Shadow of the Beast: A DS Hunter Kerr Novel

by Michael Fowler

  ‘This is really important Susan. Think about what you heard?’

  ‘She thought for a moment. ‘I can remember floorboards being pulled up and then some scraping. I can remember whispering to the others about taking a look at what they’re doing but Steve told me not to. He said they might be murderers and they’re burying a body. She took another look at Tony. ‘He said it as a sort of a joke to wind us up because we were so scared, but I mean, what you’re telling me is that was probably what was happening, aren’t you?’

  Tony checked with Mike before answering, ‘It’s certainly looking that way Susan.’

  ‘Bleeding Hell. Wait till I tell my mates. They won’t believe it.’

  Mike asked, ‘You know when you said you saw them bent over something. Can you remember anything of what that might have been? The shape or anything? Could you tell if it was a body?’

  She gave them a look that told Tony and Mike she was thinking about the question. After several seconds she shook her head, ‘I really did only have a quick look and, as I say, it was dark by then. It was hard to see anything at all.’

  ‘But you’re confident when you say there were two of them?’ Mike again.

  Her mouth tightened. ‘I’m sure I saw two. I mean it’s so long ago and it’s the first time I’ve thought about this since I was thirteen. We all made a pact not to talk about it after Bobby Scott interviewed us because we were scared about what we’d seen and we’d told him a lie by saying we weren’t in the chapel that Sunday.’

  ‘And the voices you heard – were they men’s voices?’

  She nodded vigorously. ‘Definitely.’

  ‘Young or old?’

  She studied for a moment. ‘Old.’ Then she paused. ‘Do you know I’m not sure when I say old. Like I say I was only thirteen. They were men that’s all I can say. They were whispering, but like loud, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. We were right up in the gallery. All I wanted was to get out of there. Do you know what I mean?’

  Tony nodded. ‘You said you heard floorboards being ripped up. Beneath it is soil. Did you hear any digging with shovels or scraping or anything like that?’

  She appeared to be thinking about the question again. After a while she answered, ‘I’m not really sure. I could hear this smashing up and that’s when we decided to get out of there. We sneaked out to the back corridor. There was a window that went out onto an outbuilding and we climbed out of that and just legged it. When we got to the meadow we hid ourselves in the grass and stayed there for a while. Steve kept joking about them being murderers. Then we saw the smoke coming from the chapel and Steve said to leg it before the cops come, so we did. That’s when we got our heads together and said none of us were to say anything. When Bobby Scott interviewed us we all kept to our story.’ She gave Tony an innocent look. ‘You can understand can’t you?’

  Tony nodded. ‘Sure I can. I think I would have done the same at thirteen.’ He studied Susan’s features for several seconds. He couldn’t help but think that she had just handed them some very important pieces of their jigsaw.

  * * *

  Dawn Leggate made her way to the incident board, picked up a red marker, wrote a name below the word ‘victim’ and turned to face her team. She tapped the board. ‘I’ve had it confirmed ten minutes ago. The remains found six days ago are definitely that of twenty-one-year-old Ann Marie Banks.’ She studied their faces. She could see looks of acknowledgement. Doubts had finally been answered. The DNA confirmation meant that they could progress their enquiries. ‘Now we can start delving properly into her past. It’s not going to be easy given the time-factor but we already know a little about Ann Marie thanks to her sister.’ She took a short breath. ‘We know that at the age of eighteen she started to go off the rails after she met a guy called Jamie Baxter, who got her into drugs and most likely into prostitution. He’s someone I now want tracing and questioning. Secondly, we know she worked the streets and we know she was caught on Manningham Lane in Bradford and given a caution. See if we still have intelligence regarding her activities and see if there is anything on the system about punters around that time. And thirdly, we also know that she was badly beaten up and hospitalised. The detectives who investigated her disappearance might be a good starting point, although I’m guessing they’ll be retired now.’ She set down the marker pen. ‘The flat she was living in... We know it’s a charity shop now, but I need to know who the owner was when Ann Marie was living there. We know he bagged up Ann Marie’s and Lesley Jane Warren’s stuff because he told Julie Adamson that he’d done it. I want him interviewed and eliminated as well. I want to know what that room was like shortly after her disappearance. See if the detectives searched it and noted anything untoward. And check if it was forensically examined at the time. If not, I want that done now.’ She brought together her hands with a clap. ‘Most importantly, we need to trace the man who Ann Marie was meeting that evening. Get his name and my guess is we have her killer.’ Taking a pause, she said, ‘The most likely person to know this is her flat mate. However, I have a bad feeling about her as well. The fact that she disappeared within twenty-four hours of Ann Marie going missing, has not been seen since, and especially now that we’ve found another body nearby. Doctor Wilson and her team are still excavating the grave but, if I was putting money on it, I’d say this is going to be Lesley Jane Warren.’ She took another pause before continuing, ‘Susan Braddock’s information has thrown up a new angle. Gordon Jennings’ pocket book clearly dates the night of the fire at the old chapel. It is the day after Ann Marie was last known to be alive. We now know for definite that it is Ann Marie’s body buried there and Susan Braddock says she heard and saw someone dragging something inside the chapel. And although she is unable to describe anyone she is confident two people were involved. Both of them men. I am certain that what she and her friends witnessed was Ann Marie’s body being brought there to be buried and that the fire was started to cover and protect what the killers had done.’ Turning, she tapped the map of the Chapel estate. ‘As to location, while I shouldn’t jump to conclusions, this is right on the doorstep of Terrence Arthur Braithwaite who has already been raised as a suspect. This morning I had the helicopter do a 3D image of the area, and when we overlay it over the old ordnance survey map, these latest remains are buried within the garden boundary of Braithwaite’s old house on Chapel Street.’ She scoured the faces of the detectives. ‘There is more regarding Braithwaite which, although forensically we can’t prove it’s him at the moment, it certainly makes him a person of interest.’ She broke off a second, observed a few of the faces, saw that a couple were making notes, and then continued, ‘We know that on the eleventh of May, nineteen-eighty-four, he escaped while at his wife’s funeral and wasn’t re-captured until five days later. The day after his escape is when Ann Marie Banks said she was meeting a man who was picking her up in his van, and the next night is more than likely when she was brought here to Barnwell and buried in the old chapel, witnessed by Susan Braddock. That is too big a coincidence don’t you think?’ She saw a few nodding heads. ‘At first I was sceptical about Braithwaite, even given the fact that he was on the run around the time of Ann Marie’s disappearance, but given the discovery of this latest body almost in his garden it’s something we can’t afford to ignore.’ Dawn looked to her team again. ‘The question is, if one of the people Susan Braddock heard and saw was Braithwaite, then who was the other? Everything we’ve heard from Gordon Jennings indicates that he was carrying out his attacks alone. This latest information would suggest otherwise.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  DAY SEVEN

  Sitting at her desk, Dawn Leggate set aside the photographs she’d received that morning following yesterday’s excavation of the second crime scene. The dozen different images were of the skeleton they had removed from the muddy shallow grave: The remains were human and female. Her hands and feet had been bound with rope and a piece of rag pushed into her mouth as a gag. Like Ann Marie Ba
nks she had been strangled, but unlike Ann Marie, no severed cow’s head had been placed across her chest. Trying to shake away thoughts of what this latest victim must have gone through before she died, she picked up the photograph of Lesley Jane Warren the HOLMES team had printed from the Missing Person Index. She studied the pretty smiling freckled face with the Purdey hairstyle and asked herself, is it you? Laying it down over the other photos she wondered how such an innocent looking girl had ended up on the streets – selling herself. With Ann Marie Banks it had been down to her boyfriend introducing her to drugs. What’s your story?

  Momentarily, she closed her eyes and rubbed at her temples. Fighting off exhaustion, she was re-visiting everything she had seen, and every piece of information she had been given that day, doing her damnedest to compartmentalise it before evening briefing. A knock at her door broke into her concentration and she opened her eyes as DI Gerald Scaife entered.

  A smile lit up his face. ‘We’ve got a result with the corroded Yale key they found with the body yesterday.’

  ‘By the smile on your face something tells me I’m going to like this.’

  He nodded. ‘Mike Chapman and Tony Bullars got a copy made of it this morning and took it across to the shop in Chapeltown where Ann Marie and Lesley Jane Warren had their flat. The upstairs is only used for storage now but it still has the original door and lock. It’s never been changed. And guess what?’

  ‘You’re going to tell me it fits; I hope?’

  He nodded again. ‘Absolutely! I think we can be pretty certain now that the body is that of Lesley, unless another female had a key to the flat. We’re still trying to track down members of her family. Her mum and dad are no longer around but her Missing from Home report listed two brothers, and we think we’ve found one of them living in Halifax. I’ve sent a request to West Yorks for them to visit the address we’ve got and see if it is him. With a bit of luck we should have DNA confirmation in a couple of days.’

  ‘Great news Gerry. What about a forensics examination of the old flat?’

  ‘That’s been arranged for tomorrow. Mike and Tony have spoken with the current owners, who are the Salvation Army, and they say that the rooms upstairs have not undergone any changes since they bought it back in two-thousand-and-one. They’ve certainly not decorated it and Mike tells me the carpets look right for the eighties.’

  ‘And what about the owner, when Ann Marie and Lesley were living there? Have we managed to trace him?’

  ‘The Salvation Army bought it from a Harry Wainwright. Mike’s spoken with the Captain from Chapeltown Church who was involved in buying the place. She’s going to get on to the solicitor they used because she remembers Mr Wainwright telling her that he was buying a bungalow somewhere near Scarborough to retire to. With a bit of luck, we should have an address for him tomorrow.’

  ‘Good news again. Anything else I need to know before briefing?’

  ‘We’re still trying to track down Jamie Baxter – Ann Marie’s boyfriend. We think that he might be in prison. Our intelligence system had him flagged as a suspect by SOCA. We think he was busted in a big drugs operation three years ago. I’ve sent off a prison request for confirmation. And we’ve also got the name of one of the detectives who dealt with Anne Marie and Lesley Jane’s disappearance. It’s like you thought boss, he has retired. We’ve e-mailed the Pensions Department and requested his address.’ Scaife took time out while Dawn made some notes in her journal. When she lifted her eyes, he took it as a signal she had finished and continued, ‘And the background enquiries you wanted doing with regard to Terrence Braithwaite; the prison service has confirmed that he spent the majority of his time at Rampton Special Hospital and they have an extensive file on him. It’s all on paper so they’re going to try and get a copy of it across to us within the next day or two. We’ve also spoken with the probation service who were involved in his re-settlement. There were a number of joint meetings with the police before he was released, and it was decided that because of his age, and condition – apparently he suffered a stroke while at Rampton – that he should be placed in a bungalow well away from this area. He’s currently living in Bridlington. They’re e-mailing me full details.’

  She gave him a nod of acknowledgment. ‘It seems as though some pretty solid work’s been done today.’ She picked up her journal. ‘Give me five minutes Gerry and then I’ll be through for briefing. I’m ready for calling it a day and starting afresh tomorrow.’

  Watching DI Scaife leave, shutting the door behind him, Dawn leaned back in her chair and let out a heavy sigh. She felt totally drained and she could feel a headache starting. Squeezing her eyes shut she willed it away. It had been another long day and it wasn’t over yet. She still had to call in at the hospital to visit Michael before she went home. She was getting increasingly anxious about him. It had been four days since the accident and, as yet, he’d shown no sign of recovery. The consultant had reinforced only that morning that his injuries were very serious and the healing would be a slow process. Before returning to his rounds he had done his best to appease her by gently touching her arm and telling her that, ‘miracles are not going to happen overnight,’ but she wished they would. Most frustrating was the state of the investigation – they were still nowhere near discovering who was responsible for running him over. She just wanted this nightmare to end.

  Dawn entered MIT and made her way to the incident board, pushing errant strands of hair from the sides of her face back over her ears. She gave the white board a quick glance before meeting the expectant faces of her team. It now listed two victims. Ann Marie Banks’s information and timeline had been fully updated, providing her date of birth and her flat address, together with the time and date of the last known contact with her – the phone call from her elder sister. The photograph of her aged 17 from the Missing Person Index had been placed next to the photo of her skeletal remains, as if to give the bones some formal identity. All that had been heavily underlined. Next to that, the name of Lesley Jane Warren had been scribed with an added question mark. Dawn recognised Gerry Scaife’s neat handwriting.

  Below Lesley’s name, five photographs had been bunched together. They were duplicates of ones she had seen earlier on her desk. The first one depicted soil-stained, clothed skeletal remains partially covered by clumps of mud. The victim wore pink and white nylon shell-suit bottoms and a pink Sweater shop jumper. She knew from that morning’s visit to the construction site that this was the grave shot prior to the bones being removed. The second photo showed the victim laid out on a plastic sheet with her wrists and ankles bound. The third was of a skeletal corpse after it had been stripped and laid out on a metal gurney. That was the shot before the examination by Dr Anna Wilson. There was another image of the two lengths of rope used to bind her, and the fourth photograph showed a pitted and corroded brass coloured Yale key and a gold coloured cross and chain.

  ‘We believe that the second body that was found yesterday is that of Ann Marie’s flat mate Lesley Jane Warren. At the moment that is only a “possible” because we have yet to formally identify her. We think we’ve traced a brother of hers and shall be requesting a DNA sample tomorrow. What makes us believe that this is Lesley, is the fact that in the pocket of a pair of shell-suit bottoms she was wearing we found a Yale key which fits the lock to the flat she shared with Ann Marie in Chapeltown. Thankfully the door hasn’t been changed since the pair disappeared.’ Dawn flicked open her journal and picked up on her recent notes. She took a prompt from a date she had written. ‘Like Ann Marie, the last contact we have with Lesley was back in nineteen-eighty-four. In her case it was Sunday the thirteenth, roughly twenty-four hours after Ann Marie was last seen. Ann Marie’s elder sister, Julie, rang the flat in Chapeltown early on the Sunday evening and Lesley answered. As we know she asked to speak with Ann Marie and it was Lesley who told her that Ann Marie hadn’t come home from the previous night – that she’d last seen Ann Marie when a man had come to the flat to take her out fo
r the evening. That is all the information we have prior to these two disappearing. To date we have no eye witnesses as to their last known movements. Julie phoned on several occasions after this but got no answer until the Tuesday, when the shopkeeper, who we now know is Harry Wainwright, answered, and told her that neither of them were at the flat, and expressed his belief that they had done a runner, because they owed him rent money. We have an enquiry out to speak with Harry Wainwright, but only as a witness at this stage. If that is still the case once we interview him, then what we have, is that both these girls disappeared on the weekend of the twelfth and thirteenth of May, nineteen-eight-four, and that is the last we know of their whereabouts until we found their bodies this week. Besides the phone conversation between Julie Adamson and Lesley Jane Warren in which Lesley made a comment about “a nice man with a van” picking up Ann Marie, the night she disappeared, the only other thing we have of significance is the information provided by Susan Braddock, who you will recall, as a thirteen-year-old, back in nineteen-eighty-four, saw and heard what she describes as two men dragging something into the chapel. We know that this was on Sunday the thirteenth of May because of the fire in the chapel that night, which was recorded by retired PC Gordon Jennings in his pocket book.’ Following a short pause, she said, ‘Doctor Wilson carried out a post-mortem this afternoon, and although she is unable to determine any areas of assault on the body because of its state, she has been able to disclose that she died as a result of strangulation, exactly the same way Ann Marie met her death. Though unlike Ann Marie, her hands and feet were bound with rope and a rag had been inserted into her mouth, most probably as a gag. The clothing, rope and rag have all been submitted to forensics for DNA analysis despite the condition they’re in.’ She snapped her journal shut and studied her team’s faces. ‘Things have taken a dramatic turn everyone. We have someone out there who has killed and buried two young women back in nineteen-eight-four. The question is, is it the same killer or killers? I would like to say I have an open mind on this but two females murdered and buried within twenty-four hours of each other, and only ten yards apart, that surely is too much of a coincidence. And if we take into account Susan Braddock’s testimony the likelihood is that it’s two killers. At the moment the finger of suspicion is clearly pointing at one man who has already been convicted of a series of rapes and one murder, but frustratingly, at this stage, all we have is lots of circumstantial evidence. We don’t have anything forensically to link him, and so we have to rely on old fashioned policing and look into every little aspect of Terrence Arthur Braithwaite’s life. Also, on the off-chance that I could be accused of being biased, and to make sure I haven’t missed anything or anyone, before I make the decision to bring him in, I’m also allocating other lines of enquiry to determine if we have any other persons of interest who lived in that locality during the nineteen-eighties that we should be looking at.’ She took a deep breath and added, ‘What I also need to tell you is that the press have got wind of the second body. They have already tried to get hold of me and I’ve drafted a response to the Press Office confirming the second find. I haven’t yet confirmed the identities of our victims but once I do...You know what the press are like. Especially if they discover that both our women had been prostitutes. We’re going to have Ripper-like headlines.’ Taking another deep breath, she said, ‘I have also had the Chronicle reporter raise a question about Braithwaite, they are already looking at a Beast angle. You don’t need me to tell you what the headlines will be once we reveal that Ann Marie was buried with a cow’s head, so for now I’m keeping this under wraps for as long as I can. I will be liaising with the Press Office tomorrow to determine how we handle this…’ She paused, sighed and added ‘As if we didn’t have enough on our plates. What I ask of you lot is that if you get waylaid by any of the press, or during your enquiries you are asked questions about the investigation you give away as little as possible. Savvy?’ On that note she ended briefing.