by J. S. Law
‘No,’ she repeated. ‘I will get help. I’ll talk to you about it, but at the moment I need to focus on Cheryl Walker. I need to figure this out and I can’t do it alone.’
‘And you can’t ask anyone else, can you? Because you won’t tell anyone about your assault, so no one else knows the whole story. For that reason they’d be of no help to you anyway.’
Dan nodded in reluctant agreement.
‘And John? You said that you trust him?’
‘No. I mean yes, I do, but not with this, not yet.’
‘You need to talk about this, Dan. Secrets like this are what destroy us and change us. They drive people away from us and stop us from being who we really are and who we want to be.’
Dan reached out and took Felicity’s hand, squeezed it and then gently lowered it away from her. ‘I do have some people to talk to and they want to talk to me. I have a sister, a stepmum and a dad who don’t know why I don’t come home any more, or why I can’t talk to them.’
Felicity seemed to think, looking away and giving Dan the time she needed to wipe her eyes and compose herself.
‘OK. I’ll help you, but I have some conditions,’ she said eventually.
‘I agree to them.’
‘You don’t know what they are.’
‘Full disclosure, I tell you everything, and I agree to make a formal statement to the police,’ said Dan, ‘and I seek help once this is done.’
Felicity waited, looking at her for a very long time before she nodded. ‘OK, tell me.’
‘You’ve seen the similarities in the attack. But that wasn’t the only reason that I had to go onto Tenacity, although my intuition still tells me that the link to all of this lies on that submarine.’
‘I believe in intuition,’ said Felicity. ‘I think you can often get a feel for someone very quickly, a subconscious indication of the type of person they are. Following your intuition can be a key part of life, but you also need to train your analytical mind, not to override your intuition, but just to risk assess what you’re doing.’
Dan nodded. ‘I didn’t do that risk assessment.’
‘But that doesn’t make you responsible for what happened,’ said Felicity, ‘remember that. The person or persons that attacked you are responsible. You are not.’
‘Thank you,’ said Dan, and she meant it. ‘But there were other factors too. I interviewed, or rather I unofficially spoke to, Cheryl Walker’s friend, Gemma Rockwell. She told me that she felt like Cheryl was frightened about Tenacity coming back. She couldn’t put her finger on why, but she really believed it. I checked that that was what she meant, checked that she really meant fear, and she was sure, Cheryl Walker was afraid.’
‘OK,’ said Felicity. ‘I’m starting to see an indication, but I’m still not climbing down that ladder with you yet.’
Dan nodded. ‘But you haven’t seen this yet.’
She pulled out her phone and opened up her photographs. She showed Felicity pictures of the note and the dolphins that she believed Walker had sent to her.
‘You’re right, I haven’t seen this evidence,’ said Felicity, swiping the touchscreen to re-examine each of the pictures again.
‘You will, the next time you go into work. I only handed it over to the naval police this afternoon. It was sent directly to me almost a week ago.’
‘Oh, Dan,’ said Felicity, the same words that she had used in response to Dan’s treatment on board Tenacity, but sounding so different in this context.
Felicity shook her head.
Dan pushed on. ‘I think that Walker thought he was leaving me a clue that I would see. Something that he was too frightened, or maybe unable, to tell someone else, something I would recognise that would link them together.’
‘Link who? Link what?’
‘Link whoever attacked Cheryl Walker to Tenacity.’
‘Dan, I’m going to be really candid here. I understand that you believe more than one man attacked you on board Tenacity; I get that. But even if it were true that these men were working in cahoots to some end, it is a massive step to then apply that back to Cheryl Walker’s attack. It’s very difficult indeed to share a secret as big as murder. You know as well as I do that killers seldom work together, and when they do, there is normally a very deep relationship or bond that binds them: family, lovers …’
‘I know, and I can’t figure it out either. It’s like there’s more than one thing happening and the lines are jumbled together. I won’t be able to see it until I can separate them.’
Felicity pursed her lips again. ‘You really think all of these deaths are the work of two people?’
‘Yes. Maybe.’ Dan sighed. ‘I don’t know.’
‘But you also hypothesised in your leaked paper that Hamilton was working with a partner, more or less, didn’t you? It almost cost you your career by all accounts.’
Dan raised her hands, immediately defensive. ‘That was different.’
‘Why?’
‘There were a lot of pointers that Hamilton wasn’t acting alone.’
‘No one else saw them,’ said Felicity.
‘That isn’t relevant at the moment,’ said Dan, growing impatient.
‘I think it might be,’ said Felicity. ‘I can believe that you were attacked by two people, but if you want me to believe that you have encountered another pair of killers working together, then I need to know that you don’t just spot conspiracies everywhere you look.’
Dan sighed. She realised that she would need to discuss this, that she had wandered into another condition of Felicity’s help.
‘OK, aside from the victims that we found in Hamilton’s garage, we also found DNA for several other women on and around Hamilton’s belongings and in the house,’ she said, speaking quickly, trying to move past this and back to the case in hand.
‘Yes. And he confessed to the bodies you found but denied killing anyone else, including instances where there was DNA evidence in his home,’ added Felicity.
‘But, aside from the ones we found, he never told us where any of the other bodies were, not one,’ said Dan.
‘That’s not unusual,’ said Felicity. ‘After all, he denies killing them.’
‘He also never told us how many people he’d actually killed.’
‘Also not unusual,’ said Felicity, shaking her head, pushing Dan harder to make her case.
‘And yet, we know that he did kill many more, and after killing all those people and getting away clean for all those years, almost thirty years all told, he didn’t know how to get rid of the three bodies he had in the garage.’
‘Or hadn’t managed to get around to it.’
Dan shook her head. ‘No, I was there. When I found the bodies and Hamilton found me. When he was down and bleeding out before Roger arrived and Hamilton knew it was over, he just shrugged, like it was no big deal, and said “I don’t know” – said it several times – and I was there, I was asking, and I had a shovel at his throat. Those were his exact words. The life was draining out of him and I’m telling you, intuition or not, he was not lying; he really didn’t know.’
‘That’s tenuous, Dan,’ said Felicity, still shaking her head, visibly unconvinced.
Dan held up her hand to stop Felicity. ‘OK. Now think about his IQ and think about the evidence that we found,’ she said. ‘The man was no genius – smart, yes, but not really smart. There’s no way he managed on his own for so long. The three we found in the garage were the ones that he had done alone. That’s why he fucked them up so badly. There was no fixed method, all attacked and mutilated, but in totally different ways and with different tools, in different places, and the amount of evidence for those three crimes was unprecedented. It was like he’d barely bothered to do anything more than wipe down the worktops after he’d massacred them; he was experimenting, playing around, trying to find what else would work for him. I think he was losing control.’
Dan turned over a piece of paper and drew three crosses on the back
.
‘Even though forensic evidence suggests he’d killed many times before,’ she said, drawing a circle around the three crosses. ‘These three were him flying solo and we caught him. The other ones …’
She began to draw other crosses in a separate group to the original three.
‘The ones where we only found tiny traces or trophies – where we still, to this day, haven’t discovered any sniff of a body – for those ones he had help. He had help to plan them and to get rid of the bodies afterwards. I don’t think he has a clue where those bodies are, not a clue, and I think he was simply waiting for his accomplice to come and help him tidy them away; those women were in short-term storage.’
Felicity seemed to be thinking it over, saying nothing and processing what Dan had said.
‘Think about it, Felicity, three bodies on shelves in his garage and the rest disappeared without a trace …’
‘You’re making huge leaps,’ said Felicity. ‘Killers cooperating is a very unusual phenomenon.’
‘I know, you said that and I agree, usually there has to be a deep relationship, but I think there was a deep relationship. I think, for Hamilton, it came from the navy.’
Felicity sucked her teeth, the first time Dan had seen her do it, and then clicked her tongue against the bridge of her mouth as she thought about what she was hearing.
‘It’s not impossible,’ said Felicity. ‘Hamilton joined the navy at sixteen years old and had no close family outside of an aunt he never saw. He was almost completely disassociated from his parents, who seemed only too happy to sign him away to the navy and forget about him. Someone in the navy could have taken that role, but it would need to be someone that was a constant throughout his career, an individual, a perceived authority figure maybe, and we did look for this type of connection; your paper wasn’t ignored just because it was published in the red-tops before it could have made it into any of the professional journals.’
‘Or someone who met him several times during his career and maintained a contact that we weren’t able to find,’ said Dan, unwilling to talk again about how her paper had been leaked. ‘Someone in the background, whispering to him from somewhere we couldn’t see.’
Felicity stopped as she thought about that, her eyes never leaving Dan’s.
‘OK,’ she said, ‘OK. So, say I follow your thought process, though I don’t necessarily agree, but can you make anything like a similar argument for this situation?’
‘I was attacked by two men on board Tenacity,’ said Dan, her voice rising. ‘We know there are two, so I don’t need to make the case for this one – it’s made.’
‘No,’ said Felicity, holding up a single finger to stop Dan in her tracks. ‘It doesn’t make the case at all. You were attacked by two men who, by your own account, could have killed you, but didn’t. Two men working together to attack and intimidate, that I can believe. You’re asking me to consider murder, and that is a separate thing entirely.’
Dan sat back and let her shoulders drop; it was like being scolded by a disappointed tutor.
Felicity let her words hang.
‘I don’t know if that’s what I’m saying,’ said Dan. ‘Something’s stopping me from seeing clearly.’
‘Right,’ Felicity clapped her hands and made Dan jump. ‘So let’s remove the act of murder for a moment, remove the deaths from the equation and treat them as irregularities.’
‘But it was the murder that drew me into this,’ said Dan.
‘We’ll come back to it. Now, what do we have left?’
‘We have a man whose wife was beaten, and who then committed suicide.’
‘Yes,’ said Felicity, ‘and it will shortly be ruled as such by the coroner, so for this exercise, let’s leave it as just that, a suicide.’
‘OK,’ said Dan. ‘Well, he had too much money, he worked on board a submarine, he died there, and his death forced an investigation on that submarine. I think he also tried to manipulate it so that I would investigate.’
‘Then there was your time on board Tenacity,’ said Felicity, taking over the narrative. ‘The threat by two men, the young steward wanting to speak with you, and his subsequent death.’
Dan dropped back against the soft cushions and let her head rest against them. ‘Another death – two irregularities is too many,’ she said, throwing her hands up in despair.
Felicity was clicking her tongue against her teeth again. ‘No, it isn’t,’ she said. ‘It really isn’t. Not if they’re both the work of a single attacker.’
‘I don’t follow,’ said Dan.
‘You said there was more than one thing going on here, and it was clouding what we could see. Maybe you’re right. What if there is a pair working together, but they aren’t both involved in all of the decisions?’
‘So one member of the couple acting alone, doing things that the other doesn’t know about or wouldn’t do?’ asked Dan. ‘Not a pair of killers. A pair of attackers with a single killer.’
Felicity was nodding her head slowly. ‘One of them has their own separate agenda and they’re prepared to go further than the other,’ she agreed. ‘Look at Cheryl Walker’s murder; we’ve been puzzling over the timeline, but if you break the attack down, then there are two separate phases to it, a very nasty beating …’
‘And sometime later, a murder,’ finished Dan. ‘So, she may have been beaten and intimidated by the pair acting together, but only one of them went back, or stayed back, to kill her.’
‘Now a single killer,’ said Felicity. ‘That I can believe.’
‘But how does that answer the question about Ben Roach?’ asked Dan. ‘Why would a killer expose himself again?’
‘Well, for Ben Roach, if we follow your line of thinking, we have a motive and that changes things. He was killed to stop him from telling you something. I think we have to assume he was going to reveal to you who this pair are and what they’d done,’ said Felicity, seeming energised, as though she believed they were making progress as much as Dan did. ‘But it would still be possible, and indeed very likely, that he was actually killed by a single person.’
‘If we find the couple, then we can identify their motive—’ said Dan.
‘And then identify which of them is willing to commit murder for it,’ finished Felicity.
Dan could feel hope building, as though she could begin to see a pathway to follow.
‘Walker wanted me to find this link, because he sent me that message. Maybe he knew who they were, maybe he was blackmailing them?’
‘It could explain the money and the attack on his wife,’ said Felicity, standing up. ‘But when we spoke on the first day we met here, and again in the subsequent phone call, you gave me the impression that you had some insight into Cheryl’s attack, that it was a message. I can see now that you had information that we didn’t, but I think my argument still stands, that death isn’t a warning.’
Dan thought about what Felicity was saying, about the attack on Cheryl Walker, about the attack several years ago that had left her life in tatters. ‘I think, now, that maybe our theory about two partners with separate agendas may work to solve that too. The beating,’ Dan paused and looked away from Felicity. ‘My beating,’ she continued, ‘happened exactly one year to the day that Chris Hamilton was sentenced to thirty years’ imprisonment. My attackers were waiting for me. It wasn’t random.’
It felt odd for Dan to hear herself talk about this, to hear words that had so far never been spoken aloud, had always been contained within her private thoughts, suddenly out there for someone else to hear.
‘During the attack there were three men, but one of them was standing away from the others and he was controlling them verbally, dictating what they should do, teaching them how to do it. When they began to whip me, he said to them that it had to be thirty. I’m absolutely certain of it. He said it had to be exactly thirty.’
Dan managed to look back at Felicity, not in the eye, but in her direction.
Feli
city’s mouth had dropped open. ‘Oh Dan,’ she said. ‘It was a punishment. He got to you, got someone to get to you even from inside prison.’
‘Yes,’ said Dan, feeling as though she was drawing strength from speaking out loud about this. ‘But it was someone he knew well and trusted, someone who could deliver a very specific punishment, in a very specific way. Not a killer to serve up revenge – a friend who could deliver a measured message.’
‘That’s why you never told anyone.’
‘Yes,’ said Dan, ‘it was done to humiliate me. So that people would know I had been got to. I believe it was supposed to put me back in my place and teach me a lesson; it was a message. That’s why I think that Cheryl Walker’s attack was also a message.’
Felicity reached out and touched Dan’s face, gently lifting her chin until their eyes met.
‘And you’ve carried this alone since then? Not sharing it with anyone?’
‘I couldn’t share it,’ said Dan, hearing her voice break. ‘I could live with the pain, but my dad, Charlie …’ Dan’s words trailed off. ‘He wanted them all to know, for us all to be hurt by it.’
‘You’re a brave, brave woman, Danielle Lewis.’
Dan looked away again and Felicity lowered her hand.
‘The pictures were taken by a very old and dear friend, Roger Blackett. I went to his house as soon as I was able to get back to my car. I asked him to take these pictures; I needed to keep some evidence. I asked him to help me to get home and then I asked him to support me in taking a year-long sabbatical. He was my superior at the time, and after the papers had leaked my theories no one particularly wanted me around anyway, so I took the time off and went away to heal.’
‘And did you?’ asked Felicity.
‘No,’ said Dan. ‘I didn’t.’
The two women were silent for a long time, both deep in thought.
‘So how do we find the clue that links these men together; how do we find the rotten pair within the submarine’s barrel?’ asked Felicity, her voice changing in tone and lifting the mood with it.
Dan sat up straighter, glad the topic had changed. ‘I don’t know. They’re just one massive clique and they all seem so bloody inbred. They all know each other. They all know each other’s families,’ she paused.
