by D. E. White
“Yes, and I’m not sure. Billy Jackson said he met Aileen online. Maybe they met on a dating site?” Dove unscrewed her water bottle and drained the last drops, changing the subject. “The taxi driver picked up Dionne and Ellis there, so it’s worth checking out.”
“Agreed. The other possibility is her husband is lying and she went over to her brother-in-law’s place to get changed for the night out,” Steve said. “Although I can’t see why she would want to wind him up. Everything so far points to secrecy from all four victims.”
Dove was scrolling through her phone and tapping out an email to DI Blackman. “I wonder what dating app or site Dionne was using? Tracey seemed to imply it was just for sex more than actual dating. She didn’t know what it was called, though . . .”
Stuck in the midday traffic on the one-way system, Dove called Jess and put her on speakerphone. “Hi Jess, I know you’ll let me know when everything comes through, but I’ve got a specific lead I want to check out . . .”
“Hi love, it’s fine, fire away,” Jess said briskly.
Dove explained about the dating site. “Probably not a legit dating app or anything, but it would be a big lead if it comes up as a red flag on all four victims.”
“Sure,” Jess said slowly. “Let me check . . . Did you get the phone records through?”
“Yeah . . .”
“Let me make a call to a mate in the lab and I’ll see if they’ve managed to lift anything from the search histories, or deleted emails,” Jess said. “Looks like the report is due back by five today anyway, but I’ll see if I can get any specific information expedited. Big suspect?”
“I wish,” Dove told her. “Too many bloody suspects on this one. In fact, I feel like we’ve got so many extra leads it’s almost taking us away from the main event.”
“I know what you mean. It’s a bit of a sprawler, isn’t it?” Jess sympathised.
Dove grinned to herself. “That’s what Lindsey said. Is that a technical term I missed in the training manual?”
“Very funny. Speak later, love.” Jess ended the call.
Steve, after making several backstreet turns through the winding cobbled roads of Abberley, finally eased the car back on to the seafront and parked opposite the bandstand. “Let’s go.”
The Victorian toilet block was large, brick-built and known to be a hang-out for drug dealers and addicts by night. By day it was a gloomy, sour-smelling building populated by a stream of parents and children.
“I’ll check out round the back,” Steve said, as Dove began to politely push her way through the crowds around the Ladies’ toilet.
At the sight of her ID, people began to whisper and stare. She ignored them, and gently pushed the main door, battered and heavy with metal reinforcements. It swung open. Her footsteps clattered on the grimy black-and-white chequered tiles. There were two rows of eight toilet cubicles and a line of enamel sinks, but Dove wasn’t looking for somewhere the public had access to.
If Dionne had dumped her bag in here, in plain sight, someone would have reported it by now. The general public, primed by terrorist attacks, was excellent at reporting unattended packages and bags. Somebody would have found it. Were there lockers at the back of the building? That would have been a safer bet.
She walked past the cubicles to a line of filthy showers at the rear. These were hardly ever used, were cordoned off, and stank of damp and mould. But there was room to change if you had to, Dove thought. The end cubicle had the curtain pulled right across. She paused, listening, feeling the adrenalin flow as she caught sight of her reflection in a stained, black-spotted mirror above the grimy washbasin.
Dove slipped a pair of gloves on and walked down to the end cubicle. The floor was sticky and something crunched under her boot. She gently pulled the curtain back. The rings rattled along the metal rail, and the plastic sheeting crackled in her hand. “Shit!” She held her breath, heart thumping hard against her ribcage, palms sweating in the plastic gloves.
The smell hadn’t just been damp and mould. A man’s body stood upright, wedged between the shower and the wall. He was obviously dead, with a deep cut right across his neck, and blood spatters up the walls as far as the ceiling.
No other obvious wounds, so he must have bled out. How the hell was he still standing upright? Dove supposed rigor must have set in while he was wedged in that position. Had he realised the seriousness of his wound and tried to get help? At his feet there was an empty bottle of cheap white wine, and several of an equally substandard brandy. One was smashed into glittering shards, and the other showed a jagged edge at the neck of the bottle, where it had been broken. The top half was laying on the edge of the shower cubicle, close to the victim.
In the far-right corner was a white shoulder bag, also covered in blood, but partially unzipped to reveal a blue overall stuffed in the top.
The dead man stared sightlessly at Dove, and the smell was making her want to vomit now. He was wearing trousers and a shirt, and his shoes, from what she could see of them under the bloodstains, were black and shiny.
She couldn’t stop staring. It was crazy, like a clip from a zombie movie. She half expected a practical joke, but the amount of blood and the horrible smell told a different story. Another victim, and it looked as though this one had had his throat cut.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“No fucking way. Seriously? You got another body?” DS Pete Wyndham was typing up his notes as Dove and Steve arrived back at the station and he looked at them in envy. “You get all the treats.”
“We did, but I wouldn’t call it a treat exactly,” Dove confirmed. She was never quite sure about Pete. Sometimes he was friendly but other times quite sarcastic and sharp. Lindsey dismissed it as his Gemini split personality.
“Sounds like fun to me,” Pete said, as he attacked his keyboard with vigour. “Well, you aren’t the only ones who struck lucky. Ellis Bravery has form. Ten years ago he was questioned in connection with a Dark Web op focusing on a child-trafficking ring. Nothing ever came of it and he was cleared because although he had access, he and his solicitor argued that a work colleague also had access to the same computer. No charges were ever brought, and he has no record. Want to know what else, though?”
“What?” Steve was half listening, half checking his emails, but Dove was riveted by this extra information.
“He used to live next door to Jamie Delaney. In fact, he was their neighbour right up until a year after Mickey Delaney was attacked.” Pete sat back in his chair and winked triumphantly. “I think that tops another body, doesn’t it, kids?”
Ignoring his patronising use of the word ‘kids’, Dove was gripping the desk, her mind spinning. The invisible threads drawing their victims together were starting to get a whole lot more visible. “Was Ellis Bravery ever a suspect in the Mickey Delaney case?”
“No,” Pete said regretfully. “He gave a statement, as did all the other neighbours, but he had an alibi for the entire evening. He was visiting his father in Kent the evening Jamie Delaney’s sister was attacked. No question, solid alibis from his dad and stepmum, and motorway cameras picked him up on the way there and back.”
Dove bit her thumbnail, considering this new evidence. It really came down to the problem she had expressed to Jess. The case was running off at different tangents, each seeming to lead to a different set of problems. She glanced towards the cluttered offices.
DCI Franklin was leafing through a mountainous stack of paperwork, when DI Blackman appeared from the corridor, followed by DC Amin, who was talking on her phone. She headed straight over to her desk and, wedging the phone between ear and chin, began typing furiously.
The DI beckoned Dove and Steve into his office. “This is starting to become a major headache,” he began. “Firstly, though, great work with Camillo’s and with tracing Dionne’s bag. SOCO have already confirmed Dionne’s phone was in the bag.”
“Great,” said Steve.
“We have an approximate time of dea
th for the man in the shower of between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. this morning, which means the bag was there the whole time.”
“An execution, maybe?” Dove suggested. “I’ve never seen a dead person still standing up before, but if he was killed and then propped up as a warning, which might make it gang related . . .”
Steve agreed, “It makes more sense if his body was arranged once he was dead, but it looks like he just bled to death standing up. Weird.”
The DI shook his head. “Hardly a good place to hang out at night, unless you’re looking for drugs or sex. He could have been lured there with the promise of one or the other. We’ll know whether he was a regular user after the PM, but it doesn’t, at first glance, appear to have anything to do with our case. Dionne was long gone by the time this man showed up.”
“Usually this is such a quiet town,” Steve said sarcastically. “Must be because it’s tourist season.”
“Not funny, DS Parker. The council have confirmed the cleaning contract isn’t currently fulfilled on that particular toilet block, due to cost-cutting, so they send someone over as and when to empty the bins, etcetera. They don’t bother with the showers, which is why they were taped off.” The DI was reading from his notes on the computer screen.
“The place is locked at dusk during the winter but not until midnight from April to September,” Dove said. “Unless anyone went right down to the end cubicle and drew the curtain as I did, he wouldn’t have been spotted.”
“His wallet, ID and watch were all missing, but we have established from HOLMES that he was Mr Neil Ockley. Works in the local bank. They flagged his absence this morning.” DI Jon Blackman ran his hands over his shaven head in a gesture of frustration. “You realise, of course, we are going to have to liaise with DI Rankin on this?”
“Really? Sorry, boss, you think this is something to do with the Claw Beach perps?” Dove was surprised. “But the MO is totally different.”
DI Blackman nodded slowly. “Victimology is similar, and although this man died, it was another violent attack within the radius of the other four flagged by DI Rankin and his team.”
“You mean they might have just gone too far this time?” Dove suggested. The DI was right, this case was huge, sprawling, and vital information was going to disappear down the cracks if they weren’t careful, but she couldn’t connect the dots on this one. It was a big step from robbery and beating to murder.
“Anyway, back to our own investigation. While we’re waiting for the rest of the lab results on our Beach Escape Room victims, I want you and Steve to crack on with this dating-site lead. If that was how they hooked up, chances are they’ve done it before. It sounds like Dionne knew exactly what she was doing that night.”
“Except for getting herself killed, obviously,” Steve put in.
The DI gave him a look and opened the office door. “Evening briefing is at seven, and I want some concrete suspects. Naturally you will have heard about Ellis Bravery from Pete, which also puts our co-owner Jamie Delaney in the frame. I called Delaney, because I think we need him in for interview, but their baby is sick and they are currently at Abberley General waiting to be seen.”
“We’ll have to leave Delaney for a while then, but forty-eight hours in and we’ve got six bodies. Bloody marvellous.” Steve sighed. “Want some coffee?”
“The usual, please,” Dove replied, before her brain caught up. “Hang on, why six victims?”
“Neil Ockley from the toilets, even though it looks like he’s going to be shunted over to DI Rankin’s team, and Aileen Jackson’s husband, Billy,” Steve explained. “He won’t ever be able to tell us what he was sorry for, will he?”
“Gotcha.” Why was her brain so slow today? While Steve got the coffees in, Dove made a list of possible dating sites, keeping away from the obvious ones and concentrating on smaller chat rooms. Her head was aching but she couldn’t tell if it was too much sun and stress, or her healing injury.
Her phone rang as time ticked towards the evening briefing time and she answered quickly. “Hey, Jess.”
“I’m just sending the lab reports over ahead of the evening brief, but I pulled out a bit of info you might want right away. Dionne, Oscar and Ellis were regulars on a chat room called Fantasy Play.”
“Sounds intriguing,” Dove mused. “Or sleazy?”
“Considering your sister owns a perfectly respectable strip club, love, I don’t think you should judge. Fantasy Play just made its first million and was set up by a tech entrepreneur. It’s for anyone to chat fantasies, and the local hook-ups have separate rooms.”
“Gaia owns two strip clubs, but you know what I mean. Creeping around on the web is different to blatantly flaunting it,” Dove told her friend.
“Hmmm . . . Anyway, you’ve got it now so run with it, girl!”
Dove relayed this new information to Steve and pulled up the website. “You need to register and create an account to get on it,” she said in disgust.
“Well, register under another name, brainless,” he told her, grinning.
“Don’t get smart, Parker,” she retorted, and with a flurry of keys she soon had access to the site.
The graphics were smooth, and the site navigation was excellent. Partially dressed and carefully posed men and women featured in the header and sidebar adverts. She finally found the local chat room.
“Got it.” She read rapidly through the last few posts and comments. “Who would have thought there were so many swingers round here?”
Steve sighed and shook his head. “What’s wrong with just meeting people at a bar or a club?”
“Because it’s easier online?” Dove suggested. “Easier to keep hidden if you have unusual preferences, or you want to keep it secret. Fantasy Play seems to be all about encouraging people to have affairs, from what I can see. All false names, too.” She suddenly snorted with laughter. “Big Daddy . . . Now if that doesn’t show a total lack of imagination. I wonder if that’s Ellis or Oscar?” She scanned down, following the flirtatious banter. “Or neither? It’s pretty popular and I’m on the local area hook-up bit.”
Steve was leaning over her shoulder, and drawn to the screen. Other team members were soon joining the conversation.
“Aileen wasn’t on the site, according to Jess,” Steve pointed out. “But she did have a burner phone.”
“But if the other three have all been active for a while they could have just asked her along? Or maybe she was seeing one of them on a regular basis,” Dove said, still clicking on posts. “Look at Glamour Girl . . . Bloody hell, she’s always asking for private chats . . .”
“Tech will be able to access those,” Josh Conrad pointed out, who had done time with the Cybercrimes Unit before joining the MCT. “Maybe Dionne was friends with Aileen or something and, as you say, just took her along for the night?”
“No crossover with their work or friendship groups so far, though,” Lindsey pointed out. “She’s the odd one out. I don’t imagine Dionne said ‘Hey, let’s go and have sex in a glass room on the pier at midnight’ to someone she didn’t know well, or who she didn’t meet on Fantasy Play. It’s pretty niche.”
“I wonder if Alex Harbor is on here?” Dove said suddenly.
“Who?” Pete was leering at some of the photographs. “She’s hot.”
“She wouldn’t have you, and she probably isn’t even real. The man from the Claw Beach attack, aka the man who was also occasionally shagging Dionne in his office at Pearce and Partners,” Dove told him.
“Are we having a party?” DI Lincoln tapped her shoulder.
“I think we might have just found what connects our four escape-room victims,” Steve said. “No wonder Mr Harbor didn’t want his wife to know what he’d been up to. If there is a crossover into that case there must be a lot more other halves about to get the shock of their lives. It’s play time!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“That sounds creepy, like a horror movie or something,” Dove told Steve as they sat dow
n in the incident room. She was instantly reminded of the dead man standing against the blood-spattered wall in the shower cubicle. “You would have thought it was bloody Halloween,” she grumbled to Josh.
“I love a good horror movie,” he told her. “A real classic like The Birds, The Exorcist.”
The evening briefing was swift, and the two DIs had a lot of information to relay, ensuring everyone was up to speed with the latest happenings. With so much information to process, key points were analysed, theories were quickly discarded or added to, and the notes in the case file and the whiteboard scrawl grew larger.
“Fantasy Play looks legit. It’s just that people on there are basically looking for extramarital sex, and a local search-and-hook-up function makes it easy for them,” DI Blackman summarised. “Tomas Radley’s alibi checks out. We don’t know where Billy Jackson was for the four hours he said he was at work, before he got the call from the care home about his mother. His shift manager at Tesco’s said he called in sick at the last minute, and added it was very out of character for him to do this.”
“Did he suspect his wife was having an affair and follow her?” Lindsey suggested.
“Possibly. But he did indeed get a call about his mother and head over to East Dean at 1 a.m., so although chances are slim, he could still be in the frame.” He glanced at the list of names up on screen. “Ellis Bravery’s girlfriend was asleep. The CCTV from the building shows only Ellis exiting, and she doesn’t leave until 6 a.m. the next morning, when she heads down to the gym, again caught on camera.”
The briefing came to a close as Dove was still trying to work out if Billy Jackson might have followed his wife out for the night. She kept wondering what he was sorry for.
DI Blackman was speaking again, slightly wearily now, and she drew her thoughts back into the room. “Final sum-up for today then,” DI Blackman said. “We are getting somewhere with our leads, so we just need to continue the process of elimination. Now go home, get some rest, and be back first thing tomorrow. Steve and Dove, you continue pursuing the Fantasy Play connection, but also bring Jamie Delaney in for a formal interview.”
