“One thing, Jack,” he paused and I heard him drawing a hesitant breath. “I don’t rightly know how to say it. The victim hasn’t been identified yet.”
“Yes?”
“There’s a rumour that she worked at the hospital. She was found in the hospital grounds. Sorry mate, but her description matches that of Lucy.”
* * * *
The Hollamby hospital is a brand new building on the west side of town. I’d arranged to meet Stuart in the visitors’ car park. I screeched to a halt beside a silver Bentley, bleary eyed and exhausted with the strain and the fear.
Immediately after Stuart’s call I’d tried Lucy’s mobile but there was no reply, just the messaging service. I sent several texts, none of which were replied to.
Was this the end? Had her own premonition come true, that she was going to be killed before her thirty-eighth birthday?
Stu had prepared me for the worst, and the signs were not good. Lucy had said she was coming back to Canterbury last night, and that she was planning to call in at the hospital to see a friend. If she was okay, why on earth wasn’t she answering her phone?
I spotted Stu talking into his mobile near to the area that was cordoned off by police tape, to the side of one of the large modern glass-and-concrete buildings. Stu had shaved for a change, and was wearing a turtleneck red pullover and his habitual blue jeans. His hair looked less wild than usual. Of course the victim’s body had been removed, and there was nothing much to see.
“It’s okay,” were his first words, accompanied by a huge smile of relief. “The vic has just been identified. Wendy Smithson, she’d been visiting someone in the hospital, and he got her on her way home.”
“What do we know about her?”
“Nowt really. Just that she was a local woman who was walking through the hospital grounds when she was attacked.”
“Weapon?”
“Knife’s not been found.” Stu shook his head gloomily.
“And the Bible?”
“Found beside her head, not placed on top of the body like the others were.”
“Do you know what page it was opened at?” I asked.
“Numbers chapter 25, highlighted at verse 18. Stuart lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply, blowing smoke up into the sky as he frowned. “So you’ve finished Hero or Villain? and delivered it to Truecrime. How long before it hits the bookstalls?”
“They’re hoping within a couple of months. By mid January at any rate.”
“And after that you should have no more trouble with Sean Boyd.”
“Between now and then I do my best to lie low.”
Stu nodded, changing the subject: “Listen Jack, there’s summat different about this victim, seems the killer’s changed his modus operandi. The head hasn’t been mashed like the others, everything’s neater, somehow, I don’t know, whole thing’s more professional somehow. They’re talking about it being a copycat killing. I managed to talk to Wendy’s boyfriend. Wendy had an obsession about the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. She was convinced that she had evidence that Prince Charles’s ex-wife had been murdered. She was talking about producing something that would blow the Royal Family to kingdom come.”
“As I said, with this one, the head injuries weren’t so drastic. Death apparently caused by a single blow.”
I inwardly groaned at the thought of this victim being a conspiracy theorist. Wendy Smithson sounded as if she was suffering from a mental disorder. Obsessive personalities are often on the fringes of sanity, especially the type of person who has an unhealthy interest in famous people, and royalty frequently features in their fantasies. During my spell as an inpatient in a psychiatric hospital I’d met quite a number of them. Within moments of meeting you their pet subject is aired, whether it’s how they’re related to the royal family or, more often, that there’s an international conspiracy to kill them, and everyone they meet is a potential assassin. Once I remember, a man in my ward took a dislike to one of the nurses and wouldn’t let him near him because he was convinced the man was in the pay of the Soviet security services and was intent on administering radioactive plutonium.
“What are you two doing here?” Millicent Veitch appeared, alone, having just lifted the yellow taped barrier to the crime scene to pass through. Beyond the yellow tape a tent had been erected above what was presumably where the body had been found.
“Just taking a look around, love,” Stu said.
“You’d better make yourselves scarce, before DCI Fulford catches you.”
“What’s he going to do? Smack our bottoms?” Stuart sneered.
“You’ll be escorted off the premises.”
“Premises? What premises? This is the grounds of a public hospital, not a nuclear weapons silo.”
“All the same you should leave.” Millie’s mouth turned down at the corners as she hunched her thin shoulders against the wind.
“Millie, can I ask you summat?” Stu said.
“If you must.”
“Have you ever thought of taking a day off from being an arsehole?”
“What a way you have with words, Mr Billingham. No wonder you’re still a hack writer on a provincial rag.”
“As opposed to a hacked-off feminist who’s become a provincial hag.”
Millie’s face darkened with a full flush of colour. “This is a murder scene. Not the best place to have a shouting match, but I wouldn’t expect an oaf like you to behave with suitable decorum. I can get someone to have you removed from here.”
“Fuck off, Millie. This is hospital grounds, a public place. You’ve got jurisdiction behind them yellow lines, nowhere else.”
“Look, Millie,” I butted in, stepping between them. “Stuart didn’t mean to be offensive, okay?”
“Yes I fucking well did!”
“Shut up, Stu, just cool it, can’t you?” I turned back to Millicent. “Look, give us a break. We’re just tired and stressed, yeah? I’m sure you are too. We all want to find the Bible Killer, so why don’t we just try to help each other out? Stuart’s on the local paper, your press office needs his cooperation when you put out public appeals, you know that as well as I do. For heaven’s sake, why do we have to be enemies?”
“I’d rather have an outright enemy than be friends with a traitor,” Millie snapped.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I know you hate me, Jack, so never expect me to trust you. I know you resent me as a BIA, doing the job you were trained to do, but never managed to get enough experience to be consulted on important cases. You can’t help being jealous of my success.”
“I’m not jealous, Millie.”
“Oh no? When we worked together in Birmingham, why were you always hand-in-glove with the guys, leaving me out in the cold, ganging up against me, making me the butt of your jokes?”
“I didn’t. I had a few laughs with the other guys, but I promise none of them were at your expense. I wouldn’t be a bully like that Millie, I swear.”
“Really?” She smiled into my face. “Well I don’t believe you. But it doesn’t matter. Because now the boot’s on the other foot. In this investigation it’s me on the inside laughing at you, who’s on the outside looking in.”
Half an hour later Stuart and I were in the pub. I was making the most of a dried-up cheese sandwich with a Guinness, while Stuart had opted for the cold hotpot with a pint of Fosters.
Dave Parsons, the constable I’d spoken to last time I’d run up against Millicent Veitch, came through the door in the company of a man of around sixty. PC Randall’s companion was tall and upright, with a thick grey moustache and neatly combed hair, smart blue blazer and sober tie, one of those neckpieces that looks as if it denotes an old school or an army brigade. I summed him up as ex-army. He had a military bearing: upright stance, shining shoes, clean collar and tie.
Dave saw us from the door, and made his way across. Stuart knew Dave too, and Dave asked if he could join us and introduced his friend. The man’s name was J
ulian Grylls, and, to our delight, he turned out to be Wendy Smithson’s boyfriend. Dave made his excuses and left after about ten minutes, pleading an urgent appointment, leaving Stuart and me in the company of Julian, who seemed glad to meet us, and insisted on buying us drinks.
“I just never in a million years thought they’d actually do it,” Julian said, taking a sip of his large whisky. I noticed that the ends of his moustache were damp with the liquid. Almost as if he wasn’t thinking, he ruminatively sucked the soggy bristles into his mouth to glean the liquor.
“Thought who would do it?” Stuart asked.
“Why, the government, MI6, MI5, or whatever.”
“Why would the government want to kill Wendy?” I asked.
“Because she had evidence to prove that Princess Diana was murdered, that the car crash in Paris in 1997 was actually an assassination.”
I cringed inwardly. From the moment, thirteen years ago, when Princess Diana and her boyfriend Dodi Al Fayed, son of the Egyptian businessman Mohammad Al Fayed, were killed in a car crash in the Alma tunnel in Paris, there have been conspiracy theorists. Many people to this day believe that she was murdered by clandestine government agencies in order to clear the way for Prince Charles to marry the love of his life, Camilla Parker Bowles. True to form, the ones who were most vocal about the conspiracy theory tended to be the rabid believers, often obsessives, anti royalists, occasionally even morbidly deranged people. From the light of fury in his eyes as he spoke, I suspected that Julian belonged to the fanatic brigade.
“The thing is, Wendy had a very close friend, who had a loose connection with the security services, do you get me?” Julian looked at each of us in turn. “They have plenty of part-time operatives, you know. They call them ‘cut offs’ or ‘surrogates’. People who do their ordinary jobs, but are on the books of MI6, prepared to do the occasional job for them for ready money as and when. Well this guy, Wendy’s friend, took copies of some top-secret papers. He refused to tell anyone he’d done it, or where they were, because he knew that once they were in the public domain they could be traced back to him, and the chap was understandably afraid of repercussions. After all, we’re talking about folk who murdered a princess. Knocking off some ex spook, no one would blink an eye. But last month this guy died. He knew of Wendy’s determination to prove the truth, and he bequeathed her those papers.”
“Where are they now?” I asked.
“Gone. Didn’t they tell you? Wendy was killed in the hospital grounds, but her flat was burgled too. They left jewellery, and even some money she’d left out but they took all her papers, amongst which, I can only assume, were these particular incriminating documents, as well as her computers.”
“Have you checked?”
“Yes.”
“You have a key to Wendy’s home?”
“Yes, we are – I mean we were – close friends. She was one of my very closest friends actually. Friend is the wrong word really, but at my age it’s crazy to be described as a boyfriend, and we weren’t actually living together and partners in the true sense. But we were ‘together’ in the parlance of today. Wendy was everything to me. That’s why all this is so hard to take.”
“I never really followed what happened about the death of Princess Diana, it all passed me by,” Stuart said, halfway through his second bag of crisps, crunching noisily. “Just got the headlines. But how could they have faked an accident? Owt could have gone wrong.”
“MI6 often use motor accidents for the very reason that they’re one of the most common causes of death,” Julian went on, warming to his subject. I noticed his nails were bitten down to the quick. “Listen to these facts: Henri Paul, the driver of the car in which Princess Diana and Dodi and himself died, had a sample of his blood analysed, and the news was released that he had 1.75 g of alcohol as well as 12% of carbon monoxide in blood taken from the femoral vein and 20.7% from the heart – results which are medically nonsensical. If he’d had that amount of carbon monoxide in his system he wouldn’t have been able to walk, let alone drive a car. The blood samples were switched with one of the night’s suicide victims, who’d asphyxiated himself with car exhaust, and the fools just knew he was drunk and didn’t realise their mistake. Mercedes Benz, the manufacturers of the vehicle that crashed, were keen to do their own independent inspection of the car, to assess its condition and roadworthiness – they are the very best people to do such a test, and would be eager to exonerate their vehicle from being the cause. But they weren’t allowed to do so. It has been proved that Henri Paul was a part time employee of MI6, as well as other national security agencies. Henri Paul’s bank statements prove that payments were made to him from various such organisations over a very long period. Henri Paul took a different route from the one that would normally be taken that night. Against the express advice of the other security professionals, and also for no apparent reason, he didn’t turn from the Place de la Concorde into the Champs Elysees to take the simplest and shortest route to Dodi’s apartment. Instead he continued south, took an unplanned and unnecessary turn into the Place de la Concorde, and from there drove into the Alma Tunnel. A witness to the crash – the first man on the scene – rang the police, but no one arrived, so he ran on foot to the nearest police station to report what had happened to summon help, and he was thrown into jail, and nobody believed his statement: that he’d seen Princess Diana injured in a car crash. There were reports from some of the pursuing photographers of a motorbike in front of the doomed car, with a pillion passenger who shone a fantastically bright light through the windscreen of the Mercedes. The force of this startlingly powerful light suggests it was of the type used by the SAS to temporarily blind and disorientate people. Henri Paul wouldn’t have been able to see anything, or react in any way for about a minute afterwards.”
“Hold on, hold on Julian,” Stu said. “There were inquiries afterwards. The French authorities went to great lengths to prove it was an accident.”
“If they wanted to establish the true facts, why did they thoroughly disinfect the entire area where the accident occurred more or less immediately after the crash, before it could be examined by the specialist crime investigation team? Everyone acknowledges that a white Fiat Uno had a knock by the Mercedes at the end of the tunnel, immediately prior to the crash. Why did the police not search for this vehicle, the driver of which could have given important evidence of what he’d seen? And why three months afterwards was it generally known that this same white Fiat car belonged to James Adnanson, also a part-time employee of MI6. And that months later Adnanson’s Fiat was found in a dense wood in Nantes, burnt out, its driver James allegedly having committed suicide by pouring petrol over himself and his car – quite an unlikely method of killing yourself, wouldn’t you agree? I tell you gentlemen, the list of discrepancies, inconsistencies, ludicrous apparent mistakes and sheer unlikely happenings just goes on and on. Consider this: supposing you or I had an ex wife whom we hated, and who was threatening to tell all kinds of secrets that we would find harmful, and was someone who hated you and was in a position to do you real harm, is it likely that she’d wind up conveniently dead in a car accident within a relatively short space or time? Did you know that while she was married to Charles, Diana had a close friend who was her Personal Protection Officer, a man called Barry Mannakee, someone she told all kinds of personal secrets to? It became know that she’d been indiscreet, telling him things she shouldn’t have. He died unexpectedly too.”
“How did he die?” I asked.
“In a motorcycle accident.”
“So,” I continued, “Wendy’s friend who died recently, this spy, left her some documents that constituted evidence that Princess Diana’s death was caused deliberately by some clandestine government agency?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re saying that even though she was killed in the same way as the Bible Killer kills his victims, that she was, in fact, murdered by the secret services?”
“Yes. It’
s a happy coincidence for them that there’s a serial killer on the loose. They made use of that fact.”
“Come on Mr Grylls, that’s not very likely, is it?” Stuart said. “If all that you’re saying is true, why would they need to kill Wendy? Why didn’t they just burgle her flat and get hold of these papers? That would arouse a lot less suspicion.”
“They don’t like loose ends. And killing people is what they’re good at. There’s another little known fact: shortly before Princess Diana’s death, the precise details of a plan to assassinate Slobodan Milosevic by MI6 became known. The choice of a tunnel for the venue and the blinding light and the motorbike all matched the method used when Princess Diana was targeted, only a few weeks afterwards.”
We sat in silence for a few moments. I had finished my food, as had Stuart. Julian started talking again, and I wondered how soon we could tactfully get away. I’d had enough. I was tired, under a lot of stress, and this crazy conspiracy theory was something that just didn’t ring true to me. Conspiracy theorists are always rock-certain about their facts, and very often those facts are skewed, altered or even invented by people who aren’t in a position to know the truth. Besides, Julian, with his tidy appearance, perfect enunciation and eager-to-appear-rational manner had ‘obsessive crank’ written all over him. He spoke breathlessly, with the speed of light, and grief for his dead friend Wendy was, in my opinion, making him talk irrationally.
Julian Grylls went on talking for another hour, during which Stuart made his excuses and went home, and I eventually managed to get away. As I left him alone at the table, lost, sad and on the edge of despair, I wondered if the poor guy was heading for a breakdown. I knew the signs, for I’d been there myself. But there was nothing I could do to help him, it was hard enough sorting out my own problems.
After I got home, I drove round to Mad about the Book, hoping I might catch Lucy at home. I knocked on her door, but there was no reply.
Just then my phone rang.
“Jack?” I recognised Lucy’s voice. “I’ve just got your messages and texts. I’m just recovering from the worst bout of flu I’ve ever had. Couldn’t possibly travel back to Canterbury. Think I’ve slept solidly for a day and a-half. Are you still in Wales?”
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