Cragside: A DCI Ryan Mystery (The DCI Ryan Mysteries Book 6)

by LJ Ross

  Yates raised an eyebrow and wondered if that meant he would happily ‘do off’ with somebody elsewhere.

  “They have to ask, Lionel,” Cassandra told him.

  He drew in a laboured breath and gave them a look of extreme sufferance.

  “Well, I was in the library the whole time. The lights went out and we all wondered what had happened this time. Cassie went off to investigate.”

  Lowerson and Yates turned their mild gaze onto the mistress of Cragside, who looked startled.

  “Well, yes, I told you in my statement, I went off to see what had happened.”

  “And you were gone a bloody long time, too!”

  Cassandra sent him a frustrated glare, while Yates calmly brought up a digital copy of her statement from the previous evening.

  “Mrs Gilbert, last night you said you were in the library throughout the blackout, until everyone went out into the hallway together.”

  There was an awkward silence.

  “I—I must have made a mistake.”

  “Would you like to amend your statement now?”

  “I—yes, I think I’d better.”

  * * *

  Phillips made his way through the myriad terraced streets running parallel to the River Tyne on the eastern edges of Newcastle. He felt an odd sense of homecoming, having grown up on the city’s western edge in a working-class area that was a mirror image of the one he drove through now. It had none of the gloss of the city centre; there were no chic wine bars, upmarket restaurants or expensive shops. There was an aura of disillusionment that permeated the walls of the cheap pre-fab houses that had been built temporarily following the Second World War and had never been replaced by anything better, despite the promises of successive governments. One day, they said.

  No amount of new brickwork or community centres could replace the loss of an industry that had been the lifeblood of almost every family in the neighbourhood. Though nearly forty years had passed since the old shipyards closed their doors, the sense of abandonment still felt fresh. As Phillips drove further into the industry’s old heartland, it was impossible to suppress a feeling of grief when the sight of a single crane suddenly came into view, and impossible not to remember a time when there had been dozens.

  Yet there was hope beneath it all.

  Northerners were from hardy, fighting stock and it took more than a few knocks to crush their spirit. Phillips could see that in the fresh coats of paint on the walls, the neatly tended gardens and the new businesses popping up in the old shop fronts on the high street. A group of women stood chatting and laughing outside a local supermarket and, to Phillips, they represented everything that was good about his city; they were getting on with life and living it, not harkening back to the past.

  He came to a stop at a set of traffic lights and glanced at the building to his left, which bore a sign saying, ‘ST. PETER’S CLUB’. He smiled and shook his head, thinking back to his younger days and the times he’d driven his father down here for a pint with his mates and a sing-song around the bar. Nobody had called it by its true name for years; it had always been known as ‘The Bottom Club’ and had been a meeting place for local men for at least fifty years. Its doors were closed now and he wondered whether the locals still gathered there, and whether the community spirit lived on despite the hardships it had faced.

  He hoped so.

  The lights changed and Phillips put the car in gear, hardening his heart so that he could focus on the reason he was here. Half a mile north lay the new police headquarters but he had been given a different mission, one which might provide the final answer they were searching for.

  As he passed the site where tall ships and destroyers had once been raised onto the water, Phillips slowed his car, watching for the building that still housed the records from the old days. He almost didn’t notice the beginning of Hadrian’s Wall jutting from the ground, its ancient stonework seeming out of place among the industrial surrounds but, on reflection, very fitting. Here, within footsteps of each other, were the remnants of two magnificent empires.

  Phillips spotted the place he was looking for and, a few minutes later, he shook hands with a young man who had agreed to help him search for the records they needed.

  As he stepped over the threshold, he cast his gaze upward to the sky and to the sun which was already beginning its slow descent.

  The clock was ticking.

  * * *

  Ryan set aside the papers he had now read a dozen times and set off through the forest to complete a final, vital task that would resolve the question that had been puzzling him since the beginning. What had caused the power failures at such precise times? First, eleven o’clock on Saturday evening and then nine o’clock last night. He refused to believe it was a coincidence.

  Ryan paused as he always did on the iron bridge spanning the burn to look down into the gorge where Alice Chapman had fallen. Although her killer was now a victim himself, it made no difference to his approach. He would seek justice for Henderson, just as he had for Alice Chapman, for the principle was the same. It was not for anybody to play God or to judge who should live and who should die.

  Only the law could balance the scales.

  He continued across the bridge and let himself into the house, careful not to make his presence known. He’d deliberately chosen a time when most people would be busy with work but he paused to listen out for any sounds of footfall, just in case. Then he moved quickly to begin an intensive search of some of the rooms, stopping to check he was alone before shifting large items of furniture.

  It only took ten minutes to find what he was looking for.

  Ryan smiled grimly and then turned to retrace his steps, leaving just as quietly as he had come.

  CHAPTER 34

  By four o’clock, there was still no word from Phillips.

  Ryan’s team assembled once again in the rental cottage, with Faulkner in attendance and Jeff Pinter on speakerphone.

  “I’ve done the post-mortem on Henderson.” His upper-crusty voice rang out into the kitchen and Ryan hastily adjusted the volume.

  “What did you find?”

  “Well, firstly, he couldn’t have been dead more than half an hour when you found him in the basement,” Pinter said. “His core body temperature was still thirty-seven degrees and his skin was warm to the touch.”

  “What about the rest of him?” Ryan asked.

  Pinter gave a theatrical sigh.

  “In cases of rapid deceleration such as we see in victims of falling, there are all the usual arterial lacerations, haemorrhage…almost every organ in Henderson’s body was torn apart by extreme impact.”

  Yates swallowed a gulp of tea and felt it slosh around her stomach, settling uneasily as she listened to the pathologist.

  “One of his nails was badly torn on his right hand and Faulkner tells me the corresponding fragment was found during their search. After some testing today, they were able to match the metal compound beneath the nail fragment to the type found on the lift doors on the first floor of the house.”

  “Defensive wound, you think?”

  “Not for me to say,” Pinter was quick to point out. “I can only tell you what shape he was in but, if you want my opinion, I’d say he was making a grab for something to hold on to as he fell.”

  “Anything in his blood?” Ryan enquired. “Anything that would point to accident or suicide?”

  “I put a rush on the toxicology report, as requested. His bloodwork came back nil of alcohol or drugs, other than a small quantity of propanoic acid, otherwise known as ibuprofen. That certainly wouldn’t have impaired his judgment. As for any pathological indications of suicide, there were no historic contusions or lacerations on his arms or wrists that might support a psychiatric history of suicidal tendencies.”

  Ryan nodded, glad to have his own suspicions confirmed.

  “Anything else we need to know?”

  “Just a lot of medical bumf,” Pinter said honestly. “I’l
l send my report through to you now.”

  “Thanks, Jeff.”

  Ryan stabbed the red button on his phone to end the call and looked up at his team, who were half-seated, half-standing around the kitchen in a state of agitation. He knew the feeling; it came when an investigation was taking too long, when they had worked solidly for days and there were no fruits to show for it.

  All that would change very soon.

  “So”—he clapped his hands to get their attention—“Pinter has more or less confirmed that Henderson was pushed. Faulkner? What can you tell us from the forensic side?”

  The senior CSI had shed his plastic suit and was now wearing a pair of crumpled, straight-leg jeans and a t-shirt with a faded motif of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on the front. A pair of wire-rimmed glasses sat on the end of his nose.

  “We spent all of last night and most of today going over the basement and Henderson’s personal items. Firstly, I should mention that we found large quantities of bleach sloshed on his kitchen floor and concentrated in one area. When will they ever learn that bleach doesn’t mask blood residue?” Faulkner wondered aloud. “There were specks of it beneath the bleach and we sent the samples to the lab, who tested it immediately against Alice Chapman’s blood type. There was an initial match.”

  Ryan nodded. It was just as he had expected.

  “Henderson’s shoes?”

  “Yes,” Faulkner nodded. “The shoes he was wearing when he died were also covered in bleach, which still hadn’t managed to cover up traces of blood which was, incidentally, another match for Alice Chapman’s type A-positive. It seems likely he trudged around her body looking for Victor Swann’s phone and then came home with bits of her still clinging to his shoes.”

  “Charming,” MacKenzie muttered.

  “Sorry, Mac. Force of habit,” Faulkner said. It was easy to talk of bodies as inanimate objects, no longer invested with thoughts or feelings, but they’d all been people once.

  “That adds weight to what we already know, which is that Henderson killed Alice Chapman,” Ryan said. “But what about the person who killed him? Did they leave anything of themselves behind?”

  “There’s always a trace,” Faulkner agreed. “Unfortunately, that trace was well covered by somebody who clearly thought ahead. We swabbed Henderson’s clothing for skin cell or sweat impression marks, where they might have used their hands to push him. Unfortunately, all we found were fibres of the kind you might find on thick gardening gloves or something of that ilk. We’d need to seize clothing to find a match.”

  Ryan nodded.

  “What else?”

  Faulkner reached inside a cardboard box file and retrieved a plastic evidence bag containing a few torn fragments of paper.

  “We found these bits of paper behind the fire grate at Henderson’s cottage. They’re too small to decipher any words but we’ll get around to testing them for prints and DNA.”

  “You’re thinking it could have been a note torn up by Henderson and the rest was burned?”

  Faulkner shrugged as he shuffled the bag, then put it back inside the box.

  “One of the fragments reads ‘p.m.’, which suggests a time was mentioned. It would explain why Henderson was up at the house at that specific hour, if someone had left him a note with a designated time and place.”

  Ryan smiled.

  “They were sloppy, there, and perhaps a little desperate.”

  “If it’s like you say and the first two deaths weren’t meant to happen, there was a police presence at Cragside that might have been completely absent if Henderson had been the only person to die in a tragic fall,” MacKenzie said. “The killer knew we were closing in on Henderson and their chance to kill him would disappear as soon as we took him into custody.”

  “They had to act quickly,” Ryan agreed. “As do we.”

  He stood up and paced around the floor to work off some adrenaline.

  “Martin Henderson—previously Jennings—changed his name in the summer of 1975 at a time when he was working as a fitter on The Valiant. That ship went up in smoke thanks to somebody’s negligence and, though we can’t yet prove it, my hunch is that young Martin Jennings was involved in some way or another. That inferno killed nearly a hundred men whose families were left behind to pick up the pieces.”

  Ryan paused to think of it and found he could hardly imagine the devastation.

  “Wives who were left widowed, children who were left fatherless, siblings who lost a brother,” he said. “Any one of them could have found out about Henderson’s involvement and harboured a grudge all these years, waiting to even the score.”

  They all turned to look at the faces of the remaining suspects on the wall and Ryan studied each of them in turn.

  “Imagine finding out that your worst enemy was coming to work with you, here at Cragside. Or imagine deliberately hiring him, to have him within your net. Any one of these people could be the right age and, now that physicality is less of an issue, even Lionel himself could have trotted upstairs like a mountain goat to see off his estate manager. Problem is, we can’t prove which of them it was.”

  Just then, they heard the click of the front door opening and closing. Phillips ambled into the room looking hot and bothered.

  “Stuck in traffic for half hour,” he grumbled.

  “Did you have any luck?” Ryan asked, eyeing the plastic wallet in Phillips’ hand.

  His sergeant waggled it enticingly.

  “Aye, I’ve brought home the bacon, as usual.”

  MacKenzie rolled her eyes but gave him a peck on the cheek as he took a seat beside her and rolled up his shirtsleeves.

  There was a pregnant silence as they waited for Ryan to cast his eye over the list of those who had died the day The Valiant had gone up in flames. They watched him drag a finger down the columns, his face softening as he thought of all those who were lost, until he found a name he recognised.

  “Bingo,” he murmured.

  Ryan wasted no time feeling surprised, or even upset, but instead splayed his palms on the table top and thought of how they could set a trap.

  “Everything we have is circumstantial,” he said. “Even this name. There isn’t a jury in the land that would convict ‘beyond all reasonable doubt’, so we need to find a way to prove it.”

  He surprised them all by flashing a smile.

  “I think I know how to do it but we need to move quickly. This person is volatile and unpredictable now they’ve taken a life. It creates a sense of invincibility in the minds of some killers and, if they suspect that another person saw them or might know something, they could kill again to protect themselves or their family.”

  There were nods around the table.

  “So what are we going to do?” Lowerson asked.

  “We’re going to beat them at their own game, Jack.”

  * * *

  Sunset over Cragside was an almost religious experience. For a short while, the sky seemed to ignite and spread amber flame over the treetops, dazzling the person who looked out from the uppermost turret and remembered a day many years ago when fire had filled the sky.

  There was no smell of burning flesh here, and no ghostly screams of those long dead, only the quiet sound of a carriage clock on the mantelpiece.

  Its incessant tick, tick, ticking seemed to grow louder and louder, as if to remind them that time waited for no man and there was still work to be done. There were loose ends to tie up, it seemed, and the prospect gave them no joy.

  But there were others to think of, those who needed to be protected.

  It was all for the greater good.

  * * *

  Darkness had fallen by the time Maggie finished clearing the dinner plates and the house was bathed in gentle lamplight, which she much preferred to the brash sunlight that showed up every line and wrinkle in the old mercury-coated mirrors dotted around the house. Every time she stopped to polish them, she came face to face with the effects of time and gravity and
, though she told herself it was the natural course of things, she remembered when she’d seen a very different reflection staring back at her. She let out a little sigh and leaned against the big old ceramic Butler sink so she could slip her foot out of its comfortable rubber-soled shoe and roll her ankle around. Joint pain was just another thing to get used to, she supposed, and she slipped her foot back into the shoe to give her other foot the same treatment.

  Maggie checked the time on the wall, which told her it was a few minutes before nine, and she wondered whether it would be another long night. The Gilberts were entertaining again and, though she shouldn’t grumble, it would have been nice to have an evening off duty considering all the recent drama. It set her nerves on edge.

  She wondered where the catering staff had gone, then clucked her tongue and began to rummage around for a tea towel, humming an old northern folk song beneath her breath.

  On the stroke of nine, the room fell into darkness.

  * * *

  Maggie let out a yelp and spun around, clutching the tea towel to her chest. The kitchen was completely dark but for the glow of a solar-powered light from the courtyard outside.

  “Hello! Is anybody there?”

  She waited to hear the patter of footsteps against the stone corridor but there was nothing to be heard except the drip of the tap. Drawing a shaky breath, she told herself not to panic. She could sort this out, if need be.

  She began to make her way towards the light switch on the wall beside the basement stairs, careful not to step too far. Her hand crept up the wall and she flicked the little switch, to no avail.

  “Hello?”

  Her voice echoed around the empty room.

  Everyone had retired to one of the smaller reception rooms upstairs and probably couldn’t hear her. In another moment, somebody would come along, she thought.

  But the darkness was intense and she felt her chest constricting with anxiety.

  She couldn’t wait for somebody to come.

  Maggie began to lower herself downstairs into the basement, feeling her way from memory rather than anything else. She was grateful for the thick-soled shoes which gripped the uneven stone and let out a breath of relief when she regained firm ground.