Текст книги "Scent of a Killer"

Автор книги: Kevin Lewis

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The man nodded. ‘Stills from both sides and on top. I also shot some video. I’ve got all I need. The CSM says it’s fine for you to move them if you need to.’

Matthews nodded and turned back to the body. She reached forward, gripped the edge of the severed forearm and tried to pull it straight. It did not budge. ‘Rigor mortis,’ she said to no one in particular. ‘That puts time of death somewhere in the last twenty-four hours. Fits in well with the level of putrefaction when you factor in the open wounds.’ She reached into her bag and pulled out a long, slender, rectal thermometer.

Collins winced. ‘I really don’t know how you can do your job,’ she said softly. ‘I mean, I see dead bodies occasionally, but to have to deal with them so intimately day in day out, I don’t know how you cope. Especially when they’re in this sort of condition.’

Matthews looked up and smiled. ‘It’s not so bad. I see myself as the victims’ last hope if they’re going to get justice. The blood, the gore, the bodies – none of it bothers me. But what does is trying to get my head round what goes through the minds of the people who can do such terrible things to another human being. I want to get as much evidence as I can to help you guys catch whoever was responsible.’ She paused and began prodding at the skin of the corpse’s thigh with her index finger.

‘I’m really glad you’re working on this job. I never know who I’m going to be dealing with from one case to the next until I get to the crime scene. There are so many slimy coppers out there, it’s good to have you on board. How are you finding the new DCI?’

‘Seems efficient enough.’

Matthews turned, her eyes wide. ‘That’s a very diplomatic answer, Stacey. You two not getting on?’

‘I think I’ve managed to work my way into his bad books already.’

‘Between you and me, I hear he doesn’t like working with women. Thinks we should all be at home in the kitchen or something like …’

Matthews stopped speaking. She had removed the thermometer and was staring hard at it, her forehead creased with a frown.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Collins.

‘Doesn’t make sense. I’ve just taken a reading. This guy has early-stage rigor mortis but his core temperature is lower than ambient.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Bodies normally cool down to room temperature after death, but at ten degrees Celsius, this one is well below the temperature of his surroundings, so he’s actually warming up. I’d need to check the other two, but my guess would be that the bodies have been kept in cold storage.’

‘You mean frozen?’

‘Possibly, but not necessarily frozen solid. Just somewhere cold enough to retard the normal death processes. I’d need to do more tests.’

Collins’s mind was buzzing. ‘So how long ago could they have been murdered?’

Matthews laughed. ‘There’s no crystal ball in my bag, Stacey. I have no idea at this stage. I’m just telling you what the initial evidence suggests. Could be hours. Could be days. Could be weeks. I really couldn’t say.’

‘Well, that means they might not have been killed at the same time. They could be months apart.’ Collins stepped forward and took another look at the two bodies in the boot. ‘We could be looking at a serial killer.’ Collins glanced at her watch. ‘Shit. I’d better go. I don’t want to be late for the briefing. Thanks for that, Jessica.’

‘Good luck.’

Collins took a few steps towards the entrance of the tent, then stopped and turned back. ‘We should do it, you know.’

Matthews was puzzled. ‘Do what?’

‘Meet up again, without a body. The last time was what, a year ago?’

‘More like a year and a half. It was after that serial rapist case, wasn’t it? Christ, that makes me feel old.’

‘You and me both.’

‘That’s right, we went to that Italian place, do you remember?’

‘I do now.’

‘Let’s sort something out. I’ll call you once I’ve got the PMs out of the way, some time towards the end of the week.’

‘You’re on.’

‘Nice of you to join us, DI Collins,’ Anderson said glibly as Collins squeezed her way on the edge of the semicircle of officers that had gathered around him inside the small room. Tony Woods shot her a weak smile before turning his eyes back to the boss.

‘Another key field I want to get on right away is CCTV,’ Anderson continued. ‘This car can’t have been there more than a few hours. The traffic and congestion charge people are already looking into it but I want to gather CCTV from this area as well. We want to see if we’ve caught any images of the driver decanting. We need to move fast – these private cameras tend to erase their stuff in a few hours and my nose will be seriously out of joint if we lose anything because we weren’t quick enough off the mark.

‘I want uniform carrying out house-to-house for the same reason. And let’s track down the drivers of the cars that were parked in front of and directly behind this vehicle at the time the bodies were found, see if they remember anything.’ Anderson sighed as he saw Collins raise a hand in the air. ‘What is it, Collins?’

‘Sir. I was just talking to the pathologist. It seems highly likely that the bodies are older than they look. I think they may have been kept in cold storage. It means they might not even have been killed at the same time. The deaths could be days, even weeks apart.’

A murmur ran through the crowd of officers, and Woods began shuffling uncomfortably from one foot to the other. Anderson thumbed the end of his nose, then folded his arms and stared hard at Collins. ‘And for your next trick you can come round to my house and teach my granny to suck eggs!’

Collins looked around, bewildered. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘We’d already worked that one out, Collins. DS Porter, for the sake of our latecomer here, why don’t you recap what you told us all a few minutes ago?’

Porter, a heavy-set blond man with small beady eyes, flicked through the pages of his notebook before he spoke. ‘The car belongs to a Mr Raymond Chadwick, forty-four, a property developer, reported missing by his wife approximately six weeks ago. Described as five feet ten, heavy build, IC1. Last seen wearing a charcoal double-breasted jacket, matching trousers and black Oxford cap shoes. No mobile phone, bank or credit card activity reported since his disappearance. No ransom demand received by the family.’

Anderson nodded as he listened to the details, then cleared his throat. ‘Working on the assumption that Chadwick is the man on the back seat – though we’ll need DNA confirmation before we can be absolutely sure – it seems unlikely that he went awol for the best part of two months, vanished off the face of the earth, only to get himself killed just twenty-four hours ago.’

Anderson looked at the officers gathered around him before fixing Collins with his glare. ‘Three bodies at once would be bad news. This is even worse. Three bodies from three different times with a cooling-off period in between. Looks like we’ve got a serial killer on our hands. Not only that, we’ve got a serial killer who wanted us to make a link between three separate killings. They needed to be sure we knew what was going on right from the start.’

Collins felt as though all the wind had been taken out of her sails. She wanted to kick herself as she listened to all the prime assignments connected to the case being handed out to those around her. She felt particularly cut to the quick when Woods was told to gather background information on Chadwick in order to expand the victim’s profile. Soon it seemed she was the only one on the team with nothing to do.

‘What would you like me to work on, sir?’ she said meekly as the other officers began to drift away.

‘News of the find has been broken on the afternoon TV bulletins,’ said Anderson. ‘That means we’ve had a couple of confessors come in already. I want you to take their statements and eliminate them from the inquiry.’

Every major crime always attracted a group of ‘confessors’ who came forward, admitted involvement and desperately wanted to be punished. Although they were regulars, they still had to be interviewed and their statements logged so they could be eliminated from the inquiry. This was always a relatively simple matter, as they knew almost no details of the crime other than whatever they had managed to glean from the TV and newspapers. They were a necessary evil in every incident room, but dealing with them was normally a task for some of the most junior officers on the team, not a DI.

‘With respect, sir, I think I’d be more usefully employed elsewhere on this job –’

Anderson cut her off sharply. ‘If you want my respect, Collins, then I suggest you start out by doing what I say and not questioning my authority.’

Collins bit her lip and took a deep breath. She had to calm down fast before she said something she wouldn’t be able to take back. Or worse still threw a punch. The last thing she wanted was to be hauled back in front of the DPS. She pushed her anger way down into the pit of her stomach and spoke as calmly as she could.

‘Yes, sir.’

4

DCI Anderson had asked the entire team to gather in the incident room at 9 a.m. the following morning for a briefing. Collins had arrived almost an hour earlier to write up her notes on the interviews she had conducted the previous evening with the confessors.

She had barely been at her desk ten minutes when Anderson arrived. He acknowledged her presence with a small nod and a half-grunt before making his way directly to his office in the corner of the room and shutting the door firmly behind him.

Over the next half hour other members of the team began to arrive and the skeleton crew who had been manning the incident room overnight left to head home.

As Collins peered at her computer screen, a shadow fell over her desk.

‘Cheer up, it might never happen!’

Collins looked up to see the smiling face of Tony Woods looking down on her.

‘Too late. It’s already happened,’ she replied.

Woods perched on the edge of her desk and leaned towards her, lowering his voice to a whisper. ‘I don’t know what he’s playing at. I honestly don’t. I tried having a word with him yesterday, saying he was wasting a valuable resource by keeping you on the edge of the main investigation, but he just wouldn’t hear it.’

Collins smiled weakly. ‘Thanks, Tony, but I think I’m on my own for this one. If I get a good break on the case, he’ll probably start trusting me, but until he starts trusting me, I won’t be in a position to get a break on the case. Catch-22.’

Woods was nodding slowly. ‘You could always try sleeping with him.’

Collins didn’t miss a beat. ‘Well, it certainly helped when I applied for my last promotion.’ She looked up at Woods and allowed her face to break into a full smile. ‘I’m kidding,’ she said.

‘I know,’ said Woods. ‘So was I. What about talking to Higgins?’

‘No, that would really piss Anderson off. I know I’m being kept out of the loop because of the trouble with the DPS.’

‘But you haven’t done anything wrong,’ said Woods.

‘I know, but when people start throwing mud around, some of it is bound to stick. Just being called in by the DPS is enough to convince most people you must be bent, regardless of whether there’s any actual evidence.’

She swept her hand back through her hair. ‘How did you get on with the backgrounder?’

Woods shrugged. ‘Nothing that runs the flag up the flagpole. Married, couple of kids, one sister and two brothers. Both his parents are alive but divorced. Worked as a commercial property developer at some bigwig firm in the City. Not so much nine to five, more eight to eight, which is why he got the big bucks. The Merc was a company car.

‘No evidence of financial worries, nothing to suggest problems with drink or drugs. Small circle of friends. Enjoyed his job. No enemies. Pretty unremarkable by all accounts. I’m going to see the widow later this morning.’

‘Are we treating her as a suspect?’ asked Collins.

‘The DCI told me to keep an open mind, but we both agree it’s pretty unlikely. I managed to track down a few of his work colleagues and one of his siblings. It wasn’t the happiest marriage by all accounts, and there seems to be pretty strong evidence of at least one affair going back over the years. The wife’s in line for a pretty good insurance payout, but to be honest it’s a fair bit below what she would have got if she had divorced him. It’s not really motive. We’d be looking at her a lot more closely if it was just Chadwick who had turned up dead.’

Collins nodded. ‘I know what you mean. Once you get more than one body involved, it stops being a simple murder. When you have three with the same MO, there doesn’t have to be any rhyme or reason behind it.’

‘So what’s your theory, then?’

‘Haven’t really got one yet. It all rests on who the other two victims are. Everyone who gets killed gets chosen one way or another, even if it’s just completely random. If we find out what criteria the killer is using to choose victims, that might lead us right to him.’

DS Porter and DI Hill bustled into the incident room and Collins eyed them warily. Anderson had brought them on to the team after having worked with them on his last two assignments. As a consequence they usually got to work at the sharpest end of a case, and Collins wasn’t the only one who resented them for it.

‘I can’t believe you’re still stuck on confessor duty,’ said Woods.

A few moments later the door to Anderson’s office opened and he stepped out, taking a moment to mentally check that everyone from the team was present, before making his way to the notice board on the far wall.

He pinned up a sheet of paper with RAYMOND CHADWICK printed on it in large block capitals.

‘This is victim one. I’ve just been on the phone to forensics and they’ve matched the remains found at the scene with DNA recovered from his home.’ He looked around the room until his eyes found those of DS Woods. ‘Tony, when you see the widow, try to get hold of a picture of him so we can put one up here.’

Woods nodded.

Anderson stepped to one side and pinned up a second sheet of paper, this time with the name EDWARD MILLER printed on it.

‘This is victim number two. We’ve had a bit of a lucky break. Mr Miller got himself convicted of GBH three years ago, so his DNA was on the database. Now I can see all your little brains buzzing away and getting ready to ask the obvious question – could this be linked to his death? The short answer is, of course, and it’s a line of inquiry some of you will be pursuing vigorously during the course of the next few days.’

Collins sighed quietly. She would have cheerfully bet money that she would not be one of those chosen to pursue that particular line of inquiry.

‘What’s interesting about Miller is that he has been missing for the best part of two years.’ Anderson paused to let this sink in with the members of the team. ‘Yesterday we were working on the theory that the deaths might have taken place a few weeks apart, but this massively expands that timescale. This killer clearly has access to cold-storage facilities, and, according to the experts, under the right conditions a body can be preserved pretty much indefinitely. It’s going to make the search for victim number three that much harder because we’ll have to go back as far as we can. And it goes without saying that we drew a blank on the DNA database so far as the third victim was concerned.’

Anderson pinned up a third sheet of paper, this time with a large question mark printed on it. He stood back and looked at the names on the board, then turned and faced his team.

‘At this stage, in the absence of any firm leads, we’re going to get things moving by looking very closely at the two victims we have managed to identify. I want to know every single thing there is to know about them. Habits, routines, likes, dislikes. Shoes sizes, fetishes. I want to know how they vote, how many sugars they take in their tea and the name of every single person they ever associated with. We’re looking for anyone who might make us think they are worth looking at more closely.

‘Now that it seems certain that we’re looking for a serial killer, I’m going to be getting a profiler in. That will hopefully give us some valuable leads. I’m also hoping they might be able to narrow down the geographical area our killer is likely to be in.

‘The street where the bodies were found is a little way off the beaten track, quiet enough to ensure they wouldn’t be discovered immediately. That takes local knowledge. It might well be that that particular street was chosen as the dumping ground for a specific reason. The profiler might be able to cast some light on that too.

‘Dr Matthews has given me a preliminary verbal report, but the full post-mortem and toxicology write-ups won’t be available for at least forty-eight hours. Although we have three victims, the post-mortems will be quicker than usual because of the lack of heads, hands and internal organs. It means they have much less work to do. Unfortunately it also means we are going to have a lot less to go on from forensics.’

Anderson leaned back against the wall and shoved his hands deep into his pockets. ‘I don’t want to be patronizing but I want this done by the book. This is going to be a major inquiry and I don’t want to leave any stone unturned. I don’t want a review squad coming in here in six weeks’ time because we haven’t got a result and telling me that we’ve missed a load of obvious leads.

‘I expect you to submit your intelligence reports into the HOLMES system a.s.a.p. so that I can see what progress is being made. But I find the quickest and easiest way to make sure that everyone on the team is up to speed is for you all to summarize your positions in regular morning briefings, or “morning prayers”, as I like to call them. That way everyone can stay cross-referenced with what every other part of the team is doing without having to spend hours trawling through the system to dig up every statement. So who wants to go first?’

DS Porter stood up and opened his notebook. ‘Myself and DI Hill have collected approximately twenty-two hours’ worth of CCTV footage from a variety of sources, covering streets close to where the bodies were found and some of the main roads leading to it. But there are no images of the street where the car was actually parked.

‘Some of the cameras show foot traffic in the area and we might have caught the driver on film, but several hundred people walk through the area each day. Without some kind of description of whoever it was behind the wheel, we can’t begin to eliminate anyone from our inquiries.’

Porter sat down and the officer beside him stood up. And so it continued around the room until each officer had given a short presentation of their work so far. Anderson made notes and asked a few questions. The breakthrough he had been hoping for was yet to emerge. Dozens of lines of inquiry were still being followed and hundreds of ‘actions’ were being dealt with. Nothing was being overlooked and, so far, nothing conclusive had been found.

When all the presentations were complete, Anderson threw the floor open for discussion. Collins put her hand up. She saw the DCI’s jaw tighten as he nodded at her.

‘The initial pathology report confirms that some of the internal organs of all three victims have been removed,’ she said.

‘That’s correct, yes.’

‘Do you therefore think that we’re looking for someone with medical training?’

Anderson shrugged. ‘Possibly. It depends on what you define as medical training. Even a schoolboy knows the difference between a heart and a kidney. And you can get all sorts of stuff off the internet these days. A doctor or surgeon or someone similar may well be behind all this, but I don’t want that to be our only focus. And I certainly don’t want to exclude suspects that have no link to the medical profession, not at this stage.’

A few other members of the team asked questions of their own until the energy in the room started to fade. ‘Okay. Let’s not stand around talking. Let’s get to work.’ Anderson began handing out assignments for the day and once again Collins found herself sidelined from the heart of the investigation.

Her task was to work with staff at the National Missing Persons helpline and compile a list of potential names for victim number three. Both Chadwick and Miller had been listed as missing at the time their bodies were found, so there was a good chance that the same would be true of the third victim, but Collins quickly discovered that the task was far more daunting than she could ever have imagined. After teenagers, middle-aged men are the most likely group to go missing, usually as a result of some kind of financial or emotional crisis. The initial list she was presented with contained thousands of names. It was clearly going to be another long day.

With an approximate height and weight as well as skin colour for the victim provided by the initial report of the pathologist, Collins could instantly eliminate those who were clearly too big or too small or from the wrong ethnic group, but it still left hundreds of names that had to be added to the ‘maybe’ pile.

And the pile seemed to be growing by the minute. Stories in most of the day’s papers giving vague details of the find ensured a stream of calls came into the incident room. Many were from distressed relatives wanting to know if their missing loved one could be among those found inside the vehicle.

Every time a new call came in, Collins’s colleagues passed on the name of the missing man for her to check and cross-reference.

As the day went on, so Collins’s level of frustration grew. At first she had assumed that the reason Anderson was being so awful to her was because he had his own DI and DS that he liked working with. But now it dawned on her that Anderson had not only been told to keep her on a tight reign by the officers from the DPS but had also been informed about the reason for her being interviewed in the first place. She couldn’t tell if Anderson had actually made up his mind about whether she was a corrupt officer or not, but it seemed clear that he had decided to err on the side of caution.

It was gone eleven o’clock by the time Collins clambered into her BMW and pulled out of the police station car park. She longed for a long, hot bath to ease away the stress of the day. The sooner she got home the better.

At the first set of traffic lights she stopped at, an old but tidy Vauxhall Vectra being driven by a man who fitted the same description pulled up alongside and stared across at her. After a quick glance, Collins continued looking forward and ignored him, her mind filled with thoughts about the case and about Anderson. The lights changed and the Vauxhall shot off. She was so distracted that she did not even notice that it soon pulled over to the side of the road to allow her to pass.

The sound of a horn snapped her out of her daydream. Dazzling headlights suddenly flashed in her rear-view mirror. She looked up to see the Vectra moving dangerously close to her rear bumper. She sped up a little out of instinct, but the driver matched her. What on earth was this idiot trying to do?

Collins pulled closer to the kerb to allow the car to go past, but the Vectra simply stayed tight on her bumper. She tried speeding up again, and at that moment the car suddenly shot out into the middle of the road and blazed past her, only to cut in front just inches from her bumper and screech to a halt. Collins stamped her foot on to the brake and came to a halt just inches from the man’s car.

Flaming with rage, she opened the door of the car and stomped out to give him a piece of her mind.

‘What the hell do you think you’re playing at?’ she said, reaching for her warrant card. ‘You have no idea how much trouble you have got yourself in …’

The window of the Vectra hissed as it rolled down, and the man reached out of the window and held up a mobile phone.

‘My boss wants a word with you.’

Collins snatched the phone knowing exactly who would be on the other end of it. The man’s tactics suddenly made perfect sense. He had been checking that no one else was in the car with her and that she was not being followed.

‘Hello, Princess,’ said the voice of Jack Stanley.

‘This your idea of a joke?’

‘Do I sound like I’m laughing? What the hell do you want?’

‘I want to know when I’m going to see Sophie again.’

‘And for that you try to get me run off the road?’

‘You’re the one who says it’s too dangerous for us to be seen together. This seemed to be the best way.’

‘You don’t deserve to be a father, not the way you’re behaving. You’re still a child yourself.’

‘Save the lectures for someone who cares. I want to see my daughter. It’s been more than a month. I’m fed up with playing your silly little games.’

Collins took a deep breath. She needed to calm down. ‘Look, Jack, it’s just too dangerous. There are too many things going on right now.’

‘Nothing that we can’t handle. I managed to keep my face off the radar up until now. I don’t see how it makes any difference. I can take the same precautions.’

‘I’m sorry, Jack. I just can’t allow it. I’ve spoken to Sophie –’

‘Don’t give me any crap about her not wanting to see me. I know that won’t be true.’

‘You’re right, she does want to see you, but I’ve explained the situation to her and she understands that for the time being it just can’t happen. Now if she can understand that and she’s only thirteen, why can’t you?’

Jack Stanley slammed his thumb against the red button on his phone to end the call and stood fuming for a few moments in the back office of his night club.

He was having a hard time concentrating on the business end of things. Ever since he had learned that he had a daughter everything in his life had seemed to change. The idea of a family and that kind of domesticity had never appealed to him and he had gone out of his way to avoid it, but this was different. Here was a ready-made teenager who wanted him to be part of her life. It was as if he was catching up on everything he had missed out on. And he was loving it.

He tossed the phone into a drawer and went out into the main bar area. More than three hundred teenagers and youngsters were gyrating to the latest UK garage sounds in the middle of the dance floor. Stanley made his way through them and headed to the bar, where his right-hand man, Danny Thompson, was leaning back nursing a scotch and soda.

‘You all right, Jack? You look like you’ve swallowed a wasp.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘You don’t look it, boss.’

‘Leave it. I’m fine.’

‘Woman trouble?’

‘Yeah, you could say that.’

‘That’s why I stick with lapdancers and the like. Don’t have enough brains to cause any trouble. You want to talk about it?’

‘Nah.’

Thompson took a long slug of his drink and eyed his boss carefully. They had been friends since childhood and he knew him well enough to know that something was really bugging him, but also well enough to know that there was no point in pressing him any further about it. If he wanted to talk, he would do so in his own time. Instead, Thompson waited until Stanley had got a drink of his own and then decided to change the subject.

‘I was speaking to Mitch on the Peacroft today. Said a couple more of the Albanians turned up, trying to undercut our dealers.’

Stanley slowly turned to Thompson. ‘Any trouble?’

‘Bit of a scrap. One of them went away in an ambulance. I don’t think they’ll be back.’

‘That’s what we thought last time.’

‘True.’

‘I don’t think this is just a bunch of chancers any more. They’re too well organized. They know too much about our prices and dealing set-up. The way they’re probing, I think they’re looking for a weak spot so they can make their move.’

‘You think they’re trying to take over the Peacroft?’ asked Thompson.

Stanley shook his head. ‘I know a little about the Albanians. I think their ambitions go a bit further than that. Their classic tactic is to establish a small foothold somewhere and then use that as a base from which to expand their operations. If we’re not careful, they could end up coming after everything we’ve got. They don’t work like us. The whole lot of them are cousins and brothers and uncles, it’s like the fucking Mafia.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘I’m saying that blood is thicker than water and this lot have got it by the bucket load. They can call on people and rely on them in a way that we could never hope to do. I can get a man to do a job for a fair price, but I can’t expect him to do it just out of loyalty.’

‘So what should we do?’

‘Not sure. They’ve got to be getting information from somewhere. One of our dealers must be feeding them stuff, but it must be someone low down. From what I know, they’re trying to find out who’s in charge of the operation so they can work out a way to take out the top man. The thing is, I’m too well insulated. Even most of the dealers on the Peacroft have no idea who they’re working for, so the Albanians aren’t going to get anywhere with that strategy.’

‘What do you suggest?’

‘We need to reassert our authority on the place. I want to hit them hard, a decisive blow so that they get the message they can’t fuck about in our territory, but before we can do that we need to plug the gap. No point in planning a major action if they’re going to find out about it in advance. They’ll be waiting for us.’

‘So we’re still back to square one. Looking for the leak. Any new leads?’

‘Nah. And my sources at the Yard seem to have dried up for the time being. Something will come. In the meantime, double the workforce on the Peacroft and put more lads down there, just in case they come back.’

‘Tooled up?’

Stanley thought for a moment, then shook his head slowly. ‘Put a couple of shooters in the safe house just in case but I don’t want anyone carrying on the street. At the moment it’s off the police radar. It won’t stay that way if people start turning up dead.’

‘I think we both know that’s inevitable. You need to start watching your own back too.’

‘Don’t you worry about me.’

Thompson took another sip from his glass. ‘You know you’ve been letting things slip. You don’t want to appear weak.’