Down to the Woods: DI Helen Grace 8 (Detective Inspector Helen Grace)

by M. J. Arlidge

  130

  ‘Baldur var en av de mest älskade av alla gudar. Odins son, gudstjänstemannen och den välvilliga trollkarlsgudinnan Frigg, Baldur var en generös …’

  His tongue slid over the words, enjoying their familiar cadence. Oliver Winter had lived on the south coast for nearly twenty-five years now, but he’d never lost his accent, nor his love of his mother tongue. Often, when he was with his daughter, he would read to her in Swedish, taking great delight in retelling the old myths, talking to her in a language only they understood.

  He knew that the nurses thought him odd. Some, he suspected, thought him mad, endlessly reading and talking to a young woman who appeared frozen, offering no reaction to his endless prattling. But he knew she could hear him, was listening to what he was saying, and that was all that mattered. Never mind that her health was failing, that she was fighting a losing battle against the spread of pneumonia. She was there, with him, hanging on his every word.

  Today, however, this cosy idyll was not to go unchallenged, for as Oliver turned the page, his mobile rang loudly. Immediately, heads turned, the nurses angered by his oversight in not having it on silent.

  ‘Sorry, sorry,’ he muttered, placing the book on the bed and hurrying towards the doors.

  Pushing through them, he looked at the Caller ID. It was a foreign number, not one he recognized, and he hesitated for a moment, before pressing accept.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Oliver, it’s Alice.’

  His heart sank.

  ‘Oliver, can you hear me?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, without enthusiasm.

  ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you. Have you been getting my messages?’

  ‘Yes,’ he conceded.

  ‘Then why haven’t you got back to me?’

  ‘Because there’s nothing to say.’

  He was tempted to hang up there and then, but something made him hesitate – perhaps some vestige of politeness or maybe just the desire to enjoy his ex-wife’s anger and distress a little longer.

  ‘You’ve got no right to shut me out like this.’

  ‘I’ve got every right.’

  ‘She’s my daughter too –’

  ‘No, Alice, she was your daughter. She’s mine now.’

  ‘Whatever happened in the past, she’s my flesh and blood.’

  ‘How convenient that you remember that now. It didn’t seem to count when you abandoned her …’

  ‘Please, Oliver, don’t be like this …’

  He smiled at her anguished tone, pleased that he could still hurt her.

  ‘And, anyway, I’ve told you before she’s too sick to receive visitors. Especially people she hardly knows.’

  ‘That’s why I need to see her. If there’s even the slightest danger that –’

  ‘She has everyone she needs right here.’

  ‘I’m not going to beg, Oliver.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. Save your energy, go back to your new life. Your husband, your child. How are they, by the way?’

  ‘Missing me.’

  There was something knowing in her tone, which immediately alarmed him.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m here, in England. In fact, I’m outside your house right now. Do you still leave your spare key under the flowerpot?’

  ‘You get away from there,’ Oliver breathed, suddenly furious. ‘You stay away from me, from us …’

  ‘Sorry, Oliver, too late. I’m here, with a letter from my lawyers, and I am not going back to Sweden until I get what I came for.’

  She paused for a moment, enjoying her advantage, before concluding:

  ‘I want to see my daughter.’

  131

  He was a wanted man, a rapist and sex pest called Caleb Morgan. Even her dull-witted colleagues had had no problem prising that information from the uniformed officers, who seemed keen to trumpet their achievement in discovering the long-term fugitive.

  Following her unsatisfactory interview with Helen Grace, Emilia had returned to work in a dark mood, only to find that the story had moved on again in her absence. A third body had been found in the New Forest. Cursing herself, cursing life, Emilia had resigned herself to the fact that her colleagues would be writing tonight’s front page, settling down instead to apply herself to the more important task of identifying the perpetrator.

  Grace had poured cold water on her idea that Graham Ross might be responsible and her casual dismissal of the idea had rattled Emilia, but she wasn’t prepared to give up yet. So, she set about trying anything she could think of to find a link between Ross and the third victim, Caleb Morgan. But so far she’d found nothing. She had called the girl at the photo school, double- and triple-checked the names of those appearing in the ‘Crime and Punishment’ exhibition and conducted every imaginable online search to unearth a link between the crime scene photographer from Scotland and the lecturer/sex offender from Macclesfield, but she had come up with a blank. Was it possible that her instincts had failed her? That she had been wrong all along?

  If so, she had shot herself in the foot in grand style. Ross had been angling to give her the inside track on the investigation, in the hope perhaps of a fruitful collaboration further down the line. But she had blown any chance of that with her seemingly ill-founded allegations.

  Thoughts of his sinister collection drove her back to her search once more. There was not much to be salvaged from the wreckage of the last twenty-four hours, but the one thing Helen Grace had conceded was that the staging of the murders was significant. Emilia was convinced of this too, and sensing that Grace was at a loss for how to explain them, she resumed her hunt for answers. If she could cast some light on these strangely theatrical murders that would be something – something to hold over her colleagues, not to mention Grace herself.

  Her initial searches were uninspiring, her key words throwing up hideous ISIS-style hangings. Moving on from terrorist- and military-related atrocities, she went further back in time, searching for significance in the manner and public nature of the deaths. This took her into the world of medieval torture, of a time when the punishment of crime was delivered more ‘imaginatively’. But still there was nothing that fitted the bill exactly, causing her to wonder if there was no precedent, if the killer was just a twisted one-off.

  Frustrated and angry, she was on the cusp of giving up, when suddenly she chanced upon an image that stopped her in her tracks. She had clicked on it more in hope than in expectation – it was on a site which explored Viking beliefs and rituals – but now it had her full attention. It was a cruel, unsettling image, but one which made Emilia’s heart thump.

  It was a carbon copy of Ross’s crime scene photos.

  132

  ‘ “Oliver Winter joined us from our Stockholm office in 1991, where he had worked as a compliance officer.” ’

  Helen was on Bahcon’s official website.

  ‘ “He now leads our Compliance Unit in the UK, his brief covering all aspects of engineering across our network of –” ’

  ‘Any mention of family?’ Charlie interrupted.

  ‘Just says he lives locally.’

  ‘I’ll check the National Archives,’ Hudson suggested, typing quickly. ‘If he got divorced over here, there should be a record.’

  Helen returned her gaze to the official photo on the company web page. In it, Winter looked purposeful and contented, a far cry from the careworn individual she had encountered at the hospital.

  ‘Here you go. A petition for divorce was filed in 1993, and was granted soon after. So, Winter and his wife, Alice, come over here at the beginning of the nineties. Julia must already have been on the scene.’

  ‘She would have been a year old,’ Charlie replied, flicking through her notes.

  ‘Perhaps the marriage was already in trouble, or maybe Alice just didn’t like living in a foreign country …?’

  ‘Could have been very isolating,’ Helen added. ‘If she was at home alone bringin
g up the baby. What does her Facebook page say?’

  Hudson was already on it, a lovely picture of Alice, her husband and her teenage daughter, filling the screen.

  ‘She lives in Stockholm with husband Peter and daughter Lilly. Says she’s lived there her whole life.’

  ‘She’s blanked it out, it’s like she never even came here. So the move to England, the marriage, was a mistake …’

  ‘But when she goes back home, the baby stays here,’ Charlie added.

  Helen looked at her colleagues. This was their most intriguing finding so far. Had Alice Winter willingly given the baby up? Or had she been pressured into it? Was her desire to erase her past due to guilt, shame or something else?

  ‘Must have been strange back then, a mother choosing not to live with her child …’

  ‘Still would be now, though no one would say it to your face,’ Charlie commented ruefully. ‘Let’s see what he has to say about it all.’

  Charlie now pulled up Oliver Winter’s Facebook page. Immediately, a profile photo filled the screen – a beautiful snap of a young Julia, aged perhaps fifteen or sixteen, laughing on the beach.

  ‘She was a pretty girl,’ Helen said, a touch of sadness in her voice.

  ‘And he certainly loved her.’

  It was true. Winter’s posts were sporadic, but had a common theme. They were an extended roll call of Julia’s achievements and virtues: her victory in a short-story competition, her success at Grade 5 cello, her swimming gala triumphs, her endeavours to raise money for Cancer Research.

  ‘Never writes anything about himself, does he?’ Helen observed.

  ‘No, it’s all about her …’

  ‘What does he say around the time of her suicide attempt?’

  Charlie scrolled forward, only to find a sudden jump in the time line.

  ‘Very little,’ she replied, taking in the details. ‘He posts early in her university career. Look, there’s a picture of the pair of them at her matriculation.’

  They feasted on the image of a happy, proud father with his daughter.

  ‘Then nothing for … almost a year. After that, he mentions her accident – he used the same phrase when we met him – and gives updates on her progress.’

  Charlie flicked through them. Initially stunned and sober, the posts gradually became more positive, Winter speaking glowingly of her progress, even her ability to communicate with him, before becoming darker again as her condition deteriorated suddenly.

  ‘He’s pretty pissed off,’ Charlie murmured, almost to herself, as she read his most recent posts.

  ‘With whom?’ Helen asked.

  ‘Everyone. Initially he just gives the facts – hospital-born pneumonia – but then starts firing off at anyone and everyone. Doctors, nurses, life, God, his ex-wife of course.’

  ‘ “I hope that heartless whore is happy with her new life”,’ Hudson said, reading over her shoulder. ‘That’s a nice touch …’

  ‘No mention of Campbell, Scott, Morgan, though.’

  ‘Hardly likely to be. Either they’re unconnected and thus irrelevant. Or he did set out to harm them, but decided against giving them prior warning.’

  ‘Either way, we need to talk to him,’ Helen said, rising. ‘You stay here, dig out as much as you can about the nature and timing of Julia’s suicide attempt. I’ll find Winter.’

  Helen snatched up her keys and made to leave. But as she did so, her phone buzzed. Removing it from her pocket, she was surprised to discover that she’d received a message from Emilia Garanita. It was short and sweet, reading: ‘Killings are Viking sacrifice. See Uppsala.’

  Surprised, Helen crossed back to her desk. Turning the laptop towards her, she googled ‘Uppsala sacrifice’ and immediately a selection of thumbnail images sprang up on screen. She clicked on the first one, keen to see what Emilia had meant by her cryptic text. Even as she did so, Hudson and Charlie gathered around, intrigued and confused by her sudden about-turn.

  For a moment, time seemed to stand still. The pencil sketch on screen showed a half-naked man, hanging upside down from a tree. There was a small crowd around him, some of whom seemed to be involved in his execution, others merely staring at the pool of blood gathering on the forest floor beneath him.

  ‘It’s called “The Blood Sacrifice”,’ Helen murmured, speed-reading the text. ‘It was the ultimate form of atonement for those who had sinned.’

  Helen read on, devouring the details.

  ‘Uppsala was the one place this kind of sacrifice was witnessed first-hand, by a travelling merchant. Where is that?’

  Hudson had pulled up Google Maps.

  ‘Central Sweden, north of Stockholm. But it’s only a few miles from Haga …’

  ‘Where Winter was born,’ Charlie added, picking up on Hudson’s thread.

  ‘Presumably he would have known about these myths, then. Been told about them when he was a boy perhaps?’

  And now, as Helen said this, another thought landed. Typing quickly, she pulled up another image, maximizing it so that Charlie and Hudson could see. It was a photo of a Viking helmet, perfectly preserved in a Stockholm museum, and the sight of it silenced them all once more. There were no horns on this helmet, like in the comic books of old, just a smooth, metal skull cap, with a cross-piece to protect the cheeks and nose and above it two huge, ghostly eyeholes.

  133

  Helen burst through the doors and hurried across the atrium. Ignoring the scrutiny of the hospital receptionist, she marched towards the lift bank. She had already visited the high-dependency unit and knew exactly where to go.

  Less than a minute later, she was traversing the dull-grey linoleum that led to the unit entrance. People looked up as she passed, intrigued by her urgency, but she paid them no heed. As she approached the double doors, an elderly woman walked through, holding them open for Helen, smiling sympathetically at her. Helen returned the favour and disappeared inside.

  There were only a handful of beds in the unit. Visits were strictly regulated, given the severity of the patients’ conditions, but the hours were more generous, presumably due to the chance of a sudden turn for the worse. Oliver Winter had been stationed by his daughter’s bed when they visited earlier in the week, but to Helen’s surprise he was nowhere to be seen today. Julia lay alone and unconscious in her bed, her only company the steadily beeping machines that were keeping her alive.

  ‘You’ve just missed him.’

  Helen turned to see a young nurse approaching.

  ‘Are you a relative? If so, I’m going to have to ask you to sign in –’

  ‘Detective Inspector Helen Grace, Hampshire Police,’ she informed the nurse, retrieving her warrant card.

  ‘Oh, I see …’

  ‘I need to have a word with Mr Winter. Are you expecting him back?’

  ‘Normally, he never leaves during daytime visiting,’ she replied, recovering her smile. ‘Well, not until we kick him out, anyway. I’m not sure what happened today. One minute he was here, then the next he was gone. One of the other nurses said he got a phone call, that he’d had to go home urgently, but we were to call him if there was –’

  ‘He didn’t say if he was coming back then?’ Helen interrupted gently.

  ‘Not that I know of, sorry,’ the young nurse replied, shrugging apologetically, before casting a glance over her shoulder. ‘Anyway, I’d better get back to my duties.’

  Helen sent her on her way, frustrated by Winter’s absence, but intrigued by the nurse’s testimony. How was Winter reconciling his attentive care for his daughter with his work schedule? He was senior management, but seemed to spend entire days, perhaps even the whole week, at the hospital. Was he on compassionate leave? Had he quit? More importantly, had the young nurse unwittingly cast a penetrating light on the timings of the crimes?

  Helen was increasingly convinced that Oliver Winter had initiated these murders, perhaps even carried them out himself. He knew the area well, having lived here for twenty-five years, an
d was a trained engineer, presumably capable of designing and constructing homemade weapons. If their theories were correct, he also had a strong motive for wanting to harm the three victims. If they were right, if Winter was their perpetrator, then his nocturnal sorties suddenly made perfect sense too. They had assumed that the killer chose the cover of darkness to facilitate his attacks, or because he had a job that kept him occupied during waking hours. But maybe there was a very simple reason why these murders took place at night.

  Because love kept him here during the day.

  134

  She paced to and fro, drawing hard on her cigarette. Alice Winter had known this moment was coming – that she had to confront it head on – but still her impending reunion with her former husband left her feeling nauseous and tense.

  Their marriage had been short-lived and a mistake. She was only twenty, barely more than a child, when she’d met Oliver in a Stockholm bar. She was a country girl, dazzled by his confidence, his sophistication and charm, so much so that she’d got swept up in their whirlwind romance, marrying him six months to the day after they first met.

  While they’d been living in Sweden, things had been ok. Oliver expected a lot and could fly off the handle, but they were happy enough. Then she’d fallen pregnant and, shortly after that, while she was still struggling with baby blues, they had moved to England. No discussion, no hesitation, they had just followed Oliver’s career ambition and suddenly she found herself living in Southampton with a small baby. She barely saw anyone during the day and Oliver was moody and monosyllabic at night, the new job proving more stressful than he’d expected. Alice didn’t speak English and in the pre-Facebook age it was easy to lose touch with family and friends back home. In truth, she’d been miserable from the day they landed.

  Oliver had been shocked at first, when she’d told him she wanted to go home, but responded with characteristic decisiveness. He told her she could go, if she wanted, but he would be staying in England, with Julia. Then it was her turn to be poleaxed – he was so clinical, so precise in his destruction of their marriage – but in truth a part of her was relieved. She had never planned on being a mother so young – she felt trapped, helpless, a failure. And though it broke her heart when baby Julia looked up at her with love in her eyes, their split presented her with an unexpected opportunity: the chance to start again. Of course, when it came to it, she hesitated, trying to negotiate a compromise agreement with Oliver, but he was implacable. He would get full custody of his beloved daughter and Alice would get her freedom. So, shamefaced, she had returned to her family and had been living with the guilt ever since.