Philip Brennan 01 - The Surrogate

by Carver, Tania

  ‘Ryan. Ryan Brotherton.’

  ‘Right. Let’s see what we can get on him, then you and me will pay him a visit. See what he has to say, where he was when he should have been here.’

  Clayton nodded.

  ‘Now—’

  Whatever Phil was about to say was cut short by the sharp ringing of a phone. Everyone stopped what they were doing, looked around at each other. An eerie stillness fell, disturbed only by the insistent sound. Like someone had just broken through at a seance. The living trying to contact the dead.

  Phil saw the phone in the living room and motioned to Anni. Whoever it was would be expecting a female voice. Anni crossed the room, picked it up. She hesitated, put it to her ear.

  ‘H-hello.’

  The whole room waited, watching Anni. She felt their stares, turned away from them.

  ‘Can I help you?’ She kept her voice calm and courteous.

  They waited. Anni listened. ‘Afraid not,’ she said eventually. ‘Who is this, please? . . . I see. Could I ask you to stay on the line, please?’

  She held the receiver to her chest, cupping it with her hand. She called Phil over. ‘All Saints Primary. Where Claire Fielding worked. They’re wondering why she hasn’t turned up for work.’ She mouthed the next words. ‘What should I tell them?’

  Phil didn’t like handing out death messages to work colleagues before close relatives had been informed.

  ‘Have they spoken to Julie Simpson’s husband yet?’

  ‘Don’t think so. He would have told them what was going on.’

  ‘Good. Tell them we’ll send someone round to talk to them this morning. But don’t say anything more.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I think next of kin should know first.’

  Anni nodded, went back on the phone.

  Phil turned to Clayton, his voice lowered so it wouldn’t carry down the phone line. ‘Okay. Like I said, the Birdies can follow up on Julie Simpson. Now, the media’ll be here soon. Before we go, I’ll call Ben Fenwick. Get him down here to deal with them.’

  ‘King Cliché rides again,’ said Clayton.

  ‘Indeed,’ agreed Phil, not irritated by this comment of Clayton’s, ‘but he’s good at that kind of stuff and they seem to like him. Plays well on screen. They’re going to be on our side with this one - at least for now - so we’ll sort out our approach in the meantime. And find out if Claire Fielding’s parents live in the area. Get someone over to talk to them.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we get the DCI to deliver the death message, boss? All PR to him.’

  ‘Yeah, but he might want to take along a camera crew. See who’s at the station. Get someone with a suitable rank to do it. Draw straws if you have to.’

  ‘Yes, boss.’ Clayton was writing everything down.

  Anni came off the phone. ‘We’d better get someone round there soon as. They’re not going to keep a lid on this for long. And it was a baby shower.’

  ‘How d’you know?’

  ‘Lizzie, that’s Lizzie Stone who just phoned, knew Claire was having a get-together with friends last night. Mostly other teachers, I think.’

  ‘Right,’ said Phil, thinking on the spot. ‘Can’t remember who said this, but it’s true. My mind will change when the facts change. So. Anni, get the Birdies sorted. Adrian chain of evidence, Jane still sticks with what she was doing. You get yourself round to All Saints, take as many spare units as you can. Statements, the works. Separate them, don’t give them a chance to collude. I want to know exactly what happened at that party last night. Get Millhouse up and running as gatekeeper for the investigation back at base. And get him to give the computer system a pounding. We’re going to need extra bodies. DCI Fenwick’ll sanction that, I’m sure, because I want the Susie Evans and Lisa King cases re-examined with a fine-toothed comb. Any similarities, no matter how small, they get flagged and logged. And get uniforms to check CCTV for the whole area, inside these flats and out, registration plates, the lot. Everything referenced and cross-referenced. Right?’

  The other two nodded.

  ‘Any questions?’

  Neither had any. He looked at them both. They dealt in murder and violent crime and he had hand-picked them himself. There was mutual trust between them and he hoped that look he had caught earlier wasn’t going to undermine that. He examined their faces, saw only determination in their eyes. The need to catch a double killer and a possibly living child. None of them would be going home any time soon. Or going out. He felt a pang of guilt, wondered how that would go down. Could guess.

  He pushed the thought out of his mind. Deal with it later.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Let’s go. We’ve got work to do.’

  He strode out of the apartment as quickly as possible.

  5

  Phil stood outside the apartment block, ripping apart the Velcro fastenings of his paper suit, hunting for his phone. He thought of Anni’s words once more: I mean, this is Colchester . . .

  Colchester. Last outpost of Essex before it became Suffolk. If heaven, as David Byrne once sang, was a place where nothing ever happened, then heaven and Colchester had a lot in common. But as Phil knew only too well, something, like nothing, could happen anywhere.

  He looked round. Claire Fielding’s flat was in Parkside Quarter, sandwiched between the river, the Dutch Quarter and Castle Park. The Dutch Quarter: all winding streets and alleyways of sixteenth-century and Edwardian houses stuck between the high street and the river. An urban village, the town’s self-appointed boho area, complete with cobblestones, corner pubs and even its own gay club. Parkside Quarter was a modern development of townhouses and apartment blocks, all faux wooden towers and shuttered windows, designed to fit sympathetically alongside the older buildings but just looking like a cheap toytown version of them.

  He was on a footpath by the river, where weeping willows shaded out the sun, leaving dappled shadows all around. It took joggers and baby-carriage-pushing mothers to and from Castle Park. On the opposite bank was a row of quaint old terraced cottages. Up the steps and beyond was North Station Road, the main link for commuters from the rail station to the town centre. It seemed so mundane, so normal. Safe. Happy.

  But today the Dutch Quarter would be silent. There would be no joggers or mothers along the footpath. Already white-suited officers were on their hands and knees beginning a search of the area. He looked down at the ground. He hoped their gloves were strong. Discarded Special Brew cans, plastic cider bottles were dotted around on the ground like abstract sculptures. The odd used condom. Fewer needles than there used to be but, he knew, no less drug-taking.

  He looked up to the bridge, saw others peering from their safe, happy world into his. Commuters carrying cappuccinos, mobiles and newspapers on their way up the hill were stopping to stare down, the blue and white crime-scene tape attracting their attention like ghoulish magpies dazzled by silver.

  He ignored them, concentrated on getting out of his paper suit. As he did so, he caught a glimpse of himself in the window of the downstairs flat. Tall, just over six foot, and his body didn’t look too bad, no beer gut or man boobs, but then he kept himself in shape. Not because he was particularly narcissistic, but his job entailed long hours, takeaway food and, if he wasn’t careful, too much alcohol. And it would be all too easy to succumb, as so many of his colleagues had done, so he forced himself to keep up the gym membership, go running, cycling. Someone had suggested five-a-side, get fit, make new friends, have a laugh and a few beers afterwards. He’d turned it down. It wasn’t for him. Not that he was unsociable. He was just more used to his own company.

  He tried not to conform to the stereotypical image of a police detective, believing that suits, crewcuts and shiny black shoes were just another police uniform. He didn’t even own a tie, and more often than not wore a T-shirt instead of a formal shirt. His dark brown hair was spiky and quiffed, and he wore anything on his feet rather than black shoes. Today he had teamed the jacket and waistcoat of a pin-str
iped suit with dark blue Levis, a striped shirt and brown boots.

  But his eyes showed the strain he was under. A poet’s eyes, an ex-girlfriend had once said. Soulful and melancholic. He just thought they made him look miserable. Now they had black rings under them.

  He breathed deep, rubbing his chest as he did so. Luckily the panic attack he had felt in the flat hadn’t progressed. That was something. Usually when they hit it felt like a series of metal bands wrapping themselves round his chest, constricting him, pulling in tighter, making it harder and harder for him to breathe. His arms and legs would shake and spasm.

  It was something he had suffered since he was a child. He had put it down to his upbringing. Given up for adoption by a woman he never knew, he was bounced from pillar to post in various children’s homes and foster homes as he grew up. Never fitting in, never settling. He didn’t like to dwell on those times.

  Eventually he was sent to the Brennan household and the panic attacks tailed off. Don and Eileen Brennan. He wasn’t one for melodrama, but he really did believe that couple had saved his life. Given him a sense of purpose.

  Given him a home.

  And they loved him as much as he loved them. So much so that they eventually adopted him.

  But the panic attacks were still there. Every time he thought he had them beat, had his past worked out, another one would hit and remind him how little progress he had made.

  Don Brennan had been a policeman. He believed in fairness and justice. Qualities he tried to instil in the children he fostered. So Don couldn’t have been more pleased than when his adopted son followed him into the force.

  And Phil loved it. Because he believed that alongside justice and fairness should be order. Not rules and regulations, but order. Understanding. Life, he believed, was random enough and police work helped him define it, gave it shape, form and meaning. Solving crimes, ascribing reasons for behaviour, finding the ‘why’ behind the deed was the fuel that kept his professional engine running. He was fairly confident he could bring order to any kind of chaos.

  He turned away from the window. Do it now, he told himself. Put yourself in order.

  He would start with the two previous murders.

  6

  Lisa King and Susie Evans. The two previous murder victims. Phil pulled those two names from his mental Rolodex, focused on them. He had seen their faces so many times. Staring out at him from the incident room whiteboard, imprinted on his memory.

  Lisa King was a twenty-six-year-old married estate agent. She had arranged a viewing of a vacant property on the edge of the Greenstead area of town. She had never made it out of that house. She was discovered later that day by one of her colleagues. Laid out on the floor of the house, drugged, brutally knifed. Her stomach ripped to pieces. Her unborn child mutilated, killed along with her.

  There had been a huge media circus and Phil and his team had doggedly followed every line of inquiry, no matter how tenuous or tedious. The appointment had been made over the phone, from a cheap, unregistered pay-as-you-go mobile bought from a branch of Asda with cash. Lisa had taken all the details herself; the client was hers. A woman’s name had been given, according to the file in the office. No such woman existed.

  Phil and his team had tried their hardest but failed to make any headway. No forensic evidence, no DNA, no eyewitnesses coming forward, no CCTV pictures. Nothing. It was as if the killer had materialised, murdered, then vanished into thin air.

  Appeals had been made to the woman who had called the estate agent to come forward. She was promised protection, confidentiality, anything. Lisa’s husband had been brought in, questioned, and released. The usual informants, paid or otherwise, came up with nothing. Everyone was talking about it; no one was saying anything.

  Then, two months later, Susie Evans was murdered.

  A single parent living in a council flat in New Town. Pregnant with her third child and, as she had laughingly said to her friends in the pub, between boyfriends. A part-time prostitute and barmaid, she hadn’t made such a sympathetic victim as Lisa King, but Phil and his team treated her exactly the same. He didn’t hold with the view that one life was somehow worth more than another. They were all equal, he thought, when they were dead.

  Her body was found in a friend’s flat. She had asked the friend if she could borrow it as she had a client who was going to pay her handsomely. Her eviscerated, broken body had been dumped in the bath, the walls, floor and ceiling covered in arterial blood sprays, the baby cut out, left on the floor beside her dead mother.

  A door-to-door had been mounted, but it was an area that was traditionally unsympathetic to the police. A mobile station had been set up on the estate but no one had volunteered any information. Again there was no DNA, no forensic evidence and certainly no CCTV.They had speculated on many things: that it might have been a particularly twisted punter with a pregnant woman fetish. Even that it had been an abortion gone horribly wrong. And, most worryingly, that it was the same person who had killed Lisa King and his crimes were escalating. But the investigation went nowhere. And they were left with just a dead mother and child.

  Then nothing for another two months. Until now.

  Phil took out his mobile. Eileen Brennan, worried that he was in his thirties and unmarried, had been trying to fix him up with Deanna, a friend’s daughter, a divorcee the same age. They had never met, and weren’t particularly keen to, but had agreed on a date to keep the two older women happy. This evening. He had to phone her and, with not too much reluctance, call it off.

  He had the number dialled, was ready to put the call through, when his phone rang. Grateful for the diversion, he answered it.

  ‘DI Brennan.’

  DCI Ben Fenwick. His superior officer. ‘Sir,’ said Phil.

  ‘On my way over now. Just wanted a quick chat beforehand. ’The voice strong and authoritative, equally at home in front of the cameras at a news conference or telling a joke to an appreciative audience in an exclusive golf clubhouse.

  ‘Good, sir. Let me tell you what we’ve found.’ Phil gave him the details, aware all the time of the missing baby, the clock still ticking inside him. He was pleased the rubberneckers on the bridge couldn’t hear him. He hoped there were no lip-readers in the crowd. Hid his mouth just in case.

  ‘Oh God,’ said Ben Fenwick, then offered to deal with the media as Phil knew he would. It wasn’t just that he never missed an opportunity to get his face on TV; he had so many media contacts he ensured the story would be presented in a way that would benefit the investigation.

  ‘Sounds to me like we’ve got a serial. What do you think? Am I right?’ Fenwick’s voice was tight, grim.

  ‘Well, we’ve still got the party aspect to pursue, the boyfriend to question . . .’

  ‘Gut feeling?’

  ‘Yeah. A serial and a baby kidnapper.’

  ‘Wonderful. Bad to worse.’ He sighed. It came down the phone as a ragged electronic bark. ‘I mean, a serial killer. In Colchester. These things just don’t happen. Not here.’

  ‘That has been mentioned, sir. A few times. I’m sure they said something similar up the road in Ipswich a couple of years ago.’

  A serial killer had targeted prostitutes in the red-light area of the Suffolk town. He had been caught, but not before he had murdered five women.

  Another sigh. ‘True. But why? And why here?’

  ‘I’m sure they said that too.’

  ‘Quite. Look. This is a priority case. God knows how long we’ve got to catch this bastard and get that baby, but we’ve got to step up.You’re going to need a bit of help.’

  ‘How d’you mean, sir?’

  ‘Different perspective, that kind of thing. Psychological input. Profile.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t go for that sort of thing.’

  ‘I don’t. Not personally. But the Detective Super’s been on the phone from Chelmsford. Thinks it would be helpful. Sanctioned the money too. So there we are. Another weapon in the arsenal and all
that.’

  ‘Who did you have in mind?’ A shiver ran through Phil, as if he had just plugged his fingers into a wall socket. He had an idea of what Fenwick was about to say next. Hoped he was wrong.

  ‘Someone with a bit of specialist knowledge, Phil. And I know you’ve worked with her before.’

  Her. Phil knew exactly who he was talking about. His chest tightened again, but this wasn’t a panic attack. Not exactly.

  ‘Marina Esposito,’ said Fenwick. ‘Remember her?’

  Of course Phil remembered her.

  ‘I know it all ended rather unfortunately last time—’ Fenwick didn’t get to finish his sentence.

  Phil gave a bitter laugh. ‘Bit of an understatement.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Fenwick, undaunted. ‘But by all accounts a cracking forensic psychologist, don’t you think? Or at least as far as they go. And, you know, what happened aside, she got us a result.’