Blood Rites: A Detective Inspector Paul Snow thriller

by David Stuart Davies

  Debra shrugged those shoulders again and looked vaguely puzzled for a moment. ‘No,’ she said eventually and stared at her feet once more and then as though an idea had suddenly popped into her mind, her face brightened. ‘I did sort of feel that that there was something on her mind in the last couple of months or so. She seemed to be… well, a bit miserable all the time. I asked her once if something was up but she said no. We sorted of drifted apart a bit because of it. Didn’t see as much of each other as before in the last few weeks before she… I just got the impression that she just wanted to be alone.’

  ‘And you knew of no reason for this.’

  That shrug again. ‘Not really – unless her dad was giving her more grief. But she didn’t say.’

  Snow reckoned they had reached the end of the line on this particular journey. ‘Thank you, Debra. You have been a great help. I hope I didn’t upset you too much asking you questions about your friend.’

  Debra shook her head. ‘No. It was nice to mention her again. I miss her. I wish she was still here.’ Her eyes moistened behind the heavy spectacles.

  There was an awkward silence. Snow really did not know what to say. His experience in dealing with emotional young girls was limited. Debra helped him out by dragging a handkerchief from the pocket of her dress and sniffing loudly. With an awkward movement she turned towards the door. ‘Can I go now?’ she said.

  ‘Well?’ said Matilda returning to her office after seeing Debra loping off down the corridor sniffing on a paper handkerchief.

  Snow shook his head. ‘Not very fruitful, I’m afraid, but thank you for allowing me to do it.’

  ‘She seemed upset.’

  ‘Yes. Just talking about her friend made her a little tearful. Don’t worry, I was gentle and I didn’t press her too hard or mention the pregnancy.’

  ‘I’m pleased to hear it. It seems a messy business.’ She held up her hand to prevent Snow from responding. ‘I am not fishing. Honestly, Paul, I don’t want to know the details unless they affect me directly. I have enough on my plate running this school without being party to lurid information concerning a nasty homicide.’

  Snow gave her one of his bleak smiles. ‘I can assure you, I wasn’t going to divulge anything. I still have to be professional about this even though…’

  ‘I am your girlfriend…?’

  This time his smile was genuine, accompanied by a chuckle. ‘Yes, I suppose you could put it like that.’

  She returned the smile, her features and stance relaxing a little. She was glad this interruption in her school life was coming to an end. Impulsively, she leaned forward and kissed Snow gently on the cheek. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but hope I never see you darken the doorstep of my office again in an official capacity. It really is quite disturbing. I would like to keep our official worlds quite separate.’

  ‘I’m with you all the way. I can assure you it was fate rather than personal choice that brought me here. I’ll do the best I can not to cause problems. But I do have a serious case to investigate so in the meantime if you’ll have a word with some of your staff casually to find out if Mandy was in some kind of relationship with anyone -boy or man.’

  She rolled her eyes, her body tensing again. ‘And be your mole?’

  ‘No, just make a few casual enquiries, that’s all. I assure you I’d ask you to do this even if I didn’t know you.’

  ‘I’ll believe you, thousands wouldn’t.’

  There was a policeman on duty standing outside Frank Sullivan’s shabby council house when Snow returned. The SOCOs had done their work and vanished but the property would remain a crime scene and under police custody for some time. Snow knew the constable but he flashed his warrant card at him all the same. ‘Just come for a little look round,’ he explained. The constable nodded and fumbled in his pocket for the key. Unlocking the door, he held it open for Snow to enter. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  Stepping into the hall, Snow shivered. It wasn’t just the cold that made him do so. There was something icily oppressive about the gloomy atmosphere of the place that seemed to seep under the skin. It was the scene of violence and death and the very fabric of the building seemed to resonate with it. Snow clicked on the electric light but the feeble bulb did nothing to chase away the shadows. There was a dark stain of blood on the hall carpet and the walls were speckled with crimson splashes. The attack must have been sudden and brutal. Either the murderer pushed his victim backwards into the hall or Sullivan had invited him in. Was the killer someone he knew or masquerading as some official? It was very unlikely he would get answers to these questions until the culprit was apprehended. If the culprit was apprehended, he corrected himself. There was no guarantee they would catch the bastard. That thought did nothing to lighten his mood.

  Casting this depressive notion aside he set about what he came for. To examine the bedrooms of Mandy and Frank Sullivan. The SOCOs had concentrated their efforts on the actual crime scene area where the body had been found. It had been established that the killer had gone no further into the house than the hallway where he had killed his victim before leaving. Therefore the SOCOs had only carried out a perfunctory search on the rest of the premises. Snow was hoping to come across something that would throw more illumination on this confusing case.

  The girl’s bedroom looked as though it had not been touched since she had been last in it. Probably the father had been too distraught to move anything or tidy it up. It was a common reaction: leave the room as it had been when the victim was alive. It was a typical teenage lair: the wall filled with pictures of pop stars, The New Kids on the Block featuring prominently, a batch of fluffy toys, the dressing table crammed with make up and jewellery, a portable radio, a cassette player and a rack of tapes. There were some clothes, jeans and dresses hung on the back of the door and across an old wooden chair and a slew of magazines scattered on the bed. The melamine wardrobe that leaned precariously to the left was filled with all kinds of cheap outfits. There was one picture in a plastic frame on the window sill of Mandy herself cuddling a kitten. It had obviously been taken some time ago. She looked about ten and the innocent smiling face that stared out at him, unaware of the dark tragedy waiting to overtake her a few years down the line, gave him a pang of sadness. Sometimes his job brought him too close to the pain and futility of life. It chipped away relentlessly at his sense of decency and hope.

  With a determined shrug to slough off such dark thoughts, Snow slipped on his forensic gloves and began his search for personal items. Ideally he hoped to come upon a diary or some photographs which might give him a clue as to who the father of Mandy’s unborn child was. He spent half an hour searching the room, crawling under the bed, pulling out all the drawers of the dressing table and examining the contents. There were three handbags stuffed in the bottom of the wardrobe but they provided him with nothing but some bus tickets, a few coins, lipstick stubs and similar innocent paraphernalia. He could find no hidey-hole or secret location where she may have kept a diary or some kind of record of her life. He thought he had found something of significance when he discovered a shoebox wrapped up in a woollen scarf on the top of the wardrobe but it was empty.

  With a sigh and a grunt of disappointment, he gave up. If Mandy Sullivan had secrets, she kept them to herself or hid them elsewhere.

  He moved along the corridor to the other bedroom. It was a grim chamber which smelt of sweat and staleness. There was an ancient dark wood bedroom suite, probably dating from the forties, consisting of a chest of drawers, a dressing table and a wardrobe and a battered old armchair. The curtains were drawn, although daylight was able to penetrate the thin material. Snow swept them back, flooding the room with illumination which added an even grimmer patina to the room. He began the search. He soon discovered that Sullivan was in possession of a small range of clothes; most, he deduced, were seconds bought off the market. Under a pile of socks in the bedside cabinet he found a tin box which contained fifty pounds in fivers. Beneath the be
d was a small suitcase. Despite its location it wasn’t dusty, which suggested to Snow that it had not been there long or that it had been used recently.

  He hauled it out and plopped it on the bed. To his chagrin he discovered it was locked. What the hell, he thought, and fished out his penknife and attacked the lock. Like so many of Frank Sullivan’s possessions, the case was cheap and therefore offered little resistance to his efforts to snap it open. He made quick work of it. With a tight grin of satisfaction, he raised the lid. The case contained a stash of brightly coloured magazines. The titles alone indicated their content, but the lurid pictures on the covers confirmed it. He glanced at two: Teen Tits and Schoolgirl Sex. A glance was enough. Snow shut the case and sat on the bed.

  So that was his unpleasant bag, was it? Snow was instantly reminded of something that Debra Scott had said about Mandy’s father: ‘He was a bit creepy’. He felt that strange tingle down his spine that he always experienced when he had begun to put two and two together and he didn’t like the answer. He really wanted to leave this room. He felt soiled by being in it. It wasn’t that it was the decidedly grubby quarters of a murdered man who had a taste for teenage porn. There was something else – something he could not quite put his finger on. He could feel it, appreciate it but could not quite articulate it – not yet at least. Whatever it was, it made him decidedly uneasy. However, such insubstantial notions had to be ignored; he knew he had to press on. There were still a few nooks and crannies to investigate before he could leave. Who knew what else there was yet to discover.

  It was in the bedside cabinet, slipped between a pile of underpants. A tatty little diary. It was pink and girly and it did not take Snow very long to determine that it belonged to the daughter rather than the father. He must have taken it from her room at some point – probably after her death. Moving to the window, he read a few pages. It was innocuous stuff: brief comments about lessons, people at school, music she had heard. And then he found a brief entry written all in capital letters: ‘HE TOUCHED ME AGAIN TODAY.’ There was no further comment just that rather bald but unsettling statement. He flicked through the pages looking for further upper case messages. The next one simply said: ‘HAND IN KNICKERS’. And then two weeks later: ‘ITS GETTING WORSE. I CANT STOP HIM.’ Now the normal girly entries petered out. There were no other comments except the sporadic capital letter notes. And then the one that filled a whole page in large letters; ‘GOD HE FUCKED ME TONIGHT.’ Snow put down the diary and sighed heavily. So that was it then. Her father. He was the one. He screwed up his face in disgust at the thought. The bastard had groomed his own daughter. Fuelled by his stash of porn magazines, he had sated his appetite on his own flesh and blood; his teenage daughter. The poor kid. Sullivan had obviously discovered the girl’s diary after she had died and secreted it in his own room. He couldn’t risk it falling into the wrong hands, exposing him for the wretched paedophile he was. Why on earth hadn’t he destroyed it? Probably for some perverted sentimental reasons.

  Once again Snow was reminded that his job, his profession, his calling as he sometimes thought of it, led him down into the sewers of depravity. Here he was again amongst the shit. He sat on the edge of the bed for some time in this dull, dank room and mentally sifted through his findings, seeing how they fitted in with the facts he already knew. Whether the girl actually committed suicide was still open to question, but, he wondered, had she confided in someone, told someone the terrible truth about her condition and who was responsible for it. And had that someone exacted revenge on Frank Sullivan when the news of Mandy’s death became public. It was a viable theory but by no means watertight, especially when one considered Sammy Tindall. Where the hell did he fit into the scenario? As far as could be ascertained Tindall had no connection whatsoever with the Sullivans and yet he was murdered in the same way as Frank Sullivan – a copycat killing, Chris McKinnon had assured him. Surely there couldn’t be two of them – a couple of mad killers on the loose - with the similarity between the murders being a bleak coincidence. Snow shook his head as though to dismiss this crazy idea. No, we are not dealing with a lazy TV drama here, this is bloody real life. There must be some link between Frank Sullivan and Sammy Tindall. Some bond however fragile, tentative and hidden. He had no idea what it was but he had to discover it and how poor sad pregnant Mandy fitted into the picture.

  Well, he mused, trying to put a positive spin on his cogitations, at least now I have some parts of the puzzle to play about with. He slipped the diary into his coat pocket and with some relief left the room.

  It was falling dark as he left the building and the air was stiffening with frost. The constable was still on duty by the door. He gave a brief salute and nod of acknowledgement to his superior officer. Poor bugger, thought Snow, imagining the fellow’s boredom and frustration. He was sure he hadn’t joined the force to keep watch on a dead man’s house in freezing conditions. Slipping into his car, Snow checked the time. It was coming up to five o’clock. It wasn’t worth going back to the office now, but he still wanted to follow up a line of enquiry. He decided to grab a quick bite to eat and then make one more call before heading home.

  CHAPTER

  ELEVEN

  Matilda slipped off her shoes and sighed. She gazed unseeingly at the document before her on the desk. She had been doing so for at least five minutes. She had a thundering headache and was tired. It had been a trying day. Apart from the mountain of paperwork that the local authority seemed to send her every day, she’d had Paul’s visit and its repercussions to deal with. Much as she was fond of him, the intervention of his professional activities into her world was greatly unsettling. She had not enjoyed chatting with the staff in the common room during the lunch hour in a gentle inquisitorial fashion in an attempt to find out details concerning the poor girl who had drowned. It had been a dispiriting experience and had also proved a fruitless one. Despite her efforts, she had discovered there was nothing she could pass on to Paul that would be of any use to him. Mandy Sullivan was a fairly average girl, somewhat dull and not terribly popular, but that was about it. On top of this, in the afternoon she had to deal with an irate parent who was complaining about the lack of progress of her precious child. Apparently it was the incompetence of the members of staff who were not pushing her little darling hard enough, rather than the ability of the girl herself. Matilda had to bring all her diplomatic skills to the fore to deal with this harridan, while exercising remarkable restraint. In truth she wanted to smack the woman across the face and tell the silly cow to go home. It was all very draining and now the school day was over she was ensconced in her office with tedious paper work which she must deal with before leaving. She had to leave her desk clear in readiness for tomorrow’s deluge. Matilda heaved a sigh. She felt physically and mentally exhausted and she knew that she was chained to her desk for another hour at least.

  She made herself a cup of tea and then returned to the document she had been staring at for some time. She tried once more to bring the print into focus. Half an hour later she had completed that task and was on to the next file. There was a gentle tap on the door and it swung open.

  A figure in the doorway waved a cheery greeting. ‘The cleaner said she thought it was okay for me to knock and come in.’

  The speaker was a tall, good looking man in his late twenties. He had short cropped fair hair, neat regular features and was dressed in a smart blue suit and carried an expensive looking overcoat over his arm. At first his face was in shadow and the light was behind him so that Matilda could not see his face clearly, but she recognised the voice at once. The tone and timbre awakened deep memories. Her body tensed once more.

  ‘Roger…?’ she said hesitantly, the word emerging as a question when it should have been a statement.

  The man stepped forward into the light.

  ‘Yes, ‘tis I,’ said the man chuckling, giving a little bow. ‘The dark man from your past. You know what they say: bad pennies always turn up, especially when you least
expect them.’

  CHAPTER

  TWELVE

  The spire of St Joseph’s church was beginning to blend with the night sky as Paul Snow emerged from his car. At first glance the gothic Victorian edifice appeared to be all in darkness, but on closer inspection Snow observed a faint flickering glow through the multi-coloured stained glass windows. Briskly he marched up the path and tried the church door. The large ring handle resisted his efforts to turn it at first, but with a determined tug, the old wooden door opened with a recalcitrant creak and he stepped inside.

  ‘Can I help you?’ The voice, brusque and edged with suspicion, came from the gloom of the church, beyond the feeble rays of the lantern in the foyer.

  Snow turned in its direction and addressed the tall figure glimpsed in the shadows. ‘I am a police officer. I wish to speak with Father Vincent.’

  A man, dressed in an ancient tweed jacket and baggy corduroy trousers emerged into the dim illumination. He had gnarled exaggerated features, including a bulbous nose and two large goldfish eyes peering out beneath dense, straggly eyebrows.

  ‘You got some identification,’ he said taking another step nearer Snow.

  ‘I have,’ he said, producing his warrant card and holding it up.

  The man scrutinised it carefully for some moments. ‘Reckon you’re genuine. Got to be careful. We got get a lot of ne’er do wells coming into the church for all sorts of reasons: a night’s kip, a swig of communion wine and such. All sorts of reasons.’

  ‘And you are?’

  ‘I am the church warden. I keep everything safe and spick and span. Brian Stead’s the name. Nothing goes on in this here church without me knowing it. I can tell you. I say church warden, but I’m part gate keeper too. Stopping all kinds of riff raff coming in here… interfering. I see it as my job to protect Father Vincent from being pestered by all and bloody sundry.’