by Graham Smith
‘Thanks.’ Beth’s mind whirled as she wondered if the two women were connected in any way. ‘Do you remember her name?’
‘Harriet something.’ Ethan’s face creased in thought. ‘I think her surname began with a “Q” but I can’t remember what it was.’
Beth knew it’d be easy to identify the unfortunate Harriet and learn all the details. There weren’t that many murders in Cumbria, but if the cases were linked, it could mean there was a serial killer operating in the county.
She looked at Ethan and returned his smile. ‘Thanks again. That may turn out to be really important.’
‘No problem. There’s something else you should also know.’
Beth couldn’t keep the eagerness from her voice; Ethan had already given her one great lead. ‘What is it?’
His smile widened. ‘When you’re pretending to flirt with the CSI guy, don’t keep looking over his shoulder. It makes you seem false.’
‘What do you know about flirting?’ Even as the words left her mouth, Beth could feel her face reddening. ‘That was me showing him a professional courtesy while maintaining an observation of the surrounding area.’
‘I’d believe the last part of your statement if your cheeks weren’t scarlet. And with regards to your question on what I know about flirting, well, meet me for dinner tonight and I’ll show you what I know.’
‘Dinner?’ Normally Beth would have laughed at Ethan’s cheeky approach, but she was conscious of the body not thirty feet away. ‘I’ve just picked up a murder case. Dinner will be a sandwich at my desk if I’m lucky.’
‘Fair enough, some other time maybe.’
Ethan’s casual acceptance of her excuse for not having dinner stirred something in Beth. ‘I should be able to make it to the Crown for a drink around nine.’
‘See you there.’
As she swapped numbers with him then bade her goodbyes, Beth tried to work out why she’d agreed to meet Ethan. Sure he was good-looking, and she had a gut feeling that he was decent, but agreeing to a date while investigating a murder was something she’d never thought she would do.
Three
The FMIT office wasn’t the biggest room in Carleton Hall, but at least there was enough space for all four members to have a desk of their own.
Beth rubbed her forehead and broke from the case to think about Ethan for a moment. She knew she should be focussed, but the look he’d given her earlier had stayed with her.
She knew a lot of people considered her to be attractive, and she’d even modelled in her teenage years until she was old enough to join the police. As such, Beth was used to admiring glances, yet it was only on rare occasions she felt herself being assessed with such scrutiny.
The scar on her left cheek slowed a lot of men, but Ethan had glossed over it and had let his desire for her show in his eyes.
She’d been an innocent bystander when a fight had broken out in a Carlisle pub. One of the fighters had thrust a broken bottle at his opponent and the bottle had been deflected away from its intended target. Her cheek had stopped the jagged base of the bottle and, despite a surgeon’s best efforts, her left cheek was a mess of scar tissue.
Beth pushed Ethan out of her mind. She might not even turn up tonight: the case was everything; it had to be. If that elderly lady had been killed, she deserved to have her murderer jailed.
The office was quiet as Beth went over what she knew. The two pieces of evidence linked to the mayor of Carlisle were incriminating, to say the least, but there was still work to be done. The invitation and credit card that had been found pointed a finger of blame at the mayor, but Beth knew a good lawyer would explain them away without even breaking a sweat. They’d both be taken away for analysis, including fingerprinting, and, with luck, they’d get a solid lead from them. The mayor would make a good suspect if it could be believed that a rich and charismatic man would be responsible for murdering an elderly and cancer-stricken lady.
If they could ascertain the woman’s identity, they’d be able to take a huge step forward. They’d be able to look for links between her and the mayor to back up what may be viewed as circumstantial evidence.
As a precaution against making an incorrect assumption, Beth accessed HOLMES, the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System and ran the details of the case to see if there were any similar cases in the area. This would be the surest way to find out the details of Harriet Q.
Murders always had happened and always would happen, but the age and health of the victim had Beth wondering if there was something else afoot. The victim didn’t fit into any of the high-risk categories, and if she’d been euthanised by a family member, it was unlikely they’d have dumped her naked body beside a lake.
She bent forward as her computer screen flashed up its results.
The lady who’d been found this morning wasn’t the first naked woman’s body to be found in the Lake District. Three other women had been found in the same way and none of their killers had been identified.
Christine Peterson had been holidaying in the Lakes five years ago when she’d disappeared, only for her naked body to turn up a day later. The same had happened with Joanne Armstrong eighteen months after. The final known victim was Harriet Quantrell who’d not returned home from a night out with friends in Carlisle and had been found near the Solway Firth four days later. This last murder was a month short of two years ago.
All three women had shown signs of vaginal and anal rape, and they had all died via strangulation.
That they’d all been killed by the same person was a logical conclusion, but what concerned Beth most of all was that each investigation had been more or less dropped due to a lack of evidence.
What amazed her, was that no one had connected the murders. Yes, they might be spaced over a period spanning almost five years, but to her mind it was obvious that there was a serial rapist and murderer at work.
As she examined each case in more detail, Beth found small reasons why the connection hadn’t been made, but collectively the reasons spoke of a failure rather than negligence.
Christine Peterson’s body had been found on a beach near Barrow, whereas Joanne Armstrong had turned up in a wood on the banks of Lake Buttermere. Harriet Quantrell’s body was dumped on Rockcliffe Marsh, which lies near the border of Scotland and between the points where the mouths of the rivers Eden and Esk join the Solway Firth.
In terms of geography, the three deposition sites were at the south, middle and north of Cumbria. Each location was isolated and serviced by a different police station. It was possible that the investigating officers never looked for other victims, but to Beth’s mind, the seriousness of the respective deaths should have compelled them to check HOLMES and other police databases for similar crimes as a matter of course.
The Barrow cops deserved a free pass as their victim was the first, or at least the first in Cumbria, but the teams from Workington and Carlisle should have picked up that there was a serial rapist and murderer operating in the area.
All three victims had shown signs of having been sluiced down before being abandoned. Where there was a distinction between them was in their ages.
Christine Peterson had been a sixty-two-year-old woman with grandchildren; Joanne Armstrong was a mid-thirties singleton, and Harriet Quantrell was in her early twenties and was engaged, with a daughter who was six weeks old at the time of her death.
The pictures attached to their files showed three vastly different women. Without being judgemental, Beth saw that Harriet was pretty, but obese, Joanne was stick thin and not blessed by the gods of beauty. Christine’s face was lined with age, but it was clear that she was a handsome woman.
Together they were thin, fat, old, young, pretty and ugly. Which meant the rapist either had no preference, or was an opportunist who seized whichever female he could to satisfy his twisted desires.
The toxicology reports on the three victims showed them clear of illegal substances, but Harriet’s blood had had sufficient al
cohol content for her to have been three times the drink-drive limit. To Beth’s mind, that tallied with Harriet having been taken after a night out. She may have been drunk enough to make a bad judgement call which would have made it easier for her killer to abduct her. Both Christine’s and Joanne’s blood had tested negative for alcohol, but that didn’t mean a lot. A gun or knife could have been used, and if the victims had been fed a date-rape drug such as Rohypnol or GHB, there was a chance the small amount they’d been given to make them compliant had dissipated from the body before they’d died.
Beth realised that she was thinking of the women by their Christian names and knew that was because she was getting drawn into their lives and was caring for them.
The more she thought about it, the more she grew angry about the system failure which had allowed the rapes and murders to go unconnected until she’d stumbled across them thanks to Ethan’s tip. It was bad enough that two different teams had failed to connect their cases to a previous one, but at a regional level, the chief superintendent, deputy chief constable or even the chief constable himself should have picked up on the connection between the three unsolved rapes and murders.
As ridiculous as the idea seemed to Beth, she couldn’t help but wonder if there was an element of collusion going on. If the mayor was involved, he was a wealthy and powerful man who travelled in the same social circles as the top brass. They might well be members of the same golf club or masonic lodge.
Beth scrubbed the train of thought from her mind. Senior cops didn’t cover up murders for anyone, regardless of their status in life. If they were guilty of anything, it was a negligence of duty or incompetence rather than subterfuge.
The point still remained that they’d missed it though.
Whichever way she looked at it, the case was likely to explode in the face of everyone involved in it.
Beth was rising from her seat to go and share her discovery when O’Dowd burst into the room trailed by DS Thompson. Their demeanour was enough to inform Beth that something else in the case had broken.
‘Ma’am, you’re not going to believe what I’ve found.’
‘Wait your turn.’ O’Dowd flapped a piece of paper towards Beth. ‘Here, read this and tell me what you think. It arrived this morning.’
Beth took the paper from O’Dowd and looked at it. It was a photocopy of an anonymous letter. Like ransom notes from old films about kidnappings, the letter was made up of newspaper clippings. It had one simple line of text:
Mayor Forster has killed and raped before and will do so again.
‘Well, what do you think?’ It was Thompson who spoke. His tone gruff and insistent as was his way. His wife had early-onset Alzheimer’s and was extremely frail. He might think he was coping with her illness and the conclusion it would bring, but he wasn’t. He was snappier than usual and there were times he’d adopt a vacant look as his thoughts drifted to his wife. ‘Come on, Young Beth, what do you think?’
‘Coincidence. Foreknowledge. Scared.’
‘Do you want to elaborate?’ O’Dowd lifted an eyebrow.
Beth flushed as she was again betrayed by her habit of blurting out random words while her thoughts kaleidoscoped.
‘This letter arrived today, which means it must have been posted on Friday or Saturday. Therefore it’s a huge coincidence that a letter implicating the mayor arrives here on the same day a body is found and there are two pieces of evidence beside it pointing at the mayor. That also speaks of foreknowledge to me. Did the person who sent the letter know about the murder before it happened? If the mayor is a killer, the person who sent the letter must be scared of him. He’s a rich and powerful man. It’ll be tough to pin a charge on him without hard evidence. They’ll be terrified that if they are identified as his accuser they’ll be killed.’ Beth gave O’Dowd a look. ‘I have a few questions, ma’am.’
‘I thought you might. Ask away.’
‘The envelope the letter came in, did it have a postmark, and if so what was the date it was sent and where was it sent from? Also, has the letter been sent to the lab for fingerprinting? Can they get a DNA sample of saliva from the stamp? Who was the letter addressed to?’
‘It has a Carlisle postmark and it was actually posted a fortnight ago. The original letter and the envelope are on their way to the lab now.’ O’Dowd pulled a face. ‘The envelope had a printed label with the chief constable’s name on and it was marked “private and confidential”.’
That the letter was addressed to the chief constable explained why it had lain unopened for almost a fortnight. He’d been on annual leave, and had only returned to duty today. Had the letter been opened the day it arrived, they might have started looking into the mayor and the allegations against him. If the mayor was a killer, he might have been identified as one and charged, or at the very least, he would have been aware of the police interest in him, and would not have dared risk killing another woman. Either way, the lady found at the side of Lake Ullswater may have still been alive.
Once Professional Standards learned of how the letter had lain unopened on the chief constable’s desk for at least ten days, there would be an investigation into the reasons and blame would be allocated.
Thompson rubbed at his chin with more force than was necessary to scratch an itch. ‘You wanted to tell us something when we came into the office. What was it?’
‘When I was attending the scene at Lake Ullswater this morning, I spoke to a paramedic. He told me he’d attended a similar deposition site, even gave me a name for the victim.’
‘And?’ O’Dowd planted her hands on the desk and leaned towards Beth. ‘What have you found?’
Beth explained to Thompson and O’Dowd about Harriet Quantrell, Christine Peterson and Joanne Armstrong.
‘Shit.’ O’Dowd looked back and forth between Beth and Thompson. ‘I hope one of you two has a bright idea.’
‘Actually, ma’am, there’s more—’
‘More victims? Please tell me there aren’t any more victims. Four is more than enough.’
Beth didn’t bother to hide her irritation at O’Dowd’s interruption. ‘Not victims, connections to the mayor. Harriet Quantrell had done a short internship for him three years ago when he was deputy mayor, and when I checked out the other two victims, I saw a newspaper report that placed the mayor in Barrow at the time Christine Peterson was killed.’
‘What about the other woman? Was he anywhere near her when she disappeared?’
Beth shook her head. ‘I couldn’t find anything online, but it’s only an hour away from where he lives in Carlisle to the place her car was abandoned, so I don’t think we need to worry about whether or not he was in the area.’
‘We’re going to have to arrest him.’ O’Dowd huffed out a long breath and looked at Thompson. ‘I’ll let the DCI know what we’re doing; you get a few uniforms organised and we’ll get on the road to Carlisle in ten minutes.’
Thompson gave his chin another vigorous scrubbing. ‘You sure that’s wise?’
‘What? Arresting the mayor? No I don’t think it’s wise, but I do think it’s necessary.’
‘No. I meant freezing Young Beth out of the pickup. She’s done all the legwork here and it’s only fair that she’s there to make the collar.’
O’Dowd gave Beth a stern look. ‘You up for this? Two women arresting a possible serial rapist and murderer.’
‘Definitely, ma’am.’
As she waited for O’Dowd to return from the DCI’s office, Beth tried to work out if Thompson was acting out of generosity or self-preservation. If they were wrong about the mayor’s involvement in the killings, there could be the kind of fallout that stalled careers.
Four
When Beth started out her police career, she never imagined that she’d have to arrest a mayor. Yet there she was, standing on the step of a Georgian house on Stanwix Bank in Carlisle. She was glad O’Dowd was with her, although the DI looked to be as reluctant as she was. While duty had to be done, t
his case was as toxic as they came. They’d had a lecture from both the chief super and their DCI before leaving their office at Carleton Hall.
O’Dowd had tried without success to wriggle out of the case. The mayor was a handsome, charismatic man who claimed his word was his bond, and he’d fought to deliver on every one of his election promises. Where some mayors donned the robes for ceremonial duties only, Derek Forster strove to improve the lives of others. A self-made man, he’d built up a tech business which he’d sold so he could concentrate on his mayoral duties.
If the evidence against Mayor Forster was substantiated, proving his guilt would shock the county’s residents, and if they were false, the team investigating him would become hated for maligning the reputation of a popular and benevolent man.
Beth knew she should feel reassured that O’Dowd was with her, but the DI’s blunt manner didn’t fill her with confidence. If words were weapons, O’Dowd would always choose a broadsword over a scalpel.
When O’Dowd’s finger pressed on the doorbell, Beth felt her mouth dry up even more than it already was. Her tongue felt like a burst pillow and she could feel beads of sweat trickling down her back that had nothing to do with the morning sun.
As befitted his status and personal wealth, Mayor Forster’s house was imposing without being flash. From where she was standing, Beth could see both Rickerby and Bitts Parks and the River Eden. As views went, it was among the best in the city.
The door creaked open to reveal a handsome man in his fifties. Beth hadn’t expected the mayor to answer his own door, but she knew she shouldn’t have been surprised that he had showed the ordinary touch, which he capitalised on at all times.
‘Good morning, ladies, how may I help you?’
The mayor’s voice was layered with Carlisle’s relaxed drawl, but his mannerly greeting and gentle smile added a level of class that was absent from the local accent.
