‘Harry!’ she called. His head was down, searching through the pockets of the man’s shredded jeans. He looked up. ‘Come up here a second.’
He stood up and dropped his gloves in the same bag as he had before and walked towards her. ‘What is it?’
‘You see the chunk out of the bank there?’ She pointed.
Harry nodded.
‘Our man’s muddy, we can assume it was him that made that dent.’
‘We can.’
‘And look . . . that’s where he spun across the road after he hit the bank.’
‘Looks that way.’
‘But there are no skid marks from the tyres. Let’s say the vehicle towing him came round here quick enough to drag him into the bank at speed then stopped to cut him loose. He would have had to stop quick if he was leaving him there. It’s wet and muddy. He would have skidded. And if you’re doing that, if you’re cutting him loose, this place doesn’t make sense.’
‘Okay. So what does that tell us, detective?’ Harry rubbed his chin like he was teasing her.
‘Someone cut him loose. Whatever was towing him . . . it didn’t even stop.’
‘Okay. The rope is frayed, but a cut rope under tension wouldn’t be a clean cut. Forensics will be able to tell us more about that. So what does that mean?’ Harry’s face was as close to a smile as it typically got.
‘You already know, don’t you!’
‘What are you thinking?’
‘That you can’t drive around a tight corner at speed with a body attached, keeping control and cutting the body loose at the same time.’
‘Meaning?’
‘There were two of them.’
‘At least. Well done, detective. I think I agree.’
Maddie screwed up her face.
‘What?’ Harry prompted.
‘Are you just gonna pretend that you’d already worked that out? I mean, really? You had no idea!’
Harry did now break into a smile. ‘I had an inkling.’
Maddie turned to the sound of an engine that was soon cut off. Then a car door closed and CSI Charley Mace appeared wearing bright blue overshoes and a wide smile.
‘Hey! You promise me this one is dead today, right?’
‘I’d say so,’ Maddie said.
Charley’s smile dropped away as her eyes fell to the ground. ‘What the hell?’
‘I know. It’s a bit of a mess, I’m afraid,’ Harry said.
‘I’m not interested in the body right now, where the hell are your overshoes?’
‘I didn’t . . .’ Harry blushed. Maddie had never seen that before.
‘No, you didn’t! What if there is evidence on the ground? You think your boot marks are going to help expose that or cover it up?’
‘Funny you should say that!’ Maddie said. ‘I’ve just been pointing out the significance of what is on the ground here. I was trying to make the inspector understand, Charley, but he’s a little slow on the uptake.’ Maddie giggled. Harry didn’t. Charley was back to smiling too.
‘He can be a little slow,’ Charley said. ‘You just need to wait for the penny to drop.’ Her eyes lingered on Harry, who still looked awkward. She shrugged and held up her palms as if she was prompting him for something.
‘What?’ he said.
‘Get the hell out of my crime scene! And you’d better not have touched him!’
Both the detectives made for their car. They would brief Charley there while she got fully suited. They had seen enough for now anyway.
Chapter 9
Jack leant on his own front door for support. Somehow he’d made it through the day. He’d gone back out onto the shop floor and managed to put all his focus into his work. For once it helped that his job was repetitive, he just had to run items through his tills, one after the other. No small talk, just focus on doing one item at a time. He had managed to relax a little, enough even to giggle when Alyssa had walked past with two stubby carrots held up against her head as devil horns. She had followed it up with a text message: Just trying to think of ways to get you to worship ME now that I got competition.
He hadn’t replied. He hadn’t seen her at lunch or during his afternoon break either, preferring to stay at his station and work through. He didn’t want to talk to anyone, least of all Alyssa. He knew she’d have more questions about last night. Right now, he just wanted to forget, to move on.
He pushed open his front door. Even that had him exhaling with the effort. His flat was the top half of what was once a house in a tightly packed terrace that came to a sudden dead end. His front door was directly next to that of his ground floor neighbours. His was battered and wooden, resplendent in faded blue, whereas theirs was in bright white UPVC renewed within the last couple of months. He didn’t have much to do with them. At least they were quiet.
Once inside, he bent down to pick up some post. Immediately in front of him was the steep staircase, just what he needed when his whole body was sagging with exhaustion. They never normally bothered him, but then he wasn’t usually denied sleep for forty-eight hours while spending much of his waking hours rigid with tension. He paused to take a breath as his tired eyes lifted to the stairs. They rested on a small indistinct object halfway up, dead centre on one of the stairs. It looked like a small bump in the steps, like a little ball maybe, but flattened. He scowled. He must have dropped something in his rush to get in last night, or during his zombie-like walk getting out that morning. He couldn’t think what. There was no natural light on his stairs. The switch for the overhead light was a push button that slowly popped back out. Such was his lack of strength that he had to use his bodyweight to push it in. The light didn’t help him; he was still too far away. He started up the stairs. It only took a few steps for him to realise what it was.
He froze.
He was half on one step, half on the next, his hand shot out to steady himself. It wasn’t a flattened ball. It was a round and jagged piece of metal, like a locking wheel nut. Jack recognised it from the night before. The light was directly above him. It reflected a little from the layer of dried blood caught in its crude teeth.
He managed a step closer. He could see the corner of a small piece of paper trapped beneath. He held his breath. He managed to pull it out without the metal object moving. It was a note — handwritten:
6 when you wake.
6 when you work.
6 when you sleep.
Jack turned it over; it was blank on the other side. He finally had to breathe and it came out in a rush. He found himself looking around, as if there might be something else. At that instant the light popped and he was plunged into near darkness. He moved up the stairs to the landing and turned left into his living area. His kitchen was to the right, his sofa and TV to the left. He turned on all the lights and took time to scan the room. Nothing was out of place or looked like it had been touched. He moved through to the only bedroom — still as he had left it: his duvet still on the floor where he had thrown it off in frustration at around 4 a.m.; his computer still showing a screen saver where he had tried playing an old video game that didn’t connect to the internet — anything to occupy his mind.
He shook his head. No one else had a key to his place, not even his mother. But even if she had, Jack knew it wasn’t his mother who had entered his property and put a bloodied twist of metal on his stairs. He knew exactly who it was. And he knew what it meant.
Chapter 10
Maddie looked round at the faces in the briefing room. They smiled mostly and a few still chuckled. The blinds were pulled so they could see the pictures of the country lane taken earlier in the day by the attending CSI. The last picture was still on the screen, a medium distance shot of the victim lying on his side, his eyes just visible from the front of a skull that she knew was damaged so badly that it was held together only by its thin layer of skin. He was laid out on a cold, damp road and she could see his blackened arms where the skin had been scraped off to leave a layer of black grit and mud. Any sane
person would struggle to find anything to smile about, let alone laugh, but one quick-witted DC had brought the briefing to an end with a quip about a drag act and the room had immediately descended into chaos. Maddie had smiled too. The funniest moments were often in reaction to someone else’s tragedy. Perhaps it was human nature to always look for a release. It was certainly in the nature of a police officer, possibly a way of surviving a career of turning up first to the worst that humanity had to offer.
Harry hadn’t laughed — Maddie couldn’t remember a time when he had — but he didn’t close it down either; a recognition perhaps that such black humour had its positive element. The tension in the room was released and now the horror from that scene might not be the thing these detectives took with them before returning home to their families and having to respond to the question: How was your day?
Harry had wanted to brief his team with what they had so far. It wasn’t much from an investigative point of view, but one thing they did now have was a name for their victim: Jarod Logan.
As part of processing the scene, Charley Mace had sent a close-up picture of the thumb that wasn’t ground down to a stump to the fingerprint bureau. A result had come back within the hour. The prints were known on their system, meaning he had been arrested before, a number of times it turned out. Jarod Logan was a name that raised a few eyebrows round the room. He had been a regular to custody once upon a time, typically on the weekend when he liked a drink with a fight chaser. His arrests were always for assaults or public order offences and he was always a pain in the arse for the arresting officer. The last anyone could remember of him, he’d been working in a nightclub on Langthorne’s seafront, the exotically named La Parisienne, a name it had never really managed to pull off. The club was gone now, as was the last known address of Jarod Logan. It had been within spitting distance of his place of work and both had been demolished as part of the same seafront development. All else about Logan was a blank. The intelligence around girlfriends, associates and the locations he frequented was six years old. Maddie knew that to stand any chance of finding his killer they would need to fill much of that six-year gap.
For now, Harry’s fast-track actions had been centred on finding the site where Jarod’s final journey started out. They had explored the possibility that there was no such site, that Jarod had been bound and then thrown from a moving vehicle, but it had been dismissed for now. Harry had pointed out that a fall like that might have done the job straight away and that wasn’t what this killer wanted. Dragging someone to their death was not an easy option. It carried a lot of risk for the offender. You didn’t take those risks unless you were looking to make your victim suffer — and how! Maddie could barely imagine Logan’s final journey on this earth as he was being tethered to the back of the vehicle. He would surely have known what was coming. He might have been started off slowly before gradually building up speed — perhaps it was a means of extracting information? A torture element would certainly explain the wound that had since been identified under the layer of dirt on his left hand.
There were so many questions, but Maddie didn’t mind that. She revelled in the early part of an investigation. It was like shaking jigsaw puzzle pieces out of their box and looking at the pile, debating where to start.
The DCs filed out. It was the end of the day shift and, while the searches were still ongoing, there wasn’t too much for a room full of Major Crime detectives to do yet. The scene where the body was found had been searched and stood down. The body was in for an autopsy over the next forty-eight hours and wasn’t expected to reveal many surprises — or clues. There was nothing in the way of house-to-house and only one witness: the woman who had driven over poor Jarod and then called the police. Her lengthy statement was now largely corroborated. Maddie looked back at the image of Logan on the screen while Harry shuffled papers. They were the last two in the room. An idea came to her. ‘Are we doing social media work? Around Logan, I mean. We might be able to find a next of kin and fill in some of the blanks.’
Harry stopped his shuffling to look over. ‘I had one of the DCs have a look this afternoon, but they couldn’t find anything for him. I’ve tasked Rob with it, but he won’t be doing anything with it now until tomorrow.’
Maddie grinned. She couldn’t help it. It was like a natural reaction when someone mentioned his name.
‘What?’ Harry said.
‘Rob. He just makes me laugh. If I was ever asked to describe an IT geek I’d just close my eyes and picture him!’
‘What you do in your own spare time is down to you, Maddie.’
Maddie’s grin widened. ‘Did you just make a joke, DI Blaker?’
Harry’s stoical expression didn’t shift. ‘I’ve been practicing my delivery. How was it?’
‘Flawless.’ Maddie giggled. She looked back up at the image hanging over them. ‘Did you ask if Rob could have a look tonight? If anyone can find something, it would be him. It might make tomorrow a lot more productive. I think social media’s our best bet, you know. Everybody has something, don’t they?’
‘I don’t, and I bet you don’t either.’
‘Good point! Not in my name at least.’
‘I told him we could really do with him looking before he finished today, but you know what he’s like. He’s got some gaming competition or some such rubbish. I struggle with civvies.’
‘You mean you can’t order them to get something done? I might go and ask him again.’
Harry shrugged. ‘Feel free.’
The door opened and Detective Chief Inspector Julian Lowe strode in looking hassled. He looked up at the projected image. ‘By Christ, he looks even worse on the big screen.’
‘There are worse angles than that, boss,’ Harry said.
‘He’s upset someone.’
‘I hope so,’ Harry’s growl was back.
‘You hope so?’ DCI Lowe frowned.
‘It’s either that or someone did it for fun.’
‘I see your point.’
‘What do you need, boss?’
The DCI bit down on his lip and turned to linger on Maddie.
‘Sorry, I’m just leaving,’ she said.
‘Thank you, Maddie. Just a personal matter with DI Blaker, here, is all. Do you mind?’
‘Daniel Wootan?’ Harry said. ‘Maddie is well aware, boss. If there’s an update on that she doesn’t need to leave.’
‘Well, yes. Okay then.’ He cast another glance at Maddie. She was already on her way out but she stopped, unsure if she should continue or not. Lowe shrugged and she stayed.
‘He’s been released.’ The DCI seemed to brace himself, but when he got no reaction he continued. ‘He’s still under investigation but it doesn’t look like the job is a runner. We went to CPS. The evidence is not enough for beyond reasonable doubt.’
Harry took a moment. ‘I don’t know the exact details, but he was on CCTV stealing something from a garage, right?’
‘Technically, no.’
‘Technically?’
‘Yes. And that’s the bit that CPS are unhappy with. See, he was captured entering and leaving, not actually stealing.’
‘In the early hours of the morning? Was anyone else in there at the material time?’
‘No.’
‘I see.’
‘So the evidence is strong, but not strong enough for a charge. They didn’t get the property back when they searched his bedsit — that would have sealed it, of course. The CPS are saying that we can’t prove conclusively that he stole the item, despite being pretty sure it was stolen at that time. Not enough to charge at least.’
‘You went to CPS? For a shoplifting?’ Maddie was thinking the same but was keeping quiet. Police only really consulted with CPS for an instant charge decision on major cases or any type of domestic violence. Nicking a twenty quid bottle of whisky was not the sort of thing that would usually prompt that call.
‘Yes, I insisted. If we could have charged him today then we could rema
nd him back to prison and he would be back to serve the rest of his sentence — no question. His feet wouldn’t have touched the ground.’
Harry shrugged. ‘I appreciate the effort. So now Probation revoke his licence and he goes back anyway? He was driving a car, for one — he’s not allowed in the front seat, driver or passenger. And he was stealing. Even the sniff of a dishonesty offence would normally be enough for them to put him back behind the door.’
Maddie watched Harry as his sentence finished. He was a big man, broad and strong, but looked more so when he stood with his feet apart and tensed his chest, like he was now. His body language was of someone bracing himself for a fight.
‘I thought you didn’t know the details?’ Julian’s tone carried a warning.
‘I read what was on the weekly briefing. I read every one.’
‘I spoke with Probation personally. They won’t be taking him back to prison. There’s not enough for them.’
Maddie watched Harry closely. His chest actually shrunk as he took a breath. The DCI had spoken softly, as if he was trying to appease him. Finally Harry scooped up his papers. ‘I appreciate you letting me know.’
‘That’s it?’ Lowe held his ground between Harry and the door.
‘What did you want from me? Does my opinion change anything?’
‘It might make you feel better,’ the DCI said. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean it like . . .’
‘It’s done. Nothing I can do.’ He took another step towards Lowe, who turned to let him pass.
HE WILL FIND YOU an absolutely gripping crime thriller with a massive twist Page 9
