Chosen To Kill (DI Matt Barnes Book 4)

by Michael Kerr

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Alan Eltringham had been taken to Maidstone Hospital and undergone an operation to his badly injured hand following the incident in his cell. There had been some nerve damage done by the sharpened toothbrush handle that Willie Draper had used to stab him with.

  Al was okay now, though. His hand was heavily bandaged and still throbbed, but that just kept him angry. And on return to the prison he had been transferred to C wing.

  It was a few days later that Willie had the accident. He was at work in the kitchen when Stevie Newton came into the preparation room after breakfast and started talking about how he expected to be moved to a cat D prison within a couple of weeks.

  Willie let him drone on as he tipped spuds from a sack into the electrically operated chipping machine that could hold twelve kilograms of potatoes in its rustproof, stainless steel hopper. He switched it on and the knife assembly began to spin.

  What happened next ruined Willie’s day. Stevie was still talking, but the noise from the chipper drowned out his voice. Willie hardly felt his forearm being gripped, and had no time to resist as his hand was plunged into the top of the machine. He didn’t even hear himself scream as the blades took his fingers, thumb and half of his hand off in a split second.

  “That’s payback,” Stevie shouted in his ear to be heard, before stepping away and hitting an alarm bell on the wall. “Just remember that it was an accident, or you’ll never get out of this nick alive.”

  Willie staggered away from the chipper with blood spurting from the remains of his hand. He knew that Eltringham had put Stevie up to it, but had no intention of saying anything to the screws. He couldn’t prove a thing, and he had a wife and a young daughter on the out that he wanted to see again.

  Within seconds half a dozen officers ran into the kitchen, saw what had happened and took Willie away to the hospital department.

  “What happened here?” Senior Officer Len Henson said to Stevie.

  “I dunno, boss,” Stevie said. “We was talkin’, and Willie was tippin’ spuds in the chipper. Next thing I know there’s blood sprayin’ all over the fuckin’ place.”

  “Okay,” Len said, already heading out to where the catering officer was approaching from his office. “Get this mess cleaned up.”

  That left Jimmy Lynch to sweat it out and watch his back. Al was happy to listen to Stevie tell him all the details of what he’d done to Willie. There was no hurry to deal with the other Muppet. Lynch was part of a captive audience and wasn’t going anywhere soon.

  Matt drove into the yard in Lewisham followed by a CSI unit, a police van and four patrol cars holding a total of sixteen uniformed officers.

  Stepping out of the car with Pete and Tam, Matt walked across to the office, opened the door and entered without knocking. Two techies followed them in with the kit needed to do the job.

  Ricky Lister, Sammy Clements and Travis Lawson ‒ who was still nursing slightly sore testicles from his previous encounter with Matt ‒ and a squat, heavyset guy that Matt did not recognise looked up and stared at him.

  “What now, Barnes?” Ricky said. “You here to harass me again?”

  “You got it,” Matt said. “We have warrants to take DNA samples from all your employees.”

  Ricky slammed a coffee cup down on the desk with enough force to break off the handle and send the hot liquid flying into the air. “You must be joking,” he seethed.

  “I don’t do stand-up,” Matt said. “Anyone that has a problem with assisting us can climb in the back of the paddy wagon outside and do it the hard way.”

  Ricky thumbed a number into his phone and called his solicitor. Spoke for a minute and then handed the mobile to Matt.

  “This is Malcolm Langdon, Mr. Lister’s solicitor. Who am I speaking to?”

  “Detective Inspector Barnes,” Matt said.

  “Are you charging my client or any of his employees with any crime, Inspector?”

  “Not at this present time.”

  “Then what possible reasonable grounds do you have to take samples of DNA from them?”

  “Warrants, Mr. Langdon. That’s all I need.”

  “I think that you will find―”

  “I hope I’ll find quite a lot. As you will undoubtedly know, we can obtain non-intimate samples with or without a suspect’s consent, and if necessary use reasonable force to do so. I fully intend to inform Mr. Lister and others of the reason for taking the samples, including the grounds on which the relevant authority has been given. Happy?”

  “Far from it,” Malcolm said. “What specific grounds do you actually have to suspect my client of being involved in a recordable offence?”

  “I’m obviously not going into details over the phone Mr. Langdon. For all I know you could be Lister’s tailor, or one of his unsavoury colleagues. But feel free to come to his company office in Lewisham, and be sure to have adequate photo ID.”

  Matt terminated the call and tossed the phone back to Ricky.

  “So what exactly have you got?” Ricky said as he snatched his Samsung smartphone out of the air. “Or are you just trying to rattle my cage?”

  “You know the reason,” Matt said. “Three of your employees committed a robbery, and the gun used went missing. That weapon is now on the street again, being used to murder people. That gives us cause to believe that maybe someone that works for you is a serial killer. We have his DNA, so we need to eliminate all possible suspects, or better still, get a match and arrest him.”

  Ricky thought it over. He knew for a fact that Barnes was on a fool’s errand, and that no one working for him was in possession of the gun. “Okay,” he said. “What do you call non-intimate samples?”

  “Strands of hair, other than pubic, or nail clippings and saliva. We intend to use buccal swabs to collect cells and saliva from the mouths of your work force, starting with you.”

  “Do you really think for a second that I’m a fucking serial killer, Barnes?” Ricky said.

  “What I think you are doesn’t need any discussion,” Matt said. “You can always refuse to cooperate, and I’ll be happy to take you in. A few hours in a holding cell would be a little sampler of what your future has in store.”

  Holding his emotions in check and not attacking Barnes was one of the hardest things Ricky had had to do for a long time. And although he was used to hurting people that got on his wrong side and pissed him off, assaulting Barnes in front of witnesses was a no-no. And he knew that this copper was almost rogue. He had asked around and been told that Barnes had his own take on interpreting the law. He had proved that he worked with one foot over the line by having some hitman warn him off after Henry had intimidated the woman he lived with. And then he’d broken Henry’s arm. The guy was a loose cannon.

  “Have all the staff on the premises rounded up,” Matt said. “And before we get this done and leave, I want a complete list of all your employees, to compare with the one we’ve compiled.”

  Two hours later Matt, Pete and Tam left the site and headed back to the city. Tam drove, with Matt in the front passenger seat and Pete in the rear.

  “I think that this is a waste of time, boss,” Pete said to Matt. “Most of the workers on Lister’s books are lorry drivers, office staff and the like.”

  “We go with what we have, Pete. He has plenty of muscle and at least one bent accountant on his payroll. He runs a legit organisation to cover his illegal activities. That bloody gun is in the hands of someone he knows, I’m certain of it.”

  “Whoever got it off Eltringham could have sold it on in a pub to anyone,” Tam said.

  “Whatever,” Matt mumbled. “I’m hoping that we get a match and can close this case. If it doesn’t work out, then we’ve at least explored one avenue. Maybe Eltringham was telling the truth, and Sammy Clements bought the piece off him. But without being sanctioned to tie Clements to a chair and work on him, he isn’t going to tell us anything.”

  “He didn’t seem too bothered about giving a sam
ple,” Pete said.

  “That’s because he isn’t the killer,” Matt said. “But he could at least give us one more link in the chain. We need to know who he passed or sold the gun to.”

  They stopped for coffee at a popular greasy spoon café south of the river. It was called Rosie’s, but the woman of that name had died over a decade back, having been felled by a fatal stroke as she served up a full breakfast to a council worker who lost his appetite as the food was deposited in his lap, followed by Rosie, who’d weighed fifteen stone and had smoked sixty cigarettes a day. Rosie’s brother, Sid, now ran the café, and was dissimilar to his late sister, being a whip thin, non-smoking vegetarian who still, at nearing seventy, took part in the London Marathon.

  Just as they were finishing up, Matt got a call from Tom, listened for thirty seconds, said “Okay” and ended the call.

  Pete and Tam fixed Matt with questioning stares.

  “We’ve got another dead housekeeper, in Ealing,” he said. “The bastard is front-page news, but that isn’t stopping him.”

  “What about the guy she worked for?” Pete said.

  “He got shot in the leg and left tied up. It doesn’t compute. Someone, presumably the killer, phoned for an ambulance.”

  They left the café, and Matt gave Tam the address of the crime scene and told him to drive there. Tom phoned back before they arrived to give Matt details. The MO was different. The housekeeper had been killed at her place of work, not at home.

  Most of the avenue was cordoned off. Matt showed his warrant card to a uniform after Tam had parked the unmarked car next to the kerb behind the fluttering strands of crime scene tape.

  A techie issued them with throwaway gloves and booties at the front door of the house, due to the primary crime scene being just inside, in the hall.

  Matt noted the blood and other matter on the wall, and more of it on the carpet.

  Nat Farley approached them from the rear of the house. “Ah, there you are, Barnes,” he said. “What took you so long?”

  “We had a prior engagement, Nat. And I know that you don’t like me hovering like a bloody kestrel when you’re probing livers and stuff.”

  Nat smiled. Not a pretty sight. “The female victim is in a cupboard at the end of the hall,” he said. “But it would appear that she was murdered just inside the front door, while she was standing to the side near the wall. You’ll have seen the ruined wallpaper.”

  Matt nodded.

  “As far as I can see she was shot at close range, centre of the forehead, and then dragged to the secondary scene where police found her. This happened no more than two hours ago.”

  “Is that it?” Matt said.

  “Till the autopsy’s done, yes. There is no sign of any other injuries. If I was a copper, which thank God I am not, then I would be inclined to believe that someone walked into the house behind her, closed the door and shot her dead.”

  “What about the owner?” Matt said.

  Nat frowned. “Not my concern, he’s still breathing. He was gone when I arrived; whisked off to hospital with a bullet wound in his thigh. I was advised that he was found trussed up in his bedroom, and that the wound was serious but not life threatening.”

  After Nat left, Matt was approached by DS Glyn Hooper, the CSC; an extremely competent crime scene coordinator who had more than eight years experience of managing resources required to locate, preserve, record and recover evidence and intelligence at murder scenes.

  “Let me give you the grand tour,” Glyn said to Matt, Pete and Tam. “The photography is done, and when you’re through examining the DB I’ll arrange for it to be removed.”

  “Thanks, Glyn,” Matt said. “Is there anything you can tell me?”

  “Something odd. There was a dog in the house when the first responders arrived. It didn’t belong here. The house owner, Neville Marsden, said that he doesn’t own a dog, and that neither did his housekeeper. It has an ID disc on its collar with its name, Jake, and a land line phone number engraved on it. And someone had put a bowl of water on the kitchen floor for it. We have the pooch in a van outside, waiting to be checked over by an RSPCA officer.” Glyn gave Matt the phone number, and Tam nodded that he had heard it and got busy on his mobile, to contact the squad room and have a reverse directory check done to give them an address. Not that any of them believed that a killer would take his pet dog to a house where he planned to commit murder, or leave it there when he left.

  Maria’s body was sprawled out in the cupboard with her legs protruding from the open door. A light had been switched on inside to illuminate her remains.

  Matt sat on his heels for a close-up look. He always let the images of a victim or victims at a murder scene burn indelibly into his psyche. What had been done to them and how they had been left was in some way important to him: fuelled the determination he had to find and deal with their killer. The woman’s face was pale and devoid of expression, as were her partly upturned eyes. A single trickle of blood had run down between her eyebrows, along the side of her nose, and then angled over her top lip to disappear into her open mouth.

  “What do we know about her?” Matt said to Pete, who’d been busy talking to a uniform who’d spoken to Neville Marsden before he was taken out to the ambulance, and had then searched through the deceased woman’s leather shoulder bag.

  “Her name is Maria Harper,” Pete said. “She was fifty, married, and lived in a flat in Hanwell. She’d been keeping house for Marsden for six years.”

  Matt thought it over, unmoving as he stayed hunkered down next to the body. He decided that the killer had known that Maria was married, so instead of breaking into her home, he had followed her to work. Somewhere along the way he had come across the dog unattended and used it as a prop. No one took any notice of a guy walking his dog. He had no doubt that the perpetrator had just walked up behind Maria as she unlocked the front door of Ballantyne House, pushed her inside and shot her dead.

  Matt’s knees cracked as he climbed to his feet. “You’d better arrange to meet Marci and go over to Hanwell and break the news to her husband,” he said to Pete.

  “How come I get all the good jobs?” Pete came back.

  “Somebody’s got to do it. And at the moment I’m too angry to stand on a doorstep, look a man in the eye and tell him that his wife has been murdered.”

  Pete nodded. He could see the rage in Matt’s eyes: knew that his boss took it to heart and allowed cases like this to eat at him until they were resolved. And even after a case was closed, Matt couldn’t cast it out of his mind. Pete wasn’t sure whether that was a strength or a weakness. It was part of who Matt Barnes was. He still kept in contact with the loved ones of the team members that had been killed on duty by psychos that had themselves paid the ultimate price. Pete was a good cop, and knew it, but unlike Matt he could put all the bad shit behind him. He thought that he saw a bigger picture than his boss; knew that it wasn’t emotionally healthy to hold on to stuff that had gone down and could not be modified. Death in all its appalling guises was a large part of existence, felling people as rapidly as loggers were decimating the rain forests of the world. You had to somehow fend off all the strife and woe and think of every day as a fresh start. Pete worked hard, played hard, and tried not to let too much encroach on his upbeat way of thinking.

  The dog that had been left tied up outside a shop near the tube station in Hanwell and subsequently taken and used in furtherance of the crime, was reunited with its owner; a pensioner who had reported Jake missing, and was over the moon to get him back unharmed.

  The other side of the coin was the absolute desolation that Graham Harper suffered when Marci broke the news of Maria’s death to him. Graham collapsed to his knees in the hallway, and had to be helped to his feet by both Marci and Pete, who supported him and walked him through to the lounge, to sit him down on a settee.

  Graham was in a state of shock. He couldn’t seem to accept that his wife would never be coming home again. Marci managed t
o get the name of his sister from him, and phoned her and explained what had happened. They had stayed with Graham until she had arrived, and then left a card with them and told the distraught man’s sister to call later in the day to be advised what the procedure would be.

  “I need a coffee,” Marci said as they climbed back in the car, to drive away from where she could not properly imagine the grief that their news had brought. The man was now undoubtedly at the very beginning of a dark tunnel that he may never fully emerge from.

  They stopped at a Starbucks, to sit in a booth and nurse large cups of coffee. Pete put the situation behind him. His motivation was focused on the investigation, to find the killer. Marci was feeling a little sick to the stomach: could still see the amalgamation of shock, disbelief, pain and finally the expression of unbearable loss on Graham Harper’s face.

  “I want to be in the courtroom when the bastard that did this is being weighed off,” Marci said to Pete.

  “Why?” Pete said. “Whatever sentence he gets doesn’t undo what he did. All that matters is that he’ll be off the street. He’s just one of many. By the time he goes to trial we’ll have probably dealt with another dozen cases.”

  Marci sighed. She knew that Pete was right. Murder was not uncommon. All you had to do was watch the news on TV every day to see how prolific the taking of life was.

  Pete phoned Matt.

  “Drop Marci back at the Yard to bring the boards up to date, and then meet me at the hospital,” Matt said. “We’ll have a word with Marsden and see if he can give us anything. He obviously talked to the killer.”

  Pete told Marci the plan as they finished their coffees.

  Billy was strolling along the alley at the rear of the row of terrace, avoiding cracks and feeling upbeat and pleased with how well the day was unfolding. He caught movement with his peripheral vision, but didn’t have time to turn, or even think to reach for his gun.