I paused, my hands on the steering wheel. “Not yet,” I said. “Let’s wait until we know for sure what connected them. I don’t want to go throwing accusations about him in her face like this, not just now.” Not at all, really, but sometimes we had to. People had to be pushed to face things about their loved ones that they might not want to face. Answers were to be had, and sometimes that meant dragging the truth out tooth and nail when the need arose. Lena knew that, though I still didn’t have the heart to put her through it. We’d find what we could on our own for now and turn to Lena to fill in any of the gaps as and when we needed to.
I explained as much to Mills, and he relaxed at the decision, apparently no keener to start pestering Lena for details like that than I was. Though the thoughts, the accusations and unpleasant truths hung over us like a cloud as we drove back to the station, and I, for one, was glad that Lena was no longer there to pick up on it.
We could buckle down, get some answers, hopefully get some evidence, and have more to offer both Lena and Schmidt’s parents the next time we saw them. Perhaps we’d even have an answer for Elizabeth Wellins if she even still wanted one.
Thirteen
Thatcher
When we got back to the station, the first thing I did was head straight to Wasco’s lab, as Mills went upstairs to see what Fry had managed to gather whilst we were out.
Wasco was, as usual, bent over a screen, the blue light shining on his dark skin, curly hair growing wildly in every direction, his glasses slipping down his nose. I knocked on the door frame and strolled in, leaning against his desk. He held up a hand, his eyes not leaving the screen, and I waited patiently for him to finish whatever he was doing. Eventually, he stopped, sighed, and looked up at me.
“Oh, hello, Thatcher.”
“Afternoon Wasco.”
“Nearly evening now,” he said, looking at his watch. “Good thing too, I’m famished.”
“Did you leave that computer long enough to have lunch?”
Wasco just waved an impatient hand through the air and pushed his chair back from the desk. “Someone brought me an apple at some point,” he said. “Can’t remember who.” He reached behind him to the shelving racks against the back wall, grabbing a familiar-looking laptop.
“Good news, I got into this thing relatively easily,” he said, placing Schmidt’s laptop on the desk between us. “Seems your chap wasn’t mad about computer security,” he added disapprovingly.
“And the bad news?” I asked.
“There’s piss-all on there, Thatcher, pardon my French. Looks like he used it for gaming more than anything, a few charts and PDFs downloaded, but otherwise, there’s not a lot there.”
I grimaced at the disappointing news but picked the laptop up and tucked it under my arm all the same.
“What about the phone?” I asked, hoping for some better news.
Wasco frowned and shook his head. “Thing’s buggered. My best bet is accessing the phone’s memory, but,” another glance at his watch, “there’s no point in starting that job till tomorrow. It will likely take me a while. Sorry, Thatch.” He stood up and grabbed his jacket. “Wish I had better news for you.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I assured him. “We’ll make do with what we have.”
He nodded, pulling his jacket over his shoulder, shutting down the various droning machines that cluttered his workspace. I remembered what Dr Bayat had said about Dr Schmidt, his reluctance to start digitising his work. He wasn’t the only man I knew who thought that hard copies remained the best way to stay safe.
“Hey, Wasco.” He hummed to acknowledge me. “If you had to hide something from someone, where would you hide it?”
He turned around, eyebrows raised. “What sort of thing?”
“Documents, articles, folders, that sort of thing.”
He thought for a moment, his paranoid brain whirring along. “Am I hiding this from the wife?” he asked.
“You don’t have to take it so literally, but yes. Hiding it from everyone, especially me.”
“Ah.” He clicked. “Here, I suppose,” he said with a shrug, looking around his littered office. “No chance of the wife stumbling on it and none of you lot come rifling through my things. Not—” he hastily added, “that I have anything down here that you would need to rifle through.”
I chuckled. “I never imagined you would. Cheers, Wasco.”
He gave me a wave, and I left him to it, heading up the stairs to where Mills and Fry stood at her desk, looking at her computer screen. I wandered over to join them, Mills looking up as I approached.
“Any joy?” he asked with a nod to the laptop I carried.
“Not much,” I replied grumpily. “What about here? Fry?”
She looked up at me and turned the screen so that I could see. “I found the original case file,” she said. “Though there isn’t much, the DI on the case said it looked like the boy had taken off. Got on the bus to go somewhere.”
I rankled at the shoddy police work, but I hadn’t been there at the time. Perhaps all the evidence did point that way.
“Who was the DI?” I asked, putting the laptop down and resting my hands on the desk.
“Fisk,” she said.
“DI Fisk,” Sharp interrupted, appearing by Fry’s desk. “Textbook sort of chap. Good at paperwork, good at following evidence but not all that quick on the instincts.”
I nodded, a vague recollection of the short, pale man coming up.
“Where is he now?” Fry asked, looking up at Sharp.
“He left the force about a year or two after,” Sharp replied, looking at the screen herself. “He and his partner headed to Belfast, still there,” she added.
“Do you remember this?” I asked her with a nod to the screen.
“Just about,” she murmured, a frown on her face. “Jack Wellins, missing boy. Not a trace of him anywhere. The case was left running for a while, but nothing turned up, and we couldn’t pour any more resources into a cold case. Which begs me to ask,” she fixed her stare on me, “why are you looking into Jack Wellins?”
Mills grabbed the folder from Schmidt’s lab and handed it out. “We found this in Dr Schmidt’s lab,” he said. We all watched as she flipped it open, her frown deepening as she took in the newspaper cuttings and articles. A breath hissed out from between her teeth.
“That’s not a good sign,” she muttered.
“We found another one,” I said, pulling the article from my pocket and handing it over. “Jeannie Gray wrote it with Jack Wellins’s mother, Elizabeth. She’s tracking down her old notes to get to us.”
Sharp gave me a warning look but nodded, handing the folder and the article back to Mills. “Schmidt had an interest in Jack Wellins then,” she muttered. “And kept all of these?”
I nodded. “We want to figure out why.”
“I think the most obvious answer is staring us in the face,” she replied.
“But it’s not an answer I want to dredge up without the proper evidence, ma’am.”
Sharp studied me, her hands on her hips. At the look on her face, Fry and Mills suddenly became very interested in Fry’s computer screen again.
“You’ve often been instincts over evidence, Thatcher,” Sharp said.
“And think how often you’ve lectured me about that,” I retorted.
“Thatcher,” she said warningly. “I know that you want to protect Lena here, but your relationship with her cannot get in the way of this investigation. She’s gone for conflict of interest, do not make me do the same to you.”
“That will not be necessary ma’am,” I said urgently.
“It had better not be,” she said darkly. “We still have processes to follow, Thatcher, even for detectives as good as you.”
I nodded, and she turned on her heel and strode away, returning to her office. Once she left, I let out a heavy breath.
“She’s not taking any chances on this one,” I muttered to myself.
Fry looke
d up at me with a frown. “She wouldn’t actually take you off the case, would she?”
“She might, though I don’t think she wants to. The threat is often as good as the real thing,” I added. “No worries, Fry, I’ll be ordering you around for some time yet.”
She laughed and rolled her eyes. “Hooray. I’ve printed the file,” she said, nodding to the printer in the corner. “Thought it might be easier to have on hand.”
“Hard copies,” Mills murmured, wandering over to collect them.
Fry was still looking at me. “You don’t think that Schmidt had something to do with Jack Wellins’s disappearance, do you, sir?”
No, was the truth of it. I liked to think that Lena had the good sense and judgement to have noticed if one of her friends were capable of something like that. But I had also worked here long enough to know that sometimes you just couldn’t tell. The best people could be the worst people, and you would never see it coming.
“We’ll follow the evidence,” I told Fry simply. “It’s the best thing we can do in situations like these.” She nodded and glanced down at the clock on her desk.
“Funny old day today,” she remarked, switching her computer off. “You need me to stick around, sir?”
I shook my head. “You head on home, Fry. See you on Monday.”
We’d have to make do with another constable tomorrow, but she’d already been dragged in today to help out. Fry pulled her coat on and grabbed her bag just as Mills wandered over. I didn’t miss the flicker of disappointment on his face as he saw her ready to leave.
“You off?” he asked, handing me the sheets, still warm from the printer. She nodded.
“See you Monday.”
“Thanks for all your help, Fry,” I called after her. She looked back over her shoulder with a warm smile, then started for the stairs, joining another constable as they headed down, one hand reaching back to pull her hair down.
I looked down at the case file and grimaced. It was late in the day, too late really to start delving into something like this, something that takes a lot of time and attention. I grabbed everything else we had brought with us and carted it through to our office, where at least it would be safe until tomorrow.
Mills trailed after me, stifling a yawn. I cracked a grin.
“You about ready to head home too?”
“I wasn’t this tired earlier,” he said, dropping into his chair. “Sort of crept up on me is all.”
“It does that,” I remarked, leaning against my desk. I was avoiding sitting down, knowing full well that if I did, I’d have trouble making myself get up again.
Someone knocked on the doorframe, and we both looked over to see Fry standing there.
“Back so soon?”
“I just got downstairs when Dr Cavell spotted me,” she explained. “She wants to see you.”
At last. We were both moving over to the door in a heartbeat, and Fry walked with us down the stairs, this time actually making it out of the building, and Mills and I carried on down to the lab.
It was odd, walking in and not seeing Lena and her head of white curls. Dr Cavell stood over by the computer in a long white lab coat, tapping her shoes on the ground, her brown hair pulled into a long ponytail that swung down her back.
“Dr Cavell,” I greeted her as we walked in. She turned around to look at us and smiled.
“Inspector, sergeant. Thanks for coming. I know you’re likely to leave soon.”
“Soon as we can,” Mills replied, blinking his eyes rapidly.
Dr Cavell grinned, her eyes bright, energy wafting off of her. I wondered if she’d recently had a coffee or if she was the sort of person who never seemed to actually tire.
She led us over to the table and pulled back the sheet from the body.
“First port of call was cleaning the poor bugger,” she said, folding the sheet down by his chest.
It was a welcome change. The blood had been scrubbed from his chest and face, his neck all clean. I could better see the resemblance he had to his father now, a similar structure to the face with a sharp chin and long nose.
“I’m going to take a punt,” Mills said. “And say that he had his throat cut.”
Dr Cavell smiled, her eyes twinkling. “Close, but not quite. There’s no slicing motion here, as I suspected,” she said. “He was stabbed, down,” she demonstrated with a pen on herself. “Straight through here, where the neck starts to meet the shoulder. Any lower and there’d have been a collar bone in the way. But it doesn’t have an exit wound, so whatever he was stabbed with wasn’t very long.”
“Not a knife then?” I asked.
“No, and a knife would be cleaner. This wound,” she traced her finger in the air above it. “It’s odd. Whatever it was wasn’t very sharp and wasn’t very straight.”
“Any ideas as to what it was?” I asked.
“Sadly not. I haven’t seen a stab wound like this before. And I’ve seen a lot of stab wounds,” she added, earning a grimace from Mills.
I smiled slightly. “So, what do we know?”
“We know he bled to death,” she said. “And that there’s no other trauma on the body. No scratches, no bruises. There wasn’t a fight. So, I’m guessing that our killer was taller and stronger. Strong to stab something blunt in one swing and tall enough for this angle to make sense. Unless Schmidt was kneeling, which from the distribution of blood down him, I doubt he was.”
I nodded, thinking about the state of the flat when we’d arrived, the trail and puddle of blood, the spray on the wall.
“I ran a blood test, as requested,” she said, checking her clipboard. “No alcohol in his system, no drugs—not even those sleeping pills. His blood sugar was a little low, though. High cholesterol as well, possibly hereditary that.”
“Interesting,” Mills drawled.
“Isn’t it?” she replied with a wink. “Anyway. I’d put his time of death closer to eight or nine in the evening, but no later than eleven.”
I nodded, a nice small window for us to work in.
“Otherwise, he’s a bit of a blank canvas. No tattoos, no piercings, looks to be in good health.”
“Nothing out of the ordinary?” I asked. Most people had something out of the ordinary. Everybody did.
But Dr Cavell shook her head. “Nada,” she quipped. “Not a broken bone, not a burn, not a birthmark, not a single scar. Even his teeth are good.
I frowned, looking down at our man. A perfect man of tip-top health, someone that nobody would notice, somebody with no distinguishing features that someone might be able to identify him from. Someone who was a recluse, spent most of his time at home, small circle friends, no real love life.
I glanced at Mills, and his expression looked similar to mine. This was exactly the sort of man we took notice of, someone who moved around without being seen. Someone who could have been there when a boy went missing, and nobody would have taken any notice of him.
It didn’t bode well for Dr Schmidt here, but he was already dead, anyway. Such revelations would only hurt his family and Lena, but they could also be a life-changer for Elizabeth Wellins, wherever she was these days.
“Thank you, Love,” I said. Dr Cavell nodded, bristling slightly at my use of her first name, but after noting my expression, she made no argument, just pulled the sheet back up over Schmidt’s head.
“I’ll get the official autopsy sorted tomorrow,” she said, looking at the clock up on the wall. “I feel as tired as Mills looks.”
“You don’t look it,” Mills replied, yawning behind his hand.
“How kind of you.”
“Come on,” I nudged Mills. “Let’s get out of here too.”
I needed some rest before we got deeper into this case and what exactly linked Dr Stefan Schmidt with Jack Wellins.
Fourteen
Thatcher
I had ended up needing that early night. After leaving the station, I had dropped Mills off, went home, and ate dinner with Liene before falling asle
ep on the sofa. Liene had to wake me up and help me into the bedroom to collapse on the bed. The day hadn’t been hard, per se, but it had been long and tiring, with the case going off in directions I had not been expecting it to. It was supposed to be a morning in court, and that was it, and somehow, we’d ended up looking into a burial outside a church and wondering how a missing boy from ten years ago fit into it all, and how that ended up with Dr Schmidt being killed.
Needless to say that when I woke up, my mind turned back to all of these thoughts without delay and woke me up before the alarm had even gone off. I unset it, not wanting to wake Liene up early on a Sunday and headed into the bathroom to shower and wash before grabbing something quick to eat, filling a thermos with coffee, and pulling my coat on. I took Liene a cup of tea, kissing the side of her arm. She mumbled something, half asleep, her hand wriggling free from the blankets to wave at me, and I let myself out of the house, heading down to the car.
The street was quiet, the comforting lull that came on Sunday’s, people staying in for the day and kept in by the rain that dribbled down again. A good day for a roast, I thought to myself as I climbed into the car and set off back to the station.
It was also quiet there, a few officers milling about, the atmosphere more relaxed than it usually was. I nodded to the desk sergeant and headed upstairs, settling myself down with my coffee in the office, looking at the board Mills had put together. Shrugging my coat off, I grabbed Jack Wellins’s case file from the pile on my desk and stuck that to the board as well, stepping back to look at it with the fresh perspective of a new day, hoping that something would jump out at me. No such luck. I returned to my desk and opened Schmidt’s laptop up, turned on the power button and slowly turned in my chair, sipping coffee as I waited for it to turn on. Wasco had removed the password protection, so it opened straight onto the desktop. Wasco had been right; it was an empty-looking thing. I couldn’t even spot any of the Microsoft icons. No music apps, no downloads. Just the internet, the file explorer and the icon for a popular gaming app.
Cradle to Coffin (A DCI Thatcher Yorkshire Crimes Book 10) Page 11
