by Nick Oldham
He was sitting in Roscoe’s office again.
‘Well?’
Henry looked up sharply at the figure by the door. FB.
‘I hear things are moving.’
‘Yeah – but whether we’ll find Jane or Mark is something else.’
FB looked seriously exhausted. ‘Do your best, Henry,’ he said without energy. ‘Find them, please.’
‘I will.’
FB disappeared down the corridor.
Henry immediately went back to the papers on his desk. These now included the responses from all the police forces who had had similar murders to Joey Costain’s on their patches: Surrey, the Metropolitan and the West Midlands. He had not had the time to look at these yet and he thought this might be an opportunity to do it now. He took each one and read them carefully.
At first he saw nothing to link the crimes beyond the obvious similarity of the way in which the victims had been murdered. Beyond that there seemed to be no connection, but Henry instinctively believed there must be something. He wrote out the names of the victims on a blank piece of A4, listing them down the left side of the paper. Two victims were black. Their occupations did not seem to have any similarity. It was frustrating. Henry read the files again, concentrating on the background and interests of the victims.
Twenty minutes of hard reading and analysis gave him the answer.
Gill’s flat was on a small, dilapidated council estate where the number of vacant and derelict properties outnumbered the ones which were inhabited. It was in a small block of flats about six storeys high at one end of the estate with a complex of garages at the back. The flat was on a corner, reached by a concrete stairwell leading onto a walkway which ran along the front of the flats, past the front doors. A quick enquiry with the council had revealed Gill’s name on the rent book and that the rent was paid up to date, something which surprised Henry. Council records also showed that Gill rented one of the garages at the back.
Henry and Karl Donaldson sat in a beat-up unmarked Astra about a quarter of a mile away awaiting the arrival of backup before they hit the flat.
‘If we get this guy,’ said Donaldson, who was there only as an observer, ‘then tomorrow I’d like to try and catch my bomb-maker, pretty please. My president said I should.’
‘You and your president.’ Henry laughed. ‘But of course we can. Serial killer today, serial bomber tomorrow. Piece of piss.’
‘Ahh, such a quaint term – “piece of piss”,’ Donaldson remarked. ‘Called your ex-wife, yet?’ he asked, filling a gap.
‘Nope.’
‘Going to?’
‘Yep.’ Henry nodded. He checked his watch. ‘I wonder how Andrea’s getting on with Franklands.’ She had jumped at the opportunity to interview someone who might have been present at the murder of one of her officers; it gave Henry the space he wanted to go for Gill and hopefully get a lead on Evans and Roscoe.
‘They’re here,’ Henry said, glancing into the rear-view mirror. Dermot Byrne and John Taylor pulled in behind them in a plain car, civvy jackets over their uniforms. He gave a wave over his shoulder and moved off slowly. There was going to be nothing loud and flashy here. No blue lights, two-tones or screeching tyres. Just a slow approach, park quietly and trot slowly to the front door of the flat (there was no back door or exit, other than windows) then bust the door down, pile in and disable the suspect.
‘I don’t want you to get involved, Karl,’ he reiterated to Donaldson firmly. ‘You’re just here to watch the finest of the British police in action, OK?’
‘Gotcha.’ Donaldson smiled grimly. He picked up the sledgehammer which was wedged between his knees in the footwell. Henry laughed.
They parked a hundred metres away from the target premises, out of sight of it, and alighted. Donaldson, Byrne and Taylor slotted in behind Henry as he strode swiftly towards the flat. A minute later they were up the steps, and at the door.
Henry went to one side. Byrne the other. Donaldson and Taylor hung back. Henry tried the door handle which opened and they were inside.
On silent feet all four moved into the short hallway towards the living room. Henry gently opened the door. The back of the tatty settee was facing them and on the settee was a dark figure, totally engrossed in a game show on TV and also cranking up. A belt was wrapped round his left arm, tightened by pulling the end of it with his teeth and he was injecting the bulging vein on the inner elbow with a blood-filled hypodermic.
On a signal, Henry, Byrne and Taylor leapt on the guy. Henry focused on the needle, ensuring it presented no danger. It was over in a few seconds, the man did not have a clue what was happening and within moments he was cuffed, face down, arms up behind his back.
‘Turn him over,’ Henry said excitedly, wanting to see the man he believed had murdered so many people.
They did.
‘What the fuck’s going on here?’ the man demanded to know.
It was Kit Nevison.
Henry was reluctant to take the cuffs off him. By negotiation and threat, Nevison’s hands were re-cuffed across his stomach for more comfort and he was allowed to sit back on the settee on pain of death if he caused trouble. The towering figure of Donaldson brandishing the sledgehammer just in the periphery of Nevison’s vision was sobering enough to keep him sitting there.
‘What are you doing here?’ Henry demanded.
‘I’ve come to see me mate, Davey. I haven’t seen him for months.’
‘David Gill?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And you let yourself in?’
‘Yeah, got a key. Couldn’t find it for ages, then I found it today, so I thought I’d come an’ see ’im.’
‘Where is he, then?’
‘I don’t know. Told ya, haven’t sin him for months. I just woke up an’ thought I’d bob round and see if he’d let me in. He’s always bin good for a bit o’ junk.’ He nodded to the needle out of reach on the top of the TV.
‘What d’you mean, you thought you’d see if he’d let you in?’ Henry asked.
‘Er . . . well . . . I bin round once or twice recently an’ he told me to fuck off through the letterbox. I thought he were ill, like.’ Nevison looked confused. ‘What’s this all about, anyway?’
‘Do you know where he is?’
‘No, I fucking don’t,’ Nevison said crossly. ‘Now unless you’re gonna lock me up for somethin’ I haven’t done, tek these fuckin’ things offa me.’ He held out his manacled hands.
‘I want David Gill for murder,’ Henry said, bending close to Nevison’s face. Nevison blinked and thought about the words. Then he was engulfed by racking laughter.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘Davey? Murder? He wouldn’t hurt a fly. Soft bugger, soft as shite.’ Nevison roared. ‘He’s a fuckin’ namby-pamby veggie.’
His laughter continued unabated.
Henry stood up straight. He looked at Byrne who, together with Taylor, had done a quick visual search of the flat and found nothing. They shrugged.
‘Shit,’ he breathed. Then he had a thought. ‘Let’s check the garage.’
Kit Nevison was having a whale of a time now. Still laughing fit to burst, he followed the officers out to the garage. His handcuffs had been removed on the understanding that if he tried anything, or did a runner, he would be arrested on suspicion of burglary and possession of controlled drugs and that Donaldson would whack him across the back of his head with the sledgehammer.
The garage was in the middle of a row of about a dozen. Most of them were unused with broken and twisted doors or none at all. Only a couple, including Gill’s, had locked up-and-over doors on them. It was very well secured with padlocks on either side of the door. Without the necessary keys, the officers resorted to force. Donaldson, who was itching to get swinging with the sledgehammer, smashed the padlocks off with perfectly aimed blows.
‘Very good,’ Henry congratulated him. He pushed the top of the door and up it went. There was no electric light inside, so
four torch beams criss-crossed the interior. Not much inside. A powerful motorbike with a helmet on the seat and a large chest freezer along the back wall.
‘Is the bike Gill’s?’ Henry asked Nevison.
‘Never sin it before.’
‘Don’t touch it,’ Henry instructed everyone. He recalled that around the time of Louise Graveson’s murder in Cheshire, a motorcyclist had been seen in the area. Henry walked round the bike and went to the freezer. Although Henry, in his married days, had had a chest freezer in the garage, it seemed odd to have one in this garage. It wasn’t as though it was an easy trip to get frozen food back up to the flat, especially in wet weather.
‘Is this his?’ Henry asked Nevison, pointing at the freezer.
‘Yeah – he, uh, sometimes does a bit of rustling.’
‘Rustling?’
‘Uh – yeah, gets lamb and stuff sometimes from a mate he has in Rossendale who works at an abattoir.’
‘Right,’ said Henry, unimpressed. ‘What about this motorbike?’
Nevison looked doubtfully at it. ‘No, his was a knackered thing. This is too new. That’s his van, though.’ Nevison pointed to a Transit van parked behind the flats.
‘OK,’ said Henry. He went to the freezer, tried to pull the lid up. It was locked and he could not budge it.
‘Sledgehammer,’ he called.
Donaldson responded. He lined himself up in front of the freezer, worked out the necessary upwards trajectory he would need and swung the sledgehammer, catching the freezer lock perfectly, springing it and making the lid fly open to reveal the contents inside, illuminated by a light in the lid.
Henry stared, horrified. The others crowded in behind him and looked over his shoulder.
There were several frozen legs of lamb and beef joints, obviously David Gill’s rustling booty – and there was also Mark Evans’ body, folded at the knees, lying on top of another body. The detective’s throat had been sliced open and copious amounts of blood had run and frozen over the body below. At first Henry thought it was Jane Roscoe, but on closer inspection he saw it was the body of a man.
‘Come and have a look in here,’ Henry said to Nevison.
Warily, the big man approached the freezer. Henry shone his torch onto the horror-frozen face of the man at the bottom of the chest.
‘Wauh – fuck,’ Nevison said, appalled and recoiling.
‘Who’s that?’
‘It’s Davey – Davey Gill, me mate.’
‘Anybody got a hairdryer? I’ll never be able to get this guy’s prints while his hands are frozen solid like this,’ the scenes-of-crime officer shouted, leaning over the edge of the chest freezer. ‘Need to get a bit of thawing done.’
Police activity was intense in and around David Gill’s flat and garage. Lights had been erected to illuminate the garage. The macabre task of lifting Mark Evans’ frozen body out of the freezer had been carried out. He was now zipped up in a bodybag waiting for the hearse to turn up and take him to the mortuary.
Four hours since the discovery of the crime scene, Henry was still pacing up and down, directing operations. He stopped and watched as Evans’ body was carried out past him, the bag, literally, containing a stiff. Byrne and Taylor had looked at the other rigid body and neither had been able to identify it positively as David Gill, the man whom Taylor had arrested all those months before. Taylor said the corpse looked ‘familiar’, but seeing him frozen solid it was difficult to say yeah or nay. Cops at Blackpool dealt with thousands of lock-ups like Gill, and PC Taylor said he could hardly even recall arresting him. Byrne remembered cautioning him, but again, he was one of dozens he had dealt with that night in the custody office. Henry was waiting for a photograph to turn up but it could be a long wait. Photographs tend to enter the system with less precision than fingerprints, and it was not unknown for them to get lost or mislaid.
It seemed logical, therefore, to take the dead guy’s fingerprints and get the on-call expert to do some cross-checking. The first thing Henry wanted to discover was if the fingerprint found at the scene of the murder in Cheshire belonged to the dead man. If it did match, then it raised a whole bunch of questions. If it didn’t, then it raised a whole bunch more questions.
Henry decided to take it one step at a time. Make no assumptions, jump to no conclusions, just deal with facts.
‘Hair drier?’ a uniformed constable called out.
‘Over hair.’ The SOCO laughed.
The constable, who had scrounged the drier from a woman living nearby, handed it over. She would never have offered it had she known it was going to be used to defrost a dead man’s fingers.
Henry offered the fingerprint expert a seat in Roscoe’s office. The guy was called Lane and he was one of the constabulary’s top experts, twenty-two years of cross-matching loops and whorls and providing the evidence that had sent thousands of baddies to prison.
‘Tell me,’ Henry prompted.
On Lane’s lap were two sets of prints. One from the dead man in the freezer, one from the man arrested six months earlier, giving the name of David Gill.
‘They don’t match,’ he said flatly.
‘Is that your final answer, or do you want to phone a friend?’ Henry said.
‘The prints of the dead man in the freezer are not the same as the prints taken from the man who was arrested six months ago for a public-order offence. However, the partial print recovered from the scene at Cheshire matches the forefinger of the prisoner who gave his name as David Gill.’
‘So if the dead guy in the freezer really is David Gill, then who the hell do the prints belong to which were taken by PC Taylor?’ Henry pointed to the offending set. ‘Because they are the prints of a serial killer who, it would seem, has taken on David Gill’s identity after killing him – or something,’ he finished unsurely.
Henry was suddenly depressed. He felt nowhere further forward and believed that every minute now was wasted time and made it even more unlikely that Jane Roscoe would be found alive, particularly if the abductor knew that the police had found Gill’s and Mark Evans’ bodies.
Roscoe was dead. Henry was certain of it. But why wasn’t she in the freezer too?
Lane, the fingerprint officer, left.
‘It’s doing my head in, this,’ Henry said when he was joined by Donaldson and Makin. ‘How is it going with Franklands?’
‘Better than good. I’m going to arrange protected status for him. He was there when the two guys kicked Jack to death, but maintains he took no part in it, and I believe him. And he planted the bomb in the club. Both things were done on Vince Bellamy’s instructions. So Franklands is going to be a witness for us and one way or another, the demise of Hellfire Dawn is on the cards.’
‘Excellent.’
‘He also told me something else, which is very very interesting.’ Makin went on to tell this to Henry. It was fascinating stuff, but did not help Henry with his task.
When she had finished Henry asked her how she intended to take it forward and she said she had an idea, but added nothing more.
Which left Henry holding two sets of fingerprints which did not match and a puzzle that was beginning to stress him out.
He watched with distress as the clock ticked up to midnight.
THURSDAY
Twenty-Three
There could be no post-mortems carried out until both bodies had defrosted sufficiently for the pathologist to stick his knife in. Mark Evans’ body was less frozen and Dr Baines reckoned he would be ready to start on it in about eight hours; David Gill, literally a solid block of ice, could take up to thirty-six hours before he had thawed enough to be autopsied. Which meant nothing could move forward on the pathology front other than some general observations by the pathologist which boiled down to: it looks like their throats have been cut.
Gill’s flat and garage were being top-to-bottomed by all manner of experts, forensic, scientific and search. Henry had decided that this might as well happen. He had thought about withdrawi
ng everybody and mounting an observation on the place on the off-chance that Gill – or whoever the hell it was – would turn up and the police could nab him. He had decided against that because there had been so much police activity anyway that there was a good possibility that whoever was using Gill’s ID and home had already been alerted and would not be coming back.
It was half-past midnight. Henry was alone in Roscoe’s office, thinking about her.
The office door opened, FB came in. He drew up one of the chairs and plonked himself heavily down on it, throwing his heels up onto the edge of the desk.
‘Y’know what’s really shitty?’ he asked.
Henry said no.
‘Special Branch have just told me that the Irish cops have uncovered a plot to assassinate the prime minister at the conference this week.’ FB laughed, cackled really, as though he was on the verge of going under. Henry had never seen him like this. Normally supremely confident and brash, the stress of the week, the lack of sleep, the pressure of ambition were pulling him down. ‘And you know what? There’s absolutely fuck-all I can do about it, and what’s more I don’t care. I’ve had one officer seriously injured this week who is still on life support, another has turned up dead in a fridge and a third is missing, probably dead too, and I’ve just spent two hours with Mark Evans’ widow –’ he shook his head. ‘She’s devastated.’ His head continued to shake. ‘And on the back of that the government is in town demanding to be protected. Every available cop I’ve got is here, looking after the namby-pamby idiots, and I can’t even pull a full murder squad together to dedicate to the death of one of my officers and the possible death of another. It’s absolute shite. I need a drink.’
Henry remained silent, watching FB open up. It was an amazing sight.
‘It’s all power games to them, one big fucking ego trip – then they’ll be gone on Friday afternoon and won’t even give us a second thought as we clean up all the dross left behind them.’
‘I thought you liked politicians.’
FB gave Henry a hard stare. ‘I was angling for a job, I admit it. Still am. Doesn’t mean to say I like ’em.’
