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“OK then, Gary. As long as you do the work that is expected of you then we will all be fine,” Augustine said as he tried to close down the conversation. Gary looked him up and down. He knew why he called him Boyle, because that was how he made his blood feel - boiled. He was a useless cop that was in his position because he had been there for a long time, not because he was capable of solving the difficult cases that he insisted on taking. Gary was sure that this habit would be the end of Boyle. Augustine was sure that with Gary on his team, he would have to spend too much time watching his back. Augustine wanted the focus of his entire team to be on the case in hand.
He wondered back to how he ended up with Gary on his team. Augustine Boyle had a reputation for getting everyone on board. Gary Hole had a reputation for pissing people off. He undermined his superiors, upset his colleagues and put investigations in jeopardy through his politics and games rather than getting on with the job in hand. Gary had passed through several teams without a great deal of success since he was promoted to the level he currently held. It was true in the way that he said to Augustine that he had made a lot of progress in a short space of time. What was also true was that he hadn’t made any progress recently. He needed to break through to the same level as Augustine to have enough influence to dictate his own career. He saw Augustine Boyle and others of his rank as people that got in the way of his progress. But at first it seemed that Augustine and Gary were a perfect fit - the cop that didn’t get on with anyone and the leader that got on with everyone. Surely, they would meet in the middle somewhere and Gary would become a team player? Well, not so far thought Augustine.
It wasn’t that he particularly waged open warfare on the rest of the team, but that he couldn’t be trusted. Sometimes he just didn’t come up with his side of the work and someone else had to step up to the plate and complete the missing tasks that Gary was assigned; on other occasions, he went too far along the wrong path, even though he was told to stop a particular line of enquiry because it was exhausted. Augustine wondered what Gary did with all the spare time he must have created by not doing all he was assigned. But he often thought that it was best if he didn’t know.
But now he and his team were stuck with the guy. His reputation had travelled through the rest of the force and nobody else would willingly take him on. Augustine was stuck with Gary. He thought that he might just have to find some tasks to occupy the loose wheel on his otherwise happy team. Augustine sat his chin on his hands, and his elbows on the desk. He tried to determine if his head felt heavier than it was when he was younger. He would sit like this in university lectures and found it comfortable. The only discernible difference was that he thought he had more padding on the chin. A sign of reaching forty, Augustine thought before looking back at the reports on his desk. It felt like the beginning of a series of killings. He tried to shake this thought out of his head. He had to believe they would have the killer soon.
8
For the next few days the team busied themselves with their past workload. Augustine impressed upon them that they needed to clear everything they had to have all resources ready should this case develop further. He even managed to deflect some of the other crimes that his bosses wanted to give the team to deal with. He had a few days grace on these, but couldn’t keep all work at bay forever.
Even though they were working on other parts of other cases, the whole team thought about the girl while working, while resting at home and even for some, in their sleep. It occupied their every thought. But only a few days later she was dropped to the back of their minds. Something else occurred that took over the events surrounding the unnamed girl in the alley.
9
Jeff Caine had been the leader of the far-right political group Britain Excelsior for around five years. He had taken over the leadership from the founders in a coup after he wanted them to take a more direct approach. They billeted mosques with posters asking for the people inside to ‘turn in’ people that the elders suspected of being involved with ‘illegal activities.’ He was always on the watch list for the police and Augustine had been involved in an encounter with him a few years earlier. Assigned to lead the policing team in the city centre when both the socialist and far right groups were scheduled to march in the same day, Augustine was pissed off with his commanding officer that he had been given a thankless task. As part of the policing programme, he was assigned a meeting with the leaders of the two groups to explain the policing structure and ask for some cooperation from the two sides. Augustine felt that he got very little out of the meeting with the socialist leader in terms of cooperation or resistance. But when he went to see Jeff Caine, he felt an air of hostility from the beginning. He asked questions and got no answers. He looked for cooperation and was told to ‘fuck off’ and he looked for a sign that Caine understood the way that the event would be policed. None came. When Augustine pressed him to confirm understanding, a tirade of abuse rained down that included the phrase ‘fucking pig’ around fifteen times. Augustine had heard it all before in the line of duty, but not from someone that was designated a leader in the community, even if it was the leader of a marginal group with a dubious background. The day passed with a great deal of effective policing, and Augustine made sure that he kept a strong eye and a tight rein on the far-right side after the way the encounter with their leader went. He wasn’t sure what they were capable of but he intended to give them the slimmest chance to effect it.
Caine was a tall man at well over six foot, with one brown eye and one blue eye. This was the first thing that anyone noticed of him when they met. They spoke about the fact that David Bowie had two eyes of distinct colours too. Caine lapped it up. He loved to be the centre of attention and was happy that it came to him in any way, shape or form. So, he was ecstatic when the press named him Hard Caine. It was meant to belittle him, but he just took it as another way to keep his name in the minds of others. It also kept his group in the news. He was the embodiment of ‘any news is good news,’ as the links of Britain Excelsior to beatings of young men from outside of the UK made him happy. He wasn’t going to admit or deny whether he knew anything about it to the press that often camped outside the door of his three-bedroom home where he lived by himself in the Albany district of Washington. He was just delighted that he could have his face on the news again and use the platform to spout his rhetoric. He was a muscular man in the arms and legs, but carried a little too much weight around the middle. Caine told himself it was because he was so busy that he didn’t have the time to eat properly and work out. But the fact of it was that he was lazy. He would rather go out for a three-course meal, at one of the top restaurants in the city for his profile, than to sit at home and cook for himself. He lived off an inheritance from his rich parents and a salary that he drew from Britain Excelsior, one of the reasons he courted publicity and went on frequent membership drives. The machinery of the party needed cash and Caine knew how to pique the feelings of those who blamed immigrants for their woes.
He knew how to work the fears of people to get then thinking that some outside force was responsible for the way they led their life. It wasn’t enough that people could make their own decisions. He wanted them to think that the decisions were already made for them, the people that arrived on these shores were causing the problems of the country and that he had all the answers. In fact, all he did was point out problems. He had no answers of his own, but in the meantime, it gave him a good living.
10
He had studied his prey for some time. None of this was going to be left to chance, if he could help it. The second target was someone that he tracked the movements of for months to ensure that he could be in the right place at the right time. He found references from friendly faces so that he could get the job he needed in the kitchen of a restaurant in the city. He worked nights that he thought were perfect to carry out his second act, but it took some time to see the pattern. After a few weeks, he felt he had perfected what he was going to do.
He passed the Rohypnol from a vial tucked in the sleeve of his clothing, tucked under his watch, directly into the dinner. It was something that carried a lot of risk. If he was seen by any other member of staff then he could be found out there and then. The mission would be over before it had got interesting. As he had studied the customer in the past, he expected only one course to be eaten so he had to make sure the dose was measured correctly and delivered all in one go. Too little and there would be no effect. Too much and he might pass out before he even left the restaurant. Neither of those were going to allow the plan to work. He watched as it was taken out to the restaurant before letting the head chef he was done for the night. It was time for him to clock off. It was time for him to enact the next part of his plan.
In addition to working the odd night as a chef in the restaurant, he had set himself up as an Uber driver. He was rarely on there for work but kept up enough of a presence that he had a good rating and wasn’t taken off the site for inactivity. He ran out of the restaurant and pulled a coat over his chef’s whites. It wasn’t that he was cold, but he felt it best that he kept the link to the restaurant under wraps as not to raise any suspicion from his prey. It wasn’t long before an Uber customer came up needing a lift from the restaurant and only a few clicks later he had accepted the job and was en route. He had studied what to look for in Rohypnol victims; it was amazing the facts that you could find on the internet. He saw that the target was unsteady on his feet and looked unusually tired, even for this time of night. As he was told the address, he replied that there were several sets of roadworks between the city centre and there, and he would take a small diversion. The man offered no objection and he started his ride. If he had all his senses about him, Caine might have looked down his nose at the driver. The object was to drive until the man in the back of his car was out cold. Then he had control.
11
It was all over the news the following day. The leader of the far-right Britain Excelsior had been found mutilated in the street in front of their own party headquarters. Augustine had read all about it on the internet before he even left the house to travel to the station. The newspapers used to report news the following day, when it was already cold. But with the advent of 24 news on the TV and news websites for the daily papers, a murder that was interesting had already been discussed and dissected before the before the body was cold. Augustine hated the way that they had to fight the press to get to the bottom of the story. He hated the way that they needed to issue orders to stop journalists from publishing certain details. And he also hated the way that some murders were passed over, like the girl in the alley, while others were deemed worthy of great coverage, like Jeff Caine, the man that Augustine had faced before the marches in the city a few years ago and the man that was now on the first page of all the UK news sites. Augustine wondered if he saw this in the same ‘all news is good news’ manner as he had with every other part of his life. Augustine smiled, but he knew that he shouldn’t.
Someone had tipped off the press, it seemed. In the modern age, detecting a crime gives the person who stumbles upon it a choice. They can go for the traditional method of calling the police so they can deal with it. Or they can get in touch with one of the tabloid newspapers to see if their discovery and associated story is worth anything. The person who found the body of Jeff Caine was now sitting in a luxurious city centre hotel at the expense of one of the national tabloids, with a nice holiday and stack of money coming their way to help the get over the grief of the discovery. It wasn’t long before all the press was there and the story was given mass coverage. You could already see analysis on websites, talk on social media and rolling coverage on the 24-hour news channels with so much time to fill and so little to fill it with.
But the one thing that was significant to the police, that the press didn’t know at that time was the fact that the killer had left a letter ‘L’ on a small piece of paper on the chest of the victim. Among all the open wounds and blood, this white piece of paper stood out as something pure and untouched. Set in such a scene of carnage, the pristine whiteness of the paper indicated that it wasn’t left at the same time the man was killed, or it would have been steeped in blood. This could only mean one of two things for Augustine Boyle and his dedicated team – either the killer returned at a later time when the wounds were no longer seeping, or the person who left the letter was not the person who killed Jeff Caine. This got Augustine thinking. He was just arriving at the scene saw that the police cordon was huge. Although the horse had bolted, the stable door was well and truly shut. The fact that Jeff Caine laid dead on the street in front of his own party headquarters could not be changed, nor could the fact that the entire world already knew about it. But once the police were informed of the crime, they acted swiftly to seal off the area, remove the journalists and members of the public and restore a little piece of privacy for the deceased. In many cases when someone of public repute dies there are floral tributes and celebrities lining up to pay their respects. This wasn’t quite the case with Jeff Caine because of the number of enemies he accrued over the years but there were still politicians wondering if this was aimed at them as a group. Politicians had garnered a poor reputation over the previous decade or so with the expenses scandal and a lack of clarity so they were a target for extremists, whether they espoused radical views or not.
Augustine Boyle had driven himself to the scene and met up with the rest of the team. The protocol of meeting at the station to discuss had to go out of the window somewhat with the fact that this murder was all over the news and the public expected to see detectives at the scene doing all they can to solve the case from the very outset. Augustine Boyle hated this part of the job. The politics of the role meant that public perception of the hard work you were doing was just as important to his bosses as the actual work itself. He ended up wasting time looking like he was being a good detective to show the face his superiors wanted the public to see. This was time that Augustine felt would be better used in actually making progress. The team would have been better prepared by letting the forensics do their job and discussing a plan of action. With the second piece of paper being found on the chest of a murder victim in a short space of time, Augustine and the rest of the crew knew there was a link. But an unknown girl in an alley and a well-known man in front of his own building didn’t seem to have too much of an obvious link at that time. If their presence slowed the progress of the forensic team then this was another victory for public face over real detective work, thought Boyle. He looked at the building and shuddered for all it represented over the years, unashamedly racist yet finding a following from common people. The headquarters was built with sandstone and appeared white as the sun started to appear between the buildings opposite. Caine would have found solace in the way the building stood out as white in a sea of dark buildings. Maybe it was symbolic that this was chosen as the headquarters for the pro-white party. He looked at the entire scene like he was scanning for clues, when he was really trying to rid himself of the negative connotations he carried in his mind about the building and the occupants. Anyone watching would think that Augustine was going about some important facet of detective work.
Not that there was much doubt over the cause of death. Controversial figures in politics rarely have the chance to grow old and die of natural causes. Their rhetoric attracts followers of strong belief both for their cause and against it. T
he 1960’s in America saw many of the leading figures of the time not make it out of the decade, slain by people who though that their message was wrapped up in human form. The killers believed that death of the man would lead to death of the ideas. The words and messages of Martin Luther King and JFK in particular resonate with people today so the theory of killing an idea by killing a man doesn’t ring true. The divisive message of Jeff Caine was not his alone, and they would remain long after his death. In many ways, if this was a political killing, then it made much of his ideology correct.
The wounds inflicted on his body were deep. Boyle and the team approached. The last checks on the body by the forensic team were taking place and as the investigators approached the forensics walked away and let them have a good look at the body. The face was left alone, but the rest of the body was covered in cuts and marks. The lacerations to the arms and legs were superficial and looked as though they had been delivered as Caine was trying to defend himself. The cuts on his torso were much deeper and had been delivered probably after the man was already dead. But there were little signs of a struggle in any other way. The blood was concentrated in one place which indicated that there was no movement throughout the attack or, as was considered with the attack on the alley, that the body was moved here sometime later. Again, Boyle looked around the area for CCTV cameras and again drew a blank. He thought that whoever had killed knew the camera coverage of the city in precise detail, or was a very lucky person indeed – at least so far. The wounds on the body were something else. The torso had deep cuts that exposed the internal organs and had broken ribs in more than one place. Augustine looked across at the rest of his team and saw a look of horror on most faces. Gary that usually faced anything down with bravado looked pale and about to be sick. The only one that kept a straight face was Electra, being used to the cutting up of bodies and probably already thinking about the post mortem that Gus would inevitably ask her to attend later in the day. Augustine decided that there was very little to gain from looking at the body any longer and motioned to a uniformed police officer to cover up the corpse of Jeff Caine. They would take their investigation to the surrounding area to see if anything came up.