The Murder Wall

by Mari Hannah

  Ten floors up, Forster stood well back from the window and looked down on the street, watching the good detective walk back in the direction of her car. He raised his gun, lining her up in his sights and feigned a shot. BANG!

  90

  Monday 4 January was the start of the working New Year and Bright was struggling to come to terms with the fact that his glittering police career was crashing around his ears. He wasn’t coping without Stella; the woman behind the great man, the woman without whom he’d never have made it this far. Throughout their long and happy marriage she’d smoothed the ups and downs, supported him through the good and bad moments – always willing to take a back seat.

  How he wished she’d been in that seat on the night of their accident.

  He sat up straight, cupping his hands together in front of his chest. Looking around him, he could see that he wasn’t the only one flagging; his team were suffering too. Daniels looked particularly jaded this morning. He didn’t know why, but he had the distinct impression she was deliberately trying to avoid him.

  Well, he’d see about that.

  She turned as he approached her at the coffee machine. ‘Want one, guv?’

  ‘No, you’re all right,’ he said.

  He was on the verge of suggesting they step into his office for a private word, when in walked Ron Naylor.

  ‘Phil. Kate.’

  Bright felt instantly angry, but his anger turned to smugness as he watched Naylor give his DCI a winning smile. The rumour about her sexual preference obviously hadn’t reached Ron yet. It would. Martin would make sure it did.

  Bright found himself smiling. Maybe Naylor still thought he was in with a chance. Why else come all this way during a major investigation?

  ‘How’s it going this end?’ Naylor asked.

  ‘Not good, I’m afraid.’ Daniels held up her polystyrene cup. ‘Coffee?’

  ‘No thanks, I’m wired enough already.’

  Bright observed him closely. On the outside at least, his Durham counterpart didn’t seem in the least bit stressed. In fact, quite the opposite. How the hell did he manage it? Year after long year. No respite from a Godawful job with not enough time off, even less reward. Bright was sick of it. Maybe it was time to knock it on the head, take his pension pot and tend his garden.

  ‘Word is, ACC Martin wants your guv’nor’s gonads for his wall,’ Naylor said to Daniels, his tongue firmly in his cheek as he had a laugh at Bright’s expense. ‘Finding this serial killer is the only way he gets to keep them, I hear.’

  Daniels glanced at Bright, then back at Naylor. ‘I’m a glass half-full girl myself. If we make an arrest before your lot, I think our guv’nor might still end up with all his bits intact.’

  ‘Game on, then!’ Naylor was flirting with her.

  ‘Indeed,’ Daniels grinned. ‘Shame we’re now in the driving seat, eh?’

  She was referring to the fact that Northumbria had been designated as the lead force, on the basis that their patch seemed to have a particular significance for the killer. Most of the victims had lived in the region at one time or another. Now all MIT had to do was find out what else linked them together.

  ‘Touché!’ Naylor tapped her shoulder. ‘I’ll leave you to it, then, Kate.’

  Bright waited until he was gone. ‘Er, can we get back to work now?’

  ‘We’re doing all we can, guv. You can throw as much finance and as many resources at this case as you like, but the Forster link just isn’t happening for us. Churches and care homes have already been ruled out. And if Andy doesn’t come up trumps at the Education Department then, to put it bluntly, we’re screwed.’

  He looked past her as the door opened and Brown walked in. Watched by a dozen pairs of eyes, he walked across the room shaking his head. He’d obviously drawn a blank.

  With his whole future now hanging in the balance, Bright looked gutted. Daniels had little sympathy for him, but neither did she want him to lose his job. She hadn’t seen him this wound up for ages and flinched as he bellowed angrily at the squad.

  ‘Does anyone have a clue?’

  There were red faces all round. No one said a word.

  ‘Come on, think!’ he pushed.

  ‘We’ve narrowed down the time-frame a bit, guv,’ Gormley piped up in defence of the squad. ‘If it’s any consolation, West Mids and Durham haven’t got a clue either.’

  ‘It isn’t!’ Bright snapped. ‘So why don’t you pull your bloody fingers out and give me something concrete!’

  Daniels put down her coffee. ‘Guv, can I have a word?’ They retreated to a quiet corner. ‘Look, we’re not going to get anywhere if we start losing our tempers. I absolutely refuse to be beaten on this. I’ve never given up on a case in my entire career and I’m not about to start now. And neither have you. Alan Stephens can’t speak for himself. His widow is relying on us to do his talking for him. We can only do that if we stick together. We owe her one. It’s the least we can do.’

  Bright mumbled an apology and something about flushing his career down the bog. ‘I agree with you,’ he said. ‘We should work as a team. And if you can save my arse, too . . . well, that’ll be a bonus.’

  ‘OK, I’ve had my bollocking from the DCI,’ said Bright, getting the briefing back underway. ‘Anyone not happy that this area is the key?’ There was no response. ‘Good. At least we agree on something.’ Bright directed his next question to Gormley: ‘All three victims were living here, when?’

  ‘Between eighty-five and ninety,’ Gormley replied.

  ‘And Forster is the only person thrown up by the database who we know had a thing about the Church and the opportunity to kill all three?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘What year was he sentenced?’

  ‘Eighty-eight. October,’ Daniels said.

  ‘OK, that fits with the timeline . . .’ Bright was calm again. ‘Assuming for one second it is him, what’s his motive?’

  ‘Maybe he’s offing the jury,’ Carmichael spoke up. ‘Apparently, he went down screaming revenge at the end of his trial. I read that somewhere yesterday.’

  Bright raised an eyebrow. ‘Is that right?’

  Carmichael went beetroot. Everyone was staring in her direction. Even Daniels appeared to be considering the possibility. Was everyone nuts?

  ‘What?’ Carmichael said. ‘I wasn’t being serious!’

  ‘It’s as good a motive as any other.’ The comment came from someone at the back. ‘Improbable, but not impossible for him to have traced the jury, I suppose.’

  Gormley raised his eyes to the ceiling.

  ‘She’s got a point . . .’ Brown said. ‘Juries get nobbled all the time.’

  ‘Yeah, before or during a trial, not after,’ Daniels chipped in. ‘And not this far down the road. Come on, guys! He’d have to possess an amazing memory, for a start.’

  Robson’s entry into the room interrupted her train of thought. He took one look at the expressions on their faces, realized his timing might have been better and quickly took his seat. Carmichael leaned in close, filling him in on developments.

  ‘Maybe he had an accomplice,’ Brown then suggested, ‘someone sitting in the public gallery with an axe to grind.’

  ‘Wait, wait, wait!’ Bright was off again. ‘Assuming he got hold of the names, it’s stretching it to think he could find the jurors after all this time.’

  ‘Not in this day and age, guv . . .’ Carmichael pointed at the laptop on her desk. ‘That stint I did on cybercrime with the fraud squad taught me just how much personal info people post online nowadays. You wouldn’t believe it. Conmen can work out a date of birth in less than ten minutes from a name and a bloody star sign, apparently! Addresses are easy, once they have that. If web data can be used to obtain passports, it can be used to find people too.’

  Bright smiled at Daniels, buoyed by Carmichael’s knowledge and enthusiasm.

  Daniels smiled back. ‘She’s right, guv. A stranger these days isn’t someone you meet in th
e street, it’s anyone with a personal computer or smart phone.’

  ‘There are newspaper archives, for a start,’ Robson added. ‘Not to mention social network sites: Facebook, MySpace, Friends Reunited, Google . . .’

  ‘Ask the audience, phone a friend . . .’ Gormley mocked. ‘You lot are barking mad. Facebook! Sadbook, more like.’

  Robson gave him a friendly dig in the ribs. ‘Don’t take the piss, Hank. You’re a technophobe . . . That means a dinosaur, in case you didn’t know.’

  The mood in the room had lifted. Daniels couldn’t remember the last time she’d witnessed such camaraderie within MIT. She waited for them to settle down before asking Carmichael to carry on.

  The young DC pushed back her shoulders, ready to take up the challenge. ‘I might not find every one of them, but I reckon I’d come up with some. With no other leads, it’s worth a try.’

  Bright rubbed at the stubble on his chin. ‘Go for it, Lisa. We’ve got sod all else. Robbo, get me Forster’s court file, a transcript of the trial and anything you can get your hands on. Let’s give Forster a whirl and see where it takes us.’

  The Moot Hall had been the preferred court for many High Court judges since the early nineteenth century. Robson remembered someone telling him it had taken nearly seven years to build and cost less than a hundred thousand pounds. He couldn’t calculate how much that was in today’s money as he rushed up the steps to the splendid front door heading straight for Court One.

  It was a magnificent courtroom with solid-oak furniture that had been stained with tea to bring out the natural colour of the wood. Fine desks were inlayed with leather and the dock area was surrounded with lead and brass railings, polished to perfection.

  Sally, the legal administrator, was waiting for him. She was an old friend, curious to know why he needed a file dating back to the late eighties. She was a little awkward in his presence and he couldn’t understand why.

  They’d been great pals, back in the days when they were both studying Law at Durham University with aspirations to become barristers. He’d forgotten their one drunken night of passion during a lock-in at the student bar. They’d not seen each other in ages and neither their relationship nor their adolescent dreams were important to him any more. Having explained why he was there, he sat down to wait.

  The entire team looked round nervously as the door opened. When it wasn’t Robson, they relaxed again. Carmichael’s theory was a long shot, but it had raised their expectations and Daniels felt compelled to rein them in.

  ‘Hold on, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,’ she said. ‘We have motive and opportunity, but not an ounce of proof.’

  Bright smiled. ‘You ever get sick of always being right?’

  ‘Oh, you noticed!’ Daniels grinned back. ‘And think about it, guv: if all three victims were jury members, then nine others need tracing and protecting.’

  The door opened again. This time it was Robson, soaked to the skin and out of breath. The focus of everyone’s attention, he took off his dripping coat and handed a hefty court file to Bright. The room held its breath as he opened it, his hopeful expression quickly dissolving into a frown.

  Deflated, Daniels went back to her office, unable to face propping up her boss for the umpteenth time that day. It was high time he managed without her. Gormley joined her seconds later, armed with cans of coke and crisps. There was no sign of his enthusiasm wavering, not in the slightest. In fact, his upbeat manner filled her with hope.

  Setting one can on her desk, he threw her a bag of cheese and onion crisps and sat down in the opposite chair.

  ‘Pretend it’s Starbucks. Skinny Cinnamon Dolce Latte with a Very Berry Scone.’ He sniffed the coke tin. ‘Mmm, smells good.’

  Daniels laughed out loud, hungry all of a sudden. She tore open the crisps and stuffed a handful into her mouth. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten.

  ‘Still think it’s him?’ she said, her mouth full.

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Right, I want you to retrieve each and every document that so much as mentions him, going right back to the day he was born. I want school and social-enquiry reports; prison, police and medical records . . .’

  ‘It’ll take time.’

  ‘Never mind that, just do it! I’ve got a good feeling, Hank.’

  They clinked their cokes, suddenly in a good mood.

  ‘Happy New Year!’ they said in unison.

  91

  It took longer than she’d anticipated to gather the documentation: several days and scores of man-hours to assemble a mountain of paperwork, the most comprehensive profile of an offender MIT had ever seen. Daniels instructed them to begin with the most recent stuff and work their way back, but they soon tired of wading through Forster’s life of crime and began questioning her strategy. There were mumblings of dissent: Hope she’s right . . . We could be wasting our time . . . Eggs in one basket didn’t work last time.

  After several hours’ reading, she knew just how they felt. The page in front of her was dancing, the words merging into thick black blobs, so she sat up straight, taking a break, stretching her arms above her head. Out of the window, a pale blue cloudless sky offered brief respite from the four walls of her office. Two gulls caught her eye. A joyous sight, they soared high above the rooftops, gliding effortlessly on the wind heading for the coast.

  Shutting her eyes, Daniels suddenly felt a wave of regret. She’d never again walk on a beach with Jo, never look into those pale blue eyes or share the ecstasy of a perfect mate. It was time to accept that they would never be together.

  Jo would argue they never had been.

  Pushing away the suffocating emptiness she’d been feeling the past few days, Daniels wiped her cheek with the back of her hand. On the other side of her battered desk, Gormley had his head down, oblivious to her sadness – or so she’d thought. Without lifting his head, he extended his arm, handing her a handkerchief.

  ‘Don’t!’ he said. ‘You’ll set me off.’

  Daniels managed a grin. She jumped as her phone rang.

  She lifted the receiver. ‘DCI Daniels.’

  ‘It’s me. Can you come round?’

  ‘What, now?’

  ‘Yes, now!’

  Daniels hung up. ‘I’ve got to go out,’ she said.

  Her excitement evaporated when she discovered that the invitation was strictly business, not pleasure. Jo had done some checking, and turned up some dead files on Jonathan Forster she felt Daniels needed to see.

  They were sitting in her living room, Jo cross-legged on her sofa, reading from a psychological assessment on her lap. ‘I’m quoting now: From when he was quite young, he used to kill small birds and rodents just for the fun of it. End quote.’ Jo looked up. ‘There are several references to similar behaviour over the years, some I knew about, some I didn’t.’

  The extract made Daniels’ blood boil. ‘If that isn’t an indicator that he’d turn out to be an evil shit, I don’t know what is.’

  ‘He’s a creature of habit, Kate. This repetitive behaviour doesn’t surprise me.’ Uncrossing her legs, Jo stretched them out on the couch. ‘He was a jealous, overbearing child, prone to tantrums if he didn’t get his own way. As a juvenile, he got his rocks off perving through windows, graduating to indecent exposure, sexual assault, rape and, finally, murder.’

  ‘Sounds like a right control freak,’ Daniels said.

  ‘Correct. He has to dominate and control. That’s what makes him so dangerous.’ Jo dropped the report into a box on the floor, where it landed with a solid thump. ‘If he is your man, then it’s this need that turned him from rapist to killer in eighty-eight.’

  A pile of files with yellow Post-it notes marking the sections Jo wanted to discuss sat on the table between them. They had only got through half of them and there was still a way to go. As Jo picked up the next one, Daniels rubbed her tired eyes and then suddenly had a light-bulb moment.

  ‘Creature of habit, you say?’ S
he leapt from her seat and on to the floor, began searching the box of dead files.

  Sensing a change in atmosphere, Jo lifted her head. ‘Don’t keep me in suspense,’ she said. ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘Hang on, it could be nothing.’ Daniels found one particular file, opened it and shuffled through several pages as she spoke. ‘Didn’t you tell me that he had some kind of religious magazine in his possession when he was released on life licence? True Faith, something like that?’

  ‘Close!’ Jo laughed. ‘True Faith is the Newcastle United fanzine, you idiot!’

  Daniels laughed too.

  ‘It was Living Faith,’ Jo said. ‘Why?’

  ‘There’s a note in here somewhere . . .’ Daniels went back to her search. ‘Here it is!’

  She pulled out a short scribbled note, handwritten on an A5 Probation letterhead. Her heart raced as she noticed the date: 10th October 1988 – the day Forster got life. She re-read the note quickly, unclipped it from the file and handed it to Jo.

  10th Oct, ’88

  For the attention of Reception Officer, HMP Durham

  Ref: Jonathan Forster

  Following the passing of a life sentence today, I attended the cells to carry out a post-sentence interview and risk assessment on the above prisoner, having first spoken to his parents, neither of whom felt able to face him personally.

  I sought special permission from the Senior Prison Officer on duty to hand over two items: a small crucifix and a religious magazine. His parents hope that these items will give him guidance in the dark months and years to come and assist him to come to terms with what he has done.

  Forster accepted the items from me, but refused to speak about his sentence. When I pressed him, he became abusive and I terminated the interview. No risk assessment was carried out, therefore I recommend that he is placed on suicide watch until seen by a member of the medical staff. His parents have also asked that you refer him to the prison chaplain at the earliest opportunity.

  Matthew Spencer – Crown Court Liaison Officer