Missing Persons (A DCI Morton Crime Novel Book 5)

by Sean Campbell

  ‘Miss Ashley, Miss Ashley, dear old Miss Ashley. Send her up. Unarmed. She can come to the doorway, but no farther.’

  ‘Okay. Whatever you say.’

  Rafferty made her way through the lobby, oblivious to the well-meaning backslaps she received from those around her. Morton followed close behind her.

  ‘You didn’t think I’d let you go in alone, did you?’ Morton smirked.

  He pulled on his own armoured vest, and they headed for the lift. It took a few seconds to come down, and when it opened, the second member of the ARV team was waiting for them.

  ‘When you go in there, don’t do anything stupid. I know you. You’ll want to get them out alive. She’s got that knife much too close to Tim’s neck to risk anything. I’ll be down the corridor out of sight when you knock on the front door, but if you need me, I can be there in ten seconds.’

  ‘Thanks, boss. Stay safe.’

  When the lift door opened at the penthouse, Rafferty and Morton stepped out, and the doors shut behind them. Morton crept down the hallway out of sight of the front door and motioned for Rafferty to go on without him.

  The door was only a few feet from the private lift. The hallway was more of an entrance chamber, with a large chandelier and a comfy sofa for guests to sit on while they waited.

  Rafferty hesitated at the front door to the penthouse. The whole situation just seemed so surreal. It explained both everything and nothing. She’d been right: Faye was innocent. It had to have been Leah who had panicked and attacked Paddy that night. There had been a killer sleeping on her sofa, and she’d been none the wiser. What sort of detective missed that?

  She shook herself. Self-doubt wouldn’t help the situation. She had a job to do. The CCTV footage exonerating Tim was on the iPad, and Faye, or Leah, or whoever the hell she was, needed to see it.

  She knocked three times and waited. Eventually, the door swung open. Laura was behind the door. Faye and Tim were perhaps ten feet away.

  ‘Give Laura the iPad, then turn around and go,’ Leah said. ‘Don’t try anything unless you want to see Tim, here, bleed all over this lovely oak floor.’

  Rafferty handed it over. ‘If it locks up on you, the passcode is 1234. There’s a timestamped video of Tim getting home that night, and a second of Laura getting home nearly three-quarters of an hour later. They didn’t leave until the next morning. Tim didn’t do it.’

  ‘Laura, shut the door behind her,’ Leah said, smiling sweetly. ‘Now, hold the iPad up so I can see the video. Stay five or six feet away. No closer, unless you’ve decided you don’t like poor Tim anymore.’

  ***

  Leah watched the video three times. Each time, she looked down at Tim questioningly. Each time, the knife never moved from his neck.

  ‘Why’d you do it, Laura?’ Leah asked. ‘You’re the only one left.’

  ‘I didn’t!’

  ‘Wrong answer. If I didn’t do it, and the police say I didn’t, and Tim here is a good boy, then who did it? You killed my Mark, didn’t you? Is it because he wouldn’t fuck you anymore? Oh, yes, I know all about that. You can pull the wool over dear, sweet Faye’s eyes, but I’m always watching out for her.’

  ‘I wasn’t... I didn’t...’ Laura looked pleadingly from Tim to Leah and back again.

  ‘If you wanted to keep your sugar daddy sweet, you shouldn’t have been hitting on my boyfriend. I trusted you, and you betrayed me.’

  ‘Fine. I slept with him. So what? You were in prison for four years. I was going to break it off. I love Tim.’

  Leah put her free hand on her right hip. ‘Star-crossed lovers, I’m sure. Him, a rich but ugly and boring banker. You, a dirty whore from Ilford. I can’t wait to see the movie. Who’ll play you? You won’t. You’ll be behind bars, won’t you? How about you pick up that phone, call the police back, and give them your confession right now?’

  ‘I couldn’t do it. How would I move Mark’s body? He’s big, and I’m not strong.’

  ‘You could have rolled him off the boat.’

  Laura tried again. ‘And, how did I kill him? You heard DCI Morton. There wasn’t a mark on him.’

  ‘You smothered him.’

  ‘While he was awake?’ Laura gave Leah an incredulous look. ‘How did I get the body to the place it was found? I don’t have a boat. You do, and you’ve clearly thought a lot about how he died, haven’t you?’

  Leah’s mocking smile disappeared. Her eyes became steely. Her hands trembled. She roared in anguish.

  Chapter 63: Take It?

  Morton and Rafferty heard everything from the hallway. Then Morton’s radio began to buzz.

  He flicked on the channel reserved for the negotiator and the ARV team. Stuart’s voice came through whisper-quiet: ‘Morton, what’s your call? You know her. Will she kill?’

  Time seemed to slow down. It was now or never. He could give the order to storm the building from the fire escape. That would almost certainly get Tim killed.

  He could do nothing. Leah had been holding them hostage for over an hour. If she was going to kill, why hadn’t she done it already?

  Or he could order the sniper across the river to take the shot. It wasn’t an easy shot, and success wouldn’t be guaranteed. The sniper would have to hit Leah in the head from over a thousand feet away. If she missed, she could kill one of the hostages with a stray bullet, or force Leah’s hand. The odds were against them.

  Even if they succeeded, Morton would forever be the man who had ordered the cold-blooded execution of a mentally ill woman. There was no good choice to make.

  Morton needed to weigh up Tim’s life against that of Leah/Faye, and then factor in the odds of success.

  The radio crackled again. ‘Morton, do we take the shot? We need your answer. Now! Over.’

  Morton raised the radio to his lips, ready to reply, and then he hesitated.

  ***

  Keira Thornton was watching everything go down in real time. She didn’t have access to the video feed from the Air Support Unit. That would have been a distraction. She’d tried turning on only the audio, but the lag between things being said and the audio stream was unbearable. It was easier just to lip-read as best she could.

  The delay in streaming was giving her a migraine. If the police view of the situation was this far behind live – and in a situation like this, every second counted – then it would take forever for any order to get to her. The man on the ground would have to watch the delayed feed, make his decision, and then radio it in. In those thirty seconds, the hostage-taker could kill both her hostages.

  Thornton’s duty was clear. If the situation headed south, she’d have to make the call herself. She was authorised to “use such force as is reasonable to prevent a crime”. It was, in Keira’s opinion, a cop-out. Virtually anything could be spun to be reasonable or not.

  In theory, there was no “shoot to kill” policy. The default position was that she should “shoot to incapacitate”. That was what the bosses always told her. The quickest way to neutralise someone was a shot to the heart. Not many suspects ever survived that neutralisation.

  Most of her work with the Counter Terrorism Command didn’t play out that way. They wore body armour, so the head was the only option. It was the same here, except that instead of body armour, Faye had a hostage to use as a human shield. Anything less than a perfectly timed shot to the medulla oblongata, the part of the brain that controlled movement, would give the target enough time to use the knife.

  The radio blared with Stuart’s voice. ‘Morton, do we take the shot?’

  Thornton felt her pulse quicken in anticipation. She had never told anyone how much she enjoyed the adrenaline rush that went with her work. Those few seconds before the order was given were the build-up, the crescendo, the rising anticipation of a perfectly timed shot from the greatest markswoman in London.

  The radio fell silent. She thumbed her own radio. ‘Control, what are my orders? Over.’

  Only static answered her question. Sh
e watched as the knife teetered closer to the man’s throat. The hostage-taker’s expression was unmistakeable. It was the unbridled rage of someone about to kill.

  In that moment, Thornton knew she had to make the call. She took a deep breath, steadied her hand, and laid a perfectly manicured finger across the trigger.

  And then, with a gentle squeeze, she took Morton’s decision into her own hands.

  ***

  Morton and Rafferty heard the shot over the police radio. There was no mistaking the ear-splitting screech of a bullet being launched from a Sig Sauer SG 516 Marksman.

  For a moment, confusion reigned below. Morton imagined everyone in the testosterone-soaked makeshift incident room hearing the gunshot and then only seeing it thirty seconds later.

  The ARV team member burst out of the lift and shot past them at a sprint. Morton imagined that his colleague on the stairwell was doing exactly the same from the other side of the flat.

  ‘Go!’ Morton yelled. He and Rafferty were hot on the heels of the Authorised Firearms Officer.

  Chapter 64: Time

  Keira watched the bullet strike the hostage-taker. The bullet hit her in the head, no mean feat from this distance, but Keira had missed the apricot. The hostage-taker’s brain matter exploded out of the back of her head, painting the wall behind her as Keira watched in horror.

  The knife trembled as the hostage-taker pulled it closer towards her and across to the left. The blade went straight through the man’s left carotid artery.

  The man’s throat exploded with blood, his heart pumping his blood from his neck at enormous pressure. The pressure held the cut open.

  The man had just enough time for his eyes to go wide with pain, to look longingly in the direction of the other hostage, and then his expression went blank.

  The man and the hostage-taker collapsed together in a heap.

  ***

  There was no need for the armed officer to have gone first. Faye was on the floor by the time Rafferty and Morton made it inside the penthouse. The time it had taken for them to break the door down was enough for Faye/Leah to have fallen forward on top of Tim.

  Even as she burst through the doorway, Rafferty knew Tim wouldn’t make it. There were blood sprays emanating out from where he had been kneeling, and his blood was all over the woodwork. Laura was at his side, desperately trying to pull Tim out from underneath Faye/Leah.

  Rafferty tried to run forward to help her, but Morton roughly held her back.

  ‘You can’t. She could be infected,’ Morton said, referring to Mark’s HIV-positive status. They still didn’t know which of the group he could have passed it on to. ‘He’s gone. There’s nothing you can do.’

  The world seemed to go silent but for Laura’s anguished wails. Her voice carried through the building as she screamed for somebody to help her. She held a lifeless Tim in her arms as his heart stopped beating and the blood ceased to gush from his neck.

  It was over.

  Control radioed for the okay to send up paramedics, the pathologist was called, and the roadblock was eventually lifted. Mark Sanders’ killer was dead, and so were three innocent people – if Faye was included in that number.

  Chapter 65: Guilty

  Monday 4th July, 08:00

  The fallout was immediate. Morton had failed to make the call, and at least one person was dead because of him. He knew in his heart that he could have done more, tried more, and proved everything sooner. His hunch had been right, as usual. Faye was the only one who could have killed Mark.

  The handwriting, the polygraph, the endless pursuit of the other suspects, had all been for naught. How could he possibly have known that two personalities resided in one body?

  Now that he knew that Faye had suffered from dissociative identity disorder, everything made sense. He hadn’t been wrong, and neither had Rafferty. The young woman Rafferty had been trying to protect had been an innocent in every sense of the word.

  The contradictions in the evidence made sense, too. Faye hadn’t lied because she hadn’t done it. Faye’s handwriting didn’t match the ransom note because she hadn’t written it. Leah had been the killer; the ransom note had been her way of diverting attention away from the murder.

  This was one for the books. A genuine Missing Persons enquiry had turned up a murder in which the person searching for the deceased was also the killer. The real person they’d missed was Leah Atkins: protector, alter, and unknown personality.

  Even Jensen had missed it the first time. He’d only ever met Leah pretending to be Faye. All the dogged police work in the world had failed to reveal the secret behind the mystery. It had only been Rafferty’s personal connection that had broken the case.

  The media were all over it. Morton’s face had been in the Sunday newspapers, and that was why he’d been summoned to the boss’s office first thing on a Monday morning. Three deaths were on his conscience. He was the bad guy, and Roberts wasn’t going to let him forget it.

  Roberts did his usual trick of keeping Morton waiting outside his office. It was a power display, and an obvious one, at that.

  ‘Come in!’ Roberts called out at ten past eight.

  Morton walked in expecting a formal dressing-down. Instead, the boss was in civilian clothing. It was strange to see him in corduroy slacks and a Ralph Lauren polo shirt instead of his uniform.

  ‘David, thanks for coming in. How’s everything going? I hope you’re not feeling too down about the weekend’s events.’

  Morton was thoroughly wrong-footed. ‘Shouldn’t I be, sir?’

  ‘No need to call me “sir” anymore. I’m retiring. My five years are up.’

  Had it been five years already? The gig, formally known as “The Commissioner of the Police of the Metropolis” was a five-year term with a sweet salary of almost three hundred grand a year. No wonder Roberts was dressed as if he was heading off to the golf course.

  ‘Who’s replacing you?’ Morton asked.

  Roberts said nothing. He merely pointed to the doorway where Anna Silverman was waiting.

  It was like stepping into an alternate reality. The new commissioner was a woman – the first in the Met’s history – and Morton’s old boss, at that.

  She looked authoritarian, powerful. Her languorous height filled the entire doorframe. Her silver hair was tied back in a neat bun, and she was wearing a women’s version of the uniform, complete with a crown above the Bath star and a gorget patch.

  Roberts greeted her warmly, kissed her on the cheek, and smiled. ‘This old place is your responsibility now. Good luck keeping her shipshape. Especially with this one.’ He indicated Morton with a tilt of his head.

  ‘Oh, I know how to handle David, don’t you worry.’

  ‘Then, I’ll leave you to it.’

  Roberts picked up his briefcase, paused to look nostalgically around his office one last time, and left Morton alone with the woman he had once nicknamed The Shrew.

  ‘Close the door behind you, David. And take a seat.’ Her tone was serious.

  He sat down, feeling a little bit like a child in the headmaster’s office, just waiting for the hammer to drop.

  ‘Saturday was a fuck-up, wasn’t it? You froze, and innocents died. I’m not sure I can trust your judgement. You didn’t even spot the money-laundering going on under your nose. Detective Mayberry had to work that one out. At least we found that in time to seize the money as proceeds of crime, no thanks to you.’

  Morton opened his mouth to protest. She was baiting him to see how he’d respond. He decided to stick to the facts. ‘I have the highest closure rate of any Murder Investigation Team in the Met’s history.’

  ‘Indeed, you do. I think that’s why you’ll find this new assignment most fulfilling. I want your... ahem, expertise to see more use than ever before.’

  She opened her bag, fished out a folder, and passed it over.

  Morton opened it. ‘Teaching duty?’

  ‘Our new recruits deserve the best. September’s inta
ke start on the first. You’ll be teaching them just how you’ve managed to achieve such a high closure rate. I’ll even let you bring your team with you. No doubt they contribute to your success.’

  She had him. She’d never liked Morton, not since they’d worked together twenty years earlier.

  ‘And if I don’t think this is the right assignment for me?’

  ‘There’s always retirement,’ Silverman said with a crooked smile.

  Desk duty. Morton cursed.

  It was going to be a difficult year.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: Freedom

  Chapter 2: Work

  Chapter 3: Old Times

  Chapter 4: Home Alone

  Chapter 5: The Other Woman

  Chapter 6: Home Sweet Home

  Chapter 7: Anything but Paperwork

  Chapter 8: Moving On

  Chapter 9: Long Time, No See

  Chapter 10: The Search Begins

  Chapter 11: The Note

  Chapter 12: Jurisdiction

  Chapter 13: Money, Money, Money

  Chapter 14: The Duelling Grounds

  Chapter 15: Sofa

  Chapter 16: Here We Go Again

  Chapter 17: The Frogwoman

  Chapter 18: The Pathologist

  Chapter 19: Stakeout

  Chapter 20: The Autopsy

  Chapter 21: Team Meeting

  Chapter 22: It’s Never Lupus

  Chapter 23: Love, Life, and Betrayal

  Chapter 24: Can’t Stop Loving You

  Chapter 25: Jealousy

  Chapter 26: The Doppelgänger

  Chapter 27: The Brother

  Chapter 28: Moving On

  Chapter 29: Denied

  Chapter 30: The Other Man

  Chapter 31: Amateur

  Chapter 32: Too Much Attention

  Chapter 33: Wham!

  Chapter 34: Emergency Contact

  Chapter 35: Home Sweet Home

  Chapter 36: The Wreckage