Born in a Burial Gown

by Mike Craven

  ‘So where is he now?’ Fluke asked.

  McNab burst out laughing, a low guttural sound. He looked at Towler. ‘You may be hard mate, but you’re a thick cunt.’

  Fluke looked at him, tendrils of apprehension creeping over him. He was laughing at them. What did he know that they didn’t?

  ‘You fuckin’ stupid bastards,’ he said, some of his earlier bravado returning. ‘He’s with you lot.’

  Fluke’s confused expression caused McNab to burst out laughing all over again.

  McNab continued. ‘He’s at Whitehaven nick.’

  Fluke was furious. Furious at Douglass, who’d only just come on shift and hadn’t read her emails, and furious with himself for not believing Holland would retaliate by deliberately interfering in a murder investigation. His smirk made sense now. He knew why they were there and he knew who he had in his cells. And he knew that at some point, Fluke would know.

  According to McNab, he’d been arrested for shoplifting that morning. He’d walked into Tesco, picked up a DVD player, and according to the arresting officer, simply waited outside until the police arrived.

  Towler had phoned the station immediately but it was too late. ‘They already taken him to court, boss. Magistrates remanded him. He’s in the back of a G4S van, on his way to Durham. No way of stopping it.’ He slammed his fist on the steering wheel. ‘No one thought to fucking check why we were here? What’d you think we doing, buying fucking ice creams?’ Towler shouted down the phone. ‘For fuck’s sake, we look a right pair of bell ends here.’

  Fluke felt the same but let him rant. He knew he’d calm down soon enough. Douglass was sitting quietly in the back, chastened. It wasn’t her fault anymore than it was Towler’s. Fluke blamed himself. If he hadn’t humiliated Holland at the crime scene Ackley would be in their custody. He asked Douglass what she thought the shoplifting meant.

  She looked up, surprised to be asked. ‘I can’t say for certain obviously, but all the regulars at court know what the remand threshold is at any one time in case they need to get off the streets. It sounds like he deliberately passed it. I don’t why he’d do that though, sir. He’s never done it before.’

  Fluke understood what she meant. Ackley had deliberately stolen something of a value too high for the court to bail him. Although the value changed from bench to bench, word got around quick enough. He’d wanted to be remanded into custody. It was a ploy the homeless and addicts who wanted to get clean sometimes used. Something else Michelle’s friends would never be able to understand; for some people, prison was the best they could hope for in their lives. Auntie Betty’s B&B. Nice, warm and safe, all the food you can eat and free healthcare. For some people, prison was a sanctuary.

  Douglass didn’t know why he’d deliberately got himself locked up, but Fluke did. It wasn’t because he wanted to get clean; it was because he was terrified.

  The custody sergeant at Whitehaven obviously wasn’t prepared to take any more grief from Towler and was giving as much back. Towler rang off and threw his phone down in disgust. ‘Prick.’

  They dropped Douglass back at Whitehaven, and Towler drove out the station car park without saying goodbye. Fluke gave her a weak smile as they drove past her.

  At least they knew where Ackley was.

  As Towler got back on the phone to organise a prison visit, Fluke remembered he hadn’t phoned Lucy, the bug lady. There was no time; he wanted to go back to the crime scene, to make sure it was still secure and that SOCO had everything they needed. Towler drove through Hensingham and parked in the same place Fluke had the day before.

  The crime scene was still being processed by the SOCO teams. Fluke knew that the reality of forensic work was methodical, painstaking and laborious. It took days rather than hours, popular TV shows giving a false picture of what the actual job entailed.

  He could see that there were journalists and a TV crew there. Word was out.

  A shrine of flowers and soft toys had built up. There were candles as well but the wind had blown them all out. A crowd of onlookers had gathered and some were being interviewed by the press.

  Fluke turned and surveyed his surroundings after he signed into the outer cordon. It was, as he thought: the old hospital was the only building that overlooked any of the site. A combination of trees and the screens the building company had erected interrupted the view from everywhere else. It couldn’t be seen from the road. He didn’t really know what to make of that information. He was working on an early theory that the killer wasn’t from Cumbria. Professional killing wasn’t a trade Cumbrians normally moved into. So how did he know about the place? Other than being unlucky enough to have actually been observed disposing of the body, it was perfect. He took one last look at the old hospital. It was still operational, the new one wasn’t due to open until later in the year, but even to his untrained eye it looked as though it had had its day. It was grubby and it was old-fashioned. Not old-fashioned in the grand architectural style of the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle, it was more the prefabricated type favoured in the seventies. It didn’t look nice then, and it looked worse now. But had their killer been there? Had he stood in that old dilapidated building and seen what he must have thought was the ideal deposition site?

  He walked up to the uniformed sergeant who eyed him warily. Word had obviously got out about how he’d taken Holland to task.

  ‘Sergeant. Can you move those ghouls back another fifty yards? I don’t want a suspect placing themselves here on purpose so they can claim that’s why their forensics were found.’

  The sergeant walked off to arrange it.

  Fluke took one last look at the crime scene. There was nothing more he could do here. He turned his phone on to check his emails while he had a signal. There was only one that mattered. The NBIS report on the bullet was back.

  ***

  Chapter 13

  An hour later, Fluke was back at FMIT reading the report from the National Ballistics Intelligence Service. As he read it, Alan Vaughn gave him the facts.

  ‘Matt can probably give you more info on it, boss, but there’s good and bad news. The good news is that ballistics were able to make a positive ID. It’s a .22 LR.’

  Fluke nodded, it was the calibre Towler had thought it had been. ‘LR?’

  ‘Stands for long rifle apparently. Not really sure why as it was almost certainly fired from a handgun,’ Vaughn said. ‘Matt, you got five minutes?’ he called out. Towler walked over. ‘.22 LR?’

  ‘.22 long. Fuck,’ Towler replied. ‘Just about the most common bullet on the planet. In the States you buy them by weight rather than number, they’re that cheap. Used as a practice bullet. Not too bad for vermin from a rifle, shit from a handgun. Range is terrible,’ he said. ‘Ideal for our man, though. No way is that coming out the other side of the head. It’s rimfire as well: quiet.’

  ‘Rimfire?’ Vaughn asked.

  Distracted as he read the report, Towler replied, ‘Means the firing pin strikes the side of the bullet rather than the back. Makes it less accurate, I forget why.’

  While Towler familiarised himself with the report, Fluke asked Vaughn what the bad news was.

  ‘They’ve run it through their database and it’s clean. Nothing at all on their system. Didn’t take them long either, by the sound of things. The bloke I spoke to said there were hardly any incidents using this ammunition in the UK. No more than five in the last five years. It was the first one he’d come across.’

  ‘Shit,’ Fluke said. ‘Anything good coming out of this?’

  ‘Not really. He said if we wanted to, he could give us a list of names of gangs and individuals who may deal in this sort of thing, but it was going to be sixteen pages long and none of them are Cumbrian.’

  ‘If he’s as professional as we think he is, he’s not going to be a gangbanger,’ Towler said. ‘He’s going to use someone we don’t know. No way he leaves a link back to him that way.’

  ‘Agreed but check it anyway,’ Fluke sai
d. There was no way he was leaving anything to chance. ‘You’re right though, we won’t catch him through the bullet. He’s left us no forensics. Even though he can’t have expected us to find the body, I doubt he’d have left the bullet if he knew it was traceable.’

  ‘I’ll get the list, boss, see if there’s anything that sticks out,’ Vaughn said.

  ‘Any idea of what type of weapon we’re looking at, Matt?’ Fluke asked.

  ‘No way to tell, boss. Any number of .22s fire it. Any number of rifles fire it.’

  ‘Best guess.’

  ‘I’d start with revolvers, that’s what I’d use. Never jam and no brass to pick up. There’s some nice reliable ones being made now. Some nice small ones too. Even if we narrow the search to that though, we’ll still be looking at hundreds. The rifling on the bullet may help to narrow it down a bit but not much.’

  ‘Dead end,’ Fluke said.

  ‘Yes and no, boss. It tells us a bit more about him. If you want to kill someone quietly then this is the ammo to use. A small gun, a subsonic load in the .22 LR and it’ll make more of a pop than a bang.’

  ‘You think he put the gun to her head to make sure he hit her?’

  Towler thought about it for a second. ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘It’ll penetrate the skull at twenty feet but only just, but you could be reasonably sure of hitting her at ten. There’d be no need to get up that close. Why risk the forensic transfer?’ he said thoughtfully. He paused, looking at the report. ‘Unless… unless he was using her head as a silencer.’

  There was silence as they all thought about what that meant.

  ‘That’s disturbing,’ said Vaughn eventually.

  Fluke nodded in agreement.

  ‘The skull’s full of liquid, you see? You press a small gun against the head and you wouldn’t hear anything. Not even if you were in the next room. The prick knew what he was doing,’ Towler continued. ‘Good skills,’ he added, without any trace of admiration. He was simply stating the facts as he saw them.

  Fluke had already come to the same conclusion. ‘What else we got, Alan?’

  ‘Second thing’s a bit weird, boss. That test you ordered on the notebook came back with some writing.’ He looked down at his notes. ‘They used something called an electrostatic detection device. Apparently it can find writing several layers below the top sheet, years later. Found only one thing, clear as day. They’ve made the assumption it was one layer above the top sheet as there was no other writing, although they can’t rule out someone has just rested another bit of paper on the notebook to write.’

  ‘Name and address of the killer, the victim and where the gun is hidden?’ Fluke said.

  ‘How’d you know, boss?’ then added quickly, ‘Just kidding,’ when he saw Fluke look up. ‘No, it’s numbers. Weird ones, as well. Jo and I have started running them and so far, we’ve come up with the square root of fuck all.’

  ‘You got a copy?’ Fluke asked.

  Vaughn handed him a bit of paper. Towler bent over his shoulder to look.

  2.3 8.7 92

  What the hell?

  ‘Nothing on the phone?’ he asked.

  ‘Nope. The lab’s sent it off to another lab, though. Hoping to try some sort of ghost system retrieval, whatever the fuck that means.’

  ‘Means they’re looking for two systems running side-by-side,’ said a small man who had entered the room, grinning. A cheer went up as everyone saw who it was.

  Jiao-long Zhang had joined FMIT on secondment from the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau nearly a year before, on a UK/China exchange programme. Why he ended up in Cumbria had initially been a mystery, until Fluke learned of his childhood obsession with Beatrix Potter and how he’d begged the programme manager in the Met to be attached to Cumbria. Most of his spare time was spent in the heart of the Lake District exploring the landscape that was her inspiration. He knew more about Peter Rabbit and Jemima Puddle-Duck than anyone else in the building, including Jo Skelton, and she had young children. The rest of his spare time was spent mucking about with Towler and they could often be seen leaning against each other as they staggered from pub to pub at weekends, one nearly seven feet tall, the other barely over five. The odd couple, Vaughn called them, but only when they were out of earshot.

  Normally, Longy, as he quickly became known, would have been expected to do time in an area CID team before joining FMIT. However, he had computer skills no one else in FMIT came close to. Even the High-Tech Unit deferred to him. Finding hidden information, easy. Recovering information from damaged machines, no problem. Smartphones weren’t safe; he could unlock them and within minutes, retrieve every text and email ever sent. Every photo you had ever taken.

  In the past, Fluke had had him hacking into suspects’ social media accounts, breaking passwords and retrieving information that had been hidden or deleted. He was also the best person on the team for tracking suspects across Carlisle’s myriad of CCTV cameras. He knew where they all were. The councils as well as privately owned.

  Chambers, who was against the whole idea of Chinese secondments, never used him, so Jiao-long usually worked with the outcasts. Fluke found him to be one of the nicest men he’d ever met. Nothing was too much trouble, his manners were impeccable and he did everything with a huge smile on his face.

  He’d just come back from a trip back to China and he looked exhausted. Fluke knew that he’d insist on diving straight into the investigation however, and didn’t insult him by asking him to go home to get over his jet lag first. ‘You okay to do some work, Longy?’

  ‘I’ve only been up twenty-four hours, boss, so yeah, I’m up for helping you out,’ he said.

  ‘I need you to run these numbers through every database you know of. I need to know what they are by the time we start again in the morning,’ Fluke said.

  ‘No probs, boss,’ he replied absentmindedly, already absorbed in what Fluke had handed him.

  ‘Don’t worry, Longy, jet lag’s all in the mind,’ Vaughn said, grinning evilly.

  ‘And I need someone to make sure he doesn’t fall asleep and get him something to eat around midnight. Thanks for volunteering, Alan,’ Fluke said.

  Vaughn’s face fell as everyone else laughed.

  Fluke went back to his office, wanting to sit quietly and reflect for an hour before he went home, to let his mind go over what they had up to then. Although he knew more than he than did that morning, there was still little to go on. All he had really were questions. Who was she? Where was she killed? Why was she killed? Why had she changed her appearance? Were the mystery numbers important, or were they a red herring?

  He also couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something there he hadn’t picked up on yet, something obvious. He knew there was no point forcing it though. When flashes of inspiration came, they were never head on; they always snuck in from the side, normally when his mind was engaged with other things.

  He turned on his computer and checked his emails. There were the usual ones he received as a senior manager, along with a few from HR and the policy unit. One from Professional Standards reminding staff that any gifts had to be declared. The usual nonsense.

  There was also one from Chambers demanding Fluke come and brief him on the murder. Fluke wrote a quick response summarising where they were, which was basically nowhere. He knew fobbing Chambers off with an email wouldn’t last forever, and at some stage he’d have to go and see him, but he wasn’t ready yet. Chambers had never had an original thought in his life and didn’t trust those who did. Going to him with a half-arsed theory about a professional killer was too risky. He’d either ridicule it and replace him with one of his lackeys, or worse, he’d take it seriously and want to manage it himself. Either way, the killer would never be caught.

  He turned off the computer, opened the file he’d made up on the murder and started to reread the statement from Christian Dunn. He was interrupted by a knock on the door and Fran Miles, FMIT’s administrator, stuck her head inside.


  ‘You and Matt are booked on the ten a.m. slot tomorrow at Durham, boss.’

  ‘Thanks, Fran.’ Fluke yawned. Another early start and he was already tired. No wonder his blood was playing up. There was nothing more for him to do so he picked up his coat, packed a file to read and headed home.

  Chapter 14

  Fluke had left hospital craving solitude. Before his illness, he’d lived on a nice new-build estate in west end of Carlisle. After he was discharged, he’d found it claustrophobic. There was too much noise, too many children shrieking, too many dogs barking. Where he’d once enjoyed neighbours coming round for a beer or a coffee, he found himself refusing to answer the door.

  Doctor Cooper told him he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder but Fluke dismissed it. He’d fought in wars, been shot at in Northern Ireland. If he was going to get PTSD, it would have been then. But she persisted with her diagnosis and carried out something she called ‘watchful waiting’. Basically, she was waiting to see if he was going to become suicidal. Fluke didn’t, but he found his tolerance of idiots had become ever lower. And it hadn’t been very high before. Chambers especially wound him up.

  After a massive argument with him over something trivial, Fluke had driven home and sat up all night, nurturing a beautiful anger. For the first time, he considered whether Doctor Cooper could be right. He didn’t feel as though he had the energy to carry on. He needed a change. He needed a place away from the masses. He could cope with the human debris his job threw up during the day if he could get away from it all at night.

  He decided he either had to make a change or wallow in self-pity forever. Luckily, a solution presented itself in the form of an insurance cheque. A critical illness insurance cheque to be precise. Enough to pay off his mortgage.