Requiem

by David Hodges

  She nodded. ‘I’m positive that’s what happened.’

  ‘No sign of a body, though?’

  ‘Not yet, but it could have been dumped anywhere in a place like this; there are acres of marsh and woodland out there, then there’s the lake, of course.’

  ‘So why would our man kill again in an isolated wildlife reserve?’

  ‘My hunch is he dumped his stolen Volvo here, torched it and nicked his victim’s car after killing him.’

  He shook his head. ‘Unlikely. As I pointed out at the briefing, this particular individual is a meticulous planner. He would hardly have dumped a car here on the off-chance of being able to pick up a replacement. What if he’d ended up with the car-park to himself? It would all have been rather hit and miss – not his style at all.’

  ‘You could be wrong.’

  ‘I’m never wrong.’

  She laughed. ‘Mr Perfect than?’

  ‘More or less, yes.’ He grinned and moved closer. ‘You and I are each perfect in our own way anyway.’

  His distinctive perfume seemed to reach out towards her and she drew back quickly, her heart thumping. ‘Are you flirting with me, Doctor Norton?’ she said, clearing her throat to hide her embarrassment.

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘Well, please don’t. I’m already spoken for.’

  He leaned against the wall, partially blocking her exit. ‘Spoken for – now there’s an old-fashioned term.’

  She bit her lip. ‘That’s because I’m old-fashioned. Now will you let me past?’

  He smiled again and for a moment she thought he was going to prevent her leaving. Then abruptly he relaxed with a soft chuckle and stepped to one side, indicating the door with the open palm of his hand. ‘Be my guest, Miss Hamblin.’

  She couldn’t help brushing against him as he held the door open for her and she felt acutely conscious of his eyes following her all the way down the ramp to the boardwalk, mentally undressing her with every step that she took – and she wasn’t the only one to be aware of the focus of his interest either.

  Hayden Lewis’s scowl was almost as dark as the shadows that were beginning to devour the remains of the day and Kate flinched as she saw him look past her at the still grinning psychologist standing in the open doorway of the hide. Not again, she thought as her stomach sank into her jeans.

  Before she could say anything, however, Roscoe emerged from some scrub to her left, puffing heavily. ‘I’m calling this farce off altogether,’ he rapped. ‘We’re wasting our bloody time here.’

  Kate tore her gaze away from her fiancé’s glowering face and shook her head in protest. ‘Guv, I still think —’ she began.

  But the DI was in no mood to listen. ‘You think too much, young lady,’ he cut in. ‘And I need a brew like yesterday.’

  The atmosphere in the incident-room could not have been more tense. Still weighed down by the cruel murder of Eugene Taylor and frustrated by the lack of progress with the investigation so far, the morale of the thirty-strong investigative team was plainly in need of a substantial boost, but that was unlikely to materialize with the present ineffectual SIO at the helm and his personal Rottweiler actually running the show.

  DS Sharp was in a particularly low mood – but for rather more selfish, personal reasons. Having the door slammed in his face by his own DI was bad enough, but then to be relegated to incident-room admin duties afterwards as a kind of punishment for rubbishing Kate Hamblin, instead of joining the rest of the team for the search of the wildlife reserve, was a humiliation too far. His thin face carried a venomous scowl as he sat there, throwing dagger glances around the room at anyone and everyone – especially in the direction of Kate Hamblin. There would be a reckoning, he promised himself, staring down at the polished table top; sometime soon there would be a reckoning and when it happened, that conceited bitch would laugh on the other side of her pretty little face! He just had to wait and watch. Then he stiffened, sensing he was being watched himself. Glancing up quickly, he caught a glimpse of Ansell’s cold gaze fixed on him and felt his stomach juices stir uneasily, wondering why he was being singled out for scrutiny.

  The DCI’s dark saturnine face was almost expressionless, the hard analytical eyes carefully studying him, as if reading the inner secrets of his mind and copying that information to some cerebral database buried deep in his own subconscious.

  Then, to his relief, the cold gaze left him and swept around the table. ‘So,’ Ansell said softly, ‘where is this investigation going? Two murders – one of a police officer – a major arson and the forced entry of another police officer’s own home. And what have we come up with so far? Absolute zilch!’

  He shook his head and leaned forward across the table. ‘I had a rush job done on the prints found at the two murder scenes and they match those we have on record for Larry Wadman, which means we now know for certain who our killer is. So why is it that we haven’t been able to get so much as a sniff of him? Ideas, people, that’s what I’m looking for – ideas and results!’

  There was silence for a few moments and one or two of the detectives shuffled their feet self-consciously, unable to come up with any feasible suggestions and unwilling to make themselves look stupid in the eyes of their boss by resorting to guesswork.

  Roscoe wasn’t so inhibited and cleared his throat noisily. ‘Kate reckons our man nicked a car from the wildlife reserve when he dumped the Volvo in the car-park, stiffed the driver, then buried him somewhere in the woods. I’ve had a team out there, but we found nothing.’

  Ansell pursed his lips for a second. ‘So why kill the driver? Why not simply steal the car when it was left there?’

  Roscoe shrugged. ‘Dunno. Maybe the guy tried to stop him taking it or he thought he would be able to identify him?’

  ‘Oh for goodness sake, why would he bother?’ Doctor Norton cut in almost irritably from the far end of the table. ‘One of the features of this case is that our psychopath has not tried to hide his identity at any stage. His raison d’ être thus far has been to make sure we know he is the culprit – that’s what turns him on. You will undoubtedly find his DNA as well as his fingerprints all over the scenes of his crimes simply because he is not trying to conceal who he is. Why then would he be worried about someone identifying him?’

  ‘Accepting your argument, Doctor,’ Willoughby put in suddenly, no doubt keen to raise his profile with the team, ‘if our man is not worried about being identified, why would he first fire-bomb Del Shaylor’s flat – presumably with the intention of preventing us finding out the registration number of the stolen Volvo he was using – and also torch the car itself when he abandoned it?’

  For a moment Norton looked as though he was lost for an answer and Willoughby directed a smug grin around the room, but then the psychologist simply kicked the question to touch with more than a hint of arrogance. ‘I would think it was all part of his game to muddy the waters and frustrate the police inquiry,’ he said smoothly and gave his most patronizing smile. ‘All very much in accord with his profile, Superintendent.’

  Ansell also smirked, obviously delighted with the obvious put-down. ‘More importantly,’ the DCI went on, as if the point Willoughby had raised was irrelevant, ‘and forgetting the whys and wherefores, how come the killer knows so much about the progress of our inquiry?’

  He raised a hand to silence Roscoe as the DI started to interrupt. ‘In particular, how did he find out that Shaylor had been brought in, that he held details of the car at his flat and would be going back there to pick it up? OK, so it would have been easy enough for our man to find out, by means of a simple phone call, when Sergeant Hamblin was on duty, so that he could stage his next sick event at precisely the right moment, but not the Shaylor connection which was known to just a handful of officers. We have a leak, ladies and gentlemen, it’s as simple as that.’

  ‘Not a leak, Guv,’ Kate exclaimed, ‘a bug’.

  Ansell’s gaze fastened on her curiously. ‘I beg your pardon?�
�

  Kate now also leaned forward across the table. ‘The incident-room commander’s office – probably the incident-room itself – must be bugged. Twister’s ex-SAS. He knows all about surveillance kit and, as I said to you before, he actually put an electronic tracker on my car during the Operation Firetrap inquiry.’

  Ansell pursed his lips, nodding slowly. ‘Then we shall have to get our technical support unit to carry out a sweep, shan’t we?’ he said, then fixed her with a cold smile and added, ‘But if what you say is true, Sergeant Hamblin, our man will certainly know that we’re on to him now, won’t he?’

  And as Kate caught his meaning and realized the amateurish blunder she had made, she suddenly felt sick.

  chapter 14

  KATE SPOTTED THE box of chocolates on the desk she had been allocated as soon as she arrived back in the incident-room the following morning.

  She had had a bad night again, with very little sleep, and it showed. Hayden had refused to share her bed, still believing that something had been going on between her and Clement Norton in the wildlife reserve hide, and they had had a flaming row. Lewis seemed to have forgotten his earlier apology and was displaying all the tendencies of paranoid jealousy. Kate had been unable to get through to him and he had left for work well before she had dragged herself out of bed, without so much as a ‘goodbye’. But her problems on the domestic front turned out to be far from over.

  ‘Got an admirer then, Kate?’ one of her colleagues called, looking up from the pile of files she was studying on the adjacent desk.

  Kate threw the woman detective an old-fashioned look, noting the broad grin on her face and that of a couple more detectives seated opposite as she bent down to detach the card from the box. She smiled at first, thinking that, like her flowers before, it was good old soft-hearted Hayden again. But she couldn’t have been more wrong and her smile quickly faded when she read the words on the card.

  ‘Hi Kate, Sorry if I was a bit pushy at the reserve yesterday. These are for you. Enjoy.’ It was signed ‘Affectionately, Clement Norton’.

  Kate’s mouth clamped shut, her eyes glittering. The man was becoming a bloody liability. Why didn’t he leave her alone? She was marrying Hayden at the end of the year and she wasn’t at all interested in this prat with his blue suede shoes. Why didn’t he get that through his thick head?

  ‘Do you call him Clem on the quiet?’ another voice spoke at her elbow and she turned quickly to find Sharp leering over her shoulder.

  ‘Just shut it,’ she snarled, tearing the card in half and dropping it into the wastepaper bin before dumping the box after it.

  Sharp reached down and retrieved the chocolates. ‘Well, if you’re not going to eat them, allow me,’ he said and waltzed off, studying the box as he went. ‘Cadbury’s,’ she heard him comment. ‘Hayden would have liked them.’

  ‘Hayden would have liked what?’

  Kate closed her eyes tightly for a second as Lewis pushed through the incident-room doors. She forced a smile and turned towards him, anxious to divert his attention. ‘Fancy a coffee, Hayden,’ she said.

  ‘I said, “Hayden would have liked what?”’ Lewis persisted, the heavy frown on his face warning her that he was still not over his chagrin.

  Sharp turned with a grin. ‘Nice box of chocs, mate,’ he said. ‘Courtesy of Kate’s secret admirer, Clement Norton.’

  Lewis moved a lot faster than Sharp had anticipated and the ex-Rugby Blue’s fist planted itself on his jaw before he realized what was happening, sending him crashing into a coffee machine perched on a side table and bringing the whole lot down on top of him.

  ‘Leave it!’ Roscoe’s voice shouted from the doorway, as Lewis stood over the sprawling DS.

  Kate stared wide-eyed at her fiancé’s red face and the clenched fist raised for a second blow. This wasn’t the quiet gentle man she knew and she was totally shocked.

  ‘I said leave it!’ Roscoe snarled, stepping between the two policemen.

  ‘Bastard hit me,’ Sharp choked as he hauled himself to his feet, using the overturned coffee table as a prop. ‘Look at the mark on my face. That’s an assault, that is.’

  ‘And if you don’t shut your mouth, I’ll bloody hit you,’ Roscoe threatened, then turned to stare around the room at the other half-dozen astonished faces. ‘Anyone here see what happened?’

  He was treated to shrugs and shaking heads as they all returned to the work on their desks.

  ‘There you are, Sharp,’ the DI said grimly. ‘No one saw a thing. Your word against his.’

  ‘I – I don’t believe this,’ Sharp exclaimed. ‘He hit me. I want to press charges.’

  Roscoe thrust his face so close to Sharp’s that it looked as though he was about to take a bite out of him. ‘Listen, you little turd,’ he said, ‘So far I’ve got two bloody murders and a serious arson to investigate, plus a wanted psychopath on the loose. I can do without this sort of aggro on top of everything else, OK? So take the rest of the day off and go home. I don’t want to see your ugly face in here again until tomorrow. Got that?’

  Sharp swallowed hard, nodding like a scolded Labrador, and Roscoe turned away from him to glare at Lewis. ‘As for you, I’ve got a very nice little job that’s right up your street. You can call and see Albert Price, Wadman’s ex-manager, to see if he or his missus have any useful information for us on their former employer.’ His eyes gleamed. ‘And when you’ve done that, you can pop in to see ex-DCI Roz Callow to see if she has anything to add—’

  ‘What, the Wicked Witch of the North?’ Lewis cut in hotly. ‘What could she possibly know?’

  Roscoe’s face darkened. ‘OK, so I’m scraping the barrel,’ he snarled. ‘But we’ve got nothing else – no witnesses, no leads, no forensic results, nothing – so we can’t afford to leave any stone unturned. She was the DCI on Operation Firetrap and could know something, so get on with it!’

  ‘Even if we find something nasty under the stone?’ Lewis muttered, chancing his arm.

  For a moment it looked as though the DI would explode, but he controlled himself with an effort. ‘Just do it!’ he rasped. ‘Or, so help me, I’ll get you transferred to traffic. And you can take Hamblin with you; she’s become a real pain in the arse.’

  Sharp would have put it a lot stronger if he had he been present and given the opportunity. As he checked his swollen cheekbone in the mirror of the gents toilet along the corridor a few minutes later, he vowed that ‘fixing the little Hamblin bitch’ would now become his overriding priority.

  Naomi Betjeman needed a break – anything that would get her the best angle on potentially the biggest story of her career and enable her to escape from the humdrum existence of a reporter on a regional tabloid to what she imagined to be a high-octane job on one of the big nationals, but so far she had zilch.

  In fact, as far as she was concerned, she had less than zilch. Still smarting from Kate Hamblin’s rebuff at the scene of Jennifer Malone’s murder and frustrated by the police hierarchy’s refusal, either via the force’s press office or at the subsequent press conference, to elaborate on the separate press statements they had already put out regarding this and the killing of the young police officer, she felt as if she were up against a stone wall. The bloody fuzz wouldn’t even talk about the dodgy fire at the Bridgwater flat or why they had been carrying out a search of a local wildlife reserve. She knew full well that Kate Hamblin was somehow connected with all the incidents, which suggested there was a link between them, but beyond that, she had nothing. If cover-ups were capable of winning awards, the Highbridge murder team would have been top of the heap for her nomination.

  The pub and a very large brandy beckoned and she found both on the outskirts of the town. More importantly, she also found Detective Sergeant Philip Sharp.

  Already on his fourth double whisky and swaying unsteadily as he tried to remain upright by clinging to the edge of the bar, he was a chicken ready for the plucking and Naomi Betjeman’s face lit up the moment sh
e clapped eyes on him.

  Sharp was well known to her. A useful leak in the past on other much lower profile cases, she had greased his palm on numerous occasions and, although the DS would never have got rich on a regional newspaper’s meagre bungs, he had not done too badly out of it overall – especially as he was also known to be taking backhanders from journalists on other papers, including a couple of the nationals.

  ‘Hi Phil,’ she said after ordering a brandy and soda and sliding the drink along the counter beside her as she went over to him. ‘You look a bit peed off.’

  He turned his head to fasten his bleary gaze on her prominent cleavage. ‘Well, well,’ he sneered in a thick slurred voice, ‘’Tis the lady of the press.’

  She tapped his glass with one neatly manicured red fingernail. ‘Want another of those?’

  ‘Rather have a jump with you,’ he said lewdly, looking her up and down.

  She snorted. ‘You couldn’t manage a hop and a skip at the moment,’ she retorted, ‘let alone a jump. Anyway, you should be working, shouldn’t you, not in here getting pissed.’

  Sharp seemed not to have heard her, but stared morosely into his half-empty glass. ‘Sent home,’ he muttered, ‘just like a soddin’ kid.’

  Naomi caught on quickly. ‘Sent home? Whatever for?’

  He took another gulp of his whisky. ‘Bastard hit me,’ he snarled, pointing at his swollen cheekbone. ‘Yet I get sent home. Can you believe it?’

  She raised an eyebrow. ‘Who hit you?’

  ‘Hamblin’s bloody boyfriend, DC Scumbag Lewis.’

  ‘But you’re a sergeant, aren’t you?’

  He belched. ‘Yeah, but don’t make no difference when the boss has it in for you.’ He belched. ‘Just ’cause this bleedin’ psycho is running rings round ’em and the inquiry is falling apart.’

  Naomi’s journalist’s nose twitched. ‘Why don’t we sit over there in the corner?’ she suggested, trying hard not to appear too curious.