Monument to Murder (36 page)

K
ATE
D
ANIELS DIDN
’
T
hear the officer in the control room. Her phone was in her hand, but her arm was by her side as she stared at a pair of lifeless eyes. The young woman was hanging upside down from her seat belt. She looked about twenty years old; not a pretty girl by any stretch of the imagination, but she had beautiful hair, the colour of bronze, styled asymmetrically as if she’d made a real effort tonight. To the left of her lolling head, on the interior of the car’s roof, a gift lay on its side. It was wrapped and lovingly tied with a bow, suggesting the girl had been on her way to a party.

Her last, poor kid.

‘. . . 7824: please respond. Are you able to offer medical assistance?’

Blinking snow from her lashes, Kate swallowed down her grief for the girl. It felt surreal, standing there in the middle of nowhere in the glare of the Q5’s headlights, staring at a stranger, the snow falling silently all around her, a voice from the control room cutting through the deathly hush.

When she lifted the phone to her ear, her voice was flat. ‘Come again, Control.’

‘Are you able to offer assistance? Control over.’

‘Negative. It’s a fatal . . . the casualty’s neck is broken.’

‘Stay with the vehicle, 7824.’

‘That’s a negative . . .’ Drawing her eyes away from the dead girl, Kate’s thoughts returned to Emily. She lifted her torch, scanning the scene. Even with the Q5’s capability, with dense bushes on either side of the narrow road, there was no vehicular way through and it would take longer to find another route. ‘I’m making my way to the priority job at The Stint, Control.’

‘Yes, we’re aware of that. Officers have been dispatched.’

‘7824, my battery is low. Please use the force radio from now on, over.’

L
EAPING OVER THE
steaming chassis, Kate sprinted up the road, arms like pistons, willing herself to cover the ground to Emily’s home less than a mile away. As she ran, all she could hear was the sound of her own heavy breathing. Slipping on the icy surface, she strained to see over hedgerows as the road twisted and turned.

And there it was up ahead . . .

A tiny light in the darkness.

Exhausted and panting for breath, she ran on. As she neared the property, she could see that the kitchen light was on inside the house but, as she rounded the final bend, a dark shadow appeared behind a curtain of snow. She stopped running and approached with caution, trying to get some breath into her lungs. A 52 plate, dark-coloured Renault Clio was parked just short of the gateway. Lights off. Driver’s door wide open.

Shining her torch inside, she leaned in. The car had been hotwired and a hypodermic needle lay on the passenger seat, a tourniquet strap next to it.

Fearon would be pumped up and capable of anything.

Kate turned to face The Stint. The tiny cottage was backlit in the
moonlight, a Christmas-card image covered in fresh snow, exactly as it had been on the day Emily and Robert moved in. That was party night too, an open-house celebration for a wonderful couple beginning a new life together.

A gunshot pierced the night air, stopping her dead in her tracks as she walked toward the house. The sound sent a shiver up her spine. She spoke quietly on the radio: ‘7824 to Control, shots fired at The Stint. Where the fuck is my backup?’

Kate knew she had a decision to make. There were two women in the house and one drugged-up male, presumably armed with a shooter. Another gunshot sent her heart banging in her chest. There was no time to waste.

Swallowing down her fear, and despite advice from the control room to the contrary, she decided not to wait for her colleagues to arrive. Not that anyone would’ve blamed her. She was unarmed, at an obvious disadvantage, but she was also a police officer with a duty to preserve life.

Emily and Rachel were still inside. She couldn’t leave them to the mercy of Fearon.

She crept into the house. The hallway light was off, the bulb crunching under her feet as she entered. She listened. Total silence. To the left of her, Robert’s gun cabinet was empty and there was a faint smell of cordite in the air, the internal door blasted open. In her mind’s eye, she could almost see the weapon in Fearon’s hand, poised to blow her head off the minute she entered the living room.

Through a crack in the door, she saw blood.

One cream-coloured wall was covered in it.

The torch caught a flash of denim, about forty-five degrees to her right on the floor.

Male, not female.

She blew out her cheeks, relief bringing tears to her eyes.

Fearon was lying on his back, a gunshot wound to the right side of his chest, a bloody knife in his hand. He wasn’t moving. His eyes were shut but she was taking no chances. Kicking away the knife, she kneeled down beside him and felt for a pulse.

Still breathing.

She felt sick as she stood up straight, her imagination working overtime. For a moment she just stood there, trying to restore her breathing to normal. She didn’t want to turn round for fear of what faced her on the other side of that room. But the sound of a faint whimper sent her spinning in that direction.

Emily’s pathetic figure was slumped against the wall, bloodied and still, Robert’s shotgun by her side. Rachel was curled up in a foetal position beside her mother, her face pale with shock, unable to take her eyes from the psychopath that was Walter Fearon.

F
LASHING LIGHTS TURNED
the snow blue as it continued to fall in eerie silence. The Stint was now a crime scene. A WPC had been posted outside the front door, instructed to keep out unwanted visitors. Emergency vehicles were parked haphazardly on the road and on the driveway, transportation for the range of professional personnel who had swarmed to the scene when alerted by Control: crime scene investigators, photographers, paramedics and, of course, Kate Daniels’ own team of murder detectives.

Fortunately, no forensic pathologist had been summoned.

Not yet, anyway . . .

Kate took a deep breath.

Not long after she’d entered the cottage, armed support had burst through the door, training their guns on everything that moved. For anyone who hadn’t seen them in action and didn’t know how professional they were, it was one of the most frightening experiences imaginable. Rachel had gone into shock and they had quickly been stood down.

Kate was standing in the front porch, holding on to her, an arm securing a red blanket the ambulance crew had placed round her shoulders. The girl couldn’t stop shivering. Was it any wonder? Fearon’s attempt to kill her mother had been the last in a series of horrendous incidents most people wouldn’t encounter in a lifetime. Martin Stamp had been right about him all along.

And so had Emily, up to a point . . .

On her first day back at work she’d made a prediction that he would kill his next victim. Little did she know that Stamp would be the person he’d vent his rage upon; or that an attempt on her own life would follow the vicious killing of her lifelong friend. Though she had received a single stab wound to her left side, the injury was, thankfully, not life threatening. She’d been treated quickly at the scene by paramedics and was now being taken by stretcher and deposited in an ambulance, a sight that made Rachel weep all over again.

Leading her to the same ambulance, Kate shut the door and watched it drive off into the wintery night. When she turned round, Hank was leaving the house, a pair of wellington boots and a police-issue waterproof over his suit. As he got closer, she moved her fingers slowly across her throat, a question in her eyes.

He shook his head.

Fearon was still breathing.

A
FURTHER TRAWL
of the incident log for Bamburgh had led Carmichael to a sad revelation. Ash Walker had been fifteen when his parents brought him to the Northumberland village to spend time with his grandparents in a rented holiday cottage. The old couple had gone off to walk their dog, leaving him in charge of his five-year-old sister. The pair of them had been playing on the rocks when she was swept out to sea by a freak wave. She drowned.

The wall of silence the Murder Investigation Team had expected failed to materialize – far from it. Walker had been keen to share details of his macabre acts of devotion, and the traumatic death that had started it all. He described, as if it had happened only yesterday, the sight of rescuers pulling his sister’s dripping corpse from the water. Helpless and alone, he had followed as they carried her up the beach and laid her on the dunes to commence the frantic effort to revive her.

In his head, Bamburgh Castle had become a living memorial to her, the motive for the killings not far from one put forward by Jo Soulsby early in the enquiry.

Ten years ago, on what would have been her tenth birthday, he’d killed his
little princess
, Sophie Kent, laying her to rest in the very same spot where his sister had lost her fight for life. He’d got the idea of dressing her in adult clothes when he overheard one paedophile admit to another that he’d killed and buried a young girl in a woodland grave in Yorkshire years before.

He was laughing as he told Kate Daniels, ‘The nonce who did it was a Geordie, as it happens.’

Instead of reporting the matter to his superiors he’d copied the MO in the belief that the same paedophile would be blamed
if Sophie’s body were ever discovered. To prevent the remains being identified, he’d slipped into her bedroom while visiting her grief-stricken father and substituted another kid’s hairbrush and toothbrush for Sophie’s. The traces of Bamburgh sand that had implicated her father had been a mistake; Walker hadn’t realized that grains of incriminating evidence from his shoes had been transferred to Kent’s car during a darts night out – his only error in the whole affair.

Five years on, he’d killed Maxine O’Neil, a fifteen-year-old who looked exactly as he imagined his sister would have, had she lived. He’d seen the talented dancer’s picture in the local press performing in a Christmas concert at school. He’d watched her for a few weeks planning to make a move. Then, one day, out of the blue, he spotted her waiting at a bus stop, a sign that she was the right one. Stopping his car, he offered her a lift. When she refused, he got out, rendered her unconscious with a single blow and bundled her into the boot. When she came to and refused to celebrate the prearranged birthday tea he’d lovingly organized, he killed her.

‘Some kids,’ he said, ‘are never grateful.’

Walker had thought of everything. He’d carefully selected remote locations where there were no neighbours to report strange sounds or comings and goings. He’d chosen the presents, the gift-wrapping and paper plates following the theme his sister had loved – princesses and ballerinas – perfect for her special day. The dresses he’d picked out for his victims were almost the same as the one his sister was wearing the day she died. Not quite, but nearly: red polka dots, matching ribbons for their hair, short white socks and his mother’s white shoes with a strap across the front. And pearls like the ones belonging to his grandmother that his sister loved to play with.

The guy was sick.

In interview, Walker confirmed Kate Daniels’ supposition that Rachel McCann had been his intended victim number three. His sister would have been twenty within a few days and Rachel was the right age for him to carry on his monument to murder, had she not managed to escape.

However, he denied any involvement in DCI Gordon Munro’s case. The murder investigation that had frustrated the North Yorkshire SIO seemed doomed to remain unsolved . . .

Until Kate began replaying Walker’s statement in her mind. His account of the ‘Geordie nonce’ who’d bragged about killing a young girl and dumping her in a woodland grave conjured up an image of John Edward Thompson sitting in the interview room, trying not to draw attention to himself. He’d been questioned by officers investigating the Yorkshire murder, but claimed he was abroad at the time. It turned out he’d served time in HMP Coleby, on the wing where Walker had been employed. Further actions led them to his former cellmate, who soon began to sing. As a result, Thompson was arrested. He was currently awaiting trial for the North Yorks murder. So at least one ex-SIO would be able to enjoy his superannuation without a niggling unsolved case to keep him awake at night.

Chris Ridley, the historian who’d helped Kate track down a set of pearls for comparison, received a commendation from the Chief Constable for services rendered to the Murder Investigation Team, even though the police only managed to trace one other set and it was never a full-blown line of enquiry.

Emily McCann made a complete recovery from the stab wound to her side. When Fearon had shoved Rachel aside and charged at her like a bull, probably planning to shred her face as he had done
her friend and colleague, Martin Stamp, Emily hadn’t hesitated to pull the trigger of Robert’s gun. The CPS accepted that she’d acted in self-defence and no charges would follow. As for Fearon, he too had recovered from his injuries and could now look forward to spending the rest of his sad life in prison.

When the Bamburgh enquiry ended, Ailsa Richards didn’t want to go home. She put in for a permanent transfer to Northumbria with aspirations of one day rejoining the Murder Investigation Team. Lisa Carmichael had offered her lodgings and they were now the best of mates. Kate Daniels couldn’t promise her a job, but she would see what she could do.

Though the case was closed, Kate still had one more thing to do before she could lay it to rest. With a heavy heart she drove to Acklington village to make her peace with Bill Kent and apologize for the trauma she’d put him through. He’d hear nothing of it. He was grateful that his ten-year ordeal had finally come to an end. Sophie now had a proper resting place – maybe not quite as pretty at Bamburgh beach, but somewhere he could go and talk to her.

T
HE SOUND OF
Robert’s bike was distinctive as Rachel dropped the machine into the corner – knee down – using the force of gravity to maintain stability. Then confidently sped off along a winding road through stunning countryside, heading for home. She rode well, Kate shadowing her; their trip over Hartside the first of many in the years to come. It was a favourite destination of Kate’s, the one she turned to whenever she sought solitude after a harrowing case. The summit had far-reaching views on a good day. It was a place she only ever visited alone, with one exception: Jo Soulsby. Now she was happy to share it with Rachel, and hoped she would grow to love it too.

Hank, Jo and Emily turned to greet them as they arrived at The
Stint. Since the trauma of that February, Rachel had moved out and returned to her studies. Today, she’d gone home. Surrounded by friends, she was ready to celebrate her father’s life, draw a line under the past and start over . . .

The five of them wandered down the garden to the riverbank, a casket already in place. Emily looked a little reticent as her daughter neared the water’s edge and emptied out her father’s ashes into the water and watched them float away.

She looked round. ‘No more tears, Mum.’

‘No more tears,’ Emily repeated.

As mother and daughter walked off arm in arm to begin a new life, Jo made her excuses and left. Kate watched her go, her face pained with regret. During the Bamburgh enquiry, they had come close to rekindling their relationship, only to be pulled apart by circumstances. Since then, Jo had accepted Naylor’s invitation to return to work for Northumbria’s Murder Investigation Team, but she’d given Kate the brush-off. Their relationship was destined to be platonic from now on.

‘Get a grip!’ Hank said. ‘Could be worse.’

‘Oh yeah?’ Kate levelled her eyes at him. ‘What would you know?’

Digging a hand in his pocket, he pulled out a plain white postcard and handed it to her. It was postmarked the Netherlands and addressed to her in Fiona Fielding’s flamboyant hand. Kate swore under her breath. She’d been so busy, she’d forgotten to text the artist her home address.

‘Aren’t you going to read it?’ he asked.

Kate grinned. ‘I know what it says, Hank.’

‘Ahem . . .’ He made a crazy face. ‘I think you’ll find this one’s a little different, boss. I thought I’d better rescue it from your in-tray and deliver it personally before the team got their hands on it and
posted it on Facebook or Twitter. It’s a bit more interesting than the usual stuff on there.’

‘Er, what have I told you about reading my mail?’

Kate turned the card over. Instead of her usual four words –
Are You Hungry Yet?
– Fiona had planted a bright red lipstick kiss on one half of the card. On the other, she’d written four new words:
Two Lips From Amsterdam.

Kate laughed out loud. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘It’s my shout.’