by LJ Ross
“I don’t know for sure but I think she would have used the one nearest the cinema.”
“New Bridge Street,” Phillips chipped in.
“That’s the one. I rang them this morning and they said there was no sign of her car,” he shook his head and a tear leaked from the corner of his eye.
“Phillips?” Ryan turned his head for an update.
“We’re searching for Mrs Robertson’s car and trying to get hold of the CCTV footage now.”
Robertson looked between them with wide, frightened eyes.
“If her car is missing, that means she might be alive. Doesn’t it? Don’t you think?”
They remained silent, letting him ride out his pain.
“And—and she hasn’t been found in any of the cemeteries, has she?” he continued, in a voice thick with desperation. “It must mean she’s driven somewhere. I’ve probably wasted your time. Maybe she just needed to get away—”
Robertson ran out of steam and dropped his head onto his mother’s shoulder, where the old woman cradled it like a baby, rocking slightly while her eyes shone with grief.
Ryan swallowed the hard lump in his throat and stood up.
“We’ll do everything we can.”
* * *
Ryan was unnaturally quiet when they returned to the incident room, eliciting several wary looks from his staff. They had seen a wide range of mercurial moods from their chief inspector over the years, which they were learning to predict. He was often short-tempered and intolerant of anything less than a job well done. His voice spoke of privilege but his preferences were unpretentious. He was physically striking, a fact which he rarely used to his advantage and mostly detested as a distraction for the superficial mind.
Ryan could be sharp, cutting even, towards those he considered incompetent or deceitful. He was prone to long silences during which he ruminated on the possibilities surrounding a case and he knew the value of silence in drawing people out. He had a quick humour and appreciated the same in others. He was not a violent man, nor did he seek it out, but there lingered the suggestion of violence simmering beneath the surface.
The mask he wore to look upon the dead gave the impression of indifference but it hid an emotional well of feeling.
Right now, it looked like that well was about to flood over.
In his hands, Ryan held a freshly printed photograph of Tanya Robertson. He looked down at her image and thought of her husband and children whose lives were on the cusp of being shattered forever. Gently, he pinned it to the murder board, a little distance apart from the existing photographs of Krista and Karen, to account for the fact that none of them knew for certain that Tanya was a victim of The Graveyard Killer. Not yet.
“Frank?”
Phillips was never far away.
“She’s a goner, isn’t she?” the sergeant said, between mouthfuls of Jaffa Cake. Phillips was not a proponent of self-deception any more than Ryan.
“She’s not in any of the cemeteries in Newcastle,” Ryan replied. “We know that after last night’s surveillance.”
Phillips thought for a moment.
“It could be that she’s still alive and we’re all worrying for nothing but my nose says otherwise.” With theatrical timing, his nose twitched to emphasize the point. “He might have stashed her somewhere while he waits out the investigation, hoping that the surveillance will stop.”
“He doesn’t know the cemeteries are under surveillance,” Ryan pointed out.
“I don’t think this one is stupid,” Phillips returned. “He’d have to assume we’d watch the cemeteries, especially after the second victim.”
“Karen,” Ryan preferred names to numbers. “You’re thinking he still has Tanya?”
“It’s possible.”
“It doesn’t quite fit,” Ryan rolled his shoulders and turned to stare at the large map on the wall. “He kills them and he dumps them within a few hours. He doesn’t like to hold onto them.”
Ryan’s eyes traced the line he had drawn on the map to mark out the boundaries of Newcastle City Council and the answer became all too clear.
“He’s gone outside of the city limits,” Ryan spun around, eyes glowing. “The bastard knew we’d be watching the city, so he did the most obvious thing in the world and went to one of the cemeteries outside.”
Phillips nearly choked on the remainder of his cake.
“But how will we find her? There are—” Phillips did a quick count, “—eleven local council authorities in the North East, not counting Newcastle. I mean, there’s North and South Tyneside, Gateshead, Northumberland, Durham…take your pick. All of them with oversight of the cemeteries within their district and all of them within driving distance of where Tanya might have been snatched.”
“Then we’ll use our heads,” Ryan snapped. “First, I want to know about funerals which took place today across all of the cemeteries in the remaining eleven council districts, particularly Catholic burials. Second, I want to know which of those cemeteries also fall within the remit of the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle and would be easily accessible for somebody with their own transport. Third, I want to know who accessed the information, Frank. Give me a sodding name.”
Phillips opened his mouth to say something then thought better of it and simply turned on his heel. Ryan watched him hurry across the room to his desk, where he and PC Yates contacted the outside council authorities with all speed. Then Ryan turned and placed a call to Faulkner’s team to issue an advance warning that the services of his CSIs might be required in the none too distant future.
* * *
After another hour of scrupulous work, MacKenzie and Lowerson narrowed down the radius of their search into Barbara Hewitt’s last known movements to within a five minute walk of the Tyneside Cinema, The Lobster Pot and the New Bridge Street car park. Discounting large office buildings, their choice was reduced to a contest between a pilates studio, a small art gallery, a betting shop, several fast food restaurants and St Andrew’s Catholic Church.
The two detectives hit the streets once again. They began by speaking with the manager of the pilates studio but they were informed that it was a ‘members only’ establishment with no record of a woman by the name of Barbara Hewitt. Next, they braved the stale, disheartening interior of the bookies’ shop but there was no suggestion that Barbara had enjoyed gambling or had any money troubles—the two went hand-in-hand so frequently. They made polite noises at the ugly artwork in the gallery and, in exchange, they were treated to a private showing of the CCTV footage from Friday 18th which confirmed a partial sighting of Barbara Hewitt walking straight past the entrance and on to a different destination.
Couldn’t blame her, really.
Spurred on by the small victory, MacKenzie and Lowerson continued to ask around the fast food shops, but to no avail. In the end, when all other possibilities were eliminated, the most improbable of destinations became the only one remaining which fit the timings. Despite all they had been told about Barbara Hewitt’s staunch atheism, where else could the dead woman have whiled away over an hour of her spare time?
The answer was simple.
Barbara had gone to church.
* * *
The police had been around again, asking questions and throwing accusations.
Mick Jobes watched the spotty-faced constable and his bum-chum walk slowly back to their squad car and felt sweat pool at the base of his spine. Another woman was missing and they think she was taken from his car park. They had asked for the CCTV footage and he’d told them exactly the same story he’d told MacKenzie and Lowerson yesterday.
The cameras had a fault but the technician was due to come out on Monday. He’d be in touch as soon as the problem was rectified.
He’d even managed a smile.
The truth was, the cameras hadn’t worked properly in years. Every now and then, the one beside the main entrance crackled into life, but the ones in the stairwells hadn’t worked the entire time Mick had
been there. Management liked to keep up appearances—they said that having them there would be a deterrent for any would-be criminals. But the police had come back and he’d been forced to lie to them, again.
Mick wiped a thick hand over his face and reached for a grubby rag to blot away the streams of perspiration running across his forehead and into his eyes.
They said they had spoken to Jamil, the night security guard, who had told them he stopped by to pick something up yesterday afternoon and Mick wasn’t at his post when he should have been. Mick had watched them talking, casting suspicious looks in his direction now and then.
Then, they had asked him his whereabouts.
His whereabouts, he sneered.
He’d have had more respect if they’d just come out and said they thought he killed those women.
He started to sweat again.
Mick had told them to mind their own bloody business, then thought better of it and told them he was probably taking a piss when Jamil thought he was off-post. Wasn’t a man entitled to take a piss on a twelve-hour shift?
The coppers had given him one those empty, bug-eyed stares and told him to cough up the CCTV footage which would either corroborate his story, or not.
He had given them the finger but the fact was that he was worried. His hands trembled uncontrollably and he needed a drink. The booze had worn off, leaving a foul taste in his mouth and a monstrous headache as a reminder that he must have doused himself in ale the night before.
There were fresh scratches on his neck and along the left side of his face.
He caught sight of his reflection in one of the empty CCTV screens on the countertop beside him and saw the fear in his own eyes. He couldn’t tell the police where he was yesterday afternoon, or at any time during the night. He couldn’t tell them how he came to have scratches on his face.
He couldn’t remember.
The sounds started again, inside his head. The bombs. The cries. The shouts for help.
A woman’s voice.
When he looked back at the blank CCTV screen, he saw other faces beside his own.
Dead faces.
He began to cry, fat rolling tears which dribbled down his ruddy face.
CHAPTER 14
When news broke that another redheaded woman had gone missing, the media response was swift and merciless. The press set up a permanent camp outside CID Headquarters and condemned a lack of police presence on the streets, as if that alone would deter a killer with an agenda. The long honeymoon period following the collapse of the Circle cult had given Northumbria CID a brief respite from the usual complaints about lacklustre policing but the public had a short memory. Fear had that effect; images of Krista Ogilvy-Matthews, Karen Dobbs and now Tanya Robertson had been plastered across the front pages and their faces were now embedded in the public consciousness. The mood of the city had changed. Last year, Northumbria CID had cleaned up its act and divested itself of corruption, as far as it could. It had been heralded as a shining example to other police constabularies from all corners of the land and its senior officers had enjoyed a celebrity status never seen before. Now, that was all forgotten as another major threat presented itself. It was back to business as usual and if Ryan’s halo had slipped a little, that was no bad thing in his opinion because he had never asked for it in the first place.
More irritating was the wider domino effect which The Graveyard Killer left in his wake: small bands of extremists took the opportunity to hurl paint and eggs at the walls of St. Nicholas’ Cathedral, betraying not only a troubling level of intolerance but also a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the investigation, for St Nick’s was an Anglican church, not a Roman Catholic one.
Chumps, Ryan thought.
As he had predicted, pressure had come to bear on Chief Constable Morrison from the upper echelons of the police hierarchy and, in time honoured tradition, she had passed this on to Ryan who in turn favoured Phillips with his wrath at the whole sorry situation.
“Bloody buggering hell!”
“Couldn’t have put it better myself,” Phillips agreed.
“What does Morrison think I am? Psychic?”
“No use getting all het up about it.” Phillips was, as ever, the voice of calm amid the chaos, even if he felt jittery himself.
Ryan passed a tired hand over his face and looked up at the clock on the wall. It was only four o’clock.
“I think we’re making progress,” Phillips said, with unfailing optimism. “We’ve got a list of thirty-five funerals that were scheduled for today, across all the other council areas, twelve of which were Catholic burials.”
“That sounds promising,” Ryan perked up a bit. “That number could have been a lot worse.”
“Aye, well, don’t get too carried away. Do you want the good news or the bad news?”
“Hit me with the bad, first.”
“Maybe you should sit down.”
Ryan went halfway and leaned back against the side of his desk.
“Well, the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle covers five ‘episcopal’ areas, ranging across eight council areas: Newcastle, Gateshead, North Tyneside, South Tyneside, Sunderland, East Durham, South Durham and Northumberland.”
Phillips paused briefly for any comment but none was forthcoming, so he carried on.
“Within each episcopal area, there are a number of ‘deaneries’. Father O’Byrne has oversight of the Newcastle city centre deanery, for example.”
Again, no comment.
“Those twelve Catholic burials range across four council areas: Northumberland, South Durham, North Tyneside and Sunderland. All of the funerals have gone ahead which means that the graves have all been filled over.”
Ryan looked at Phillips for a full minute while his brain processed the magnitude of the operation that lay ahead. When he spoke, his voice was unruffled.
“These figures only apply if we presume that the killer stuck to his previous method and used a grave that had already been dug for him,” Ryan cautioned. “It’s perfectly possible that he decided to dig his own grave, as he did for Krista. Is there any way to narrow the search even further? On the face of it, we’re going to have to exhume twelve coffins in four counties to see what lies beneath them.”
A grisly prospect.
“Luckily, that’s where the good news comes in,” Phillips said enthusiastically. “PC Yates has been yapping at the heels of the IT manager at Newcastle City Council and she’s really come through. It turns out that the IT systems over there are actually pretty decent—”
“Wonders never cease.”
“Aye, you can say that again. It means there’s a digital record of every access made to the Bereavement Services database of forthcoming burials in the district. They sent through the data and the bottom line is that everybody is accounted for. Nobody except the three members of the Bereavement team have accessed the database in the last week and all three of them check out.”
He licked the tip of his finger and flipped over to the next page in his notebook.
“I also spoke to the remote services team who manage the integrated computer system for Hexham and Newcastle Church Diocese. I think I put the fear of God into him—ha ha—because some bloke sitting at his desk in Glasgow has just forwarded me a six-hundred page log of all the individual accesses made to their shared calendar in the past week, alongside the corresponding login IDs. The problem is, almost everybody logs into the shared calendar on a daily basis and there are hundreds of church and admin staff in the Diocese. There’s no way of being able to tell suspicious activity apart from normal activity from the login data alone.”
Ryan pinched the bridge of his nose.
“Remind me again how this is good news, Frank? You’ve just told me that almost everybody connected with Newcastle City Council has an alibi and we already know that the cemetery ground staff check out, as do the grave diggers and the funeral directors. Now you tell me that we’ll have to trawl through a list as long a
s the Yellow Brick Road to try to figure out if it’s somebody within the church.”
As the words left his mouth, the penny dropped.
“Phillips, did I ever tell you, you’re a genius?”
‘Not often enough, lad,” the other replied with a twinkle.
“Well I’m telling you now,” Ryan declared. “The Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle spans several neighbouring council districts.”
“Aye.”
“Which would explain how our killer might know about burials due to take place in any one of the council districts in the area, making it less likely that he is affiliated with any particular council and more likely that he is connected to the church in some way or another.”
“Aye,” Phillips said again.
“Which means that we’re closer than we thought we were. That’s good work.” He began to pace as he thought of the next steps. “What about the priests who conducted the funerals today? Are there any names you recognise? Anybody whose name comes up twice?”
Phillips scratched his chin.
“Not so far, guv. But I have another bit of good news: the visit we paid to Jimmy Moffa seems to have worked, because that ogre he calls a bodyguard dropped off some CDs earlier containing the CCTV footage from Thursday night, when Krista went missing. I’ve had a look and they show her walking away from the All American Diner at 21:13, alive and kicking and in the wrong direction for the taxi rank at the station. It’s looking like she planned to walk home. At the same time, I had a bit of a trawl through the city centre CCTV and I’ve got her heading north from The Diner, through the centre, in the direction of home. The last working camera is just before the Tyneside Cinema on Pilgrim Street, which has her passing at 21:24. I’ve got nothing after then.”
Ryan marked the final sighting on the map.
“That makes two victims snatched in the same area of town, Frank, coincidentally free of CCTV coverage. I don’t like it.”
“Aye, it smells off to me.”
“You know what else sits in the area?” Ryan tapped a knuckle against the map. “St Andrew’s Church.”
Ryan compared the locations where their victims were assumed to have gone missing with the nearest Catholic church in the area.