by LJ Ross
She bore the martyred look of one who was well versed in making excuses for her errant husband and Phillips found himself feeling sorry for her.
“Why don’t you take a seat, Mrs Gilbert?” He led her back to one of the sofas arranged in a u-shape in the centre of the room.
“I don’t know what to do.” She sniffled, partly from grief and partly thanks to the virus she was coming down with. “What can I do, to make it up to that poor girl’s parents?”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Phillips said as he patted her arm.
“But she was here, under my roof, doing such marvellous work on our paintings. I feel responsible. Why would she do a thing like that?” Tears spilled over again. “She had her whole life ahead of her, everything to live for.”
Phillips decided to hold his tongue rather than raise the prospect of murder and left Cassandra to be comforted by Charlotte Shapiro, who was seated beside her.
“Thank you for your cooperation this morning.” Ryan raised his voice so that he could be heard in all four corners of the room. “As some of you may already be aware, we have identified the body found underneath the iron bridge as being that of Alice Chapman.”
There were murmurs around the room, more tears and a degree of fear that hadn’t been there before. He passed his gaze across each of their faces and thought: one of you knows.
His jaw hardened.
“I understand that each of you has provided a statement to my colleagues but, for the time being, I would appreciate it if you would make yourselves available for further questioning should the need arise.”
“Is that really necessary, chief inspector? Of course, we’re all devastated about what happened to Victor, and now Alice, but I don’t see what any of us has to do with it.” This came from Henderson, who stood near the door with a sullen look on his pinched face.
Ryan gave him a hard stare.
“For the avoidance of doubt, the deaths of Victor Swann and Alice Chapman are being treated as suspicious and as potentially linked.”
Realisation dawned on each of their faces and he made a careful note of their varied expressions. He saw Maggie clutch a hand to her throat and was sorry for it, but the facts could not be helped.
“On any analysis, two serious incidents within a twenty-four-hour period cannot be ignored and, therefore, will be jointly investigated until new information comes to light.”
Cassandra blew her nose loudly and then said what they were all thinking.
“Chief inspector, if Victor and Alice were…if their deaths weren’t accidental, do you think one of us might have been involved?”
Ryan could have given her a safe, roundabout answer, but he wasn’t in the habit of dishing out empty platitudes.
“Yes,” he said. “I do. For the time being, I would urge you to be vigilant and to report any suspicious activities to myself or one of my colleagues. Direct contact numbers will be made available but, failing that, you can always call the emergency number.”
His words fell like a death knell.
“There must be a mistake, chief inspector.” Dave Quibble was the one to break the residual silence. “Nobody in the room is capable of hurting anyone. We’re like a family, here at Cragside.”
There were nods of agreement around the room, more tears, but Ryan remained resolute.
“Anybody is capable, given the right motivation.”
* * *
As Ryan faced the room, one person looked on and almost laughed. He was so serious, so wholesome and dedicated to the scales of justice. How easy it must be, to live in a world of black and white and never any shades of grey. Perhaps he hadn’t lived enough of life to learn that, sometimes, action must be taken for the greater good. It was not enough to forgive and forget, or to go on with your life as if none of it mattered.
It was remarkable, really, how one individual action could trigger a sequence of events with such far-ranging consequences, some of which wouldn’t become obvious until much later. A person was forced to go on living with those consequences, putting up with the pain and the hardship, until the day arrived when there was an opportunity to balance the scales.
The girl’s death was unfortunate but, really, in the grand scheme of things, Alice had been a casualty in the war against a greater evil.
One that must be stamped out for good.
* * *
It took several hours for the CSIs to complete their work for the day, during which time Alice Chapman’s body was transferred to the mortuary for post-mortem and Ryan had the unenviable job of breaking the news of her death to the girl’s parents. They were based in Cambridgeshire, so Ryan delegated the task of paying a house call to a local family liaison officer. It gave him no pleasure to hand over a duty he felt he owed to her family and he intended to follow up with another phone call the following day, as much in solidarity as anything else.
A search of the immediate vicinity had provided the police team with their first breakthrough in the form of a solid link between two deaths which had, at first glance, appeared unconnected. Articles of menswear and other small items had been recovered from the shallow waters of the burn and had been found scattered in the rocky undergrowth in a twenty-foot radius around Alice’s body. They were undergoing forensic examination, but Lionel Gilbert had already confirmed that he recognised at least one article of clothing as belonging to his valet, Victor Swann.
A separate search of the gardens near the house had unearthed Alice’s large black shoulder bag among the rhododendron bushes, which begged the question of why a woman intending to take her own life would choose to leave it in such an odd place unless it had fallen from her body in some other way.
Lowerson and Yates had taken detailed statements from every member of the household who was present, amounting to twelve in total. That number narrowed to eight when they considered who had remained on site at Cragside the previous day, after the rest of the staff were sent home. A cross-check confirmed that all eight had been at the party on Saturday night too.
There was always a margin of error, thanks to numerous available access points to the estate which might feasibly allow an intruder to enter and leave without being noticed, but the police could not legislate for that. It was at moments like these that Ryan wished for modern conveniences like closed circuit television.
Ryan scheduled the first briefing of ‘OPERATION LIGHTBULB’ for five o’clock and approved his rental cottage as an authorised police site, enabling them to use it as a base rather than travelling forty minutes each way to CID Headquarters back in Newcastle. Proximity was a definite advantage in close-knit communities like Cragside.
There was no better way to smoke out a killer than being right on his doorstep.
* * *
Back in the city, Denise MacKenzie braved the late afternoon shopping crowd to meet her friend for an al fresco lunch in the city centre. It felt good to be alive, she thought, as she strolled down Grey Street towards their chosen restaurant. She had walked these pavements so many times before and yet it was only after her visit to Cragside that she found herself looking at the architecture afresh. It was incredible to think that one man—admittedly, one man with a vast fortune—had built the city landscape as they knew it. Few people could lay claim to such a legacy and MacKenzie found herself considering the kind of legacy she wanted to leave behind when she was gone. What difference had she made to the world, really?
There was her family back in Ireland, her parents who continued to be as robust as ever. She loved them and enjoyed visiting but could she imagine living in the little village in County Kerry where she had grown up?
No, not any more.
Her life was here. Frank was here.
Then, there was her work. She had spent twenty years carving out a career in law enforcement and, with no false modesty, considered herself to be a damn good murder detective. She knew she had helped to prevent dangerous criminals from committing further crimes and without the long arm of the law, th
eir deeds would have gone unchecked.
She smiled as a group of teenage girls wandered across the road, laughing raucously at some private joke known only to their generation. Without rules, without order, they would not be able to live so freely. Her smile dimmed and she was forced to admit that, even with all those rules and officers on the beat, there were still people out there for whom social laws meant nothing. For them, inflicting harm on others was a kind of blood sport.
Immediately, his face swam into her mind.
“Oh, no,” she whispered, and panic gripped her unexpectedly by the throat.
MacKenzie collapsed to her knees, right there in the middle of the city’s finest street, and shoppers slowed down to get a better look.
“Drunk,” one of them muttered.
“Drugs,” another said, with a superior smirk.
She saw them through the fog that covered her eyes and mumbled something unintelligible before the world slipped away.
* * *
“Denise?” MacKenzie came around a few seconds later to see a pair of sandal-clad feet hurrying across the pavement, then a set of neat, red-painted toenails came into view. Her body felt weak and shaky and there was a cut on her knee, burned through the material of her best jeans.
“Oh, my God. Denise, are you alright?”
Anna dropped down beside her friend and gave the crowd a scornful look, wondering what the world had come to.
“Have you hurt yourself?”
Now that the faintness had passed, MacKenzie felt a greater sense of embarrassment and pushed herself upwards.
“No, no. I’m fine. I’m alright.”
But she swayed a bit and Anna wrapped an arm around her waist.
“Let’s find somewhere to sit down,” she suggested, looking around for a convenient spot but finding none.
“No, really, let’s just get out of here,” MacKenzie muttered, eyeing the gaping faces of the herd.
Anna started to move in the direction of the restaurant.
“Haven’t you got homes to go to?” she couldn’t resist calling out, and made MacKenzie laugh.
“Human nature,” she commented.
“Yeah, it’s a bitch.”
* * *
Just before five o’clock, Ryan returned to the cottage to set up a makeshift incident room. He knew Anna was spending the afternoon with MacKenzie and was heartened to see the two women growing even closer than before. Whether they admitted it openly or not, they needed each other. Entering the kitchen, he slid his navy blazer onto the back of a chair, removed his cufflinks and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt to the elbows. He was eager to shed his suit altogether and exchange it for something more comfortable but there wasn’t time.
The kitchen boasted a supersized oak table with enough seating for ten or twelve people. He laid out a jug of water and some glasses, then disappeared into one of the bedrooms where they kept a printer to run off some copies of the reports generated so far.
The doorbell went as he was coming back downstairs, bang on five o’clock.
It was Melanie Yates.
“Come in,” Ryan said as he glanced over her shoulder. “Where’s Lowerson?”
“He said to tell you he’d be five minutes late,” she replied, slipping off her shoes. She looked for an MDF shoe rack but found instead a smart antique priest’s chair with purpose-built slots for shoes. “He’s, ah, sorting out the voluntary consent forms so we can take DNA swabs from everybody.”
Ryan led the way through to the kitchen and moved across to the kettle.
“Is anyone kicking up a fuss?”
“I think there were a couple of murmurs but, thankfully, everyone has complied without needing to get the lawyers involved.”
“Amen to that.” Ryan jiggled the kettle. “Want some coffee?”
“Yes, please.”
Yates lingered in the doorway for a moment and then stepped inside the room, casting curious eyes around the airy space.
“It’s a pretty cottage,” she remarked, taking in the Aga range and old beams, so unlike her parents’ modern, nineties house. She wondered what it would be like to settle down with a good book beside the fire in the sitting room, or to cook a meal in here.
Ryan spooned instant coffee into two mugs and added water.
“It’s only temporary,” he said, “but it’s been great for us to get out of the city for a while. Milk and sugar?”
“Milk, no sugar, please.” She licked her lips and wondered whether to ask a personal question. “Have you, ah, found somewhere more permanent?”
To her surprise, Ryan looked over his shoulder and tapped the side of his nose.
“That’s classified information,” he smiled. “But let’s just say, I have something up my sleeve.”
He turned and held out a cup with a picture of a Christmas elf on the side, then nodded towards the table.
“Take a seat, the others won’t be long.” He settled himself on one of the chairs and crossed one long, suit-clad leg over the other.
He waited for her to select a chair.
“How did you find it today?”
Yates cradled the coffee in her hands and wondered whether she should give him the short answer or the honest one.
“I prefer honesty,” he added, reading her mind with ease.
“It was—well, it was hard to see the body like that. I’ve seen one before, sir, when I responded to a call out on the Hacker case but this one seemed more disturbing, somehow.”
Ryan understood what she meant. The victim she had found previously had been a local gangster whose badly mutilated body had been the Hacker’s handiwork. In CID, it was a point of principle that every victim was afforded the same standard of care and the same level of professionalism as any other, but they were only human. It was far easier to feel sympathy for a young woman who had died badly than a man who had made his living from the misery of others.
“We do our best for all of them,” he said. “But sometimes you feel it more than others.”
He looked up from his coffee.
“Lowerson tells me you held up well at the scene,” he remarked. “If you’ve got a good stomach for the darker side of life in CID, that’s half the battle. You need to be able to look at a set of facts objectively but be unafraid to follow your gut when it feels justified. Do you think that’s for you?”
Yates drank her coffee and let the warm liquid settle the butterflies in her stomach.
“Yes, sir, I think I can do it.”
Ryan nodded and gave her a direct, unwavering stare.
“Tell me, Yates, why do you want to work in my department?”
She had expected the question to come at one stage or another but her palms still turned clammy.
“When I was sixteen, my twin sister was murdered. It devastated my whole family, particularly because they never found her killer. They could be out there, right now, killing other people.” She swallowed the acid rolling in her stomach and met his eyes. “When I was younger, I thought I wanted revenge. I don’t feel that way anymore, but I do feel compelled to try to stop the same thing happening to other people, or at least try to give the families closure so they can move on with their lives.”
Unlike my family, she added silently, thinking of the stale environment of her parents’ home and the tears her mother still shed every night.
Ryan listened and heard the pain buried beneath the softly-spoken exterior. Nobody was better placed to understand the pain of losing a sibling but it also meant he was uniquely placed to warn her of the potential pitfalls of policing for the wrong reasons.
“Is this a personal crusade, Yates? Vengeance has a time and place”—he could hardly argue otherwise, given his chequered past—“but you need to be able to see past your own life experience. Not every victim is your sister.”
She set her cup down on the table and lifted her chin.
“I can do it,” she repeated firmly.
Ryan nodded and stood up again to a
nswer the doorbell.
“Good. In that case, consider yourself part of CID from now on; I’ll square it with Morrison and we’ll see about getting you on the training pathway to become a detective. Six months’ probationary period.”
Her eyes lit up, animating her face.
“Thank you, sir.”
As he left the room to open the front door, Melanie smiled broadly and thought that everything was beginning to slot nicely into place.
CHAPTER 16
The sun was low in the sky by the time Ryan’s team had all gathered around the kitchen table. For now, he had decided to keep things simple and brief his core staff, leaving the various support staff based out of CID Headquarters—administrators, intelligence analysts, telephone operatives, IT specialists, to name a few—to provide their assistance remotely. The only exception to this rule was the presence of Tom Faulkner who, although not employed by the Northumbria Police Constabulary as a permanent member of staff, fulfilled that role in all but name.
Forensic services were outsourced, as were the services of their police pathologist, who could usually be found in the basement mortuary of the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle. Ryan planned to pay a visit to the pathologist as soon as he’d had an opportunity to assess Alice Chapman’s body and Victor Swann’s post-mortem had also been bumped up the list.
For now, Ryan waited while his team availed themselves of coffee and let off a bit of steam before they got down to business. Phillips had taken a seat next to Lowerson and was pulling his leg about being vegetarian, gluten-free and lactose-intolerant, which were three cardinal sins in Phillips’ carnivorous world. Yates watched them from her position on the other side of the table while giving a very good impression of listening to Faulkner droning on about various flora and fauna he’d spotted in the gardens at Cragside.
Ryan judged it was time to step in.
“Alright, let’s get started.”
The group fell quiet and looked at him expectantly.
“First, I want to thank you all for your hard work today. It’s not a barrel of laughs, dealing with a DB on one of the hottest days of the year but I’m sure Alice’s family appreciate everything you’ve done for her today.”