Dying Wish

by James Raven

  ‘The answer’s no, Inspector. Not without a warrant. And not without a lawyer present.’

  ‘You make it sound like you’ve got something to hide,’ Temple said.

  Fowler’s gaze seemed to intensify as he spoke. ‘It’s nothing of the kind, Inspector. I’m just exerting my rights and protecting my privacy.’

  Temple pushed out his bottom lip. ‘Fair enough, but there’s one thing I need to ask you before we go. Can you account for your movements on Thursday evening between about seven and ten?’

  Fowler didn’t even have to think about it. ‘I had an early drink at the Court Jester. Left there about seven thirty and came home. I spent the rest of the evening watching television by myself.’

  ‘Why’d you leave so early?’

  ‘It was too depressing. All the talk was of Grant dying.’

  ‘So who can confirm that you were there?’

  Fowler heaved a loud sigh. ‘The landlord’s Mick Russell. He’ll tell you. And I shared a table with Noah Cross. He’s another regular and was also a friend of Grant.’

  Temple frowned. ‘Are you sure that Mr Cross was there? We were told he went to London on Thursday afternoon.’

  ‘I’m positive. In fact, he left when I did.’

  Temple put his notebook away and stood up.

  ‘Thanks for talking to us, Mr Fowler. We’re going to want to see you again, I’m sure. So if you plan on leaving the area during the coming days, you’ll need to let me know.’

  Temple placed one of his cards on the table, and he and Marsh headed for the front door. He walked slowly to give himself time to look around.

  He saw two half-open doors in the hall – one to the living room, the other to a downstairs toilet.

  But he saw no other doors that might have provided access to a basement. And that came as a disappointment.

  28

  The Court Jester was a small, timber-framed pub with a thatched roof and a patio garden at the front. It was picture-postcard pretty, with purple aubrietia spilling from cracks in the walls.

  Inside, a fire was blazing away in an open hearth, giving off a warm glow and a sharp, rustic smell.

  Heads turned towards Temple and Marsh as they walked in. There was a man in a green waxed jacket at the bar who was sipping beer from a pint glass. At a table to his right sat a middle-aged couple who paused to look up from their ploughman’s lunches. In a booth to the left, two young men in suits, who might have been reporters, stared with undisguised curiosity.

  At the bar, Temple ordered drinks and sandwiches before identifying himself to the portly server who said he was the landlord, Mick Russell.

  ‘Some other detectives were in here yesterday,’ Russell said as he started pouring the drinks. ‘I told them everything I know about Grant Mason, which isn’t very much.’

  ‘We’re aware of that,’ Temple said. ‘But we’ve been interviewing some people nearby so we thought we’d pop in for a bite to eat and a chat.’

  ‘And you’re most welcome,’ he said. ‘You’ve actually come at a good time. We’ve been packed out with journalists since the news broke. I gave an interview to the BBC not an hour ago.’

  ‘What did they want to know?’

  ‘Anything I could tell them. How often did Mason come here? What did he drink? Who were his friends? What were his favourite bar snacks? If what your lot are saying about him is true, then I wish the bastard had never set foot in here.’

  ‘I gather he was a popular character with your customers,’ Temple said.

  ‘Well, he seemed to get on with most of them. He was pretty quiet, though, and shy too.’

  ‘We just spoke to one of his friends, Tom Fowler.’

  ‘Yeah, it was Tom who started the ramblers’ group and made Grant chairman.’

  ‘Tom said he was in here early on Thursday evening with some of the other regulars after it was reported that Mason had died.’

  Russell finished pouring their drinks. ‘That’s right. Nobody could believe it. Everyone was really down. But of course we didn’t know then what we know now.’

  ‘Can you remember if Noah Cross was also here on Thursday?’

  Russell scrunched up his face in thought. ‘He was. I remember because he stuck to soft drinks and left earlier than usual.’

  ‘Did he say where he was going?’

  ‘Not to me. Why do you want to know?’

  Temple ignored the question and cast his eyes around the pub.

  ‘I don’t see any CCTV cameras,’ he said.

  ‘That’s because we were having too many problems with the system. It was taken out two weeks ago and is due to be replaced next week.’

  He pushed their drinks across the bar – half a lager for Temple and a diet coke for Marsh.

  ‘Did Mason mix with everyone or did he have any particular friends?’ Temple asked.

  ‘Well, he mostly interacted with other members of the ramblers’ group. That’s five men and six women. I gave all their names to the other detectives.’

  ‘And they included Mr Cross and Mr Fowler?’

  ‘Of course. Those two were with him mostly because they’re regular drinkers here. He usually got together with the others only when a hike was organized, which I suppose was about once a month.’

  Temple thanked Russell and gestured for Marsh to follow him to a table.

  ‘I’ll bring your sandwiches over as soon as they’re ready,’ Russell said.

  When they were seated, Marsh removed her jacket and pinched her petite nose between forefinger and thumb. She looked exhausted.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Temple asked her.

  Her voice sounded flat. ‘Just tired. And a little shell-shocked as well, I think. This is the strangest and most disturbing case I’ve ever worked on. When I saw that couple in the grave, it turned my stomach. Mr and Mrs Cramer featured in one of the videos I viewed. Mason and his mate did some terrible things to them.’

  It occurred to Temple that Marsh had been unusually quiet throughout the morning. And now he knew why. He hadn’t realized that the case was getting under her skin, but he wasn’t entirely surprised. And he was sure she wouldn’t be the only officer to find it hard going.

  He gave her an understanding look, noting that her pewter eyes were dull and opaque, as though someone had turned off the light.

  ‘I’d be lying if I said that things are likely to get easier,’ he told her. ‘The truth is we’re almost certainly in for a long, rough ride. We could be searching for graves for weeks. And we can’t be sure we’ll ever find Bob and Rosemary Hamilton – dead or alive.’

  Marsh made a face, as if spitting something out.

  ‘That’s a scary thought, guv.’

  ‘Then don’t think about it. Just concentrate on helping me find Mason’s accomplice. That’s our priority.’

  She picked up a bar mat and folded it down the middle. ‘I’m wondering if we’ve already found him, guv.’

  ‘You mean Tom Fowler?’

  ‘Absolutely. The guy’s a real weirdo.’

  ‘I know what you mean, but it won’t be easy to disprove what he said. We’ll need evidence.’

  ‘We should search his house as soon as we can.’

  ‘I’ll try to get a warrant. And in the meantime we’ll send someone over to get a DNA swab, although it’s not likely there’ll be DNA traces on any of the bodies.’

  At that moment, the landlord brought their sandwiches and they got stuck in.

  Between mouthfuls, Marsh said, ‘What about Noah Cross? There’s something not right there. His sister lied about him going to London on Thursday afternoon.’

  ‘Either that or she made a genuine mistake. We’ll go and see her again before heading back to town.’

  In the end, they had to put off another visit to Amanda Cross’s house. Temple took a call from Dave Vaughan, saying that Beresford was holding a three o’clock briefing and he wanted them there.

  ‘There’ve been a few developments at this end too,
boss,’ he said. ‘The main one being that we might have identified Mason’s accomplice.’

  29

  He was watching through his new binoculars from a distance of about three hundred yards. Behind him was a small coppice and in front, a field of heather and grass that sloped gradually down towards the scene of activity.

  Police were gathered in and around the South Oakley Inclosure, most of them in Hi-Vis jackets. The media were also there. Two TV satellite trucks were parked on the side of the road near to the track leading to the car park.

  He couldn’t see what was going on inside the woods, but he didn’t need to. Before leaving the house, he’d watched a televised press conference during which the police revealed that they’d found a grave at this location.

  He tried to imagine the state the bodies were in. After four months in the ground they would surely be unrecognizable. He wondered how long it would take the police to establish their identities.

  An image of the couple surfaced in his mind. Simon and Jane Cramer. Simon had been tall, muscular, in his thirties. Jane had been blonde and pretty and about the same age.

  They had driven into the South Oakley car park on a bleak Friday afternoon, and he and Mason had been waiting. He remembered what a relief it had been after a day of touring the forest looking for victims. The poor weather had kept day-trippers away and most of the parking areas they’d visited had remained deserted.

  But just when they were thinking of giving up, the Cramers had appeared. They’d bundled the couple into the back of the hired van and within the hour, they were strapped to the beds in the basement.

  For five days and nights, the Cramers had provided a constant source of pleasure. In the basement there’d been nothing that he and Mason couldn’t do to them. There’d been no one to stop them, nothing to hold them back.

  The couple had been raped, spanked, whipped, pinched, burned and made to perform sex acts on each other. And finally they’d been strangled with electrical cable.

  He could well remember how in the dead of night, they had returned here to the woods with the bodies in the back of the van. The grave had already been dug so it had taken just fifty minutes to drop them in and cover them with earth and bracken.

  The following day, they’d taken the van back to the hire company before joining a seven-mile hike through the forest organized by the ramblers’ group.

  The Cramers, like the others before them, were never meant to be found. Their disappearance should have remained a mystery. And it would have if not for Mason.

  At the televised press conference, a reporter had asked the Chief Constable if it was true that the police had found a map in Mason’s house, a map which was marked with the locations of up to ten graves. The Chief Constable had been forced to admit that there was a map with crosses marked on it at ten different locations.

  A map, for God’s sake. How stupid was that? How fucking diabolically reckless. Why couldn’t the idiot have been satisfied with videos and photos, and the belongings he took from their victims?

  And as if that wasn’t bad enough, the police had also revealed that Mason had had an accomplice. For that reason they were stepping up the search for Bob and Rosemary Hamilton, whom they believed had been abducted.

  It meant that the situation was now more precarious and unpredictable. He would have to make sure he stayed one step ahead of the police. But it wasn’t going to be easy. In fact, he wasn’t even sure he’d be able to pull it off.

  He heard the police helicopter before he saw it. It swooped in low over the trees to the north and hovered above the woods like a giant prehistoric bug.

  At the same time, more police cars appeared on the scene with their lights flashing.

  He decided it was time to go as he didn’t want to risk drawing attention to himself. But on the short drive home he saw another helicopter swooping low over the forest and then, to his horror, he was flagged down at a police road check. A uniformed PC asked to see his driving licence and then failed to spot that it was a fake. He then told him to open the boot.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ the PC said when he saw that there was nothing inside but an old blanket and a first-aid kit. ‘We appreciate your patience. Now drive carefully and have a good afternoon.’

  It made him realize how difficult it was going to be to dispose of the Hamiltons. The police would be maintaining a high-visibility profile throughout the forest with uniforms and marked response vehicles. And if they were randomly stopping cars, then it would be a huge risk to go anywhere with two bodies in the back.

  The important thing was to hold his nerve and not to panic. He needed to focus on a way out of this mess. It wasn’t as though he could just pack a bag and disappear. He had nowhere to go and very little money left in the bank. His life had taken root here and he’d never felt the need to have a back-up plan if things suddenly went pear-shaped.

  The anger swelled inside him and he smacked the palms of his hands against the steering wheel.

  ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ he yelled, spraying the inside of the windscreen with spit.

  He still couldn’t wrap his mind around the fact that everything was falling apart. It was nothing less than tragic. For the first time in his life he was settled. He felt he belonged in the forest. It was his home as well as his hunting ground.

  For over two years, he’d been living a glorious lie. Only Mason had known him for what he was and his secret had been safe from everyone else. But now it was all under threat because he, the hunter, had become the hunted.

  He aimed another round of expletives at the windscreen, and decided that he would vent his anger when he got home on the Hamiltons. Might as well make the most of them while they were still imprisoned in the basement. After all, they’d be gone soon and after that, it might be a while before his cravings could be satisfied again.

  30

  ‘His name is Ethan Kane,’ DS Vaughan said. ‘He’s a 46-year-old Londoner and he shared a cell in Wandsworth prison with Mason. He was released three years ago. But then he vanished while on probation.’

  Temple and Marsh were back in the incident room and Vaughan had taken the floor at the briefing. The Chief Super was there along with the rest of the team, several of whom Temple didn’t recognize because they’d been drafted in from other divisions.

  ‘According to the prison governor’s office, the pair were as thick as thieves,’ Vaughan said. ‘But then maybe that’s not so surprising since they had a lot in common. Kane was serving an eight-year stretch for a string of sexual offences including the rape of a 30-year-old married woman. And it wasn’t his first time inside. He was jailed seventeen years ago for breaking into a house and beating up a young couple who were also sexually molested. The guy sounds like a right nut.’

  Kane’s mugshot appeared on the big monitor at the front of the room. He had a narrow face with a short dark beard and a shaved head. His nose was badly broken, making him look like a prize fighter.

  Temple felt a flicker of recognition, but then after so long on the force, most criminals looked vaguely familiar to him.

  ‘If Kane teamed up with his old cellmate outside prison, then there’s a good chance he was Mason’s accomplice,’ Vaughan said. ‘Two violent perverts who may have spent years hatching plans to prey on people when they were both free again. And where better to do that than the New Forest? It’s an easy place to acquire victims. Low risk targets. Isolated parking areas. Strike when there’s no one around.’

  ‘Plus it was in Mason’s back yard and he was already settled there,’ Temple said. ‘Perhaps he invited his old friend to join him.’

  ‘We’ve checked the name against electoral registers in the New Forest and neighbouring counties,’ Vaughan said. ‘But unsurprisingly he hasn’t come up. Having jumped probation he’s probably using a different name or even obtained a whole new identity. And we all know that’s pretty easy these days, especially if you have the contacts.’

  ‘What about his last known address?�
� Temple said.

  Vaughan nodded. ‘It was a house in Kent owned by a woman he was going out with. That’s all I know because I’m still waiting for his probation officer to get back to me with the details.’

  It was an exciting development and it had the room buzzing. Beresford said he wanted the mugshot circulated to all officers and distributed to the media.

  ‘Let’s get his face out there fast,’ he said. ‘If he’s our man, then he’ll have been expecting us to make the connection sooner or later, so he might have fled the area already.’

  Temple asked Vaughan to collect more information on Kane, including his crime files and any psychiatric reports.

  ‘Did he and Mason serve out all their time in Wandsworth?’ he asked.

  Vaughan screwed up his face as he consulted his notes.

  ‘No, they didn’t. But it’s where they both finished up. Before being transferred there, Kane was in Albany on the Isle of Wight and Mason did a stint in Winchester.’

  Temple’s ears pricked up. ‘I want you to check when Mason was in Winchester. Then see if the dates coincide with when Tom Fowler was there.’

  ‘Give me a sec, guv,’ Vaughan said as he swivelled in his chair and started tapping at his computer keyboard.

  Temple, meanwhile, went on to tell the team what they’d found out about Tom Fowler.

  ‘He has to be another serious suspect,’ he said. ‘He was probably Mason’s closest friend and he’s still active on the S&M scene, despite killing his girlfriend some years ago.’

  Temple told them about the escort agency through which Fowler apparently met up with female dominants, who were prepared to beat him up for a fee.

  ‘He reckons he’s switched from being a sadist to a masochist when it comes to role-playing because it’s his way of atoning for his sins. But it could be bullshit so we need to check it out. I want someone to speak to the guy who runs the agency and the women who work there.

  ‘Fowler insists that he didn’t meet Mason before he turned up at his office to buy a property in the area. He says they struck up a friendship after Mason bought the house in East Boldre. He claims he had no idea what Mason was up to.

  ‘Fowler refused to let us look around his house without a warrant so I think we should get one.’ Temple turned to Beresford. ‘Can you swing it, sir? I really think we should go inside.’