The DCI Morton Box Set

by Sean Campbell

  'Drugs? He thought we were here for drugs?' Ayala’s expression was quizzical.

  Morton returned his confusion, and then ordered Ayala to arrest him anyway.

  Ayala stepped forwards, ordered Duvall to face the basin, and then slapped cuffs on him.

  'Anthony Duvall, you are under arrest for possession of a controlled substance. You do not have to say anything but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in Court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. Do you understand?'

  Duvall nodded, and allowed himself to be led from his flat without protest.

  Chapter 55: Taped

  'We've got the bastard.' This time, CCTV analysis confirmed the match. They could initially hold him thanks to the drugs charge. Morton had tried to start the interrogation as soon as he was in-station, but the greasy bastard had clammed up and demanded a lawyer within seconds of their opening fresh tapes.

  'Get the Crown Prosecution Service on the phone. I may need them to extend the time period for detention.' The police could detain without charge for thirty-six hours before they needed to go to court. They would charge him with the drugs, but there was the possibility he'd make bail on that charge at the first hearing, and they might need to keep him off the streets a bit longer. With a magistrate agreeing they could keep him for seventy-two hours.

  'Is his lawyer here yet? Good. Let's go.' He wanted another officer watching from the one-way mirror to see if their opinions matched.

  'Afternoon, Mr Duvall.' The politeness was for the lawyer, not the suspect.

  'I'm Theodore Leigh, and I represent Mr Duvall.' The portly lawyer rose, extending a pudgy hand to Morton. Morton waved it away. Leigh did not look like a typical defence solicitor. He was too well-dressed, even wearing a waistcoat. All that was missing was a pocket watch, and then Morton would have sworn on record that he had been transported back in time.

  'Detective Chief Inspector David Morton. For the benefit of the tape, have you had time to counsel your client?'

  'I have.' Leigh had been given thirty minutes' grace before both lawyer and client were hauled into the interview suite.

  'Mr Duvall. Where were you on Tuesday afternoon?'

  Duvall's face dropped. He thought he was in on simple drug possession charges, and had suddenly realised the extent of the trouble he was in.

  'Can't remember.'

  'That's unfortunate. Mr Leigh, have you explained to your client that the courts can draw an adverse inference from Mr Duvall's non-cooperation?' The question was intended to stick the needles in Duvall, but he sat there looking smug, the panic of the previous moment shuttered down behind glassy eyes as if someone had flipped a switch.

  When he got no response, Morton continued.

  'Were you at the car park of Greagor, Gershwin and Hopkins LLP on Tuesday afternoon?'

  Duvall didn't dare lie directly. He simply shrugged, a slight glare thrown in the inspector's direction.

  'Silence won't help you, Mr Duvall. We have blood evidence that links you to the scene.' The tests hadn't come back yet, but the police were allowed to lie to a suspect. He was pushing the limits of his ethical obligations, but he squared the white lie with his conscience with ease. It wasn't even a fallacy anyway, as the results were bound to come back positive.

  Duvall's face paled, and he turned to whisper to his lawyer. It was the lawyer who spoke next.

  'He wants to cut a deal.' The lawyer confirmed Morton's suspicions, forcing him to conceal a thin smile.

  'Deal? He killed someone in cold blood.'

  'That may be true, but there's more to it than that.'

  'In what way?'

  'He was put up to it. You want the big boss, not the little guy.'

  'Interview terminated. 16:32. I need to speak to the prosecutor. If he agrees to a deal, I'll listen to what you've got to say. If it's no good, your client is going down for murder.'

  'Fine with us,' Duvall said in a confident voice.

  Morton left, wondering what the hell he had just stumbled into.

  ***

  'The lab report came back in a rush. DNA confirmed that Anthony Duvall was involved in the altercation with Yosef Gershwin.'

  'Then why are you asking me to cut a deal?' Kieran O'Connor looked perplexed. He had known David Morton for years. Not once had he suggested a deal.

  'I don't want to. I want this guy bang to rights.'

  'Best I can do for him is manslaughter anyway, conditional on a guilty plea. The judge can still send him down for life.'

  'I don't like this.' Morton switched sides, knowing that he could let the lawyer back himself into a corner. It was a technique he had perfected on suspects.

  'Let's offer the deal, and see what he has to say.'

  'Fine.'

  Kieran went into the interview suite first. It was no longer solely a police interrogation.

  'Mr Duvall, I am willing to drop the charge to constructive-act manslaughter if and only if the information you provide is sufficiently valuable. I will decide that in my sole discretion.'

  'That don't seem fair. You deciding, that is.'

  'It's what I'm offering.' The lawyer entrenched his position.

  'Naw. He decides.' Duvall gestured at Morton.

  No one looked more surprised than Duvall's lawyer. Leigh almost sputtered as he took a sip of his water.

  Morton shrugged.

  'Let's hear it then.'

  'That Gershwin guy stiffed me. He agreed to kill someone for me, and in return I was going to kill for him. Only he didn't do it, kept making excuses.'

  'You move in different social circles. How'd you find him?' Morton's tone was sceptical. It was only curiosity driving him; he didn't think there was any deal in this, yet.

  'On the Internet.'

  'We searched his computer, and didn't find anything.'

  Duvall should have looked crestfallen, but instead he looked smug.

  'That's cause we used a darknet, didn't we?'

  'You what?'

  'A private network. Heard about 'em in prison. It's not on Google or anything, you just connect port-to-port.'

  Morton was in over his head. The terms meant nothing. Thankfully Kieran was more up-to-date. 'So you used an anonymous group to find each other?'

  'Yeah, it's like a newsgroup, man. I use it for dealing weed.' That explained what he was flushing. With a class C substance, it was hardly worth bringing him in for just the drugs.

  'Onion routing?'

  'Yeah, man. All peer-to-peer stuff. We connected through Tor.' He named a common program for concealing his Internet presence.

  'How'd you modify it?'

  'Some white dude over the Silicon roundabout fixed us up. Said something about adding more latency to the darknet. Meant we couldn't be monitored, anyway. I don't know exactly how it works.'

  'Can you show us?'

  'Does this mean I've got a deal?'

  'If we bust this network wide open, then yes, you've got your deal.'

  Chapter 56: Darknet

  The darknet wasn't something Morton readily understood. The idea of swapping murders on the Internet was anathema to traditional policing, and was unlike anything he had come across in his three decades with the Met.

  Still, he logged on quickly enough, and found Yosef's message in Ant's inbox. It occurred to Morton that while it wasn't the perfect crime, it might well be the perfect defence. Without prosecution knowledge of the murder swap plan it easily gave rise to reasonable doubt. A half-decent defence lawyer would have a field day pointing the finger at everyone else in sight.

  Morton wondered how Yosef knew about the darknet, and what else he might have used it for. Ant's messages were less than subtle. Punks scoring weed online was nothing new, but Gershwin was a respected architect, not a petty thief.

  'You.' He collared the nearest constable as one ambled by his open office door.

  'Yes, sir?'

  'Get me Gershwin's laptop, and
send someone up from IT when it gets here.'

  The man nodded briskly, and set about his task.

  It didn't take long to arrive. The unlucky constable was sent straight out to fetch the laptop from among the late Mr Gershwin's possessions. Morton felt a certain chill as he rifled through it, but it was no longer simply a dead man's property; it was evidence in a murder investigation, and one that might lead him to a larger network of criminality.

  'We have a suspect in custody who claims to have used a darknet to secure a deal whereby he would kill someone in return for someone's killing for him. I need to get into this laptop.'

  'Yes, sir. May I?' He gestured at the spare seat next to the desk.

  Before long his fingers were typing at lightning speed, prising open the dead man's system to expose it for Morton to see. As he worked, Morton lazily read his name badge, Conway Lee.

  Morton's coffee had cooled to room temperature when the laptop bleeped acceptance of its new master.

  'We're in.' Conway announced, pride tingeing his speech.

  'Good. I need to know who he talked to, and when.'

  'Looks like just one darknet contact, sir, but this laptop is only a few months old.'

  'I assume that the contact is Mr Anthony Duvall?'

  'Doesn't have a name, sir. Got the messages Duvall sent? I can see if they match.'

  Morton passed him the printout Duvall's lawyer had faxed over.

  'Nope, he's not the one, sir.'

  'What? That can't be right.'

  'I'm afraid so, sir. The exchange in your printout doesn't match. Duvall demands performance in his messages, but Mr Gershwin didn't receive those messages.'

  'There's a third person involved.' Morton surmised, absentmindedly drinking his cold coffee.

  'I'd agree with that.'

  'It's not just one murder swap, but a whole web. The question is, who's the puppet master?'

  'Perhaps, sir, but I think it's more of a chain than a web. It had to start somewhere, right?'

  ***

  Morton laid out all the unsolved death cases from the last three months on the conference table. He went back to the date on the first message Gershwin and Duvall had responded to.

  The case files relating to the deaths of Eleanor Murphy, Janet Morgan, Vanhi Deepak and Barry Fitzgerald joined Yosef Gershwin on the table.

  As their faces stared vacantly up at him, Morton realised he only wanted the cases where the suspect had no apparent connection to the victim. That removed Janet Morgan from contention. Her husband had almost certainly killed her; they just couldn't prove it. She clearly wasn't linked to the other deaths. Murphy was the earliest death that there was no other suspect for.

  All of the others had died at the hands of someone who appeared to be a complete stranger. Gershwin had died by Duvall's hand, and Fitzgerald was killed in a spectacularly anonymous fashion on the ferry to Le Havre.

  'Wasn't Fitzgerald involved in that other odd case, boss?' Ayala asked.

  'Oh yes, the death by self-defence case. Peter Sugden.'

  Something clicked as he said the name. Sugden had been involved in an FSA investigation. Were the two connected? Morton made a mental note to contact Michael Burrows at the FSA.

  'Five deaths? Nothing to link them. Get me their laptops.'

  'On it, boss.'

  ‘Good,’ Morton said. ‘Once you’ve done that, get me the FSA on the phone.'

  ***

  Burrow answered on the third ring, and Morton jumped right in without wasting time on the pleasantries. 'Does the term darknet mean anything to you?'

  'No, enlighten me.' Burrows' tone was too polite, as if he was humouring the detective.

  'It's a private network using an Internet technology that lets users communicate anonymously, without anyone being able to discern the identity of those using it.'

  'Great Scott! You think that Sugden was using this to share insider information?!'

  'Yes, and more. He tried to kill a man. I think he's involved in something far darker than artificially manipulating share prices. '

  'I don't know. He didn't come off that way when we interviewed him. A polite, courteous fellow. I could see him as a white collar criminal, but nothing more sinister.'

  'We've got him on tape.'

  'Well, I'll be damned. Thought I had the measure of the man.'

  'Looks like you need to re-examine your case. I've requested his laptop, should be here any moment. You want it after we're done with our investigation? Shouldn't take long; he's dead after all, and can't be prosecuted, but it might help to bring down your insider trading ring.'

  'Thank you, Detective Chief Inspector. I appreciate the call.'

  ***

  The laptops all went through the same treatment, and it took almost a day to crack them all.

  'Every victim except Murphy had been involved in darknet use,' Ayala announced to the room. He needn't have bothered; they all knew why they were there. After the laptops had arrived Chief Inspector Morton had called in every able body to help dig through the electronic paper trail.

  'So Murphy wasn't involved. Does that mean our web was limited to the others plus Duvall?' Morton asked.

  'No, sir, at least one other person was involved, as there were messages sent from all these laptops that weren't received by the others.'

  'This person got messages from all of them?'

  'Yes, sir.'

  'So we've got our ringleader. Can we work out who agreed what?'

  'Sort of, sir. We know Deepak was killed by another member of the group, Barry Fitzgerald. We don't know if she carried out a kill but if she did, it was one before her death.'

  'Did she agree to one?'

  'Yes, sir, she wanted someone who abused her killed, according to the messages. I think it was the Brixton kill. Her name was in his case file. It was redacted for her privacy, but the CPS got the original jackets when you asked for this taskforce.'

  'Good to see the lawyers can do something right. Who killed Barry?'

  'Well, Sugden tried to. Then someone else succeeded.'

  'Who? Gershwin?'

  'No. From his messages he didn't carry out the kill. That's why Duvall killed him.'

  'So who did Duvall want dead?'

  'He won't say. He just mutters something about the right against self-incrimination.'

  'We don't have one. Lean on his lawyer.'

  'Yes, boss. We know he killed someone else. He felt stiffed by the deal agreed."

  Morton nodded. ‘So who did he kill?'

  'We don't know. We've got a few John Does that could fit. Does it really matter? He's going down for life anyway.'

  'Of course it bloody matters! The victim's family deserve closure, and justice,' Morton thundered. Ayala paled, and didn't respond.

  'Anyone have an idea who our puppet master is?'

  No one raised a hand to volunteer their thoughts. It was getting late.

  'We'll reconvene at half past eight. Don't be late.'

  With that, the Operation Darknet staff were dismissed for the evening.

  ***

  'Morning, ladies and gentleman. I've been reviewing all the cases we dealt with yesterday. It looks like this isn't just limited to London. One of Mr Duvall's requests was for an out-of-London hit. We believe that Yosef Gershwin agreed to kill a man in Portsmouth for him. We don't know if that hit ever took place, but if it did, it wasn't Gershwin that did it, as Duvall exacted revenge for his non-performance.

  'Someone also had to kill Barry Fitzgerald, and none of the messages indicate who. We also have our ringleader. That leaves up to three unknown persons, or we have multiple serial killers among our group.'

  'I think I can help,' piped up a small voice from the back. It was the new tech, Cindy Jacobs, who had stayed up all night with Morton as they worked through the evidence.

  'We know from her messages Vanhi Deepak planned to carry out a kill. She then got killed, and her killer was killed. That makes me think those later kills
were a facade for the earlier ones.'

  'Good work, Jacobs.' Morton rarely praised those under his command, but if someone truly deserved it he would go to hell to get them a commendation.

  'We also know she killed someone,' Jacobs ventured tentatively.

  'No, we don't. We can only speculate.'

  'With all due respect, sir, it's well-founded if it's speculation. She was killed to cover up another murder. If she hadn't gone through with it then persons unknown would not have needed to kill her to cover it up. They could simply have ignored her.'

  A few nods bobbed in the room, and a few deputies murmured their assent. It was a reasonable assumption. Morton had other ideas.

  'I like how you think, but if she was the first then she knew the original target. That would be enough to get her killed, whether she performed or not.'

  'Yes, sir.' Jacobs blushed.

  'You got Deepak's messages? Put them up on the projector.'

  Jacobs did so, and a collective gasp went round the room. The information on her target was enough to isolate her victim.

  It was Eleanor Murphy. She was the first victim, and only one person stood to gain from her death.

  'Issue an arrest warrant for the husband. Now.' Morton knew something about him hadn't been quite right.

  'And for God's sake get his laptop. It might be the only evidence we've got.'

  The team dispersed. A manhunt was on.

  ***

  Edwin had already stored or shipped most of his stuff. He'd auctioned some of the knickknacks too, as his new flat was much smaller than the townhouse he and Chelsea were used to. With the new apartment awaiting their imminent arrival, and the old townhouse tenanted out, the London era was drawing to a close.

  He and Chelsea had moved into the Hilton a few days ago, as the new tenants at Belgrave Square wanted immediate possession. It was a bit of a rush job, but Edwin didn't mind. With all the memories of Eleanor, the house had a bad vibe and he was glad to see the back of it.

  He was now technically home-schooling Chelsea, having withdrawn her from the private school at the end of the last week. That in reality had meant letting her play tourist in her own city for a few days. They'd visited all of the free museums in Kensington, been up in the Millennium Eye and even posed with a Beefeater. Chelsea had smiled more in those few days than she had in the weeks since her mother's death.