The Twisted Web (Detective Hannah Robbins Crime Series book 4)

by Rebecca Bradley

  Pasha nodded.

  He turned back to me. ‘I just can’t believe they would do that to him. The crime scene. It’s so sick.’

  ‘I know, I’m sorry.’ I had no words to comfort him other than to tell him we would work hard on this and bring him justice.

  ‘But they did it to Seb.’

  ‘I know, it’s difficult to take in. We’ll provide you with a family liaison officer who will be here to support you and to guide you through the whole investigation and hopefully prosecution process.’

  He rounded on me. ‘It’s not that. I’m not talking about that. Don’t you realise who Seb is?’ He shook his head, wiped at his face with the tissues that were now dissolving in his hands. ‘What he did?’

  I glanced at Pasha who lifted her eyebrows in response. What were we about to find out? What had we missed?

  ‘Seb was a true-crime blogger. His blog had a massive following. That they killed him and turned his death into a crime scene, well… what does that say to you, DI Robbins?’

  7.

  Drew watched the Twitter feed and the hashtag feed and greedily soaked it in. The shock, the horror and outrage that the police had left a crime scene, a body, out in public this way, for anyone to come across. Old people, sick people and children, anyone could have come across it. The police were taking a real slating.

  They were being shamed.

  People had strong opinions and he felt a flutter in his stomach as he read the comments. His body tingled at the mounting drama on the screen. His face was lit by the light of the monitor, heavy curtains drawn closed and the rest of the room in an eerie toast coloured glow with a cream edge of light around him.

  The level of affront and offence grew by the minute as person by person the information filtered through and the images permeated the new day.

  He heard movement downstairs. A tap being run, water flowing, a flick of a switch as the kettle was turned on, a mug dragged from between the many in the cupboard – how many mugs did two people need? – before it was slammed with too much force onto the worktop. He peered behind him. Would this be the day he would be interrupted?

  What would he see? It was Twitter. The world lived on and lived by Twitter.

  The flutter in his stomach turned heavy and he swallowed.

  Viewed the screen again.

  What turned his stomach was how the shock, the disgust, the so-called distress they talked about, didn’t stop them talking about it. Didn’t stop them sharing it. Didn’t stop them adding a fancy goddam hashtag to it. Because it was social media and a hashtag had to be added. This wasn’t real life, after all, they were behind their keyboards safe and sound, being violated by what had happened out there. They could say what they wanted, spread the image of a dead man on the street and then they could go about their day without having to deal with the repercussions.

  They could vent their disgust in their nice warm homes. Regardless of the facts of the event. Who needed facts when you could share an image? Slate a person? It was much more fun to attack a large organisation, especially when you were doing it with the herd, than it was to wait for any facts to emerge.

  If the herd said this was Nottinghamshire police’s fault then so be it. Nottinghamshire police were going down. How dare they leave a crime scene this way?

  Shame on them.

  8.

  The bank of screens in front of us was huge. There were three walls filled with monitors.

  This was the nerve centre of Nottingham’s CCTV. People and vehicles were moving about the monitors, going about their business like a small insect colony.

  The room was near dark other than the glow coming from the moving images. The quantity of monitors provided a decent amount of light for anyone working in here. But still, it was a grim environment for a workplace. There was not a single window. It wasn’t possible due to the data protection issue surrounding the monitoring of people and vehicles. The smell of leftover food hung in the air of the confined and closed in space. Like microwaved meals just left out in the open to congeal. I wouldn’t fancy being locked up in a room like this day in and day out.

  ‘How do you focus on all this?’ Pasha asked Scott, the wiry male who was responsible for keeping an eye on it all. His colleague was currently biting what was left of his nails in the corner, a worried expression on his face.

  ‘You get used to it,’ Scott answered. ‘If something’s happening, we need to call you guys out for, it kind of leaps out at us. We’re tuned in to it. Like a sixth sense.’

  Pasha was listening while she watched the screens.

  ‘CCTV Jedis, I suppose,’ he continued, practically salivating over Pasha.

  I looked at him. ‘And last night?’

  His face paled. ‘Ah, ah, I wasn’t on. It wasn’t me. I’d have called it in. Of course.’

  I turned to the guy eating his way through his fingers, who pulled them away from his mouth long enough to hold them up in a submissive gesture and deny he was at work either.

  ‘So, who do we need to speak with?’ I was losing patience with these Jedi operators.

  Scott moved to a desk and flicked through a folder, peeling over pages until he came to the one he wanted. ‘It was Smithy. Smithy was on last night. With Louise.’

  I raised an eyebrow.

  He flipped the cover of the folder closed. ‘David Smithson and Louise Burton.’

  ‘I’ll need their details. Addresses. Contact phone numbers,’ I said.

  ‘Okay, but I have to check with head office first though.’ His eyes never left Pasha as he spoke to me.

  ‘Check now please. This is a murder inquiry and we don’t have time to mess about.’

  His head snapped round. ‘Murder?’

  Jesus.

  ‘And I’ll need a copy of last night’s recording for Market Square as well as recordings of the surrounding areas, so we can attempt to ascertain where they came from.’

  The finger chewer finally spoke up. ‘I can’t believe someone wheeled a dead body straight onto Market Square and dumped it and those two idiots didn’t notice.’

  ‘How does something like that happen?’ asked Pasha.

  ‘Beats me.’ He shrugged. Then returned to his silent act.

  We thanked them for their time, took copies of the night’s recordings and seized the originals for evidence then made our way back to the car.

  ‘How can that happen, Boss?’ Pasha was driving as I needed to make some calls to the incident room.

  ‘What’s that?’ I was distracted. I had two missed calls from Baxter and a follow up email telling me to contact him and update him on where we were. It hadn’t been that long since we briefed. What did he expect to have happened in this period of time?

  ‘That the killer got Seb into Market Square without anyone, the CCTV crew, calling it in while it was happening? It doesn’t feel right.’ She turned to look at me. ‘We could have caught him as he was leaving the scene.’

  She was right. I didn’t understand this either. I put a call in to the incident room and spoke to Martin. Gave him the details for Smithson and Burton and asked that he contact them and get them into the station. I wanted them to feel a little pressure. They had let a murderer dump a body right under their noses and I wanted to know not only the how, but the why. Why had this happened? Was it negligence on their part, were they screwing around, figuratively or literally, or was it more sinister than that?

  We needed to find out. And a witness interview room would apply more pressure than if we spoke to them at their homes where they would be comfortable and confident.

  ‘The DCI has been in looking for you,’ Martin said before he rang off.

  ‘Yeah, I have a couple of messages from him. I’ll get to him. Thanks, Martin.’

  I’d return his calls at some point. I couldn’t focus on the investigation if I had to chase up Baxter at every turn, if I had him chasing me for updates every hour. I understood how difficult this one was. I could imagine the pressure
he was getting, especially with the social media aspect.

  ‘Straight back to the station?’ Pasha asked.

  ‘Yes, hopefully Martin will get those two in, even if he has to get a uniform car to drag them in.’

  My phone rang in my hand. It was Baxter again. I let out a sigh and pressed the green answer button.

  ‘DI Robbins?’

  ‘Yes, Sir.’ I looked at Pasha. Her eyes were firmly on the road.

  ‘Why haven’t you been answering your phone?’

  ‘I’ve been busy. Working this case.’

  There was a silence as he caught the unsaid annoyance in my words.

  ‘We have a problem.’ He had let it slide.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Obviously the local media are interested in this morning. It was going to happen because of the hash things, what are they called? It doesn’t matter,’ he snapped. ‘They were always going to be interested. We’ve had a call from one of the Nationals. They’ve been paying attention to that Twitter and want to know if we did leave a body unattended. They want our response before they go to print.’

  9.

  I wanted to get the team together for another briefing, based on the information Nick Henson had given us. It was a disturbing slant on the murder.

  ‘It looks as though we need to up our game and learn a lot more about the online world than many of us may be comfortable with.’ I looked at the team, Pasha was smiling. ‘Though, I acknowledge some of you will be fine with this aspect and will therefore be our guiding light.’ She nodded enthusiastically.

  ‘So, he talks about crime online and is murdered and left to be found in what is made to look like a crime scene?’ Ross asked, clarifying the situation in his own mind. A situation we all needed to get our heads around.

  ‘That appears to be the gist of it, Ross. I’m going to bring Evie in on this and ask her to do some research on his blog for us.’

  ‘But, what the hell?’ Ross again.

  ‘It is pretty sick,’ Pasha confirmed.

  ‘And that’s the precise reason we need to get on top of this one as quickly as possible.’

  The door to the incident room opened and DCI Kevin Baxter strode in. All heads turned to look at him, then back to me.

  ‘Don’t let me stop you, DI Robbins.’

  I knew I was in trouble when he used my official title. I had decided working the case was more important and had started the briefing before seeing him to discuss the press issue.

  ‘I’m informing the team of our victim’s active interest in true-crime, Sir. According to his partner, his blog was extremely active and had several thousand hits every month.’

  Baxter raised his eyebrows. ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Yes, Sir. His main focus was Nottinghamshire, but when he couldn’t find anything to blog about locally he would look further afield. He was very good at what he did apparently and was talking about setting up a podcast in addition to the blog.’

  I knew about podcasts; I subscribed and listened to a few of these. A couple of travel ones and a couple of science ones. They were great because you could listen while you were doing something else.

  ‘Podcast?’ Baxter looked blank.

  Ross smirked.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I clarified, ‘because he hadn’t got that far. His blog was popular and the manner in which he was found has to be considered in terms of his interests.’

  ‘Jesus, Hannah. This is all we need. What mind fuck is going on?’ His face hardened.

  The team looked down at their desks.

  ‘We’re working on it now, Sir.’

  ‘I’ll speak to you when you’ve finished the briefing.’ He stalked over to an empty chair, sat and crossed his arms. He had no intention of moving. He wanted to know what was happening. If he was stressed about this case then I was obviously going to be stressed; that was the way it worked.

  I grabbed the remote control from the desk at the side of me and turned on the screen that I’d positioned at the front of the incident room. ‘Pasha and I went to the CCTV hub earlier and we’ve seized the footage of Sebastian being dumped on the council building steps. They’re already logged into evidence. We also had a couple of copies made, which is what we’re going to look at now.’

  Pasha had set the disc up so it was already in place. The screen was a murky blur. CCTV at night was notoriously difficult. Luckily Market Square was well lit but in essence a fuzz of dots made up each image and we knew if anyone was visible, it would be an incredibly difficult to identify them.

  I pressed play. Everyone in the room leaned forward. Even Baxter had his eyes glued to the screen. Silence lay heavy as we waited for what we knew was about to happen.

  The camera faced the council building, but had a view of the whole square. A bird swooped into view, landed near an empty packet that was floating about, investigated the contents then flew off.

  ‘Here he comes.’ Pasha was nearly falling out of her chair.

  And she was right, we had already viewed this at the CCTV hub.

  It definitely looked like a male. Dressed pretty much as the victim had been, in jeans, but with a large hoody pulled over his head, his face obscured. Gloves on his hands. They didn’t look like medical gloves. Normal gloves that wouldn’t draw attention to a person walking through the streets at night.

  ‘Wow, he’s brazen.’ Ross was incredulous.

  The reason: the male was pushing a wheelbarrow and in that wheelbarrow was our victim, but the way he was hanging out of it, from the dark fuzzy image, he looked like a Guy Fawkes, especially bearing in mind the time of year. Yes it was late, but you could still be forgiven for believing this was what was in the wheelbarrow.

  There were also two small cones, narrow nozzle end pushed into the barrow, one either side of Sebastian.

  We watched to see what would happen next. Though Pasha and I were the only ones who knew exactly in what order our killer did what, we all knew the end result. Sebastian Wade left out in the open to be found and be turned into a public topic of discussion and outrage.

  The man on the screen made his way, without hurry, over to the council building. The camera followed him, one or both operators obviously interested, to some extent, in the lone male with the wheelbarrow crossing the square. He stopped halfway, rubbed at his back as though the load in his barrow was too much for him and he was struggling. He stretched out. Pulled at his muscles.

  ‘Camera!’ Baxter barked as the killer lifted himself to full height in his stretch. ‘Where’s the other camera? We need his face.’

  I shook my head. ‘The one that would have been useful was on automatic rotation and was pointing the wrong way. As you can see, the operators are following him, but only using one camera.’

  ‘Damn those incompetent idiots. What have they said for themselves?’ He was pacing about now.

  ‘They’re on their way in. We’ll be speaking to them after this briefing.’ I needed for him to calm down so we could get on with this and I could then speak to Smithy and Louise.

  I un-paused the image and we continued our vigil of Sebastian, who was already dead, and now a prop in his killer’s sideshow.

  When he had finished easing out his aching muscles he picked up the barrow again and started to move. No change in his direction. A perfect straight line towards the council building. Not a falter or sense of apprehension came from him.

  At the council building the killer put the barrow down and stretched out his back again, then pulled down the peak of a baseball cap he was wearing underneath the hoody. Being extra cautious.

  I looked to Baxter and before he had chance to ask the question I said, ‘There’s a partial view of him, but it doesn’t cover his face.’

  He swore under his breath.

  The male pulled out the two cones and popped them on the ground a short distance from the steps. The camera continually trained on him. It definitely was not on automatic rotate. He dug into the side of Sebastian, down into the
barrow and brought out what we knew to be the crime scene tape and we watched as he tied it around the decorative lion at one end of the steps and then wrapped it around one of the cones, moved along and wrapped it around the other before dropping the reel on the ground.

  There was a gentle murmur around the room as the team voiced their disgust at how organised this guy was. I didn’t silence them. They were still paying attention and I felt pretty horrified myself by what I was watching, what I had seen.

  It was when he lifted Sebastian out of the barrow and dragged him over to the steps that the wave of revulsion grew louder. He did it in such a way that Sebastian looked just like a ragdoll that no one should pay any attention to. He hurled him out of the barrow, half tipping him out, half lifting him, with an appearance of weightlessness, then dragged him with one arm up the steps to the top. It was maybe because they were only five shallow steps that he was able to do this with such ease, because I doubted he would have been able to make this look so effortless if the steps had been deeper or higher.

  With a little flourish, he had Sebastian in the position we found him in and with his head dipped he strolled back down towards Market Square and the camera. The peak of his cap pulled low, and the baggy sweater hood over the top of it casting shadow around the sides of his face. In the pixelated grey of CCTV darkness, his face was completely hidden from view.

  ‘Dammit,’ Baxter cursed from the back of the room.

  ‘He’s very aware,’ said Martin. His voice quiet and respectful of what we were viewing.

  ‘He’s not made it easy for us,’ I admitted.

  The killer moved to the cones, bent to pick up the crime scene tape, walked to the lion at the other end of the steps and tied it off, completing the closed off appearance of a crime scene.

  Then he stepped over the tape and dropped the cardboard notice down that had the hashtag written on it. In this lighting, it wasn’t possible to see the words.

  With another adjustment to his cap, the killer picked up the handles of the wheelbarrow and moved off, head down, away from the camera that had been following him. As though he was aware.