Killer Plan

by Leigh Russell

  Caroline was free, and her husband had been justly punished. He smiled to himself as he turned the key in the ignition. It had been so easy.

  5

  It was growing late by the time they returned home. The boys were grouchy, and Caroline was tired. It had been cold standing on the touch line. The Labrador was whining in the hall. Dave had forgotten to put him out. Irritably she sent the boys upstairs to shower while she went to the freezer.

  ‘I’m putting on some chicken nuggets for the boys!’ she shouted. ‘Do you want some?’

  Dave didn’t answer.

  ‘Do you want some chicken nuggets?’

  Dave still didn’t answer, so she threw the whole packet on the baking tray and shoved it in the oven. It was too late to take the dog for a walk, so she let him out in the back garden. The soppy animal shot through the door, yelping. She cleared the work surfaces before trotting upstairs to check on the boys. On the way she glanced in her bedroom, half expecting to see Dave lying on the bed, fast asleep. He wasn’t there.

  After telling her he wanted to stay at home to cut the grass, he had slipped off while she was taking the boys to football. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he had forgotten to let the poor dog out. Angrily she stabbed at his name on her phone. He didn’t answer.

  ‘Lying toad,’ she muttered.

  ‘Mum, where’s dad?’ Matthew asked as he joined her in the kitchen.

  A moment later his brother followed him in. Caroline forced a smile at them as she dished up their supper. Apart from inheriting his blonde hair, they were already developing into miniature versions of their father, slightly built with classic good looks.

  ‘You both played really well today,’ she fibbed, feigning enthusiasm.

  ‘Where’s dad?’ Matthew repeated. ‘I want to tell him about my goal.’

  ‘It was just a lucky shot,’ his brother said. ‘You were rubbish.’

  ‘It was brilliant. I was brilliant,’ Matthew replied.

  ‘You were rubbish. He was rubbish, wasn’t he, mum?’

  The boys settled down to eat.

  ‘Slow down, Matthew,’ Caroline said.

  The boy looked up from his supper. ‘Where’s Dobby?’

  ‘He’s out in the back garden.’ She glanced at her watch. It would be dark outside. ‘I’ll go and get him.’

  When she opened the back door cold air struck her like a slap, making her eyes water. Somewhere in the garden the dog was whimpering. She called him and stood in the doorway, waiting for him to bound over to her. There was no sign of him.

  ‘Dobby!’ she yelled. ‘Get in here now!’

  Only his whimpering alerted her to his presence in the darkness, but he refused to answer her summons.

  ‘Oh, stay out there and get cold then!’ she snapped, slamming the door, aware that she was venting her anger with Dave on the dog.

  It wasn’t unusual for Caroline to feed the boys and put them to bed by herself during the week, but Dave was generally around on a Saturday. Doggedly she kept up a pretence of being cheerful until, finally, the boys were settled in bed. Dave still wasn’t home. Furiously she tried his mobile again. There was no answer. Her anger turned to a familiar aching bitterness. It was all right for Dave. He did whatever he wanted, leaving her alone with the chores. They might as well not be married at all. She put the television on. At least she could choose what to watch, while he was out throwing hard earned money at some little tart.

  With a guilty start she remembered Dobby, outside in the cold. The dog almost knocked her off her feet in his haste to come in. He dashed past her so fast she couldn’t make out what he was holding in his jaws. Afraid he was bringing a dead rat into the house, she hurried after him.

  ‘Dobby, drop it! Drop it!’

  Head lowered, tail down, the dog obeyed. She gazed at the misshapen lump on the kitchen floor. It took her a few seconds to recognise Dave’s shoe, glistening with Dobby’s saliva, the dirty white fabric stained with blood.

  The next few minutes passed in a blur. To begin with Dobby dashed ahead of her, barking and yelping, as she made her way across the garden. It was beautiful in the moonlight. As they approached the shed he hung back, cowering, his tail between his legs. Apprehensively she peeked inside. The shed door creaked and groaned as it swung on its hinges in the cold night air, while the dog’s howling echoed eerily across the garden.

  At first she didn’t see the body lying at her feet. As her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness she made out a shape on the shadowy floor.

  ‘Dave? Dave? What’s happened? Is that you?’

  It was impossible to believe that her husband was lying there on the filthy floor. Crouching down, feeling the hard mound of his shoulder cupped in her hand, touching the skin on his stiff cold neck, she was momentarily baffled. Only when she felt slippery wetness on the side of his head, slightly sticky on her fingers, did she have a glimmering of understanding.

  Apart from the sound of Dobby, whimpering softly, the night was still. Trembling, she scrambled to her feet and stumbled back to the house to call for help. As she stepped indoors, she saw her fingers were bloody. Her legs were shaking. She was afraid she would collapse before she reached the phone. As she heard it ringing, she realised she had left the back door unlocked.

  6

  Geraldine was pouring a glass of wine when her phone rang. She felt a familiar thrill at the summons. As a detective inspector working in Serious Crime Command, a call at home could mean only one thing. Within seconds of answering the phone, she was pulling on her shoes, still listening to the call.

  ‘I’m on my way.’

  She arrived half an hour before the briefing was due to begin and went straight to her office, expecting to find it empty at that hour. To her surprise, her colleague Nick Williams was still at his desk.

  ‘I thought you’d gone home,’ he greeted her.

  ‘You’re working late.’ He grinned at her. ‘I couldn’t think of a nicer way to spend the evening than looking at you.’

  Preoccupied by the pending case, Geraldine wasn’t sure she appreciated Nick’s flattery at that hour. It sounded insincere, and was quite frustrating because she couldn’t tell if he fancied her, or was just being friendly. Taking everything into account, she hoped it was the latter. Sharing an office, it could become uncomfortable if they grew intimate, or fell out.

  Normally clean shaven and smartly dressed, Nick appeared uncharacteristically unkempt. His hair was a mess, the lower part of his face grey with stubble. Aware of her scrutiny, he turned away and began to fidget with files, straightening them so they lay parallel to the edge of his desk.

  ‘Are you OK? You look a bit rough.’

  He countered with a flippant comment about some women liking ‘a bit of rough’.

  ‘I’m serious, Nick.’

  ‘Well, I’m fine. You don’t need to worry about me.’

  He forced a laugh, and mumbled something about going drinking with some mates. He refused to meet her eye as he spoke.

  ‘Is something going on here, or is it problems at home?’ she probed gently.

  He shrugged. ‘A bit of both, to be honest. But how about you? What are you doing here at this ungodly hour?’

  Geraldine told him she had been summoned to a short briefing at the station before the investigation began.

  ‘Reg cracking the whip?’

  Geraldine had a grudging respect for Detective Chief Inspector Reg Milton, the senior investigating officer on the case.

  ‘He probably just wants to keep us all out of bed,’ she said, lightly dismissing Nick’s comment.

  He turned away from her with a shrug. ‘If that’s what you think.’

  She was drawn in, despite her reluctance to engage Nick in conversation. ‘What do you mean?’

  Undecided what to make of Reg, she was curious to discover what Nick thought of him.

  ‘I’ve got a lot of time for Reg,’ Nick said. ‘We go back a long way.’

  ‘But?’
r />   Prompted, he came over and perched on the edge of her desk, very close to her. She restrained herself from shifting her chair further away from him.

  ‘But nothing. Reg is – well, he sometimes comes across as more interested in himself and the progress of his own career than in the case, if you get what I mean. Not that there’s anything wrong with that,’ he added quickly. ‘There are plenty of very good career officers on the force. But not all of them have the same passion for the job that we have.’

  Geraldine nodded. If she was honest, she had entertained a few reservations about Reg’s motives herself. He was clearly ambitious, and she suspected he would probably prioritise his own career over any other considerations. It could be dangerous to make a mistake on a case where he was senior investigating officer.

  ‘Fortunately his promotion depends on carrying out successful investigations,’ she said, ‘whatever his personal motivation.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to say he isn’t dedicated to the job,’ Nick seemed to backtrack. ‘He’s a bloody fine officer.’

  There wasn’t time for Geraldine to reply. The briefing was due to begin.

  ‘The body of a man has been discovered in his own back garden, just off Ballards Lane,’ Reg announced to the assembled officers.

  He turned to a picture of the dead man as he spoke. It looked like a passport photograph. In his thirties, with short curly fair hair and wire-framed glasses, the victim stared levelly back at them. ‘David Robinson, living with his wife and ten-year-old twins.’ He read out an address in Finchley, North London.

  Someone asked who had found the body. The victim’s wife had discovered him in his garden shed. A faint sigh rustled round the room.

  ‘Imagine if he’d been discovered by one of his kids,’ someone muttered, voicing what everyone was thinking.

  ‘It was his wife who found him,’ Reg repeated firmly.

  Geraldine drove to the victim’s house, accompanied by her new sergeant, Max Grey. He seemed enthusiastic and conscientious, but they hadn’t worked together before. She was pleased to find that he was impatient to view the crime scene before too much had been moved. As far as they knew, the body had not yet been taken to the mortuary.

  It was Saturday evening, and everyone had had a busy day. The usual crowd of spectators had not yet gathered, hungry for information and gossip. In the light from the street lamps uniformed officers were visible, guarding the entrance to the house, but the street was otherwise deserted. Passing through the cordon, they followed a constable down an unlit side passage that ran alongside the house and into the back garden.

  ‘He was found by his wife,’ the constable told them as they pulled on their protective suits. ‘It’s lucky she happened to spot him, really. There are two kids living here who could’ve found him. His kids. They’re only about ten. His own kids. Can you imagine? He’s not a pretty sight.’

  Geraldine thanked the constable and turned to enter the protective tent that had been erected over the entrance to a garden shed.

  ‘I wish he hadn’t said that,’ Max muttered as he followed Geraldine.

  She didn’t answer. Beneath his dark hair, the young sergeant’s sharp face looked pale in the brilliant lighting that had been rigged up inside the tent. She hoped he wasn’t going to turn out to be squeamish. It was a surprisingly common handicap for a detective working on a murder investigation team. Geraldine herself had never been fazed by the horrors they witnessed in the course of their work. She liked to attribute that to her single-minded focus on the job. The dead gave invaluable clues to the identity of their killers. But apart from her professional interest, she found them intrinsically fascinating.

  ‘His wife and kids are in the house with a constable,’ they were told as they went in.

  ‘Widow,’ Max said.

  Geraldine noted his pedantic remark with silent approval. Attention to detail could be crucial to the success of a case.

  A scene of crime officer and a doctor were inside the tent, the former gathering data, the latter kneeling by the corpse conducting a preliminary examination. Any question over whether the death might have been accidental vanished as soon as they set eyes on the body. The victim lay on his back. With thin arms and legs sticking out from his slight frame, he resembled a monstrous four-legged insect. One side of his face had been smashed in. A large metal gardening spade lay on the floor nearby, the blade stained with blood. Blobs of soft tissue clung to it, like rock barnacles.

  ‘Jesus,’ Max mumbled.

  The doctor turned to greet them and Geraldine was pleased to see Miles Fellowes. She had worked with the young pathologist on previous cases. He had been summoned straight away, since there was no doubt this was murder.

  ‘Can you tell us the time of death?’ she asked.

  ‘Between four and five this afternoon,’ Miles said. ‘It looks as though he was taken by surprise, felled from behind and then repeatedly hit when he turned to face his attacker.’

  Geraldine stared at the dead man’s pulverised head.

  ‘It was a violent attack,’ she said.

  ‘You can say that again,’ Max agreed. His voice shook slightly.

  The pathologist nodded. ‘There were multiple blows to the head, possibly none severe enough on their own to kill him, although I’ll be able to tell you more about it once I’ve had a chance to carry out a full examination. The killer hit him repeatedly with the flat of the spade, but the edge of it caught him a couple of times too, slashing the side of his head. The murder weapon was a heavy garden spade…’

  ‘Suggesting it wasn’t premeditated?’ Max interrupted him. ‘The killer didn’t bring the murder weapon with him.’

  ‘Yes, it looks as though the killer used whatever came to hand.’

  ‘But we can’t be sure of that,’ Geraldine said.

  They looked down at the body.

  ‘Is it possible to say how many times he was hit?’ she asked.

  Miles shrugged. ‘At least six times, possibly as many as a dozen. I’ll know more once I’ve examined him properly.’

  ‘It’s possible the killer wasn’t very strong, if he had to hit him repeatedly before he managed to kill him,’ Max said.

  ‘It’s possible,’ Geraldine concurred, ‘but it might have been a frenzied attack. We can’t be sure of anything yet.’

  ‘We can be sure he’s dead,’ Miles pointed out with a slight grin.

  Geraldine suppressed a smile. She suspected the killer had hit the victim repeatedly in a rage. Someone who wasn’t very strong would be unlikely to seize a heavy spade and use it to beat a man to death. Not only that, but the longer the attack lasted, the more chance there was of discovery. The nature of the attack suggested the killer had been out of control.

  ‘He fought back,’ Miles went on, ‘but he was already on the ground. The first blow must have caught him off guard because it felled him. He didn’t stand a chance really.’

  While Max went to speak to scene of crime officers again, Geraldine went in the house where the dead man’s widow and two sons were sitting huddled together on a sofa in the living room. The woman looked older than her thirty-five years, her dark hair streaked with grey. Two identical blond-haired boys were sitting on either side of her, leaning against her. Both children were crying. Their mother stared straight ahead, the desolation in her eyes more desperate than tears.

  Geraldine approached. ‘Mrs Robinson?’

  The woman nodded without looking up. Geraldine introduced herself and asked if she would answer a few questions.

  ‘We can do this later, if you prefer. But we’re keen to find out what happened as quickly as we can.’

  The woman gave another nod to indicate she had understood and was prepared to talk. After a female constable had taken the two boys to the kitchen, Geraldine sat down.

  ‘Can you tell me what happened? Take your time.’

  7

  It was only natural for Caroline to be distressed. As the recently widowed mother of ten-y
ear-old twins, she would be expected to be shocked by her husband’s sudden death. That was lucky, because it gave her time to think. But she couldn’t delay answering the sharp-eyed inspector indefinitely. The detective was watching her, waiting for her to regain control of herself. With her head down, Caroline wondered what would happen to her sons if the truth ever came out. Shaken by a bout of crying, she glanced up at the inspector who was sitting perfectly still, waiting.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she stuttered, ‘I can’t think straight. What did you want to know?’

  ‘There’s nothing to apologise about.’ The detective smiled. Her huge black eyes stared at Caroline without blinking. ‘This can wait. I can come back tomorrow.’

  Tomorrow.

  Caroline struggled to understand the implications of her husband’s death. Dave hadn’t been mugged in the street. He had been killed in their own back garden. Worse than that, it was her fault he was dead. She shivered. She had never meant it to end like this. Whatever else happened, the police must never discover that she had not only met her husband’s killer, but she had given him their address and told him when the coast would be clear so he could find Dave alone. The police would never believe the truth. They would assume she had arranged for Brian to kill Dave.

  ‘I want to know who did it,’ she muttered fiercely. ‘I want to help. Ask me anything you like. Anything at all.’

  She wasn’t sure what she was talking about, or what she would be saying if she was innocent. She tried to imagine how she would be feeling if she hadn’t been involved in the murder. Of course Dave’s death had come as a total shock, but there was no escaping the dreadful truth. She may not have been wielding the murder weapon, but she was responsible for the death of her husband, her children’s father, the man she had once loved more than life itself. All that mattered now was her sons. She felt herself trembling with fear in case she slipped up and betrayed her guilt. If the police suspected her, they would take the boys away from her. Wherever this nightmare carried her, she mustn’t lose the boys.