LOOT & I'M WITH THE BAND: The DCS Palmer and the Serial Murder Squad series by B.L.Faulkner. Cases 5 & 6 (DCS Palmer and the Serial Murder Squad cases Book 3)

by Barry Faulkner

  ‘Congratulations, sir. Good luck.’

  Bateman knew Palmer didn’t mean this. Palmer’s dislike of fast-tracked university types straight to management level in the Met was well-known; and Bateman’s numerous attempts to get Palmer’s squad integrated into CID, and Palmer retired, was also well-known. But Palmer wouldn’t take the early retirement offered; he loved his job, and more to the point what would he do all day? Mrs P. had made it very clear that her lifestyle of various WI committees and Gardening and Dog Clubs would go on, and he would have to work his retirement around them. Bateman had even looked into offering redundancy, not a tool the Met usually employed to get rid of staff; but Palmer had served for so long the payment would be astronomical, and there would be questions from the political masters as they liked Palmer, which Bateman could never understand why; the truth being that they liked Palmer because he caught killers, his record was exemplary, his officers loved him, the press liked him, and he was a big brick in the wall at New Scotland Yard. Bateman acknowledged Palmer’s good wishes for the election.

  ‘Thank you, Palmer.’

  ‘If you need any help sir, I could give you Dotty Watkins’s number.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Our local florist; she’s organising the local campaign for our neighbour who is running in the local council election – same sort of thing really. She may be able to give you some pointers, sir.’

  Bateman had to stop himself from smiling. He could see the laughter in Palmer’s eyes.

  ‘I’ll bear it in mind, Palmer. Off you go – and remember, don’t rock the boat.’

  ‘Me, sir? No, never.’

  Palmer took the stairs down to his floor. He didn’t like the idea of Bateman getting the top job; another stuffed shirt paying more attention to cutting costs than to cutting crime figures. But he did like the idea of Bateman not being his boss anymore. Mind you, better the Devil you know.

  He gave a little jump of glee off the last two stairs, and immediately wished he hadn’t when his sciatica stabbed into his left thigh as a reminder of his age; too old for gleeful little jumps.

  In the Team Room Claire and DS Singh were tapping away at their keyboards as usual.

  ‘Nothing happening here, guv,’ said Gheeta. ‘We haven’t really got a starting point – needle in a haystack job. We’ve got the tube station footage though. It was definitely a push on Brockheimer, not an accident.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said and sat beside her. ‘Let’s have a look.’

  They watched the screen as the tube station platform filled up with commuters. Gheeta had put a red arrow marker that followed Brockheimer as he came onto the platform from the escalator, and a green arrow that followed his killer who looked to be a man – or maybe a woman – in jeans and a hooded top. The platform was full of the rush hour crowd, so it was difficult to see the two of them entirely; the man stood two people behind Brockheimer, who was at the front of the platform. The train came in and the killer made his – or maybe her – move, barging forward between the other passengers and giving Brockheimer a heavy push, sending him over the platform edge and down onto the line. It wasn’t subtle or disguised, and it was obvious to all the passengers nearby what had happened. Shock permeated them into a frozen state; hands were raised to mouths, and a stillness overcame the immediate throng; except for one person – the hooded assailant – who barged his or her way through them back to the rear of the platform and disappeared through the arch leading to other platforms and public exits.

  ‘That’s it,’ Gheeta sighed loudly. ‘Didn’t stand a chance, did he? I’ve sent a copy to Forensics to see if they can enlarge the picture and maybe get a face shot or something that identifies the killer. Don’t think we have much chance though, as he or she was well-covered. I’ve got the CCTV from the entrance, but he doesn’t show on that, either entering or leaving; so he might have come on another train and left on one going the other way on the Metropolitan line and got out at any of the stations along the route. Or he could even have changed lines somewhere and then got off anywhere on the whole Underground system.’

  Claire sat back in her chair.

  ‘The Sergeant’s right, sir – finding a needle in a haystack would be easier. Where do we start cross referencing people? As far as I can find out from the net so far, all the band had the same social circle. Their Facebook pages are just about identical; they knew all the same people, and so presumably they had all the same enemies too. I’m checking out all the fans that have left condolence messages on the Facebook memorial page first, and there’s a lot of them.’

  Palmer was surprised.

  ‘That’s a bit off, isn’t it? A memorial page…’

  Claire shrugged.

  ‘It’s the done thing these days – any celebrity popping their clogs seems to get a memorial page on Facebook.’

  The phone rang and Gheeta answered it.

  ‘Okay, yes that’s fine. Bring him up, please.’

  Palmer raised inquisitive eyebrows as Gheeta stood up and went to the door.

  ‘Rob Elliott has turned up; hopefully with his list of enemies of the band.’

  She went and met him at the lift and brought him in. Pleasantries were exchanged, and Claire introduced.

  ‘Sit yourself down, Mr Elliott,’ Palmer said. ‘Tea, coffee?’

  ‘No, I’m fine thanks; and please call me Rob.’

  He looked around.

  ‘So this is where it all happens, eh?’

  Palmer smiled.

  ‘No, it all happens outside. This is where we try to make head or tails of it.’

  Elliott pulled a folded piece of paper from his inside pocket.

  ‘I’ve brought a list for you like you asked. Not a very long list, I’m afraid. As I said before, Solly did all the hiring and firing and we just smiled apologetically when people left, making out that it was beyond our control.’

  He caught sight of the case progress board on the wall with the pictures of the band members taped to it and walked over. Under the pictures of Stag George, Maurice Jade, Frank Moss and Solly Brockheimer were the words ‘dead’. He turned to Palmer.

  ‘Christ! That brings it home doesn’t it, eh? Then there was one…’

  ‘Which is why we have you under protection, sir.’

  Palmer moved beside him and patted him on the shoulder.

  ‘Don’t want you on the memorial page do we, eh?’

  ‘What memorial page?’

  ‘The one on Facebook.’

  ‘I didn’t know there was one.’

  ‘We presumed your record company put it up.’

  ‘If they did they didn’t ask me.’

  Gheeta pulled it up on her screen.

  ‘Have a look.’

  Rob Elliottt sat beside her and looked at the black-edged screen with a series of band pictures, followed below by various messages from fans. He wasn’t impressed.

  ‘I don’t like that. Bit cheap and tacky isn’t it, eh? No, I don’t like that at all. I know the lads wouldn’t want that sort of thing.’

  He pulled out his iPhone, flipped it open and tapped a speed dial number.

  ‘I think that can come down pretty quickly. Awful…’

  He spoke into the phone.

  ‘Shirley? Hi, Rob Elliottt… Yes, fine thanks… Yes I know, we will all miss him. Shirley, I’m looking at the band memorial page on Facebook; it’s pretty awful, cheap and tacky, and I’d like it taken down. I wasn’t consulted… You didn’t… Okay, I’ll hang on.’

  He covered the phone and addressed the others.

  ‘She’s our PR lady and knows nothing about it. She’s finding out who in the Social Media Department sanctioned it.’

  They waited a minute or so and then Shirley came back.

  ‘They didn’t? Really? Okay… Yes, please go ahead. Thanks Shirley, talk soon. Bye.’

  He shut his phone and sat back.

  ‘They didn’t put it up; nothing to do with the record company. They’re having Facebo
ok shut it down. Usually takes a day or so.’

  ‘So, who did put it up then?’ Palmer asked.

  Rob Elliottt shrugged.

  ‘No idea. I suppose it could be a fan?’

  Palmer turned to Gheeta.

  ‘Anything we can do to find out?’

  ‘I can trace the original IPS of the person who posted it? Hang on.’

  And she was away, tapping her keyboard and hacking into the page’s data. She had a thought.

  ‘Claire, get on the front page and bring up the list of ‘friends’ and print it out before they pull it down.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Claire brought the page up on her computer and started the task.

  ‘There’s lots of them.’

  Rob Elliott laughed.

  ‘At our peak we had a hundred and thirty-eight thousand members of the Fan Club.’

  ‘Christ!’ said Claire, looking aghast. ‘Hope they aren’t all ‘friends’ on here. I’ll be here all night.’

  Palmer was lost.

  ‘Friends?’

  Gheeta explained as she worked.

  ‘If you have a Facebook page guv, people ask to be able to see it and post things on or make comments on anything you post by becoming your ‘friend’. They click an icon and then it asks you if you want them to be your ‘friend’ and see what you post and be able to post back. You can say yes or no.’

  ‘Sounds a good way to waste a lot of time to me.’

  ‘It is,’ Rob Elliottt agreed.

  Claire gave a sigh of relief.

  ‘There’s only six hundred and eighty-two ‘friends’ on the memorial site, I’m glad to say. I’m downloading the list into a PDF file in case it’s taken down before I can print them all out.’

  Gheeta nodded.

  ‘Yes, good idea. Well, I’m sorry to say we aren’t going to get to know who put the site up as they obviously don’t want anybody to know. It’s been routed through proxy servers in Eastern Europe and a mousetrap.’

  Rob Elliottt looked at Palmer who shrugged.

  ‘No, I have no idea what she’s talking about either. But I take it we’ve hit a brick wall.’

  Gheeta nodded.

  ‘We have, guv. Whoever put this Facebook site up did it through eight unregistered servers in Romania and Bulgaria, and linked them together so that when you finally get to the last one it sends you back to the first one again, and that just repeats and repeats the process ad infinitum. It’s a well-used system on the dark web – a brick wall, known as a mousetrap.’

  ‘Clever bugger, eh? But why would they want to do this? The content seems okay; nothing nasty about the band or anything like that.’

  ‘They could be bootleggers, collecting the Facebook addresses of the genuine fans so that at a later date they can offer them fake band memorabilia or illegally pressed live recordings – bootlegs.’

  Rob Elliottt nodded.

  ‘We’ve had that in the past. Usually they have recordings of live shows and flog them outside the venues; got so bad in the early nineties we had security people checking bags at the concerts for recording gear being smuggled in.’

  ‘Well, well, well!’

  Claire spoke slowly and sat back in her chair.

  ‘Look at this. Here’s a surprise friend on the list.’

  ‘Somebody we know?’

  Palmer was hoping for a lead.

  ‘You bet.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘A certain DCS Palmer.’

  They all turned and looked at him. You could have heard a pin drop.

  Palmer thought for a moment.

  ‘I don’t have a Facebook page, so it can’t be me.’

  ‘You have now, sir.’

  She clicked on his name in the friends list on the memorial page and up came the DCS Palmer Facebook page. The header picture across the top of the page was the cover of the Revolution LP ‘Storm The Barricades’.

  ‘And you only have one friend.’

  ‘I have?’

  ‘Calls himself ‘Just Desserts’. Bit ominous, isn’t it? Considering what’s been happening.’

  Palmer nodded.

  ‘He’s our man then, got to be; and he wants to play a game of ‘catch me if you can’ by the look of it. Silly boy – putting his head above the parapet like this and coming out into the open, gives us a target’.

  Gheeta had been tapping away.

  ‘Both your site and his are non-traceable, guv. His site is just a blank colour wash, nothing else; so he must have set it up just to be able to write on other sites like the memorial one and yours. Why would he do this?’

  Palmer rubbed his chin.

  ‘Recognition, any criminal profiler will tell you that; he’s after recognition. He’s done four murders, and none were reported until Mr Brockheimer gave the story to the press. Our killer is a star in his own mind and wants to be lauded as one by other people. He wants recognition for what he thinks are the perfect murders; and that’s when this type of killer trips themselves up.’

  He pointed to the ‘Barricade’ picture.

  ‘He’s gloating and threatening at the same time; he’s showing us the three members of the band he’s killed plus Brockheimer, while at the same time putting Rob in the picture which is the threat.’

  He looked at Rob Elliottt who leant forward and pointed at Brockheimer in the picture.

  ‘He’s got the wrong bloke then. That’s not Solly, that’s our first manager Peter Brown.’

  The silence was deafening. Palmer looked at DS Singh and raised his eyebrows. She shook her head.

  ‘He’s not on our check list guv, and he’s not named on the record sleeve or we’d definitely have him on the list.’

  ‘He wouldn’t be named on that sleeve,’ Rob Elliottt explained. ‘We’d cut that record and done the sleeve photo, and then he was sacked just before it was released. No time to have another picture taken, so all they could do was erase his name from the credits on the back.’

  ‘Sacked?’ Palmer said, all ears. ‘What was he sacked for?’

  ‘Nothing bad, nothing like that. Pete was a school mate who’d been with us since we started out, but we’d got to a level where the powers that be at the record company wanted a professional management company to take over; it was all getting a bit too much for Pete to handle. One day he was there, and the next they told us he’d left and Solly’s company was taking the reins.’

  ‘Did he stay in touch?’

  ‘No, but we would see him now and again in the audience at gigs. But he never came backstage or anything like that. Shame, really.’

  ‘Where did he go, what did he do?’

  ‘No idea, but he was into IT and very good at it; he built our first website and stage sound systems. Good ones they were, too. So, I imagine he probably got into computers or software as that was his pride and joy, as well as his Mercedes SL280 car. He renovated it from basically a heap of scrap. He loved that car, sprayed it bright red. Everybody in the business knew it.’

  ‘Recognition principle again,’ Palmer said softly. ‘He wanted praise for his work. The band was getting all the plaudits and attention and he wasn’t because nobody recognised him as the manager. So, by driving a stand-out bright red car they would.’

  Gheeta spoke softly.

  ‘Being so good at IT and web building he’d know all about Facebook and the dark web and how to use them, wouldn’t he.’

  Rob Elliottt went quite pale.

  ‘Oh my God, you think he put the page up. You think he’s the killer.’

  Palmer gave him a reassuring pat on the back.

  ‘We don’t know – bit early to make that assumption. But we’ll check him out at CRO and hope he comes back clean. In the meantime, I’ll get a car to take you home; and don’t worry too much, you’ve got officers outside your place and two will be inside with you twenty-four seven, so just carry on as normal. Only difference is you’ll have company. If you need to go anywhere, you’ll have two of our chaps with you al
l the time.’

  He gave Elliott a fatherly smile.

  ‘Hope you’re not courting? Could be a bit awkward.’

  ‘Courting? No way. I’ve two broken marriages behind me and I’m not going down that road again.’

  He froze.

  ‘You don’t think one of my exes could be…?’

  Palmer laughed.

  ‘No, not a chance. If you think of anything connected with Peter Brown give us a call, okay?’

  ‘Okay. God, I can’t believe it would be Pete. He’s just not the sort.’

  Palmer shrugged.

  ‘People change and do strange things when jealousy or the thought of revenge starts to eat into their minds; and if he’s had thirty years of it in his head it might just have built and built until it pushed him over the edge. But, let’s hope it’s not him and we can clear him from the picture, as he sounds quite a nice chap.’

  He nodded to Gheeta, who stood and steered a rather thoughtful Rob Elliottt out of the room and down to street level for his ride home.

  Palmer sat deep in thought, looking at his Facebook page and wondering just what Just Desserts was planning as the next move. Obviously, it had to be something that would get him close to Rob Elliott; close enough to kill him, which was made harder now that he had shown his hand to the police. So why had he? Was he hoping to control Palmer’s moves? Send him on wild goose chases? Or was it the usual egoistic drive of the serial killer to have recognition?

  Palmer thought hard. How shall I play him? Make contact online and play him along? Annoy him so much that he breaks cover? Or perhaps just sit tight and make no comment so he thinks we haven’t noticed him? That might annoy him even more.

  Gheeta came back into the room.

  ‘He’s off with two armed protection officers for company. I hope they like heavy rock music.’

  She sat at her computer.

  ‘Right. I have an idea, guv.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘We can log into Just Desserts’s ISP server – that’s his Internet Service Provider, like Yahoo or BT – and I can flag up his unique customer code so that we get a heads up whenever he logs onto Facebook. Being a clever so and so with IT knowledge he will be using a mobile phone to log on as a landline is easily traced; so, when he logs on we need to keep him online long enough for me to hack into the ISP, get the mobile number and then run it through the service provider’s customer bases, which will give me a postcode for the area he’s logged in from – and postcodes generally only cover about half a dozen addresses.’