Josiah Dark Thrillers Box Set

by Tim Ellis

  Higham’s fingerprints and DNA were taken when he was booked in and formally charged, so we’ll be able to compare those with what was lifted from the note sent to Miranda Flagg.

  I went to 14 Hawthorn Drive in Wilmslow and retrieved a cash payment journal, which records bribes made to a variety of people in order for Whitchurch to be awarded an unusually high number of the design-build public contracts available between 1991 - 2002.

  I sent the list of contracts overseen by Albert Flagg between those dates to the Fraud Squad, and their conclusion of corruption is additional evidence. I’m passing everything relating to the building contracts and bribery to the Fraud Squad.

  Also, there was a receipt journal, which records the large sums of money paid to Jeffrey Higham by numerous criminals and others to bury bodies in the foundations of his construction projects. This is supported by a meeting between Higham and a yet to be identified male that was recorded possibly by Albert Flagg and then transferred to memory stick. There’s another recording on the memory stick, which shows Higham paying the driver of the black BMW who killed Albert Flagg. I’m passing this evidence to the SCD proper, so that they can improve their clear-up rate.

  Also, I’m passing what we know about ACC Angela Vickers to Professional Standards, they can deal with her.

  Have you phoned the two canal boat people yet who went through the lock in the early hours of last Tuesday morning? If not, why not? Stop dragging your feet and get on with it.

  Joseph Corbyn was discovered stuffed into a litter bin in Brabyns Park. His face was visible. He couldn’t have climbed in, or been pushed through the openings, so someone must have killed him first and then put him into the bin. Yes, he had a stake hammered into his heart. To do that, the killer would have needed a special key to unlock the bin and then lock it again afterwards.

  The professor thinks that Corbyn was killed last night and his body put into the bin. Brabyns Park is a popular place, and it’s unlikely that the body would have been in the bin for any longer.

  Contact Burrows. I want to know if she’s obtained the list of the park-keeper’s helpers at Brabyns Park.

  Joseph Corbyn’s post-mortem is at eleven o’clock – I should be back by then.

  There was a film crew filming in Brabyns Park last week – find out who they were and what they were doing.

  Contact Mabel Webb from the Marple Review and ask her why she’s so obsessed with vampires.

  I went to see a psychiatrist (not about you, and definitely not about me) about sanguivoriphobia, which is the fear of vampires to see if we had any escaped patients on the loose. Apparently, there have been two documented cases in America, and both were women. It’s possible we could be looking for a woman.

  He stuck the list in the middle of Lake’s desk using blue-tack. And then, after sending the Chief Superintendent an email to let him know what had occurred during his absence and what he was planning to do, he switched the lights off and made his way upstairs.

  ***

  ‘Oh God!’ Dixie said when she opened the door. ‘It’s gone global. International Syndication Services have picked it up. Not only am I a fucking thousandaire, but I’m as famous as Marie Colvin as well. I could kiss you, Dark.’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘You really know how to boost a girl’s ego.’

  ‘I’m only interested in the outcome. Show me the article.’

  ‘Walk this way, your miserableness.’ She walked into the living room.

  He shut the front door and followed her.

  ‘Hi, Mister Dark.’

  ‘Evening, Hendrik. How’s the money trail going?’

  ‘I think we’re nearly there.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘You want coffee?’ Dixie asked him.

  ‘Did you make it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘Sit.’

  He sat on the sofa that he’d slept on last night.

  Dixie passed him her laptop. ‘Read.’

  He read her article, looked at the pictures, listened to the audible recordings and watched the visual recordings. She’d also included an old picture of him. Did he really look that miserable? There was a group photograph of the Dark Warrior Motorcycle Club outside the Glover’s house smiling and giving the thumbs up signal; the official picture of Chief Constable Mervyn Rathbone CBE QPM that she’d copy-and-pasted from the Greater Manchester Police website; pictures of the five paedophiles trussed up in the back of the van outside the Blackpool address; the van’s number plate; the front of the house; the hidden room where Alicia Glover was kept for three years; photographs of the five armed Abingdon Street police officers; the signed Court Order to take Alicia back into custody; the original CCTV recording of the man leading Alicia away that had been suppressed; and Neil Bowman’s written confession. The whole thing was a work of art. She’d also described what had happened at CEOP when Dark had called, and inferred that maybe something wasn’t quite right there.

  ‘Coffee,’ Dixie said, passing him a mug.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘You’re a bastard, Dark.’

  ‘You’re the second person who’s called me that today.’

  ‘It must be true then.’

  ‘Your article is a work of art. Is that what you want to hear?’

  Her face adopted a pie-eating grin. ‘It is, isn’t it?’

  ‘The shit will hit the fan,’ Hendrik said.

  Dixie blew a raspberry. ‘You’re as bad as him.’

  He took a slurp of coffee and said, ‘So, what’s been happening?’

  ‘Oh! Not much,’ Dixie said. ‘Apart from offers of money, jobs, marriage and sex.’

  ‘Marriage!’ Hendrik said. ‘You never said anything about those.’

  ‘Typical! Are you not bothered about all the sex I’ll be having with strangers?’

  ‘Well yes, but marriage is so . . . final.’

  ‘And you call me crazy.’

  ‘I’ve never called you that.’

  She shuffled to the old people’s wall. ‘Okay. Well, this was meant to be my new story instead of Blackpool, but now it’s a series of articles.’

  ‘Go on?’

  ‘I contacted the original Detective Sergeant – Eric Jeffords – who investigated the original case of Olga Bloch and then gave up on it, because it was too hard. We had a very productive meeting and came to a similar arrangement that we did. I do all the work, he gets all the glory, and I get the world exclusive, which he was quite happy with. He’s retiring in six months, so the case will be his swansong, his last hurrah, his final performance . . .’

  ‘Okay, I get the idea.’

  ‘I’m in literary mode. You’re looking at the famous investigative reporter Dixie Reyes.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Well, that’s it really. Except, I sent an email to the Bona Vacantia Department, who are part of the Government Legal Department, and I asked them if they were interested in recovering three million pounds of intestate money that had been stolen from them by a scheming Lucrecia Borgia. Of course, they were. A very nice solicitor called Martin De Santo came back to me . . . De Santo! Do you like that name? It sounds Spanish, doesn’t it? He also offered me sex and marriage, and not necessarily in that order. Dixie De Santo! I like that, don’t you? In fact, I’m mulling his proposal of marriage over.’ She glanced over at Hendrik, but he didn’t appear to be listening. ‘So, after I’d spoken to DS Jeffords, we came up with a three-way plan that my future husband – Martin De Santo – would ask DS Jeffords to investigate why his department were not getting their just desserts, and I would write a series of articles describing the progress of the investigation and turning DS Jeffords into a household name . . . Much the same as I’ve done for you.’

  ‘And don’t think I’m not grateful.’

  ‘You could show your gratefulness a bit more.’

  ‘Haven’t I br
ought you a case that made you a thousandaire and famous?’

  ‘I suppose. Well, I won’t have to worry about all that soon. As Mrs Dixie De Santo I’ll be living the high life in London, mixing with all the celebrities, and not worrying about anything in particular.’

  ‘And is Hendrik happy with your future plans?’

  ‘Hendrik doesn’t seem to care one way or the other, which suits me just fine. Dixie De Santo sounds much better than Dixie Larsson.’

  ‘It does, doesn’t it? Oh well, as long you’re happy.’

  ‘As a pig in shit.’

  ‘So, apart from Hendrik finding out . . .’

  ‘Here we go,’ Hendrik interrupted him. ‘Edward Singer’s money was transferred from bank to bank all around the world to end up in an account in the same bank as Edward Singers’ empty account, and it’s in the name of Beverley Adler, who just happens to be the girlfriend of Peter Waddington, who is employed as the Financial Director of the Cheshire Cat Rescue Centre.’

  Dixie took her laptop back off him and sent emails to Martin De Santo and DS Eric Jeffords. ‘There, that’ll start the ball rolling. Jeffords arrests the two of them, freezes the account and investigates backwards to Olga Bloch using the evidence we’ve already found. If he’s lucky Adler and Waddington will confess, which will negate the need for any exhumations – case closed.’

  ‘Talking of which,’ Dark said. ‘Apart from the mopping up exercise, the Alicia Glover case is closed. CEOP will initiate a public inquiry about what went wrong at Abingdon Police Station, and how there were able to get away with things for so long; Manchester’s Chief Constable will fall on his sword for trying unsuccessfully to cover it all up . . .’

  ‘We still don’t know who the “powerful people with a vested interest are”,’ Dixie said.

  He pursed his lips. ‘And I doubt we ever will. All anyone ever sees are the puppets, the people pulling the strings remain in the shadows.’

  ‘I couldn’t find the missing two hundred and fifty thousand pounds from Whitchurch or Jeffrey Higham’s account in July, 2002, Mister Dark,’ Hendrik said.

  ‘That’s all right, Hendrik. That case is closed as well. I’m handing it over to the Fraud Squad and some of my colleagues in the SCD. We have more than enough evidence concerning Jeffrey Higham, Whitchurch and many others. You can send an anonymous email with all the illegal information we collected about the case as attachments. I’ll let you know the address tomorrow.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Did you manage to obtain documents with photographs on them for Nina Courtney?’

  Hendrik brought the documents up on his laptop and turned the screen round to face Dark.

  ‘Assistant Chief Constable Angela Vickers if I’m not mistaken. Good work, Hendrik. Okay, you can send those anonymously to the Head of Professional Standards, together with details of the multiple bank accounts you discovered.’

  ‘Will do.’

  He focused his attention on the last wall – Ellie’s wall – as he now thought of it. ‘I see you’ve been busy.’

  ‘Ah!’ Dixie glanced at Hendrik.

  ‘Who are all those men?’ he said, indicating at least a half a dozen photographs linked to dates and newspaper articles.

  ‘Who were all those men?’ Dixie corrected him. ‘Now, they’re all corpses.’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘Go on, Hendrik,’ she said.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘You can run faster than I can.’

  Hendrik swivelled round in his chair to face Dark. ‘We had this idea . . .’

  ‘It was Hendrik’s idea really,’ Dixie interrupted. ‘I didn’t know anything about it until he told me. Needless to say, I was shocked and . . .’

  ‘So, I had this idea to look at the newspaper reports surrounding each of the dates, and in each of the locations, your wife said she was away working for Riverbank Catering and I found those men.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘They’d all been accused, charged and found not guilty of rape. And then, on or around the date your wife was there, they were all mutilated and murdered.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ he said, but he knew it wasn’t.

  Dixie nodded. ‘Which is exactly what I said, ridiculous – completely ridiculous.’

  ‘Do you realise what you’re suggesting?’

  ‘Yes, Hendrik,’ Dixie added. ‘Do you?’

  ‘I’m not suggesting anything, Mister Dark. I’m simply saying what I found when I began looking. I think you’re filling in the gaps.’

  Dixie spread her arms wife. ‘I’d like you to know that I had absolutely nothing to do with it. I was in the bathroom taking my Prozac at the time.’

  Yes, he was filling in the gaps, but they were easy gaps to fill in. If he was sitting on a jury of twelve good men and true, looking at the evidence as presented by the prosecution barrister, he’d have no trouble in convicting Ellie of murder. And it wasn’t merely Colin Derwent in Birmingham who had been mutilated and murdered. There were potentially another fifteen victims over six years, which would make Ellie – his wife, the mother of his two children – one of the most prolific female serial killers in the UK. He had to find out the truth one way or another.

  ‘We’re nibbling around the edges, Hendrik. You need to find a way to get beyond the Hendon Data Centre network security without setting off the alarms, and find out what they’re hiding about Commander Anthony Baker and Ellie.’

  ‘I’ll get onto it, Mister Dark.’

  He stood up. ‘I’m going home now. I think we’re done here until you gain access to that information. By all means, continue to collect all the evidence you can find about the murders, but I’m not quite ready to lock Ellie up and throw away the key yet. When you do gain access to the files, give me a call.’

  Dixie showed him out. ‘It might not be as bad as it looks.’

  He didn’t reply, because he knew it was worse than it looked.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Monday, January 20

  ‘So, let me see if I’ve got this right, Dark,’ Henn said without waiting for him to close the door and sit down, which he did without any invitation.

  While Henn was distracted, he also helped himself to a coffee. He didn’t care for the man, but his coffee was something else entirely. In Dark’s world, you didn’t have to like the person to drink their coffee.

  Henn was pacing in an L-shape – the length of the wall behind his desk, a ninety-degree angle up the adjoining wall to the door, and back again. His hands were waving about clutching Dark’s email as if they had a life of their own. He was red-faced like someone who might be choking on a stone from the cherry in his mouth.

  ‘It’s because of you that the Chief Constable has resigned, isn’t it?’

  ‘I think you’ll find he was the architect of his own . . .’

  ‘Don’t interrupt me, Inspector. I leave you on your own for two days, only to find upon my return that you’re the last man standing. There are more casualties here than in an episode of Game of Thrones.’

  Game of Thrones! He’d never heard of, or played, the game. The king is dead, long live the king. He was wondering why Henn didn’t have a suntan. The man had been down south – to Brighton of all places. Everybody who went to Brighton came back with a suntan, didn’t they? If that was a fact of life, why didn’t Henn have a suntan?

  ‘You told me, in no uncertain terms, that the Alicia Glover case was finished, that you had no interest in it, that . . .’ He poked his finger at the email. ‘And what’s this about a biker gang calling themselves the Dark Warriors? Are you their leader? Is this some new kind of vigilante justice you’re using to solve your cases now? Oh, but wait! The Alicia Glover case wasn’t your case, was it? In fact, it wasn’t even a Greater Manchester case. I’m having flashes of it belonging to Blackpool, which is Lancashire Constabulary.’ He sat down and stared at Dark. ‘I’m lost for words.’

  ‘That’s not been my impression so far. You should be glad y
ou were in Brighton. If you’d been here, I might have been recording you asking me to sweep the case under the rug, and then I might be trying out your chair for size this morning.’

  ‘Do you think I would have done that, Dark?’

  ‘I guess we’ll never now, will we? What I do know, is that the Chief Constable asked me to do exactly that.’

  ‘There’ll be wide-ranging consequences.’

  ‘So everybody keeps telling me.’

  ‘And what’s this about Assistant Chief Constable Angela Vickers from Buxton?’

  ‘She’s a dirty copper. Misconduct in public office I believe they call it now. As I explained in my email, she accepted a bribe of two hundred and fifty thousand pounds in July, 2002, from Jeffrey Higham to call a murder a joyrider accident, and the proof of that is the anonymous tip I received about her second identity and bank accounts in the name of Nina Courtney.’

  ‘DCI Crowther from the Fraud Squad has already been onto me about the names in that payment book.’

  ‘Good. I expect to hear of further resignations over the coming weeks.’

  ‘It will undermine the establishment, Dark.’

  ‘Which has been built on greed and deceit.’

  ‘God almighty! It’s like a house of cards. And that’s another thing, there’s no way of proving that any of the bodies identified in the receipt book are buried where it says they are without digging up most of the north-west.’

  ‘That’s not my problem. I’m sure the fast-tracked, over-educated and over-promoted people under your command in the SCD proper can come up with a solution to that conundrum.’

  ‘But this is all smoke and mirrors to hide the fact that you haven’t solved the murder you were meant to be solving, isn’t it, Dark? It’s been a week now. How many suspects do you have?’

  ‘As I’ve explained to both you and your much more attractive stand-in – Chief Superintendent Isherwood, I followed the leads I had. Those leads happened to take me, not only to other people’s unsolved cases, but to a cesspit of bribery, corruption and murder on a massive scale, so I hardly think you can point any fingers at my lack of progress.’