The Electrician's Code

by Clarissa Draper

  The two laughed.

  Theo leaned forward seriously and said, “It’s mind numbing that a previous suspect from a prior murder is at the crime scene and the actual suspect, the one who would have the greatest motive—Walter Peter’s wife—dies on the same day.”

  “It is,” replied Dorland. “And Mrs. Chu did re-confirm Ms. Armes’ alibi. I’m sorry, sir.”

  Theo’s mobile beeped and he retrieved an email from Sophia. Attached was a photo of one of Tipring’s artworks.

  I found another of Maddock’s tiled art. This time it was in one of the meeting rooms here at MI5. Apparently, Maddock sent it to his uncle. I decoded it and the poem reads:

  Can you find them

  I think not

  Buried forever

  There they rot

  I believe he created this one before the others. Bloody hell, he’s been taunting us for years. How he must have laughed at us and our stupidity. No wonder Earnest started a file on his nephew. I never suspected this to be a code, and even though I seem to look for codes in everything and I know it wasn’t my fault, I feel guilty. Guilty. I hope we can find the missing bodies.

  Theo messaged her back, What do you think we should do next?

  She replied, I think we should visit Mandy Ford.

  Who is Mandy Ford?

  Not a who, a where. It’s a small town. It’s near where Maddock Tipring grew up.

  What’s there?

  More tiled art.

  What? Why did he send one there?

  Apparently charity?

  Charity, my arse.

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Sophia drove around the roundabout on High Street six times before she spotted the old brick town hall in Mandy Ford. It sat nestled between an office of solicitors and a gent’s hairdressing shop. By then, all three of them were feeling ill.

  Parking was another matter. Although there was a designated car park of three small spaces, they were all occupied. Sophia let Theo and Dorland out and found a space for her car two streets over.

  Theo and Dorland stood at reception. Dorland tapped the little silver bell. No one came forward from any of the rooms behind closed doors.

  “Does anyone even work here? Perhaps it’s a show-yourself-around sort of place,” said Dorland.

  “It’s not that sort of place,” said Theo.

  A woman finally came out from a back room, turning her skirt around her hips as she walked. She pushed a bobby pin back into the loose bun atop her head.

  “My name is Olivia. How can I help you?”

  The men held up their warrant cards. She glanced at them briefly then walked behind the reception counter and hid the bell in a drawer of the desk.

  “I’m not doing any tours today. Although, I can’t imagine that’s why you’re here. I expect it about the Mrs. Chambers scandal. I gave the other officers my statement and really, nothing has changed.”

  A small bell above the door rang, and Sophia walked in.

  “Well,” said Theo, “I can’t say much about that affair. We’re just looking for a certain piece of artwork.”

  “A tile work,” Sophia said, and explained what it looked like.

  “Tile? You don’t mean the fountain do you?”

  “Well, we won’t be sure until you show us,” Theo replied.

  “All right, come this way,” she said and motioned them toward the back. She led them through a door out to a small garden. A half fountain, empty save a few leaves, stood at one end with Doc Tipring’s contribution as an odd backdrop.

  “Shit,” said Sophia.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Theo.

  “The bottom half of the message is covered by the blasted fountain.” She turned to the woman. “Why would someone cover the art?”

  “What art?” the woman replied. “The garden was like this when I started here. I would never allow them to ruin a priceless piece of art.” She cocked her head toward the wall, like it was a hidden picture. “That awful tile concoction, is it worth something?”

  “Some people find it fascinating,” Sophia said and took out a notepad. She started working on the code. When she was done, she handed Theo what she had.

  Mary, Mary, quite contrary,

  You held me captive

  Promises, promises

  I watched, I waited

  Briefly, briefly

  Signs of love

  Taken aback

  Down on your knees

  Then taken from you

  Buried, buried

  Mary, Mary, quite contrary

  Look how you made my garden grow

  Iris stand guard

  Your dream still

  Like the water above

  I hunt no more

  Oh dear, no de . . .

  “The rest of the tiles were hidden from view behind the fountain,” Sophia finally said and handed Theo the decoded message.

  He read it carefully and handed it to his partner. “What does it mean?”

  “I suppose it tells us what he’s done. I think the poem is pretty obvious. He’s killed and buried them somewhere. Do you think he’s disclosed the whereabouts farther down?”

  Sophia shrugged. “There’s no way to know without breaking apart the fountain. I’m not sure it would be a good idea to do that. Not yet, anyway.” She pointed her head in the direction of Olivia.

  “What do we do now?” Dorland asked.

  “I think it’s time for a drink,” Sophia replied and walked back through town hall and down the street toward the pub, leaving Theo and his partner to say their polite good-byes.

  The pub was busy.

  Sophia took a booth and sat in the high-back wooden chair while Theo and Dorland grabbed a pint at the bar. She shifted back and forth in the uncomfortable chair.

  Theo returned and plonked down the beer on the table. Some splashed up and over the edge.

  “I will need to take those pieces of art from you. You understand why?”

  “I understand, but I want it all back.”

  “Why? What are you going to do with your art now? Now that you know it was made by a serial killer? Break it apart? Turn it into a shower room?”

  Sophia laughed. “Are you mad? I can’t sell them now. As soon as collectors find out I own all the artwork of a serial killer, my collection may double or triple in value.”

  “How sad that is,” replied Dorland.

  “I just don’t understand it,” Theo said. “I was sure he would be more specific. Are you sure there are no other pieces of art?”

  “Well, I can’t be sure but those are the only ones I could find listed on the Internet. Maybe he has a solicitor who could tell you more.”

  “When we talked to the solicitor, he didn’t know of art anywhere but at Tipring’s residence. We will have to ask him again, I suppose. Doc was cocky but not as cocky as we thought. He didn’t disclose any information at all really. It could be surmised that he didn’t trust that police or his uncle at MI5 wouldn’t eventually find out what he’d done. So, he kept things a bit vague.”

  “Based on what we know,” Sophia said, “Doc did up thirty-two pieces of art, and that means he’s probably killed that many people—most likely all women.”

  “Thirty-two,” said Dorland. He shook his head and gulped down the last bit in his glass. “What a sick bastard. I can’t see how it’s true. How could he kill so many women and no one notice?”

  Sophia wasn’t really listening. “Based on the poems, a lot of words have meanings like buried or watched. But he also used a few specific terms like iris or knees. I wonder what those mean?”

  Theo and Dorland both put down their beers at the same time and looked at each other.

  “Didn’t Tipring have a row of irises in his back garden?” Dorland asked his partner.

  “You don’t think . . .” said Sophia.

  “I couldn’t be . . .” started Theo.

  “It wasn’t something we considered important. We need to get those flowers dug up
and see what’s underneath. I don’t suppose the bodies are buried there, are they? I mean, he would have to dig pretty deep to add thirty-two bodies to that little space. And how could the neighbors not notice?”

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  On the way back into London, Theo rang SOCO and the coroner to meet them at Maddock Tipring’s house. The garden was so small that only three men could be out there at a time, and so the detectives let the investigators dig. Meanwhile, Theo counted the flowers that they dug up—thirty-two dirty, fake, faded irises.

  “I thought it was an odd season to have these flowers still in bloom,” remarked Dorland, “but I never gave them a second glance. ‘They’re my sister’s favorite flowers,’ that’s all I thought at the time.”

  Theo wasn’t really listening. He was concerned. They had been digging for an hour and hadn’t found anything resembling a body. Perhaps the poem was only symbolic. Perhaps he liked thirty-two irises to remind him of his disgusting deeds just as he used his morbid art to remind him.

  “We found something, sir,” one of the men digging exclaimed.

  Theo pushed past the others in the doorway. The men had hit something metal and were pushing the dark dirt off the cover. It was a tin box about the size of a shoe box. They continued to dig around the edges until finally it came up with a tug. The officers stared down at it as it lay on the ground. No one made any attempts to open it. Theo pulled gloves from his pocket and opened the lid. It wasn’t easy. Who knew how long the box had been buried there. He pulled it apart with two hands and it knocked him back. Some of the contents spilled out onto the grass.

  “What is it?” asked Dorland.

  Inside the tin were many triangular-shaped objects. Theo reached in and placed one on his gloved palm.

  “What are those?” Dorland asked again. “Arrowheads?”

  The coroner leaned over Theo and said, “No, they look like patellas to me. Lots and lots of them.”

  “What’s a patella?”

  “A kneecap.”

  Theo gingerly placed the patella back into the tin. “There are so many of them.”

  Sophia came over and had a look. “After he killed them, he cut out their kneecaps. But they’re so clean.”

  “Most likely he boiled them to remove remnants of muscle and tendons,” the coroner said.

  “How easy would it be to remove a kneecap from a body?” she asked him.

  “Well, with a good knife . . .”

  Theo handed the tin to one of the SOC officers who bagged it up carefully.

  “Shall we keep looking? Go deeper?” one of the men holding a shovel asked.

  “Yes, a little deeper. I don’t want to miss anything else, but I don’t think the bodies are buried here.” He went back into the house. “I want to get back to the incident room. I’m in a great deal of muck for this but I want to find those bodies. I refuse to let Maddock Tipring laugh at us from his grave.”

  Theo was quiet and pensive the whole way back and as soon as he entered, he fired off instructions like it was his last few moments on earth.

  “I know we’re trying to find Yoder’s killer, but I feel the Maddock case and the Yoder case are somehow connected. To solve one, we need to solve the other. So, I want everything on Tipring, I want his tax records, his bank records, I want to know what he did for work, where he went to school, where he went to the dentist, who he dated, and what his hobbies were.”

  Everyone stared at him, mouths open, not moving.

  “And I want it now,” he shouted.

  People shuffled off, not sure where to start, not sure what their assigned tasks were. Dorland went over to the board and started a list of tasks, placing officer’s names beside their assignments. Sophia followed Theo back to his office and managed to enter the room before he could slam the door in her face.

  “Why are you so angry?” she asked.

  “I’m not as angry as I am frustrated.” He sat down at his desk and began typing some notes into a document on his computer. Sophia sat down across from him.

  “Let me help. I can get information on Tipring as easily as any of your officers.”

  He looked up sharply from his keyboard. She could tell his immediate reaction was a negative one but then he sat back. “Sure. Whatever you can find will be a great help.”

  She nodded and quickly set about sending a text message to the one person she knew was the master at information retrieval—Crystal.

  “Aren’t you going to go and find information?” he asked her after a few minutes of her staring at him.

  “No. If there is information to be had, it will arrive here.” She held up her mobile. Instead, she took out the poem, rewrote a copy, and handed it to Theo. “You might want this.”

  He grabbed it from her.

  She circled a few words on her poem—buried, knees, irises, hunt. “What did his family say about him? You did talk to his family members, didn’t you?”

  “Of course we did. But the family wasn’t really close. His sister didn’t say much about him.”

  “Can I read the report?”

  He hesitated, but finally handed her the Tipring file. “I don’t know what you’ll find interesting. They didn’t know much about Doc at all.”

  Sophia wasn’t listening; she was reading carefully.

  “This tells us nothing,” she said finally. “Why didn’t you ask his sister important questions, like what his hobbies were or did he display psychopathic tendencies?”

  “And why exactly would we have done that, Ms. Evans? He was the victim. It really didn’t matter to us at the time what the man did in his teens.”

  “Well, it sure matters now.”

  “I will ring his sister. What would you like me to ask her?”

  “Did he hunt? Did he like irises? Are there irises on their property? Has his sister ever seen him with a woman? Did he ever bring a woman to the house?”

  “He did hunt,” Theo said. “We didn’t write it down but his sister told us he did. In fact, she showed us photographs of him with a rifle.”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me if there were flowers where he buried the bodies.”

  Theo picked up the phone just as Sophia’s mobile vibrated. Crystal had sent her some information.

  In the incident room, Sophia picked up Doc’s file and flipped through. She came across the earrings and went through one by one.

  “Why do you have pictures of these?” Sophia asked Dorland.

  “We found a box of earrings in Doc’s house and these are photos of each set from his solicitor. Doc really felt those earrings were special. We believe they belonged to his mother.”

  “His mother?” Sophia asked. “According to his file he didn’t get on with his mother. How many earrings were there?”

  “I don’t know exactly. A lot.”

  Sophia counted the photos. “Thirty-two pairs of earrings. That can’t be a coincidence.”

  “Well, actually thirty-one. One pair was missing. We believed it had been stolen.”

  She looked at him. “And you didn’t find that odd?”

  “Well, we did. However, the earrings were not worth anything and even though there was huge issue with the missing set, none of the witnesses had any information to point us in any direction. It was another dead end.”

  “So, there is no way to trace why those particular earrings are missing or to whom they belonged?” she asked.

  Dorland raised his arms in disgust. “And just how would you go about doing that? If you’re suggesting the killer took the earrings, and we did assume that at the time, the killer is not going to freely admit it, now are they?”

  “Can I see what the missing set of earrings looks like?”

  Dorland handed her the photo. The missing earrings were long dangling silver with emerald teardrops. Sophia placed that photo on top of all the others and returned to Theo’s office.

  She asked Theo, “You said you found records of missing women that may be connected with Tipring. Do you
still have them?”

  Theo was still on the phone and he pointed to the corner of his desk. About ten file folders sat precariously. Sophia grabbed them all and sat down at a table outside Theo’s office.

  The first victim was Abigail Arnold. Sophia went through her file slowly, hoping to pick up any mention of jewelry or a connection to Tipring. She found none.

  The next file belonged to Charlotta Standford. She went missing a year and a half before Abigail, in 1985, and the only description of jewelry the missing girl was wearing was a heart pendant.

  Sophia went through the last set of files but only found one mention of earrings, on a missing woman named Janine Fur. It matched a photo in the pile. Dorland came and sat down at the table next to her.

  There was no mention of any silver and emerald earrings. How frustrating. When Doc Tipring stole them, he stole them as a keepsake, another reminder of what he had done, not because they were worth anything.

  “Now that we have the patellas of each of the missing girls,” said Sophia, “hopefully we can match the DNA from them to the missing girl. We do know what set of earrings belongs to Charlotta Standford. We can make a reasonable assumption.”

  “How?”

  “Well, Dorie Armes worked for Doc Tipring. I’m sure when she saw the earrings that belonged to her sister, she knew that Doc Tipring was the murderer. She must have been the one who stole the earrings. But, what I find hard to fathom is how she recognized the earrings. I mean, 1985 is a long time ago. I can’t remember earrings I’ve lost that long ago. How could she know those exact earrings belonged to her sister? It’s one thing to be sure, it’s another to murder someone based on a flimsy assumption such as that.”

  “We don’t have a choice,” replied Dorland. “We have to ask Dorie about the earrings. Will you come with us?”

  “No I need to leave. I’m dealing with an issue at work.”

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  According to Sophia’s mobile, Liam wasn’t where he was supposed to be. She had asked Crystal to create an application to record all locations related to Stewart and his organization and then track Liam’s whereabouts. If the paths crossed, she would be alerted. Crystal had sent her a text message while she was at the station informing her that Liam was at one of Stewart’s known hangouts and his mobile hadn’t left the location for an hour and forty minutes. But ten minutes before she arrived, the mobile shut off. She sped up so as not to lose him but when she arrived at the location, she couldn’t spot Liam’s car anywhere.