Angel: A DCI Ryan Mystery (The DCI Ryan Mysteries Book 4)

by LJ Ross

  He was about to give up, satisfied that the earring had been lost, when he found it.

  There was a small, shining pearl winking at him from the very depths of the boot where it must have fallen and become lodged. He was always careful to line the boot with thick plastic sheeting but he supposed it was always possible for something so tiny to work its way underneath.

  He emerged from the boot and held up the small earring to the light, as if he had found buried treasure.

  That had been a close shave.

  He was too relieved to notice that the garage doors had begun to open again, of their own volition.

  * * *

  Back at CID Headquarters, MacKenzie and Lowerson tapped into the radio frequency and munched listlessly on packets of crisps as they lived vicariously through Ryan and Phillips. It was like listening to a radio play and was no real substitute for being in the thick of it all. But if she was completely honest, MacKenzie was more than happy to step down on this occasion. The sense of creeping danger had followed her like a dark cloud for days, preventing her from sleeping properly and filling her with a constant urge to look over her shoulder as she went through the ordinary motions of life. If Conor O’Byrne was responsible for the notes left at her home, then they would bring an end to it when he was brought into custody—something that was very imminent now.

  “Did you hear what happened down at the New Bridge Street car park?”

  MacKenzie lifted the right ear of her headphones.

  “What’s that?”

  Lowerson reached across and picked up his notepad, flipping over a few pages.

  “Things have been moving so quickly, I forgot to mention it. We sent a couple of PCs around to chase up that CCTV footage which never came through. Mick Jobes told them the same story he told us: the cameras were faulty and they were due to be repaired.”

  Lowerson started to put his feet up on the table but MacKenzie slapped them down again. “Anyway, they smelled a rat. The boys decided to go over Jobes’ head and speak to the management. You remember, when we spoke to them, they confirmed Jobes’ story about there being a technical fault but now they’re telling a different tale. Turns out the cameras haven’t worked in over two years and they’re denying they told their security guards to peddle the story about them being faulty.”

  MacKenzie grabbed another mouthful of crisps.

  “So the company lied to cover themselves. Wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “Well, it gets better. The PCs went back for a follow up to double check Jobes’ story and he’d abandoned his post. They found him wandering around outside a pub half a mile away, apparently with no idea who he was. Doctors think he had some kind of ‘episode’.”

  “Episode?”

  Lowerson reached across for a handful of ready salted.

  “Yeah. He wasn’t even drunk; he was disorientated. The PCs say he was ducking, as if there were snipers trying to get him. Jobes tried to tackle them to the ground, apparently.”

  MacKenzie thought sadly of what she would have called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. They probably had some new acronym for it now but that’s what it used to be called in her day.

  “It doesn’t surprise me,” she said. “I told you he was medically discharged from the army, years ago. He’s had a drink problem and run-ins with the law ever since.”

  “He’s in hospital right now. I guess they’ll want to assess him.”

  MacKenzie nodded.

  “I hope they take care of him,” she said sincerely. “He’s not our man.”

  “Poor bastard.” Lowerson thought of the security guard and tried to imagine him wandering around the centre of Newcastle, terrified that bullets were flying all around.

  MacKenzie resumed listening to the radio. The incident room was nearly empty of its former staff, most of them having been assigned to field operations or sent home to their families. There were no support staff to answer the desk telephones, one of which hadn’t stopped ringing for the past twenty minutes.

  Although he risked missing some of the action, Lowerson took off his headphones and picked it up when it rang yet again.

  MacKenzie listened with only half an ear.

  “—from where?”

  Pause.

  “You’re sure it was him? Absolutely sure?”

  Another pause.

  “No, no. That’s very helpful. Thank you for calling this in, we’ll be in touch.”

  Lowerson replaced the receiver and when he returned to their miniature camp of snack food and headphones, his face was animated.

  “Mac! You’ll never believe who I’ve just spoken to.”

  She hung the headphones around her neck and gave him her attention.

  “Who?”

  “That was an investigator from the Solicitors Regulation Authority,” he began. “Apparently they’ve been trying to get through for ages.”

  MacKenzie pulled a face.

  “We’ve been a little tied up. What was so important?”

  “Well, they’ve been investigating one of the solicitors firms in the city for serious professional misconduct and they were granted an order to seize documents from the firm, which they exercised on Friday. They have their eye on one solicitor in particular and they looked over some of her recent e-mails as soon as they came in.”

  MacKenzie sighed.

  “Where is this going?”

  “I’m getting to it,” Lowerson said. “They haven’t had time to go through everything yet but they came across some e-mails that were seriously concerning. Turns out this particular solicitor represents Keir Edwards.”

  “The Hacker?” The man who had killed Ryan’s sister.

  “Yes. The solicitor has allegedly been accepting bribes from Edwards to perform certain errands for him, among other things. One of those errands was to deliver some hand-written notes to your home.”

  MacKenzie turned pale.

  “Written by him?”

  “That’s unclear. The solicitor might have written them herself before driving over to deliver them. Either way, we have our answer.”

  MacKenzie searched Lowerson’s enthusiastic face and tried to work up some excitement of her own. It was good news, she supposed.

  “Where’s the solicitor?”

  “The Fraud Team arrested her on Saturday night. She has a bail hearing tomorrow.”

  MacKenzie nodded and stood up to pace around a bit until she found her bearings. It was unsettling to learn that a notorious serial killer had chosen her to be the recipient of his intimidation. It was disgusting to know that Edwards would use the exploits of The Graveyard Killer to copycat his signature so that she would feel threatened, even if only for a few days.

  She nibbled the inside of her lip while she tried to understand his motivations. Edwards had always preferred slim brunettes, although if he was given the chance to brutalize, he wasn’t too fussy.

  All the same, why her?

  Then, all at once, it came to her. Last June, the team had investigated the deaths of several brunette women who had been killed by the psychiatrist Doctor Paddy Donovan. That man had connections with Keir Edwards and, to draw him out, MacKenzie had gone into HM Prison Frankland disguised as one of the pathetic, lonely women who wrote fan mail to Edwards.

  For a few hours, MacKenzie had been ‘Ruth’.

  He must have found out, she realised. Edwards’ ego was monstrous and would not tolerate that kind of deception since he prided himself on being highly intelligent and capable of seeing through police subterfuge. He had a long memory and a long reach, she thought uneasily.

  “Are you alright?” Lowerson was worried.

  “I’m fine,” she took a drink of water and painted a bright smile on her face. “In fact, it’s definitely good news. We know that Edwards was responsible for those notes and we also know that he’s safely behind bars. It wasn’t pleasant while it lasted but there’s no real threat after all.”

  Lowerson nodded his agreement.


  “Thank God for that,” he said. “You’ll be able to move around without me babysitting you all the time.”

  MacKenzie folded her arms.

  “You’re the only one with a baby face around here, boyo.”

  “It gets them every time,” he winked.

  CHAPTER 24

  “What have you got there, Father?”

  Conor O’Byrne turned in wide-eyed horror towards the garage doors, which opened slowly to reveal Ryan and his team, dripping wet and silhouetted against the thunderous rain which fell around them. He watched Ryan take a few steps closer until he came underneath the canopy of the garage and they were face-to-face, with the Lexus between them.

  He clutched the pearl earring in his hand and thought about throwing it away but they would still find it. Looking out into the rain, he saw four, maybe five other police officers and two of them were armed.

  Ryan watched him struggle.

  “It’s over, Conor.”

  O’Byrne looked down at the earring and shook his head.

  “Sheer dumb luck that Krista lost an earring,” he laughed, but the sound held no mirth.

  Ryan raised an eyebrow.

  “She didn’t,” he said, ever so smoothly.

  “What?”

  His hands began to shake as a slow, sneaking suspicion crept over him.

  “Nobody lost an earring,” Ryan repeated.

  O’Byrne looked incredulously at the pearl stud clutched in his palm, then back up into Ryan’s merciless face.

  “Take a look around the garage, Conor,” Ryan advised. “It’s rigged with cameras which were planted earlier today in anticipation of your visit.”

  O’Byrne didn’t bother to check.

  “You don’t have any evidence against me. I didn’t kill anyone,” he argued.

  “You’re right, we didn’t have much in the way of forensics,” Ryan began to move closer again and O’Byrne circled around the car away from him. “Although we do now have some footage of this Lexus driving in the direction of Edgewell Cemetery after ten o’clock on Saturday night, returning again just before eleven. That’s suggestive, but it was possible that others had access to the Bishop’s keys. We needed you to show your hand, and now you have.”

  The Dean’s mind raced, trying to follow the steps.

  “You contacted the Bishop and he authorised all this,” he realised, waving a hand at the hidden cameras. “Then you asked him to plant the idea of a missing earring and made me believe it was real.”

  Ryan nodded.

  “We knew you wouldn’t use church property to kill those women, or at least not the bricks and mortar kind,” Ryan said. “But we knew that if we gave you enough rope, you would hang yourself by leading us here. You had to be certain that the earring hadn’t fallen out somewhere inside the car. Only the killer would think to do that.”

  O’Byrne smiled nastily.

  “Clever bastard, aren’t you?”

  “Time to go,” Ryan stepped forward, intending to place him under arrest.

  It all happened in an instant. One moment, O’Byrne was leaning on the other side of the car and the next he had slipped inside the Lexus, slamming the heel of his hand against the internal locking system.

  Ryan swore and made a grab for one of the door handles, trying to open it.

  “O’Byrne! Don’t be a bloody fool, man. Open the door!”

  He slid the key into the ignition and fired up the engine, while Ryan ran around to the front of the car and put his hands on the bonnet.

  They looked at one another, through the windscreen.

  “Don’t do this,” Ryan told him.

  In answer, O’Byrne slammed his foot down on the accelerator and the car surged forwards, knocking Ryan off his feet. The other members of his team sprang out of the way to avoid being mown down, with Phillips finding himself face down on the gravel driveway. The firearms officers were on their feet again within seconds and, at Ryan’s signal, aimed at the tyres of the car that was now speeding down the driveway in a cloud of dust and rain.

  At the gates, the Lexus rammed through the squad car which blocked the exit with a hard metallic crunch and the police vehicle spun away and into the path of oncoming traffic on the main road. Despite a massive dent to its front end, the Lexus sped off into the darkness.

  The team ran back to their vehicles while Ryan shouted down the radio for immediate air support as they gave chase.

  * * *

  The atrocious weather made for an arduous night flight from Humberside to the North East and Andy Hayworth was not in full possession of his faculties. The chopper dipped and swayed without his usual skill and the high winds and rain made the journey all the more treacherous. He had turned the radio off as per his instructions and was taking his life into his own hands by completing the flight without the support of the control tower. He followed the perimeter of the coast, keeping a good distance from the shore and flying barely fifty feet above the billowing waves of the sea to make his presence harder to detect.

  Fear was a living, breathing thing inside him and its power was matched only by his terror at the thought of what would happen to his wife and child if he failed.

  Their pictures hung from a small chain in the cockpit of the helicopter.

  * * *

  Another helicopter circled above the western end of Newcastle city centre, shining its powerful searchlight through the dark and the rain until it latched onto a black Lexus hurtling along the A1 southbound at breakneck speed. Closing the distance behind him, Ryan was at the wheel of the white surveillance van and pushed its performance to the limits. Phillips braced himself against the dashboard with one hand while the other clutched a mobile phone to his ear as he spoke with colleagues in the Durham Police Constabulary. O’Byrne was heading in their direction, flying over the River Tyne with no immediate signs of stopping and they would need to head him off at the other end with as little disruption to ordinary motorists as possible.

  “Shame those roadworks have finished,” Ryan joked. “We could have used some traffic right about now.”

  Phillips was too busy keeping control of his bowels to laugh but he appreciated the thought. Behind them, more sirens joined the chase and blue lights filled the rearview mirror as they whizzed past an enormous shopping mall on the south side of the river.

  “Where the hell does he think he’s going?”

  “He’s not thinking straight,” Ryan replied, but then he thought of the geography and the meaning behind it all.

  Unconsciously, his foot eased off the pedal and Phillips threw him a nervous look.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I know where he’s going,” Ryan said. “He’s going to the Angel of the North, to see Grace.”

  “Grace Turner? The girl died years ago.”

  “Yes, but he remembers her through these women. Every time he kills them, he gives them the proper burial she never had. Didn’t you notice, Frank? The paper reported her death as a suicide and there’s no burial record for a Grace Turner in the Diocesan registers around that time. I’m guessing that Father Healy and the nuns denied her a proper burial on account of it being a mortal sin to take her own life. O’Byrne never got over it. Maybe he thinks the Angel is a monument just for Grace.”

  “He’s mad as a hatter,” Phillips pronounced.

  Ryan put his foot down again while his sergeant liaised with Durham Police, telling them to set up a road block around the entrance to the Angel of the North.

  * * *

  The car chase was reported across every major news channel and the residents of the North East gave up their usual nightly soap operas to enjoy the real life version playing out before their eyes. TV helicopters were scrambled to get live footage of The Graveyard Killer’s desperate flight across the river and in the meantime, newscasters relayed garbled eye-witness accounts from fellow motorists who used their five minutes of fame to discuss their own brief encounter with the country’s newest serial killer.
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  Oblivious to the coverage, Conor O’Byrne drove the Lexus onwards without any particular idea of where he was headed, although he found himself steering the car towards Gateshead. He heard the sirens howling somewhere behind him and the lack of traffic ahead told him that the police must have shut down access to the main road, so he knew he didn’t have long before they would close in.

  As he followed the A1 south along the edges of Gateshead, an enormous iron angel came into view, stark against the navy blue sky with its aeroplane wings angled forwards as if to welcome him. How many times he had looked at the Angel of the North and wondered if God had commissioned it himself, as a permanent monument to his messenger?

  His angel.

  It was his monument, O’Byrne realised, feeling the old energy coursing through his veins. God had erected it so that the people might know there was an angel here on Earth, one empowered to punish and to save in equal measure.

  * * *

  Andy Hayworth almost lost his nerve countless times on the journey north from Humberside. He visualised flying the helicopter into the black depths of the sea or careening into the rocks, rather than being forced to go on. But then he thought of his family and what they might be suffering; the unknown was far more terrifying than what he faced right now.

  So he mustered the strength to carry on.

  The city lights and his own experience told him that he was not far from his destination and he turned on the satellite navigation system once again so that he could locate the pick-up point.

  He was running exactly on time.

  CHAPTER 25

  They found Conor O’Byrne kneeling at the foot of the Angel.

  The Lexus had been discarded in the small visitors’ car park nearby with the driver’s door left wide open to the wind. Its engine oozed smoke from beneath the crumpled hood and one of its back tyres was completely flat, the rubber burned away almost to nothing. Ryan and Phillips led the procession of police vehicles and, after a brief word into his radio, their wailing sirens were turned off so that the only sound that could be heard was the rain drumming against the tarmac.