Dead Girl Found

by Giles Ekins

  The breakthrough came when Grace ordered further house to house questioning of Robinson’s neighbours to obtain more background on the family. His mother had died some years ago, he was an only child and had never been known to have had a girlfriend. Eventually it was revealed that his father rented an allotment from the council on Bell Hagg Road, even though he now rarely used it due to his arthritis, but Malcolm was a keen gardener. Subsequently, Ellen Gregory’s panties and a length of green nylon rope were recovered from a garden shed on the allotment.

  Confronted with the evidence, Malcolm Robinson broke down and confessed. He had been running in the park and had seen Ellen Gregory running ahead of him along the riverbank path. He ran up to join her and tried to engage her in conversation, asking if if she wanted to go for a drink but she told him ‘to piss off, you rancid little wanker.’

  He had an old piece of green nylon rope in his hand, he had found it lying around and intended to put it in a rubbish bin. Enraged by the casually ‘rude dismissal, after all she was only a whore,’ he had sprinted up after her, looped the rope around her neck and dragged her off the path. He had not, he claimed, intended to kill her, only remonstrate with her for calling him a ‘fucking little wanker’. It only after discovering she was dead; did he pick her up and carry her into the woods and dump her body.

  He refused to explain why he had taken her panties.

  His plea of guilty to manslaughter was rejected (the removal and theft of Ellen’s panties played heavily with the jury) and he was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of 22 years.

  Grace received a lot of praise and acclaim for the investigation and believed this success had led to the invitation to form part of ACC Vickers delegation to the Police Federation Conference.

  Bookings, she was told, had been made at the Chrysanthemum Hotel, close to the Birmingham ICC.

  Vickers, Chesworth, Halliday and Crawford would travel down in Vickers official Jaguar, with Pc Jennings, the ACC’s regular assigned driver, Grace would make her own way in the Alfa Romeo.

  The Chrysanthemum, she learned on Google, was a 4* boutique hotel in the city centre, recently developed by a Chinese hotel group headquartered in Hong Kong. The hotel had 178 rooms and suites, a spa, restaurants, bars, coffee shops and shops selling costly designer goods, all well beyond her price range.

  The hotel had been booked for 3 nights, the night before the convention opening and for the two days of the convention.

  Leaving South Yorkshire Police HQ in the late afternoon, Grace quickly got onto the M1 at Junction 33 and drove south towards Birmingham, her Sat-nav optimistically telling her that the 86 mile journey would take 1 hr 36 minutes.

  If only.

  Interminable roadworks, long stretches of motorway restricted to 50 mph and traffic frequently reduced to a crawl, meant it took more than 3 hours before she left the M6 and followed the signs to the City Centre. The Sat-nav then directed her to the Chrysanthemum Hotel, a short walk from the International Conference Centre on Broad Street.

  She pared her car in the hotel car park and made her way to reception and checked in. She was looking forward to a long soak in a hot bath. The room was tastefully decorated in muted pale brown, with a soft looking double bed, desk and chair, low brown velvet sofa and coffee table. ‘Very plush and expensive,’ she thought, glad that she was not picking up the bill.

  She was concerned to note however, that there was a connecting door to the adjoining room and tried the handle to make sure in was locked. It was but she still had slight unease, remembering an incident a few years ago at a hotel in Paphos in Cyprus. That room also had a connecting door to an adjacent room

  Grace and her partner Gary were staying there on their first holiday overseas together. On the last night of the holiday, they ate a superb meal at their favourite restaurant, a taverna a short walk from the hotel, preferring the authentic Cypriot food to the bland and anodyne set meals at the hotel.

  It was the fifth time they had eaten there and Costas, the proprietor, now greeted them as old friends and valued customers. They ordered a bowl of olives and hummus with bread and a Keo beer each to start, followed by grilled pork skewers known as ‘souvlaki, sheftalia, (grilled halloumi cheese) and loukaniko (pork sausage), which they wrapped in thin flatbread with more hummus, all washed down with a bottle of Arsinge 62 dry white wine.

  On learning it was the last time they would eat there, Costas offered ‘his friends’ a ‘special’ after dinner drink, ’zivania,’ a strong colourless grape liqueur distilled only in Cyprus. When commercially distilled, zivania is 45%, but the one Costas offered Grace and Gary had been illegally distilled in a village up in the Troodos Mountains and was much, much stronger. ‘This is the real zivania’ Costas boasted, ‘the best always comes from the villages.’

  Grace could only manage a small glass, tossed back in one swallow, to her it tasted like rocket fuel and had the same effect on her throat and stomach, she felt that the spirit had burnt such a hole in her stomach that her intestines might fall out. However, Gary drank at least 4 or 5 glasses and was very unsteady as they walked arm in arm, back to their room where Gary almost immediately passed out. Grace put him to bed., washed, got into bed and turned out the light.

  What it was that woke her, Grace could not say, but as she opened her eyes, she could see a figure creeping around the room. He had a shaded pen-light in his mouth as he opened her handbag and started to rummage around inside.

  She screamed as loudly as she could, ‘Gary, Gary, there’s somebody in the room’ and leapt from the bed to apprehend the intruder, unmindful of the fact that she was naked. The startled robber, dropped his penlight and sped across the room and through the opened connecting door, slammed it behind him and Grace heard the lock snib turning followed by the second door in the adjoining room slamming to and the turn of a lock.

  She snatched up a hotel dressing gown and jerked open the room door, just in time to see an indistinct figure run into the emergency stairs, the fire-door closing sharply behind him.

  ‘Fuck!’ she swore and made her way back into their room, where a groggy eyed Gary was sitting up in bed. ‘What’s all that noise, and screaming?’ he asked,

  ‘There was somebody in the room, going through my handbag.’

  ‘What, somebody in the room?’ Gary asked incredulously and looked about him as if expecting to see the intruder still there. ‘Don’t be silly,’ he said at last, ‘How could there be somebody here?’

  ‘Don’t call me silly, Gary. I saw him. I saw him. He came in and went out again through that connecting door. There!’ Grace answered angrily, pointing at the door as if Gary had never seen it before.

  Unsteadily, he was still very drunk and developing a hangover, Gary staggered from the bed and stumbled over to the connecting door and tried the handle.

  ‘See? It’s locked, you must have dreamt it.’

  ‘I did not fucking dream it! I saw him going through my bag. Look, he’s dropped his torch and when I confronted him, he ran back through that door and locked it behind him. When I opened our door, I just caught a glimpse of him as he escaped down the stairs. Now, we’ve got to inform the hotel and call the police.’

  ‘OK, OK, OK, I believe you, but let’s just think about this for s minute?’

  ‘What is there to think about.?’

  ‘If we involve the police, we’ll be stuck here for days, even weeks whilst they take statements, and yet more statements, ask how much we’ve had to drink, all that. The local cops are most likely complicit in this, the hotel certainly is and probably pay the local boys to turn a blind eye. We’ve no proof.’

  ‘There’s the penlight.’

  ‘The hotel will just claim it belongs to a cleaner who lost it a week ago or it must have been left by a previous customer and swear blind that nobody has access to the keys to the connecting door, you know how it is?’

  ‘There’s DNA on the torch.’

  ‘I guar
antee if we give it to the local police for DNA testing it will get lost on the way to the lab. It’s just not worth their while,’

  Gradually, as Gary persisted and strengthened his arguments, Grace finally conceded that the fuss and bother of a complaint to the police would be fruitless and a waste of time. Nothing had been stolen, and as Gary pointed out, they were simply ‘rich’ tourists who were meant to be ripped off by the locals. So they went back to bed, but not before Grace had wedged a chair under the door handle. even so she was still annoyed, unable to sleep, especially with Gary snoring heavily again.

  Grace was mindful of that Cypriot experience when she looked at the connecting door in her room at the Chrysanthemum and almost wedged a chair under this door before deciding against it, after all, this was a room in a new showcase hotel in England, not a Cypriot tourist trap.

  It was a decision she was to regret.

  Thirty-Nine

  She did not expect to see Vickers and the others until morning, probably at breakfast, and she was contemplating the longed-for bath and then ordering something to eat from room service, when the house phone rang.

  It was Vickers. ‘Ah Grace, you’ve arrived, good. We’re all meeting in the rooftop bar in ten minutes, see you there. OK?’ and he put the phone down.

  ‘Bugger!’ The last thing she needed was a heavy drinks session, but she supposed they would be discussing the conference, the reason for being there. She quickly touched up her make-up, applied fresh lip-gloss, fluffed up her hair and made her way to the bar on the top floor, resolving to have only one glass of wine. Or maybe two.

  She found Vickers, Chesworth, Halliday and Crawford seated in plush white leather armchairs in a semi-circular booth by panoramic windows offering views of the shimmering lights of the city. Across the room, a teppanyaki table was in full flame as a chef juggled with his knives and then chopped at the rice, noodles, entaki mushrooms and slivers of Kobe steak sizzling on the griddle.

  None of the four men got up to greet Grace as Vickers waved her to an empty chair next to him. After asking what she wanted to drink. he then ignored her as the men carried on with a heated discussion about the derby game between the Sheffield football teams, United, the Blades supported by Chesworth and Halliday, whilst Vickers and Crawford were supporters of Sheffield Wednesday. the Owls.

  United, it seemed had won by virtue of a disputed penalty, at least disputed by the Owls supporters. They then went on to argue the promotion prospects of both teams, but as Grace had little interest in football, and none at all about the prospects of either team gaining promotion, she sat there feeling distinctly uncomfortable; an alien intruder into the macho world of football arguments.

  When her drink, a large glass of Chardonnay arrived (she had requested a small one) it came with another round of single malt whisky for the men. Then a large platter of sushi, sashimi, gyozas and other oriental delicacies was delivered and placed on the table between them. The four men simultaneously reached for chop-sticks and began attacking the food, the chop sticks darting into the food like the beaks of storks attacking a shoal of small fish in the shallows.

  It was an undignified feeding frenzy, as if the men had not eaten for days but Grace had gathered that they had eaten earlier on their arrival from Sheffield.. And had also been drinking ever since.

  ‘Here, Grace, tuck in.’ said Vickers, handing her a pair of chopsticks, and suddenly feeling hungry, she lifted salmon nigri, tuna sashimi, nori seaweed-wrapped maki and some kakinohazuki together with a small bowl of soy sauce and a dab of wasabi paste onto her plate.

  It was delicious food, and she realised that it was the first Japanese food she had eaten since Gary died. She had to hold back a tear as she remembered meals they had eaten together in various Japanese and Oriental restaurants in and around Sheffield.

  Another round of drinks arrived, including another glass of Chardonnay for Grace, even though she had not ordered it or indeed drunk the first glass.

  Once the food was finished and the empty platter and other detritus had been cleared away, Grace tried to steer to conversation around to the conference, but Vickers would have none it. ‘That’s for tomorrow Grace, enjoy tonight.’ And he patted her lightly on her knee, which she chose to ignore.

  The conversation now shifted to England’s chances in the next World Cup with the consensus being ‘not much’ and then they loudly discussed the absurdity of hosting the 2022 tournament in Qatar, ‘it’s a fucking desert’, exclaimed Crawford,’ there’s nothing there but camel shit and it’s so hot if you go outside during the day you boil your brains out.’

  ‘They bought it, didn’t they, the rag-heads, it’s obvious, lots of fat brown envelopes being passed around FIFA headquarters and payments into off-shore accounts. Everybody knows the FIFA guys were bribed, don’t they?’ offered Chesworth in a loud voice, the whisky having taken hold.

  ‘Leastwise the women there know their place, six paces behind their men, where they ought to be’ Halliday chortled.

  ‘If you’ll excuse me. sir,’ Grace said at that point, ‘I’m tired, it’s been a long day.’

  ‘Of course,’ answered Vickers. ‘We’ll see you later,’ and patted her knee again as she made to get up from her chair, leaving most of her second glass of wine undrunk. She waved to the others as she walked away, followed by a chorus of ‘G’night, Grace’ and ‘Have a good one.’

  Back in her room, Grace laid out her cream silk pyjamas, a Christmas present from Gary. She then ran a bath, pouring in all the complimentary bottle of luxury bath foam so that the bathwater was completely covered in sweet-smelling bubbles.

  Opening the mini-bar, she took out to a miniature Bombay Sapphire gin and a bottle of Fever Tree tonic, sliced a lemon and took her drink into the bathroom, putting it within easy reach of the bath.

  She undressed, hung up her clothes in the wardrobe and put the underwear she had been wearing into a polythene bag beside her suitcase. She wiped off her makeup, washed her face, tied up her hair with a ribbon. She slid into the bath, luxuriating in the caress of hot water and the misty haze of scented steam and bubbles as she sipped her soothing G&T.

  Afterwards. she dried herself on the thick soft towel, she cleaned her teeth and was about to walk naked back into her room when a sudden premonition struck her. Had she heard something? She could not say what had alerted her senses, even so she took down a bathrobe, tied it securely about her waist and slowly opened the bathroom door.

  ACC Martin Vickers was sat in the armchair and smiled up at her a she walked slowly into the room, her heart beating violently. She should have seen this coming she berated herself; the pats on her knee, ‘we’ll see you later’, he’d said, the connecting door and the fact that she was the only women invited. The invite had nothing to do with her successful investigation of the Ellen Gregory murder, it was so Vickers could try to get her into bed.

  She took a deep breath. ‘I think you must have come to the wrong room, sir.’

  ‘No, not at all, Grace, I am exactly where I should be.’

  ‘I don’t think so, sir.’

  ‘Don’t play so coy, Grace. You must have known full well what this is all about, why else did you come, otherwise?’

  ‘I came for the conference. Nothing more. And certainly not this.’

  ‘Methinks, the lady doth protest too much.’ Vickers said, misquoting Hamlet’s mother, a hard edge creeping into his voice. He did not object to a bit of resistance, relished it almost, it added spice to the chase, but it made no difference to the outcome. Grace Swan had accepted his invite, and so must pay the price for this lavish, very expensive hotel room, (not that he was paying for it personally of course).

  ‘Although I must say I expected something a bit sexier than this,’ he added, pointing at the pyjamas laid out on the bed, ‘I had quite visualised you in a black shortie nightdress.’

  ‘I must ask you to leave, sir.’

  ‘I don’t think so, Grace. Here I am and here I stay. At leas
t until, well you know.’

  ‘This is sexual harassment, sir, I could report you.’

  ‘And who would believe you? There are three senior officers who will swear that it was you who came onto me and invited me to come to your room. Who will anybody believe, eh, an ACC, a Chief Super and two Supers, or a lowly DI?

  ‘It’s an abuse of authority, that what it is.’

  ‘What is the point of having authority if you can’t abuse it, eh? This is the real world, Grace,’ he said getting up from his chair. ‘You’re a single woman, I’m a man and here we are in this lovely room, so why all the fuss.’

  ‘A man? A married man you mean/’

  ‘Ah, yes, but you see Grace I have this simple philosophy; when at home I do not roam, but when I’m away, I sometimes stray’.

  ‘And if I tell your wife?’

  ‘Helen would not believe you, but even if she did believe you, she would turn a blind eye to it. You see, Helen very much enjoys the…cachet of being the wife of an ACC. And not to mention the money. Helen very much does love the money, so she will do nothing to jeopardise the money and status by divorcing me. So, as long as I don’t shit on my own doorstep and cause her embarrassment, she accepts things as they are,’

  ‘You bastard.’

  ‘Undoubtedly, but that changes nothing.’

  ‘I am not going to sleep with you, Mr Vickers. Not under any circumstances.’

  ‘You still don’t understand do you, Grace? It is not just about sex, enjoyable no doubt that would be, but it’s…how can I put this, it’s about being part of a team. A collective endeavour that operates to the advancement of all. We help each other. I can help you up the ladder. You are a good detective with sound instincts but without my help you will find it difficult, if not impossible, to rise any further. You see. I can block advancement as well as promote it. It’s up to you.’

  ‘If the price of promotion is having to sleep with the likes of you, no thanks. And what happens tomorrow night, those very senior officers you mention, are they supposed to get their turn with me as well, is that it?’, Grace answered angrily and then jerked back as Vickers made a sudden move towards her.