by J G Alva
“Very well.” Brown turned back to him. “The third reason I wanted you on this team is a little more vague. There’s mention of it in some of your reports, but I got more from DCI Stohp. You’re good with people, I’m told. You have a knack. You put them at ease. They talk to you.”
Ben shifted uncomfortably under his gaze…and the compliments.
“I was watching you when you came in,” Brown said, pointing in the direction of his office. “Through the window. Did you know the workman you were talking to? Beside the skip?”
Ben shook his head.
“His name is Steven Childs,” Brown said. “He is the supervisor for all the men you can see out in the main part of this floor. They’ve all been working shifts around the clock to get this place finished for us.”
Sarah sneezed, wiped her nose.
“He is not a happy man,” Brown continued. “He’s getting compensated for his time, but time away from family is never happy time. And yet you got him to laugh. What did you say to him?”
Ben cleared his throat.
“It’s probably best if I don’t say,” Ben said. “In polite company.”
His eyes flicked to Sarah.
Brown understood, nodded, his smile winking on and off.
“Trade secrets, no doubt,” he said. “Detective Constable Sarah Goodchild,” Brown continued, reading again from the sheet on the table next to Kip. “I think you know why you are here.”
“Yes.”
“For those who don’t know,” Brown said, looking at the others in turn, “Sarah has a PhD in Psychology. Which you can all understand will come in handy in our line of work. I also believe” – here Brown checked the paper again – “a BA in English Literature as well?”
“Yes.”
“And then you joined the police.”
“Yes.”
“Can you enlighten us as to the particular circumstances for this rather unusual journey into her Majesty’s finest?”
“Well…” Sarah cleared her throat. “I took a BA in English Literature because of my mother. You may already know that she was an author. A very well respected, if not a particularly successful, one. She wrote two books in the seventies. I suppose she hoped I’d continue the family business.” Sarah shrugged awkwardly.
“And Psychology?”
“People are the greatest mystery of all.”
Brown nodded. He seemed amused. He indicated Ben.
“Not to DI Lewis, it would appear. But that doesn’t explain what brought you to us.”
Sarah seemed to ponder this question for a moment.
“When I was growing up, a young woman, a young woman who lived three streets away from me, was murdered, by a friend of her father’s. In fact, the whole family were murdered. I believe it was drug related. I didn’t know the girl, except to see on the street, but the whole thing…it affected me. In contrast, a literary career didn’t seem very…relevant. At least not in comparison to such a tragedy.”
Sarah shrugged again.
“Very well. Right. Now to the final member of our team. Me. Why am I here?”
Brown went and stood by the wall, his hands clasped behind his back.
“I’ve been a DCI for four years, which means that I have experience in running a police department. Before I joined the police, I was in the army – a Major.” Ben thought: bingo. “I did a tour in the Falklands. You’re probably too young to recall, but it wasn’t a…happy time. As this new division was partly my idea, I suppose they – and by they, I mean my commanding officers – felt duty bound to offer the position to me. But I do have one more notch on my belt that recommends me: in 1994, I was one of a handful of detectives investigating a delightful couple from Gloucester who were suspected of killing a young girl. Several young girls, in fact. Their names were Fred and Rosemary West.”
There was a small shocked silence. Brown took in each of their faces. There was a grim look on his face, as if he had just disposed of something rotten…with nowhere to wash his hands.
Pushing himself off the wall, Brown said, “as we are becoming more and more analogous with the USA – God knows, after Halloween, I expect all of us to be celebrating Thanksgiving soon – the powers that be have decided to give us what I would say is a rather dubious acronym. We are to be the Fast Investigative Research and Response Strategic Taskforce. Or to quaintly put it, F.I.R.R.S.T.” Brown smiled without much humour. Slightly sarcastically, he continued, “we can now consider ourselves to be the newest member of a very select group of other more ominous alphabet agencies that you have heard so much about…unless of course we don’t all drown in alphabet soup first.”
Brown cleared his throat, stepping closer to them.
“You must understand, this type of department, it is a test run for an idea that may be rolled out nationally, were it to be proven successful. As such, the budget we secured is frugal, at best. After all, you don’t bet too much money on a horse that you’ve never seen run before. This might go a little way to explaining why we are here, in this part of Bristol, in an office block, instead of in an annex to the Bridewell Station.”
“You mean it was cheap,” Ben said.
“I mean it’s government owned,” Brown said, with a wry smile, and Ben flashed to the board above the reception desk downstairs: Wessex Water. “It’s not cheap. It’s free.”
Of course, Ben thought. The police budget was only either tight…or non-existent. There was seemingly never more money to go round, only less.
“Anyway,” Brown continued, “the reason your transfer has been so rushed, and the reason why you are sitting here today amongst sawdust and cement, is that we have a new case almost tailor made for this department. The powers that be felt that we couldn’t wait, and I agree with them. We have a murder. Sorry, three murders. Francis has the details. Francis?”
Kip got up and began passing out the file folders he had brought in with him.
“Before we begin,” Brown continued, “let me just give you a few details about how this case came to my attention. The bodies were discovered at six o’ clock this morning, by a colleague of the deceased. In between then and now, CID processed most of the crime scene, and at that point certain…aspects of the crime meant that SOCA had to be alerted.” SOCA being the Serious Organised Crime Agency of course. “SOCA then came to me, and I then in turn set various wheels in motion to bring you all here. However, SOCA’s involvement did not end there. As of this very moment, one of their detectives is en route to us. He’ll be assisting us with this investigation. He should be here sometime this afternoon.”
“Why is SOCA sending a detective to work with us?” Ben asked.
“Because this recent murder ties in to a cold case that SOCA – or rather, this detective – has been working on.”
“How many victims?” Sarah asked. “I mean, previous to the ones last night?”
“Seventeen,” Brown said.
There was another shocked silence. Ben felt a definite shiver pass over him.
“In a moment, you’ll visit the crime scene,” Brown continued, “but for now, if you go to the files in front of you, we can review the particulars…”
◆◆◆
The Aldershot house was a big block of grey Georgian concrete; it looked cold and uninviting in the bright June sunlight.
A steady flow of Forensic scientists and police leaked from the front door. Police tape had been strung around the front of the building, from the iron railings on one side, to the wall bracketing the other. A couple of PCs, looking bored and uncomfortable, stood sentinel beyond the paved front lawn, keeping back onlookers. On the front lawn itself were parked a Forensic van, a Saab and a Rover, the latter two probably owned by Detectives.
The morning was crisp and the light sharpened everything. Ben got out the car and felt the bite of the weather, unusual for June. Sarah didn’t feel it, or didn’t seem to, but her nose started running; she wiped at it fretfully with her handkerchief, as they crossed the road to
the house.
The PC checked them before letting them under the tape. One of the Forensic team jostled Ben rudely as they wove between the cars, his or her identity concealed behind their all-in-one white coveralls. There were steps up to the front door, and at the top of them, Detective Inspector Brund, an overweight, balding, miserable, but very good detective, stood waiting. Ben had worked with him in CID. He was newly married, Ben recalled, to a tiny woman from Thailand.
Brund inclined his head to Ben, a sort of nod of greeting. He was wearing a suit, unbuttoned, a spotted red tie loosened around his neck.
“Dressing up for TV?” Ben asked, smiling.
“Fuck off,” Brund snapped. He was chewing gum, and the words came out of the side of his mouth.
“Come on. Don’t tell me you still miss the old cancer sticks. How long have you been on the nicotine gum now?”
“Too long,” Brund grunted.
“A decade?”
Brund almost cracked a smile.
“Always the joker. Who’s this?” He indicated Sarah. “Your babysitter?”
“Detective Brund, this is my new partner, DC Goodchild.”
Now Brund did smile.
“I heard they moved you. I thought it was ‘cause you fucked up.”
“It almost sounds like you missed me.”
Brund gave a non-committal grunt.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll walk you through it.”
They followed him in through the front door.
They were in a short hall with brown carpet and terracotta coloured walls. Some conflagration of people was blocking the entrance to the kitchen, so Brund led them through a side door into the front room. There was a large bay window, a fireplace, and against most walls bookshelves.
“No TV,” Ben said to Sarah.
She nodded, her face serious. She was checking the spines of the books.
There was another door, to the Dining Room, and Brund led them through that also. The kitchen was at the far end, separated from the Dining Room by a breakfast bar. On the floor, at the base of the fridge, was a large pool of dried blood. Numbered yellow marker points had been placed around the edges of the pool to indicate spatter. To the left of this was a carton of milk, its contents dried to a thick paste.
“The daughter was found here,” Brund said.
“She’s at the Flax Bourton mortuary already?” Ben asked.
Brund nodded. His face was grim.
“Her face was smashed up like a fucking pumpkin,” Brund said.
“Jesus, Ollie,” Ben said.
“Come on. You’ve got kids. It makes my blood boil. What was she? Seven?”
“Six,” Ben said. “Was the carton on the floor like that when you got here?”
Brund nodded.
“He came in through the conservatory,” Brund said, indicating the open back door. “He chipped away at the putty and took a pane out, came in through the back door here. No burglar alarm. It must have been easy.”
Ben frowned.
“They couldn’t afford one?” He asked.
Brund shrugged.
“Aldershot owned this place outright. He was some kind of respected lecturer at the university. I don’t think money was a problem.”
“Huh.”
“What’s this?” Sarah asked, indicating a lighter patch of flooring next to the dark pool of dried blood. “It smells like…bleach.”
Brund smiled.
“She is your babysitter,” he said to Ben.
Ben gave him the finger.
“That’s exactly what it is,” Brund told Sarah. “The bottle was on the counter. We’re checking it for fingerprints now. He pretty much emptied it all out on to the floor right there. And look at this.”
Brund moved closer to the kitchen door to the hall, and impatiently shooed some of the Forensic people in the doorway out of his way. What they had been obscuring was the wife’s body, crumpled in an unholy heap, half in the kitchen, half in the hall, one ankle turned at an impossible angle.
Ben moved closer. Her face was turned up toward him, but some terrible violence had been done to it: a scattering of messy puncture wounds covered all the exposed skin, in no discernable pattern. Not gunshot wounds, but something else. Ben wasn’t sure what.
Brund stepped gingerly over the corpse and indicated the wife’s left arm, which stretched outward; it was as if she were pointing to the back door. Giving them clues from beyond the grave, Ben thought with grim humour.
Her hand rested in a cereal bowl.
“He filled a bowl with bleach, then placed her hand in it and left it there,” Brund said, in a tone of voice that suggested that the world might be just as mad as he feared it was.
“You found her like this?” Ben asked.
“Yep. We were thinking DNA.”
“She scratched him,” Ben said.
“Yeah. Probably. Put up a fight. I hope she got an eyeball. But you only have to watch CSI to know we can get DNA from tissue under the fingernails. He obviously thought he couldn’t take the chance.”
“So he’s a little bit more than just an idiot,” Ben said thoughtfully, looking around the room.
“Or he’s already in the system,” Brund added hopefully.
At that moment, Brund’s mobile went off, and he held up his finger as he answered it.
“Hello?”
A small tinny voice could be heard shouting at the other end.
“Honey, baby,” Brund said, in a placating tone of voice, “I’m not buying a fucking Jacuzzi just because every now and then you get a twinge in your back…”
Brund made an apologetic face and Ben nodded, and then Brund went outside, to deal with his domestic situation.
“New wife,” Ben told Sarah. “Shall we try and put this together?”
“Why do you call Francis, Kip?” She asked.
“What?”
She shook her head.
“It’s been…I’ve been wondering.”
“He told me sometimes he dreams in computer code.”
“Oh. Right.” She frowned. “And what’s Krav Maga?”
“What?”
“Krav Maga. You asked Francis about it.”
“Krav Maga is an Israeli self-defence technique. Pretty brutal, no bullshit stuff.”
Sarah nodded, her expression thoughtful.
“So he comes in through the conservatory,” Ben said, moving to simulate their mystery intruder’s entrance, “and…what? The daughter surprises him?”
“She came down for a drink of milk,” Sarah said, indicating the carton. She frowned. “But remember what Brown said: no previous victims under the age of nineteen.”
“So he hadn’t planned for it. And then the wife hears the commotion, and comes down to investigate, and then he attacks her.”
Sarah looked at the wife’s body.
“And that’s when she scratched him,” she said.
“She fought back.”
“But why dump all this bleach here?”
“Maybe he was bleeding.”
“But there’s no other blood,” Sarah said.
Ben scratched his head thoughtfully.
“Perhaps some of these peripheral spots will turn out to be his.” He indicated the yellow marker points.
“But wouldn’t there be a trail leading out the door as he left?”
Sarah began opening the floor cupboards and checking inside.
Ben asked, “what are you doing?”
Sarah stopped at the cupboard under the sink. She turned, at the same time pulling out a small metal bin.
“What?” Ben said.
“The bag’s gone.”
Ben frowned.
Sarah looked around the kitchen, stopped, moving to the countertop under a window. She pointed to a towel dispenser.
“He was bleeding. He thought it would lead us to him. So he cleaned it up with towels, put the towels in the rubbish bag, took the rubbish bag with him.”
“And dumped blea
ch over the spot for good measure. Okay.”
He paused, thinking about it. It was…unusual.
“Come on,” he said eventually. “The husband’s upstairs. So’s the message.”
◆◆◆
Jeffrey Aldershot’s body was still on the double bed, a facedown parody of Christ. Somebody had pulled the white duvet down to reveal navy blue boxer shorts. Ben felt a little sorry for Aldershot, to be robbed of this little dignity, even after his death.
Two Forensic scientists were packing up their gear as both he and Sarah stepped in. He moved around the bed so that he could see Aldershot’s face, turned as it was to the window. It had suffered the same violence as his wife’s: a flurry of deep messy wounds dotted the entirety of his features, from forehead to chin.
“Do we know what caused these wounds?” Ben asked the Forensic guys.
The shorter one turned to him and shrugged. He was wearing a hood and mask, so Ben couldn’t properly see his face.
“Something small and blunt,” he said, his voice muffled by the mask. “Probably a screwdriver. We haven’t found it.”
The two Forensic scientists gathered up their things and left. Ben felt disturbed on some deep level. Jeffrey Aldershot was near enough his own age, and was a father too. Was this a random attack? Or had he somehow earned this violent end, either through accident or intent?
And why had he not been able to protect his family? Hadn’t he heard what was going on downstairs?
Sarah stared at the wall above the bed where in red paint the killer had left them his message. Sarah read it aloud.
“”The father you spring from is the devil and you will carry out the evil wishes of your father, who has been a murderer from the beginning”.”
“CID are checking to see if it’s a quote from anywhere,” Ben said.
“It’s from the Bible,” Sarah said.
That stopped him.
“What?”
“It’s from John, chapter eight, verse forty four. The full verse goes: the father you spring from is the devil and you will carry out the evil wishes of your father, who has been a murderer from the beginning; he didn’t uphold the truth for, in him, there is no truth; and now, when he speaks for himself, he lies; he is a liar and the father of lies.”
