by Linda Coles
With a heavy sigh, Jack retrieved his coat and headed home.
“I’m home, love.” Seeing his drained face, Janine collected his coat from him and guided him to his chair in the lounge, where a bottle of beer stood waiting for him on a side table.
“Sit,” she instructed. “Dinner won’t be long, so enjoy your beer and try to unwind a little. Then we can talk when you’ve eaten, if you wish.”
She wore her no-nonsense smile as she spoke, and Jack was reminded again how much he loved the woman he shared a home with. She left him sat contemplating and busied herself back in the kitchen. Jack was grateful she gave him space when he got like this, got so involved in a case that it consumed every ounce of his energy, leaving nothing behind. But they both knew it never lasted for long. Cases got solved, or closed, or moved, and something else took their place. There was always another set of victims or culprits waiting around the corner.
The beer began to soothe his nerves, and after a while Janine came in to fetch him. Together, they sat down to enjoy the last of the turkey that Janine had made into a pie, along with Christmas ham and leeks from the garden, all topped off with a crust. She’d even put a couple of pastry leaves on top. The pie was deep golden in colour from the egg wash, and looked and smelled magnificent.
“My god, Janine, that’s a work of art. It’s almost a shame to eat it.” He peered closer as Janine took his plate and cut into the pie; creamy sauce oozed out like a pale landslide moving slowly over the cut leeks. Steam drifted upwards. She handed him the plate back and he helped himself to mash and mixed veg with an extra helping of sauce from a jug. When she’d served her own, they ate in silence for a couple of minutes. Jack would speak about what was on his mind when he was good and ready, she knew; they’d stick to more mundane topics, in the meantime. It was nearly the end of their meal before he spoke about what was niggling him.
“I had words with Eddie today,” he started. “Told him I was sick of doing it all on my own and that he and Morton needed to give the team more of their attention and resources. I ended up smacking a packet of biscuits up the wall. Better than smacking him I suppose, that wouldn’t have done me any good.”
They both sat quietly for a moment digesting what he’d said.
Then Janine said, “Did they break?”
“Eh?”
“Did the biscuits break?” Janine was smiling, knowing the worst was over for him now and normal service would resume shortly. He couldn’t help but smile back and, feeling more relaxed and rested than he had for days, picked their empty plates up and took them through to the kitchen. There was a trifle sitting on the kitchen side.
“You really have been busy,” he called back, but Janine was already standing behind him.
“I’ll bring us a bowl each. Go and sit down.”
And so he did, and when he’d devoured the sherry trifle on top of the pie, he’d almost forgotten he’d missed Christmas at all. An hour later, he was sound asleep in his chair in the lounge while Janine cleared away in the kitchen.
Somehow later that evening, he’d got into bed, and it was nearly 7 am when he finally awoke to the sound of Terry Wogan chatting quietly to his audience across the length and breadth of the UK. The pips signalled the time on the hour, and he sat bolt upright with a start. Next to him, Janine stirred slightly at his sudden movement, then rolled over on her side without saying a word. Jack rubbed his hands over his face before flinging the quilt back and heading to the bathroom. The previous evening was a complete blank, save for the pie and trifle.
He slipped inside the shower curtain and turned the taps on, and waited until the water ran through warm. As steam started to fill the small room, he stood underneath the jets, the warm needles of water feeling therapeutic on his head and shoulders as he lathered shampoo onto his head. The sleep and the meal had done him a world of good, as had unloading his day on Janine, though he’d only told her about his lazy colleagues. There was never any need to bore or burden her with case details. It wasn’t necessary. With the fragrance of a pine forest filling his nostrils, he dried off, quickly dressed and headed downstairs to make Janine a cup of tea before heading out. He was almost done when he heard the phone in the hall ring and hurried to grab it before it rang off.
“Jack Rutherford.”
“Jack, it’s Pete Abbott here, on the desk. I’ve got a message for you.”
“Yes, Pete. Good news, I hope?”
“Well, that depends on who you are and what your view is, I guess. We now have DNA confirmation that the body in the burned-out house over at Swanley was that of Martin Coffey.”
Jack let the news sink in a moment. “Thanks, Pete. Yes, good and bad, indeed. Is Eddie aware?”
“Not managed to get him.”
Why bother asking?
Hanging up, he reflected on what the news really did mean. If Coffey had been involved in a sexual abuse ring of some sort, the world was better off with him dead. But that left them with yet another piece of the puzzle: what kind of horrors had been going on in that house?
They needed more, so much more. Maybe the day ahead would bring them something useful. He could only hope.
Chapter Sixty-Four
Jack had arranged to meet the local Cobham police sergeant at Epsom morgue, where their assumed latest victim had been taken after being found in the pond. It wasn’t a long drive down, only fifty minutes or so in easy traffic, and Jack made use of the time on his own to reflect on the task ahead while listening to some music. Never a Spice Girls fan, he enjoyed the rougher sounds of mainly male rock and roll, namely his beloved ELO. He pushed the start button on the CD player and waited to be transported to another place while he drove. “Last Train to London” spilled into the car, and he sang along in an attempt to make the task ahead more bearable, moving his head from side to side in time with the music, strumming his hands on the steering wheel, his imaginary drum kit. He’d been to many of their concerts and enjoyed the peace and energy the band gave him, particularly when he needed to think. Next up came “Mr Blue Sky,” and he let the words roll over him like a therapeutic massage. He knew every word by heart, and warbled away happily as he made his way down the A232 towards the hospital.
A mobile food van came into view and, checking his watch, he decided there was time for a quick bacon butty. If he was going to do a spot of thinking; he could chew at the same time. The food van looked like any other roadside convenience. A queue of four people waited to place their orders, attesting to the quality of the food. He indicated left and pulled into the layby.
Ten minutes later, he was back on his way towards the hospital at Epsom, one hand on the steering wheel, the other nursing his sandwich, and “Mr Blue Sky” on repeat play for his thinking time. He sang along to the words between bites, his mind working over the lyrics.
Please tell us why …
You had to hide away for so long …
Thoughts of the girl he was about to meet, though in death rather than in real life, filled in within the words of his private concert, the faces of the band members clear in his head as they sang and posed the question to only Jack.
Tell us why …
Why had she died? What had been going on in that house? And why had she helped Leanne escape but not escaped herself?
You had to hide away for so long …
Where had she been hiding? And how had she become embroiled in whatever it was? She was only a young woman herself, not much older than Leanne. He wondered where she was missing from. Leanne had said she’d sounded foreign, so maybe from somewhere across the eastern bloc. Maybe she was Polish, or Albanian even. She’d had a look about her, Leanne said, and had told him it wasn’t French or Italian or Greek even. Her colouring had been all wrong. In another few minutes, he’d see for himself, though the fact that she’d been in the old quarry pond for so long meant the colour of her flesh would have altered dramatically. In cases such as this, it was hard for even parents to identify their own children.
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br /> Jack entered the hospital building and followed the signs to the morgue where he was due to meet both the pathologist and the local DI. Had the young woman died before she’d been thrown into the water, he wondered, or had she drowned? Because if she’d already been dead, that added a new dimension to the case – two dead bodies under suspicious circumstances. If she’d been alive when she’d entered the water, that meant she could have fallen in herself. He wasn’t thinking suicide, though he wasn’t ruling it out either.
He entered the office space and the clock on the wall told him he was bang on time. Two men turned his way at the sound of his shoes on the tiled floor. Jack assumed one was the local DI and the other, the smaller man in surgical scrubs, was the pathologist. He introduced himself.
“DC Jack Rutherford, Croydon,” he announced with an outstretched hand. The taller man, about Jack’s age, stepped forward.
“DI Peter Woodhouse. Good to meet you, Jack.” Standing back a pace, he introduced the smaller man, who Jack thought looked a little like a mad professor, thinning grey hair standing up on end like he’d had an electric shock. The man could have only been about five feet tall in his shoes. “And this is Dr Charles Winstanley,” Woodhouse said. The second man stepped forward slightly and shook Jack’s hand.
“Any relation to Dr Barbara Winstanley, by chance?” Jack asked.
“My daughter, Detective.” Winstanley’s smile was gentle and his eyes glinted at the mention of her name. He was obviously a proud father. “And Stanley, my son, is almost a pathologist. He will graduate later this year. You know Barbara, then?”
Stanley Winstanley, Jack thought, trying to keep the smile from his face. It was almost child abuse.
“Yes,” he replied. “She’s been helping me on another case with a DNA puzzle – which reminds me: I should give her a call. With all that’s been going on and Christmas coming at the same time, it’s been on the back burner a little. Missing girls and dead bodies take precedence over most other cases.” Jack hadn’t given a great deal of thought to Mary. He’d hardly had a moment to himself of recent, but he made a mental note to call Barbara and follow up.
Pleasantries over, the doctor suggested they get to it, and both detectives followed him through the swing doors to a smaller room where a sheet-covered body lay on a gurney, only its face exposed. As Jack approached, he could see the brown straggly hair that would have fallen to her shoulders, a pale and rather thin face pointing straight up towards the bright lights of the room, eyes closed. The water had done its worst to her skin, and he closed his eyes for a moment out of respect. The young woman laid out in front of him was indeed young; her thin frame looked more like a twelve-year-old’s. It never got any easier seeing a body in this condition, and Jack only hoped she hadn’t suffered in death.
“Did she definitely drown, then?”
“I’m afraid she did,” said Dr Winstanley. “Her lungs were nearly double in size. We usually see that with a freshwater drowning, and there are traces of pond vegetation in her airways. She has bruising to most of her body, some old, some more recent. Both arms have also been broken in the past and healed again; I’d say within the last five years. I’d estimate her age to be around eighteen.”
Jack closed his eyes again to shake the images of her abuse from his mind, but it didn’t work.
DI Woodhouse took over now, with a question of his own.
“Do you think her death was deliberate, or could this be an accident? Did she fall in, for example?”
“Given she was bound and gagged, I’d say this wasn’t an accident on her part. What I can’t tell you is whether someone placed her at the pond knowing she’d fall in, or whether she made her way there of her own accord. Her feet are badly cut up, so she’d walked barefoot over rough terrain for some time, but again, she could have been going around in circles without realizing it, only to end up falling in.”
Both detectives were now looking at the young woman’s face, deep in thought. Neither said a word.
“I did find something of interest for you both, though, something I’ve never seen in all my years of working with the dead.”
“Oh?” they responded in unison.
“It was inside her stomach, actually, along with the meagre remains of her breakfast cereal. And I found a similar example tucked into the cuff of her track bottoms.”
Jack looked at Woodhouse and they both followed Winstanley over to a table where he had set out his findings in plastic evidence bags.
The first bag contained small pieces of paper that had been reconstructed, like a puzzle, back into a single piece. On it were several words written in what looked like blue pen. In the second bag were the remains of what appeared to be cardboard from a cereal box, again with words written on them in blue pen.
“I’d say she was trying to send a message,” said Winstanley.
“Holy shit,” Jack exclaimed.
Chapter Sixty-Five
Hey you, pretty face…
“Is that what I think it is?” asked Jack incredulously.
“It is, or so I believe,” said Woodhouse. “Though it’s going to need some work, it’s definitely a list of names.”
Both men looked at each other as if the answer, the confirmation they needed, was written on the other man’s face.
Inside the simple plastic bag Woodhouse was holding was a list written in blue pen, but what did the list refer to? Customers? A business network? Victims, even? There were large parts missing where the ink had soaked away, as well as gaps where sections of paper were missing, but there were the bones to work with. The machine printing on the reverse of the paper in the first bag looked like a flyer of some sort.
Jack had the other evidence bag in his hand, containing the cardboard from her tracksuit bottoms.
“And I’d say this is a duplicate, looking at the bits still visible.”
“Looks like we have a puzzle to do,” Woodhouse announced. “I take it you have copies of this for us, Doc?”
“Of course. From my observation, if I may?” he enquired.
“Please do,” encouraged Jack.
“She must have known she was going to die to have done this. Something happened for her to do this only once, because there were no older particles of paper in her system. They were all from this one ingestion. If she’d done it repeatedly – say, in the hope of one day getting this information, whatever it relates to, out in the open – there’d be more. My guess is something went down to encourage her to do this. She was a smart girl to hide whatever it is in this way. It can’t have been easy. And having a duplicate could have put her life in danger. She was extremely brave.”
Her life had been in grave danger anyway, it seemed, but Jack kept it to himself. He was thankful for her efforts.
“How long ago would you estimate that she went into the water?”
“Two days; three absolute tops.”
Jack reasoned that would tie in nicely with the events of Christmas Eve, the house fire and Leanne escaping. All hell must have broken loose and, somehow, this clever and no doubt terrified girl had managed to leave them something to work with in her death. Jack walked back across to where she was lying. The two other two men joined him.
“You said she’d had both arms broken in the past. How about sexual activity?”
“I’m afraid there’s been plenty, and for some years.”
“Any clue as to who she is? We have reason to think she wasn’t from the UK. One of the victims told me she had an accent, so she may have been from somewhere in Eastern Europe.”
“There was nothing on her to indicate who she is, and no DNA match in the system. Dental is no use unless she matches a missing person’s listing. We may never know her identity,” Dr Winstanley said gravely.
Jack let the words sink in. Another lost soul, name unknown, life extinguished. Someone’s daughter. Mary flashed into his mind for the second time that day. He needed to focus on her again as soon as he could and help get her young life
back together before she too became a lost soul.
DI Woodhouse broke into his thoughts. “Do you think this young woman is part of your case, then, Jack?”
“I do. It’s too much of a coincidence. I’m loath to show her photograph to my only witness, a girl a handful of years younger, but I may have to take that chance. I’ve no other way. And if that list we have is customers or the perpetrators, I want to find every one of them. And damn soon.”
“Need some help?”
Jack knew the man didn’t have to offer; resources were always tight in every force. “I’d appreciate that, thank you. Yes.”
“Right, then. Well, if we’ve done here, why don’t we head off for some lunch and you can fill me in with what you know so far. Then we’ll head back to the station and see what we can put together. The sooner we can fill in some of those names, the sooner we can start looking into them and see where they fit into this mess.”
Back outside in the cold fresh air, DI Peter Woodhouse steered them in the direction of the town centre. Jack was glad he’d kept his jacket with him and not left it in the car.
“So, I’m wondering,” Woodhouse asked, “if you were in the young girl’s shoes and being held against your will at that house, what list would you make to help the police after your death? What would be the most valuable information you could share?”
“Well, the most valuable would be the ringleaders, the organisers. But let me ask you a question. Which list would she know about? How would she know either category’s names? That makes me wonder if she knew the customers’ names, those who desired what the house was peddling, took part in what went on in those rooms?”
