‘Usually vagrants or college kids; unusual to get one like this’
‘Like this?’
Palmer was interested.
‘Yes, a normal everyday-looking chap; smart dresser, too. His personal effects indicate he was a bank worker in the city, so odds on it’s a Charlie OD. Usually is.’
‘Maybe,’ Palmer said. ‘We will see once the autopsy is done.’
Sergeant Singh had noted Palmer’s reluctance to say anything about the other three bodies already stored in the Wandsworth Police Morgue; three bodies that all had the same trace of blood from the ears. According to the pathology reports, none of them had been killed by a cocaine overdose, or indeed an overdose of anything.
‘We’ve got officers going round to his work place and home now,’ the BR Inspector continued.
Palmer was glad to hear that, as it meant he didn’t have to spare any of his team to do it.
‘Right. Keep me up to date, won’t you please? My Sergeant will check in with you later for all the details; name, address, and so on.’
He squatted and looked carefully at the dead man’s ear, before exchanging a knowing glance with Sergeant Singh.
Sitting in the back of the squad car travelling at less than walking pace in London’s rush hour traffic wasn’t Justin Palmer’s favourite way of spending the afternoon, but it did give him a chance to recap on the case.
‘So that’s four now, Sergeant, and we’ve not got the faintest idea why any of them are dead. When do we get the biopsies back from the Maudsley?’
Professor Latin’s Forensics team had taken mouth swabs and blood samples from each of the three previous victims and sent them over the Thames to the Tropical Diseases Laboratory at Maudsley Hospital in Camberwell. It was a long-shot, but you never knew; the victims may have had contact with a friend, or a friend of a friend returning from the tropics with a virus.
‘They should be back tomorrow, guv; so they said, anyway. Can’t be a disease though, can it?’
Well, if it is – and it’s catching – we’ve probably got it. Not a very nice thought, eh?’
He shifted uneasily in his seat.
‘No, not very nice thought at all. Thanks for sharing that, guv.’
‘But,’ Palmer said, giving her a reassuring smile. ‘Three victims in five weeks, and none related to each other by family or work; doesn’t point to a nasty little bug flying around does it, eh? And their nearest and dearest would be dropping like flies as well by now if it was, and they haven’t. But there has to be a connection between them somewhere; there always is.’
He sighed loudly and settled back in his seat.
‘I wouldn’t mind a nice little bug to wipe out some of this traffic right now. I thought this congestion charging fiasco was going to clear the London streets and get the traffic moving?’
The driver gave a sarcastic laugh.
‘Ha! It cleared off the Mayor’s budget deficit, Chief; that’s all it did. Traffic’s just as bad, if not worse.’
Palmer smiled.
‘Ah yes, but I bet it also gave our wonderful Mayor a pot of cash so he can keep the rates down and get re-elected. Never take a politician at face value, Constable.’
‘I never thought of it that way, sir,’ the driver said, nodding as it sank in. ‘The crafty bugger.’ ‘You can bet the Mayor thought of it that way.’
Palmer learnt a long, long time ago that nobody in public life ever did anything for the public good, only for their own good.
DS Singh smiled. Palmer’s sarcasm amused her; he had a way of making people look at things differently. He’d impressed on her a long time ago to never take anything at face value, that there was nearly always an ulterior motive behind the face. Or maybe he was just a grumpy old man.
She checked the emails on her laptop as they came to another halt in the traffic in the Strand. Nothing important, just her auntie asking if she’d spoken to ‘that nice young Indian businessman whose telephone number I gave you’…. Soon, very soon, Gheeta would have to have an almighty row with her auntie and her mum about arranged marriages. She grimaced at the thought of it. Generation gaps, culture clashes – the world had changed so much in the last few decades that some of the older generation were having trouble keeping pace with it, mum and auntie being two of them. She turned her mind back to the case.
‘You want to get a team meeting on this one, guv?’
‘No, not yet,’ he said, thinking for a moment. ‘I’m not really sure which way to go with this case as yet. Just keep putting all the information on the victims into the computer programmes as it comes in and see if we can get any matches.’
Chapter 2
Several of the hierarchy at New Scotland Yard had raised worried frowns when Palmer had plucked novice WPC Gheeta Singh from the West Central street beat and given her half his operational budget and a free hand to bring in computers to his Serial Murder Squad office. But Palmer was a wily old fox, and forty-plus years in the Met had honed his ability to pick out winners early on. He’d first been impressed with WPC Singh’s IT aptitudes when she was able to re-programme his crashed HOLMES database terminal in half an hour, a job the outside contractors usually had two people working on for three days at six hundred quid a day; at that time he didn’t know Gheeta Singh was a university graduate in IT and Computing, or that she privately considered the Yard’s systems to be very outdated and vulnerable.
Her parents had brought the family into the UK, fleeing Idi Amin’s Uganda, and had set up a technology business now run by her three elder brothers. Her father had steered her education through technical college and university, grooming her to take a lead role in the family business; but Gheeta’s heart was set on police work from an early age, and there it was to stay. When Palmer had seconded her to his unit for a three-month trial and let her range free over all the systems in his team room, she was in her element; upgrading, creating shortcuts, rewriting and deleting programmes, adding new ones, and generally kicking the systems into the 21st century. After just one month Palmer pulled the necessary strings, and the move was made permanent.
That was four years ago; Singh was now a Detective Sergeant, and Palmer knew she was the obvious one to take his role when he finally succumbed to retirement in a year’s time. Well, Mrs P. thought it was to be in a year’s time, but Palmer had no intention at all of hanging up his brain and becoming an assistant gardener to Mrs P. in one year’s time, or in five years’ time come to that. No, retirement was not a pleasing thought to him. Mrs P. ran the house and garden with military precision, and he generally felt he was in the way if he took so much as a day off work, and usually spent most of it finding excuses to go out; and even his faithful dog Daisy drew the line at being dragged out for five walks a day, even though she was a Springer with all the excess energy of that breed.
At New Scotland Yard they signed in and climbed the stairs to the fourth-floor offices which housed the Serial Murder Squad and went straight into the team room. This was a large open-space room with all Singh’s computers and terminals along one side on a work surface, and various tables and chairs scattered around the rest of the room like a wedding party aftermath. It used to be the old canteen before the modernisation of the Yard, and every time he came into the room Palmer always got the well-remembered whiff of early morning bacon sandwiches that had permeated the walls over the years; too many early morning bacon sandwiches, according to Mrs P., who worried about his expanding waistline. He removed his trilby and jacket and slung them on a handy table next to where his civilian operator was working a terminal.
‘Claire, are you still here? Your hubby won’t be pleased.’
Sergeant Singh had first met Claire in the admin typing pool and done a ‘Palmer’ on her, having her transferred as administration clerk to the team after noticing her reading Computer Weekly on her lunch break rather than the usual Hello or Nuts magazine; a chat over coffee had yielded the information that Claire was doing an evening IT course, and was also
something of a computer ‘nerd’. She turned to greet them as they entered.
‘Yep, still here I’m afraid sir; married to my job.’
‘Very commendable, but I don’t think your old man will appreciate it. Can’t have the Yard cited in divorce papers.’
Gheeta unloaded her laptop from her shoulder and sat on the chair next to Claire.
‘Anything?’
‘No, nothing at all. I can’t understand it – all we’ve got that ties the victims together is the way they died, those blood trickles from the ear. It’s like somebody just picked them out at random and zapped them with something.’
‘Could well be that’s exactly what happened,’ Palmer said. ‘Random killings. Our killer gets up in the morning and has the urge to murder, so out he goes and kills the first unsuspecting poor blighter he can without being seen. An empty tube train carriage is ideal – he does the job and hops off at the next station; anybody getting on the carriage would think our victim was just sleeping. Is the final pathology report through yet?’
Claire shook her head.
‘No, sir. I’ll chase it in the morning.’
Gheeta sensed a lilt to Palmer’s question.
‘What’s your interest in that report, guv? You’ve an idea, haven’t you? I can tell. What are you expecting it to say?’
‘Nothing really,’ Palmer said. He sat and tipped a chair back against the wall as his feet clattered up onto a table. ‘But for blood to run there has to be a wound, so I just thought they might find a needle hole or something inside the ear.’
Singh nodded.
‘Yes, but it’s not very likely that the victims would allow somebody to push a hypodermic in their ear, is it guv? Not going to sit there and say “carry on old chap, help yourself”, are they?’
‘Not very likely at all – if they knew it was being done, Sergeant. But what about if they didn’t know it was being done?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, maybe the killer chloroformed them first. Just an idea.’
He swung his feet down, got up and crossed the room to stand in front of the case progress board on the wall. Across one wall of the team room Palmer had a wide plug board for updating the crime trail as it unwound; an aide memoir that he could ponder like a grand master ponders over a chessboard before making the next move. The three victims’ pictures and crime scene photos were all that graced it at present. Palmer pointed his finger at the first victim’s set of photos.
‘Hannah Robson, nondescript housewife, 32 years old; just done the weekly shop and then drops dead in the front seat of her car in Asda’s car park. A busy car park, so we can assume that if she were attacked in any way she’d have shouted, and it would have been noticed. Not a weak lady, far from it – in fact, just come from her twice weekly gym work out. Very capable of defending herself if need be. But, looking at it from another way, she’s just come from the gym; she’s tired, and now she’s done the weekly shopping as well, so she slumps into the car and – don’t forget it was a very hot day – she takes a nap.’
‘And Mr X – the killer – comes up with his needle and injects?’
Gheeta wasn’t convinced.
‘Could have, why not?’
He pointed to the second set of pictures.
‘Victim number two: Samuel Haines, schoolboy, sixteen; getting his books together in his room at 7.30 in the morning, and then, when mum goes to hurry him up, there he is – dead.’
‘So where did the killer come from?’
‘With Samuel, I don’t know,’ Palmer admitted, shaking his head. ‘I just have no idea. But with Arthur-’
Palmer moved to the third victim’s pictures.
‘With Arthur, I do. Arthur McGann was in a late night launderette; bachelor boy Arthur is doing his own wash, eleven at night. Round and round goes the tub; Arthur is sleepy and dozes off.’
‘Enter the killer.’
‘Yes.’
Palmer swung round and faced them, putting his hands in his pockets.
‘And the same with our chap on the tube train. He just dozed off; see it all the time on the tube.’
‘And the killer injected him in the ear without waking him? What about the other passengers?’
‘We don’t know that there were any. If the killer is out looking for a victim, he’s going to be in no hurry and wait his chance – after all, any victim will do. All he has to do is bide his time until fate presents him with one, which it did. So the answer to your original question about my interest in the Pathology Lab report is really twofold: are there any puncture marks inside the ears of the victims; and, if so, is there a foreign substance in that goo, as Professor Latin calls it, that used to be their brains?’
‘That fucking goo, guv.’
Singh did a passable Professor Latin impression, highlighting the swear word.
‘Been to see the professor, eh?’ Claire laughed. ‘Do you think his language is as bad when he’s at home? I can’t see his wife standing for that.’
‘She’s worse than him,’ Palmer said, being the only one to have met her. ‘East End girl, and you know what their language is like.’
Claire smiled at the inference; Gheeta lived in the East End.
‘What did he think was the cause of death?’
Singh shrugged.
‘He didn’t know.’
‘Bit sinister isn’t it,’ Claire said, with a shiver.
‘It seems that way at the moment Claire,’ Gheeta sighed. ‘But it’ll come together, it always does.’
Palmer smiled, hearing Sergeant Singh using one of his own phrases.
‘Sergeant, you get more like me with every case. You’ll develop sciatica next.’
‘Cynicism more likely,’ said Claire.
Palmer chuckled.
‘Copper’s stock in trade, Claire: cynicism, sciatica and optimism. They go hand-in-hand with the job. And divorces too, so you get off home, young lady; you’ve done quite enough for today.’
Sergeant Singh walked over and joined Palmer at the wall board.
‘Be nice to have a murder weapon wouldn’t it, guv? Even a bullet or a knife wound – just something to get working on. Got nothing yet, have we? If Pathology come up with no pin holes and no substance, we’ve even less than nothing.’
Palmer nodded in agreement.
‘We’ve got to find the link, Sergeant, that little thread; that common denominator that ties all these unfortunate people together. Somewhere there is a link – as always, we’ve just got to find it. More than likely it’s staring us in the face right now; we can’t see it for looking, but it’s there, I’d bet my pension on it. It’s in there somewhere… but where?’
Chapter 3
‘Not a sausage.’
Sergeant Singh ripped the fax off the machine. It was the following morning. Palmer looked up from the mountain of papers on his desk.
‘What do you mean, “not a sausage”? I don’t want a sausage, I want a pinhole or a substance!’
‘No pinhole no substance – just nothing, guv,’ she said as she placed the Pathology Lab report in front of him. ‘Zilch.’
Palmer scanned the paper for a minute and wasn’t happy. He read aloud from the report.
‘Undetermined intrusion, what does that mean then? We don’t pay those lab boys to come up with nothing. The disintegration of the lower left part of the brain in each victim was caused by an undetermined intrusion – in other words, they haven’t a clue. Great, very helpful.’
He put the report down on his desk with the other papers.
‘If there’s nothing there to be found, guv, they won’t find anything.’
‘Yes, I suppose that’s true,’ Palmer acquiesced. ‘Any joy on Joe Public in the tube train?’
‘Mr James Fennel, guv. Clean as a whistle, bright upstanding member of his local community, leaves a grieving mother and father and a vacancy at Lloyds Bank city branch.’
Palmer sighed loudly.
‘Thi
s isn’t good is it, eh? Four bodies all killed the same way, and no motive or weapon. I’m beginning to believe in aliens now.’
‘The truth is out there somewhere, guv. Just got to find it.’
Singh turned on her heels and made for the door.
‘Some old copper I used to know was always saying that. Then he went off his head and started believing in aliens.’
She was out the door before Palmer’s hurriedly aimed biro hit it behind her.
In the team room, Claire was pinning up the James Fennel crime scene pictures as Sergeant Singh walked in.
‘Good looking lad, wasn’t he?’
Singh stood beside her and gazed at the slumped body in the picture.
‘Just looks asleep really. If you were on the train you wouldn’t know he was dead, would you? No wonder he was going round and round the Circle line all day. Did you get a copy of the Pathology report?’
‘Yes, disappointing eh? Complete blank. Bet the governor was overjoyed at that.’
‘He wasn’t best pleased.’
The door opened quickly and Palmer stood there, hurriedly putting on his coat; the glint in his eye was strong, the smile was back.
‘Get your laptop, Sergeant; we have lift-off. Some nutter has just phoned the Mayor’s office and demanded a million quid or he’ll kill a thousand people.’
Sergeant Singh slung the laptop strap over her shoulder and joined him.
‘Is there a connection?’
‘Oh yes, he knew the locations of all four of our victims.’
Palmer was smiling broadly now.
‘Game on.’
The Mayor was not too bothered and carried on working through a stack of official papers with his secretary, who was trying hard to appear unflustered as Palmer and Singh waited in his office for the Mayor’s IT department man to search through the telephone recording machine to find the right call and replay it. The PR man fumbled with the buttons on his jacket, trying to think of way to spin all this to the Mayor’s advantage if it went pear-shaped. He fidgeted nervously as the in-house techie pressed the buttons on the machine, trying to extract the ransom call from the other 3000 of the day.
POETIC JUSTICE & A KILLER IS CALLING: The DCS Palmer and the Serial Murder Squad series, cases 3 & 4. Page 11
