Devil's Game

by Patricia Hall

  ‘If you’ve taken statements from them all, make it very clear that we may want to talk to them again, then send them home to bed.’

  Mower laughed.

  ‘I’d be surprised if any of them get a good night’s sleep,’ he said, with no hint of sympathy in his voice. ‘And it won’t be the fact that they missed out on their nooky that’s bugging them.’

  ‘They should have thought of that earlier,’ Thackeray said, his expression chilly.

  ‘D’you want to talk to any of them yourself, guv? Councillor Maxwell’s doing his nut. Demanding to talk to the chief constable. Going on about his human rights, no less.’

  ‘Well, he’ll have to make do with me,’ Thackeray said. ‘I’ll come down in ten. Let him sweat for a bit. It might concentrate his mind.’

  ‘Oh, I think his mind’s well concentrated,’ Mower said with a grin. ‘Not least on what the Gazette’s going to make of all this once it leaks out. And that won’t take long, I reckon.’

  ‘What are they saying?’ Thackeray asked. ‘The general gist?’

  ‘That it’s an innocent bit of fun. No money changes hands. They don’t know the names of the people involved, as most of the men, at least, went to some trouble to disguise themselves – anything from Tony Blair and George Bush to Mickey Mouse and Marge Simpson, apparently. And the women were all more than willing. Most of them made a big thing of that. Most of them admit to seeing Karen there that night she disappeared. And on other nights previously. She didn’t hide her face. But I’ve not found one who’ll admit to having sex with her. We’ll have to cross-check who admits to wearing which mask – or take DNA samples from the lot of them.’

  ‘We’ll do that if we have to,’ Thackeray said, his face grim. ‘Do they know who’s been organising it? Who’s been putting the ads in the Gazette?’

  ‘They all say not – and they all claim it certainly wasn’t them,’ Mower said sceptically. ‘They pretty well all say that they heard about it from someone who already took part. Given time, I expect we can work right back through the chain to the source.’

  ‘Right, I’ll come down and talk to Councillor Maxwell, and you can send the rest of them home for now. But don’t give any of them the impression that they’re off the hook. I don’t want any of them sleeping easy in their beds.’

  ‘Their cars are still up at Bently,’ Mower said.

  ‘Some taxi firm’s going to do well out of their jaunt tonight, then, isn’t it?’ Thackeray said unsympathetically. ‘Let them find their own way home.’

  Thackeray found Peter Maxwell pacing uneasily about an interview room. He spun towards the DCI as he came through the door, clearly furious.

  ‘Mr Thackeray, isn’t it? What the hell are you doing bringing us all down here and keeping us for hours?’ he said. ‘It’s quite unnecessary. We could all have come in tomorrow to answer any questions you might have. It’s little short of harassment. I’ve a good mind to talk to the chief constable about it. He happens to be a personal friend of mine.’

  ‘I’m sorry you feel like that, sir, but when a woman who belonged to your group has been found murdered, I would have thought you would want us to take it very seriously,’ Thackeray said. ‘And I’m sure my superiors will agree.’

  ‘She didn’t ‘belong’ in the sense you’re implying,’ Maxwell said. ‘No one did. People just turned up. No one knew anyone in any real sense of the word. Just as well, as it turns out, as we seem to have attracted some right little slags.’

  ‘If the women were slags, what does that make you, sir?’ Thackeray asked sharply. ‘It was all casual sex, wasn’t it, on both sides? Did you have sex with Karen Bastable the night she went missing?’

  ‘No, I did not,’ Maxwell said.

  ‘According to DS Mower, one of the women has said that she thought you did. What sort of a mask were you wearing that night?’

  Maxwell flushed.

  ‘The Lion King,’ he muttered.

  Thackeray raised an eyebrow at that.

  ‘Did you use the same mask on every occasion?’

  ‘Yes,’ Maxwell said, then hesitated. ‘Usually. Not always. Sometimes we swapped around – for fun, as it were.’

  ‘Or to confuse anyone who might want to identify you?’ Thackeray hesitated. ‘Although I gather, from some of the women’s statements, they had other ways of identifying you. Certain epithets that amused them.’

  ‘Dear God,’ Maxwell said, sinking suddenly into one of the chairs and burying his head in his hands for a moment. ‘What have I let myself in for?’

  ‘I’m not sure, Mr Maxwell,’ Thackeray said, his voice like ice. ‘You should be aware that we may need a DNA sample from you. From your point of view, it’s probably preferable that you volunteer one. If we arrest you, of course, we have the power to take one anyway. We’ll let you know.’

  ‘We haven’t committed a crime,’ Maxwell said, regaining some of his belligerence. ‘What crime have we committed?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure we can come up with something along the lines of outraging public decency,’ Thackeray said. ‘Unless we need to arrest you on suspicion of murder.’

  Maxwell paled and swallowed hard.

  ‘Can I go now?’ he asked, with the faintest trace of a whine in his voice.

  ‘Of course,’ Thackeray said. ‘We’ll let you know when we need to speak to you again.’

  As the interview rooms gradually cleared, Thackeray sent his team home, with instructions to be in early the next morning when the real task of cross-referencing and analysing the collection of statements they had made would begin. He walked slowly back to his office, and sat down again at his desk, deliberately switching his mind away from the doggers and gazing at his mobile phone for a long time before eventually picking it up and punching in the number that he knew almost better than his own. Laura picked up straight away, but her tone was cool.

  ‘Can we talk?’ Thackeray asked quietly, aware of his heart thumping.

  ‘Is there anything to talk about?’

  ‘Vicky called me and read me the riot act,’ he said, his voice thick with emotion. ‘I am trying to come to terms with this, Laura. You must believe me.’

  ‘Call me again when you’ve come to terms with it, then,’ Laura said angrily. ‘But you don’t have much time. There are decisions I have to take, plans I have to make. There’s only a certain length of time you can let the past bugger up the future, and you’re well over the limit. This is now and there’s a baby on the way. You can’t stop the clock. So let me know – soon.’

  The silence after she had cut the connection rang in Thackeray’s ears like a death knell. He sat for a long time at his desk before eventually getting to his feet and putting on his coat. But before he could switch out the light his mobile rang. He scanned the screen quickly, hoping it was Laura again, and almost cut the call off when he saw it was not. But Superintendent Longley was already in full flood.

  ‘I’ve just had Peter Maxwell bending my ear,’ he said. ‘What the hell have we landed ourselves in with these bloody people? Do you have a suspect you’ve got any chance of charging, or what? I need to clear my lines before they all get on the phone to the chief constable and make my life a misery.’

  ‘They were brought in as witnesses,’ Thackeray said. ‘I can’t believe you’re suggesting we soft-pedal because half of them are Freemasons and the other half belong to your golf club. Sir?’

  ‘You know that’s not what I’m saying, Michael. Don’t be so bloody offensive. But I need to know what’s going on with these beggars. They can’t all be murderers and those who are not can make our lives very difficult if they choose. How long do you think it’ll be before the Gazette gets a whisper? You’d better be very careful about the pillow talk yourself. That young woman of yours is as sharp as a barrowload of porcupines.’

  ‘There’ll be no pillow talk,’ Thackeray said between gritted teeth. Longley hesitated, as if wondering if he could follow up that remark, and decided against it.r />
  ‘Let me have a full report first thing in the morning,’ he said. ‘This could get very nasty.’

  ‘It’s already very nasty,’ Thackeray said, thinking of the post-mortem report which had listed the forty-nine injuries Karen Bastable had been left with, most of them inflicted painfully before she had died. The mental image of that carefully constructed parcel of human remains still flashed vividly in front of his eyes whenever he thought about the murdered woman and filled him with fury. So, she was a slapper, as several of this evening’s witnesses had contemptuously complained. She was, as her friend Charlene cheerfully admitted, out for a bit of fun. But no shortcomings on Karen’s part could even begin to justify her fate.

  ‘I’ll see you first thing, then,’ Longley said.

  ‘Sir,’ Thackeray agreed wearily. He buttoned up his coat, switched off the office light and locked the door. Nothing awaited him but a small and slightly bleak flat where he still stored some of his possessions. It had been a bolt-hole which he had seldom used as his relationship with Laura lengthened and deepened, but one he had never quite summoned up enough courage to dispose of. It increasingly looked, he thought, as if that was all he could now call home.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Sergeant Kevin Mower had worked in Bradfield long enough to have almost obliterated the memories of his inglorious and brief career with the Metropolitan police. And least welcome of all was any reminder of his spell at Paddington Green, where his involvement with the wife of a senior officer had led to his rapid departure from his job and a hasty relocation to the north of England. But the information that had landed on his desk that morning took him unwillingly back to his unruly youth and a quick trawl through his surviving contacts in London to discover who might be willing to help with his inquiries.

  The catalyst for his phone-bashing was a brief report which identified the fingerprint that had been found on the plastic wrapping around the remains of Karen Bastable. According to the database, it matched the prints of a convicted drug dealer and suspected pimp, who had last been recorded ten years previously, living in a bedsit amongst the warren of run-down houses which had until then defied creeping gentrification between Paddington Station and Notting Hill. Mower very much doubted that traces of Leroy Jason Green would remain in West London, especially as he had good evidence that he had very recently been in West Yorkshire, but he had to be sure, especially as the last official contact with Green had been on his release from prison eleven years earlier. The criminal records photograph revealed a young, good-looking Afro-Caribbean man who had succeeded in retaining a faint smile in the face of the police photographer.

  Mower eventually got through to a Detective Sergeant Doug Mackintosh at Paddington Green, a name he vaguely recognised, but who seemed to have no recollection of his own brief sojourn at the station, which was probably just as well.

  ‘Doug,’ he said more cheerfully than he felt. ‘They tell me you’re the man for intelligence on your manor. I wonder if you can help me? I’ve got a good fingerprint lead on a murder suspect up here and he turns out to have been one of your bad lads some time back.’ He passed on the name the fingerprint records office had given him, and Green’s record of intermittent fines and imprisonment for drug offences from the Police National Computer, and waited, without much optimism, for anything further the Met could come up with. But to his surprise, it turned out that he had struck gold with Doug Mackintosh, who had the sort of encyclopaedic memory that was invaluable to police intelligence. Mower heard the computer keys rattling at the other end of the line and then Mackintosh came back to him with a note of quiet triumph in his voice.

  ‘He’s still on file here, though we haven’t had any official contact with him for more than ten years. He did a three-year stretch for dealing, not the first time he’d been nicked, and we assumed not the last. But then he went very quiet. I’ve got a couple of later reports on his activities locally, and then he seems to have vanished. Maybe that’s when he graced you up there with his presence, but I would have expected him to have been more than a blip on your radar before now, given his record.’

  ‘We’ve got nothing up here,’ Mower said.

  ‘Well, he’d been in and out of trouble since he was thirteen, according to our information, though he was never charged as a juvenile. That came later. But he kept cropping up as a known associate of various undesirables over a period of years. And again, after he came out of the nick, for a year or so. But we never managed to pin anything else on him. Either he got a lot more careful or, more unlikely, he gave up dealing. He certainly didn’t seem to change his associates much. There’s one odd note, though. One of his mates apparently told one of our informers that Green had “got religion”. Maybe in gaol? Who knows? It happens sometimes. After that little nugget of info was recorded, he seems to have dropped out of sight completely and my predecessor in this job seems to have reckoned he left the area about nine years ago. No information about where he went. Simply dropped out of sight.’

  ‘That fits with his criminal record,’ Mower said. ‘He’s had no convictions in the last ten years, as far as I can discover. Which means the photo we have of him is years out of date.’

  ‘But you reckon he’s in the frame for murder?’ Mackintosh asked. ‘He must have moved into the big time and kept a very low profile. Maybe someone up your way made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. But I must say, we never had him down as more than a relatively minor player.’

  ‘Could be he moved up a league, I suppose.’ Mower said. ‘But this isn’t gangland stuff, drugs, gun crime, the usual. This is sexual and very nasty.’ Mackintosh whistled down the line.

  ‘Serial killer?’ he asked.

  ‘No evidence of that yet, but we’re asking other forces to check for similar cases.’

  ‘Right,’ Mackintosh said. The computer keys tapped away again at the other end of the line. ‘I’ve got no current information about family, though there’s mention of a mother and a sister in some of the early references. I’ll put the word out and let you know if we get a sniff about where he’s gone, if you like, anyone still around who might know. If it’s that serious. Though it’s a long time since he moved on, by the look of it.’

  ‘I’d be grateful,’ Mower said. ‘We need to find him fast. It’s the sort of case where it could happen again. If it hasn’t already.’

  ‘Keep me posted,’ Mackintosh said. ‘It’s always interesting to know where our graduates end up. And help make sure they’re still getting their just desserts.’

  Superintendent Jack Longley sent for his DCI halfway through that morning, and Thackeray found him in a foul mood.

  ‘I’ve just spent an hour with the chief trying to work out how to handle the press over this,’ Longley said. ‘We’ll have all the hounds of hell up from London as soon as it leaks out. I’m surprised that little toerag Bob Baker hasn’t got onto it already, but the press office says not. I suppose the people you interviewed are keeping a very low profile themselves in the circumstances, but we’ll have to say something sometime today. I can’t imagine all that activity up at Bently Forest went entirely unnoticed, remote as it is. Someone from the Forestry Commission will see the signs left by all those vehicles and begin to wonder what was going on.’

  ‘I should imagine there are some frantic phone calls going on this morning,’ Thackeray said. ‘Kevin Mower says that it was obvious some of the men knew each other when they were put into the vans. We’re working out the links between them all. It’s a moot point whether they had recognised each other at the gatherings, as most of them claimed to have worn masks while they were playing games up there, but we’re analysing their statements to try to work out how they heard about what they seem to call their ‘little club’. Someone out there launched this thing and I want to know who that was. It’s only been going about six months, according to some of them, but I’m not sure I believe that. They say it started up in the summer, when the weather was warm, and there was some talk
about whether they could keep going as it got colder, but apparently they worked out ways of keeping warm enough.’ Thackeray’s face was dead-pan but Longley allowed himself a small smile.

  ‘Banging away a bit more vigorously, maybe,’ he suggested. ‘Anyway, the chief’s told the press office to prepare a statement for later today, which he’ll approve personally. If we leave it until after the Gazette’s gone to press, we might gain ourselves a bit more time to think, but the proverbial will undoubtedly hit the fan tomorrow.’

  ‘No doubt,’ Thackeray said.

  ‘What about forensics?’ Longley asked.

  ‘Mower’s not had much joy with the fingerprint on the plastic Karen Bastable was wrapped in. It’s on record but belongs to a black lad, a Londoner with a record, who seems to have disappeared from the radar about ten years ago. How he comes to be up here, God only knows. Anyway, we’re pursuing that, and they think they may possibly get DNA from it, but that will take time. DNA results on the body itself are not through yet. When we get those we can ask the men we picked up in the forest to supply DNA samples for elimination purposes. If they won’t volunteer, we may have to arrest them. I’ve no doubt one or more of them had sex with Karen that night, though that doesn’t mean they necessarily killed her.’

  ‘What a nightmare,’ Longley said. ‘Peter Maxwell swears he never touched her, but no doubt someone did.’ He glanced down at the list of names which lay on the desk in front of him and permitted himself a grim smile. ‘I know most of these beggars socially,’ he said. ‘They must be going spare. If – or when – their wives find out there’ll be an army of bloody Amazons on the warpath. Any other leads?’

  ‘We’ve circulated other forces to see if there’ve been any similar cases, but I don’t hold out high hopes,’ Thackeray said. ‘With that level of brutality, any similar killing would have been all over the tabloids and we’d have been well aware. But it’s worth a trawl. I asked for details of unsolved disappearances as well. If our man has made a habit of burying bodies on the moors, he could have got away with it until now. It was sheer chance Karen’s body turned up so quickly. It could have lain up there for years before anyone stumbled on it.’