This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents in
it are the work of the author’s imagination.
Any resemblance to any persons living or
dead, locations or events is entirely coincidental.
Published by BSA Publishing 2017 who
assert the right that no part of this
publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system or transmitted by any
means without the prior permission of the
publishers.
Copyright @ B.L.Faulkner 2017 who
asserts the moral right to be identified
as the author of this work
BOOKS IN THE DCS PALMER SERIES (SO FAR)
BOOK 1 FUTURE RICHES
BOOK 2 THE FELT TIP MURDERS
BOOK 3 A KILLER IS CALLING
BOOK 4 POETIC JUSTICE
BOOK 5 LOOT
BOOK 6 I’M WITH THE BAND
All are available individually as e-books and double case paperbacks online or in double case paperbacks from your favourite book shop.
THE PALMER CASES BACKGROUND
Justin Palmer started off on the beat as a London Policeman in the 1970s, and is now Detective Chief Superintendent Palmer running the Metropolitan Police Force’s Serial Murder Squad from New Scotland Yard. Not one to pull punches, or give a hoot for political correctness if it hinders his inquiries, Palmer has gone as far as he will go in the Met and he knows it. Master of the one line put-down, and a slave to his sciatica, he can be as nasty or as nice as he likes.
The mid 1990s was a time of re-awakening for Palmer, as the Information Technology revolution turned forensic science, communication, and information gathering skills upside down. Realising the value of this revolution to crime-solving, Palmer co-opted Detective Sergeant Gheeta Singh onto his team from the Yard’s Cyber Crime unit. DS Singh has a degree in IT, and was given the go ahead to update Palmer’s department with all the computer hard- and software she wanted, most of which she wrote herself, and some of which are, shall we say, of a grey area when it comes to privacy laws, data protection, and accessing certain databases. Together with their small team of officers, and one civilian computer clerk called Claire (nicknamed ‘JCB’ by the team, because she keeps on digging), they take on the serial killers of the UK.
On the personal front, Palmer has been married to his ‘princess’, or Mrs P. as she is known to everybody, for nearly thirty years . The romance blossomed after the young Detective Constable Palmer arrested most of her family, a bunch of South London petty criminals, in the 1960s. They have three children and eight grandchildren, a nice house in the London suburb of Dulwich, and a faithful dog called Daisy.
Gheeta Singh lives alone in a fourth floor Barbican apartment. Her parents arrived on these shores as a refugee family, fleeing from Idi Amin’s Uganda; since then her father and brothers have built up a very successful computer parts supply company, in which it was assumed Gheeta would take an active role on graduating from university. She had other ideas on this, and also on the arranged marriage her mother and aunts still try to coerce her into. Gheeta has two loves, police work and technology, and thanks to Palmer she has her dream job.
The old copper’s nose and gut feelings of Palmer, combined with the modern IT skills of DS Singh, makes them an unlikely but successful team. All their cases involve a serial killer, and twisting and turning through red herrings and hidden clues, they keep the reader in suspense until the very end.
POETIC JUSTICE
Chapter 1
Madame Geneelia did not look very nice dead; in fact, she looked hideous. Death has a habit of stripping away the body cosmetic, the personality it once housed, and leaving on view the basic flesh and shape, helpless in its inadequacy to convey to the viewer even the slightest hint of the person it once housed. The person whose body it once was has gone, and now, like an empty discarded pupa, it is left behind; the empty host to an expired life.
Madame Geneelia’s body, minus Madame Geneelia, was quite a shock to Detective Chief Superintendent Justin Palmer, head of Scotland Yard’s Serial Murder Squad, and his number two, Detective Sergeant Gheeta Singh, as they took their first look at it lying exposed on the hotel room floor. She had obviously been dressed in only a bathrobe when she had opened her hotel room door to the killer, whose vicious attack had sent her sprawling backwards onto the plush carpet, where he or she then repeatedly plunged a serrated steak knife into her chest, which had presented itself as a suitable target when the robe had fallen open.
Chapter 2
The case had started for Palmer nine days before. London had been wet that day; it was a Wednesday in late May, with drenched commuters bent against the fierce straight rain slicing down like water javelins from the heavens; they sought shelter in already crowded shop doorways, which provided a short-lived remission from the wet onslaught as they waited for their buses home. Folded soggy newspapers held above their heads were a poor deterrent against the aqua attack, as their squinting eyes tried to pick out the bus numbers through the spray which bounced off the crawling traffic, coating it with an ethereal wet mist.
Palmer rocked slowly to and fro on his heels as he looked down onto the scene from behind the thick safety glass that served as a front wall to the second floor Guest Lounge of the Majestic Hotel, Park Lane. He sipped coffee from a hotel issue white stoneware cup emblazoned with the hotel’s elaborate crest, which he’d tried to decipher through boredom but couldn’t make head or tail of; he had elected to wrap his hand around the cup and hold it like a mug, after several unsuccessful attempts to get a finger through the ridiculously small aperture of the handle. The coffee was good, and he liked good coffee; it reminded him of his days as a young Constable at West End Central Police Station, when a mug of good hot coffee at the Lyon’s Corner House in the Strand would fortify him for the rest of his beat. Get four of these piddling little hotel cups in one of those mugs, he thought to himself. A fresh squall of rain sent rivers of water zigzagging down the outside of the glass wall, making it hard to define anything outside.
He turned to where Sergeant Gheeta Singh, in her regulation Metropolitan Police issue blue trouser suit, sat forward on a leather buttoned sofa beside a glass coffee table, sipping her coffee; he noted she could get a finger through the blasted handle. She was flicking through a shiny fashion magazine, one of many that littered the coffee tables in the lounge; all offering overpriced ‘designer’ fashion garments, mostly made for a few rupees in an Indian sweat shop. He remembered an argument he’d had a while ago with Mrs P. about the power of advertising, and how he reckoned that if he set up a ladies fashion range called ‘Shite’ and advertised it enough in the glossy magazines, and paid a third-rate celebrity to wear it, it would be a success. He smiled, recalling her reaction of feigned shock at his use of such a word, and promising him that should he mention such an idea in front of her lady friends, he would most certainly be in the ‘shite’ himself!
He put his cup on the table and lowered himself into a plush, soft armchair that immediately enveloped him lovingly like an attacking giant marshmallow. There was something about luxury that wasn’t to his liking; it pervaded you, dulled your senses. No sharp edges. Or perhaps it was just that he couldn’t afford it. He exhaled loudly.
‘Third week of May, Sergeant, and we’re still getting April showers. Or April storms, more like. Do y
ou realise, Sergeant, it’s the second week of British Summertime this week, and all we’ve had is rain, rain, and more rain.’
He tried to reach forward for his coffee, but the chair had got him trapped in its soft grip.
‘I’ll need a ruddy crane to get out of this chair.’
Sergeant Singh passed him his coffee. He took a sip, and relaxed back.
‘Typical Wednesday, this is; wet. Funny how you associate things with days, isn’t it?’
‘Do you, guv? I hadn’t really noticed.’
Gheeta’s answer was automatic. She turned a page, engrossed in an article on e-commerce fraud.
‘Yes, Wednesdays is always wet,’ Palmer continued. ‘Mondays is here we go again, another working week; Fridays are hoorah, weekend is here; Saturdays is football day – well, it used to be when I was a boy; now every blooming day is football day. Tuesdays and Thursdays are blanks; and Sunday is peace and quiet. Good old Sunday, eh?’
‘Not peace and quiet where I live, guv.’
Gheeta shot him a glance, before returning to the article.
‘Well,’ Palmer said, shifting his backside which the chair was gradually devouring within its soft cushions. ‘If you choose to live in the middle of a leisure centre, then you must expect Joe Public to use it at the weekend for his leisure – this damn chair is swallowing me!’
‘The Barbican isn’t a leisure centre, guv.’
Palmer struggled up a little.
‘Oh no? If the Thames floodgates fail it’ll be a ruddy aquarium, never mind a leisure centre.’
He chuckled to himself as he sank further into the chair.
‘I’ll need a lifebelt in a minute. I could get very used to this comfortable style of living.’
‘Not on police pay you couldn’t, guv.’
‘That’s true. I bet these coffees probably cost a week’s wages.’
Gheeta transferred her attention to a menu lying open on the coffee table.
‘Four pounds sixty.’
Palmer was incredulous.
‘For one cup of coffee?’
‘Yep. You could have had a side plate of six biscuits to go with it for another two ninety five, if you liked.’
He nodded towards the street below the window.
‘I bet there are people down there that don’t spend that much on a day’s food, let alone six biscuits. How the other half live eh?’
‘And die, guv.’
Gheeta sat back and looked around the luxurious lounge.
‘I suppose if you are going to get murdered, this place beats a back alley in Brixton.’
Palmer checked his wrist watch.
‘Where’s this manager bloke? Twenty past six already; we’ve been waiting for him to appear for forty minutes now.’
Gheeta reluctantly closed the magazine,
‘Front desk said he was on his way.’
She stood up and hoisted the bag which housed her laptop onto her shoulder.
‘I’ll go and hurry him up.’
And off she went. Palmer shifted forward in the chair and retrieved the case folder from the table; flipping it open, he began to refresh his mind on the case details so far.
Chapter 3
This was the third murder to take place in a high class hotel in six months. A ballerina, an international model, and a household name athlete had all been killed while staying overnight; he ballerina had been thrown from her hotel suite window, the model stabbed and slashed to death, and the athlete strangled by her own tights. All had been investigated by their local CID unit,s but nothing had been found to link them; no motive, no clues, no reason. Families, friends and business associates had all undergone serious questioning, but still nothing. There was nothing to link them together, other than the fact that they all met their end in a hotel room – a very expensive hotel room; and each body had a similar small piece of paper nearby, with the name of a day and ‘child’ written on it in the same hand. It seemed as though each murder had been carried out by an assailant acting on the spur of the moment against a random victim; except that those pieces of paper and the names on them pointed to a planned murder. So Palmer knew this would not be random. Thirty-seven years as a copper had taught him that these things are never random. The theory of chaos didn’t apply to crime; somewhere there would be a pattern, a link. It was just the small matter of finding it. The only link so far were the pieces of paper with the name of a day and ‘child’ written on them. When he’d seen the different reports of the murders coming across his desk at the Yard, from the different forces’ CID crime updates, he’d taken a second look and decided it was obvious they matched a serial crime profile. The reports were from different CID units, so nobody had seen them all together and recognised the paper link. He’d taken his thoughts up to the fifth floor at the Yard, to his immediate boss Assistant Commissioner Bateman, and asked for the cases to be transferred to the Serial Murder Squad.
He wasn’t a fan of Bateman, and Bateman wasn’t a fan of Palmer. If he felt the need, Palmer would use his years on the force and his record of solving crimes to ignore some of the new procedures and protocols ex-university fast-tracked suits like Bateman on the fifth floor wanted to bring in; Bateman, on the other hand, thought Palmer an old-fashioned stickler, who would block his modernising ideas or at least side step them in his own department if he could. Twice he’d managed to get the board to offer Palmer early retirement, and twice Palmer had told them to take a running jump, or words to that effect. So they just about tolerated each other, avoiding contact wherever possible; but Bateman had the sense to appreciate Palmer’s years of experience, and his ability to use his hard gained knowledge and ‘copper’s nose’ to back him when he presented a good reason for doing something. Palmer’s wish to take over the unsolved hotel murders, which seemed to have hit the buffers, offered Bateman two opportunities: one, that the case would be solved and he could take credit for transferring it to Palmer’s Squad; or two, it would fail, and he could attribute its failure to Palmer losing his touch, ready for another offer of early retirement.
Chapter 4
Palmer shifted uncomfortably in the hotel lounge chair. He was getting very irritated now at the long waiting time. He knew Mrs P. had made a steak and kidney pie for the evening meal, and he intended to be there for it; he also knew she would have made him extra gravy, which soaked into her pastry and gave his taste buds a real treat!
A clap of thunder, so near that it sounded like it was coming from the floor above, preceded a fresh torrent of rain outside. A couple of warm days to follow this lot and the grass in his garden would be growing at a foot a minute, and Mrs P. would be hinting that he should get the mower out, achore guaranteed to set off his sciatica. He smiled to himself. His garden indeed; he wouldn’t know a petunia from a pansy! Mrs P. was the garden expert; between her and her green-fingered friends at the local gardening club, they could amass enough gardening knowledge to run Wisley. But he did do the hard stuff: the digging, the mowing, and the hedge cutting. He didn’t really mind that. Mrs P. had created a lovely mature garden over the years, and he had to admit, he did so enjoy a long summer evening on the recliner, with a pint of Old Speckled Hen, some cashew nuts, and a good book as the various scents of the garden wafted by; it was worth a few sharp stabs of sciatic pain, and was as near a perfect end to a day as he could imagine. Waiting in a London hotel lounge for a manager to appear wasn’t. With a great effort he pitched himself forward out of the chair’s clutches and gathering the files he made off towards the reception area on the ground floor. He took the lift rather than aggravate his sciatica down the left leg on the stairs. It always seemed to be worse in wet weather.
Exiting the lift on the ground floor, he crossed the large foyer to the front reception counter, where he could see Sergeant Singh behind it talking on an internal phone. Her free hand was waving in the air as she underlined her points. Five receptionists – two male, two female, and one Palmer wasn’t sure about – worked quickly and eff
iciently behind the long, busy counter, which was holding at bay a three deep wave of people. Keyboards clicked away as new guests booked in, and PDQs whirred as departing guests settled their bills and left.
A commotion at the front main doors caught his attention as he reached the counter. A middle-aged, rather rotund, to put it politely, female celebrity of some kind was being ushered through a cluster of autograph hunters and other rubber neckers by two doormen. Two bellboys followed, pushing an overloaded baggage trolley piled high with what seemed a perilous mountain of designer luggage cases that were about to topple over at any second. It seemed to Palmer that whoever this celebrity was, and he wasn’t well versed on celebrities, she wanted people to know; being inconspicuous was not on this lady’s agenda. Bright orange hair piled like an Eiffel tower topped an over-painted face housing a crimson enhanced pair of lips and glinting white teeth which must have cost a fortune; they flashed brilliantly white through wide smiles given in all directions. A bright scarlet ankle-length satin dress shimmered beneath a flowing jet black cape that swirled behind her, as she was ushered into a waiting lift being held for her by another bellboy. And then she was gone. Palmer smiled to himself as he remembered an old Max Miller gag: ‘Is your sister at home with Cinderella?’ It takes all sorts.
He caught the eye of a female desk clerk and nodded towards the lift.
‘Anyone I should know?’
POETIC JUSTICE & A KILLER IS CALLING: The DCS Palmer and the Serial Murder Squad series, cases 3 & 4. Page 1
