DCI Isaac Cook Box Set 1

by Phillip Strang

  There had been one, a smart young woman whom he had admired. Her genius level intellect was close to his. It was unfortunate, the day he had to push her in front of an express train as it passed through the railway station where she was waiting for the train to take her back to her small flat. That had caused him anguish for some months afterwards, but his secret had remained safe.

  It had not been easy, after killing Bob Robertson. He had kept out of sight since then by hiding in an abandoned warehouse, scavenging at night for scraps of food. He knew the police would be looking for him, not necessarily as the murderer, but he had been at the hostel that night, and he had disappeared after the killing. He knew the police were not stupid, and that they’d put two and two together and realise that he was a principal witness. He knew that he had perfected his disguise: the beard, the old clothes, the rank smell. He didn’t like any of them, but the alternative was not preferable.

  The tenuous political situation all those years ago remained the same today. Some people would take the efforts of his research and use it as a weapon. The death of a few individuals and his less than satisfactory lifestyle were a small cost.

  Big Greg sat in a corner of the warehouse, its construction half complete. He missed those who had become his friends, the downtrodden, the incoherent, the brain-addled, yet he did not know why. He had grown up in a comfortable middle-class household, shown brilliance at a young age, left Oxford University with an honours degree in mathematics.

  The mandate of his last position in the government research department had been clear: the development of low-cost energy. Idealistic, he had thought at the time, but he and the others had applied their collective wisdom to the solution.

  That had been fine for the six years they had worked as a team on the problem. It had been him who had come up with the final solution, the stabilising of the energy, the directional control of the microwave beam from the solar collectors in low-level orbit, and he was willing to reveal it at an upcoming presentation, including to his team, but then he had overheard their director talking in the conference room to some men in uniform.

  Three men. One was the director of the government department where the research department was located, a decent man, idealistic, the same as he was, Big Greg knew that. The other two were clearly military. The discussion: the military implications of what he alone had solved.

  Big Greg, although that was not how he was known then, realised that what the military men saw was that the potential of low-cost and virtually limitless energy could also be directed towards weapon development. He also knew that the director would be forced to hand over all the information regardless of his protestations, or else…

  Even though he was now relegated to the street and its deprivations, Big Greg knew that it was a small cost if it protected those he held dear. If they, the scurrilous element in the security services and the military, knew that he still lived, then his wife and his daughter, even his grandchild, could be threatened.

  ‘We only need the solution,’ the lead torturer had said.

  Big Greg remembered him well: short, swarthy, a London accent. The man revealed that he had been assigned to an army base in Egypt to oversee Egypt’s treatment of Al Qaeda fighters they had brought in from Afghanistan. How he had signed the papers to allow the waterboarding, the electric shock treatment, the beatings, and the sleep deprivation.

  ‘You’ve held up better than they did,’ the sadistic man had said once. ‘You’ll not leave here without telling us all we want, or else it’s your family. I’ve seen your wife, pretty isn’t she, and how about your daughter? What we could do with them,’ he had said.

  Cornered, Big Greg was unable to reason with the man, to explain that what they wanted him to give them was too dangerous to be in the hands of malevolent dictatorships or governments; it was the ultimate weapon, that could generate energy for the betterment of mankind or to destroy vast sections of it. He knew they would not let him leave alive, and if his family were the lever, they’d use them.

  Desperate, his ability to resist the interrogation weakening, he plotted his escape. Big Greg, taller than the average and twice the size of his interrogator, and with his bindings loosened after his constant struggle with them, grabbed the man that had been holding him captive using the last ounce of his strength and placed his hands around the man’s throat. The man gasped for breath, attempted to break free, but there was no one else in the room to help him. Eventually, Big Greg placed him in the chair where he had been restrained not five minutes before and made good his escape, but not before maiming another who stood in his way. His only thought was how to protect his family.

  The knowledge he possessed was too important; his family was not safe, never would be. The only solution was for him to die. This had not been so easy to arrange. The researcher’s death was assumed, once they had found his clothes stacked on a beach and a suicide note posted to his wife, that he had swum out to his death. Not that it prevented them bringing his wife in for interrogation, a situation that he could not control, but it had not lasted long.

  The body of the tramp that he had killed, a man with similar features he had found under a railway bridge, was not hard to deal with: a suitable number of bricks and the man had sunk into the silt on the river bed without a trace. For the first few weeks, the new Big Greg had kept a low profile, allowing his appearance to degenerate, his beard to grow. Once the transformation was complete, he had returned to within a mile of his family and had watched them from a place in a park across from the house that he had shared with them once.

  In time, the hurt of seeing them without him had diminished. However, his daughter maturing, making a fool of herself sometimes, getting drunk too often, sleeping with the wrong man, had been difficult, but she had passed that phase and had matured into someone he was proud to call his daughter. Once, she had given him some money as he sat there watching her. ‘Here you are,’ she had said, as she passed by him with his grandchild in its pushchair. He had wanted to lean over and touch the baby, but he didn’t. He knew what would be the reaction of the mother, his daughter, and it was best for all concerned if she saw him as an old tramp down on his luck.

  ***

  Isaac and the investigation team met as they always did at the Homicide department’s office in Challis Street. As always, the ubiquitous presence of Detective Chief Superintendent Goddard, the demand to wrap up the case as soon as possible, which to Isaac seemed yet again to be rhetoric over reality. So far, they had a body, no motive, and certainly no murderer. The fingerprints, according to Gordon Windsor, the CSE, had revealed nothing of value. It was likely due to the cold evening that whoever had wielded the pole had worn gloves.

  ‘Why Bob Robertson?’ Wendy Gladstone asked.

  ‘Why not?’ DI Larry Hill said. ‘The man must have had enemies, the same as all of us.’

  ‘Did he?’ Isaac asked. He had just had two weeks in Jamaica, his parents had come from there, visiting relatives, soaking up the sun, eating chicken jerk in Boston Bay, jumping off the cliff into the sea at Negril, and chasing a few too many of the dusky maidens, yet a murder investigation gave him more pleasure.

  Most people would have thought him crazy to find joy in dealing with the underbelly of society, and now in this case, the homeless, but for Isaac that was the real world, not the sun-soaked paradise, although his parents’ homeland had more than its fair share of drug-related crime, including the drug mules taking the drugs into the UK. His team had become heavily involved with drugs, mainly heroin, in a previous case, after a dismembered corpse had been pulled out of the canal in Little Venice. However, knowing Bob Robertson’s aversion to drugs and alcohol, Isaac hoped that this time there’d be no drugs involved.

  Isaac could see the beneficial effect Bob Robertson had had on Katrina Ireland when he met her that night, and there had been others who after a spell in prison had ended up in the hostel. Most of those had found jobs locally in Paddington, usually menial.
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br />   ‘What do we know about Bob Robertson? Isaac asked. ‘Apart from the fact that he was a decent man.’

  ‘Nothing,’ Wendy replied.

  ‘I want this wrapped up in the next week,’ DCS Goddard said as he left the office. He had arrived looking for good news to relay to his seniors, not to hear a debate.

  Isaac chose to ignore his departure. ‘Wendy, find out what you can about the victim. Work with Bridget on this one. Larry, focus on Big Greg, find out what you can about him.’

  ‘From what I’ve been able to gather from Katrina Ireland, the man is well known in the area. An anachronism really,’ Larry said.

  ‘Could he have killed Robertson?’ Isaac asked.

  ‘There’s no reason why not, but where’s the motive? A homeless man doesn’t usually commit murder. It doesn’t fit the profile.’

  ‘What profile? As you’ve said, the man does not fit the usual criteria for being homeless. If he’s educated, and not suffering from any addictions, what’s he doing out on the street? He doesn’t fit your homeless profile, does he?’

  ‘Not at all. I’ll check him out. He’s bound to be known to welfare,’ Larry said.

  Chapter 5

  Big Greg knew one thing, he had killed again and for the right reasons. Not that anyone would understand, certainly not the police and definitely not Bob Robertson’s family.

  Yet again he was forced to live with a secret that he had to keep. It was as if he had given himself to martyrdom, knowing full well that there would be no accolade for him, no sainthood bestowed from Rome, no being welcomed back into the bosom of his family.

  He had seen his daughter again walking in the park. It had been dusk, and she had not seen him, not that she ever did, apart from that one time when she had caught him unawares. Even in that short period he had seen the kindness in her heart, in that she had been willing to donate her time, even some money, to an undeserving man. He had been careful to conceal his educated accent, to affect the voice of the street. Her best protection, as for his wife and his grandchild, had been for the world to believe he was dead.

  His daughter was oblivious to what had happened, what would happen if they could use her as a lever to get to him, and they would. Now that Bob Robertson had entered those formulas into Google, the one place where the information would eventually be discovered, then what? Big Greg knew that Robertson’s death had been a reaction to what the inquisitive man had done. Too little, too late, he realised.

  He knew he had to do something now, but what? And as for the secret, they would kill for it, as would he. He knew it was up to him to act.

  ***

  Katrina Ireland had always known that one day her luck would change. With Bob Robertson no longer in control of the hostel, the organisation of the place had fallen on her. He had suggested that she should become more involved once or twice before his death. The rental accommodation that Bob had arranged for her was no longer needed as there was always a place for her to stay at the hostel; not Bob’s bedroom, she wasn’t ready for that yet, but his office was free. Katrina took one of the beds from the main dormitory and gave it a thorough cleaning; it smelt of disinfectant by the time she had finished, but at least she’d not be sharing it with any other, microscopic or otherwise. Not that she wanted to either. Too much time on the street selling herself and then gyrating around a pole had tainted her desire for men, and then there had been Walter, who used to hit her often but he was now doing time in prison for murder.

  She had admired Bob, probably would have been available to him if he had been willing to make an honest woman of her. She had observed that he only drank coffee, black and strong, although he would sometimes linger to take in the whiff of alcohol that was all too common on the street outside the hostel when the queue was forming for the free meal each day.

  Not that she had formed an opinion of what he may have been. To her, the person in front of her was the person she knew, not the person they had been.

  It had been the same with Walter, her last boyfriend. He had treated her well at first, knew what she had been, and he had been willing to accept her. With time, his passion for her had subsided, only to be replaced by a loathing of her past history. It had been on one of those occasions, after a particularly severe beating, that she had relapsed and had found the man on a corner not far from the place they rented.

  It was only later when the police knocked on her door that she knew that Walter, in an act of anger, had killed the man who had sold her the heroin. She knew then that he had cared for her in his way, although mitigating circumstances that he had been protecting his girlfriend had counted for little, and he had been convicted of murder.

  For a while, she had visited him in prison every week, but in time the visits had become more infrequent, eventually withering away to none.

  One week after the last visit, one hour after selling herself to the last man, she had found herself in the hostel, with Bob Robertson on the phone organising an appointment for her at a detox centre and a place to stay for the night. He had even given up his bed that night for her and slept in with the vagrants. She never forgot his generosity, his willingness to trust a person who could not trust in return. As she sat in his office, she knew she would never let him down. The hostel had been important to him, it would be to her. She switched on the computer, noting the password written on a scrap of paper.

  The hostel had benefactors, local businessmen who assisted with their time and their money. She needed to contact them, let them know that the hostel was to continue and she would be running it in Bob’s memory.

  Apart from the usual files dealing with income and expenditure, she found the phone numbers of the businessmen that she needed to contact. She called them; they’d be available within the next day or so.

  Now firmly in control, Katrina looked further into the programmes on the office computer. It was clear that Bob had surfed the internet on a regular basis, some of the sites inappropriate, although she ignored those.

  One site interested her, a site that dealt with mathematics, though she didn’t understand what it said. There was a notebook in the top left-hand drawer of the desk that she sat at. She opened it. The formulas on the computer screen and in the notebook showed similarities.

  ***

  Larry Hill made contact with the neighbourhood government job centre; a pleasant woman in her late twenties attended to him. ‘There’s no record of anyone matching that description,’ she had said after Larry had passed on all that he knew about Big Greg. Larry found it strange that a man, clearly noticeable due to his height, could appear and disappear at will. At the hostel they had only known him by a nickname, and even the records Katrina Ireland had shown him confirmed that he always signed in as Big Greg.

  ‘It would help if I had a photo,’ the young lady said. Larry had to admit that he was enjoying his time talking to her. There had been another row at home again, the third in as many days, the subject, the same: his long hours at work, his beer consumption, his expanding girth when he was on a strict wife-enforced diet. Larry knew that she was right on all three counts, but he was a police officer, not a child, and sometimes he needed to let off steam, drink more than he should, and if that included a pub lunch and a few laughs, then so be it. He realised, though, that he should have kept the comments to himself. He had walked out of the house that morning angry, but as usual with him and his wife, their collective anger was short-lived.

  He’d phoned her up after two hours to apologise, and said that he’d be home at a reasonable hour that night. The only problem, he knew too well, was the reasonable time promise. Now he had a man who needed to be found, even if it was only to clear him of the charge of murder: a man that officially did not exist.

  He’d wanted to stay chatting to the young lady, but she was busy, as was he. She had a warm office but where he was heading was out on the street, checking all the haunts where the homeless congregated, it was not.

  ***

  There was
n’t anything that Isaac Cook disliked more than paperwork, and it always snowballed whenever there was a murder. He knew that he was lucky to have Bridget Halloran in the department, a dab hand on the computer, a paperwork administrator par excellence. He was aware that she could take the majority off him in the early stages of a murder enquiry, but once the missing pieces of the jigsaw started to be found, then he’d be taking a lot of it back.

  He’d tried to get someone to assist Bridget, but the woman was stubborn, wanting to be the Mother Hen, not only of him, but of the office, and whereas some had come to help, most had not been suitable anyway. Only one had shown promise, and he’d soon left to take up a better position with Fraud. Not that Isaac could blame him, as the man was more qualified than the job required. And besides, Isaac had to admit that he preferred a tight, cohesive team.

  He knew that with Larry Hill, Wendy Gladstone, and Bridget Halloran the bases would be covered, and none of the three would ever let him down. They were also totally loyal. He still remembered when he had been ejected from his position as the SIO as a result of the escalating murders in the Charlotte Hamilton case and the commissioner’s attempt to bring in his man, Caddick. Though he hadn’t lasted long, Isaac had seen some in the department sucking up to the new man, but his three key members had been professional, polite to him, but never sycophantic, even when their jobs were on the line.

  Isaac knew that if it only remained at the one murder, then he’d manage with the paperwork, but experience told him there was more to the case than the murder of one man.

  Isaac wasn’t sure what would be relevant, but he knew that everyone has skeletons in the cupboard. What if Robertson had been killed because of those skeletons? It was a question worth considering, but first the department needed to find the primary witness and possible suspect, Big Greg.