The Autumn Tree (DI Bliss Book 8)

by Tony J. Forder

  Bliss was astonished. The Met did not let go of investigations lightly, especially those involving murder. He was about to probe further when he was suddenly struck by a terrible realisation.

  ‘Hold on a moment,’ he said. ‘I think we skipped over something pretty important. Your records tell you our man takes a new victim within a day of murdering and dumping the last, correct?’

  Hammersley nodded. ‘That’s right.’

  Bliss felt his shoulders slump. When he spoke, his voice was low and troubled. ‘In that case, if he’s back and following his previous routine, he may well have already struck again.’

  Nineteen

  Nineteen-year-old Abbi Turner had considered herself streetwise until the man calling himself Des Knowles entered her life. He’d played her so easily that not only had she been blind to his intentions, but she would never have guessed it of him in a million years. An apparently shy, timid soul, he came across as a decent human being who lacked the confidence to approach women naturally. In retrospect, his had to be one of the oldest tricks imaginable. And still she had fallen for it.

  As an upscale escort working for a downscale agency, Abbi was never entirely sure how her organised dates were going to turn out. Some men hired her because they were genuinely lonely and wanted a companion for the evening; others paid for a dating experience they knew would ultimately end up in a bedroom if they were willing to ask and pay extra. The majority skipped everything but the sex.

  Des Knowles had taken her through each stage, cautious at first but seeming to grow in confidence every time they met. Initially anxious and edgy, their first encounter lasted less than an hour at a club before nerves got the better of him. Their second ended in a similar fashion, though it lasted twice as long. Finally they reached the stage where he brought up the issue of sex and paid her the extra in cash, after which they ended up in bed. He was surprisingly skilled and attentive to her needs, and although it had been a long time since a man had satisfied her, she had enjoyed the experience. Eventually they became comfortable enough that he would simply arrive on her doorstep and they would spend the night together without the need for a date.

  Having accepted him as a regular, Abbi spoke to Des about cutting out the middle man. Their time together would be exactly the same, she explained, only at half the cost. She recalled him expressing his discomfort, fearing they might get caught avoiding the agency fees.

  ‘I’m allowed a life of my own,’ she’d assured him; she now regretted every word. ‘That includes a sex life. They don’t need to know if money happens to change hands.’

  With some reluctance on his part that she had come to understand was a complete masquerade, this became their new arrangement. Then one evening, upon his arrival at her flat, Des appeared to be as nervous and distracted as he had been on their first date. She asked him what was wrong. At first he refused to talk about it. She asked again, and he shook his head, saying he couldn’t face discussing it. Eventually she coaxed it out of him, and he spoke as if ashamed.

  ‘I never imagined we would reach this point,’ he mumbled, wringing his hands. He still could not bring himself to look at her. ‘I’ve never spent this much time with one woman before. Never felt as relaxed with somebody the way I do with you. I think I’ve always been afraid of coming this far, you see.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Abbi had said. ‘You can say anything you like to me. You know that, Des.’

  Looking back, she could not be certain what her intention had been. She liked him. She enjoyed his company and their time together, which wasn’t always spent between the sheets. But even now she couldn’t honestly describe her motivation.

  ‘You’re going to think me dirty. Repugnant,’ he said, still unable to meet her eyes.

  For a moment she said nothing, but eventually she found the right words. ‘Des, I’m going to be honest with you. I don’t spend time with you for the money. I mean, I still need to earn a living this way, but when I’m with you… I know I could do that because I want to, and I enjoy it. In fact, I’d quite like to see how that goes. It could be our new arrangement, if you like. But you have to remember that I am what I am and I do what I do.’

  ‘I understand that, Abbi. Of course I do. But I don’t think of you that way.’

  ‘Which is nice. I like that about us. But not everybody is as kind as you. Some men are harsh. Some men want things others might describe as dirty. Even repugnant. Your words, not mine. But what I’m telling you is that I’m fine with that. Nothing should be out of bounds between us, provided we’re both in agreement. If you want to take things to a whole new level, I’m game as long as it’s also something I want to be a part of.’

  She had imagined his preferences might involve scat or golden showers; those, she did find repugnant, and would have refused had he asked. But if they were of interest to him, Des made no mention of it. Instead, what he considered ‘dirty’ was merely erotic asphyxiation – at least, up to a point. Unlike most people whose tastes embraced this particular peccadillo, he had no desire to be choked, but rather to be the one carrying out the choking during the moment of climax.

  Abbi recalled her immediate response all too well: ‘For a moment I thought you were going to suggest something truly awful. Choking is fine, Des. Honestly, it gets requested more often than you might realise. Usually I’m the one with my hands around their throat, but it goes both ways. We do have to establish some ground rules first, though.’

  If she had been concentrating or at all wary, Abbi might have taken more notice of the glint in his eyes at that precise moment. But she was genuinely relieved that he didn’t want her to lie beneath him while he pissed or shat all over her. She could tell him from experience that neither was particularly pleasurable, and the scat games were disgusting beyond belief. Income was income, and those freaks paid good money to get off over her, but that stuff was something she refused to even consider unless the financial reward was substantial.

  What she thought Des wanted was to put his hands around her throat and squeeze, to stem her flow of oxygen as he came inside her. A demonstration of his dominion over her, allowing him to break free of his crippling shyness. But not if he had to pay for it, and only if she agreed to it. Despite her tender age, there were not many sexual experiences she had yet to take part in, and she had encountered many types of deviant along the way. What Des was asking of her was nothing, relatively speaking.

  Or so she had thought.

  When she came to after that first time, Abbi realised she must have been drugged. Enough to make her fully compliant, to enable him to remove her from her flat and bring her elsewhere; a narcotic sufficient to render her unconscious, leaving her with no memory of what took place from the time her eyelids grew heavy until the moment they fluttered open again.

  Returning to consciousness naked and trapped inside a room about a dozen feet square, she had no way of knowing how many days had passed since. The only furnishing was a thin mattress laid on the rough concrete floor, a duvet providing meagre covering for both warmth and modesty. The room was windowless, brick-built and solid. A wall light encased in a metal cage provided feeble illumination from a bulb dulled by a thick crust of grime. When it was not switched on, she could barely see her hands in front of her face.

  A routine, of sorts, had since been established. Every so often Des entered the room, tore the duvet from her grasp, led her outside, barefoot, along a short, narrow corridor and into some kind of caged wet room in which he hosed her down. The water was seldom warm, and often brutally cold. He gave Abbi no soap, no shampoo. He ordered her to scrub herself down from head to toe with a nylon-bristled brush which hung from a hook by the coil of hose. She was allowed no deodorant, no moisturiser, no makeup, nor even a toothbrush. Other than being allowed occasional use of the toilet facilities adjacent to the wet room, she hadn’t been permitted to go anywhere else. At no point since her capture had she seen daylight. He fed her greasy bacon rolls, washed down with milky tea. This had b
ecome her life.

  During the lowest moments of her incarceration, Abbi fought her misery for as long as she had the strength; she hoped that keeping it at bay might also keep her sane. But as time passed in fearful solitude, and her mind chipped away at already fragile defences, the fissures expanded and tears began to leak through. As swiftly as the trickle became a torrent, so the torrent turned into huge convulsing sobs, causing her bones to ache.

  Weeping forced her to confront every one of the demons clawing their way through her soul. Sure, she was clean at the moment, but the needle had already won its skirmish with her. Hardly a day went by that Abbi did not miss it, but the difference was she no longer craved the high. Her drug of choice had initially released her from a nightmare – at least, that’s how it had felt at the time. In the clean period since, she had come to realise that all she had fought to escape from was normality: a clingy sister who adored her so fiercely that she demanded too much attention, and devoted parents whose ‘savagely brutal dictatorship’ was in fact nothing more than a mother and father wanting the best both for and from their elder daughter. Hers had not been a life of beatings and abuse, yet for reasons she was unable to fathom, their love had choked the life from her, to the point where she needed to escape its clutches in order to breathe.

  What followed had been the true misery.

  Until she’d met Des Knowles, whom she had truly believed was capable of leading her back out towards the light.

  The last time he’d visited, his demeanour was very different. Since taking her and locking her away in the room, he’d barely spoken to her at all; his face had been a set mask of determination, as if he were on a mission that needed completing. This time, however, she’d seen something approaching the man she had grown to know and have feelings for. Abbi decided to have one last stab at re-establishing communication between them.

  ‘Why are you doing this to me, Des?’

  At first it seemed as if he would ignore her desperate pleas. But he looked down at her as she sat on the mattress and his face softened. ‘I need to break you,’ he told her. ‘Completely. I must make you fully compliant.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said, warm tears stinging her eyes. ‘I always did everything you wanted of me.’

  ‘Everything but the one thing I really need.’

  ‘Which is? I’ll do anything, Des. Whatever it takes. Whatever you need. All you have to do is name it.’

  He nodded. ‘I know. And that’s the problem. You’ll do it willingly, which is not how it’s supposed to be now I have you here. Because for me to make this right, I have to break your spirit. I have to make you fear me. Hate me, even.’

  ‘But why? I don’t understand.’ Abbi reached up towards him. The duvet slipped from her body, revealing her naked form in its entirety. She gave herself to him willingly.

  He slapped her hands away. ‘Of course you don’t. How could you? The truth is, I have to make you desperate, to want to do anything to escape. To do anything you can to get away from here. From me. It’s that fight, that desperate struggle, that makes it all worthwhile.’

  Abbi wept, her features strained. ‘I don’t know what you mean, Des. Please tell me. Make me understand. Why is this happening to me?’

  He leaned forward. In that instant, his eyes went cold and flat, as if all life had fled from them in a single blink. He ran his fingers through her hair and said, ‘Because next time somebody puts their hands around your throat, I need you to fear for your life. To resist them, to fight them off for real. As if your life depended on it. Because next time, it will be for real. Next time, you will be fighting for your life.’

  Twenty

  Only the Major Crimes Unit team, Detective Superintendent Fletcher, and Glen Ashton remained in the room. Hammersley and Attwood had stuck around for a further ninety minutes, discussing every facet of their own investigation and offering comments on the efforts of Cambridge and Thorpe Wood to date. By the time that stage of the meeting broke up and the two Met detectives took their leave, they were all in full agreement that everything that could have been done had been done.

  ‘What was that all about?’ Bliss said, looking around at familiar faces once more.

  ‘We got lucky, I’d say,’ Fletcher replied. ‘Though the dubious look on your face tells me you’re about to suggest otherwise, Jimmy.’

  ‘I’m sorry, ma’am, but I’m sceptical at the very least. I realise they’re short-staffed and burdened by case overload, but that’s not the Met I know. What’s more, Hammersley couldn’t have been more reluctant if he’d tried. He virtually said as much – that the decision had been taken out of his hands by somebody further up the chain. The question is: why?’

  ‘Are you implying they know something we don’t know, something they haven’t mentioned?’

  ‘I can’t put my finger on it. But the Met don’t pass off investigations that readily. And to do so by packaging up all their own case files and having two senior officers traipse up here to hand them over is unheard of in my experience.’

  ‘Perhaps they live in more enlightened times since their move, Sergeant.’

  Bliss gave a gentle snort of derision. ‘I’m sure that’s how they love to describe themselves, ma’am. Great PR. But I’m not having any of it. They were too quick and too willing. Eager, almost. But not the two men actually leading the investigation; neither of them were happy about it.’

  ‘Would you like me to call my opposite number and ask him directly?’

  ‘Do you think it would do any good? Is he likely to tell you if there’s an elephant in the room we can’t yet see?’

  Fletcher took his point. ‘If you’re right, why would they drop it in our laps?’

  ‘It’s what you do with a mess,’ Bishop offered. ‘Maybe they’ve seen their own people finding no joy working on three separate cases that are all connected. Perhaps they sent their own people to dig a bit deeper into what we have, to find out if we’ve managed to take it any further than they could. When I made the point about adding their nothing to our nothing and getting nothing, maybe that was the moment DSI Hammersley decided to hand over the poisoned chalice.’

  Fletcher closed her eyes and sucked in a deep lungful of air. She let it loose slowly and said, ‘You’re saying we’ve been had. The Met saw this case as a lemon and were happy to give it up.’

  ‘Their senior leadership, yes,’ Bliss insisted. ‘I could tell by the look in Hammersley’s eyes that he wanted his team to finish what they’d started. But I’m guessing he swallowed his pride because he was instructed to do so if we had nothing new to offer.’

  ‘Which, if you think about it, tells us a great deal,’ Chandler said. ‘We’ve had this case for five minutes compared to them. With all their resources and reputation, they have little viable evidence, no suspects, no witnesses, not a great deal of forensics. Clearly, the Met don’t see any way of bringing this case to a satisfactory conclusion without at least one more victim ending up naked in a field somewhere.’

  ‘Penny’s right,’ Bishop said, picking up on the thread. ‘We’ve been chasing a false trail. They can see that, but they’ve also seen that we have nothing more to go on than they ever did. The Met think this case is a loser that will become nothing more than a gruelling media ordeal for whoever has it.’

  ‘Which begs the question: why did it not go that way for them?’

  All faces turned to Glen Ashton, who had been sitting at the table in silence the whole time. Bliss had assumed the ERSOU man was sulking, or at least reluctant to speak up, but he recognised the significance of what was being suggested.

  ‘Glen’s not wrong,’ he said. ‘We didn’t know about these other murders. We weren’t aware there was a serial out there. There’s only one possible reason for that: the Met never admitted to it.’

  Warburton was intrigued, and shuffled in her chair. ‘How could that possibly happen?’

  ‘Their three murders were spread out between three separate boroughs ac
ross London. That gave them the opportunity to put a lid on it. There’s no way the press wouldn’t eventually have figured out something was going on, so the Met struck some kind of deal with them.’

  ‘What kind of arrangement are we talking about?’

  Shrugging, Bliss said, ‘I’m not sure, boss. Perhaps they offered the media an inducement provided they agreed not to broadcast their speculations. We’ve seen it happen in the early stages of other murder investigations in major cities. They convince the media that revealing the story will cost more lives. The press have been stung that way before, so they don’t want to become the new story, having caused further loss of life.’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ Fletcher said, rapping a hand on the table and bringing the meeting back to order. ‘Whatever their intentions, the Met have left us to run with this. What I’d like to know are your ideas for taking the investigation in the right direction.’

  Once again it was Bishop who stepped up; Bliss was proud of his colleague and friend. ‘Ma’am, we are confident that both the jogger who discovered Majidah Rassooli’s body and the dog walker who saw him doing so are not involved. We could do our own interviews, but I’m happy with the statements provided by Cambridge.’

  ‘And the post mortem results?’

  ‘Provided us with nothing we didn’t already have, other than confirming how she died and when. I was reading the PM report when our Met officers arrived. As we already knew, there’s evidence of our victim and the previous victims being scrubbed with some mixture of disinfectant, after which they were washed down with detergent. If our girl was raped prior to her murder, any evidence of that has been washed away. As a forensic countermeasure it’s overkill, but it’s effective. Nancy Drinkwater was unable to say either way whether Majidah had taken part in sexual activity immediately prior to her death; however, there was no tearing and no bruising suggestive of rape.’