When You're Smiling

by GS Rhodes

  “Lovely to meet you too,” she said, letting out a breath, her smile looking a little less pained than it had a moment ago.

  “And I don’t need to introduce you to DS Sanchez.”

  “I should think not.” DS Sanchez was sat over to one side of the room on a sofa, a disposable coffee cup in one hand, her phone in the other. Her dark brown curls had been pulled up and away from her face, a couple of strands hanging forward in front of her bright amber eyes. She raised an eyebrow at Kidd. “Hey, stranger.”

  “Morning, Zoe,” Kidd said. “How’s things?”

  “We’ve got a murderer on the borough copying one of your old mates, how do you think things are?” she snapped, rolling her eyes, and turning her gaze back to her phone. DC Ravel flinched. So did Kidd. Things were definitely not good.

  “I trust you know where everything is,” Weaver said with a smile. “You hop to it. You know where to find me if you need me.”

  Kidd resisted the urge to say, “Pretending nothing is going on and staying out of the way.” Instead, he smiled and said, “Thank you, sir.” He might as well start off toeing the line. He could find a hundred or so ways to piss off Weaver without even thinking about it, best not start with one on his first day back.

  Weaver left the Incident Room and Kidd turned his attention back to Zoe. Her eyes were fixed on him. She got up from the sofa and walked over, nodding for him to follow her. He did this gladly.

  They walked over to a desk that Kidd could tell even from a distance was hers. It was messy, more than messy, it was chaos personified. There were papers stacked up one side, threatening to topple and fall to the ground, and more disposable coffee cups than was necessary.

  She must never sleep, he thought.

  “Wasn’t expecting you back so soon,” Zoe said as they got to her desk.

  “No, me neither,” Kidd said. “Do you own a travel mug, Zoe?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “A travel mug,” Kidd said. “Might stop you from using all the disposables. Environment and all that.”

  She raised an eyebrow at him. “Really? You go off-grid for six months and the first thing you’re talking to me about when you reappear is that I need to become an eco-warrior?”

  “Not a warrior,” Kidd said. “I just thought—”

  “I messaged you,” she said. “I called you. I even thought about coming to your house but I didn’t want to intrude.” She held his gaze, waiting for him to say something. When he didn’t, she sighed and continued. “Where did you go?”

  “Took a holiday,” Kidd said.

  “For six months?”

  “No,” Kidd replied. “For part of it, the rest of it I…” he trailed off. What had he been doing for the past six months? He’d read a lot, he’d run a lot, he’d watched more TV than was humanly possible. He’d done everything he could to purge the job from his mind. They signed him off with stress, their intention probably for him to destress, to come back a changed man, but he spent most of it worrying there wouldn’t be a job to come back to, that everything would have moved on without him.

  He’d wanted to forget this place while he was off. And that had meant cutting himself off, but Zoe didn’t see it like that.

  “I know you, Ben,” Zoe said, lowering her voice so as not to pull focus from the other DC’s in the room. Ben looked around to see that Owen and Simon were busy working on the evidence board, DC Ravel had gone over to join them with some papers of her own. “You don’t do a disappearing act for no good reason.”

  Kidd sighed. “If you know me, then you know that the only way I could be less stressed so I could come back would be if I disconnected,” he said. “Anything else wouldn’t work. And de-stressing was the whole idea, wasn’t it?”

  “And did it work?”

  Kidd snorted. “What do you think?”

  That got him a tight-lipped smile. A smile with a twinkle in her eye that meant that their friendship wasn’t completely over.

  “Boss?” Owen called from across the room. “We’re about ready to get going over here, if you are.”

  “Thank God you’re here, he’s been acting like he’s second in command all morning,” Zoe grumbled.

  “Really?”

  “There was about to be a double murder.”

  Kidd snorted. “There’s not a court in the world that would convict you.”

  “For killing Campbell?” Zoe smirked. “They’d give me a bloody medal. There’d be a statue of me in Market Square.”

  “Boss?” Campbell repeated.

  Kidd and Zoe looked over towards the board where DC Powell and DC Ravel were also stood, their eyes trained on Kidd.

  They turned back to each other. Zoe raised her eyebrows at Kidd. “You ready, ‘Boss’?” she said, her tone so loaded, it was practically a cocked gun.

  Kidd smiled and took a deep breath, lowering his voice so the rest of the team wouldn’t hear him. “Not even a little bit.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Kidd walked to the front of the room, DS Sanchez close behind him. Owen and Simon got themselves out of the way so Kidd could get a decent look at the board. It was enough to turn even the hardiest officer’s stomach.

  DC Powell had put everything from the original case over to one side and Kidd stopped dead, staring at them wide-eyed like he’d seen a ghost. Because he had. Three ghosts, to be exact. Natalie Anders, the first victim, Angela Berry, the second, Karen Nicks, the third.

  Once the third victim had been found, the media swooped in like a kettle of vultures. Nobody could stop the think pieces, the front pages, the aggressive hounding of the victims’ families. Once you hit the third victim in a case, it becomes a serial killer, and there are few things the British public like more than the story of a sick serial killer out on the streets. There’s an obsession with serial killers for a reason. People marvel at the mind of someone who can do something like that, who can be so cruel, so vicious, without any remorse.

  Though, who was Kidd to judge. He’d dedicated his life to it.

  The cuts in the cheeks, the slice through the neck, each one of them the same, methodical, careful, so clean it made it infuriating. The killer left nothing behind. Not a trace. With every body they found, they had practically nothing new to go on.

  It had started as a code for him at first, calling them The Grinning Murders, but then the newspapers got hold of it and they ran with it. You couldn’t move for it in the headlines. Every day they would speculate, stir up fear, trouble, just like they always did, even now. But in an age of social media, it all moved a heck of a lot quicker. You couldn’t breathe without it being caught on camera and every faceless profile had an opinion.

  Kidd had to stop paying attention to the newspapers. It was enough to drive him insane.

  He looked across to the fourth picture. It was the picture that Weaver had shown him this morning, the one of the woman face up on the ground, covered in blood. Seeing them all next to each other, it didn’t take a genius to see that this was different than the others. The women in the previous killings had all been completely clean but for the fatal wound to the neck and the gouges on their faces. Whoever this woman was, she’d been through it in a much worse way. Nothing about it was clean and precise. Everything pointed to someone trying to do it in a hurry.

  Kidd turned to his team. “So, what do we have so far?”

  Owen took a breath. “Waiting on a DNA match for the victim,” he started. “We want to establish who she is, see if there’s a connection to Hansen and the previous murders. Once we have that, we’ll be able to figure out if there are any patterns, protect anybody who might be… in trouble.” The hesitation made Kidd nervous. The fact that someone else could be in trouble made him very nervous. No time for that.

  “Good start,” he said. “What else?”

  “Photographs have been taken, as you can see, forensics is looking for fingerprints, hair, fibres, anything that could point us in the direction of the killer,” he continued.
>
  “If they’re really taking hints off Hansen, they wouldn’t have left a single thing,” Kidd said, stepping a little closer to the photo. “But I get the impression he’s singing from the same hymn sheet but in a slightly different key.”

  “You think he’s not as careful?” Zoe asked.

  Kidd took a breath. “Honestly? I’m counting on it. Any connection with the locations of where the original bodies were found?” Kidd asked.

  “Not that we can tell,” Owen said.

  “And time of death?”

  Owen shrugged. “Going to have to wait for pathology on that one, sir.”

  Kidd knew that they needed to get that timeline as quickly as possible. If whoever was doing this was truly trying to replicate Hansen, they only had a few days before another body would show up. It was another place his efficiency had come into play. It had all happened in such quick succession, by the time they’d found one body and got any details from pathology another body had shown up. Nine days. Three bodies. How long could they possibly have here?

  “Anything else, boss?” Owen asked.

  “Who found the body?” Kidd asked, turning away from the board. “Weaver mentioned a couple of kids at the scene.”

  “Uni students,” Zoe chimed in, the eye roll prevalent enough in her voice that Kidd didn’t have to see it to know it was there. “They were walking through the woods in Bushy Park and found the body.”

  Kidd eyed her carefully. “Do you buy that?”

  “All purchases were not final,” Zoe said. “We’ve taken DNA from them, photographs of the shoes they were wearing for footprints to count them out of any investigation.”

  “They been questioned?”

  Zoe shook her head. “They gave detailed statements. They’re yet to be questioned by police.”

  “How are they?”

  “Seemed a little rattled,” Zoe said with a shrug. “But that’s pretty understandable. It’s one thing to find a body period, a whole other thing to find a body in this state.” She sighed. “Sorry, DC Campbell, you want to carry on?”

  Owen nodded. “Thank you, DS Sanchez,” he said turning back to the board triumphantly before turning back to face Kidd. “I… uh… I think that’s all we have for now.”

  “Media?”

  “We have a couple of news outlets picking it up,” DC Ravel started. She was visibly shaking. “Some short articles already being written, some tweets here and there, but they don’t have enough details to pin it to anything, least of all to Hansen. There are a few people putting two and two together, harassing us for more information, dropping Hansen’s name, but all they really know is a body was found in Bushy Park, everything else is up for grabs.”

  “Good work,” Kidd said. “Can you keep an eye on that? I don’t want it to get out of hand if we can help it.”

  DC Ravel smiled. “Sure thing, sir.” A smile was a good thing.

  “Press conference?” Kidd asked the room.

  “Weaver wants one arranged as soon as we have some leads,” Owen said. “In an ideal world, I think he’d like it to be over and done with as quickly as possible because… well… it’s The Grinning Murders.” Just mentioning it out loud brought a strange hush to the room, even Campbell lowered his voice. “No one wants that media circus again.”

  Kidd nodded and looked up at the wall. It was like his past had come back to haunt his future. The irony of being signed off for stress and then brought back into the fold with something like this. It was enough to make him want to disappear to a desert island and not come back.

  “Anything to add, sir?” Owen said.

  Kidd walked over to the board and pointed at the newest picture. “It will be easier for us to put together a picture of what’s going on when we know who the victim is,” he started. “But there are already a few things I can see here that don’t quite add up.”

  Zoe eyed him curiously like she was about to chime in, but Kidd carried on anyhow.

  “She’s lying in her own blood for a start,” Kidd said bluntly. “If you look at the previous murders, or the case files of those murders, those bodies were dumped, they were never murdered at the scene. So that already makes one difference,” he added. “And we know for a fact that it isn’t Hansen.”

  “Why’s that, sir?” Owen asked.

  “Hansen is in prison,” Kidd said. “He’s serving three life sentences, he hasn’t been let out and hopefully he never will be. This is a copycat. A shit copycat as well, if you ask me.”

  Kidd stared up at the board. He had that feeling of being watched. He knew the eyes of the team were on him. He needed to get started, get back into the swing of things. And he knew just where he wanted to start.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Kidd headed out of the station, DS Sanchez in tow. He’d left the team to keep doing what they were doing, going through the case files, figuring out connections, finding leads, waiting for information from the lab, but he needed to get out. When it came to the start of an investigation, Kidd always liked to start at the scene of the crime. It’s just what made sense to him.

  “You don’t need to see it, you know?” Zoe said. “We’ve got the pictures, we’ve had officers there, we’ve got statements.”

  Kidd shook his head. “I need to be there,” he replied. “Maybe it’s old fashioned but I want to start at the very beginning.”

  “I’ve heard it’s a very good place to start,” Zoe said as she followed him out of the building and into the car park. “You want to drive, or shall I?”

  “You’re more than welcome,” he said, heading towards an electric blue Focus, one of the unmarked police cars in the car park, pulling his jacket tight as the wind whipped about him.

  “Good,” Zoe said with a smirk. “You’re a shit driver. I hate being your passenger.”

  Kidd looked at her carefully, his eyebrow arched, a laugh bubbling beneath the surface. He laughed as he hopped into the passenger seat.

  “What are you laughing at?” Zoe asked as she got in, pulling on her seatbelt.

  “It’s taken you literally fifteen minutes before you started ripping into me again,” Kidd said. “Some things never change.”

  And Kidd was sort of glad of that. Zoe hadn’t exactly seemed pleased to see him when he’d walked into the station. He thought there was going to be some tension between them but they seemed to be picking up where they’d left off. The last thing he wanted was for their relationship to be damaged, or for him to be treated differently because he’d been signed off.

  “Well,” Zoe started, switching on the engine. “Any excuse to remind you that you shouldn’t be allowed to drive.” She turned to him. “You ready for this?”

  “For what? Are you about to start doing doughnuts in the car park or something?”

  Zoe snorted. “No, I mean to be back at a crime scene. It’s been a while, Kidd.”

  Kidd sighed, this was what he’d been afraid of. “I don’t need to be babied, Zoe. The sooner we get this investigation started, the sooner we get our killer.”

  “The body is already with the pathologist.”

  “Don’t want to see the body,” Kidd said, knowing that it was yet another image that would stay fixed in his mind for the rest of his life. “I want to see where it happened. I want to be able to trace the killer’s steps. It helps. Trust me.”

  Zoe shrugged. “You’re yet to give me a reason to doubt you.”

  She pulled out of the car park and started them away from Kingston towards Bushy Park. He still couldn’t believe it was in Bushy Park. How on earth had the killer managed to get a woman into the trees at Bushy Park and kill her without being seen? Or even heard? It didn’t make sense.

  Kidd shook his head. This person wasn’t as careful as Hansen had been all those years ago. They were more focussed on replicating the method, not replicating the process. Everything about Hansen’s killings had been careful, methodical, he’d known exactly what he was doing. It was what made it all the more terrifying. Th
e bodies appeared and there wasn’t any trace of how they got there, or how they were killed. This was messy. They were already making mistakes. At least, Kidd hoped they were. If they made mistakes it would be easier to track them down.

  The roads were pretty clear given the time of day, so it wasn’t long before they pulled into the car park and got out of the car. There were a couple of other police cars here, poor PCs that had no doubt been asked to stand at a cordon and answer any questions put to them by the nosiest members of the public, come rain or come shine. Kidd didn’t envy them. He’d had to do it many times in his career and he would hate to go back to it. Now that people had mobile phones and they could record your every reaction? Absolutely not.

  “Okay, so don’t kill me for asking you this,” Zoe started.

  “Your choice of words isn’t exactly great given the circumstances, but go on,” Kidd said with a smile.

  “Shit, yeah, sorry.” Zoe shook her head. “I just wanted to check in with you. I know I went in a little hard on you when you got into the office but I’ve been worried about you, okay?”

  “Christ, everyone’s worried about me.”

  “Everyone?”

  “You, Liz.”

  “How is Liz?”

  “Today? She’s hungover,” Kidd said. “We were out last night. But she’s good, yeah. I’ll let her know you asked after her.”

  Zoe smiled. “Thanks.” She took a breath. “But seriously, though. You’re alright, aren’t you?”

  Kidd opened his mouth to respond. He was about to be honest with her, about to tell her that maybe he wasn’t quite as alright as he was letting on, that maybe he shouldn’t even be back at work yet, but he knew that if Zoe knew that, she would find a way to get him back on leave. It wasn’t malicious. She wanted what was best for him. So, instead, he fixed a smile on his face.

  “I’m happy to be back,” he said.