The Shrine: A DCI Ryan Mystery (The DCI Ryan Mysteries Book 16)

by LJ Ross

“I know,” Ryan muttered. “The fact is, one of them might be involved.”

  They watched people coming and going, including the police staff who buzzed themselves through a security door to access the executive suite beyond. It was a similar set-up to their own headquarters back in the east end of Newcastle, even down to the dubious clientele.

  Speaking of which, at that very moment, a woman was escorted into the building by two constables, hissing and spitting about being manhandled. Her skinny legs were bare and unwashed, and she showed signs of extensive drug abuse.

  “We’ve told you before, Sue. There are charities that can help you—”

  “I don’t want any bloody do-gooder comin’ around tellin’ me what I should and shouldn’t do, and all that. I just want to go home. Why won’t you let me go home?”

  But she wouldn’t go home, Ryan thought. She’d go straight back on the streets, to earn enough money to score her next high. Addiction was a cruel and vicious cycle, often leading to disease or death, either by their own persistent hand or by somebody else’s.

  Either way, he and Phillips were often the ones to look after them, in the end.

  “DCI Ryan? DS Phillips? Good to see you, again.”

  They turned to find DS Ben Carter approaching them, his shoes squeaking across the tiled floor. Their first thought was that he seemed younger here than he had appeared beneath the dim lights of the cathedral. Yet there was a quality to the man that was ageless—whether it was the conservative haircut, his generic blue suit or general demeanour, they couldn’t say; but it was easy to see how the young man had been promoted so quickly. He had a dependable, dogmatic quality to his personality which was well suited to the life they led.

  “I spoke with DCI MacKenzie earlier,” Carter said, as they made their way along the corridors towards Major Crimes. “She rang to introduce herself. I hope you won’t mind me saying DS Phillips, but you’re a very fortunate man.”

  “Don’t mind at all, son,” Philips said, good-naturedly. “Since it’s nothing but the truth, and none who knows it better than me.”

  Carter smiled.

  “I understand DCI MacKenzie will be handling the investigation into the robbery at the cathedral, and you’ll be leading the investigation into DCI Tebbutt’s murder,” Carter said to Ryan. “That being the case, sir, I’d like to say that we all thought very highly of Joan, and you won’t find any obstruction from our end. We all feel that, if it had to be anyone outside of our area command to handle her case, we’re glad it’s you.”

  “That’s much appreciated,” Ryan said, and hoped it was true. “I didn’t know Joan well, but I knew her well enough to respect her skills as a detective and her integrity as a person.”

  A flicker of sadness passed over Carter’s clean-shaven face.

  “We were all stunned by the news,” he said. “First, the cathedral, then this…I think it’s only just beginning to sink in.”

  “It’ll mean more responsibility for you,” Phillips said, watching him closely.

  “I suppose you’re right. Here’s the office.”

  They entered what might, ordinarily, be a bustling open-plan division, now sadly bereft of personnel. A few officers were seated around the room, and looked up as they entered.

  “No DC Winter today?” Phillips asked.

  Carter shook his head.

  “Justine only works part-time,” he told them. “She looks after her disabled brother two days a week.”

  “What about the rest?” Ryan asked.

  “You’re looking at them,” Carter said, with a resigned shrug. “We’ve got a few out in the field interviewing staff and volunteers at the cathedral but, as you know, we lost a good number of senior staff members following Operation Watchman.”

  Ryan made a noncommittal sound in the back of his throat.

  “Was this Tebbutt’s desk?” he asked, pointing towards the one he would have chosen.

  “Yeah, how did you know?”

  “You can see the whole room from here,” he said, and moved along the aisle towards her cubicle, so he could try to visualise the woman in her day-to-day life.

  “We’ll need access to her e-mail server,” he said, and Carter nodded.

  “Do you know where she kept the key for this?”

  Ryan tapped a locked drawer at the bottom of Tebbutt’s desk, but Carter shook his head.

  “It’s probably on her keyring or somewhere at home,” he said. “You gave instructions that nothing should be removed from her house, so we haven’t altered anything at the address, sir.”

  Usually, Ryan would not stand on ceremony. He preferred to be addressed by his name rather than his title but, given the circumstances, he didn’t say anything.

  “I’ll send over one of our specialists from Digital Forensics,” he said. “They’ll need to go through her hard drive.”

  “Don’t you want me to contact the Digital Forensics team here?”

  Ryan took the opportunity to draw a firm line in the sand.

  “No, we’ll be outsourcing everything to Northumbria. I know this won’t be easy, Carter. Our work will feel invasive and, at times, you might feel offended. I won’t apologise for that, because it comes with the territory and you should know that it’s my job to make sure Joan receives a fully-independent eye. That can’t happen unless we take everything off-site, right down to the service personnel we use.”

  The broader ramifications of what Ryan was saying, as well as all he was not saying, seemed finally to hit home.

  “Of course,” Carter said, stiffly. “We’ll accommodate whichever digital forensics specialist you choose, sir.”

  “Good,” Ryan said. “Now, shall we find somewhere to sit and take down your statement?”

  “I’ve already given a statement to Lowerson and Yates.”

  “So you did,” Ryan said. “But I have a terrible habit of wanting to hear things from the horse’s mouth.”

  On which note, he set off in search of an empty meeting room and a vending machine, because he had just realised it had been more than two hours since his last caffeine hit.

  A man couldn’t be expected to work in those conditions.

  CHAPTER 20

  While Ryan raided the vending machine at Durham Constabulary Headquarters, MacKenzie and Lowerson made their way through the crowded streets of the city, a few miles further east. While forensic work was still ongoing inside the cathedral, MacKenzie had agreed to remove the police cordon to allow pedestrian traffic to resume around Palace Green. However, there was no time to stop and admire the symmetry of the quadrangle, nor to dip inside the library to view its treasures, because something much more pressing demanded their attention.

  Finally, they had a lead.

  A call had come in direct from Mike Nevis, Head of Security at the cathedral, who’d spent some considerable time overnight checking the CCTV footage from the past few days. Much to their collective embarrassment, he had found something before they had.

  MacKenzie looked forward to hearing whatever Nevis could tell her, but she also knew that fools rushed in, and so took the trouble to run a quick background check on the man who’d been so eager to make himself a part of their investigation. Michael John Nevis, originally from Berwick-upon-Tweed, was a fifty-one-year-old ex-army corporal, who’d learned about computers during his time serving Her Majesty, and had put his skills to good use since leaving the army with an honourable discharge. He was unmarried, but had two children by different mothers, both of whom had been forced to chase him for child support through the court system. That little nugget prompted a deeper search, which revealed several county court judgments against him for non-payment of finance and other credit agreements in the past three years.

  Put together as a whole, it was possible the man had a gambling problem—which was unfortunate, but not particularly interesting, were it not for the bribery risk he now posed. A man in need of a bob or two might find his principles more readily compromised, should the right
offer come along. Luckily, before handing over the case, Ryan had had the foresight to request access to bank account data in respect of certain key staff members connected with the cathedral—including Nevis.

  “What exactly did he tell you on the phone?” she asked Lowerson, as they approached the north door of the cathedral.

  “Nevis said he’d found something suspicious on the footage,” Jack replied. “He didn’t elaborate, he just said it was urgent.”

  As they dipped inside the cathedral, the temperature fell by a couple of degrees and MacKenzie shivered. On another day, they might have stopped to admire the perfect lines of arch and column, but they were directed to the security office without delay, where they found Mike Nevis waiting for them.

  “Mr Nevis? I’m DI…DCI MacKenzie,” she corrected herself. “This is my colleague, DC Lowerson.”

  “I met a couple of your friends the other day,” he said. “Come in.”

  He closed the door carefully behind them, and they found themselves in a square room dominated by a central, zigzag desk, upon which a number of computer monitors sprouted up like beanstalks.

  “It’s like a scene from The Matrix,” Lowerson muttered.

  “I understand you’d like to make a report,” MacKenzie said, coming straight to the point.

  Nevis settled himself on a plush looking desk chair—the kind of high spec model that would never be found inside Northumbria CID—and spread his hands.

  “After I sent through the footage to your team, I thought I may as well look over it myself,” he said. “To tell you the truth, I was angry to think that I, or one of my team, had missed something. I wanted to check, just to satisfy my own curiosity.”

  “And? Had you missed something?” MacKenzie asked.

  “Obviously, the cameras in the Great Kitchen and the nave were severely compromised by the amount of smoke billowing around those areas, but there are still a few partial images of two people escaping on foot. These two were smart, and they must have known where the cameras were located, because they kept their heads down and their backs to the cameras.”

  MacKenzie felt her heart plummet. Without a clear image to ID, they would be working with very little.

  Or so she believed.

  “That isn’t really the part I wanted to talk to you about,” Nevis said.

  He paused to fiddle with the controls.

  “The part I want you to see is from a few days prior to the robbery. I’ve put together a compilation of the clips, to save us some time.”

  He fiddled with a few buttons, and presently a video began to play on the monitor in front of them.

  Moving images rolled across the screen, captured by cameras positioned directly above and to the side of the display case that previously held Cuthbert’s cross.

  “Here it is,” Nevis said quietly. “See?”

  MacKenzie gave a slight shake of her head. The images showed a small party of tourists milling around the display case, none of whom appeared particularly out of the ordinary.

  “I’m afraid, I don’t see—”

  Nevis clicked the ‘play’ button again, and the next set of rolling images, this time captured a few days later, came onto the screen.

  “There he is again,” Nevis said, and paused the screen.

  This time, MacKenzie and Lowerson leaned forward, their eyes scrutinising each face that had frozen on the screen. But it wasn’t until Nevis played the third set of images, taken a day after the last, that MacKenzie saw the same thing he had seen.

  It was the same man, peering through the display glass at Cuthbert’s cross, for several days in a row.

  It took another minute for Lowerson to catch up, but, when he did, he gave a low whistle.

  “That’s the same man,” he said.

  “I went back over the last two weeks,” Nevis said. “Took me all night and most of this morning, but I found him,” he said triumphantly. “He isn’t a one-off visitor, because he comes back every day, or every other day, for the two weeks leading up to the explosion. I cross-checked some of his visits against footage from the other cameras, but he doesn’t linger over any of the other display cases. He comes in and makes directly for the central case holding Cuthbert’s cross.”

  MacKenzie nodded, thinking quickly.

  “This is very helpful, Mr Nevis. If you could send this compilation reel straight through to us, that would be even more helpful. We are grateful to you for taking the time to go through the footage; this may well prove to be a vital discovery. We don’t know yet, but it is a good lead and we’ll follow it up.”

  She turned to Lowerson.

  “Jack, as soon as the compilation footage comes in, I’d like this man’s face run through the database to see if we can find any existing match,” she said.

  It was possible, and the man hadn’t been overly cautious to hide his face. She wondered idly whether that was a sign of weakness or confidence.

  “Will do,” Lowerson said, and moved away to type a quick message to Yates, asking her to expedite the process once the file came through.

  “One thing I will say about him,” MacKenzie remarked. “Whoever this chap is, he doesn’t go to any great lengths to hide his features, does he?”

  “Some don’t need to,” Nevis said. “They move easily with the crowd and blend in. Your colleague was right about that—the first time I looked at this footage, I almost missed him because my eye just passed right over him.”

  “Which colleague?”

  “The tall one—Ryan, was it?”

  She smiled.

  “Thank you, Mr Nevis.”

  * * *

  Before they went about the rest of their business, MacKenzie turned to Lowerson as soon as they were out of earshot.

  “Ask Yates to forward the compilation to Digital Forensics,” she said quietly. “I want them to double-check the footage is part of the original and hasn’t been doctored.”

  “D’you think he would do that?”

  “A desperate man would do anything,” she replied. “Never underestimate the power of fear as a motivating force, Jack.”

  CHAPTER 21

  “Tell us about yourself, Ben.”

  The three men were seated around a table in one of the smaller meeting rooms at Durham CID, the only concession to informality being the presence of several polystyrene cups.

  “There isn’t much to know,” Carter said. “I’m Benjamin Carter, and I’m twenty-seven years old, but you already know that. My home address is in my personnel file, but I live in the city with my mother, in an apartment building on the river.”

  “Thank you,” Ryan said. “Please, go on.”

  “I joined Durham Constabulary straight after my training at the Police College,” Carter said. “Right from the outset, Joan took me under her wing.”

  He took a minute to compose himself.

  “You were close, then?” Phillips asked.

  Carter nodded.

  “Yes, she had a way of building you up, and being there when you fell,” he said. “It’s rare to find somebody who’s able to do both.”

  Phillips looked over at his friend, who was entirely unaware that he, too, was one of those rare people. But then, part of being exceptional was not realising you fell into the category.

  “How long have you been a sergeant?” Ryan asked.

  “Since the end of last year,” Carter replied. “I know what you’re thinking—and, yes, I am young for the position, but Joan was a woman who rewarded hard work.”

  Ryan looked for the same quality in his staff, and was struck again by how great a loss Tebbutt would be to the community she had served.

  “When was the last time you saw Joan?” Ryan asked.

  Carter ran a hand over his mouth, trying to remember.

  “It must have been last Friday,” he said. “Joan wasn’t on duty last Saturday and Sunday, and she regularly opts to take a Monday off work. She used to joke that it was all because of that song by The Boomtown Rat
s.”

  “Tell me why I don’t like Mondays?” Phillips said.

  Carter nodded.

  “I know she had a prickly exterior, but, once you got to know her—”

  “Once you got to know her dubious taste in music?” Ryan finished for him.

  “Dubious?” Phillips almost choked on his coffee. “That song is a classic.”

  Ryan pinched the bridge of his nose.

  “Frank, I am not going to enter into a debate with you about which songs over the entire course of human musical enterprise should count as classics, except to say that the late and great David Bowie would be turning in his grave to hear you say that.”

  Carter grinned, and then his smile faded.

  “We used to have this,” he said. “Joan and me, we could have a laugh about life—even on the bad days.”

  “Like when you had to say goodbye to some of your former colleagues?” Ryan prodded.

  “Yeah, those were hard days,” he said.

  “Which leads us nicely on to my next question,” Ryan said. “I know you’re already putting together a list of all the people and cases who might have had an axe to grind, and that includes some of your former colleagues. Does anybody in particular stand out to you?”

  “There must be a hundred cases,” Carter said. “Countless people who threatened her over the years, or had other people do their dirty work for them, but nobody recently springs to mind.”

  “Nobody at all?”

  “When most of the people who used to run Major Crimes were dispatched, that didn’t go down well, but she had no choice. People blamed her, but it was the right thing to do.”

  Carter retrieved printed sheets from his file and slid them across the table.

  “I made a list, like you asked. There may be more to add but, quite honestly, searching for the one person amongst this rabble is like searching for the Lost Treasure of Atlantis. When you hunt down the bad guys, you’re always running the risk that, one day, one of them will come looking for you.”

  Not for the first time, Ryan experienced a chill which ran along the length of his spine.

  He took the list Carter had prepared.