The DI Jake Sawyer Series Box Set

by Andrew Lowe

  Holly glanced at Joshua; he was already looking at her. His eyes widened and he shook his head. Holly slowly turned to peer around the sofa backrest at the woman behind. She kept her voice low, but loud enough to be heard over the movie. ‘Can we have a glass of milk, please?’

  Normally, the woman would shift in her chair and turn down the request, saying it was too late or they’d had enough for the day. But she didn’t respond. The book had dropped onto her lap, and her head had lolled to the side. Holly edged off the sofa and walked to a table near the wall with a stack of books. She made a show of sorting through them, turning her head to check on the woman.

  Eyes closed now. No movement.

  She looked back to Joshua; again, he shook his head. She smiled, nodded, and walked to the door. It was an unthinkable risk, but if the woman woke, or the man came home, she could always claim she had been heading for the kitchen to get her drink.

  The woman didn’t wake, and Joshua watched as Holly Chilton walked to the door and slipped through it.

  A few minutes later, something caught his eye and he turned to look at the woman. The LED light on the sensor bracelet flashed red. Joshua turned back to the film, queasy with anxiety. Would he be blamed for Holly’s departure?

  He turned again, and saw the moment the light switched from flashing red back to green.

  Soon after, the main door at the front of the house slammed shut and the tall man walked in, head bowed.

  The woman stirred. ‘Cold out there, love?’

  He took off his hat and scarf and looked up at the screen. ‘More Disney. They should watch things with more substance.’

  ‘They like those. It keeps them happy. How did you get on?’

  He winced. ‘Nothing. Didn’t show.’

  He looked at the woman’s side table, at the bracelet. ‘I told you not to take that off.’

  She smiled, sat up in the chair. ‘It’s okay. It’s right there.’

  The man lifted the bracelet off the woollen hat. ‘Keep it on a hard surface, so you can hear the vibration.’ Jerking his head to face the high-backed sofa, he strode over and peered around the backrest, at Joshua who lay there with his eyes closed, either asleep or pretending to be asleep. He turned and stared at the woman. ‘Where’s Holly?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘WHERE’S HOLLY?’

  Joshua startled at the shout.

  The woman scrambled out of the chair. ‘Toilet? Kitchen?’

  He glared at her for a second, then dived for the door. In the kitchen, he opened a drawer and took out a heavy torch. He crashed out of the side door and ran down the garden, crunching into the thick snow. He stopped, and shone the torch at the ground ahead.

  Footprints. Leading out through a gap in the hedge.

  He ducked and barged out into the open field, white and shining in the darkness. The footprints were fresh, but were already being sealed over by the snowfall. He dug in his heels and followed them, up towards the distant treeline. How long had she been gone? Could she have made it to the road?

  He stumbled forward, up a shallow slope, staggered by the snow. After a few minutes, he reached the trees and had to hunt around for the footprints among a snarl of bracken and fallen branches. He picked them up again—clearer under the shelter of the trees—and followed them down towards a thicker patch of woodland that faded to scrub at the edge of the road. It wasn’t a busy area, but there was a chance she would get lucky and catch a passing car. It was tough underfoot, though, even for a tall adult. Had she overreached?

  He dragged himself through the snow, and almost toppled forward at a sudden dip in the slope. As he righted himself, he saw her: just on the edge of the thicker trees.

  Face down, motionless. Her foot twisted at a sickening angle under a snow-covered tree root.

  He reached the body and squatted, panting. He wore his heavy brown leather jacket with a couple of layers underneath, but he could still feel the depth of the cold. Holly was wearing jumper, jeans and socks. No shoes. It must have been a superhuman effort for her to even make it this far.

  He pulled on his gloves and reached down to her. He brushed aside her long brown hair and squeezed her neck, feeling for a pulse.

  Nothing.

  A convulsion rippled through him: rage, grief.

  Ten years.

  He reached down to the right leg of her jeans and rolled it up at the hem. He took a small key from his jacket pocket and unlocked the ankle collar.

  His eyes pricked with tears, but he held them back. No DNA.

  He pocketed the collar and rolled the fabric back down over Holly’s frozen ankle. He checked her pockets. She had died with nothing, wearing clothes bought by her captors.

  He stood up, battered by the biting wind.

  The snow swooped around Holly’s body, eager to claim her.

  He steadied himself, breathing deep and slow.

  He bowed his head, raising the base of his neck above the jacket lapel and exposing the tattoo: a sketch of an eye shape with a sun-like circle in the centre, surrounded by seven rays.

  26

  The Snake Pass was a broad, undulating A-road that rippled through the Pennines like a cracking whip. Today, it was scudded with melting snow, and even Sawyer took care on the bends, despite the urgent guitar music: Queens of the Stone Age. The scenery commanded something more expansive, but he was hazy and sleepless; he needed the wake-up.

  He turned off and pushed north, up through the bucolic sweep of the Longdendale Valley: smothered in white, twinkling in the morning sun. The dirt track that led to his father’s house was a swamp of icy slush, and he had to twist and bully the Mini up through the steep section alongside the Langsett Reservoir.

  He parked next to his father’s laurel green Volvo. As usual, the house door opened before he could get out of the car. The building sat in splendid isolation, overlooking the reservoir valley, on a high point outside the village of Upper Midhope. It was built as the residence of a mining company manager in the 1700s, and since retiring from the service, Harold Sawyer had reinvented himself as an abstract artist and remodelled the cottage as his classic Englishman’s castle.

  Harold’s German Shepherds, Rufus and Cain, lolloped across the porch to greet Sawyer as he climbed out of the car. He fussed them, and looked up to see his father, bent forward on the porch, brushing away a mush of melted snow. Harold was a couple of inches taller than his son; hefty, but light-footed for a man in his late sixties. He had a long, distinguished face with a permanently furrowed brow hanging over narrow but bright eyes, and a flop of unkempt black hair, grey at the temples.

  He swished away the snow, gripping the brush with his vast goalkeeper hands. ‘This won’t stick around. Not cold enough in November, really. January is the month where I usually have to go survivalist up here.’ He smiled at Sawyer and drew him into a hug. ‘Do your bail restrictions stretch this far?’

  ‘Spoken to your old mate, Keating?’

  Harold led him inside. ‘He’s briefed me, yes.’

  ‘Briefed you?’

  ‘About Klein’s death. The man who murdered my wife. Courtesy, I suppose. He says he’s getting grief from the brass about transferring you from the Met without first considering the potential issues with Klein’s release.’

  Sawyer scoffed. ‘So, he thinks I did it?’

  ‘Of course he doesn’t.’ Harold turned and led Sawyer through to his reading room at the side of the house. He stopped and stared out of the enormous French windows that overlooked the valley and the near end of the dirt track.

  Sawyer cast his eyes around the room: walls lined with bookcases, sky-blue armchair, upright digital piano. ‘Are you going to say you told me so?’

  Harold fiddled with a coffee machine by the window. ‘Told you what?’

  ‘To leave Klein alone. Accept his guilt.’

  Harold shrugged. ‘Well, he was obviously into something we didn’t know about. Tea? Coffee?’

  ‘No, thanks. Why
do you say that?’

  ‘Somebody wanted him dead.’

  ‘I can see your old police skills haven’t deserted you in old age, Dad.’

  Harold eyed him, smiled. ‘Could have been a botched burglary or something. Maybe not so much to it.’

  Sawyer unwrapped an orange boiled sweet and slipped it into his mouth. He held up the cellophane and pocketed it. ‘They have my DNA at Klein’s flat. On a wrapper. Klein could have taken a sweet from my car without realising.’ He sat in the armchair. ‘And anyway, Keating looked into my interest in Klein’s release. He told me he had concerns. I told him I didn’t think Klein killed Mum. I’ve never been secretive about that.’

  Harold turned and took a mug from a cupboard below the coffee machine. ‘The Crown lawyers will interpret your openness as a double bluff, if you’re charged.’

  ‘Someone didn’t like me getting close to the truth, and so they clipped Klein and put me in the picture as the most plausible scapegoat.’

  ‘Jake. If a sweet wrapper is the best they’ve got—’

  ‘I don’t know that for sure. The custody interviews were sloppy.’

  Harold slotted the cup into the machine and switched it on. ‘Well. It’s circumstantial. Where did they find the body?’

  ‘At his brother’s place in Castleton. He was staying there.’

  ‘And I assume they’re questioning the brother?’

  Sawyer stood up. ‘Klein’s brother didn’t do it, Dad. Whoever did used a hammer on him.’ Harold flinched. ‘That’s someone speaking to me, Dad. To you. Even to Mike. About Mum. That’s someone taunting us. Taunting our family.’

  Harold pushed his fingers through his hair. ‘Trolling. As the kids call it.’

  Sawyer waited for a few seconds, letting the silence settle. The aroma of coffee smothered the room’s standard fug of detergent and dog breath. ‘I want to get myself checked out again. You said I was examined, after the attack. Once when I was nine, and again when I was sixteen. Do you still have the brain scans and reports? CT? MRI?’

  Harold sipped his coffee. ‘Of course. All my admin is in my studio. I still have all your old school reports, police certificates, Michael’s stuff.’

  ‘I’d like to take the scans and reports.’ Sawyer moved off, towards the door that led to the back of the house.

  Harold hurried after him, getting ahead. ‘Hold on. I don’t want the dogs getting in there.’

  The studio was a large, open space in a converted outhouse. It had a modest window that looked out on the open fields at the back of the house, and Harold had laid the floor with brushed white parquet tiles, arranged in a chevron zig-zag pattern. It was clean and ordered, with his blank canvases neatly stacked in the far corner, and his paints and accessories stored on colour-coded shelving: yellow for paint, blue for tools, red for filing.

  Harold browsed through the paperwork in a multi-drawered cabinet on the red shelf, while Sawyer studied his current work in progress, propped on an easel in the centre of the room. He was keen on abstracts, and his father’s art was normally bold and primal. But this was a different direction: a layered central smear of dark and bright reds, blended over each other, increasingly chaotic as they fanned out towards the greys and white at the edges of the canvas.

  Sawyer leaned in, surprised by the jagged peaks which had formed in the paint; his father’s brush strokes were normally so measured and uniform. ‘This your Rothko phase, then?’

  Harold sighed. ‘I keep hearing that, yes. There’s no patent on that palette, you know. Deep colours, big emotions. By the way, I went to see Michael. I’ve arranged for some more speech therapy.’

  Sawyer looked up, surprised. ‘You told me that would be pointless, because there’s not enough to work with.’

  ‘Change of heart. We have to keep trying.’

  ‘Did he speak to you?’

  Harold turned. ‘Of course not.’ He handed over a black folder which contained smudgy photocopies of two consultant reports from 1992 and 1999. He had also kept copies of the letters to Sawyer’s GP. The CT imaging hadn’t reproduced well, but the MRI scan showed a series of top-down slices of Sawyer’s brain.

  Sawyer browsed the notes and letters. Focal bilateral amygdala lesion… suggested isoproterenol infusion… He looked up at his father. ‘Surprised you kept these, after your conversion from science to God.’

  Harold closed the cabinet drawer. ‘One day you might grasp that faith can be private, personal. It doesn’t have to be preachy. Life is a struggle. We all have individual ways of coping.’

  ‘Yes, but I just can’t see why you would switch from a world based on gathering evidence and hard facts, to some comforting fairy story.’

  Harold downed the rest of his coffee. ‘Seems to me you might be going the other way. From denial of the evidence to a kind of acceptance. Why do you want these scans? Are you at last considering the possibility that you might have been physically damaged?’

  Sawyer slumped down on his father’s vermillion corner sofa and scanned the spines of a stack of novels. Hemingway, Roth. A couple of recent Booker winners. ‘Dad. Somebody murdered the man who was convicted of killing Mum, and they have either tried to point the finger at me, or Klein had taken a sweet wrapper from my car and the whole thing is an almighty reach from Keating.’

  Harold nodded. ‘Because he’s embarrassed at accepting your transfer. Being seen as naïve.’

  ‘Whoever it was, he committed the murder with a hammer. Not a knife or a gun. It speaks to Mum’s death. It speaks to us. You know the score. Look for what stands out.’

  ‘Does the killer think the connection with Mum’s murder will make it stick to you more?’

  Sawyer frowned. ‘It’s MO, not signature. He doesn’t need to do it that way. It’s not for the feels. It’s referring back to the method of a previous murder, which was signature based on anger, hatred, resentment. Maybe humiliation. Given that we haven’t had an ongoing thirty-year hunt for a hammer-wielding serial killer in this area, I don’t think the person who killed Klein is the same person who killed Mum.’

  Harold angled his head. ‘I wouldn’t use this theory as the basis for your defence.’

  ‘I think it fits with my innocence. Someone killing the man who killed Mum using the same method. Symmetry. Biblical justice. An eye for an eye.’

  ‘It’s not meant to be literal.’

  ‘Atheists can read the Bible, too, Dad. Leviticus. “Fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.”’

  Harold smiled. ‘Most of the naysayers get bored before the New Testament. That’s where Christ clarifies. He taught love, not pain. Not vindictiveness. That just leads to a cycle of resentment and violence. It’s all in the interpretation. Commensurate justice. You take a life, you have your life taken away. Some people read that as capital punishment, some see it as life imprisonment.’

  Sawyer got up. ‘So, how is Keating? I was hoping to ask him a couple of questions myself about the day they arrested Owen Casey.’

  Harold bristled. ‘This again.’

  ‘Yes. This again.’

  ‘With everything else hanging over you?’

  ‘Owen Casey was let off a serious burglary charge, with no paper chain. He’s told me directly that he was tasked with stealing a hammer from Klein’s house. The murder weapon.’

  ‘We’ve been through this, son. A senior officer with a moustache and a big watch. Casey is a chancer, telling you what he thinks you want to know. I assume you paid him?’

  Sawyer leaned back on the storage shelves, scrutinising his father’s reaction. ‘I saw him again, the other day.’

  ‘I told you. I don’t remember him, or anyone who was involved in his arrest.’

  ‘He gave me a name. William Caldwell.’

  Harold dropped his gaze and seemed to run his eyes along the patterns in the floor tiles. He looked back up. ‘How much did that cost you?’

  ‘You don’t recognise it?’

  ‘No. I was pretty junior a
t the time. I didn’t really connect with the senior staff, even if that name is authentic.’ He opened a drawer in a wooden desk beneath the shelves.

  Sawyer took a few steps forward, ending up close to his father’s shoulder. ‘Mum’s last word to her killer, according to Michael: “Why?” She knew him. And I’ve got another one-word question, Dad. How? How did she know him? Was it this Caldwell? And did he kill Klein, too? Or have him killed?’

  Harold took a circular coin of around an inch in diameter from the drawer. ‘Have you heard of the French painter, Philippe de Champaigne?’

  Sawyer sighed. ‘No.’

  ‘Seventeenth century. French Baroque. He produced a painting called Still Life with a Tulip, Skull and Hourglass. It showed the three essentials of existence. A tulip, representing life, a skull for death, and an hourglass for time.’ Harold held the coin up to the light. ‘It was part of the Vanitas genre: works that featured symbols of mortality, and encouraged reflection on the ephemeral nature of life. How it all seems so limitless, yet only happens to us for a short period of time. This is a Memento Mori medallion. It’s meant to be carried with you, to remind you that life is fleeting.’

  Sawyer took the coin. On one side, a profile illustration of a skull sat between the words MEMENTO and MORI at top and bottom, with an hourglass on one side and a tulip on the other. On the other side, six words were stacked in the centre.

  YOU COULD LEAVE LIFE RIGHT NOW

  He nodded, glanced up at his father. ‘Marcus Aurelius.’

  ‘Yes. Your original Stoic. The full quote is, “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.” He was urging people to live a life of virtue in the moment, rather than wait. The coin was created at a mint in Minnesota in 1882 by a man who wanted to help recovering addicts not to succumb to temptation. But it also serves as a reminder not to obsess over trivial things or make plans too far into the future.’

  ‘Like going to Heaven?’

  Harold smiled. ‘My faith is about my actions on Earth, not to get a reward in the afterlife.’ He bowed his head, avoiding his son’s gaze. ‘You and Michael are survivors, Jake. You’ve both come so far. Please focus on being there for each other, in the here and now.’