by David Hodges
‘Not exactly a key player, sir,’ she said, ‘but I was involved, yes.’
Ansell nodded. ‘I think I already know most of the background from the file, but, since I only arrived in the force from the Met three months ago, it would be useful to hear about it from your perspective.’
She hesitated. ‘You mean all of it?’
Another insipid smile and he held out a hand in an inviting gesture. ‘In your own time, of course,’ he replied.
She glanced quickly at Roscoe and, receiving a non-committal shrug in return, she moistened dry lips and cleared her throat. ‘I was part of a three up surveillance team,’ she began, ‘keeping observation on the home of a suspected arsonist, Terry Duval, out on The Levels—’ She broke off and he raised an interrogative eyebrow, encouraging her to continue.
‘I had to go for a … a leak,’ she went on, ‘and, while I was away from the vehicle, a man, later found to be Larry Wadman—’
‘Twister?’ he interrupted.
‘Twister,’ she agreed, ‘placed an explosive device on the side of the vehicle and blew the thing up, killing both my colleagues. One of them was DC Alf Cross and it turned out that Alf’s own wife, Pauline, was behind the killings and had hired Twister for the purpose so that she could claim on his life insurance.’
‘Nice lady,’ Ansell observed drily. ‘And I gather your surveillance target, Duval, was framed for the murders, and was subsequently shot dead by one of our ARV officers?’
Kate nodded, wondering why he was asking so many questions if he knew the answers already. ‘Yes,’ she confirmed, ‘he had taken me as a hostage and the ARV officer thought he was armed.’
‘Unfortunate,’ Ansell commented with little sincerity. ‘And this man, Twister, came after you, eh?’
Kate gave another nod. ‘I was the only witness to the murders and he didn’t know how much I had seen.’
‘With the result that your twin sister, Linda, was murdered by mistake?’
Kate shuddered and swayed slightly in the chair, remembering the awful night she had found Linda’s body trussed to a chair in her flat. ‘He – he thought she was me,’ she said in a strangled voice.
With a surprising sleight of hand, Ansell produced a glass of water from the desk and handed it to her. ‘Nasty business,’ he said and waited while Kate took a gulp from the glass. ‘So how did you discover Twister’s identity?’
Kate handed the glass back to him and took a deep breath. ‘From a partial print on a tracking device he had put under my car. Because of his CRO record, I was able to trace him to his undertaking business.’
Ansell smiled approvingly. ‘Where you evidently rescued your boyfriend, DC Lewis, who was being held by him as a bargaining counter, and came close to losing your own life as well. Excellent work by the sound of it.’
‘The troops arrived at the right moment, sir,’ she said modestly, ‘but Twister escaped in the pandemonium.’
He grunted. ‘With a knife wound to his gut, courtesy of his coconspirator,’ he rejoined, more as a statement than a question.
‘They apparently fell out,’ Kate explained, ‘but Twister was – is – a powerful man and the wound was not enough to finish him. He killed Pauline before she could get away and we later discovered that he had put her body in one of his coffins, swapping her for another deceased woman whom he returned to the mortuary fridge.’
‘And Pauline Cross ended up being cremated in her stead?’
Kate nodded yet again, tiring of the questioning and wondering what the point was to it all.
Ansell slid off the desk for a second time, bending to smooth the creases out of his trousers. ‘And you think Twister has come back to finish the job on you, eh?’ he said, looking up at her.
The way he said it seemed to suggest that she was simply being neurotic and she flushed.
‘The girl in the coffin was obviously put there for a reason, sir,’ she said tightly.
‘Of course she was,’ he agreed. ‘She was dead.’
Kate shot to her feet, her eyes flashing dangerously. ‘With respect, sir,’ she said, ‘this is not a joke.’
‘Sergeant Hamblin!’ Roscoe castigated.
Ansell waved him to silence and straightened up, studying her fixedly. ‘No one is suggesting it is, young lady,’ he replied quietly, ‘but it does seem rather odd to me that a wanted criminal would choose to return to the scene of his crime and blatantly advertise the fact with a stunt like this. If he’s after revenge, why not simply do the job, and quietly disappear again?’
Roscoe glared at Kate, indicating her chair with a flick of his eyes, and she reluctantly sat down again. ‘He likes to play games, sir,’ she said, then added, ‘That girl was not just someone who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. She was specifically chosen for her resemblance to me and you’re forgetting she was dressed in a police uniform bearing my shoulder numbers.’
‘Your shoulder numbers?’ Ansell echoed sharply and gave Roscoe a hard searching glance.
The DI cleared his throat. ‘Sorry, Guv,’ he said, ‘I should’ve told you about that.’
Ansell’s face had noticeably darkened. ‘Yes, you should, Detective Inspector,’ he agreed tartly. ‘Anything else you haven’t told me?’
Roscoe moved from one foot to the other, like a nervous schoolboy about to admit to some heinous transgression. ‘You had only just arrived and there wasn’t time—’ he began, but Ansell cut him off. ‘So what else should I be aware of?’
But Kate got in first. ‘I believe the uniform the girl was wearing belongs to me,’ she said. ‘One is missing from my wardrobe at home – the bastard even took a pair of my knickers, a bra, tights and a spare pair of my shoes.’
Roscoe nodded. ‘DC Lewis reported the matter when he came on this morning,’ he said.
‘DC Lewis?’ Ansell queried.
‘I live with him,’ Kate explained.
‘Do you now?’ Ansell replied. ‘How nice for you.’ Then he added, ‘So we have a burglary as well as a murder then, do we? SOCO taken a look yet, have they?’
It was Kate’s turn to feel uncomfortable again. ‘No, sir. Well, there was no break-in as such that I could see.’
Ansell took a few moments to digest the information. ‘No break-in, but a burglary nevertheless, eh?’ he said. ‘Bit of a contradiction in terms that, isn’t it? So how did your burglar get in – climb down the chimney or did he have his own key?’
Kate shrugged. ‘I don’t know, sir, but my uniform is definitely missing.’
For the first time Ansell looked worried. ‘If your assumptions are correct, Sergeant,’ he said suddenly, ‘you are in considerable danger. From now on you can’t be allowed to patrol on your own, understood? You must always have someone with you.’
Kate was once more on her feet, this time flushed with indignation. ‘Sorry, sir, but that’s not on,’ she snapped. ‘I’m a bloody sergeant.’
‘And I’m a bloody detective chief inspector,’ he said, giving her a cynical smile. ‘And that means you will do as I tell you, OK?’
‘Quite so,’ Willoughby agreed pompously. ‘No argument.’
Kate clenched her fists tightly by her side, her mouth a hard line. ‘Under protest, sir,’ she said.
‘Excellent,’ Ansell replied and glanced at his watch. ‘And I do believe it’s time for the incident-room briefing.’
chapter 6
‘MIND IF I join you?’
Kate glanced up from the swirling depths of her coffee and stared at Phil Sharp’s grinning weasel face, for a moment, uncomprehending. ‘What?’ she said distantly.
‘I said, mind if I join you?’
He sat down anyway, hugging a bottle of coke and dumping a folded newspaper on the table.
She shrugged, eyeing the greasy-haired detective with distaste. ‘If you really must,’ she replied.
The dig was lost on Highbridge’s self-declared number one sleuth and his inane grin remained fixed, like a plaster cast.
The canteen was virtually empty following the briefing. Most of the troops, including Hayden whom she desperately wanted to talk to, were already out on their assigned ‘actions’, including house-to-house inquiries in the vicinity of the murder. She had been spared that onerous task, but after being put on the spot and subjected to a tense question and answer session on Twister – who at least now seemed to have been accepted by the hierarchy as the number one suspect – she felt even more drained than before.
She had chosen the corner table, partly hidden by an ornamental bamboo screen, so she could linger over her coffee in peace prior to heading home to bed before the night shift, but apparently it was not to be and she stared at Sharp with a sense of resignation.
‘We made the front pages of the nationals then?’ he said, tapping the newspaper with a forefinger. ‘Nice pic of Wadman’s place.’ He turned the paper round, so she could see the headline. ‘Murder At Death House,’ he read. ‘Dead dramatic, eh?’
He chuckled at his pun, took a swig from his coke bottle and burped. ‘I hear you’ve been told to stay well away from the press? Willoughby’s probably worried you might upstage him when he finally decides to call a press conference. You know old Willoughby, “yes, I will, no I won’t”.’
She ignored his derogatory remarks, instead commenting, ‘I thought you’d have still been in your pit after your busy night.’
He shook his head. ‘Not me. Got home at five and was up again at eight. I don’t need much sleep, see. Over-active brain.’
She raised a tired eyebrow. ‘Didn’t know you had one of those,’ she retorted. ‘Must have been a recent acquisition.’
His grin faded for a second, then returned with a vengeance. ‘What do you think of the boss?’ he asked, keeping his voice low and glancing around him as if he were on the set of a spy thriller. ‘Not Ethelred, of course – the real boss, Ansell?’
Kate shrugged. ‘Seems OK to me. Why?’
‘Ex-Met, you know,’ he replied. ‘Transferred to us on promotion to DCI. This is his first big case, so he needs a result.’
‘Good for him.’
‘Bit of a hatchet man by all accounts.’
‘Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?’
‘I’m just telling you what I’ve heard.’
She sighed and took a sip of her coffee. ‘Well, I’m really not interested in canteen gossip,’ she said. ‘Nor should you be.’
But he wasn’t listening. ‘No sense of humour, did you notice that?’ he went on, oblivious to her censure. ‘They reckon he had a charisma bypass – only known to smile once as a baby and then it turned out to be just wind.’
He chuckled at his own joke, then stopped short under her sober gaze, his grin vanishing at the same time. ‘Let’s hope Ansell gets a better result than Callow did on your Operation Firetrap, eh?’
Kate flinched, remembering with a sense of revulsion her former CID boss, DCI Roz Callow, whose sexual predation had made her life a misery.
‘I hear she had it in for you,’ he went on with brutal directness. ‘My source tells me she fancied you and you wouldn’t give her one. That right?’
Kate refused to be drawn, staring into her coffee cup again and trying to think of other things, but Callow’s hatchet face stared back at her from inside her head even as she tried to blank it out.
‘Ended up having it off with Alf Cross’s missus, didn’t she?’ Sharp persisted, then gave a short laugh. ‘Only to find out her nice little Pauline was actually the one behind the murders. At least she got her comeuppance when they sacked her anyway.’
Kate studied him with contempt. ‘She wasn’t sacked actually. There was insufficient evidence of anything. She was retired on ill-health grounds,’ she replied tersely, wondering why she was bothering to say anything in defence of the woman who had set out to destroy her. ‘She badly injured her leg and hip in a fall at the undertaker’s place when we nailed Twister.’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ he sneered. ‘Fell down the stairs as she was running away, I hear.’
She glared at him. ‘Whatever,’ she rapped, tired of his constant probing. ‘Anyway, I’m going home to bed.’
‘With anyone I know,’ he called after her as she headed for the door, but his chortle jammed in his throat when Detective Chief Inspector Ansell, who had apparently been sitting on the other side of the bamboo screen, stood up and threw him a hard penetrating glance before following Kate out.
Twister parked the Volvo in the small car-park and made out he was reading the newspaper he had spread over the steering wheel. The man he had been discreetly tailing across the Levels for the past twenty minutes nodded to him as he got out of his old green Land Rover and walked past him to the gate, his binoculars swinging on the cord around his neck as he walked.
Twister waited until the other had disappeared through the gateway before leaving the vehicle and walking slowly after him. The sign beside the gate indicated that he was entering a wildlife reserve and he smiled as he pushed through. A twitcher’s paradise, he thought and, removing the binoculars he had been using in the stake-out of his target’s house from the pocket of his hooded coat, he hung them around his neck in a similar fashion to his quarry.
It was very cold and although the thick mist of the morning had largely gone, save for a few wispy spirals creeping across the track close to the ground, the faint glimmer of wintry sunshine made very little impression on the gloomy day. Not surprisingly on this grey afternoon, the reserve seemed to be otherwise deserted and, apart from occasional panicky flapping in the undergrowth as he walked past, the surrounding woodland remained a sodden, dead world, brooding and secretive.
He shivered and pulled his hood up over his head, unable to comprehend why anyone would want to spend time in such a wet miserable environment simply to watch the antics of a few ducks and swans, but there again, train-spotting was just as daft to him, yet plenty of people seemed to enjoy it. Maybe he was missing something somewhere? But even if he was, he wasn’t about to lose sleep over it; all that mattered was the fact that twitching had given him the ideal opportunity to complete his next move in the game.
The man he was following was way ahead of him, moving briskly along the track, obviously unaware of his presence and knowing exactly where he was going, but Twister kept his distance; the last thing he needed was to be spotted and quizzed on the local birdlife and that was a fact.
In a couple of hundred yards the track forked both left and right and Twister hesitated. Which way now then? His man was out of sight, so he could have gone in either direction. Then he spotted the boardwalk and at the same moment there was a flurry of activity from alarmed birds away to his left and he smiled again. Brilliant. Those feathered sentinels were better than an electronic tracker.
His rubber-soled shoes made only a slight sound on the wooden planks as he stepped on to the boardwalk and, within a few yards, he reached a bend in the track and saw the low wooden building dead ahead.
The hide stood on stilts among a jungle of reeds, a ramp leading up from the boardwalk to the single door, which was closed.
He decided that the best strategy was a completely open approach and he deliberately coughed as he mounted the ramp and pulled open the door. He was greeted by a welcoming smile. ‘Nice to have some company,’ the man said, turning back on the bench seat to scrutinize the lake with his binoculars through one of the open hatches.
Flicking up the wooden snib to open another hatch, Twister made a show of following his example, noting with little real interest the lake stretching away into the distance, enclosed on all sides by reed beds, giving way to the familiar woodland. Bending his head, as if to familiarize himself with his location, he watched a flock of geese swoop in like a squadron of fighter aircraft, barely grazing the surface of the water as they landed, then raised his binoculars to study them more closely.
‘Canada Geese,’ the twitcher explained. ‘Nothing special there, would you say?’
Twis
ter grunted, then moved past him to the other end of the hide, opening another hatch, apparently studying a reed bed to his right. ‘Something interesting in there, though,’ he said and stood back as the other slid along the bench to have a look.
‘Sorry, what did you see?’ the man queried.
‘Nothing much really,’ Twister replied and, seizing his head from behind in a vice-like grip, jerked it sharply to one side, then back again snapping his spine with a sickening crunching sound.
For a moment the killer stood there breathing heavily, as his victim pitched off the seat on to the floor, then he reached forward to pick up a greaseproof packet of sandwiches lying beside a flask on the sill that ran the length of the hide under the hatches. He opened the greaseproof paper and peeled back one of the slices of bread. ‘Corned beef,’ he murmured and nudged the corpse on the floor with the toe of his shoe. ‘Now how on earth did you know they were my favourite?’
chapter 7
KATE ARRIVED HOME late in the afternoon, to find a plain van and Lewis’s distinctive red Jaguar parked in the drive of the cottage and the place virtually taken over by a team of scenes-of-crime officers. Lewis was waiting for her in the living-room and he looked apprehensive, as if unsure of her likely reaction.
‘Sorry, Kate,’ he said, ‘but Guv’nor wanted a detailed examination carried out, in case our visitor left any traces.’
‘Did he?’ she commented grimly. ‘So he still doesn’t believe me then?’
He was quick to reassure her. ‘Oh, I don’t think it’s that,’ he replied, ‘But he’ll have no choice now anyway – SOCO found marks on the little pantry window which suggest that that is how our man got in, shutting it after him and probably leaving by the front door.’
He hesitated and her eyes narrowed. ‘There’s something else, isn’t there, Hayden?’ she said. ‘Come on, out with it.’
He sighed and nodded towards the stairs. She followed him up to the bedroom, but stopped dead in the doorway.
