She was keen to get away from the station and get the investigation moving at a quicker pace. Most of all, she was keen to meet with Carol Smith. It was impossible to conceal a body beneath a patio without someone living at the property being aware of it.
Fifteen
Chloe ran a finger beneath the collar of her shirt and rolled her eyes in Alex’s direction. The council building was a shrine to glass, with the reception area consisting of floor-to-ceiling windows that arched to form a part of the building’s roof. Though it was only March and the air outside was still wintry cold, the heat trapped inside the building gave the misleading impression that the external temperature was far greater. Around them, a vast area of open space was home to little more than two sofas and a plastic stand stacked with leaflets, and the place still had that new-carpet smell Alex associated with the first drive of a new car. In summary, the council offices’ reception area was a shocking waste of space and money. No wonder so many people had complained at the extravagance of the building when it was constructed just a few years earlier.
They were greeted at reception by a woman who was optimistically dressed for a much warmer spring than the one that was struggling beyond the glass. She wore a short-sleeved pink blouse bedecked with an enormous white bow, and her hair was scraped back into a bun so tight it appeared to be giving her a DIY facelift. She acknowledged the two detectives as they approached the reception desk, offering a smile that stretched right across her face.
Alex showed the woman her identification and told her they were looking for a Carol Smith. Emerging from behind the desk, the receptionist displayed a pair of tights so heavily patterned they looked capable of bringing on a migraine if stared at for any great length of time. Alex wondered if the woman’s clothing choices affected her mood. Maybe, she thought, that was where she had been going wrong all those years. Perhaps she needed to start wearing more pink.
‘I’ll show you to Miss Smith’s office,’ the receptionist said cheerily, bustling her way through an electronic turnstile before holding her key fob to the sensor so that Alex and Chloe could follow her through. ‘She’s up on the second floor.’
Alex thanked her, and the two detectives followed her into the lift. On the second floor, they walked the length of the corridor to find Carol Smith in her office, a tiny triangular room tucked away in a far corner of the building. She couldn’t have looked more of a cliché had she tried. She wore a pale blue suit with a silver brooch pinned to the lapel, and a pair of glasses rested on the end of her nose. Her greying hair was pulled back into a bun. At the side of her desktop computer, waiting at arm’s reach, was a coffee mug that looked as though it hadn’t met with a washing-up bowl in quite some time.
‘Detectives?’ she repeated, after Alex had introduced herself and Chloe. She stood from her desk and nervously smoothed down the front of her skirt, looking from one woman to the other questioningly. ‘What can I do for you? Sorry,’ she added, raising her palms as she looked around the small office. ‘I’d offer you a seat, but … I don’t usually entertain guests.’ She gave a nervous laugh.
‘That’s fine, Miss Smith,’ Alex said. ‘We can stand.’
Carol Smith didn’t sit back down; instead, she stepped from behind her desk and shifted from one foot to the other, her unease palpable.
‘We’re here about a property you once owned,’ Alex explained. ‘Number 14 Oak Tree Close.’
Carol nodded. ‘Okay,’ she said, apparently unaware of the events that had played out at her former home just the previous afternoon. ‘I sold it a number of years ago now, though.’
‘There’s building work going on at the property at the moment,’ Alex explained. ‘The owners are having an extension built.’
The woman nodded. ‘Lovely. I mean, naturally it’s a bit strange for me to think of any changes being made there. I grew up in that house, you see, so it’ll always stay as it was in the seventies for me. But things have to move with the times, don’t they?’
She cast a smile at the two detectives, looking disconcerted when it wasn’t returned by either woman. The smile evaporated, replaced by her initial expression of unease. She looked from one woman to the other questioningly.
‘Sorry. I’m not sure I understand why you’re telling me about an extension.’
‘Unfortunately,’ Alex told her, ‘the building work has been stalled by the discovery of remains buried beneath the patio.’
She watched Carol Smith’s reaction carefully. If the woman knew anything about the body found in her family’s former home, she was one of the best actors Alex had ever seen. She looked from one detective to the other once again, her mouth moving as though making an attempt to form words, but no sound escaping it.
‘Remains?’ she said eventually. ‘As in, human remains?’
Alex nodded. Carol Smith raised a hand to her mouth.
‘Was the house passed down to you by your parents?’ Chloe asked.
Carol nodded. Moving her hand from her face, she ran it over her hair and then sat back down at her desk, turning her attention briefly to her computer but not appearing to take in any of the details that waited for her there. ‘Sorry. This has come as a shock, obviously. My parents signed the house over to me years ago, before they died. That was over a decade ago. How old … I mean, how long was it there? I’m sorry … there must be some mistake, surely?’
The words were an echo of Natalie Bryant’s, disbelief momentarily suggesting that an error could be made with a discovery as huge as this; that an initial assessment had been little more than a misjudgement and the remains weren’t human after all.
‘Between thirty and forty years,’ Alex told her. She and Chloe watched the woman’s reaction as she did the mental maths to work out the decade in which the body would have been buried. The realisation that it must have happened at some point during her own childhood drew itself across Carol Smith’s face, dragging at the corners of her mouth in a painful grimace.
‘That can’t be right,’ she mumbled, almost inaudibly.
‘Why not?’
Carol looked up. ‘I mean, I was just a kid then. I was still living at home. There must have been a mistake.’
‘There’s no mistake, I’m afraid. We are currently trying to make an identification of the remains. That’s where we may need your help.’
‘My help?’ Carol turned to Chloe, though it had been Alex who had spoken. It wasn’t the first time that someone had sought comfort from Chloe in response to Alex’s words. Not for the first time, Alex considered the fact that her younger colleague was so much more approachable than she herself was. There had been a time when the fact had offended her, but she was beyond that now.
‘I’m sorry,’ Carol said, raising her palms in apology. ‘I don’t know how I can help you.’
‘I know it was a long time ago, but whoever was responsible for concealing the body in the garden was likely to have been someone you came into contact with at some point, at the very least. We’re going to need as many details as you can give us – friends, family members … anyone who had access to the property between the mid seventies and late eighties. I know,’ Alex added, noting the reaction that flooded the woman’s face, ‘it’s a big ask. Do you have any other immediate family?’
Carol exhaled loudly. ‘Family around at that time, you mean? No. I was an only child. I mean, I’ve got aunties, cousins, that sort of thing, but no one close, no.’
‘We’ll need contact details for them,’ Chloe said.
* * *
They left the office with a promise from Carol that she would get the contact details of relevant friends and family members sent over to them before the end of the afternoon. Alex hoped for all their sakes that the woman had a decent memory. She was in her early forties, so would have been in her early teens at most at the time of the burial. Alex knew what her own recall of details was sometimes like; expecting Carol to remember every person who might have had access to the house was asking a lot
, though she already wondered whether the contact details would prove necessary.
‘Just think,’ she said, once the lift doors had closed and she and Chloe were away from any possible prying eyes, ‘someone has access to your home and manages to dig your garden up, bury a body there and lay a patio over it without you noticing.’
‘Seems unlikely.’
‘Exactly.’
The lift stopped and the doors opened on to the reception area, where the two detectives put their conversation on pause until they were back in the car park.
‘So it must have involved at least one of the parents?’ Chloe said, finishing Alex’s train of thought.
‘Probably. Not unless whoever lay the patio was responsible for putting the body there, but he’d have had to be working alone and managed to get it past the people living there. I can’t see how it can’t involve at least one of the parents in some way.’ Alex reached into her pocket for her keys before unlocking the car. ‘I don’t think Carol Smith knows anything about it, do you?’
Chloe shook her head and got into the passenger seat.
‘We just need to find out who that body belongs to,’ Alex said, starting the engine. ‘Then we need to find out what he was doing there.’
Sixteen
Alex and Chloe returned to the station to find Dan on the phone at his desk. His focus was on the screen of his computer when they entered the incident room, but when he saw the two women, he ushered them over, thanking whoever was at the other end of the line before ending the call.
‘That was the auctioneers the farmhouse on Caerphilly Mountain is currently listed with. It’s been up for auction with them a total of eight times over the past five years, but there’s only ever been one bidder. That was back in 2015 and the sale fell through. The place is in such a state that people are afraid to touch it, by the looks of things. Too pricey to put right.’
‘And the current owner?’ Alex asked.
‘These guys.’ Dan pointed at the website on his screen, a property development company called Carter and Morgan Homes. The main image showcased a grand detached building overlooking the sea, its glass-enclosed first-floor balcony scattered with sunloungers and tables decorated with half-filled wine glasses. It was the epitome of the kind of lifestyle popularised by reality television shows and design magazines, doubtless aspirational to many but to Alex’s mind unrealistic for anyone whose life had even the slightest element of responsibility.
At the bottom right of the page, in a separate image, two men wearing expensive suits posed for the camera, their smiles flashing unnaturally white sets of teeth.
‘I’m obviously in the wrong job.’
‘They don’t get to work with us, though,’ Chloe said, perching herself on the corner of Dan’s desk. ‘Just think what they’re missing out on.’
With a smile, Dan turned his chair to face both women. Alex felt a pang of something she had not yet felt – a nostalgic tug at her chest at the thought of leaving these people she had grown to think of as friends as well as colleagues. They had been through so much together and a part of her had taken for granted their being there, as though it was fact that they would always remain so. Losing her mother the previous year should have been enough to teach Alex that nothing and no one was permanent, but she had always been adept at ignoring any realities she didn’t want to face.
The fragility of time was making itself known and had finalised that adoption application as though signing it for her. Alex was forty-five; she knew that if she didn’t make the move now, she never would.
She looked back to the photo on the screen. ‘Have you managed to get hold of either of them?’
‘Not yet. Might not be too easy, either. One lives in Dubai, the other’s currently on holiday in Bali. How the other half live, eh?’
Alex sighed. If that was true, then neither man would have been in the country at the weekend. It put her no closer to finding out who had been on that mountain road with Matthew Lewis and Stacey Cooper on Saturday night. Had someone else known that the property was deserted and that both its owners were out of the country for a while? It was unlikely that whoever had been digging that grave had done so on a whim. The time and place were most certainly premeditated, with whoever had been up there mistakenly confident that they would be uninterrupted.
‘The farmhouse doesn’t really seem their style,’ Chloe said, scrolling through the gallery of properties featured on the website. ‘Everything on here is glossy and modern. Why buy a derelict place like that?’
‘I thought the same. I asked the woman from the auctioneers – she said she’s not sure of the details, but from what she understands, Damien Morgan made the purchase years ago, when the property came back on the market. She thinks it used to be in the family; that he might have purchased it through nostalgia.’
‘So why not do anything with it?’ Chloe wondered. ‘These two hardly look strapped for cash.’
‘Maybe it turned out to be more of a hassle than he realised,’ Alex suggested. ‘Is Morgan the one living in Dubai?’
‘Not sure. I’ll get on to it.’
Alex’s mobile phone began to ring. She retrieved it from her pocket and glanced at the screen, not recognising the number. ‘DI King.’
It was someone from the ballistics department calling with the results of the bullet analysis. ‘I’ve just emailed over the report on the weapon used to kill Stacey Cooper,’ the man told her. ‘Take a look and get back to me if you want to go over any of the details.’
Alex gestured to Dan, who moved from his seat so she could take his place. She accessed her inbox on his computer, quickly typing in her password. As promised, the email was there waiting for her. She opened the attachment and read through the details, with Chloe and Dan close enough to also absorb the contents of the file.
‘A .22 air rifle,’ she said.
‘An air rifle was powerful enough to do that?’ Dan queried, his tone laced with disbelief. He glanced across the room to the evidence board, where the graphic image of Stacey Cooper’s head wound was displayed.
It seemed sickening that a weapon capable of causing a fatality could be legally kept by anyone in the name of so-called sport. Alex was aware of a number of cases in which people – some of them children – had been killed by a misfired air rifle. In the right hands, they were as deadly as any other form of firearm, and this was no accident. Whoever had fired the gun that had killed Stacey Cooper was clearly an experienced shot. She wondered whether it was the first time the killer had used the weapon to murder someone.
‘According to this,’ she said, scanning the contents of the email, ‘a rifle is lethal enough if aimed at close range and with accuracy. Or if it’s been modified with the purpose of making it more deadly. Look.’ She minimised the report and left her email account for a moment. A quick internet search demonstrated how frighteningly easy it was to purchase a modification kit that would make a rifle even more dangerous.
‘What’s the point of gun laws if it’s all this easy?’ Dan asked. Bitterness laced his tone, as it had tended to recently. His eyes met the burns that lined Alex’s face, and she caught him looking away quickly, as he so often did. She knew he blamed himself.
She shrugged. ‘Ridiculous, isn’t it? Basically, anyone with access to the internet can get their hands on one of these if they happen to be that way inclined.’
‘So where do we start in terms of trying to identify who owns this type of rifle?’
‘Gun clubs, shooting ranges … let’s start with the obvious. The farmhouse …’ she said, directing their attention away from the weapon for a moment. ‘It may have been standing empty for years, but someone knows it well enough to be aware of that. I wonder how many viewings it’s had since it’s been up for sale. Whoever was up there digging that grave is familiar enough with the place to know they were unlikely to be interrupted.’
‘Someone linked to the auction company?’ Dan suggested.
‘Or a potential
buyer,’ Chloe added.
‘Get back on to the auctioneers,’ Alex said to Dan, ‘and find out if we can get a list of people who’ve viewed the place. Let’s get hold of Carter and Morgan as well,’ she added.
She left Chloe and Dan at Dan’s desk and went to the evidence board at the far side of the room. Stacey Cooper and Matthew Lewis looked out at her, their smiles hauntingly tragic. How different those faces would have looked if they had known what was waiting for them just around the corner. It was a blessing that most people lived in ignorance of their fate.
She lingered on the face of the young man, searching his eyes for answers. Had she built her first impressions of him on a misconception, assuming he was no more than a typical twenty-one-year-old? Her belief in his innocence had felt firm, but it wouldn’t have been the first time she had made a mistake. Either way, the notion that too much time had passed and that she had already failed him – that she had already failed Stacey – felt all-consuming. It was a feeling she was too familiar with: one she wished she had never had to experience.
‘Where are you?’ she asked beneath her breath.
Seventeen
It had been easy to find Elliot West. He worked in a department store in the centre of Cardiff, selling designer suits to people who had cash to burn and a desire to stay ahead of current trends in men’s fashion. Having been directed to the right department by a young woman at the perfume counter, the first thing Jake noticed about Elliot was that he looked nothing like his social media profile pictures. This was no surprise – people rarely did – but in Elliot’s case the difference was so stark that anyone meeting him for a date thinking they were to spend the evening with the man they had seen on Facebook would have been forgiven for bailing out early on the grounds of being drawn there under false pretences.
‘Elliot West?’ Jake said, flashing his police ID.
A Promise to the Dead: A gripping crime thriller with a brilliant twist Page 9