“Here,” I said quietly, pointing at the screen. “Diazepam.”
Stephen made a noise of acknowledgement. “So he was drugged.”
“Aye, unlike the original victims.” I rubbed my palm over the stubble on my cheek as I processed the new information. It wasn’t a surprise, considering how very neat the cuts to the victim’s feet had been, but it was good to have it confirmed. Stephen had continued to read the report.
“It was a high dose, too,” he noted.
“Dangerously high?”
He shook his head. “It’s difficult to overdose with diazepam. It’s relatively safe, as sedatives go.”
We read the rest of the report in silence as I sipped at my coffee. The presence of high levels of diazepam in Johnson’s blood was the most significant point. There were only traces of alcohol, and no recreational drugs had been detected.
“He wasn’t grabbed when he was drunk, then.”
“Or he was kept long enough for the alcohol to move out of his system.”
I hummed thoughtfully, flicking back through my records to find the transcript of our interview with Allen Frank.
“Here, Frank, Johnson’s colleague, said that he last saw Johnson on the Friday. And he didn’t show up dead until Tuesday.” Which was over a week ago, now, I thought, though it hardly felt like it.
Stephen nodded. “So, he was either taken Sunday or Monday, since Frank said it was completely unlike Johnson to miss work.”
That meant that Johnson had been with the killer for a day, nearly two.
“Plenty of time to work alcohol out of your system,” I mused.
As I was idly looking over the reports I’d pulled up, I looked again at the pictures of Johnson’s body and a thought I’d had last week occurred to me again. In the rush of events, I’d forgotten it, but the idea returned with a vengeance now. Stephen must have caught the change in my expression.
“What is it?” he asked.
I clicked my fingers. “Do you remember us talking about how Johnson’s body seemed to be too far out of the water? Unnaturally so?”
Brief confusion turned into understanding, and Stephen nodded. “Now that you say it, yeah. Why?”
“I had a theory about the bodies having been placed there, right? Not washing up by the river.”
Stephen gave me a look that clearly said, ‘so what?’
“We didn’t bother to look at the riverside CCTV,” I continued, gathering momentum, “because the body could’ve been dumped at any point upstream. But, if they weren’t-”
“Oh!” Understanding dawned on Stephen’s face. “If they were placed there deliberately, the killer might be on camera!”
I grinned at him. “Bingo. We need to check some CCTV.”
It took some ringing around before I managed to track down the cameras we needed, the ones closest to where the bodies of Martin Johnson and Peter Gregory had been found. Stephen worked on looking at the cameras closest to the former, while I studied the ones near Gregory.
“Anything?” Stephen asked, half an hour later.
“Not yet.”
I’d decided to look at the CCTV recorded after dark first, and then, if I didn’t find anything there, I’d try the daytime footage. The first camera I looked at had caught a couple of urban foxes, as well as a cat with a litter of kittens following after her, but nothing in the way of humans other than the occasional group of drunkards and the homeless.
We broke for lunch, and I could feel the time ticking against me. Was this going to result in something worthwhile? I felt the pressure that every second must be made to count, mustn’t be wasted. I wondered whether, if this case were to be unsuccessful, my leadership of it would hold up to inspection in another decade. They’d have new forensic techniques by then, I thought. Perhaps in the future, this case would already have been solved with some advanced machine capable of picking up a stray speck of matter on one of the bodies, identifying the killer in seconds.
I told myself not to get distracted, wishing for things that couldn’t be and focus on what we did have. We settled back at our desks to look over other cameras in the vicinity and, with my chin on my hand, I flicked through the footage recorded on the days before Gregory had been found.
Stephen startled me by saying sharply, “Mitchell.”
“Aye?” I looked up.
He tapped the screen with his finger, and I shifted my chair closer. There, on the grainy black and white, was a figure dragging a shape that looked very much like a carpet. I watched closely, wishing every moment that the person would turn and face the camera, but they never did.
“Is their face caught on any cameras further up?” I found myself speaking quietly, as if the figure moving furtively on screen might hear me.
“I haven’t checked yet.”
We watched as the body was unrolled and put into position on the river bank with obvious care. Rain speckled the recording and made the image increasingly unclear. The figure, dressed in a shapeless, dark raincoat and sporting a woollen hat and wellies up to their knees, kept their back to the camera throughout, hurrying off in the opposite direction from which they’d come. The hat left me unable to see whether they even had short or long hair, and I had no way of even hazarding a guess at their possible gender.
“A man, I reckon,” Stephen put in.
“I couldn’t tell.” I shook my head and pulled my chair back towards my own desk. “This is something, but not much. Check other cameras nearby, will you? See if they showed their face in any of them.”
Stephen agreed, and I set back to looking at my own footage. It wasn’t too long before that, too, bore fruit. I tapped Stephen on his broad shoulder, and he wheeled himself closer to see.
The figure wore the same thing as last time, though their baggy jeans looked to be a lighter colour. Again, they never faced the camera as they placed Gregory’s body at the edge of the water, tweaking the position of his limbs until they seemed to be satisfied. I watched them walk away, splashing through the edge of the river water. Something about their stride as they walked away, their head down, struck me as faintly familiar, and I played it again, frowning. Stephen looked between me and the screen.
“D’you recognise them?”
“I feel like… I almost do,” I muttered, before shaking my head. “No, I don’t know. Maybe I imagined it.” I chewed my lip, playing the CCTV again. “I think you’re right. It’s a man. Something about the shoulders, the legs.”
“It is hard to tell. Could be a bulky woman.”
“Aye,” I sighed. “People come in all shapes and sizes.”
I watched again as the figure put the body down before retreating. Did we miss any boot prints in the mud, I wondered, because we’d all assumed that the body had emerged from the water, and not been carefully laid there? But no, they barely stepped on the bare mud at all, but rather splashed along the edge of the river in their wellies. It was clearly a deliberate choice, what with the section of unflooded path right beside them.
“They’re making sure not to leave evidence behind.”
“How’s that?”
I replayed it again. “Look at how they stay in the river. Walking in the mud would leave crystal clear footprints.”
“Dammit,” Stephen muttered, and I nodded, my own thoughts echoing the sentiment.
With the new information turning over in my head, I left to fetch myself a fresh coffee. Today was someone’s birthday, so they’d left out a tray of homemade fairy cakes, and I helped myself to one, bringing another back for Stephen.
I bit into the sponge as I sat down, blinking at my screen in a moment of confusion. I’d accidentally left the CCTV running while I was away, and it’d run ahead onto last Thursday night, when Gregory had been found. I watched, unnerved to see myself and Stephen moving about on the exact same ground where the killer had been not so long earlier.
As I sipped my coffee, which was pleasantly bitter against the sugary cake, I wound the CCTV further forwards,
to show last Friday night. I was curious whether the killer had returned, to check whether anyone had found the body they’d left behind, but there was no sign of them. Perhaps they’d been watching in the bushes whilst we were there, working the scene and getting Gregory’s body into an ambulance. I shivered at the thought.
I ran the footage even further forwards, fast-forwarding right through to last night.
I swore quietly, and Stephen turned around, about to ask what I’d found. He saw what was on the screen and shut his mouth with a click. We stared at the CCTV together, watching silently as the same raincoat-clad figure walked along the side of the river. Lain across the killer’s shoulders was another body, and I felt ill as I watched the body being unwrapped and left there, on the edge of the water. A third murder. Stephen finally cleared his throat.
“I’ll tell Gaskell.”
I made myself nod. “And I’ll call the forensics team, and an ambulance.”
Not that we would need the paramedics, I thought, with a sour taste in my mouth. Another victim, and still, we were little closer to discovering who was doing this. We were creeping steadily closer, but there was still a long way to go, and we didn’t have the time we needed.
After calling out the forensics team, Stephen and I headed out to the crime scene, close enough to where Gregory had been found that the same CCTV camera had caught footage of it. I didn’t dare go too close this time, but, while we waited on forensics, I taped off the area around the body half-hidden in the reeds. Now we knew that the victims weren’t being washed up by the flooded waters of the Ouse. I was desperate for there to be some clue left behind. They’d been careful not to leave any bootprints behind, but perhaps they’d made a mistake somewhere. They must have entered and left the river waters at some point and left a mark there.
A cursory look didn’t reveal much, so I left Stephen guarding the spot and walked further up, stopping when I reached the lapping edge of the flooded river. I could see nothing on the path except for weeds, rubbish, and mud-coated grass. I headed back the way I’d come, passing Stephen as I looked further up that way. I tried to recall the CCTV footage as I went, and I thought that this was the direction the killer had headed in when they left the body last night.
“Here!” I called, fifty or so meters away.
Stephen looked up. “What is it?” he yelled back.
At that point, the forensics crew arrived, and I waved one of them over so they could mark the print in the mud I’d found. It wasn’t the crisp, perfect example I’d been looking for. In fact, it was only half a boot heel, but it was better than nothing. I knew that it might not even belong to the killer, but it could be the wellies of a dog walker. Still, it was something.
While I was looking at that, the rest of the criminal forensics team had moved over towards Stephen and were carefully closing in on the body. I headed back towards them, keeping well back so as not to get in the way.
As I watched the team work, absently directing nosy members of the public away from the scene as I waited, there was a small commotion around the body. I turned my full attention to the forensics team, several of whom had moved to stare down at the body, so that only the bare feet were visible from where I was standing. I called one of them over and Stephen, just as curious as I was, came to stand by my side.
“What’s going on?” I asked the forensics guy, whose square-shaped glasses and narrow face looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place them. No doubt I’d met him before and ought to know his name, but I didn’t.
“The body, we all recognised it.” He gestured back towards the body, the lens of his glasses flashing in the thin daylight.
I went still and tense.
“You did? Who?” The thought that the body could be someone I knew crushed my initial excitement at being able to crack on without needing to fumble around for an ID. But the forensics guy didn’t look upset so much as confused.
“It’s that cooking bloke. He did a local recipe book.” He clicked his fingers, trying to jog his memory. “Linus Walker.”
Startled, I stared at him for a long second before turning to Stephen. “That’s the bloke-”
“Keira’s brother,” he said at the same time, and we both fell silent, shocked at the news.
I swore quietly. The forensics guy looked between us, clearly puzzled, but I didn’t want to explain it to him just now.
“Thanks for telling us,” I said to him, and he took the cue, gave us a nod and went back to his team. Stephen and I moved away from other officers by silent agreement.
“It’s a hell of a bizarre coincidence that the man Robbie interviewed the other day, whose house he visited, has now turned up dead, with the same cuts as the other victims.”
Stephen was looking torn. “You can’t think it’s Robbie?”
“I ruddy hope not!” I pulled a face, loathing even the thought of it. “But maybe he’s got some other connection, or knows something that could help. Keira told me again this morning how kooky Robbie’s been acting and that she’s worried for him.”
I spoke briefly with the team to make sure that they were good to wrap this up and get Walker’s body out of here and on its way to Leeds for the PM. On the way back to the station, I couldn’t help but fidget, trying to wrap my head around how Keira’s brother could be wrapped up in all this, and that, only a little over a week since this started, we already had a third victim.
“Gaskell was right,” I said, rubbing a hand over my messy hair. “We can’t afford to waste a minute on this case.”
Stephen glanced over at me before turning his attention back to the road. “Maybe, but spending ten minutes thinking and planning can save a lot of time later on.”
“Aye, you’re not wrong.” I huffed a laugh as I tapped my fingers on the dashboard. “Perhaps we should try his house first?”
“It’s three o’clock,” he pointed out. “He ought to be at work.”
He was right, and so we headed directly back to Hewford to make some calls. A number of officers were out at the murder scene, so the place felt surprisingly quiet, but I guessed that Keira would be upstairs in the tech room like usual.
“We could ask Keira. She’d know who her brother’s boss is,” I said aloud. “But I’m not sure I want her to know this yet. She might panic.”
Stephen made a noncommittal noise. “You don’t think it’s her right to know?”
“At this point? When we’re not certain that it’s not a weird coincidence? No, I don’t think so. As soon as anything is certain, we can bring her into the loop then, okay?”
He agreed to that. Even without Keira’s help, it wasn’t hard to trace where Robbie worked from his social media and the article in the paper in the break room.
“Hello, how can I help you?” a friendly female voice greeted me from the other end of the phone.
“Hi, I’m DCI Mitchell, calling from Hewford Police Station,” I said. “I’m looking to talk to one of your employees.”
There was a brief silence before the receptionist transferred my call to someone more senior than she was, who then passed me onto his boss.
“You want to talk to one of our staff?” she asked, when I finally reached someone who could hopefully give me the answers I needed. “Who?”
“Robbie Adams, a journalist on your books.”
“I know him.” There were a brief silence and the tapping of keys. “He’s away on a business trip today, I’m afraid, detective.”
I held back my sigh. “I see. When will he be back?”
More tapping. “He’s due back in work on Monday, but I would guess that he’ll be back in York tomorrow.”
Tomorrow was Friday, and that piece of news improved my spirits.
“When did he leave on this trip?” I wondered, thinking of the timings of when Linus Walker’s body had been left on the river bank. I was all but hoping that Robbie’s boss would tell me that he’d been out of the city all week if it would give Keira’s brother an alibi, but it
wasn’t to be.
“He left for Cardiff this morning.”
I was taking notes as we talked and wrote that down. “Who’s he there to see?”
“He’s running an article on a sportswoman down there.”
I nodded to myself. “And have you noticed any recent change in Mr Adams’ behaviour?”
“Well, I manage a number of employees, you know, I don’t have a great deal of contact with them on a day-to-day basis.”
“So he’s been turning in work as usual?”
“He’s been turning it in punctually.” She paused. “He was flagged for substandard work earlier in the week, but we’ve never had problems with him before.”
“The articles he writes,” I asked, changing tact, “do you choose the subject or does he?”
“It’s a mixture, really. He writes a range, but focuses on health and well-being, especially fitness. He’s done several articles on triathlons and triathletes over the years.”
“His sister mentioned that being a passion of his.”
“Yes. He turned down the opportunity to interview a triathlete last week, actually. I thought it wasn’t like him, but he claimed he had something bigger for me.”
“Which was?”
“Well, it was that Yorkshire chef who’s been popular recently,” she said, and I felt cold unease spill down my spine. “He seemed surprisingly eager to do it, so I turned the triathlete article over to somebody else and let him go for it.”
“It was his idea, then,” I said, just to be absolutely clear, “the article on Linus Walker?”
“Yes, absolutely. He made the approach and secured the interview.”
My stomach sank, and I had to focus on keeping my voice even as I thanked her for talking to me, and asked her to call the station immediately if Robbie got in touch, or returned to work.
“Why’re you interested in speaking to him, if you don’t mind me asking?” she asked as I was about to call off.
“We’re keen to talk to him,” I said evasively. “His sister is concerned for his welfare, and he’s been displaying unusual behaviour.”
If Robbie did turn out to be entirely innocent, wrapped up in this mess by pure misfortune, then I didn’t want his employer to think he was a criminal and cause him to lose his job. We had titbits of information on him that might add up to something significant, or they might not. There was nothing concrete or particularly damning evidence against him, and I made sure to remember that. The fact that he was Keira’s brother, and that I knew how much she cared for him, didn’t hurt with helping me keep that in mind.
Snakes in the Grass (A DI Mitchell Yorkshire Crime Thriller Book 5) Page 12
