Lost Souls

by Chris Merritt

  ‘Do you own any white ribbon?’ asked Lockhart.

  ‘What?’ Cooper looked confused. ‘White ribbon? No.’

  ‘For the recording,’ said Lockhart, ‘I’m showing Mr Cooper two photographs.’

  He removed the printed images from his manila file and laid them on the table facing Cooper. Each showed a length of white ribbon, which had been carefully removed from the victims’ hands and necks during their post-mortems by Dr Volz.

  Cooper studied the images in silence.

  ‘These two identical ribbons were recovered from the bodies of Donovan Blair and Charley Mullins,’ added Lockhart. He held back on describing exactly how they had been used. ‘Have you ever seen them before?’

  Cooper swallowed, and the lawyer extended his palm over the pictures. He seemed poised to intervene, but then Cooper said, ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘Right. And you don’t own any white ribbon?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  Lockhart left the photos on the table and reached beneath his seat to produce the evidence bag which Guptill had brought into the office yesterday. Inside, the ribbon was clearly visible.

  ‘Can you explain to me, then, why we found this in your flat?’

  Lockhart knew this was a key moment. Time constraints had prevented them from forensically testing the samples to determine if they were an exact match. But, having denied owning the item, Cooper now needed to account for its presence in his possession. Lockhart waited. And he wasn’t surprised when the lawyer responded first.

  ‘We’ve not had any notice of this.’

  ‘It was recovered last night,’ Lockhart stated.

  ‘My client and I would like a moment to—’

  ‘It’s not mine,’ said Cooper.

  Lockhart frowned. ‘It was in your flat, where you’ve lived alone for…’

  ‘Six years,’ Guptill said.

  ‘Six years,’ repeated Lockhart.

  The lawyer leant across and whispered something to Cooper. Lockhart guessed he was reminding him of his right not to comment. Cooper listened, blinking, without lifting his gaze from the evidence bag.

  ‘Mr Cooper?’

  ‘Yes, um, I’ve remembered now.’ Cooper nodded quickly. ‘It was from work. There was meant to be a wedding last spring. May, I think. I was asked to buy some ribbon for the church, but then the ceremony couldn’t go ahead. You know, because of Coronavirus. So, I must’ve just… kept it.’ He sat up straight, blinked. ‘And forgotten about it.’

  The explanation wasn’t convincing, but it wasn’t impossible either. In the absence of anything better – like phone data, which they didn’t have – Lockhart could already see their case to the CPS resting on Cooper knowing the first victim, the ANPR hit connected to the second victim, and the ribbon. And, in the chronically underfunded criminal justice system, Lockhart knew that anything less than a slam dunk was unlikely to go to trial.

  Then he remembered Green’s profile.

  She’d said that the killer had very likely been through similar experiences to his victims and empathised with them, to the extent of wanting to protect them – as bizarre as that seemed. He wrote a note on his pad and, shielding it from the pair opposite, showed it to Guptill.

  ‘Were you ever in care, Mr Cooper?’ she asked.

  Cooper folded his arms. ‘Eh?’

  ‘I don’t see what this has to do with the present case,’ said the lawyer.

  Lockhart studied Cooper.

  ‘Would you mind answering the question, please?’ Guptill said.

  The young man flicked his eyes from her to Lockhart and back.

  ‘I…’

  The lawyer turned to him. ‘You don’t have to comment, Eric, if you don’t wish to.’

  There was silence for a few moments. Lockhart noticed Cooper’s hands tighten into fists.

  ‘Erm, yeah,’ he said eventually. ‘I was. For a bit.’

  Guptill rested her notepad in her lap. ‘Can you tell us about that time?’

  Cooper closed his eyes. When he opened them again, they had a kind of strange, vacant look.

  ‘No comment,’ he said.

  Fifty-Two

  Lucy Berry reached the end of her set of search results, looked up from the screen and let her gaze roam around the MIT office. She’d read that it was good to do that every so often. Not to focus on anything in particular; just to give her eyes a break. But what she saw around her was pretty depressing.

  Dan was sitting at his corner desk, staring at his monitor, with hands clasped on top of his head and a blank expression on his face. Others were dotted about, working quietly at their computers. There wasn’t much activity or energy in the room. And she knew the reason for that.

  Two hours ago, the CPS had confirmed they weren’t going to charge Eric Cooper with the murders of Donovan Blair or Charley Mullins. An hour later, he’d been released. There were some on the team who clearly thought this was a bad decision, and that the white ribbon in his flat represented some kind of smoking gun. Lucy knew that wasn’t true, but it hadn’t stopped several of her police colleagues expressing strong opinions about it.

  PC Leo Richards had said that Cooper was definitely guilty. Andy Parsons had blamed the CPS for letting a killer walk free, and even Max Smith – who wasn’t usually so vocal about these things – said that it was a mistake, that they needed more time. But Cooper’s lawyer had successfully argued that there weren’t sufficient grounds to extend his detention, so off he went. At least they knew where to find him if any new evidence turned up.

  As an analyst, Lucy tried to keep her judgements detached, precise, and led by data. She tried not to get drawn into the ‘good-guys-versus-bad-guys’ narrative that was so prevalent among officers in The Met. And, if she was brutally honest, she agreed with this decision. They simply hadn’t found sufficient proof that Eric Cooper was their killer.

  It was certainly rather odd that he’d chosen to keep the angel drawing by Donovan, which he claimed to have collected after Sunday School one morning, months ago. But there was quite a gap between ‘odd’ and murdering two children. The evidence linking Cooper to Charley Mullins’s murder was even weaker. The ANPR hit only proved he was in the area that night, not even that he’d been inside the church where her body was left.

  By Lucy’s calculations, there were two explanations for their current situation. One, Eric Cooper was the killer, but had covered his tracks well enough to evade detection. Or perhaps they’d not done their jobs well enough. Could one further test, or one extra search have produced the decisive link? Maybe. But, in Lucy’s mind, the second possibility was more likely.

  Eric Cooper wasn’t the killer.

  That would mean they hadn’t missed anything significant while investigating him. It also meant there was someone else out there who they weren’t aware of, yet.

  She could sense the frustration among her colleagues. Dan was a good leader, though, and she knew he would regroup and set them off on a new track with an updated suspect strategy. She imagined that’s what he was trying to work out right now. In the meantime, she was rechecking Charley’s social media to see if they’d overlooked anything.

  Two people entered the office at the far end and immediately caught Lucy’s attention. Max Smith was walking alongside Marshall Hanlon, the PhD student, and they were chatting amiably. Lucy was a bit surprised to see him in their team base, but she hid that behind a smile as they approached.

  ‘Marshall,’ she said pleasantly.

  He glanced around, as if uncertain of his new surroundings, before raising his palm in a slightly awkward greeting.

  ‘Hi, Lucy.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were coming in.’ She kept her tone friendly. ‘What’re you doing here?’

  ‘Marshall’s just given us a witness statement,’ said Max. ‘He spoke to Donovan Blair a couple of weeks ago while volunteering at the Salvation Army. Really helpful.’

  ‘Of course,’ Lucy said. ‘You called me about i
t.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘He mentioned the project he’s working on with you,’ continued Max, ‘so I thought I’d bring him up and let the two of you have a quick chat.’

  ‘Oh. Um…’

  ‘Only if you’ve got a moment,’ said Marshall hastily. He raised a thumb towards the door. ‘Otherwise, I can probably go—’

  ‘No, no, it’s fine,’ said Lucy. ‘I was just taking a break from our main case.’

  ‘Paxford?’ queried Marshall. ‘The double murder case.’

  ‘Er, yeah…’

  ‘It’s in the press,’ he added. ‘The name, I mean.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I’ll leave you to it, then.’ Max inclined her head and strode off towards the kitchen.

  ‘Thanks.’ Marshall rubbed his hands together.

  Lucy switched her monitors off and invited him to pull up a spare chair.

  ‘I told Max everything I knew about it,’ he said, unprompted. ‘Donovan and I chatted one evening. I remembered him being quite spacey, like he’d taken something. Max told me they found traces of ketamine in his system. Makes sense.’

  ‘Mm,’ she concurred.

  Lucy really wasn’t sure how much she was supposed to talk to him about the investigation. But if Max had invited him into the office, then she trusted that decision. His witness statement apparently hadn’t made him a person of interest in Paxford.

  ‘He mentioned having problems at school. Bullying, it sounded like. I sympathised with him. I mean, I know how that feels.’ He sniffed. ‘Anyway, he just said that a teacher was helping him. That reassured me, obviously. But he didn’t give me a name.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘And I’d never seen Charley Mullins at the Salvation Army,’ he went on, ‘although I’m only there once a week. But I don’t think she’d run away, had she?’

  Lucy ignored his question. ‘You did tell Max all this, didn’t you?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, yeah.’ Marshall flapped a hand.

  ‘So, shall we talk about the missing children, then?’

  ‘Sure. Great.’ Marshall sat up in the chair. The height of it was set for someone tall and he hadn’t adjusted it. His swinging legs reminded Lucy of Pip on his booster seat at the dining table.

  ‘What’ve you been able to find?’ he asked.

  ‘Not much more, I’m afraid,’ she replied. ‘We’ve been prioritising the murder cases since we last spoke. But I have found a number of Merlin reports.’

  ‘Merlin?’

  ‘That’s our database on children who are known to us, for one reason or another. Usually they’ve witnessed a crime, or been present when police have visited a home because of concerns about the parents or carers.’

  ‘Interesting.’

  ‘Yes, although not unexpected. A lot of children who ended up going missing will have been in situations that led them to have some contact with us before they disappeared.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘So, I’ll keep looking through those, when I get time, and see if I find any patterns.’

  ‘Are you doing it manually?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, at the moment. There’s no way to integrate the datasets.’

  ‘Ah. I was just thinking, if you could get them to me, I might be able to work up an algorithm to spot any links between these, er, Merlin reports.’

  ‘I can’t do that, Marshall. I wouldn’t be allowed to share it.’

  ‘Could it be anonymised?’ he suggested.

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘What about Social Services’ records?’

  She frowned. ‘What about them?’

  ‘Could you get them?’

  Lucy blew out her cheeks, exhaled slowly. ‘In theory, yes. But I’d have to make an official request, get the relevant approvals and so on.’

  ‘Shame. I reckon if you put the demographics together with Merlin and Social Services data, we’d have our answer.’

  Lucy considered this. There was a good chance Marshall was correct. But aggregating that data would almost certainly be illegal.

  ‘Possibly,’ she said.

  ‘Hey, I don’t suppose you’ve found any connection between our missing children and these two murders, have you?’

  Lucy recalled the name Roger Hughes. But something stopped her sharing it with Marshall.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Nothing so far.’

  Fifty-Three

  Smith prodded the grass with her search pole, pushed a low branch aside and inspected the ground beneath it. Nothing. She knew the chances of finding Charley Mullins’s mobile phone were slim to none, especially after three of their team had already made one pass of this area, where her handset had come to rest the night she disappeared. But she couldn’t just sit around in the MIT office doing nothing, now that they’d let Eric Cooper go free. That wasn’t her style at all. She needed to be doing something.

  Smith was an old-fashioned grafter, someone who’d joined The Met before smartphones and CCTV became the go-to evidential source for every crime. She knew that it took legwork and luck to solve some cases. The tough ones, where the perpetrators were clever bastards, like with these two murders.

  Whether it was Cooper who had done it, or someone else, Smith wasn’t going to let them get away with it. She’d do everything she could to catch them before they attacked another vulnerable kid. And, if there was one thing that living with a disability had taught her, it was the value of grit and determination. She just had to keep searching.

  If they had limitless technical resources, she was confident they could trace the mystery man who Charley had dinner with the night before she went missing. But so far, they’d drawn a blank on that. Marshall Hanlon’s testimony, which Smith had no reason to doubt, suggested that the Salvation Army was a dead end, too. They needed to try something else.

  She believed that their best course of action was to locate Charley’s mobile and get the data off it that wasn’t in the call records. The names of her contacts, the content of her messages on apps that the phone providers couldn’t access, maybe even her photos and video clips. Most of someone’s life was stored on a smartphone these days; they were a treasure trove of information which The Met could plug in to a computer and download in a matter of hours. Provided they could find the damn thing, obviously.

  ‘Any joy, Mo?’ Smith called out.

  ‘Nothing,’ replied Khan. ‘Ain’t found jack shit.’

  She turned and observed him. He was stooping, sweeping his own phone over the vegetation a few metres away from the roadside. But there was no light coming from it; he wasn’t using the torch.

  ‘What’re you doing?’ she asked.

  ‘Metal detection.’ He held up his phone briefly. ‘There’s an app that turns your phone into a metal detector.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Serious. I’ll show you later. Works by magnetic fields and that.’

  ‘Sometimes I feel so old.’

  ‘It’s got nothing to do with age.’ Khan shrugged. ‘Just gotta be open-minded enough to give new stuff a go, innit?’

  She chuckled. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘You ain’t that old, anyway,’ he added.

  ‘Cheers.’

  They resumed their search. She reckoned they had about another hour, hour and a half tops, before the light went. As she parted the plants and poked the topsoil below, she thought about the phone being dropped around this road. They knew that the mobile had stopped moving at about the same time as, according to Dr Volz’s estimate, Charley had died. It was strange to think that her phone battery had outlived her. But, on a more practical level, it meant that she probably died somewhere quite close. Within a mile or two of this spot, maybe.

  ‘What were they doing out here?’ she said, almost as much to herself as to Khan.

  ‘Dunno,’ he replied. She heard some stalks and branches snap as he moved. ‘Guess the killer was looking for someplace private.’

  She cast a glance around her. ‘But there’s n
othing here.’

  Smith had checked on Google Maps before coming to this area. Almost a square kilometre of woodland and scrub-like commons surrounded Barnes railway station, with no more than a handful of houses in one cul-de-sac to the north.

  ‘Maybe he killed Donovan and Charley in the middle of the woods,’ Khan offered.

  ‘At night, in January?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘In freezing cold and total darkness?’

  ‘You know…’

  ‘Without leaving any more than a single ligature mark on them?’

  ‘Now you mention it—’ His phone bleeped.

  ‘Got something?’

  Khan nudged the grass with his shoe. ‘Just a tin can.’

  ‘At least we know your metal detector’s working,’ she observed.

  Khan gave her a grin in reply.

  ‘When we’re done here,’ she said, ‘we should check out the homes nearby.’

  ‘OK.’

  They were still looking for the original crime scenes; the place or places where Donovan and Charley had been murdered before their bodies were transported to the secondary crime scenes of the churches. She recalled the Throat Ripper case, sixteen months earlier, when a lockup garage had proven decisive in locating the killer. Was there somewhere similar around here that they didn’t know about? She resolved to check the satellite images again, too. Her copper’s nose was twitching, but she wasn’t quite sure what it had scented.

  She’d just resumed searching when her phone rang. She didn’t recognise the number.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Oh, hi. Detective Sergeant Smith?’ A woman’s voice, posh and gravelly. Smith placed it a second before Susanna Chalmers gave her name.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ asked Smith. She recalled their previous contact. ‘Is there something else about Donovan?’