by LJ Ross
“I know, you’re right.”
“It always feels like forever,” Ryan added, pinning her with smoky grey eyes that were both sympathetic and uncompromising. “But it’s only been a couple of days. These things can take time.”
“I want to help.”
“You are helping,” he said firmly. “Everything you tell us about his past is invaluable information.”
Phillips coughed in the manner of one about to impart information he shouldn’t.
“I had another chat with that little birdie I was telling you about,” he said, voice lowered beneath the chatter of the restaurant. “And the pathologist found something out of the ordinary. It seems that Bowers had a brain tumour.”
Anna nearly dropped her fork but instead placed it back onto her plate with extreme care while she processed this latest shock.
“He never told me.”
“Aye lass, I guessed that,” Phillips scratched at his ear.
“They’re thinking suicide?” As usual, Ryan sliced through the emotional mire.
“That’s just it. They don’t know what to think, because there’s nothing else which points to him having blown his own brains out—”
Phillips cut himself off with a grimaced apology for Anna.
“Sorry, love. I meant to say, they can’t understand where the weapon has gone and there were no signs of Bowers having pulled the trigger himself.”
“Which means,” Ryan said, “Gregson will be swinging his evil eye back in my direction.”
“Surely, they must know by now there’s no evidence against you?” Anna turned worried eyes to Phillips and he said another prayer to the God of Police to be forgiven for the confidential breach he was about to make.
“There’s nothing but a bit of wool off your jumper, as far as they’ve found. Still waiting for the telephone company to triangulate the source of that text message you got from Bowers. He wasn’t found with a phone.”
“Nothing in his house—his car?”
Phillips gave one brief shake of his head and took a lazy glance around their immediate vicinity.
“No phone or wallet, nothing except his car keys which were in his trouser pocket when they found him. No mobile phone at his house, either. They’re going over his computer now.”
“No weapon, no phone, no wallet. Interesting that he managed to send me a message without access to a mobile phone, don’t you think?”
“One last thing, while I’m burning all my bridges,” Phillips said, eyeing up the banana split making its way across to a neighbouring table. “The bullet they’ve found is from an old weapon, something much older than anything in general circulation at the moment, even on the black market. In fact, it wasn’t even a bullet. It was a lead ball and some black powder. They’re trying to trace the source.”
“Mark didn’t own anything like that,” Anna said. “He had a decorative sword, which was a gift, but he didn’t own any other weapons that I know of.”
“That you know of,” Ryan repeated and then gestured for their bill.
* * *
Jane Freeman sipped daintily at a chai latte while she waited for the phone to ring. He was later than expected but perhaps Gregson was caught in the throes of matrimonial grief and needed time to gather his wits before he came running for help with his latest catastrophe.
She chuckled to herself and rose from the leather-backed chair to walk to the large window of her office. Outside, the sun was high in the sky and beamed ladders through the blanket of fluffy white clouds. Jacob’s ladders, they called them. The masses did enjoy spinning their yarns about God and his kingdom.
That kingdom was changing, she thought maliciously, pressing a slim hand to the window to block out the rays.
Finally, the telephone rang.
“Freeman.”
“Jane! Thank God,” Gregson’s urgent voice came down the line. “Something’s happened. It’s terrible. I don’t know who—who—”
“Arthur, the last person you ought to be thanking is God,” she remarked silkily, in tones of quiet reprimand.
“I—Yes, yes, I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
“There’s a surprise,” she muttered, flicking lint from the material of her expensive skirt. “Come to the point.”
“It’s—it’s Cathy. She’s dead.”
Freeman waited a beat.
“That was careless,” she said.
“What? No, no! You don’t understand,” Gregson said, feverishly. “I came home and I found her. Somebody—somebody’s killed her.”
“My condolences,” Freeman replied.
“I need help! There’s a pay-as-you-go phone on the countertop beside her and—and I think it was used to text Ryan. They’ll think it was me!”
“How vexing. I presume it belongs to the unknown perpetrator, which will therefore mean this is all a dreadful coincidence.”
At the other end of the line, Gregson’s eyes closed against what he was about to admit.
“It’s mine. I—I misplaced it the other day and—and now there it is, on the countertop.”
Freeman bit her lip to stop the bubble of laughter.
“You mean to tell me that you have compromised the Circle once again?” Her voice was sharp as a razor. “You have the audacity to telephone me—I presume using a non-regulation telephone—endangering me with exposure as well as yourself?”
“I—I panicked. I need help!”
Freeman relished the next part.
“It’s over, Arthur. As of this moment, you are no longer our brother. You will relinquish or destroy all artefacts pertaining to the Circle on pain of retribution. You will not contact us directly again.”
“No! No, please!”
“Goodbye, Arthur.”
Freeman pressed a button to end the call and began to deconstruct the phone into parts. She would throw them in the river later.
* * *
Gregson remained seated on the armchair in his living room, staring at the blank screen of their new television. It stared back at him, an empty black void mirroring his life.
His hands trembled and he was shivering despite the mild weather, his mind succumbing to the shock. Part of him realised that he was a cold bastard. What kind of a man was more upset to find himself ostracised than to find his wife lying dead on the kitchen floor?
But then, it wasn’t as if he’d just been kicked out of the tennis club and was no longer able to attend socials at the clubhouse. For over thirty years, the Circle had been his family; it had given him more purpose than he might have felt in a hundred years spent as a policeman.
Now, it was over. The cord had been cut and he was floating, falling, unable to grasp a lifeline.
He didn’t know who had killed his wife but he didn’t really care. It might have been Jane Freeman; she was not a woman who liked competition. Yet, he had never coveted her position. He had always been happy as the fixer, the one who took care of the details.
Gregson’s chin lifted.
That’s right, he thought. He could take care of the details.
* * *
It had been a while since Jimmy ‘The Manc’ Moffa had made a house call. Semi-legitimate business interests allowed him to lead a comfortable, cleaner existence than had previously been the case. But now and then, the engine needed oiling. Hands required shaking and, in this case, bodies required disposal. Every good turn deserved another, so they said, and Arthur Gregson had rubber-stamped plenty of business ventures in recent years. True, he had skimmed a healthy retainer off the top, but he still had enough leverage to be able to call Jimmy at short notice to help with his dirty work.
Moffa exchanged his £3,000 hand-made suit and cushy office in central Newcastle for a pair of greasy overalls and a nondescript white van. His bodyguard donned a similar get-up and, not long after receiving the call, they pulled up in front of Gregson’s house in the suburbs of the city. They reversed onto the driveway, so that the back doors of the van were flush to the garag
e door, which had been left open as instructed.
Nice house, Jimmy thought with a sneer. So, he had offed his old woman, had he? Now, he would be the one to pay. After today, Jimmy would be writing his own ticket, thanks very much.
He cast an astute, watery blue eye over the quiet street and was content. One broken CCTV camera—they had already taken care of that on the way in. A few flickering curtains but no passers-by to complicate matters. That was good.
They walked around to the back of the house and found Gregson hovering around the patio doors waiting for them. He held a hand out, which Moffa ignored.
“Where is she?”
Gregson swallowed and let his hand fall away.
“In the kitchen,” he jerked his head. “Through the lounge, on the left.”
Moffa pinned him with a stare.
“After this, you’ll owe me. Understand?”
Gregson looked at the young man with the strangely old eyes seasoned by the things he had seen and done. Moffa looked equally at home in a Michelin-starred restaurant as in a boxing ring, scrapping for fun. He liked to think he was a chameleon, able to blend into any level of society, that was his gift. Beside him stood a heavyset man with a reddened face, riddled with broken veins. Small eyes sunk into cheeks that were puffy from too many steroids and both ears were cauliflowered to the sides of his head. Gregson knew him as ‘Ludo,’ which derived from his love of Quaaludes and other recreational drugs in his younger years and also explained why he wore a perpetually unfocussed expression on his gorilla-like face.
“I understand.”
“Step aside until we’re finished.”
“You need to get rid of everything,” Gregson swallowed again and rubbed a nervous hand over his face. “There’s a black mobile phone on the kitchen counter. I need that back.”
Moffa laughed in his face.
“Piss off, old man.”
Gregson opened his mouth and then closed it again. There was really nothing more to say. He turned away, slumping into one of the bistro chairs on the patio and Moffa laughed under his breath.
“Don’t you want to know what we’re going to do with her?”
Gregson looked away, deliberately.
“Tosser,” Jimmy said, matter-of-factly, to which Ludo grunted his agreement.
Moffa pulled out some heavy protective gear from the sports bag Ludo carried. Suitable against chemical and toxic waste, it covered them from head to toe.
Sweating inside the thick overalls, they began the task of removing all traces of Cathy Gregson. Fresh plastic sheeting was taped to the floor, a makeshift path leading from the kitchen through the garage to the van, another from the patio doors to the kitchen. Once complete, they turned their minds to the mess on the kitchen floor. There, on the Mediterranean tiles she had chosen herself, Cathy was wrapped in plastic sheeting and then rolled up in an old carpet, ready for transportation to one of Jimmy’s warehouses where she would be dissolved in acid before nightfall. The kitchen was cleaned and scrubbed, layered with bleach from top to bottom until the colour of the tiles turned a half-shade lighter. Jimmy cracked the windows to minimise the smell but that was Gregson’s lookout. He was a copper, so he should know that you could never really get rid of all blood traces. If he was lucky, he’d have twenty-four hours before his bum chums at CID would be along to sniff around the house.
Either way, he couldn’t give a shit. Nobody would pin this on him because he wasn’t fool enough to kill anybody in his own home or leave a mobile phone hanging around like a gigantic map with ‘x’ marking the spot.
Prat.
Jimmy palmed the black phone he found on the countertop and decided to keep it as insurance, careful to remove the plastic SIM card.
They spent another twenty minutes messing up the house, pocketing jewellery and cash. That’s how Gregson wanted to play it. Burglars entered the house and Cathy surprised them. Anybody looking would see a white van with fake licence plates, parked sometime in the afternoon. At worst, they’d see a couple of workmen loading a roll of old carpet into a van. When they heard the bad news, they’d tell themselves that was the van that had kidnapped poor Cathy Gregson. As for her husband, he’s just a hardworking officer of the law who stumbled into a crime scene. Poor old Arthur, what a tragedy.
Afterwards, Moffa joined Gregson on the patio and saw that he was shaking badly from head to toe. He rolled his eyes and gave the signal to Ludo, who stomped across and heaved him out of the chair.
“W-wait,” Gregson muttered. “I’ve changed my mind—”
“Too fucking late.”
Ludo propelled Gregson away from him so that he stumbled across the patio, as if fleeing for his life. Inevitably, he fell, and Ludo didn’t hesitate to administer a couple of good blows to the back of his head—enough to concuss, to see some serious damage, but not enough to kill.
Of course, there was always a margin of error.
Moffa pulled the garage door shut and climbed behind the wheel of the van. Beside him, Ludo was breathing a bit heavily.
“You’re getting soft,” he bit out, then gunned the engine.
CHAPTER 11
“It looks like I’m going to have to eat my paper hat after all,” Faulkner said.
At the other end of the telephone, MacKenzie pulled a face.
“Sorry Tom, I’m not following you.”
“It’s the blood samples we took from the altar at Heavenfield,” Faulkner supplied. “I was wrong. It wasn’t just Bowers’ blood that we’ve found—there was plenty of his, for sure, but we’ve also found seven new samples, maybe more to come. They’re being analysed as we speak.”
“How much more blood?” MacKenzie told herself to stay calm.
“We’re talking about very significant blood loss, Mac. I had the boys go over the site again with luminol spray and the place is covered in old stains, particularly on the floor around the altar. Some of that will be the bleach, of course.”
MacKenzie gave into the urge to rest her head on her hand, propping her elbow on the edge of her ancient desk chair while she did.
“Bleach?”
“Yeah. Bleach reacts with luminol in the same way as blood, which is why it’s a good option if you’re planning to cover up a murder,” he laughed shortly. “It can give us a false positive in terms of testing for blood samples and obviously causes confusion, although finding bleach in widespread quantities would be suspicious in itself.”
MacKenzie massaged her temple.
“Are you telling me that you can’t be sure if it’s blood or bleach that you’ve found?”
“No, we’ve got positive blood samples, like I say. Haven’t run them through the database yet—”
“Make it a priority and call me if you find a match.”
MacKenzie ended the call and met Lowerson’s curious eyes, wondering what awaited them just around the corner.
* * *
Dusk was only just beginning to fall when Ryan and Phillips received the order to attend the scene at 17 Haslemere Gardens, in an area of Newcastle known as Gosforth. Well-heeled families resided in that part of the city, a mix of old and new money who enjoyed being closer to the bustling centre. Communities stayed close and Neighbourhood Watch was more than an organised group of safety-conscious citizens; it was a state of mind. Right on cue, curtains flickered and the more audacious amongst them stood outside their houses to watch the comings and goings. Twenty minutes ago, they knew, a police car had pulled up outside Arthur and Cathy’s house, followed by an ambulance and two paramedics who had transferred Arthur on a stretcher and driven away, presumably to hospital. Yet there had been no sign of Cathy and wasn’t that interesting? The police were probably inside the house questioning her right now.
Cathy must have attacked Arthur. That was the only possible explanation, they twittered.
Of course, it could have been a stroke.
Or a heart attack.
Or, heaven forbid, one of those youth gangs might have broken
in and attacked both of them. They had seen something similar on Crimestoppers only last week.
They watched with widened eyes as a sleek, dark grey Mercedes pulled into the cul-de-sac and parked on one of the grass verges.
They tutted and thought immediately of making a complaint.
A tall, dark-haired man unfolded himself from the driver’s side and moved around to the boot to retrieve a small bag. Another man hefted himself from the passenger side, inches shorter and thicker all round, but the two made their way towards Number 17 with single-minded purpose.
“Bit like Stepford, eh?” Phillips commented, taking in the manicured borders.
“More like my idea of hell,” Ryan muttered, feeling the force of at least ten pairs of eyes boring into the back of his shirt. “I don’t know how people can stand to live like this, with everyone knowing their business every second of the day.”
“Not all of us are as antisocial as you,” Phillips was forced to observe. “Some of us actually like people.”
“I like people,” Ryan argued half-heartedly but let it drop as they approached the PC manning the front door. He took their names for the log book, recording their warrant card numbers with the kind of painstaking detail only to be found in a newly qualified constable.
Formalities complete, Ryan cornered the other PC hovering beside them.
“PC Yates?” Ryan snapped out, so the young woman was forced to face him. “You were the first on the scene?”
“Yes, sir.” Yates drew herself up to her full height, feeling hot and bothered under his scrutiny. DCI Ryan was known to have that effect on people.
“I’ll have your report, please.” Silently, he offered her a bottle of water, which she accepted with surprise.
She took a few sips to steady herself.
“Control Room received a call at twenty past six, from the next door neighbour on that side,” she pointed to the house at their left. “Mrs Anjuli Sisodia. She reported that she and her husband were due to have dinner with the Gregsons this evening at six-fifteen. She tried calling their house several times during the day to confirm, but the number rang out. She says she tried knocking on the front door around five o’clock after seeing a white van leaving the premises, but there was no answer. She was becoming concerned since she could see both cars on the driveway but decided to try again later in case Mr and Mrs Gregson were…um, busy.” Yates wiggled her sandy blonde eyebrows expressively and Ryan’s lips quirked at the thought.
