Murderland

by Pamela Murray

  Burton’s doorbell rang just before 7.45pm. Good old Fielding, he thought, reliable as ever, always there when I need her.

  ‘What we having to eat then?’ Fielding asked in a light-hearted way as soon as he answered the door for her.

  ‘Can I open the door first and let you in!’ Burton laughed as he opened his front door wider to enable her to enter.

  ‘Sure you can. Now let me in, it’s freezing out here!’ She stamped both her feet up and down a few times, over-exaggerating her reaction to the cold. ‘Oh, and I brought this with me,’ she said, holding up a bottle of Prosecco. ‘Maybe not your first choice of alcoholic beverage, but I couldn’t fit a six-pack into my bag.’

  ‘That’ll do for me,’ he told her, not wanting to admit that he’d already had two very welcome bottles of beer this evening.

  Fielding handed him the bottle and slipped off her coat and hung it up on one of the pegs beside the front door, then walked through into the living room and sat herself down on the black leather sofa in front of the fire. The flickering flames of the log-effect gas fire were a very welcome sight, as was the heat they were giving off on such a bitterly cold night.

  ‘Chinese or Indian?’ Burton appeared from the kitchen holding up two takeaway menus, one in each hand.

  ‘You choose, I’m good with either.’

  They both decided on Chinese, and while Burton was ringing the order in, Fielding glanced around the room and caught sight of his dinner table. She couldn’t remember a time when it didn’t have anything on it – usually his laptop, phone, charger, a book, newspaper, magazine even, but she hadn’t expected it to be as cluttered up as it was now with case files strewn all over it.

  ‘I thought the DCI told us to take time off from this until Monday?’ she asked when Burton reappeared from the kitchen carrying two plates and wine glasses.

  ‘Well, I am having time off, Sal,’ he said, walking over to her. She had already picked up one of the files, the one with Nathaniel Jackson’s caseload in it, and was glancing through its contents. ‘I haven’t opened any of the files yet.’ He put the plates and glasses down on an empty spot on the table then pointed to one of them. ‘That’s what the profiler has come up with so far; makes for interesting reading if you want to take a look at it.’

  ‘So what you mean is you were waiting for me to come over before you started on them!’ she joked, knowing full well that if that had been the reason, he would have just come out and asked.

  ‘No, of course not!’ He feigned hurt at such a suggestion. ‘But… like I said, if you’re already here…’

  She threw one of his cushions at him.

  Fielding should have known better than to expect Burton to completely switch off for the evening, and for the next day as well. He did relax, she knew that for a fact, but not usually when they were in the middle of a difficult case. That just wasn’t his style, hers neither come to think of it. At least, as he’d said, he hadn’t looked at the files yet, so that was a bit of a bonus. But he had intended to look at them, otherwise why bring them home in the first place? They had five murders on their hands, and to completely switch off and not think about them and leave things alone for a day and a half was not only unrealistic, but unprofessional. They couldn’t be expected to just sit around not thinking about the case; that would have been impossible for them both. So she accepted the situation and agreed to go over everything again with him while waiting for the food to arrive.

  20

  ‘I just can’t see any other answer than Carruthers being responsible.’ Burton was draining the last of his Prosecco. The food had been delicious and Fielding’s company was as welcome as ever. They were sitting going over the files again for the second time since they’d finished eating.

  Fielding leaned back against the sofa. They were sitting on the floor in front of the fire surrounded by the case files, and she couldn’t tell at this point if it was the Prosecco making her giddy or the contents of the files from over-reading them. As Burton had said, everything pointed to Carruthers – yet at the same time it did not.

  ‘Contrariwise,’ she said to herself more than to her colleague.

  ‘What?’ Burton was back on his feet now, heading towards the kitchen. She heard the fridge door open and close, and he returned with a can of beer in his hand. ‘Want one?’ he offered, thinking that perhaps he should have asked that when he was pulling one out of the pack for himself.

  She shook her head; half a bottle of Prosecco was more than enough for her for the evening.

  ‘What did you say before?’ He sat down on the floor again beside her.

  ‘Just a word that popped into my head from years ago. Don’t know why it did after so long. How strange!’

  ‘You’ll have Louise Simmons analysing you if you’re not careful,’ he laughed, toying with the can in his hand.

  ‘I think she already has, as she has concluded that I’m a link in this somehow,’ she said pointing towards the files. ‘Seriously, Joe, how can she think that I’m connected to this?’

  ‘Well,’ he popped the ring pull and took a long drink from the can, ‘she’s got that from your two school friends back home.’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m just not convinced, that’s all.’

  ‘Ambleton appears to think it a possibility, otherwise she would not be bringing in extra troops on Monday.’

  ‘How do you feel about that?’ Fielding asked, knowing full well that he took complete responsibility for all the cases he and the team were on and didn’t like to be thought to be anything less than self-sufficient.

  He just shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘It can’t hurt, I guess.’ Adding, ‘Now you’re beginning to sound like a psychologist – “how do you feel?”’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ she insisted.

  To which his response was, ‘I know.’

  After that, Fielding decided to call it a night and head back off home. Although going through the files had been interesting, she felt that she hadn’t learned any more than she knew already, and besides, she felt she needed a break from it all as well as Burton did. So she called herself a taxi, thanked him for the takeaway, said goodnight, gave him a peck on the cheek and headed off home to her cats and, hopefully, a good night’s sleep.

  Fielding may have been heading home to sleep, but Burton had other plans for the rest of the night. Pulling all-nighters weren’t usually his style, as he, too, liked nothing more than to settle down in his warm, comfortable bed and drift off to a place as far away as possible from his job and all that it entailed. Unfortunately, that wasn’t often the case. With the type of crimes they dealt with, the luxury of sweet dreams and a peaceful night’s sleep was a nigh impossible thing to achieve, and he usually found himself tossing and turning most nights while trying to fight off every kind of assailant imaginable in the land of slumber. He didn’t know if it was the combination of the Prosecco and the can of beer, but he felt wide awake and full of energy, raring to set to on the files again. There was something they were all missing here, and he was determined to find out what that was – even if it took him all night.

  Despite all his good intentions, after only a few hours in, he felt his eyelids dropping. When the morning sun woke him up and he found himself slumped over the dining table surrounded by the files, one of which was sticking to his forehead, he was still without a definitive answer, other than all the evidence pointed to Alex Carruthers who, Burton had to confess, looked as guilty as hell.

  Sally Fielding did exactly as she’d told Burton she was going to do. After leaving his apartment, she rode the taxi back to her place, fed her cats, watched a bit of inane so-called celebrity reality TV, then climbed into her bed and fell asleep.

  Her dream was a strange one: she was younger, in her late teens, and walking in the small park near the home she grew up in. It was summer; the trees were full of life and colour, and the grass beneath her bare feet was a lush green. She could even feel it prickling her toes as she wa
lked on it. As she rounded a corner, there were two children swinging in perfect synchronised movement in the playground area. They called out to her as she passed – but it wasn’t her name they were calling, it was another name, one she couldn’t quite catch.

  She kept on walking until a bandstand appeared in view, decorated with multi-coloured bunting and balloons, and in the centre of the structure two elderly men were sitting playing chess, who stopped what they were doing to look up at her when she approached them. ‘Hello, my name’s Nate, what’s yours?’ the man in the clown outfit asked her. She was about to answer when the other man turned to her and opened his mouth to speak, but as he did, his mouth gaped open as far as it would go and what seemed like hundreds of beetles, earwigs and millipedes all came spewing out of it.

  It was at that point that Fielding awoke with a start, and in a cold sweat – or she thought that she was in a cold sweat and that her wet face was due to the after effects of the nightmarish dream, but then she realised that she had a cat sitting on either side of her head, each licking her face with a sense of urgency.

  Glancing at the clock, she saw that it was just after ten. No wonder they were frantic, as she was always an early morning riser and they should have enjoyed their breakfast long before now, then settled down on their cat beds for their post-breakfast nap.

  ‘Okay, okay,’ she laughed, brushing them away from her face. With a quick meow apiece, they scuttled away out of the bedroom and into the kitchen, and sat expectantly around their bowls waiting for food.

  After giving them their breakfast, she decided to skip hers and go out for a jog before lunch. She’d always enjoyed a run on a weekend when she wasn’t working, but the last few months had put paid to that as the workload had been much greater than usual with everyone being required to do extra shifts just to cope with it all. So her once-regular routine had faded into non-existence.

  Then she’d bought herself a tracker watch in the summer and had been determined to put it to good use when the level of work had died down. This was the first real chance she’d had to put it to its proper use, even though she wore it on a daily basis, plus she felt she had to run off the previous night’s Chinese meal at Burton’s… and the half bottle of Prosecco that she’d drunk with him while eating it, as both were now weighing heavily on her stomach… and her head.

  So she delved into her wardrobe and dug out a pair of exercise leggings and top, together with a hoodie, then slipped on her trainers from the shoe rack beside the front door and ventured out on to a route she used to regularly run, which took her into and around Heaton Park.

  The huge 600 acre historic area on the edge of Manchester was a big drawing point in the summer with a full range of attractions including play areas, cafés, an animal centre, a tram museum, bowling greens, golf course and a boating lake.

  During the autumn and winter months, it was mostly a place where joggers and dog walkers could be found, rather than the seasonal tourists and sightseers who enjoyed the peace and quiet of the very wide and very open space to themselves.

  Fielding was halfway around the boating lake when she realised just how close she was to the care home where Nathaniel Jackson had died, which in turn made her think about the case. She sighed. I’d hoped a jog would stop me thinking about the case, not bring it to the fore. She stopped by a bench and sat down on it, pressing the side button on her watch to check the number of steps she’d done. Ten thousand already… not bad.

  Thoughts of the care home led her in turn to think about the murders of her two school friends back on Tyneside. Although they’d all been very close back in the day, inseparable in fact, all that had been thirteen years ago and a lot could happen in that length of time. In her case, she had moved away from the area and cut all ties to her previous existence, and that had all been down to her mother’s and sister’s reaction to her choice of career.

  But why hadn’t she kept in touch with her best friends? In some ways she felt ashamed by that, but on the other hand, people change, they go off and lead completely separate and different lives, and simply drift apart. If she had stayed, if she had remained in Boldon and still been close to them, might she have ended up as one of the victims as well? She tried her best to imagine what they could possibly have had in common which led to them being victims of a serial killer – for victims of a serial killer they most definitely were, together with the three victims here in Manchester. What was it that connected two of her former school mates with three elderly people here in the city?

  The education link was now apparent with the revelation that both Jennifer and Caroline were school governors. But could it simply be, as profiler Louise Simmons had suggested, a case of one intended victim with others as red herrings?

  Her head was now spinning; a combination of the crisp, fresh autumnal air blowing away the cobwebs, the 10,000 steps on her pedometer, hunger despite overeating the previous evening, the half bottle of wine and the complexity of the case. Deciding that the jog hadn’t exactly been the distraction that she’d needed, she decided to call it a day and head home again. She would spend the rest of the day curled up in front of the television with her cats likewise curled up next to her.

  21

  By the time Burton got into work on Monday morning, two official forms were sitting on his desk in the office. The first one was confirming the deployment of a group of five admin staff and two detective constables from the neighbouring Salford division into his. He was required to sign off on it and return to DCI Ambleton as soon as possible. He stood up and looked through his office window and saw that the admin staff were already seated around the room at the spare desks and busy at work. Very efficient, he thought.

  The second form was a request that he contact a DC James Morrison, who was part of the household crime division on the second floor. He picked up his phone and dialled the number provided. DC Morrison answered almost immediately.

  ‘Ah yes, sir,’ he said after hearing who the caller was. Burton could hear papers rustling on the other end of the phone and visualised Morrison shuffling his documents around trying to find his copy of the form… and then success. ‘Here we are, there was a theft in the city yesterday, which I attended, and when I entered the name of the victim into the system, it came up as being linked to a case of yours. I just thought that I would make you aware, sir, just in case it was relevant to your case.’

  Now extremely curious as to who it might be, Burton asked him for the name of the person and was more than a little surprised to hear it was Monica Williams, who, he remembered, was Alex Carruthers’s next-door neighbour. He’d spoken to her just the other day. ‘Exactly what happened?’ Burton asked him, thinking that this couldn’t possibly be a coincidence.

  ‘She had been out to the cinema with a friend and when she returned at around 2.30pm, she found that her apartment had been broken into. Although the door was closed, the lock had been broken along with the door frame and when she looked around, all that was missing was her phone,’ Morrison explained.

  ‘You mean that she didn’t have it with her?’ Burton found that difficult to comprehend in this day and age, but then remembered that when he and Fielding had been to see her, she’d had to retrieve her phone from the sideboard to find them a photograph of Alex Carruthers.

  ‘I know,’ Morrison told him, ‘it is unusual, but she said that she rarely uses it and only mainly for taking photographs. Also, she was at the cinema and she says it wasn’t necessary. I just wish more people were like her, don’t you?’

  Burton admitted that he did. He couldn’t keep track of the number of accidents caused by people having their eyes permanently stuck on the screen of their mobile phones. He thanked Morrison for his diligence and then shouted through for Fielding to come into the office.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ she said, opening the door and sticking her head through it.

  ‘We’re going out on a little trip to see Alex Carruthers’s neighbour again.’ And seeing her questioning look,
he explained the events of the previous day.

  ‘I just can’t believe that somebody broke in and only stole my phone. I’d like to think that I’ve got things of more value in the house than that!’ Monica Williams joked as she showed them into her living room once again. Apart from the noticeable wear and tear on the door frame indicating that someone had forced their way in and entered illegally, nothing had changed in her apartment. It was still orderly and well-kept, and anyone with a compulsion for keeping things clean would have nothing to worry about in here as it was virtually spotless.

  Burton and Fielding sat down on her very comfortable sofa as she continued. ‘But it’s strange, isn’t it, someone stealing my phone after I’d just shown you that photo the other night?’

  ‘Just what we were thinking, Miss Williams,’ Fielding told her. ‘In fact, that’s why we’ve come back.’

  ‘Oh please,’ she insisted, ‘do call me Monica.’

  ‘Tell me, Miss… Monica…’ Burton began, ‘you do have a backup storage system of some kind though, don’t you?’ He was sincerely hoping that this was the case.

  ‘Yes, I do have cloud backup, but everything has been wiped from it. I just checked on my laptop this morning.’

  Both Burton’s and Fielding’s hearts sank on hearing that. The phone was obviously connected to their enquiry, otherwise why would it have been stolen and the backup storage deleted. There again, Carruthers was centre stage, right at the front of everything – he was a computer whizz-kid after all, travelling around the country with his job, setting up businesses with their computer systems and showing them how to use them.

  ‘However,’ Monica Williams said, seeing the looks on their faces, ‘I do have copies of everything I photograph.’