The Falcon Tattoo (The National Crime Agency Series Book 2)

by Bill Rogers

  ‘That’s not the worst of it,’ he said. ‘He’s also got a daughter with a skunk addiction that’s led to schizophrenic episodes.’

  ‘God, that’s awful.’

  ‘I know. Best not let on that you know. He’ll tell you himself when he’s ready.’

  ‘Thanks for the heads-up,’ she said. ‘The last thing I want to do is put my foot in it.’

  Andy was the first to leave.

  ‘It’s Holly’s tenth birthday,’ he told them as he wheeled his scooter out from the stock cupboard. ‘We’re all going to Wagamama for our tea, and then it’s the Peanuts movie at the Lowry cinemas.’

  ‘Her choice or yours?’ quipped Ram.

  Andy slipped his arms through the straps of his backpack.

  ‘Don’t mock,’ he said. ‘The Peanuts comic strip is an intellectual masterpiece that has endured for fifty years. As forlorn as it is ferocious, it plumbs the depths of human misery, and shines a light on the absurdity of man’s striving for success and the essential loneliness of social existence.’

  ‘Sounds like a heap of laughs,’ said Dizzy.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ Andy replied, as he pushed open the door, ‘it is.’

  An hour later, Jo was the next to leave. She still had a massive sleep deficit to make up, and the work she planned to do could just as easily be done at home.

  Chapter 19

  Jo stared one more time at the empty shelves and slammed the refrigerator door in anger and frustration. Under normal circumstances Abbie would have done the weekly shop.

  She stormed into the lounge area, and scrabbled through the leaflets under the telephone table until she found their favourite takeouts. Hunters BBQ & Asian Takeaway or Slice Pizza & Bread Bar on Stevenson Square? Pizza won. As she began to punch the restaurant’s number into her phone, it dawned on her that a singleton order would fall way below the minimum price for home delivery. There was nothing for it but to put her coat back on and head out into the pouring rain.

  The unrelenting deluge made a mockery of the festive lights strung between lamp posts. Reflected globes of coloured light fractured as she kicked her way through the puddles on the pavement. Crossing the square, she passed two council employees exchanging curses as they attempted running repairs to the roof of one of the stalls in readiness for the Sunday Makers Market. She paused between the empty tables and stacks of wicker chairs, timing her dash to dodge the intermittent waterfalls streaming from the colourful awnings.

  The bright, warm interior and welcoming smiles of the staff embraced her. Reluctant to return too soon to the empty apartment, Jo took her time choosing. For once she had the bittersweet luxury of being able to choose what she really wanted, without worrying about what Abbie might prefer. Nevertheless, it proved a difficult decision between their unique mozzarella and potato pizza, or the one with aubergine, spinach, goat’s cheese and basil. In the end, she made it easy by ordering both. One to eat, the other to freeze for later in the week. Was this the way that it was going to be from now on, she wondered?

  Jo sat with her pizza on her lap, a bottle of Chianti Classico Reserva on the table and a half-empty glass in her hand, watching the news headlines. Thousands in Brazil join a rally to push for the President’s impeachment; there is an outcry against the Tories’ decision to drop their plan to crack down on bank chiefs’ bonuses; LA officers fire thirty-three bullets into a man holding a gun; Strictly Come Dancing dance-off won by a former Coronation Street TV soap star. She was about to switch off when a story scrolling across the bottom of the screen caught her attention. A twenty-nine-year-old Oklahoma policeman charged with thirty-six offences of sexual assault, including rape, faced a 263-year sentence. She reached for the remote and pressed the red button. He had collapsed in court, and wept when the guilty verdict was announced. She switched off, and threw down the remote in disgust.

  ‘And he still doesn’t have the faintest idea how those women feel,’ Jo shouted at the empty screen. ‘Or give a damn!’

  She took her plate through to the kitchen and placed it in the empty dishwasher. At this rate, it would be another week or so before there was enough in there to justify switching it on. She went back into the lounge and picked up the folder containing the details of the potential suspects she intended to prioritise. It had been a risk bringing it home with her, because were she to mislay it, be mugged or burgled, and it fall into the hands of a member of the public, or worse still a reporter, that would be the end of her career. They all did it, of course, not that that could be used as an excuse. She sat on the sofa, flipped the file open, picked up her glass and began to read.

  An hour and a half later, the words were beginning to blur on the page and she had the beginnings of a headache. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that she had demolished three-quarters of the bottle of wine? She stood up, stretched, and glanced at her watch. Andy would be having a nightcap with his wife about now, the children tucked up, and fast asleep. She half-envied him that. The easy companionship, the unconditional love, even the distraction from his work that quelling sibling rivalries must bring. The irony was not lost on her that this was precisely what she had chosen to reject. It begged the question who she was really angry with, Abbie or herself? She switched off the lights, and went into the bedroom.

  Jo opened her eyes. Her headache had gone, but she now had a pain at the base of her neck from sitting propped up against the headboard. The backlit glow from her Kindle bled a ghostly pool of light on to the ceiling. The time was 1.45am. She switched it off, placed it on the bedside cabinet, and picked up her mobile phone. No messages. It irked that Abbie, relying on the fact that Jo had not changed the locks on the door to the apartment, had not even left a forwarding address. She was somewhere in Manchester, but even their mutual friends claimed not to know where she was staying.

  Jo was seriously tempted to use the resources available to her as an NCA Investigator to track Abbie down. It would be so easy. A matter of minutes. But to what purpose? To surprise her? To confront her like a pathetic stalker? And then what? With every keystroke recorded on their computers, the inevitable consequence should Abbie complain would be dismissal for gross misconduct. Even if she did not complain, there was now software in place that would throw up anomalies between ongoing investigations, and personal data searches.

  Jo switched off her phone, plumped up the pillow, curled up on her side and fell asleep.

  Chapter 20

  ‘These three.’

  They stood in a semi-circle staring at faces on a display board.

  ‘Where did you get their photos from?’ asked Max.

  Jo pointed with her index finger. ‘These two are screenshots from their Facebook pages, this one is from a staff profile on the university website.’

  ‘None of them with previous then?’ guessed Andy.

  ‘Number one has,’ she replied. ‘But his mugshot was taken years ago. I decided it would be more helpful to see what he looks like now.’

  They nodded their heads in approval.

  ‘His name is Nathan Northcote. Caucasian, thirty-eight years of age. Divorced. He was stopped the night before last, at three in the morning,’ – she paused for effect – ‘on Cromwell Road.’

  They looked nonplussed.

  ‘Cromwell Road?’ she repeated.

  Andy raised his eyebrows. Only then did she remember that none of them had any local knowledge whatsoever.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘It passes right by Castle Irwell, the Salford University student village.’

  She indicated the locations on the map alongside the photos.

  ‘Ah,’ said Max.

  ‘What was he doing there at three in the morning?’ asked Ram.

  ‘He told the officers that he had been at a mate’s in Moston, up here in North Manchester,’ she said, pointing again. ‘Playing computer games and then watching The Bridge on catch-up.’

  ‘Nothing like a bit of Nordic noir to get the pulses racing,’ ventured Ram.r />
  ‘I assume they breathalysed him?’ said her fellow investigator.

  Jo nodded. ‘He barely registered. Claimed he’d had a couple of pints early on, and a curry. Then he stopped drinking because he was driving home, and he had to run over to Leeds in the morning for work.’

  ‘Very responsible,’ observed the psychologist.

  ‘Happy to drive on a couple of hours sleep though,’ Ram pointed out. ‘Did they search his car?’

  ‘It was clean. No body, and none of the paraphernalia you’d associate with an abduction.’

  ‘What does he do for a living?’ asked Max.

  ‘This is where it gets interesting,’ she said. ‘He works for a security firm, Iskuros Security Ltd. They specialise in the installation and maintenance of intruder alarms, CCTV, fire protection, and access control systems. He does all of that, plus one week in four on rapid response call-outs. DI Sarsfield’s team asked for a copy of his work record, and guess what?’

  ‘His work takes him into North West Universities?’ Max said.

  ‘Five campuses in all, in the past twelve months, including student accommodation.’

  ‘Any of the campuses linked to our victims?’

  ‘Four of them,’ she told him. ‘The dates and times don’t tally, but that doesn’t mean anything. More importantly, he wasn’t on call on any of the nights the victims were abducted, so he’d have been free to carry out the attacks.’

  ‘Five victims across fifteen months. He’s only on call one week in four. It’s not statistically significant,’ said Ram.

  ‘It doesn’t need to be,’ she said. ‘On each of those dates he had the opportunity to abduct those women. That’s all that matters. Furthermore, he lives in Swinton. That’s four miles from the city centre, a mile from the M60 motorway, close to the fifth victim’s last known sighting, and the Worsley Woods dumpsite, and well within the circle thrown up by Ram’s geographical profile.’

  Andy tugged at one of his earlobes. ‘You say he has a record. Does it include any precursor behaviours?’

  ‘Not for sexual assault. Unless you’re going to tell me that Taking Without Consent and Public Disorder are predictive of rape?’

  He shook his head, as she knew he would.

  ‘When he was eighteen,’ she continued, ‘he was with a bunch of lads the same age. Man City football supporters. They went to watch an away game in Leeds and got involved in a fight with a gang of Leeds supporters. Northcote stole a car so he and his mates could flee the scene, allegedly to escape from the avenging Leeds fans as much as from the police. The car was eventually stopped on the M62. He received a conditional discharge, a £500 fine, and was banned from all football stadiums for five years. Nothing since then.’

  ‘How the hell did he get a job installing security systems?’ Max wondered.

  ‘That’s one of the things I intend to find out,’ she said. ‘I’m going to interview him later this morning.’

  She pointed to the second photo.

  ‘This one’s yours, Max. His name is Zachary Tobias. Twenty-nine years of age. Single. As you can probably tell, he’s of mixed heritage. Specifically, second-generation British Asian-African. Born and raised in Blackburn. He works as a motorbike courier for a firm that specialises in scientific supplies and medical emergencies. That includes delivering blood products to hospitals and research laboratories.’

  ‘Including universities?’ asked Max.

  ‘Especially university medical and dental schools, labs and science parks. He lives in Bury. Almost the centre of the geoprofile locus. According to his employers, he’s visited all of the campuses associated with our victims. He visited two of them on the actual days on which the victim was abducted, but since all of the abductions took place in the early hours that’s not particularly relevant. The firm provides the bike. He does have a car of his own. A BMW 3 Series estate.’

  ‘What about his physique?’ asked Andy.

  ‘He fits in terms of height and build,’ she said. ‘They all do.’

  ‘Does he know we want to interview him?’ asked Max.

  ‘No. I thought I’d let you break the news and make the arrangements,’ she said.

  ‘I think I’ll find out where he’s going to be today, and just turn up and surprise him,’ he said. ‘See how he reacts.’

  Andy pointed to one of the photos. ‘Number three interests me. There’s something about his expression. What’s his story?’

  ‘Forty-six years of age,’ Jo said. ‘Married, and American. He’s over here on a three-year teaching scholarship funded by the American Creative Writers’ International Foundation.’

  Professor Harrison Hill stared through piercing blue eyes over his right shoulder, with a smile that verged on a sardonic sneer. His blond hair looked as though it had been blown into a tousled effect intended to convey artlessness. The overall effect was quite the opposite. It looked pretentious.

  Jo held up her tablet.

  ‘This is an extract from his bio on the website: “Best known for his short stories including Around the Moon in Forty Nights, Whistling in the Mangroves and Lion Hunting in Alaska, he’s also the author of three novels: The Organ Grinder’s Monkey, Whistler’s Father and Whatever Happened to Fenella Goodyear? The latter earned him the Wurlitzer Prize 2013. His work has appeared in The Edinburgh Review, GQ, The Cambridge Literary Review, Harper’s, The New York Times, Granta, Playboy and The Atlantic.” ’

  She stopped reading.

  ‘His current role is as Visiting Fellow in English and Creative Writing for the North West Universities Networked Learning Community.’

  ‘Which gives him access to all of the colleges?’ said Max.

  ‘Exactly. He also does a semester teaching at each university in turn. At the moment, he’s at Manchester University.’

  ‘How did he come to our attention?’ asked Ram.

  ‘His name came up in a number of allegations made following my appeal to the public. Three students from two different universities claim that he not only behaved inappropriately towards them, but that they believed he was also stalking them.’

  ‘In what way inappropriate?’ asked Andy.

  ‘Offering extramural one-to-one tutorials. Plying them with alcohol. Implying that he could ensure good grades in exchange for favours.’

  ‘Par for the course then,’ said Ram.

  ‘Don’t be so cynical,’ Max told him.

  ‘Cynical?’ Ram retorted. ‘I had a psychology tutor who was just like that.’

  ‘Did you report her?’ asked Jo.

  ‘Him,’ said Ram. ‘I reported him. Didn’t do any good though. Apparently it was all a misunderstanding. Cultural differences were cited.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I changed tutors, and majored in criminology.’

  ‘Our gain,’ said Andy.

  ‘The most significant allegation,’ Jo continued, ‘was that he pulled his car up alongside one of these students and offered her a lift. It was gone midnight. She’d been drinking and was obviously unsteady.’

  ‘What happened?’ asked Max.

  ‘Her friend pitched up and told him that they were fine. She was with her and they were going to wait for a taxi.’

  ‘Good for her,’ said Andy. ‘How did he react?’

  ‘Apparently he drove off in a huff. Never mentioned it again. Guess what colour the student’s hair is?’

  ‘Blonde?’ said Ram. ‘And I bet she’s tiny?’

  ‘Five three and a half.’

  ‘Bingo!’ he said.

  Max scratched the side of his face.

  ‘You said he was married?’

  ‘Is married,’ Jo replied.

  ‘So what’s he doing cruising the streets after midnight?’

  ‘We can ask him that together,’ she said. ‘As soon as we’ve finished with the other two.’

  Chapter 21

  The staff lounge was empty except for a woman at the far end working in one of the study carrels. Nathan
Northcote looked confused.

  ‘I told you. I was at my mate’s. I’m surprised you haven’t checked with him.’

  He was annoyed on two counts. Firstly, because he thought it had all been sorted the night he had been stopped, and secondly, because it was embarrassing being told that someone from the National Crime Agency wanted a word with him when he was in the middle of fixing an alarm-sensor fault in the Vice Chancellor’s office.

  ‘We have,’ said Jo. ‘I’m not here about that.’

  He looked apprehensive.

  ‘So why are you here?’

  ‘Mr Northcote,’ she said. ‘Sit down, and I’ll tell you.’

  He slumped on to the chair opposite. Though he bordered on being skinny, his height could easily be intimidating. Was he too tall and too thin to be their unsub, she wondered? He rested his arms insolently over the back of the chair.

  ‘Go on then,’ he said. ‘I haven’t got all day.’

  Right, she decided, if that was how he wanted to play it.

  ‘I’m investigating a series of abductions and serious sexual assaults,’ she said, a little more loudly than necessary. ‘You match the description that we have of the perpetrator, and you also appear to have privileged access to places of interest connected with a number of these crimes. If you’d rather we did this in an interview room back at . . .’

  ‘No! God, no!’ he said, looking anxiously over his shoulder. When he turned back, he looked genuinely shaken.

  ‘Good,’ she said, lowering her voice. ‘I take it you don’t mind if I record this? It’ll allow me to listen carefully to what you have to say, although I may still need to make a few notes.’

  Nathan Northcote looked suspiciously at the tablet, but nodded his agreement.

  ‘Do I get a copy?’

  ‘When we’ve finished, I will take you through the salient points, and ask you to confirm them as your formal statement. In the event that they may be used at some time in the future in relation to the prosecution of a third party or yourself, then you and your legal adviser will receive copies of both the recording and your statement.’