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 or act relating to any
persons, living or dead, locations or
events involving them, is entirely alleged
and 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 2018 who
Asserts the moral right to be identified as
the author of this work
ISBN 978-1-9997640-0-5
Proof reading & editing by Zedolus
BOOKS IN THE DCS PALMER SERIES
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 available as individual e-books and paperbacks and double case paperbacks.
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. 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, who were a bunch of South London petty criminals, in the 1960’s. They have three children and eight grandchildren, a nice house in the London suburb of Dulwich, and a faithful ‘springer’ dog called Daisy.
Gheeta Singh lives alone in a fourth floor Barbican apartment, her parents having 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, as well as the arranged marriage that 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 multiple killings, twisting and turning through red herrings and hidden clues, and keeping the reader in suspense until the very end.
CASE 5. LOOT
1945 MERKERS-KIESELBACH GERMANY
Spring 1945, outside the Merkers-Kieselbach salt mine in Germany. The USA 90th Division had pushed the German line back across the Werra River where it had broken and fled in disarray, even though Hitler had ordered that Merkers be held at all costs. The Allies had intelligence that the mine was a Nazi depository for looted art, and with the help of the British Royal Engineers Bomb Disposal Unit the sealed entrance had been breached with a land mine, trip wires made safe, and the thick steel doors forced open.
Colonel George Leyton RE turned to the US General behind him – a long way behind him.
‘All clear General’, he shouted. ‘You want to go in, or shall we check inside for booby traps first?’
‘After you Colonel,’ shouted back the General. ‘You take care now.’
Leyton nodded to his Sergeant and two sappers, and they gingerly moved forward into the gloom. Their torches swept the floor for tell-tale signs of buried mines and stretched wires across their path. After twenty yards of slow and painstakingly careful progress, the entrance tunnel widened into what their torch beams showed to be a very wide cavern indeed; at least sixty feet across, thirty feet high, and stretching far into the distant darkness beyond their torch beams.
‘There’s a large wall board on the right with switches on, sir.’
The first sapper behind Leyton pointed it out with his torch beam.
‘Okay,’ Leyton nodded. ‘One switch at a time then, and slowly does it.’
As the switches were thrown, fluorescent lighting tubes splashed light down from their ceiling hangers into the cavern. The whole vast place was lit in a bright, white light that bounced off the white salt walls and roughly hewn roof.
‘My God!’
Colonel Leyton stood transfixed by the view of hundreds of looted works of art stacked on pallets along the left-hand side of the cavern. But the big surprise was along the right-hand side, where pallet after pallet was stacked with gold ingots shining in the bright light.
‘Is that what I think it is, sir?’ his Sergeant asked as he started to move forward. Leyton held his arm.
‘Steady Sergeant, slowly does it. Could be booby trapped.’
They inched their way to the first pallet. Leyton picked up an ingot, noting the eagle and swastika impressed into it. He looked along the seemingly never-ending street of gold ahead of them.
‘I think we’ve found El Dorado, Sergeant. Back the Land Rover up to the door and tell the Yanks we’ve found some trip wires, and to stay well back until we give them the all clear.’
Chapter 1. LONDON PRESENT DAY
‘Busy isn’t it, eh?
Detective Chief Superintendent Justin Palmer relaxed in the back of an unmarked Jaguar squad car as it made its way slowly along Knightsbridge towards Piccadilly. He put down the sheaf of documents he’d been glancing through and looked around the bustling area, the pavements brimming over with shoppers as the traffic nudged forward foot by foot.
Detective Sergeant Gheeta Singh nodded in agreement.
‘Always is along here guv, especially this time of year – tourists.’
She glanced at the vast windows of Harrods, wondering why people were attracted to shops that charged the highest prices when you could buy the same goods much cheaper elsewhere; or better still, buy hassle free online with next day delivery. Must be the bag you get – a paper status symbol to take home and carry around your local neighbourhood with egoistic pride. You wouldn’t throw a Harrods carrier bag in the trash bin like you would a Lidl bag, would you? She wondered if heads would turn if you wa
lked around Harrods with a Lidl bag to put your shopping in? She smiled at the thought of the haughty shop assistants’ reactions. Palmer broke into her thoughts.
‘This was all an overgrown forest in the 1700s; there was a river crossing through it and a bridge. It was one of the main dirt roads out of London for the mail coaches. Amazing when you think of that and look at it now. A hundred a day thundered through here, and at night they travelled with armed guards on the top of the coaches ‘cause of the highwaymen. Notorious place for them it was, and the gangs of robbers. They’re still here of course – the robbers that is. Only now we call them solicitors and estate agents.’
He smiled to himself.
‘Hard to imagine how it was back then.’
‘Very hard to imagine, guv.’
Palmer laughed.
‘Mrs P. would have liked it – all that horse manure for her rhubarb! The coaches would come through here then break off onto their various routes: Bath and the West Country, Gloucester and Wales. No Severn Bridge then, they had to go the long way around, through Gloucester and down to Wales. Some coaches went hundreds of miles up to the North. It was big business. No post offices in those days, you used the inns – left your post in the pub and picked up any incoming mail for you when the coach had been. You know, there was an inn up the road here.’
He pointed ahead.
‘In Lincoln’s Inn – it was called The Swan With Two Necks. The landlord had near on two thousand horses in the fields behind the pub. Big player he was; chap called Palmer too. It was the start of the transport system we have today.’
‘You’re a mine of information, guv.’ Gheeta was genuinely impressed.
‘Mrs P. says that. Only she says I’m a mine of useless information.’
He laughed to himself. The driver half turned and spoke over his shoulder.
‘You want me to put the blues on, sir? Get through quicker if I did.’
‘No, we’re okay for time, thanks Harry. Anyway, it’ll give me more time to read this lot.’
He patted the pile of documents.
‘Now that is a mine of useless information.’
Chapter 2.
They were on their way to the massive excavation dug just behind Baker Street as part of the London Cross Rail programme. A body had been found that morning, inside the giant metal casing that was about to be filled with hundreds of tons of concrete and become a main sixty-foot diameter support strut. The body was inside a tough red plastic bag.
At the site the works foreman gave them each a hard hat and took them across to a viewing platform jutting out over the giant pit.
‘Blimey! That is a big hole.’
Palmer was impressed as he and Singh stood at the top of the excavation looking down. The foreman laughed.
‘Got to be; there’s five underground rail tracks going through here, plus a maintenance tunnel alongside them.’
He pointed down to the metal casing jutting up a hundred feet from the floor.
‘That’s where we found the body, inside that casing. Found it just in time too; fourteen hundred tons of concrete were going into that later today. We had a load dropped in late last night, so the body must have been dumped after that. Stroke of luck the welders decided to do one last safety check on the rivets this morning and found it. It’s very dark inside once you get eighty to ninety foot down, so you couldn’t see a thing just peering in from the top. They go down on ropes with arc lights to check things. Gave them a shock I can tell you.’
‘Is the body still there inside?’
Palmer didn’t fancy a trip down a rope pulley.
‘No, your Forensic chaps had it pulled out and put in our cold store.’
‘That was handy. What have you got a cold store for?’
‘Chemicals, fuel and oil mainly. We use a lot of cooling fluid on the tunnel drill heads. These drill heads are not your normal Black and Decker DIY type; they’re six hundred feet across and bite into solid rock, so you can imagine they get very hot and need a lot of cooling. That’s the cold store.’
He pointed down to a Portakabin below them.
‘Are our Forensics people still in there?’
‘Hang on, I’ll find out.’
The foreman made a call on his radio.
‘No, the body’s been taken away and your chap is on his way up here now.’
Palmer raised his eyebrows questioningly to Sergeant Singh, who consulted her open laptop on which she’d been making notes.
‘Reg Frome, sir. He’s the one who called us in.’
Reg Frome was overall head of the Yard’s Forensic labs. He and Palmer went back a long way, having joined the Met. at the same time and completed their training at Hendon together. Frome had opted to move into the Forensics side, while Palmer had his eye on the CID as a career. Both had wildly exceeded their own expectations in achieving their current high positions.
A two-person steel lift clattered up from below and came to a jarring halt against the side edge of the platform. Reg Frome pushed aside the metal lattice door, squeezed himself from between two piles of cement bags, and stepped out. He had the appearance of the Doc Brown character from the Back to the Future films; a wild shock of unkempt grey hair, and a suit that any decent charity shop might politely refuse to take. He brushed cement dust from his clothes.
‘Not the most comfortable lift I’ve ever been in.’
Palmer shook his hand.
‘How are you, Reg? I hear you called us in on this one.’
‘Hello Justin, I’m fine. Good morning Sergeant,’ he said, nodding to Gheeta.
‘Hello Mr Frome,’ Gheeta smiled. ‘Good to see you again.’
Palmer was getting impatient.
‘So what have you got then, Reg? I’m getting a bit queasy up here; never did have a head for heights. God knows how these chaps manage it.’
‘You get used to it,’ the foreman explained through a sympathetic smile. Palmer had forgotten all about him.
‘I think we’ve taken up enough of your time, young man. No doubt you’re up against a time frame on this sort of job, so we’ll not keep you any longer. Many thanks for your help.’
He shook the foreman’s hand.
‘Come on Reg, you can travel back with us and explain things on the way.’
His quick exit was to keep any information that Reg might let slip out away from the public domain. For all he knew, the foreman might have links to the murder; he might be getting a back-hander to let a major crime gang dump their victims in the cement inthe dead of night. The rumour that four bodies are buried somewhere inside the main concrete supports of Spaghetti Junction on the M6 is still a pretty strong one.
They made their way back to the squad car, having swapped back the hard hats for their usual headwear. The driver wasn’t too delighted to see Reg Frome and his cement powder-coated trousers slide onto his clean back seat with Palmer; but everybody loved Reg, so he let it pass and eased the Jaguar out into the traffic for the return journey.
‘It’s the plastic bag, Justin,’ explained Reg after he settled in. ‘It’s a special type that councils use for putting asbestos roof sheets into when they’re sent for disposal. They are tough and impervious; you can’t buy them at the local DIY store.’
Palmer had had experience of Reg Frome’s explanations before. He usually went twice round the block the long way before giving the answer.
‘So what’s so interesting about this type of plastic bag?’
‘It’s the second one to turn up in the last two months with a body inside it. The other one was washed up on a Sussex beach.’
Chapter 3.
Back at the Yard Palmer entered his office on the third floor, flicked his trilby at the old hat stand in frisbee-throwing manner, missed it, picked it up off the floor and placed it on the nearest hook, hanging his trade mark Prince of Wales check jacket next to it. He checked his messages for anything important – important usually meaning a list of shopping to get on his way home
from the Co-op for Mrs P. No messages this time, so he crossed the corridor into his Team Room.
Having just finished the Saturday’s Child case, the write-on-wipe-off case progress boards on the walls were clear, the tables and chairs neatly stacked, and the only occupants Detective Sergeant Singh and Claire the technical operator who was hard at work, tapping away at her keyboard in front of a bank of computer screens as Gheeta directed her.
‘Anything come through yet?’ Palmer asked. He was waiting for the details of the first body in the bag to come through from Sussex CID. The bag had been washed up on a Brighton beach, much to the annoyance of the local Tourist Board who had only just gotten their Blue Flag ranking from the Keep Britain Tidy people for clean beaches and water. So murdered bodies floating around in bags was not what they wanted at all.
‘Not yet, guv. But Reg Frome sent some pictures.’
Gheeta handed Palmer a sheaf of ten printouts of the pictures from the file Frome had sent. Palmer pulled a chair from a stack and sat looking through them.
The victim had been strangled, judging by the red welt around his neck; middle-aged, unclothed, overweight and white. The red bag was large, six-foot by four-foot, and two of them had been used; one pulled over the head and down, to meet another one pulled over the feet and up. Tape had secured the bags together, and some tape remnants remained. He read Frome’s report, that went into great detail about the bag and little detail about the victim, except to confirm that death was due to strangulation by a thin rope, which was probably a three-strand polyester type; Frome concluded this by the minute strands left embedded in the victim’s skin.
LOOT & I'M WITH THE BAND: The DCS Palmer and the Serial Murder Squad series by B.L.Faulkner. Cases 5 & 6 (DCS Palmer and the Serial Murder Squad cases Book 3) Page 1
