Snakes in the Grass (A DI Mitchell Yorkshire Crime Thriller Book 5)

by Oliver Davies

  Before the postmortem started, I pulled a chair up close to the screen so that I wouldn’t have to stand and fetched myself a cup of coffee from the nearby vending machine. My legs were aching after my race into work this morning, and I didn’t want to spend another hour or more on my feet if I didn’t have to.

  The forensic pathologies got to work not long afterwards, and I leaned forwards, watching closely. It was a different doctor to last time, but she was just as thorough and narrated what she was doing as she performed the postmortem.

  “Ah,” she said, not long after she’d started. I perked up, watching as she prodded the body’s left knee joint. “He’s got a prosthetic knee joint.”

  “Good,” I muttered, taking a sip of my coffee.

  Stephen glanced over at me. “That’s good?”

  “Aye, most prosthetics have a unique manufacturing number on them. We’ll be able to use it to ID him fairly easily, or that’s the hope.”

  “Huh,” Stephen said, raising his eyebrows as he turned back to the postmortem where the doctor was opening up the knee with a scalpel to access the manufacturing number.

  She continued the postmortem after that, talking us through the abrasions on the elbows, hands, and knees as well as the deep cuts in the soles of the feet. They were identical to the previous victim’s, right down to the length of them. The doctor had the body turned over before she examined the gashes to the back of the knee.

  “These are clumsy, ragged around the edges.”

  I nodded to myself, jotting it down in my notebook. “The same as the last one.”

  “I’d say that these were done after the cuts to the feet, and while the victim was awake.”

  The rest of the postmortem passed uneventfully, as the pathologists took their various samples, as well as scraping under the victim’s short nails and over the bloody grazes looking for any evidence that might’ve gotten lodged there under the skin.

  We thanked the Leeds staff and walked back to catch the midday train back to York. I turned the case over and over as the train trundled and bumped its way back towards the familiar city.

  “What’s our next steps?” Stephen asked, and I looked up. He sent me a grin as he added, “I mean, after lunch.”

  I huffed a laugh and turned to look out of the blurry window, smeared and studded with cigarette burns, on the muddy farmland and hills beyond.

  “Well, the Leeds folk will send over the manufacturing number for the second victim soon enough. Then it’ll be a job to ID him and track down his family.” I clicked my fingers. “And we could really do with that tox report back on the first bloke, Martin Johnson, so we could give the lab a ring, chase it up a bit.”

  Stephen nodded, and with that decision, I took a short nap as we approached York. Despite sleeping like a log for nearly twelve hours, I was still feeling tired after yesterday and wondered wryly whether it was possible to get jet lag travelling from York to Cornwall.

  Stephen prodded me awake none too gently once we arrived into the bustling hub of York’s echoing station, with its high arching roof and old-fashioned bridges between the multiple platforms. Tracking down the car wasn’t hard when it was the only police vehicle in the car park, but the drive back was slow, winding our way through the traffic back to the station.

  At Hewford, Stephen tucked into a pleasantly fragrant pasta salad while I drank my nth coffee of the day and got to work bringing our reports and paperwork up to date on the case. The email from the Leeds unit came through not long after I’d finished, and I planned to start ringing round the medical liaisons to the police to find out who the prosthetic knee had belonged to.

  But I didn’t get the chance to start before a young officer came hurrying audibly up the stairs, crossed the office floor like there was wildfire on his tail, and knocked hastily on Gaskell’s door. I watched closely, noting the agitation in the officer and how Gaskell’s frown was deeply set into his face when he emerged from his office and strode towards the stairs, the young officer quickly following after him.

  I glanced over at Stephen and found him watching the scene with equal curiosity, as were several other officers on the office floor. But Gaskell hadn’t asked for us, and I had no reason to think that it was related to our case and not some other one, Sedgwick’s, for example, so I settled back into what I was doing.

  As I was waiting for one of the medical liaisons to pick up the phone, another call came through on my office phone, beeping loudly. My eyebrows raised, I put the phone down and picked it up again, answering the call from downstairs.

  “Mitchell speaking.”

  “Come on down here, Mitchell,” Gaskell’s deep voice came through, loud and commanding as he overran me. He didn’t sound happy.

  “On my way, sir.”

  Gaskell hung up, and I hastened to get up, grabbing my jacket and gesturing for Stephen to follow me. Stephen’s big shoes pattered down the stairs alongside mine as we jogged down.

  “What’d he say?”

  “Nothing. Just to get down ourselves there.”

  “Not ominous at all,” Stephen muttered.

  I got my jacket pulled on as we stepped out of the stairwell and found the entrance hall empty. The officer on reception helpfully directed us through to one of the back rooms that I rarely visited, where we found Gaskell and a couple of less senior officers all standing around a table.

  “Sir?”

  He turned around and, as he moved, I saw what they’d all been looking at. On the table was an innocuous brown paper envelope, and beside it was a piece of paper that, from across the room, looked like it’d been muddied. Still, a chill went through me, and I understood immediately that this was the reason why Gaskell had called us down, and why he now looked so uneasy. There was a fit of anger there, too, in the deep folds of his frown and his turned-down mouth.

  “This is your case,” Gaskell said gruffly as we came inside, Stephen shutting the door behind us. “Tell me what this is.”

  I made myself move forwards even as the slick, wary feeling in my stomach made me want to stay where I was. It was an atavistic response, not a rational one, since I knew that the police were always careful with post that arrived unsolicited, and Gaskell wouldn’t have brought me in here if it was carrying anything dangerous.

  I moved forwards, accepting the pair of plastic gloves that a DC offered me and slipped them on. It wasn’t mud or paint on the paper, I realised. It was undeniably dried blood. Beneath it, there was scrawled writing, the black ink scuttling across the crumpled paper like a dead spider, and what it said made cold seep down my back.

  Everyone crawls in the end.

  I stared at it for a long moment, aware that Gaskell was waiting. I pinched the edge of the crumpled paper with my gloved fingers and carefully held it up, turning it around to complete the inspection. On the back, printed cheaply in pale blue, was the brand logo for a Cornish Pasty shop.

  The paper was packaging for a pasty shop in Cornwall, and the message was clear. The killer, whoever they were, was reminding us of the Snake Killer murders in Cornwall and promising that there would be more here in York. Perhaps they even knew about the trip down south I took with Stephen.

  “How did this arrive, sir?”

  “In the regular post,” Gaskell said, his voice tight.

  It would be nearly impossible to track it back to its origin, then. As I moved back to let Stephen have a closer look at the threat, I looked over at Gaskell. He looked grey-skinned and shaken.

  I wasn’t sure what exactly to say to him. He’d asked what this was, but it could hardly be mistaken as anything other than a threat, taunting our powerlessness and promising that the killer wasn’t done yet. To me, it suggested again that Abe wasn’t the original Snake Killer, though there was no reason why this couldn’t have been done by a copycat. All the relevant information had been in the papers. But my gut told me that this was the killer claiming ownership of the Cornish killings as well as the two in York.

  �
��We’ll take a sample of this blood,” I said aloud. “See if it matches anything we’ve got so far on the system.”

  Gaskell grunted, still looking galled. Whether he was angry at whoever had sent this envelope, or the case in general, or even me and Stephen for not having answers for him, I couldn’t tell. He turned to fix his gaze on me, and I went still.

  “Figure this case out, Mitchell,” he snapped. “Get it done, y’hear me?”

  What did he want me to do? I thought, frustrated. Stephen and I were doing our damnedest.

  Still, I said, “Yes, sir,” like I was supposed to. Then a question occurred to me, and I asked it before I could think better of it, “Were any threats delivered to the police in Cornwall, sir? When the Snake Kil-?”

  “I know when you mean,” Gaskell said shortly. “No. Nothing like this. None of these disgusting games.” He jabbed a finger towards the paper. “This is a copycat, some sick person who’s dragging up the past. You will find them.”

  He strode off before I could reply, and I peeled off my gloves as the door slammed shut behind him.

  “Well…” Stephen said at length. The younger officers were occupied with carefully putting the threat into an evidence bag for taking it up to the lab, no doubt. I wondered whether Sam would be the one to look it over, take a sample of the blood and analyse it.

  “Aye.” I tossed my gloves in the bin. “What a mess.”

  There wasn’t much else to say, and we headed upstairs in silence. I turned the wording of the threat over in my head repeatedly, but I couldn’t read anything more subtle than the obvious.

  “This talk of crawling, ‘Everyone crawls in the end’,” Stephen started once we’d sat down, “is referencing the Snake Killer moniker, right? That the victims have to crawl on their stomach.”

  I grimaced, able to picture the bruises and abrasions on the hands and knees of the dead vividly.

  “After they’d been injured like that, I doubt they could do much else.” I paused. “It seems like there’s an aspect of humiliation to me. The killer wants to feel powerful, completely powerful over the victims.”

  “Making them drag themselves along the floor, yeah,” Stephen grunted, looking disgusted, “that makes a sick kind of sense.”

  My mind was whirring now. “Does that give us a motive? Why did the killer want to humiliate these men in particular? And, if the original killer was the same person, why did they want to humiliate the older women?”

  “God knows.” Stephen shook his head helplessly.

  I chewed my lip. “Perhaps they’d wronged him in some way. Martin Johnson, our first vic, was described as being rather cold, wasn’t he? Not unkind, though, his colleague said.”

  “So perhaps he offended the killer in some way? Or the killer was a fired employee, maybe, belonging to Johnson’s company?”

  “Could be. It’s something to look into.”

  After fetching a coffee to help prod some energy into me, I started by chasing up the tox report. It wasn’t ready yet, I was told snippily, but it’d be along soon. Stephen got on the phone to Frank Allen, Johnson’s colleague, to ask about any employees who might’ve had a grudge against Johnson.

  While he was on the call, I found myself thinking again about the threat that’d arrived in the post. It could be nothing more than a taunting message which would fit into the theory that the killer wanted to feel powerful, or it could have some other meaning that I’d missed.

  My head resting on my chin, I searched the web for newspaper articles that had been released at the time of the Cornish killings and read over them with a frown. There were theories that the dead women were all linked by a book club they went to, or by their husbands’ jobs, or that they were fallen women who the killer was punishing. There were farfetched claims that the killer made their victims crawl because they wanted to subjugate the working class, or because it was their sexual fetish, or because the killer couldn’t walk themselves and they wanted to inflict the same pain on their victims. Nothing other than wild speculation and various over-eager “witnesses” wanting to claim that they had particular insight or knowledge to share with the world about the inside of the elusive killer’s mind backed up the theories.

  Later articles, after Abe Muldoon had confessed and been charged, skipped over the motive for the particular mode of killing entirely, and I could guess why. Abe had never explained it, not in a satisfactory way. He would have done better at lying if he’d picked one of the newspapers’ outlandish theories, I thought, and given the public some horrendous tale about why he’d done it so that they could shudder at his wickedness and move on.

  I thought again about the envelope that had arrived today, containing the blood scrap of paper, and rubbed my aching forehead. How many more bodies would there be before we caught this killer? They hadn’t caught the Snake Killer at all, he’d supposedly confessed.

  I clicked my fingers, a stray thought occurring to me, and Stephen looked over.

  “What is it?”

  “Do you remember, last Friday, when I mentioned Gaskell’s DI?”

  Stephen looked thoughtful, and I was about to prompt him when he said, “Oh, yeah, something about her not agreeing with Gaskell. She’d not thought the killer was Abe Muldoon.”

  “Exactly. If she’s still in Cornwall, I doubt Gaskell will agree to us going off again.” Stephen looked relieved. “But we need to speak to her.”

  “A video call might do.”

  “Aye, if she’ll agree to speak to us.”

  Whatever her reasons for disbelieving that Muldoon had killed those women ten years ago, I sensed that it could be crucial to our case, or at least give us another perspective on the matter. Perhaps she’d had the same thoughts as I had; that Muldoon’s confession out of nowhere had been too convenient. I wondered whether she knew about Georgina’s death.

  With new purpose, I set to track down the contact details for Gaskell’s old DI, whose name was Roberta Burgess. It was a lead, but how fruitful it would prove to be was yet to be seen.

  Ten

  It turned out that DI Roberta Burgess had moved to Newcastle upon Tyne and moved from police work into being a solicitor, using the legal knowledge she’d gained in the force as a step up.

  Though it was certainly closer than Cornwall, Newcastle upon Tyne was still a while away, so we’d called her on video chat, and she’d seemed interested in talking to us. She looked to be about Gaskell’s age, with thick, black hair shot through with grey and cropped short. Her face was rounded and genial, though her eyes were sharp with intelligence, and I could imagine that you wouldn’t want to be on the end of a tongue lashing from her.

  “I couldn’t believe how Muldoon fell into our laps,” she said between sipping on her cup of tea. She worked from home, and there was a wall of bookshelves in the background of the video call. “The confession felt too easy, and he didn’t have enough answers to satisfy me.” She shrugged. “But he had enough to convince John,” she said, talking of Gaskell.

  “What facts did he have exactly?”

  She pushed her hair behind her ears with two hands. “He knew all about the mutilations, mainly. That wasn’t in the press yet. He knew details of where the bodies had been dropped into the sea off the coast, and what they’d been wrapped in. Things like that.”

  I nodded as I took notes. “What made you-?”

  “Does John know you’re talking to me?” she interrupted briskly. “And this case in York, are you sure it’s connected?”

  “No, we haven’t informed Gaskell yet,” I admitted. I thought he’d take it badly that we wanted to hear from his DI, if I was honest, and I didn’t want him to forbid us from talking to her. “And we’re convinced it’s connected, yeah. The injuries to the victims are very similar. Did you ever have a theory for why the killer made them crawl, by the way?”

  “We never found out for sure.” She wrinkled her nose. “My thoughts were rather Freudian, really. By probability, I guessed that the killer was a mi
ddle-aged man. Now, an older woman’s relation to a man that age is usually maternal.” She shrugged again. “My assumption was that he killed the women in some sort of act against his mother, whoever she was and whatever she’d done to him. I did investigate Abe Muldoon’s relationship with his mother, but they seemed close.”

  I thought about it and decided it was certainly a more plausible idea than any the newspapers had come up with.

  “I can’t imagine why, if it is the same killer, he might have changed to target middle-aged men,” Roberta mused. “The Snake Killer would be ten years older, so perhaps he was feeling inferior to younger men.” She sighed. “I’d always wanted to think I was wrong, of course, and Muldoon was our guy, but it seems not.”

  There was one more thing I wanted to show her, and I brought up a picture of the paper threat that had arrived in the post earlier in the day and emailed it over to her. Once it had arrived and she’d had a look, I watched her face, hoping that she’d be able to see some meaning or code in it that I couldn’t. But she only picked out the aspects that Stephen and I had already recognised; the connection to Cornwall, the taunt that ‘Everyone crawls in the end’.

  “Have you matched the blood to anyone’s?”

  “No.” The sample had gone straight up to the lab and made a priority, but it’d turned up nothing. “Whoever it’s from hasn’t got their DNA in our system.”

  “It could be the killer’s blood,” she mused.

  The thought had briefly occurred to me, amongst other theories, and I gave a noncommittal shrug. “Could well be.”

  “Well, I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more help,” she said. “Don’t hesitate to get in touch if something else comes up.”

  “One last thing.” I put up a finger. “Were any of the victims in the original case drugged?”

  There had been no record of a toxicology report in the case files I’d read, but it didn’t hurt to check.

  “No, their blood was clear, as far as I recall. No recreational drugs or alcohol either.”