by Graham Smith
Beth could have talked to her father in confidence, but she knew he worried about her and she didn’t want to add to his worries by opening up to him. When he’d spotted that she was preoccupied or a bit down he’d always made a polite enquiry, but he’d also always given her enough space to shrug off his concerns with a disclaiming phrase like, ‘don’t worry, it’s nothing I can’t handle’.
How O’Dowd felt about having to be the one to give voice to another person’s nightmare was something she didn’t want to think about, yet she knew that one day her turn would come, and it would be she who was staring into fearful eyes and beginning a sentence with, ‘I’m so very sorry to have to inform you.’
When that day came she would have to face it with the same strength and tenderness O’Dowd had shown to Suzy. Much as Suzy may have needed a shoulder to cry on, she didn’t need a weak copper fighting her corner. What she required was a detective who’d be described with terms like dogged, resolute and determined.
All victims and their families deserved such a detective and that’s what Beth strived to be. For the victims, their families and for herself.
O’Dowd was all the things Beth believed a good detective should be. Beth planned to watch the DI closely so she could learn from her, osmose her techniques and bear witness to all the traits that made O’Dowd’s tenure as the DI in charge of FMIT so successful.
She knew that O’Dowd would have faults and flaws like any other human, but for Beth, there were a lot of things to admire.
Twenty-Five
The tray Sarah lifted from the bed bore a plate that still held most of the meal she’d put on it. Her nana’s appetite had all but failed as she neared the end of her life. Once a vibrant woman, possessed with an indomitable strength of character and a wickedly inappropriate sense of humour, she was now bedridden.
Six months ago, Nana’s doctor had told her that she had less than a year to live. Like the battler she was, Nana had taken the news without complaint and had resisted all offers of help until she became too infirm to care for herself. It was at this point Sarah and her mother had tried to insist Nana live with one of them. The old girl had refused though, and Sarah and her mum now alternated nights at Nana’s house. Social services had carers who’d visit in the mornings and at lunchtimes, but Nana refused all their attempts to bathe her. That task was just one of the many which fell to Sarah and her mother.
Between the two of them, they now had three houses to keep, a full-time job each and lives of their own to live. But they didn’t complain, and just tried to remember that Nana had enriched their lives with imparted wisdom, sage advice and a constant supply of home baking that threatened to make their waistlines bulge.
Sarah filled a bowl in the shower and, using a facecloth, washed her nana down. She chatted as she worked, but the old lady had fallen asleep a minute after refusing the sixth forkful Sarah had tried to feed her.
Once she’d straightened the covers and laid the remote control for the TV next to the elderly woman’s right hand, Sarah went downstairs and filled the kettle. While it boiled she ate the tuna salad she’d made for herself.
The nurse who visited daily had intimated the end was approaching. On a detached level, Sarah knew that her grandmother didn’t have long left; her cheeks were sunken and she was spending more time asleep than awake. Her brain may have told her this, but her heart wasn’t ready to admit defeat, wasn’t ready to accept the inevitable and prepare to say goodbye.
As a distraction she flicked through a fashion magazine and then used her mobile to check Facebook. Neither held her interest for long, so she bent her mind to the contents of her wardrobe. She’d had a root through it before coming to Nana’s and had selected three outfits she could wear on Wednesday. It was important that she struck the right balance between professional and alluring. The guy she wanted to snare was the kind of guy who’d be used to a certain amount of female flattery; while she may get his attention with a flash of cleavage, that wasn’t enough for her: she wasn’t interested in having a one-night stand, what she wanted was longer term.
While the timing couldn’t have been much worse, she couldn’t pass up this opportunity. There weren’t a lot of men in the Kendal area she considered to be a decent catch, and therefore she couldn’t allow someone else to snare him first.
Her ex always used to say her legs and backside were her best features and with this in mind, the favourite of her three options was a tight skirt that showed off her legs. The problem was, the only shoes she had that worked with the burgundy skirt were four-inch heels that were likely to cripple her if she wore them for a full day.
With luck, tomorrow may be quiet enough for her to sneak off and buy a pair of shoes with a lower heel.
‘Sarah.’
The lone word had her on her feet and dashing up the stairs in an instant. Nana’s voice was hoarse and strained. Were it not for the baby monitor hidden beside the bed, Sarah would have never heard her calling her name.
Twenty-Six
O’Dowd powered down her computer and gave Beth a long hard stare. Returning it, Beth saw that there were bags developing beneath the DI’s eyes and that her shoulders had a stoop to them which she’d never seen before.
‘Everyone else has beggared off, yet you’re still here. I’d have been gone by now if Phinn hadn’t rambled on needlessly for hours about the need to find our killer and left me to catch up on my paperwork after he’d gone home.’ She brushed a hand through her hair. ‘Jeez, I can’t believe he thinks we need motivating after seeing the victim.’ O’Dowd shook her head. ‘Right then, Beth, cards on the table, you’re smart, there’s no denying that, you also have initiative and you see things more experienced officers need to have pointed out to them. What I want to know is, what drives you?’
Beth didn’t have to think about the answer. ‘I want to right the wrongs, ma’am. Too often people get off with whatever crime they’ve committed. That’s not right. Not right by the law and certainly not right for the victims expecting justice.’ She pointed at her scarred cheek with the pen she was holding. ‘I didn’t get it, so I know exactly what it’s like to have your life turned upside down through no fault of your own. How it feels to see the people who’ve wronged you receive no punishment whatsoever.’
‘I thought that might be the case, but I wanted to make sure. Just promise me one thing, Beth.’
‘Ma’am?’
‘What happened to you was terrible, but while the desire to bring justice is a wonderful thing, it needs to be guided by an open mind. I don’t want you setting your sights on the wrong person rather than admitting you’ve got no leads. There no place on FMIT for vigilantes.’
Beth stood, struggling to keep her tone respectful. ‘I’m not some crazy vigilante. I believe that victims deserve justice. Nothing more, nothing less.’
‘So our little tiger cub has claws.’ O’Dowd’s smile was disarming. ‘I’m pleased to see it. Sit back down, Beth, and wipe that scowl off your face. You’ve just been tested, don’t turn a pass into a fail.’
Beth sat and turned back to her screen.
O’Dowd called over, ‘That list you mentioned earlier, have you finished it?’
The reason she was here so late was to finish working on the list of evacuees. ‘Not yet, but I’ll have it done in another hour or so.’
‘Good lass. Do that and then bugger off home. We’ll be going through it in the morning with a nit comb.’
‘What are your thoughts, ma’am?’
O’Dowd rubbed her eyes before answering. ‘My experience tells me that until we get something more concrete to pursue, we need to follow every lead we get, examine every last piece of data.’
Beth returned to the screen and typed in the name of the next evacuee. The result spat out by the computer made her add the boy’s name to the deceased column. Then she started on the list of the teachers who’d travelled with the children to continue their education and the locals brought in to care for them. Sh
e gasped when she saw a name connected to the evacuees. Beth dashed to the corridor, but was too late. O’Dowd had left for the evening.
Her discovery would have to wait until morning.
Twenty-Seven
Beth took a break to make herself a cup of tea and strode around the office while the kettle boiled. Her mind was awash with details of the evacuees but she knew she needed to shift her focus for a short period.
It wasn’t that she was fatigued by the amount of information, it was more that she knew that her brain sometimes worked best if she wasn’t thinking directly about the matter in hand. Instead she let her mind go back to what Unthank had unearthed while she and Thompson were at the mortuary.
He’d been given the task of tracing Angus’s last days and had pinpointed the time of Angus’s disappearance. Angus had moved to his mother’s house on Saturday, and had failed to show up for work on Tuesday morning; he had been working on the extension he was building until five the previous day. Suzy had told Unthank he’d called his daughters that evening around six and had then gone to the pub as he always did on a Monday night. She’d asked him to come home and talk to her but he had refused and they’d exchanged a series of harsh words that culminated in him hanging up on her and switching off his phone.
The landlord of The Globe had confirmed Angus’s presence. Monday was darts night and Angus was a key player in the darts team. He had supped a few pints, played his darts and was last seen heading towards Longtown’s takeaway kebab house.
Unthank had traced him to the takeaway and he’d followed the route Angus would have taken to get to his mother’s house.
The news hadn’t been good.
Angus’s mother lived in a house 200 metres beyond the town boundaries, a good twenty-minute walk from the kebab shop. The road was tree-lined; therefore it would be easy for someone to ambush Angus. The fact he’d a few pints on board would make the killer’s task easier.
To Beth’s way of thinking, it was a perfect storm. A tipsy, if not outright drunk Angus, alone on a deserted road, his mind preoccupied with the latest fight with Suzy. He’d be easy pickings. Unthank had covered the bases and got a team of officers doing door-to-doors along the route, but so far, their reports had yielded nothing.
The triangulation of Angus’s mobile showed he’d left it in his mother’s house when he’d gone to play his darts match. Suzy didn’t have a spare key, and they’d had to wait for a locksmith to open the door so they could find Angus’s phone. Digital Forensics had it now and once its secrets had been mined, they might have some more leads to follow.
* * *
Beth read over the notes she’d taken. Before she presented anything to O’Dowd and the others, she needed to make sure of her facts, be confident that she’d followed all the correct procedures and that she hadn’t overlooked anything.
She’d tried calling O’Dowd, without success, as the implications of her discovery became clear. In the absence of O’Dowd, she’d tried speaking to a chief inspector who was on duty, only to be brushed off with a curt dismissal that her theory could wait until morning. She’d tried to argue her case, but he’d pointed at the door of his office while looking at the papers on his desk. As Beth had stomped her way back to the FMIT’s office, she hadn’t been able to argue with Unthank’s description of the humourless chief inspector as a stand-up comedian who didn’t know it was time to sit down.
Now with all her facts together she was certain of her theory. All of it made sense and whichever way she looked at it, she couldn’t find a flaw.
Another idea struck her, but rather than wait for her computer to power up again, she decided to use her phone. The information she needed would be found on Google rather than any of the police systems or databases anyway.
Beth ran a series of searches on the effects of swallowing flammable liquids that were then ignited. She knew that Dr Hewson could give her the same information, but she wanted to do her own research, so that when his report came in she’d better understand it.
With a few extra scribbled pages added to her thick bundle of notes, Beth stood, pulled on her jacket and set off for home. A look at her watch told her she had to be back there in seven hours, but that didn’t worry her. She was used to six hours’ sleep a night and could manage for the best part of a week on four.
Beth knew that tonight she’d be lucky to get more than four hours the way her brain was firing. She’d experienced a buzz during other investigations, but none had energised her the way this case did. Despite the tiredness and the tedium of some of the tasks, she felt more alive than ever. Her pulse raced and there was an unfamiliar spring to her step. The anticipation of this feeling was just one of the reasons she’d applied to join FMIT.
* * *
Beth flicked on the TV and channel-hopped until she found repeats of a sitcom she’d seen a dozen times before. It was the televisual equivalent of a comfort blanket and required no mental effort from her as she watched the familiar characters go about their lives. A half hour later when she climbed into bed, her brain still wasn’t ready to shut down.
While Angus Keane was in his mid-forties, it was still too early in the investigation for them to work on the assumption the killer would strike again and assign a type to his choice of victim. What she couldn’t shake from her mind’s eye was the mental snapshot of Angus’s daughters. Their father had been taken from them and it was up to her and the others in FMIT to at least give them the closure of knowing the person who’d killed him was locked up in jail.
As well as shelves of puzzle books, the bookshelf she had in her bedroom was filled with books about serial killers. Some focussed on one particular killer while others looked at many. She had a fascination with serial killers and had read up on every one she could.
Other than Harold Shipman, all the British cases that she could think of which involved multiple murders had young women or children as their victims. From what she could remember from her training, and the manuals and books she’d read, she also knew that a high percentage of serial killers had a sexual element driving them. Whether it was a desire to have sex outside accepted societal norms, or just a desire to have someone beyond their reach, they’d capture their victims and then rape and kill them.
Beth knew it was a sad fact of life that too often women were blamed for their rapes or sexual assaults. A short skirt or a revealing top were used as excuses by the vermin who preyed on women. They’d say the girl or lady in question was too drunk to remember giving consent, that their clothes and flirtatious behaviour were giving men a come-on.
None of the excuses washed with Beth. For her, no meant no.
The men in her social circle all held the same view, which is why she’d kept in touch with them after leaving school. They were decent and saw a drunk woman as a drunk person, not as an object to be used for their gratification. Beth’s male friends talked to her face and listened to her views, treating her as an equal.
Sadly though, she knew her male friends and family members weren’t typical of all men. There were still those who held the genuine belief that women were inferior to men and should know their place. These unenlightened fools were the problem. They were the vultures, the carrion who preyed on vulnerabilities and insecurities. They were the ones who controlled their wives or girlfriends, the ones who dominated supposed loved ones in the name of masculinity. To Beth they weren’t men, they were prehistoric beasts who were still millennia away from discovering fire and the wheel.
She’d had her share of encounters, the same as every other woman on the planet. An unwelcome hand on her backside in a crowded place, the leering gazes delivered without discretion as one lecherous fool or another talked to her chest or legs rather than her face. Beth remembered her brief experience as a model for online stores and various amateur photographers. She could never know for certain, but she was sure she’d lost a number of modelling jobs by rejecting the overtures made to her by promoters and organisers.
Those w
ere as bad as her experiences had got though.
It pained Beth that women had to always be conscious of their surroundings and worried how they were perceived by men. She believed that everyone had the right to feel safe, but sadly, that’s not how things were.
As these thoughts went through her head, she hit on a realisation. When she was on a night out, she’d always get a taxi to take her home. What if Angus had done the same thing?
Yes he may have been snatched from the street, wherever he was working, or his mother’s home, but that was unlikely to happen in a residential area. Plus, it was the best part of a mile from where he’d got the takeaway to his mother’s house. Who would he trust? Two answers: someone he knew, or someone whose job it was to ferry people around. Namely, a taxi. It was the perfect cover for someone looking to abduct people. Angus’s killer may have posed as a lost driver asking for directions, but she didn’t think Angus would have got into a stranger’s car.
She made a mental note to pass on the idea to Unthank and closed her eyes.
Twenty-Eight
O’Dowd scowled around her yawn as she trundled into the office and dumped herself into her chair. Her eyes were red and there was a whiff of alcohol crawling out beneath her perfume.
‘Right my little bunch of reprobates, today is the day we catch a killer.’ A finger was pointed at Thompson. ‘Have you learned anything new?’