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

by LJ Ross

  “How long do you think he’s been gone?” Phillips asked.

  “Judging by the stage of putrefaction, I’d say at least three or four days,” Ryan replied. “If he put a call through to Tebbutt on Sunday night, it can’t have been before then, but Pinter will be able to give us a better idea.”

  He thought of what kind of mind was capable of inflicting injuries such as these, and then answered his own question. He knew exactly the kind of mind; he’d encountered them, many times before. Morally absent, entirely without remorse, and often children of extreme abuse who’d grown into adults without empathy. For a certain brand of criminal, it could be a very lucrative trait to possess.

  “At least this answers one question,” he said.

  Phillips, who’d been forced to step away or lose his lunch, raised an eyebrow.

  “What’s that?”

  “The question of whether there’s a connection between Tebbutt’s murder and the robbery at the cathedral. Now we know there has to be. It’s no mere coincidence that this man called Tebbutt, and they both ended up dead.”

  Just then, they heard a sound downstairs.

  Ryan tapped his fingers to his lips. If the same people who’d done this to Edward Faber had returned to the scene, they wouldn’t be the friendly types, judging by their recent handiwork.

  “Quick—the spare bedroom,” he whispered, and both men concealed themselves behind its closed door.

  * * *

  “Did you hear something?”

  MacKenzie and Lowerson stood completely still in the kitchen downstairs, listening for any sounds of life.

  “Probably just a creak,” he said.

  They continued to search the downstairs rooms, wrinkling their noses at the cloying stench of death.

  “D’you think—?”

  “Yes,” MacKenzie said shortly. “Somebody has died in this house. We follow procedure, and make sure nobody else is alive or injured, before tending to any body or bodies we may find.”

  Eventually, she put her foot on the bottom stair and squared her shoulders, dragging herself upward and into the unknown. Lowerson followed, dreading whatever awaited them in the shadows upstairs, and grateful he did not have to face it alone.

  “In here,” she said, as she caught sight of the open bathroom door at the top of the landing.

  She looked inside, and then quickly away again.

  “Best prepare yourself, Jack. It’s not a pretty sight.”

  But before he could look, there came another creak from one of the bedrooms.

  MacKenzie was angry with herself for not checking those rooms first, and prayed whoever was in there wasn’t carrying.

  “Go and call for back-up,” she ordered.

  “Not a chance,” Lowerson said, surprising her. “I’m not leaving you here, alone.”

  “Alright, we go together. We’re unarmed, so we retreat.”

  They didn’t make it far before the bedroom door swung open and a dark figure loomed, poised for attack.

  * * *

  “AAARGH!”

  Lowerson let out an undignified yell, which soon evaporated on the air as he caught sight of the two men emerging from one of Faber’s spare bedrooms.

  “Frank? For the love of all that’s holy—you nearly gave me a heart attack! What the hell are you two doing here?” MacKenzie cried.

  “We could ask the same of you,” Ryan replied. “Why were you both creeping around, anyway?”

  MacKenzie stuck a hand on her hip and used the other to point an accusing finger in his direction.

  “Never mind what we are doing here,” she said. “We were following a lead in the cathedral case. Now, I have no idea how you found out about Faber, but I thought it was understood that we would keep the two investigations separate, and your involvement in the case to an absolute minimum?”

  Ryan held up his hands in a gesture of surrender.

  “I swear, we’re here because we were following a lead in the Tebbutt case,” he said. “Faber put a call through to Joan Tebbutt the night before she died. We wanted to come and ask him why, that’s all.”

  MacKenzie felt her heart rate return to normal.

  “We’ve just come from the cathedral,” she said. “Their Head of Security is a proactive type, and took it upon himself to start analysing the CCTV footage.”

  “Mike Nevis? Yeah, he has that look about him. Just so long as he doesn’t tamper with it, we can use all the help we can get,” Ryan remarked.

  “My thoughts exactly,” MacKenzie said. “Anyway, Faber turned up on the footage several times, he visited the cathedral on consecutive days in the lead up to the robbery on Monday, and always to see St Cuthbert’s cross.”

  “Sounds fishy,” Phillips said, vocalising what they were all thinking.

  “The thought had crossed my mind,” MacKenzie said.

  Phillips nodded his head towards the bathroom door.

  “We’ll have a hard job asking him anything, now,” he said. “The bloke’s well and truly kicked the bucket.”

  Ryan laughed, despite the circumstances.

  “Nicely put, as always, Frank.”

  “One tries, dear boy.”

  * * *

  While Phillips and Lowerson dealt with the practicalities of calling in the murder and enlisting the assistance of the coroner’s office and Faulkner’s team of CSIs, Ryan and MacKenzie compared notes.

  “You said from the beginning that the two cases would be linked,” MacKenzie said. “The problem now is trying to figure out how they connect.”

  Ryan watched a sparrow swoop down to peck at something only it could see, before rising up again with an elegant flap of wings.

  “Faber—or Fabergé—must have been in league with the robbers,” Ryan said. “He has form, and the necessary connections, although I wouldn’t have said he was in the Big Leagues.”

  MacKenzie mulled it over. “Set against that was Faber’s longstanding relationship with the police in this neck of the woods,” she said. “He was a trusted informant and even a consultant on some cases. He must have known he’d be in the frame if he got on board with something like that.”

  “Then, there’s the phone call to Tebbutt on Sunday night,” Ryan said. “Why call Tebbutt, unless it was to turn himself in?”

  They heard the arrival of police responders, followed by the sound of Phillips voice reverberating around the quiet cul-de-sac as he directed them to start securing the scene.

  “There’s another thing to consider,” Ryan said, thinking of the kind of woman Tebbutt had been. “If Faber had called to tell Joan of the plan for Monday’s robbery, she would have done everything in her power to prevent it from happening. So why didn’t she? Obviously, because she didn’t expect it to happen on that particular day or because Faber didn’t know the precise day it was due to happen. After all, he can’t have been part of the crew who committed the actual theft—he was already dead by then, as we now know.”

  MacKenzie thought of the man lying upstairs, and then of his house.

  “The house has been ransacked,” she said. “Very tidily done, I must say, but there were drawers not fully pushed in and a couple of doors half open in the kitchen. I wouldn’t be surprised to find similar things upstairs.”

  Come to think of it, Ryan thought, she was right.

  “They were obviously looking for something, and perhaps they tortured Faber to try to elicit its whereabouts. It couldn’t have been the cross, because it wasn’t stolen until Monday. Unless the torture was a punishment for speaking to Joan Tebbutt.”

  MacKenzie shook her head.

  “This is all conjecture,” she said. “What could they have been looking for?”

  “That’s the question.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Anna dreamed of the island.

  She felt the sand crush between her toes as she walked along the harbour beach, and felt the sting of the wind against her cheeks as she stopped to look across the sea to Bamburgh castle. Sh
e smiled as the late afternoon sun burnished its stone a deep orange-red, a beacon against the crashing waves of the sea far below.

  She walked on, waving to the children she’d once known, seeing herself and Megan amongst them.

  Megan.

  She watched her sister’s dark hair whip around her face as a woman’s voice called to them on the wind.

  Anna! Megan! Time to come home!

  She saw two little girls sprint across the sand into their mother’s waiting arms and smiled, just for a moment, before the scene changed as she knew it would.

  The wind began to pick up, curling the waves into breaking arches against the sand as she remained there, afraid to walk on, afraid to see.

  The wind was howling now, rushing through the village streets.

  Louder and louder it wailed, until it no longer sounded like the rush of a breeze but the cry of a woman’s voice in terror.

  Anna tried to run, but found she couldn’t move.

  Andy, no!

  She tried to raise her hands, to cover her ears, but they too were frozen, trapped in the capsule of a memory she could no longer control.

  Then, she saw a man walking towards her, dressed in long, simple robes. Around his neck hung a glittering cross, no longer roughened or worn, but new. In one hand, he carried a string of fish, and, in the other, something she could not make out.

  Help! Help me, please!

  As the wind roared on, her head began to throb, the pain too intense to bear. Tears began to fall, mingling with the rain which plastered her hair and ran in rivulets down her pale face.

  The man drew nearer, and the wind stopped suddenly.

  Overhead, clouds continued to swirl darkly, and on the far horizon, old-fashioned cargo ships tipped and bobbed to the mood of the sea. But there on the sand, the rain stopped and all became silent, as though the world was waiting for him to speak.

  Are you penitent, my child?

  The clouds parted to allow a shaft of light, which illuminated the man’s face.

  But it was not Cuthbert, nor any other kindly saint come to help her.

  It was him.

  The face she would always see, in the depths of her nightmares.

  Her father’s face.

  Stephen Walker’s face.

  Mark Bowers’ face.

  Keir Edward’s face.

  I am The Master, he said. Welcome to my Circle.

  In his arms, he held a baby girl.

  * * *

  Eve and Charles heard Anna screaming, and ran as fast as they could.

  “Shh, there, you’re safe, Anna. You’re safe,” Ryan’s mother crooned, running a gentle hand over her daughter-in-law’s face.

  “Charles, fetch some water and a facecloth, please,” she said. “Anna? It’s me. It’s Eve.”

  Anna swam back to the surface like a drowning woman, gasping for breath as she sought to escape the world her mind had conjured, trying to claw her way out, kicking at the covers with her one good leg.

  “You were having a nightmare,” Eve said, rubbing her hand. “It’s over, now. You’re home, in Elsdon, and safe with us here.”

  She dabbed the tears away from Anna’s eyes with a tissue and, a moment later, Charles returned with water, a facecloth, and a dram of whisky.

  Eve raised an eyebrow at that.

  “It’s medicinal,” he said, defensively.

  “Thank you,” Anna said. “I—I’m sorry, I can’t seem to sit up.”

  “Let me help you.”

  Eve and Charles helped to lift her up, propping some pillows behind her head and checking the bandages hadn’t been dislodged in the process. They elevated her broken ankle on another pillow on the bed, and righted the bedclothes, which had fallen to the floor.

  “How’s the pain?” Charles asked.

  Anna gave him a weak smile.

  “I’ve felt better,” she admitted. “Sorry to cause such a fuss.”

  “You didn’t cause a fuss,” Eve said. “We were worried about you.”

  “You were shouting about something to do with a circle,” Charles said. “Is that the same Circle you had trouble with, a few years ago?”

  Anna took a sip of the water Eve offered, along with the painkillers to ease the pain in her head.

  “It’s an old nightmare,” she said. “Usually, I relive the experience I had with the cult, and I see my father, or one of the other leaders, dressed in their animal masks and long black robes. This time, it was slightly different. I saw a man who I thought was Saint Cuthbert, but he turned into something else, something monstrous, and called himself ‘Master’.”

  “What happened to you in Durham is bound to stir things up again,” Eve said. “I’ll call Ryan—”

  “No, please, I don’t want him to worry,” Anna said. “It was a bad nightmare, that’s all. I’ll tell him about it when he comes home, but there’s nothing he can do now. Besides, what I really want is for him to find the people who did this and get them off the streets, before anybody else is hurt. It’ll make him feel better, knowing the world is balanced again.”

  Charles smiled.

  “You know him very well, don’t you? Max…that is, Ryan was always that way. Always eager to see justice done, and always so upset when he uncovered a fresh injustice in the world.”

  “It’s because he’s an idealist,” Anna said, closing her eyes against the glare of the sun through the bedroom window. “He wants to make the world the best it can be.”

  Charles nodded, remembering a time when he’d been the same.

  “I’ll make some sandwiches,” he said, to change the subject. “You need fattening up.”

  With that, he was gone, leaving the two women staring at an open doorway.

  “They’re so similar, aren’t they?” Anna said. “Ryan has a habit of command that would be incredibly aggravating, if he didn’t have so many redeeming features.”

  “Ryan and Charles? Yes, they’re much more similar than they know,” Eve said quietly. “I’m afraid he gets that habit of command from his father. Mind you, I’ve found that all it takes is a firm stick and a juicy carrot to keep things ticking along nicely.”

  They both laughed at the metaphor.

  “I won’t ask what kind of carrot,” Anna said.

  “That’s for the best, dear.”

  CHAPTER 25

  It was a small party who gathered together in one of the conference rooms at Northumbria CID for a five o’clock briefing, Phillips having already taken himself off to collect Samantha from school, thereby giving his wife the time to manage her side of the investigation. Likewise, Chief Constable Morrison had elected not to attend owing to a number of other pressing engagements, leaving only Ryan, MacKenzie, Lowerson and one or two support staff in attendance.

  It was almost ten minutes past the hour, and Yates remained notably absent.

  “Anybody know what’s happened to Mel?” Ryan asked.

  Lowerson, who would be the most likely to know her whereabouts, was at a loss.

  “I’ll try calling her again,” he said. “It isn’t like her to be late.”

  “In the meantime, we’ll make a start,” Ryan said, and invited MacKenzie to take the floor.

  “Thanks,” she said, turning to the group. “I know it’s getting late in the day, so I’ll make this brief. What we’ve learned is that whoever orchestrated the robbery at the cathedral on Monday was meticulous. They did their homework—for example, they knew they wouldn’t be able to carry any of their improvised smoke devices through the baggage check into the Open Galleries. They knew this would present a problem, since they would need the smoke to act as both cover and diversion while they tore into the display case to steal the cross, so they came up with solutions.”

  She moved around the desk to where a large-scale schematic diagram of Durham Cathedral had been pinned to the whiteboard.

  “Thanks to the efforts of DC Yates—alongside our analytical support staff, who’ve been working tirelessly to piece
together the CCTV footage received from the cathedral and other external sources—we’ve been able to build up a clearer picture of how the robbers went about their business on Monday.”

  She moved along the board to where two partial images of the robbers had been displayed.

  “In the first place, we know there were at least two robbers working in tandem. One, who planted the devices”—she rapped a knuckle against the first image—“and another, who brazenly wandered into the open galleries through the baggage check, just like any regular tourist.”

  She moved to the second image, which consisted of a side-view of somebody’s head, too generic to provide any determinative identification, despite all the technology at their disposal.

  “The first man—or, person we believe to be a man, factoring in average height and build—set about planting the first three smoke devices in the main part of the cathedral. He left two beneath the pews in the nave, and another underneath the font, right in front of the entrance at the north door.”

  Arrogant, Ryan thought. For any would-be criminal to act in such a risky fashion displayed an extraordinarily high level of arrogance—or, he supposed, a very high level of motivation. It was a dangerous combination, whichever way you looked at it.

  “These three devices were detonated first, by some remote method, probably a mobile phone,” MacKenzie was saying. “Then, as visitors and staff reacted to the shock of the first three explosions, this first robber made his way quickly to the exit of the Open Galleries, which leads directly into the Great Kitchen. Once he was sure his accomplice was already in place beside the display cabinet housing Cuthbert’s cross, he proceeded to throw another smoke bomb inside the gallery area, setting off the alarm and creating further panic. It was this second, slightly delayed detonation that Dr Taylor Ryan heard and, as smoke gradually began to fill the room, she found herself in the path of the second robber, whose sole purpose it was to break into the display case using an axe which had been thrown inside for him to use. In all, we calculate there was less than a thirty-second time lag between the first and second detonations.”

  “Slick and well organised,” Ryan put in. “Don’t underestimate the people we’re dealing with. These are hardened criminals, not bumbling amateurs—and they have no remorse.”