Phobia

by Dean Crawford

  ‘I agree, in principal,’ Harper said. ‘But it could also be the result of drugs, alcohol, anything.’

  ‘There was too much to do. The perpetrator had to break into the church, get the body up into the steeple, strap scaffolding planks together, secure them, hang the victim and then get out, all without being seen.’

  Harper inclined her head.

  ‘True, but the square mile doesn’t have a large residential population. That means that a suspect could have picked the location purposefully, and maybe even the means of displaying the victim: CCTV cameras point down to the streets, not up to the tops of buildings, so even if you capture them on the footage we’re not necessarily going to capture evidence of a crime.’

  ‘Both backs my point and opposes it,’ Honor said. ‘The weather provided further cover against the perpetrator’s work being discovered before he was ready – nobody would have seen the body hanging there, the fog was thick overnight. It’s only this morning that it showed up, so with the lack of witnesses and poor visibility he could theoretically have taken his time. But it seems unlikely that he would have come up with something so complex, at least not if we’re considering an opportunistic killer.’

  Harper nodded, and Honor could see the unease in her eyes.

  ‘I don’t like the sound of it,’ the DI said after a moment’s thought. ‘Chances of another killing, that it’s not random?’

  ‘We need to talk to the wife, Katarina,’ Honor said, ‘but right now there’s nothing to suggest anything obvious in their lives that would warrant Sebastian being hanged in the middle of the square mile. They seem like an ordinary couple, although we know that could be veiling trouble in their personal lives.’

  Honor blushed at her own words, and averted her eyes from Harper’s. Suddenly her chain of thought was broken and an old pain welled inside her, a dark chasm of grief that threatened to crush her soul from within.

  ‘Question the wife as soon as you can,’ Harper said, noting Honor’s sudden silence but choosing to ignore it. ‘We need to figure out why Sebastian was put up there. When’s the autopsy due?’

  ‘By tomorrow,’ Honor replied. ‘Pathologist will run toxicology as a priority to see if the victim was under the influence at the time. Given that we know Sebastian Dukas was terrified of heights, it’s quite possible.’

  ‘Terrified of heights?’

  ‘The wife told us that Sebastian couldn’t have hanged himself, that he was sufficiently scared of heights that he wouldn’t have been able to get up there at all.’

  Harper leaned back in her chair for a moment. Honor silently stomped down on the blackness still swelling within, battered it back into some deep neural tract where it would no longer bother her. Denial. Distraction. She managed to get her eyes up to meet Harper’s, and the DI nodded.

  ‘Okay, I’ll assign the case to your team. We’ll have a meeting with the Borough Commander at sixteen hundred to update him, so you’ll all need to be there with everything you know at that time. Sebastian Dukas didn’t float up onto that steeple on his own, so use the CCTV to establish a timeline and we’ll go from there. I’ll send the HAT car to MIT 4 and have them on call for whatever else comes in. Right now, I’ve got a meeting with the DCI and a capacity meeting right after that: we’re woefully short of hands right now, and the MET’s suffering just the same. Can you handle this with Green and Raaya for the moment?’

  ‘No problem,’ Honor lied. ‘What about Hansen, he’s got a stick shoved where the sun doesn’t shine about me coming back.’

  ‘Hansen’s back to MIT 4,’ Harper replied, unconcerned. ‘We’ll catch up at sixteen hundred.’

  Honor headed out of the office, cursing herself for letting her wayward emotions fly out of control, even for a moment. Samir and Danny were at their respective desks but joined her in her office as soon as they saw her.

  ‘Team of three?’ Danny asked after she filled them in. ‘It’ll take us days to sift through all the CCTV.’

  Honor focused on the crime scene and pushed it to the front of her thoughts. ‘Assuming the suspect used the fog to conceal his movements, we can work backwards from oh–seven–thirty this morning. He won’t have positioned the body before the fog descended, which was probably sometime in the early hours if the news I saw this morning was correct?’

  ‘Came in off the water,’ Samir confirmed. ‘Probably one, maybe two this morning.’ ‘Okay, so let’s go from midnight last night until the time of the call this morning, that’s seven hours or so of footage, probably six or maybe eight cameras to start with.’

  She heard their whispered oaths as they dispersed back to their desks. Honor knew that they were in for a marathon viewing session as she started up the PC at her desk and ordered her thoughts: the frontline investigation toolkit. She sat at the keyboard, but her guts churned with nausea as she thought of how she’d almost cracked right in front of the DI. She’d only been back a few hours and her nerves were already shredded. She couldn’t bear to think about the possibility of media questioning, the barrage of the public’s right to know, the crushing sense of failure if they could not apprehend a suspect. Stress was part and parcel of any detective’s life, and she had shouldered that stress successfully, deftly even, for years, right up until…

  Nobody is looking at you. Nobody cares. Focus on you, and you alone.

  She breathed deeply. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Get a grip and get to work.

  The crime scene had been secured, and CAD updated with all attending officers, with the EAB updated to contain anything that might later be used as evidence, including Sebastian Dukas’s details as found on his belongings. The fact that he was still in possession of his wallet, money, keys and mobile phone ruled out theft as a proximal cause. ICEFLO camera images of the scene were put into a MG11 document and CRIS updated, along with her encounter with Katarina Dukas at the crime scene. The task was laborious, but absolutely essential in recording every tiny detail of the crime scene, to later be referenced when presenting to the Crown Prosecution Service. Honor wasn’t ready to start sifting through CCTV when she knew that Katarina Dukas might be able to reveal further information about her husband’s whereabouts, so as soon as she had updated CRIS she headed down to the custody suite.

  Katarina Dukas was sitting in a small but tastefully decorated suite, strategically positioned as far away from the “bin” as possible, so that grieving families were not disturbed by cries of protest from the recently arrested as they were processed. Alongside her was the Family Liaison Officer, in this case Officer Charlotte Hammond, a former dental assistant who had joined up four years’ previously and was a familiar face around the borough. A fearless beat officer, Hammond looked up as Honor entered the room. Hammond offered Honor the tiniest of winks and nods that Katarina could not see: you’re good to talk to her, but go easy.

  ‘Katarina,’ Honor said as she sat down on an armchair opposite the bereaved wife. ‘On behalf of us all, I’m so sorry for your loss.’

  Katarina nodded through a stream of silent tears, dark eyes still smudged with mascara that now traced the lines of her pain. She did not speak, merely clutched tissues in one tightly balled hand, enveloped in catatonic misery.

  ‘I need to ask you some questions,’ Honor said gently, ‘to help us with our investigation.’

  Again, Katarina nodded but said nothing.

  ‘When did you last see your husband?’

  Katarina’s voice was meek in reply, a far cry from her outrage outside the church. ‘Yesterday afternoon,’ she whispered. ‘He finished work and met me briefly for coffee, then headed off to a pub to meet with some friends.’

  Honor eased out her notebook and scribbled quickly. ‘Do you know which pub?’ ‘All Bar One,’ she said, ‘Liverpool Street.’

  ‘Okay, and that was your last contact with Sebastian?’

  Katarina nodded, but then she shook her head. ‘No, he texted me at about nine o’clock, said he’d be later than planned.’


  ‘Okay, did he say what time he’d be home?’

  ‘No,’ Katarina replied, ‘but he’s never home later than about eleven during the week, because of work. Seb isn’t a big drinker.’

  Honor made a mental note of that. ‘Why was he out? Did he go out much during the week?’

  ‘Not often, no. It was a leaving do for one of the staff, just a few drinks. Seb told me that about eight of them were going. I normally go to bed about nine in the evening, so Seb came to meet me for coffee after work so that we’d see each other for a bit.’ She smiled. ‘He likes doing things like that.’

  Denial. The reality of her husband’s death had not hit Katarina yet. A few more hours and suddenly it would knock her to the floor. A few days or weeks later would come the anger, the rage. Honor kept her voice gentle, matching Katarina’s timbre as she sat with one leg over the other, crossed toward Katarina in a subtle gesture of acceptance, a simple psychological trick to engender trust in a stranger.

  ‘So, the drinks went on for longer than planned. How did Seb normally get home?’ ‘He walked,’ Katarina replied. ‘He likes walking.’

  Honor reckoned that Seb’s walk home would not have taken more than maybe thirty minutes, down Liverpool Street, south across London Bridge and into Southwark, Vauxhall and then Clapham. A fair stride, but nothing to a healthy thirty–two–year old.

  ‘Any chance that he could have been drunk?’

  ‘No,’ Katarina said. ‘Tipsy, yes, but never drunk. He hates hangovers with a passion. Two pints, maybe a coke or something between them. I’ve never seen him drunk in ten years together, and we’ve had some big nights out.’

  Honor nodded as she wrote the details down. A two–pint man could easily be drunk on four if they lost track of what they’d had.

  ‘Were there any issues that you know of, no matter how small, that might lead Sebastian to take his own life in this way, or be the victim of a crime of any kind?’

  Katarina’s dark, smudged eyes lifted to look into Honor’s. ‘Crime?’ Honor chose her words with care.

  ‘It’s possible that Sebastian took his own life, but it’s also possible that he was a victim of a homicide. That’s what we’re trying to work out, so anything at all that you can tell us might help us to understand what happened to your husband last night, and get you the answers you need.’

  Katarina shook her head vigorously.

  ‘There’s nothing,’ she insisted. ‘Seb has a good job, we’re happy…’

  Katarina’s grief swelled up inside her, her body crouching over the crushing blows as the realisation started to dawn on her that their family was going to be one short for all time. Honor felt her guts twist as she witnessed a woman’s dreams being forcefully ripped from her forever, saw Charlotte’s arm squeeze Katarina’s shoulders.

  Katarina somehow got a hold of herself, eyes wide and imploring. ‘You think that somebody murdered Sebastian?’

  There it was. The moment, the threshold of altered awareness, that life was now different than it had been yesterday, irreparably damaged for all time. Honor knew that pain, felt it scald like acid through her veins with every beat of her heart, and she couldn’t bring herself to lie to this poor woman any longer.

  ‘We believe so,’ she replied.

  Katarina stared without seeing, eyes as black as night, her features twisted with agony as she processed the knowledge that her husband had not taken himself from her, had not been the victim of some tragic accident. Someone else had taken him, someone out there who was still alive. Katarina’s voice surged from wrenched vocal cords to fill the room.

  ‘He hated heights,’ she repeated between sobbed breaths. ‘He would never have willingly climbed that church. Never!’

  Katarina’s words trailed off and Honor could bear it no longer. She briefly took and squeezed Katarina’s hand, then stood and shot Charlotte an urgent look before she turned and left the room.

  The air outside the room seemed cold as she closed the door behind her. A deep breath escaped like a released prisoner from her chest as she leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes for a moment.

  ‘You okay?’

  A passing uniformed constable hesitated alongside her. She nodded. ‘This shit never gets easy.’

  The officer glanced at the suite, knew instantly to what she was referring. ‘Keep your chin up.’

  The constable went on her way. Honor waited for a moment longer, wondering why the hell she’d returned to work so soon. Beside her, the suite door opened and she heard Charlotte telling Katarina she’d be right back before she closed the door behind her.

  ‘Anything?’ Honor asked.

  ‘Nothing more than what you have,’ Charlotte replied. ‘Same story, no deviation in detail. She’s off the planet. If it’s an act and she’s covering, she’s got an Oscar with her name on it.’

  Honor nodded. Pretty much the same conclusion she’d reached.

  ‘Can you get an alibi from her? We’ll check it out from there, and come back with a time of death once the pathologist has conducted the autopsy.’

  ‘Leave it with me. If she alibis out, I’ll call you.’

  3

  The clock on Honor’s office wall told her it was already quarter past one in the afternoon, and she hadn’t eaten a thing yet. Her office, a rare luxury for a sergeant in a modern police force, looked out onto a modern glass and metal office block that towered over Bishopsgate, the windows reflecting the sunlight now peeking through the mist dispersing against the blue sky over the city. Just south of the station was a conveniently placed KFC, the junk–cuisine of choice for City detectives swamped with too much work to even think about eating healthily. Traffic passed by several floors below on the A10, clattering over a loose manhole cover as they headed south toward Leadenhall and the Thames.

  Right now, her MIT had nearly thirty ongoing cases that had spilled over from the MET, with just three detectives to handle them all. Honor was in the process of reviewing the case of Ali–Jahim Mohammad, a twenty–nine–year old whose trial at the Old Bailey the previous week had resulted in a nineteen–year sentence for the murder of a gang rival, who had been stabbed in the neck during an altercation near Tower Hill. There was also the disappearance of seventeen–year–old Tamara Hicks, a vulnerable girl who had last been seen walking alone near Aldgate a month before. The MET were understaffed and overwhelmed with cases, and had called in City of London detectives to help solve the disappearance, so far to no avail. Seven more cases, two of them homicides, were on her desk, all of which had been handed over to her the previous week during a meeting with DCI Mitchell. The briefing had been exhaustingly comprehensive, four hours long, and Honor had returned home to enjoy her first sleepless night in four months.

  Danny Green leaned around the edge of her office door.

  ‘Sebastian Dukas’s autopsy’s been moved up due to paperwork issues with an unidentified male found near Spitalfields, thought to be a homeless man who perished overnight. He’s not thought to have died under suspicious circumstances, so Sebastian’s next on the list. We should get a preliminary report by this evening and toxicology by the morning if we’re lucky.’

  ‘Thanks, Danny.’

  Honor walked out of her office and made her way to Samir’s desk, where she found him trawling through hours of CCTV footage from sites east of St Magnus the Martyr’s church.

  ‘Don’t check anything before about 9pm last night,’ she informed him. ‘The wife says that Sebastian texted her from All Bar One over in Liverpool Street at about that time, so he was still alive. I’ll update CRIS with her information.’

  Samir grinned with delight as he began clicking folders on his screen and archiving them.

  ‘Great,’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t we be tracking his movements prior to the bar to see if he was being followed or anything?’

  Samir might be new, but he was eager and had good ideas to put forward.

  ‘We’ll hold on to all the footage we have,’ s
he replied. ‘That way, if the investigation requires it, we can backtrack and see what was happening to Sebastian when he left work, when he arrived, that sort of thing. Right now, we’ll get the bar’s CCTV and review it from 9pm onwards because that’s where the action is most likely to be.’

  Samir nodded, but kept watching her. ‘Are you okay?’ ‘What?’

  ‘After you saw the DI, you seemed a bit upset.’ Honor swallowed thickly.

  ‘Murders get to us that way,’ she said quickly, not lying but not exactly revealing the truth either. ‘You’ll see. There’s only so many times you can watch a family member’s grief and not be moved by it. If it doesn’t happen to you, you’re a psychopath and we’ll probably end up arresting you.’

  ‘Which I’ll enjoy immensely,’ DC Hansen chirped from his desk, further down the office. ‘Dummy recruit joins police and gets himself arrested.’

  ‘You’ll have to catch me first.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound too hard,’ Danny replied, leaning back in his chair and twirling a pen in his fingers. ‘That degree in electronics will come in real handy when I’m chasing your arse through the city, mate.’

  ‘Are you covering the west, or just here to provoke?’ Honor demanded.

  ‘Running as we speak,’ Danny replied with a casual gesture to his screen, his seat swaying back and forth as he kept one eye on the footage. ‘Nothin’ of note yet.’

  Danny’s desk was overflowing with case files, but it was also home to scattered pictures of his family perched between the teetering piles, a touching display of affection amid the public record of pain and grief. Danny had divorced from his wife two years previously, but had two young daughters to show for the marriage.

  Honor headed back to her office and sat down in front of the screen. She logged into her user account and again updated CRIS with Katarina’s new information before taking a look at what CCTV footage she had to review. She had folders containing video files from Monument Street, the same route she’d taken herself that morning to the crime scene. Four cameras had been in operation, and a phone call from Danny earlier that morning had secured footage from all of them, each looking in various directions. With Samir and Danny covering Lower Thames Street, they had all approaches covered but for London Bridge itself and a public walkway that passed beneath it on the north shore of the Thames, which allowed access to the church from the south through a small alleyway and courtyard.