‘We’ve discovered she gave blood regularly. So that appears the most likely option.’
‘I see. Makes sense, I suppose.’ Parr took a fresh breath. ‘Now, I have prepared a bit of a demonstration to let you see how the old sniper thing works. We normally don’t do it here: it’s normally done at the sniper school – an old RAF base – but I’ve booked an area over at PATA.’
‘PATA?’ Bradbury inquired.
‘The Pontrilas Army Training Area. It’s a little way up the road from here.’
Lapslie was appreciative. ‘Thanks. Not sure how much it will help, but it should be interesting at the very least.’
Parr leaned back in his seat. ‘I’ve taken the liberty of getting a little more involved in the inquiry than I would normally. I got some of our friends within the security industry to see if they can trace any .5 sniper rifles that might have gone astray . . .’
‘You mentioned previously an Accuracy International AX50 .50 BMG, which Stowell in our interview has mentioned as one of his favoured weapons. The other was an L115A3.’
Parr nodded thoughtfully. ‘Either of those would have been ideal for this range of shot. Might be worth checking Stowell’s Army mates to see where he might get either of those rifles in the UK. Meanwhile I can get my contacts to see if there are any INTREPs on similar rifles coming into the country legally or illegally.’
‘INTREPs?’ Bradbury asked.
‘Intelligence Reports,’ Parr said without missing a beat or looking at her. ‘If we can track guns of that type through those two sources, then we meet in the middle with some success. There aren’t many of those guns beyond the boundary fence of this and two other UK compounds, and practically zero in private hands.’
‘It’s very good of you. We appreciate it.’
Parr smiled. ‘I’m also looking at who the best shots in the Armed Forces were, going back twenty-five years. Aside from your chap Stowell, that is.’ Parr smiled primly and braced his hands on his thighs with a firm pat. ‘Well, if you’re both ready, I’ll introduce you to our snipers.’
The three of them stood together and left the room. They followed Parr to a LandRover that was parked directly outside. Once in, he drove them out of the camp, along a short section of common road and then up and around a long, twisting track to where a stretch of high-security fencing paralleled the road. A little way along the fence was a parking area and a gate that was operated by a keypad. Parr glanced around and checked his mirrors – checking that nobody else was trying to creep in alongside them, Lapslie assumed – and then typed a code into the keypad. The gate swung smoothly and quietly open. Parr drove in, and waited for it to close before he continued on, past earth bunkers and fifties-style barracks blocks, past strange concrete shapes, until they reached an open area of grass.
‘And here we are.’ He stepped out of the LandRover and gestured to Lapslie and Bradbury to join him. ‘Legs, Spike, are you there?’
Lapslie and Bradbury looked around, and then looked at each other. There was nobody around: the place was empty.
Bradbury raised an eyebrow. ‘I think I’ve seen this film,’ she whispered.
The grass just in front of them moved and two figures stood up. Where there had been no one only moments before, suddenly there were two people, and they weren’t small either. Not only that, but one of them was holding a rifle that had been part-disguised with bits of greenery. It was remarkable. Lapslie couldn’t help feeling that if their killer had these skills then it was no wonder he had no trouble getting in and out of the bunker.
Parr introduced the two men. ‘Legs, Spike, this is Detective Chief Inspector Lapslie and Detective Sergeant Bradbury.’
They all shook hands. Neither man spoke. They were dressed in what Lapslie recognized as ‘ghillie suits’ – outdoor clothing patterned in camouflage and covered in a net of fine twine through which leaves and twigs had been woven. He noticed with interest that he still had no idea of the snipers’ real names. That, presumably, was deliberate on Parr’s part.
‘The boys are going to use the same rifle as we think our killer used, the Accuracy International AX50 .50 BMG. The range won’t be quite so far, neither will the elevation, but it’s far enough and should make the point.’ He pointed. ‘You should just about be able to see the target against the sandbank over there.’
Lapslie strained his eyes. He could just about make out what looked like the outline of a human being, silhouetted against the sandbank.
‘The aim is to hit the target in the heart.’ He smiled at Bradbury. ‘With a chest shot, if you’re a couple of inches out then there is still damage done. With a head shot, a couple of inches could be the difference between hitting and missing.’
‘Are they normally a few inches out?’ Bradbury asked.
‘Talent and training are only two parts of the equation. A gust of wind could change the situation, as could target movement.’ He turned back to the snipers. ‘Gentlemen, in your own time.’
The two men lay back in the grass. This time Lapslie could see them quite clearly, but then this time he knew what he was looking for.
One of the men murmured information to the other, barely distinguishable over the noise of the wind. The other man – Lapslie realized with a jolt that he didn’t even know which one was Legs and which one was Spike – ranged the shot by adjusting his position, and turning a dial on the side of the sniper scope. After a few moments, he fired a ranging shot. There was a lot less noise than Lapslie expected, but it flooded his mouth with the syrupy, sugary taste of tinned peaches, and he winced. He hoped they wouldn’t have to do much of that.
After a few moments the two men conferred again, and a second shot was fired. Once again, only slightly stronger this time, Lapslie’s mouth was awash with tinned peaches, but this time the taste was bizarrely overlaid with sea salt.
Bradbury saw his discomfort. ‘You okay, sir?’
Lapslie nodded, and put his hand up, indicating to her to stop fussing. Parr glanced over at them curiously.
The sniper fired his final shot. Lapslie resisted the temptation to spit: it would make little difference to what he was tasting, and wouldn’t look too good.
Legs and Spike stood, and made their way towards the sandbank and the target. Parr, Lapslie and Bradbury followed.
The final shot had certainly hit the target, but only on the outer edge. A kill shot for sure, but whoever had shot Leslie Petersen had hit dead centre, and from a longer range.
Parr turned to Lapslie. ‘Whether our shooter is this chap Stowell or someone else – he’s a remarkable shot. A highly dangerous man.’
Lapslie, looking at the target like a rabbit hypnotized by the lights of a car, said nothing, but had to agree. And if it was someone able to put Stowell in the frame and mask any link to the other victims so successfully, more remarkable still. A killer to be reckoned with.
Part Five
2 September 2010
Clair Brett dropped down in her armchair, exhausted. It had been a very long day. People never really appreciated how hard modelling was. It really took it out of you, especially if the photographer hadn’t a clue what he was doing, and this one didn’t. She knew much more about the process than he did. He didn’t seem to understand that maintaining an unnatural position for minutes on end while he fiddled with his focus and his exposure was hell on the muscles.
She was used to a broad range of photographers. There were the professionals who were normally fine, and the semi-professionals, who were also pretty good. After that there were the clubs, who varied dramatically, and then there were the rank amateurs. Some were okay and took it very seriously; some just liked the idea of photographing attractive girls naked; and some regarded it as something like a dating agency for creeps. What she had to beware of was the occasional nutter whose entire aim in life was to try and get her naked somewhere private and chance his arm, or some other part of his anatomy.
Picking up her diary, she leafed through the pages, tr
ying to work her week out. She was booked every day, mostly with professionals, but she also had one club and one life art class, and one amateur, but she’d worked with the man twice before, and she trusted him – well, trusted him as much as she trusted anyone.
She totted up her fees. Just shy of two grand for a week’s work, and most of that tax-free. She always declared a bit in order to stop the taxman becoming suspicious, but not all of it. She wasn’t stupid. Still, eighteen hundred quid for a girl without a GCSE to her name wasn’t bad going. She never told her dad about the details – he would have gone loopy – but she did tell her mum. She told her mum everything. Her mum’s attitude was: ‘Well, if they can only see and can’t touch, that’s fine by me. Girl’s got to make a living, ain’t she?’ Clair had laughed. She loved her mum.
Stripping off her clothes and leaving them where they fell, she made her way out into the garden, to where Richard had set up the hot tub jacuzzi. She had turned on the heater as soon as she got into the house, and she was looking forward to a good hot soak. As she made her way into the garden she stopped by the full-length mirror on the wall and looked at herself. She was a little less than six feet tall, with what she knew was a perfect body. She knew because everybody said so. Flat stomach, high breasts, long legs, long dark hair, green eyes and a perfect mouth that didn’t need any work done on it to make it pout.
She really would have to start charging more for her shoots, she thought.
Walking out into the garden, she made her way over to the hot tub and dipped her hand into the water to check the temperature. It was perfect. Climbing the few steps into the tub, she slowly slid under the warm waters. It was the most relaxing experience possible. She felt the tensions of the day just melt away into the water. She ducked her head under, staying there for a few seconds and rubbing her hair between her fingers before she emerged and wiped the hair away from her face.
Leaning back, she decided to switch on the jacuzzi and let the bubbles massage away the aches and pains and frustrations of the day. The hand control was only a few feet away, and she could reach it easily. There were three levels: gentle, medium and full-on. She wanted full-on: she wanted the water to pummel her body, smashing out the knots and the twists. She could turn it back to gentle after that, and drift the rest of her time away.
She turned the dial hard to the right. The giant electrical surge filled the hot tub at once: thousands of volts crackling through Clair Brett’s perfect body. She only felt the pain for a second. It wasn’t even long enough to scream, never mind try and get out. Death was almost instantaneous, and as the charge continued to flow through the water and along her nerves, the hot tub which had been Clair Brett’s sanctuary slowly began to cook her from the inside out.
*
On the way back from Hereford Lapslie had decided that his next stop would be the senior chief investigating officer for the nurse’s murder in 2007. Fortunately he was an old friend: former Chief Inspector Alan Day. Bradbury had managed to get him after just a couple of calls. The Chief Inspector had retired two years before after thirty-two years’ service, and now spent most of his time gardening and working in his allotment. He had arranged to see Lapslie there at 2 p.m. the day after the Hereford trip. Lapslie left Bradbury behind at force HQ, checking on the progress of the team. Also, he had it in the back of his mind that Alan was a very old-fashioned copper and investigator and the force had been glad when he finally went. He’d had little time for female officers, saying that they were only good for two things: sex, and bringing the coal in on a cold winter’s night. That kind of attitude was not only wrong, it was unsupportable in the current political climate. However, Lapslie reminded himself, it wasn’t Alan’s politics he was interested in, but his opinions on the Jane Summers case. He found Day in a small greenhouse behind his house, cutting away some very red-looking tomatoes.
‘Hello, Alan.’
He turned. ‘Mark: how good to see you.’ His voice was dry grass and clover. ‘Just cutting you a few tomatoes. Seem to remember you were quite fond of them.’
‘I am, and they are beautiful. Thanks a lot.’
‘I’ve picked you half a dozen. Cherokee Purples, they are. They go great with a bit of cheese. Come over to the shed: I’ve got the kettle on.’
Lapslie followed him out to his garden shed where an old kettle was boiling on a small gas burner. Day mashed the tea and added a dash of milk from a thermos flask before the two of them sat down in a couple of old deckchairs just outside the shed.
Day’s allotment was quite wonderful, Lapslie reflected. Full of a variety of vegetables and fruit: a real green haven away from the rigours of the city. And Lapslie would lay money on the chance that not only could Day name all the varieties, but that they were rare or heirloom varieties as well. Day had a thing about generic, tasteless fruit and vegetables becoming the only kind that consumers knew about, because of the pernicious cost-saving manoeuvrings of the big supermarket chains.
After sipping quietly at their tea for a while, and discussing long-dead colleagues they had known – a popular subject when old officers got together, like an ongoing competition to see who could live the longest – Lapslie brought Day back to the point. ‘Do you remember the murder of a nurse called Jane Anne Summers in 2007?’
Day put his tea down. ‘First of July 2007, to be precise. Mother found her dead on her bed, strangled. Never did get anyone for it.’
‘Why not?’
‘Usual reason: no evidence, no witnesses. She was a nice girl, well thought of by her friends and work colleagues. She was engaged to be married: nice lad with a cast-iron alibi. She never played around, not that we were aware of, anyway. No jealous former boyfriends in the background. She was a beautiful girl too, and yet there’d been no sexual assault. Whoever killed her got in through an open window. It was a warm summer – everyone was leaving their windows open. Manual strangulation, it was, so in the end the only thing we were sure about was that it must have been a man, based on the size of the bruises on her neck.’
He sipped his tea again. ‘She lived on a busy estate, lot of people about, yet he still got into her bedroom in the middle of the afternoon, strangled her, and then left without a single person seeing a thing. We had half the bloody force doing door-to-door, appeals on local radio and TV; even got that Nick Ross bloke to make an appeal on Crimewatch. We did a reconstruction and everything. Not a bloody thing.’
‘Forensics?’
‘Not a jot. No fibres, no hair, prints, shoe marks, nothing. He was like a bloody ghost.’ He sighed. ‘Most frustrating case I’ve ever worked on. Thanks for reminding me of it.’
The description of a ghost seemed to fit Lapslie’s man perfectly, he considered. ‘So there was nothing out of the ordinary about the case?’
Day shook his head. ‘Other than it was the only murder case I never solved, no. Why the renewed interest after so many years?’ He fixed his gaze on Lapslie. ‘Got a fresh lead, have you?’
Lapslie looked across at Day. He certainly wasn’t going to go over everything about the dolls again; besides, a copper of Day’s generation would think he’d gone mad. But the link to Leslie Petersen’s murder might be worth a spin, now that they had a possible suspect.
‘Maybe. Did the names Leslie Petersen or Mike Stowell ever come up while you were investigating?’
Day sank into thought for a moment. ‘No. Can’t say that they did.’
‘And there were no other nurses murdered during your time, were there?’
He shook his head. ‘No. Well, not that I heard of, and I am sure I would have.’
‘What about her parents?’
‘Both dead now. I swear it was the shock of losing her that helped them along the way. I kept in touch, seemed to be the decent thing to do. If anything came up I let them know at once. Not that much did, and what did turned out to be rubbish. They only lasted a few years after her murder. They seemed to age rapidly, every year like ten. I’ve seen it before. It’s like
the shock closes the body down.’
Lapslie had seen that too, far too many times.
Day continued. ‘She was an only child, you see. Her mother had her later in life. Both parents were a bit surprised, but delighted. She was the apple of their eye and from all accounts a wonderful girl.’ He sighed again. ‘Then I let them down by not catching the bastard. Pity, really, because her old man was foreman on a jury I once gave evidence to, managed to steer the jury towards the right verdict. I recognized him. Would have been nice to have returned the favour.’
‘You didn’t have a bad hit rate, Alan.’
Day sipped at his tea again. ‘It’s funny, really: it’s not the nicks you remember in the end, but the ones that got away. I’ve always remembered Jane Summers, and it bothers me. It rankles. If you get anywhere, you will let me know, won’t you?’
Lapslie nodded. ‘Of course I will.’
Finishing off his tea, Lapslie picked up the bag of tomatoes and stood. ‘I’d better be getting off.’
They shook hands. ‘Heard you’d gone doolally tap,’ Day said with a question mark in his voice. ‘Everything okay, is it?’
Lapslie smiled. ‘Everything’s fine. You’ve been very helpful.’
As Lapslie turned to go Day called out to him: ‘There was one thing, now I come to think of it.’ Lapslie turned, his interest sparked. ‘Our killer, he cut her nurse’s uniform up. Took a large section of the dress and the hat away with him. We never found it. Some sort of trophy, I guess. The rest of the uniform was bagged up: might still be in the exhibits cupboard. Might not be, of course. You know how things are. Of interest?’
Lapslie nodded. ‘Yes, Alan, could well be.’
Lapslie knew he had to remain calm, but his stomach was turning over. From everything that Day had said, he had strongly suspected that Jane Summers had been killed by his man – but the damage to the uniform was a clincher, and that opened all sorts of doors. The nurse’s had been the first doll in the line, so, given the meticulous nature of the killer, she had almost certainly been the first victim. That would then give him a starting point. He could look into both the nurse’s life and the bride’s, and see if there were any links. People, places, events . . . Stowell, or, as he increasingly suspected, an ingenious killer who’d been murdering undetected for seven years, and as his team had become involved, had put Stowell in the frame.
The Thirteenth Coffin Page 13
