by Tim Ellis
‘Do you know her?’
There was a long silence at the other end.
‘Christ, Kowalski, tell me you haven’t slept with her?’
‘It was a long time ago, before I was married, we had a thing.’
‘You’ll tell her that we don’t know each other when she starts making your life a living hell, won’t you?’
‘You’re like an old woman, Parish. She won’t even remember me. What’s happening about the Chief’s...’
‘Debbie’s going to take care of everything, but they’re doing a post mortem first.’
‘How has Richards’ taken it?’
‘Bad.’
‘Yeah, to be expected.’
‘I’ll see you later, Kowalski.’
‘Okay.’
Chapter Sixteen
‘Come on, Richards,’ Parish said lifting her up by the elbow. ‘Time to go. There’s nothing we can do for the Chief here, but there’s plenty we can do back at the station.'
‘You’re not thinking of going back to work are you, Sir?’
‘You think we should go and shut ourselves away in a darkened room and grieve while a child killer kills again?’
‘Well no...’
‘Good, let’s go.’
‘Everything carries on as if nothing had happened,’ Debbie said as they walked along the corridor towards the exit and the car park.’
Richards passed Parish the keys and said, ‘I can’t drive.’
Debbie needed a lift back to the station because she’d travelled with the Chief in the back of the ambulance.
She was right, thought Parish. Nothing changes. Life goes on. The person’s absence is felt – acutely at first, but then, as time passes, you have to glance at photographs to remember what they looked like. It was the things people did that you missed. There would be no point in disguising his knock on the Chief’s door because the new Chief would not be able to distinguish one knock from another like Walter Day could. It would be unlikely that a new Chief would permit Richards to attend and give briefings. Most people wanted a business-like approach, and Richards was anything but.
He pulled onto the hard shoulder, switched the engine off, and climbed out. Vehicles sped by as if nothing momentous had happened. He wanted to shout, ‘The Chief’s dead for God’s sake. He was my mentor, my friend, my... father.’ He hadn’t thought about Walter Day as a father before, but now the notion occurred to him. If he’d ever had a father he would have wanted one just like the Chief.
He walked along the hard shoulder and took in deep gulps of air. Walter Day was one of those people who deserved to live forever. Now, everyone’s lives that he had touched would change in small significant ways. He pulled out his mobile and phoned Angie.
‘The Chief’s dead, Angie,’ he blurted out and tears pooled in his eyes and ran down his face. He turned away from the car so that Debbie and Richards wouldn’t see his face and wiped the tears away with his index finger.
‘But he was sat at our table just last night...’
‘I know... Life’s crap.’
‘How’s Mary taking the news?’
‘As you’d expect.’
‘I’m so sorry, Jed. He was such a wonderful man.’
‘I know.’
‘Are you on your way home?’
‘No, we’ve still got work to do. It’s true that the world keeps turning. There’s a child killer the Chief wanted us to catch, and I wouldn’t want to disappoint him.’
‘I know. We’ll be here waiting for you.’
‘We?’
‘The baby and I.’
‘Oh!’ He hadn’t thought about the baby all day. ‘Do you think...?’
‘No, I don’t think we should call him Walter. Maybe as a middle name?’
‘Yeah, maybe. It’s a bit old-fashioned, isn’t it?’
‘Where are you?’
‘I’ve pulled onto the hard shoulder on the A10. Listen, I’d better go. I’ll see you about seven. I love you.’
‘I love you as well, Jed Parish.’
He disconnected the call and walked back to the car.
‘Who were you phoning, Sir?’
‘Your mum.’
‘Did you tell her?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is she alright?’
‘Never mind all these stupid questions, Richards. You haven’t asked me what Doc Michelin said.’
‘I don’t know if I care anymore, Sir.’
‘You do know the Chief fought for you every step of the way? Are you going to throw it back in his face now that he’s gone?’
‘You’re so mean, Sir.’ Tears skittered down her face. ‘What are we going to do without him?’
‘We’re going to carry on, that’s what he would have wanted. We have our memories of him, and that will keep us going.’
Crazy Frog rang out.
‘Hello Kowalski, I hope its not more bad news?’
‘My son has gone missing.’
Kowalski and Jerry had four children – three girls and a boy. Gabe – the ten-year-old was Kowalski’s heir – the apple of his eye. After Gabe came eight-year-old Oceana; then Tabitha who was seven, and last but certainly not least was the mischievous Gabi who was five.
‘Don’t say that...’ Then it dawned on him. ‘I hope you’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking?’
‘I think the people you’re looking for took Gabe.’
‘But why?
‘As a warning.’
‘Tell me what happened, Ray?’
‘He’d just walked out of the school gates with his friends. There were a thousand kids and parents who were witnesses. A black van with no number plates pulled up, two men dressed in black with ski masks on jumped out of the side door and snatched him. They took him, not one of the other kids - he was targeted, Jed.’
‘But... You’ve not just rang me have you, the Emergency Response Team are onto it as well?’
‘Of course. They’ve set up an Incident Room at the school. I’m here with them, but I have a bad feeling, Parish.’
‘You’re imagining it. You must have more enemies than most.’
‘How do you work that out?’
‘What about Pete Ranger, or Murcer?’
‘Ranger’s not that stupid, and Murcer has more of a grudge against you than me.’
‘I suppose?’
‘The bastards won’t let me help.’
‘They know best, Ray. Let them do their jobs, you’d only get in the way.’
‘If someone has harmed my Gabe they won’t need a lawyer.’
Parish was reminded of the assassination of Aaron Carter outside the Old Bailey, and their late night visit to Murcer. An eye for an eye! That’s what people wanted. Knowing that the person who killed your child, wife, or significant other was lounging about in prison at your expense playing snooker, watching television, reading, and any number of other recreational things was not justice in many people’s eyes. They didn’t want to forgive. They wanted revenge – plain and simple.
‘Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it, Ray. In the meantime, what can I do?’
‘You can find the bastards who killed those children, Jed, they’ve got Gabe, I know it. God, I can’t think straight.’
‘What about Jerry and the kids?’
‘Jerry’s here with me, and the kids are with Jerry’s mum.’
‘I’m on my way back to the station with Richards and Debbie. Phone me if there’s any news?’
‘Yeah, okay.’
He ended the call and started the car up. As he pulled back onto the A10 and put his foot down, he told Richards and Debbie what had happened.
‘I think he’s right, Sir,’ Richards said. ‘I think they’re warning us off.’
‘So do I,’ Parish agreed.
***
‘We’re sorry about the Chief, Sir,’ Holmes said. ‘He seemed like one of the good ones.’
It was four-thirty and all four of them were in the inc
ident room.
‘He was,’ Parish replied. ‘God knows what this Rhona Powers is like.’
‘I think she’s pretty good,’ a female voice said from behind him.
Parish jumped up. He hadn’t heard the door open and Chief Superintendent Rhona Powers enter. She was thin, with long blonde hair, and wore a bright orange blouse with a pair of black slacks. He could understand why Kowalski had been attracted to her.
‘Sorry, Ma’am...’
She held up her hand. ‘Don’t worry, Inspector, I’m not here to make trouble, and I’m also sorry to meet you under these circumstances, Walter Day was a lovely man and he spoke highly of you and Constable Richards.’
Richards started snivelling again.
‘I’ll just sit in on the briefing, if I may?’
‘Of course, Ma’am.’
‘I prefer Chief, Ma’am makes me sound like a grandmother. Oh, and Kowalski told me what you said...’
‘Kowalski’s got a big mouth...’
‘I’m not going to make anybody’s life a misery. I’m part of the team now, and I’m here to help. The Chief Constable sent me for a reason – I don’t repair things that aren’t broken, and this team isn’t broken.’
‘Okay, Ma... Chief.’
‘I’d love a coffee before we start though, I’ve been travelling for a couple of hours.’
Parish passed Richards his mug. ‘And me, Richards. Make the new Chief a coffee...’ He raised an eyebrow.
‘...Milky with half a sugar.’
‘...And stop snivelling.’ He squeezed her forearm. ‘The best thing we can do for Walter Day is find the killers of these children.’ He swept his arm around to encompass the whiteboards displaying the photographs of the graves and skeletons.
‘Okay, Sir,’ Richards said scooping up Parish’s mug.
‘She’ll be all right, Ma... Chief. She helped the old Chief through his first bought of cancer and they became very close.’
‘It’s okay, Parish... You don’t mind if I call you Parish, do you? I know that’s what Walter called you.’
Parish shrugged. It seemed as though Rhona Powers was doing everything in her power to keep things the same. He had to admit that he liked her. Even though he felt as though he was betraying the Chief, Rhona Powers was definitely an improvement in the looks department. He thought she was probably in her mid-forties, but she looked a lot younger.
Holmes cleared her throat.
‘Oh sorry, Holmes. Sergeant Holmes and DC Watson are my two new team members, Chief.’ He introduced Holmes and Watson and the new Chief shook their hands.
‘I’ve spoken to the Commander heading up the search for Kowalski’s son, and he says that Kowalski thinks the people you’re hunting are the ones that have taken his boy, what do you think?’
‘I’m not dismissing the idea, but...’ He stood up, picked up a marker pen, found a white board that had nothing on the back of it, and swivelled it. In the middle he drew a cloud and wrote “Galleyhill Wood”. ‘Okay, we have the children’s bodies found in the wood.’ He drew a short line and another cloud. Inside this he wrote “5 x 5”. ‘There are five graves, and all of them, we assume, would eventually have had five bodies in each.’ He drew lines off the cloud and added notes. ‘The graves are in the shape of a “pentagram”, and the distance between each of the graves has been measured, so the whole thing is more complex than a simple burial site. I think it forms the basis of a ceremony of some sort.’
Richards came back with the coffees. ‘Oh, you’ve started without me?’
‘Don’t worry, Richards,’ Parish said. ‘We’re just going over what we know for the benefit of the new Chief, and also to make sure we haven’t missed anything.’
He took a swallow of his coffee and Richards sat back down.
‘We’ll come back to the pentagram in a while. Next, the bodies in the graves are actually “skeletons”’. Off this he drew more lines and against them wrote more notes. ‘The entomologist has found no “flesh” in any of the graves, which means that time of death can’t be determined. This is consistent with Doc Michelin’s finding that the bodies were “boiled” to remove all the flesh. And while we’re talking about the skeletons, Doc Michelin also found a tiny symbol carved on the sternum of each child’s skeleton depicting two balls and a cane.’ He drew a small cane with a handle and a small tiny either side, which apparently is the password for a Master Freemason and is a pun on Tubal Cain.
‘It looks like a...’
‘Yes, thank you, Watson,’ Parish cut her off. ‘We are dealing with an all-male secret society. I’m sure the Freemasons made it appear phallic on purpose. Shall I continue?’
Nobody said anything.
‘Also, because all we’ve got is skeletons, we’ve had to get a forensic anthropologist from Sheffield University to reconstruct the faces using some new computer software they’ve developed. I called into the Mortuary earlier today and I’m assured that photographs of the reconstructed faces will be available tomorrow together with any matches they’ve found on the database.’
He drew another cloud and inside it wrote “Masterson”. ‘Now, from the available evidence, there seems to be a similarity between how Masterson was killed, and how the children were murdered – that is, there are marks between the sixth and seventh cervical vertebrae suggesting that they were decapitated with a bone saw. However, the killers took Masterson’s body and left his head. It was Richards who suggested that we could be looking for more than one person, and I think we’re all generally agreed on that by now, but how many we have no idea.’
‘What about...?’
‘Who’s telling this story, Holmes?’
‘Sorry, Sir.’
‘Let’s go back to Tubal Cain. Richards and I visited CEOPS yesterday to see if they could help us, and the only clues they came up – based on key words associated with this specific case – were Satanism and Wicca. Added to that was the one word we were able to retrieve from Masterson’s email that he sent to himself before he was murdered – Cain – and I asked Sergeant Holmes and Detective Watson to direct their search for local Satanist and Wicca groups. One group materialised that uses the pentagram as an identifying symbol, and has “Cain” in the name – the Clan of Tubal Cain. What did you find out about them, Holmes?’
‘Still nothing, Sir. We’ve looked everywhere, but there’s no mention of them.’
‘So, that’s where we are at the moment, Chief...’ He had the eerie feeling that Walter Day was in the room listening to him, and calling Rhona Powers “Chief” didn’t help. Turning back to the board, he drew two more clouds with dotted lines back to the centre cloud. In one he put “Murder Attempt – Parish” and in the other, “Abduction – Gabe Kowalski”. ‘These two events may or may not be linked to the case. First, a “woman” made the attempt on my life and, if it had been successful would have appeared as a tragic “accident”. Second, Gabe Kowalski was abducted in “daylight” in front of thousands of “witnesses”. These two events don’t follow the pattern of a group that has operated in the shadows for who knows how long.’
‘Maybe they’re desperate,’ Holmes said. ‘Maybe we’re getting close, and they’re getting worried.’
‘Okay, let’s say that was true. What would have happened to the case if I was lying in the mortuary now?’
‘It would have been re-allocated and we would still be looking for the killers,’ the Chief said.
‘Exactly, nothing would have changed. Now, what about Gabe Kowalski’s abduction, what’s happened because of that?’
‘The Emergency Response Team have become involved,’ Richards said.
‘And it’s been all over the news,’ Watson added.
‘So, there are more police out there hunting the kidnappers and they’ve got themselves some free publicity,’ Parish said. ‘We can’t do anything about finding Kowalski’s son because that’s in the hands of the ERT, but if the people we’re looking for do have him then what we can do is fin
d them. Also, forensics is producing a facsimile of the woman from Pimlico train station. As soon as we get that she’ll be front page news, so I don’t think she’ll try again.’
‘What’s your next move, Parish?’ Chief Powers said.
‘The only suspects we have are this elusive Clan of Tubal Cain – tomorrow we focus all our efforts on finding them. We’ll shake some trees and see what falls out. Sergeant Holmes seems to think that this group is who we’re looking for, and I tend to agree with her – they left their calling card etched into the breastbone of each of their victims. Also, we’ll have the facial reconstructions tomorrow, and I’m hoping some names to go with the faces, which in turn will give us a lot more information on time-frames, locations, families, and so forth. One of the many questions about this case is: “Where did all these children come from?” We know about Amy Linton, but who are all the others? There’s been no outcry at the numbers of children going missing, so I’m hoping we’ll get some questions answered tomorrow.’
***
At four-fifty Alex Knight climbed out of her Ka, stretched her arms backwards and grunted like a builder. She was as stiff as a three-day old corpse after the journey, which should have taken fifty minutes, but in reality had taken her four hours twenty minutes. Getting out of central London had been the problem; it was like an obstacle course. A fifteen-car pile-up had taken over two hours to clear. Had she been given prior warning it would take that long she could have reclined the seat and caught up with her beauty sleep, but as it turned out she had crept forward about fifty yards an inch at a time.
Now, she stood in the Woodford Green service station on Chigwell Road. She needed to fill up with petrol and stock up with food and drink. If she was going to stake out Parish’s house and wait for her opportunity to plant the devices, she needed sustenance in the form of cheese and onion sandwiches, or maybe a cheese salad on brown bread, and orange juice with the bits – it had to have the bits. And chocolate, a stakeout wasn’t a stakeout without chocolate.
She also needed the toilet – desperately, and the service station didn’t have one she could use, and there were no public toilets anywhere in site.