The Retirement Party

by Graham Miller

  'And then you'd be tracking them all over the place, seeing where they turn up. But the good news is that at the end of it you'll take down a dozen lines.'

  'Yeah, no, that'd be good. Especially on the reports at the end of the month budget meetings.'

  'Okay then. We have a deal.' There was the slightest of pauses. 'Can you do me two favours in return though. Can you make sure you keep the lines out of Bradwick and remember where the lead came from?'

  'Of course. You sure you want me to remember you?'

  'What do you mean?'

  'Well if it all goes tits-up, then it'll be on your head.'

  'I've told you; this is guaranteed.'

  Haines said goodbye and hung up. He sat back and stared at the ceiling. He had gone out on a limb now. But he knew Billy and he knew that this could be important if the promise of a big raid was ever fulfilled. He hoped he'd just banked a favour that he could call on when needed.

  The other piece of information he had put into the computer before the phone call. Pietr Garoza was bigger than his own force. He was well known to the national crime agency and they were in their turn co-operating with Interpol. He was definitely wanted in his home country and was a person of interest over here. There was no definite address and the NCA were keen to locate him.

  Haines had made a quick decision to keep this close to his chest. He printed out some photos to circulate around his team. But at the moment he would order his men to have a watching brief. It wouldn't be enough to locate Garoza, he wanted to have him bang to rights, on his own turf.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The next day, DC Angel had her confirmation. The videos came back so she spent some time looking through them. She went through at double speed and within ten minutes, she'd seen a dark Ford Fiesta in the area of the Taylor killing. She then fast forwarded to after the time of death and found the same car on the other side. If nothing else, the driver would be a really good witness.

  However, after another thirty minutes of shuttling back and forth she was frustrated. The rear number plate lights weren't working. Was that a deliberate ploy, she wondered, or just poor maintenance? From the front, the headlights washed out the poor quality CCTV meaning she had absolutely no idea of the number plate. In the dark it was difficult to even see how many people were in the car. She thought the person behind the wheel was possibly white, but that was as far as it went.

  She leaned back from the desk and rubbed her eyes. Why couldn't she have a CCTV system like they had on TV shows? The kind where you just clicked a mouse and zoomed right the way in as far as you wanted and the picture just kept getting clearer. She would then be able to get the killer's face.

  Not knowing if it would do any good at all, she shuttled back and forth again until she'd selected some views that were, while not brilliant, the best she could find. She pressed the buttons to save the images and send them off to print. While the computer was working, she went to fetch herself a coffee and then settled down to go through the footage from the Evans killing.

  At least it was daytime, so there weren't any problems with missing lights. The CCTV was still quite shoddy, jumping and occasionally being covered with static. She almost missed it when it happened. She was skipping through on fast-forward and the camera was covering a main road. As it was around rush hour, the cars were stacked up, stopping and starting with the change of the lights.

  She was watching the junction that led up to the side road which went past the footpath where the body was found. From behind a van, a dark car emerged for a couple of frames and disappeared up the road. She checked the time stamp – the driver was in the right place and the right time to either attack Stella Evans or witness her murder.

  She paused it and was amazed to see that she could get a clear shot of the number plate. The whole case seemed to be cursed, but this was the first real break they'd had so far. She sent the images to print and switched over to the DVLA site. Her heart sank just a little when she saw that it came back as a hire car company. And not some small local operation either, but a big national chain that had branches everywhere.

  She decided it was time to involve DCI Haines. She knocked on his open door and settled in front of his desk. She ran through everything and then showed him the photographs, first from the Taylor scene and then from Evans.

  'So, you've done it. Pull the DVLA records and we'll go round there and nick him.'

  'Not quite that simple. The car comes back to a national car hire place. Registered at a central office.'

  'And you need me to use my rank and local knowledge to scare up a warrant quickly so we can find out who was driving that car?' The mischief in Haines' voice was easy to hear.

  'It shouldn't be a problem,' DC Angel said. 'We've established a firm timeline and that car was driving past two crime scenes at just the right time to be a very good witness if not a suspect.'

  'Yep, I'll get straight onto the magistrate. For the minute though, I'll keep our powder dry on the Taylor case. I know what they're like. They're all ex lawyers. The connection to the first killing is too thin. I'll give them a simple picture – the driver of that car can help us with the enquiry into the Evans murder.'

  'Thanks, boss!'

  * * *

  The next day, DC Angel pushed herself back from her desk. If she hadn't been in a male dominated office she would have burst into tears. Instead she'd had to make do with slamming the phone down onto the cradle.

  She'd just got off a conference call with BioMed – a company that was based in the north of the county just outside Bristol. They mainly sold medical supplies across the south west. The car that Angel was interested in had been hired by them at exactly the time of the Evans murder. She had learned this thanks to providing the head office of the hire car company with a valid warrant.

  BioMed had confirmed that they had sent three of their sales reps to a sales conference in a hotel outside Birmingham. This information had been painfully gleaned in a call between herself, the sales manager, the head of HR, a legal advisor, and the head of the finance department. It was hard to tell who was speaking and they frequently interrupted each other. She was trying to establish who had been driving the car at the time, while all the managers had been discussing their duty of care regarding the personal information they held.

  In the end they had left it that the legal advisor would have a conference with his boss to decide if they were able to release the name of the driver or if they would have to wait for another warrant.

  What she had been able to learn was that three of their sales staff had been sent on a conference to learn about new products and how to sell them. To reduce costs, they had been supplied with a hire car – saving any insurance and licence complications over business use on a personal car. Unfortunately for DC Angel, this car was supposed to have been at a posh hotel outside Birmingham for three nights and the night on which Stella Evans was murdered was right in the middle of that period.

  She felt like screaming. She didn't need to know much – just who had access to the car and if they left the conference. Whether she could put them in the vicinity of the murder or not. She went over to lookout of the window – she hated waiting on other people to make decisions. She saw a number of CCTV cameras on poles, all watching car parks. A thought started forming.

  All she needed to know was where that car was. She reckoned on a couple of hours to drive to Birmingham. So, a five-hour window around the time of the murder would do the trick.

  She went back to her desk and phoned the finance manager. As soon as she announced who she was, his tone became wary.

  'I just wondered if you could tell me where the conference was held?'

  'Why do you want to know?'

  'It's purely routine. We just need it for elimination purposes. We don't need any names. I know you'll have handled the expenses. If you give me the name of the hotel, then I can talk to them direct.'

  'Maybe I ought to phone Mr Broughton in legal. Just ru
n it past him.'

  'Listen, I know it was a medical sales conference, I know it was in a hotel outside Birmingham and I know the dates. I could find it either on the internet or by phoning all the hotels. It's not privileged information at all. We just need you to help the police with their enquiries and speed the process up a bit.'

  There was a long pause as the manager considered this. DC Angel's spirits rose when she heard a sigh and the clatter of keys at the other end of the phone. 'It's a Ramada hotel,' he said resignedly, and gave the address.

  Angel finally felt that she was getting a break. She had dealt with that chain before and she knew that they were generally good at helping the police. Not wanting to lose the momentum, she immediately phoned through and asked to speak to the security manager.

  Stella Evans had left work just after five and had been found at a quarter to seven. There was nothing to suggest that she'd done anything other than head straight home so they were fairly confident that she died somewhere between twenty past five and twenty to six. Factoring in the two-hour drive from Birmingham, DC Angel asked for the CCTV files covering three o'clock through to eight o'clock.

  There was a sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line. 'Listen, we can do it, if it's essential.' She heard the phrase and translated it in her head to "I need a more senior rank". 'But we have a total of eight cameras covering all areas of the car park and the exits, all storing the files digitally. If we were to edit that section out.' He paused doing mental arithmetic. 'That'd be over forty hours of footage. I can't just email that through, it'd break our servers. I'd need to talk to the tech guys at head office, get them to set up a secure site, upload the files, send you out the address and password. All takes time.'

  DC Angel sat back and thought. What would prove things, either one way or another? 'Okay. You say you've got eight cameras? Can you email me eight stills, all taken at five thirty on that day? Just for starters?' She thought that if they were on a conference, they'd probably drink in the hotel bar and eat in the hotel restaurant, all on expenses. There shouldn't be any reason to go out in the car at all.

  'Eight stills? Sure, that'd be easy.' His voice grew distracted as he wrote and talked at the same time. 'Eighth of August, seventeen thirty, all car park cameras. I'll have that over to you as soon as I've done it.'

  Two hours later she had her answer and she was not happy. She printed off a single photo and angrily circled a number plate in red marker pen. Then she grabbed the two photos from the Evans scene, together with one from the Taylor killing and pinned them all up on the incident board in a neat line.

  'What's all this?' DC Ed Mitchell had wandered over and was looking at the photos.

  'Well.' Angel was aware she sounded like a teacher. 'This car was seen in the vicinity of the Taylor killing, but we can't identify the plate. I suspect this is the same car, shown here and here. The timings place it both before and after the Evans murder.'

  'And this one in the middle? Looks like a car park.'

  'Yeah. This car was approaching the crime scene at 17:14, parked in Birmingham at 17:30 and leaving the scene at 17:43.'

  'What's the driving time from Birmingham to Bradwick then?'

  'I'll tell you something.' Angel was frustrated and it showed in her voice. 'It's a lot more than fifteen bloody minutes!'

  'Hey, calm down. You've got something here.' Before he could explain, DCI Haines entered the open-plan area and walked over. Between them Angel and Mitchell explained what they had. Then Mitchell asked, 'What was that car doing in the car park in Birmingham anyway?'

  'It's a hire car, medical sales reps attending a conference.' DC Angel sounded fed up.

  'So, there's two possibilities.' Mitchell was getting into his stride now. 'Either a bunch of sales reps decided to clone a number plate, fudge their attendance at a conference so that one of them could use a hire car to commit a murder.' He paused for effect. 'Or, our main suspect drove past a hire car place, saw a car with the same make and model as his one and cloned the plate.' He tapped the photos on the board. 'What you have here is a photo of our main suspect.'

  'He's right, you know.' DCI Haines was nodding. 'It'll be easy to check the conference, there'll be CCTV all over the inside of the hotel, hundreds of witnesses. If I was about to commit a crime in a car, I'd drive past several hire car lots and write down the number plates.'

  'Hold on a minute though,' DC Angel said. 'There's loads of legislation around number plate machines now. How hard is it to make up fake plates without a log book?'

  DCI Haines clapped her on the shoulder. 'That's your next job. We know our lad is local. He's picked two spots that aren't covered by CCTV, one of which is a well-known short cut. He got his number plate from a hire car lot on the southern edge of Bristol. Have a sniff around dodgy garages, especially the small one-man type outfits. See if any have shut down recently, maybe sold off their assets? If you get names, give me a shout and I can lean on them.'

  DC Angel nodded and returned to her desk. She spent the rest of the afternoon looking for dodgy number plate machines. The trouble was that the whole trade was overseen by the DVLA through a licensing scheme and anyone found breaching the conditions would face a fine of thousands of pounds and loss of their licence.

  This meant that all the official sources for buying the machines were very keen to emphasise that you needed to provide documentation. She knew from experience that the whole car industry was riddled with petty crooks. Given that their suspect was in Bradwick but happy to go up nearly as far as Bristol, she had a large area to search for number plate makers. Her heart sank when the results came back – there were literally hundreds of suppliers. It seemed that every backstreet garage, second-hand car lot and small motor factor had a machine. Any one of them could've reported a theft of a machine, or simply sold it under the counter, or made fake plates cash in hand.

  However, she wasn't a member of the public and she wasn't restricted to just using search engines. She called up the police computer system and started crafting a search. She had to manually scan through and discount thefts of actual number plates, although she made a note to check with the hire car company that the killer hadn't simply stolen the plates.

  What she was left with was a list of more serious car crimes. She noticed that in recent years, even these had tailed off. As HPI checks moved to phones and more of the DVLA services were online, it got harder and less profitable to change the identity of a stolen car to sell it on.

  She spent a long afternoon checking cases. In every one there had been a car dealer involved in giving cars new identities. And in every case, the machine for making the plates had been seized and destroyed.

  At five to five she opened the last case of the day. She had been working backwards and had now got to 2001. She thought that tomorrow she'd try a different approach – she'd gone far enough back in the past to satisfy her curiosity.

  There was a number plate machine noted in the evidence, but no record of its fate. Frowning, she called up the case details and phoned through to the evidence suite.

  Five minutes later, she pushed back from the desk and stared at the ceiling. The machine had been checked out of evidence after the trial and had never gone back in. In her mind, she followed through the possible trail. Had a corrupt officer sold the machine into the underworld, or had they gone on to become a killer themselves?

  She realised that Michelle Jones had got into her head. She was seeing corruption everywhere now. On the other hand she had a quiet voice in her head that wouldn't be silenced. Whoever had killed Mazey and Stella had known about CCTV, DNA and number plates. They had taken effective steps to avoid all of them. That left the question, were they dealing with a very careful amateur or a law enforcement professional.

  She decided, despite her dressing-down for not being a team player, to keep this to herself for the moment. Before she did anything, she needed information. So, she packed up and prepared to leave her desk like a normal Monday evening
.

  However, this time she went down to records and pulled the case file for a car theft ring from 2001. She would read it overnight, draw her own conclusions and then decide what to do next.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  DCI Haines always thought that newspaper offices should be like they are in the films – all bashing presses and harassed reporters rushing around clutching articles.

  In practice, the Bradwick Recorder had moved to an out of town light industrial estate. He had called the editor, Angela Bathgate, out about this when they first moved. She'd shrugged and pointed to the rows of monitors and quiet workers hunched over them.

  'It's the internet, isn't it? This place has amazing broadband speeds and we can get lots of articles written and uploaded as well as keep up with Twitter.'

  Now, they had chosen to meet, not in the office but in a cafe that did a roaring trade on the estate. Like every other building it was bland and modern. Haines and Bathgate were both locals and even though there was nearly ten years between them, they still felt like compatriots.

  Once they had coffees, they got down to business.

  'So, what's the latest on these two murders? Have you got a name for this serial killer yet? Butcher of Bradwick is my favourite. Or the Seaside Strangler?' There was a glint of mischief in her voice.

  'You know I want to keep it quiet. And we haven't even linked the two cases.'

  'Come on, I may not be a detective like you but two women, similar age, both strangled in remote areas. If we don't report it soon, someone else will.'

  'I do appreciate all that you're doing. You know how important this is.'

  'You don't need to explain it to me. We're on the same page – a serial killer scare could finish this place off. Even now if you say Hungerford or Dunblane, the massacres are the first thing you think of. And, I know we've gone all digital and away from paper but one thing hasn't changed. We still need advertisers. We're doing well in promoting Bradwick as a retro holiday spot. Playing down the drug trade, the high street closures – all of that can be done.'