Sycamore Gap: A DCI Ryan Mystery (The DCI Ryan Mysteries Book 2)

by LJ Ross

Phillips crossed his arms and turned to the man who, despite being fifteen years younger, was his professional superior. That didn’t seem to matter; Ryan never pulled rank and Phillips never felt the pinch. They had a mutual respect. Hell, more than that.

  They were family.

  “Son,” Phillips’ gravelly voice gentle, designed to soothe. “I know what’s going on inside your head.”

  Ryan huffed out a half-laugh.

  “No, you don’t.”

  “You think I can’t remember?” There was a layer of anger underneath the gentle tone, an undercurrent of frustration. “I’ve got my memories. Every one of us took memories home with us and woke up with them in the morning. That last day –”

  “Frank.” Ryan held up a hand, in protest.

  “That last day,” Phillips persevered, “I’ll take with me ‘til I die. Seeing you there like that, dealing with all of it … and then the aftermath,” Phillips shook his head, tried to find the words. “I never told you I was proud.”

  Ryan looked down at his feet, eyes burning.

  “I was proud that you stopped.”

  The breath shuddered out of his body, as memories flooded in. Ryan, covered in his sister’s blood and his own, using his fists on the man who had killed her.

  “I wanted to end the man who ended her.”

  “I know,” Phillips agreed, looking out across the car park at the people coming and going. “But you didn’t.”

  “It was you who stopped me.”

  Phillips shook his head.

  “There isn’t a person alive who could have stopped you, unless you’d wanted to.”

  Ryan looked up again.

  “Never thought of that, did you? You stopped yourself. You brought him in, even though everything inside you wanted to finish him, to take your revenge or whatever you want to call it. You did the right thing.”

  They were both silent for a few minutes.

  “He’ll rot in prison. That has to be enough.”

  Phillips nodded. Doctor Keir Edwards, the man known in the media as The Hacker of the North or Doctor Death, depending on the tabloid, would spend the rest of his life in HMP Frankland, the maximum security prison for Category A criminals in the nearby city of Durham. Last summer, after a killing spree during which five young, attractive women had been found dismembered in their own homes, he had taken his final victim: Natalie Finley-Ryan. He had stalked her, tortured her and finally killed her to punish the detective who had the temerity to try to stop him.

  Ryan had been too late to save his sister and Phillips knew that would haunt him for the rest of his days.

  “We don’t know for sure that Amy Llewellyn is one of his tally,” Phillips said reasonably.

  “He had photographs of her in his private stash,” Ryan retorted. “We always assumed that he had killed her.”

  “He never admitted to it. He was usually one for crowing loudly about the women he’d killed.”

  That was true, Ryan thought.

  “He never explained how he came by the photographs and he never admitted to having had a relationship with her. He clammed up.”

  There had been a pile of photographs, Ryan remembered belatedly, found in a private album at Edwards’ home. He couldn’t understand how he had forgotten Amy’s name, or her face, when he could recall the detail of Keir Edwards’ police statements by rote.

  Indeed, Ryan made it his business to know everything there was to know about Keir Edwards; his age, his habits, how many sheets of toilet roll he used on a weekly basis in his two-by-four cell. Edwards wouldn’t so much as fart without him knowing about it, for the rest of his miserable life.

  Yet, he didn’t know the answer to whether Edwards had killed the girl who was now reduced to little more than bone matter, lying in an impersonal room upstairs being examined by men and women in white coats.

  Just as his sister had been.

  He closed his eyes and Natalie’s face swam to the surface. His eyelids snapped open again and he groped around for something to take his mind away from the horror of remembering that last day. He caught sight of Phillips bravely sampling the gelatinous muck which passed for vending machine coffee and mustered a smile.

  “Come on,” he said. “Time to visit Amy’s family.”

  * * *

  The Llewellyns lived in an immaculate, semi-detached house in an upmarket cul-de-sac on the outskirts of Newcastle. The gardens were tidy and the smart car on the driveway sparkled from a fresh coat of wax.

  It was always the same, Ryan thought, as he followed Mrs Llewellyn into the spacious front room. Here, all was tidy too, not a speck of dust in sight. Everything was decorated in shades of cream and unimaginative prints hung above the feature fireplace and the white leather sofa. There was always a sixth sense, a premonition which all families of the missing felt when plain-clothed police officers walked the long journey towards their front door. They watched from behind half-closed curtains, unsure whether to answer the bell.

  For Rose Llewellyn, the sound of that simple chime signalled an end to the interminable purgatory of hope and despair she had occupied for ten years. Not a day had gone by without her imagining that her daughter, Amy, would suddenly return to them after a terrible incident. Until the moment that Ryan rang the doorbell, Rose had filled the long hours obsessively cleaning every surface and orifice of her home. Just recently, she had taken to trimming the lawn with kitchen scissors.

  Before Amy left them, Rose had been a pharmacist working in Newcastle. After she realised that Amy wasn’t coming home, she’d had her first breakdown and since then hadn’t been able to sustain the kind of office hours that her job demanded.

  She told herself that looking after her home and family was just as important, but even thinking of the word ‘family’ would often reduce her to tears.

  So, she cleaned. She tidied. She hoped.

  Until today.

  Ryan would not have thought himself well-equipped to deal with grieving relatives but his natural reserve was perhaps the key to his success, for when Rose looked up at the tall, remote stranger, she saw empathy. Beyond that, she saw tenacity.

  Ryan and Phillips waited until she had seated herself before settling themselves in a couple of easy chairs.

  “Mrs Llewellyn, would you like one of us to contact your husband?”

  “Steven – Steven is just outside in the garden –”

  The man in question stepped through the patio doors at the other end of the room and, recognising their visitors instantly, he moved to take his wife’s outstretched hand.

  “You’re here about Amy.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “Yes. I regret to inform you that we have identified a body we found early this morning to be that of your daughter, Amy. You both have our deepest sympathies.”

  The words might have been hackneyed, but that didn’t make them any less true. Though in her heart she had known, Rose felt the hot tears rising and her breathing hitched in great, shuddering sobs. Steven stood beside her, his face shuttered and oddly expressionless.

  Phillips felt a knot rise in his own throat and he looked away to clear his head. Every police officer hated this side of the job; it was the very worst part of it and it never got any easier with practice.

  “How – how?” Rose managed.

  Ryan’s jaw clenched. They always wanted to know and he never wanted to tell them.

  “We believe your daughter was murdered.”

  Rose Llewellyn sagged against her husband, whose arm came tighter around her shoulders while he visibly kept himself in firm control. Without a word, Phillips stood to offer her a small packet of tissues from his inner breast pocket.

  “What have you got so far? Tell me what has been done.” Steven snatched the tissues up and passed them to his wife.

  In their long experience, relatives tended to react to terrible news in one of two ways and it seemed that they were seeing the perfect example of each. Rose had broken down emotionally, the natur
al reaction of a mother who had finally been told what she had long suspected: that her child had been taken from her. It didn’t matter how old that child was, the anguish was always there. Steven, on the other hand, buried his grief in anger. He looked at them both with green eyes that were bone dry and venomous.

  “We’re doing all we can,” Ryan answered evenly. He drew out a small card with the contact details of a Family Liaison Officer and placed it on the coffee table, remaining watchful as they dealt with the worst news of their lives.

  “Have you got any suspects?”

  “We are at a very early stage in our investigation,” he replied. “Rest assured, we will be doing all we can to bring your daughter’s killer to justice.”

  “Fuck that! Fuck that!” Llewellyn burst out, his skin turning red beneath his tan. “You know as well as I do, it was Keir Edwards who killed her! That bastard killed her as sure as the Pope is Catholic. He’s probably laughing himself to sleep about it while my taxes pay for his cushy little cell! Now, do your pissing job and get the evidence to prove it!”

  Rose lifted a hand in a mute appeal for him to stop, but he was on a roll.

  “That goes especially for you,” he hissed, jabbing a finger towards Ryan. “I thought that after what happened to your sister, you would have understood how it feels.”

  Mid-tirade, Llewellyn’s eye fell on the single picture of his daughter, which stood proudly in a silver frame on the coffee table. The fight drained out of him, to be replaced with a dull, numbing pain.

  “It’s always the way, isn’t it?” He pinned them with a merciless stare. “You coppers look after your own, but when it comes to anybody else, you don’t give a shit.”

  Phillips opened his mouth to deny the accusation, feeling the burn of what was wholly untrue. Ryan gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head to shut down any angry replies that were brewing. For, despite what Steven Llewellyn thought, he did understand. He understood the pain of loss and that first-hand knowledge strengthened his resolve. Right now, Llewellyn needed to let out his rage, his impotent fury at what could not be changed.

  Ryan had been there himself.

  When neither detective gave him any response besides silent compassion, Llewellyn looked down at his wife. He hadn’t been able to change what happened to Amy and he hadn’t been able to stop Rose’s gradual decline. She was painfully thin and frail and he knew that, once again, she was forgetting to eat. She was also trying to hide the fact that she was struggling to go beyond the edge of the garden and he could tell that agoraphobia was beginning to gain a hold on her. She had been obsessive for years now, about cleaning in particular. Since Amy, she hadn’t felt able to trust anyone aside from him.

  Now, he was once again being forced to accept a position on the periphery, unable to be a main player, even in the search for his daughter’s killer. He had failed as a father and as a husband.

  “I understand,” he said finally, rubbing his wife’s cold fingers.

  “You have the means to be very helpful to our investigation,” Ryan reminded him, seeing the dejection. “It would help us enormously to know as much as possible about Amy, her life, her habits and so on.”

  Steven scrubbed his hands across his face and belatedly remembered that he had forgotten to wash his hands since weeding the garden. His cheeks were probably tracked with mud.

  “I need to clear my head, first, if you don’t mind,” he muttered. “I’ll make a pot of tea, then I’ll answer all your questions.”

  “Thanks.”

  * * *

  “What did you make of them?”

  Phillips asked the question as he slipped into the passenger seat of Ryan’s car, admiring the leather as it moulded itself lovingly to his rear end.

  Ryan sat behind the wheel and considered the question.

  “We were never going to get anything useful from Rose Llewellyn, at least not today,” he began. “She’ll need a day or so to come to terms with the worst of the shock, before she’ll start to remember the answers to some of the questions we might have. In the meantime, we can look over her old statements from 2005.”

  “Aye, that’s a plan,” Phillips agreed.

  “As for the husband, he seemed a bit more of a cold fish, until his outburst.”

  “Uh huh,” Phillips looked pointedly at his SIO. “Men dealing with emotional trauma by repressing their feelings. Remind you of anyone?”

  “Not even remotely,” Ryan had to smile. “But, on that basis, you make a fair point.”

  “Only one picture of Amy that I could see and they’ve turned her room into a spare bedroom. Bit weird, isn’t it? Families usually keep their rooms the same, hoping they’ll be coming home and all that.”

  “Hmm.”

  There was a short silence, during which time Ryan drummed his fingers against the wheel and rolled his shoulders. Phillips began a silent countdown.

  Five … four … three … two …

  “Run a background check on both of them and re-interview them tomorrow or Tuesday. Recall the original case files and cross-check with the findings there.”

  “Already done, boss.”

  Ryan slanted Phillips a look. His sergeant was looking particularly smug.

  “If you’re angling for a pay rise, you can kiss my hairy arse.”

  “If it would get me a pay rise, I’d consider it.”

  CHAPTER 4

  The commander of the Northumbria Police Constabulary’s CID division had been expecting Ryan’s visit. Detective Chief Superintendent Arthur Gregson was in his late-fifties, though his face held few lines, most of which had been dug in the early years when he had walked the beat. Nowadays, his skin was weathered by the sun, from weekends spent tending to his extensive garden or from the twice-yearly holiday to the South of France, which his wife insisted was ‘good for his constitution’. He owed his trim physique to regular tennis sessions with friends at his club and the beers that followed were offset by the militant diet his wife imposed on them both.

  Low cholesterol, he thought with a sneer.

  While he briefly considered the possibility of sneaking a kebab on his way home, he linked his broad fingers together loosely atop his desk. When the expected knock came at the door, he was ready.

  “Come,” he barked.

  Ryan entered and moved to stand before him, a soldier to his captain.

  “Take a seat, Ryan.”

  “Thank you, sir.” He settled his long body into one of the uncomfortable olive green chairs arranged opposite Gregson’s desk. He noted that his commander was dressed in casual clothes, which was something of a first, before remembering that it was a Sunday.

  “You’ve come to talk to me about the body found inside Hadrian’s Wall.”

  “Yes, sir. I understand that you have already spoken with Professor Freeman –”

  “And you want to know why I didn’t consult you before ordering half of the force to attend the site?”

  Ryan’s jaw snapped shut.

  “Call it a blessing, call it a curse,” Gregson shrugged his wide shoulders. “Part of my job is to keep the public happy. Last thing any of us needs is this Professor kicking up a fuss, calling in the local media to complain about the department.”

  “Empty threats.”

  “Of course they were,” Gregson agreed with a flick of his wrist. “Still, you pick your battles.”

  Ryan nodded.

  “I trust you’ve been able to get a handle on things?”

  “I believe so. You’ve seen my summary,” he referred to the e-mail he had sent earlier in the day. “The forensic archaeological team have spent all day excavating the site. The remains were transferred to the pathologist at the RVI, who has been working with an anthropologist to produce a report. I have their preliminary observations already and should know more within the next forty-eight hours. The ground operation was overseen by Faulkner and his team of CSIs.”

  “That’s fast work,” Gregson commented mildly.

>   Ryan paused, glancing away then back again. He knew that there was a question somewhere in that statement.

  “Sir, following your lead, I felt it best to expedite the excavation in order to avoid any undue delay or further loss of evidence. Despite the fact that we found no identifying items on or around the victim’s body, we have nonetheless been able to identify her very quickly.”

  Gregson’s face broke into what could loosely be described as a smile.

  “That’s good, very good indeed. Who is she?”

  “Her name is Amy Llewellyn, sir. Next of kin have been informed.”

  “That should make life fairly simple,” Gregson said with satisfaction. “Hopefully, Faulkner will uncover some useful evidence from the site and you’ll have your man in no time.”

  “We may already have him.”

  “Is that so? This is one for the record books.”

  “It’s Edwards, sir.”

  “Impossible,” Gregson replied without inflection. “You’re looking at a ten-year-old body. This girl died years before Edwards became active.”

  “That we know of,” Ryan put in quietly. “Edwards had in his possession nude photographs of Amy Llewellyn. It would be a safe assumption that she is one of his victims.”

  There was short silence, punctuated only by the sounds of the world outside, everyday comings and goings. A pigeon cooed on the window ledge.

  “What do you propose to do?”

  Ryan had already considered this; he had weighed up the pros and cons, thought about the angles.

  “I have a team briefing scheduled for six-thirty. Faulkner’s CSIs might have made some progress by then, or within the next forty-eight hours at the latest. In the meantime, Phillips and I will look into the victim’s cold case file from 2005 and start to build up a picture. After then, should the evidence support my theory, I plan to conduct an interview with Edwards.”

  Gregson’s eyebrows shot up into his hairline.

  “You only have a photograph to support your suspicion, which Edwards denied taking. In contrast to his extremely vocal confessions to the murders of five women, he denies killing this girl. Put bluntly, Ryan, unless you can come up with something forensic to support your theory, it’s going to look like a vendetta.” Gregson didn’t hold his punches. “Look,” he spread his hands, palms up. “The events of last year were traumatic, they affected you on a personal level, understandably so.”