‘Well, so far we’ve got all the manpower—’
‘I mean in a command role, Kathy. Another, more experienced team leader to come in and take over this new investigation, the Jarvis murder, and let you concentrate on the Giannopoulos inquiry. Double the intelligence, double our chances.’
Kathy felt a jolt as if she’d been slapped. ‘And double the possibility of oversights and confusion. With respect, sir, these are one case, one killer. Splitting the command doubles the risks of mistakes. I may be new to my rank and my role, but I’ve had twenty years’ experience of homicide investigations at the highest level. I assume when you appointed me to MIT team leader you thought me capable of this. I know I am.’
A moment’s silence. Kathy wondered if she’d spoken too loudly, if other people around had heard. Then Torrens said, ‘All right. Three days—five pm on Tuesday. Then we’ll see.’ He turned on his heel.
Kathy worked for another couple of hours, responding to the stream of questions and information that kept pouring in. By three thirty am it was clear that there would be no breakthrough before daybreak, so she went to the rest room on the floor below and tried to get some sleep.
By dawn she was up, showered and back drinking coffee in the command suite in the task-force office. Around her sleepy figures were getting to work on CCTV downloads and phone records from the neighbouring towers, looking for numbers that had been operating in the area at the times of both murders. Two technical officers were busy adapting the HOLMES major inquiry system for their use, while others were combing records from across the UK and Europe for similar styles of assault.
Kathy talked to them all, then checked on the deployment of uniforms and detectives across the Hampstead and Highgate area. When she was satisfied that everything was working properly, she called Peter Sidonis, who arranged a car to take them to the Air Support Unit. There they boarded one of the EC145 Eurocopters for a flight over the crime scene area.
They approached from the east on a clear, crisp morning, flying over morning traffic on Archway Road. Looking down, Kathy made out the green area of Highgate Cemetery, and thought of her first murder case with Brock all those years ago, which began when Peg Blythe and her sister Eleanor returned home from their visit to Karl Marx’s grave to find their sister, Meredith Winterbottom, dead.
Not far away, she saw a crowd gathered outside the Jarvises’ house. The media, she assumed, hoping for a quote from the judge. She imagined him under siege inside, impatient and frustrated, and wondered how long he’d delay his current trial. Not long, she guessed.
The chopper swung to the south to make a sweep across the Heath. Below them now was the high point of Parliament Hill, tiny figures pausing on their morning walk to look up. Then they were over Hampstead and banking north along Spaniards Road. Out to the right Kathy saw the whole sweep of the Heath, its woods and meadows, its necklace of ponds that long ago served as London’s water supply gleaming in the reflected morning sunlight. Now, at the north end of the Heath, she saw the white block of Kenwood House, the stately home where Julia Roberts was seen filming a costume drama in the movie Notting Hill.
They began to lose height, coming down over the clearing of the old duelling ground in South Wood and dropping towards South Meadow and Number One Pond, where white-clad figures could be made out among the surrounding trees.
Kathy handed her headphones to the pilot and stepped down onto solid ground. As she and Peter Sidonis hurried towards the tree line a voice called out, ‘Chief Inspector Kolla!’ She turned as two men in dark anoraks ran towards her, assuming they were detectives until they were up close and she saw the microphone and camera.
‘Any progress, Chief Inspector?’
Kathy shook her head, annoyed, and made to move on, but the man said, ‘I suppose you’ll be giving this case top priority, eh? Gotta keep the toffs happy.’
Kathy turned. ‘We treat all homicide cases as top priority,’ she said. ‘We’ll be treating this case like any other.’ And she marched away. She was annoyed with herself for having risen to the bait, and her tone hadn’t sounded quite right, but there wasn’t time to worry about that. She moved in among the trees to get an update from the field team.
Nearby a car was waiting to take her and Sidonis to Westminster for the post-mortem. Things had changed a lot since Meredith Winterbottom was on the mortuary slab. Kathy vividly remembered the smells, the howl of the bone saw as she stood with Brock in an ancient basement next to the pathologist Sundeep Mehta as he worked on the old woman’s body. Now the post-mortem examinations of suspicious deaths were carried out in a new facility across the road from the Home Office, and observers watched by CCTV link to avoid contamination.
They were shown to Fenwick’s office and he took them through a virtual autopsy of CT scan imagery on his large computer screen. Caroline Jarvis’s body had been scanned from head to foot and could now be rotated and digitally peeled away, layer by layer, in graphic three-dimensional colour, without the use of any scalpel or saw.
‘Fifty-eight years old, in good health,’ Fenwick said. ‘A childhood fracture in the right ulna, here, and a partial mastectomy in the left breast … here, for breast cancer five years ago. Otherwise fine. So, the damage …’
The image swept up to Caroline’s head, and Kathy gasped. The whole front of the skull had been crushed and shattered into small bone and teeth fragments.
‘Very thorough,’ Fenwick said. ‘A methodical, workmanlike job.’
‘Not frenzied then?’ Kathy asked.
‘Oh, I couldn’t say that. It certainly looks obsessive to me. I’d never seen anything like it until last Tuesday. There is one area that may be helpful.’
He manoeuvred the view around to enlarge the left side of the head.
‘There. When the left temporal bone was struck, it broke up around a circular piece corresponding to the shape of the hammer head.’
He overlaid a cursor on the piece.
‘Thirty-four-millimetre diameter. I’d say that’s the size of the hammer head you’re looking for. When we reassemble the fragments elsewhere we’ll be able to confirm that, I’m sure.’
Kathy nodded. ‘Good.’
‘One other thing,’ Fenwick said. He touched the controls so that the image seemed to withdraw from the skull, focusing instead on the flesh layer above. ‘You see brown filaments here, and here, caught up in the pulped flesh?’
He zoomed in and Kathy said, ‘They’re everywhere.’
‘Yes. We’ve collected and cleaned some and examined them under the microscope.’ He brought up an image on the screen.
‘Furry threads,’ Kathy said. ‘Green?’
‘Right, green cotton threads. I think he laid a green cloth or towel over her head before he started hitting her.’
‘Why?’
‘To reduce the blood spatter, I’m guessing. Protect himself and his clothes. I’d say he was learning from the Giannopoulos murder, modifying his technique.’
Kathy said, ‘There’s a raw mark on her neck. Was he trying to strangle her?’
‘No, it’s only on the left side of the neck. I think she was wearing a necklace and he tugged it off.’
Kathy turned to Peter Sidonis, who shook his head. ‘There was no sign of a necklace.’
‘A trophy,’ Kathy said, her heart sinking. This was looking worse and worse: a killer who was developing his technique and now taking trophies—a true serial killer. He wasn’t going to stop now.
As they were leaving the mortuary Kathy called the judge’s mobile number and asked if they could meet to follow up a few points. He explained that he’d spent the night at the Gowes’ home in Belgravia and would be spending the day there. He’d heard that his own house was under siege from the press.
Audrey Gowe answered the door and led Kathy to a sitting room. ‘He’s very withdrawn. Insists he’s going back to work tomorrow, but I’ve tried to make him see sense—told him people will say his judgement is impaired and overrule his decis
ions … Ah, darling.’
Kathy turned to the doorway to see a man she recognised from TV, Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Defence, Oliver Gowe, dressed in a dark suit, a coat over his arm.
Audrey Gowe introduced Kathy.
‘So you’re in charge, are you?’ he said. Kathy had the impression of an exhausted man, for whom this was one problem too many.
‘Yes, sir,’ she said.
‘I’m told you’re throwing everything at this case. Is that true? You have all the resources you need? Because if you don’t I can pull strings.’
‘I have all I need at the moment, sir. We have over a hundred detectives and uniformed officers on the ground …’
He cut her off with a nod. ‘Yes, yes. Well, keep my wife up to date, will you?’ He turned to her. ‘I must go, Audrey. Car’s waiting. You’ll cope?’
‘Of course, darling.’ She went out with her husband to the hall and Kathy heard the front door close. Audrey returned and said, ‘Important meeting in Washington. Bit of a crisis. Selwyn is in the sunroom.’
She led the way to a conservatory overlooking a beautifully groomed garden. This house was much grander and more formal than the Jarvis home, and the judge seemed diminished in this setting. He put down the newspaper he was reading and got to his feet.
‘Any news?’
Kathy described a little of what was happening and he asked about having his wife’s body released for her funeral and said he would like to visit her to say goodbye properly beforehand. Kathy told him she would make arrangements, then took an envelope of photographs from her bag and showed them to him.
‘These are the items of jewellery that Caroline was wearing, Judge. The watch, rings, bracelet. Can you tell me if anything is missing?’
‘Oh … I’m not sure if I can. That’s certainly her wedding and engagement rings, but whether she could have worn any others I couldn’t be sure.’
‘What about a necklace? Could she have been wearing one?’
‘Oh yes, I think she would have been, wouldn’t she, Audrey?’
‘Definitely. What about the gold chain you gave her for her birthday? She was wearing that a lot. I’ll look when we go back to Highgate, shall I?’
‘Would you?’ Jarvis sank back onto his chair.
Audrey gave Kathy a description of the necklace and the judge agreed to search through old receipts for details.
‘One other thing,’ Kathy said. ‘Would Caroline have taken some green cloth with her?’
‘Cloth?’
‘Yes, a cotton towel or facecloth, perhaps?’
‘No, certainly not.’
Later that afternoon Kathy received an urgent summons from Commander Torrens to his office in New Scotland Yard. There was something about his secretary’s manner that made Kathy uneasy, as if she were aware of some disaster that was about to strike. After a delay, during which Kathy could hear Torrens’s raised voice through the door, it opened abruptly and he waved her in. Without a word, he shut the door behind her and pointed a remote at a large screen on the wall. It came to life with a clip from a news broadcast. Over pictures of emergency vehicles, the commentator’s voice said: ‘Police continue to investigate the brutal murder yesterday evening of a second woman on Hampstead Heath. According to an unverified source, both women’s bodies were savagely mutilated in a ritualistic manner. Residents of the high-value London district are said to be traumatised by this latest atrocity, but despite this the police are insisting on a low-profile approach.’
The image switched to a clip of Kathy, her name and rank printed at the bottom of the screen, talking to camera: ‘We’ll be treating this case like any other.’ She looked indifferent, Kathy thought, almost bored.
‘What the hell did you think you were doing?’ Torrens exploded.
‘They’ve edited it to change the inference, sir. I’d just said that we treat all homicides as top priority.’
‘But that’s what they do! That’s why we don’t make comments off the cuff! That’s why we have a bloody press bureau!’
‘I’m sorry, sir. He ambushed me.’
Torrens turned away, exasperated. ‘I warned you about handling the media on this case, didn’t I? Now our whole strategy has been thrown into chaos. Instead of trying to avoid panic, we’ve been made to look like we couldn’t give a damn. I’m about to call a totally unnecessary press briefing to try to repair the damage. Is there anything, anything at all, that I can tell them to show we’re on top of this?’
‘We’re following every lead …’
‘Don’t tell me, tell them. The media unit’s waiting for you downstairs. Give them everything you can think of so they can write my statement.’
‘Sir.’
‘A shaky start, Kolla. Get your act together.’
Night fell, shifts changed over, no sign of a breakthrough. A DNA trace was found on Caroline Jarvis’s purse which wasn’t hers or her husband’s, but there was no match on file and they had no idea whose it might be. At ten Kathy realised she’d been staring at the same screenshot for some minutes without taking it in. She got to her feet and told the duty officer she was calling it a night, heading home.
Home was new, an apartment on the south bank of the river at Vauxhall, on the twelfth floor, the same level as her old flat in Finchley. But so much grander—the view across the Thames to Pimlico and Westminster and beyond was breathtaking. She could still hardly believe it was hers, made possible by an unexpectedly large legacy from her working-class Aunt Mary and Uncle Tom in Sheffield, who had apparently been nurturing all these years a secret deposit of dubious money left them by Kathy’s father before he killed himself. She saw it as a measure of how far she’d moved on that she could now find it funny that she was profiting from the old crook’s crimes.
She poured herself a wine and sat at the big window, trying to unwind before bed. Two brightly illuminated boats passed by on the dark river below, a helicopter drifted across the sky, and she thought about Torrens’s words: A shaky start. She’d made a mistake, but she refused to doubt her ability to do the job. She just couldn’t think what else she should be doing. She needed a break, a little bit of luck. And she thought of Brock, wondering if he’d have done anything differently. She remembered him now as unruffled, taking it all in his stride, but perhaps it had never been like that.
As if it could read her thoughts, her phone rang and his name was on the screen.
‘Kathy, how are you?’ That familiar voice.
‘I was just thinking about you,’ she said. ‘I suppose you’ve seen my stellar performance on TV.’
He chuckled. ‘Don’t give it a thought, Kathy. There’s always some bastard trying to trip you up.’
‘My boss thinks it’s more serious than that. He’s on the point of taking me off the case.’
‘Torrens? No finesse. Believes in crashing through. Thinks he can make things happen by shouting loud enough. Murder investigations aren’t like that. Sometimes it just takes time. Well, you know that. We’ve been in that situation often enough.’
‘Yes, but then you always protected me from the heavy mob upstairs.’
‘You sound tired, Kathy. Where are you now?’
‘Just got home. I’m going to bed. When are you and Suzanne coming to see my new flat?’
‘Soon—she’s desperate to see the luxury penthouse.’
‘It’s not quite that. Come up to town for lunch or a show or something, when I get some time off.’
‘Absolutely. In the meantime, don’t let them rush you.’
After she’d rung off, Kathy finished her wine and went to bed, but found it impossible to sleep.
The next morning she started by going through an update on leads received from the public. All would be investigated, but in the meantime they’d been given priority ratings, A, B, C or D. One of the As caught her attention: a man who’d phoned in about something he and his girlfriend had noticed on the evening Caroline Jarvis was murdered. He had turned off Sp
aniards Road into the car park of the Spaniards Inn for a drink and found it full. As he was turning the car to leave they saw a man crossing from the other side of the road and going to a white van parked in the inn’s car park. He remembered it because he’d complained to his companion that people shouldn’t park there if they weren’t customers of the pub. There was a light near the van and he could see the man quite clearly; he had been dressed in overalls and carrying a holdall. One of Kathy’s team, Judy Birch, had spoken to the caller. The times seemed to fit and they were now searching CCTV for a sighting of the van.
By mid-morning they had tracked the van through Highgate and on to Crouch End, where the trail ran cold. They did, however, have one clear image of the number plate, registered to a plumbing contractor in Hornsey. Kathy called for backup to accompany herself and DS Birch.
The unit was in a quiet street, between a tyre shop and a monumental mason’s yard. Two uniforms went around the back while Kathy and Judy Birch entered the front office, where a woman was working at a computer.
‘Morning,’ she said cheerfully, then frowned. ‘You look like coppers.’
‘You got it,’ Kathy said and showed her ID. ‘Boss in?’
‘Mr Bell? Sure.’ She lifted a phone. ‘Teddy? Two cops to see you.’
Teddy Bell was a small, round man with a cheery smile. He took them through to his tiny office, invoices and dockets piled on his desk. They squeezed in, sat down, and Kathy explained what they were after.
‘Saturday afternoon?’ Bell tapped at his computer. ‘Hampstead, yes, that would be Jabbar. Not in trouble, is he?’
‘Full name?’
‘Jabbar Chaudri.’ He provided an address in Stoke Newington.
Judy Birch pulled out her phone.
‘What was he doing over there?’ Kathy asked.
‘A problem with a leaking pipe in the old tollhouse opposite the inn. The property manager called us.’
The Promised Land Page 3