A Little Death

by A. J. Cross

  Watts eyed her. ‘Which door’s that then?’ He pointed to the list of persons of interest. ‘Vickers, Turner, Gill, Malahide. There’s a few to choose from.’

  ‘I’m working on it.’

  ‘And if it’s none of our POIs, there’s around two million people in this city and sometimes it seems like as many businesses.’

  He got up from the table. ‘Police work’s not like your world, doc, where there’s time and money to delve about for months, years even, finding out how a gnat’s kneecap works. The real world is here. I spent two hours in a meeting yesterday, helping Goosey fit a muzzle on the chief constable who’s going barmy over costs. We’ve got media eyes on us and next to no money, which means we’re fast approaching zero hour.’

  Hanson looked at him, all of the stresses of the last few days flooding her head. She felt irritation rising. ‘Don’t you think that after two years here, I know that? Stop telling me the damned obvious. This isn’t one cold murder case. It’s linked to a current attack on a pregnant woman and we have to find—’

  ‘Who did it? Now it’s you telling me the obvious.’

  She pushed back her hair. ‘I was about to say we have to find out why he did it.’

  He placed his hands on the table, mustering patience. ‘If we don’t turn up a real lead on the Bennett case it’ll get stored in the basement sooner or later. If it’s handed to Upstairs, I can’t see them doing any better than we have and it’s the same pot of money their investigation comes out of.’

  ‘Why is it always about money? We have to get justice for Elizabeth and for Amy. We owe them that!’ She bit her lip. ‘Sorry.’

  She watched him reach for the local newspaper, unfold it and push it across the table towards her.

  She read the headline: Cold Case Unit Stalls. She looked away.

  He picked it up again. ‘The chief constable and Goosey wanted chapter and verse from me on what we’ve got on the two cases. I told them about the leads we’re following up. The chief constable went on about “local goals” and value for money and I wish I could say he went away happy. He didn’t. He left Goosey scrabbling through this year’s budget. He’s probably still at it.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘He’s expecting me back. Let’s hope he’s found enough to keep us afloat for the next few days.’

  She watched him leave then rested her head back on her chair, pressing the heels of her hands against her eyes. She looked up, catching sight of the words they’d had painted in black flowing script above the window at the end of their last case.

  Let Justice Roll Down.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Hanson stared across the campus beyond the window. She felt secure here. UCU felt as though it was changing. After more than two years of working at headquarters she still struggled with the concept of a cold case. As she saw it, every case deserved continuing oversight, ongoing action when something cruel and terrible had happened to somebody’s family member or friend. She knew how naïve that was. She thought of Hugh Downey and wondered how he was coping. She’d been aware of much activity from Upstairs whilst she was at headquarters. They had arrested Sean Gill and were pursuing a case against him for Nan Downey’s murder.

  The door opened and Julian’s head appeared around it. ‘Sorry, Kate. I knocked but when I didn’t hear anything I thought you were somewhere else.’

  ‘I was. Come on in.’

  ‘Can I work in here?’

  ‘Of course.’

  She waved him to the old armchair and watched him unload textbooks from his backpack.

  ‘Want to know the latest at UCU?’ she asked. He stopped and looked up at her.

  ‘We’re within days of our first failure. Make that failures.’

  ‘Why? What’s happened?’

  She turned her chair towards the window. It was dull outside today, the bright sun of the last few days obscured by cloud. ‘We’re out of money and we’re out of time. Or as good as.’

  ‘But there are leads which haven’t been followed up yet. What about the tyre and boot prints?’

  She turned to him, shaking her head. ‘We don’t have the time to wait for them to become relevant.’

  ‘But we’ve still got the POIs.’

  ‘Yes. People we’re “interested” in. Some more than others. My view is: Turner, definitely of interest; Vickers, maybe; Malahide another definite. And then there’s Myers.’ She leant towards Julian. ‘How’d you rate each of them as Elizabeth Williams’ killer and Amy Bennett’s attacker?’

  She watched him turn over the question. ‘I agree Turner and Malahide as definite. Vickers as a possibility. Not Myers. He’s too … flaky, to use Joe’s word.’ He looked at her. ‘I’ll tell you something I don’t think is helping and that’s the sketch Amy Bennett helped produce of her attacker. I know she’s confident that it’s what she’s got in her head, but the face is so distorted he looks off the wall. Not like anybody.’

  Hanson felt a surge of discouragement. ‘I know what you mean. But we can’t discount it. She was there. We weren’t.’

  Watching him organise his books and open his laptop, guilt joined discouragement inside her head. As his PhD supervisor it was her job to assist and support him. This was his time to do research. She tuned into what he was saying.

  ‘Maybe we shouldn’t discount Myers. He’s got a minor sex offence record.’ He shook his head. ‘Which means I’m trying to make him fit the crime and we’ve got no evidence that our cases are about sex.’

  Hanson sat back, turning her pen end over end. ‘And Myers doesn’t own a vehicle, although according to the worker at The Sanctuary he can drive.’

  She stared at the floor between them. ‘This is a mess at every turn but we can’t strike Myers from the list. We still don’t know enough about these cases to do that.’

  ‘So, what are you going to do?’

  Hanson paused, looked down at the notes covering her desk. ‘Go through all of this again to make sure I haven’t missed something.’ She pushed her fingers through her hair, looked up at him. ‘I’ll tell you what’s troubling me about these cases, Julian. I’m still trying to find the why. Why was Elizabeth killed? Why was Amy attacked? I can’t seem to get to the motive.’

  He closed the book on his lap. ‘OK. What have we got? One murder. One serious assault. Commonalities: a focus on the neck because of what Amy told us and what Myers said. The most obvious answer is that this is somebody into strangling women.’

  Hanson thought about it. ‘But we don’t have physical signs of that for Elizabeth. If he was intent on strangling Amy Bennett, he made a mess of it.’ She put a hand over her eyes. ‘Hope that doesn’t sound as awful as I think it does. What I mean is, he failed.’ She reached for her pen and wrote one word: necks.

  She looked up. ‘So, why the scarf around Elizabeth’s neck? If there was no strangulation, did it have a function?’

  ‘Decoration?’ suggested Julian.

  She dropped the pen on the desk, needing an alternative focus, even for just a few minutes. ‘How’s the research going?’

  ‘I’m following up all the research angles you suggested and they’ve led to two or three which really appeal to me.’

  She recalled Watts’s recent take on life in academe. He had a point.

  ‘That sounds like progress.’

  She heard the Chamberlain tower clock strike and looked at her watch. ‘I have a lecture but if you’re still here in an hour we can discuss those angles.’

  When Hanson returned to her room, Julian had gone. She dropped her lecture notes on the armchair and gazed down at those on UCU cases still waiting on her desk. Crystal appeared at the door of the adjoining room.

  ‘Drink?’

  ‘A G and T would do nicely,’ she said absently.

  Crystal nodded. ‘I wish. Unfortunately, I can only offer you the usual.’

  ‘Then I’ll have that.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Surprise me. I could do with some excitement in my life.’
>
  Closing down a sudden thought of Corrigan before it had a chance to develop, she sat at her desk, hands against her forehead and scrutinized the case notes. After one minute she knew that forcing herself to find the why of these cases wasn’t getting her anywhere. They had a fair amount of behavioural information from both. This man’s behaviour had to be the key. What he’d said and what he’d done were closely intertwined. She’d concentrate on that.

  Hanson reached for the four A4 sheets of data Crystal had word processed and arranged them side by side. They showed all of the utterances which UCU had amassed from Myers and Amy Bennett. She looked at those Myers had given them at the field: ‘I’m here. Look me in the eye. Lo-ok at me-e.’ She recalled his voice as he half-sang those words. Eerie. Haunting. Possibly the reason he’d struggled to identify the speaker’s gender.

  She looked at the words Myers had spoken when he was interviewed at headquarters: ‘Oh, come to me. Look at me. Look me in the eyes.’ She stared at the similarities, the stress on eyes, the demand that the victim look directly at him. She pored over the words, anxiety surfacing about the differences in Myers’s two recalls, aware of his general unreliability in what he claimed about himself. Maybe they couldn’t place a lot of faith in what he’d told them?

  Hanson turned the sheets over and looked at those bearing the words recalled by Amy Bennett. These had to be the gold standard for analysis, even taking into account the shock and fear she was experiencing at the time she heard them. She scoured them, seeing that Amy’s recall also varied, no doubt due to being in abject fear. Myers had his problems. Was she being unfair to him, too critical of what he’d offered them?

  She studied the words Amy’s attacker had said to her immediately following his request for change for the drinks machine: ‘You have to turn round. I’m going to turn you round to look at me’, followed later by ‘I have to see your eyes blaze.’

  Hanson stared ahead, unseeing. Was this man a sadist? Was he driven to see the fear, the suffering he was inflicting?

  She looked at what Amy had told them during their second visit about her fear of her attacker, her difficulty in looking at him directly and again his insistence that she ‘Look at me. Look at me. Keep your eyes on mine.’ Later she’d also recalled him saying: ‘You need somebody like me to keep you safe.’

  Hanson frowned at the last word. Safe. How did that fit with sadism?

  She turned back to what Myers had recalled when she last saw him at The Sanctuary: ‘He said something like, “You could have been safe but you didn’t stay.”’

  She sat back, her eyes on Myers’ words and shook her head.

  ‘Where’s the sense in Elizabeth’s murderer saying that she didn’t stay? She did stay. He’d killed her and he had her body right there with him. When he said those words he was burying her.

  Hanson closed her eyes. They felt like hot coals. But she’d achieved something. The analysis had removed her concerns about Myers’ reliability. What he’d said he heard and what Amy Bennett had reported bore striking similarities, provided by two different people who had never met.

  Coffee arrived on her desk and the one already grown cold removed. Murmuring a ‘Thank you, Crystal’, Hanson checked the time. Five forty-five. She needed to be at the school playing field at six thirty to collect Maisie and Chelsey from netball practice.

  She scanned Amy’s attacker’s words. There was no suggestion that he viewed her as an object. He was controlling but there was little evidence of the extreme control and anger which had been part of many of the attacks on women she’d analysed for other forces. Myers’ delivery of the killer’s words had sounded heartfelt. Almost beseeching. Maybe because they were uttered in the presence of death?

  Hanson stared at the words until they moved on the page. This man had wanted something very specific from both Elizabeth and Amy. He was trying to create a scene, or rather recreate some scene already captured inside his head. If she’d had even the smallest, lingering doubt about a link between the murder of Elizabeth Williams and the attack on Amy Bennett these last few minutes had vanquished it. Both were the work of the same man. But what was it that he’d wanted? What had he been looking for? She read slowly through all that Amy Bennett had said of the attack on her and the intense emphasis on her neck. She stopped reading, hands clasped at her mouth, brows together. Her speculation on sadism was now being overtaken by another, more specific theory.

  Did this man have an intense focus on an object or body part which he had to incorporate into sexual activity for him to be aroused? She recalled evaluating a man who had a fixation on high-heeled boots. He’d attacked women in order to steal them. Another had been fixated on hair which led to his standing behind females in club and cinema queues, snipping off pieces and curls with tiny gold-plated scissors. Was that what these two cases were about? If so, he’d killed Elizabeth because she could identify him. Amy had survived only because she’d managed to fight, then drive away from him.

  She stood, rubbed the back of her neck then gathered the notes and put them into her briefcase. Opening the Notebook she tapped a message to the UCU smartboard requesting a database search.

  This man was still a silhouette. He had to be forced out of the shadows.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Hanson arrived in a deserted UCU the following afternoon and checked the board. The database search she’d requested had been done. It had yielded nothing which was useful to their case. Of the three known neck fetish rapists in the greater West Midlands, one was deceased; the other two incarcerated and had been for some years.

  She turned as the door opened and her colleagues came into the room, followed by the clamour of voices raised in what sounded like triumph.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  Watts was looking gratified. ‘What you just heard was an Upstairs celebration. Gill’s been charged with Nan Downey’s murder. Their case is that he did it because of his sacking by Hugh Downey. They’re saying he went to the house in a rage, not realising that Downey wasn’t there.’

  ‘Has he admitted it?’

  ‘Behave, doc. People like Gill never put their hands up for anything. You could watch them do something and they’d still deny it.’

  She looked across at Corrigan. He smiled at her, as open as always.

  She considered telling them about the analysis she’d done on their cases but decided against it. It was too incomplete. She had to do more. But not this evening. She wanted to spend all the available time with Maisie.

  A sudden, loud commotion started up in the corridor outside UCU. They exchanged glances. It did not sound celebratory. Hanson followed Watts and Corrigan as they rushed from UCU.

  In reception, she was stopped dead by the scene there. Hugh Downey was being restrained by Whitaker and another constable. She watched as her two colleagues took hold of Downey who was still shouting and moved him into the informal meeting room. She stood in the doorway, shocked. Downey was now slumped, his head on the table.

  She went to where Whittaker was standing. ‘What happened?’

  Face flushed, he pointed at Downey. ‘He came to see Dr Chong saying he wanted his wife’s body released so he can arrange her funeral. He thought he could just ask for it to happen. She couldn’t get through to him that it didn’t work like that in a murder case. After a while he seemed to accept it but somehow he picked up that Gill’s here and that he’s been charged with his wife’s murder. He tried to open the security door. When he couldn’t, he completely lost it.’

  Hanson looked up to see Corrigan at the door of the interview room, beckoning her. She went to him. He lowered his voice. ‘We can’t release him in this state without somebody who’s willing to be responsible for him. Would you ring Malahide?’

  Back in UCU she rang him and explained the situation.

  ‘Poor Hugh. What will he do without Nan? I’ll be there in ten minutes.’

  Hanson returned to the interview room. Downey didn’t appear to have moved.

/>   Watts said, ‘We’ve told Mr Downey he needs to leave things to us for now. That right, Mr Downey?’ Downey didn’t respond.

  She laid a hand on his arm. ‘Mr Downey? Aiden is on his way.’

  He looked up at her, adrift. ‘Apologise to Dr Chong for me, would you? I wasn’t thinking straight. I understand that I can’t bury Nan until the police release her to me. It was when I realised that … that … animal was here.’

  ‘Will you be staying with Mr Malahide over the next few days? In case we need to contact you?’ asked Corrigan

  Downey summoned concentration with an effort. ‘I don’t know. A cousin of mine has invited me to stay with him in Malvern.’

  He straightened his jacket which had come off one shoulder in the struggle and stood, looking as though getting to the door was a significant effort.

  Hanson glanced at Watts who was staring at the floor, arms folded. She knew he didn’t like expressions of emotion, particularly around bereavement.

  He watched Downey move slowly to the door. ‘I want the Malvern address and contact details in case you do go, Mr Downey.’

  Downey nodded, reached into his jacket pocket, took out a piece of paper and handed it to him. ‘That’s his address and phone number. He’s not on the net. He leads a quiet life. Maybe it’ll help. I know I can’t carry on like this. If I do go, I’ll probably leave sometime tomorrow.’

  To Hanson, he was the husk of the vital, active man she’d first met days before. She caught a wave from the direction of the reception desk.

  ‘Aiden Malahide is here,’ she said.

  In reception Malahide looked shocked at the sight of Downey. ‘Come on, Hugh,’ he said quietly.

  Hanson watched them all the way to the car park, Malahide leading Downey to the car. She saw him patiently settle Downey into the passenger seat.

  She and her colleagues returned to UCU.