by LJ Ross
* * *
At precisely the moment Lowerson discovered a framed photograph stuffed inside a hidden compartment in the wooden panelling of Barbara Hewitt’s desk, the nuns of Our Lady of Charity Care Home in Newcastle reported the disappearance of Sister Mary-Frances. A search party was quickly organised and able-bodied volunteers took to the streets to find her, scouring the riverbank where it was widely known that she liked to walk in the afternoons.
Some of them whispered about old-age statistics on depression and others pooh-poohed the idea as they remembered the nun’s zest for life and her lifelong commitment to God and to the needy.
Nobody worried about The Graveyard Killer because Mary-Frances had been old and grey, not young and beautiful. Who would kill an old nun?
It was unthinkable.
They followed the path of the inky-black river, their torches flickering in the darkness while their footsteps trampled over the ground where the heels of Mary-Frances’s shoes had dug tracks in a wasted effort to survive.
CHAPTER 16
MacKenzie had spoken of finding the skeleton in Barbara’s closet. As it turned out, the skeleton was a faded photograph of a younger Barbara surrounded by around forty children of varying ages inside a cheap wooden frame. But instead of a closet, they found the photograph hidden inside a panel dug into the antique desk in her spare bedroom.
“There’s no way this photograph found its way in there by accident,” Lowerson said, to murmured agreement from MacKenzie.
“Which tells us that she wanted to hide it away but couldn’t quite bring herself to dispose of it. How interesting.”
Lowerson used the edge of a pen knife to ease the backing away from the frame, which had almost welded itself to the photograph after years of heat and humidity.
“Aha! Here we go,” he gently prised the photograph away from the cheap wood and flipped it over. On the reverse side, Barbara’s swirling handwriting read:
OUR LADY OF CHARITY ORPHANAGE
ROTHBURY HOUSE
CHRISTMAS 1989
“I know that name,” Lowerson said, and started to root around for his smartphone. He spent another minute scrolling through his e-mail inbox until he found what he was looking for.
“Rothbury House?” MacKenzie queried. “Yes, I think it’s on the outskirts of town—”
“No, no,” he said, frantically. “Here it is. An old nun had been reported missing and it just came through as a general alert—look at the name.”
He handed MacKenzie the phone.
“Sister Mary-Frances Creighton, an eighty-five year old nun, was reported missing this afternoon from Our Lady of Charity Care Home,” she read out. “An informal search is underway and Missing Persons officers are investigating. Her disappearance is being treated as ‘low risk’.”
MacKenzie handed the phone back to Lowerson.
“Our Lady of Charity,” she repeated, gunning her car into life again. “I have a feeling that Missing Persons will be upgrading her risk category very shortly.”
Lowerson’s fingers flew over the screen while he performed a series of internet searches and MacKenzie executed a smooth u-turn.
“ ‘Our Lady of Charity’ is a network of Catholic-run orphanages and old-age care homes—they have them nationwide. The care home in Newcastle is one of them; it’s down near the river at Newburn, which is where they’re searching for the missing nun.”
“Is the orphanage still operating?”
Lowerson hurried to find the answer.
“No, Rothbury House is now owned by the RAF and it’s used as a sort of getaway for service personnel and their families. It’s a beautiful old building,” he thought aloud, as an image popped up on his screen of a stately home with perfectly manicured lawns and picture windows. “I’m searching archived news articles now.”
MacKenzie frowned ahead at the road, her mind working quickly as each new piece of the jigsaw began to fall into place.
“The orphanage closed down in the winter of 1990, which isn’t long after this photograph was taken,” Lowerson declared.
MacKenzie cast her mind back to the late eighties, when she was a young woman living back in Ireland. Her attention would not have been drawn by a local news item concerning an orphanage in the wilds of Northumberland. But she did remember wider reporting of endemic abuse within Catholic-run orphanages around that time.
“Something happened around then, Jack,” she said. “Run a search on child abuse in association with that group.”
“I’m searching…wait, here’s something. It’s not child abuse but it’s still a scandal.”
He paused to read the news article and, pixel by pixel, the image of a teenage girl began to materialise.
“Oh my God,” he whispered.
MacKenzie looked away from the road for a second, filled with concern.
“What’s the matter?”
“They’re connected, Mac,” Lowerson spoke quickly, the words tumbling out of his mouth. “Around Easter 1990, a girl committed suicide—she was called Grace Turner. She threw herself off the roof of Rothbury House, according to this report. The orphanage tried to cover it up, apparently, but it got out and the papers had a field day. The church’s reputation was already in tatters after recent investigations into sexual abuse, so the orphanage decided to close for good.”
“What happened to the children?”
MacKenzie took the slip road from the dual carriageway towards the west of the city.
“I can’t find anything about what happened to the children,” Lowerson mumbled. “They probably scattered all over the place or were redistributed into other orphanages. I can only see—”
“What? What can you see?”
“There was an inquest into Grace Turner’s death in May of 1990. It was reported in The Evening Chronicle. I recognise three of the names reported there: Sister Mary-Frances Creighton, Barbara Hewitt—who’s listed as the children’s nurse—and…it’s…it’s him,” Lowerson stammered. “The priest responsible for the pastoral care of the orphanage was Father Simon Healy.”
Lowerson looked across at MacKenzie’s profile, briefly lit up by the headlights of a passing car. It brought to mind thoughts of Italian sculptures: beautiful in its perfection but stony and unyielding. He was pleased that it was too dark for her to see him blush at his own thoughts.
“When we spoke to Father Healy, he told us that he hardly knew Barbara Hewitt. He never mentioned such a specific connection, having worked at the orphanage together.”
“He lied,” Lowerson said, bluntly.
“It’s precisely the kind of omission that causes people like me to draw adverse inferences about his character,” she gritted out..
“Grace Turner was a redhead,” Lowerson added. “There could be a connection to Operation Angel.”
“Why do you think I’m driving like a maniac?” She threw out the question with a feral grin and flipped the internal switch to operate the siren on the roof of her car, just for good measure. After a few more minutes of speedy manoeuvring, CID Headquarters emerged as a beacon in the night, a port in the present storm. Its long, unappealing windows radiated cheap yellow light and its boxy lines were like an old, familiar friend they hadn’t seen in too long.
Both detectives ran the distance across the car park and through its scarred front doors.
* * *
The Incident Room was full to brimming with staff, including the unwelcome addition of Chief Constable Morrison, who positioned herself inconspicuously in the corner but nonetheless managed to convey the enormity of her presence to everybody in the room. Ryan knew that her attendance meant only one thing: that his team was about to receive an edict. The fact that Morrison had chosen to deliver it in front of the assembly and not in private also told him that her patience was wearing thin.
Join the club, he thought.
“Alright! Anybody who doesn’t have their arse parked on a seat, sort it out!”
Chairs scraped against t
he mud brown carpet tiles.
“Before I get into it, I want to thank you all for your hard work over this weekend. I know it’s the job we all signed up for but some of you were expecting to enjoy a bit of a holiday, so I want to thank you personally for setting aside your disappointment. I know that the families of these three women are thankful, too.”
Ryan sent Morrison a swift glare to drive home his point. If The Graveyard Killer hadn’t been caught, it was not because of any slipshod policing from his staff.
“Here’s the situation, folks,” he walked around to the board at the front and pointed at the row of images. “We now have a potential third victim. Her name is Tanya Robertson, aged 36, wife and stay-at-home mother of two children. As you can plainly see, she has red hair and falls within the same age range as his previous two victims.”
He swept his eyes around the room.
“Unlike the previous two victims, Tanya has not yet been found—”
“Honestly, guv, there was no movement over at All Saints Cemetery,” one of the constables piped up, a bit worriedly.
Ryan held up a hand to ward off any similar interruptions.
“I’m not suggesting that any of the surveillance teams fell asleep on the job. In fact, our current thinking is that we did too good of a job because we managed to scare our killer out of the city altogether.”
He let that sink in and there were a few mutters from the bright sparks amongst them.
“How can you be so sure?”
Heads swivelled to the back of the room, in the direction of where Morrison had spoken.
“We can’t be sure, at least not yet,” Ryan said flatly. “But we have a solid line of enquiry.”
He moved across to the map and pointed a finger at an area highlighted in yellow.
“This area indicates four of the counties falling under the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle, which is where Catholic burials took place today. There were twelve of them, in total.”
“Why only Catholic?” Again, from Morrison.
“The content of the notes that The Graveyard Killer leaves behind is Catholic and both of the funerals due to take place where we found Krista and Karen’s bodies were Catholic ones. These are both strong factors.” He paused, then added, “Of course, if this line of enquiry fails, we can branch out into other religious denominations, if necessary.”
Morrison remained quiet, which Ryan took as a signal to continue.
“Phillips and Yates in particular have devoted a lot of time to a process of elimination over the past two days,” he caught Frank’s eye and nodded his thanks. “The result of that is we now know that relevant individuals in Newcastle City Council, contractors of the Council and both funeral directors employed to manage the funerals taking place on Friday and Saturday at West Road and Heaton cemeteries are not considered suspects in this investigation.”
“Are you saying it’s somebody in the church?” Morrison asked, a bit sharply. She had just come off the telephone after a long and heated argument with the Media Liaison for the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle, who had reminded her in no uncertain terms that, if her department so much as slurred one member of the church without proper evidence, they would not hesitate to bring a private court action.
Ryan could read the Chief Constable like a book.
“Tell the church elders to calm down,” he snapped. “I’m saying that it is looking most likely to be someone connected to the church. That could include anybody with access to their internal systems because that’s the key here. Somebody had access to the calendar of forthcoming burials, was familiar with the individual cemetery sites and was able to enter and leave using a key, which he most likely copied or stole.”
“That doesn’t sound promising,” Morrison countered.
“It’s more than we had this morning,” Ryan shot back, eyes flashing. He didn’t need naysayers at this point in the investigation, when it was imperative that the team kept their spirits high and focused on catching a killer.
“Geography might help us to narrow our search,” he continued, moving back to the map to indicate two large blue pins. “We have St Andrew’s Church here and St Mary’s Cathedral, further south and not far from the station, here.”
Then, he tapped some other pins which marked the spot where each victim was last seen alive.
“I don’t need to be Inspector Columbo to figure out that, in each instance, the site where these women were taken was within a ten minute walk, or a five minute drive, of one or both of these churches. We also found circumstantial evidence at Karen’s house to suggest that she might have, at some stage, attended Narcotics Anonymous—held on Friday nights at St Andrew’s Cathedral.”
Ryan looked across at Phillips and invited him to jump into the briefing. The latter fiddled with his tie as an automatic gesture before speaking—today, it was a relatively tasteful black silk number with a small row of white piano keys embroidered along one side.
“I had a word with Krista’s widow, who told me that she sometimes volunteered at the soup kitchen at St Andrew’s on Sundays. I also rang Tanya’s husband, who told me that his wife used to go along to the playgroup at St Andrew’s with their youngest.”
“This sounds like a lot of conjecture,” Morrison interrupted him. “I want those twelve sites exhumed immediately and Tanya Robertson brought home to her family.”
Ryan gave her a look that would have shrivelled a lesser person.
“If we wait another twenty-four hours, we might have a better idea of where to search,” he argued. “The public won’t be happy anyway, seeing Tanya brought home in a body bag. They want us to find the person responsible and the best way to do that is to continue focusing the investigation around these two churches.”
Morrison thought of the negative press accumulated so far and, inevitably, politics won out.
“Get it done, Ryan. First thing tomorrow morning, I want the wheels in motion for exhuming those bodies. That’s an order.”
He was about to launch into another argument when the double doors to the incident room burst open dramatically. Everybody turned to seek out the source of the commotion and, when Phillips saw that it was MacKenzie, he jumped out of his chair with more haste than finesse.
“Denise?”
She paused briefly to lay a reassuring hand on his arm, then headed directly to the front of the room where Ryan was poised for action, anticipating that they were about to impart some game-changing news.
“Sir, evidence has come to light during the course of our investigation that we believe connects with Operation Angel.”
Lowerson handed him the photograph and Ryan looked down at the image. A group of children ranging in age from toddlers to sixteen or seventeen-year-olds stood in two rows, with the smallest at the front. Eight nuns stood to either side, one of whom was a middle-aged Sister Mary-Frances Creighton, as well as a much younger Barbara Hewitt with a blonde fluffy perm courtesy of the fashion at the time.
Ryan flipped it over and read the inscription on the back.
“ ‘Our Lady of Charity’? Explain, please.”
MacKenzie did, articulately and concisely.
“What about the other nuns or staff members of the orphanage? Whatever happened to them?”
“I looked into that briefly already, sir,” Lowerson said. “Father Simon Healy seems to be the only surviving member of the original church executive from Our Lady of Charity Orphanage. All the other nuns are deceased, Barbara Hewitt has been murdered and it’s looking increasingly likely that Sister Mary-Frances is going to turn up dead, too.”
Ryan frowned off into the distance while he processed this unexpected development. His eyes strayed to the murder board and to a collection of smaller notes that had been pinned there. His eyes narrowed into silver slits and, like a man in a daze, he wandered closer to inspect the handwriting on one of them and then compared it with another scrap of paper tacked nearby.
“Sir?”
He snapped back
to the present and frowned portentously.
“How old is Father Simon Healy?”
“Somewhere in his late fifties or early sixties, sir,” MacKenzie replied.
“Which would make him a man in his thirties back in 1990,” Ryan deduced. “You believe Grace connects to our present investigation—how?”
“Look at the age range, for starters,” Lowerson said. “Krista and Tanya were both redheaded women in their late thirties and Karen looked older than thirty-two. They all fall within the same range.”
Ryan accepted a copy of the online article Lowerson had printed as they talked, showing an image of a young Grace Turner, her bright hair glimmering with the sun at her back. The report listed her as being fourteen when she died twenty-six years earlier.
“You’re saying that these women are of a similar age to Grace Turner, if she were still alive today?”
Lowerson nodded.
Ryan took a moment to read the rest of the paperwork as it was fed into his hands and Morrison hurried across to join their huddle.
“What do you think?” she demanded.
Ryan ran a hand across the back of his neck and then looked up, a curiously guarded expression on his face.
“I think that Father Simon Healy is either a killer or the killer’s next target. He would have had access to internal church systems, he was in the area to kill Barbara Hewitt but the style is very different to The Graveyard Killer. Barbara Hewitt was killed by manual strangulation without any ritual element, whereas the victims of The Graveyard Killer are all much younger, of a physical type and have all been arranged in a very specific way, with Catholic overtones—”
“Healy was seen arguing with Barbara Hewitt on the day she died and then he lied about it when we asked him directly. Then, he lied by omission by choosing not to tell us that he had worked with Barbara years earlier at the orphanage in Rothbury and he made out that he hardly knew the woman,” MacKenzie argued. “It would have been easy enough for him to gain access to the church intranet because his parish falls with the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle. Sir, Grace Turner could be his twisted motive for killing redheaded women. As for the others, maybe he blamed them for her death? Perhaps the reason why there was no burial or Catholic rites is that he didn’t believe that Barbara Hewitt deserved absolution.”