by Ben Cheetham
When Mark’s eyes finally drooped into sleep, Jim padded from the room. The constable had returned from wherever he’d been on his break. Giving him a nod, Jim headed for the lift.
7
During the drive back to the crime scene, Jim sifted through the details of what Mark had told him, searching for chinks in his story. There were none, so far as he could tell. And if there were, they would soon be rooted out by forensic examination of the shotgun, and a simple check of Mark’s phone records. When he reached the lane, he found it clogged by media vans with satellite dishes on top, ready to transmit details of the grisly events to the nation. He squeezed past them, sounding his horn at a clutch of journalists.
He parked up and walked towards a lorry marked ‘Major Incident Command Unit’, but his step faltered as he caught the sound of Garrett’s voice from inside it. His nose wrinkled with annoyance. He’d never particularly liked any of his previous DCIs, but he’d respected them. He couldn’t bring himself to like or respect Garrett. Every time the guy fixed him with his phony earnest eyes it raised his hackles. The feeling was mutual. He knew Garrett considered him a dinosaur, a relic whose time had passed. That much was obvious from the way he often gave the plum assignments to younger team members. And maybe he was right to do so. Maybe his most senior detective had become out of touch with new policing methods. But he was still in touch with the streets – something Garrett had never been. And he could read criminals’ minds like Garrett could read Detective Chief Superintendent Knight’s moods.
‘Ah, to hell with him,’ muttered Jim, continuing past the lorry towards the house. He’d get the details of the briefing off Amy.
A fireman barred his way at the front door. ‘Sorry, I can’t let you in. It’s not safe.’
‘Do I look like I give a shit?’ Jim stepped around him into the hallway. Noting that Stephen Baxley’s body had been removed, he headed upstairs.
‘Hey guys, you’d better get out of there,’ the fireman called to his colleagues. ‘Some idiot’s gone upstairs.’
The master bedroom’s floor sagged noticeably where the weight of the charred four-poster bed rested on it. Hugging the walls, Jim edged towards the television. He pulled on a pair of forensic gloves, then took out his penknife and prised open the DVD drive, revealing the edge of a disc. He snapped the blade shut and opened out the screwdriver attachment. The television’s fire-warped casing cracked as he twisted out the screws that held it together. He levered the casing apart and disconnected the DVD drive. Then he took apart the drive and removed the DVD. He returned downstairs and sought out Ruth Magill. Finding her stooped over the corpses in the forensics tent, he showed her the DVD. ‘Got anything I can watch this on?’
‘You can use my laptop. What’s on it?’
‘If I knew that I wouldn’t need to watch it. I took it from the master bedroom’s television.’
Arching an eyebrow, Ruth gently admonished him. ‘Naughty boy. How did you know it was there?’
Jim recounted his conversation with Mark Baxley as he followed the pathologist to her car. She booted up her laptop and inserted the DVD. Grainy colour footage of what appeared to be some sort of basement popped up on the screen. A date and time flickered in the corner of the footage: ‘22:43, 1/9/97’. A windowless, whitewashed brick wall, foam-insulated pipes and quarry-tiled floor swept before the camera’s lens as it swung round to focus on a group of figures. There were four adults – three men and a woman – standing in a row. Although the camera cut off their heads, their genders were easily determined because all of them were naked. The woman was slim with small breasts, narrow hips and a triangle of dark pubic hair. To her right was a stocky, pot-bellied man whose barrel chest was covered with curly black hair. And to his right was a slim man with a wisp of white-blond hair between his nipples. A purple blotch like a mole was visible on his left hip. To the woman’s left was a man with broad shoulders and muscular arms. His body was as hairless as an egg. His hand groped at his erect, circumcised penis.
Two more figures were lying on cushions on a rug. One was a strikingly beautiful, full-lipped girl of fifteen or so, wearing white cotton underwear. A dull needle of memory prodded Jim’s brain at the sight of her straight black shoulder-length hair and almost luminescent blue eyes. He knew those eyes, but where from? The question was thrust from his mind as the girl bent over the second figure – a cherubic-faced boy of about eight or nine with curly blond hair falling over his forehead, partly covering glassy, drugged-looking eyes. The boy was dressed in navy-blue pyjamas. He exhaled a barely audible moan, his head lolling sideways as the girl began to unbutton his pyjama top. Then the boy was coming out of his pyjamas and tears were coming out of Jim’s eyes. ‘Oh God,’ he murmured, in a voice thick with horror.
He closed his eyes tightly, unable to bear what he was seeing. They snapped back open seconds later as the laptop’s speakers emitted a soul-wrenchingly small sobbing noise. The boy was weakly pulling away from the girl, curling up into a bundle of tears.
‘Give him some more medicine, Angel.’ The voice too came from the laptop, crackling with slight distortion. It unmistakably belonged to a man, well spoken, with the barest hint of a local accent.
The girl’s mouth was drawn into a tight line. There was a kind of despairing defiance in her eyes as she shook her head.
‘Do it.’ The voice was soft, but the accompanying images lent it a chilling menace.
Still the girl hesitated to obey. The hairless man whipped the back of his hand across her cheek. She stared up at her assaulter, silent tears running from her eyes. What she saw drained all the defiance from her face, leaving only fear. With trembling reluctance, she picked up a brown medicine bottle. The boy’s sobbing choked off as she pushed it into his mouth.
The DVD seized up suddenly. Ruth ejected it from the laptop and examined its underside. ‘Looks like it’s been warped by the heat.’
A despairing rage swelled Jim’s eyes. ‘It never ends. No matter what we do, it never fucking ends.’ His shoulders quaked as sobs welled up within him. He bit his lip, fighting to gain control of his emotions. ‘Sorry, Ruth, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.’
Ruth gave him a look that said, There’s no need to apologise.
‘Christ, I haven’t cried like that in years,’ continued Jim, sweeping his hand across his eyes. ‘Not even when—’ Not even when Margaret left me, he’d been about to say, but he swallowed the words. He couldn’t allow himself to think about her. Not now. He had to get his head straight, concentrate all his energies on what needed to be done. The case had suddenly got bigger than the Baxley family. A thought occurred to him. ‘Has the Baxley house got a basement?’
‘Not that I know of.’ Ruth gestured at the screen. ‘Maybe this is behind what happened here.’
Jim’s brow wrinkled doubtfully. ‘That footage is fifteen years old. If Stephen Baxley was going to kill his family and himself over it, I think he’d have done so before now.’
‘Maybe he was being blackmailed.’
‘That doesn’t seem likely either. Even if one of those men is Stephen Baxley, it’s impossible to ID him.’
‘Difficult, but not necessarily impossible. There are identifying features.’
Motioning for Jim to follow, Ruth got out of the car. She led him back to the forensics tent and picked up a clipboard. ‘Stephen Baxley, five foot eleven, approximately one hundred and forty-five pounds,’ she said, reading from the uppermost sheet of paper. ‘I’d say that rules out the big-bellied man, unless Stephen Baxley had dropped a lot of weight since ‘97.’ She resumed reading. ‘Brown hair, hazel-brown eyes.’
‘And that rules out the blond-haired man,’ said Jim. ‘So we’re just left with the circumcised man.’
Ruth unzipped a bodybag, revealing the man’s corpse. With scissors and tongs, she carefully cut and peeled away the melted remnants of his trousers and boxer-shorts. ‘Well whoever this guy is, he’s not circumcised.’
‘A
ssuming he’s Stephen Baxley, that would seem to rule out blackmail.’
‘Maybe there’s an undamaged copy of the film somewhere out there in which Stephen Baxley is identifiable.’
‘That’s a possibility,’ conceded Jim. ‘What about the woman? Could she be Jenny Baxley?’
‘I’d say that’s extremely unlikely. The body shape and hair colour are too different.’
Jim heaved a sigh. ‘I’d better go give the DCI the good news. Mind if I borrow your laptop?’
‘Go ahead.’
A note of awkwardness came into Jim’s voice. ‘Oh, and Ruth, I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t mention the way I reacted to the DVD to anyone.’
‘Of course I won’t, Jim,’ Ruth replied in a tone that said, Surely that goes without saying.
‘Thanks.’
Jim went over to the operations lorry. He rearranged his face into its usual inscrutable veteran’s mask, then knocked on the door. Amy poked her head out. ‘Hello, Jim,’ she said, her eyes flicking warningly over her shoulder at Garrett. The DCI was studying a whiteboard with four close-up photos of faces stuck to it. Jim recognised Mark Baxley. The others were of a sharp-featured middle-aged man, a good-looking woman of roughly the same age, and an auburn-haired teenage girl with pretty blue eyes and a petulant mouth. Jim guessed that they portrayed Stephen, Jenny and Charlotte Baxley.
Garrett glanced towards Jim. ‘Ah, Detective Monahan, good of you to finally grace us with your presence.’
‘Sorry, sir. I felt it was best if I stayed with Mark Baxley and heard everything he had to say.’
A ripple of disapproval disturbed the surface of Garrett’s clean-shaven, bespectacled face. ‘I don’t care what you thought best. You shouldn’t even have been at the hospital. I wanted you here to coordinate things in my absence.’
Garrett began to lecture Jim on his duties as the senior DI. As Jim listened, the DVD footage spooled through his brain like a waking nightmare. It made his blood burn to think that the perpetrators might be out there somewhere right now doing the same to other children. Shut your patronising gob, he felt like snapping. But he limited himself to, ‘There’s something you need to see.’ He set the laptop down on a table and flipped it open.
Garrett’s look of irritation at being interrupted quickly turned into one of shocked disgust as the DVD began to play. When it was over, his voice uncharacteristically shaken, he asked, ‘Where did you get this?’
Jim told him, adding, ‘I think Stephen Baxley was watching it when his son entered the house.’
‘Mark isn’t his real son,’ said Garrett. ‘Stephen Baxley adopted him when he was only a few months old.’
‘So who’s the real father?’
‘We don’t know. There’s no father’s name on his birth certificate.’
‘Does Mark know?’
‘I’ve no idea. Seeing as you’ve already established a relationship with him, I was going to ask you to find out.’ Garrett gestured at the laptop’s screen. ‘But this complicates matters.’
‘Maybe this is a blackmail case,’ suggested Jim. ‘Maybe someone was using that film to put the screw on Stephen Baxley, and it tipped him over the edge.’
‘Maybe so, but I prefer not to deal in speculation, especially when there are other factors at play that could explain what happened here.’
‘What other factors?’
‘DI Sheridan will fill you in on the details on the way to the Northern General. I have a press conference to prepare for in…’ Garrett glanced at his watch, ‘less than twenty minutes.’
‘So you still want me to talk to Mark Baxley?’
Garrett nodded. ‘And when you’re done with him, I want you both to get to work on reviewing missing-children cases from the time that footage was filmed. But before you do anything else, get that DVD to forensics. I want to know who’s handled that thing.’ His mobile phone rang. His lips compressed as he looked at it. He headed out of the trailer, putting the phone to his ear. His slightly fawning voice drifted back. ‘Hello, sir… Yes, sir… Of course, sir…’
‘Must be the DCS,’ Jim commented wryly to Amy. ‘Can you print out the faces of the kids in that film?’
‘Shouldn’t be too difficult.’ Taking care to touch only the edges of the DVD, Amy removed it from the laptop and inserted it into a PC. Jim resisted the urge to avert his gaze as the film began to play again. As much as he despised the sight of it, he needed to fix every detail in his mind – the position of the pipes, the size and shape of the quarry-tiles. But most of all, he needed to memorise every possible identifying feature of the perpetrators.
Amy paused the film on a close-up of the boy’s face and clicked ‘Print Screen’. She repeated the process for the girl.
‘Play it again from the beginning,’ Jim said, fishing a handheld tape recorder from his jacket pocket.
Guessing his intention, Amy said, ‘I can extract the audio and download it to my iPhone. That way there’ll be no background interference.’
As Amy plugged her phone’s USB cable into the PC, Jim asked, ‘So what are these other factors Garrett mentioned?’
‘Stephen Baxley was about to be made bankrupt. The bank started foreclosure proceedings on his home and business this week.’
‘Well that certainly gives us motive.’ Jim huffed air sharply through his nostrils. ‘What is it with these bastards? Why can’t they just put a gun to their own heads? Why do they have to try and take their families down with them?’
‘Arrogance, pride, narcissism. They can’t imagine their families would want to live on in a world without them.’
Jim studied the printouts, wondering if their subjects were alive and, if they were, what sort of lives they led. Meanwhile, Amy continued, ‘Or maybe he was so bitter about losing his business that he just wanted to take his anger out on someone. We know from his record that he’s capable of violence when things don’t go his way.’
‘He’s got previous?’
‘Back in ‘88, Stephen Baxley and a business associate were arrested for assaulting a man over an unpaid debt.’
‘Who’s the business associate?’
‘Bryan Reynolds.’
‘As in the Bryan Reynolds?’
‘The very same.’
Jim blew out his cheeks in astonishment. Bryan Reynolds was a name familiar to every copper in South Yorkshire. He was a major player in Sheffield organised crime. He ran – or rather, was suspected of running – a sophisticated drug-dealing network. Recently several mid-level dealers had been arrested in simultaneous raids across the city. The ‘drug supermarkets’, as the newspapers called the fortified flats and houses the dealers sold crack and heroin out of, had Reynolds’s name stamped all over them. But such was the respect and fear he inspired that, no matter what threats were made or deals offered, none of the dealers had given him up. ‘How did a man like Stephen Baxley come to be knocking around with Reynolds?’
‘Baxley doesn’t come from money. He grew up on Park Hill in the same block of flats as Reynolds. They went to the same school. Only difference is Reynolds dropped out at fifteen whereas Baxley went to college. Things went wrong for Baxley when he didn’t get the grades he needed for university. In ‘88, Reynolds got him a job collecting for a loan-shark. He’d only been at it a few weeks when he and Reynolds put some bloke in a coma for missing payments. They were remanded on charges of GBH and malicious wounding. Both pleaded innocent, but shortly before it came to trial Reynolds changed his plea to guilty and copped for the whole charge. He was sentenced to three years, of which he served eighteen months.’
Jim arched an eyebrow. The surprises just kept on coming. ‘Very charitable of him. He must’ve had a soft spot for his old schoolmate. So what happened next?’
‘Reynolds went on to become the scumbag extraordinaire we all know and love. Baxley married Jenny Shaw. She must have had a positive influence on him, because he returned to college, got his grades and went to university. After graduating in
‘92, he worked at Phoenix Engineering, before starting up SB Engineering in ‘96. As far as we know, he had no further contact with Bryan Reynolds.’
‘Maybe not, but he was certainly no stranger to criminality.’
‘That’s assuming Baxley is in that film, off or on camera.’
‘Why the hell else would he have it in his possession and be watching it just before he tried to murder his…’ Jim trailed off, his brow wrinkling as though something had occurred to him.
‘What is it?’
Jim shook his head as if to say, Nothing. ‘What about Jenny Baxley? Did the background checks turn up anything on her?’
‘No arrest records. Not even a traffic ticket. She’s clean as a whistle. So are Mark and Charlotte.’ Amy pointed at the printouts. ‘You don’t think she could have been involved in that, do you?’
Jim considered this in frowning silence. The idea was almost too vile to contemplate. He heaved a sigh. ‘Are you done?’
‘Almost.’
Amy unplugged the USB and checked the audio file transfer had worked. They left the operations lorry and walked over to a van marked ‘Scientific Support’. Jim gave the DVD to a forensics officer, explaining where it had come from and what the DCI wanted done with it. Then Amy and he headed to his car.
They rode in silence. Jim glanced at Amy. Her inexpressive face gave away nothing of what she was thinking, but he wondered if, like him, the images from the DVD were swirling through her mind. He wondered too at the strength of his feelings. It was as though what he’d seen that night had punched a hole through some internal dam and he could no longer control the flow of his emotions. And the primary emotion that overtook him when he thought about the DVD was rage – an almost painful fury at the knowledge that the perpetrators had got away for so long with what they’d done.
