‘Bloody hell. He was murdered by piping the gas in from below. But with what?’
Mayberry pointed farther down the tunnel. The current had swept along a bunch of insulated boxes. Ayala jogged down, grabbed one, and brought it back to Mayberry before holding the torch on it.
Dry ice. The killer had brought tons of dry ice down and used a child’s play tunnel to funnel it up through a Victorian drain and into the victim’s home.
‘Holy shit.’
***
The media frenzy over the Hudson Brown murder was fierce. Morton was sitting at home with Sarah when it showed up as Breaking News on BBC One. He turned up the volume of the tiny television fixed above the microwave so he could listen.
‘Turn it off, David,’ his wife begged him. ‘Please.’
The allure of freshly made croissants and homemade jam dragged Morton’s attention away from the television for a moment. He smiled wanly at her and hit the mute button so he could keep a half-eye on the case without distracting Sarah too much.
‘Sorry. Force of habit.’
‘It’s not your case.’
‘I know,’ he said. But whose case was it?
The murder of an MP would normally have come directly to him. It was well within his bailiwick. His entire murder investigation team specialised in investigating the weird, the wonderful, and the downright crazy. To know about a locked-room murder with a famous victim but to have to watch it from the sidelines was tantamount to torture.
‘Two locked doors,’ Morton said, nodding at the text alert scrolling along the bottom of the television. ‘Doubly mysterious.’
‘Hey, isn’t that the crazy MP?’ Sarah asked, her interest leapfrogging Morton’s. Aside from psychology, which Sarah had recently returned to education to study, politics was her favourite conversation. ‘It is him. I knew it. He was on TV not long ago, arguing we should deport everyone who wasn’t born here and anyone who doesn’t have two English parents. That’d be half the country!’
‘No doubt he had plenty of enemies. It won’t be an easy investigation.’
Morton wondered who’d be handling it. There was nobody else with the experience to handle such a high-profile case. His mind flashed briefly to Rafferty, but surely, even the chief wouldn’t hand such a train wreck of a case over to a junior officer?
Morton tried to lip-read the news anchor. ‘Our informant inside the Metropolitan Police...’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, David. Just watch it. And then maybe you can remember that you’ve got a wife who made you breakfast.’
He grinned apologetically and hit the mute button to turn the volume back on.
‘...that Hudson Brown was found dead from carbon dioxide poisoning. Despite a constant police presence from the Close Protection Unit...’
‘Carbon dioxide?’ Sarah echoed.
‘It’s a new one,’ Morton said. ‘I’ve seen carbon monoxide victims, but never a carbon dioxide murder. I suppose that explains the unbroken locks. Whoever did it is smart and experienced. This isn’t a first kill.’
‘You think it’s a hit man?’
Morton mused for a moment, pausing to take a bite of his croissant. ‘Hmm. No. It doesn’t feel like it. It could be, but there’s something very determined about murdering someone this way. There aren’t many hit men who would bother with such an elaborate kill. Two bullets – one for the close protection officer on duty, and one for the vic – would have been ample. This is someone who wanted to kill just him, but they didn’t mind risking poisoning the neighbours either. That’s not clean. That’s reckless. Kill one man, and you’ll get a murder investigation team on you. Kill an entire block, and you’re looking at a joint task force of SOCA, SCD2, and the counterterrorism task force.’
‘Then, who?’
‘Someone who hated him, I suppose. I don’t envy whoever has to investigate this one.’
***
The moment Stuart Purcell heard Rafferty yell that they’d found the gas source in the sewers below, he knew he’d be the one heading into the muck. He could have delegated the job. He was the boss. It would have been the easy route.
Instead, he donned full-body personal protective equipment, got his torch, and headed down the path Ayala and Mayberry had illustrated. The old sewers were thick with grime. The current underfoot swept detritus farther and farther along, and, despite the map Mayberry had pulled from the British Library’s archives, nobody really knew the extent of the smaller pipes on the old network.
On the way down, he’d dusted the ladder from the street. There were prints there, more than Purcell had expected. Mayberry mentioned something about geocachers using these old tunnels, and if he was right, that would complicate evidence collection immensely.
There were fingerprints all along the tunnel, too, preserved above the water line. It would be difficult to get in and out of the tunnels without ending up covered in some sort of grime. Purcell’s elbows were already greasy from rubbing against the walls, and he was ankle-deep in sewage runoff. Every now and then, he heard a plop as waste was dropped in from above. He hoped to high heaven that nothing landed on him as he collected the evidence.
Before long, he came upon the tunnel Ayala and Mayberry had found. It was still in place, still stuck to the ceiling with some sort of epoxy. The glue was clean and stood out against the grime and dust on the old brickwork. It wasn’t well-secured, but it was enough to hold the lightweight play tunnel in place. One edge was beginning to drift away, which neither Ayala nor Mayberry had mentioned when they sent him down here. Purcell snapped a quick photo and then pulled loosely at the tunnel. It came away easily.
The play tunnel was a generic one from a high street retailer. He bagged it for evidence knowing it would be fruitless trying to trace the purchaser.
The dry ice, on the other hand, might prove to be a critical lead. There were few dry ice retailers in London, and the murder had required a fairly significant quantity.
Ayala and Mayberry had said something about boxes. Purcell couldn’t see them. He trudged down the tunnel farther and farther until he was well beyond the house of Hudson Brown. Ayala hadn’t come this far down. It seemed the boxes had drifted on the current.
He found them at a grate half a mile downstream. They were large white polystyrene containers, the kind Purcell had delivered by his online butcher. There was no brand name; they were generic, wholly generic. It looked like another dead end.
Purcell bagged them anyway. There was the off chance that the dry ice had trace imperfections that might identify the manufacturer.
***
Rafferty’s day went from bad to worse. The unusual details of the MP’s murder had somehow been leaked to the press. There were officers from a number of units buzzing over the crime scene. Forensics were combing through, looking for DNA in the tunnel as well as the house, the fire brigade had been on scene for hours, and ambulances had been around for hours, too.
It was a leaky bucket. Any one of those service personnel could have talked to the press. As a newbie to the leadership gig, Rafferty didn’t command the necessary respect to get everyone in line. She wished Morton were here. He’d have calmed things down in no time.
Even the pathologist wasn’t happy with her. He clearly thought Morton ought to be in charge, and he was holding a grudge. Sometimes the old boys’ club held strong, even when it was more out of personal loyalty than any hatred of female detectives.
Ayala’s new-found work ethic was perplexing. He had gone from hating her guts to trying to solve the crime before anyone else. He was quick to take credit for Mayberry’s work in the tunnels. Maybe that was it. Maybe he thought solving this case first would be his ticket to running his own murder investigation team.
The one bright side was Dermot, the cheeky fireman. Part way through the afternoon, he’d sidled up to her, announced that they were off, and pressed a note into her hand as he left. On it was written his number in neat calligraphy.
Even on her worst day
, hung over to high heaven and as stressed as she could be, and without any make-up or glad rags, she still had it. It was those Irish eyes she liked. They twinkled as if they were always smiling. His salt-and-pepper hair didn’t hurt, either.
Rafferty shook her head, blinked, and forced herself to focus. Now wasn’t the time. She had a dozen journalists to face down just to get off site, and she couldn’t be distracted by a pretty face.
She steeled herself, set her shoulders back, and stood upright, a fierce woman to be contended with. Cameras flashed as she approached the police barricade.
‘Inspector Rafferty, is it true he was murdered by Marxist lunatics?’
Rafferty gave the reporter a withering glare. The conspiracy theorists were already coming out of the woodwork.
‘No comment.’
A dozen more questions and a dozen more ‘No comment’ replies later, Rafferty managed to slip behind the wheel of her car. Just ten more minutes, and she’d be back at home, ready to curl up with a nice cup of tea. It had been a long weekend.
Chapter 16: The Past, the Present and the Future
Monday morning saw Morton return to the lecture theatre. None of the team joined him to assist. He knew not whether Ayala was still sulking or if he’d finally followed the order he had been given to go and work with Rafferty on the Angela King murder.
The class settled in quickly, and silence fell before the clock struck nine.
‘Today, we’re going to be covering serial killers. Criminals, like everyone else, get better with practice. They become more criminally sophisticated with each crime they commit, and thus harder to catch. Can anyone see an obvious flaw here?’
Maisie Pincent, the cheeky young woman who had suggested poisoning Ayala’s coffee, raised a slender hand as Morton met her gaze.
‘Yes, Ms Pincent?’
‘Because they’ve committed a number of crimes, their risk of being caught is amplified by the earlier offences. Each crime in the series shows how they think and how they act, and we can trace their steps back to find out where they started.’
‘Exactly,’ Morton said. ‘And when we find their earlier crimes, we find the evidence they didn’t know to hide at the time.’
Pincent was sharp. That much was obvious.
‘Can anyone tell me what tools we have at our disposal to match current crimes with historical crimes?’ Morton asked, searching out another victim. At the back of the room, the non-binary student was slinking down in their seat as if to hide from his questioning. They were sitting away from the group, a physical outsider. ‘Mx Rudd?’
‘Err... DNA?’
‘Obviously,’ Morton said. ‘We have the full gamut of forensics to use to match crimes: DNA, mass spectrometry, fingerprints. The hard science can be invaluable. It’s usually admissible in court, and if you’ve got a criminal who hasn’t taken sufficient precautions, it can be a slam dunk. But what if we’re dealing with someone too smart? Imagine they’re aware of how to clean down a crime scene, how not to leave fingerprints or DNA. What do we do then, Mx Rudd?’
‘What about geographic profiling?’
‘That’s one tool, yes. Criminals tend to start out close to home and spiral out away from their home area as they gain confidence. Profiling is the most valuable tool we have at our disposal. Can anyone tell me what Holmes typology is?’
Eric O’Shaughnessy, whom Morton remembered for his herringbone suit and sharp tongue, leant forward and raised a gangly hand.
‘Mr O’Shaughnessy?’
‘There are two types o’ killers. Act-focussed killers and process-focussed killers. For the former, it’s about having killed. It’s over and done, simply, efficiently. For the process-focussed killers, it’s about the process, the ritual.’
‘Indeed,’ Morton said. ‘Act-focussed kills are clean. You’ve probably seen the news reports of the Angela King murder. Her husband is one of our own. She was shot at close range in a dark alley and left to die. This is an action-focussed killer. By contrast, the process-focussed killers get an emotional kick out of the murder. Some are simple hedonists; they enjoy killing. Some are sexual sadists who get off on the pain of their victim. Some want to “win” money or affection. Others just want to play God.’
‘Sir,’ said another student whose name Morton couldn’t bring to mind. ‘Isn’t that all dreadfully subjective? Where’s the boundary between enjoying a murder for hedonistic purposes and enjoying it for sexual reasons? Is there a difference in how the crime scene looks?’
Morton nodded and pressed the button to turn his slide show to the next slide, entitled ‘Criticisms of the Holmes Method’. He didn’t know why Ayala had made PowerPoint sound so complicated. All he had to do was click.
‘You’re right, of course. It’s one of the many limitations of profiling. It’s a human science, and, by definition, subject to the flaws of both the human being profiled and the human doing the profiling. We can combine the Holmes method with other classifications to help narrow things down. We know some killers fall to the OCD end of the organised/disorganised spectrum, while others are all over the show. It comes down to judgement. After years in the job, you get a gut feeling about suspects. We can follow the numbers and the statistics all day long. We know most serial killers are men, most are white, and most are in their twenties or thirties. But when you come up against that rare killer who isn’t so obvious, you have to think outside the box.’
‘What about their backgrounds?’ Pincent asked. ‘Aren’t there predictors in childhood and criminal history?’
‘Often, yes. Many cold-blooded killers are psychopaths. As Dr Jensen, our in-house expert for the murder investigation teams of SCD2, will no doubt tell you, many killers fit the definition of antisocial behaviour disorder. Many come from broken homes. Some have been subject to abuse, neglect, cruelty. We have two major issues here. First is an information asymmetry. We don’t know enough about everyone to be able to make this judgement call early on. It can be useful in winnowing down the most likely suspects on a list, but it isn’t an elimination criterion like DNA, which can exculpate a suspect entirely. It is possible to go through hell and come out of it a perfectly functional human. The extent and degree to which any one act affects us is subjective, personal, and complicated.’
‘Then, how do we catch these serial killers?’ someone asked from the back row.
‘We use everything we have. We combine the modus operandi of the crime, the victimology, the profiling, the evidence, and we try on case theories for size. We aggressively chase down leads until we find something. Sometimes, we can’t. I have a stack of cold cases on my desk that I revisit every week. It tortures me not to be able to give those victims justice. That comes with the job. And on that note, I think that’s all for today. Class dismissed.’
Morton folded down his laptop, sank into the seat behind the lectern that Ayala should have been occupying, and watched as his class began to file from the room.
There was something satisfying about this teaching lark. They genuinely seemed to care what he had to say, and it did make a change not being shot at by violent psychopaths.
***
Mayberry found himself back in his comfort zone on Monday morning. Dealing with the press, members of the public, and generally talking to others was not his bag. Aphasia made it difficult to communicate, even if he knew exactly what he meant to say.
To sit in front of a bank of computers and watch YouTube was a blessed relief. He was in Brodie’s office, using Brodie’s spare desk. Hudson Brown had been receiving death threats for decades. He had managed to insult and annoy virtually everyone he had come into contact with.
The reason was obvious: Hudson Brown had traded on notoriety for fame and money. Whatever he said had been deliberately crafted to be as provocative as possible. He’d blamed the victims, insulted the survivors, and marginalised minorities, and he’d enjoyed every last minute of it.
YouTube was full of videos of him. Many of them had as many or
more Thumbs Down as Thumbs Up, and yet the view count kept climbing. The videos were never reasoned, never logical, but always appealed to a core emotion. Outrage rather than respect drew the viewers to watch his oration.
Mayberry had to admit that Hudson Brown was quite the public speaker. He spoke slowly, calmly, and with gravitas. No matter how bullshit his speech might be, he seemed to earnestly believe every word of it. He was the ultimate charlatan: a con man who had drunk his own Kool-Aid.
It was no surprise, then, when Mayberry received the files documenting the death threats against Hudson Brown. They had been prepared by his parliamentary private secretary, who had carefully logged and cross-referenced over ten thousand pieces of correspondence from this parliamentary term alone.
‘Just on the desk, yeah?’ the delivery guy asked, placing a fat box down in front of Mayberry. Mayberry’s stomach churned as he sliced the top of the box open to see the original copies of the threats. There were far too many to get through, even if he had had a team of hundreds and a year to sort through it all.
It got worse, too. Just as Mayberry thought he was getting a handle on the volume of paperwork, the delivery guy returned with three more boxes.
‘Alright to put these on the floor, mate?’
Mayberry nodded meekly. He was going to need some help.
***
Brodie proved invaluable, as always. His tried-and-trusted approach to evidence of digitising it all first and sifting later had proved more than worthwhile on previous cases, and no doubt it would this time too. He and Mayberry fed everything into a commercial scanner fed by a conveyor belt, used optical character recognition to create digital copies, and began to sift through, looking for keywords that could indicate violence.
They still had to prioritise. Hudson Brown’s secretary had put those she thought were most likely into the first box, so they had started there.
Many of the criticisms – and there were myriad – were, in Mayberry’s opinion, entirely valid. Hudson Brown had been slammed for comparing refugees from Syria to rats, describing old-aged pensioners as hospital bed-blockers on borrowed time, and had angered half the nation by calling stay-at-home mums the feckless unemployed.
The DCI Morton Box Set Page 58
