Creepy Crawly

by Andrew Lowe

  Shepherd stepped forward. ‘Karl, I’ve got to present a briefing in half an hour. I’d really appreciate it if—’

  ‘Alright, alright.’ Rhodes turned to his screens and slotted in the CD. ‘A DI and a DS to strongarm a lowly sort like me. If I’d dug my heels in, I take it you would have got your dad on me. Sent Keating down.’ He opened the video file and rendered it in full screen on his second monitor. The image showed a broad view of The Farmyard Inn’s bar area and restaurant. It was grainy but legible. ‘So what are we looking at?’

  Sawyer took a seat and wheeled in close. ‘Place in Bakewell. Tuesday’s footage from the bar area. A witness has mentioned someone suspicious. Tall, scruffy. Big beard. Hoping we can find him and get a clear image. Start at around 7pm.’

  Rhodes ran the video in fast forward, to the point where the time signature read 19.00. He slowed the speed to double time. At 20.05, Lucy entered and was shown to a seat in the restaurant area, decked out for dinner. A woman Sawyer recognised as Georgina came in five minutes later and they took their table.

  Sawyer twirled his finger in a circle in front of the screen. ‘Can we go a bit quicker?’

  Rhodes gave him a look and shifted up to four times playback speed. The video showed a steady flow of accelerated customers, scurrying in and out, starting and finishing drinks at the bar, balancing trays of glasses. Nobody appeared who matched Lucy’s description.

  At 21.15, Lucy and Georgina moved out of the restaurant and crossed to the bar area. They took a seat that kept them both just visible at the edge of the screen.

  ‘Switch it back to double time,’ said Sawyer. Rhodes sighed. ‘Please.’

  Sawyer looked back at Shepherd who was still standing. ‘How was Danny Stoll?’

  Shepherd shrugged. ‘In a state. He’s completely mystified. Says he has no idea if Georgina knew Toby Manning. No idea why anyone would want to hurt her. And there was a new flash drive in his mail. Haven’t watched it yet.’

  Sawyer closed his eyes. ‘There’s a treat for later.’

  ‘The Kraken awakes!’ Rhodes tapped at Sawyer’s sleeve.

  He turned back to the screen and leaned in close. ‘Could you put it to real time?’

  A large, lumbering man had entered the bar, backpack hitched over one shoulder. He wore a fitted grey beanie hat and a dark bomber jacket with the woolly lapels upturned. His features were buried behind an overgrown black beard. He bought a drink—a spirit—and took a table by the door, keeping his hat and coat on. He took a book out of the backpack and rested it flat and open on the table. As Lucy had said, he sat perfectly still, eyes trained down on the book, turning the page every few minutes and taking a sip of his drink.

  Rhodes looked round at Sawyer and Shepherd. ‘This your man? Bit of a party animal, eh?’

  Sawyer squinted. ‘Can you get the image any cleaner?’

  Rhodes accessed a couple of drop down menus and the visual switched to a zoomed-in view. The new perspective degraded the image quality. ‘I can enhance it a bit more but it’ll take a while to render. And there’s not much to work with.’

  The man turned a page. Something twinkled as his hand rested back on the table.

  Sawyer pointed. ‘What’s that?’

  Rhodes shifted the image’s focal point and zoomed in. ‘Ring?’

  ‘Can you enhance that?’

  Rhodes nodded. ‘I’m wondering what he’s reading, as well.’

  ‘Good call,’ said Shepherd. ‘Print out a likeness for the briefing. Then get us the best aspect on the face, the ring and the book.’

  They watched the rest of the footage. Lucy and Georgina spent half an hour in the bar, then left by the side door. A few seconds later, the bearded man packed away his book and followed.

  ‘I’ve seen him somewhere before,’ said Rhodes. ‘Might be the hat.’

  Sawyer turned to Shepherd. ‘We need to know who he is, and what he’s got against Toby and Georgina. This wasn’t a random killing or a crime of opportunity. There’s an agenda. If we’re lucky, he might be done and we just have to ID him and catch him.’

  ‘If we’re unlucky, he might just be getting started.’

  Shepherd tacked the print-out to the whiteboard. It showed the best unenhanced view of the bearded man: standing, setting his drink down on the table.

  ‘Looks like a fucking scarecrow.’ DC Myers looked over his shoulder, mugging for a laugh. Not many takers.

  Shepherd turned and addressed the room. Sawyer stood off to the side. ‘This is an image of a man we need to speak to. We already know that on the night of her disappearance, Georgina Stoll met her friend, Lucy Newbold, for dinner at The Farmyard Inn near Bakewell. This man arrived at around 9.30pm. He bought a drink and sat by himself, reading a book. When Georgina and Lucy left, he followed them out. Rhodes is enhancing the image to see if we can get any detail on the book he’s reading. He also seems to have a ring on his finger. Might help with ID.’

  DC Walker moved to the front and leaned in close to the printout. ‘I’m not having it.’

  Sawyer stood and joined him by the whiteboard. ‘Not having what?’

  ‘You said he’d be smart, meticulous. This bloke looks a mess.’

  Sawyer nodded. ‘It’s worth considering. Appearances can be deceptive, I suppose.’

  Walker took a seat nearer the front. Sawyer tipped his head at the detective with rolled-up sleeves and slicked-back hair. ‘Myers. How did you get on with the poisonings?’

  Myers sat up in his seat. ‘Nothing suspicious. And no attempted abductions. Best I could find was a bunch of hipster campers who didn’t have a great time after they made a curry with hemlock, thinking it was water parsnip. They survived, after most of their insides ended up on the outside. One of them had to have a tracheotomy.’

  Groans. Sally O’Callaghan spoke up from the back. ‘Shows the danger of getting the dosage wrong.’

  Keating silenced the murmurs. ‘How are we doing on victimology?’

  ‘Company in Canada,’ said Shepherd. ‘They produce bespoke porn. Niche fetish stuff. I asked if anyone had commissioned anything related to live burial, and the owner has pulled out one request that apparently ended in a dispute. I’m speaking to the client later today.’

  ‘We also have a new flash drive,’ said Sawyer. ‘Sent to Georgina’s husband.’ He glanced at Shepherd. ‘I’ll have a look later.’

  Moran sniffed. ‘Sounds like you’re looking forward to it.’

  The comment fell flat, and Sawyer refused the bait.

  Shepherd craned his neck and found Sally. ‘PM? Toxicology?’

  ‘Expedited. Full reports on both vics later this morning. I’m expecting a definitive match-up on toxicology.’

  ‘What about the walking routes from the car parks?’ said Keating.

  ‘Line searches yielded nothing. The cars are clean, apart from some of the vics’ blood. You could eat your fucking dinner off the coffins. The CROP teams report no suspicious activity around the burial sites or car parks. Bit of dogging in one yesterday. Two men keeping a respectful distance. All very civilised.’

  Keating sighed. ‘Keep the posts active until I stand them down. Daily reports. Stephen. Press conference prep?’

  As usual, Bloom stood. He was clad in business battledress: petrol blue suit, gleaming white shirt and pocket square, pink paisley tie. ‘Good to go. Conference room booked for three. Mostly locals, but a couple of nationals. Local TV news. You presenting, sir?’

  ‘Yes. With Shepherd.’

  Bloom nodded at Shepherd. Sawyer thought he saw a slight flinch. ‘Sir, I would suggest we present the suspect image as the focal point. It seems our other lines of enquiry are limited. Leaves us looking less exposed.’

  Sawyer stepped in front of the whiteboard, in front of Shepherd. ‘So let’s boil it down. What? Why? Who? What took place? Why did it happen the way it did? Who would have done this for these reasons? Starting with the “what”. In the lead-up to the two murders, the killer ordered
at least two cardboard coffins, probably from different sources. He also gathered some hemlock and prepared an intravenous solution containing a dosage that would be sufficient to shut down the victims’ respiratory system soon after their burial. We know he probably rehearsed or tested that, but we don’t know how. He bought cable ties, syringes and, probably, a ball-peen hammer.’

  Rhodes entered the room and stood at the back. He nodded at Shepherd.

  Sawyer continued. ‘In the early hours of last Tuesday, he connected a portable video camera to the lid of a cardboard coffin and buried the coffin in a shallow grave at Padley Gorge. He concealed the grave and, in the evening, he followed Toby Manning to Sickleworth Golf Club. He attacked him as he left, and drove Toby’s car to a car park near Padley Gorge. He secured Toby’s wrists and ankles with cable ties and carried his unconscious body to the grave site. He administered a precise dose of hemlock, uncovered the grave and placed the body inside the coffin. He watched, probably from Toby’s car, as he died. He took two thick sections of tree branch and tied them into the shape of a cross using yellow duct tape. He drove the cross into the ground over the coffin and took an unknown walking route away from the scene. He transferred the footage of the death onto a flash drive and posted it to Toby’s parents. A week later, he made similar preparations before following Georgina Stoll to The Farmyard Inn, where she left at around 9.50pm. He attacked her and drove her car to a different car park near the gorge. He tied her, moved the body to the coffin, watched her die, and marked the grave. He posted the flash drive with footage of her death to her husband, Danny.’

  ‘So the “what” is clear now,’ said Shepherd.

  Sawyer nodded. ‘But we have a lot of work to do on the “why” and “who”. And we’re pretty much nowhere on the reasons.’

  ‘Let’s wrap up,’ said Keating. ‘Shepherd, make sure HOLMES is up to date and co-ordinate with Bloom on the conference. And I want to hear about the porn client. That’s specific enough to be interesting. Sally, let’s get that toxicology link confirmed.’

  The briefing dispersed. Shepherd and Sawyer headed over to Rhodes at the back of the room.

  He grinned. ‘Come on down. Got something for ya.’

  They took the lift to the ground floor and followed Rhodes down a musty stairwell to the basement.

  As they entered, he looked over his shoulder. ‘We call this the Batcave, y’know. Well, I do. Everyone thinks the glamour’s up there, but this is where the breakthroughs happen.’

  Shepherd’s mood matched the gloom of the room. ‘What have you got, Rhodes? The suspense is killing me.’

  Rhodes sat down at his terminal. ‘Long may it last, eh?’

  Sawyer glanced at Shepherd. ‘Oscar Wilde.’

  Rhodes raised his eyebrows. ‘He’s good.’

  ‘What’s the story?’ said Sawyer. ‘Did you enhance the imagery?’

  ‘Not yet, no. It’ll take a while to isolate the frames, enhance and render. I wanted to have a look around first. I knew I’d seen the fella somewhere before. So I checked over the footage I was looking at last week, from the night the lad was murdered. The roads up near the golf club.’ He opened a window with a still image of a rural road, near dusk. ‘This is Saltergate Lane, one of the roads on the edge of the club.’ Rhodes advanced a few frames. The bearded man appeared at the far side, in front of a manicured hedge and the course’s boundary fields beyond. He walked, head down, left to right, until he disappeared off screen. ‘Lighting is mostly just leakage from nearby houses but I can punch it up if you like.’

  The time signature read 9.15pm. Rhodes rewound the video and set it to play on a loop from the man’s entrance to exit.

  Sawyer leaned in. ‘We now have him near to both scenes at the right times.’ He turned to Shepherd. ‘Ask Sally to check The Farmyard Inn seat and table for DNA or prints. And get a good quality of this new still to Keating. Update the imagery for the press conference. And take it to the Mannings and Danny Stoll. See if they recognise this guy.’ He headed for the door. ‘You focus on the living for now. I’m going to see what the dead have to say.’

  26

  Donald Ainsworth sat at the kitchen table in his one-bedroom flat in Glasgow’s Townhead district. He was approaching the eighth anniversary of solo living, only a few days behind the date he had labelled in his mind as ‘the terrible tenth’: a decade since Lena’s departure.

  The sense of fishtailing, of constant oversteer and correction, had lately been replaced by something more dire: a decaying orbit, an impending stasis. His sixtieth birthday had arrived and departed in the dead of last winter, to little fanfare. He had bowed his balding head and plodded through the January gloaming, crunching over the frosted grass of Woodhead Park.

  He had stopped at a familiar tree to gaze at the old family home on Monkland Road. An ugly yellow SUV was parked in the drive. Someone else was playing out their life where he used to live, used to laugh. He had been shaken by a terrible epiphany: that none of it belonged to him any more. The house, the street, the city, the world. It was all for the pleasure of others. He had strayed beyond the boundary of relevance.

  At first, he had tried to fill the void with pets. An elderly dog from an upscale rescue centre in Langside. He had found it slumped on the rug one Sunday morning. The death was merciful; his work at the University meant he had to leave it alone for most of the day, and the guilt of the days had neutralised the companionship of the nights.

  A cat. A handsome tortoiseshell Maine Coon. After a few months, it had mopped up its breakfast and squirmed out of the undersized cat flap, never to return.

  He ground his knuckles into his forehead. Figure of eight. Figure of eight.

  He stared down at the plate of eggs and bacon. In another time, in another life, breakfast had been vivid and social: Judith, a politics lecturer, fulminating on some social injustice; Lena, loud and fiery and funny and certain of everything, so very present and impossibly correct. He thought of Larkin’s line, about ‘the strength and pain of being young’. It had of course been written for Lena, and she would ultimately be overtaken by the pain, unable to summon any more strength.

  In the first few years after her leaving, he had been savaged by the twin demons of regret and remorse, but had assumed the disturbances would recede over time. To his terror, they had grown steadily larger and more hateful, their talons slashing at him as he endured night after night of foetal insomnia. Nothing could soothe him. No relaxant was calm enough, no distraction loud enough. Nothing on Earth could silence the crossfire of babbling voices.

  He gazed into the gelatinous yolks. A great ocean of grief churned in his stomach, shutting down his appetite.

  Lena had hated eggs. She had turned vegetarian at seventeen, and vegan at eighteen. He remembered the Christmas lunch conversation, when Judith had asked why she didn’t want turkey.

  The sigh. The look. ‘You’re seriously asking why I don’t want to swallow bits of a dead animal and let it rot inside me?’

  The diet refinement had toxified into a lethal eating disorder, and the frenzy—for control, for purity—had consumed her.

  If only he could talk to her again, reassure her. Reminisce. Walk the happy highways. Revisit the bottomless bliss of her childhood.

  Ainsworth took out his phone and called the number.

  Viktor Beck answered almost immediately, as if he had been coiled to pounce.

  ‘Professor Ainsworth! What a pleasure to speak to you. How can I help?’

  27

  ‘We must stop meeting like this.’

  Frazer Drummond set down his coffee mug and lifted his gaze from the mound of papers. ‘I agree. It’s getting close to restraining order territory.’

  Sawyer took the seat opposite. The Macclesfield College refectory was quiet, but Drummond had opted for a corner near the fire exit, away from the windows, like a nervous cat intent on an efficient observation spot.

  ‘Keating told me you were here today. Inspiring future generat
ions?’

  ‘It’s a “Day In The Life” talk to the science faculty.’

  Sawyer looked around and scowled at the IKEA chic. Pinewood floor, pastel limes and pinks. ‘Nice place. Lovely open plan campus. I’m surprised you can cope with all the daylight.’

  ‘I presume you haven’t come here to listen to me talk through the career path from biology student to mortuary manager?’

  Sawyer smiled. ‘It’s a nice drive.’ He took out a Blue Riband chocolate wafer, unwrapped it and took a bite.

  ‘Breakfast?’

  ‘Got this from the Peak View Tea Rooms on the way. I didn’t know they still made them.’

  Drummond tidied his papers and sat back. The suit looked new and fitted. Tweed. Grey pullover. White shirt, collar tucked. He had swapped the semi-rimless glasses for contacts and trimmed his beard to a velvety grey fuzz. Without the cosmetic surround of spectacles or the distortion of lenses, his sky blue eyes looked feral and wary.

  Sawyer munched at the chocolate bar. ‘Scrubbed up well, Frazer. You look like a man on a double mission. Make a few quid off a two-hour lecture, and get yourself in the shop window while you’re at it.’

  ‘I couldn’t work in a place like this. Too much noise. Literal and conceptual. And I couldn’t stand all the fucking idealism. I’m due back for part two in ten minutes, Sawyer. Make it quick.’

  Sawyer crumpled the Blue Riband wrapper. He twisted it into a thin rod, which he folded into a small knot. ‘The two PMs. Same killer? Definitely? Can you put a number on it?’

  ‘A percentage? Hundred and ten. Same MO. Blow to the back of the head. Hemlock injection mark. Cable ties. No struggle. No cyanosis, scratches, nail marks, lacerations. No sexual assault or defensive wounds.’

  Sawyer picked up Drummond’s almost empty coffee mug and held it up in question. Drummond nodded.