Heart of the Demon (D.S.Hunter Kerr)

by Fowler, Michael

  “I hope you don’t find that me being not so upset about the news that Claire is dead reflects on my relationship with my daughter. I can assure you we were very close as a family. But I’m also a realist. I suppose I’ve known that Claire has been dead for a long time. Even though I never said it openly to Beverley when she was alive, I’ve always felt that Claire was lying somewhere in a grave where she shouldn’t be. She’s always been in my thoughts. Every time I saw or heard of a body being found, no matter where, I waited for the call. I’ve been waiting over ten years. The Police came back to us on many occasions at first, and her disappearance was re-investigated on a couple of occasions, and both me and Beverley used to get so excited. But then when Beverley died and there was no fresh news I just accepted the reality of it all.” Derek Fisher raised himself from his seat and went to a nearby wall unit. From the cupboard he brought out a bulging photograph album and handed it to Grace.

  She opened it to find the folder crammed with yellowing newspaper cuttings and scraps of paper filled with copious notes. She leafed through the folder quickly. It had been meticulously maintained. Every milestone had been recorded from day one to the present time and was interspersed here and there with happy family photographs of the Fishers. Their past was in this book.

  “I don’t know if that will be of any help to you. It’s everything we collected over the years relating to Claire. Every newspaper report. The possible leads. Every glimmer of hope. Keep it as long as you need. I hope it’ll help.”

  “It’ll certainly help us. Thanks, I’ll make sure it gets back to you safely.”

  “Before we leave you in peace Mr Fisher” interposed Hunter, “can you just remind us of Claire’s movements the evening she went missing.”

  Derek Fisher stroked the line of his jaw and chin, cleared his throat and seesawed his eyes between Hunter and Grace.

  “Do you know I don’t even need to think about what I’m going to tell you. I’ve said the same thing so many times over the years. Claire left home at just gone six. She told us she was going to her friend’s Stacy’s and would be back to finish her homework about eight o’clock. At quarter to eight she phoned us from a payphone to say she was at the youth club and asked if she could stay whilst nine. We were a bit concerned because it was dark, but at the same time we were going through a bit of a rough patch with Claire and we wanted to allow her a bit more freedom, so we told her no later than nine. That was the last time we spoke. What we subsequently found out is that she was in fact seeing a fifteen-year-old boy called Gary Martin and that they were at the fair together. She had been dating him for two months without us knowing. Police told us that the pair rowed that night because he found out she had been just stringing him along as cover. It appears she had been seeing someone older. She confessed it to him and he apparently stormed off in a huff and left her. That was about half past nine. You’ll see from our own file that Gary was interviewed many times and was a suspect on several occasions but he was alibied by quite a number of people that night. I’ve spoken with him myself many times over the years and I’m confident he wasn’t involved in Claire’s disappearance.” He shifted in his chair and cleared his throat. “I’m guessing you’ll no doubt want to speak with him again. Gary’s married now with a family of his own. We still keep in touch. He’ll tell you things that are not in those folders I’ve given you.” He stared at Hunter and then Grace through unblinking eyes. “In the few months before Claire disappeared we went through some bad times with her. She seemed to have changed, and it wasn’t for the good.” He paused. “Do you have children?”

  Both Hunter and Grace nodded.

  “Oh I know all teenagers go through a phase, but Claire really put us through it. She came in drunk, smashed up her room once when we tried to keep her in, and we even found out from Gary that she was seeing other lads behind his back. She’d become a real rebel in her last days, and that’s what’s so sad about it. My last memories of Claire are not nice ones.”

  Now where had he heard all this before, Hunter thought. A pattern’s emerging here.

  “Let me just check this with you Mr Fisher,” enquired Grace. “Just back-tracking a little you said Claire was last seen at the fair by her then boyfriend Gary Martin?”

  Derek Fisher nodded, “Yes, that’s right. He told me that when he left her he got the impression she was hanging about to meet up with an older guy”

  “Which fair was that?”

  “The local Feast Fair, that’s held on the Common Field every year. It still is.”

  Alarm bells were ringing in Hunter’s head. This was the second time The Feast Fair had featured in their enquiries. Hadn’t Rebecca Morris’s best friend Kirsty Evans told them that someone older had been fancying Rebecca when she had been at that fair? This was their first real link.

  * * * * *

  “I’ve just had a very interesting conversation with Derek Fisher” said Hunter strolling into the office and spotting Barry Newstead hunched over a pile of paperwork. He dropped the Claire Fisher file onto his desk jotter, then slipped off his jacket and hooked it over the back of his chair.

  Barry looked up from the sheaf of papers he had been reading, pushed himself back into his seat and rubbed the back of his neck. “Oh yes and what was that, as if you didn’t want me to ask?”

  “He told us that his daughter Claire was last seen at the local Feast fairground by her then boyfriend Gary Martin on the evening she went missing back in ninety-nine. The boyfriend apparently left her in ‘a strop’ after she told him that an older guy was fancying her. I don’t know if you’ve managed to get up to date with the investigation yet Barry but that’s very similar to something which Rebecca Morris told her friend Kirsty Evans, after they had also visited the Feast fair a couple of months ago – that someone older was fancying her. Added to that do you remember what Karen Gardner told us about the guy she was seeing at the same time as she was seeing Paul Goodright, way back in ninety-three?”

  “Crikey yes.” interjected Grace, teasing off her own jacket which was stuck to her blouse, a consequence of the muggy heat from the earlier thunderstorm. “She told me that she was being visited by a Billy Smith who travelled with the local fair. I checked his name against the database in the Intelligence Unit and although there was very little on him, an old conviction for drunk and disorderly, I did, however, discover from one of the beat officers that he didn’t just travel with the fair but his parents actually own it. He currently lives in a static caravan in a compound next to the canal.” She paused and her eyes widened. “Bloody hell. The compound where he lives is only about a mile from the Manvers site, where we found Carol and Claire’s bodies.”

  “This is just too much of a coincidence” Hunter said. “Barry does that name ring any bells with you – Billy Smith?”

  Barry pushed his reading glasses up onto his mop of tousled dark hair and fixed his gaze upon the ceiling as though the answer lay somewhere up there. He muttered the name ‘Billy Smith’ under his breath several times then shot his gaze back towards Hunter, slamming the flat of his hand on top of his pile of papers and jabbed an index finger towards him. “Billy Smith – Fairground Billy Smith, Of course, I’ve got him. He’s someone I came across way back in my really young CID days. It was from a job in the late eighties. We got a call to a shooting at the Barnwell Hotel – ‘The Drum’ as everyone referred to it. It’s been knocked down now but back then it was a real dive. One of our problem pubs. If a fight broke out there you knew you had to go in mob handed to sort it out. Anyway I can remember being radioed up one Friday night to attend there. Uniform had responded to an ambulance call and found a man in the back yard of the pub with shotgun wounds to the stomach. He wasn’t dead, but half his guts were hanging out and he was in a real bad way.” Barry paused for a moment taking in Hunter and Grace’s expressions. “The guy wouldn’t say a thing about what had gone on and the whole place had emptied by the time we had arrived. The pub was locked up at first but we ev
entually managed to rouse the Landlord. You could see he didn’t want us inside the place, and no wonder. When we got in the poolroom had been virtually demolished. Chairs, tables, and pool cues smashed up, glass everywhere, and someone had tried to clean up the blood. At first the landlord refused to say anything but after we threatened to lock him up for attempted murder he spilled the beans. He told us that earlier that night there had been a load of gipsy travellers in from a local site and that they had been playing pool for money. After squeezing him a bit more, particularly with the threat of losing his licence for allowing illegal gambling on the premises, he told us that there had been a thousand pound bet on the pool table and that one Billy Smith from the fairground had won the game, but then the gipsy who he’d been playing wouldn’t pay up. There’d been a bit of a scrap between him and Billy. Apparently Billy was very handy. We later found out that Billy was a bare-knuckle fighter who earned quite a bit of money from his illegal activities. Anyway Billy was getting topside of the gipsy and a few of his pals joined in so Billy had to get away quick. The landlord told us that whilst he was trying to get the gipsies out of his pub, because he was scared some of his locals might call the police, Billy Smith suddenly appeared back, and armed with a shotgun, demanding his money. There was a standoff at first and then some of the gipsies started goading Billy that it wasn’t loaded. So Billy shot off one barrel into the ceiling and again demanded his money. The guy who owed him the money responded by mouthing off and that’s when Billy shot the gipsy in the guts. Then he followed that up by smacking another couple of the guy’s mates with the butt of the gun, and then legged it.”

  “Did you get Billy?” Grace asked.

  “We did actually. I was so hyped-up I can tell you. It was early in my career and it was the first time I had actually seen armed police. We surrounded the fairground compound where Billy lived with his parents and he came out meek as anything telling us he’d been at home all night, and his father backed him up. We arrested him of course and carried out a search as best as we could but there was no sign of any gun. The gipsy who’d been shot was operated on and they stitched his guts back in and we finally managed to speak to him three days later but he refused to say anything. He wouldn’t even confirm his name. At the travellers’ site we couldn’t find anyone who wanted to talk to us so without witnesses and vital evidence the enquiry went nowhere. We found out later that the elders from the traveller site settled things with Billy’s father, whatever that meant.” He paused and smiled, “How’s that for someone who’s supposedly past it?” then in a hammy Poirot accent he added, “Hastings the little grey cells they do not desert me.”

  “That was a crap attempt at a French accent. It sounded more Welsh” goaded Grace.

  “You Philistine,” sneered back Barry, “Hercule Poirot, the greatest detective in the world – even greater than you, is Belgian not French.” He finished by giving Grace a quick wink.

  Hunter couldn’t help but smile. It hadn’t taken Barry long to settle in, and just as he had thought he had not lost any of his recall. His storage of information on villains, their cohorts and their networks, plus all the jobs he had attended over his thirty years was far better than any local Intelligence Unit computer system.

  “Right you two I’m going to get this to the HOLMES people and then get Tony and Mike. Meanwhile, I think it’s time to shake Billy Smith’s tree a little. I want you Grace to sort out the paperwork and get a magistrate’s warrant. ”

  * * * * *

  Hunter’s team sped into the open entranceway of the Smith’s fairground compound in two unmarked cars only to find themselves being greeted by two snapping and snarling Alsatians acting as sentries. The surprise element was long gone. The cars swerved around the slavering animals, churning up the ground of loose shale, and they slewed to a halt in front of a thirty-six foot static caravan where Barry Newstead had earlier indicated Billy Smith should still be living.

  Before jumping from the car Hunter whipped his head around in the direction they had just come from, focussing on the vicious hounds that were frantically jerking and leaping against the chain which was holding them. He quickly scanned its length, and only averted his gaze when he judged those brutes couldn’t reach him. At that same instant a single facing door shot open, crashing against the aluminium side of the caravan with a resounding clatter. A tall, stocky built, man confronted them.

  Hunter could see that the man was well over six feet tall and judging by the broad shoulders, expansive chest and bulging arms, which strained the white T-shirt he was wearing, he was someone who regularly trained and maintained his physique. His facial features were quite striking. Overall he had a tanned weather-beaten appearance framed by a head of thick, naturally curly, almost black hair.

  His ice blue eyes, wide and alert, strafed the compound. “What the fuck’s going on?”

  Hunter leaped from the driver’s seat. Mike Sampson and Tony Bullars were also pulling themselves out of their CID car and Hunter signalled towards them with a raised hand. “You and Bully hang back five,” he ordered and turned to the thick-set man framed in the doorway of the caravan. “Billy Smith?” He shouted, raising his voice over the now hysterical dogs, wishing he could silence them – permanently.

  As if reading his mind the man suddenly ordered loudly “Quiet! Sit! Sabre, Spike!” Then with a smug grin turned towards the detectives as the two dogs immediately stopped barking and settled back on their haunches. “What do so many cops want me for? You’d think I’d murdered someone.”

  “Funny you should say that,” Grace mumbled under her breath.

  Hunter caught the comment and nudged her arm. “We could do with a word with you Billy. You got a few moments?”

  “Sure come in, but wipe your feet,” he replied and disappeared back inside the van.

  As Hunter stepped up into Billy Smith’s home, he couldn’t help but be impressed by the vision, which met him. The plushness of the interior took him completely by surprise. Thick pile carpets, lush furnishings and soft pine cabinets ran from its entranceway into the open lounge. Expensive pieces of Crown Derby were much in evidence, both on the windowsills and in the glass units. The smell of fresh polish hung in the air. The mobile home was immaculate with everything neatly in place.

  “My next question is,” said Billy Smith as he eased himself into an armchair, “What is so important that it needs two car loads of detectives to turn up at my door?”

  Strong sunlight shone through slatted blinds behind him throwing his form into silhouette.

  Hunter narrowed his eyelids to catch a glimpse of Billy’s face.

  “How did you know we were cops? We haven’t introduced ourselves yet,” Hunter responded.

  “Dogs can smell you a mile off” he retorted. “Now get to the point and tell me what’s going on?”

  “We’re here making enquiries into the murder of Rebecca Morris.” Hunter replied.

  Prior to setting off from the station Hunter had briefed his team and decided against introducing the parallel investigation of the slaying of Claire Louise Fisher which provided the fairground link to at least two of the three murder victims, and only he and Grace knew the tenuous link to Carol Siddons through the Billy, Karen Gardner, Paul Goodright ménage a trois.

  “I’ve seen that on the telly. Why do you want to talk to me about that? I don’t even know the girl. I’ve never met her.”

  “We believe there’s a link to your fair, in as much as she was at the Feast fair shortly before she died.” He lied in order to get a reaction from Billy, which might indicate guilt.

  “I hope this is not leading where I think it is. I swear on my mother’s death I had nothing to do with that girl. If she was at the fair I never saw her.”

  “In order to satisfy ourselves, is it all right if we do a search of your home?” Grace interjected.

  Billy thought for a moment. “What if I say no?”

  “Well we have got a search warrant,” Grace responded waving the
magistrates’ document in her hand.

  “Looks like I’ve got no choice does it? But please don’t wreck things. I’ve heard about police and searches.”

  Hunter called in Tony and Mike and the four of them split up to begin a methodical high and low exploration of the caravan.

  Hunter ensured Billy remained in view throughout his search, continually glancing towards him through the corner of an eye, at the same time chatting in general terms endeavouring to relax him with a view to throwing him off guard when it was time for the more probing investigation-based questions.

  Then after about twenty minutes Mike Sampson shouted from one of the bedrooms at the back of the static.

  “Got something,” he announced and appeared in the doorway holding aloft a small item in a latex gloved hand. He strode purposefully through to the lounge followed by Grace and Tony. He showed the item to Hunter and then held it in front of Billy Smith.

  “Whose is this?” he requested sharply.

  “Mine, why?” Billy responded.

  “Not with these markings on it,” returned Mike. “This is Rebecca Morris’s mobile phone.

  * * * * *

  “I’ve told you a dozen times I found the damn thing,” Billy Smith replied, an agitated note in Billy Smith’s reply to Grace’s question.

  “And so you keep saying” she responded, “But you’re not convincing me.”

  Hunter watched Billy’s face beginning to flush across the desk. Grace had pressed Billy hard to the extent that sweat was now staining the front of his T-shirt.

  “All right, all right, I might well have not been straight with you but I thought you were just trying to pull a fast one on me with that Rebecca Morris business.”

  “Believe me Billy we do not lie about murder. Especially of a fourteen year old girl.” Grace said calmly leaning across setting her stare upon him.