The Death Collector

by Neil White

  Sam followed them both up the driveway. Hunter straightened his tie. Weaver hoisted his trousers onto his paunch and tucked in his shirt. Sam looked around as Hunter rang the doorbell. There was a view along the valley towards the grey shadow of Manchester in the distance, obscured slightly by the pink petals of cherry blossom on a tree at the edge of the garden, the gentle breeze scattering them across the neat square lawn.

  The door was opened quickly, angrily almost, by a tall man with dark hair swept back, only his temples showing tinges of grey.

  He stopped and then paled, as if he knew straight away what it was about. ‘Sorry, I thought you were someone else,’ he said, licking his lips, tears already in his eyes. ‘What do you want?’

  Hunter pulled out his identification and introduced himself. Nothing else needed to be said. It was the pause that did it, the respectful smile and slight nod of the head.

  ‘Sarah?’

  ‘Can we come in, sir?’

  The man turned and went into the house, walking slowly along the short hallway, his shoulders slumped, until he was able to reach the sofa in the living room. He sat down and perched forward. Hunter indicated with his head that Sam should get him a drink.

  Sam went into the kitchen and listened as Hunter broke the news and closed his eyes when he heard the man wail. When he opened them again, it was the ordinariness that struck him. The kitchen looked out over a rectangular lawn, visible through a wooden pergola trailing honeysuckle and clematis just coming into flower. There were little touches that showed the woman who had lived there. Small magnets stuck to the fridge, souvenirs from holidays that she used to secure notes and drawings and the scribbles of young children, at school for the day, about to come home and find that their mother never would. Things would be different now. Grief changes everything.

  Sam filled the kettle, and once it had boiled he took a mug of tea through.

  The husband’s name was Billy. He wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand. He was staring forward, his expression a mixture of disbelief and misery.

  ‘She told me she was going to Wendy’s house, one of her friends,’ Billy said.

  ‘Wendy?’ Hunter said.

  ‘Wendy Sykes. Sarah used to go out with her a lot, and she stayed out late sometimes. I have to be up early for work, so I didn’t think anything of it when she hadn’t come home before I went to bed. Then when I woke up and she wasn’t there, I called Wendy. Sarah was never there. Wendy wouldn’t say anything more, so I guessed that, you know…⁠’

  ‘Sarah had been with someone else? Another man?’

  Billy nodded, tears running down his face. ‘How did she die?’

  ‘She was found on Saddleworth Moor.’ Hunter didn’t elaborate on that, but he delivered it in the smooth tones of someone used to dealing with bereaved relatives. ‘I’m sorry to have to ask you these things, but we need to know, and the sooner we know, the faster we can act. How was your marriage?’

  After a few moments of silence, Billy said, ‘What are most marriages like? We argued, we didn’t talk to each other much sometimes, but it was just something we had to work through.’

  ‘And were you working through it?’

  Billy just shrugged.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  Billy exhaled. ‘I don’t know. Something was different. She was buying smarter clothes, making herself look nice, but only for when she went out. When she was here, she was distant, as if she wanted to be somewhere else and all we had was too much drudgery.’

  ‘And she went missing the night before last?’

  Billy nodded slowly.

  ‘And where were you that night?’

  He looked up, anger in his eyes now. ‘I was here, looking after my children. It’s what I do when she goes out. Sarah went out with her friend, so she said, and now this.’

  ‘Do you mind if my colleague looks through her things, just to see if there is anything that might give us a clue where she went?’ Hunter gestured towards Sam.

  Billy looked at Sam and shrugged. He didn’t have the will to fight anything.

  Sam went upstairs and into Billy and Sarah’s bedroom. It was so ordinary. Silk cushions on a purple duvet. Clothes on the floor, waiting for the wash. Photographs of Sarah and Billy in happier times, their heads together, grinning at the camera. Sam’s mind went back to the grotesque display on the moors. How had Sarah gone from the happy woman in the photograph to how he had seen her not long before?

  He went to the drawers at the side of the bed and went through those that contained Sarah’s underwear. He rummaged at the bottom. Billy wouldn’t go through her underwear drawer, so any secrets might be kept there, but there was nothing unusual. Some headache tablets, small bottles of perfume, like free samples thrown in after a shopping trip.

  The wardrobe was all about Sarah. There were some shirts to one side, and a suit that had dust on the shoulders, but they were squashed by the blouses and jumpers and dresses. Shoes and boots were thrown in untidily. Sam was looking for boxes, anything that might contain souvenirs of what she was doing away from the home, but nothing struck him as unusual. He couldn’t find any diaries or letters.

  When he went back downstairs, he said, ‘Do you have her bank statements?’ When Billy looked confused, Sam added, ‘If she’s been doing something out of the ordinary, it might show in her spending.’

  ‘We do online banking, but I think Sarah kept her passwords in a pocket in that case.’ And he pointed to a laptop at the side of a bookcase. ‘Sarah looked after that kind of thing.’

  Sam was disappointed. He wouldn’t be able to touch the laptop until a copy had been made of the hard drive, so that they could look for traces of long-deleted emails and online chats without spoiling the evidence. Paper copies would have given him something instant.

  He rummaged in the pocket of the laptop case and found a piece of paper. There were lists of online accounts and hints and clues to passwords, things that she would know. It showed some degree of caution, just in case the laptop case was lost.

  Sam recognised the name of a bank and underneath the words ‘dob 79’ and then ‘cat 999’. Hints and clues.

  He got the answers from Billy to all of the clues on the piece of paper, her date of birth and the name of her cat, and gave the nod to Hunter that he had what he needed, the sheet of paper with passwords in a sealed plastic bag.

  There was a knock at the door. Sam went to answer. It was a female detective Sam knew from his early days in the Force, Nicola Sharp.

  When Sam showed her through, she said, ‘DI Evans sent me. I’m your FLO.’ Then she looked at Billy. ‘I’m the Family Liaison Officer. I’m here to help you during the investigation.

  Billy looked and nodded, but didn’t say anything. He was retreating into himself.

  Hunter looked irritated. Sam couldn’t understand why. Nicola was a woman who exuded sympathy but she could also read people well. The FLOs were experienced detectives, not hand-holders. If Billy was hiding something, Nicola would spot it.

  Hunter forced out a smile and got to his feet. He headed for the door, Weaver with him, leaving Billy with Nicola. Sam thanked Billy for his help and followed. When he thought of what devastation awaited the children, he was relieved to be leaving.

  Twenty

  Lorna Jex looked down before she spoke, as if she was trying to work out what to say. Eventually, she looked up and said, ‘I don’t really know when it started, David’s obsession with the Aidan Molloy case. It just crept up on us. Why should he have been obsessed with the case? He’d been on the investigation, knew all about it. But he was, and I couldn’t understand it.’

  ‘When did you first notice?’ Joe said.

  She shrugged. ‘A year ago. Perhaps a bit less. It was as if he suddenly started to feel bad about something, but why should he? He put a bad man away. David had put a lot of really bad men away, but this seemed different, as if it really affected him. He started to collect things, newspaper reports, things like t
hat, and would go to see people, spend all night sometimes, driving around. I don’t know where he went, didn’t want to know really.’

  ‘What was his thing about the case, though? Did he ever say?’

  ‘No, but I would catch him sometimes, just staring into space, like something was bothering him. And I remember that he became obsessed about our debts. He said we would have to clear everything, so we didn’t book a holiday last year and stopped buying treats. We just put everything towards the credit cards and mortgage.’

  ‘Do you think he was planning on running away? Perhaps he was making sure you could cope after he left.’

  ‘What, because we were clearing debts? I don’t think so. He could have just told me he was going and left. That would have been better than what we have now, this uncertainty.’

  Joe frowned. ‘Did David think that they’d got the wrong man in Aidan Molloy?’ When Lorna looked at him, he added, ‘Why else would he become obsessed with the case? Like you said, Aidan was locked up, David’s job done. What else was there to do?’

  Lorna shook her head. ‘He never said.’ A pause, then, ‘Do you want to see David’s notes?’

  Joe raised an eyebrow. ‘Yes, I do.’

  She got to her feet wearily and walked towards the living-room door. Joe took it as a sign to follow her, and he creaked his way up the stairs behind her until they got to the small bedroom at the front of the house.

  ‘This was my daughter’s bedroom, before she got married,’ Lorna said, and she pushed open the door.

  The room wasn’t very big. Just enough room for a bed that ran to the window sill, space saved by storage underneath, raising the bed so that anyone tall would sleep with their feet on the windowsill. There were old white cupboards and shelves opposite that had been taken over by black filing folders, with a computer and monitor resting on a small desk at one side. There were newspaper clippings pinned to a cork board and maps taped to the wall.

  Joe stepped forward, expecting them to be all about Aidan Molloy, but as he got closer he saw that they were missing person reports from newspapers. As far as he could tell, there were six women mentioned, the clippings pinned alongside each other with string going to a point on a large map of Manchester. Four of them were just small pieces, as if they were hardly worth of a mention, whereas two were bigger spreads, with appeals from their families. Joe remembered one of them from the media buzz. A law clerk called Mandy, blonde and pretty with cute children. There were a few tearful appeals and the public mood had turned on her husband because he hadn’t cried at the press conference.

  ‘He was spending more and more time in here,’ Lorna said, her voice flat and emotionless. ‘And drinking. He’d always drunk at weekends or while we were watching a film, but then it turned into something he did on his own, up here.’

  Joe turned away from the clippings. ‘Tell me about the night he disappeared.’

  Lorna leaned against the wall. ‘He’d been getting worse. He was drinking more and not turning up for work. They were going to discipline him, but he put in a sick note and went off with stress. Then one evening he was different. He seemed happier, excited almost. He said he was going out but wouldn’t tell me where, but he hugged me, and he hadn’t hugged me in a long time. He said he loved me but he had to go out, and that was it. He never came home.’

  ‘Where do you think he went?’

  ‘I just don’t know, but something was different that night.’

  ‘What did you do?’ Joe said.

  ‘I reported him missing.’

  ‘What did the police say?’

  ‘That’s just it. They didn’t say much. They put out an alert, some pictures in the paper, stating that they were worried about him, but they seemed to think he’d just run away.’ She wiped her eye. ‘I don’t think they liked it being public. He was on sick leave for stress, so it hinted that whatever happened was somehow their fault.’

  ‘Did he take any money out of his bank? If he was still getting his wages when he was off sick, he would have money to take out and he would need it.’

  Lorna shook her head and tears appeared in her eyes again. There was the truth, and she knew it. He was dead.

  ‘So what about Carl?’ Joe said softly. ‘Where does he fit into all this?’

  ‘Carl loves his dad. Worships him. David’s a policeman, strong and protective. What teenage boy wouldn’t love a father like that?’ A smile through the tears. ‘That’s how we met, through the police. My car was broken into and David was the person who came to see me. He didn’t solve the break-in, but he was so sweet. Tall and strong, just started out in the job. I asked him out. He was a good man. Carl couldn’t cope with David walking out, and he suspected it was something to do with all of this.’ She pointed towards the clippings. ‘So he started going through it all, to try to find the answer.’ She wiped her eyes again. ‘I told him to stop, that he had schoolwork to do, but he wouldn’t listen. He became as obsessed as David, up here all the time, going through things. He started to stay out a lot, always late, and the school told me he was skipping lessons.’

  ‘Did Carl say where he was going the other night?’

  ‘He said he was going to see a friend. When he didn’t come home yesterday morning, I called the police. They told me he’d been arrested, so I came to you.’

  Joe looked back towards the newspaper clippings, and to the black file covers. Two missing persons, father and son, both connected somehow to Aidan Molloy, and none of this would earn any money for the firm.

  But as he looked at the shelves, he knew that the answers to whatever had happened were in those papers.

  ‘I want to help,’ he said.

  Lorna reached out for him and put her hand on his arm. ‘Thank you,’ she said softly.

  His phone beeped. He held up his hand in apology and looked at the screen. It was a message from Gina. Where are you? Client downstairs.

  Joe sighed. He knew he should go back to the office, but he was more interested in Carl Jex. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, and called Gina. When she answered, he said, ‘I won’t be back in time.’

  ‘Where are you? You’re not booked in the diary anywhere.’

  ‘I’m just checking something out.’

  ‘Aidan Molloy?’

  He glanced at Lorna to see if she was listening, but she was gazing at the clippings on the wall, her husband’s obsession. ‘Yes. I’m with Lorna, Carl’s mother.’

  There was a pause, until Gina said, ‘I know you want to make a splash, but I don’t think Tom will care. Make some money. That’s what talks with Tom.’

  ‘If he wants us out, there’s nothing we can do. You suck up to Tom if you want, and he might keep you on. Me? I’m gone, I know it.’

  ‘And what about your client?’

  ‘You see him and tell him to find another lawyer.’

  With that, he hung up and went back to looking at the news clippings and the map on the wall. Did the locations mean something? They had meant something to David Jex, as he had drawn attention to them. Or perhaps he was just trying to find a pattern somewhere, shapes in the mist, although Joe didn’t really know why.

  The files on the shelf had titles on the binders. Statements was prominent on seven of them, and the name of Aidan Molloy and the six remaining people listed on the missing persons reports. Each had a date written on the spine and all six people had gone missing after Aidan Molloy had been arrested. Joe shook his head. It all meant one obvious thing: David Jex didn’t think Aidan Molloy was guilty. Neither did Carl. And now both had disappeared.

  Twenty-one

  Hunter drove quickly, heading to the home of Sarah Carvell’s friend, Wendy Sykes, where Sarah was supposed to have been on the night she went missing. He glanced in his mirror at Sam. ‘You’re Joe Parker’s brother, right? The defence lawyer.’

  Sam was unsure whether Hunter was just making conversation; he didn’t seem the type for idle chat. ‘Yes. He’s doing well for himself.’

  ‘Th
at’s a matter of opinion. He’s at Honeywells, isn’t he?’

  ‘Has been for a couple of years now.’

  Hunter didn’t comment any further, just concentrated on his driving. Sam didn’t know if Joe’s job made things better or worse for him, in Hunter’s eyes. Did Sam get some credit for choosing the right career or was he tainted by association?

  Whispers in the canteen gave defence lawyers mixed reviews. Most of the police accepted them as a necessary evil, but they thought they also derailed investigations and left victims without justice. Some played fair, but too many didn’t.

  But Sam knew something else too: no one fights dirtier than a copper in trouble.

  The journey wasn’t far, a couple of miles. Wendy lived in a similar house to Sarah, built on the gaps made by the bulldozing of industry, modern and clean and on a street of sweeping curves and short driveways and garages that never housed a car.