Leaving Sammy where he was, still barking, she ran back into her conservatory and into the kitchen, pulling open the drawer where she kept her neighbour’s key with such a force that it almost came out of its runners. Hands shaking, she quickly grabbed hold of the fob it was on and flew through her front door. She knew that time was of the essence here, as Caroline may well have just collapsed and was drowning at this very moment.
Reaching the patio, she lifted the girl’s head up from out of the planter but realised as she was doing so that it was already too late. Her neighbour’s body was already cold and rigid.
Sandra almost dropped her back in there in shock. The only thing she could do was to try to lift her up and turn her over onto her back. She knew from all the television detective programmes she watched that she really shouldn’t touch or move the body, but she couldn’t leave her neighbour with her face down in the water. She would just have to explain that to the police when they came. Knowing that she would have to ring 999, she headed back to her house to call them, but as she was doing so, something floating in the water caught her attention. Although puzzled by it, she left it there and hurried back to her own home.
Northumbria Police responded to the call within ten minutes, by which time Sandra Matthews was beside herself – and her dog wasn’t faring too well either. He appeared to be just as traumatised as his owner.
‘It was my dog who heard something,’ she said when the police and the SOC unit arrived at the scene. ‘He started barking at the fence down the bottom of the garden there.’ She pointed in its direction.
‘But you didn’t see or hear anything, Mrs Matthews?’ the DC asked her, jotting everything she was saying down in his notebook.
‘No, not a thing… oh, and it’s Miss Matthews by the way. Like I said, Sammy was the one who did, not me. She was such a nice girl. Who would want to do a thing like that?’
‘So you don’t think it was an accident then, Mrs… Miss Matthews?’ the officer continued.
‘No, I don’t. I don’t think it’s an accident when somebody empties a planter, fills it with water and then puts their head in it, do you?’
‘No, I don’t,’ he was forced to agree. ‘I have to ask you, though,’ he continued, ‘why did you move her?’
‘I know that I shouldn’t have,’ Miss Matthews confessed. It was the question she had expected. ‘But my first thought that she must have collapsed and fallen in there. I thought that I could pull her out and try CPR; I was a nurse before I retired. But I didn’t think that she would already be dead…’ her voice trailed off.
11
After speaking to the police commissioner and contacting the psychology department at the University of Manchester, DCI Ambleton had been given the okay for profiler Louise Simmons to come along and join the team for the duration of the case. DC Phillipa Preston was, of course, delighted, but she would make sure she kept a highly professional front in her girlfriend’s presence.
‘Don’t worry, Burton,’ DCI Ambleton told him when they were both sitting in her office awaiting the arrival of their new addition to the team. ‘I’ve checked her out, and although she’s relatively young, she’s already proving to be one of the best psychologists in the Manchester area. These newly-qualified psychologists have had access to both old established theories and all the new ones too, and apart from DC Preston’s recommendation – and, by the way, Burton, I wouldn’t have taken her on because of just that – she has the backing of some of the big bosses in her department.’ She paused for a moment. ‘You and your team, Joe, are the best I have here, and this is in no way a reflection on your work. No way at all, and I hope you realise that. You and Fielding, and the rest of the team, well, I can’t fault any of you on anything. It’s just that with the killer leaving a calling card, quite literally… this is something we need a psychologist’s advice on. We need their insight on the killer’s mental state.’
Although not in total agreement with his superior, Burton knew that they had no other leads they could follow at the moment. Truth of the matter was, the profiler seemed like their only hope.
The phone rang shrilly on the DCI’s desk. ‘Okay, send her up,’ Ambleton said into it and replaced the handset on the receiver, looking in Burton’s direction. ‘Play nice, Burton,’ she added. ‘She’s all we’ve got right now.’
Louise Simmons was an extremely attractive young woman. Anyone failing to notice that fact must be mad, Burton thought as he looked her over. With her dark auburn hair tied up in a bun, horn-rimmed glasses, smart leather briefcase, off-white shirt with a neat bow at the neck and grey pinstripe suit, she looked every inch the professional.
‘I think that you’ve already been made aware of what we are up against here?’ Ambleton said to her, and she nodded. ‘We’d really appreciate a psychologist’s view on this, as there are no apparent motives or connecting factors in these murders that we can find through normal police investigation.’
‘I’ll see what I can do for you, chief inspector,’ she said.
Yes, very professional, Burton thought.
Back in the incident room, Burton formally introduced his team to the profiler while Ambleton stood in the background looking on. She stood her ground until, introductions over, Louise was shown to a spare desk, took her coat off and began to get down to business. She knew that Burton and his team desperately needed a break on this one and hoped that Simmons would be able to throw some sort of light on the type of person they were looking for.
Happy for now, she headed back to her office with more than she had earlier. The first thing the profiler wanted to do was to see the crime scene photographs and the case notes. Francis was assigned to help her with that.
While she was going through all the information, Fielding took an incoming call from a member of the SOCO team. ‘I just wanted you to know, DS Fielding,’ the officer began, ‘that the print found on the card last night is the same as on the other two.’
Fielding’s heart sank; this case was becoming a nightmare of mammoth proportions.
‘I’ve compared all three,’ he went on. ‘And if you want my professional opinion, I’d say they’ve all been placed there deliberately. The exact half a thumb print on all three cards in exactly the same position, that’s no accident. Unfortunately, as I said before, there’s no way in the slightest we can trace it, not even with today’s technology.’
Fielding thanked him for all the information he had provided, and ended the call.
At the same time, Burton received a telephone call from a DS Swanson with Northumbria Police. As instructed, one of their uniformed officers had gone out to see the manager of the company Alex Carruthers was working for during the week, and he had confirmed without a shadow of a doubt that he was working there, so Carruthers had not been in Manchester over the last few days. It wasn’t what Burton had hoped to hear, but he thanked DS Swanson nevertheless for his help and assistance.
Louise Simmons wasted no time in getting into action. She’d already glanced through the files and photographs and had started to post up the crime scene photos on the cork board. She put up shots of Jackson’s body, then Stephenson’s, then finally last night’s victim, Dorothy Johnson. Underneath each of the three photographs, she added the image of each of the playing cards found at the three crime scenes.
The fingerprint-dusted cards each clearly showed the print, and Fielding could see what the SOCO had meant when he said that they were exact matches – same place, same half-print. Looking at them in this way, all together up on the board side by side, she could see the similarity and the pattern which was emerging.
Simmons took a few steps back from the board and looked it over, eyes darting from one picture to the next. ‘This is a very odd one,’ she said at last. Burton and the team had already realised that and didn’t need anybody else to tell them. ‘And you say nobody has come forward regarding the sketch artist’s drawing?’
‘No, not a thing,’ Burton confirmed. ‘We’ve drawn
a complete blank with that one. Just the usual attention-seekers and time-wasters coming out of the woodwork.’
‘And what about the call you received from dispatch sending you to all three of the murder scenes?’
‘I’ve got a couple of the detectives questioning the dispatch team upstairs right now as we speak.’
Simmons scrutinised the board again. ‘Well, I can tell you that you are not dealing with a typical serial killer here. Although, by looking at the cards that were left at the scene, it looks like you are most certainly dealing with the same person. Although what the motive is – other than the obvious one of gambling – I just can’t say at the moment.’
Great, Burton thought, nothing we didn’t know already then. How can this possibly help? But give the girl a chance, he told himself, if only for Ambleton’s sake. After all, he had promised that he would play nicely.
‘What about the people themselves, are they linked in any way?’ Simmons asked, looking quickly at the file.
‘Apart from them all being elderly and retired, there’s little else that we can find,’ Burton told her.
‘I see that Mr Jackson from the care home is a retired head teacher, albeit he retired over twenty years ago. What about the man from the allotment and the lady last night? What do we have on their line of work?’
‘I’ll get a couple of the detectives down to both addresses to check this out. Although,’ Burton added, recalling Mrs Stephenson senior’s physical state when they saw her at her son’s mansion, ‘it might be wiser for someone to call Mrs Stephenson’s son rather than go and see her.’
While Burton was waiting for the DS he’d assigned to find out the relevant information, Louise Simmons talked Fielding and himself through the basics of criminal profiling as it applied to what she had in front of her.
‘Usually,’ she began, ‘a serial killer is someone defined as having murdered three or more people, with the murders taking place over more than a month with some time between each murder. This is where your case differs significantly. For example, all three deaths have taken place in a matter of days; this is not the usual known pattern. There’s an urgency to it, a need to get it over and done with very quickly, and this is very important to the killer. Traditionally, and by universally accepted criminal profiling standards, serial killers are white males, late twenties to early thirties, with a higher than usual IQ. But as the murders do not fall into the known standards, I’m quite confused as to who we are actually looking for here.’
She paused and looked from Burton to Fielding. ‘I think it might help to find out what all their professions were prior to retirement. If we can find out if they were all in education in some form or another, then that would be a great lead.’
‘Why is that then?’ Fielding asked, trying to see where Simmons was going with this.
‘Well,’ Simmons responded, ‘at least we would have a good link if that was the case. Usual motives for killing include power, abuse and revenge. Just assuming that education could be the key, then maybe the killer was abused at school perhaps, and is seeking revenge. It’s just a thought… if the link was their employment and that employment was in education. There is another option, of course,’ Simmons added, till scrutinising the photos on the cork board.
‘Which is?’ Burton was almost fearful to ask as there was already far too much going on in this case than he cared to think about.
‘Well, only one of the victims might have been the intended target.’
Psychologists, off on a tangent again, Burton thought, but just said, ‘Go on, explain.’
‘I’ve known that it has happened before in cases of multiple murders. One person is the actual target of the murderer but, in order to cover it up, or to make it more difficult for the police to catch the perpetrator, they kill other random people as well.’
‘That’s very interesting,’ Burton admitted. ‘We did think that Alex Carruthers was a prime suspect for his great-uncle’s death, but that’s just fallen apart as I’ve just received confirmation that he was working up north at the time the old man died – and also, when the other two murders took place. So it couldn’t have been a case of him bumping off the relative for money or whatever the motive may have been, then bumping off a few more just to cover it up.’
Despite Burton’s irritation at having to call a psychologist in, he had to confess that she was seeing things from a different viewpoint, ones they hadn’t instantly picked up on. The killings seemed to have been non-stop over the last few days, one following hot on the heels of the other, so another person’s take on it was more welcome than he’d first cared to admit. Truth was, Louise Simmons coming in was the first positive thing to have happened in the last few days.
‘Of course, there’s yet another possibility,’ Simmons said to him.
‘And that is?’
‘That Alex Carruthers had an accomplice.’
Burton hadn’t seen that one coming. And that made a whole lot of sense.
12
The national and local evening newspapers had a field day when they discovered that there had been another murder, and were up in arms that they hadn’t been told about it. Burton didn’t feel it was his duty to keep the press updated with every single little thing as it happened, but they apparently didn’t agree with his way of thinking, referring to both him and his team as, quote: ‘A bunch of incompetents who couldn’t catch a killer if he came up to them and confessed.’ He wasn’t happy with the slight on all their characters, the DCI wasn’t happy and, even worse, the detective chief superintendent wasn’t happy.
With another press conference on the cards and pencilled in for that very afternoon, Burton wanted something specific to give them, without giving anything away. Following Louise Simmons’s theory regarding the victims’ previous professions, the investigating DC had finally caught a break in the case and found the connection: Nathaniel Jackson, Jacob Stephenson and Dorothy Johnson had all worked in education in their past. Jackson had been a head teacher, as was already known, Stephenson a janitor and Miss Johnson a school secretary. None of them had worked in the same school, but at least there was now a tangible link between all three.
The playing cards though, now that was still the confusing piece of the puzzle.
‘I still think it must be gambling,’ Fielding had said, trying to keep Burton’s mind off the pending press conference, knowing how much he hated both them and the press.
‘But none of them gambled; that’s been confirmed,’ Burton told her.
‘Secret gamblers then.’ Fielding was determined that this was the only possible thing that the cards could signify. What else could it be?
Burton sighed the sigh of a man beyond tired. ‘In that case,’ he rubbed his temples, ‘we need to question not only the neighbours and relatives, but also the friends of the victims as well.’ This line of questioning could go on forever, though. What the hell was he going to say to the press?
‘I’ve been doing some research on that, sir,’ Preston chirped up, overhearing their conversation. ‘On the whole question of the cards, that is.’
‘Go on,’ Burton said, taking an interest. Any sort of lead or theory would be better than none at all at this moment.
‘Well,’ she began, consulting the sheet of paper in front of her. ‘Fortune telling. In India, the symbols on cards have astrological aspects. Each of the four suits have a different meaning too. A heart represents spring and the element of fire, and it is supposed to allude to our childhood. The club represents summer with earth as its element, with emphasis on education and the irresponsibility of youth. A diamond signifies autumn and the element of air, representing the time we are growing and developing our responsibilities. Finally, the spade represents winter and old age, when a person learns wisdom. The element for this is water. The only thing I can get from all this that has a bearing on our cases is the mention to education and childhood, and the irresponsibility of youth. Perhaps the link is related to something t
hat happened when all three were in education. But I know that this had already been suggested.’
‘That does seem to be a possibility, but it all seems a bit contrived and personal to the killer rather than him, or indeed her, trying to tell us something. Although, didn’t Simmons say that, generally, serial killers are supposed to have a high IQ? Don’t they also say all serial killers ultimately want to be caught? If that were the case, then maybe they shouldn’t be so vague when leaving their clues. And the astrology thing, that seems to imply a more ritual aspect to the killings, doesn’t it?’ Burton surmised.
‘Then there was this,’ Preston continued. ‘I’ve tracked down two cases within the last two decades linking playing cards to a crime scene – which is more appropriate to what’s going on here. From 1999 to 2005, there was a series of five murders in Japan. All deaths were different, apart from the fact that the killer left a playing card at the scene of the crime, with a word written on it with the victim’s own blood. There were little clues at the scene, apart from the cards, and someone was eventually arrested but released as there was no real evidence to convict him. The case eventually went cold and has remained unsolved to this day. Then in 2003, in Spain, Spanish police named a serial killer of four victims the “Playing Card Assassin”, due to the fact playing cards were left at the bloodstained scene in Madrid. The police said they were looking for a “psychopath… a strong, dark and agile young man”. However, in this instance, the playing cards were tarot cards rather than the usual standard playing cards, ranging from the ace of cups upward – the cup cards indicating emotional fulfilment.’
Burton now felt even more confused than he did before, but the two things that stuck out in his mind from these instances were the link to education… and to emotion. The profiler had suggested it, and now Preston had brought both in in an abstract way from the general information dug up from the Internet on playing cards. And as for the motives – as the two sets of murderers who had deposited playing cards for the purpose best known to themselves had never been captured, there was nothing to be learned as to why they’d committed the crimes, so this was something that would never be answered. Trust the killers never to have been caught, Burton thought. He would loved to have heard the reasoning behind it. If nothing else, it had given him food for thought.
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