by Ford,P. F.
Cutter moved his right arm down to his side, exposing the back of his head.
“Now the attacker has clear sight of the back of Sandra’s head and delivers the fourth blow. This proves to be the final blow, smashing her skull and killing her.”
This final time she raised the imaginary axe above her head and swung it straight down.
“Shit,” said Norman quietly. “What about the kid?”
“One blow, fracturing the skull,” said Nadira, moving back to the two tables to hold up the child’s skull and show them the clear fracture at the back. “This time, with the back of the axe.”
Cutter was back on his feet and now leaned over and lined up the back of the axe with the damaged skull.
“Do you think the kid would have been first or second?” asked Norman.
“If you mean did the child have to watch her mother being chased and slaughtered, I’m afraid I can’t answer that,” said Nadira. “I just hope the child was first to die.”
There was a deadly silence as the two detectives absorbed what Nadira had told them.
“So they were brought to the woods and then hunted by someone with an axe,” said Slater, struggling to make sense of the horror
“That’s my theory,” she said. “It would be impossible to prove after all this time, but that’s what I believe happened.”
“That’s a particularly brutal way to kill someone, isn’t it?” asked Slater.
“It’s certainly not something we come across every day,” said Cutter. “It takes a very special kind of cold person to do something like this.”
There were a few more moments of stunned silence as Slater tried to imagine the scenario. He knew Norman would be doing the same. It was Henry Cutter who finally broke the silence.
“Obviously we’ll put this all together for you in our reports, and we’ll let you know if anything else comes to light after that. But right now, guys, I think this might be a good time to break for a cup of tea and some fresh air, don’t you?” he suggested. “Nadira’s found a nice little courtyard area just out the back with a couple of benches. A change of scenery and a change of topic usually works for me.”
He headed for the kettle.
“Nadira, take the guys outside while I rustle up some tea.”
It was gone 4pm by the time Slater and Norman were ready to leave. Cutter had been right, there was a neat little courtyard just behind the mortuary. And, ably assisted by Nadira, he proved to be very good at leading Slater away from his morbid thoughts and lightening the mood. By the time they left, Slater was feeling more like himself, and Norman was becoming his usual chatty self.
“I think this calls for an urgent appointment with the boss, don’t you?” Slater asked Norman, as they drove away.
“I can’t think of any other way we’re going to get reinforcements,” agreed Norman. “And we certainly need them now it looks like we’re going to be re-investigating something that should have been sorted out 15 years ago.”
To Slater’s surprise, Bob Murray was already ahead of the game. He’d obviously got wind of how their case was developing, (“I’ve known Henry Cutter for years,” he told them) and he was busy re-allocating his staff to create a bigger team.
“I’ve only got limited numbers, as you know,” he told them. “So it’s going to be hard work for everyone. But try and make it work or I’ll have to go cap in hand for help from elsewhere. If that happens, we’ll lose control of the whole case. We don’t want that, do we?”
It was a rhetorical question and Slater and Norman stayed quiet.
“I’ll expect you two to give your team a full briefing first thing in the morning,” warned Murray. “I’ll make sure everyone knows they have to be there for 8am, so make sure you’re both there so I don’t look like an idiot, alright?”
“Right, Boss,” said Norman.
“Thank you, Boss,” said Slater. “We’ll get on it right away.”
“Fine. That’ll be all,” growled Murray, returning to his paperwork.
Norman and Slater knew that meant the meeting was over so they stood and made their way over to the door. Just as Slater was turning the handle, Murray added a little footnote.
“Don’t forget the other cases you have,” he said.
“Yes, but-” began Slater.
“You have a team, David,” Murray said, sighing. “Do I need to tell you how to use it?”
“Don’t worry, boss,” Norman butted in. “We’ve got it covered.”
He hustled Slater out of the door before he could get another word in.
“How many pairs of bloody hands does he think we have?” asked Slater grumpily as Norman ushered him away from Murray’s office. “Aren’t we under enough pressure as it is?”
“There you go again,” chided Norman. “Mr Negative is back. Moan, moan, moan.”
“What?” said Slater, in dismay. “What can you find about this that’s positive?”
“Will you open your eyes just for once,” snapped Norman. “Don’t you think he’s under pressure as well? He told you he’s got limited numbers to work with. Or perhaps you think Detective Sergeant Slater is too important to have to dirty his hands with small cases?”
Slater was affronted at Norman’s verbal attack.
“Of course I don’t think I’m too bloody important,” said Slater. “I’m a team player, you know that.”
“So start acting like a team player,” said Norman. “Don’t you think Murray’s part of the team?”
“Well, yeah,” agreed Slater, not really following Norman’s train of thought. “I suppose he’s the captain.”
“So, he’s being a team player by rearranging things to give us more help, right?” asked Norman.
“I suppose so, yes,” agreed Slater reluctantly.
“Do you think that’s going to make his life any easier?”
“Well, no. I suppose not.” Slater knew Norman was making sense
“So don’t you owe it to your captain to be a team player and repay his support?”
“Well, yeah. Of course I do.”
“So stop griping, and get on with it,” said Norman. “We have a team of our own. Surely we can utilise one or two people here and there to keep their eyes and ears open, can’t we? He didn’t say ‘solve them tomorrow’, he just said ‘don’t forget them’.”
Slater looked contrite. Of course Norman was right. Again.
“I think you need to teach me more about how this positive stuff works,” he said gloomily. “I still don’t understand how you always seem to find positives in just about everything.”
“It’s simply because you focus on negatives and I don’t.” Norman grinned at him. “Let’s go grab a coffee before we put this briefing together. We can talk better with coffee.”
Slater wrapped his hands round the warm mug as he listened to Norman.
“Here’s some advice you can have for free,” Norman said, sipping his coffee. “First of all, you take things too personally. That wasn’t a bollocking from Murray, it was just a reminder. He knows damn well you won’t forget, but he wouldn’t be doing his job if he didn’t say it. It’s no different to you telling Steve Biddeford to restrict his airfield search. Steve should know to do that, and you know he probably would, but you still told him.”
“Okay. Point taken,” said Slater, slowly nodding his agreement.
“Another thing you need to learn is to stop and think before you react,” said Norman.
Slater started to protest, but Norman waved his hand.
“Yeah. I know you don’t always do it,” he said. “But this goes with my first point. It’s when you take things personally that you jump in with both feet before you’ve thought about what’s been said. Listen to the comment and then think before you answer. Ask yourself ‘is this comment really aimed at me, or am I just taking it too personally’.”
“Alright, smartarse,” said Slater, with grudging admiration. “So tell me, what was positive in what Murray said ea
rlier, because I obviously missed it.”
“Oh it was there alright.” Norman said, smiling. “And yes you did miss it. And I’ll tell you why you missed it. You missed it because you were too busy focusing on what you thought was a negative, by taking a comment personally that wasn’t personal at all.”
“You can be a right arsehole sometimes, Norm,” said Slater. “You’re loving this, aren’t you? So what was this great big positive I missed, then?”
“Murray paid you several compliments in there and you missed them all. One, he has confidence in you and me to lead this team. Two, he trusts us to brief the team. And three, and this is the one you took completely the wrong way, he trusts in your ability to solve more than one case at the same time. Don’t you think that’s all positive stuff?”
Slater was briefly lost for words. Norman was right. He had missed all those positives.
“So how come you saw that and I missed it?” he finally managed to ask.
“You need to ask yourself that question,” said Norman. “You were in the same room as me, hearing the same words as me. Yet we have almost opposing views of what was said.”
“That’s what I mean,” said Slater wearily. “How does that happen?”
“It happens because I have a positive outlook and look for the best in a situation, while you have a negative outlook and expect the worst.”
Slater considered this. He’d heard Norman prattle on about this stuff before, and he had promised himself he would try to change, but then he’d got busy and forgotten all about it.
“So how do I change?” he asked.
“First you have to want to change. And then you just have to train yourself to stop and think.”
“So how come you’re such an expert?”
“I’m not an expert,” said Norman. “I just know this stuff changed my life. If I hadn’t learnt it, I wouldn’t still be here. I would have got so depressed I would have topped myself a long time ago.”
Slater’s mouth plopped open in surprise. He just couldn’t imagine Norman being anything but the happy-go-lucky guy he appeared to be. Never in his wildest dreams could he picture Norman being depressed.
“Anyway, we’d better go,” said Norman. “We have a briefing to prepare.”
With that, he began marching off towards their incident room, leaving Slater, still gobsmacked, trailing in his wake.
Chapter Thirteen
“Good morning, people,” said Slater. “We’ve decided the easiest way to do this is to go over everything we’ve got so far. I know it might be rather boring for those who’ve been here from the start, but it doesn’t do any harm to go over things again. You’ve all got copies of the notes we’re using for the briefing, but if anyone has any questions, feel free to ask. Remember, the only stupid question is the one you don’t ask. Okay?”
There was a murmur of “okays” from around the room. Slater had been a little disappointed to find there wasn’t exactly an army of new faces to help, but then he knew the situation. Tinton was a very small town with a very small number of police officers – resources were limited. The original team of Slater, Norman, Biddeford, Flight, and Jolly had been upgraded with the addition of two DCs, two PCs, and a sergeant who had apparently volunteered his services. Thus, the team had doubled in size overnight.
Slater knew Sergeant Toby Allen was adept at office management, which was going to be a huge bonus. While Jolly Jane was always happy to pitch in and do whatever was needed, her partner was clearly not enamoured with the idea of being tied to a desk or a phone. In fact, PC Phillipa Flight was becoming increasingly tetchy with every hour she was kept inside. Slater and Norman had agreed last night, the sooner they could get her out on the road, the happier the whole team would be.
“So this is what we have so far.” Norman moved across to the whiteboards, taking up a position alongside the first board, where he could easily point out what he was talking about.
“Our original body.” He pointed to the photo of Sarah Townley, as provided by her mother. “Sarah Townley. She was found close to the Haunted Copse on Tuesday evening by an unfortunate dog walker. The body was a terrible mess and at first could not easily be identified. The pathologist believes the girl was drugged by her attacker, loaded into a small aircraft, taken up into the air, and pushed out.”
A hand shot up from Tony Ashton, one of the DCs.
“Yes, Tony?”
“Was the girl dead before she was put into the airplane?”
“Good question,” said Norman, approvingly. “I’d like to be able to say yes, but the pathologist isn’t sure. He believes there’s a good chance she was still alive when she was pushed from the aircraft. She might even have been conscious. At this stage we just don’t know.”
There was a brief hush as they absorbed this particular piece of news and its implications.
“Her mother tells us Sarah was here to try and find out what happened to her sister who disappeared from here 15 years ago along with her daughter.”
Slater now moved alongside the second board.
“As DS Norman has already told you, this body was found by a dog walker. While we were investigating, the dog, which had run off, decided to come back. It came back carrying a human femur. A search the next morning revealed a shallow grave in the middle of the Haunted Copse. This grave contained the skeletal remains of Sandra Bressler and her five-year-old daughter.
“At that stage, we didn’t know why Sarah had come to Tinton, so there was no immediate connection between the first body and these two. However, once we were told why Sarah had come to Tinton, it seemed an unlikely coincidence. DNA proved it was no coincidence. Sandra Bressler is the sister Sarah Townley was looking for.
“Fifteen years ago, Sandra, her husband, and daughter, moved down to Tinton from the Midlands. Sandra supervised the move because her husband was away at the time. He came home at the end of the first week to find the move had gone smoothly enough, but Sandra, her daughter, and all their belongings had disappeared.”
Slater took a sip of his coffee while he let everyone absorb this.
It was Tony Ashton who asked the question, again.
“Wasn’t she reported missing at the time?”
“Yes, she was,” said Slater, slowly. “Unfortunately it seems the investigation wasn’t exactly the most thorough that’s ever been carried out.”
“It was a joke.” Norman shook his head in disgust. “I don’t think they could have stopped the murder, but they might well have found the bodies if only they’d tried looking.”
There was a hubbub about the quality of some past investigations and the word Nash was mentioned more than once, but Slater could see they were getting off the point.
“Okay, everybody,” he said, raising his voice. “We’re getting off the point here.”
Tony Ashton had another question.
“How were the mother and daughter killed, Sir?”
“This was another grisly murder,” said Norman. “It looks as if the mother was chased into the woods and then hunted down by someone using an axe. He took three big swipes at her and then smashed the back of her head in. The kid was just bashed over the head with the axe.”
“And before you ask,” added Slater. “We don’t know if the child had to watch her mother being hunted before she was killed.”
“Jesus!” Ashton looked and sounded horrified. “That’s one cold bastard that could do that.”
He had spoken for all of them.
“They’re both pretty cold murders if you ask me,” said Norman. “But then I’ve never come across a murder yet that left me feeling all warm and fuzzy, you know?”
“What you just heard,” Slater spoke loudly and deliberately, “stays in this room. The press will be told we’ve found, and identified, two bodies. They will not be told how they were killed, and no one outside this room is to know. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you why.”
“Are we looking for one killer, or two?” asked the ser
geant, Toby Allen.
“That’s the $64,000 question,” said Slater. “While the victims are definitely connected, there’s 15 years between their deaths, and the methods are totally different. Having said that, it seems the first victim, Sarah, had been looking for her sister or at least trying to find out what had happened to her, so it’s quite possible she stumbled across the original killer who then killed again.”
“At the moment,” Norman said, “we’re trying to keep an open mind, and that’s what we all need to do until we have some evidence to give us a pointer. The problem with speculating without any evidence is that it’s just guessing, and I shouldn’t need to tell anyone what a waste of time that is.”
There were more murmurs of agreement.
“Okay,” said Slater. “That’s about it for now. Make sure you read your notes and remember, if you have questions, for goodness sake, ask. I don’t want to find two weeks down the road that someone had an idea but chose to keep quiet in case they made a fool of themselves.
“DS Norman will give you your assignments for today. From now on we’ll be having regular gatherings like this until we’ve solved this case, okay?”
He could hear the assorted groans and grumbles about early starts as the meeting began to break up. He could understand how they all felt, but it was part of the job, and they all knew it. He looked around for Steve Biddeford.
“Steve? Have you got a minute, please?”
“Sure,” said Biddeford, making his way across the room. “What can I do for you?”
“Any luck with your hunt for a light aircraft?”
“Not a bloody thing so far,” he said, gloomily. “I started 20 miles out, like you said, and I’m working my way back in. I’ve got just the one airfield left to visit, at Trapworth. It’s about five miles away, but I’m not optimistic, to be honest. I did think it might be an idea to do a house to house within the area around the Haunted Copse. Maybe someone actually heard an aircraft that night. At least I’d know for sure that I was following the right trail.”
