Philip Brennan 02 - The Creeper

by Tania Carver

  People do that all the time. Disappear. The words no comfort or consolation for Julie’s parents but they heard them over and over, a mantra of no explanation. She’ll either come back on her own, people said, or she won’t. No one knew what to do next, apart from hope Julie sent a postcard from somewhere hot and far away.

  ‘This our runaway, then?’

  Phil turned at the voice. Detective Chief Inspector Ben Fenwick was walking up the gangplank, his blue suit, gloves, boots and hood somehow not obscuring his smugness.

  ‘I think so, sir,’ said Phil, knowing that ‘sir’ gave the pretence of deference Fenwick liked. ‘I mean, I hope so.’

  Fenwick nodded, his face a mask of professional concern. ‘Yes. Right,’ he said, standing beside Phil and looking down at the body, wincing. ‘Wouldn’t want there to be another one, would we?’

  Phil had voiced the same sentiment out of concern for the victim. Fenwick, he knew from experience, had expressed concern at keeping his stats down.

  There was no love lost between the pair of them. But they had called a temporary truce in order to get their jobs done. Since Phil was hardworking, inspired and always got results, Fenwick, as his superior, endured him as a necessary evil. Phil, for his part, thought Fenwick was a phoney; trotting out whatever the latest politically correct management-speak jargon happened to be, paying lip service to ideas of progressiveness and equality in the police force, but underneath his tailored suit and expensive haircut he was as reactionary and scheming as any old department dinosaur.

  Phil noticed Fenwick had brought with him a similarly blue-suited sidekick who stopped walking when he did. Fenwick turned to the newcomer.

  ‘This is Detective Sergeant Martin. Rose. She was in charge of the original missing person’s case.’ Fenwick smiled. ‘She’s here to give her expert opinion.’

  DS Rose Martin stepped forward, shared a small smile with Phil and Mickey, looked down at the body. She flinched, looked away. Phil feared her response was going to be the same as Mickey’s but she composed herself, looked again, bending down getting in closer. Phil admired her for that. Mickey, Phil noticed, seemed slightly put out at her reaction.

  ‘What d’you think?’ asked Phil. ‘You’ve got a better idea than us. Is it her?’

  Rose Martin straightened up. Keeping her eyes on the body she nodded. ‘I think so. Yes, I think this is Julie Miller.’

  Phil nodded. Looked at the body again.

  Definitely no time for personal stuff now.

  3

  Phil looked at the other three, all of them sweating inside their blue paper suits. He was aware what they must look like standing there, hoods up, feet and hands covered. A twenty-first century gathering of druids at a contemporary sacrificial altar.

  ‘Clearly not natural causes, then,’ said Fenwick, trying for a feeble joke.

  No one laughed.

  ‘Her heart stopped,’ said Mickey Philips, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, ‘how natural d’you want?’

  Phil turned to his new DS, the comment leading him to believe the man had regained his cocky composure after the vomiting incident. But the look in his eyes said something different. His words had been a genuine response to Fenwick’s weak joke. There was nothing funny or flippant about them. Phil began to warm to him a little.

  ‘Phil,’ said Fenwick, making a stab at some kind of authority, ‘I’d like you heading up the team for this case.’

  Phil nodded.

  ‘And I think it would be a good idea if Rose, DS Martin, that is, joined your team. She’s had nearly a week working on this already. Knows the lay of the land.’

  The lay of the land, thought Phil. King Cliché rides again.

  ‘OK.’ Normally Phil liked to choose his own team members, make sure he could trust them, but he could see the sense in Fenwick’s words.

  ‘Good. I’ll handle the media and leave you to it. You report directly to both me and the Super in Chelmsford as per usual.’

  ‘What about the media? We going public with this?’

  Fenwick frowned. ‘Let’s get a definite confirmation before we release any names. Don’t want to jump the gun, do we?’

  Jump the gun. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Good. Well, I’ll leave you to it.’

  Fenwick turned and moved away. As he did so, Phil noticed that his hand lingered on the small of Rose Martin’s back for a few seconds longer than it should have done.

  ‘Right,’ Phil said and made introductions. ‘Looks like you’re my team on this one. We may get Anni back but we can’t count on that so let’s get cracking. Gather.’

  Phil always had his team group at the site of an incident, pool thoughts, ideas.

  ‘Before we do anything else, let’s see what this scene tells us. What’s important here?’

  ‘You mean was she placed here deliberately, that kind of thing?’ Rose Martin frowned as she said it.

  ‘That kind of thing, yes,’ said Phil. He looked again at the body. ‘Her head’s facing towards the front end of the boat—’

  ‘Bow,’ said Mickey Philips. Phil looked at him. The DS blushed. ‘Front end. Bow. My old man. Used to take me sailing.’

  Phil surprised himself and smiled. ‘Really?’

  Mickey shrugged. ‘Yeah. Hated it. Always threw up.’ He gave a self-deprecating smile. ‘No change there.’

  ‘Concentrate,’ said Phil. They did so. ‘So her head is at the bow, her body in a straight line towards the cabin and the light tower. Her legs are apart.’ He looked at the other two. ‘Is that deliberate? Did whoever did this want us to find her like that? Or is it just accidental, the way it turned out?’

  ‘Looks deliberate to me,’ said Rose. ‘I mean, the body could just have been dumped and left. He took the time to arrange her, place her like that.’

  Mickey pointed to the wooden deck. ‘There’s the scuff marks. Could they be from who ever left her here?’

  ‘Could be,’ said Phil. ‘Might have taken a while to get her the way he wanted her. There’s blood on the floor too, smudged where he’s moved her.’

  ‘Just one bloke, boss? Or d’you think there was more than one?’

  Phil shrugged. ‘Hard to say. She doesn’t look that big. One guy would have struggled, two could have handled her easily.’

  ‘Killers working in tandem?’ said Rose. ‘Rapist-killers?’

  ‘We don’t know she’s been raped yet, Rose.’

  ‘It’s a fair assumption,’ said Mickey, pointing at her mutilated vagina, swallowing hard.

  ‘Sexually motivated, you think?’ said Phil.

  Rose looked around the boat. ‘Legs apart with a huge tower of light between them? That’s Freud for Beginners, isn’t it?’

  ‘It looks that way but let’s not jump to conclusions. Wait till Nick Lines has his say. What we do know is she wasn’t killed here. Not enough blood. But she was left here for a reason.’

  ‘Her flat,’ said Rose.

  Phil looked at her, waited.

  She pointed over the river to the apartment blocks. ‘She lived there. In one of those flats. In fact, I think you can see this ship from her window.’

  Phil felt a familiar tingle inside him. Information was coalescing, forming patterns. He didn’t know what it meant but he was sure it was significant. He nodded. ‘Deliberate, then.’

  ‘And I think it’s safe to say he hates women,’ said Rose, trying not to look at the carving on the body’s forehead.

  ‘I’d say that was a given.’ Phil looked at his watch. ‘CSI on the way?’ Phil hated saying that. But since the TV franchise had conquered the world the department insisted.

  Rose nodded. ‘Ben called them on the way here.’

  Ben, thought Phil.

  ‘Probably stopped for an ice cream,’ said Mickey Philips, wiping sweat off his forehead with the back of his gloved hand.

  Phil ignored him.

  ‘No one touch anything,’ Phil said then looked pointedly at his DS. ‘No swe
at and certainly no more vomit. Let’s get this crime scene sealed off.’

  The three of them left the boat as the uniforms stepped in and did their job. The roads were cordoned off, blue and white tape stretched across all access routes, traffic stopped down the road and turned back. The CSIs would assume the largest possible area for a crime scene then circle inwards, blue-suited birds of prey, narrowing their scope of reference down to just the body. Then, using their painstaking, occult sciences, hopefully recreate the path it took to reach there. And, more importantly, tell Phil and his team who put it there. And maybe even how to catch them.

  There was a man sitting on a wood and concrete bench in front of an urban regeneration mural. Middle-aged and balding, in a blue polo shirt with an exercise-free stomach spilling over the complaining waistband of work trousers. He looked visibly shaken. A uniformed officer who had been sitting with him stood up, crossed towards Phil.

  ‘That the guy who phoned it in?’ said Phil.

  She nodded.

  ‘Made a statement?’

  She nodded. ‘Came to open the garage as usual. Saw some seagulls - an unusual amount, he said - congregating on the deck of the boat. Crossed over to shoo them away, saw the body.’

  ‘He see anything else? Hear anything? Vans? People acting suspiciously?’

  She looked down the length of the quay. ‘You know what some of these firms are like down here, boss. If it wasn’t for suspicious characters they’d have gone out of business long ago.’

  Phil sighed. ‘Point taken. But take him through it again. You never know, something might trigger a memory. Thanks.’

  The officer nodded, turned her attention back to the seated man. Phil turned back to the boat. He couldn’t see the body for the lip of the boat’s side but he knew it was there.

  Mickey Philips came and stood alongside him, his eyes as focused as Phil’s, his hood pulled down. The departure of Phil’s previous DS had been traumatic, murdered in the course of work, an act which had devastated the whole team. He knew Mickey Philips was aware of that, knew his attempts at humour, however misplaced, his strained bonhomie, were just his way of trying to fit in.

  Phil gave him a quick glance. The DS was unzipping his blue suit, pulling his shirt away from his chest to allow air to circulate. Mickey Philips was a burly, rugby-playing type. Stocky and muscled, like a shaved and domesticated bull. He was dressed like every policeman was supposed to be. Well-cut - but not flashy - suit. Polished shoes. Short, spiky haircut. Cufflinks, even. Under his paper suit, Phil looked the opposite. And deliberately so. Jeans. Superdry trainers. An untucked, flowered shirt with a suit jacket over the top. Hair spiked and quiffed. When he had graduated from uniform and joined the Major Incident Squad he had been adamant he wouldn’t be swapping one uniform for another. And he had stuck to his word. In fact, he was well dressed by his usual standards.

  DS Rose Martin came over to join them, her paper suit dispensed with altogether. Phil got his first real look at her. Tall and big-boned yet fit and lean, her straight black hair was cut into a long bob with a fringe resting below her eyebrows. And with her jeans, T-shirt, boots and designer-looking, collarless leather bike jacket, she looked like she fitted Phil’s work ethos better than Mickey Philips. But appearances, he knew, were deceptive.

  Phil hoped there wouldn’t be tension between these two. He already had trouble with another of his DCs, Anni Hepburn. She had put herself in for promotion when the DS position needed filling, been unsuccessful and was consequently harbouring resentment about it. He had tried to call her, get her to join him this morning, but she had already been called out on another matter. He wondered whether she had arranged that deliberately.

  He just hoped his team could put aside whatever differences they had and work together. They had to. It was his job to ensure that.

  ‘Right,’ said Phil, ‘before we start, any questions?’

  ‘Boss . . .’ said Mickey.

  ‘Yes, Mickey?’

  ‘Well . . .’ He glanced round at the boat, back to Phil. ‘I’m just wondering. I know I’m new here, coming from the drugs squad an’ that, but this looks pretty serious. Less like a one-off and more like a serial in the making, you know what I mean?’

  ‘What are you getting at?’

  ‘Well, shouldn’t we think about getting a profiler in?’

  ‘It’s a possibility,’ said Phil.

  ‘D’you know any good ones?’ said Rose.

  ‘One or two,’ said Phil. ‘One in particular.’

  ‘Worth a call?’ said Mickey.

  Phil became thoughtful. Marina Esposito was the best profiler he had ever worked with. She was also his partner. His soulmate. The mother of his child. And the cause of his problems he had tried not to bring to work with him that morning. Right now she was distant. Hard to read, to talk to. Secretive, even. About where she went, what she did. Something wasn’t right. He would have to sort it out, talk to her. Work it out between them. It had taken so much to get them together, he wasn’t going to let anything pull them apart.

  ‘Not at the moment,’ said Phil. ‘She’s . . . busy. Anything else?’

  They both shook their heads.

  ‘Good. Oh, and one more thing.’

  They looked at him expectantly.

  ‘Welcome to MIS,’ Phil said.

  4

  ‘Hi.’

  Marina Esposito sat down in the chair provided, looked at the man opposite her. He was still, his face, his posture serene, in an attitude of listening. She gave him a small, tentative smile.

  ‘Traffic was awful,’ she said. ‘Murder coming up past the station. Everything rerouted, for some reason.’ She sighed. It covered up the awkwardness she was feeling. ‘But I made it. Wouldn’t want to miss our session.’

  She was dressed in a long, black linen skirt, white linen top, jewellery. Large-lensed sunglasses pushed up on the top of her thick, dark, curly hair. It felt good to be out of the house. To get dressed up for something. For anything. Even to come here.

  Marina pulled the chair round, positioned it the way she wanted. The windows were open, the late spring/early summer air and morning sunshine giving the institutionalised room a warmth and life it didn’t often have.

  ‘Right then . . .’ She sighed again. Then found things that needed doing before she could next speak. Physical actions that helped to compose her mind. She switched her phone to silent, rearranged the contents of her bag prior to placing it on the floor. Marvelled at some of the things she found there. Pushed her hair behind her ears, arranged her neckline. Pulled her top away from her chest, allowed air to travel down there, stop it sticking. Eventually, with nothing more to occupy them, her hands came to rest in her lap like grounded birds. The signal that she was finally ready to talk.

  ‘So . . .’ She glanced at him. His face was immobile. Waiting. ‘I’ll start. It’s been . . . OK. Yeah,’ she said, as if convincing herself, ‘OK. Josephina’s doing well. I’ve left her with her . . . with Eileen and Don. They love her. So that’s . . . that’s where she is this morning.’

  Marina sighed. Words were tumbling through her brain. She grasped for them, clutching them, hoped she settled on the right ones. ‘I’m . . . things are going all right. Since we last . . . since our . . . since the last time I came to see you. All right.’ She nodded. ‘Yeah.’

  She sighed again and a cloud covered the sun. The summer brightness was leached from the walls as they became grey and bleak and the room became what it was - an institutionalised, dying room.

  ‘No,’ she said, as if the change in the light had also stripped away her false brightness, leaving just a grim honesty. ‘Things are not all right. I mean, Phil and I are good. You know, good. We’ve got the new baby who’s just gorgeous, and the new house. So that’s all positive. That’s good. But there’s . . . you know. The other stuff.’

  She waited for the sunlight to return. It didn’t. She went on.

  ‘The fear. That’s what they never tell you
about. The fear. You’ve got this tiny little infant, this . . . human life . . .’ She clasped her hands, looked down at them as if they held her invisible daughter. ‘And you’ve got to, you’ve got to look after her. You’re responsible for her. You’ve given her life, now you have to help her to live.’

  She unclasped her hands. Looked up. Back at him.

  ‘Sorry. You don’t need to hear that. I’m sure.’ Another sigh. ‘Because there’s all the other stuff too. All of . . . this.’ The words were starting to tumble out now. This was what she had wanted to say. Came here to say. ‘I can’t . . . can’t . . . enjoy it. Any of it. There’s this shadow. This . . . spectre at the feast, elephant in the room. Call it what you like, you know what I mean. And sometimes I forget, and I’m happy for a moment. Just a moment. And I can relax. And laugh. And then I remember. And it starts again. And I just . . .’ Her hands were out in front of her, fingers twisted, as if grasping in the air for an invisible, intangible solution. Her voice dropped. ‘Sometimes I don’t think it’ll ever change. I think that this is it. This is the way it’ll always be.’

  She looked round. The sunlight had returned and with it warmth, but Marina didn’t notice. To her, it seemed suddenly cold. Not light, but dark.

  ‘And . . . I can’t live with that.’

  She stopped talking. She waited for a reply. None came. Took his silence as listening, as encouragement to keep talking.

  ‘It’s my fault. I know that. Mine. And . . .’ Her hands started grasping once more, fingers wriggling as if to be free. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know, I don’t know what to do . . .’

  She paused, looked down at her hands once more.

  ‘I just feel so . . . guilty . . . And I am. It’s my fault. Everything that happened, everything that went wrong. My fault. But I don’t know what to do for the best. I need . . . I want this hurt to stop. I need to know what to do for the best . . .’

  The tears came, as they always did at this time. She bent her head forward, reached out. Took his hand. He let her. She sat like that until it was time for her to leave.