Kate glanced around. Most of the people in the room were teenaged boys, probably around thirteen or fourteen. They nearly all looked pale and frightened. No doubt this would eventually morph into an urban legend in their re-telling when they got back to school; a horror story that ended with a real body. One boy, in particular, looked really out of it and Kate guessed that he’d had the dubious honour of being first on the scene. He was shivering despite the mild morning and his dark eyes looked deep set and smudged in his pale face. She held up a hand to stop Barratt’s account and strode over to the boy.
‘Hi,’ she gave him the best smile she could muster under the circumstances. I’m Detective Inspector Fletcher. Did you find Callum?’ She deliberately used the boy’s name instead of ‘the body’ unwilling to highlight again the awfulness of the situation.
The boy nodded. His eyes flicked from her face to the police officer opposite him, to the window and back again.
‘What’s your name?’
‘A...Aaron,’ he stammered.
‘Okay, Aaron. I’m going to want to talk to you but not right now. Right now, I want you to sit on the sofa over there. This police officer will go back to your room and get you a sweatshirt – tell him what you need and where it is – and then he’ll get you a hot chocolate. Does that sound okay to you?’
Aaron nodded, eyes wide at this sudden demonstration of compassion. He slid off the seat, followed by the police officer and headed to the sofa that Kate had indicated. She watched as the two of them had a hushed conversation, Aaron finally smiling as the policeman went to fetch him warmer clothes and a drink.
She clapped her hands together to get the attention of the people in the room.
‘Right. Who’s in charge here?’
A hand was raised by one of the few civilian adults in the room. The man was unshaven and dressed in a baggy grey tracksuit that might have passed for pyjamas and she suspected that he hadn’t had time to get properly dressed this morning. He looked to be in his mid-twenties and was obviously dazed by the events of the morning. He stood up and approached her looking like a scolded puppy, obviously expecting to be berated.
‘I’m the overnight supervisor,’ he said, extending a shaking hand. ‘Mark Thompson. I’ve rung the centre director and he’s on his way.’
Kate nodded her approval, hoping to put him at ease.
‘Good. Look, I know you’re probably out of your depth here but you’ve got a group of traumatised young boys who need a bit of TLC. Can you take an officer to their rooms and get some warm clothing. We can’t let them get their own. And, please, organise some hot drinks. Get a kettle from the kitchens, some tea bags, hot chocolate, coffee and plenty of sugar. That young man’s in shock,’ she pointed at Aaron. ‘And he’s probably not the only one.’
Satisfied that her instructions were being carried out, she returned to Barratt.
‘Start again,’ she said.
‘Okay. Fowler rang in the discovery of the body this morning. A young lad went looking for his mobile phone, thought he’d left it down there last night when they had a bonfire and ghost story session. They were up till after eleven apparently – it’s one of the highlights of a visit here. Anyway, he’d just left the path, eyes at his feet and he found the body. It hadn’t been hidden. It was lying next to the ashes of last night’s fire.’
Kate noted Barratt’s impersonal use of ‘it’ for the body of Callum Goodwin and considered taking him to task about it, reminding him that this was a four-year-old boy that they were talking about, but she could see that the DC was struggling with his emotions. Depersonalising the body was probably a coping mechanism and she didn’t want to snatch it away unnecessarily. Instead she nodded for him to continue.
‘I got here about twenty minutes ago. Some of the boys were already being interviewed so I had a chat with Fowler. He does a bit of work here, outdoor skills, that sort of thing.’
He lowered his voice.
‘Bit of a coincidence, him being on both scenes.’
Kate nodded. It was a huge coincidence. But he had a legitimate reason for being on the site.
‘What time did he get here?’
‘Just before seven, according to Mark Thompson.’
‘And he wasn’t here last night?’
Barratt shook his head.
‘So, where was he?’
‘He played in a pool tournament at his local then home alone until he left at six thirty to come here.’
‘Okay. Well there’s a start. I’ll get Cooper to check his alibi. What’s the pub called?’
Barratt told her and she sent a quick text. No rush though. She doubted that there would be anybody at the pub much before ten o’clock.
‘Have statements been taken from all the boys?’
Barratt shook his head.
‘They’ve been kept separate but I don’t think anything official has been put in place. We’ve got enough bodies now though. I think Thompson wants us to allow them to ring their parents.’
Kate shook her head.
‘Not yet. If Thompson wants their parents here that’s fine but we can’t have a bunch of traumatised teenagers blabbing all sorts to their mums and dads. We need to keep this quiet until we’ve established the facts. Thompson will have contact details and there’s only …what?’ she looked round, ‘ten or twelve kids? Hollis is on his way. I want him to talk to that boy Aaron, the uniforms can chat to the others. It doesn’t sound like they saw much anyway. You stick with Fowler for the minute. Okay?’
Barratt nodded and went to speak to Mark Thomas who’d just appeared with a couple of sweatshirts under one arm and a tray containing a kettle, mugs and various jars and boxes of drinks. He’d obviously followed her instructions to the letter.
A quick scan of the room satisfied Kate that all was in order so she could leave and face the scene under the bridge.
Just as she was struggling into her overalls and bootees, Hollis appeared striding across the bridge.
‘Morning. Where do you want me?’
Kate quickly filled him in and gave him a description of the boy that she wanted him to talk to.
‘You off down there?’ he asked, gesturing to the bridge.
‘Yep. Just what I need after breakfast.’
Hollis sighed.
‘I really hoped that we’d find this one alive.’
‘I know,’ Kate said. ‘We all did. All we can do now is try to work out what happened and try to stop this bastard from doing it again.’
She stalked off towards another barrier of police tape, struggling to wriggle her hands into nitrile gloves.
It wasn’t hard to pinpoint the location of the body. Clear plastic stepping plates led from the first area of slightly flat ground to a dark expanse of shadow beneath the bridge. Kate could make out several ghostly white figures hunched over something on the ground which she assumed to be the body of Callum Goodwin. Around the bridge and into the woods plastic containers of various sizes lay upended protecting possible evidence from the increasing threat of showers. It was dry here, Kate noticed; no sign of the thunderstorms that had kept her awake for half the night. She moved closer to the body, treading carefully and breathing in shallow rapid breaths. She didn’t know what to expect. Aleah had been her first child murder victim in nearly twenty-five years of policing but she had felt removed from the girl – perhaps it was the distortion of the water in her hair and clothes or possibly the shock – but she felt a shiver of apprehension when she caught her first glimpse of Callum’s sneakered foot.
‘What do we know?’ she asked, and even to herself it sounded like bluster. Her voice wasn’t quite steady as she tried hard to both look at and avoid looking at the tiny, broken body.
Kailisa glanced up, irritated at the interruption. He would only have been called because the body was in some way ‘problematic’ and couldn’t be signed off by the area surgeon – just like Aleah Reese. Kate was already making connections and Kailisa’s presence was another tick
on her imaginary checklist.
‘We have the body of a child. Approximately four or five years old. White. Cause of death unclear, as yet.’
Kate looked away from the body, examining the scene. The bridge was angular, shaped like a goal post – the road above forming the cross bar and thick concrete buttresses forming the posts. There was no sign of the railway line that used to run beneath; in fact, it was difficult to see why the bridge was there – it just spanned an expanse of elder and bramble which must have grown out of control after the closure of the pit.
‘How did he get there?’ Kate asked. The undergrowth around the body looked barely disturbed and would have been difficult to force a path through, especially in the dark.
Kailisa sighed.
‘Judging by the positioning of the body and the post-mortem injuries, at the moment, we’re working on the premise that he was dropped from up there.’ Kailisa pointed to the concrete above with a wooden spatula.
‘Dropped?’
‘There is very little disturbance to the area around the body, it was pure chance that that unfortunate young man spied the feet through the bushes.’
‘Shouldn’t you be looking on the bridge then?’
‘All in good time. We have only been on site for an hour, Detective Inspector. You will no doubt have noticed that the bridge is part of the crime scene but we also needed to provide access to the reception building for the children. It’s unlikely to yield anything important as it is a busy thoroughfare when the centre is in use. Ditto the car park.’
Kate looked up again. The road was probably less than ten feet above her head and the sides of the bridge added another three feet to that. A thirteen-foot drop – not enough to kill somebody, even a small boy. Unless he’d landed on something hard. Kate opened her mouth to ask another question but Kailisa held up a gloved hand.
‘All in good time,’ he repeated. ‘Please let my team do their jobs and then you can do yours. Observe, by all means, but please keep interruptions to a minimum.’
Kate stepped back, interpreting Kailisa’s comments as ‘back off and shut up.’ There was nothing to be gained by pushing him but she couldn’t just walk away; she’d met the boy’s parents. They would have their own questions and she owed them the best and most honest answers that she could give.
2015
Kate watched Kailisa examine the body for well over an hour, biting her tongue when he shared findings with his team. He seemed fairly convinced that the little boy had been dead when he was dropped over the bridge but, as usual, he couldn’t tell her much about time of death or cause, although he was tentatively suggesting strangulation. The small body was scratched from the fall but none of the injuries had any vital response, indicating that he was dead before he had been dropped from the bridge. There were no other marks on his body. His clothing was intact and didn’t look to have been removed at any point but, again, Kailisa told her to wait until they’d examined him more closely at the mortuary.
She was vaguely aware of movement on the bridge above her as members of the team examined the area where the body might have been dropped from, but she knew that Kailisa’s assessment was probably right – there wouldn’t be much to be found in the dust and debris that had piled up along the edges of the bridge. As Kailisa’s team got ready to remove the body, Kate headed back up to the reception centre. Barratt and Hollis would have finished taking statements and she knew that she ought to send them back to base to collate all the information – and possibly get a bite to eat.
She examined the bridge trying to imagine how somebody could possibly have hanged themselves from them. There was nothing to fix a rope to on the bridge or next to either side. She stepped closer to get a better look at the tops of the walls and saw the solution to her puzzle. Studded along the concrete surface of the wall were the rusting stumps of iron railings, barely half an inch high. Their regularity made them look like the holes left by the removal of stitches from a deep cut. They would have been taller at some point, tall enough to knot a length or rope around. Kate wondered if they’d been removed as a result of Paul Hirst’s death, or if they’d been stolen and sold for scrap. Not that it made any difference now. Next to one of the low bridge walls a crime scene case was standing open – a pile of evidence bags stacked on top. Each holding something that may or may not have some relevance to the case.
‘Mind if I have a look?’ Kate asked the nearest crime scene technician.
He shrugged in a ‘help yourself gesture’ so she bent down to get a closer look, picking her way through the layer of transparent bags. The contents were not very inspiring. A few sweet wrappers and cigarette butts, a nail, a stiff sports sock that had once been white but had transformed to the same shade of grey as the gravel track over a period of months or even years. One item was even more incongruous than the sock. She held it up to the light, hardly able to believe what she was seeing. It was a square of leather attached to a keyring and the side that she was looking at still had a faint but unmistakable letter P carved into the surface.
‘Where did you find this?’ Kate yelled at the group of people who were still trawling through the gravel.
One of them looked at it and then pointed to the wall.
‘It was in the gravel next to that bit of wall.’
Kate ducked under the tape and peered over. Kailisa was giving a few final comments to his team directly below her.
‘How long do you think it’s been here?’
The technician shrugged. ‘Hard to say. It’s not especially scuffed or worn. Could have been left any time in the last few months I suppose. There’s no way to know.’
‘Well, get fingerprints and DNA from it if you can. Prioritise it. It might be linked with another case.’
A T on Aleah Reese and a P near Callum Goodwin. Tracy Moore and Paul Hirst. Two tragic deaths, ten years apart. She needed to find the link.
Cooper answered on the first ring.
‘Kate?’
‘Sam, listen. Have you found anything else about Tracy Moore?’
‘Not really,’ Cooper said. ‘I’ve got a DOB and a birth certificate which has her parents’ names on it. I’ve not managed to find out anything about them yet, though.’
‘What was her father’s name?’ Kate held her breath as she heard Sam tapping on her keyboard.
‘Donald. Donald Moore.’
‘Damn! Listen, Sam. I need you to find a link between Tracy Moore and Paul Hirst. There is one, I’m certain. They both meant something to somebody and I think that somebody is our killer. I’m not sure why he’s doing this, but it’s linked to those two deaths. Text me the minute you find anything.’
She hung up and clenched her fists in frustration. The answer was tantalisingly close, she could almost smell it. Her thoughts swung back to Ken Fowler. He’d been on both scenes – legitimately – and he knew the area well. Could she have been wrong about him? Barratt didn’t trust him and Barratt’s instincts weren’t bad. It was worth another look. She rang Cooper again.
‘Sam. While you’re at it see if there’s any link between Ken Fowler and either of the other two names.’
Cooper sighed at the other end of the phone, but Kate knew that it was mostly for effect. There was nothing Sam Cooper liked more than digging around on the internet and mining databases for information.
‘And don’t pretend that you don’t love it,’ Kate laughed as she hung up.
As she’d expected, Barratt and Hollis were questioning the last of the boys. She raised her eyebrows in a question at Hollis as he snapped his notebook closed and thanked a tired-looking teenager. Hollis shook his head slightly. Nothing useful then.
‘What have you got?’ she asked as Hollis approached, stretching his shoulders and neck.
‘It doesn’t look like any of the boys saw anything. I had a long chat with Aaron and he’s a bit less shell-shocked now. He was just looking for his phone and saw the shoes through the bushes. He didn’t get near the body but he feel
s responsible.’
Kate nodded. ‘Only natural.’
‘He ran to Fowler, who rang it in. Fowler didn’t approach either.’
‘Not even to check whether Callum was still alive?’
‘He says he called the police and an ambulance just in case but he didn’t want to get too close. He had a look from the bridge and he was fairly sure that the kid was dead.’
‘But still?’
Hollis smiled. ‘Don’t know what’s better. People who think they can help or people who think it’s best to keep away. At least he didn’t contaminate the scene.’
Which might have been his intention, Kate thought. If he was responsible, then surely, he’d have wanted to get close to the body in order to explain the presence of his DNA. If he wasn’t involved, why not try to help? It didn’t make sense.
‘I need to talk to him,’ Kate said. ‘Where is he?’
Hollis looked around.
‘Thought he was over there. Nobody’s been given permission to leave.’
Kate quickly scanned the room. If Fowler had fled the scene there could only be one interpretation of his actions. Guilt.
‘Barratt!’ Kate called. ‘Here a minute.’
The DC approached looking worried.
‘Where’s Ken Fowler? Have you seen him?’
Barratt nodded. ‘He’s in the back I think. Tea and coffee duty. Volunteered when nobody else wanted to do it.’
‘What a saint.’ Hollis smiled at Kate’s sarcastic tone.
‘Can you see if he’s still there?’
Thirty seconds later Barratt was back with Fowler in tow. The older man looked slightly amused as though his disappearance had been a deliberate attempt to cause a commotion.
‘Can I help you, Detective Inspector?’
Kate led him to a vacant table and gestured for him to sit down.
‘Just a couple more questions,’ she said.
Fowler nodded. ‘Anything to help.’
‘When you saw the body under the bridge, why didn’t you get closer to see if he was still alive?’
The Kate Fletcher Series Page 16
