by Mark Roberts
Corrigan continued, ‘I took him by car to St Mark’s. He went inside.’
‘Have you looked at the footage inside the Ritblat Gallery?’ asked Rosen.
‘No, not yet,’ Feldman replied.
‘Look at that footage next.’
Gold and Feldman exchanged glances.
‘Because I want to see how he is around the things of antiquity, the ancient and the sacred . . .’
‘Why?’ asked Bellwood.
‘Humour me. There’s background on this character Flint. He opted to leave a plum job in the Vatican to go and work in Kenya. Flint hits the outback at a time of a plague of demonic possession, with people running around “possessed” by devils, but also, more to the point, lots of brutal murders. No one else on the team needs to know this, so keep it close, OK? Flint the exorcist himself becomes “possessed”. He ends up getting lynched. Why? Did the saviour turned into the scourge? I spoke to a Kenyan police officer today, Sergeant Kimurer. He said he’s talked to reliable eyewitnesses who saw Flint enter and leave a house. A mother and her child were butchered while Flint was inside that house. Kimurer said there were twelve victims in total. The Catholic Church whisked Flint out of Kenya before you could say boohoo. If Kimurer’s right, Flint’s a serial killer. I found out only a few hours ago, just before I met up with him at Charing Cross.’
The door to Baxter’s office opened and Baxter walked into the middle of the incident room.
‘OK, troops, that’ll do for now.’
‘David!’ called Baxter, disappearing back into his office. Rosen followed.
‘Shut the door.’
Rosen closed the door. ‘Yes?’ he asked.
‘Where did you disappear to mid-afternoon?’
‘Hospital appointment.’
‘What’s up with you?’
‘Plenty.’
‘What medical reason can you give for walking away on the day a body is discovered?’
‘I can’t. The appointment wasn’t mine. It was Sarah’s.’
‘Is it her nerves again?’
‘No, her nerves are fine; they have been for a long time. I think I’ve explained to you on more than one occasion, mental illness isn’t permanent.’
Rosen regretted having to mention Sarah’s name in Baxter’s presence, let alone discuss her former illness. It felt like an enforced act of betrayal.
‘What else did you do, when you weren’t otherwise occupied?’
‘I went to pursue a lead.’
‘Which was?’
‘At the British Library.’ Rosen considered telling Baxter about Father Sebastian and dismissed the notion in the same instant.
‘What was at the British Library that you had to deploy officers there?’ The colour purple shot up from Baxter’s throat. ‘And what’s with all this fucking off up and down to Kent?’
‘Robert really has been doing a good job. He wasn’t in on the Kent loop.’
‘At least DC Harrison has the communication skills to inform his superior officers about what is going on, unlike you.’
‘Do you believe in God, Inspector Baxter? The devil?’
Baxter looked as if he’d just bitten into a shiny red apple that was rotten to the core.
‘The Herod murders could be – could be – copycat killings. Herod, it appears, is basing his MO on a thirteenth-century Florentine Satanist.’
‘Alessio Capaneus.’
‘Robert again,’ said Rosen.
‘Do you know what, David, I just wanted to hear it from your own mouth because I can’t believe the way you’ve wasted the time of officers on your team. I’ve heard enough from you. I’m not even going to ask you any more. I can wait a couple of days, because on Tuesday morning you can explain it all in the initial peer review meeting, which will take place at nine o’clock. Everyone who is or has been involved in this investigation on any level whatsoever has been invited and is strongly advised to attend. The guys from Islington can ask you where and why because, frankly, I’m sick to death of trying to talk to you.’
Rosen closed Baxter’s door behind him and looked around the incident room.
Gold and Feldman stared at CCTV footage. Bellwood was on the phone.
Corrigan entered through the main door.
‘Peer review, Tuesday,’ said Rosen.
‘Crock of shit, Wednesday,’ said Corrigan.
37
The morning brought cold daylight and the arrival, at last, of Gwen Swift’s cold case file.
Baxter’s door was shut tight and there had been no sign of him all morning.
Flint’s water bottle had been sent by DHL to the DNA database and had been signed for at nine, with an urgent request to process the sample.
Bellwood watched Rosen as he took the cold case file from the clerk who delivered it to his desk.
‘Sorry it took so long,’ said the clerk. ‘It was misfiled under G and not S.’
The thinness of the brown card file told Rosen, at a glance, that the detectives investigating back in the early 1970s had laboured in a desert, chasing phantoms. How he sympathized as he opened it.
Inside lay a deeper tale of frustration. There was no order. The last person to handle it must have thrown back the papers and pictures in anger or despair.
Rosen now sorted it. Three fruitless interviews with three schoolboys who had the misfortune of being short, thin and dark haired; a description in a witness statement given by a driver, of a boy of this type, seen following – or maybe just walking behind – Gwen when she got off the bus.
The photographs of Gwen at the scene of the murder were black and white and grainy. It hadn’t been a ferocious attack. There was no blood evident and, had the attack not occurred on a lonely footpath, she could have been sleeping. He lingered on her face, going back in his mind to the discovery of her mother’s body, and the picture of her in her shrine of a bedroom. Then his thoughts turned to the children in the heart-shaped locket on the dressing table, the picture of a girl and a little boy.
Most murder victims know their killer: the words spun around his head as if on a carousel. He turned his attention to the coroner’s report, scanning it until he came to cause of death. As he read the uneven typewritten findings, the blurred and speckled print seemed to dance off the page. He felt a sensation like a pair of steel talons bearing down hard on his skull. Abruptly he was on his feet, the report gripped in both hands.
He looked around the incident room. Seven of the team in. The door to Baxter’s office still closed. Harrison on his way back from the water fountain. Bellwood working on the computer at her time-shared desk. Gold and Feldman bug-eyed at their laptops. Others coming and going. He sat down, having caught Harrison’s eye, but Harrison looked away. Rosen stared at the coroner’s report again and said, ‘Carol, got a minute?’
Bellwood strolled over. ‘Still no word back on Flint’s DNA?’
Rosen pointed at the file on his desk. ‘Look at that,’ he whispered. ‘Look at that, Carol, look at the cause of death but don’t react.’
Harrison glanced up from his laptop, looked across and back at the screen.
She focussed on the coroner’s report and read silently: ‘Gwen Swift died of cardiac tamponade after being stabbed in the chest cavity by a thin, sharp piece of metal, possibly the spoke of a bicycle wheel or a section of a wire coat-hanger.’
‘Just like Jenny Maguire, Alison Todd, Jane Wise, Sylvia Green and Julia Caton. We’ve got a connection from 1973 to today. Who have we got from 1973?’ His mind raced and he whispered, ‘Susie Armitage’, in the same moment that Bellwood said her name. An image crossed his mind: a girl and a little boy – Paul Dwyer – trapped in a locket with a lock of black hair on a dressing table at 24 Brantwood Road.
‘Get hold of Susie. We need her to look at the locket from Mrs Swift’s dressing table.’ Rosen looked up at her ‘OK, Carol. Stand right there. If anyone comes this way, you act as a shield between the screen and their eyes.’
‘Anyone
being Harrison?’
‘Anyone.’
Rosen scrolled into the Police National Computer.
He typed in the name Paul Dwyer.
‘How old?’
‘He was seven in the late sixties.’
‘Let’s stay safe with either side of the low forties.’ He typed in ‘Age forty to fifty-five’.
Four names appeared on the screen; three were deceased, one had been a resident of Broadmoor since the eighties.
‘Shit.’ Rosen wanted to bang the table. ‘He won’t be operating under that name, though. Let’s try the HOLMES reader.’
Bellwood fetched her HOLMES laptop from her desk and took over Rosen’s seat as he blocked the view of the rest of the office. She logged on to the system and said, ‘If there’s one specific commonality between any single detail in two separate cases, this computer system’s going to match them and throw it up. I’ve been up and down the highways and byways on HOLMES with all the information we have and nothing’s chimed so far. What do you want me to try next?’
He considered. Rosen picked up Harrison’s internet printout, of Alessio Capaneus’s brief and bloody biography.
‘Capaneus. Have you ever typed that into the system?’
She shook her head. ‘I stuck to forensics, time, logistical details, places . . . that’s what HOLMES sorts. In terms of HOLMES, Capaneus is ancient history.’
‘Let’s imagine Capaneus’s crimes have just been reported to us. Put them in the system, Carol. We’ll take some antiquated maybes and see how they square up with some modern definites.’
He took the scant internet information from the in-tray on his desk and summarized.
‘Alessio, precise birth date and parents unknown, thirteenth century, adopted by Filippo Capaneus and given the family name. Exiled from Florence, he returns from the Middle East and Africa with esoteric texts. Arrested, hanged for the murder of six pregnant women, notably Beatrice Ciacco, fifth victim, neighbour of the Capaneus family . . .’ Rosen paused. ‘Let’s try that. Type in Capaneus and fifth victim and adoptive family and neighbour and Beatrice Ciacco.’
As she typed, Rosen asked, ‘Have you recorded everything about the murder of Julia Caton?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK?’
‘Done,’ said Bellwood.
She pressed ‘enter’ and within seconds a match showed onscreen.
Capaneus, fifth victim, adoptive family, pregnant neighbour, Beatrice Ciacco
fifth victim, pregnant neighbour
‘Look at the gaps,’ said Rosen. ‘Whose names go in the gaps?’
‘Dwyer and Julia Caton.’
‘And he was fostered, not adopted, which for our purposes amounts to the same thing.’
‘As copycats go,’ said Bellwood, ‘that’s a pretty compelling match.’
‘We need to talk with Susie Armitage. We’ll meet her at 24 Brantwood Road. We need to pump her on Dwyer, take her back in time. We need to mine her memory. You’ve got her number?’
Bellwood dialled Susie’s number and within a minute she had agreed to meet them at 24 Brantwood Road.
Rosen called Craig Parker.
‘The old lady’s bedroom had been mostly emptied, David.’
‘What’s been left?’
‘The dressing table and the wardrobe,’ said Parker.
‘Can you bring me the gold locket from the dressing table?’ asked Rosen.
‘The heart-shaped one with the kids’ picture and the lock of hair?’
‘Get it here pronto, Craig. I need to place it back at the scene.’
——
HARRISON WATCHED ROSEN and Bellwood leave the office, noting their sudden departure and the nervous energy around them, without a word to anyone. The others, the London officers who looked down their collective noses at him because he dared to come from outside the capital city, were busy at their computers. Harrison strolled casually across the office to Rosen’s desk and almost laughed out loud. The dope had walked out leaving his mobile phone squarely on his desk for all to see.
Harrison looked around. No one was watching. It was a Motorola, a crap phone for a crap detective, a has-been, resting on laurels grown brown and grey with age, a joke detective who hadn’t even locked his phone. He put the mobile in his pocket and went back to his own desk, the one he shared with three other people he couldn’t stand and who couldn’t stand him because they knew he was a threat, a high flyer, the sharpest blade in the box but the one most blunted by Rosen and his lack of imagination.
The weight of Rosen’s phone felt strange in Harrison’s pocket. How he looked forward to seeing who was in the address book and intercepting any texts and voicemail messages intended for Rosen, the idiot in the eye of a storm.
38
In Isobel Swift’s bedroom at 24 Brantwood Road, Susie Armitage looked like a child locked in the body of a middle-aged woman.
‘Mrs Armitage,’ said Rosen, ‘I’m very grateful to you for coming here so promptly, so willingly.’
‘I feel like I’m on another planet, in some other world.’
‘Most people go through a whole lifetime and don’t go near the scene of a serious crime,’ Rosen said, to encourage her. ‘You’re not only at the scene of a murder, you’re in a place that was once a childhood home. Thank you for helping us today.’
It felt as though Mrs Swift’s bedroom had been shrink-wrapped in silence. Susie hovered just inside the doorway and Rosen judged correctly that she was scared to the point of panic.
He drew a line in the air that showed her a path from the place she was standing to the place he wanted her to go; her former foster-mother’s dressing table, where the only item remaining was a gold locket. Bellwood gave Susie’s elbow the merest of touches to send her over.
‘Where is everything? Where’s the bed?’
‘Detective Sergeant Parker has had to remove the bed for our forensic scientists to study.’
‘Oh.’
‘If you wouldn’t mind, the thing we’d like you to look at is the locket on the dressing table. See.’ Automatically, she reached for the object. ‘But, please don’t touch.’ She snatched her hand back.
It was open, made of worn-out gold, the lock of hair on one side, the picture of the young girl and a small boy on the other. Susie squinted.
‘Would you like some more light?’ asked Bellwood.
‘Yes, please.’
‘Not a problem.’ She flicked her torch onto the locket and Susie let out an incoherent sound that spoke of a lifetime of unresolved sorrow. Bellwood held Susie in her arms and, for the time being, the questioning was suspended as the woman sobbed from the depths of her soul.
Rosen drifted to the window and looked down at the path next door along which the killer had managed to take Julia Caton, and put her into some sort of vehicle, without anyone seeing him. The reason dawned on Rosen as he gazed up and down the tree-lined road. The only person who could have had a clear view of the front path of 22 Brantwood Road was the neighbour at 24 Brantwood Road and, it was his conviction, the killer had murdered that witness some eighteen months earlier.
‘Cunning bastard,’ Rosen spoke quietly, his breath misting on the window.
‘I’m sorry.’ Susie was calming down, and Rosen returned to join them at the dressing table. ‘That’s a picture of me, and the little boy with me, that’s Paul Dwyer. I’ve been talking to the others since I last saw you. I can tell you more, much more about what happened.’
‘Thank you for that, Susie,’ said Bellwood, softly.
She pointed at the image of herself and Paul Dwyer in the locket. ‘She must have still cared for me, deep down, to keep my picture like this.’
‘It wasn’t you she rejected, Susie; it was the whole world she pushed away.’
‘And the lock of hair?’
‘It’s not Gwen’s hair. Wrong colour.’
‘Her husband?’
‘He was fair haired.’
The beam of the torch played on
the sleek black hair, the same colour as the single hair recovered by DC Willis from the loft of 22 Brantwood Road.
‘It’s the same colour as Paul’s hair. See.’ She pointed at the hair, then at the image of the little boy.
‘Why would she have taken and kept a lock of Paul’s hair?’
‘She was lovely to all the children, but especially to Paul, as he was . . . vulnerable.’
‘Vulnerable? Did he have learning difficulties? A physical disability?’
‘He wasn’t an attractive child. I think she viewed him with great compassion and that compassion turned to love for the son she could never have herself. You’ve got to remember she had him from a baby and he was just snatched away seven years later. You know, she went strange after what happened to Gwen, but it wasn’t an overnight change. Things took a turn for the worse after Paul’s birth mother arrived. I was sixteen when Paul was taken away, and I left shortly afterwards. I visited but . . . after Gwen, well, you know what happened with Gwen and the foster-children, don’t you, Carol?’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘I think that hair is Paul’s. He’s not in trouble, is he?’
‘We’re not sure.’
‘I hope and pray not.’
‘If he is in trouble,’ said Rosen, ‘we’ll do what we can to help him.’
But as he spoke, Rosen thought about the guns of CO19 – Central Operations Firearms Control – at one extreme and, at the other end of the spectrum, the folk who took care of the criminally insane in Broadmoor in the south and at Maghull up north.
‘What happened when Paul was taken away by his birth mother?’
‘His real mother turned up at his seventh birthday party. She was dressed formally but you could tell by her face, she looked harrowed. Drugs, a former drug addict, now wearing this huge cross around her neck. She was with a man in a dog collar who called himself Pastor Jim. He tried to calm Isobel down. Paul’s mum was a member of the Church of the Living Light. The old ways were over, she said. She’d seen the light and she’d found Jesus. It sounded good but there was something that just felt bizarre and horrible about the whole thing. Paul was clutching on to Isobel, crying, “Mum, don’t let them take me!”’
