The Autumn Tree (DI Bliss Book 8)

by Tony J. Forder

  ‘I don’t know what you want! I don’t know what this is about. Honestly!’

  Bliss hung a fist before the man’s startled eyes, extending a finger to point. ‘If you make me ask again, Des, I’m going to fetch a carving knife from your kitchen and I’m going to open up your stomach and let your bowels slop out onto the floor.’

  Knowles clamped his lips together, recoiling in terror.

  Bliss lowered his face until the two were only inches apart. ‘Are you going to make me ask a fourth time? Disembowelment is not as quick a death as it sounds, Des. There will be plenty of time for me to ask you over and over until you finally do tell me. All while you sit there watching the steam rise up from your own innards.’

  Knowles leaned to one side and vomited copiously across the floor. He raised a hand in submission. Bliss nodded to himself and stood upright. He grabbed hold of the man and yanked him to his feet. ‘Lead the way,’ he said, using the sole of his shoe to prod Knowles towards the doorway. ‘And don’t be stupid, Des. You warn whoever’s out there with her, and I’ll take my chance finding her after I’ve ended you.’

  Wordlessly, Knowles guided him away from the mobile home, beyond the kennel cages. ‘I keep her out of those,’ he said, as if it were somehow a kindness. ‘She has her own room.’

  Bliss said nothing. He shoved Knowles further forward. A light rain had started to fall, and he thought he heard a hissing somewhere away in the distance. Vehicles approaching. Slick rubber on wet tarmac. Close by, water gurgled as it flowed steadily along the drain.

  Knowles stopped outside what looked like a brick storeroom and nodded at the door, pointing silently. Bliss snatched up a short run of heavy pipe from the debris that had been left strewn across the yard. He put a finger to his lips and gestured for Knowles to open up. The door squealed ajar, gradually revealing its dreadful contents.

  A man on his haunches leaned back against the cold brick wall behind him, chest heaving, sweat leaking from his slick naked body. His mouth hung open, strings of saliva stretching between his lips. His eyes glimmered and dimmed before rolling backwards. At the same time, he let out a low, guttural laugh. ‘That was amazing,’ he panted, shaking his head in wonder. ‘Absolutely fucking amazing.’

  Beneath him, Abbi Turner lay motionless on her back. The terribly abused young woman stared at the ceiling in a catatonic trance. At least, that was Bliss’s first thought. Only then did he notice the stillness of her pale white breasts. And unlike the cloud of moist air emerging from the mouth of her defiler, around Abbi’s face there was nothing at all.

  On realising what had become of her, Bliss swung the length of pipe without any thought for the consequences, dropping Des Knowles like a crash test dummy. Then he turned his attention to the still-delirious man on the mattress, and advanced upon him.

  Forty-Five

  Jimmy Bliss did not cry often, but he did that night. Silent tears, trickling slowly at first before flowing steadily in an unchecked stream of utter misery. The sobs soon followed, exerting pressure on his ribs as each wracking heave threatened to break him in two.

  At his own insistence, he’d remained at the scene longer than anyone else apart from the CSI team, who’d be there well into the next day. He was there when Neil Abbott, the forensic crime scene manager, declared the spare bedroom sheets to be ‘the Jackson Pollock of the bodily fluids world’. He was there when the piles of women’s clothing were found sealed in large plastic boxes in the crawl space beneath the mobile home. He was there when the scrubbing brush was discovered in the kennel compound, human tissue and blood clogged up in its stiff nylon bristles. He was there when gallons of Vetaclean fluid were uncovered and identified as the probable source of the chemical elements found on Majidah Rassooli’s body. He left only after Abbi Turner was removed from the scene in a black mortuary vehicle.

  Inside the incident room upon his return to Thorpe Wood, the mood was sombre, yet one of renewed enthusiasm for the task ahead. It made no difference to him how often he was assured the squad had done its best. Neither did he care to be reminded how close they had come to rescuing Abbi. Five minutes, five hours, or five days; to Bliss’s mind, dead was dead, and no acknowledgement of the vagaries of time and chance would ever change that simple fact. ‘Coming close’ could never be regarded as a successful outcome. The image of the young woman’s lifeless shell replaying across his mind’s eye would forever act as a reminder that between life and death there existed only failure.

  Yet in the midst of the sorrow and guilt, he somehow managed to embrace the positives with a grim determination that would serve him well in the days to come. Abbi’s killer had been caught about as red-handed as it was possible to be; the sick and twisted excuse for a human being in the shape of Des Knowles would also trouble no other women in the coming decades. The failure to save Abbi’s life overshadowed these accomplishments entirely as far as Bliss was concerned, yet they were not without merit.

  In addition, there was the overarching factor of the investigation to consider: one that would ensure it remained fully active, albeit drastically altered in terms of perception. He and his team had been wrong to initially consider Majidah Rassooli’s murder the work of her employers. He and his team, together with the Met investigation, had been wrong to label the murders of four women as the work of a serial killer. Because having seen the horror waiting for him behind that steel door, having arrested the man responsible for strangling Abbi Turner to death, Bliss understood that five young women had died in the exact same way, but each at the hands of a different client; precisely the notion they had been so keen to dismiss from the outset of Operation Phoenix.

  Not your traditional client, of course. Not clients of the murder victims themselves. No, this was a different violation altogether, and Bliss understood how and why they had all been fooled by the circumstances.

  Currently being held under close guard in hospital, Des Knowles nursed nothing more severe than a concussion, the remnants of the beating Bliss had administered inside the mobile home now the least of the man’s concerns. Bishop had been glad of the delay in proceedings. It meant their custody clock would not start ticking down until Knowles was brought to Thorpe Wood for questioning. It was for the best, he’d suggested. Tensions were running high, and a night’s sleep would help settle everybody. Their task once they got the man in the room was to not only have him confess his role, but also to obtain the names of the men who’d murdered four other women.

  As for Abbi Turner’s killer, he’d coughed up pretty much his entire life story in the time it took Hunt and Gratton to drive him back to the nick from Pondersbridge. Whatever high he was on took some time to come down from. By the time a doctor had examined him and declared him well enough to be interviewed, a duty solicitor had attended after initially being advised of the anticipated charges via e-mail. Both Ansari and Hunt had recently received additional training in contemporary interview skills, and Bishop had given them the nod to go ahead.

  That the man was in any fit state to be interviewed owed a great deal to Chandler. Having watched her partner marching Knowles towards the kennels, and on towards a small brick structure, she had spotted him pick up the length of pipe. She decided to follow at a distance, keeping one eye on the dwelling, not knowing who else might be inside or how Jimmy might have dealt with them. When she saw Knowles pull open a big steel door, her gaze switched to Bliss and the look of horror that crumpled his face. The moment he swung the pipe, causing Knowles to buckle at the knees and fall face-forward to the ground, she was up and running.

  It took her three attempts to talk her partner down.

  The man he wanted to lay into remained hunched above his victim, still chattering away as if he had not a care in the world. Each time Bliss raised the steel pipe, Chandler begged him to rethink. She did not approach him, nor did she attempt to wrestle the weapon away from his grasp. Given his incandescent rage, she didn’t want to think about how he might react. Her final cry was also he
r most forceful, and this time it got through to him. His chest rising and falling like bellows, Bliss scowled at the naked man hulking over Abbi Turner’s body, before slowly allowing his hand to fall by his side. His fingers unclenched and the pipe clattered to the rutted concrete floor. Bliss staggered once, then turned his attention to the victim.

  All of which he had to be reminded of, as Chandler swiftly prepared him for his meeting with senior officers. Brain-fog made him feel woolly and disconnected, but eventually her words seeped through. They had to get their stories straight, to somehow lessen the impact of the violence he had unleashed. Bliss spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening in a haze. When Des Knowles recovered from the blow, he immediately complained about police brutality. Bliss stubbornly claimed self-defence, and although an official enquiry had to be launched, he was not overly bothered by it. He’d not struck Knowles purely out of anger – more to incapacitate the man while he was inside the brick building. He’d pulled the blow; it was hard enough to knock him unconscious, but with no intent to cause any lasting damage.

  The sweaty man who had taken Abbi Turner’s life and seemed triumphant about it was the truly lucky one. Stepping towards him, the metal pipe still clutched in his right hand, Bliss could not deny the murder in his heart at that precise moment. Nobody would ever need to know the impetus behind it. There was no one else around to bear witness if he made a single blow count. A false claim of self-defence would be left to him and his conscience to overcome, but ultimately he knew who would win that skirmish.

  And that was the problem. For all his faults, for all his minor deviations from the rule book, Bliss was no killer. And so the rational side of his nature had taken over. If ever a man deserved such an end, it was surely this sick, perverted rapist and murderer. Removing him from the face of the earth would be doing the planet and its inhabitants a huge favour. Such men gave up the right to expect a humane response to their horrific acts. But while Bliss was happy to play both judge and jury, he refused to also become an executioner.

  He barely remembered Chandler arriving and trying to talk him out of it. There had been no need. His arm moved reflexively on a couple of occasions, a primitive instinct prepared to hand out a beating to exact some form of revenge. Instead, and despite knowing in his heart that Abbi was already beyond saving, he attempted to resuscitate her, pumping her chest so fervently the young girl’s ribs snapped, at which point Chandler gripped his hands and gently pulled him away. When the rest of his colleagues arrived, they found him holding the limp form of Abbi Turner in his arms, her killer on the ground with his left arm extended and twisted back by Chandler. Ignoring them all, Bliss had wrapped the duvet around the pale naked form on the filthy mattress and pulled her into a close embrace. He held her tight and gently ran his fingers through her hair.

  He told her how sorry he was, his voice no more than a whisper.

  Sorry for all that she had endured. Sorry for not solving the investigation sooner. Sorry for arriving barely minutes too late.

  Sorry.

  Forty-Six

  At various times ahead of the interview, different members of the team watched Abbi’s killer on a small monitor, his every movement and utterance in the room recorded. A seasonal farm and building labourer by the name of Alex Youngs, he twitched and bit his fingernails while sitting, but preferred to pace the floor, both hands wrapped over the thinning crown of his head. He babbled to himself, a torrent of words strung together into incomprehensible sentences.

  A doctor had seen Youngs and adjudged him healthy enough for interview, declaring the obvious high a natural one. The man was left to stew, allowing time for his adrenaline buzz to wear off. Later he spent forty minutes in animated conversation with the duty solicitor before the interview began with the usual introductions and preparation of the recording devices. Detective Constables Hunt and Ansari had used the intervening time to agree upon their mode of attack.

  Following the PEACE model of best practice, the planning and preparation stage allowed them to review and assess the available evidence connected to the offence for which he would eventually be charged. This proved to be the first sticking point. Ansari was of the opinion that a statement from Des Knowles in which he implicated Youngs would be something worth delaying the first interview for. Hunt disagreed, believing their man would fold if they got to him quickly. Ansari caved only after it was suggested that their initial twenty-four hours with Youngs might be over before Knowles was discharged from his hospital bed. While additional time in this case was certain to be granted if they applied for it, they went ahead with the aim of feeding off their own momentum.

  After identifying everyone in the room for the digital recording, DC Hunt formally revealed the reasons for detaining Youngs for questioning. The engagement and explanation aspect of the PEACE framework completed, Hunt swiftly moved them on to stage three. This essentially amounted to Hunt and Ansari seeking an understanding of events as related by Youngs, during which they would either ask for clarification or challenge him if they knew any part of his account to be false.

  For any detective carrying out a suspect interview in a major crime, this was the moment of genuine tension. Either the man from whom they hoped to elicit answers sat back in his uncomfortable chair and reeled off a composed ‘no comment’ to every question, or he’d start jabbering and barely be able to contain himself. As Hunt had expected, Alex Youngs was a naïve braggart who couldn’t wait to unload.

  Des Knowles, he informed them, took advantage of dark web chat rooms to advertise unfettered use of his pets. Abbi Turner had not been Alex’s first, he confessed, but he assured everyone in the interview room that when he’d left the previous pet she was alive, though not necessarily well. In answer to Ansari’s follow-up question, Youngs said he had no idea what had become of the other girl – only that the next time he communicated with Knowles, the man revealed he had a new pet begging for attention. When shown a photograph of Majidah Rassooli, he smiled and nodded. When prompted to speak up for the benefit of the recording, he nodded again and answered in the affirmative.

  ‘She was a great fuck,’ he added. ‘Nice, slim neck.’

  In response to being asked if he had killed the young woman in the brick shed earlier that day, Youngs became a little coy. He admitted to having carried out his particular fetish – strangling the girl while having sex with her (a sexual act which, he assured them, would become commonplace and accepted in society at some point in the near future). However, he went on to insist that during the act, his conscious awareness had ranged from hearing her begging him to continue, to his eventual release, but with no realisation of her death occurring in between.

  At this point, Ansari sought clarification. He had raped the girl, she pointed out. During that rape he had strangled her with his bare hands. When he was finished brutalising her, the young woman was dead. Youngs did not even glance at his solicitor. He told them in a clear, unfaltering manner that what he had described was his own true recollection of events. He had not intended the pet any enduring harm, had certainly not set out to murder it. Events had simply conspired against them both.

  ‘And in this case when you say “pet” you mean “woman”,’ Hunt said. ‘When you say “it” you mean “her”.’

  Youngs frowned as if he didn’t quite understand. ‘No,’ he said eventually. ‘Those are your terms. Not mine. Don’t put words in my mouth. To me, when they’re locked away or chained up, they’re pets. As simple as that.’

  ‘But to be clear, we’re talking about a young woman by the name of Abbi Turner. I’m not discounting your preferences, Mr Youngs. I understand that you view these girls as animals and regard them as pets, but before we can move on, we have to establish that we’re talking about the same thing. What you thought of as a pet, the rest of us acknowledge as a human being. Yes?’

  The nod was grudging at best. ‘Yes.’

  Closure and evaluation – the completion of the PEACE principles – foll
owed soon afterwards. When Hunt called a halt and informed those present that it was time for a break, but that a second interview was likely ahead of charges being made, Youngs was left to discuss matters with his brief ahead of being taken back to his cell along the corridor known as the Green Mile.

  Less than an hour later, following a brief discussion with Warburton, Bishop, Bliss and Chandler – all of whom had watched the interview from another room – the DCI herself made the call to the CPS, who declared themselves delighted with the result. The only debate was whether to charge murder or voluntary manslaughter. The latter was the easier option, and possibly one Young’s solicitor could tempt him with for a guilty plea.

  ‘I want murder,’ Warburton said bluntly. ‘“With intent to kill or cause grievous bodily harm” is your weapon for that charge, I suggest. Youngs wrapped his hands around our victim’s throat, pressed down with his thumbs, and choked the life out of her. I’m sure he’ll claim a loss of control during the sexual act, and I don’t doubt he had no intention of killing her from the outset. So no premeditation. But when you strangle somebody, your intention is to cause GBH at a minimum, and you know there is always the possibility of taking it too far.’

  The CPS argued the defence was liable to push for involuntary manslaughter due to that loss of control – a considerable step down from murder.

  DCI Warburton remained defiant. ‘I think you have enough to prove intent on the GBH. If you do, given that intent ultimately led to the victim dying, I believe that gives us our murder. And yes, I know you know that, but I’m letting you know that I do, too. It’s what we want. It’s the least this man deserves.’

  Moments later, she ended the call with a sour look on her face. She was barely able to keep it straight for more than a few seconds, before she punched the air and the room erupted in cheers. With Des Knowles being under guard and on suicide watch in his hospital room overnight, the team hit the Woodman with every intention of not going home until they were all too drunk to walk straight. Hangovers and headaches would take care of themselves the following day.