Concrete Evidence; Crime Book 6 (Detective Alec Ramsay Crime Mystery Suspense Series)

by Conrad Jones

  His mind wandered from dreams to a blurred reality. The anaesthetic made him feel warm and safe inside a bubble but he knew that all wasn’t as well as it seemed. He was in hospital but he wasn’t sure why. There was a warm numbness in his back. Had he been punched hard? He remembered the blow. Then he remembered the blood trickling down his skin. Had he been stabbed? Maybe. A knife flashed into his mind but it was stuck in someone’s abdomen. Not his. He was an onlooker. As he focused on the strange sensation from his back, he became aware that the numbness had an edge to it. There were tiny prickles of pain radiating from it. He didn’t like that feeling. He didn’t want the numbness to fade. He didn’t want to know what it was masking. The image of a woman flashed into his mind. Her face was impassive. He was having sex with her for a few enticing seconds then she was gone replaced by newspaper headlines. His blood ran cold. His consciousness reached another level. He was coming around. The prickles of pain became darting bolts of white light in his brain. Breathing was painful. He didn’t want to come up out of the warmth. He wanted to stay down in the pleasant oblivion. Fear crept into his mind. Fear of the pain that was intensifying but there was something else. Something that he should fear more than the pain. He had been hiding from something. He was on the run. The sudden realisation shot through him like an electric shock.

  His eyes twitched as he tried to open them. They felt glued shut. His mouth was as dry as sandpaper. He couldn’t swallow. Panic replaced his feeling of wellbeing spreading through his veins like poison. His eyes opened and the overhead lights hurt. He blinked hard and tried to clear his vision. The surroundings were sterile, white and magnolia. There was a drip hanging from a stainless steel stand. The tubes ran from two bags of clear liquid into his right hand. He lifted his hand to inspect it. There were no handcuffs fastening him to the bed. It was a relief but he felt like a tortoise on its back. He wanted to get up but couldn’t. His brain screamed at him to move. Get out! Get out! But his arms and legs weren’t listening. They were disconnected from his motor neurons.

  Tod tried to speak. He desperately needed water. He wasn’t sure what he tried to say but it came out as a rasping cry. A woman appeared from his left as if she had been standing over him. She picked up his wrist and touched his forehead.

  “Tranquilo! No pasa nada,” she said in a soothing voice. He didn’t have a clue what it meant but it sounded nice. Her eyes were deep brown. He could dive into them and get lost. She was beautiful. Her presence soothed his nerves. “Tranquilo! No pasa nada.” She repeated softly. Tod tried to speak again but could only rasp. “Beber,” the nurse said putting a glass to his lips. “Beber,” she smiled. Tod sipped the water and felt it hydrating his mouth and throat. He swallowed a little and nearly choked. He took a deep breath to clear his airways and pain racked his back and chest. The nurse turned at the sound of a male voice. The uniformed figures of four armed police officers loomed into his sight and he couldn’t control himself any longer. Tod knew what he had done. He felt his lower lip trembling and then he began to sob like a child.

  CHAPTER 24

  Stirling climbed down the cellar steps tentatively. The wood creaked beneath his bulk threatening to give in beneath the weight. Three bulkhead lights that were fixed to the walls threw pools of light across the concrete floor leaving the corners draped in dark shadows. The air was dry and dank and tinged with the smell of urine, excrement and the unmistakable coppery aroma of blood. The body of Peter Barton was slumped in a kneeling position in the centre of the room. His dead hands still clung to a single barrelled shotgun, which was resting on a blood soaked shoulder. The head was all but gone. Only the lower jaw remained intact. The remains of his brains and skull were splattered across the rear wall in a funnel shape. Globules of pink matter dripped from the rafters above him. As he looked around, it was what covered the walls beneath the viscera that gripped Stirling’s attention.

  “He’s blown his own head off,” an FET officer said quietly.

  “You think so?” Stirling nodded and decided not to comment on his powers of observation. There was a reason why some officers became detectives and others kicked down doors. While the ruined body was hypnotising to look at, the images, maps and newspaper cuttings that covered every spare inch of wall were totally mesmerising. He stepped around the corpse and studied the images. Each headline made his heart beat faster. Barton had made a collage of articles from all over the globe, murders, kidnaps, rapes and child abductions from every corner of the world.

  There was a desk pressed to the far wall and above it was an enlarged map of the North West of England and North Wales. Dozens of coloured pins adorned the map, some solitary and others in clusters. It was the cluster of pins that covered Crosby Beach, which fascinated him the most. There was a circle drawn in red marker pen and Stirling immediately identified it as where he was standing, Barton’s house. The pins seemed to radiate out from there.

  The newspaper cuttings around the left of the map were all about the hunt for Simon Barton. Post-it notes were stuck over each article with an illegible scrawl written on each. To the right were articles relating to the Butcher murders. ‘Another Victim of the Butcher of Crosby Beach Located’, each headline was painfully familiar. Stirling had mixed feelings about that case. He had met his wife during it and she had been kidnapped and nearly died at the hands of Brendon Ryder, The Butcher. During the investigation, the DI had lost an eye and her confidence. It was all behind them now but seeing the headlines made him feel uneasy. Stirling studied the notes and checked them against the pins. It appeared at first glance that each post-it note had a coordinate scrawled on the top right hand corner. Each coordinate related to a pin on the map.

  Stirling looked at the papers on the desk and sifted through the top sheets with a gloved hand. One of them was a list of local farms, local parks, woods, nature reserves and graveyards. He was familiar with the area and the list seemed to run in order of their proximity to his house. Each one had a tick on one side and a cross on the other. He placed the list back on top of a stack of Ordinance Survey maps and an orienteering compass.

  “Have you seen this?” an officer asked disturbing his thoughts. Stirling turned and walked over to him. One section of wall was covered in blood and brains. The paper cuttings beneath the gore were a collage of Peter Barton’s arrest, trial and incarceration. ‘Evil Uncle, Peter Barton Refuses to Give Up the Body of his Nephew.’ Stirling read the headline several times. He walked slowly around the cellar and glanced at each map and each cutting before taking one last look at the reeking corpse.

  “My DI is going to love this,” he grumbled as he climbed back up the steps.

  CHAPTER 25

  Annie Jones shivered as she walked along the path to Barton’s house. Autumn was quickly giving way to winter at an increasing rate of knots and the nighttime temperatures were plummeting rapidly. Every light in the house was on as CSI teams searched the scene. She reached the door and noticed the splintered frame. A white clad figure walked up the stairs to the first floor and another disappeared through a door beneath them. Stirling appeared from a room to her left, his bulk filled the doorway. He grunted hello and sheepishly handed her a forensic suit.

  “What the hell happened?” Annie asked as she removed her coat. Stirling noticed that her prosthetic eye didn’t narrow as much as her real one when she was annoyed.

  “We knocked on the door, he locked himself in the cellar and blew his head off with a shotgun.” Stirling shrugged. “There’s not much more to it.”

  “There was no dialogue at all between you?”

  “None, Guv.”

  “Who knocked on the door?”

  “I did.”

  “So it’s your fault,” she said dryly.

  “Completely.”

  “Good,” she said zipping up her suit. “I’m glad that’s sorted. Now where is this map that I need to see?”

  “Maps plural, Guv,” Stirling corrected her. “Lots and lots of maps. Let’s start in here
.” He turned and walked into the living room. The plasma television was still on. “He was watching BBC one.”

  “So he probably saw the appeal.”

  “Probably,” Stirling grumbled. “It would explain his decision to eat his gun. He was sitting here when we arrived.” He said pointing to a well worn armchair. “We’re guessing that he was using his laptop to print off information about the murders. It was found underneath the table, the screen was cracked but it was still switched on. He had a wireless printer on the dining table over there and there are a couple of articles printed off in the print tray,” Stirling said walking around the armchair. “There’s an empty bottle of scotch on the floor so he may have been intoxicated. Take a look over here.” Stirling pointed to the wall above the dining table. It was covered in Ordinance Survey maps, which were overlapping to make one huge map of the Northern Hemisphere. There were crosses and circles marked all over them. Surrounding the map were press cuttings from a myriad of publications. The table was stacked with newspapers and articles printed from the internet. Some of the papers were yellowed with age and some looked unread. A pair of reading glasses and a biro sat next to a packet of cigars and an overflowing ashtray. “It looks as if Barton spent a lot of time sifting through newspaper cuttings.”

  “London, Paris, Talin, Prague, Amsterdam,” Annie said as she studied the markings on the maps. Her eye crossed the Atlantic. “San Francisco, Flagstaff, Phoenix. Have we found a passport?”

  “Not yet, Guv.”

  “When we do, we need to see if he travelled to these places.” Annie scanned the wall and frowned. “There’s seems to be a newspaper clipping relating to murders in each city,” she looked at Stirling and shrugged. “What was he doing?”

  “He was collecting,” Stirling shrugged. He picked up a yellowed newspaper. “Some of this stuff goes back ten years or more. We would need months to analyse this and make any sense of it.”

  “It might be more obvious than you think,” Annie said. She didn’t think that it was obvious but she had to be positive. “Has he left any journals, diaries or anything personal that might explain what he was doing?”

  “Nothing yet, Guv,” Stirling shook his head. “There are some hand written lists downstairs.”

  “He certainly put a lot of time and effort into it.”

  “Wait until you see the cellar.” Stirling said. “I’ve got some ideas but I’d like you to see it first.” He turned and walked towards the door. Annie lingered a moment and pictured Barton reading the articles and mapping them. An article from San Francisco caught her eye. Several words had been highlighted in yellow marker. Similar words were highlighted on another article from Bakersfield. “That’s a long way from home.” She muttered. “A tingle ran down her spine as she read on. “What were you up to, Barton?” she whispered to herself as she turned to follow her sergeant. She noticed an old upright piano on the opposite wall. It reminded her of her childhood. Her mother had paid a small fortune to a local piano tutor to teach her to play. She remembered taking a cardboard stencil home to help her practice. It sat on top of the keys as an idiot’s guide to the chords. It was money wasted. Chopsticks was as far as her talent stretched.

  The rest of the living room was a mishmash of furniture spanning four decades. The sofa was an imitation Chesterfield from the 70’s. Annie’s Grandma Jones had one similar. She only removed the plastic wrapping when guests came, quickly recovering it as soon as they left. She remembered her granddad rolling his eyes to the heavens every time she did it. “The bloody thing is meant to be sat on!” he would complain.

  The dining table and chair, singular, were MFI flat-pack from the late 80’s but the television, laptop and printer were new models. Expensive top of the line stuff. It reminded her of furnished rented accommodation rather than someone’s home.

  Stirling was in the hallway waiting patiently for her to catch up. “We lost his heat signature here, which led us to the cupboard under the staircase. It is well hidden and not on the plans. We wouldn’t have found it during a normal search.” He pointed to the splintered wood around the hatch. “It took us a while to break in because the access hatch was fastened from underneath. There was no way that we could have stopped him.”

  “That makes sense,” Annie nodded. “Alec has acquired copies of the original case files and he said that once the original warrant was issued, it took the arresting team two weeks to locate Barton. They searched this place from top to bottom three times. He must have been hiding down there when they came for him.”

  “Where did they make the arrest in the end?”

  “He was in his car near a local nature reserve.”

  “He has lists of similar places downstairs,” Stirling raised his eyebrows. “You’ll see what I mean when we get down there.”

  Annie ducked into the cupboard and cautiously navigated the steps. She wrinkled her nose as the smell of death reached her. The corpse was gone but the body fluids that had leaked from it were still present. The remnants of Barton’s head and its contents were darkening as they congealed on the walls and ceiling. “Barton was a busy boy,” she said as the scale of his research became apparent. “The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Post, The Prague Post, L’Echo de Paris, Het Parool from Amsterdam and some that I have never heard of,” Annie said as she studied the clippings on the walls. Some clippings were covered by three or more others that related to the same story. They were stapled at the top so the observer could lift each one to read the one behind. As she moved along the wall, she looked at the collection of British headlines that covered Barton’s arrest. “The headlines about him being convicted are all page one news but he only made page five when he was released.”

  “I think that this is where he started his collection,” Stirling said from the opposite end of the cellar. He stood in front of the desk. “I think that this is his first map,” he said pointing to the wall. “This is his house circled here and then he has marked concentric circles that get wider as the distance increases.”

  Annie stood next to him and soaked up as much detail as she could at a glance. She could have been looking at a search pattern from one of their own investigations. “So he starts off with his home as the epicentre of what exactly?”

  “Look at this,” Stirling picked up the list that he had found earlier. “Local parks, playing fields, streams, woods, farms, even slag heaps from some of the old coalmines.”

  “Hunting grounds or dumping grounds?”

  “Dumping grounds. That’s what I think.”

  Annie spotted the cluster of pins at Crosby Beach. It made her stomach knot and she felt a little nauseous. The headlines about the Butcher murders screamed at her from the wall. “Why the fascination with Brendon Ryder?” she swallowed hard as she spoke. “Why the fascination with any of this?” she gestured around the room. Murders across Europe and America occupied every inch. “From the first look at things, he’s posted notes on each case.”

  “He has,” Stirling agreed. “Most of them have a map coordinate noted in the corner. Look at this list though, he’s crossed off the entire list of local areas,” Stirling said studying the list. “It goes as far east as Snowdonia and Anglesey and as far north as Cumbria and the Lake District. I think he was looking for the best place to dispose of Simon Barton. Somewhere during the process, he has developed an affinity to other killers and began tracking them.”

  Annie held her chin between her finger and thumb and looked over the list. “This list has been compiled by an organised and intelligent mind,” she shook her head in disagreement. “It is so thorough that it could have been put together by a detective from our team searching for a victim’s remains. This is exactly what we would have done,” she said pausing to think. “My question is, was he trying to rule out the obvious dumpsites where he knew that the police would look or was he tracking something else?”

  Stirling frowned and looked at the map. “Tracking what?”

  “I don’t kn
ow,” Annie shrugged. “We need a list of where the original searches were made by the investigation team and in what order they were carried out. I have got a hunch that they will correspond closely with his list.”

  “Do you think that he was just following where the investigation was focused?”

  “Let’s say he held the boy down here,” Annie said looking around. “He could have held him for weeks before he killed him. What would you do if you were a suspect?”

  “I would follow the investigation and try to second guess where they wouldn’t look.” He pointed to the mountainous areas of Snowdonia and The Lakes. “If you had the time and the strength to dismember a body and then took it into these areas, the pieces would never be found.”

  “Why go that far away?” Annie mused. “There are thousands of rivers and ponds, quarries and beaches between here and the mountains.”

  “Agreed, but if he was under the spotlight, he may have felt pressured to dump the body somewhere that no one was looking for him.” Stirling pointed to the county boundary lines. “He would have known from the reaction of the local residents and his family that they would never stop looking for Simon. As the main suspect it would follow him for the rest of his life like a dark cloud hanging over his head. The only way that he could ever get any peace of mind,” he tapped the map with his finger, “take the body over the borders where the murder wouldn’t be as much as a blip on the radar of a different force.”