by Dane Cobain
“And what was in the package?” Cholmondeley asked.
Constable Cohen flashed him a panicked look, the colour draining from his face as bile rose in his stomach. “I couldn’t exactly say, sir,” he said. “It’s better if you come and take a look at it. Better glove up before you handle anything. The lads from forensics are going to want to see this one.”
Intrigued, Cholmondeley sped up, and Mogford increased his pace to keep up with him. The package had been collected from reception and taken away to a safe room, and that was where Constable Cohen led them. The room had an officer at the door who inspected their badges despite knowing them all on a first name basis, and the only thing inside it was a plain, stainless steel table, two chairs and the package itself, which was partially unwrapped and lying open in the middle of the table.
Cholmondeley pulled on a pair of plastic gloves, which the man on the door provided, and moved closer to inspect the package. Sergeant Mogford was at his shoulder, a step and a half behind him, while Constable Cohen watched nervously from just inside the doorway.
Cholmondeley knew there was something wrong just by looking at it. The inside of the box looked like a butcher’s bin. It was half-full of blood and gore with a couple of hunks of flesh floating around in the middle of it. Genitalia stew.
Because, Cholmondeley realised, that was exactly what he was looking at. It seemed like they’d found the rest of Jayne Lipton, just in time to bury it along with her body. Cholmondeley backed away from the box and started to retch, but he was old enough and tough enough to stop the bile from slipping past his larynx.
Gary Mogford, meanwhile, had leaned in a little closer. He held one gloved hand across his face and used the other to rifle around in what the crime scene cleaners called “murk,” the word they used for any unpleasant combination of bodily fluids or human remains. His hands closed around something and he pulled it out, then laid it on the table beside the bag. He made the mistake of looking at his hands, then turned away from the blood and the gore in the knowledge that his sleep would be haunted, again, for the foreseeable future.
“Sir,” he shouted, “there’s something in there.”
Working like a tag team, Mogford moved back towards the door to inhale the fresher air from the corridor, while Constable Cohen backed out of the room altogether. Detective Inspector Jack Cholmondeley leaned closer to the table to look at what Mogford had found.
It was a message, written in blood on what looked to be a thin piece of parchment. Looking closer, Cholmondeley thought he recognised the pattern and made a mental note to check it against the missing patch on Jayne Lipton’s dress. He suspected he’d find a match.
The message was short and simple, almost as brutal is the killing itself. It said, “This is only the beginning.”
Chapter Six:
Occam’s Razor
IT WAS THE FOLLOWING MORNING, and Maile was the first one at the office. She’d also been the last to leave. Leipfold had left just after three o’clock, and she’d stayed behind until quarter past seven. Then Kat had called and asked her when she was coming home, and the lure of a takeaway had been too much for her. But Maile had still spent the evening carrying out a little research, propping her laptop on the arm of the sofa and simultaneously chatting to her hacker friends on IRC while watching TV with her housemate.
She was hungry, so she opened up the office microwave and removed the remains of a curry that had presumably once belonged to Leipfold. Then she nuked her leftover takeaway. She ate straight out of the container with a plastic fork while she waited for her laptop to load up.
Leipfold arrived at 9:35AM, looking scruffy and unkempt thanks to a lack of sleep and a cold shower. His mop of ginger hair was gel-free for once, and it flopped over his forehead and almost reached down to his eyes. Maile realised it was the longest she’d ever seen it and wondered whether her boss was looking after himself. She’d seen him look worse, but not by much.
Leipfold sat down at his desk and checked his emails in a tense, gloomy silence. Maile finished catching up with her own emails and then scooched across on her office chair and rolled to a stop beside Leipfold. He turned to look at her.
“How’s it going?” he asked.
“Good, I guess,” Maile said, sliding a sheaf of paper across the desk towards him. “I’ve got you some reading material, but I thought you might want me to give you the overview.”
“Sure,” he said. “But make it quick. Lots to do today, and not just on the Lipton case. I’ve got a potential new client who wants to see my portfolio. I haven’t got a portfolio. I need you to make me one.”
“Er…okay,” Maile said. “Sure.”
“So tell me about Jayne Lipton,” Leipfold said. “What did you find?”
“Nothing,” Maile replied. “At least, nothing important. I had a look at her posts on the main social networks and could only find the usual stuff. Selfies, food porn, that sort of thing. But I did find a couple of photos of her shopping trips. Looks like she loved to spend money, and she can’t have had a shortage of it. Some of the gear she bought costs as much as your entire wardrobe.”
Leipfold, who mentally calculated the value of his wardrobe to be around £300 for a total replacement, smiled but said nothing.
“That’s not all, either,” Maile continued. “She said she’d booked flights home, which didn’t make sense to me at first. I mean, I thought she was born and bred here, and she was. But it turns out her grandparents are living in the south of France. I guess she was planning on going to see them.”
“Or fleeing the country,” Leipfold replied, remembering the suspicion she’d fallen under during his last investigation.
“Perhaps,” Maile said. “Do you think it could be an international crime? With the French connection, maybe she has some enemies who tracked her over here.”
“I doubt it,” Leipfold said. He stared moodily into the distance, thoughts already swirling around as he started to form a theory. “Did you figure out the username?”
“Yeah,” Maile replied. “It was LottyLove89. Mean anything to you?”
Leipfold shook his head.
“Looks like she’d been shopping for lingerie, too,” Maile continued. “She posted a couple of raunchy photos. It’s strange. She doesn’t seem like the type.”
“Times have changed since my day,” Leipfold reflected. “My father always told me never to trust a woman who owns lingerie. Now the single girls are buying the stuff just to flaunt themselves to other people.”
“Not always,” Maile said. “Sometimes a woman just wants to feel sexy.”
Leipfold glanced across at her, looking her up and down with his piercing, steely grey eyes. She blushed and turned away, as though she’d revealed too much, and then scuttled off into the kitchen to boil the kettle.
* * *
Mr. Taplow, Leipfold’s landlord, popped round that afternoon. He was a paunchy, unhealthy-looking man, an elderly chap with no hair and a smoker’s cough. He’d brought a battered yellow toolbox with him and, after a little jiggery-pokery with a screwdriver and a soldering iron, he finally fixed the building’s out-of-date intercom system. Leipfold had been lobbying for him to fix it for the last eighteen months, and he’d finally relented once the rent was paid up. In just two short weeks, Leipfold had managed to claw it back, and he’d even covered the next instalment a couple of weeks early. He wasn’t just up-to-date with the rent. He was ahead of it.
The guy was at least twenty years older than Leipfold, and his crow-foot eyes showed the signs of a long, hard life. He almost toppled from the fourth rung of his rickety stepladder when Maile suddenly slammed her fist against her desk and shouted, “Holy fucking—”
Leipfold glanced over at her, lowering the sheaf of paper he was working through, and asked, “What?”
“Boss,” Maile said, “you need to get over here. There’
s been another murder.”
“What?” he exclaimed. In his haste to get across to her, he almost knocked Mr. Taplow off his perch for the second time in as many minutes.
The old man spluttered and cursed and shouted, “What the hell is going on in here, Mr. Leipfold?”
“Nothing that concerns you, Mr. Taplow,” Leipfold replied. “Don’t you worry about it. You get on with your job, and I’ll get on with mine. Have you finished with the intercom yet?”
The landlord scowled down at him and murmured something threatening and vague about “useless bloody tenants,” but he turned his attention back to the intercom and started to solder the last little bit of wiring that Leipfold hoped would fix the damn thing for good.
Maile, meanwhile, was showing Leipfold a series of social media posts and news reports, explaining them all as best as she could as she flicked through them.
“It’s all over the net,” she said. “If you know where to look, at least. There’s been another murder. Look. Reported in similar circumstances. Found with their throat cut and their body mutilated. Only this time…”
“What?” Leipfold growled.
“Only this time, the victim wasn’t a woman,” Maile said. “No official word from the police yet, but it looks like there’s a name on the rumour mill. Hang on. Ah, here we are. Abu Adewali.”
“Where was he found?” Leipfold asked.
“In a hallway at the YMCA,” Maile said. “A couple of people took photos before the cops arrived. Get a look at these.”
Maile edged over so that Leipfold could crouch down beside her to take a look at her screen. She moused over a couple of the pictures, and Leipfold whistled softly as she blew them up to full screen. They’d been shot on a smartphone, but the quality was still pretty good, easily good enough for them to make out the injuries. Leipfold wondered briefly what sort of sick, perverse individual would take photographs of a body like this, and then he remembered that sick and perverse individuals made up seventy percent of his business.
“So what do you reckon?” Maile asked. “Could this be another attack? Are we looking for the same person?”
“I’m not sure,” Leipfold replied. “If it is the same person, they changed their MO. That’s unusual, but it’s not unheard of, and there are plenty of similarities. The cut throat, for example, and the mutilation to the body.”
“Could be a copycat?” Maile suggested.
“No,” Leipfold replied. “The police kept a lid on all the details. There’s not enough out there in the public domain for them to have copied it. At least, not to this level of accuracy.”
“Could be a coincidence?”
“Maybe,” Leipfold said. “But it seems unlikely. No, now is the time for Occam’s razor. The simplest explanation is usually the correct one.”
“There’s a simple explanation?” Maile exclaimed. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
At the entrance to the office, Mr. Taplow had finished working on the intercom and was noisily folding away his stepladder.
“I’ll be off then,” he shouted, but Maile and Leipfold both ignored him.
“The simple explanation,” Leipfold said, “is your first assumption. The two cases are connected because the same culprit is responsible.”
* * *
Maile wanted to keep discussing the case, but Leipfold told her to stay on top of the news while he put in a call to Jack Cholmondeley. In search of a little privacy, he followed the landlord out of his office and then waited for him to climb into his little black Ford Fiesta. Then he sat on the stairs and put the call through.
Cholmondeley didn’t answer on the first call, so Leipfold followed their unwritten protocol of dialling back for three rings every two minutes until he answered. This was their emergency protocol, and it meant that the call was top priority.
Cholmondeley answered after eight minutes with an exasperated, “What?”
Leipfold cut straight to the chase. “Have you heard the news?” he asked.
“What news?” Cholmondeley replied. “Look, James, I’m in the middle of a briefing at the moment and I haven’t got time—”
“Abu Adewali,” he said. “Heard of him?” There was a short spell of silence on the other end of the line, broken only by the sound of Cholmondeley’s heavy breathing. Leipfold was hit by a dawning realisation. “My God,” he whispered. “You haven’t.”
“What are you talking about?” Cholmondeley asked.
“Abu Adewali,” Leipfold repeated. “Google him. Get your whole damn team on it if you have to. The man’s dead.”
“Slow down,” Cholmondeley said. Leipfold could hear him moving around on the other end of the line, and he suspected that the old man was trying to find somewhere quiet so he could hear him better. He hoped he was finding a pen and paper while he was at it. “Okay, start again. From the top. Who’s Abu Adewali?”
“I have no idea,” Leipfold replied. “But he’s connected to Jayne Lipton somehow. Abu’s body has just been found, and I suspect your boys are on the way to the place if they’re not there already. If it’s not your team, you need to put a couple of calls in and find out who’s handling it.”
“And you think his death is connected to Jayne Lipton? How?”
“The killing was exactly the same,” Leipfold said.
“Yeah,” Cholmondeley scoffed. “Except for the fact it was a bloke and not a woman. Where did it happen? Was this at the Grosvenor House Hotel?”
“No,” Leipfold admitted. “It was at the YMCA. But don’t you see? The two are connected.”
There was another pause on the other end of the phone line. Leipfold could picture Cholmondeley there, tucked away in one of the police force’s private offices, wiping sweat from his forehead and scribbling notes with a pen and paper or quickly looking things up on a new computer. He heard the clatter of keys, which seemed to confirm the latter of the two guesses.
Then Cholmondeley asked, “How do you know all this?”
Leipfold laughed. “You can thank my assistant next time you come over,” he said. “Maile found it. Looks like it got leaked online before the cops showed up. You’re going to want to track down whoever posted it and have a word with them. They might know something.”
Another pause. “Where did you say the body was found?” Cholmondeley asked.
Leipfold gave him directions from the station to the YMCA and Cholmondeley paused for a moment again. Then he said, “Still got your bike?”
“Yeah,” Leipfold said. “She’s parked outside.”
“Good. Hop on and meet me there.”
* * *
Leipfold arrived at the same time as Cholmondeley and Mogford, the police team’s two heaviest hitters, pulled into the YMCA car park in the old man’s black BMW. They parked side by side and grouped together in the car park before heading inside the building, a relic of eighteenth century London with most of the original brickwork.
“Ah,” Cholmondeley said, as Leipfold rushed over to greet him. “Glad you could make it, James.”
“Why’s he here?” Mogford growled.
“Good to see you again, too,” Leipfold replied. Cholmondeley, the unlucky intermediary, gestured for them both to simmer down.
“Here’s the deal,” Cholmondeley said. “Mogford, I want you to go in ahead and secure the scene. If you find what Leipfold says you’ll find, I want you to radio for backup immediately.”
“Sounds good,” Mogford replied, snapping off a quick salute. “I’ll see you inside.”
Leipfold and Cholmondeley watched Mogford’s back as he walked towards the entrance. Cholmondeley put a hand on Leipfold’s arm as he started out after him. “Wait,” he said. “Give him a minute. Besides, I need to talk to you.”
“What about?”
“I need information,” Cholmondeley said. “Assuming you’re right about
this, and you usually are, I’ll need to know how you found this out.”
“Then you’ll need to talk to Maile.”
“Listen, I’m putting my neck on the chopping block just by getting you involved.”
“Some would say it’s a risk worth taking.”
“Perhaps,” Cholmondeley said. “It’s my balls on the line either way. Whether I involve you or not, if I don’t solve this one, I’m finished.”
“So what do you want me to do?” Leipfold asked.
“Call your assistant,” Cholmondeley replied. “Have her figure out who posted the photos, then give me the details so I can get my men to track them down and talk to them. But keep my name out of it, and keep Mogford out of it, too. You got that?”
“Sure thing,” Leipfold said. He reached for his mobile phone, but Cholmondeley reached across and stopped him.
“You can do it in a minute,” Cholmondeley said. “We have more pressing concerns at the moment. Let’s go take a look inside, see if we can’t find that crime scene of yours.”
Leipfold shrugged and put his phone back, then followed Jack Cholmondeley into the YMCA. They were looking for Gary Mogford, but they didn’t have much of a problem finding him. They just followed the commotion.
Most of the building was empty, including the front desk, and Leipfold guessed that people had either flocked to the body or ran away from it as soon as Adewali was discovered.
Leipfold and Cholmondeley rounded a corner and came suddenly upon the corridor. Gary Mogford had beat them to it and was trying to radio for help while simultaneously directing the security staff to hold the crowds back. Leipfold guessed there were easily thirty people in the corridor, and the sight of them was somehow awful in its own right.
But if the crowded corridor was like hell, then the body was like the devil himself. It was the second time Leipfold had seen a scene like this, and it didn’t get any easier over time. Abu Adewali was sprawled across the floor in the middle of the corridor. He was naked.
And parts of him were missing.
