Monument to Murder (17 page)

Kate took a pen from her pocket. ‘Now, I’d like your full details if you don’t mind.’

‘And if I do mind?’

‘I’d take the easy route if I were you.’

The man scowled, gave his name, age and date of birth, his address and occupation.

‘Do you have any identification on you? Bus pass, driving licence?’

‘I ride, I don’t drive. That’s how I got this.’ He pointed at his head. ‘Some tosser in a lorry decided to cut me up a week past Wednesday. Thanks to him, I’m on the Pat and Mick.’

The DCI wasn’t interested in his sob story. ‘Anything else that’ll confirm your identity?’

The man patted the back pocket of his jeans. He handed over a crumpled gas bill, telling her that if she cared to walk him home there was plenty of stuff to verify that he was who he said he was.

Pulling out her phone, Kate rang the control room. When Brooks came on the line, she reeled off the man’s details: ‘Sydney Curtis, 2 Cottage Row, Bamburgh. Age and date of birth as follows . . . Do a check on him will you, see if he’s known?’

‘I’m not!’ Curtis said.

‘Shut it!’ Kate warned.

Brooks was back. ‘Nothing known or recorded, boss.’

The DCI took in Curtis’ smirk. ‘No NFAs or matters pending?’ she asked.

‘Correct,’ Brooks said. ‘Nowt on the PNC at all.’

Thanking him, Kate hung up just as a pint-sized uniform police constable ran out of the dunes and down the beach towards them, baton drawn. She gave him a look that stopped him in his tracks and muttered, ‘Fuck’s sake you idiot, put that thing away!’

H
EART STILL IN
her mouth, Emily hugged her daughter and held on for a very long time. Her thoughts were in turmoil as they stood in the middle of their living room, a spilled vase of flowers on a wet cream carpet, Fearon’s threat playing like a mantra in her head, filling her with alarm and making her question her sanity. And still she couldn’t write it off as a load of crap. The sick bastard had been so precise. So convincing. Did he have access to information about her? How could he?

Emily didn’t know.

She wanted things to go back to the way they were before a quirk of fate ripped her world apart. They were a family of three, not two – and so happy – the perfect couple with the perfect child, a string of hopes and dreams stretching far into the future. Now all she had left was a bloody big empty space. The black hole sucked her in, deeper and deeper, as each day passed.

She was angry too.

Her husband hadn’t been fighting for his country or saving a drowning child when he died. There was no freak accident. No act of
God. No terrible weather event had taken him away. A dodgy aortic valve had caused him to collapse while running a half-marathon.

How stupid and pointless was that?

The phone rang in the kitchen.

Leaving Rachel to clear up the mess on the floor, she walked away to answer it. It was Jo Soulsby, wanting to know if she fancied a drink. Emily declined, reminding her what day it was.

Jo suggested an alternative, meeting Kate later in the week. ‘If she can drag herself away from that job of hers.’

‘I’d like that,’ Emily said.

Mention of Kate brought to mind her frantic attempts to contact the DCI by phone. In turn that led her thoughts back to Fearon. ‘Jo, did Martin tell you there was another incident at the prison today?’

‘Incident?’ Jo said.

She hadn’t been told.

Before Emily could say more, Rachel arrived in the kitchen looking for a dustpan and brush, preventing further discussion of her mother’s latest confrontation with the prisoner from hell.

‘My office or yours?’ Emily opened the cupboard under the sink, took out a bottle of carpet cleaner and handed it to Rachel, hoping Jo Soulsby would take the hint on the other end of the line. ‘Tomorrow morning any good for you?’

‘Rachel’s there, right?’

‘Correct!’

‘Nuff said. See you tomorrow, Em.’

The line went dead.

It was perhaps as well she couldn’t talk freely. Emily was done talking about Fearon and far too exhausted to go over it again. Maybe she was jumping to conclusions. Now she came to think about it, the prisoner had merely described a younger version of
herself. It stood to reason that any daughter of hers would possess similar physical characteristics. As for their home, Fearon wasn’t local but he knew what a traditional Northumbrian cottage was like. It was an educated guess – nothing more – and she had done exactly what Martin hinted at – played right into his hands.

B
Y THE TIME
Emily and Rachel were ready to go for a walk, the sun had come out. It often did that, this near the coast late in the afternoon. They didn’t have far to go. Their tiny cottage was blessed with four acres of land, including five hundred metres of fishing rights on the River Coquet, which rose in the Cheviots and meandered through Northumberland before discharging into the North Sea – a journey of around forty miles.

A keen angler, Robert had fallen for the property as a young man. He used to fish there with the son of a former owner. He particularly loved the bend in the river, the way it bubbled and danced over the bedrock. When the cottage came on the market, he’d snapped it up, consulting with Emily only after the event, hoping she’d love it too. That evening, he’d taken her to a pub in Walkworth, bought a bottle of wine they could ill afford and sprung the news on her . . .

‘We’ve got to have it, Em. It’s not massive but it’s big enough. It’s well built. It has land. It’s in a fabulous location. And . . .’ He looked at her,
really
looked, like he wanted to get her into the sack. In that moment, time stood still. They were the only customers in the bar – the only couple on the planet – two people madly in love, eyes for each other and no one else. Robert lifted his glass and said the magic words: ‘The Stint is a great place to raise a family.’

She loved the name:
The Stint.

He was right too, except the big family never materialized. For reasons that baffled them both, more so their GP, Emily conceived
only the once. It wasn’t for lack of trying either. They didn’t need a baby-making excuse to rip each other’s clothes off. But neither did it matter all that much. If fate chose not to grant them a second child, then that was OK by them. They’d been blessed with a precious daughter.

‘She’s enough,’ Robert always said.

And she was.

K
ATE
D
ANIELS WAS EXHAUSTED
. It had been a bummer of a day so far. Hours and hours of purgatory: a suspect found, then lost; an argument with Jo; a bust up with Hank after he’d made his mouth go; an idiot lighting candles near her crime scene who turned out to be nothing more than a voyeur. Consequently, she had no enthusiasm for the briefing.

The squad looked jaded too, but as the meeting progressed it soon became apparent that things were about to get a whole lot worse. For starters: the pearls. During the day, Robson had discovered that Kate’s set, and those found on the first victim, were manufactured prior to the Coronation by a company that had ceased trading in the mid-seventies. That was bad news because the line of enquiry could go no further. Worrying too because whoever put them on the child had gone out of his way to recreate the exact same scenario with his second victim.

‘OK, it’s not the end of the world,’ Kate said. ‘But if we can’t find the supplier, then the house-to-house team needed to get a wriggle on with that list of recipients I asked for. Anyone know how they’re doing?’

No one spoke.

A phone bleeped. Hank went for his pocket. ‘I’ll have a word with Yates first thing in the morning,’ he said, before accessing the message that had just come in.

‘Where are we with the other set of pearls?’ asked the DCI.

Brown had an apology written all over his face as he raised a hand at the back. A serial note-taker, he flipped a few pages before answering her question. ‘They’re bog standard, boss. Cheap, mass-produced rubbish manufactured in the States. They’re sold in several chain stores and in vending machines too. Y’know, where you put money in and get a toy inside a plastic ball? They’re still current and available over the Internet. I talked to one of the main suppliers. They’re shipped to Europe and right across the USA, distributed to craft shops and toyshops all over the knot end. Chances are we’ll never trace them.’

Another dead end.

‘Well, well!’ Hank raised his eyes from his phone, specifically from his inbox. An email marked urgent had come in from the forensic science lab. ‘It seems the pearls aren’t the only thing our victims had in common.’

Everyone looked at him.

He held the phone up. ‘Report from Matt West. The shoes have now been forensically examined. They’re also old and bore the same manufacturing label.’ He caught Kate’s eye. ‘But don’t get too excited. You ever heard of Philby & Son on Prudhoe Street?’

‘Where the hell’s Prudhoe Street?’ Carmichael asked.

‘Before your time, Lisa,’ an old detective at the back said. ‘It was pulled down years ago. Philby & Sons was a cheap shop, bit like Farnon’s, another establishment you young ’uns won’t have heard of. It was in a grid of streets near the Haymarket bus station. The arse end of Eldon Square Shopping Centre.’

‘So where does that take us?’ Kate was looking at Hank now. ‘Can we get a familial DNA match from shed skin in the shoes?’

He shook his head. ‘Apparently not.’

Kate’s shoulders dropped. Matt West was an expert in his field. If it had been remotely possible to extract a sample of DNA she knew he would have. ‘So how does it help us?’ she asked.

‘The shoes were well worn. And here’s the thing . . .’ Hank glanced at his email. ‘The wear pattern was almost identical. The scientists are sticking their necks out here, but they say, quote: they belonged to the same person in all probability. Both were worn down on the left inner heel.’

‘Mother of the offender?’ Kate suggested.

‘That would be my guess.’

‘Sounds like Jo’s theory was right,’ DS Robson said.

‘Looks that way. What else we got?’

Kate had just come from a meeting with Abbey Hunt. The anthropologist had completed her tests and was now certain that the years she’d given them to work with – 2001 and 2006 – were spot on in both cases, but she couldn’t be any more specific than that. Her best guess was a winter burial. As for dental records, she’d lucked out there too. Nominal 1 had perfect teeth. Nominal 2 had all her permanent molars and some decay but no restorative treatment that might assist with identification.

‘Not everyone has a dentist,’ Brown said. ‘NHS or otherwise.’

Carmichael stuck her hand in the air. ‘What about broken bones?’

‘A well-healed fracture of the right tibia on the fifteen-year-old,’ Kate said.

Gormley was about to say something when a phone rang on the desk nearest to him. Picking it up, he listened for a moment and then interrupted Kate, holding up the phone. ‘Gerry Offord, front
desk, for you – and before you ask, I did remind him to hold all calls. You want it on speaker?’

Kate nodded. Offord was big mates with Brown, a man who wouldn’t dream of disturbing a Murder Investigation Team in full flow unless it was important.

‘This had better be good, Gerry. You know I’m busy.’

‘Apologies, ma’am. I’m holding an urgent call from North Yorks Major Incident Team. I’m assured you’ll want to take it.’

‘Says who?’

‘The SIO, I assume—’

‘You assume? Did you verify the ident?’

‘He sounded genuine enough—’

Kate rolled her eyes. ‘If I said I was the tooth fairy, would you believe me too?’

Offord went quiet at the other end.

Detectives in the room were grinning. It might not be written down in the
Front Desk for Dummies Manual
but it was standard procedure in their department to verify a caller’s identity before entering into any detailed conversation. Many a detective had been caught out by unscrupulous arseholes claiming to be someone they were not in order to feed the twenty-four-hour news.

It pained Kate to think that people would go to such lengths to obtain information on murder cases never intended for release to the press or wider public. Even more worrying, the thought that an offender might get the upper hand just so some tosser could make a name for him or herself with a front-page scoop in a newspaper.

Sloppy gits like Offord made for a very leaky sieve.

‘Did they ask for me by name?’ she asked.

Offord sidestepped the question, telling her the DCI’s name was Munro.

‘Male or female?’

‘Male.’

‘OK, put him on.’

A voice came on the line. ‘Apologies for the interruption to your briefing, but I have an unsolved level 1 case from ’99. Similar MO to yours. Young girl, disposed of in a woodland grave, dressed in adult clothes.’

‘Where are you?’

‘My office.’ He began to reel off a number.

Kate cut in before he could finish: ‘Call you back.’

She hung up, pointing at Carmichael’s computer monitor. ‘Lisa, police almanac. Look him up: MIT, North Yorks, DCI Munro. Fast as you can. The rest of you, take a break. Quick one, mind – I want you all here by the time I’ve finished this call.’

As Carmichael began typing, the team made their escape. Some headed for the loo, others out on to the fire escape for a quick fag break. As Kate waited for confirmation of Munro’s ID, his voice replayed in her head. It was measured, calm, the accent more Cheshire than Yorkshire, she would’ve said. She thought he was on the level. For a start, he hadn’t called his murder incident a ‘cold case’, a media term she hated. And he hadn’t made out he was some kind of hero on a quest. He sounded a lot like Bright.

He sounded the real deal.

Carmichael picked up her phone and started dialling. The phone was answered straight away. She asked for Munro, first name Gordon. The man she was speaking to said that was him. Asking him to hold for her SIO, Lisa glanced at her own tired DCI. ‘This is him, boss. Line two.’

Picking up the handset, Kate said: ‘I have one question.’

‘Which is?’

‘Was she wearing any jewellery?’

‘What kind of jewellery?’

‘Pearls, Gordon. Was she wearing any pearls?’