by Adam Croft
‘Just tell me one thing,’ he said as he leant back in the armchair and rubbed his brow with his thumb and forefinger, having spent the last couple of hours enduring baseless small talk. ‘What did you say to Emily?’
‘When?’ Helen asked, looking up at him.
‘When you went away. And after. Since then.’
‘Nothing,’ she replied, not sounding altogether convincing.
‘Don’t lie to me, Helen. It’s my job to know when people are lying.’
Helen made a derisive snort and looked away. ‘And there it goes again. The job.’
‘Don’t change the subject,’ he said, leaning forward in the chair. ‘I don’t believe for a second that she wouldn’t want to see me. I’m her dad.’
‘She doesn’t remember you, Jack. She was three years old.’
Culverhouse jumped to his feet and walked over to the window. ‘It doesn’t matter if she remembers me. That’s not the point. Any kid would want to see their dad if they hadn’t seen him for eight and a half years. Unless they’d been told some bullshit about him and made to believe he was some kind of animal.’ He looked at Helen as he said this and thought he detected an almost imperceptible reaction in her eyes. ‘That’s it, isn’t it? You’ve fed her some story to stop her wanting to come back. What is it? What did you tell her?’ he asked, his voice having now risen almost to the level of shouting.
‘I didn’t need to tell her anything, Jack. You managed to do that all yourself. She might only have been three years old but kids pick things up at that age. Look at you, stood there trying to intimidate me. Is it any wonder she doesn’t want to see you?’
‘That’s fucking bullshit, Helen and you know it,’ he replied, getting angrier as he spoke. ‘Yes, I’m shouting at you and yes I’m fucking angry but you made me like this. Don’t ever try to say I was like this back then, because I wasn’t. Yes, I was dedicated to my job — and I still am — but I was happy. I was positive. I was calm. I wasn’t an angry person back then and you know it.’
Helen smirked. ‘What, so it’s my fault now is it?’
‘I never asked you to leave, Helen. I didn’t even know there was a problem until I came home that night and found your letter.’
Helen stood and rose to meet his eye. ‘And if you had known, would you have done anything about it? Would you have changed?’
Culverhouse was silent for a moment longer than Helen might have liked. ‘I would’ve tried.’
‘Tried? Oh yes, you always tried. But trying’s not always good enough, Jack. You know, I thought I was mad coming back here. I hoped we might be able to get along like adults and get to the point where Emily would want to see you and we could have some sort of normality. I can see that’s not going to happen. I don’t know why I wasted my time.’ As she bent down to pick up her handbag and leave, Culverhouse grabbed her arm as if to stop her going, knocking the handbag out of her hand as the two of them watched the small cardboard packet fall out and land on the carpet. He bent down to pick it up.
‘Aripiprazole,’ he said, reading the packet. ‘What is it?’
Helen grabbed the packet from him and stuffed it back into her bag. ‘It’s nothing, don’t worry about it.’
He put an arm on her shoulder and guided her to sit back down. ‘It’s obviously not nothing. Tell me, Helen. What’s it for?’
Helen remained silent for a few moments before letting out a huge sigh. ‘It’s for helping me cope.’
‘Cope? With what?’
‘With life. It helps stabilise my moods and stop me doing daft, compulsive things and upsetting people.’
Culverhouse rubbed his brow. ‘What do you mean? Is it like depression or a mental breakdown or something?’
‘No, not really,’ she replied, before realising that he was still none the wiser. ‘It’s a crossover of Cluster B personality disorders, they think mostly BPD and HPD but with elements of ASPD.’
Culverhouse looked at his wife. ‘You know I don’t have a fucking clue what you’re on about, right?’
‘I’m a nut job, Jack. I don’t think properly and I hurt people.’
‘Christ. They give you drugs for that now? Maybe I should get myself a prescription.’
‘It’s not a joke,’ she said, making eye contact with him. ‘I had... an episode. An incident. I spoke to doctors and they started me on some treatment programmes. This is why I wanted to come and see you. To help make amends for the past and to deal with my issues.’
Culverhouse just nodded, trying to understand but failing.
‘Look, it’s best that I go now. We can catch up at a better time. I’m here for a little while yet,’ she said, scribbling a mobile phone number down on a scrap of paper in her bag. ‘This is my UK mobile. Give me a call tomorrow and we’ll sort something out properly.’
‘Right. So we’re just leaving it like that, are we?’ Culverhouse said, pocketing the piece of paper.
‘I think it’s best we both get some sleep,’ came the reply.
‘Sleep? Oh yeah, I’ll nod off nicely after all this,’ Culverhouse said. ‘Put my mind right at rest, this has.’
‘What do you want to know?’ Helen asked, sitting back down on the edge of the sofa.
‘Well, everything. But for now, this personality thing. The disorder. What... What does it do?’
‘I’m not about to flip out and kill you if that’s what you mean,’ she replied, smiling. ‘I don’t know if it’s something that has always been there or if it’s developed. It definitely started to get worse around the time I left. It was like some sort of uncontrollable impulse. I had to go. I had to. It just overrode everything else. I had no thought for what it would do to you or Emily or to anyone else. Looking back now, it seems mad. But hindsight’s biggest downfall is that it’s always too late, isn’t it?’
‘I guess so,’ Culverhouse replied, finally feeling as though he had her in a position where she felt comfortable to talk. This was progress, he told himself. ‘What did you do, though? What did you say? I mean, Emily was only young at the time but you must’ve had to explain it to her at some point since.’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘You know, your friends wouldn’t speak to me after. I remember one day I was in town and I saw that girl Janice you used to work with. She’d just crossed the road with a double buggy and as soon as she saw me she crossed straight back over again. She looked right at me and it was like she’d seen a ghost.’ Culverhouse looked at his wife as if willing her to explain. ‘Why would she do that?’
‘I don’t know,’ Helen said. ‘She’d always been a bit odd.’
‘Tell me the truth, Helen. We’re both being open and honest now.’
‘I don’t know what you mean. I didn’t say a word.’
Culverhouse could feel the blood pulsing in his veins as he got angrier. ‘Helen, I’m a police officer. I know when people are lying and holding things back. And I know damn well when people have been told things that aren’t true. Like your friends. And Emily. You spun them a web of lies about me and now you can’t find your way out of it. Am I right or am I right?’ he barked, now inches from her face.
She stood up. ‘Alright, yes. I did. I told them all you were a fucking monster. And do you know what? It looks like I was right.’ She picked up her bag and marched towards the front door before he could stop her, only pausing once she had her hand on the latch. ‘You know what? I felt really shitty about what I’d done. I admit, I was wrong about you before. Perhaps I shouldn’t have said those things. But after seeing how you’ve changed, I feel vindicated. You know that monster I invented? You’ve become him, Jack.’
The door slammed in front of him as his wife walked out again. At least this time he had something approaching an explanation.
He walked into his kitchen and tried to make sense of what had just happened over the past couple of hours. As he tried to piece everything together, his mobile phone vibrated in his pocket; a long, repeating pattern which told him
he had an incoming call. He pulled it out and jabbed the answer button.
‘Culverhouse.’
Once again, work had got in the way.
5
31st August
Albert Road was in the Victorian part of Mildenheath, amongst a collection of similar-looking streets constructed in the mid to late 1800s. The houses were mostly terraced, and parking was always an issue as accounting for two-car families had naturally not been an issue at the forefront of most Victorian architects’ minds. This, Culverhouse was finding out as he tried to find somewhere to leave his car in the early hours of that morning. In the end, he opted for the middle of the street, noting that the uniformed officers were closing off both ends shortly after he’d arrived anyway.
The alleyway through to George Street was almost all that broke up the monotony of terraced housing and it was in this alleyway that the body had been found. A uniformed officer greeted Culverhouse as the officer in charge and briefed him on what had been discovered.
‘It’s a woman, no identity at the moment but we’re working on that. Looks like the cause of death was a severe laceration to the side of her neck. It’s gone right down to the bone, by the look of things. Only thing is, there’s very little blood at the scene so it doesn’t look like she died there. Looks more like a dumping ground to me.’
‘I see,’ Culverhouse said, his earlier interaction with Helen having worn him out mentally. On any other day, he’d have made a comment to the young officer as he wasn’t keen on having what he saw as vague theories clouding his early judgement of a murder scene. As he approached the body, he recognised the familiar figure of Dr Janet Grey unpacking her box of tricks a few feet away.
‘We meet again,’ Culverhouse said as he reached her.
‘Indeed we do. And yet again it’s over a stiff. I’m starting to think you’re bad luck, Jack.’
Culverhouse let out a small chuckle. ‘I did apply to join the Fluffy Bunnies and Rainbows Division but they wouldn’t have me.’
‘Don’t blame them,’ Dr Grey replied, pulling on a rubber glove and snapping it against her wrist.
‘Any first impressions?’ Culverhouse asked, nodding to the body. Janet Grey was someone who’s opinion he greatly valued, mainly because she was usually right.
‘Well, she’s definitely dead,’ Dr Grey said, smiling. ‘Judging by the wound on her neck and the fact that there’s practically no blood here, my only other presumption at the moment would be that she was killed somewhere else and dumped here.’
Culverhouse heard the satisfied chuckle from behind him and spun round to find the young officer stood only a few feet away. The look Culverhouse shot him soon wiped the smile off his face and he walked back off towards the police cordon.
‘Weird dumping ground, though,’ Dr Grey continued. ‘Usually when that happens the killer either hides the body away somewhere so no-one finds it or they leave it right out in the open so it’s discovered quickly and sends a message. This one’s odd. It’s kind of a halfway house.’
‘What about the injuries?’ Culverhouse asked.
‘Again, odd. Huge incision on the side of her neck, right down to the vertebrae. That’d leave a hell of a lot of blood, but her clothes seem pretty neat. They’re bloody, but I’d expect them to be absolutely covered. Slash marks to the abdomen, too. Difficult to say in this light, but looks like they were done from left to right. Oh, and the bruising to her cheek. Looks like she was punched in the face. Not sure that would have knocked her unconscious, though. Almost certainly not for long enough for our killer to have been able to mutilate her in this way.’
‘Any early instincts on what happened then?’ Culverhouse pretended to itch the underside of his nose, but in reality he was trying to mask his senses from the smell that was now starting to emanate from the dead body.
‘Difficult to say. Doesn’t look as though she’s been hacked at, though. In fact, it’s pretty precise work. Almost surgical. Whoever did it seemed to know where the major arteries were so she’d bleed out quickly. The abdominal lacerations seem a little more emotionally led but still quite considered. It’s the choice of dumping ground that concerns me, though. If she was killed somewhere else, then there’s a hell of a lot of blood lying around somewhere.’
What worried Culverhouse was that the site where the dead body lay was barely four hundred yards from Mildenheath Police Station, which sat directly opposite the far end of Albert Street. Not only that, but this was a densely populated area of town and, even at this ungodly hour, transporting and leaving a dead body here would’ve been a risky business to say the least.
Murder could usually be split into two distinct types: a rush of blood to the head in which one person kills another on the spot and the premeditated, planned type. If it was an unplanned, unexpected killing, there’d be far more to go on. The fact that the body had been moved and then left more or less in the open was what worried Culverhouse. That showed some level of forethought and planning. Leaving it out on display was the mark of an unplanned murder, but this body had been moved to this location. So why not go the whole hog and try to dispose of the body permanently? Why move it to a more visible location? It reeked of someone trying to send a message, but Culverhouse didn’t yet know who was sending the message, who they were sending it to or what the message was.
Crimes of passion and fights gone wrong were much easier to investigate. An impulsive killing would undoubtedly leave clues and quite possibly even witnesses, but a planned, premeditated murder was always far more daunting. Although he had very little to go on at this early stage, it seemed to DCI Jack Culverhouse as though this particular murder had been thought through very carefully indeed.
6
31st August
The incident room at Mildenheath CID was buzzing that morning. Serious crime was not only a growing part of everyday life in Mildenheath, but for the CID officers murder had been becoming more commonplace. Even so, the discovery of a body and the opening of a new case could still produce a frisson of excitement.
Culverhouse had assembled the same team that had assisted him in previous cases, choosing to reward loyalty as he was wont to do. Detective Sergeant Wendy Knight was to be his second in command, with Detective Sergeants Frank Vine, Steve Wing and Luke Baxter providing assistance.
Wendy was not Luke Baxter’s biggest fan. Like most of the rest of the officers in CID, she had worked her way up from the bottom and earned her position as a Detective Sergeant. Her father had been a CID officer and the world of policing had always been a way of life for her. Baxter, on the other hand, had joined the police force fresh out of university and was being fast-tracked through the ranks with the support, if not the impetus, of DCI Culverhouse. She wasn’t opposed to people progressing in their careers, but cocky wet-behind-the-ears people like Baxter really got on her nerves.
As was usual, Culverhouse had asked everyone to be ready for a nine o’clock briefing yet was the last person to arrive, just before quarter past.
‘Right,’ he said as he strode through the door and dumped a manila file on his desk. ‘First things first, I’ve been up all night hanging around in alleyways with Dr Grey, so I’m not in the mood for any pratting about, which includes,’ he added, looking directly at a chuckling Frank Vine, ‘sniggering about what I just said. We have a victim, female, probably mid to late forties. No identity as of yet.’ As he spoke, Culverhouse removed some printed photos of the crime scene and pinned them to the board behind him. ‘Dr Grey says the victim died elsewhere and was dumped at the location by the killer. Why, we don’t know. My first priority was to get onto the local press to announce that a body had been found and to try and find out who our victim was. It’s just gone out on the hourly news bulletin on local radio, so hopefully we’ll have a lead at some point soon.’
‘I’ll get onto Missing Persons as well, guv. See if I can match anything up there,’ DC Debbie Weston said.
‘No need. I’ve already done it,’ said Luke B
axter. ‘Nothing on record that seems to fit.’
‘Right. Thank you,’ Debbie said, nodding. Culverhouse had, in years gone by, tried to urge DC Weston to apply for a promotion but she had always been perfectly happy to remain a Detective Constable. Secretly, he’d been quite happy as it meant his Major Incident team could remain together, albeit a little DS-heavy.
Other Major Incident teams were usually more balanced in terms of the ranks of officers involved, but with Mildenheath having only the one CID team, it was seen as something of a law unto itself at county level. There had been whispers that Mildenheath CID would be brought under the auspices of an all-encompassing county-level CID department — as had all other satellite squads in the county — and there were even rumours of a pan-county CID setup being touted, meaning that their local independence would be truly lost. For now, though, Mildenheath CID was an odd, outdated quirk of plain clothes policing and that suited Jack Culverhouse just fine.
‘In the meantime,’ Culverhouse said, ‘We’ll need to do some door-to-door work in the Albert Street area to find out if anyone saw or heard anything. Can’t be easy to sneak a dead body into an alleyway around there, even at that time of night. Debbie and Frank, can you get onto that? Luke, I’ll need you to find out what CCTV coverage there is in the area. There’s got to be someone with a camera on their house, or a nearby shop that’ll have picked something up.’
Wendy looked at Culverhouse and noted that there was something different — more muted — about him. His opening warning aside, he’d seemed rather more subdued than usual. If it was anyone else, she would’ve put this down to him having been up all night, but she knew Jack Culverhouse and that should’ve only made him worse.
‘The description that’s been circulated is that of a woman aged in her forties, with shoulder-length mousey brown hair, wearing a purple strapped top and blue denim jeans. She had a silver ring on her right hand in the shape of a heart.’ As he read the description, Culverhouse handed out sheets of paper with it written on, alongside details of where the body was found and at what time. For now, this was the only point of reference the team would have with which to begin the investigation.
