Deadly Intent

by D. S. Butler

  It took him fifteen minutes to get to Whitechapel. And he was glad to leave the underground system and get back into the fresh air.

  The coffee shop was very close to the station. He stood aside as two young girls came out holding iced drinks and squabbling, followed by their harassed-looking mother.

  She thanked him for holding the door. “I can’t wait for the summer holidays to be over,” she said and rolled her eyes.

  Mackinnon smiled and headed inside.

  The cool air was a welcome relief. The coffee shop was busy, but surprisingly, there was no one waiting to be served.

  Two members of staff were working behind the counter. A blond-haired man stood beside the till and a short pink-haired woman cleaned the metal milk frothing spout on the coffee machine.

  Mackinnon discreetly showed his ID. “I’m looking for Victor,” he said to the blond man.

  “That’s me.”

  He had a subtle accent Mackinnon couldn’t immediately place. Swedish? Or maybe Finnish? His eyelashes and eyebrows were pale, and he had startlingly blue eyes.

  “I spoke to your colleague,” Victor said. “If you’d like to follow me, I’ll take you to the computer so you can view the footage.”

  “Great.” Mackinnon followed him, impressed with his efficiency.

  As they walked into a small admin room, he saw Victor had already paused the CCTV on the screen. Very organised.

  “I’ve already got to the right day and approximately the right time for you,” Victor said. “We can go through it together if you’d like. Teresa will hold the fort. Here is the fast forward and this is the rewind button,” he said, pointing to the arrow keys on the keyboard.

  But Mackinnon didn’t need to use the keys yet. There, in the middle of the screen, was Tammy, sitting at a table with a man who had to be Brendan.

  Mackinnon thanked Victor and slid into the chair behind the computer. It was a side-on view. Both Tammy and Brendan were in profile, so it wasn’t the best angle for identification purposes.

  At some point Brendan must have faced the counter, which meant he’d look directly at the camera.

  “We are interested in these two individuals here,” Mackinnon said pointing out Tammy and Brendan. “This is a good start, but if we can find an image of him looking at the camera, that would be a great help.”

  Mackinnon noticed Brendan had a cup in front of him. “Can we go back to the point where he buys his drink?”

  “Sure,” Victor said and pressed the back arrow to rewind the footage. It took a while but then Brendan got to his feet and appeared to walk backwards towards the counter.

  Mackinnon held his breath as Brendan turned, giving an excellent view of his face.

  Got him!

  “Can we zoom in?”

  Victor obliged, enlarging the image.

  Brendan didn’t have the type of face that stood out from a crowd.

  He was pretty average. Maybe a little taller than most, but he wasn’t overweight or particularly skinny. His hair was a common shade of brown. It was hard to tell his eye colour from the CCTV freeze frame, but Mackinnon guessed his eyes were probably brown too. His skin tone was Caucasian but was neither very pale, nor tanned, and he wore casual clothes—a navy hoodie and a pair of blue jeans.

  Very unremarkable. Mr Average.

  Mackinnon guessed his age to be mid to late twenties. He looked older than Tammy, but appearances could be deceptive.

  He asked Victor to press play so he could get a real-time view and see how Brendan moved and interacted with his surroundings. Mackinnon was looking for any standout characteristics, maybe a limp or a nervous tic perhaps. But there was nothing.

  There were no signs to indicate Brendan was unlike any of the other men in the coffee shop. No anxiety. No signs of stress.

  Mackinnon watched disconcerted as Brendan smiled shyly at the woman beside him in the queue.

  He’d thought their suspect would be a loner. A man who distanced himself from normal society. But he seemed perfectly at ease in the busy coffee shop, interacting with people normally.

  Mackinnon rewound the footage and made a note of the time stamp on the screen when Brendan entered the coffee shop and then fast forwarded the CCTV, noting the time Brendan and Tammy had left together. Then he went back to the head-on shot of Brendan and paused the footage.

  “Is that a good enough image?” Victor asked.

  Mackinnon had forgotten he was standing there.

  “Yes, sorry, Victor. This is fantastic. Thank you for getting it all set up ready. It’s saved me a lot of time.”

  Victor smiled. “Of course, you’re very welcome.

  “I’d like to take a couple of screenshots and email them to my address. I’d also like to take a copy of the CCTV with me.”

  They could go through the rigmarole of getting a warrant, but they wouldn’t need to if the manager gave his permission.

  “Sure thing,” Victor said. He tapped a few buttons and slid a DVD into a separate drive beside the computer. “It will probably take a few minutes to copy across.”

  “Thanks.” Mackinnon wished all CCTV footage was as easy to get hold of.

  “If you get the images you want on the screen, I’ll take the screenshots and email them over to you.”

  Mackinnon lined up the images of both Tammy and Brendan, then made sure to get a couple of clear shots of Brendan facing the camera.

  “What’s your email address?”

  Mackinnon dug out a business card that contained his contact details and gave it to Victor.

  Victor attached the images to an email, then clicked on the paper airplane icon. “Okay. Sent.”

  Mackinnon thanked him and checked the time. He was going to be at least half an hour late for his first appointment. But it couldn’t be helped. He had a hunch that the bedbugs would be important to this case somehow, but a hunch didn’t beat out sensible police work, and in this case, an image of Tammy and Brendan together was very important. Getting hold of it before the CCTV was wiped was crucial if they wanted a successful prosecution at the end of this case.

  The computer beeped an alert, signalling the copying was complete.

  Victor removed the disc, slid it into a case and then handed it to Mackinnon. “There,” he said. “Is that everything?”

  “It is. Thank you. You’ve been a great help, Victor.”

  Mackinnon made his way out of the coffee shop. Before going down to the Underground, he forwarded the emails to Tyler so he’d have a copy of the screenshots of Brendan.

  Now they had a face for the man they were looking for.

  Mackinnon put his phone in his pocket and jogged down the steps towards the ticket barriers, feeling hopeful. Things were heading in the right direction.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  DC Charlotte Brown knocked on the door of Araminta’s office in the tech department.

  “Come in,” her cheerful voice called out.

  Charlotte entered. “I hear you have Tammy Holt’s computer?”

  Araminta nodded. She was sitting at a long bench, with a grey, bulky Lenovo laptop in front of her.

  “I just got my hands on it five minutes ago. I’m running some primary tests and doing a backup.” She nodded to the hard drive beside the computer.

  “Great,” Charlotte said, looking at the laptop and hoping it provided the answers they needed. “I’m not sure how much you know about the case, but we now think another young woman is at risk.”

  Araminta nodded to the laptop. “Tammy Holt. The owner of this laptop. She’s disappeared, right?”

  Charlotte nodded. “Yes. We believe she met a man calling himself Brendan at a Costa Coffee shop in Whitechapel. No one saw her after that point, so he is our main suspect.”

  “Understood,” Araminta said.

  “We think she met Brendan on the cureityourself forum, and that could be where Ashley met him too. We want to find a link between Tammy Holt, Ashley Burrows and Brendan.”

 
; Araminta opened the browser and navigated to the cureityourself forum. “It’s our lucky day, Tammy has given the browser permission to store her login information. We can search through her PM’s but it might take a while.”

  Charlotte frowned. “How many has she got?”

  “She’s had private conversations with forty-five people.” She clicked on one at random. “Some of the conversations go on for pages.”

  “It’s probably the most recent PM.”

  Araminta focused on the screen and her fingers zipped across the keyboard. “All right. Here we go.” She pointed at a section of text on the screen.

  Charlotte moved closer to read the message.

  It was the arrangements they’d made to meet. He called himself Brendan, but the username he used was @lookingforacure.

  Charlotte smiled. “Okay, I think the net is closing around Brendan. We need to go back to Ashley’s personal messages and see if she communicated with the same individual.”

  Araminta pushed away from the laptop and spun on her wheeled chair to face the screen of a large desktop computer.

  “I can do it myself if you’ve not got time,” Charlotte said. “I have a copy of Ashley’s PM’s and forum posts.”

  “That would be helpful,” Araminta said. “DC Collins has asked me to focus on Tammy’s laptop and see if I can trace Brendan’s IP address or track down his web footprint. I’ll try to get an ID.”

  “Great. You do that, and I’ll go back through Ashley’s communications. Thanks Minty!”

  “No problem,” Araminta said as Charlotte left the office.

  Charlotte was buzzing as she walked upstairs. They were so close. If she found evidence of communication between Brendan and Ashley then they’d have a concrete link between both cases.

  Her copper’s instinct told her the cases were linked. But a jury wouldn’t convict anyone based on her instinct. They needed concrete evidence, and Charlotte was going to give it to them.

  She used the digital copy of the forum posts and personal messages from Ashley’s computer and performed a search for Brendan’s username.

  She groaned when she saw how many forum posts he’d made. It would take ages to go through them all. But she was most interested in the personal messages because that’s most likely how he’d have arranged to meet Ashley just like he had Tammy.

  She scanned the recent PMs, and like Tammy, Brendan was the last person Ashley had communicated with via personal message. That in itself was damning.

  Charlotte opened up the PM and began to read. She’d only scanned a few lines down when a knot formed in her stomach. It was hard to read and witness the grooming and the growing trust Ashley had for this guy she’d met on the Internet, knowing how things turned out.

  Charlotte’s anger grew as she continued to read. It was too late for Ashley. But it wasn’t yet too late for Tammy. They still had a chance to save her.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Mackinnon got to the Carson house half an hour later than originally planned. The Carsons lived in a small terrace on Mullett Avenue. The house was in the middle of a long row, built in the eighties. Each property along the road had a thin strip of front garden, which was only just large enough to store the bins and maybe a couple of flowerpots.

  Before knocking on the door, he scanned the immediate vicinity, looking for anything unusual about the area. Nothing stood out, or struck him as odd.

  This property had reported the bedbugs and had been treated by A1 pest control, but the bugs could also be in any of the properties nearby. There was a chance, however small, that this was where Brendan had kept Ashley and was now keeping Tammy.

  Most of the houses were well-kept and the gardens well-maintained. One directly opposite the Carsons’s home, looked more rundown than the other houses in the neighbourhood. A collection of rubbish was piled up in the front garden, just beneath one of the dirty windows. The paint on the door – green – was peeling, revealing the original white beneath.

  Squeals of joy and laughter rang out, and Mackinnon watched as two kids, he judged to be seven or eight, exploded out of the front door, shouting and shooting each other with water pistols. The two small boys, who looked like they were taking advantage of the summer holidays by not bothering to comb their hair, both wore blue shorts and no T-shirts. Mackinnon couldn’t blame them in the current heatwave.

  He turned away and knocked on the Carsons’s front door. The door had been painted in a shiny black, and the brass lion’s head knocker and matching letterbox gave it a smart appearance. He noticed they’d also had new uPVC windows installed recently, the bright white a startling contrast against the red brick.

  Around the doormat, someone had sprinkled white powder. Mackinnon wondered if they’d had a problem with ants. The hot summer had led to an explosion in the ant population in Oxford and probably by the looks of it here too.

  The door was opened by a woman in her mid-thirties.

  She wore a white T-shirt, beige cargo trousers and a pair of pink flip-flops. Her red, curly hair was pinned up. She patted it self-consciously.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Mackinnon said, showing his ID.

  “It’s fine. I was off work today anyway, catching up on the cleaning.” She stepped back. “Would you like to come in?”

  He followed her inside. From his first impressions, the place looked immaculate. In the hallway, there was pale wood flooring and no carpet on the stairs. Ivory walls and bright white woodwork made the area look spacious and clean.

  She led him through the hall into a long, narrow sitting room and then into the small kitchen at the front of the house.

  “Can I get you a coffee? A tea? Or maybe you’d prefer something cold in this heat?”

  She gestured for him to sit down at the kitchen table, and Mackinnon did so. “A glass of water would be great, thanks, Mrs Carson.”

  “Call me Daphne, please.” She gave him a nervous smile and took a glass out of the cupboard. “You want to know about the bedbugs we found a few months ago?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m not sure what it is exactly you want to know about those horrible things. To be honest, I’m surprised you even wanted to come into our house. I’m still looking for them everywhere. I can’t relax. I have to admit, the whole thing has made me paranoid.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “It was a real shock to the system.” She put a glass of water on the table in front of him and then sank into the seat opposite. “We’d only recently moved here. We’d been here less than two weeks, when I realised I was getting bitten. At first, I put it down to the fact I’d been spending a lot of time in the garden, doing weeding and general tidying up. I thought I’d been bitten by midges or something like that, but when I showed my mother the bites, she suggested getting someone from pest control to take a look. I’m so glad I did. He found them straightaway. I was horrified. The couple who owned the house before us had three cats and two dogs, so I wondered if I was getting bitten by fleas.”

  “But it wasn’t fleas?” Mackinnon asked.

  Daphne shook her head. “Sadly, no. Apparently, fleas are much easier to get rid of, and they only tend to bite you when their natural host isn’t around. We had a chap from A1 pest control take a look and he was the one who told us about the bedbug infestation. He found them living beneath the wallpaper in our upstairs bedroom.” She shivered. “He was fantastic. He sprayed the walls and the carpets, and I haven’t been bitten since, so I’m pretty sure we’ve got rid of them.” She looked around as though expecting to see insects crawling along the carpet and scratched her arm.

  “How long ago was the treatment?”

  “It was the beginning of May.”

  “Do you remember the name of the man who sprayed the house?”

  She bit her lip. “I’m sorry, I don’t. Is it important?”

  “Probably not. Don’t worry. How many people live here?”

  “It’s just my husband and me.” She frowned
. “Can I ask you a question?”

  Mackinnon nodded.

  “Well, you said you were from the police, not the council?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So why are you interested in an infestation of bedbugs. It’s not usually a police matter, is it?”

  “Not usually, no. But in this case, we are interested in properties in the area known to have a recent infestation. It’s related to a case I’m working.”

  Mackinnon didn’t really want to elaborate any further.

  “I see,” Daphne said, though she still looked confused.

  “Do you know if any of your neighbours have had similar problems with the bugs?”

  She pursed her lips. “Well, I know it’s wrong of me to judge on outward appearances.” She got up from her seat and pointed out of the kitchen window towards the house across the street.

  Mackinnon stood too and looked out.

  “They are not exactly the tidiest and cleanest residents on the street. Just yesterday I saw their youngest boy standing by the front door and scratching his legs for ages.” She caught the look on Mackinnon’s face and flushed. “Sorry, like I said, I shouldn’t judge.”

  “Have you noticed anything unusual around here over the past few weeks?”

  “With the neighbours you mean?”

  Mackinnon nodded.

  “Not really. It’s a pleasant place to live, people mind their own business. I mean, the Dawsons over the road are a bit rowdy, and their kids run wild, but apart from them, it’s a pretty quiet street.

  “Any men living alone on this road?”

  She thought for a moment and then shook her head. “No, it’s all couples or families as far as I know.”

  Mackinnon nodded. He didn’t like asking leading questions. It was better when the person interviewed volunteered information without being guided, but in this case, they could be running out of time to save Tammy Holt. The last thing Mackinnon wanted was for Mrs Carson to say at a later date, Oh, yes there was that odd man living at the end of the road, but you didn’t ask me about him.”

  “Do you know anyone called Brendan?”