Dark Skies: A DCI Ryan Mystery (The DCI Ryan Mysteries Book 7)

by LJ Ross

  “Well? Let’s have it,” she commanded.

  Now it came to it, Ryan found he didn’t know where to start. As a notoriously private person, how could he begin to detail the events that had once nearly broken him? How could he relive the memory of what a young fool he had been?

  Besides, he thought of Lucas’s threat to re-open the Hacker investigation and it gave him pause.

  “I’m not here to complain about the past,” he said eventually. “What I have to say very much concerns the present.”

  “How so?”

  “Look, I understand that you want a new superintendent—any superintendent—to blow in here like a whirlwind, wave their magic wand and sprinkle fairy dust over all of us so that the brass will smile, nod, and give us a bunch of cash,” he said. “But life doesn’t work that way. It’s demoralising to take a hard-working team and break it up just for the sake of it.”

  Morrison opened her mouth to protest but he held up a hand.

  “Just hear me out. Please,” he added.

  Her mouth shut again, and he took a deep breath, thinking carefully about what he could and could not say. He hadn’t forgotten Lucas’s threat against Anna and, until he’d spoken with her himself, his hands were tied.

  “I’m talking about methods and motivation. It wasn’t the department’s fault that we uncovered a cult on Holy Island, but we put them down in the end, as quickly as we could. Just like it wasn’t your fault, or mine, that Lucas’s predecessor turned out to be part of it.” He thought of their former DCS, Arthur Gregson, and his heart hardened. “We didn’t ask for any of it, or the shadow that it cast on all of us, but we dealt with it as best we could and saved countless lives in the process. You know how many other cases we’ve closed, on top of all that. It’s got to be worth something.”

  Morrison listened, admiring the idealism shining through his words; his belief in the system and in the wheels of justice that they both fought to maintain, in their different ways.

  She sighed and rubbed at the tension beginning to spread across the base of her skull. She had always been a fair woman, or tried to be. But they were under attack from all sides. The department needed fresh blood who not only looked and sounded the part but acted it too. If she’d had her way in the first place, it would have been Ryan performing that special duty and not Jennifer Lucas.

  But if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

  “I’ve spoken to DCS Lucas,” she said. “All she’s suggesting is a trial period where the teams are reorganised to clear some of the inactive cases that are still circulating in the press. Surely you’d welcome that? I’d have thought you’d also welcome some time spent in the office, rather than having to work the beat, as it were?”

  No, he thought. He could think of nothing worse. But she made it all sound so damn reasonable, as if Lucas’s only motivation was to act in the best interests of CID.

  What a joke.

  “The fact is, Lucas is your superior and I’m not about to step in and undermine her authority at a time when she needs to establish her credentials with the rest of the staff. You should know that.”

  Yes, he did know it, but he had hoped for a miracle.

  “I want you to lead by example and get behind her,” Morrison told him sternly. “Whatever grudges you might hold against each other, I need you to pull together and work in the best interests of the department.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, in a voice entirely devoid of emotion.

  For long minutes after Ryan left, Morrison stared at the door and wondered why she felt so uneasy. They had been through a lot together and she trusted his judgement. Ryan might be high-handed at times and he could be downright cold-blooded when it came to tracking down criminals, but he had an infallible nose for the business of policing and was universally respected in the constabulary.

  Yet she had dismissed his concerns out of hand.

  She hoped to God she’d been right.

  * * *

  “Run that by me one more time?”

  Phillips stood beneath the plastic canopy outside the back entrance of police headquarters with his stocky feet planted and his shoulders hunched, reminding Ryan of an angry bull preparing to charge into an unsuspecting china shop. Beside him, MacKenzie leaned against a pebble-dashed pillar with a murderous expression on her face that was vastly more terrifying. The youngest members of his immediate team, Lowerson and Yates, stared at him with twin expressions of shock.

  “But…why would she do that?” Lowerson asked, puffing rhythmically on a menthol e-cigarette. “The team works fine as it is.”

  He glanced across at Melanie Yates, whose company he was most interested in cultivating.

  “Lucas wants me to work the cold cases?” MacKenzie burst out, and her Irish accent was more pronounced in the heat of anger. “We already have a dedicated team for that. I didn’t spend twenty years working my way up the ladder just to sit in the archive room.”

  Ryan couldn’t have agreed more, but he had to maintain a professional front.

  “Like I said, they’re re-allocating resources. Lucas wants somebody to take over the management of that team and you have the experience—”

  “Don’t give me any of that old blarney,” MacKenzie cut in, with a swipe of her hand. “We both know that this is about Lucas flexing her muscles and my experience has bugger all to do with it.”

  Ryan couldn’t argue with that but Morrison had made it abundantly clear his job was to lead.

  “Whatever her motivations, that’s the edict and we have to deal with it. Yates? You’ll be working with Phillips from now on; he’ll be your new mentor during your training.”

  PC Melanie Yates set aside her disappointment that she wouldn’t be working with Ryan day-to-day and gave Phillips a smile because, as far as mentors went, they didn’t come much better. Meanwhile, Lowerson took another long drag of his e-cigarette and watched his hopes of getting to know her better go up in a cloud of billowing smoke.

  “Looks like you’ve drawn the short straw,” Phillips joked, with a fatherly wink, and Ryan was grateful to him for helping to keep things light.

  He turned back to Lowerson.

  “Jack? I’m not entirely sure what Lucas has in store for you, but she wants you to report to her office first thing tomorrow morning.”

  It was on the tip of Ryan’s tongue to tell him to be on his guard, to protect himself against foes from within, but that would necessitate a full-blown discussion he wasn’t ready to have. Besides, hadn’t he made the mistake of trying to mollycoddle Jack once before? It had been an unwelcome intrusion and he’d been roundly ticked off for it.

  “What will you be doing?” Lowerson asked the burning question.

  Ryan pulled an expressive face.

  “I’ll be chained to my desk engaged in the highly important business of resource and case management,” he drawled. “What else?”

  “This is bollocks!” Phillips could contain himself no longer. “You need to be out there, not stuck inside crunching numbers—”

  “It’s decided,” Ryan said flatly.

  Phillips started to speak again, then stopped himself. He’d save his breath and have a word with Morrison about it, first chance he got. He might not be the Commissioner or some other pillar of the community, but his word still meant something around here and he’d known Sandra Morrison since their first days on the Force. The least she could do was listen.

  “We’ll get the job done,” MacKenzie murmured.

  Ryan looked at each of them and felt something dip in his stomach; as if a door were being closed to the past and their future was now uncertain.

  When they disbanded, Ryan put a hand on Phillips’ arm to hold him back.

  “Frank?”

  Phillips detected an unusual tone in Ryan’s voice.

  “Aye, lad?”

  Ryan looked out at the staff car park and watched uniformed and non-uniformed staff arrive in time for the start of a new shift. On the far side
of the tarmac, the infamous Pie Van was doing a roaring trade as local workers flocked from neighbouring offices to buy all manner of cholesterol-heavy snacks to see them through the afternoon.

  His eyes registered it all but his mind was far away, re-living the events of a night that would stay with him forever.

  “Did you know it was Anna who took the shot?”

  Phillips’ silence gave Ryan all the answer he needed before his gravelly voice confirmed it.

  “I knew she saved your life,” he said. “Any one of us would have done the same but it’s thanks to Anna that you’re standing here, talking to me now.”

  Ryan felt a lump rise in his throat.

  “She never told me,” he managed. “Neither did you.”

  Phillips looked across at the man who was his superior, at least on paper, and the best damn friend he could ask for. They’d butted heads in the early days, finding their feet. But now, they were like family, and family spoke the truth to one another.

  “Anna respects your integrity and so do I,” Phillips said. “She didn’t tell you because she didn’t want you to be compromised at work. There’d be hell to pay if the press got wind of it.”

  “Does anyone else know?”

  Phillips tugged at his lower lip and decided it was best to make a clean breast of it.

  “MacKenzie guessed it first,” he said, and a smile touched the corner of Ryan’s mouth.

  “Nothing gets past Denise,” he murmured.

  “Nothing worth knowing, anyhow,” Phillips agreed.

  Ryan let out a long breath and stuck his hands inside the pockets of his jeans.

  “Lucas knows. She’s threatening to make an internal referral to the IPCC.”

  There was a small pause while Phillips considered the implications of that.

  “She knows, or she suspects?”

  “Alright, she suspects.”

  “Suspicion isn’t the same as fact,” Phillips pronounced, and gave Ryan a bolstering slap on the back. “Nobody was harmed, except an inhuman maniac who would have killed you, given half the chance. There isn’t an officer in the land who wouldn’t have done the same thing Anna did that night. She’s one in a million, that one. Hold on to her, lad, and hold her tight.”

  Ryan gave him another lopsided smile and wondered what he’d done to deserve such friendship.

  “Thanks, Frank.”

  But when the doors clicked shut behind him a few moments later, Ryan stood for a while longer and felt the ground begin to quake beneath his feet.

  CHAPTER 7

  While Ryan re-acquainted himself with his desk, Phillips took up the baton and went about the business of introducing Yates to one of the less glamorous locations on a murder detective’s map.

  The mortuary at the Royal Victoria Infirmary was the province of Doctor Jeffrey Pinter, the chief pathologist attached to Northumbria CID. He was a fastidious and often infuriating man in his early fifties, but they forgave his little foibles because he was far and away the best in his field. Pinter could be relied upon to pinpoint a post-mortem interval to within a couple of hours and to find even the smallest indicators of foul play on a body that had been subjected to the worst abuse that man could imagine. Unfortunately, Pinter resembled one of the dead he cared for, owing to a combination of genetics and long-term Vitamin D deficiency from a life spent largely indoors.

  When Phillips and Yates trudged along the long, stiflingly hot basement corridor with its row of industrial air conditioners and buzzed through the security doors into the mortuary, the first thing they heard was Rod Stewart blasting through the speaker system. The sound of it carried across the freezing airspace and Phillips jiggled his hips in time to the music as he pulled on a visitor’s lab coat.

  “Howay, let’s see what Jeff’s got for us.”

  They hurried past a row of metal gurneys, all empty except one, where a single mortuary technician stood poised to complete a neat ‘Y’ incision. It was degrading for a man of Phillips’ experience to admit that he still felt queasy at the thought of seeing a cadaver, but an old leopard doesn’t change its spots and it was better for all concerned that he worked with his stomach, rather than against it. Glancing across at Yates, he was mollified to discover that, for once, he was not alone. He just hoped they could hold it together until their task was complete.

  Pinter turned from his discussion with a tall, blonde woman of around thirty.

  “Frank! Good to see you.” He extended a bony hand and Phillips hesitated for a fraction of a second, always fearful of where it had been.

  “Aye, good to see you too, Jeff.” Phillips angled his body to introduce Yates. “I don’t think you’ve met my trainee? PC Melanie Yates, this is Doctor Jeff Pinter.”

  Yates found her fingers engulfed in a friendly grip.

  “No Ryan, today?” Pinter queried.

  Phillips cast around for something non-committal to say.

  “He’s held up at the office with…this and that,” he finished lamely. “We’ll be taking care of business in the meantime.”

  If he sensed an undercurrent, Pinter decided not to pursue it any further.

  “You might remember Doctor Ann Millington,” he said, turning to the studious-looking young woman to his left. “She’s come down from Edinburgh to help us with the body you found at Kielder this morning.”

  “Aye, I do,” Phillips recognised the forensic anthropologist from the last time she’d helped them to date and assess a body found hidden deep inside Hadrian’s Wall. “Thanks for coming on board.”

  “I was fascinated when I heard what you’d found,” she said. “I wish I could say I hurried down here on the first available train as an act of pure altruism but there was a healthy dollop of professional interest. We don’t find these ‘bog bodies’ very often but, when we do, it’s a real coup.”

  “Bog bodies?” Yates queried.

  Millington nodded.

  “If the conditions are right, a body can be mummified naturally for extraordinary amounts of time; even thousands of years. The body you found this morning bears all the markers of having been preserved in a similar way. Pretty exciting,” she remarked.

  Phillips supposed that was true but, as far as he was concerned, ‘the body’ was a young lad who had been missing for God only knew how long. He’d had a life ahead of him, and probably a family who cared.

  “Have you had a chance to look him over?” Phillips asked.

  “I’ve made a start and I can give you some very general observations. Why don’t we go and take a look?”

  Before they could protest, Millington turned in the direction of a small corridor off the main workspace, leading to a series of smaller examination rooms and offices. She unlocked one of them and flicked on the bright strobe light hanging overhead.

  There, in the centre, was a shrouded figure.

  “Obviously, air will accelerate decomposition and so we’ve spent some time this morning trying to ensure the body remains preserved.”

  Yates wrinkled her nose at the pungent scent of noxious chemicals permeating the air and, when the paper sheet was turned back, she was faced with something she had not expected. She had seen one or two dead bodies and it hadn’t been anything to write home about, but this was different. The teenage boy—at least, he looked like a teenager—was shrunken, the skin stained terracotta brown and shrivelled, as if his insides had been sucked out. His features were still recognisable; the outline of nose, chin and mouth and the hair plastered against his head. He might have been sleeping, cocooned for years in death.

  “It’s incredible,” she found herself saying.

  “Mm, in purely scientific terms, I have to confess I was mildly disappointed to find he’s only been in situ for around thirty years,” Millington remarked, with a degree of clinical objectivity that might have been distasteful in other circumstances. “In fact, I doubt you’ll need my services much except to confirm what you already know.”

  Phillips frowned.

>   “How’s that?”

  “His clothing,” she explained, moving across to a computer station where she brought up a series of images they’d taken earlier. “It was fairly well preserved, like the rest of him. He was still wearing the Levi 501s he died in, as well as the t-shirt and jacket. He lost a shoe somewhere along the way, but he was wearing the other trainer—an Adidas Gazelle, size nine.”

  She stepped back to allow them to flick through the images on-screen.

  “We’ve swabbed the clothing for analysis and sent them across to Faulkner’s team,” she told them. “You never know what they might be able to find.”

  “Looks like seventies, maybe early-eighties fashion,” Yates guessed.

  “Sounds about right. Better still, we found a bus pass inside the pocket of his jeans,” Pinter replied. “Laminated plastic, with a start date of January 1981, expiring in December of the same year. Unfortunately, no name printed.”

  “That’s brilliant,” Phillips said, and enjoyed a brief daydream about closing the case before nightfall. “That’ll really help us narrow down the field when we look at Missing Persons.”

  “The bus pass was issued as a ‘youth’ pass, for ages up to sixteen. It’s hard without the bone structure to work with, but factoring in his size and facial features, I’d estimate he was between the ages of fourteen and sixteen when he died. I’ve already requested dental records,” Millington said. “Hopefully, they won’t take too long to come back and we’ll have a more definitive answer.”

  Phillips began to think he’d be home in time to watch Game of Thrones.

  “We’ve already spoken to Missing Persons,” Yates said. “Hopefully, the dental records will help us there. But how did he die?”

  “Badly,” Pinter said, scratching the side of his long nose. “Blunt trauma to the cranium, here,” he indicated a spot on the boy’s skull with a retractable pointer. “After that, massive internal haemorrhage and asphyxiation by drowning, or cardiac arrest, most likely. Impossible to say for sure at this stage but that’s an educated guess.”