Dark Water: A gripping serial killer thriller

by Robert Bryndza

  ‘How do you keep so thin?’ asked Erika.

  Nils shrugged.

  He took it from her and turned the box over. ‘Best before end 11th November 2006,’ he read. ‘Perhaps she was saving it for a rainy day. It certainly pissed down last night.’

  ‘Why underline the writing on the box?’ asked Erika. Peterson and Nils looked back at her and shrugged.

  * * *

  When Erika and Peterson came back out to the car, they sat for a moment, watching as the body was brought from the house in a black body bag on a metal stretcher.

  ‘I want her Internet history and access to her phones. I want to see what she was looking at, and who she was talking to before she died,’ said Erika.

  ‘We should check with Isaac if she has any chocolate orange in her stomach too.’

  Erika shot him a look, ‘I’m serious,’ he added.

  ‘It’s not Terry’s, it’s mine…I know it sounds hokey, but there’s something wrong here. Why would she call me to say she’s found something and then she’s found dead?’

  55

  Afternoon turned to evening and nothing came back from forensics, Amanda Baker’s phone company or her Internet provider. Erika was back in the incident room, watching the light fade on yet another day.

  The she received a call from Marsh.

  ‘Erika, I’ve been asked to get some more information on what exactly is going on with your case. The Assistant Commissioner is concerned you have lost control of the investigation. Erika outlined what had happened.

  ‘Do you think the intruder in your house and the discovery of Amanda baker’s body could be linked? Perhaps you’re getting close to something.’

  ‘That’s my theory, but forensics is slow, and I’m waiting on phone records. I’m hoping that my sister will be able to provide a likeness with the e-fit artist…’

  ‘Either way, Erika, you need to pull a rabbit out of the hat very soon. You wanted to bring in Joel Michaels as a suspect and the one day he is in custody and Trevor Marksman is in hospital this happens.’

  ‘I know, Sir.’

  * * *

  Erika arrived back at the hotel in Dulwich just before seven. She had wanted to stay later, but Moss and Peterson insisted she go back to be with her sister and the kids. The hotel was very small, and situated on a smart residential street in Dulwich. When Erika went up to the room where Lenka was staying, she was just finishing up with the e-fit artist and the translator. The kids were asleep on the bed in front of a Disney DVD.

  ‘This is what we got,’ said the artist. He turned his laptop around to face Erika. She put her bag down and leaned in to the image. It was a man with a thin athletic face, a strong nose and jaw. He had wide set eyes and a smattering of stubble on his face.

  ‘You saw stubble?’ asked Erika.

  ‘When I hit him over the head, he went down and I saw he had a stubbly face,’ said Lenka. When the e-fit artist had gone, they opened a bottle of wine and sat in the corner of the room.

  ‘I should wake them up soon, or they won’t sleep,’ said Lenka. Marek is due to be arriving very soon.

  ‘What are you going to say to him?’ asked Erika.

  ‘I don’t know. My only option is to go back. I don’t speak the language. I’m in the way here.’

  ‘You are not in the way, I promise,’ said Erika. Marek arrived an hour later, he’d got a cab from the airport.

  He was on his best behaviour, and greeted Erika warmly. He even had some food for her, a jar of his mother’s jam.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Erika. The kids woke up and were so excited to see him, and when he cuddled them and picked baby Eva up, Erika excused herself and went to find the room she was booked into.

  She was dozing off just before eleven, with her laptop on her knee, when her phone rang.

  ‘Hi Erika, it’s Lee Graham from Cybercrime.’

  Erika rubbed her eyes and sat up. ‘Hi Lee, I thought you were based over in Brighton now?’

  ‘No, back in London. I get around.’

  ‘I bet you do.’

  Erika had worked with Lee on several cases over the past few years, and she enjoyed flirting with him. Probably because she thought it wouldn’t ever go anywhere.

  ‘I saw the request had gone out for phone and email records.’

  ‘I take it you managed to find something?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, I’ve got Amanda Baker’s Internet usage records from her provider. Nothing dodgy, but she’s been accessing HOLMES several times a day over the last week.’

  ‘HOLMES? That can’t be right, she wouldn’t have access. She left the force years ago.’

  ‘She’s been accessing HOLMES through the login and password registered to a DI Simon Crawford…’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘You know this officer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Her phone records also show that she’s been making and receiving calls to DI Crawford over the past three weeks too.’

  ‘He was assigned three weeks ago to my case,’ said Erika.

  ‘Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. It looks like she’s been poking her nose in. I’ve got a full list of her Internet history over the past month. It really picks up over the past few days. I’m also sending through the phone records.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Erika. When she came off the phone she only had to wait a few minutes before the email came through, and then she started to read with interest.

  56

  When Erika arrived at the station the next morning, she was the first in the incident room. She watched as everyone arrived and just before eight she emerged from her office and called everyone to attention, and explained the findings from Amanda Baker’s phone records.

  ‘So this brings me on to the question, where is DI Crawford?’ finished Erika. She looked around the room at her officers.

  ‘Boss, Crawford didn’t come into work yesterday,’ said John.

  ‘Did no one think to tell me?’

  ‘You came in after lunch, after all the chaos, and then DCI Baker’s body was discovered…’

  ‘Ok. I want you to call him, I also want you to put in a request for his phone and his Internet records. I also want access his access to HOLMES suspended. I’ve put Amanda Baker’s internet records up on the system and the list of what she’s accessed over the past few days. I want you to divide it up and go through it, even if it looks innocent I want to see everything that she saw.’ Peterson I want you to be in charge of this, okay?’

  Peterson nodded. John looked up at Erika from his phone,

  ‘Boss, I’ve just tried DI Crawford’s house and his mobile, he’s not answering either of them.’

  ‘Okay, Moss you come with me, let’s make a house call.’

  * * *

  It was raining yet again when Erika and Moss drove from Bromley to where Crawford lived between Beckenham and Sydenham.

  ‘I have a bad feeling about this,’ said Moss, when they arrived outside his flat.

  ‘Is this it?’ asked Erika peering up out of the front window. They were on Beckenham Hill Road, which was a busy main road. It was crammed with a long row of pound shops, newsagents, and betting shops, a few crummy launderettes, and an Iceland supermarket. It was also on several major bus routes.

  ‘I can’t park outside, there’s a couple of buses behind me.’ She drove a little further up and pulled into a Mc Donald’s car park. They hurried out and waited for a couple of minutes to cross the busy road. Crawford lived in a flat above a payday loans shop. It was a white front door that opened directly onto the street. They found his flat number in the long row of doorbells and rang, but there was no answer. A man came out of the door, and Erika and Moss slipped in after him.

  A staircase with a grubby carpet wound its way up four flights. Crawford was on the top floor. When they reached the third floor, a door was open, and they could hear the sound of a Chinese lady shouting. A grey haired man came to the door, followed by the woman who was small and feroci
ous.

  ‘You plumber, but you not fix this leak?’

  ‘I told you, it’s coming from the flat above, and the person isn’t in.’ He said to her wearily.

  ‘Hi, I’m DCI Foster and this is DI Moss,’ said Erika as they flashed their badges. ‘There’s no one answering upstairs?’

  ‘Thas’ what he just said,’ snapped the woman. ‘There’s leak in my kitchen, big leak. It spread since last night all across the ceiling…’

  Erika looked at Moss and then made for the stairs.

  It took just two attempts for Erika to kick down the door. Crawford lived in a studio apartment. The bed was unmade under a window looking down onto the main road, and there were flies buzzing around above dirty pots and pans in the kitchen in the corner. On the wall were a picture collage of Crawford with two kids, a boy and a girl who were in their early teens. The pictures had been taken over the years, starting with a photo of what looked like the main gates at Disneyland Paris.

  ‘He’s divorced,’ said Moss. ‘I heard him moaning about his ex wife a couple of weeks back.’

  They noticed a large wet patch on the carpet outside the bathroom door. It was slightly ajar, and they moved slowly across to it. Erika pushed it open and they saw in the tiny bathroom that the bath was full to the brim. DI Crawford’s naked body floated in the water, which was stained red. One of his arms flopped out and over the side, and they could see he had slashed his wrists.

  57

  Two days later, Erika attended the mortuary with Moss and Peterson. Both Amanda Baker and DI Crawford’s bodies were laid out side by side on the stainless steel mortuary tables. Isaac was waiting for them, weary after performing both autopsies through the night.

  ‘What disturbs me about both of these deaths, is that whoever did this, made a very weak attempt to pass them off as suicides,’ said Isaac. ‘It’s almost like they’re mocking us.’

  ‘You don’t think they were suicide?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ he said. He moved to Amanda Baker first. She lay under a white sheet, and she was placed on her front. It was only when Isaac pulled down the sheet that they saw the angry weals around her neck.

  ‘You can see here the usual kind of bruising I would expect to see from a hanging, the rope has bitten deep into the skin and left a very clear and defined line,’ he said indicating the line running around her neck. ‘If you can see here, there is a series of small circular bruises at the nape of the neck. This indicated to me that the noose was placed over her head, tightened, and then she fought, the knot of the noose moving and creating a ring of bruises. You can also see the bruise at the base of her her spine…’ he moved down and gently pulled the sheet back. ‘We also recovered some skin cells from underneath her left hand fingernails. This indicated she fought with an attacker…’

  Isaac paused and then moved over to the body of DI Crawford. He lay on his back, his hair combed back from his forehead. His arms lay out of the sheet and beside him.

  ‘You see here, there are two long incisions one on each arm. They are horizontal as opposed to vertical, and each cut severed the radial artery, the main artery that supplies blood to the arms and hands. It was done with a strait-razor, or what you might call an old barber shop razor.’

  Moss grimaced at the sight of the two long slashes in the arms, which had been neatly stitched up.

  ‘He had high levels of alcohol in his blood, and also traces of the sedative Halcion…’

  ‘We talked about Halcion the other day,’ said Erika.

  ‘Yes, it is illegal in the UK, but not so in the USA, and it’s possible to get hold of it online.’

  ‘So he got drunk, took the sedative and slit his wrists? He seemed on edge the last few days he was in work, well he seemed distracted for the whole time he was on the case,’ said Moss.

  ‘He didn’t slit his wrists,’ said Isaac.

  ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘The barbershop, straight razor was found on the edge of the sink. It had been wiped clean, there were no prints.’

  ‘Couldn’t he have done that himself?’

  ‘He could have, but there would have been torrents of blood when he sliced open the radial artery. He would have had to use a cloth or a tissue, there were no bloody cloths or tissues fond at the scene and the bloodletting was confined to the bath water and the tiles surrounding the bath. Whoever did this, wanted to make it look like a suicide, but also pass on the message that it wasn’t so.’

  ‘And they were both discussing the Jessica Collins case in the lead up to their murders,’ said Erika.

  ‘There’s more I have to tell you,’ said Isaac. He moved over to the long counter by the sink where he had some paperwork.

  ‘We were able to test the skin cells from under Amanda Bakers fingernails, we got a positive match on a Jayden Quince. He’s ex army, served in Iraq and then was discharged shortly afterwards. He was charged with GBH four years ago, hitting a man in a club in the west end. He had his DNA taken then and its been stored on the database.’

  ‘That’s fantastic,’ said Erika.

  ‘I suggest you send forensics back into DI Crawford’s flat and do a complete swab.’

  ‘This is such good work, Isaac,’ said Erika.

  ‘There’s one more thing; the DNA matches the blood taken from your flat the other night when the intruder broke in. It’s the same man. I think he was coming for you too.’

  58

  Gerry had been keeping a low profile. He’d bled badly from the cut behind his ear, where the woman had hit him. She’d knocked him unconscious, and he didn’t know how long he had been out when he came to on the carpet in the darkness. Then he’d heard her in the bathroom with the two kids who were whimpering.

  He knew something was badly wrong when he staggered to his feet. The room was spinning and lurching to one side, he went to the bathroom and tried the door, but he felt himself losing consciousness. He gripped the handle and pushed. The door had given a little and he’d staggered back hitting the floor hard, pain coursing up his tailbone.

  The kids inside the bathroom were crying, she was trying to quiet them down. His mind raced, calculating the possibilities. He could kill the woman, but what about the kids. When he agreed to this, it didn’t include kids. And there was a baby. He’d blacked out again, and when he came to he could hear the far off sound of police sirens.

  Abort, he had to abort, he decided. He ran from the flat and out into the garden. The route he’d planned out before stayed in his mind and he moved through several dark gardens. He stopped in a large garden, filled with trees and bushes and found a pond, shimmering like ink in the darkness. He leaned over and washed the blood from the side of his face. The cold water felt good on his skin. He then moved on, and found his car parked in a back street.

  * * *

  He’d lain low in the small house he rented, he slept, he gathered his strength and now on the third morning he knew it was time. He went to the tiny bathroom and flicked on the light above the mirror. The bruise had gone down on the side of his face. He’d done a rough job tacking together the three inch cut on the side of his head with surgical glue, and the iodine he’d swapped over it, against his cappuccino coloured skin had a green tint.

  He took a shower and then walked through to the small kitchen. On the table was a Glock 17 handgun, and £8000 in unmarked bank notes.

  Gerry was smart and he could be greedy, but his intelligence told him that it was time to end this. His mobile phone rang on the table beside the cash. He picked it up.

  ‘Where the fuck have you been?’ came the familiar voice. He was silent. ‘Are you there?’

  ‘I’m here.’ He replied.

  ‘You were supposed to do all three of them. Two suicides and a home invasion. Not only did you fail on the latter, but also the Foster woman will find out. She’s not stupid.’

  ‘I’m out,’ said Gerry.

  ‘What do you mean? You’re out? You need to finish the fucking job. I won’t pay yo
u a penny more.’

  ‘Keep the rest of the money. I’m out.’

  ‘It’s not just the money, you know.’

  ‘You’ve been holding this over my fucking head for so long, and I’ve had enough. There’s two sides to every story and if I go down, so will you. I just realised I’ve nothing to lose by walking away.’

  With that Gerry ended the call. He opened the pre-paid phone and took out the SIM card breaking it neatly into four.

  He now had to move fast. He figured he had a day, maybe less before his DNA profile would come back, and he had to prepare his escape.

  59

  Erika sat across from Superintendent Yale in his office. He looked exhausted. His face was pale, and he had large dark circles under his eyes.

  ‘Sir. I don’t need you to divert any more resources my way,’ she said. He held up his hand,

  ‘Erika, I don’t think that stationing a police car outside the hotel you are staying at will break the bank. We’ve already had a stabbing in broad daylight on the front steps of the station and one of my officers has been found dead in suspicious circumstances. You’ve given me much bigger fish to fry… I take it you’ve heard about Jason Tyler?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘He was refused bail and taken to Belmarsh, someone heard he was going to give evidence for a plea bargain, and they got to him. He was stabbed in the leg with a shank.’

  ‘How did someone get hold of a shank?’

  ‘You’re not going to believe this. Kit Kats, or should I say the foil the two finger Kit Kats come wrapped in. Some bright spark has been saving them up for months and fashioned a lethal spiked shank with what must have been a few hundred foil wrappers. Tyler was stabbed in the thigh, bled out in the showers, and now his empire dies with him.’