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

by LJ Ross

  “The renovation works,” MacKenzie said. “They refitted the Great Kitchen a couple of years ago, and installed brand new display cases, along with the new security system. It would’ve made sense to do it then.”

  They were silent for a moment, and the sounds of city traffic filtered through the window from the road below.

  “What do you want to do?” Phillips asked. “If you’re right about this, we need to go back to square one and look at everything again.”

  “More than that, Frank. We need to look at who had access over the past three years, and how the switch could have been made. There’s something else we haven’t managed to answer, which is why they’re going to so much trouble—not just to switch the cross in the first place but to plan and execute the subsequent robbery. Why were they willing to do all that—and to kill Faber and Tebbutt—just to make sure nobody discovered the substitution?”

  “If it was an inside job, they could’ve been worried that the trail would lead straight to them if it became known that the cross was a fake—so worried that they staged the robbery to cast suspicion elsewhere,” MacKenzie suggested.

  Ryan’s eyes narrowed. “I hope you’re right about that, Denise—because if you are, they must have some reason to fear that we can trace them. However, you look at it, they’ve gone to a lot of trouble to steal this cross twice.”

  “It’s obviously special to them,” Yates said.

  “I’m beginning to wonder about the other artefacts,” Ryan said. “Is the cross itself special to them, or all of Cuthbert’s relics? If it’s the latter, there was nothing to stop a person of sufficient means switching several of the artefacts, and creating quite a collection for themselves.”

  “This is enormous,” Lowerson muttered. “People are going to go crazy, when they find out.”

  “They’re not going to find out. At least, not just yet,” Ryan said. “I’ve asked Faulkner and Ahern to keep this to themselves for a while longer, in the strictest of confidence, and I’m going to ask the same of you. If I’m right about all this, we’re not just looking for some rich collector—we’re looking for a ruthless mastermind. We won’t be able to conduct any kind of investigation if this goes public, because it’ll drive them underground. No,” he said. “I want whoever is behind this to believe their dummy robbery has been a success, and that we’re congratulating ourselves at having restored the real thing to its rightful resting place. They want us to believe we have the real cross, so let’s play the fools for a while longer, and see what we uncover.”

  He looked to each of them in turn, and received a firm nod.

  “What about Morrison?”

  “I’ll speak to her,” Ryan said. “She’s no blabbermouth. But, aside from that, this needs to remain strictly within our circle.”

  “What about Tebbutt?” Phillips asked.

  “I’ve got an update on that,” Yates told them. “When we used the robber’s mobile phone number to pinpoint the location of Windy Side Farm yesterday, we assumed the number belonged to the robber who turned up dead—”

  “Do we have an ID on him, by the way?” Ryan interrupted.

  “Not yet,” she replied. “We’re running it through the DNA database, right now.”

  Ryan nodded, and gestured for her to continue.

  “We assumed the mobile number belonged to his burner mobile, but what if it belonged to the other robber? Sir, I had a word with the phone company this morning and they say the number is no longer active, which means they’re probably aware that we raided the farmhouse last night—”

  “Has that been made public, yet?” Ryan asked.

  “Not to my knowledge, sir.”

  The light of battle began to shine in his eyes.

  “I see. They disposed of the burner mobile, or at least removed the SIM card, so we’re unable to trace its current whereabouts.”

  “Yes—but we can trace its previous whereabouts,” Yates said.

  “You’re a crafty one!” Phillips told her.

  She grinned.

  “Anyway, I went back to the phone company and asked them to send me a list of the times and dates that mobile number had checked in to the various masts in the area, and I’ve uncovered something interesting.”

  She made a grab for her file and hurriedly plucked out a printed spreadsheet which she’d already taken the trouble to highlight.

  “If you look here, at the yellow columns, you’ll see there’s a pattern. This mobile number checked in to the same mast, without fail, every Monday for the past six weeks, which is as far back as the data runs.”

  “Do we know where the mast is?” Ryan asked.

  Yates nodded, and told him the address. If Ryan was surprised, nothing of it showed on his face, which remained hard and resolute.

  He turned to Phillips.

  “Grab your coat, Frank. We’ve got an arrest to make.”

  CHAPTER 29

  For the second time that week, Ryan and Phillips paid a visit to their neighbouring constabulary. This time, there was none of the awkwardness or nerves there had been the first time around. Righteous anger had taken their place, and the sure-fire knowledge that Joan Tebbutt would have done exactly the same thing without hesitation.

  “Where’s Carter?” Ryan asked the desk sergeant, who took one look at his face and hurriedly buzzed them through the security door.

  “I think I saw him heading down to the changing rooms,” she said. “In the basement, one floor down.”

  They took the stairs rather than waiting for the lifts, and emerged into a wide corridor which led to a small gym and changing room area in one direction, and the custody suite in the other.

  They found the young man on the rowing machine.

  “Carter.”

  He looked up from his programmed workout, and then hit the ‘END’ button.

  “This is a surprise,” he said. “Sorry, I didn’t know you were coming, or I’d have made sure I was ready to meet you,” he said.

  “Never mind that,” Ryan said. “Where’s Winter?”

  Carter was surprised.

  “I know she hasn’t given you a statement, yet, and I’m sorry about that—”

  “I asked you where she was,” Ryan snapped.

  “She’s at home, I expect—Justine had to take her brother to another appointment at the hospital this morning, so she needed to take the day off.”

  “What’s wrong with her brother?” Phillips asked.

  “He has a degenerative disease,” Carter said. “He also suffers from severe learning disabilities. Justine has to take him to a regular appointment at the hospital on Mondays, but sometimes other things crop up. Unfortunately, Justine’s father has never been in the picture, and her mum passed away from breast cancer a couple of years ago. We try to be accommodating. What’s this all about?”

  But before Ryan could answer, Carter’s mobile phone began to ring.

  “Sorry,” he muttered. “It’s the front desk.”

  “Yes?”

  His face registered a range of emotions, from surprise, to confusion and, finally, sadness.

  “Right, thanks. I’ll take care of it.”

  Carter ended the call, and looked between the two men.

  “That was Durham University Hospital,” he said. “They say Justine left Danny at the hospital this morning, and she hasn’t come back to fetch him. What’s going on here?”

  “We’ll tell you on the way,” Ryan replied. “Hurry up.”

  * * *

  The journey to Justine Winter’s home in the small village of Aykley Heads took less than fifteen minutes, during which time Ryan and Phillips acquainted Carter with several pertinent facts he had not known about his constable. At first, he was unwilling to accept the possibility of them being true and Ryan had to admire the man’s loyalty to his staff, as well as his tenacity in questioning their facts. It was a foolish man who took the world for granted and, as they’d already come to understand, Ben Carter was far from being a
foolish man. When presented with the telephone data, showing the robber’s burner mobile having been present for six weeks at the hospital every Monday, and tallying with Justine’s regular appointment to attend with her brother, the coincidence was too great to be believed.

  “At least give her a chance to explain. There must be some explanation for all this,” Carter said, mostly to himself.

  “We aren’t in the business of haranguing people, but we’re talking about a woman who facilitated the murder of your friend and DCI,” Ryan snapped. “We’ll do whatever has to be done to ascertain the truth.”

  Carter nodded, thinking of the woman he’d come to know, and trying to understand how he could have been so blind.

  “The CCTV footage at the cathedral showed two men,” he muttered. “I thought they were both men?”

  Ryan shook his head.

  “One is clearly male, the other was of average height and build, and wore a jacket and a backpack. Neither of them ever looked directly at the cameras, so we only ever had partial imagery. Justine wears her hair in a short style. It’s easy to mistake the gender in those circumstances.”

  As they turned into Justine’s road, Carter spotted her car parked further down the street.

  “She’s home,” he said. “That’s her car.”

  “Right, now, here’s what I want you to do,” Ryan said, parking the car a few doors away. “I want you to go and knock on the door first, to put her at her ease. We’ll follow in a few minutes. She knows we discovered the farmhouse, which means she may also know we’ll have been tracing her burner mobile, even though she’s now stopped using it. It was a mistake to keep it on her person; she should have done what it says on the tin and burned it after the first use.”

  Carter nodded, and slammed out of the car.

  They watched him walk along the pavement, his shoulders slumped, and then straighten himself up as he approached her front door.

  “He’s got more mettle than I gave him credit for,” Phillips remarked.

  But something else had occurred to Ryan.

  “Frank, why would she leave her brother at the hospital?”

  “What’s that?”

  “The hospital rang to say she’d left her brother there, and not come back to collect him. Why would she do that, unless—”

  They looked at one another and then swore volubly.

  “She doesn’t plan to go back, so she needed to put him in a safe place,” Ryan muttered. “Shit.”

  They ran towards the front door, where Carter was still knocking loudly and calling her name.

  “She’s not answering,” he said.

  “Stand aside, son,” Phillips told him.

  He gave the door a couple of hard kicks and then the wood splintered and swung open to reveal an empty hallway beyond.

  “Justine?” Carter called out. “Justine!”

  CHAPTER 30

  One week later

  Winter had chosen to do it in her bedroom, using the same handgun she’d used to kill Joan Tebbutt. She’d muffled the sound using one of her pillows, which explained the confetti of duck feathers sticking to the coagulating blood which formed a halo around her head.

  She’d tried her best not to cause any damage to the property, since it was a rental, and had taken the trouble to cover the floor with plastic sheeting, so as to protect the carpet. She even left an envelope with some cash to cover the cost of a new mattress and any redecorating that might be necessary following her death.

  They found nothing whatsoever that would provide any insight or clue as to how she’d become involved in the cathedral robbery, but Justine had still chosen to leave them a message, to do with as they wished. She’d chosen to have three items resting beside her on the bed when she died. First, there was a framed picture of her and her brother, on the back of which she’d written, “I’m sorry, Danny, I did my best. I love you.” Second, a photocopy of the life insurance policy she had taken out some time ago, detailing that the policy would still pay out even if the insured takes their own life—the sum would cover the costs of her brother’s ongoing care. Third, a single sheet of paper, upon which she’d written a cryptic, one-word note, which they were presently unable to read as it consisted of symbols rather than letters.

  “I wish I knew what the hell this is supposed to mean,” Ryan said, one sunny afternoon the following week. “I’ll have to bring in a symbologist, or whatever they call themselves.”

  “It’s written in runes,” Anna told him, barely glancing up from the book she was reading. “Those symbols are part of the runic alphabets, which people used to use in the old Germanic languages, before the Latin alphabet was adopted more widely. If you want to find out more, I’ve got several books on the history of runes in my study.”

  “How the heck do you know all this?”

  “Common knowledge,” she said.

  “What does this one word say?”

  Anna glanced across at the paper in his hand, trying to remember the meaning of the different symbols.

  “I think that word says, ‘SACRIFICE’,” she said, quietly. “Would that make sense to you?”

  Ryan frowned, thinking of Justine Winter’s motivations. Even to the last, she’d thought of her brother, and not herself.

  “Yes, I think it might,” he replied, and thought of the woman he’d known only briefly. Winter had been a logical woman, well thought of by her peers, all of whom had expressed complete shock at the news of her deception. Time and again, he’d heard the same phrase repeated from different mouths: “it just wasn’t like her.”

  Had her actions been out of character? Ryan wondered. There were people in the world who kept their true selves well hidden, sociopathic types who could adapt their nature to suit an audience. Had Justine Winter fallen into that category?

  His gut told him that the answer was no.

  She’d be reviled and hated as a cop-killer and a traitor throughout the corridors of Durham Constabulary and beyond. There was nothing Ryan could do about that, nor anything he would particularly wish to do, for Justine Winter had taken two lives, and almost contributed to the loss of the lives of his wife and child. There was insufficient evidence to say, conclusively, whether Winter had also played a part in the death of Edward Faber, but the manner and style was entirely different from her preferred method—which was, of course, a quick gunshot to the head. That kind of killer took no pleasure from the act; they sought to get it over with as quickly and painlessly as possible, much as they would wish to relieve a dying animal from its pain.

  Given his suspicions about there being some unseen, controlling hand behind the false robbery and perhaps other incidents they had yet to uncover, Ryan was forced to consider the possibility that Winter had been acting under duress. Organised criminals, of every variety, were constantly on the lookout for individuals in positions of authority, who are also prone to bribery or coercion, to further their own ends. In Justine Winter’s case, her brother had been her Achilles’ heel, and there was nothing she wouldn’t do to ensure his happiness; even on the day of her own suicide.

  Had some unscrupulous person singled her out?

  “I was thinking about the Cuthbert connection,” Anna said, suddenly.

  Ryan turned to her.

  “What about it?”

  “You already know that some people believed—and probably still believe—that he could perform miracles. The same applies to his relics, after he died. People are convinced they have healing properties.”

  “What are you thinking?” he asked. “You think somebody’s taken the cross because they’re unwell?”

  “Maybe. It’s a possibility, isn’t it? What if they want the cross because they think it has healing properties?”

  Ryan closed his eyes, thinking of the far-reaching possibilities if that was the case.

  And he thought again of Justine Winter’s brother, whose disease was degenerative, and would ultimately kill him.

  Had she believed that her action
s would lead to some sort of cure? Had somebody used her vulnerability to convince her to do these unspeakable things, in some kind of twisted quid pro quo?

  If she’d made a deal with the devil, had Justine left her message of sacrifice for the police, or for somebody else, entirely?

  Ryan looked across to where his wife was sitting up in bed, sipping from a tall glass of water. There was something, or someone, evil lurking beneath all that had happened over the past week. He’d thought it would be a case of finding the bad guys, and locking them away, just as usual. He hadn’t considered there might be a deeper layer, something infinitely more terrifying to contemplate.

  Because, if they’d managed to get away with it, unseen and unnoticed until now, who could say how many people had been hurt, or compromised, or used as proxies for another’s bidding?

  “Is everything alright?” Anna asked.

  Ryan pasted a smile on his face, unwilling to allow anything to make her anxious at such a critical time in her recovery, and so close to their baby girl’s arrival. There was nothing he wouldn’t do to protect the ones he loved, but now he feared he’d brought a new threat into their lives.

  “Everything’s fine,” he said. “Can I get you anything?”

  Anna shook her head, and went back to her reading, while Ryan headed downstairs and did something he hadn’t done in a long while.

  He asked for help.

  “Dad?”

  Charles Ryan looked up from his daily inspection of the newspaper, and set it aside as he saw the ashen look on his son’s face.

  “What is it?”

  “I’m going to need your help. I’ve stumbled into something dangerous, and I’m worried about Anna and the baby.”

  Charles removed his glasses and folded them neatly.

  “We’ll be there to support you, whatever the future holds,” he said. “Never fear, son.”

  Eve watched her husband and son exchange a hard embrace, and put a hand to her heart, thanking whichever moon or star had granted her deepest wish.

  They were a family again.

  * * *