Twelve Deaths of Christmas

by Jackson Sharp

  He wasn’t Colin Carter, anyway. But beyond that –

  ‘Could be anyone, right?’ Chalmers said moodily.

  She nodded. Chalmers would’ve already put out a call, posters in the area, a slot on the local news, but it was hard to see it doing a lot of good.

  Her phone buzzed.

  Aidan’s number.

  She glanced apologetically at Chalmers.

  ‘I need to take this.’

  ‘No worries.’ Chalmers stood up, stretched. ‘I’m going to go grab a coffee, anyway.’

  She waited till he’d sauntered out of earshot, then hit the green button.

  ‘Hello. Everything okay?’

  ‘Hiya, Mum.’ It was Matthew. He sounded, Cox thought, a little anxious, as if he were ringing a stranger.

  ‘What’s up, love? I’m at work.’

  Matthew started talking breathlessly about a party: about how it was going to be brilliant, because there’d be loads of people coming, and games and food like Christmas only better because there wouldn’t be any sprouts – and because she’d be there.

  She realized he was talking about New Year. Kerry smiled wistfully. So that’s what her mum was up to. Orchestrating a family get-together, being the matchmaker. Thinking she could glue them back together with some cold cuts and a sing-song as the clock struck twelve. It would be touching, if it weren’t so transparent.

  ‘You are coming, aren’t you, Mum?’ Again the tinge of anxiety in his reedy voice.

  ‘Mm? Yeah. ’Course I am love.’

  While she spoke the CCTV footage ran on.

  ‘Dad says I can stay up late. Maybe all the way to midnight, he says, if I’m very good.’

  ‘Well, you’ll have to be very good then, won’t you?’

  No one passed by the camera as the timestamp crawled upwards. A lonely place: a good place for a mugging – or a murder.

  ‘I’ll be good if you’re there, Mum.’

  ‘Don’t you worry, love. I’ll –’

  Timestamp 19.54. A man, six-one, six-two. Built like a brick shithouse. Blue down jacket, baseball cap, tracksuit bottoms. Walking back in the other direction. And over his shoulder …

  She grabbed for the mouse, froze the image.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘Sorry love, just a sec.’

  Different clothes. Same rucksack. Same guy. She was sure of it.

  ‘Mu-um.’ On the brink of tears, she could tell.

  ‘Matthew, love, I’m sorry, Mum’s really busy just now.’

  ‘But will you come to the party? Do you promise you’ll come?’

  ‘I’ll be there. I promise.’ She bent close to the screen – as if just by squinting she’d be able to drill down through the grainy pixels, make out a face, an identity … ‘Matthew, love, I’ve really got to go. But I’ll see you at the party, okay? Love you, sweetheart. Bye.’

  ‘But, Mu-u-um …’

  She rang off. The sharp bite of guilt died quickly; she was on to something here …

  Chalmers returned, shambling in with a cup of muddy-looking faux-cappuccino. He clocked Cox’s expression; sat down with a slow grin on his face.

  ‘Go on then,’ he said. ‘Impress me.’

  ‘It’s really not much.’ She said it to convince herself as much as Chalmers. ‘But this guy, the big guy – did you notice him?’

  ‘Of course I noticed him. I sat through nine bloody hours of CCTV footage. I noticed everyone. What about him?’

  ‘Notice the rucksack? It’s the same as your suspect’s.’

  ‘You mean it’s a 20-litre Berghaus ‘Venture’ daysack, the best-selling rucksack in Greater London?’ Chalmers crossed his ankles, smiled tiredly. ‘Coincidence, Cox. Sorry.’

  Cox shook her head firmly.

  ‘No. No way. Forget the detail, just look at the guy.’ She wound the tape back, set it running again. ‘Trust your instincts. Look at the way he walks, the way he holds himself. The size of him. Ignore the clothes, clothes can be changed. This is the same guy.’

  Chalmers cocked his head. Looked unconvinced.

  ‘There are a lot of people who look like that in Battersea. I dunno, Cox. I mean, if he had a wooden leg, or an extra head or something, okay, yeah, it wouldn’t be coincidence. But as it is …’

  ‘He went after Allis,’ Cox insisted. ‘He followed him into Battersea Park. He killed him. Then he changed his clothes, stuffed them in his rucksack and walked away.’ Sat back, shaking her head. ‘It was no mugging. Muggings are opportunistic. This was premeditated. This was murder.’

  Chalmers made a face.

  ‘Nope,’ he said, after a while. ‘Don’t buy it.’

  Cox bit her lip; thought fast, changed tack.

  ‘Phone records,’ she said. ‘Do you have them? Have you been over them?’

  ‘We’ve got his phone,’ Chalmers nodded. ‘But the tech team haven’t scraped the data yet. They’re short-staffed down there just now. Christmas, flu, you know how it is.’

  Cox thought of the laptop on Allis’s writing desk.

  ‘What about his computer? Have you been through that?’

  He squinted at her.

  ‘His computer? You mean his home computer? The guy was stabbed by a mugger. What’s his computer got to do with it?’

  She’d gone too far. Again.

  ‘I – I just think it might be a good idea to go through his computer. See what shows up.’

  Chalmers was looking at her levelly.

  ‘Steady on there, Judge Dredd,’ he said. ‘A, this is my case. I might not be bubbling over with excitement about it, but it’s a fact. My. Case. And B, this was a mugging that went wrong. I’m not going to strip down the guy’s hard drive. Nor do I propose to waterboard his known associates.’ He swigged from his coffee. ‘You need to take it down a notch, Cox, if you don’t mind me saying. Book a day off, for Christ’s sake.’

  Cox was about to reply when she heard her name called from across the office suite. She turned.

  It was Coombes, a young DC from Naysmith’s team.

  ‘The DCI wants to see you, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Urgently, he says.’

  Cox’s heart sank. She’d been making progress, not quickly, nothing earth-shaking, but she’d been getting somewhere. Now she’d bet a pound to a penny Naysmith had found a way to chuck another spanner in the works.

  She stood, headed over to Naysmith’s office.

  Coombes was hovering uncertainly by the door.

  ‘I don’t want to speak out of turn, ma’am,’ he said, uncomfortably, ‘but you ought to know – he ain’t at all happy, ma’am.’

  Cox forced a confident smile.

  ‘He never is. Thanks, constable.’

  Coombes nodded, hurried off.

  Before she went in, Cox straightened the sit of her jacket, smoothed her hair, brushed a smear of grit off the toe of her shoe. Wouldn’t matter a damn to Naysmith, of course – but it made her feel better. Slightly.

  She knocked, waited for the hoarse get in here, pushed open the door. Naysmith wasn’t alone. The man sitting opposite him was middle-aged, grey-suited, bespectacled and smoothly intelligent-looking. And there was another man, a man she half-knew, by sight anyway – one of the force’s in-house lawyers.

  No preamble, not even a ‘hello’.

  ‘This here,’ barked Naysmith, ‘is John Harris from Garraway, Blunt and Harris.’

  That didn’t sound good.

  ‘I’m a solicitor,’ the grey-suited man said in a soft Scottish accent, smiling faintly, ‘acting for Dr Euan Merritt.’

  Oh, shit.

  ‘Pull up a seat, Cox,’ said Naysmith.

  Harris had the full story – the visit to Portland, the interview, the veiled threat of arrest – and now so did Naysmith.

  ‘Go ahead,’ the DCI said gruffly, folding his hands across his thick stomach. ‘Explain yourself.’

  Justifying an off-the-record visit to a high-profile suspect on the evidence of a tip-off from a convicted paedophile in fron
t of two high-powered lawyers and your bad-tempered commanding officer … this was the stuff of a CID copper’s nightmares.

  Take it slow, Kerry. Step by step.

  ‘I had reason to believe,’ she said carefully, ‘that Dr Merritt may have been in danger.’

  Harris smiled thinly, checked his notes.

  Addressing Naysmith, he said: ‘This, DCI Naysmith, is a very far cry indeed from the impression my client received during his encounter – I would not call it an “interview” – with DI Cox and her associate. There was no mention, direct or implicit, of any danger to my client’s person. On the contrary, my client was given the distinct impression that, far from being the object of DI Cox’s compassionate concern, he was in fact a suspect in a murder inquiry.’

  ‘A misunderstanding,’ Cox tried.

  ‘DI Cox isn’t currently involved in a murder inquiry,’ Naysmith said abruptly, carefully avoiding Cox’s eye. ‘Your client must have misunderstood.’

  ‘My client,’ Harris said smoothly, ‘has two PhDs and is a noted expert in human behaviour. I think we can agree it is more likely that any misunderstanding’ – he stressed the word sarcastically – ‘was a result of DI Cox’s failure to communicate the context of her conversation with my client.’ He crossed his legs, coughed delicately. ‘DCI Naysmith, my client is not a vindictive man.’

  Naysmith nodded; looked thrown by the shift in tone.

  ‘Glad to hear it,’ he said.

  ‘May I speak freely?’ asked Harris. ‘Off the record?’

  Naysmith glanced sideways at the police lawyer, who gave the slightest of nods.

  ‘The man from Del Monte says yes,’ Naysmith said. ‘So please, go ahead.’

  ‘Thank you. I believe it will be best if I lay my cards on the table, so to speak.’ Another delicate clearing of the throat. ‘Some years ago,’ Harris said, his voice soft but clear, ‘my client was the victim of a very serious smear campaign. A number of outrageous and utterly unfounded allegations were made against him. It goes without saying that the subsequent investigations by police and other regulatory authorities into the allegations in question resulted in the complete exoneration of my client – and, I might add, more than one successful prosecution for defamation, libel and harassment. Nevertheless, as you can well imagine, this was an extremely challenging period for my client. He had not at that time attained his present level of academic prestige and media profile, but the allegations caused him acute personal embarrassment and considerable professional difficulty. As a consequence, my client took the difficult decision to change his name by deed-poll – to the name by which he is now known – and to relocate to a different part of the country.’

  The lawyer paused for breath.

  What were the allegations? Cox wanted to ask – knowing full well what the answer was likely to be. But this was no time for stirring up trouble.

  ‘Speaking in the very strictest confidence,’ Harris said, ‘I can tell you that prior to 1995 my client went by his birth-name, which was –’

  Let me guess: Martin? Merton?

  ‘– Ian Merton. I tell you this,’ Harris added, turning for the first time to look directly at Cox, ‘because I wish to assure you that if any attempt is made, at any time, by any officer or associate of any officer, to publicly repeat, revisit or reinvestigate the unfounded allegations made against Ian Merton, this will be met with a highly robust legal response.’ Harris nodded and tapped his notepad on his knee. ‘Highly robust,’ he repeated.

  Cox had crossed swords with enough top-end criminal lawyers to know what that meant. ‘Robust’ meant war. ‘Highly robust’ was the nuclear option.

  She nodded.

  ‘Understood,’ she said. The police lawyer chimed in: they were all agreed, they had all voiced agreement, agreement had been reached by all parties, the usual boilerplate legal crap – and the force unreservedly apologized to Dr Merritt for any inconvenience or embarrassment caused by the actions of DI Cox.

  They all stood.

  Cox took one more chance.

  ‘Would you be able to tell me, Mr Harris,’ she asked politely, ‘who Mr Butcher is?’

  Harris turned. His blue-grey eyes were severe behind his rimless spectacles.

  ‘I’m afraid, inspector,’ he said, ‘that the name is not familiar to me.’ Turned away, shook hands stiffly with Naysmith.

  ‘I’ll show you out,’ offered the police lawyer.

  Then it was just the two of them. Naysmith, sinking again into his seat, breathed out, a long, steamy, exasperated sigh through his nose.

  ‘What is it with you, Cox?’ he said at last. ‘You and this constant need to keep pushing your luck. Is it the excitement? Are you one of those risk addicts you read about? Have you not been getting laid recently, is that it? Is this your way of getting your kicks?’ He slammed his hand on the table, swore foully. Looked back up at Cox. ‘I can’t keep giving you second chances,’ he said.

  Cox met his gaze. He was right – she couldn’t ask for anything more from him, not without giving him something in return. It was time to front up.

  She told him about Colin Carter.

  ‘The nonce?’

  ‘That’s him.’

  Told him about the details of the abuse, the rape and torture. About the visitors to HHUC. About the man who used to come to the children – young kids, nine, ten, eleven years old – after dark; about Dr Merton.

  ‘They called him Dr Midnight,’ she said. ‘You can guess why.’

  Naysmith’s face was impassive. He didn’t speak for a minute.

  ‘Go on,’ he said thickly.

  She took a breath – and told him everything. The connections between Verity Halcombe and Bill Radley, and the allegations that linked them both to years – hell, maybe decades – of child abuse at Hampton Hall; Reginald Allis’s ties with the institution as a member of the board of trustees; Verity’s long-standing relationship with Dr Ian Merton, or whatever he called himself nowadays.

  The only thing she left out was Greg Wilson’s part in the investigation. It was already complicated enough.

  ‘It’s all there, guv,’ she finished. ‘It all adds up.’

  Naysmith gave her a calculating look.

  ‘Or,’ he said, ‘Verity Halcombe dies of natural causes, which is just enough to push her dear old pal Bill Radley over the edge, and he takes his own life. In an unrelated incident, a wealthy old man goes for an unwise walk in Battersea Park, gets mugged, fights back and is fatally stabbed.’

  Cox shook her head in frustration.

  ‘How about Radley’s lunch with Allis? We’ve got evidence for that.’

  But Naysmith just shrugged.

  ‘Two old farts with nowhere better to go on Christmas Day. Big deal.’ He shifted in his seat. ‘Look, Cox, use your head. This isn’t about what’s true; it’s about what we can prove, and prove conclusively. Stuff like this, you don’t go in half-cocked.’

  Cox opened her mouth to answer, but Naysmith, raising a finger, cut her off.

  ‘Don’t come to me with Colin Carter,’ he said. ‘If your case relies on putting Carter on the stand, forget about it right now. We’re not here to give the CPS a laugh.’ He sighed, ran a hand through his scrubby hair. ‘Look. Leave it with me, Cox. I’ve let you make your case, okay? Now leave it with me.’

  Cox nodded. Felt suddenly exhausted. Drained.

  ‘One other thing.’

  Lifted her chin.

  ‘Yes, guv?’

  ‘If you’re going to insist on taking Greg fucking Wilson with you on these fishing expeditions, keep it low-key.’

  ‘Guv?’

  ‘You’re too smart to play dumb, Cox. That smooth bastard Harris gave me a very detailed description. I didn’t let on – thank me for that later. Managed to keep him out of it; it was you he was really after, anyway. I s’pose he figures that you’ll pass on the message.’

  Cox nodded.

  ‘Yes, guv.’

  ‘Now, like I said: leave
it with me.’ He said it slowly, heavily, dropping each word like a stone. ‘Take tomorrow off. You need some family time.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘That is a direct order, inspector.’ He looked up at her from under his creased eyelids. ‘I do not want to see your face in here till 2015, is that clear?’ Tilted back in his seat, he stretched his arms wearily behind his head. ‘Happy fucking New Year, Cox.’

  Time was, a day off – hell, even an evening off – was something to get excited about. When things were good between her and Aidan; when Matthew was around. Now it was just time wasted, opportunities missed, the trail going cold, the truth drifting away –

  Family time? Fat chance of that.

  The TV was playing a repeat of an American sitcom she’d seen a dozen times before. She stood, walked to the kitchen, opened the fridge. There was a bottle of half-decent Chablis in the door-shelf.

  Well, what the hell. She’d earned it. Opened the nearest wall-cupboard, reached up for a wine glass.

  Over on the coffee table, her phone buzzed stridently.

  She lowered her hand. Sighed; rested her forehead momentarily against the cool fridge door. Christ, she was tired.

  The phone buzzed on and on. It’d be work, of course. Naysmith, or Wilson; the copper up in Whitby, maybe, or the nurse at Hampton Hall – or Colin Carter, ready to talk some more, or Euan Merritt, drunk and wanting to tell his side of the story …

  An evening without work was an evening with – what? With nothing but herself. She didn’t have the strength for that. Not now. She crossed the room. Picked up the phone.

  It was Wilson.

  ‘Listen, Kerry, don’t be mad –’

  Not a good start.

  ‘– but I’ve been, uh, staking out Colin Carter’s place.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Greg …’

  ‘Look, he might be small fry to you, but I say the guy’s up to something – and who knows, it could be something big.’

  ‘I thought you were supposed to be helping me with my investigation,’ Cox said irritably. ‘Is this your idea of helping? Going rogue and playing at detectives?’

  ‘I know what I’m doing, Kerry.’

  ‘Do you? Greg, guys like Carter are nasty and they’re smart. And they don’t like being watched.’