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

by LJ Ross

  “That’s just it, Arthur. There were no signs, no warnings, no proper barriers. If Duncan Gray’s body had been discovered in 1981 bearing any signs of an accidental fall, Slater’s firm could have come in for a lot of flak.”

  “You’re reaching too far,” Gregson blustered, thinking back to the night Derek Slater had turned up on his doorstep with a roll of cash, stinking of desperation. Poor old Slater; he’d gone the way of the Dodo now.

  “We did everything we were supposed to do,” he said. “And back then, Duncan Gray had been talking about leaving—plenty of people said so. Still, we kept the case active for a few months until his mother got the postcard from him. It made sense to call things off—”

  Ryan went on full alert and thrust away from the wall.

  “What postcard? There’s no mention of a postcard in any of the files.”

  They all turned at the sound of his voice, especially Gregson, whose face broke into a smirk.

  “Woken up, have you?”

  “Answer the question,” Ryan barked. “What postcard?”

  Gregson chuckled.

  “Did I forget to mention it in the inventory? Silly me.”

  “Where is the postcard now?” Yates asked urgently, but Gregson just smiled. He had the upper hand now, if only fleetingly, and he would feed off it for the coming months until his trial. Whenever his strength or resolve failed him, he would remember the look on each of their faces and it would tide him over the dark times.

  “Go and play finders keepers, little girl.”

  Gregson signalled to the guards that he was ready to leave and they began to unshackle him from the table. He hadn’t been charged with this crime, so there was no obligation for him to stay.

  “You gave up on that boy and didn’t even bother to investigate new evidence that came to light, did you?” Ryan’s voice stopped him. “You let his mother believe he was alive all these years. She believed her son didn’t love her, that he’d abandoned his family, and you allowed her to believe it.”

  Gregson looked at Ryan for a long, charged moment.

  “I’m still a better man than you,” he growled. “Say ‘hi’ to Jennifer Lucas from me. There’s a woman who knows how to keep her men in check.”

  * * *

  Ryan said absolutely nothing until they were well clear of the prison compound—not as he stormed down the corridors of the Westgate Unit, nor as he scribbled his signature in the log book to record the time they were leaving. Only when they were safely inside the confines of his car did he finally put his hands on the steering wheel and say what they were all thinking.

  “He hasn’t changed, much.”

  Phillips scratched his wiry, salt-and-pepper hair and wished for a cigarette. It had been more than two years since he’d last smoked one of those addictive little sticks of molten tar, but the old craving still surprised him in moments of stress. Without the overarching fear of what would happen to him should MacKenzie ever find out he’d slipped, Phillips might have succumbed long before now.

  “Bastard had the nerve to talk about Denise,” he said, thinking back to Gregson’s comments about the ladies locker room. “Had a good mind to teach him a few manners.”

  “You’d have been wasting your breath,” Ryan said wearily. “The man’s a sociopath.”

  “Who said anything about talking?” Phillips muttered.

  Yates slumped back against her seat and caught Ryan’s eye in the rear-view mirror.

  “I’m sorry, sir. I messed up.”

  “You did no such thing,” he replied. “I thought you handled the situation like a pro.”

  Phillips roused himself enough to agree.

  “Aye, well done, lass. You went a bit off-piste halfway through, but it paid off in the end.”

  “What do we do now?”

  Ryan turned the ignition key and swung out of the car park with more haste than finesse, which woke them all up.

  “Howay, man, I left m’ lunch back there!” Phillips protested.

  Ignoring him, Ryan turned back onto the motorway and thought about how to answer Yates’ question.

  “What do we do now?” he repeated, half to himself. “We search the archive boxes for that bloody postcard and hope that Gregson wasn’t lying about its existence. We’ll speak to Angela Gray and her ex-husband to see what they can tell us about it and we chase up Kate Robson’s financials.”

  “And then?”

  “We hope to God there’s a postage stamp on that little rectangular card because somebody had to lick it and saliva contains DNA. We might not have been able to test it back in 1981, even if Gregson had done his job properly, but Faulkner can work his magic now.”

  “Then, we check it against the database and the samples we’ve taken from everyone locally?”

  “You’re damn right we do,” Ryan said, and put his foot down on the accelerator. “And one more thing. I want the fraud team informed about Gregson’s involvement in Duncan Gray’s case. He might have covered up a lot in the intervening years but if there’s anything to find, they’ll find it. Every little helps when you’re dealing with that kind of scumbag.”

  “Amen to that,” Phillips said, and spent the remainder of the journey holding on to his stomach.

  CHAPTER 31

  The call came just before midnight.

  Ryan was still wide awake and poring over a stack of old paperwork he’d retrieved from the Archive Room at Police Headquarters. He was seated at one of the sofas at the lodge, barefoot in jeans and a thick woollen jumper to stave off the cold that was seeping through the cracks in the walls. Anna had fallen asleep on one of the squishy armchairs opposite. There was no sound except the wind that howled through the chimney grate where a small fire burned and the crackle of paper as Ryan sifted through box after box of paperwork generated on Duncan Gray over the past thirty-three years.

  But still, he could find no postcard.

  When his phone vibrated against the wooden coffee table, they both jumped.

  “This is Ryan.”

  Faulkner’s excited voice came down the airwaves.

  “Sorry to disturb you at this time of night,” he rambled. “I wasn’t sure whether to call—”

  “It’s no problem, Tom. What have you found?”

  He leaned forward and the light from the fire turned his hair blue-black as he waited impatiently for the news.

  “I did some testing on the samples we found on Kate Robson’s body,” Faulkner said. “And you need to know I found something interesting. Very interesting. There were traces of blood beneath her nails and inside her ears and it didn’t belong to her.”

  “Who, then?”

  Ryan held his breath.

  “It matches Guy Sullivan’s blood type and DNA.”

  Ryan slumped back against the sofa and closed his eyes.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely,” Faulkner said. “We had Sullivan’s DNA and blood profile on the system and we ran an automatic check for matches. It came back positive.”

  “Do you know what this means?”

  “That Kate Robson probably killed Guy Sullivan?”

  “Not only that, Tom. It means there was more than one of them.”

  * * *

  When Ryan rang off a short while later, Anna had awakened and was sitting upright in her chair.

  “You should try to get some sleep,” she said. “You’ve been working flat out.”

  He shook his head.

  “I can’t…not when we’re so close.”

  “You need to stay strong,” she argued. “It isn’t over yet.”

  He simply nodded.

  “Somebody’s out there and they think they’ve pulled off the perfect murder. If I’m right—”

  “You usually are, when it comes to these things.”

  “Well, if I’m right this time and Craig Hunter had nothing to do with killing Kate Robson, that means there’s a third person who has been waiting for the opportunity to strike. It con
firms what every instinct was telling me about the way Kate Robson died.”

  Ryan leaned forward again and tried to imagine the scenario, sliding effortlessly into the role of a killer in a way Anna might have found disturbing in other circumstances.

  “Let’s say Duncan Gray went out there, behind the demolition lines, with a couple of friends late on 21st October 1981. One of those friends was Kate Robson. She, or maybe she and the third friend, killed Duncan for some unknown reason and they kept quiet about it for over thirty years. But later, when his body is found, Kate Robson begins to crack. When she sees Guy Sullivan, she thinks Duncan has come back to life, or whatever the hell these crackpots think just before they murder someone,” Ryan said mercilessly.

  “Then what?” Anna prodded, tucking her feet up onto the chair so she could listen comfortably. “The third friend goes after Kate Robson and sets Craig Hunter up?”

  Ryan nodded slowly.

  “Whoever it is, they’re an opportunist, because it’s unlikely they knew about Craig Hunter’s history. But they needed to figure out a way of getting rid of Robson before she got any worse and started saying the wrong things to the right people.”

  “They’d have killed her anyway, then,” Anna surmised. “Craig Hunter was just a bonus.”

  “Yes, I think so. She was threatening their way of life.”

  “It must be somebody already known to you,” Anna said, thinking of all the names and faces of the people she had met around Kielder, shivering slightly at the thought of having chatted to a killer.

  Unaccountably, she thought of the man she’d seen at the observatory and at the pub in Corbridge and she wondered whether to mention it.

  “We have a shortlist of people who were part of Duncan’s circle,” Ryan was saying, and the thought melted away again. “They’re all friends from school who lived in the vicinity.”

  “How are you going to narrow them down? Presumably, they’ll have stuck to the same lie for all these years.”

  “And if you tell a lie often enough, people start to believe it’s true,” Ryan said grimly. “There’s a team going over Kate Robson’s equestrian centre but the farmhouse alone could take days to search. I’m hoping to hear back from the solicitors firm where she held a copy of her will, so we can see who she left all her money to, and I’ve requested copies of the account records from her bank. Maybe there’ll be something in it.”

  “Did she have a phone?”

  Ryan nodded.

  “Already looked at that and there’s nothing out of the ordinary, although there are a couple of numbers we’ll need to cross-check.” He sighed and lifted a hand towards the mountain of paperwork spread out over the carpet and coffee table in front of them. “What I really want to find isn’t amongst any of these papers but it could be the most vital piece of evidence in the whole case.”

  “What is it?”

  Ryan warred with himself but decided to ignore Lucas’s edicts on marital sharing. The woman was no pillar of the police community whereas his wife was like a vault when it came to confidential information.

  “A postcard, apparently sent by Duncan Gray to his mother in the months following his disappearance.”

  Anna frowned, stepping through the chronology in her head.

  “That doesn’t make sense,” she concluded. “If Duncan sent a postcard, which implies he was elsewhere, how come his body was buried at Kielder? Surely, he’d have been found far away from here.”

  “Unless he came back at some point later and was killed, which seems bizarre,” Ryan muttered. “But it’s not impossible, so I won’t rule it out.”

  Anna uncurled her legs from the armchair and walked around the coffee table to join him on the sofa, shifting some of the papers aside to make room. He watched her progress with darkened eyes and felt instantly at ease when she curved herself into the side of his body and rested her head on his chest.

  “Are you going to speak to his mother tomorrow morning?”

  “First thing,” he said, and began trailing his hand along her arm in a gesture that was as natural as breathing. “I hope she’s up to having visitors; she was in a bad state the last time I saw her.”

  “She must be broken,” Anna whispered, hardly able to imagine the pain of losing a child. “I hope, for her sake, you can find who did this.”

  Ryan rubbed his cheek against her soft hair and drew her more tightly against him as they watched the flames flickering inside the log burner.

  “I will,” he said. “Their time has almost run out.”

  * * *

  From the shadows of the trees outside, the couple were perfectly centred in the window, as if it were a picture frame or a TV screen.

  The woman lay with her head against Ryan’s chest, her dark hair falling in a curtain down her back while his hand stroked her arm with the kind of intimacy that came when two people were supremely comfortable with one another.

  What would that be like?

  It didn’t matter.

  People were encumbrances; curiosities that could sometimes be diverting, at least for a while. But it was becoming harder and harder to speak to anyone and not wonder what their insides looked like, or how their eyes would change when they died, or what fixed expression their face would settle into. Sometimes, it was funny, like a pantomime. Other times, it was disappointing and anticlimactic.

  It was becoming more difficult to put on the same mask each day, to pretend to be just like everybody else, when beneath the surface was a seething, decaying core which was perishing more by the day. It was surprising that people didn’t notice the difference; the evidence was surely there, simmering just beneath the surface for all to see.

  Ryan and his wife embraced, but that didn’t evoke any feeling in the person who stood watching, other than a passing interest in their small, humdrum lives.

  Neither of them would ever know what it felt like to be great, all-powerful and consuming.

  Like a supernova.

  Perhaps it was time to show them a taste of paradise.

  CHAPTER 32

  Tuesday, 3rd October

  Ryan was up early the next morning to make his first and most important call of the day. As Freddie Milburn had warned, the weather was mercurial and by the time he had driven the short distance from Kielder Waterside to the village at the tip of the reservoir, he had left the blue skies of the morning behind him. A steady drizzle layered the windscreen and covered the tree-lined road in a fine, blurry mist which gave the impression that he was travelling through an ethereal, otherworldly place as he wound through the avenue of trees.

  On the stroke of nine, he pulled up outside Angela Gray’s home. The little 1950s terrace had been painted a pale yellow and the other houses in the row were also a pretty mix of complementary pastel shades. Ryan happened to know that the houses had originally been built for the forestry workers but now many of those families had moved on. Those who stayed, stayed because they loved the life. There was a lot to be said for it, Ryan thought as he slammed out of his car. Ingrained habit led him to lock the doors, but he’d bet nobody bothered locking anything around here. They trusted their neighbours not to steal from them, which was a rare thing in the twenty-first century.

  Angela Gray answered her front door after the third knock and Ryan’s immediate thought was of how frail she had become. As a woman of nearly seventy, Angela had been fit and healthy, albeit intensely lonely. Her only regular occupation had been her work at the gift shop, but it had been closed since Friday and Ryan wondered if she would ever have the heart to open it up again.

  “Mrs Gray? I wonder if I might have a few moments of your time.”

  She raised tired eyes, ringed by dark shadows.

  “Come in,” she said quietly.

  A stack of letters and assorted junk mail had accumulated on the hallway floor and, as Angela didn’t seem to notice, Ryan bent down to pick it up and set it on the small console table as he followed her through to the living room.

>   “I’m sorry to disturb you again, Mrs Gray—”

  “Angela.”

  “Thank you. I’m sorry to disturb you, Angela. I wouldn’t, if it weren’t important that I speak with you.”

  She sank into an armchair and looked at him vacantly for a couple of seconds, then rushed to get up again.

  “I didn’t offer you anything to drink,” she muttered. “Tea? Would you like some tea?”

  Ryan urged her back into her seat.

  “Why don’t we sit comfortably for a few minutes?”

  “I was planning to wash the windows,” she said, plucking at the material of her skirt. “Then I need to make a start on the skirting boards.”

  “I won’t keep you long,” he promised.

  “Heaven knows what state the gift shop is in since I’ve been away.”

  Her tone suggested that she had been mildly inconvenienced and that, soon, everything would return to normal. Ryan had thought she was coming around to a stage of acceptance about her son’s death but that had obviously been premature and it made his job all the harder.

  “Mrs Gray, do you have anyone who you could call to come and keep you company? A family member, perhaps?”

  “I told my sister to go home,” she said tiredly. “There’s nothing she can do… nothing she can say.”

  “All the same, you might need her support over the coming days.”

  “There’s nothing. Nobody.”

  Ryan heard a note in her voice that gave him cause for concern, over and above the grief he would expect to hear. He forgot the reason for his visit as concern for her welfare took precedence.

  “Angela, have you spoken with your GP since the news on Friday?”

  “Joan took me to see Doctor Rush on Saturday morning,” she said. “She prescribed those pills over there.”

  He looked across to where a stack of small cardboard boxes rested on a side table.

  “They’re for depression,” she told him, faintly. “Sera-something inhibitors.”

  “Serotonin,” he murmured.

  “I don’t like them,” she said, and her eyes dared him to argue. “I don’t need anything. If everyone will just leave me alone, things will go back to normal.”