by Sally Rigby
‘Shit. Do we know what happened?’ Her body tensed. A murdered kid. It didn’t get worse than that.
‘No. All we know at this stage is he was found on the Newcastle to Lenchester train. I’m on my way to the station now. I wanted to let you know straight away.’
A knife attack on a teen was going to attract media attention, and as much as she trusted her DS, this wasn’t something she would allow him to handle alone.
‘I’ll meet you there. I’m about forty minutes away.’ Leaving the training before the end wasn’t ideal, but there was no alternative.
‘Are you sure? What about the course?’
‘Leave it with me.’
She ended the call and returned to the range, heading straight to where Ray was examining the targets. ‘I’ve just had a call from one of my officers. I’ve got an emergency to deal with,’ she said as he glanced up from the pile of targets he was examining.
‘You haven’t finished the assessment. Don’t you have people who can work on it for you?’
‘Normally, yes. Not this time.’ She debated telling him about the murder, then decided against it. It wasn’t relevant, and she really didn’t have time.
‘I can’t pass you unless you complete all the course components.’ The trainer shook his head.
‘Can I come back and take the remainder another time?’
If she didn’t, she knew her immediate boss, Detective Superintendent Jamieson, would come down on her for wasting police resources. These courses were expensive, and he hadn’t wanted her to go in the first place. He believed that, as a DCI, she should be more involved with the metrics and algorithms of twenty-first century policing, rather than what was happening at a grass roots level. She disagreed. Which wasn’t surprising, as there was little on which they saw eye to eye.
‘Give me a call and we’ll see what we can arrange,’ Ray said.
‘Thanks. I appreciate it.’ She flashed him a smile.
Why did criminals seem to sense when she had personal plans? She not only had to leave the course, which she was loving, but she had to cancel her family visits, with no idea when she’d be able to rearrange them. Murders took precedence over everything else.
Chapter Two
Sunday, 9 June
Whitney drove down the side road leading to the rear of Lenchester’s railway station. She parked in one of the empty taxi rank spaces. Officers had been strategically placed at all the entrances, not allowing anyone in. Closing the station on a Sunday shouldn’t be too much of a problem, and she was sure they could arrange bus transport back to the city from the next station on the line. Tomorrow would be a nightmare for commuters and traffic, though, if it remained closed. But until she’d assessed the scene, she couldn’t make a decision on how they were going to deal with it.
There was a cordon around one of the trains, and a police officer was standing on duty.
‘Morning, Beth. How’s it going?’ she asked the constable.
‘Everything’s in order, guv. I was first officer attending. DS Price is here, speaking to the Station Manager, and the pathologist is on the train.’
‘Have the British Transport Police been here?’ She didn’t want the BTP involved, however much they wanted to be. This was her investigation.
‘Not to my knowledge, guv.’
‘Good.’
Whitney checked all the relevant steps had been taken to secure and protect the scene from unnecessary evidence contamination, then scanned the log to see who’d been allowed into the scene, signed it herself, and walked towards the train. As she got closer, she saw Matt talking to a grey-haired man in a suit. When Matt saw her, he came over. He still had a slight limp from the gunshot wound he’d received a few months ago when he was acting as a decoy in a sting operation to catch a vigilante seeking revenge on men who groomed young girls on the internet.
‘Sorry to drag you away,’ he said.
‘No problem. Tell me what you know.’
‘This is the journey’s end, so the conductor was checking everyone had got off, when he found the body. It was the fast train from Newcastle, stopping at Leeds, Coventry, Banbury, and terminating here.’
‘Any witnesses?’
‘None, so far. By the time the train arrived at Lenchester, there weren’t many people on board.’
‘Are any of them still here?’
‘Unfortunately, not. The body wasn’t found until everyone had left the train. The victim was in the last carriage to be inspected.’
Coincidence? Or well planned?
‘We’ll put a call out for passengers to get in touch,’ she said. ‘What about the conductor?’
‘Stanley Crabtree. He’s in the manager’s office at the moment. In shock.’
‘I’ll need to speak to him.’
‘He knows that. I’ve asked him not to leave until after we’ve interviewed him.’
She nodded. The conductor may have been the last person to see the boy alive. He could be a person of interest, too. They’d need to background check him, a-sap.
‘Which pathologist is here?’
‘Dr Dexter.’
Thank goodness for that. Claire Dexter was the best there was. She might have an awkward manner, but Whitney didn’t care. She was in a class of her own, and in cases like this it was imperative to have the best.
‘SOCO?’ she asked, hoping he’d organised for the scene of crimes officers to attend.
‘They’re on their way.’
‘Good. Take me to the body, then we’ll speak to Crabtree.’
They walked along the platform to the last carriage. After pulling plastic booties over their feet and putting on disposable gloves, they stepped onto the train. It was old and had blocks of discoloured plastic seats with faded blue-and-green striped upholstery, all facing the same way. As they walked through, they came to two cream tables with seating for up to four people.
‘This way,’ Matt said as they headed to the rear.
‘A perfect spot to kill someone, as there’s no chance of anyone wandering through the train,’ she muttered to herself.
‘Stay where you are.’ The booming voice of Dr Claire Dexter brought them to an abrupt halt.
In front of them was the Lenchester pathologist, whose looks belied her true personality. Smaller than Whitney’s five feet four inches, and rounder than the detective’s slight built, she had short red hair, which always looked like it could do with a comb, and she wore the most bizarre clothes imaginable. Always loud, and never matching. Peeping out from the neck opening of her protective suit was the collar of a bright orange shirt with purple spots. A pair of red and green enamel parrot-shaped earrings dangled from her ears.
‘Hello, Claire. What have we got?’ she asked.
‘It’s not pretty. Young boy. Stabbed in the heart region. Let me finish taking photos and you can come over.’
Whitney swallowed hard. What the hell had happened?
‘Rigor?’
‘Not yet. But that’s hardly surprising seeing as he’s on a train and the murder only happened a short while ago.’ There was no mistaking the sarcasm in Claire’s tone. Some things never changed.
‘I hadn’t thought of that.’ She impatiently moved from foot to foot while the pathologist carried on taking photographs in the confined area.
‘You can come over now,’ Claire said as she stepped back from the double seat where the victim was situated, leaving room for them to move forward.
Whitney headed over, with Matt following. The boy was leaning against the window, his face white and jaw relaxed. A smattering of freckles across his nose were a stark contrast to his pallor. It was as though they’d been painted on. To all intents and purposes, it looked like he was asleep, until her eyes fixed on the dried blood on the front of the grey sweatshirt he was wearing. She shuddered. He was just a kid. Fourteen, if that.
There was a maroon and black rucksack on the seat beside him. ‘Have you photographed that?’ she asked, pointing to it.
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‘Yes. It’s all yours,’ Claire said as she put away her camera and packed up her case.
Whitney took hold of the rucksack and unzipped it, hoping to find some identification. Inside there was an iPad, a food container holding a half-eaten ham sandwich, an empty crisp packet, and the wrapper from a bar of chocolate. At the bottom was a dark-brown leather wallet. She opened it, and in one of the slots found a photo ID card from Westfield Independent School, in Banbury. The name on the ID was Hugo Holmes-Reed. She glanced at the card, at the smiling face, and then at the victim. There was no mistaking the likeness. It was definitely him.
‘Hugo Holmes-Reed.’ She shook her head and looked through the rest of the wallet. Inside was a train ticket with today’s date. ‘It looks like he got on at Coventry and was going to Banbury. He must have been going back to school, as he has an ID for Westfield.’
She’d heard of the school but didn’t know much about it, apart from it being independent.
‘A Westfield boy. Good school,’ Claire said, nodding.
‘You know it?’
‘Of course. One of the top ten schools in the country. My brother went there.’
Whitney shook her head. Of course he did. And no doubt the forensic psychologist, Dr Cavendish, who she worked with sometimes, would know the school, too. Whitney had suddenly surrounded herself with posh people. And it was just plain weird. That aside, this was the sort of case on which she could use George’s professional capabilities. Except she couldn’t call her now, as she was spending the weekend with her parents. Most inconvenient.
‘We need to contact his family. Hopefully his address will be in here.’ She went through the remainder of the wallet, but it wasn’t there. She then searched through the rest of his backpack but still no address, though she did find a mobile phone, which she dropped into an evidence bag. She’d take it back to the station for her resident research guru, the young Detective Constable Ellie Naylor, to check. She was trained in extracting information from mobile phones, which saved them enormous amounts of time, as it meant they didn’t have to send phones to the digital forensics unit and wait for their analysis. She’d also get Ellie to do a quick background check on the conductor.
‘Matt, contact the school and get the victim’s address.’
‘Yes, guv.’ He walked to the other end of the carriage.
She glanced out of the window and noticed Jenny and Colin, two members of the forensics team, walking down the platform.
‘SOCO’s here,’ she said. ‘We’d better get out of the way and let them do their work.’
‘How come I don’t get the same treatment?’ Claire said, locking eyes with her and arching an eyebrow.
‘You love me being here. Who would you moan at, if I wasn’t?’ Whitney quipped.
‘If you say so,’ the pathologist replied, rolling her eyes.
‘When will you have something for me?’ she asked Claire.
‘You expect me to dignify that with a response?’ the woman said, shaking her head.
‘I’m not asking for an exact time. I know it depends on what you find. But I was hoping for something approximate, like tomorrow morning, maybe.’ She knew Claire wouldn’t give her anything concrete, but she asked anyway, just in case. Usually, she’d ask a question and Claire would refuse to answer.
‘Some time tomorrow, yes. I’m not committing myself to a time. I’ll be in touch when I’m ready.’ The pathologist dismissed her with a flick of the hand, picked up her equipment, and squeezed past her and Matt, who was heading back towards Whitney.
‘Did you contact the school?’ she asked.
‘Yes. They gave me his address in Coventry.’
‘Let’s speak to Crabtree, and then we’ll head out to see his parents.’
They left the train and went into the red-brick building housing the ticket office, waiting room, and station offices. When they arrived at the room labelled “Station Manager”, Matt knocked and a man answered the door.
‘Mr Hughes, this is DCI Walker,’ Matt said, nodding in Whitney’s direction. ‘We’re here to speak to Stanley. Is he still with you?’
‘Yes. Come in.’ He held open the door and they walked through.
‘We’d like to speak to him alone,’ Whitney said as the manager was about to close the door.
‘Okay. When can we open the station again? Having it shut is playing havoc with our timetables.’
She understood where he was coming from, but it hardly showed respect for the body of the young victim. That aside, she couldn’t answer his question until SOCO had done their work and her officers had started investigating. She also wanted to hear from Claire before a final decision was made.
‘Not today. We’ll be in touch to let you know.’
‘Can we at least move the train into one of the sidings? It makes it easier for trains passing through,’ he said, his tone impatient.
‘Once forensics have finished then, yes, it can be moved.’
Moving the train would help preserve the crime scene and stop people going on board.
‘Thank you,’ he said as he opened the door and left the room.
She walked over to where the conductor was seated at a round table with Matt.
‘I’m DCI Walker, from Lenchester CID,’ she said, holding out her warrant card. She sat on an empty chair next to her officer. ‘Please could you take me through exactly what happened.’
The conductor audibly sucked in a long breath. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it. We come across all sorts in this job. I’ve seen someone dead after a heart attack. I’ve seen bloody fights. But, a young kid. I’m telling you; this will haunt me until I die. It—’
‘Mr Crabtree,’ Whitney said, gently, interrupting him. ‘I understand how awful it must have been. Why don’t you start from where the journey commenced? Take your time and tell me exactly how it all went.’
‘Sorry. It was just so … so …’ He held up his hand. ‘The details. I get it. You want the details.’
‘Thank you.’ Whitney nodded encouragingly.
‘The Newcastle to Lenchester train on a Sunday is usually only a quarter full, if that. Today was no exception. I checked the tickets of everyone on board when we left Newcastle, and then each time new people got on. It’s a fast train and there are only four stops: Leeds, Coventry, Banbury, and Lenchester. Nothing seemed strange.’
‘Do you remember checking the victim’s ticket?’ she asked.
‘Yes. He got on at Coventry.’
‘Can you remember who else got on at that station?’
He paused for a moment. ‘Five people got off and four got on. The young boy, and a woman with two children.’
‘Can you remember who got on and off at Banbury?’
The murderer could have got off the train there. Or did he wait until Lenchester? Either would be possible.
‘Actually, no. I didn’t see. I was talking with the driver.’
Damn. ‘Do you remember who else was in the carriage with our victim?’
‘He was alone when I checked his ticket. There were people in there when we left Newcastle, but they got off at Leeds and Coventry.’
‘How many people?’
‘Three. A young couple in their twenties, who got off at Leeds, and an elderly woman on her own, who left the train at Coventry.’
‘What about in the other carriages?’
‘This train only has six cars on a Sunday. There were people in all of them. The last one, where the boy was, isn’t one that usually fills up. Most people prefer to sit in the others.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘It happens on all trains. The first two or three carriages are the most popular, then the fourth, fifth, and so on until the last one. I think it’s because people are anxious to find a seat as soon as possible, so they can settle. On quiet trains there are rarely many people in the last carriage.’
Did the murderer know that? It was something they needed to consider during the investigation.
‘Leading up to when you found the body, did you notice anything out of the ordinary?’
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘Once the train had emptied, I did my usual check of all the carriages to make sure everyone was off and to pick up any lost property. When I got to the last carriage, I almost didn’t see him, as he was slouched down against the window and hidden behind the headrest of the seat in front. When I did notice him, I thought he’d fallen asleep. I went to wake him, but before calling out I spotted the blood on his top. I then noticed his half-opened eyes … lifeless … and then I realised he was dead.’
‘What did you do next?’
‘Ran to get Mr Hughes. He took charge and phoned for you lot.’
She glanced at the clock on the wall. It was already three, and they needed to get to the victim’s family. It was an hour’s drive away, and she didn’t want to ask the Coventry police to handle it. She owed it to the family to be the one to break the news, as she’d seen Hugo. She also needed to arrange for a formal identification of the body.
‘Thank you for your help, Mr Crabtree. Do you live locally?’
‘Yes. I live in Lenchester.’
‘I’d like you to go to the station and make a formal statement. We also need your fingerprints so we can eliminate you from our enquiries.’
‘Do you want me to go now?’
‘If you can. I’ll radio on ahead and someone will be expecting you.’
The conductor left, and Whitney called the police station, making arrangements for him to be dealt with when he arrived.
‘Let’s go,’ she said to Matt once she’d ended the call. ‘We need to speak to this poor kid’s family.’
Chapter Three
Sunday, 9 June
Dr Georgina Cavendish sat back in the chair at the expensive restaurant her parents had insisted on visiting for their twice-yearly lunch. She enjoyed good food, but this particular restaurant was more pretention than excellent cuisine. Even on a Sunday afternoon it was full of Oxford’s glitterati, and reservations had to be made months in advance. Unless you were her father, of course, who had successfully operated on the owner’s son, saving his life, which meant he could eat there whenever he wanted.
