23 Cold Cases (The Mac Maguire detective mysteries Book 5)

by Patrick C Walsh

  ‘What did you give her before you left?’

  ‘Give her?’ Joseph thought for a while. ‘Oh yes it was my card. I told her to call me day or night if she needed any help but she never did.’

  Kate was puzzled. Did drug dealers have cards these days?

  ‘Have you got a card you can give us?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes sure, I’ll get someone to give you one before you go.’

  ‘So if you’re saying that Leah gave Ashley heroin, I take it that Leah was dealing then?’

  Joseph sighed, ‘Yes Mason thought it would do her good to do her nurse training where we all grew up and it might have worked if she hadn’t met someone from the local drugs gang. He was in for knife wounds after a fight. Anyway she fell for him, quit training and started dealing instead. She’s very good at it or so I heard.’

  ‘Yet you don’t seem to think that the gang might have been responsible for Ashley’s death?’ Kate asked.

  ‘They weren’t, let’s just say that I know some of them personally,’ Joseph said as she stood up. ‘I’m sorry but I’ve got to go now. Can I please ask that you don’t call here again, I don’t want certain people thinking that I’m getting too close to the police. You can call me if you want though, my number will be on the card. I really hope you catch whoever did that to Ashley.’

  The huge man was waiting for him outside. They walked back together down the corridor.

  ‘Now that was a strange conversation,’ Kate said.

  ‘Yes I know what you mean. I’ve met a few drug dealers but no-one like him before,’ Tommy replied.

  The young woman came back and showed them out.

  ‘Joseph said to give you this,’ she said handing them a card as she held the door open. Once outside Kate stopped and looked at the card.

  ‘My God, here!’ Kate said, stifling a laugh with her hand as she handed the card to Tommy.

  The card said –

  The North London Wireworks Clinic, Director Dr. Joseph Whyte

  ‘He’s a doctor!’ Tommy exclaimed.

  ‘And that’s his clinic! I was nearly going to say something about him being a drug dealer but I thought it was so obvious that I never did. I’m so glad,’ Kate said with a smile, ‘I’d have looked a right idiot. Come on let’s go and see Mac.’

  Mac was engrossed in an email he’d just received when Amrit showed Kate and Tommy in.

  ‘I’ll be off now Mac. You can let me know how the next episode turns out tomorrow,’ she said leaving them alone.

  ‘Are you and Amrit watching TV together or something?’ Tommy asked.

  Mac smiled, ‘No I’m keeping her up to date with what’s going on with the case. She thinks it’s every bit as good as the police serials on the television. Anyway I was just reading an email from the Canadian police, it looks like Trina Derbyshere has disappeared again.’

  ‘That was her mother, she must have warned her that we were looking for her,’ Kate said with a frown.

  ‘Well the police are keeping their eyes open and we can only hope they find her. So what have we found out today?’ Mac asked.

  Kate and Tommy went through their interviews with Mrs. Derbyshere, Pat Barrowclough and Dr. Joseph Whyte, leaving out the fact that they thought the doctor was a drug dealer at first. Mac went through his phone interview with Naomi Cadogan.

  ‘So in summary Trina Derbyshere fled to Canada at short notice but we don’t know why and it looks like she might have done it again. She’s obviously scared of something or someone. Ashley’s uncle said that his niece was also scared but couldn’t tell him why and funnily enough Adeline was pretty much the same. She did say something to Naomi about ‘innocent lives being at risk’ but wouldn’t say any more. Ashley and Adeline were both on drugs not long after they left the clinic. Adeline got on heroin whereas her drug of choice was cocaine and Ashley actually had a needle mark on her towards the end of her stay at the clinic.’

  Mac was quiet for a moment.

  ‘For me it’s all starting to point to the clinic. I’d bet that someone at the clinic is getting some of the clients hooked on drugs and then using them to sell drugs to their rich friends. Whoever it is seems to have a strong hold over them, strong enough to stop them talking even though they all seem to have been pretty desperate.’

  ‘How would that work though?’ Tommy asked.

  ‘Easily enough, they keep all of their clients in strict quarantine from each other, all part of the ‘discretion’ I suppose. Naomi called it a ‘five star jail’ with guards everywhere. If you had access to a client, perhaps someone malleable who might be easy to control, then you could work on them. They’d be very vulnerable and more or less in solitary confinement so it wouldn’t be too hard, if you had access that is.’

  ‘So who would have access?’ Kate asked.

  ‘Naomi only mentioned her personal therapist, the guards and of course Dr. Al-Faran herself.’

  ‘My money’s on the doctor,’ Kate said.

  ‘Perhaps you’re right but we’ll need a bit more evidence than we’ve got so far. Martin’s working on Adeline’s phone so we might learn something from that. Do you still think that Leah could tell us more?’ Mac asked.

  ‘Well it looks like she’s involved with the drugs gang for sure so we could follow up on that but I doubt we’ll learn much more about Ashley’s murder from her,’ Kate replied.

  ‘So I take it that you’re not going ahead with the raid on Leah then?’ Mac asked.

  ‘I didn’t say that but yes that was what I was thinking. I don’t think we can now,’ she said with a sigh. ‘What do you think Tommy?’

  ‘I agree if we raid Leah straight after interviewing her uncle I think the gang will put two and two together and at the very best Doctor Whyte might end up with a few fingers missing. What shall we do about Martin’s camera then?’

  ‘I suppose we’d better not leave it there any longer than we need to just in case anyone spots it. Shall we go over and get it now? You can drop me at home on the way back then,’ Kate said.

  ‘Okay, I’m sure Martin will be glad to get his toy back in one piece anyway,’ Tommy said.

  They were interrupted by Bridget’s arrival. Tommy explained why he had to go out again.

  ‘Pity we’ve got to cancel the raid,’ Kate said as they drove towards St. Albans. She had the computer on her lap and she was reviewing the footage on fast forward. ‘I suppose we can always get the local police to raid her in a few weeks or so and that way the gang shouldn’t be able to directly connect it to the doctor.’

  ‘Has she had many visitors so far?’ Tommy asked.

  ‘No I’m up to four thirty now and she’s only had one so far. A man in a delivery van called about three fifteen and dropped off a sealed cardboard box. It had the company name printed on the box so it might not have been anything illegal.’

  ‘Not a bad way to move drugs around in bulk though, is it? I mean everyone’s getting things delivered now so it wouldn’t be seen as anything unusual,’ Tommy said.

  ‘Yes that’s a very good point,’ Kate said. ‘If you had to deliver drugs to someone how would you do it?’

  ‘Well I think I’d set myself as a seller on a legitimate site using false information and advertise real items for sale. I’d know which addresses were for real and which were for drug deliveries. So, as long as I never got them mixed up, the real items would go to real buyers and the drugs would be delivered to the dealers.’

  ‘Yes that would work,’ Kate said. ‘So maybe the delivery was for real but what was in the box wasn’t. With so many deliveries being made every day there’s no way you could keep track.’

  They had just reached the outskirts of the town and it was getting dark. Kate was now watching Leah’s front door in real time when she noticed that Leah had another visitor. A black Mercedes four by four pulled up just past her door and a young man wearing a hoodie and sunglasses got out and looked up and down the street. Kate thought that he couldn’t have looked more s
uspicious if he tried.

  ‘I think Leah’s getting a visit from the gang. You think they’d try and blend in a bit more instead of turning up in suburbia in their four by fours and shades, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘So she receives a box and then a visit from the gang, sounds like something interesting might be happening,’ Tommy said.

  It was fully dark by the time they reached the flat. They let themselves in but didn’t turn the lights on.

  ‘Are you in a hurry to get back?’ Kate asked.

  ‘Well, I don’t suppose so,’ Tommy said.

  ‘I’d just like to see what happens with our new visitor if you don’t mind.’

  Tommy looked at his watch.

  ‘I could give it an hour I suppose,’ he conceded. ‘What are you expecting to happen?’

  ‘No idea,’ Kate said, ‘but I wouldn’t mind finding out who Leah’s friend is.’

  They sat at the back of the darkened room watching Leah’s front door on the laptop.

  After forty five minutes Tommy said, ‘By the look of it nothing’s going to happen so we might as well…’

  Tommy was stopped in his tracks by the sight of Leah’s door being flung open by a young man dressed only in a pair of boxer shorts. He ran out into the road screaming. He expected to see a raging fire in the house behind him or a madman with an axe but there was nothing. They both ran over to the window. He stood in front of them not more than twenty yards away. He yelled at the top of his voice and Kate could see the blood vessels stand out in his neck.

  ‘What’s he got in his hand?’ Kate asked.

  ‘It’s a frying pan I think,’ Tommy replied with a puzzled expression.

  The young man ran straight towards them, vaulting over the metal fence that marked the boundaries of the flats. Thinking they’d been seen they both moved back from the window just before they saw him launch the frying pan at the window of the flat next door. They heard the sound of breaking glass followed by more screaming and then the sound of someone clambering up the outside of the building.

  Once the sound had gone upwards Kate and Tommy rushed outside and looked up. The young man was already halfway up the four storied building. He seemed to be pulling himself up by his arms only in a display of tremendous strength.

  ‘What in God’s name is he doing?’ Kate asked.

  Tommy could only shrug. He looked around, they weren’t the only ones watching the young man’s progress up the building. Some of Leah’s neighbours had come out of their houses and were silently watching from across the road. Once the young man had reached the roof he pulled himself upright and angrily shouted abuse at the people watching opposite. He started pulling tiles from the roof and then throwing them wildly in their direction.

  Kate and Tommy had to move back as some of the tiles were getting a bit too close for comfort. He then stopped and looked as though he was watching something that was invisible to everyone else. He then shouted incoherently and launched himself off the roof. He was reaching out for something that only he could see, something that wasn’t there.

  His body did a slow turn in the air and then picked the worse possible spot to land. A gasp went up from the spectators as he landed back first on the metal fence with a loud crunch. It just about broke his body in two. It now hung down on either side of the fence like a limp piece of cloth. They could see his face, it had a look of surprise on it.

  ‘Leah! Where’s Leah?’ Kate asked. ‘Ring for the police and an ambulance while I’ll go and look.’

  Tommy rang and reported the incident and made a few quick calls before running after Kate into Leah’s house. He had no idea what it might have looked like before because the whole house had been trashed. Furniture was tipped up on end and what was breakable was broken.

  Leah was broken too. Her bloodied body lay on the floor with little white packets dotting her body like snow. She was only wearing panties and they could both see that she’d been beaten to death with something blunt.

  ‘The frying pan I’d guess,’ Kate said with a frown. ‘What in God’s name happened in here?’

  ‘Perhaps he didn’t like her bacon sandwiches?’ Tommy suggested, giving her a mischievous look.

  Kate was standing by a young woman who had been brutally beaten to death and her body strewn with packets of a substance that regularly ruins many more young lives. At that moment, standing in the middle of a chaotic murder scene, she should have been full of despair for the human condition.

  Instead she laughed out loud.

  Thanks Tommy, she thought, I really needed that.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Kate stood in front of Leah’s front door and Tommy kept people well away from the young man’s body while they waited for someone to turn up. The police came first.

  Inspector Ken Ahmed got out of a police car and looked at the body draped over the fence and then at Tommy.

  ‘We’ve got another one in the house over the road,’ Tommy said.

  ‘What happened?’ the Inspector asked, looking at Tommy suspiciously.

  ‘I wish I knew.’

  He told the Inspector exactly what he’d seen. The Inspector ordered one of his men to take Tommy’s place.

  ‘Show me where the other one is.’

  Tommy led him over the road. The Inspector nodded at Kate as he walked inside. He surveyed the scene and then Leah’s body without a change of expression.

  ‘Looks like murder alright and in that case we’ll have to hand it over to the Major Crime Unit who are so efficient that they’re already here. You’re not on some sort of secret job creation scheme are you?’ he asked Kate and Tommy in disbelief.

  ‘No, we were observing this young woman, Leah Whyte, as part of the ongoing murder investigation that we told you about earlier,’ Kate replied. ‘We’d learnt that she might have some involvement in drugs but we decided not to raid her as this might implicate the person who’d given us the information. We were on the point of removing our surveillance camera when the man who’d been visiting Leah came out in his underwear, ran across the road screaming at the top of his voice, broke a window with a frying pan, climbed the building and then tried to fly. I’ve honestly never seen anything like it.’

  The Inspector looked at all of the white packets strewn across the floor.

  ‘What were they doing in here?’

  ‘They’d received a delivery earlier today and I reckon it was a bulk delivery of drugs. It looks like they were weighing and sealing the drugs in plastic bags ready to be sold on the street,’ Kate replied.

  ‘Look,’ Tommy said pointing to a couple of syringes on the floor. ‘Perhaps they tried it out on themselves first.’

  ‘Come on, let’s get back outside and leave it for the forensics team to sort out,’ the Inspector advised.

  It was only once she gotten outside that she realised there was one call she’d forgotten to make.

  ‘Dan Carter!’ she said to Tommy.

  ‘Don’t worry I called him straight after I called these in. He’s on his way. I also quickly updated Mac.’

  ‘Thanks Tommy,’ Kate said with some relief. ‘Sorry but it’s been a very strange few minutes.’

  ‘You can say that again, I still don’t quite believe it all myself yet.’

  The ambulance turned up next. Someone must have told it not to rush as they heard no sirens. A couple of minutes later the forensics van turned up. Kate saw Bob Yeardley get out. He was already in his white all-in-one suit. He strolled over and looked at the man’s body and then went into Leah’s house. He emerged a few minutes later, gave his team some orders and then strolled back over to Kate and Tommy.

  ‘Hello again. The Inspector said that you saw it all.’

  Kate told him exactly what happened.

  ‘That’s really interesting,’ Bob replied, ‘something like this has happened before if I remember right. Can you do me a favour and put ‘Lancashire contaminated drugs man climbs pub’ into Google on one of your phones, I’ve got my g
loves on.’

  Tommy did just that. An article in a local paper from a few years before described how a batch of amphetamine pills had been contaminated causing some men who had taken the drug to become extremely aggressive and violent and, in one case, a man had climbed up onto the roof of a pub.

  Tommy passed the phone to Kate.

  ‘Looks very similar I’d say,’ Kate said. ‘So you think that the batch of drugs they received was contaminated with something?’

  ‘Most probably. I’d guess that it might be something like PCP judging from your description of the dead man’s actions. It can cause hallucinations and, through that, some extremely violent reactions as people often think they’re being attacked and so on. You’d also literally feel no pain.’

  ‘I take it that it might be down to the lab that made the heroin not being too careful with its processes?’ Kate asked.

  ‘Happens all the time, it was probably either them not cleaning down properly between processing different drugs or more likely just getting the drugs mixed up. I’ll need to get a sample to the lab as soon as possible,’ Bob said. ‘If that’s the only contaminated batch then they might have done us all a favour and stopped this going out onto the streets but if there’s a lot more of this stuff around we’re likely to have a public health crisis on our hands. See you later.’

  Kate and Tommy gave each other a concerned look. The thought of masses of violent young drug users running naked around the streets attacking anything that moved was truly appalling.

  Dan and his sergeant, Adil Thakkar, turned up ten minutes later. Kate got them up to speed.

  ‘So what do you want us to do?’ Kate said when she’d told Dan everything.

  ‘Nothing, go on get off home now. You can make a statement in the morning,’ Dan said.

  ‘But won’t you need some help here?’ Kate said.

  Tommy gave her a look that clearly said she should leave well enough alone.

  ‘Jo, Leigh and Chris are on their way as we speak, glad of something to do I should think,’ Dan said.

  ‘I take it that you’re still getting nowhere with the Priory Park case?’ Tommy asked.