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

by LJ Ross

  Where to begin? In the way of David Copperfield? I was born, I grew up … but really, the details of my unremarkable childhood aren’t important. I have no family, none that share my blood.

  All my life has been spent masked, my true nature hidden beneath the clothes and personality, which I wore as a cloak every morning and took off each night. How can I describe to you, my friend, the mounting pressure and the growing need, which built each day and demanded release?

  If only there had been another to understand, to really empathise with the extraordinary mind I was born into?

  Perhaps, now, I have found that friend.

  With very best wishes,

  Doctor K. Edwards”

  He flicked back to the original letter written by Colin Hart and tried to understand what led a man to idolise a killer.

  “Dear Mr Edwards,

  I trust that this letter finds you well, or as well as can be, given the circumstances.

  I hope that you will not think me too presumptuous in writing to you, as a stranger. I have always harboured a keen interest in understanding man’s progression from the social norm towards that which is not readily accepted and I wondered if you would be willing to discuss your own evolution?

  I look forward to hearing from you, in due course.

  Yours faithfully,

  Colin Hart”

  “He calls it ‘evolution’ or ‘progression’,” Phillips muttered.

  “Huh?”

  “Colin Hart. He writes to ask Edwards about what he calls his ‘progression’ towards killing. That’s not normal, is it?”

  Ryan picked up on the nuance immediately.

  “Ordinary people would consider his actions to be a descent, or a degenerative failure of some kind. Not many would consider killing to be an evolution, or a progression.”

  “Colin does,” Phillips grunted.

  While Phillips continued to leaf through the letters in search of anything meaningful, Ryan cast his eye over the detailed record of all post delivered from, or to, Keir Edwards. There was a separate record of all Internet usage, which would take a lot longer to go through, alongside a telephone record of all calls made or received using the prison telephones.

  Of course, that didn’t account for any unregistered mobile phone that Edwards may have laid his hands upon. Ryan wasn’t naïve enough to think that contraband didn’t find its way into the wrong hands, particularly when those hands belonged to someone as manipulative as Edwards.

  Ryan traced a fingertip down the list of entries, noting the letters described as ‘fan mail’ and told himself not to feel disgust, or shock. After all the things he had seen in his thirty-five years, there ought to be nothing that could shock him.

  Inexplicably, women wrote to Edwards on a regular basis.

  Ryan continued running through the list, until he found what he was looking for.

  “There!”

  Phillips looked across.

  “Outgoing mail, dated 1st June. One postcard image of Sycamore Gap, taken on Midsummer’s Night. Recipient was Colin Hart. No written content.”

  “He sent an empty postcard?”

  “Colin had it on him,” Ryan spat. “He had the postcard there, in his rucksack, when he found Amy Llewellyn.”

  Phillips whooshed out a breath.

  “Midsummer’s Day – that sometimes falls on the solstice. They can be the same thing.”

  Ryan swore.

  “Edwards sent him there. Why else send an empty postcard? It was a map, telling Colin to get himself up to Sycamore Gap on the solstice.”

  “Sly bastard,” Phillips breathed.

  “Call MacKenzie. Tell her we’re on our way back to the station. Any word from Faulkner on forensics?”

  “Still nothing,” Phillips shook his head. “You want me to chase him again? We can’t hold Colin much longer without charging him.”

  Ryan knew it.

  “Try to light a fire up his arse. He should have Colin’s prints and swabs by now – tell him to hurry the fuck up and compare them with the DNA on Amy’s bracelet, for a start, then compare it with anything found on Claire. We’re more likely to find something on her.”

  “All over it.”

  * * *

  Arthur Gregson slid his mobile phone into the breast pocket of his blazer and watched Ryan pull his car into the staff car park from his vantage point on the fourth floor of CID Headquarters. The day had been fine, but as afternoon slid into evening there had been light rainfall, leaving a glimmering sheen of moisture on the ground, which glinted in the last of the day’s sunshine. Ryan unfolded his tall frame from a snazzy little grey convertible and tucked a large folder under one arm as he strode purposefully in the direction of the main entrance. Without pausing in his tracks, his head shifted upwards and met Gregson’s gaze. No smiles were exchanged, no raised arms or waved hands.

  That was not, of itself, too concerning. Ryan had always been a reserved sort of man, prone to bouts of antisocial behaviour and self-imposed seclusion. Yet, in recent times, he seemed to have softened. He had cultivated a kind of easy camaraderie with his colleagues, which Gregson was not privy to.

  Perhaps, Gregson thought, social exclusion was one of the downsides of superior rank. On the other hand, it could signify something much more concerning: that Ryan knew, or had begun to suspect, that the carefully constructed world around him was built upon a foundation of sand.

  He thought of the tense conversation he had just held and reminded himself to dispose of the cheap ‘pay-as-you-go’ mobile phone, which was burning a hole in his pocket. There could be no slip-ups, not now. There was too much at stake, the least of which was his job title. In certain circles, punishment was swift, brutal and didn’t make allowances for rank.

  * * *

  Within two minutes of entering the police station, Ryan was informed that Colin Hart had been allowed to return home. His solicitor, a well-heeled young woman from a premier legal firm in the city, had made several loud declarations about the shoddy treatment of her client and had stalked out of the building with Colin meekly in tow. Armed with new information following their visit to HMP Frankland, Ryan and Phillips walked in the direction of Faulkner’s office to seek further ammunition to bring Colin Hart back in, this time under arrest. They found his staff, heads bent diligently over microscopes, but no Faulkner.

  “Damn. Is he out on a call? If so, why are the rest of his team still here?” Ryan isolated one, shifty-looking young lad sitting across the room who was studiously avoiding looking across at either of them.

  “You!”

  His eyes snapped up.

  “Where’s Faulkner?”

  “I-I-I … He’s out, sir.”

  “I-I-I want to know where,” Ryan parodied, a bit unkindly.

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  He looked as if he was telling the truth, and the rest of the crowd looked equally devoid of useful information.

  Or, so he thought.

  “Sir?”

  A homely-looking woman edged forwards.

  “I was hoping to speak to Tom about this,” she confessed, feeling guilty and disloyal. “But he hasn’t been back in the office for a few hours and I … well, really think we’ve hit on something important.”

  “Go on.”

  “It’s to do with Amy Llewellyn’s bracelet, sir. We cross-checked the DNA swab Colin Hart gave us earlier and we’ve found that it matches one of the unidentified LCN DNA samples found on the bracelet. It’s a tiny sample, a few skin cells only, but …”

  “Exactly. But.” To avoid kicking any living or inanimate objects, he stared unseeingly at a nondescript landscape print of the Northumbrian coastline, which hung inside a plain wooden frame on the back wall of the room.

  He should have been told the moment the results had come in. They’d let Colin Hart walk free because they didn’t have enough to hold him but, ironically, the forensic evidence had been sitting in a petri dish upstairs. When he looked back from
the picture on the wall, the CSI woman was practically quaking in her rubber-soled shoes. He flashed her a smile, in sympathy.

  “That was excellent work. You did the right thing, letting me know.”

  Her skin turned a slow shade of red. She might have been a mother of three, two of them sons, but that didn’t mean she had lost her appreciation for a man who looked like the Chief Inspector. She was only human, after all.

  “Thank you,” she said. “We’ll keep working on the rest.”

  Ryan turned back to Phillips.

  “Should be enough for an arrest and a search warrant. Get on it, will you?”

  “I’ll have a chat with the magistrate,” Phillips executed a funny little dance, in anticipation.

  “What the hell was that?”

  “You’ve never seen Singin’ in the Rain?” Phillips asked, in a shocked tone.

  “Sure, I’ve seen it,” Ryan replied. “Only I don’t remember Gene Kelly doing anything like that.”

  “Well, you’ve either got it, or you ain’t.”

  Ryan couldn’t help but grin.

  * * *

  Geraldine Hart could hardly breathe, a state of affairs arising from a combination of stale atmosphere and the simple fact that her heart struggled to pump the oxygen around her body. Her chest heaved and shuddered as her lungs tried to open and draw the air into her morbidly obese body.

  All the while, she watched daytime television from the relative comfort of her orthopaedic mattress. Beside her rested an empty tray, which formerly held all manner of edible goodies, but now only the wrappers remained. She was very aware that her incontinence pad needed changing; in fact, it had for quite some time now and the smell was beginning to bother even her unfussed nose. Colin had been absent for ages. The ornate clock on the mantel, sandwiched between two porcelain figurines, told her that he had been gone for nearly four hours, and it was now approaching eight o’clock.

  Past dinnertime, she thought pitiably.

  Just then, her well-trained ear picked out the sound of the front door opening and then shutting quietly downstairs.

  She stabbed at the volume button on the television remote to turn down the sound and opened her mouth to yell.

  “Colin! It’s about time you got home. I’ve been waiting for hours!”

  There was no answering reply.

  “Colin? Did you hear me?”

  Geraldine heard the creak of footsteps on the carpeted stairway and turned to reprimand her son. When the door swung open, she began her tirade.

  Almost immediately, she was silenced.

  A short time later, the door swung shut again and there came the sound of retreating footsteps treading quickly down the stairs.

  * * *

  Colin bade his solicitor farewell and thanked her for the lift home. He didn’t notice the unmarked police car parking a little further down the street, which Ryan had ordered as a precaution. He stood for a long while on the short gravel driveway leading up to the wide front door of the house, which had been his home for the past forty-four years. It was a prison; a gilded cage from which he seemed destined never to escape. He looked up to the first floor bay window with its frilly lace blinds and knew that the author of his present tragedy slept there, a mountain of sallow flesh and wasted life.

  He forced himself to put one reluctant foot in front of the other and let himself into the house, closing the door behind him with a quiet click.

  He thought he heard his mother calling out his name, her jarring monotone scraping along the edge of his nerves. He put his hands to his ears, to drown out the sound.

  “Ssh,” he muttered. “Shut up. Just shut up.”

  He could hear nothing when he took his hands away again and he walked to the foot of the hallway stairs, head bowed. A headache throbbed in his temples and the ache spread through his neck and the base of his skull. Memories of being in the police car and at the station surrounded by police staff played on his mind, interspersed with flashing images of Claire. He sucked in his lips to stop the weak tears, which wanted to flow as he remembered the times he had spied on her, late at night. Or, the times he had followed her to the bus stop, claiming that he was catching the same bus as she, despite the obvious fact that he owned a car. The memories culminated in the last time he had seen her, on Sunday evening. He had finally plucked up the courage to go into town, to visit her at the Diner.

  He had worn what he thought of as his trendiest gear – new jeans and a matching denim shirt. He had heard somewhere that denim-on-denim was in fashion. He had even styled his hair, being careful to smooth over the bald patch at the top of his head.

  She hadn’t been happy to see him.

  “Colin, why are you here?”

  “I came to see you, Claire. I had to see you.”

  “Colin, I’ve told you so many times before. I just don’t like you that way.”

  “I only want to be your friend.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea. Why don’t you go home? You can see I’m trying to work.”

  A heavyset bouncer had materialised from nowhere and taken a firm grip of his arm.

  “Think it’s about time you slung yer hook, isn’t it, mate?” He’d jeered. “I better not find you lurking around here, again. Now, bugger off!”

  The humiliation had been complete when he had been shunted out onto the street, rejected by Claire, rejected by her world.

  Colin had snivelled, the tears rolling down his cheeks in salty tracks while he’d wished to be stronger, smarter, better looking … anything that would make him more worthy of Claire’s affection. Then, he had dried those tears on the sleeve of his new denim shirt and had pulled himself upright. He had friends; strong, powerful friends and women who loved him, albeit online.

  Perhaps, it was she who was not worthy of him.

  Back in the present, Colin rapped his forehead against the hard wood of the newel post to try to dispel the images.

  He thought he heard his mother calling out again and his teeth dug painfully into the tender flesh of his tongue to prevent an angry retort from escaping. His hand shook as it gripped the bannister and he made the slow journey upstairs. The headache was turning into a migraine, he thought distractedly. His eyes were blurry and his ears were buzzing. Still, he finished the journey to his mother’s room and pushed the door open.

  Less than five minutes’ later, he pulled the door smartly shut behind him again. He rushed downstairs, wild-eyed, without direction or purpose.

  “M – Mother …” he began, chattering to himself in the quiet house. He turned towards the front door and then backwards again, towards the kitchen. He didn’t know what he was looking for; perhaps to get her a glass of water, or something tempting to eat so that she would wake up again, but both were forgotten when he beheld the contents of his fridge.

  “No. No,” he pointed at the small glass vials, which stood in a proud line on the top shelf, backing away and slamming the fridge door shut again.

  Confused, panicked, he ran into his sitting room and headed for the desk. Before he got there, he nearly tripped over the large, navy rucksack that was strewn on the floor, its contents spilling onto the cream carpet.

  He bent down to look more closely and picked up a heap of women’s clothes. When his fingers brushed the cheap pink satin skirt worn by waitresses at the All American Diner, he fell backwards onto the floor.

  “Claire?” He saw her image in his mind, wearing the skirt on the day she had died. “I didn’t. No. No, I didn’t. I couldn’t.”

  But he remembered the hate he had felt after she had rejected him. He thought of his most secret, hidden fantasies and the encouraging words of the man who had understood them.

  CHAPTER 15

  MacKenzie stayed long after everyone else had packed in for the day, poring over the grainy CCTV footage which had, miraculously, been delivered by a spotty-faced youth on behalf of the owner of the All American Diner.

  Her optimism that Jimmy Moffa had tur
ned a corner in his life was short-lived, once it became clear that the footage had been tampered with. Befitting the high-spec camera system circling the Diner, it began with crystal clear images of Claire Burns clearing tables and mopping floors after her shift had ended. It showed her retrieving her small handbag from the staff locker room, before she waved a friendly ‘goodbye’ to her colleagues. She couldn’t have known that it would be the last time.

  The footage showed Claire opening the main doors to leave, then it skipped and jumped, the image blurring so badly that no figures could be seen. After a time-lapse of around three minutes, the exterior camera showed an empty street outside, where Jimmy stood smoking a cigarette while his driver waited from the comfort of a white Porsche Cayenne.

  MacKenzie would send the footage to the techies to see if they could do anything to clear it up, but all that would take time. As things stood, the only thing that it could confirm was that Claire Burns left the All American Diner at 11:33p.m.

  Disappointed, MacKenzie moved onto the communications she had received from the tech department about ANPR footage. There was a snarky e-mail from one of the I.T. managers, telling her in no uncertain terms that there was no way he could provide her with the footage she needed before the end of the week.

  In other words, she had precisely nothing to contribute in the way of visual evidence, no leads about potential vehicles and certainly nothing they could use to incriminate Colin Hart.

  Ever the realist, she decided that it was no use crying over spilt milk, so she collected her things and turned off her computer for the night. The hallways were quiet, empty of the usual bustle of swift footsteps and echoed sounds of industrious typing or police banter. The overhead lighting had reverted to night-mode, so instead of shining a garish banana yellow, they shone a murky grey-white light.

  MacKenzie locked the Incident Room behind her and made quickly for the elevator, before remembering that it too had been shut down for the evening.

  That left the stairwell.

  She recognised the signs of heightened stress in her own body and put it down to the cumulative effects of a disturbing few days. It was always unpleasant to find a fresh body, and her experience with Colin Hart had only compounded her distress, regardless of training and experience. So, when faced with the prospect of a dark, empty flight of stairs as her only means of getting out of CID Headquarters, she was understandably hesitant. It was classic Hitchcock, after all.