The Patient Killer (A DCI Morton Crime Novel Book 4)

by Sean Campbell

  But by choosing to send Mayberry in, he’d risked them both.

  It was easy to make a logical case for what he had done. Mayberry was the closest approximation to Niall Stapleton they had, and if they had any chance of fooling the kidnappers, he was it.

  Morton’s priority had to be to try to bring the innocent victim home safely. Sending Mayberry in had been a simple risk/reward calculation – and it had backfired.

  ‘Answer me!’ the superintendent demanded.

  ‘Sir, you know why I made the call that I did. Detective Mayberry is well-trained and capable, and, given the circumstances, I thought he was the best chance of getting our hostage home safe.’

  ‘He has aphasia, for Christ’s sake! How did you expect him to help her?’

  ‘He saved her life,’ Morton said quietly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mayberry saved Vanessa Gogg’s life by wrapping himself around her during the crash. If he hadn’t been there, or hadn’t thought to protect others regardless of the risk to himself, then she could have died right there and then at the bottom of Hillcrest Road.’

  The superintendent turned away for a moment. When he turned back, Morton could see a glisten in his eyes.

  ‘But, Morton, he’s...’

  ‘He’s going to make a full recovery. He’ll be in a lot of pain for weeks, if not months, and I wish I could do something about that, but if I had to make the same call again, knowing everything I do now, I would. Can I get you a tissue, sir? Or a cup of tea?’

  The older man waved Morton off and then muttered that his parking would be up soon.

  Morton watched him lope off towards the stairwell.

  ***

  Annie left soon after her father, leaving Morton to read his newspaper as Mayberry wheezed loudly in his sleep.

  Mayberry slept right through lunch. He tossed and turned, fighting with the blanket that covered him. His heart rate monitor beeped rhythmically at regular intervals, and the nurses came by to check on him periodically as well as to top up Morton’s cup of tea.

  There was a big box of chocolates on the windowsill from Ayala and Rafferty, and it took all of Morton’s restraint not to pinch one while Mayberry snored.

  Mayberry eventually stirred, stretched, and then jumped backwards as his eyes snapped into focus. He yanked his blanket up around him and looked over to Morton, wild-eyed with surprise.

  ‘B-boss!’ Mayberry said. ‘How l-long have you b-been here?’

  Morton glanced at his watch. ‘Three hours. How’re you feeling?’

  ‘Th-thirsty.’ He pointed over to a jug of water and a plastic cup on the trolley at the foot of his bed. Morton poured him a cup and then watched as Mayberry gulped it down greedily. He poured another and then returned to his seat.

  ‘Is s-she O-OK?’ Mayberry asked, plainly referring to Vanessa Gogg.

  ‘She’s fine. She’ll be out of here later today if they’ve not let her go already. It’s you we’re all worried about.’

  Mayberry managed a limp smile, which fled as quickly as it had arrived.

  ‘Why so glum? Do you need more pain medication?’ Morton asked. Given all of Mayberry’s injuries, Morton could forgive him the need for morphine.

  ‘I... I’m not g-going t-to be at work for a w-while, am I?’

  ‘I daresay you’re not. You’ve got at least six weeks of paid leave ahead of you. But it won’t be too long before you’re up and about again.’

  ‘I w-want to work.’

  ‘You just need to work on getting better.’

  ‘C-can I h-have a laptop?’

  ‘I think we can manage that. I’ll send someone over with one on Monday. That work for you?’

  Mayberry nodded. ‘B-boss?’ he stammered. ‘Why didn’t they kill me?’

  ‘They almost did. So the question is: were they inept enough to get it wrong, or callous enough not to care?’

  Chapter 30: A Link to the Past

  Monday April 13th 10:00

  Monday morning soon drove the weekend from Morton’s mind. He’d taken the rest of Saturday and the whole of Sunday away from work, and had arrived fresh and ready to push on with the investigation.

  Unfortunately, with Mayberry out on medical leave, there was now much more to do with fewer detectives to do it.

  It took Mayberry’s absence to reveal just how much work he did behind the scenes. He was always lurking, and never seemed to be in the middle of an investigation, and yet all the little things he contributed, like his neatly drawn incident boards, had not been done, and the slack had begun to show.

  The morning was spent on paperwork. The kidnapping case had to be formally handed over to SOCA, but Morton wanted to keep tabs on it anyway insofar as it impacted the investigation into Niall Stapleton’s death.

  It was Rafferty who had the first breakthrough of the week. She found a cold case which appeared to have a similar modus operandi to the Stapleton murder. One Amoy Yacobi had been found hanging from a meat hook in Smithfield’s, his body concealed among the cattle that were drying there. Like Stapleton, Yacobi had had his throat slit while strung upside down.

  ‘Morton, do you know this DCI?’ Rafferty asked. She handed Morton a printout of the Yacobi case.

  At the top of the first page was a name Morton recognised: DCI Alana Crow, the senior investigating officer in the Yacobi murder. Morton and Xander had worked with her back in the day, but it had been years since he’d even thought about her.

  ‘Dead,’ he said, in an oddly croaky voice. ‘Heart attack. That was five or six years back. Real shame. I always liked her.’

  ‘What about DI Jasper Wilson?’ Rafferty asked. He was listed as having worked the case.

  ‘I can’t say I remember the name. Go see if you can find him. If the Yacobi case is connected to this one, then we’re going to need to speak to him.’

  ‘He’s downstairs, and he’s free after lunch.’ Rafferty grinned.

  ‘Then set up the meeting room–’

  ‘Done.’

  ‘And print out a copy of the case files–’

  ‘Done.’

  ‘And the Kennard file.’

  ‘Not done. You seriously think they might be connected? She’s a pensioner. Why would she have anything to do with Amoy Yacobi or Niall Stapleton?’

  ‘Just humour me.’

  ***

  Jasper Wilson turned out to be a giant of a man with red hair flecked with grey, which gave him a wild, almost violent, demeanour. When he stood up at the front of the incident room, his bulk obscured half of the projector screen.

  ‘Amoy Yacobi was well-known to us before he died. He was an Indonesian national with a rap sheet as long as my arm: smuggling, drugs, extortion. At the time of his murder, we believe he was involved in people-smuggling.’

  Morton raised a hand. ‘Was he affiliated with any groups?’ Like the Bakowski family.

  ‘Not that we know of. Our investigation died with him, so we never got to dig that far. I can’t rule it out.’ Wilson shifted to one side, clicked a button, and flashed an image up on the projector. ‘This is how we found him.’

  Yacobi was strung upside down, his feet tied, with the rope looped around a meat hook dangling from the ceiling. Just like Stapleton, he had been cut neatly across the jugular with something exceptionally sharp, and a dark pool of blood had gathered on the floor of the meatpacker’s warehouse, congealing so that it looked like a pool of rust.

  To Morton’s right, Ayala pulled a face.

  ‘You alright there, Ayala?’ Wilson asked. ‘Do you need a moment?’

  ‘No. Just... just go to the next slide already.’

  Rafferty laughed. ‘Ayala, you wuss. Why on earth did you become a detective?’

  Morton looked between them. While Ayala had paled considerably at the sight, Rafferty looked bemused and unruffled.

  ‘Quit it, you two,’ Morton said. ‘Wilson, as you were.’

  ‘Rightio. This’ – Wilson clicked over to the next slide �
� ‘is our man three weeks before his death. It was taken by DCI Crow when we were surveilling him.’

  The second image showed Amoy Yacobi standing alongside a Bentley, smoking. He had tattoos up and down both arms, though the photo wasn’t good enough for Morton to make out any of the detail.

  ‘Yes, he really is that short, Wilson said. ‘He was five foot two, and even that may have been due to elevated shoes.’

  ‘What was the cause of death?’ Morton asked. ‘Exsanguination?’

  ‘Just like Stapleton,’ Ayala chimed in.

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Can we go back to the previous slide?’ Rafferty asked.

  Ayala groaned, but Wilson clicked back anyway.

  ‘And then can we put the crime scene photo of Niall Stapleton up beside it? It’s logged in the system.’

  They waited as Wilson fetched the Hatton Garden crime scene photos from the cloud. Once they had both photos side by side, Morton mumbled, ‘Good spot.’

  ‘What is it?’ Ayala asked, still averting his eyes.

  ‘For God’s sake, just look, Bertram,’ Rafferty said. ‘There. Look at the throats.’

  Ayala peered at the screen for a split second. ‘So what? They’ve both been cut.’

  ‘They’ve both been cut neatly. Both men have a left-to-right cut from something ultra-sharp going right across the throat at the jugular.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So,’ Morton interjected, ‘we’re looking for a right-handed killer who could get close enough to both men that he could cut them from behind.’

  ‘Aren’t we assuming they were both awake? What if they were unconscious?’ Ayala asked.

  ‘We know Stapleton wasn’t,’ Rafferty said. ‘The blood spatter on the wall fits with the height of his neck. What about Yacobi?’

  All eyes fixed on Wilson. He shrugged. ‘Sorry, no idea. We don’t have any photos of the crime scene other than the one you’ve seen. The boys upstairs weren’t too keen on spending the big bucks bringing a criminal’s killer to justice. Frankly, I think the superintendent was of the impression that the more criminals who killed each other, the better.’

  ‘What did the autopsy show?’ Morton said. ‘Did the coroner note any signs of a body dump?’

  Wilson shook his head. ‘No rigor mortis on the notes.’

  ‘And what was the PMI?’ Morton referred to the post-mortem interval, the time between death and finding the body.

  ‘We don’t know. The warehouse was chilled to preserve the beef hung up there. It could have been hours, or days.’

  Morton scribbled a note on his pad. ‘That’s no help, then. Did the coroner note anything else?’

  ‘Nah. It was open and shut,’ Wilson said. ‘The coroner had no reason to linger over such an obvious cause of death, and, like I said–’

  ‘There wasn’t much interest in pursuing it,’ Rafferty finished for him.

  ‘Exactly.’ Wilson clicked again to go to the next slide, and this time a map of London appeared, with a pin drop indicating the location of Amoy Yacobi’s body in Smithfield Market.

  ‘Boss!’ Ayala said excitedly. ‘Look how close that is to the twins’ offices. Nuvem Media Associates is right around the corner from there.’

  Morton cast a dirty look in Ayala’s direction. ‘A mile away, but a decade too early. Nuvem Media Associates only just moved to Farringdon. Besides, do you have any idea how many people live or work within a mile of there? We’re talking hundreds of thousands of Londoners, if not a million plus.’

  ‘What happened to his body?’ Rafferty asked.

  ‘Cremated.’

  ‘Damn,’ she said. ‘No chance of digging him up to re-examine the corpse.’

  ‘What on earth for?’ Wilson said.

  ‘It’s like Morton said: someone had to either stand right behind him or drug him. We’ve got a pool of blood in the photos, but no arterial spray. A hardened criminal is unlikely to let someone get behind him and slash his throat. What if he was drugged to knock him out, and then his throat was cut? I don’t see anything in your file about toxicology testing.’ Rafferty rifled through the papers and fished out the meagre coroner’s report once more. ‘Isn’t Chiswick usually more thorough than this?’

  ‘Like I said–’ Wilson began.

  ‘There wasn’t much interest in pursuing it. I get it. We botched the investigation because it was a dead criminal and nobody cared. Now, that’s come back to bite us in the arse.’ Rafferty glared at him.

  Morton glanced down at his notes. Rafferty had covered everything he wanted to ask. He turned to Wilson. ‘Thank you, Detective Inspector Wilson. I think that’s everything. If you think of anything else, please don’t hesitate to give us a call.’

  Wilson nodded, scooped up his papers, unplugged his laptop from the projector’s media hub in the centre of the conference room table, and made good his escape in record time.

  ‘Ayala, you’ve got the neatest handwriting, don’t you?’ Morton asked, though he already knew the answer. ‘Then, up you get. With no Mayberry, you’re in charge of our incident board.’

  Ayala tentatively stood and approached the whiteboard, which was ominously empty. ‘What am I writing?’

  ‘Start with our three victims’ names along the top. Let’s label the cold case Victim Zero, as Yacobi isn’t strictly part of our investigation just yet, then label Primrose Kennard as Victim One, and Stapleton as Victim Two,’ Morton ordered.

  Ayala wrote up the names. ‘You think all three cases are one big case, boss?’

  ‘What do you think? Let’s take each victim one by one.’

  Ayala began to write on the board in his loopy, almost girly handwriting: Victim Zero: Amoy Yacobi, Indonesian, mid-thirties, drug/people smuggler, notable for his short stature. Possible gang affiliations. He was found hanging from a meat hook in Smithfield Market among hanging cattle.

  ‘Not bad. If you have time, I’d like this recreated digitally so I can refer to it on my iPad. Who do we think had the most reason to kill Yacobi?’ Morton looked around at Rafferty, who was studying Yacobi’s criminal record.

  ‘It’s got to be gang-related. He ripped off the wrong person and got himself killed for it.’

  ‘OK. Solid theory. Now, explain how that person comes across Niall Stapleton. They’ve got the same MO, so if they’re connected, then presumably we’re looking for one killer.’

  ‘He was killed while attempting to commit a burglary,’ Ayala said.

  ‘So, we’re thinking gang crime. Write us up a summary of Niall Stapleton’s murder on the board.’

  Ayala shifted to the right-hand side of the whiteboard and wrote: Niall Stapleton. Found with his throat cut. He was executed during the commission of a robbery – to retrieve something which was worthless.

  ‘Both victims were hung upside down, and then cut like meat,’ Morton said. ‘Why?’

  ‘The symbolism with Yacobi is obvious,’ Rafferty said. ‘He was an animal, less than human. He didn’t deserve any dignity in death, and so his place was among the cattle that had been slaughtered.’

  ‘You think the killer was making a moral judgement? It wasn’t simply about taking out the competition and warning anyone who might want to take his place?’

  ‘I do. I think it fits. Stapleton died the same way – and he was about to commit a burglary. We’re looking for a vigilante.’

  ‘Then, how did he know about Stapleton? Niall woke up that morning with no intention of committing a crime. It was only after he was blackmailed that he went to Hatton Garden. It seems farfetched that a vigilante could have stumbled across him as he prepared to commit a crime.’

  ‘What if the vigilante is an inside man?’ Ayala suggested. ‘He could be part of the gang that killed Yacobi and the gang that extorted Niall Stapleton.’

  ‘An undercover vigilante?’ Morton echoed sceptically. ‘Are we agreed that Stapleton and Yacobi were probably killed by the same person? The blood, the hanging upside down, the neat surgical cut to the thro
at – that all reads like a distinct signature to me.’

  ‘We can’t rule out a copycat,’ Rafferty said.

  ‘We didn’t make any of the details of the Yacobi case public.’

  ‘Then, logic dictates that if it is a copycat, we’ve got an inside man,’ Rafferty said. ‘Think about it. A vigilante enforcing justice where the law failed to stop Yacobi. A high-stakes burglary stopped before it could be committed. Doesn’t that sound like someone involved in law enforcement to you?’

  Silence hung in the air. It had never struck Morton that the killer could be one of them. A policeman. A scene of crime officer. A prosecutor. It wasn’t impossible.

  Morton stroked his chin thoughtfully. ‘Who, then?’

  ‘The same person who substituted your diamonds for cubic zirconia,’ Rafferty said.

  ‘You think the evidence clerk did it?’ Ayala said.

  ‘Can you rule it out?’ Rafferty challenged.

  Morton looked from Rafferty to Ayala, and he could see they thought they were on to something. He had to put his foot down. ‘Enough. As ingenious as your conspiracy theory is, we don’t have a shred of evidence. If we’re going to go accusing people, then you need proof. Let me hear some other ideas. Ayala?’

  ‘Cannibalism.’

  ‘Not this again.’

  ‘It fits!’ Ayala said. ‘Yacobi and Stapleton had their blood drained. Primrose Kennard had a lung removed. Black pudding and offal.’

  Even Rafferty looked vaguely disgusted at this suggestion. She pulled a face and tutted loudly. ‘No way. Cannibalism is off the menu. A vigilante makes far more sense. Yacobi and Stapleton might be related, but why would anyone target poor old Primrose Kennard?’

  ‘Board time again, Ayala, if you please,’ Morton said.

  Under Victim One, Ayala wrote: Primrose Kennard. Retired, widow, had no life other than church socials and trips to bingo. She died after being injected with sodium thiopental, her lung was neatly removed and her body was dumped on her husband’s grave.