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

by LJ Ross

  “Is everything alright?”

  “I … Look, I’m sorry to bother you at work –”

  “Hearing from you is never unwelcome,” his tone softened, wrapping itself around her like velvet.

  “It’s probably nothing.”

  “You wouldn’t have called if it were nothing,” he urged.

  “There’s a car parked outside the house … well, a few doors down, but it’s been sitting there for over three hours. It might have been there even longer, but I was working in the study and then Mark visited –”

  “Bowers?”

  “Yes, he called in earlier,” she said distractedly. “But I came upstairs to change and I noticed the same car was sitting there. I first noticed it hours ago, when I opened the front door to Mark.”

  Busted. Sticky wicket. Rumbled. All of these words entered Ryan’s mind and he realised the time had come to own up.

  “Now don’t get upset –”

  “That’s never a good way to begin a sentence.” Her voice had cooled by a few degrees.

  “The car is probably one of ours,” he said. “I felt it was best to keep you under surveillance, just for the moment.”

  There was a taut silence at the other end of the line and he rubbed the palm of his hand over his face, already expecting the fall out.

  “I see.”

  That was it?

  “You do?”

  “I see that, once again, you thought that you could control my movements, in a high-handed manner. You seem to have developed a unique talent for it.”

  Ryan was taken aback.

  “I was concerned for your welfare. I wanted to be sure that you would come to no harm. Is that so wrong?”

  Anna sighed.

  “You don’t get it, do you? It would have been so much more meaningful if you had taken the trouble to have a five minute conversation with me about it first, before taking any unilateral decisions.”

  “It was my decision to make,” the words were out of his mouth before he could snatch them back.

  “I see.”

  Those two little words again. A dull throb started behind his eyes, so he closed them and tried to hear only her voice.

  “I didn’t mean that to sound so …”

  “Officious?” She offered.

  He clenched his teeth.

  “Listen, all I meant to say is that I had to take a decision in the heat of the moment. The evidence is pointing towards someone with an obsession around me, or cases I’ve worked on. That includes you. I won’t take any chances, Anna. You’re too important.”

  She heard the worry and the burden he carried, but this was a question of trust.

  “You probably don’t realise this,” she said, “but your boys aren’t quite as good as they think they are. I was aware of someone following me yesterday lunchtime. I’ve been paranoid and scared ever since, which rather defeats the object, doesn’t it?”

  There was a lengthy pause at the end of the line.

  “Yesterday lunchtime? You’re sure?”

  “Yes, of course I’m sure. I ran all the way back to the university, like an idiot.”

  “The surveillance team didn’t start until 3 p.m.”

  Anna felt an icy chill, like an insect crawling over her back.

  “The car sitting outside – what make is it?”

  “Ah, a dark blue BMW, I think.” She headed back over to the window.

  That settled it, he thought. The department didn’t spring for luxury vehicles and he happened to know that the two-man surveillance team attached to Anna were supposed to be driving a Ford.

  “Stay where you are and lock the doors, if you haven’t already.” He hesitated and then continued. “Arm yourself with something hard or sharp. I’m on my way.”

  Anna swallowed.

  “Ryan, the car outside. It’s gone.”

  “Stay put, I’ll be there in thirty minutes,” he said urgently.

  “Bollocks to that,” she stopped him dead in his tracks. “I’ll drive over to CID and meet you there. That way, you don’t have to abandon your investigation at a crucial moment but you still get to play Mother Goose. Win, win.”

  Ryan wanted to argue, but actually it made damn good sense.

  “See you in half an hour. Oh, and Anna?”

  “Yep?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Do it again and you will be,” she said smartly.

  “Understood.”

  As Anna tugged on a pair of jeans and threw some basic necessities into a canvas bag, the two policemen tasked with keeping her under observation were carb-loading in the nearest greasy spoon at the end of a double shift. The order to stand down had come from a well-spoken man quoting Ryan’s pass-code. In fact, with a subtle alteration of dialect, the disembodied voice had sounded just like him.

  After speaking with the two men, Ryan ran a standard vehicle check.

  And, wouldn’t you know it, a dark blue BMW 3-series was registered to the same person who had taken a call from Colin Hart the previous day.

  * * *

  A few minutes before five, Anna butted through the doors marked with a grubby sign reading, ‘Operation Hadrian’. Her nose was assaulted by the stale fumes of old sandwiches left forgotten on desktops and body odour, which hadn’t quite been disguised by the liberal spraying of air freshener. Outside, the clouds had cleared overhead to make way for temperate summer skies. It was somehow harder to believe that people could kill when the sun was shining.

  She saw Ryan gesticulating towards a large map of the region, which bore several bright red pins to indicate points of interest. He looked up as the doors opened, instantly alert. She wondered how he managed to walk through life without having some kind of major coronary incident, because she couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t been alert. Each morning, he woke and was instantaneously on-the-ball. There was no languorous, lazy awakening with a yawn and a rub of his eyes. Whereas she needed to be coaxed from her bed, Ryan’s rise into consciousness was prompt and he remained watchful and ready-for-action throughout the course of the day.

  He smiled across at her and the muscles of his face relaxed slightly, so that he appeared less intimidating and more like the man she had come to know.

  Then, he looked at what she held in her hands and struggled between conflicting feelings of gratitude and irritation. He had, after all, instructed her to come straight here and certainly had not sanctioned a stop off at the Pie Van to buy bulk provisions.

  The rest of his team were not so proud and, spotting her in the doorway, abandoned him to fall upon the steaming food like a pack of ravenous lions.

  She caught his eye and shrugged.

  “I see that no further introductions are necessary,” he mocked. “You’re a disgrace, every last one of you.”

  “Always said I liked this one,” Phillips mumbled, waving at her with a slice of corned beef pasty. He flipped the end of his tie over one shoulder, to prevent spillages.

  Talk turned back to the investigation and she noticed that MacKenzie was missing from the gathering. The room was full of police staff. She saw Faulkner sitting at a hot desk with a couple of CSIs leaning over his shoulder, while he pored over data on his computer. At another workstation, there was a bunch of other people she didn’t recognise but presumed to be analysts of some kind. Behind her, standing along the back wall of the room like a trio of unruly teenagers, was DCS Gregson, flanked by Jeff Pinter on one side and a man she vaguely recognised as being Paddy Donovan on the other. It was a full house.

  “Where’s Denise?” She whispered across to Frank, who couldn’t quite meet her eyes.

  “Ah, she’s just checking out a couple of things with Claire Burns’ family,” he said, for the benefit of their wider audience.

  Anna was puzzled. Why the shifty looks?

  “The word from Traffic is that our suspect has not been sighted from the air,” Ryan was saying. “No stolen vehicles in the area; no car, van or other rentals. There’s
been no card or ATM activity whatsoever on any of Colin’s known accounts in the last twelve hours.

  “He could have had some cash in the house,” somebody suggested.

  “Might have,” Ryan agreed. “More likely, he’s managed to hole up somewhere, or somebody helped to shelter him.”

  There were mutters around the room, given the prospect of an accomplice.

  “Faulkner? Give us a forensic summary, please.”

  The Senior CSI shuffled to the front of the room.

  “We have confirmed one of the DNA samples found on Amy Llewellyn’s bracelet as belonging to Colin Hart. A number of suspect items have also been found in Hart’s house, of the same type used to murder Claire Burns, such as a quantity of Lorazepam, which also ties in with the witness evidence that Hart had been stalking her for some time before she died. We spent the entire morning and early afternoon working over the crime scene at Number 32. Some of my team are still there, but I can tell you that the only prints found on the syringe used to kill Geraldine Hart belonged to her son, Colin.”

  “That syringe matches the size and shape of the puncture wound I found on Geraldine’s neck,” Pinter chucked in, from the back.

  “Thanks, Jeff,” Faulkner nodded, trying to pick up the flow of his speech again. “As I say, with the exception of one unidentified DNA sample on Amy’s bracelet and one unidentified print found inside Colin’s car, all other suspect prints and samples have been accounted for.”

  “Unidentified print?” This, from Gregson.

  “Yes, sir,” Faulkner sought out Gregson’s bland stare and nodded. “It could be nothing. We wouldn’t think anything of it, except for the fact that the rest of the house bears only two sets of prints: Colin’s and his mother’s. They were obviously a very private family, without visitors, so the existence of a third set was unusual.”

  “Nothing flagged on the database?”

  Faulkner gave a quick shake of his head.

  “Then, it was probably the mechanic who gave the car its MOT,” Gregson jeered.

  “How about fibres?” Ryan pointedly ignored the last remark from his commanding officer.

  “Well, the results have now come in from the clothing samples found around Amy’s skeleton, but they had deteriorated so much that we haven’t been able to recover any distinct evidence.”

  Everyone in the room felt disappointment, with the exception of two people, whose faces betrayed nothing of their relief.

  “How about Claire?”

  “Interestingly, there was no clothing found on Claire’s body, as you know. There were very few fibres to test, other than the medical tape left around the body, which we’ve already identified as Micropore. In the case of Claire, her killer was a careful person,” Faulkner scratched at his head while he remembered the things he needed to cover.

  “Micropore was found inside Number 32, in addition to Lorazepam, syringes and so forth. Throw in the fact of Geraldine’s death and it’s looking very much like Colin is our man.”

  As Faulkner stepped away from the front, Ryan gave him a bolstering slap on the arm. He cast his eye to the back row of his makeshift theatre.

  “Jeff? Would you mind giving us a low-down on where we’re at with pathology?”

  Pinter straightened and loped towards the front, in that long-legged, sure-footed way of his. The sun shone through the dingy window along the sidewall, to pick up the silver streaked through his hair, lending him a rakish air.

  “Got the technicians going over Geraldine Hart now,” he plunged straight in. “But I’d put money on her dying of cardiac arrest, following a massive dose of Lorazepam. There was a spent syringe on the floor beside the bed – the only one around – and its contents are confirmed as a match. Went in straight through the artery,” he made a jabbing motion towards the side of his own neck, causing widespread discomfort around the room.

  “No defensive wounds?”

  “None that showed any obvious signs of a struggle,” he shrugged. “There were some skin cells under a couple of her nails, so we’ll test those and see.”

  “What about any other medications?”

  “She was on a cocktail of drugs,” Pinter tugged at the lapels of his navy blazer. His attire resembled that of an off-duty naval captain, Phillips thought resentfully, eyeing the beige chinos and smart navy jacket.

  “That’s the interesting thing, I suppose –”

  “What’s that?” Phillips snapped back to attention.

  “Thing is, she was on so many drugs, in larger doses. She even had oral morphine, for special occasions. I suppose I can’t understand why he – Colin – would choose to administer an overdose of Lorazepam, when he could easily have chosen something stronger and quicker.”

  There was a brief lull.

  “Remember that this amateur likes to think he’s better than The Hacker, or at least as good. He wants the fame and the glory of the Holy Island killers, without the hassle.” Ryan said, in bored tones.

  Pinter gave him a hard look.

  “There could be an intelligent reason behind his choice,” he said.

  “Nah,” Phillips dismissed that idea with the back of his hand. “He’s a coward, if you ask me. Look at how he’s scuttled away to hide. He’s probably snivelling behind some bins, somewhere. Not exactly the actions of an artist. Unless –”

  “What?” Ryan asked.

  “Well, it’s a mad thought,” Phillips held both hands out, in mock embarrassment. “But maybe – I mean, are we sure Colin is even our man? Faulkner, you said yourself, you found other prints. Could be that there’s an even bigger coward out there, hiding behind that poor bastard who’s on the run.”

  “It’s possible, you know,” Ryan mused.

  “We’ve been through this,” Gregson boomed, from the back. “The facts point to Colin, so find him.”

  “Well, that’s the trouble, sir. He hasn’t left much of a trail to follow,” Ryan pointed out. “I’ve asked Doctor Donovan to give us some insights on his mentality. Doctor?”

  Paddy wove through the ensemble, carrying his heavy bulk with grace.

  “I haven’t had much time to look at the case files, or to complete anywhere near a full report. I want you all to understand that what I say here will be initial observations only. They shouldn’t be taken as gospel.”

  “Understood,” Ryan answered for the room.

  “Alright, then. First thing to think about is an oldie, but a goodie. He lives with his mother and, as far as we can tell, always has done. No evidence of former relationships or significant women in his life. Lack of father figure; in fact, rather than becoming the ‘man of the house’ there’s some potential for Colin to have been significantly emasculated, over the years. Bit of a Norman Bates figure, if you like.”

  “OK, but how does that help us?”

  “Well, the thing to remember is that he will have looked to his mother as both friend and foe. He will have been immensely protective of her, whilst also hating her at times. Fear of disappointing her, or bringing another woman into the house, will have prevented him from forming new and meaningful attachments, even if he wanted to.”

  “But, we found the files on his computer,” Ryan interposed. “He had files on several women, including Claire Burns. He’s obviously interested in women.”

  Paddy nodded sagely.

  “Deep down, he will have known that these women were unattainable. It would have been ‘safe’ for him to develop imaginary worlds around them, to fashion himself as a great lothario, in order to cope with his ultimate reality. Because, in reality, he is likely impotent or able to become excited only by the thought of exerting control over women, perhaps violent control.”

  “If his fantasy women were unattainable, how come they’ve turned up dead?” Phillips slurped Irn-Bru, as he thought aloud.

  “It’s possible that the pressure of living an unwanted life eventually became too much to bear. His mother’s behaviour may have become intolerable, combined with the i
ncessant feelings of rejection from women whom he has placed on a pedestal. It may have broken something inside.”

  “Aye, well, that’s all fine and dandy,” Phillips muttered, “and I’m sure we all feel very sorry for him. But, we’ve got three dead women on our hands, Doc.”

  Donovan raised a hand, in understanding.

  “I’ll come to the point. I think that it’s possible Colin Hart experiences fugue states; episodes of time where he is more like his alter-ego, or the most confident side of himself.”

  “Like, when he’s pretending to be DoctorKeir79?”

  “Exactly,” Donovan agreed. “While experiencing one of these ‘states’, it’s possible that he behaved in a manner entirely inconsistent with his usual timid self. Turning fantasy into reality, if you will.”

  “Sounds textbook,” Ryan commented. “Now, if I had multiple personality –”

  “We don’t call it that, nowadays,” Donovan started to correct him and then thought better of it. Now wasn’t the time for semantics.

  “If I had different alter-egos hopping around inside my head,” Ryan started afresh, and Donovan sighed. “Where would I go?”

  Paddy scratched at the fluffy hair at the top of his head.

  “This area, Sycamore Gap, seems to have significance for him,” he offered.

  “Yes, but we’re leaning towards thinking that Keir Edwards killed Amy Llewellyn, so maybe Colin only adopted the area as his own.”

  “If Edwards killed Amy Llewellyn and led Colin to her resting place, that would be consistent with his adoption of DoctorKeir79,” Donovan agreed. “If Edwards sent him up there, he may feel it is incumbent on him to continue the pattern and deposit a body in the same place.”

  “You think he might be up there now?”

  With incomparable timing, the DC responsible for reader-receiving thrust away from his desk at that very moment.

  “Sir?”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes?”

  Both Ryan and Gregson turned, leaving the detective constable in an awkward quandary. Sidestepping it, he spoke to nobody in particular.

  “That was one of the uniforms. Three people rang in to report a man acting strangely beside the train station in Bardon Mill. Physical description matches Colin. Apparently, he stole a bike.”