Cragside: A DCI Ryan Mystery (The DCI Ryan Mysteries Book 6)

by LJ Ross

  * * *

  Beneath the shade of an old tree, one person looked out across the valley. How many people had walked the earth around those rocky hills? How many had carried on, unaware and ignorant of the people they left in their wake? They watched as a kestrel circled high and then dived downwards to capture an unsuspecting mouse.

  Surely, it wouldn’t be long before the police came. The investigation had been running for days now and Ryan had a reputation for closing cases quickly. DNA swabs had been taken earlier and there was usually something for the police to find. If that was the case, Ryan would be back to make an arrest.

  On the other hand, perhaps the police wouldn’t find anything. It was always a possibility, however remote.

  Time to end this, they vowed.

  CHAPTER 21

  After a pit stop for lunch, Ryan and Phillips headed back to CID Headquarters. They had almost made it to their office when they were intercepted by the Chief Constable’s overbearing personal assistant.

  “Morrison wants a word with you,” she barked out, without any niceties.

  Ryan pasted a megawatt smile on his face.

  “Good afternoon, Donna. How nice to see you again—I hope you’re having a pleasant week?”

  She didn’t bat an eyelid.

  “Morrison wants to see you in her office now,” she repeated, before turning her back on him and stalking down the corridor.

  “That woman should have a sinister theme tune,” Ryan muttered. “Every time I run into her, she looks as if she’s about to hack me to pieces with the blunt end of a machete.”

  From his position on the side lines, Phillips burst out laughing.

  “It’s a pity Jack wasn’t here to see that,” he said. “Might have made him feel better about the fact you’re not universally admired by the opposite sex. Unlike me,” Phillips tagged on.

  Ryan rolled his eyes.

  “Yeah, all those hordes of women throwing themselves at your feet. It’s starting to become a health and safety issue.”

  “Aye, it’s a problem but we each have our cross to bear.”

  * * *

  Chief Constable Morrison was waiting for him when Ryan knocked on the door of her office, and she gestured towards one of the semi-comfortable tub chairs arranged in front of her desk. He noticed she’d put a few potted cacti on the window ledges and watercolour pictures of local seascapes hung on three of the walls to soften the stark white. Ryan came to stand in front of her desk.

  “I understand you wanted to see me, ma’am?”

  “Yes. Take a seat, Ryan, you’re giving me a neck-ache.”

  She watched him settle himself, admiring the way he always managed to look unruffled, no matter what bubbled beneath the surface of those clear grey eyes.

  “How are things up at Cragside?”

  Ryan shifted in his seat, recognising the warm-up question for what it was. They both knew what Morrison really planned to talk about but he was happy to go along with the subterfuge if it bought him a few precious minutes.

  “Progressing,” he replied. “I had a word with Jeff Pinter earlier this morning and it’s likely there was a struggle before Alice Chapman died. On that basis, we’re treating her death as murder in the absence of any other plausible alternative. DNA testing is ongoing.”

  “What about the first victim?” Morrison racked her brains for a name. “Victor Swann? I understand you’re treating his death as a linked investigation.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Although we’re awaiting the pathologist’s report, it would appear there is an evidential link between the two deaths. I suspect there is a strong financial motivation too. Swann lived like a king but his earnings capacity didn’t match his spending. DC Lowerson and PC Yates have been following the money, digging around into any outstanding SARs to see if there are any markers on his file.”

  Morrison nodded. He seemed to have everything in hand, which was no less than she expected.

  “I hear that MacKenzie has started back at work? That’s excellent news.”

  Ryan nodded.

  “She’s planning to do two or three days per week to begin with and I’ve agreed to be flexible on that. It’s still early days.”

  “Of course. If there’s anything she needs—”

  “She’ll let us know,” Ryan interjected smoothly. “But I’m keeping an eye on her. We all are.”

  The tone suggested, ever so subtly, that his team looked out for one another. Not being party to that, Morrison was left out in the cold.

  Her lips flattened.

  “There was another matter I wanted to discuss.”

  She found herself bristling under his silent scrutiny and came straight to the point.

  “I was disappointed by your reaction the other morning, when I told you of the new appointee to the superintendent position,” she said, flatly. “While you are naturally—shall we say, reserved?—I thought your behaviour was out of character, even for you.”

  She realised he was not going to help her by volunteering any information, so she needed to be even more blunt.

  “I want you to tell me why you have a problem with DCI Lucas. Surely it can’t be something as trivial as a brief history together, over a decade ago.”

  A muscle ticked in his jaw and Ryan looked away for a moment. When he turned back, his eyes were completely veiled.

  “I have no grievance on record against DCI Lucas.”

  “Alright,” Morrison said, a bit testily. “You say you don’t have a formal grievance but what about an informal one? Don’t try and tell me everything is tickety-boo, because I wasn’t born yesterday.”

  Ryan felt the old fear creep back, the worry that he could be wrong or that he would not be believed. He remembered how Lucas had behaved all those years ago and what she had done; the times she had made him doubt his own sanity. Had he magnified those memories over time? Perhaps she had changed; recovered and found inner peace.

  Pigs might fly.

  Ryan opened his mouth to tell Morrison about the times he had feared for his safety; the times Lucas had threatened suicide if he should ever leave her; the horror at coming home to his flat in London to find her there with a firearm held to her head.

  At the time, he hadn’t put it on record out of a sense of sympathy and misguided pity, and it had been his single biggest mistake. He had been a much younger man, barely twenty-three to her more worldly thirty-two, and he hadn’t the first idea how to manage such a volatile situation. Lucas was his superior and they had been discreet from the start because personal relationships had been discouraged in the ranks. Unfortunately, that meant nobody knew of it and Lucas threatened to deny any intimacy between them if Ryan raised it with the brass.

  When he’d overridden her threat and tentatively mentioned it to one of his colleagues, they’d laughed.

  Grow a pair of balls, mate.

  Man up.

  Apparently, it was inconceivable for a man like Ryan to be the subject of unwanted attention. He’d been told he should stop complaining and that other men would kill to have a woman like Jennifer Lucas in their lives. Back then, he’d been young and proud, unwilling to embarrass himself any further by showing them the scars of his short-lived romance.

  He wondered whether the response would have been different if he’d been a woman.

  But that was then.

  Ryan was a different man now, with ten more years of life experience. He knew what it meant to be a partner in a meaningful relationship, where neither party was ever made to feel trapped, or worse. He didn’t mind the jokes around the canteen or the banter from his friends because he’d made a new life for himself from the ashes of the old one.

  He’d built something good here, something solid that was worth protecting.

  Ryan had just made up his mind to tell Morrison the real reason for his concern, when she said something that stopped him.

  “I don’t know whether it will interest you to know that DCI Lucas will be moving north with her
husband,” Morrison said, and watched relief pass over Ryan’s face.

  It was like a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. He was delighted to know that Lucas had left her troubles behind her and gone on to find happiness in the years that had passed. He couldn’t wait to tell Anna about this development.

  “As you can see, there really should be no awkwardness,” Morrison continued. “Unless there’s something else you feel I should know?”

  Ryan thought of Lucas’s husband and of the uncomfortable position it may put her in if he were to rake up the past. For all he knew, she had children who could be affected by any repercussions.

  “No. No,” he said again, more firmly this time. “There’s nothing.”

  Therein, Ryan made his second big mistake.

  * * *

  Ryan found his team gathered around Lowerson’s desk, waiting for him. “Everything alright, lad?”

  Phillips gave him a sharp look but Ryan nodded and felt relaxed for the first time in days. It might be awkward working with Lucas at first but there was a lot of water under the bridge.

  “What are we all looking at?”

  He walked around to lean over Lowerson’s shoulder and look at an e-mail from one of the investigators in the financial investigation unit, then grabbed a spare chair and wheeled it across to join their little huddle.

  “Where’s Mac?”

  “On her way back,” Phillips told him. “Faulkner’s still at it but there’s no need for her to hang around.”

  Ryan nodded.

  “Alright. Where are we at?”

  “I’ve been focusing on Victor Swann’s household documents—mortgage, pensions and so on, while Yates has been liaising with the FIU to peel away the top layer.”

  Lowerson reached behind him to grasp a sheaf of papers showing Swann’s personal current account and handed it to Ryan, who skim-read the figures, paying attention to transactions highlighted in neon yellow and green.

  “As you can see from those accounts, Swann had access to considerable funds and spent them freely.”

  Ryan’s eyebrows raised when he noted £1,000 had been spent on a solid silver and 18ct gold cartridge pen.

  “There are some weighty cash deposits here,” Ryan observed.

  “Yes, it confirms what we already suspected. There was more to Victor than met the eye,” Lowerson said, then showed him a different set of papers. “These are some of the papers we found scattered on the floor of his house.”

  Ryan looked down at a set of sale documents for the retirement bungalow, which had been bought with a small mortgage. Flipping the page, he found pensions and life insurance documentation, showing that Victor had invested heavily in both.

  “There isn’t much out of the ordinary there, nothing that was flagged by the money laundering reporting officer at the bank, anyway,” Lowerson said. “But at this point, I’ll hand over to Yates, who can tell you the fun stuff.”

  He gave her an encouraging smile.

  “Um, yes. The disparity of income and expenditure seemed suspicious, so I contacted our colleagues in FIU. They tell me that Victor Swann has several markers on their system for separate transactions over the space of at least two years, owing to unusually high cash deposits and outgoings, but he was not being actively investigated.”

  “Why not?”

  “Resources, they tell me. Frankly, sir, they ‘have bigger fish to fry than a pensioner splashing the cash’. That’s a direct quote from them.”

  It was the same story they’d heard many times before.

  “I explained the potential link between Swann and one or more members of the household at Cragside to the FIU investigator and I’ve submitted the paperwork for them to go ahead and seek full disclosure of all Swann’s records from his bank. We’ve only been able to find one current account and two savings accounts held with the same bank, both of which contain a moderate sum.”

  “There might be more accounts but it will take time to find them,” Ryan predicted.

  “Yes.”

  “I bet there’ll be a timeshare in Marbella hidden somewhere, ’n all,” Phillips grumbled, thinking that all he could look forward to in his dotage was an annual trip to Butlins.

  “So,” Ryan said, moving swiftly on, “they’re going to come back to us with Swann’s financial records. What about tracing the source of these cash deposits?”

  Yates gave him a pained look.

  “The only way we can really do that is to seek speculative access to the private accounts of the people on our list, to see if there are withdrawals of a similar amount and date range as the deposits made into Swann’s account. We’d need to make a formal application to see those records, which isn’t granted lightly.”

  “We’ve got a long list,” Lowerson agreed. “But we need to whittle that down to a short list otherwise we’ll get nowhere with the banks.”

  Ryan clapped his hands together.

  “Let’s get whittling.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Just before three o’clock, MacKenzie stepped through the shiny automatic doors of the main entrance to the new police headquarters in Wallsend. The foyer was large and open-plan, without any sign of the mouldy walls and persistent smell of urine and bleach that had been a defining feature of their old workplace. The visitors’ chairs were brand new but made of the same cheap plastic so they could be wiped clean. The clientele was just the same as before: a mixture of people who had fallen prey to substance abuse, prostitutes, local thugs, and students seeking a crime reference number for the mobile phone they’d lost during a heavy night out at the weekend.

  Everything felt familiar, yet unfamiliar.

  “Denise!”

  She swung around to see a couple of uniforms heading across to greet her.

  “Great to see you back on your feet! How are you feeling?”

  She listened to their well-meaning remarks and forced a smile, thanked them for their good wishes, then moved away as a small headache started to pound in the base of her skull. In another moment, the headache would intensify and she’d black out.

  MacKenzie made it to the other side of the security doors and was grateful to find she had the corridor to herself.

  Her vision was spinning.

  “No,” she told her treacherous mind. “Not again. Not today.”

  She leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes, visualising herself in a safe place, with warm sun on her skin and quiet music playing in her ears. Her breathing slowed to an even pace and the headache receded.

  “That’s better,” she muttered and made her way to the first floor.

  * * *

  MacKenzie found the rest of her team holed up in a small meeting room, where Phillips was product-testing a state-of-the-art flat screen television mounted on the wall. “Good to see you’re all hard at it,” she declared, taking a seat beside Phillips at the oval-shaped conference table.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said, fiddling with the buttons.

  “It’s plain to see I’ve come back to work just in time. The public don’t pay you to watch Judge Judy.”

  “You’ve arrived in the nick of time,” Ryan agreed and confiscated the remote control from Phillips. “We were about to eliminate some suspects from our list of eight.”

  He ran through a summary of what they’d learned so far about Victor Swann’s accounts, as well as their reasons for suspecting that someone at the house might have been financing the old man.

  “It goes like this,” Ryan said, as he stood at the head of the room and spread his hands. “Victor was accepting cash from a person or persons unknown, who may have killed him. After Victor died, they raided his house and locker to recover something incriminating. The following day, Alice Chapman is found dead at the bottom of the valley. Bearing in mind the odds and ends belonging to Victor we found scattered around her body, it stands to reason that Alice had found or come into possession of them—”

  Ryan broke off as an alternative scenario presented i
tself.

  “No,” he said. “It’s more likely she interrupted somebody who was in possession of Victor’s things. Putting two and two together, Alice came up with the correct number and ran towards the bridge, where there was a struggle and Victor’s bits and pieces ended up at the bottom of Debdon Burn with her.”

  “Why would she head for the bridge?” Lowerson asked. “Why not run towards her car?”

  “It was raining heavily,” Ryan postulated. “If she was running in fear, she might have been disoriented…”

  He trailed off as the truth hit him.

  “Ah, God…” He ran an angry hand over his neck and then swore viciously. “The pathway over that bridge and through the trees leads to nowhere except the cottage I’m renting with Anna. She was running to tell us what she’d discovered,” he said, sadly. “Alice was running for help but we weren’t there for her.”

  “There’s no way you could have known,” Phillips said, always the voice of reason.

  Ryan shoved the guilt to one side for now. He would deal with that later and add Alice to the reel of other victims whose faces crowded his dreams.

  “All of this suggests Victor knew something important enough to extort regular payments from our unknown perp.”

  “But who?” Yates asked, beginning to come out of her shell. “We’re still no closer to discovering who was paying these bribes, if that’s what they were.”

  Ryan smiled knowingly.

  “That’s where a bit of common sense comes in,” he said. “If we assume Victor was pushed and, the following day, Alice was chased down and then bodily thrown over the side of the bridge, there’s one important characteristic our killer needed.”

  “Physical strength,” MacKenzie murmured.

  “Exactly.” Ryan pointed his finger to capture the thought. “Turning to our list of suspects, there are several we can cross off straight away.”

  He shuffled some papers and found copies of their photographs which he laid out in a row on the table.

  “We can strike Lionel and Cassandra off the list, and Maggie,” Phillips said. “They’re all at least seventy and none of them could have chased a girl half their age, let alone forced her over the side of a bridge.”