned. He was good at waiting for the right moment to strike.
Now Woodville was dead, Toby felt an emptiness that he couldn’t explain. It certainly wasn’t sadness at his murder, it was something stranger and more complex than he could begin to understand.
There had been times when he was in the children’s home when, despite the terrible things that he did to him, Woodville had paid him some attention and been good to him.
The reasons why were now blatantly obvious to Toby as a full-grown man. It was nothing short of grooming.
It still gave him goosebumps when he thought of the storm of emotions that had raged inside him, his confusion at how he could feel warmth towards the person who was sexually abusing him.
Now when he thought of him lying dead, the storm was replaced by sheer exaltation.
Chapter 34
It only took DC Pierre Rainer about half an hour to read through the file he had been given and get himself up to speed. He carried out the necessary intelligence checks to make sure he wasn’t walking into anything unprepared, and waited for the newest member of the team to arrive to accompany him.
Thirty minutes later, the incident-room door opened to reveal DC Hazel Hamilton.
Pierre watched her stride in, a long gracious entrance that made her appear to belong there, or at least to give the impression of belonging.
She wore a navy trouser suit and had her blonde hair loose to her shoulders.
‘Morning,’ she said with a smile after running an eye over the room, empty but for Pierre.
‘Hello,’ he said as he got up and met her halfway across the worn grey carpet, brown masking tape holding it down to stop the staff breaking their necks on the torn segments. ‘You must be Hazel. I’m Pierre.’
They shook hands and Pierre felt a firm hand-grip from the woman standing several inches taller than himself.
‘You’ve either got incredible detective skills or no one else would get here this early.’
‘Both of those are true, and also you’ve been issued with a security pass,’ said Pierre as he finished shaking her hand. ‘That kind of gave it away. Welcome to Major Crime. Do you want a coffee or anything before we leave?’
He gave a glance up at the clock on the wall above her head.
‘If we’re pushed for time, I can make do until the services,’ she said. ‘I was told that I’m in your hands and to crack on with whatever you tell me to do.’
Pierre laughed. ‘I take that to mean that you’ve been briefed on the phone by our very direct detective inspector, Harry Powell?’
She closed her eyes and smiled. ‘He didn’t waste many words on me.’
Harry’s voice boomed out from his office, sparing Pierre the dilemma of whether or not to tell their newest detective that the person she was talking about was within spitting distance, sitting in a ten-foot-by-ten-foot room, and could easily hear them through the thin partition walls.
Pierre raised an eyebrow and said, ‘Let’s say hi and then get on the road.’
Harry had been on holiday when the interviews for a new detective in the department had taken place, having a thoroughly miserable fortnight with his wife in the Maldives. It was somewhere he hadn’t wanted to go and he hated the sun. His pale freckled skin and red hair meant he usually burnt. And because he had a five o’clock shadow by eleven in the morning he had the extra problem of catching the sun on only half of his face.
He had spent most of the holiday in the shade reading military-history books, and managing to annoy his wife whatever he did.
There had been no way of finding out what Hazel Hamilton looked like, although he had heard the rumours. He had rarely paid any interest to the women around him, especially other police officers. Despite the volatile relationship he had with his wife, he had never strayed. He knew in his heart that this was because he adored his children and couldn’t bear the idea of her taking them away from him, rather than because he loved her. The boys were older now and would soon leave of their own accord, off to university or travelling the world; then there’d be something missing in his life.
None of this raced through Harry’s mind as Hazel appeared. At that particular moment, he was incapable of thought.
‘All right?’ he said after an awkward short pause.
‘Yes, thanks, sir,’ she said.
‘Pierre looking after you?’ Harry pointed unnecessarily at the other detective in the room. He saw the look Pierre was giving him and realized that he must have been staring at Hazel.
‘He certainly is,’ she said, and glanced across at Pierre, a smile taking hold of her face.
For some inexplicable reason, Harry felt jealous. He knew it was ridiculous to have such feelings over a woman he had only known for seconds, especially because he kept telling himself that he was happily married; and most of all because Pierre was gay.