[DC Laura McGanity 05 ]Cold Kill

by Neil White

  Laura blew out. Murder was just as much about the living as it was about the dead. She looked at Carson, who shook his head and then walked towards his car. He didn’t need to say anything, Laura knew that. Don Roberts was blinded by his dislike of the police, and if he found the killer before they did, there would be another death to deal with.

  Chapter Nine

  Laura was in Carson’s slipstream as he rushed into the police station, past a television crew that was still unpacking its gear and through the large wooden entrance door, banging it hard against the wall behind. One more hole for the maintenance team to fill.

  The station was busy, just as Laura had expected. The day was rushing on, nearly one o’clock already, and it seemed like all rest days had been cancelled. There was going to be a high police presence in Blackley today, to provide reassurance to the community. Everyone was hanging around and waiting to be despatched, talking in small groups in the canteen, which was situated in the centre of the station in a bright and airy atrium, lit by the sun streaming through the high glass roof. Two police drivers pushed their way through, pulling trolleys behind them, one containing bags of files to be taken to the prosecution office, and the other filled with large brown exhibit bags, heading towards the forensic laboratory a few miles away.

  Carson had commandeered a room on the ground floor, a large glass-fronted space with views over one of the car parks. The squad was based at the constabulary headquarters on the other side of the county, and so they had to set up base camps in other stations whenever a murder took them further afield. Desks lined the room. It was used mostly for training, the new boom industry, with computer terminals around the edges, the white board at the front filled with the enquiry routes from Deborah Corley’s murder. Laura saw Joe at a computer screen, and as she walked in, he looked up and waved tiredly.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ Laura asked.

  He sat back and ran his hands through his hair. Laura noticed a few grey streaks.

  ‘I’m trying to find similarities,’ he said. ‘He must have done something like this before.’

  Laura heard Carson grunt behind her. ‘He did,’ he growled, and he pointed at the photographs on the wall. ‘Three weeks ago.’

  Joe didn’t answer, just flashed Laura a half-smile, and she guessed that he had learned to let Carson’s moods blow themselves out. Carson was bad-tempered and aggressive, and he didn’t have the bedside manner of some, but if Laura ever wanted a copper on her side, it would be him.

  Carson sat down and sighed. ‘Go on then, hotshot,’ he said to Joe. ‘What have you got?’

  Joe twirled his pen in his fingers. ‘So far, nothing. At least not in Lancashire.’

  ‘What, you think he might be from out of the county?’ Carson said.

  ‘Maybe,’ Joe said, nodding, ‘but not too far. He had to have known the locations well enough. And I just don’t believe that a fantasy is this well-developed without there being something else before it.’

  ‘Fantasy?’ Carson said.

  ‘The strangulation. The leaves. The dirt,’ Joe said, before standing up and going to the wall at the front, which was covered in photographs and maps. He tapped at the first picture: naked legs, flaccid and pale, sticking out of a large overflow pipe that took water from a reservoir into a nearby river. ‘Deborah Corley,’ Joe said. ‘Just the same. Leaves and dirt and grit jammed into her mouth, her vagina, her anus, dumped so that she could be found easily. I thought at first that the dirt might have been for some forensic reason, to make it harder to pick up DNA, but now I’m not so sure.’

  ‘Just because it is repeated doesn’t mean that it wasn’t done for the same reason,’ Carson said.

  Joe shook his head. ‘When it’s repeated, it’s more than that. It’s the fantasy, part of the act. Remember what we said from the scene, that she was alive when he jammed the stuff in there. They both died from strangulation, so if we go with the forensic clean-up, then he must have attacked her and then jammed her full of debris, but that doesn’t fit in with a violent sexual offender. Sex attackers get off on the violence, so it doesn’t seem right that the violence would come after the sex. That’s when they are normally trying to get away. Some even stay to apologise, to try and comfort the victim.’

  ‘Maybe he couldn’t finish the job and acted out of frustration?’ Laura said.

  ‘What, twice?’ Joe said, his eyebrows raised. ‘Frustration suggests lack of control, because it wasn’t planned, but if you are out of control, you don’t act identically twice.’

  ‘So what do you think?’ Carson said.

  Joe chewed on his lip for a few seconds, and then said, ‘The best I can come up with is that the removal of the clothes from the scene is part of the forensic clean-up. I think the debris and the strangulation is part of the act, and the motivation will have been sexual. If he didn’t have sex with her, he must have got his kicks in some other way. My guess is that he masturbated at the scene, maybe even onto her when she was still wearing clothes. That might be why she was naked and there were no clothes at the scene, because when her clothes went, his DNA went with them.’

  ‘Perhaps they were trophies?’ Carson said.

  ‘Possibly,’ Joe said. ‘Do you remember the small cuts on her body and legs?’

  Laura and Carson exchanged glances and then nodded that they remembered.

  ‘I think that happened when he cut off her clothes,’ Joe said.

  ‘So what scenario do we have?’ Carson asked.

  Joe looked at the photographs again, and then he went back to his chair. ‘He attacks the victim and fills her mouth with dirt and debris, perhaps to keep her quiet. He jams her with dirt wherever he can, for some sexual motive, and then strangles her. As she dies, he masturbates over her, and then cleans up.’

  ‘So it’s a pure sex attacker?’ Carson said.

  ‘That would be my guess,’ Joe replied.

  ‘What about a diversion?’ Laura said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Joe said.

  It was Laura’s turn to walk towards the photographs, but this time she went to a glamour shot of Deborah Corley, a soft-focus picture from one of the high street make-over studios, her hair over her face, her top pulled down from her shoulder.

  ‘From what you’ve said, Jane Roberts is from a bad family, the sort that makes enemies,’ Laura said. ‘Nothing like Deborah. Her father’s a copper, for Christ’s sake, a different world to Don Roberts. She was rebelling a bit, maybe, sleeping around, but no different to a lot of young women.’

  ‘So what are you suggesting?’ Carson said.

  ‘Do you remember the whispers we heard about Deborah’s father?’ Laura said. ‘Good cop on the street, bad man at home; that he was a bully, spent too much of his off-duty time with a bottle in his hand. His wife has called in twice when he’s come home drunk and got too heavy-handed. Maybe he got the same with Deborah, argued about her private life, and ended up killing her? Was Jane Roberts just a cover-up, to distract us from the first family, to make it look like a serial killing rather than someone closer to home?’

  ‘Why expose himself a second time, just to rig up a smokescreen?’ Carson said. ‘It’s too much of a gamble. If he wasn’t seen the first time, and there is nothing forensically to link him, he is taking a big risk in doing it again. No, if Deborah’s father was behind it, he would sit tight and wait for it to blow over.’

  ‘And it wouldn’t be so sexualised,’ Joe added. ‘But it could be a distraction for a different reason.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Carson said, sitting forward now.

  ‘Some kind of turf war,’ Joe said. ‘Perhaps someone found out how Deborah died and replicated it, so that it hurt Don Roberts and distracted us.’

  Carson shook his head, unconvinced. ‘Don Roberts is an old-school crook,’ he said. ‘So are his enemies. Just small town big fishes. They would tear each other’s fingernails out, but they still play by certain rules. You don’t go into each other’s houses.
You keep family out of it. The rules are the only things that keep things stable, because they don’t want to attract attention. That’s why all the new drug dealers get spotted, because they think the game is all about power and Bentleys, about baseball bats and guns. It’s not. It’s about secrecy.’

  ‘But was the dirt in the vagina meant as an insult, not a sex act?’ Joe said. ‘We’re only guessing that he masturbated.’

  Carson groaned and put his head back. ‘How many bloody angles do we need?’

  ‘But she was the target, we know that,’ Joe said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Carson said.

  ‘The location. There was too much risk of being seen, because it’s overlooked by houses. And nice houses, where they would perhaps be more likely to investigate a scream or a fight. If it was random, I would expect the killer to be somewhere more secluded, or driving around, looking for the right victim.’

  ‘Maybe he was driving around?’

  ‘But if you had transport, would you choose that location for a dumping ground?’ Joe shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t expect so, and so it makes me think that Jane Roberts was meant to be the victim. But why?’

  ‘We do know one thing, though,’ Laura said. ‘We have only ever told the press that the first victim was strangled, and so the girl we found today was either killed by the same person, or by someone who knew all about the first.’

  ‘Do we keep it secret from the press again?’ Carson said.

  Joe sighed. ‘It will stop anyone copying if we do,’ he said, ‘but it will also stop anyone from recognising the method. There is no easy answer.’

  Carson nodded and pulled at his lip, before he said, ‘Keep it quiet for now. We could let it out later, if we get nothing from the phones or the scene in the next couple of days.’ He checked his watch, and then looked at Laura. ‘The press will be here soon. Will Jack be?’

  Laura felt her cheeks flush. ‘Probably. He was at the scene earlier.’

  ‘I know, I saw him,’ Carson said.

  Laura was rescued by the opening of the door and a detective appearing, holding a camera in the air.

  ‘Who wants to look at the gawkers?’ he said. He was dressed in his scruffs to blend in, jeans and a T-shirt, but the short hair and muscles gave him away as police. The detective went to a computer terminal and hooked up the camera. He clicked the first photograph to make it fill the screen, and then stepped back as Carson stepped forward.

  ‘McGanity, you need to look at these,’ he said. ‘You’ve been based in Blackley.’

  ‘Look for people who are standing apart from the crowd,’ Joe said. ‘The person who is alone, not talking to anyone.’

  Laura nodded as Carson began to flick through the pictures. It seemed to be people from the nearby estate, teenagers on bikes and young mothers. Nothing of interest there. Then Laura saw something.

  ‘Stop!’ she said. ‘Go back.’

  Carson looked round. ‘Which one?’

  ‘The picture before.’

  Carson clicked the back button and scoured the screen for someone of interest. And then he saw him, loitering at the back of the scene, his hands in his pocket, distant from everyone else.

  ‘Do you recognise him?’ Laura asked, and she could tell from the frown on Carson’s face that he did.

  ‘Deborah Corley’s father,’ he said quietly, before he looked at Joe. ‘It looks like we are going to have to look into more than just sex fiends.’

  Chapter Ten

  Jack strode into the offices of the Blackley Telegraph, a seventies relic of glass and concrete next to the bus station, made dusty by the passing fumes. The reception area was typical of a newspaper office, with a high counter and low chairs, the latest edition spread out over tables, the walls lined by recent photographs and framed past editions. There was no one at reception though, so he just strode through into the offices behind.

  He missed the buzz of the newsroom. The shouts, the banter, the rush to make deadlines. Things were different now though. Most stories were done on the telephone, and the noise was just the sales staff trying to drum up advertising space. It was past two o’clock in the afternoon and people were busy trying to finish work on the next day’s paper. Dolby Wilkins worked from a glass-fronted office at the end of the room. He was leaning back in his chair, talking into a telephone.

  Jack walked between the desks, smiling the occasional hello, pausing to knock on Dolby’s door, who waved him in impatiently. Jack settled into a leather chair opposite and read the newspaper cuttings pinned to the wall as Dolby finished his call. They were all headlines from after Dolby had arrived, part of the new style that he wanted the paper to adopt: unsubtle and edgy. Dolby liked to attack the police whenever he could, and once that became stale, he turned to the other easy targets, asylum seeker appearing often.

  The phone went down and Dolby grinned, showing off bright white teeth, and swept his hair back, a habit of his, although it only ever flopped forward again. He was younger than Jack, only just past thirty, but he had the confidence that a good education brought.

  ‘How was it at the murder scene?’ Dolby asked.

  ‘Pretty much the same as always. Police en masse and everyone kept back.’

  ‘Do we have a name yet for the woman?’

  Jack shook his head. ‘Not mentioned to me.’

  ‘There’s a press conference in thirty minutes,’ Dolby said. ‘There should be enough padding in that to make up the front page.’

  Dolby could get one of his staffers to do it, Jack knew that, but this was about the power balance. Dolby gave out an assignment as an order, not a request, and being freelance was just like being a staff reporter, but without the paid holidays.

  ‘It will delay your Whitcroft feature,’ Jack said. ‘You wanted it today, but I can’t do it if I’m running around doing this.’

  ‘How is that story?’ Dolby said.

  Jack frowned. ‘It’s not the hell-hole you want it to be,’ he said. ‘Just people like all of us, trying to make their way in life. It’s just that some do it better than others.’

  ‘Knock on some doors. We could run a good life on benefits story instead,’ Dolby said.

  Jack sighed. He knew how they worked. You talk to people about their struggles, and then make sure you get a picture of them in front of the big television, grinning.

  ‘What do you want, someone with plenty of kids, or a brown face and a foreign accent?’ Jack said.

  ‘Don’t be like that, Jack,’ Dolby said. ‘It sells papers, you know that. It gets people talking in the pubs.’

  ‘And it gets innocent people beaten up.’

  ‘Okay, okay, you’ve tweaked my liberal conscience,’ Dolby said, sarcastically. ‘What about delinquent kids, causing mayhem as their parents sit in drinking?’

  Jack smiled. ‘Lucked out again, Dolby. They have private security on there now, and so even those kids are probably better than they used to be.’

  ‘Private security?’ he said.

  ‘There’s a van that patrols the estate. Just a couple of bald men in black satin jackets, you know the type. It sounds like the residents pay for them.’

  Dolby thought about that and then said, ‘Find out what you can about that. Why are people on the lowest rung paying someone to do the work the police should be doing?’ He leaned forward. ‘You never know, this could turn out to be a story to fill your pinko heart, the noble working class looking after itself.’

  ‘You really are an arsehole, Dolby,’ Jack said, shaking his head.

  ‘I know, but I write your cheques, so be nice to me.’ He tapped at his watch. ‘Press conference soon. I don’t want you to miss the show.’

  Jack got to his feet and managed a small smile as he headed back towards the sunshine.

  He was a spot of calm surrounded by noise. The jumpsuits and boots. Detectives deep in consultation. The air around him felt still. No one saw him. No one spoke to him. He could see them though. He watched them, saw how they
gathered in small groups. Talking, laughing, always moving around him as if he wasn’t there.

  He could tolerate the uniforms, because they knew their place, that it was all about eight-hour shifts and then home, nothing more. It was the detectives that he fucking hated. Glory hunters, just egos in pastel shirts.

  He smiled, and then lifted the cup to his mouth to hide it. Beware the quiet man.

  Chapter Eleven

  Jack had to park some distance from the police station because the spaces were taken up by the out-of-town television crews sorting out their equipment, and the growing huddle of newspaper journalists who sucked on cigarettes as they waited for the show to start.

  The police station was shiny and new, on the edge of town and visible from the motorway, its red brick and high windows towering above the low-rise office complexes that surrounded it, high steel fences guarding the car park. Jack saw Karl Carson ahead, Laura’s boss, a bald-headed bully of a man, making chit-chat with some of the reporters. They’d come across each other before, had fallen out and then made up again, and so when Jack got up close, Carson just smiled and made sure he used plenty of force when he slapped the visitor sticker onto Jack’s shirt.

  Carson turned and walked back into the police station, holding the door as the journalists trooped past. When Jack got close, Carson muttered, ‘No trouble, Mr Garrett.’

  ‘Not if you behave yourself, Inspector,’ Jack said, and winked.

  They were ushered to a room on the ground floor that looked out onto the police canteen. Jack went to the back as everyone else fixed their microphones to the tables at the front, the television people jostling for a prominent spot, so that their question could form a part of their edited highlights, ego over news. Cameras lined the back of the room. Deborah Corley’s murder three weeks earlier had provided fodder for columns filled with tales of her social life – how she was a pub regular and liked the company of married men. The television people just wanted to fill the late afternoon news slots, but the newspapers were wondering what the new murder might give them, needing to write it up for a deadline, and so the air crackled with tension. It went quiet though as Carson entered, with Joe Kinsella and Laura right behind him. As everyone settled into place, Jack ended up behind a television camera, his view restricted to what he could see over the cameraman’s arm.