With any case, I look first at Victimology. I find out about the victim. Bess and Grace I know. Rudd had a sexual interest in Bess, a revenge interest in me, no interest in Grace. Motive to do harm certainly, but no opportunity and surely not murder. The boy was with a pipe laying gang in Glasgow, four witnesses and his landlady attested to his being there all that Thursday. The father was enjoying ‘a lock in’ at my own village pub with half a dozen witnesses I had spoken to. Duane was only fourteen, asleep, his mother the same in the bedroom next door.
For almost seven years I have quietly but diligently, three to six hours every night after work, fifteen hours per day at weekends, investigated the possible fate of my wife and little girl.
Tonight, having reluctantly dismissed the Rudds, I find that there is no word on my family's case from a hundred news feeds online or a score of police contacts I have cultivated while investigating for myself across the UK and abroad. Nothing has come in from the fifty or more local contacts I have continued to quietly and discreetly call or visit every six months.
I study the whiteboard, willing inspiration, knowing that desperation has already settled on my lonely quest. In thick red letters the list is stark against the shiny white. With no one to hear, I read them aloud to myself.
POSSIBILITIES
BESS LEFT ME?
Why, when, how, gone to?
MURDER
Me as the Culprit
Major Criminals Striking Back Against Me
Rankin
Stalker
Opportunist Thief or Burglar
Rudd(s)
Paedophile
Human Traffickers
Enemy of Bess’ from her patients, colleagues, friends
Malvingham village people
Corrupt Officers in Force
Creel, Odling
Unknown / Other
KIDNAP
Reasons Unknown
Influence, seeking my help in return for safe return?
Bess, a Disgruntled Patient
Human Traffickers, Sex Trade and / or
Paedophile ring.
***
My mind simply cannot dwell on this last item. My succubus flares to life at any such thought.
I force my mind away, to speed over more palatable themes in this morass. I cannot believe Bess left me, and even if she had, why would she be so cruel as to take Grace, leave no message or sign and ruin my life, career and my very being. No, Bess was simply never like that. I had seen no sign of our drifting apart, of her being unhappy, of sorrow in our life or distaste for me. We had big plans for our future. Yes, she did not like my job, its harsh effects on me as evidenced, she said, by my dealing with Wayne Rudd. Neither did I. But that was about to change, even if I never got the chance to tell her.
I have investigated this whole list, with phone calls, face to face interviews, surveillance, background research, checking and rechecking. Most I have mined and ruled out.
Stalker, Opportunist, Paedophile are all possibilities but I have mined every angle without any hint of such. As to corrupt officers in the force, I was not exposing any such at the time and would any go so far as murder or kidnap in any event? Kidnap can be ruled out now as no demands were made, whether for money or influence.
Myself as culprit? It helps me build the evidence against me so as to defend myself, just in case. I have had times when exhausted, depressed, grief stricken I thought I might be guilty: it is the only rational explanation. Until I realised, that way lay madness.
I force myself to begin the whole cycle anew as I approach my investigation’s eighth year. First is to check the time line of the night in question. I find and re-read the police reports of the two PCs who were keeping an eye on the cottage while I was away and had been first on the scene at the empty house. PC Peter Hennessy was dead of a sudden heart attack five years ago and had point blank always refused to talk to me about this, following Creel’s orders. The other, PC Tony Bradley, had emigrated to New Zealand a month after ‘the incident’ in a move planned for almost two years and hence above suspicion. I had talked to him on a crackly line six years ago but Bradley, while totally sympathetic, had sadly only repeated what was in his statement.
I knew Hennessy of old as a lazy copper, always on the make and looking for the angle to grub some extra cash without actually doing anything illegal. I suspected him, as well as Creel and Odling, of being the ones who leaked the colour and detail about my life, and the family photographs, to the media though you could not rule out a journalist gaining access to my home and just stealing them. One precise and atmospheric description from an eye witness - ‘the tragic empty crime scene, scrubbed forensically clean to erase all clues with only the child’s sad teddy showing what had once been a tender normal family life’ – meant to me they had to have been there on the night in question. It could only have come from Hennessy. The dead PC had been the first one to check upstairs.
The red letters of the board threaten to skitter and fall to the ground before my eyes as my tired mind struggles to concentrate. Each day the routine has been the same: work at Intelligence, the gym, cook and eat at home alone, pore over the evidence for anything new or anything missed, often then walking the dark countryside to think and exhaust myself until I collapse to embrace my dream and choke on nightmare.
Head in hands sat at my desk, my fingers scrape and bite into my face with the worst thought. Someone has killed Bess and kidnapped Grace for paedophilia. There my most desperate focus has been, including visiting six places abroad but without even a hint of a sighting.
To maintain my sanity, I think practically when the blackness is too much. All the avenues my inventive mind can think of, I have explored several times over. Chasing down local burglars and thieves, all had solid alibis and, besides, none amongst them would be able to manage the forensics cover up. I had quietly sifted through police colleagues who were jealous of me. It was one of the few explanations for someone knowing I was away and the forensic clean up being so good. Even I did not really believe police jealousy or Creel’s vaunting ambition would lead any of them to murder. While the criminals I had put away all had cast iron alibis.
As to Rankin, major crime overlord for the whole county, he actually agreed to talk to me man to man once, sympathy in his blue eyes as he assured me he would never countenance such a thing as that against my family. I can still hear his stabbing rumble of a voice, ‘Lost a young daughter of my own you know, not wish that on anyone, and the rules are we touch no family, right.’ I believed him, liked him even. He would be capable of orchestrating my dilemma. Why would he? We had never come close to touching his organisations in three years and he knew it.
Staring at photographs of my wife and daughter laid on the desk, I tenderly trace their faces and shapes in two dimensions. This is all I have left of them. I dare not watch the family DVDs, once was enough. But this act of tracing their image on photographs is a nightly penance of communion that brings me as close as I can get right now. In a world of make believe. Futile though it is, it is all I have.
Nothing ever brings real rest. I can still count the few times I have slept in my own bed since their disappearance. Most nights are slumped at this very desk, like Goya’s etching “Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters.’ My life is counted by what I have missed - the number of family meals uneaten, games of ‘lorries’ and kite flying lost, walks together with Ovid not taken, family Sundays and holidays unspent, birthdays desolate, Christmases dreaded and endured - since Bess and Grace left me.
Suddenly, the buzz of an alarm sounds from one of the television screens. Two figures flit across the meadow close to my cottage, pausing at the high hedge, seeking a gap. Without warning spotlights come up on the near meadow, highlighting ‘Cat’ Rudd and Stephenson who hurtle off away, struggling on the frozen ground to reach the far woods and the road back to their house. A prank no doubt but I do not call it in; why bother, nothing would be done? For another fifteen minutes, I watch a
ll screens before turning the exterior lights off and resetting them.
My mobile phone goes. I read the text with a joyful shudder as my University friend Jerry’s words intone, ‘Do not be afraid, you are not alone.’ I actually, fitfully sleep.
23
The last day I felt fully alive is only a mind film now. Playing lorries dissolves deliciously into a white cloud of flour while cooking and devouring scones and jam. Each of us uses the toy conductor’s baton to urge on the orchestra as music lulls us. Bess catches her long gypsy style skirt on the coffee table, it spins her round and she almost falls as she kneels to get the perfect angle of our daughter with the digital camera. Grace watches seriously as dog and teddy pose with her for a final image. ‘Careful Mummy,’ as Bess stoops beside the table once more. Bathed, powdered, snuggled down to gentle sleep, our infant snuffles and turns herself over with a smile at some thought all her own.
I remember thinking: I will never know better, nor purer, than this day. If I have to die, this night will be the time as I would carry these immediate memories with me. ‘Axel’s Castle,’ the story where the lovers decide that life can only decline after their initial ecstasy, and so it is not worth continuing. Superstitiously I shuddered at even having such a notion; no matter how fleeting.
Sharp staccatos of sound and vision in my mind film, canted angles of lightning flashing red in my nightmare labyrinth. Images of rats last but a second, cut to bloated bodies lying still, cut to frenzied discordant music while a figure threatens my cowering family, cut to gouging screams from bats streaking after Bess and Grace beyond my sight, lost. The demonic monsters of Beowulf’s preternatural evil have overwhelmed my unguarded house.
***
My alarm goes, five thirty a.m.. I am sane for at least one more day.
Sam rings as I am drinking coffee and eating toast. He is released on police bail without being taken to court, going home for a good meal, bath and sleep. He cannot work as his van is impounded, which likely means he will lose his job. He agrees to stay at my mother’s house for a few days and make a show of the house being occupied. He thinks it is charity. I assure him it is not. He agrees, quietly happy that he is helping my mother.
I would dearly like to take him where I am going but know he is in enough trouble. Without potentially adding to it if I am caught and he is with me.
I drive to within two miles of Albion House, a dark Georgian outline beneath the billowing clouds sunk low towards the land’s gentle hilly shadows. Blackness hems in the narrow roads. I toot loudly at a pair of jackdaws that appear willing to risk death for an extra peck at something they have found in the middle of the road. No police are on watch at the death scene, but still I slip stealthily across the rutted frozen field opposite the house gates from its far side. I watch again for police observers but can see none and am then obscured from any prying cameras or eyes on the Albion estate by the high hedge and darkness. This has to be done. For the dead woman’s sake, for Sam who needs clearing. Evidence may disappear in these weather conditions and it seems I cannot trust Odling to pursue truth.
Save for the rustling of the hedgerows in the wind, and the sudden movements of hares alert for any threat to their young playing in the field, the only noise is a light flapping from the crime scene tape that has floated off in the wind and now strangles a gatepost.
The ground remains frozen, lightly covered by snow overnight. I shiver mightily even beneath my thick jumper, cord trousers, duffel coat and scarf, putting on an extra-large crime scene suit over all of that.
I toil across the vast field, grateful for a faltering moonlight that helps me avoid the sharp ridges and two-foot-deep troughs in the black iced soil that could easily turn or break an ankle. Fifty yards away from the point of impact, I can see not a mark or an object or a clue.
Another twenty yards, along what I take to be the trajectory the woman should have taken when thrown high in the air, brings me to an interruption to the pattern of the plough. The ridges are battened down, partially flattened when wet on Sunday evening before they froze. The body landed here from the sky, making the perfect imprint of her body as it bounced down.
Crouching, inching along the indentation where the snow has not penetrated or has dissolved, with a tiny torch trained on the soil, I make my discoveries. Strands of black wool like the dead woman’s coat and jumper, several of her hairs, spots of blood where her knee and head would have been and a black scarf covered in silver flecks of paint and scraps of headlight glass. All in the little shadowed crevices of the soil. It is not adequate but I take samples, photographs, do what I can in the muted moonlight and tiny torch beam.
Only then do I see the footprints, three pairs; small, medium, extra-large in size. I can plot them coming in from the side of the field from whence I came to where the body landed.
I track the smaller pair that then clearly led the party, with torches I imagine, while the giant footsteps are deeper, presumably carrying the dead weight of the woman. They all finish by the six-foot hedge at the point in the ditch where Sam found the body. Only two yards inside the field from where I first investigated. Two footprints there lie side by side; big, deep and embedded, where he reached high, holding her like a sacrifice, and dropped the body over the hedge and into the ditch. No doubt hearing a splash from the leg and arm, hitting the mire and assuming she was lost forever. A tall giant of a man would be needed to achieve this act.
I photograph all of this, take samples from the hedge where they snagged some strands of her black coat, her hair, and even a slice of skin from her face my torch picks out.
My mind races. Even with this development, was it murder or just a hit and run where someone desperately then tried to cover it up? But in the dark, they were unable to conceal their footprints, no doubt hoping, assuming that they would be quickly covered in snow or washed away by winter rain within hours. Perhaps they even came back at dawn to complete their work, check the body was hidden for months if not forever, only to find Sam and me already present and then the police.
***
As the dirty light of dawn dapples the black horizon I return the seventy yards to where the body originally landed. If the woman was carrying a phone or a bag, such a lighter object might have been thrown further or closer to Albion’s gates in this field.
I begin to move in concentric circles around the body, a yard further outward each time. It seems hopeless until a spark of light, something shiny appears twenty yards beyond where the body landed. I chance a torch beam again, my hand stilling as it picks out a reflection. My eyes have adjusted somewhat but still I see nothing until I am right on top of a rutted trough. There, three feet down, almost hidden within the soil is a metal snap on a short leather strap. I pull and a camera and its case creak out, half buried in the frozen mud. Wiping my latex gloves on my legs, I pick it up and carefully brush of the dripping water and mud oozing all over it. I pray it is water proof as I switch it on, just in case the battery is still good. Modern cameras usually turn themselves off if not used for sixty seconds.
Red-light flashes, a small screen says ‘Firing Up.’ The expensive leather strap clearly bears the teeth marks of an animal. Likely a fox that saw it as a plaything and perhaps dragged it away from where it originally fell with the body to here before losing interest in what could not be eaten.
The camera menu appears. I press to see ‘Recent Activity.’ All noise abates, I hardly breathe as I spin through two hundred images and a short video. All taken by the dead woman, charting the last hours of her life and sudden death.
24
I loved leading, moulding a top team – both my old Major Crime squad, and at Intelligence.
Surveying the newly assembled Major Crime Team 2 now though, I worry. For all of us. Created to cover the northern half of Ancaster County, including a swathe of rural countryside, the pretty market town of Merian and the ailing industrial and port town of Ister where I first walked the beat, we face quite a task. And to be bru
tally honest, we are a motley crew of rejects and newbies, shunted into a corner as befits the way we are seen. Born to fail.
Looking around the squad room I wonder anew at how truly petty Calvin Creel is. Never let it be said that the man ever forgot a slight and did not pay back with real attention to detail. Neither he, nor his followers, would ever forget, nor forgive, their humbling in ‘The Box.’ They would strike back, the only question being when and how; assigning the squad this depressing room is only the beginning.
Our base is to be the third floor of the early Victorian police station in Merian, the town where my father taught at the local comprehensive and I went to the local D’Eynscourte Foundation Grammar School. To describe the room as ‘A Major Crimes Incident Room’ is to use the exaggerated spin of an estate agent. Eight battered desks and chairs, the oldest computers and printers in the force, a gnarled and decrepit conference table with a dozen unsafe chairs scattered about it and an empty space for the team to gather beside the whiteboard that bears the giant welcoming message, ‘Murdering Bastard’ in thick bright red ink. Walls, ceiling, windows, lino floor, all are grey with the sheen of age and neglect.
Oddly the squad room is in Merian, not Ister, where I expect most of our work to be. That notorious town of two hundred thousand souls has some of the highest rates anywhere in Great Britain on virtually any analysis – the homeless, poverty stricken, youth unemployment, divorce, single mothers, rape, drugs, domestic violence, prostitution and vice. ‘The world’s greatest fishing port, catching and selling any fish on earth’ had been the grand claim for most of the twentieth century. Now it is known locally as ‘Toxic Alley’ for the plethora of chemical works along its riverbanks and food processing factories sprawled on depressing industrial estates for miles around the old docks. On a good day, it just smells rotten for miles; on a bad day, you realise what the poisonous killer fogs of yesteryear and those of modern China entail. ‘Ister, the blister, right up England’s posterior’ goes another apt saying to describe the town’s character and geographical situation half way along a wide estuary on England’s curved east coast.
Bitter Pastoral_A DCI Caleb Cade Crime Thriller of rural Ancaster County. Page 14
