Death Do Us Part (DI Damen Brook 6)

by Steven Dunne

  Brook clicked on his search history to reveal details of the documents Terri had accessed earlier that day.

  ‘Black Oak Farm,’ he mumbled, closing his eyes briefly. He took out his iPhone and speed-dialled Terri’s mobile, unsure what approach to take if she picked up. Her phone was switched off. He texted her to ring him, then tried the landline at her Manchester flat, to be greeted by a recorded message that announced the service had been disconnected.

  ‘What? When?’ He loaded his emails, pleased to see one from DC Cooper.

  Sir, noticed you already accessed all material from Black Oak Farm. Do you still want me to send?

  Brook typed his reply. Hard copies of all printed material, please. I’ll pick up tomorrow. Also, can you find out when this landline number was disconnected? Urgent response – please text news. He added Terri’s landline to the email and reluctantly typed in his own mobile number, dismayed that his store of contacts had expanded to five.

  Given the circumstances, instead of driving into Derby to meet Noble and Banach at the Royal Derby Hospital, he sat down to read the reports and click through the scene-of-crime photographs of the Black Oak Farm murders that his daughter had printed off that morning.

  He began with written reports. He knew the background to the case from internal bulletins and station gossip about Luke Coulson’s trial, but the fine details had evaded him and made for grim reading.

  Monty Thorogood, a local millionaire businessman, and his wife Patricia had been attacked and brutally stabbed to death in the kitchen of their farmhouse in Findern, a pretty village about six miles to the south-west of Derby. Their killing had been frenzied, with the perpetrator, Luke Coulson, striking over and over again at the two victims.

  In addition to their murders, their daughter Reardon, in the house at the time, had been sexually assaulted by Jonathan Jemson, one of the attackers and a former boyfriend from their time at school together. Their relationship had ended years before, but Jemson had always harboured a grudge, and when the opportunity arose, he’d jumped at the chance to teach his former girlfriend a lesson.

  According to Reardon’s statements, Jemson’s friend, Luke Coulson, also a former schoolmate, had entered her bedroom covered in blood and discovered the assault in progress. It seemed Coulson had also developed an unhealthy obsession with Reardon at school and was appalled to see her being attacked, so after failing to pull Jemson away, Coulson had stabbed him in the back and neck, severing an artery. He had then ransacked the property for valuables and changed into clothes belonging to Monty Thorogood.

  Meanwhile Reardon, despite the trauma of the assault, had gone in search of her parents, discovering their mutilated bodies in a scene of bloodletting and carnage at which even Brook, with all his experience, blanched when he looked at the SOCO photographs.

  Fortunately, Reardon had been able to flee the scene, partially clothed, despite a final confrontation with Coulson. She reached the village to raise the alarm while Coulson fled the farm in the family Range Rover with just over a thousand pounds in cash, items of jewellery he’d found in a safe in the master bedroom and a bag of his own bloodstained clothing for disposal. He’d made a desperate dash down the M1 in the high-powered car, heading for Dover and presumably escape to France on a ferry.

  Unfortunately for Coulson, he’d become snarled up in the afternoon rush hour on the M25, and once details of the getaway car had been distributed, it was a simple matter to arrest him. He was detained at a service station without a struggle.

  Brook’s mobile vibrated with a message from DC Cooper. Landline disconnected four months ago when property vacated.

  ‘Vacated?’ exclaimed Brook, staring at the text. ‘Terri, what’s going on? And what’s so important about Black Oak Farm?’ He transferred the questions to his mobile, but once again his daughter failed to reply. Brook poured tea from his flask and switched on a couple of lamps to dispel the gathering darkness, then returned to read more reports.

  The murders had occurred in early October last year, on a cool and cloudy Monday afternoon between twelve and one p.m. That morning, Jemson and Coulson had finished their preparations for the raid before taking the bus to Findern village. They had approached the farm on foot, both dressed in hiking gear and boots and carrying a small rucksack, which was later recovered from the scene. In it police found a detailed map of the area around Findern, with suitable escape routes highlighted in red, as well as damning evidence of an inside job – a plan of the farmhouse.

  Handwriting and fingerprint comparisons showed beyond a doubt that Reardon’s missing brother Ray had drawn the plan. On it he’d identified the location of the safe, the security control room and Reardon’s bedroom. Clipped to the map was a photocopied printout of all the valuables – jewellery, expensive watches and gold coins – likely to be found in the safe. The photocopy was from an insurance policy document taken out by the Thorogoods only three weeks before the murders – at Ray’s instigation, according to his sister’s statement. In a corner of the photocopy, the safe’s combination had been written in biro in Ray’s own handwriting.

  Also in the rucksack investigating officers found an empty plastic bag containing remnants of the drugged meat the pair had fed to the family dog, Sargent, to prevent it attacking the intruders or alerting the Thorogoods to their presence.

  The farm itself should have been well protected by its sophisticated alarm and security camera system, installed the previous year again at Ray’s insistence. However, according to its internal clock, and unknown to the victims, the system had been disabled the night before, allowing Jemson and Coulson to approach the house unseen and break in without setting off an alarm. The telephone landline had also been disabled.

  In addition, footage of all film prior to the attack had been expertly erased from the hard drive, presumably to remove the record of Ray Thorogood approaching the control room to turn off the system on the eve of the murders. A Post-it note attached to the police report referred to Jemson having previous employment as an installer at a security company in Derby, and it was subsequently discovered that he had exchanged a series of text messages with Ray Thorogood giving detailed instructions on disabling and erasing material from a security system.

  Without this footage, the exact sequence of events inside the farmhouse before and during the attack was difficult to pin down. It was believed that Coulson had entered through the front door and murdered Mr and Mrs Thorogood while Jemson proceeded to Reardon’s bedroom, where she was lying on her bed listening to music on her headphones, oblivious to the fact that her parents were being attacked a few rooms away.

  The fact that Coulson was right-handed – Jemson was left-handed – confirmed to police and prosecutors that he had struck the fatal blows that had killed the Thorogoods. Significantly, Coulson declined to defend himself, claiming he had no memory of events, neither denying nor admitting his role in the attack. In fact from the moment of his arrest he uttered barely a word to police interrogators and didn’t submit to cross-examination at his trial.

  This wasn’t unusual for Coulson. Defence lawyers produced paperwork confirming that he had learning difficulties and had left school with no academic qualifications. He also suffered from a speech defect and never spoke in lessons – a good reason for Coulson and his brief to sidestep the ordeal of cross-examination, although that didn’t explain his reluctance to make a pre-trial statement about his role in the murders.

  Not that a full confession would have mitigated his crime. Coulson’s life sentence was a formality once he’d been examined by experts and declared criminally responsible and fit to stand trial. He might have been educationally subnormal, with a couple of de rigueur personality disorders thrown in, but Luke Coulson was deemed capable of understanding the gravity of his crime and was duly punished.

  Brook drained his tea and sat back to check his phone again – still nothing from Terri.

  Resuming his reading, he clicked through forensic and crime-scene re
ports, all of which damned Coulson further. After the attacks, he had rifled through Monty Thorogood’s wardrobe for fresh clothes in which to make his escape, but stupidly had stuffed his own bloodstained clothes into a carrier bag and thrown them into the boot of the Range Rover – presumably for disposal at sea. Blood from all three bodies had been discovered on his clothes and shoes and subsequently under his fingernails and on his hair.

  Brook clicked on another link, surprised to see that CCTV film was available. He soon learned why. After being attacked by Jemson, Reardon had made her escape, but not before rebooting the security cameras in the control room near her bedroom in order to locate Coulson and other possible intruders. The grisly sight of her blood-soaked parents on the control room monitor subsequently drew her to the kitchen to check in vain for signs of life.

  Being unable to call the police on her dead mother’s inert mobile phone or the disconnected landline, she headed for

  the front door, only to run straight into a knife-wielding Luke Coulson. Security footage showed the encounter, but Brook paused it so he could skim through Reardon’s transcript of what she could recall of their conversation before restarting the film.

  It was bleak, fascinating stuff and Brook watched their dance of death intently. Both Reardon and Coulson were eerily calm after the bloodbath. Such a reaction was not uncommon. People often responded to extreme traumatic events with unnatural composure, at least in the initial stages of an ordeal. Shock could make people block out harrowing events like the death of loved ones and, worse, make them oblivious to imminent danger.

  The possibility of sudden death, even one’s own, was such an extreme and unique situation that the mind was often incapable of processing the information, suppressing unpalatable outcomes. The consequences could be fatal if individuals were unable to sense the need to run from, or fight against, danger – the fight-or-flight instinct required to force those at risk to act in their own interest.

  But whatever her state of mind, Brook watched rapt as Reardon made all the right moves, maintaining eye contact and keeping her opponent talking, at the same time treating him with a respect he’d probably craved, and been denied, for most of his short life. The fact that Coulson had just rescued her from a violent ex-boyfriend must have given her sufficient confidence that she could dissuade him from doing her harm, and gradually she was able to talk him down until Coulson dropped the knife.

  After discarding it, he moved towards Reardon for a hug, holding on to her tenderly and pressing his head into her neck. According to Reardon’s statement, at this moment Coulson had whispered something in her ear. Her response was brief before she disengaged and moved warily to the front door. Once outside, a CCTV camera showed her sprinting to safety along the grass fringes of the gravel drive in the direction of the village.

  Brook looked at the transcript to see what had been said.

  Coulson: If I let you go, will you forgive me?

  Reardon: Of course I will.

  He clicked off the film and loaded further reports on to his monitor. DS Rachel Caskey’s name was prominent, and Brook was pleased to see she knew her stuff. After the attack, while SOCO did their grisly work, the first port of call had been Jonathan Jemson’s flat, which had thrown up an unregistered prepaid mobile phone hidden in a drawer.

  The phone contained dozens of text messages exchanged between Jemson and Ray Thorogood, revealing the extensive planning leading up to the attack on Black Oak Farm. The texts also made known the full scope of Ray’s venom towards his parents, hinting at unpaid debts and speaking of his determination to free himself from their purse strings.

  Brook skimmed through more transcripts as the two men put their plan together. The content of the messages painted a picture of Ray Thorogood as the brains behind the operation. Under instruction from Jemson, Ray would disable the security system and landline the night before and delete any film of

  his actions. Jemson meanwhile was charged with recruiting Coulson, whom both Jemson and Ray knew from school. Texts referred to his low IQ and it became clear that Jemson and Ray were lining him up to take the rap for the murders of Monty and Patricia Thorogood as well as Ray’s sister Reardon.

  Brook read through some of the relevant transcripts.

  Do Mummy and Daddy first, and then try to get Luke to fuck or at least jizz over my bitch of a sister. He always had a thing for her. Should be simple. Then do them both with the same knife and make it look like they croaked each other in the struggle so we can hang everything round Luke’s neck. Ray.

  Can’t wait to see the look on her face when I walk in on her. LOL.

  Almost wish I could be there. Ray.

  Brook sat back to contemplate the exchange. Almost wish I could be there. Ray. He narrowed his eyes. ‘And why weren’t you there, Ray?’

  With Coulson’s body at the scene and his DNA inside Reardon, it wouldn’t be hard for investigating officers to construct a version of events placing Coulson at the heart of the crime. The obsessed loner seeking out a former schoolmate for whom he’d developed an unhealthy obsession, killing her parents before taking his revenge on her. She fights back, inflicting fatal injuries on her attacker before succumbing to her own wounds.

  The perfect crime.

  The beauty of the plan was that Ray would be on hand to fill in the gaps, to confirm Coulson’s sleazy fascination with his sister, and with the rest of the Thorogoods dead, he would be free to inherit the family fortune. After a suitable but unspecified period, he would reward Jemson for services rendered. When things had died down, Brook had no doubt that Jemson’s death would be the next item on Ray’s agenda.

  Of course, the plan had fallen down on Coulson’s reluctance to be a party to the assault on Reardon. His crush was apparently more about unrequited love and less about straightforward lust, as Ray and Jemson had presumed. For that reason, it was speculated that Jemson had initiated the attack on Reardon to stimulate Coulson’s interest. Or maybe he really had wanted to teach his former girlfriend a lesson and had got carried away, though he should have been intelligent enough to know that a rape on his part would leave unmistakable evidence of his presence at the farm. For someone with a criminal record, that meant a certain DNA match against his stored profile, and arrest within days.

  Whatever the trigger, the sexual assault had spawned further violence, Jemson striking Reardon several times about the face – the likely trigger for Coulson’s deadly intervention.

  Unfortunately for Ray Thorogood, this turn of events effectively left him in limbo, and instead of being able to bury his family and claim his inheritance, he’d been forced to run. With Reardon alive and able to testify that he’d been at the farm the night before the murders, his part in the attack became clear, despite the failure of security cameras to confirm his presence, or that of his car, a silver Porsche.

  Brook leaned back in his chair to think. He was impressed by the fact that Ray had disappeared so completely. This hinted at preparation, at contingency plans, as well as betraying Ray’s lack of faith in his co-conspirators. He clicked through more reports, looking for information on Ray’s whereabouts at the time of the attack. He couldn’t find any. However, a few days after the murders, Ray’s car was discovered at the East Midlands Airport long-stay car park.

  Brook scrolled down for further information but couldn’t find what he was looking for, so he scribbled a reminder in a fresh page of his notebook before reading through reports of subsequent checks carried out on airline passenger manifests, including available film of passengers boarding flights at East Midlands on the day of the Black Oak Farm massacre.

  As soon as Ray’s car was found, airport police began checking all departing passengers for weeks after the events in Findern. But if Ray had taken a flight from East Midlands, security checks were unable to discover it and CCTV couldn’t definitively identify any viable suspects leaving the country, even though all male passengers in their mid-twenties, especially those matching Ray’s descri
ption, had been thoroughly checked.

  In fact, all British males passing through the airport were traced and eliminated from enquiries, although three men travelling under foreign passports had never been found – two Frenchmen and one Pole. However, not one of them matched the description of Ray Thorogood closely, and because of that, the search had been expanded to include ports and other airports as well as the British motorway network.

  But in spite of all these measures, Ray Thorogood had never been found. Either he had escaped disguised as a foreign national, complete with forged passport, or he had laid down a false trail and made a run for it across country – destination unknown.

  Brook loaded Google Maps to remind himself of the extensive motorway system around the airport site. The M1 and the M42 link road were under a mile away, so if Ray hadn’t taken a flight out of the country, he could feasibly have dumped his Porsche at the airport and driven another vehicle north, south or west – there was no nearby motorway east of the airport. But without knowing if there was a second vehicle, checks on motorway film were pointless. If he was still in Britain, Ray Thorogood could effectively be anywhere.

  Brook read on, loading more files documenting the search for Thorogood, both forensic and physical. A SOCO team had descended on Ray’s small cottage in Repton to build the case against him and Jemson. Forensically the search was routine. Evidence of Thorogood’s presence was abundant, but it confirmed little more than his occupancy, as well as providing plentiful DNA and fingerprint samples. Not that samples would be of much use in the murder inquiry, as his DNA and fingerprints were also to be expected at Black Oak Farm, the parental home.

  On the other hand, officers had found plenty of other evidence at the cottage. Trawling through his financial papers, they had been able to substantiate the rumours of Ray’s mounting debts. Significantly, he didn’t own the Repton house – his mother did. He was a tenant, albeit one allowed to live rent-free in a valuable property in a desirable area, yet still unable to sell the house to pay his debts.