Concrete Evidence (20 page)

Stirling looked at the papers on the desk and sifted through the top sheets with a gloved hand. One of them was a list of local farms, local parks, woods, nature reserves and graveyards. He was familiar with the area and the list seemed to run in order of their proximity to his house. Each one had a tick on one side and a cross on the other. He placed the list back on top of a stack of Ordinance Survey maps and an orienteering compass.

“Have you seen this?” an officer asked disturbing his thoughts. Stirling turned and walked over to him. One section of wall was covered in blood and brains. The paper cuttings beneath the gore were a collage of Peter Barton’s arrest, trial and incarceration. ‘Evil Uncle, Peter Barton Refuses to Give Up the Body of his Nephew.’ Stirling read the headline several times. He walked slowly around the cellar and glanced at each map and each cutting before taking one last look at the reeking corpse.

“My DI is going to love this,” he grumbled as he climbed back up the steps.    

                                           CHAPTER 25

              Annie Jones shivered as she walked along the path to Barton’s house. Autumn was quickly giving way to winter at an increasing rate of knots and the nighttime temperatures were plummeting rapidly. Every light in the house was on as CSI teams searched the scene. She reached the door and noticed the splintered frame. A white clad figure walked up the stairs to the first floor and another disappeared through a door beneath them. Stirling appeared from a room to her left, his bulk filled the doorway. He grunted hello and sheepishly handed her a forensic suit.

              “What the hell happened?” Annie asked as she removed her coat. Stirling noticed that her prosthetic eye didn’t narrow as much as her real one when she was annoyed.

              “We knocked on the door, he locked himself in the cellar and blew his head off with a shotgun.” Stirling shrugged. “There’s not much more to it.”

              “There was no dialogue at all between you?”

              “None, Guv.”

              “Who knocked on the door?”

              “I did.”

              “So it’s your fault,” she said dryly.

              “Completely.”

              “Good,” she said zipping up her suit. “I’m glad that’s sorted. Now where is this map that I need to see?”                

              “Maps plural, Guv,” Stirling corrected her. “Lots and lots of maps. Let’s start in here.” He turned and walked into the living room. The plasma television was still on. “He was watching BBC one.”

              “So he probably saw the appeal.”

              “Probably,” Stirling grumbled. “It would explain his decision to eat his gun. He was sitting here when we arrived.” He said pointing to a well worn armchair. “We’re guessing that he was using his laptop to print off information about the murders. It was found underneath the table, the screen was cracked but it was still switched on. He had a wireless printer on the dining table over there and there are a couple of articles printed off in the print tray,” Stirling said walking around the armchair. “There’s an empty bottle of scotch on the floor so he may have been intoxicated. Take a look over here.” Stirling pointed to the wall above the dining table. It was covered in Ordinance Survey maps, which were overlapping to make one huge map of the Northern Hemisphere. There were crosses and circles marked all over them. Surrounding the map were press cuttings from a myriad of publications. The table was stacked with newspapers and articles printed from the internet. Some of the papers were yellowed with age and some looked unread. A pair of reading glasses and a biro sat next to a packet of cigars and an overflowing ashtray. “It looks as if Barton spent a lot of time sifting through newspaper cuttings.” 

“London, Paris, Talin, Prague, Amsterdam,” Annie said as she studied the markings on the maps. Her eye crossed the Atlantic. “San Francisco, Flagstaff, Phoenix. Have we found a passport?”

“Not yet, Guv.”

“When we do, we need to see if he travelled to these places.” Annie scanned the wall and frowned. “There’s seems to be a newspaper clipping relating to murders in each city,” she looked at Stirling and shrugged. “What was he doing?”

“He was collecting,” Stirling shrugged. He picked up a yellowed newspaper. “Some of this stuff goes back ten years or more. We would need months to analyse this and make any sense of it.”

“It might be more obvious than you think,” Annie said. She didn’t think that it was obvious but she had to be positive. “Has he left any journals, diaries or anything personal that might explain what he was doing?” 

“Nothing yet, Guv,” Stirling shook his head. “There are some hand written lists downstairs.”

“He certainly put a lot of time and effort into it.”

              “Wait until you see the cellar.” Stirling said. “I’ve got some ideas but I’d like you to see it first.” He turned and walked towards the door. Annie lingered a moment and pictured Barton reading the articles and mapping them. An article from San Francisco caught her eye. Several words had been highlighted in yellow marker. Similar words were highlighted on another article from Bakersfield. “That’s a long way from home.” She muttered. “A tingle ran down her spine as she read on. “What were you up to, Barton?” she whispered to herself as she turned to follow her sergeant. She noticed an old upright piano on the opposite wall. It reminded her of her childhood. Her mother had paid a small fortune to a local piano tutor to teach her to play. She remembered taking a cardboard stencil home to help her practice. It sat on top of the keys as an idiot’s guide to the chords. It was money wasted. Chopsticks was as far as her talent stretched.

              The rest of the living room was a mishmash of furniture spanning four decades. The sofa was an imitation Chesterfield from the 70’s. Annie’s Grandma Jones had one similar. She only removed the plastic wrapping when guests came, quickly recovering it as soon as they left. She remembered her granddad rolling his eyes to the heavens every time she did it. “The bloody thing is meant to be sat on!” he would complain.

The dining table and chair, singular, were MFI flat-pack from the late 80’s but the television, laptop and printer were new models. Expensive top of the line stuff. It reminded her of furnished rented accommodation rather than someone’s home.

Stirling was in the hallway waiting patiently for her to catch up. “We lost his heat signature here, which led us to the cupboard under the staircase. It is well hidden and not on the plans. We wouldn’t have found it during a normal search.” He pointed to the splintered wood around the hatch. “It took us a while to break in because the access hatch was fastened from underneath. There was no way that we could have stopped him.”

              “That makes sense,” Annie nodded. “Alec has acquired copies of the original case files and he said that once the original warrant was issued, it took the arresting team two weeks to locate Barton. They searched this place from top to bottom three times. He must have been hiding down there when they came for him.”

              “Where did they make the arrest in the end?”

              “He was in his car near a local nature reserve.”

              “He has lists of similar places downstairs,” Stirling raised his eyebrows. “You’ll see what I mean when we get down there.”

              Annie ducked into the cupboard and cautiously navigated the steps. She wrinkled her nose as the smell of death reached her. The corpse was gone but the body fluids that had leaked from it were still present. The remnants of Barton’s head and its contents were darkening as they congealed on the walls and ceiling. “Barton was a busy boy,” she said as the scale of his research became apparent. “The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Post, The Prague Post, L’Echo de Paris, Het Parool from Amsterdam and some that I have never heard of,” Annie said as she studied the clippings on the walls. Some clippings were covered by three or more others that related to the same story. They were stapled at the top so the observer could lift each one to read the one behind. As she moved along the wall, she looked at the collection of British headlines that covered Barton’s arrest. “The headlines about him being convicted are all page one news but he only made page five when he was released.”

              “I think that this is where he started his collection,” Stirling said from the opposite end of the cellar. He stood in front of the desk. “I think that this is his first map,” he said pointing to the wall. “This is his house circled here and then he has marked concentric circles that get wider as the distance increases.”

              Annie stood next to him and soaked up as much detail as she could at a glance. She could have been looking at a search pattern from one of their own investigations. “So he starts off with his home as the epicentre of what exactly?”

              “Look at this,” Stirling picked up the list that he had found earlier. “Local parks, playing fields, streams, woods, farms, even slag heaps from some of the old coalmines.”

              “Hunting grounds or dumping grounds?”

              “Dumping grounds. That’s what I think.”

              Annie spotted the cluster of pins at Crosby Beach. It made her stomach knot and she felt a little nauseous. The headlines about the Butcher murders screamed at her from the wall. “Why the fascination with Brendon Ryder?” she swallowed hard as she spoke. “Why the fascination with any of this?” she gestured around the room. Murders across Europe and America occupied every inch. “From the first look at things, he’s posted notes on each case.”

              “He has,” Stirling agreed. “Most of them have a map coordinate noted in the corner. Look at this list though, he’s crossed off the entire list of local areas,” Stirling said studying the list. “It goes as far east as Snowdonia and Anglesey and as far north as Cumbria and the Lake District. I think he was looking for the best place to dispose of Simon Barton. Somewhere during the process, he has developed an affinity to other killers and began tracking them.”

              Annie held her chin between her finger and thumb and looked over the list. “This list has been compiled by an organised and intelligent mind,” she shook her head in disagreement. “It is so thorough that it could have been put together by a detective from our team searching for a victim’s remains. This is exactly what we would have done,” she said pausing to think. “My question is, was he trying to rule out the obvious dumpsites where he knew that the police would look or was he tracking something else?”

Stirling frowned and looked at the map. “Tracking what?”

“I don’t know,” Annie shrugged. “We need a list of where the original searches were made by the investigation team and in what order they were carried out. I have got a hunch that they will correspond closely with his list.”

“Do you think that he was just following where the investigation was focused?”

“Let’s say he held the boy down here,” Annie said looking around. “He could have held him for weeks before he killed him. What would you do if you were a suspect?”

“I would follow the investigation and try to second guess where they wouldn’t look.” He pointed to the mountainous areas of Snowdonia and The Lakes. “If you had the time and the strength to dismember a body and then took it into these areas, the pieces would never be found.”

“Why go that far away?” Annie mused. “There are thousands of rivers and ponds, quarries and beaches between here and the mountains.”

“Agreed, but if he was under the spotlight, he may have felt pressured to dump the body somewhere that no one was looking for him.” Stirling pointed to the county boundary lines. “He would have known from the reaction of the local residents and his family that they would never stop looking for Simon. As the main suspect it would follow him for the rest of his life like a dark cloud hanging over his head. The only way that he could ever get any peace of mind,” he tapped the map with his finger, “take the body over the borders where the murder wouldn’t be as much as a blip on the radar of a different force.”        

Annie listened but she wasn’t feeling Stirling’s theory. It was solid thinking but she didn’t think that he was being open minded enough. She stepped back from the map to look at it in its entirety. The area that it represented was vast. “No one could begin to search an area this wide. Simon Barton might as well be buried on the moon,” she sighed. The newspaper headlines caught her eye again. “Simon went missing during the height of our investigation into the Crosby Beach murders, right?” she asked herself. “Did Barton feel that he had some kind of connection to Brendon Ryder or was it something else completely?”

“I don’t follow.”

Annie pointed to the area of Crosby Beach. “If he was following the case as it unfolded, then maybe he was trying to offer the investigation a different suspect.”

“You’ve lost me, Guv.”

“What if he was innocent?”

“My gut says he wasn’t”

“Ignore your gut for a minute,” Annie gestured at the map. “What if his alibi is genuine and he didn’t abduct him.” She looked at Stirling and turned her palms upwards. “What if he thought Simon was taken by a killer like Brendon Ryder or a local paedophile?” Stirling’s face was a picture of confusion. “What if Barton wasn’t looking for a dumpsite to use himself and he was in fact, looking for where Simon’s body had been dumped?”