ONE STEP AHEAD: detectives hunt a serial killer who knows all their moves (The DCI Jeffrey Brandt Murders Trilogy Book 1)

by Denver Murphy

  He reached over to the passenger side of the windscreen to tear off the car’s amateurish advertisements, only mildly irritated by the residue left over by the Sellotape. He was about to toss the crumpled-up pieces of paper over his shoulder into the rear seats when it suddenly dawned on him that leaving the traveller’s mobile phone number inside was far from a good idea. Anxious to get moving before drawing any more attention to himself, he placed it in one of the cup holders and resolved to use the car’s cigarette lighter to destroy it, along with the V5 document, when he found somewhere secluded.

  Putting the car into gear, and having to raise the clutch more than was healthy to find the biting point, he rolled steadily off the verge. There was the merest creak from the suspension as the wheels met the road. Here we go then, he thought, following the familiar route to the motorway.

  Chapter Fifty-two

  ‘I think that’s him,’ McNeil said, pointing to the screen. Never mind Johnson needing glasses, he felt he should go for an eye test the way he had to keep blinking to stop the image appearing blurred. They had both worked long into the previous night before finally admitting that, with so much to sift through, they would have to call on extra support. With exhaustion pushing thoughts of an amorous nature out of his mind, he had gone home to get a few hours’ sleep. Johnson had promised to do the same and, although she was wearing different clothes now, he wouldn’t have put it past her to have a change of wardrobe in one of her office cupboards that she used for occasions such as this. Certainly, the dark circles under her eyes didn’t suggest otherwise.

  ‘Okay let’s run with this,’ she agreed. With the images from St. Albans providing them with so little to go on, in terms of a possible description, they had been struggling to narrow down the huge number of men that passed the cameras in the relevant time windows. They were looking for someone middle-aged; the nature of the crimes had suggested a calmness and maturity that came with time, and the images of St. Albans neither showed the sprightliness of youth, nor any symptoms of being elderly. However, this had still left an unfeasible number of possibilities. The sheer mass of people at Nottingham railway station for the first one was proving prohibitive; there was no CCTV in the vicinity of the second attack and the third, on the river path, was hard to narrow down in terms of where the person would have joined or exited. Milton Keynes had been more promising because there were cameras on Bletchley High Street, but they didn’t show anyone enter or even stop to look in the alleyway, much less go down it.

  In each case they neither knew from which overall direction their man had approached, nor which way he had left. Except, that was, for Canterbury. Following the attack, he had walked north along the Whitstable Road to the mechanics where he dropped off the knife.

  Knowing his direction of travel had allowed them to greatly reduce the number of cameras that needed checking. With the little they knew already, and with assumptions like he wouldn’t be carrying any shopping, they had narrowed it down to one individual.

  ‘Put St. Albans on the other monitor and let’s run these images side by side,’ Johnson suggested. They both sat in silence, flicking their eyes between the two screens. ‘I couldn’t say for certain that it is the same person but…’

  ‘…then again there is nothing to say it isn’t.’ McNeil finished the sentence for her.

  ‘Exactly, we need to speak to this man,’ she said enthusiastically. ‘Right, get the IT guys to follow him back and get the best image of him for us to work with.’

  ‘So, what’s next?’ he enquired.

  ‘Well hopefully he’s on our database because Potter is never going to let us make a public appeal.’

  ‘Er, how come?’

  ‘Based on what? We found someone who might, might, have something to do with St. Albans. We have then found a man in Canterbury who we can’t say looked like this man, only just that he doesn’t not look like him. And that’s even before we consider the fact that we haven’t even gone public with the connection to St. Albans yet.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ responded McNeil, lowering his head.

  ‘Hey,’ she said, lifting his chin up gently. ‘This is good. More than that, it’s the first decent lead we’ve had. If this guy has got previous, and let’s face it people don’t tend to start their career of crime with serial murder, we’ll have his address within a few hours. You never know, we might be celebrating cracking the case tonight!’

  ‘I’d like that.’

  ‘Me too,’ she replied softly. ‘Right,’ she continued, standing. ‘Let’s get this over to the IT nerds and order an early lunch whilst we wait. What do you fancy?’

  McNeil didn’t answer. What he was thinking he didn’t dare say out loud.

  ‘I want pizza,’ she continued, unconcerned by his silence. ‘One of those greasy ones with extra cheese.’

  He laughed. ‘I didn’t think you did carbs, ma’am.’

  ‘Today’s different. Special, I think.’

  I hope so, I really do.

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Brandt didn’t mind waiting. It was to be expected. Given some of the unsettling noises from the car on the journey up, and the way it pitched alarmingly to the right under heavy braking, he was just glad to be there at all. Perhaps I’ll do a pikey next, he chuckled to himself. Still full from the substantial breakfast, he hadn’t yet touched his meagre packed lunch. With longer to plan, he would have definitely picked up some more appetising supplies, especially because he had no idea how long he would be sitting there. Brandt knew there was a strong possibility that he might not even see his target today but, with his Milton Keynes murder making St. Albans seem like little more than a bad dream, he felt luck was on his side again.

  One thing he hadn’t given much thought to was what to do with the car afterwards. He would need to dump it somewhere but clearly far enough from his house that it wouldn’t lead the police straight back to him. It’s not too late to go home and think this through a little more clearly. Brandt hated that voice, always trying to make him doubt himself. Whilst he had to admit that this had been a little rushed, and perhaps events had conspired for him to be less measured, less dispassionately calculating, that wasn’t to say he was doing the wrong thing. If he developed the habit of listening to this voice, he very much doubted he would get anything done. Brandt was put in mind of a quote he had read once about fools rushing in where angels feared to tread. He knew he was no angel, but he was far from a fool either. Calculated risks, he reassured himself, manually reclining the seat to relax his posture.

  Chapter Fifty-four

  ‘What if we were able to get a clearer image?’ Johnson asked without waiting for a reply. ‘McNeil, perhaps we can see if we can pick this guy up on a camera somewhere else and get…’

  ‘Look, ma’am,’ said the IT guy whose name Johnson didn’t know or couldn’t remember, pointing at the screen. ‘These dots show where the facial recognition software has picked up specific points for comparison. It found enough to work its way through the database.’ He was pointing at a slightly blurred still of Brandt’s face.

  ‘Well clearly not, because it hasn’t found anything!’ Johnson fumed.

  ‘No,’ he responded calmly. ‘It’s just that there were no matches.’

  ‘This is bullshit,’ she said, storming out of the room.

  ‘Thank you for your help,’ McNeil said sincerely but only receiving a shrug of acknowledgement before he set off after Johnson.

  She was already half way along the corridor when he tried to gain her attention. When her pace didn’t slow, he jogged to catch up. Concerned that she was still ignoring him, he held his hand out to prevent her being able to pull open the next door.

  ‘What the fuck?’ she snarled, turning to glare at him.

  He could see her eyes were watery; whether through rage or disappointment, he couldn’t tell. ‘What is it?’ he asked, trying to sooth her. ‘Tell me.’

  Johnson released the handle and slumped against the wal
l. ‘I really thought we might have got him.’

  ‘And we might still have,’ he ventured hopefully.

  She shook her head.

  ‘Seriously, Johnson, we just need to go back to the other footage and identify him at each of the other crime scenes. Potter is bound to sanction the public appeal in that case.’

  ‘That’s assuming this is our guy…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Like I said before, the chances of this being his first criminal offence are slim. We have to accept the strong possibility that we may have picked out the wrong guy.’

  ‘Where, in St. Albans?’

  ‘No, I’m convinced he’s the one, but we need to double check that we didn’t match it up with the wrong one in Canterbury.’

  Although McNeil was pretty sure no one similar had been missed, he was encouraged by this. Johnson had moved on to thinking about their next steps, however laborious and tedious they might be.

  ‘Okay, let’s grab some coffee and start on that,’ he said in as enthusiastic a voice as he could muster.

  She slowly nodded and stopped leaning on the wall. McNeil had already turned to open the door when he felt a hand on his shoulder. ‘Thank you,’ she said quietly.

  ‘No problem,’ he replied breezily. ‘We’re both tired; neither of us got much sleep last night.’

  She looked up at him guiltily.

  ‘If any at all,’ he said, correcting himself. ‘Are you sure you don’t want some kip now and we start on this tomorrow?’

  ‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘I just need to be more certain this is the right guy first. At least then I can send it around to the different police stations, including distributing it here. Okay, he’s not on our database, which means he might not have actually been convicted of something, but that isn’t to say he isn’t known to someone.’

  Chapter Fifty-five

  DSI Franklin felt dreadful. He should have taken his falling asleep on the train and having to wait at the end of the line for another to take him back to his station, as a sign that he had drunk enough. Instead he had staggered home via the off-licence and picked himself up a four pack of lager to help wash down the kebab he bought at the takeaway next door. This had been the first night he had been grateful to return to an empty house. His wife would have been apoplectic with rage given the state he had been in.

  Waking up the following morning, fully clothed and lying on the sitting room floor, the first thing he had done was to rush to the kitchen sink to vomit up his partially digested supper. The improvement to his symptoms this provided was only a brief respite and, as he showered a few minutes later, he began retching again until all he was throwing up was the yellow bile from his stomach lining.

  Regretting having told so many of the department that he had been going to the football yesterday, an absence from work would only confirm the suspicions he knew some held that he had hit the bottle since his wife left. Gambling the risk of driving against him being spotted arriving in a taxi, Franklin decided on the former. Stopping in a layby to involuntarily purge himself of the water he had drunk in a vain attempt to combat his dehydration, he vowed that he would invent an off-site meeting for the afternoon and return home early.

  Having sweated his way through his morning briefing of CID, he had retired to his office, pretending to be on the phone whenever anyone had tried to come and see him. Despite the way he was feeling, he had enjoyed yesterday. It seemed that, in retirement, Brandt had become far more interesting than Franklin would ever have expected. He certainly had kept his love of football a secret. And what a game it had been! All the drama of Arsenal continually being pegged back by equalisers, only to then finally win in added time. That was enough excitement to light up any match but for the last game of the season, against Spurs of all teams, it was something Franklin expected to remember for a long time. He decided he must ask Brandt who his mate was that gave him the tickets, because he’d love the opportunity to go again next year. He doubted anything could live up to that game, but perhaps it was something they could do together once in a while. The fact that it was something his wife wouldn’t have approved of only made the thought appeal more to Franklin.

  He couldn’t remember whose idea it was to go to the pub afterwards but that had been an inspired choice too. The atmosphere in there was almost as good as the stadium, what with the chanting and everything. Franklin thought it a shame that those idiots by the pool table hadn’t seemed as friendly as everyone else. He assumed they were regulars who resented the extra people that match day brought in. Seeing yet another person walking towards his door, he decided he would give Brandt a call.

  With his call going unanswered, Franklin assumed that Brandt must still be in bed, yet another benefit of retirement, and hung up. Reminiscences of yesterday’s enjoyment had caused him to feel a little better, deciding that now would be a good time to risk lining his stomach. He left his office in search of a bacon roll.

  Feeling slightly guilty for having guzzled two of them, along with three cups of coffee, he returned to work believing he could last the day without having to invent a meeting elsewhere. However, and although his late breakfast had managed to settle his stomach, he started to flag in the early afternoon. Franklin couldn’t remember what time he had gone to sleep last night but the combination of being laid out on his hard sitting room floor, along with the effects of the alcohol, had conspired to leave him weary. With the stimulation from the caffeine having worn off, the headache he felt that morning seemed to now be approaching a full-grown migraine. Staring at his laptop hadn’t helped. The initial optimism of discovering a blister pack of paracetamol in one of his desk drawers was replaced by the frustration of finding it empty. Concerned of the suspicions that asking his colleagues if they had some might arouse, he decided that he would just make some excuse and leave for the remainder of the day.

  After a quick tidy of the papers on his desk, none of which he had actually read, he went to shut down his computer. As he was just about to close his emails the alert for an incoming message sounded. It was from the Nottinghamshire Constabulary. He shifted his cursor over to it, but with his head now throbbing, he moved the mouse back to the small cross in the top left-hand corner of the window. It can wait until tomorrow, he thought.

  Chapter Fifty-six

  ‘All done?’ McNeil asked.

  ‘Yep, that’s the last of them sent,’ replied Johnson, closing the lid of her laptop. It hadn’t taken them long to revisit the footage from Canterbury and confirm that there weren’t any other middle-aged men who had arrived from the same direction and turned off the high street at the correct point without having bought items from any of the shops.

  ‘I guess we had better start looking at the cameras from here again,’ he sighed, reaching in the box for the last remaining slice of pizza. It had long gone cold and the cheese topping looked rather congealed, but he assumed he was in for a long night.

  ‘That can wait until the morning,’ she said, stretching. ‘We’re both knackered and could do with a good night’s rest.’

  ‘I’m not sure I could sleep...’

  Johnson laughed. ‘Oh God, don’t start turning into me. I can assure you, being this highly strung is not fun. It certainly ruins your social life.’ She turned towards him. ‘Walk me to my car?’

  ‘Sure,’ he replied, dropping the pizza slice, having taken only a bite.

  They didn’t say a word to each other as they exited the building; both deep in their own thoughts. McNeil was about to say goodbye and veer towards his old blue Ford Fiesta, a hand-me-down from his mother, when Johnson stopped and grabbed his hand. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, believe me I am as frustrated as you are that the man wasn’t on the database…’

  Johnson laughed again but this time nervously. ‘No, I mean… erm, I mean…’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know how to describe it but clearly there’s something there; something between us.’ She looked into his eyes to see
if he was following what she was saying. ‘The truth is I don’t know how I’m feeling and it’s hard with all this other stuff…’

  ‘I get it,’ McNeil replied, trying to offer a reassuring smile.

  Johnson shook her head again. ‘No, I need to explain it.’ She paused, taking a deep breath. ‘I don’t care about the age gap…’

  McNeil opened his mouth to speak.

  ‘Please let me finish,’ she said softly. ‘I don’t care about the age gap. I don’t even care that I’m much more senior than you.’

  McNeil giggled, notwithstanding knowing how unfortunate his timing was.

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake! I meant senior as in higher up than…’

  ‘I know, I know,’ he managed, despite having yet to regain his composure.

  Johnson couldn’t help but smile at his ability to always take the tension out of a situation. ‘Look, what I’m trying to say is that I’m not hiding away from what’s developed between us. I just want you to know that I’m sorry it’s taken this long. I promise you that when all this is done I want to see how this, our this, whatever this is, plays out.’

  McNeil nodded.

  ‘I just need you to be patient for a little while. Do you think you can do that?’

  ‘Yes, I think so,’ he lied.

  Sat in his car he guessed that, by now, Johnson was busy lighting a cigarette. He regretted the way he had handled the situation, particularly with his laughter. He could have done more to reassure her that he felt the same way about her, and that he understood the reasons why things hadn’t progressed. The truth was, as awkward as she had appeared, he was equally as unaccustomed to discussing his feelings. What he had really wanted to say was that, if nothing else, the last few weeks had taught him how precious life is and, rather than wait for the right time, whatever the hell that was, people should embrace the chance of happiness whenever it presented itself.