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

by Patrick C Walsh

  ‘Well I suppose we all need a car,’ Amrit said.

  ‘Perhaps but she always bought a top of the range BMW sports car, the last one cost her nearly a hundred thousand.’

  ‘Oh well we all have our little treats I suppose.’

  ‘She obviously had some capital tucked away but it’s not obvious where. She read Ancient and Mediaeval History at an Oxford University and got a first class degree with honours. After that she appears to have done nothing really, she never worked, never even travelled.’

  ‘How can you be sure, about her travelling I mean?’ Amrit asked.

  ‘Well she never applied for a passport so she couldn’t have travelled abroad.’

  ‘I wonder if she might have been a little like that Emily Dickinson, a recluse,’ Amrit ventured.

  Mac wondered what she might have to do with a dead pensioner when he realised she was talking about Emily Dickinson and not Edith.

  ‘She was a poet, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Yes that’s right, she lived in America in the nineteenth century. I saw a film about her, sad it was too the way she locked herself away from everyone. Towards the end she never even left her bedroom.’

  Mac could only sympathise, he felt like he was turning into a recluse too.

  ‘Well that’s as good a guess as any I suppose.’

  Mac wasn’t really convinced however. It’s as though Cassandra Bardolph had walked so lightly through her life that she never left a single footprint. This lack of any detail about her life only intrigued him more.

  The days rolled by as Mac examined every one of the cases thoroughly. For Terri Maynard and Marie Callaghan, try as he might, he couldn’t find anything at all that would give him the slightest traction. As for Edith Dickinson he remembered his earlier thought and rattled off an email to Martin.

  That just left Agniezka Coleman and Asma Rafiq.

  He read carefully through Agniezka’s case file again. In Mac’s experience this type of frenzied stabbing was either due to strong personal feelings, a jealous lover or a fierce family feud perhaps. The only other explanation was that it had been carried out by someone with a severe mental illness. He didn’t like the latter as it was a rarer occurrence than most people might think. However if it was the former it couldn’t have been her husband because he was at work when his wife was murdered and it couldn’t be anyone from her family because that were all back in Poland.

  His initial thoughts about mistaken identity came back to him. He looked at the exact spot where she had been killed on street view. The entryway between the three storied block of flats and the house next door could be clearly seen from the street. He looked at the photos taken at the time again. Back then a large bush obscured the view of the entryway so anyone passing by on the street wouldn’t have had a clear view. It looked a good place to set a trap.

  He looked closely at the photos of the crime scene. He could see that there was a high brick wall on the left and a high wooden fence on the right, presumably behind which was the back garden belonging to the house. This puzzled him as, if the killer was lying in wait in the entryway itself, Agniezka should have been able to see him as soon as she entered as there was nowhere he could hide. Walking home late at night he doubted most women would walk into an alleyway knowing that someone was already lurking there.

  He looked closely at the photos once again. He was wrong there was a place to hide. A gate almost seamlessly formed part of the wooden fence. He looked again through the statements to see if the investigators had interviewed anyone from the house. He couldn’t find anything at first which he thought was a bit odd.

  He eventually found a note tucked away in the file that stated that they’d tried to contact the owners of the house and had finally established that Mr. and Mrs. Everson had been one week into a three week Mediterranean cruise when the murder had taken place. They were eventually interviewed and they stated that they hadn’t left their house keys with anyone and they always kept the gate to the back garden locked.

  Mac thought about this. He considered it more than likely that the killer had waited behind the gate. It would have been the perfect hiding place and would give the killer the element of surprise. It would have been easy enough for most people to climb over the fence and unlock the gate and this could even have been done the night before.

  Of course the murderer would have had to have known that the Eversons were away so that might be something that could be followed up. However, he was still puzzled. If that had been how it happened then why didn’t the murderer pull Agniezka’s body into the Everson’s garden, lock the gate and then go? It would certainly have delayed finding the body which would surely have helped the murderer by making the exact time of death much harder to pin down.

  Mac followed this tenuous thought. What if the killer didn’t want any delay, what if he wanted the body to be found as soon as possible? Why might that be though? If the body is found quickly then it’s much easier to be precise about the time of death but why might the murderer want this?

  Of course! It was all about time. Maybe it wasn’t mistaken identity after all.

  He did a Google search and it produced something of great interest. A story from a local paper dated just over two and a half years after the murder announced the wedding of John Coleman and Angela Gardner. In the short article John explained how Angela had become a friend after his wife was inexplicably murdered and eventually friendship had grown into love.

  Mac bet it had. He spent hours looking over all the CCTV footage and there was John clearly visible for just about every minute between nine and when he knocked off at eleven. He could see Angela working in the background too. She walked towards the toilet around five minutes to nine and didn’t reappear anywhere in the store for over fifteen minutes. He looked at the map. If there was a back entrance to the supermarket then fifteen minutes would be plenty of time for her to walk to the entryway, lie in wait, then kill Agniezka and return to the store.

  At the time of the investigation John Coleman had been squeaky clean with not even the slightest rumour having been heard about him having an affair or having any sort of problem with his marriage. The thought struck Mac that perhaps he might have loved his wife and been totally happy with his marriage. Maybe it was all down to Angela.

  Did she harbour a secret love for her supervisor? It wasn’t uncommon and even if John had returned her love there would have been a problem. Agniezka, like many Poles, was a devout Catholic and well known at the local church. She would never have agreed to a divorce. So Angela might have wanted to get rid of her but in a way that wouldn’t implicate her husband. After all what would be the point of having the object of your desire banged up in prison for twenty five years?

  Mac thought it through. Angela didn’t appear to have been on the investigators’ radar but then why should she have been? She was just one of forty nine people working in the supermarket that night, a lot of whom he guessed would have gone off camera for varying amounts of time around the time of the murder, especially if they were smokers. At the time there might have been nothing between John and Angela except in Angela’s head.

  Mac took a step back. It was all just supposition but it could be a lead and one only made possible by the passage of time. The case would have been well and truly frozen by the time John and Angela got married, the original investigators had possibly forgotten about the murder, it was just one out of a never ending string of cases after all. In that space of time they might even have moved on to other jobs or left the area.

  Mac sighed, he had a feeling that he might be on to something but there was no evidence and it was highly unlikely that any would be uncovered after all this time. There would have been blood on the clothes of whoever killed Agniezka and a knife to gotten rid of. Mac could see it in his mind’s eye.

  In a supermarket as big as that one they would probably have had hundreds of knives in stock. He went back through the file. One investigator stated that they seized and
checked all the knives that had been in stock but a supermarket is a big place. What about the stock they probably kept around the back? Even if they knew about that it would be easy to wash the knife put it back in its box and then place that and several other boxes of knives in a location that wouldn’t be found on the computer. They wouldn’t exist and so no-one would ever know they were there. If they did find them then it would just look like a mistake anyway. She could have come back later, perhaps weeks later, and simply put the knives back where they belonged. Perhaps she later destroyed the knife that killed her love rival or perhaps she just allowed it to be sold. Someone might have been slicing their roast beef with a murder weapon without knowing it.

  What about the clothes then? He replayed the video and, although the colour wasn’t great, he could see that she was wearing a dark red track suit of some sort.

  What a good colour to be wearing if you’re about to knife someone, he thought.

  So what would he do? It was late in the evening and, being March, it would be dark out. Wearing the dark red track suit he’d go and kill his victim and then return to the supermarket. He’d have a bag somewhere near the toilets with an identical track suit in its original packaging. All he needed to do was simply change into the new tracksuit and carefully insert the old suit into the packaging and place it at the back of the display rack. Next day perhaps buy the tracksuit yourself and simply walk away with the evidence.

  If she was indeed the killer, the supermarket, vast and surely full of secret places only known to the staff, would be a great place to hide evidence such as knives and clothes and, perhaps best of all, you could simply hide them in plain sight on the display shelves.

  Mac sighed, yes he’d worked out who could have done it and how they might have done it but there was just one snag – there was no evidence. He smiled as he remembered flying a kite similar to this one in a case and Peter Harper shooting it down with four words.

  ‘Where’s the proof then?’ he’d asked.

  He knew that there was a good chance he was right but there was also a chance he was wrong. If Angela hadn’t carried out the murder and the police started asking questions then might it plant the idea in her husband’s mind? Perhaps they had children now and the mistrust created might end up breaking up a family. Mac knew he couldn’t take that chance.

  Unfortunately poor Agniezka would end up in the same pile as Terri, Marie and Edith, unsolved and likely to stay that way. All he had now was the Asma Rafiq case left and he had little hope of cracking that one.

  Chapter Twenty Two

  It was Thursday and Mac realised he wasn’t far off being halfway through his prison sentence. Amrit had just taken away his empty plate after he’d dispatched another of her wonderful lunches. He realised that he was being spoiled, somehow just having a sandwich at mid-day now would seem like something of a hardship.

  He then got a call from Dan. He wanted to come and visit. Mac was more than happy to see him but, knowing Dan, he knew that there would be some point to the visit.

  He was right.

  ‘We’re on a run Mac,’ Dan said. ‘Our idea of using facial reconstruction actually worked!’

  ‘Really? You found out whose body it was in the Priory Park lake?’

  ‘We did,’ Dan said with a proud smile.

  ‘Well don’t forget that it was all your idea, I just put you in touch with the professor. Go on then, tell me how you did it.’

  ‘Well the professor was good enough to do us three photos with different variations in skin tone and hairstyle to give us a better chance of identification. We decided to start off with the properties closest to the lake and then spiral outwards. We got a positive identification after just an hour from a woman who ran a corner shop two streets away from the lake. She identified our dead man as ‘Ginger’. Unfortunately she didn’t know any name beyond that but she knew where he used to live. She said he’d shared a flat above a nearby shop with another young man called Ally. Apparently both of them used to visit the shop regularly, mostly for alcohol. They were both from Scotland and made a living working in the local bars. The woman remembered that Ally had told her a while back that Ginger had gone back to Scotland.

  So we waited until this Ally was at home and then we raided the flat. Ally didn’t even try to deny that he murdered his friend, whose real name was John MacGregor by the way. He said it happened after they’d both had more than a few drinks. They’d been playing a football video game and had gotten into an argument.’

  ‘Let me guess Messi or Ronaldo, who’s the greatest?’ Mac ventured.

  ‘Spot on. So Ginger is saying Ronaldo while Ally goes for Messi. After arguing about this for quite some time and, with even more alcohol having being taken on board, Ally decided he’d had enough and strangled Ginger with the lead that connected the controller to the video game box. He then went to bed and decided to get rid of his friend’s body by dragging it to the lake the next night. Imagine this, he didn’t try to cover it up in any way and he managed to drag it down a couple of streets without anyone noticing.’

  ‘It was almost as though he was hoping he’d get caught,’ Mac said.

  ‘I think you might be right, he certainly didn’t seem that upset when we knocked down his door. I think it was more a relief than anything else.’

  ‘So another one solved, you must be making your bosses very happy.’

  ‘Yes they’re more than happy with the team, so happy indeed that they signed off on Martin’s cameras without a single moan.’

  ‘How’s the case against the doctor going?’ Mac asked.

  ‘Well it’s going to take some time. She was only partly right about the encryption on her computer system though. Our experts think it should be breakable without losing the data but it’s going to take them a while. We’re in no hurry though. She hired some high powered barristers to try and get bail but it didn’t work, so thankfully she’s safely in jail for a while which gives us time to build a good case. Once we crack the computer we can start contacting all her former patients. I guess we won’t have too much trouble finding all the people she’s victimised and, hopefully, there’ll be at least some who will be willing to testify against her, especially when they learn that all her threats were just smoke and mirrors. We’ve got one witness already.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ Mac asked.

  ‘Trina Derbyshere. She gave herself up to the Canadian Police and they flew her back here on Wednesday. We’ve already taken an initial statement. It makes interesting reading. I’ll send it over to you if you like.’

  ‘That would be great, thanks Dan.’

  ‘You know I never knew how much I was helping myself when I sent those cold cases over to you. Thanks Mac, see you later.’

  It was strange, Mac thought, how easily some cases could be solved once you’ve got that crucial bit of evidence. All the surmising and theories in the world aren’t anywhere near as good as a single hair or skin cell.

  He sighed as he returned to the Rafiq case, he really wished he could find some evidence that would tell him exactly what had happened. A Muslim girl is killed and the family close ranks. Then her brother disappears and goes and fights and dies for the cause in Afghanistan, a classic honour killing scenario in every respect. So what was it about this case that grated with Mac?

  In his statement a friend of Asma’s brother said that, while Youssef had mentioned fighting in Afghanistan, he’d been fairly sure that it was just talk because he only ever mentioned it once he’d had a few drinks.

  His family said that they were surprised too. He’d gone out one night with his friends, then came home late, packed a bag and left without saying goodbye. Mac supposed that the investigators took all this with a pinch of salt as they were probably thinking that the family were lying and had actually helped to get Youssef out of the country.

  The police searched Youssef’s room again after he disappeared and found the knife, still with his sister’s blood on it, and a computer pri
nt-off from a Jihadi website all about how to get to Afghanistan.

  But what if Youssef’s family wasn’t lying? Mac thought.

  Does anyone really go out with friends one night and then suddenly make the decision to go abroad and do it there and then? Wouldn’t it at the very least take some setting up?

  Mac read all the statements from Youssef’s friends again. He was trying to get an idea of what Youssef was like. Impulsive certainly and he also seemed to have a thing about women, one friend said that as far as Youssef was concerned all women were just whores but when another friend had mentioned that he quite fancied his sister Youssef pulled a knife on him and had to be restrained.

  So that confirmed that the knife was likely to be Youssef’s and that he had a thing about his sister too. Mac had to admit that it was highly probable that he had killed his sister but he couldn’t help feeling that there was a lot more to it than that. Mac kept digging away, after all he didn’t have anything else to do.

  He noticed that there was a new email from Dan and he opened it with some anticipation. It was Trina Derbyshere’s statement. Mac read it several times, it certainly made things a little clearer.

  Trina said that Ashley had broken down and one night told her all about the doctor. About how she’d supplied her with heroin in the clinic and about the threats she’d made if she didn’t start dealing drugs for her. Trina had advised her to go to the police and tell them everything but Ashley felt that she couldn’t. Ashley too had believed in the existence of Hadya and Hussein and she told Trina that if any harm came to them because of her she wouldn’t be able to live with herself.

  While Trina didn’t take drugs herself quite a lot of the clients she worked for did. Working for the public relations company involved looking after the needs of visiting clients many of which were film or rock stars. Those ‘needs’ often included women, drink and, of course, drugs. Trina got the drugs from Ashley to try and help her out. After Ashley was murdered Trina didn’t know what to do, she could only hope that whoever killed Ashley didn’t know about her and so she tried to keep a very low profile. Then one day she received a photograph in the mail. It clearly showed her and Ashley exchanging drugs and money. She had no idea who it came from but Mac guessed that it was from the doctor. He also guessed that it had the intended outcome as Trina immediately fled to Canada.