No Smoke Without Fire (A DCI Warren Jones Novel - Book 2)

by Paul Gitsham

  Reversing direction, Warren snapped his head forward, slamming his forehead into Stockley’s nose full force.

  The satisfying, crunching, squidging noise was definitely worth the bruise Warren would no doubt be wearing in the middle of his forehead for the next fortnight. As Stockley collapsed back, with a deep groan, Warren scrambled over and grabbed the bottle of cyanide. Without pausing, he threw it overarm into the rushing river below.

  “No!” shouted Stockley, watching his last chance to control his own fate spinning end over end into the void below. He knelt, covering his face with his hands. A quiet sob racked his body.

  “It’s done, Michael. It’s all over. Come quietly — there’s no need to make any more of a fuss.” Warren fought down his revulsion for the man in front of him and tried to sound sympathetic.

  It wasn’t easy. The man before him was a monster of the worst kind. A sick predator who had ended the lives of a string of young women for nothing but his own sexual gratification. Unbidden, the faces of five young women swam before his eyes: Sally Evans, Carolyn Patterson, Gemma Allen, Saskia Williams and last of all poor Melanie Clearwater. She’d survived, but at what cost? And then there was Jemima Duer; Warren hadn’t seen a photo of her, had no idea what she looked like. He prayed that he could say hello to her in person, now that it was all over — to know that they’d saved at least one of this animal’s victims.

  But what about Stockley? Warren had been acting instinctively when he’d tried to stop him from taking the cyanide, but what had he accomplished, really? The man had destroyed so many lives, not only those he’d killed, but their loved ones as well — yet he would survive and live out the rest of his days. He would almost certainly spend those days in prison or a secure institute, but so what? He’d have access to TV, books, probably even the Internet eventually. Every day he’d wake up and live that day until he went to bed, ready to do it all over again. How was that fair? Warren thought back to the tear-stained face of Gemma Allen’s mother. “How is that right?” she’d asked through her tears. Warren hadn’t been able to answer her then — he still couldn’t answer her now.

  Reaching behind him, he was relieved to find the plasti-cuffs he kept in his back pocket still there. He tossed them to Stockley.

  “Put those on, Michael, then let’s get you some warm clothes and hot coffee.”

  Stockley stared at the cuffs lying on the snow before him.

  Suddenly, in a burst of speed that Warren would have thought beyond him, he leapt to his feet.

  “Never!” And with that he hurled himself past a frozen Warren, towards the rushing river below.

  Epilogue

  Warren sipped gratefully at the freshly brewed coffee poured for him by Assistant Chief Constable Mohammed Naseem. It was barely forty-eight hours after the climactic events in the forest and, despite technically being on sick leave, Warren had been writing up report after report. More than once he’d considered switching the sling from his left arm to his right arm and claiming that he couldn’t write properly. Unfortunately, the paperwork wasn’t going to go away and he might as well get it done with.

  Now, with most of the administration completed, he had been summoned to the ACC’s office to give his side of the story. No police investigation ever went completely smoothly and the fact that Stockley had managed to kill so many victims was guaranteed to provoke condemnation from some quarters, so the force was determined to rebut any allegations of poor detective work immediately.

  That wasn’t the only reason, of course, that Jones found himself face to face with his boss. The rumours were that Naseem fancied himself as something of a novelist and that one day he would parlay some of the more interesting cases to have come across his desk into fiction. Whether it was true or not, Naseem was known to be an appreciative audience and Jones was actually rather looking forward to telling the tale.

  “Thanks for coming in, Warren. Of course, I’d have completely understood if you had felt you needed more time to deal with what happened.” He gestured at Warren’s bruised and battered face and his sling. Warren smiled at the white lie.

  “Hell of an ending, Warren. Of course, the circumstances were horrendous and I don’t think anyone could have expected you to stop him.”

  Warren nodded; in his mind’s eye he again saw the mother of Gemma Allen as she asked how it was fair that Stockley would live, when her daughter was gone.

  Naseem shook his head in sympathy. “Between you, me and these four walls, I think a hell of a lot of us believe that an ice-cold, watery grave is a fitting end for a bastard like Michael Stockley. There is nothing else in our system that will ever adequately punish him enough or bring justice for his victims.”

  Warren nodded. Tony Sutton had suggested much the same as he had wrapped his shivering boss in a blanket and awaited the arrival of the ambulance, that fateful night.

  However, forty-eight hours after the event, Warren wasn’t so sure. Who was he to pass sentence out in the woods, with nobody else to argue his decision with? To horribly misquote Churchill, the adversarial justice system was the worst type of system, except for all the others. Deep in his heart, below the moral certainty that all policemen needed to do the job, Warren knew that he was only a facilitator of justice, not its arbiter. Morally, Warren knew that allowing Stockley to kill himself through inaction was no different from pushing him into that river himself. It was up to a jury of twelve peers to be swayed by arguments both in favour of and against the defendant. He had no right to make life or death decisions. Did anyone? Not even the family of those victims had that right, he felt. Perhaps one might argue that the killer’s victims might have that privilege, but, until somebody figured out how to communicate with the dead, that remained nothing more than a philosophical debating point.

  For him to assume that responsibility, out in the woods on his own, would place him on the same moral plane as Michael Stockley and that wasn’t somewhere that Warren wanted to be. He didn’t feel that he could cope with the burden of guilt that passing such a sentence would leave him with. Would he ever sleep again?

  For that reason, Warren was glad that Sutton had arrived when he did. His desperate lunge to grab a falling Stockley had strained and torn ligaments in his shoulder and the pain had threatened to overwhelm him. A few more seconds and he would have had to let go whether he wanted to or not. As it was, his saving of the twisted killer and rapist had garnered him a mixture of admiration from those who were impressed by the lengths he went to or dismay from those who regarded it as an opportunity lost.

  “So why don’t you take us through the whole story, Warren? I hear that Stockley is admitting everything.” Naseem had settled himself down, cradling his cup of coffee, and was clearly looking forward to the tale.

  Warren grunted. “You could say that. We can’t get him to shut up. Of course, he claims no personal responsibility and that we aren’t the ones who should be judging him.”

  Naseem raised an eyebrow. “How so?”

  “As far as Stockley’s concerned, it was the fault of his father; he claims that his father passed on something in his genes that meant he was wired wrong — claims it’s all his dad’s fault and had he not been so wicked et cetera et cetera. He also claims that as it’s not his fault, he won’t be punished for his actions by God.”

  Naseem rolled his eyes, clearly expressing what he thought of that. “Then I guess we’ll just have to punish him on God’s behalf. Leaving that aside, what sort of influence did his father have on him?”

  “Pretty significant, it would seem. He found out a lot about his father’s crimes during the court case and later through his own research. He emulated his father’s methods, not only to implicate him but because they were so effective.”

  “And this wasn’t the first time he’s done this?”

  “No, he says it started when he raped a jogger in a park in Bristol back when he was at university. He learned from his father’s mistakes and nearly killed the woman with an overd
ose of chloroform to stop her coming around. Nevertheless he pulled it off and the crime remained unsolved.

  “It seems that this episode woke him up and he voluntarily committed himself to drug rehabilitation and counselling. He admitted whilst he was in therapy that he had strong, inappropriate sexual urges and blamed them on his father, but claims to have been sufficiently vague that the therapist didn’t make the connection with any crime, assuming that he was talking hypothetically.

  “The therapy had some limited success, but fast forward four years and Michael is working in Reading. He loses control again. Again, he gets away with it. But he says that he felt revulsion for what he had become and started to blame his father. Moving back to the family farm, he underwent counselling again, this time with a local priest, and was advised that he should seek to reconcile his relationship with his father to move on.”

  “Bloody amateur.”

  “Exactly. It was the worst thing that he could have suggested. God only knows what he picked up from him. We know that he shares his old man’s phobia of prison — that’s why he carried that small bottle of cyanide; whether or not Cameron had any influence over his son or aided him directly, we’ll probably never know. The shrinks reckon he really does believe that his urges weren’t his fault. He’s successfully managed to shift all the blame, mentally, onto his father.”

  “So I guess using his father as a scapegoat for his own actions makes a kind of perverted sense.”

  “Exactly. He even planned his father’s death, figuring that with Cameron seemingly on the run, he would be able to continue to indulge himself and let his father take the fall.”

  Naseem shook his head in disbelief. “Surely he knew that it couldn’t last for ever. What were his long-term plans?”

  Warren shrugged. “That we don’t know. We’re not sure he really knows. We found a notebook with jottings and observations about his various victims; presumably that was how he planned his attacks. There were some vague scribblings in there that indicated he might have been eyeing up some other potential targets, but they are too ambiguous to identify the women he was stalking. I don’t suppose it really matters now.”

  “No, I don’t suppose it does. Besides, what would we do if we could identify them? Can you imagine how those poor women would feel if we told them?”

  Warren nodded; he’d had similar thoughts himself.

  “So how did he select his victims? Not all of them were at that sports centre.”

  “Stockley has a long association with the football team and Alex Chalmers knew him through the Royal Mail, from years back. When Royal Mail bought into World Wide Parcel Logistics, Stockley moved sideways into WWPL. The depot shares offices with the Middlesbury sorting office and so he stayed where he is. Workers at the office are so used to seeing him around that he pretty much has the run of the place. I believe that he found out about Angus Carroway’s little vehicle-hire business and helped himself. Robbie Cartwright didn’t recognise his photo because technically he isn’t a Royal Mail employee and so doesn’t appear on their staff database. It never occurred to me to ask for a printout of everybody that worked in the building.”

  Naseem shrugged. “Why would it?”

  “Anyway, Alex Chalmers asked if he could get WWPL to sponsor the team. They did and Stockley started coming along to some of the games. He was never a football player himself and so he doesn’t appear on the fixture lists or anything.

  “According to the Reverend Harding and Cameron’s probation officer, Stockley has always had problems making friends, but the team was happy to have him along. A cynic might point out that you welcome your sponsor with open arms, especially when he always gets the first round in.” Warren indicated that it didn’t matter.

  “Nobody at the sports centre knew of his connection to Richard Cameron of course and he kept it that way. As he socialised with them he met Darren Blackheath’s girlfriend Sally Evans and Chalmer’s then girlfriend Carolyn Patterson.

  “Looking back on it, people we’ve interviewed say that he was always a bit weird around them, and women in general. A bit too attentive to them, perhaps. But nothing too extreme, and you don’t want to offend the team sponsor by asking him not to be so nice to your girlfriend.”

  “Reading the report, Alex Chalmers stopped playing over two years ago — surely Stockley wasn’t planning to rape these poor girls back that far?”

  Warren shook his head. “Very doubtful. We think that his father’s release last year was the action that caused everything to fall into place. Maybe something happened; there are suggestions that his father abused him as a child. He won’t say and obviously we can’t ask Cameron — we found him buried in the farthest field with an axe in the back of his head, just like Stockley told us. Regardless, when he decided to choose his targets, it was obvious for him to go after women that he’d been somewhat obsessed with.”

  Naseem placed his empty coffee cup on the desk and leant back in his chair.

  “So, what about the other victims?”

  “Saskia Williams had been a casual gym user for years. No direct link to the football team, but they could have crossed paths. Gemma Allen was just very unlucky. She worked in the Costcutter around the corner from the sorting office where staff would go for a paper or whatever. Physically, they both fall into both father and son’s preferred type. Blonde, slim to average build, twenties and pretty — a bit vague, but line up their photos and you can see the similarities. Interestingly, you can also put a photo of Angie Cameron — Stockley’s mother — in that group.”

  Naseem grimaced. “Let’s leave that one to the psychologists, shall we? What about his last victim, Jemima Duer? How is she, by the way?”

  “Physically, she’s fine. Tony Sutton got the chloroform rag off her before she suffocated fully and kept her warm until the ambulance arrived. She was unconscious from a blow to the head, but escaped serious injury. Psychologically though…time will tell. Again, she simply seems to have caught Stockley’s eye on several occasions as she waited for the bus. He worked out her routine, which stayed essentially the same even when her dad started picking her up.”

  “So tell me, what was it that finally made you realise that it was Stockley and not his father?” Naseem now looked excited; this was what he was most interested in.

  “It’s hard to say, but something that always nagged me was his confession to having given his father a false alibi for the nights that Sally Evans and Carolyn Patterson were taken. He said that he panicked and so claimed that his father was asleep in bed. That matched his father’s alibi, of course. However, if you think about it, if Cameron really was giving us a false alibi and his son made up one, then what were the odds that they’d give the same one? Especially since they both implied that he had ‘gone to bed early’ in other words it was a bit unusual. I figured that there must have been some sort of agreement between them, which meant that Stockley was at least guilty of conspiracy, if not an active participant.

  “Of course, we know now that Stockley was slipping his old man a sleeping pill on the nights he needed to go out. We found an old pot of prescription tablets going right back to when his mother was ill. That opened my mind to the possibility that Stockley was less than honest, although at the time I hadn’t really thought it through.

  “Something else that bothered me was how an older man who entered prison with little education in 1998 could use a computer in such a sophisticated manner. He even erased his Internet browsing history. I spoke to his probation officer and he said that Cameron did basic literacy and numeracy courses as part of his rehabilitation, but as a sex offender was taught only the most basic computer skills — he had no access to the Internet.

  “What we now believe was that Stockley set up the computer and knew his father’s password and used his account to surf for porn and plan the attacks. He erased the Internet history to stop his old man realising what he was doing — assuming that he even used the computer. He might even have known that we wo
uld be able to trace his surfing history even with the cleared browsing history and so did it to make our discoveries seem more authentic.”

  “Well, he’s certainly a crafty bastard, I’ll give him that,” mused Naseem.

  “Then there was the matter of his slipping up and leaving a sample of semen with both Gemma Allen and Saskia Williams after he’d successfully left no traces previously. Bad luck or fatalism, perhaps, but it niggled me. Then I had a conversation with Melanie Clearwater, the prostitute attacked and left for dead. She remembered being picked up by a younger man as a treat for an older man, who she thought may be related to him. He was very insistent that the older man had a happy ending, so to speak, even to the point of checking the wastebasket afterwards. At the time, I thought we might be dealing with a separate attacker and so didn’t immediately join the dots.”

  “But you were open to the possibility that Stockley was guilty of at least something?”

  “Yes, but he muddied the waters quite successfully in the beginning. He knew about Darren Blackheath’s past problems with the law and he was also aware of Alex Chalmer’s reputation for hitting women. He guessed that we would follow those leads — no smoke without fire and all that.”

  “And the Royal Mail van and Angus Carroway’s little vehicle-hire operation just pointed the finger even more clearly. Bit of a gamble though — surely there was a risk that we would follow it back to him?”

  “Calculated risk, I suppose.”

  “So, is he insane?”

  “That’s beyond my pay-grade, sir, but in my opinion he’s one sick bunny.”

  The two men sat for a moment in contemplative silence.

  “Well, you did well, Warren. There will be lessons to be learnt as always and a few voices asking why we didn’t do things differently, but twenty-twenty hindsight is a wonderful thing.