The Maggie Murders

by J P Lomas

  Her own sorrow would have to be put on hold, as she was still too upset by the shock of his departure from her life to take it in. For now Derek needed the empathy that no-one else had given him.

  Sobers was grateful for Jane’s intuitive understanding and for her ability to withhold questions she must have wanted to ask. From his time working with her, he had rated her as one of the best detectives he’d ever been fortunate enough to know. As he looked at the horizon which the young Raleigh must once have gazed on, he decided it could have been worse. He had never risen to the heroic heights of that renowned explorer, but more pertinently he had never sunk so low either.

  He watched as the waves danced quickly up the beach on their inward sweep falling just a little further back from their previous reach, each time leaving just a little more of the beach uncovered as they slowly retreated from the land.

  Holding Jane’s warm hand, Sobers counted his blessings. He had failed to solve a murder, been exposed as a homosexual and resigned his job; Raleigh had fallen from favour, been locked up in the Tower and then been decapitated. At least he still had his head and a chance for redemption.

  Part 2

  1987

  Making a Killing

  Chapter 10

  Britain was booming. Mrs Thatcher could afford to call the next General Election a year earlier than she needed; the current economic climate ensured a hat trick of victories was already in the bag. The Labour Party might have chosen a more telegenic leader in Neil Kinnock; however their attempts to gain the moderate centre ground of British politics had not convinced the voters they were free of their militant extremists.

  Through privatisation the Government had been enthusiastically selling off state assets: everything from utility companies to council houses had found a price tag. Shares in the under construction Channel Tunnel had also added to a sense of easy wealth being made available to all who could afford it. Satellite dishes had sprung up on homes all over the country, accompanied by CCTV cameras guarding commercial premises – Orwell’s vision of a future society may have been a few years late in arriving, yet the late eighties seemed to suggest his only mistake was suggesting Big Brother was in charge, whereas Big Business seemed to be running Britain in the Eighties.

  Mrs Thatcher herself seemed beyond satire. Attempts by the Spitting Image puppets to lampoon her as a mad old battle-axe just seemed to reinforce her Teflon toughness. Having survived an attempt by the IRA to murder her in the Brighton Bombing, she had retaliated with a shoot to kill policy in Northern Ireland. When Ronald Reagan wished to avenge the murder of American marines in West Berlin, she had allowed his bombers to take off from British airbases in an attempt to assassinate the Libyan renegade and IRA financier, Colonel Gadaffi. At home, her most likely rival for power in the party, Michael Heseltine, had come a cropper in the Westland Helicopter scandal. The Iron Lady had become adamant.

  She boasted a near impregnable majority in the House from the last election and not even a rejuvenated Labour Party looked like challenging it. All the opposition could realistically hope for was to cut her majority in order to give them a fighting chance in five years’ time. The ’87 Election was not about Maggie winning a third term, it was about her ability to secure a fourth.

  ****

  One emergency services’ vehicle on the St Mary Mead’s development might not have raised eyebrows, but seven most certainly did. The fire engines, panda cars and ambulance parked outside the executive-style three bedroom houses on St Mary’s Avenue may have provided an element of drama in the normally sedate lives of the neighbourhood, but they didn’t bode well for property prices.

  The new development on the Brixington side of Exmouth captured the economic confidence which had propelled Thatcher’s third successive election victory and which saw her gain her biggest majority yet. The mock Georgian semi, with smoke still billowing out of the patio doors at the back was in marked counterpoint to the previous night’s sense of optimism and jubilation in the neighbourhood.

  D.S. Jane Hawkins had been hoping all morning that this was an accident, yet the fire-fighters soon confirmed her fears. An accelerant had been used to start the fire and now she was likely to be assisting in her second murder investigation.

  ‘Time to lose your virginity, Sergeant?’

  ‘It’s not my first time, guv.’

  ‘I thought this was Snoozeville, Tennessee,’ joked D.C.I. Brian Spilsbury.

  ‘We’ve had one before, just like this.’

  Spilsbury was no longer smiling, impressed by the note of anxiety in the D.S’s voice.

  ‘A local butcher, killed in a fire the night after the last election.’

  ‘Shit.’

  Spilsbury hadn’t been expecting much more on his posting to Exeter than a few domestics, or a couple of drug busts. Just one, or two undemanding cases as he worked his way through to sixty and early retirement. A career in the Met and then in Essex had given him his fill of violent crime. This morning’s call sounded like it could have been an accident or domestic, one of those nasty, but easily tied up cases. It was only when that attractive, but rather pushy D.S. had gained the Super’s permission to go along with him that morning, that he had begun to get an inkling that there might be more to this.

  ‘Check out what happened after the election in ’79.’

  ‘Already have, guv. No deaths suspicious or otherwise in Exmouth, or East Devon on that date. One old woman died of natural causes in a nursing home in Sidmouth and another geriatric died at home in Lympstone. There was no report of anything amiss about his death – old age being the layman’s way of expressing it. I also checked both elections in ’74 and the one in 1970; a total of five deaths, but none in a fire. Do you want me to go back to the sixties?’

  D.S. Hawkins certainly knew her stuff, he reflected. He just hoped she wasn’t seeing connections for the sake of it. It wouldn’t be the first time a keen copper had been desperate to reopen an old case.

  ‘No, but get on to HOLMES and see if any other forces have reported suspicious deaths by fire on the night of the ’79 election.’

  ****

  D is for Death.

  A word with Anglo-Saxon origins and not foreign ones, which I find most apposite as the English are very good at death. Kill a fellow countryman and it’s counted as murder, but kill a black or a paddy and that’s Empire Building! We must have killed millions this century alone in trying to hang on to the pink bits of the globe and then we let even more die when we pulled out of those places. From Ireland to India we left Death trailing in our wake.

  I wonder how many Argentineans the good sergeant would have killed if they hadn’t got him first? We certainly gave their boys a bloody good pasting in the Falklands. Boys being the operative word. They died in their hundreds at the hands of our men. Even our young soldiers were far superior to theirs as we hail from a warrior race. They were mainly conscripts, whilst we are very professional when it comes to death. We’ve got death in our blood.

  When Election Night came Death was my gift to the cripple. He could not wait for death, so I kindly came for him; as the poet might have put it. I became an angel of mercy for a man who should have died in San Carlos Water. I was sorry that I had to wait so long to take him, but Maggie calls the shots. In many ways he was lucky; she could have waited until 1988 before calling it.

  It felt good to do it again. Okay, not good, that’s a silly word to describe a killing, but thrilling and exciting – the frisson from the first time had returned.

  It was a relief to get the waiting out of the way. When she called the election it felt like a release. A part of me which had been in standby mode was reawakened. My victim had been chosen well in advance and his death was endlessly refined in my head. Having just a month until polling day to make the final adjustments, was like one long dress rehearsal before the opening night. Everything suddenly felt more intense again; it’s strange how arousing the thought of death can be. Well maybe it’s not strang
e; opposites attract as they say.

  I could have stopped. I’d got away with murder. No-one cared any longer about that old poof I’d put down in Littleham and that case would never be solved. By carrying out my second visitation, I knew I was more than doubling the risk – connections would inevitably be made and the old case reopened, but what’s life without a degree of risk?

  Besides I’d been getting impatient. I was glad that Thatcher had not waited for another year before calling it – like her I wanted to seize the opportunity to assert my power. The country had changed; we were no longer crippled by the old ways of undue deference and impotent politeness. The free for all of the free market rewarded those who had the desire to make something of their lives.

  This was the right time to make a killing.

  ****

  Gerald Mallowan found the paperwork in front of him one of the most arousing things he had ever seen. It was even more exciting than his burgeoning shares portfolio, for this piece of paper was his final step in acquiring the rights to develop the site of Exmouth Docks. He loosened his waistband and breathed a contented sigh of relief. This was the biggest slice of the cake he’d ever got. His previous projects had centred on acquiring small pieces of land and developing them into blocks of flats, or converting Victorian and Edwardian family homes into smaller units, but the ambition of this latest venture exceeded all of his previous ones and would propel him into the big league!

  He chewed on an indigestion tablet as he slurped his coffee. He was going to have to stop drinking quite so much, although last night’s election victory had required that quite a few celebratory toasts were drunk at the club! And anyway, he was never going to be a part of the mineral water and salad brigade. The yuppies might like all that Yank influence, but his was a generation that liked their business lunches served with something proper to drink.

  The spreadsheet on his home computer made very happy reading. This project might be the one which enabled him to retire as a millionaire. Thanks be to Maggie! The way she had encouraged entrepreneurs had enabled him to change career path from that of a moderately successful yacht broker to that of a highly successful property developer. With the booming housing market he was raking it in hand over fist and might even have enough to retire early, seeing as he was still only just in his early 50s and well on his way to his first million.

  Even his wife’s shops were making a profit. At first he’d invested in them as a loss leader, what they failed to make on the balance sheet he was sure to make up in the bedroom and yet the shop he’d backed as no more than a bit of pin money for her had done so well that it had been worth his while opening other branches. In fact most of the money he’d put into the shops had come from a government start up loan. Britain truly was open for business; he’d build the houses and she’d sell them all the expensive tat to decorate them. It was a marriage made if not in heaven, then certainly in a concession stand situated conveniently close to the celestial gates.

  His latest acquisition was surely his Falklands moment. The redevelopment of the docks into an upmarket marina would make him millions. As he and his partners had acquired the ailing business for a song, coupled with the fact that the banks were lending money like there was no tomorrow, they’d soon be able to replace the derelict warehouses and empty silos with Executive style waterfront apartments and then sell them on for six figure sums! Anyone who was anybody needed a second home and whilst some of his former clients in the yacht brokerage business had turned to overseas investments, he knew that the South-West ports were still prime real estate for those on City salaries who fancied themselves as weekend sailors.

  ****

  In the hurriedly assembled incident room, located in a wing of Exmouth Police station which had been taken out of moth balls to cope with the demands of this high profile case, Spilsbury turned to the preliminary findings on his desk.

  The forensics reports made grimmer reading than usual. Spilsbury had seen some nasty, vindictive stuff in his time, but this killing bore the hallmark of the twisted psychos you read about in American crime fiction rather than the casual brutality he’d witnessed on the fringes of London. Pain in his experience was used to teach a lesson, or send out a warning, not to screw with the mind of the victim. Well not when the victims were men and certainly not when they were war heroes; especially when they were disabled war heroes.

  It was the findings of the post-mortem which had nearly made Spilsbury bring up his Full English. The victim had been set on fire; traces of an accelerant had been found both on his face and body. The horrific third degree burns Sgt Baker had survived in the Falklands had been out done by the ones he received in his own bed.

  His body had been found on the other side of the lounge door. The killer had thoughtfully propped his wheel chair under the handle on the other side to prevent him opening it. The room in which he died had been designed as a dining room, but had been converted into a ground floor bedroom. Sgt Baker had managed to crawl as far as the lounge door, pulling himself forward like a baby with his outsized arms, as he had lost both his legs at Bluff Cove when one of HMS Fearless’ landing crafts had been sunk by Argentinean Skyhawks.

  Baker had taken, or been given a sedative shortly before his death, though it would not have been strong enough to have meant he could have slept through his grim fate.

  Spilsbury tried to imagine his last moments. The man must have thought he was reliving his worst nightmare: waking to find his bed on fire, to feel his skin melting and to find he was trapped with no way out. The D.C.I. had no experience of active service, but he could still recall the horrific pictures released after the war of the fleet auxiliaries Sir Galahad and Sir Tristram burning at anchor in Bluff Cove.

  Another victim of that raid had been Welsh Guardsman Simon Weston, whose badly burnt face had been reconstructed by plastic surgeons. Pictures of Weston’s injuries had become the iconic images of the conflict for those who had opposed it. Spilsbury had been all for it to be fair. It had been one of the many things he liked about Maggie – her sense of resolve and her determination to stand up to bullies like General Galtieri. And to be fair, Bluff Cove had been one of the few disasters in a fairly easy victory. The image of the Union Jack being raised victoriously over Port Stanley was his preferred memory of the Falklands.

  He tried not to look too closely at the crime scene photos, as they were making his stomach turn and he’d already had enough problems in that area today. He took refuge in the bacon sandwich Jane had deposited on his desk. He was grateful for the unexpected thoughtfulness of the gesture and was glad he had been able to swing it with Dent that she was seconded to the investigation. Though he half wondered if the newly promoted Deputy Chief Constable had really been paying much attention to what he was asking for, when Dent had swung by the incident room on one of his self-styled ‘touching base’ visits. The DCC had seemed far more interested in what he could tell the press than the nitty-gritty of their inquiry.

  Forcing his mind back to the forensics report he reflected that if Baker had been an ordinary man it would have been bad enough, but killing a disabled man? This was as bad as killing kiddies or interfering with little girls in his book. The man had already died once, why on earth make him go through it all over again?

  His mind flipped back to what Jane had been saying about the other murder. ‘Other’ being a fairly apposite word to describe murders in Exmouth – it may not have been a sleepy town; however it was certainly fairly tired when it came to homicide. Like most parts of the UK it had a thriving drugs trade, mainly the importation of cannabis as far as he could work out, yet much of the second hand violence which attended it seemed to be missing. Two potentially related murders in five years would be like The St Valentine’s Day Massacre in this part of the world.

  Could someone be knocking off war heroes? Both men had served as sergeants – one in the army and one in the marines, but in completely different wars some forty years apart! Yet both had died in fires, wh
ich the report in front of him confirmed had both been started deliberately. He supposed there could be some sort of political angle to this. Perhaps it was some bizarre form of anti-war protest? Yet if people were against killing, surely they weren’t going to start burning to death helpless victims?

  Chapter 11

  Jez Carberry woke up still smiling at his good fortune. He wasn’t even surprised to see that she had left already. She was like that, it was one of her many charms. Part of him sensed that there was more to her than just her ravishing beauty and passionate sensuality, yet most of him just wanted to enjoy the amazing way she made him feel alive and needed. The fact that they mainly met in hotels had alerted him to the probability she had good reasons for not taking him home, but he was not going to question too deeply her motives when the last year had been the happiest of his life. As his father had once told him, when he dared to question why they were still holidaying in South Africa when the rest of the world seemed to be boycotting the place ‘The sun shines on those who help themselves’.

  He realised as he lay back on the luxurious sheets of the king sized bed that his journey from sex starved adolescent to becoming the lover of an older and more experienced woman was like something from ‘The Graduate’, though without the cheesy soundtrack. Yet after years of exaggerating the breadth and depth of his sex life to his friends in The Wheatsheaf, Jez for once had been playing down this relationship to them.

  After years of trying and plentiful near misses with girls, he felt he had now cracked it.

  There had been that embarrassing afternoon after his A’ Levels when he’d tried to force himself on to Katy Bennett’s younger sister Liddy… Well maybe ‘force’ was too strong a verb. It had been a stifling Sunday and his hangover and hormone levels had both been raging. He probably would have tried it on with Mrs Bennett if he’d found her home alone! As it transpired both Liddy’s parents had driven out to Ottery that day to visit friends and Katy had gone round to a girl friend’s.