He headed up to the fourth floor where the cordon was now only across the doorway of the property where Amy and Mark had been found.
A single officer manned it.
Penn nodded in his direction before moving along the hallway to the next property.
‘Wasting your time there, mate,’ said the officer, pointing to his temple. ‘Nutty as a fruit bat.’
Penn gritted his teeth and knocked the door, glad to see the police diversity training at its best.
‘Bet you a tenner she calls you Steve. Everyone’s Steve,’ he said, quietly.
‘Who’s Steve?’ Penn asked.
He shrugged. ‘Ain’t no Steve,’ he said, as the door began to open.
A lady he guessed to be late seventies, early eighties, assisted by a walking frame, opened the door.
Her wrinkled face broke into a grin.
‘Steve, come on in,’ she said, with a voice damaged by decades of smoking cigarettes.
He heard the police constable guffaw as he closed the door behind himself.
‘Well, how are you?’ he asked, following her slowly down the hallway, a strange clunking noise coming from her frame. She stopped before a wing back chair with a seat made higher with a mismatched square cushion. She used the frame to lower herself down to the chair.
‘I’m fine, Steve,’ she said, reaching over for a pack of Park Drive. His grandfather had smoked that brand for years. ‘Did you bring the coupon?’
‘I’ll get it in a minute,’ he said, pleasantly, with no clue what she was talking about.
‘Bad bit of business next door,’ he said, nodding towards the wall.
She sniffed. ‘Don’t care for them much to be honest. He thinks he’s all that because he works at Bluebird, and she’s been at Jonty’s for years now.’ She leaned forward conspiratorially. ‘Stuck up to be honest.’
He had no idea what Jonty’s was but he knew the Bluebird factory had closed down in 1998.
‘Used to bring me those toffees but he doesn’t any more, miserable bleeder.’
Penn hid his smile. She had some spirit.
‘If he thinks I’m going to keep giving him my Green Shield Stamps, he can think again.’
‘I’d keep them yourself,’ he said, as an alarm sounded in the kitchen.
‘Oh, that’s my muffin done,’ she said, making to get up.
He stood. ‘Let me.’
‘Oh, you’re a good boy, Steve, and don’t forget the coupon.’
‘Okay,’ he said, heading back down the hall.
He turned into the kitchen to see that it was indeed a muffin she’d been timing. The clock was set beside the grill. Except the muffin had been placed face down on top of the extractor fan.
He took it, blew it and placed it under the grill on low heat and found himself wondering at the safety of this woman living alone in this environment when she clearly suffered with dementia.
He could understand why other people had written her off in regard to learning anything about the incidents next door, but Penn wasn’t as quick to walk away.
‘Not quite done yet,’ he said, retaking his seat on the sofa.
‘Well, have you got it?’ she asked, looking at his hand. ‘The coupon.’
He slapped his own head. ‘Oh, I’ve left it in the car.’
‘Well, how am I gonna win if it’s in the car?’
Of course, the football coupon. He thought she was the football coupon man.
‘I’ll go and fetch it in a minute,’ he said. ‘And I’ll help you put the crosses in.’
She smiled her pleasure and he smiled back.
When Jasper was small he’d struggled to communicate and Penn had learned to just let him talk. Eventually the pieces had come together.
He glanced down at the walking frame and saw what had caused the clicking as she’d travelled down the hall.
He leaned down and lifted it up taking off the grey rubber foot. He wiped the inside and put it back on, firmer. Same thing happened on his mum’s frame all the time.
‘There you go,’ he said, looking up into a face filled with suspicion. He immediately knew what had happened. She was back in the present.
‘Who are you?’ she barked.
‘I’m here about that nasty business next door,’ he said, wiping his hand on his jacket.
She narrowed her eyes. ‘What, are you from some housing association too?’
Fifty-Eight
‘Want anything from the canteen?’ Alison asked, standing.
Stacey shook her head.
‘I get a bit of a sugar low around this time each day,’ Alison said, sitting back down. ‘But, I’ve probably had enough for a bit.’
Stacey grunted in response. If the woman was fishing for compliments with the figure she had, they were not going to come from her, especially seeing as she’d had a bit of trouble fastening the button on her size 14 trousers this morning. Damn it, she loved to eat but maybe a trip to the gym now and again wouldn’t kill her.
‘So, did you research your boss last night?’ Alison asked.
‘Alison, I’m trying to work,’ she said, without looking up. One because she didn’t want the woman to see the lie in her eyes and two she didn’t trust this woman’s motivation in trying to talk to her.
Right now she was more interested in trying to locate the son of Bill and Helen Phelps. There was a young man out there who needed to know what had happened to his parents.
‘It’s not disloyal to try and find out everything you can,’ she continued. ‘It is an active case after all.’
‘Hmm…’ Stacey said, not really listening.
‘I mean how could she not be affected by what she saw at that flat. An exact replica of one of the most traumatic events of her life. I mean the level of detail, the flat being just a few floors below. The radiator, the handcuffs, the cracker packet.’
Stacey looked up. Now she was listening as Alison bowed her head and began scribbling again.
Yes, she’d forgotten about the cracker packet in the throat of Mark Johnson.
How had she forgotten about that?
She’d read every newspaper report on the incident and yet she had forgotten about that.
As though sensing her stare, Alison raised her head. ‘Sorry, was it something I said?’ she asked.
Stacey returned her gaze to the computer screen and opened a new search tab.
‘Yes, Alison, I think it was.’
Fifty-Nine
‘Bryant, I’m fine,’ Kim said for the twentieth time as she took a MenthoLyptus sweet from the pack he offered. ‘Just something I ate,’ she continued, explaining why she’d just emptied the contents of her stomach in the toilet bowl.
‘Yeah, if you ate,’ he mumbled, popping a sweet in his own mouth.
She ignored him as he turned back towards the automatic doors.
‘Ready to go back in?’ he asked.
Was she ready to go back in the room and watch Keats violate those burnt and blackened bodies to seek answers she needed to find the bastard who’d done this? Could she watch the man do his job without visualising Erica and Keith behind those featureless faces?
She shook her head. ‘You go back in. I’m gonna check on Rubik.’
He hesitated for just a second before hitting the button to re-enter.
* * *
Kim headed to the end of the corridor, knocked lightly on the incident room door and entered.
The room had been split into three clear areas. To the right was the remainder of the cube with Doctor A kneeling before it. From behind, her Doctor Martens protruded from the white coat she wore offering a comical appearance.
In her hand was the business end of an endoscope camera used to perform keyhole surgery. She pushed it into the wreckage and pictures flashed up onto the screen. Kim couldn’t help the smile that began to form on her lips when she remembered the approaches and tools that had been considered by Keats and Mitch. Instead Doctor A had utilised the probing equipment use
d to work on flesh and organs to penetrate and interrogate the cube, to understand it before trying to separate the man from the machine.
The left side of the room contained a bright white sheet holding extracted pieces of metal. In the corner, closest to her, was a large clear plastic tub with evidence bags draped over the side and a metal detector against the wall. She guessed the instrument was to check any body parts for traces of metal before bagging the body bits and sending them next door to Keats.
‘See, I told you, Mitchell, that the inspector had not forgetting about us,’ Doctor A said, narrowing her eyes, and switching off the camera.
‘Been a bit busy, Doc,’ Kim said, returning her gaze.
Mitch nodded her way and returned his attention to the clipboard in his hands.
‘Great progress, Doctor A,’ Kim said, remembering the original size of the cube.
‘Ahem,’ Mitch said.
‘Both of you,’ she corrected, moving to stand behind the doctor.
‘So far we have extracted one and a half legs, most of the arms parts, one hand and two feet. Still much middle to find,’ she said, pointing to her stomach. ‘We are assembling the parts on a stretcher in the cupboard,’ she said, nodding towards the door.
Kim guessed she meant the room that held the bodies in the cooling drawers that were stacked from floor to ceiling.
‘Tissue samples have been taken and sent to lab and if he was married he wore no ring.’
Kim remained silent and waited.
‘What?’ Doctor A demanded. ‘I have no more at this time.’
‘You’re kidding?’ Kim asked. Thirty-six hours and that was all they had? She’d been able to tell that from the hand sticking out.
‘Oh, Inspector, your sense of humours appear to have gone AMOL. Our victim is male aged between forty-five and sixty. He is between five foot five and five foot eight and weighs around seventeen stone. He had two broken bones as a child, right arm and left leg but not at the same time. All weights and measurements are approximate and—’
‘Doctor A, I love you,’ Kim said, taking out her phone.
‘Get in line, Inspector,’ she said, tossing her long ponytail behind her.
‘Can you send…’
‘Emailed to you and your team ten minutes ago,’ she said, returning her attention to the cube.
‘Thanks, Doc,’ Kim said. With that information, they could begin to build a detailed picture of their victim.
She sidled over to Mitch. ‘Hard act to follow, eh?’
‘Yep, nothing as sexy or progressive from me, I’m afraid,’ he said, recording a measurement onto the clipboard.
To her it was a mass of numbers, arrows and mathematical signs.
‘Interesting,’ she said, unable to make head nor tail of what he was recording.
‘This might make more sense,’ he said, taking another sheet of paper from the back of the clipboard. He opened it out to A3 size.
She saw a collection of shapes in different colours with reference numbers attached.
‘Red shapes are body parts recovered and blue are car parts.’
‘Okay,’ she said, taking his word for it. The body parts were labelled as numbers, so she had no way of knowing what was what.
‘I’ve yet to feed all the data into a computer simulation back at the lab but I’m prepared to state that I think our victim was locked in the boot of the car.’
‘Mitch…’
‘I know,’ he said, smiling.’ You love me too.’
‘Not as much as the doc,’ she said. ‘But you’re on the Christmas card list.’
‘Well, that’s…’
His words trailed away as her phone began to ring.
‘Stace,’ she answered. ‘You get the email from the doc?’
‘Yeah, boss, gonna look at it in just a minute but need to run a couple of things by you. Still trying to find next of kin for our car victims, but there’s something else.’
‘Go on,’ Kim said, moving back out to the corridor.
‘The cracker wrapper in Mark Johnson’s throat. I don’t get it. I’ve been through every news report, twice, and I can’t find mention of it anywhere.’
‘Trust me, it’s significant,’ Kim said, quietly.
‘Exactly. That’s my point,’ the constable argued.
‘Stace, you’re not—’
‘If he didn’t get the detail from the news reports then where did he get it from?’
Shit, she saw Stacey’s point. Where else was there a wealth of information on her childhood?
Kim ended the call with a pretty good idea of where to go next.
Sixty
So far Penn had waited in the stuffy council office for twenty minutes for one of the two women behind the desk to become free.
The blonde, who seemed to be sorting two people to the brunette’s one, occasionally glanced at him in a ‘shouldn’t be too long now’ kind of way.
He had watched people pay their rent, report blocked pipes, shout about neighbours, collect keys and one woman had made an urgent request for money to buy sanitary towels. The blonde had taken a couple of pounds from her own purse and handed it over.
‘Sorry to keep you,’ she said as his turn finally came.
‘No problem. I’d like to talk to you about a property on Hollytree.’
‘Hollytree?’ she asked with surprise. Obviously not that many people expressed an interest in moving to that particular estate.
He shook his head and held up his ID. ‘I want to talk about the flat where the two—’
‘I know the one,’ she said in a lower voice as she looked behind him to the queue continuing to form. It appeared her colleague had only one speed and it wasn’t in the higher numbers.
‘It’s yours, isn’t it?’ he asked.
She raised one eyebrow. ‘As opposed to?’
‘It’s not housing association?’
Penn knew that most councils had sold off property to housing associations to fund other projects before finding themselves woefully short of social housing just a few years later.
She shook her head. ‘There are no properties on Hollytree with a housing association. They’re all still council owned,’ she said. Penn could hear the silent ‘lucky us’ attached to the statement.
‘So, what’s the history with the place?’ Penn asked. Few council properties remained empty for long. Even ones on Hollytree.
‘Don’t even ask,’ she said, rolling her eyes. ‘Last occupant was a fifty-six-year-old man on the sex register for kiddy porn. Got a lot of shi… trouble from the neighbours and played the ‘I am innocent victim’ card for all it was worth until a guy two floors below couldn’t find his seven-year-old and broke down the guy’s door.’
‘And?’ he asked.
‘Kid was sitting on the sofa with his top off eating a bag of Haribos.’
‘Jesus,’ Penn said, feeling sick to his stomach.
‘Dad rounded up some mates and gave him what for.’
‘Dead?’
She shook her head. ‘Not quite but it’s safe to say he’ll never live independently again.’
Understandably there was little sympathy in her voice.
He considered for a moment. He’d established there was no housing association linked to the property despite the brief lucid moment he’d shared with the neighbour. So, had he been wrong to listen to her, to trust that the police officer guarding the door had been wrong? To pursue something guided only by the ramblings of a seriously ill old lady.
He remembered a time when he was seventeen and Jasper was only two.
They had both been in the lounge, he watching telly and his brother staring around the room as usual. He had become very agitated pointing to a corner of the room above the dog’s toy basket. Both his mother and father had searched the corner and had eventually given up and left the room.
Jasper had been distraught and had continued to point, until Penn had gone over to the corner himself and started to look. Lik
e his parents he had found nothing but had figured the kid had to know something. One at a time he took the toys out of the dog’s basket and showed them to his brother who had watched intently. The last but one item, a Kong toy designed to hold treats for their springer spaniel, had contained a trapped, angry wasp. Had the dog gone near, most likely it would have been stung. Penn had taken the toy to the window and had shaken the wasp free. His brother’s smile had said it all.
So, no, he didn’t think he was in the wrong for pursuing the woman’s lead.
‘Has anyone taken the keys to look around the property?’ he asked.
‘Oh, now that’s a different story,’ she said. ‘No one wants to live there but there’s a morbid fascination with going and having a look.’
‘Can’t I get a list?’ he asked, hopefully.
She pointedly looked behind him to a queue that now stretched out the door.
‘Just point me in the right direction,’ he said, offering a smile as he stepped to the side.
She considered for a moment before pushing the chair away from the desk. He’d expected her to tap a few keys and for the printer to spur into action. Not the case.
Instead she reached for a lever arch file that appeared to have been relabelled a hundred times.
She placed it before him.
‘They go in number order of the property,’ she said, turning the file his way.
He thanked her but she was already listening to someone talk about rent arrears.
He opened the folder to find a good old-fashioned key register. Property, key number, name of key taker, signed out and signed back in. Simple and effective. This office was not going paperless any time soon.
He wet his finger and flicked through until he found the address he wanted.
The records dated back to the late Nineties but he moved forward to the period of seven years where the property had been occupied by the paedophile. The keys had been returned to the council five months ago and quite a few people had viewed it since.
He caught the eye of the blonde lady, who pointed to the photocopier.
Dead Memories: An addictive and gripping crime thriller Page 14