DCI Isaac Cook Box Set 2

by Phillip Strang

  ‘It wasn’t important, but with Janice…’

  ‘What is it? Out with it.’

  ‘Gladys never stopped with the men, not even when she was married to Hector. He knew that. The man would never have touched his daughter, nor would he have played around, but Gladys couldn’t help herself.’

  ‘Janice?’

  ‘I think she was Tim’s.’

  ‘Does he believe that?’

  ‘I knew about him and Gladys at school, and then, around the time when Janice could have been conceived, a meeting at the school for the parents.’

  ‘Yes,’ Wendy said. Not another one, she thought. Why is that every time Homicide believes that it’s starting to get a handle on the investigation, another unknown comes into play.

  ‘I was there with Tim, but I left early for some reason or another. Later that evening, much later, Tim comes in, takes a shower, and climbs into bed. I could see by the look on his face that it had to be Gladys. She was on her own that time; they had separated, and Gladys was never one to hold back, not just because he was married to me. Well, it wouldn’t have made any difference.’

  ‘Proof?’

  ‘I never thought much about it, not until I found out that he had been visiting Janice.’

  ‘She’s not,’ Wendy said. ‘We’ve taken DNA from her and Hector. She was his daughter, but do you think your husband suspected she was his?’

  ‘I doubt it. That wasn’t Tim’s style; too trusting.’

  ‘Of you?’

  ‘Of me. Nothing like that, but I’ve looked, thought about it, and if I got up north, who knows.’

  Wendy wasn’t there as a psychologist nor as a marriage counsellor. She wanted out of the house, back to Challis Street and Homicide. A murder made more sense than the woman’s neurosis.

  ***

  Ian Naughton remained elusive. No sight of the man since he had left Holland Park, no sign of the people carrier or the Bentley that had been at the rear of the house.

  The number plate of the BMW had been changed from when it had been in the garage at Godstone to when it had re-emerged as a burnt-out shell. Forensics had checked the vehicle, found that it had been stolen two years previously, resprayed, re-registered and the vehicle identification number had been doctored.

  It was a high-quality transformation, not the sort of thing a backyard operator could have done.

  But it was more than that, Isaac knew. Naughton was baiting them; Moriarty to Sherlock Holmes, the master criminal leaving clues, revelling in the sport, killing as needed.

  He was, Isaac could tell, a man who would be almost impossible to find.

  It had come to him the previous night. It was late, and he had been unable to sleep. In the end, believing that worrying about the investigations wasn’t going to help, he picked up a paperback from the bookshelf, a book he had read more than once.

  Holmes had described Moriarty as the ‘Napoleon of crime’, a criminal mastermind, adept at committing any atrocity to perfection without losing any sleep over it.

  And that was it; Naughton was playing with the police. A man so successful in crime, but boring of the game, he had thrown in clues, killed people, purely for his pleasure.

  As Isaac read more of the book, of the Machiavellian criminal mastermind, the more he realised that there were no clear motives behind the deaths. Jane Doe, whoever she was, could be relevant, but Janice and Hector could be minor players and he, Detective Chief Inspector Isaac Cook, was being tested.

  If that was the case, Isaac was sure he was up to the challenge.

  Challis Street. Homicide. Early in the morning, the most productive time of the day, Isaac assembled the team. Bridget was bright-eyed, Wendy was struggling, and Larry looked as though he’d had a rough night.

  ‘A curry,’ Larry said as he drank a cup of tea.

  Bill Ross’s favourite restaurant had done the man a disservice. Enough for Larry to reconsider policing in the east of London, seeing it as nothing more than a momentary fascination.

  The café in Notting Hill that had served him breakfast for the last three years, when his wife wasn’t talking to him, or he could sneak it in undetected, had never let him down, never given him a queasy stomach.

  And even though it was policing at the coal face in Canning Town, the crooks were all the same, just less intelligent, less articulate. The superintendent over there might not have been politically correct, nor Bill Ross, but it was still a thankless task, and the gangs were without exception a disreputable bunch of reprobates.

  Isaac outlined his theory; Larry couldn’t make head nor tail of it. Wendy trusted her DCI; she’d go along with his reasoning, not sure how it was going to help and how she was to proceed. Bridget wasn’t sure how it would affect the investigation.

  ‘What do you want from us?’ Larry asked. He looked perplexed, felt as though he should understand but couldn’t.

  ‘The woman in the cemetery is the prime focus. We keep Janice and Hector Robinson on the side; they’ll resolve themselves in due course. If they’re related, which we must assume they are, then we’ll get the answers eventually.’

  Wendy could see the flaw. ‘If Janice and Hector are diversionary, a game someone’s playing, then how do we know that Brad and Gladys won’t be targeted, and what about Rose?’

  ‘We’ve done all we can, you know that. Barring a massive protection effort, we can’t do much more. And how long are we going to be in the dark? You tell me. You can’t; none of us can.’

  ‘I could revisit the cemetery,’ Larry said.

  ‘I could find out where Naughton and the Asian woman have gone,’ Bridget said.

  ‘Which is what you’ve been doing already, and with little success. The man’s supremely arrogant, playing with us.’

  ‘But why? He wasn’t to know that I’d figure it out,’ Larry said.

  ‘It must have been for someone else,’ Isaac said.

  ‘Illogical, it makes no sense.’

  ‘It’s neither of those. Think about it. Naughton wants to draw the best criminal minds to him, which means he’s a major player.’

  ‘Like SPECTRE,’ Larry said, referring to a James Bond movie he’d watched on Netflix the week before.

  ‘Similar, but purely criminal, although it could be more. We’ll not know, not yet.’

  ‘If Naughton’s playing us as fools, then he must be leaving clues,’ Bridget said.

  ‘Which means the man’s nearby or somewhere we can find him.’

  ‘I don’t like this,’ Larry said.

  ***

  Isaac had known he was going out on a limb, and even Chief Superintendent Goddard thought his DCI was clutching at straws when the two of them sat down in Goddard's office, up on the third floor, a view through a large window as far as the London Eye. Isaac hadn’t been up in it, not yet, as Jenny was afraid of heights, and he wasn’t going to go on his own.

  Larry visited the cemetery, looked at the grave, walked around the area inside the cemetery and up Harrow Road and then down Kilburn Lane. He couldn’t see anything more. The cemetery employee who he had met on that day at the second grave came up to him, had a chat, offered him a cigarette.

  ‘Not much of a day,’ Larry said.

  ‘It’s about normal. You don’t expect much working here; no Christmas bonus from the residents.’

  ‘Any more?’ Larry asked as the two men leaned up against one of the graves. He thought that it was sacrilegious, but the other man didn’t; used to it, Larry thought. ‘Late at night, scare you sometimes?’

  ‘I’ve heard things, not that they worry me now.’

  ‘What sorts of things?’

  ‘In summer, courting couples. They can always find a way in, and once we had a coven of witches, attempting to summon the devil, not that they had much success.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Sometimes I spend the night in my hut.’

  ‘Sometimes?’

  ‘Okay, every night. I don’t want for much and th
e hut, not the tidiest I’ll grant you, does me just fine. Can’t get cheaper and the neighbours don’t bother me, no screaming children, barking dogs.’

  ‘The coven?’

  ‘They were not far from the hut, not far from where you found the box.’

  ‘Any significance?’

  ‘I doubt it. It wasn’t the same grave, and it was eight, nine years ago. I was just getting off to sleep when they started up.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Nothing, not with them, and besides, it doesn’t pay to become involved, not when I’m using the hut as a home.’

  ‘The cemetery doesn’t approve?’

  ‘As long as I keep it low-key, cause no fuss, they don’t bother me. Besides, it’s good to have someone here. A few vandals sometimes, although they’ve got better things to do nowadays, what with their smartphones and no discipline. I’ve not seen any of them in here for some time.’

  ‘The witches?’ Larry asked. The man was apt to deviate from what he was talking about. Larry thought that he was a lonely man who spoke to only a few people, and no doubt had a bottle of something strong in the hut. Not fit for human habitation, Larry would have said as he’d been inside it, but that wasn’t his concern.

  ‘I went outside the gate, phoned the police, not that they came quick and it was a cold night. They came into the cemetery, rounded up the offenders, not that they were doing much, not desecrating anything, and took them down to the police station.’

  ‘What happened to them?’

  ‘Not sure. Probably not much, a fine for trespassing; it was an arrestable offence.’

  Larry doubted if the man would have been as diligent with the courting couples.

  ‘We can’t find out who the dead woman was.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. We get all sorts in here, and that grave where she died, I’ve seen others.’

  ‘You didn’t tell us that before.’

  ‘You never asked. And besides, I keep a low profile. But now you’re here, scratching your head, I thought I should give you a hand.’

  Larry felt like grabbing the man by the throat but knew that it would be him that would be in trouble, and the man would probably clam up.

  ‘In summer, people like to wander around, look at the headstones, the dates, speculate who they were, what their lives must have been like. I’ve done it myself, not recently though. I must have seen most of them, and there’s over sixty-five thousand. Did you know that Marc Isambard Brunel and his son Isambard Kingdom Brunel are buried here?’

  Larry didn’t know, although he could remember from his schooldays that the father had been responsible for the construction of the Thames Tunnel, and the son had been involved in the construction of the first propeller-driven, ocean-going iron ship, the largest ship in the world at the time. Also, he was responsible for building the Great Western Railway.

  ‘Princess Sophia, King George III’s daughter, is buried here. Don’t know why she isn’t at Windsor Castle. Some say it was because she wanted to be buried near her brother, the Duke of Sussex, but I reckon it’s to do with her having an illegitimate child. But you’re a detective inspector, you’d know better than me.’

  Larry didn’t. History hadn’t been his forte at school, and the teacher had been a boring man who rammed dates into the students, expecting them to learn them parrot-fashion: 1066, the Battle of Hastings, William the Conqueror, and a few other kings and queens. The only King George he knew of had been mad, but which number, he didn’t know.

  ‘The grave?’ Larry said. He didn’t need an interminable history lesson; he needed something tangible.

  ‘It was three weeks ago, a cold day, a wind blowing through the cemetery, although it wasn’t raining. I was up near there, tidying around the place, doing the best I could anyway. I see this woman, not the one that died. She’s interested in the grave, so I go up to her, ask her if she needs any help.’

  ‘She spoke?’

  ‘Not really. She said she was fine, polite to me, but nothing more. I couldn’t see any reason to hang around, so I left her to it.’

  ‘How long did she stay there?’

  ‘Five, ten minutes, no longer, but I thought it strange that she would have been interested in that grave, not when we’ve got others more famous. Not far from there we’ve got…’

  ‘The woman,’ Larry said.

  ‘She was young, in her early twenties, dressed in a buttoned-up coat. No hat, but she had probably come from somewhere cold, colder than here even.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘I don’t know, but isn’t China cold?’

  ‘Chinese, are you certain?’

  ‘She could have been Japanese, I suppose. Not that I’d know. Her English was fine, a strong accent, but I could understand it well enough.’

  ‘The Philippines?’

  ‘It’s possible, not that I know much about there. Attractive, a good figure from what I could see.’

  The man’s evaluation no doubt gained from perving at the couples in summer, Larry thought. He was a sad specimen of a man, but his description of the woman was invaluable.

  Larry took out his phone, made a call.

  ‘I’ll have someone up here within the hour. You’ll work with him, try to come up with an accurate likeness of the woman.’

  ‘Do you know who it is?’

  ‘It’s a possibility, but we don’t know where she is.’

  Chapter 15

  If there’s one thing that a cemetery employee isn’t much good at, it’s remembering faces. Larry thought it was something to do with the job, numbed through dealing with the dead. Regardless, the officer sent to work with the man came back with an approximate likeness.

  It looked liked Analyn, the Naughtons’ housemaid, but it could have been a thousand other young Asian women in the city: petite, straight jet-black hair, small-breasted, and attractive. It wasn’t going to help much, not unless it was enhanced by someone else.

  Wendy was just inside the entrance to the cemetery on Harrow Road and Larry took a similar position on Kilburn Lane. A booth had been set up at both locations, three junior police officers given the task of questioning those who walked through.

  Neither Wendy nor Larry intended to spend the day there, that was for the junior ranks, but Wendy had been adamant that she needed to ensure that everyone knew what was required.

  The early-morning rush had concluded: two hundred and forty-seven people questioned. The weather was closing in, and the junior officers weren’t in a good mood, complaining about why it was them standing there.

  Larry would have told them that no matter how well-educated they were – virtually all new police officers were studying for one degree or another – they still had to put in time out on the street, to do the least pleasant jobs.

  ‘I saw her,’ a schoolboy on his way home from school said. Another hour and the police would wind up for the day. It was Constable Gwen Pritchard who had spoken to him. He had looked her up and down. A fourteen-year-old on the cusp of manhood and the softly-spoken statuesque blonde.

  ‘What time?’

  ‘It was three thirty, three or four weeks ago, not sure of the day.’

  ‘What do you remember?’ Gwen Pritchard said, conscious of the young man’s wandering eyes. He wasn’t the first man that had looked, and while she could take it in her stride, a fourteen-year-old in school uniform seemed indecent to her.

  He was, she knew, no different to her younger brother at that age.

  ‘Describe her.’

  ‘Nice to look at, not very tall, black hair, Asian.’

  ‘Is that it?’

  ‘She had a ring on her right hand, I could see that.’

  ‘William, how could you see that from the path? The grave’s not that close that you could see detail.’

  ‘Good eyesight, I suppose.’

  ‘Or you tried to see more than you could. Don’t worry, I’m not judging you, but it’s important. Did you fancy her?’


  ‘She was older than me. Why should I be interested?’

  ‘The same reason you’re looking me up and down. Adolescent, the hormones going crazy. Nothing wrong in that, but it’s important. You know about the woman who was murdered there?’

  ‘I heard. Is that what this is about?’

  ‘You know it is. Details, that’s what I need. What did you see and why so much?’

  The young man had been caught out. He was embarrassed, not sure whether to tell the truth or not.

  ‘Look here, William, I’ll make it easy for you. You see her standing there, no one else is around, so you find a quiet spot behind a headstone, maybe take a photo, something to show your friends, or maybe you want her to yourself. Am I getting near the truth?’

  ‘Somewhat. I couldn’t help myself. I snuck up close, took a photo, not sure why, but I’m keen on photography.’

  ‘The photo?’

  ‘I took three or four, not that she saw, and I’m not a peeping tom, nothing like that.’

  ‘You’re not being accused of anything. The photos?’

  ‘On my phone. I’ve got one of those zooms that you can clip on. I can send them to you.’

  Gwen Pritchard forwarded them to Wendy, who distributed them to Homicide.

  Larry took one look, confirmed that it was Analyn and the time stamp on the photo agreed with what the cemetery employee had said.

  It was a good result, so much so that the team met at the pub not far from Challis Street Police Station that night for a couple of drinks. Gwen Pritchard joined them, as did the other junior officers who had been at the cemetery.

  Larry kept to one beer.

  ***

  A sense of optimism in Homicide, further confirmation that Ian Naughton was critical to the murder enquiries, irrevocably confirmed by the photo of Analyn. The question remained as to who she was and what she was doing at the grave in Kensal Green. No one had any more ideas; the only option was for Wendy and Larry, now assisted by Gwen Pritchard, to get out and about again. Larry had his contacts, Wendy had the Robinsons and the Winstons, Gwen had enthusiasm.