by Wes Markin
Additionally, with every crime scene, came a reawakening of Yorke’s addiction to cigarettes. He could go months without a craving, but the presence of murder caused it to flare. He’d have to be extra disciplined today. His long-term colleague, DI Emma Gardner, was no longer with them, and it was her fierce stare that was always the main deterrent to a relapse.
Not that she didn’t have her own vices. He smiled when he recalled her addiction to Tic Tacs. She couldn’t go minutes without a crunch, especially when her stress levels were high. His smile quickly fell away. Without her here with him, he suddenly felt lonelier than ever.
The hospital hadn’t been able to offer much space to the studio. If they were charging rent, Yorke hoped it was cheap; although in this age of austerity, he doubted it was. Feeling the pinch, people were grabbing what they could while growing grumpier by the day. The white-suited Scenes of Crime Officers were hard at work in a narrow corridor. One knelt beside an open toilet door dusting the handle for prints. Another was inspecting the worn carpet, which was peeling away from the grippers at the edges. Slipping past the SOCOs in the corridor was difficult work. He received irritated stares, although he quickly wrote these off to his own paranoia. Without Gardner, he was feeling unusually vulnerable.
He bypassed a poky kitchen, where another couple of SOCOs appeared like they were engaged in a game of Twister to collect evidence. Then, he turned into the actual studio.
He’d never been into a radio studio before, but it was similar to how he’d envisioned it. Foam on the walls to soundproof. Two large desks separated by a glass partition. A mountain of mixing equipment, and a computer on the presenter’s side. There were also trademark large microphones with bulbous foam heads.
However, it wasn’t exactly the same as his vision. For starters, in his version, there hadn’t been a young lady face down, dead in a pool of her own blood. Neither had there been a cameraman snapping close-up photographs of her ruined head.
Yorke recalled the muffled thwap, the thud, and the sound of static.
Lance Reynolds, Scientific Support Officer, looked less spritely than usual. He usually danced around his victim with the camera and had earned the nickname ‘The Elf’ as a result. Today, he seemed rather lethargic, ponderous even. It could have been the lack of space in the studio, but Yorke suspected that it was the event earlier which had him spooked. ‘You were listening, weren’t you?’
Reynolds nodded. ‘He shot her in the back of the head.’
He was stating the obvious, but Yorke nodded his gratitude for the information. ‘I didn’t hear a gunshot on the radio show. Did he use a silencer?’
‘Unfortunately, there’re never any tell-tale signs of that on a gunshot wound, and it’s unlikely ballistics will recover any markings on the bullet unless he used a homemade suppressor or a very old-fashioned one.’
‘He executed her with a silencer,’ Superintendent Joan Madden said from behind Yorke. ‘That’s how this man works. He’s experienced and he’s efficient.’
Yorke turned around. ‘I agree. You don’t play games like this unless you’re confident.’
Madden was a firm woman with a firm figure. She sneered in the face of Body Mass Index recommendations and had opted to remove all traces of body fat by exercising in every available moment of her limited free time. She’d no family, and Yorke very much doubted that she’d any friends to socialise with.
‘DCI Yorke, you look dishevelled,’ Madden said.
Lost for words, Yorke’s hand instinctively flew to his unruly beard again.
‘Is this what being the father of a young child does to you? Press are in abundance over this one as I’m sure you’ve noticed. I need my SIO with his best face on.’
‘I’ll shave back at HQ before I meet my team.’
‘Good. Where’s Dr Wileman?’
‘She had to go and pick up our daughter from nursery. We’ve another pathologist heading here from Southampton.’
Madden nodded, but looked disappointed. ‘Always a shame when the best can’t make it.’
She walked away from Yorke to talk to Reynolds.
Collette Willows stepped up to join him. She’d recently made the step up to Detective Sergeant. Deservedly so. She was a magnet for facts and information. Yes, she sometimes lacked emotional intelligence, but she was straight to the point and Yorke valued that in a team member.
Yorke also appreciated a familiar face in a world from which his closest colleagues seemed to be disappearing of late.
She flipped open a notebook. ‘Sir. Vic’s name is Janice Edwards. She’s thirty-two years old and was born, and raised, in Salisbury. I feel for her on that one. She’s been presenting on Radio Exodus once a week for the past two years. Her show is the most popular on this station, probably because it caters for the dusty middle-aged who want to relive their youth with nineties’ indie classics.’
Yorke raised an eyebrow. ‘Dusty?’
‘Yep. Although she interviews authors which does suggest some sophistication in her audience.’
‘Ah that’s good.’ Yorke offered a sardonic smile.
‘And she had a guest tonight too,’ Exhibits Officer Andrew Waites said from the side of the room. He held up a plastic bag. Inside was a blood-stained book. ‘Matthew Peacock, Crime Writer. Writes about a detective called Phyllis Kemp. I’m a big fan actually. There’s not a lot of violence in them, and they’re more light-hearted than your average crime book. Gives me a break after all the shit we have to sieve through.’
‘Cosy mysteries,’ DC Lorraine Pemberton said. ‘My partner loves them too. Keeps me up all night with her bloody reading light.’
Yorke was a fan of Pemberton. She’d emigrated down from Yorkshire and brought her deadpan humour with her.
‘The bullet wound sprayed the book with blood,’ Reynolds said. ‘The killer then transferred her hand to the book post-mortem. We know this because the blood has transferred to her palm, and there is no blood spray on the back of her hand.’
‘Matthew Peacock was a guest on this station at five o’clock,’ Willows said. ‘I’ve already arranged for someone to pick him up.’
‘Good work, Collette,’ Yorke said. ‘CCTV?’
‘Have you seen the camera, sir?’ Pemberton said. ‘Without someone cranking its handle, I doubt it was filming.’
Yorke smiled, but Willows didn’t. ‘Hospital security should be phoning us back at any moment.’
There was a series of flashes from Reynolds’ camera and a sucking sound. Yorke looked over, squinting. A SOCO had lifted Janice’s head slightly from the pool of blood. Her eyes were half-closed, and her mouth sloped at an unusual angle. There didn’t seem to be an exit wound on her forehead.
The bullet from the killer’s gun slept in her brain.
‘Come over here, DCI Yorke,’ Madden said.
‘Yes, ma’am.’
Yorke stood alongside Madden and she pointed down at a SOCO crouched down underneath the table. ‘Show me again what you just found, young man.’
With his gloved hand, the SOCO held up a sweet wrapper pinned between his tweezers. He dropped it into a plastic evidence bag. Reynolds knelt and took a photo of the floor before the SOCO swept up another wrapper.
Reynolds turned his head to look up at Yorke and Madden. He was smiling. ‘Chewits. I used to love Chewits.’
‘How many wrappers?’ Yorke said.
‘Five,’ the SOCO said.
‘The victim’s?’ Reynolds said.
‘Possibly. Probably.’ Waites said, approaching them to collect the evidence.
‘They could have been dropped today though. This place is probably cleaned daily. We can get confirmation on that,’ Yorke said.
‘So either Janice Edwards, or her killer, had a Chewit fetish,’ Pemberton said. ‘Good job it’s not a chocolate fetish as that’d put me firmly in the frame.’
Willows raised an eyebrow. ‘It’d put a huge amount of people in the frame. There’d be no statistical significa
nce.’
Pemberton raised an eyebrow back at her.
Willows’ phone rang. She answered it and offered it up to Yorke. He was given the details regarding the CCTV. He requested that the recordings be submitted to Wiltshire Police HQ, provided the details and hung up.
‘CCTV footage is clear they reckon,’ Yorke said. ‘I remain dubious, but we will know soon enough when we watch it at HQ. Janice’s writer guest, Matthew Peacock, left at 5:45 pm, and our killer, assuming it’s our killer, arrived at 5:55 pm. I’m going to assume it’s our killer though because he was wearing a balaclava. He arrived in a BMW. I’ve got the reg, but I’m betting any money that it’s a fake plate. Not sure that our efficient killer will be making rookie errors like that. The killer left at 6:02 pm. Two minutes after the murder.’
‘She still had an hour of airtime left,’ Willows said. ‘If her death hadn’t been broadcast, she wouldn’t have been discovered until 7pm when the next DJ, Ralph Simmonds, arrived for his shift. So, why did this madman bother to do it over the airwaves? He could’ve been far more covert. Gained himself more of a head start. What does he gain from a public execution?’
‘Nothing to gain, but everything to enjoy,’ Madden said.
Yorke nodded. ‘His favourite song is Don’t Fear The Reaper, remember? He wanted it known. It may’ve irritated the killer that Nigel Hawkins got that wrong, but he was going to execute this young woman regardless.’
Reynolds said, ‘So the purpose of this whole charade was just to tell us the name of his favourite song?’
‘And potentially what his favourite sweet was,’ Pemberton said, pointing at the bag containing the Chewit wrappers.
‘No,’ Yorke said. ‘The purpose of the whole charade was to tell us that he’s the Reaper.’
3
OPERATION TAGLINE.
Yorke wasted no time in writing the randomly generated name at the top of the whiteboard in the assigned incident room at Wiltshire HQ. Tomorrow morning it would be full of core and non-core members but for now it was just his and all was still.
Rubbing his now-shaven cheeks, he looked out over the empty tables and chairs and recalled fevered moments in this place; times full of urgency, desperation and all too regularly, panic.
If anyone had asked him his state of mind during those chaotic moments, he’d have told them that he was in hell. If anyone asked him right now about those moments, he’d tell them that he’d loved every second of it.
And he genuinely had.
Yorke sighed. Even his recent promotion back to DCI had done little to ease the melancholy that was weighing him down of late.
He imagined DI Emma Gardner in one chair, crunching on Tic Tacs, admonishing him for not visiting his goddaughter, Anabelle, in over a month. On another chair, he saw DI Mark Topham using a compact mirror to check his expensive haircut was in order before briefing started. Patrolling the back wall was brooding DI Iain Brookes considering how best to frustrate his seniors and their meaningless orders.
Yorke looked at the empty chairs one by one.
He wandered over to the window and looked outside. He could see DS Jake Pettman in the carpark developing a nicotine addiction. Being thrown out of the family home had a nasty habit of causing that in some people. Jake was his best friend, or at least had been his best friend for many years. And was, right now, another reason that Yorke was feeling lonely. Since Jake’s separation, which was almost certainly going to end in divorce, they’d grown apart. This wasn’t Yorke’s decision. He’d been trying. He really had. But Jake was starting to while away his time with characters that Yorke considered unsavoury. Most notably, the one he was currently smoking with.
DS Luke Parkinson.
In terms of policemen, Parkinson was as oppositional as they came. To have him in your incident room was akin to having a jagged stone in one of your running shoes during a marathon. However, he was highly thought of by Superintendent Joan Madden, and had over twenty years of experience on the job, so to moan about him brought more trouble than it was worth. Yorke had a history of conflict with Parkinson. On the night Yorke faced down his sister’s murderer, William Proud, Parkinson took great pleasure in being part of the team that arrested Yorke, before taking even greater pleasure in his eventual demotion. And there was the big lug, Jake, his one-time best friend and former reliable colleague, cosying up with him.
The door opened and Willows came in. As usual, she skipped her greeting. She struggled with niceties. ‘Our Cosy Mystery writer, Matthew Peacock, is talking to Pemberton and Tom in the interview room. And I got the intel on the victim.’
She ran through a potted history of Janice Edwards. ‘It was only a year after Janice’s father died that her mother emigrated to Greece to shack up with someone younger than her daughter. Did she have no shame? Janice’s only employment up until two years ago was freelance cleaning. Not sure it was paying the bills because she ended up going to live in her uncle’s house. Herbert Wheelhouse. Life got a bit brighter for her at that point, and she ended up taking a few courses, so she could pursue her ambition to be a radio broadcaster. She knocked the cleaning on the head.’
‘Surely, once a week on the radio wasn’t paying the bills?’
‘No. Deciding to live with her uncle had been a masterstroke. He’s loaded.’
‘What does he do?’
‘Did do.’
‘Dead?’
‘Not exactly. This is where it’s going to get very interesting.’
‘For someone who loves to get to the point regardless of the audience, you certainly revel in keeping me in suspense.’
‘He’s in prison.’
‘What for?’
‘Organised crime. He worked for the Youngs.’
Those familiar feelings he felt in an incident room - urgency, desperation and panic – suddenly came flooding back.
HMP Hancock was a large nineteenth-century building, and its decaying appearance was a perfect example of how austerity was hitting public services hard. It was a Category B prison, so prisoners did not need to be held in the highest security conditions. On appearance alone, that certainly looked the case; the average con could probably kick their way through those crumbling walls if they really wanted to.
Yorke preferred a good, old-fashioned Category A prison. Regardless of the nature of the crime, if someone had been deemed as a threat to the public, escape should always be impossible.
To have killers such as Christian Severance, and Lacey Ray, two serial killers Yorke and his team had caught, incarcerated in such a solid facility, eased Yorke’s mind. To have people such as Herbert Wheelhouse imprisoned in this cost-cutting system didn’t.
‘Wheelhouse used to be in a Category A,’ Yorke said while the prison gate opened for him. ‘But I guess when you reach the grand old age of seventy, you become less of a risk.’
‘Anyone who is capable of doing what he did will never be less of a risk,’ Jake said.
Yorke nodded as he drove through the gate.
Back at HQ, Yorke had made a spur-of-the-moment decision to take Jake along with him and had grabbed him after that crafty cigarette with Luke Parkinson. Their relationship had been struggling for months but here was Yorke’s olive branch. ‘I want you on the team, Jake.’
Jake had jumped at the offer. He’d even smiled for the first time in God-knows-how-long. Yorke had felt momentarily euphoric and had even told him that he’d missed him.
But it’d not taken long for the reunion to sour.
Yorke’s problems with Jake had begun when Jake had started an affair. Feeling responsible for Jake, like an older brother perhaps, Yorke had badgered Jake into ending it. Resentment toward Yorke and his incessant need to steer him in the right direction had grown. After Jake’s new girlfriend had been murdered, and his wife, Sheila, had thrown him out of the house, Jake had turned his back on Yorke.
Immediately, in the car, these same problems resurfaced.
‘Luke Parkinson?’
�
�What about him?’
‘You know what he’s like.’
‘And what’s he like then?’
‘A pain in the arse. Untrustworthy. Caustic.’
‘And? So?’
‘Why’re you knocking around with him?’
‘A couple of fags in the carpark is hardly knocking around with someone!’
‘It’s been more than that, Jake. I’ve seen you two together around HQ on a number of occasions.’
‘Good for you.’
The rest of the journey had passed in silence.
In the prison reception, they showed their IDs before being searched and led into a dingy, windowless room that stank of cigarettes. They were left alone. Still struggling to communicate, Jake and Yorke sat on stools that were fixed to the ground.
‘How’s the new place?’ Yorke said.
‘Fucking fantastic,’ his best friend said.
Yorke drummed his fingers on the table.
Shit. It was in times like this that Yorke really, really missed his other best friend, Emma Gardner.
As they entered the interview suite together, DS Collette Willows did a quick calculation in her head of how long it had been since she’d last exchanged pleasantries with DC Lorraine Pemberton.
Five days.
Technically only four days if you crossed out the actual evening on which they’d kissed.
‘Mr Peacock, why this jumper?’ Willows pointed at his green jumper on which was a picture of a drunk Father Christmas throwing back ale.
‘It’s cold?’ Peacock shrugged.
‘An eccentric writer, Mr Peacock?’ Pemberton smiled.
‘No, just cold, as I said, and it’s the only jumper I have. Welcome to the struggling lifestyle of a full-time author.’
Willows was proud that she’d managed to hold back on recommending a charity shop. On Yorke’s advice, she was trying to think a lot more before blurting things out.
