‘Yes, I was so sorry about your father. I remember you went through a really bad time back then. Still not on speaking terms with your mother or sister then?’
‘No,’ Fielding confessed. ‘Neither of them can forgive me for wanting to follow in Dad’s footsteps. I, in turn, cannot forgive them for being so unsupportive in my choice of career. If it was good enough for Dad then it’s certainly good enough for me.’
Claire took a drink from her bottle of water. ‘Well maybe they’ll change their mind one day.’
Fielding shook her head. ‘No, I doubt that.’ Both her mother and her sister had made that abundantly clear to her before she’d left for Manchester.
They’d been booked into two single rooms at the Britannia Hotel, which was just a short walk from the airport. Despite memories from the past, Fielding had to admit that it felt good to be back in her own neck of the woods again. She’d missed it over the years, but had now become part of the whole Manchester scene, and had spent a lot of time over the past thirteen years with her dad’s relatives who lived in and around the area. Just another thing to alienate her from her mother and sister, it seemed, as they’d never seen a great deal of dad’s side of the family before his untimely death. On top of everything else, Fielding knew her mother and sister had seen her move to Manchester as taking sides against them. They’d have preferred her to stay in the north east, pursuing a career more suited to them, rather than the one she had chosen for herself.
Her main reason for deciding to study in Manchester had been a purely personal one, as she could have easily become a police officer in the north east, putting up with her mother’s and sister’s opposition. But no, her boyfriend at the time, Bobby Samson, had been accepted at the University of Manchester to study economics and politics and she’d gone down there to be with him, studying not far away at Sedgley Park Police Academy. They’d even moved into accommodation together, sharing a flat between their two places of study until, after only the space of a few months, Bobby’s eye had been turned by another student on his course. Fielding had found them together one evening in their home and in their bed. She’d gathered together her things right there and then and left them to it, finding somewhere else to live for the duration of her studies.
She’d dated on and off after that, but nothing serious as her trust in men had been seriously and irrevocably damaged that night. It wasn’t until she’d joined Burton’s team that she began to have faith in men again. He had restored that for her through his words and his actions. They’d never been anything other than colleagues, but she felt that there was this unspoken thing between them that would remain unspoken for as long as they were colleagues – which was probably going to be a long time to come.
Their appointment at police headquarters was for 9.30 the next morning. Fielding was ready and waiting when Claire knocked on her door at 7.45, and together they had breakfast in the restaurant downstairs before getting reception to call them a taxi for their meeting with the police commissioner, William Trenton, in the Cobalt Business Centre offices in North Tyneside.
Trenton was a distinguished-looking man with silvery-grey hair and a neatly trimmed moustache. He looked years younger than the sixty-two years she knew him to be. He thanked them for coming on such short notice, then quickly moved on to the business in hand. Pressing the intercom on his desk, he spoke to his secretary and asked her to send in a DCI Winters with all the relevant information for them.
‘We could have sent all this down to you,’ DCI Winters said to Fielding and Rawlins when they were both standing with him at the table in front of the window, ‘but we’ve been having issues with our external courier services so have had to stop sending documents this way for the time being.’ The two sets of files he had brought in with him, both the Northumbria Police ones and the Manchester ones, had been opened and reports and photographs were now spread across the entire length of the table. Claire Rawlins was busy reading the medical examiner’s report, but it was the two crime scene photographs from up here that caught Fielding’s attention.
‘We drew a complete blank when we were trying to solve this case and had no leads whatsoever to go on apart from these.’ Winters pointed to what had already caught Fielding’s attention. ‘We had to leave the case open for the sake of the victims’ families, but really thought that this was going to be one of the unsolved ones. Then we got wind of what had been happening down in your neck of the woods in Manchester, and it was the break we were looking for.’
Fielding picked up the two photographs and showed them to Rawlins, who was still engrossed in the medical reports. Both women exchanged glances: two playing cards, both the queen of hearts, and a partial thumb print in the bottom left-hand corner captured for all time and preserved with the black forensic dust.
‘They’re the same as the ones we have,’ Fielding told Winters, ‘but the cards we have with our victims are the joker, the ace of spades and the queen of clubs.’
‘As you can imagine,’ Winters continued, ‘we couldn’t believe our luck when the two separate cases cross-referenced themselves. Although the term “luck” seems a bit tasteless, considering.’
‘I can’t see why your two victims had the same playing card beside them, though,’ Fielding stated, looking at all the sets of photographs laid out in front of her now. ‘At first we thought that the cards were linked to the way each of the victims were found. Mr Jackson in fancy dress – like a joker maybe? Mr Stephenson in his allotment – we could see a definite link to the spade card. Then Ms Johnson’s head was completely decimated by a club – hence the queen of clubs. But these two,’ Fielding motioned to the two north east victims, ‘were they missing their hearts?’
‘Not at all, although we had noticed that possible connection too,’ Winters told her. ‘What we had were a decapitation and a drowning, but the drowning victim had been sedated first; we found a similar needle injection site at the base of the neck – just like your victims.’
‘But not the decapitated victim?’ Fielding asked.
‘No. We think that there was no need to sedate her as the beheading would have been instant. Therefore… no need.’
A chill went through Fielding as she contemplated the scene. This was no ordinary killer; he, or she even, as that was indeed a possibility, had no qualms whatsoever to either mutilate to the point of non-recognition, or behead another human being. It was cold and very calculated; extremely so, especially as a calling card had been left beside each of the victims’ bodies. But the definitive link between them was now wide open again. Northumbria Police’s victims were not in education, and they were both in their late twenties, exactly the same age as one another and, as Fielding observed, her own age too.
It was then that Rawlins spoke up after a long spell of silence, and completely changed the direction of the inquiry. ‘I know these two people.’ She was looking at the pre-death photographs of Jennifer Grayson and Caroline Porter. Then she turned to Fielding and added, ‘And so do you, Fielding.’
15
‘What?’ Fielding looked very closely at the photographs of the two women. She hadn’t been back to her native north east for around thirteen years. How could she possibly know them? Rawlins lived and worked up here, so it was more likely for her to know them than Fielding herself.
‘Maybe you find them familiar but I don’t think I do.’ Fielding scrutinised their features closely but nothing remotely familiar jumped back at her.
‘Yes you do,’ Rawlins insisted. ‘They were both at school with us. You were close friends with them as I remember. Only then, Jennifer Grayson was Jennifer Sanderson.’
Fielding looked again. Younger versions of both women formed in her mind. Jennifer Sanderson, with long dark hair way past her waistline, and the longest lashes she had ever seen on anyone – even on models in magazines. Then there was Caroline Porter, who was slightly overweight, but with bright green eyes the colour of jade and short auburn hair cut in a fashionable pixie-style.
Could they be the same two as the faces she was looking at now? The faces of her one-time close friends?
‘If that’s the case, then this is very significant,’ Commissioner Trenton finally spoke as he joined them at the table. ‘You say that you have a possible suspect down in Manchester?’
‘He works up here during the week, but it’s beginning to look as if he may be our main suspect now,’ Fielding told him. Adding, ‘Were both these women murdered on a weekday by any chance?’
Claire Fielding still had the medical reports on both the victims and checked for the recorded dates of death. ‘Yes,’ she said after carefully checking both of them. ‘They died on a Wednesday and a Thursday.’
‘Then I would say that you have quite a substantial case against this nephew,’ the Commissioner concluded.
Fielding rang Burton to break the news to him. As it was a Saturday, Carruthers should be back at his home in Manchester and she felt that this may just well be enough to bring him in for questioning. She had already asked for the information in the files to be emailed down to Manchester, and Claire Rawlins had asked for the forensic information to be sent directly to Dr Barnes at the coroner’s office. She also rang him to tell him that the information would be arriving by fax shortly, doubtless ruining his Saturday morning lie-in.
‘Oh, and Fielding,’ Burton had added before ending the conversation, ‘can you go out to the place where Carruthers works up there? I know that Northumbria Police have visited him already, but that was to check he was there this week. Can you go and see the manager personally, and get him to also check his records for the dates the two women were killed up there. I believe that the place is open at the weekends. Ask him what Carruthers is like while you’re there. Is he liked, is he not liked, is he trustworthy, you know the sort of thing.’
Also taking copies of the files for them to scrutinise on the flight home, Fielding and Rawlins thanked DCI Winters and the police commissioner for all the information they had provided them with and waited for the call back from Burton from the comfort of Starbucks café at The Village Hotel on the Cobalt Business Park site. At 11am, Burton called Fielding to confirm that Carruthers was now sitting quite unhappily in the comfort of one of their cells and awaiting his solicitor. He had confirmed his place of employment to be a company called ComputerLinks, which operated out of the Tyne Tunnel Trading Estate just a mile or so away from the Cobalt, and was open on a Saturday… and the manager was now expecting them.
‘We should have hired a car,’ Rawlins said as they sat in the taxi. ‘Or I could have gone home and got mine.’
‘Where are you living now then?’ Fielding asked, thinking that it might have been a good idea if she’d mentioned it earlier.
‘I’m in Whitley Bay, not far from the seafront.’
Fielding remembered her trips to North Tyneside when she was younger. Whitley Bay was quite the place to go back then, made even more popular by the fact that one of the members of the pop group Duran Duran was from there and had a wine bar in the town. But perhaps the big drawing point to the area, apart from the lure of a local pop star’s bar and the hope of a glimpse of him there, was the Spanish City – an outside fun fair and games arcade, originally erected way back in the early twentieth century to be a smaller version of the iconic Blackpool Pleasure Beach. Together with the Blackpool-like array of fish and chip shops and slot machines on every corner, it was the go-to place during the summer months. She had loved it there in the summer with her friends. The same two friends who were now part of a police investigation into their murders.
‘It’s been restored recently,’ Rawlins said as Fielding reminisced about her childhood spent in Whitley Bay. ‘Quite the place to go these days, completely renovated and housing restaurants and leisure facilities. They’ve even got a champagne bar in there too.’
She appreciated the march of progress in her native part of the country, but all her wonderful memories of the place disappeared in an instant. It had all gone, never to be seen again. A bit like her one-time friends.
It didn’t take too long for them to get to the ComputerLinks site, and to save time afterwards, they asked the taxi driver if he would wait for them.
The manager, a Mr Barry Sangster, was extremely concerned to hear that they were asking him about Alex Carruthers. ‘Alex? What’s he done then?’ he asked while checking the attendance logs for the dates he’d been given.
‘We’re just hoping that he can help us with our enquiries, sir,’ Fielding told him, not willing to say that he now appeared to be the prime suspect in their murder case.
‘Enquiries?’ He stopped looking at the computer screen and faced them.
‘Didn’t he tell you about what happened in Manchester?’ she asked.
He shook his head, looking even more concerned now than he had been before.
‘His great-uncle was murdered.’
A look of genuine shock appeared on the manager’s face.
Now why wouldn’t Carruthers have mentioned something like that? Unless he was, as Burton had said after he’d spoken to him, something of an ‘insensitive arse’. Burton hadn’t liked him, and if Burton didn’t like someone, it usually meant that there was something questionable about them or their behaviour. And Fielding trusted his judgement implicitly.
‘I… I didn’t know…’ he spluttered. ‘He just didn’t mention it.’
‘Does he seem a secretive sort of person to you at all?’ Fielding continued.
Sangster didn’t need to think about that one. ‘No, not at all. A little overly-sharing if you ask me; won’t shut up half the time. It’s not like him to keep quiet about something like that… and it’s his own flesh and blood as well, isn’t it? I’m very surprised. You’d think he’d want to talk about it, or have time off even…’ he trailed off.
‘What sort of person is he then?’ Rawlins decided to join in with the questioning. Fielding cast her a sideways glance. Usually she wouldn’t tolerate a civilian butting into her enquiries, but as Rawlins was there on official police business, albeit in a civilian capacity, she let it pass… this time.
‘Well, he’s a good enough bloke, I suppose.’ Sangster almost seemed reluctant to say it.
‘I sense a “but” there,’ Fielding said, noticing his hesitation.
‘Can’t fault him with the work; he certainly knows what he’s doing with computers. So he should, all the qualifications he has. He was sent up from head office down in Manchester to help us open the branch here. But as for him personally…’ He trailed off momentarily. ‘Well, how can I say this politely?’
‘Just say it, sir,’ Fielding encouraged.
‘He’s such a dick. Arrogant little prick. The girls seem to like him, but he’s not a man’s man, if you know what I mean. No offence, but he’s not a “northern” bloke – not one of the boys.’ He then remembered that he was talking to a police officer from Manchester – hardly local, hardly ‘northern’ as he had put it. But then he was confused, for he did notice a local accent from both of them. He decided to stop there and not say any more – probably best. Eyes now back on the computer screen, it didn’t take long for him to find the information Fielding had asked for.
‘Right, here we are,’ he said, pointing to the screen, and Fielding leaned in to take a look. ‘Yes, he was here on both those dates.’
There was one last question Fielding felt obliged to ask him. ‘And when he’s working up here, does he ever leave the office, go out for an hour or two – anything like that?’
Sangster laughed. ‘Like I said, he’s a dick; goes off whenever he feels like it. Thinks he’s God’s gift to mankind, the jumped up little…’
But Fielding cut him short. ‘Okay, thank you, sir.’ She got the picture.
16
Even though things weren’t looking that good for Carruthers, Fielding had to admit to herself – and Burton the next time that she spoke to him – that he couldn’t have killed anybody in Manchester this week as he was working in
the north east at ComputerLinks, just confirmed by Barry Sangster, the manager.
In any case, what could the possible motive be for him to kill two women, both known to Fielding herself in her youth. It just didn’t make any sense at all. This was turning out to be one of the most baffling cases both she and Burton had ever experienced in their careers on the force. It really wasn’t the best time for Rawlins to ask her if she wanted to visit her mother.
‘Why on earth would I want to do that?’ Fielding asked with perhaps more venom than she had intended to.
‘Whoa, steady!’ Rawlins put her hands up in defence. ‘I just thought that, as you are up here, you might want to go and see her, that’s all.’
‘I haven’t wanted to see either her or my sister since I left here over thirteen years ago. What could possibly possess me to want to do so now?’
‘Okay, sorry I brought it up.’ Rawlins’s apology seemed genuine enough, and Fielding now felt guilty for exploding that way in front of her. This case was definitely getting to her and her outburst had been unforgivable.
‘No, I’m the one who’s sorry, Claire,’ she apologised. ‘Ah, it’s this case. I don’t know if you know this but we’d just closed one case before this one came along, and I thought that was a really tough one. We could have done with a week or two’s break before getting into something like that again.’
‘Could another team of detectives not take over the reins for you?’
‘No, not at all. Heaven forbid. It’s Burton’s baby, and once he gets his teeth into something, nobody can take it from him. I know he’s just as beat as I am, probably more so, but he doesn’t give up… at all… ever.’
‘Well I hope you find a resolution for this one pretty soon. I can tell that you – in fact all of your team, not just you and Burton – are on edge with it.’
Murderland Page 10
