Let The Bones Be Charred

by Andy Maslen

  Callie was proposing a course of action they’d worked between them many times. PIP stood for the College of Policing’s Professionalising Investigation Programme. Stella, as an SIO, was qualified to PIP 3 – Major Investigations. Callie had reached the next level, which covered strategic management of highly complex investigations.

  While Stella was responsible for managing the investigation itself, Callie had five jobs to do that would, hopefully, help Stella do hers. Provide overall command and leadership. Set up and manage any partnerships the investigation might need, other government agencies being the usual angle. Manage staffing, budgets and other resources. Handle top-level management of information and intelligence. And maintain public confidence.

  Callie was looking ahead to the last two of these jobs. The media were savvier than they used to be. She blamed the Freedom of Information Act, among other things.

  The beasts knew that Stella knew everything about her investigation. A well-phrased question, ‘Is the killer using dressmaking scissors?’, ‘do you have a suspect in custody?’, ‘are you interviewing Eastern European lorry drivers?’ would leave Stella with nowhere to go but the truth. She’d have to give them a straight ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. Whereas Callie could parry the incoming shots with, ‘I am not aware that is the case,’ and they wouldn’t be able to pin her down in a lie.

  Stella finished her pint and wiped her top lip. The heat in the pub was almost as bad as that outside.

  ‘Thanks, boss,’ she said, feelingly. ‘You want another?’

  ‘Aye, go on then. Seeing as we’ve established ourselves a wee little cordon sanitaire, it’d be a shame to give up the table.’

  Stella grinned. Callie was right. The presence of a sharp-featured woman in the full black-and-silver regalia of a chief superintendent seemed to be acting as a forcefield around the tiny circular table.

  She returned five minutes later with two tall glasses of lager, their sides already sweating.

  ‘That was quick!’ Callie said, before taking a pull on her drink.

  ‘They asked if I was with you and then pretty much shoved me to the front.’

  Callie smiled.

  ‘Nice to know there are still a few folk who respect the uniform. So, listen, as I am your PIP 4, how are you doing? In yourself, I mean. Getting enough sleep? Eating?’

  Since Stella’s return to active duty, Callie and she had met regularly for drinks or dinner to talk. As Callie had said a few years earlier, when one of your most senior officers has killed more people than ninety-nine per cent of the people she’s trying to catch, it gives you an added incentive to make sure she’s on an even keel.

  Stella nodded.

  ‘I’m fine. Probably drinking too much coffee, but then, I’m probably drinking too much alcohol, so they balance each other out. As for sleep, what do you think?’

  Sleep. Every copper’s drug of choice. Except, unlike cigarettes, alcohol and whatever else they might find to help them take the edge off, sleep was always in short supply. Worse than that, no amount of money, threats or pleading with your GP or the Force Medical officer would get you any more than you were prepared to give yourself.

  Once you hit inspector, you were freed from the tyranny of shift work and, in theory, you kept office hours. But Stella reckoned there weren’t many quality control managers, HR assistants or marketing managers who worked in offices where a 7.00 a.m. start might lead to an 11.00 p.m. finish plus a few hours at your kitchen table at home in the small hours when a child murderer, serial rapist or basher-over-the-head of old ladies wouldn’t let you cash in your chitty for a few hours of blissful unconsciousness.

  Perhaps sensing Stella’s inner monologue, Callie rolled her eyes.

  ‘OK, stupid question. But take it easy, d’ye hear? I know you like to look after your team and make sure they’re not burning out, but so do I. And you’re part of my team. Where are you going from here?’

  ‘Actually, I thought I might go home. To be honest, I’m shattered. I want to watch Netflix and order a pizza and chill out for a few hours. Then I want to go to bed and sleep for eight hours straight, wake up feeling calm and refreshed, have croissants and freshly squeezed orange juice and then walk to work whistling the theme from Hill Street Blues.’

  Stella held Callie’s gaze for a few seconds. Then both women burst out laughing.

  ‘Aye, and have a wee bit of hochmagandy with Ewan McGregor while you’re about it, eh?’ Callie asked, when she’d caught her breath.

  ‘Nah. Tom Hardy, though. I wouldn’t kick him out of bed for eating crackers.’

  Trading their ‘hot picks’, Stella and Callie finished their drinks and left the pub.

  The heat of the day was still radiating off the pavements, but a breeze had sprung up, blowing up Whitehall and across Trafalgar Square. Callie turned to Stella. ‘Want a lift home? I’ll give Bash a call.’

  Kamal ‘Bash’ Bashir was Callie’s driver. He’d been driving her around for four years now. His fanatical loyalty to his boss was the stuff of legend at Paddington Green. He’d once floored three Occupy protesters who were converging on Callie after she’d attended a meeting with bankers in Canary Wharf.

  ‘Yes, please. I’ll leave my bike at the station tonight.’

  Stella offered Callie an ironic salute from the pavement, then turned and let herself into her building. She paused at the mailboxes and opened her own. It contained a voter registration card from the London Assembly and a piece of junk mail advertising gold coins.

  Inside her flat, she dumped her murder bag in the hall and went through to the kitchen, opening a beer from the fridge and fishing out a takeaway menu from the sheaf tucked in amongst her cookbooks.

  One of the books leaned out as she extracted the glossy, brightly coloured menus. A Taste of Sicily. She and Richard had bought it the week after they’d returned from their holiday on the roasting hot island.

  She smiled at the memory of their attempts to recreate the local dishes they’d gorged themselves on during their two weeks in Taormina. They’d come to grief with a spectacularly fiery chilli and lemon pasta with baby octopus that had them both weeping with pain from the unfamiliar little chillies they’d found in a deli in Soho.

  Still smiling, she put the menus back and reached for a butcher-striped apron hanging on a hook screwed to the back of the kitchen door.

  Ten minutes later, she was stirring a chopped onion, a mashed up clove of garlic and a finely-shredded red chilli in some butter, white wine and olive oil, while spaghetti rolled and tumbled in a pan of salted water.

  She sat down at the kitchen table to eat with a second beer, this time poured into a glass. The flavours of the spaghetti dish sent her mind spiralling back to the early years of her marriage to Richard, and then the arrival of Lola, their beautiful baby. So instead of reading reports or reviewing evidence, she stared at the collage of photos she’d made a few years earlier, then framed and hung on the wall to the left of the window.

  In the photos, Lola was never older than five months. Dressed in outfits that indicated the two seasons she’d enjoyed, winter and spring, Lola beamed out of the pictures, or stared with that wide-eyed, bewildered, slightly alien look they’d called her ‘why is this happening?’ expression.

  Stella sighed. She had managed, with a great deal of violent retribution and an equally substantial amount of professional help, to grow a protective membrane around her memories of Lola and Richard, and her life before the evil that was Pro Patria Mori tore her family apart. But still, it hurt.

  Then her force-issued phone rang. She glanced at the caller ID. NDNAD. Her stomach fizzed with anticipation. This was the call she’d been waiting for: the National DNA Database, more properly known as the UK National Criminal Intelligence DNA Database.

  ‘Stella Cole.’

  ‘Evening, DCI Cole. Prue Brundage here, NDNAD. I’ve got the results of your samples here. You sent three, yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The sample
from the blood on the rope matched that from the victim’s blood supplied by the pathologist. Niamh Connolly. The epithelial sample is unidentified, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Male or female?’

  ‘According to the standard amelogenin test, your unsub is a male.’

  ‘And the third?’

  ‘From the semen on the bed linen and pyjama trousers. They matched the sample provided by the victim’s husband, Jerry Connolly.’

  ‘OK, thanks. Email me the report as normal, please.’

  Having ended the call, Stella sat back in her chair. Knowing the killer was a male hardly advanced the investigation. But it was better than nothing.

  Then she slammed her palm down on the table. No! It wasn’t better than nothing. It was nothing. All the second sample proved was that a man had handled the rope. But that could just as easily have meant a sales assistant at Sherborne Ropes was the killer. Hell, it could have been Arthur Sherborne himself.

  45

  THURSDAY 23RD AUGUST 7.25 A.M.

  Cam looked down at her laptop. She’d entered the addresses of all four rope suppliers into Google Maps and was staring disconsolately at the calculated journey time for the four hundred and thirty two-mile round trip. She called Stella.

  ‘Morning, Cam, what’s up?’

  ‘Morning, boss. It’s my ropey road trip. Is there any money for an overnight? Only there’s nearly nine hours’ driving just to get to each rope supplier.’

  She heard the answer before Stella gave it. Didn’t blame the boss. God knew, she was under the cosh already.

  ‘I’d love to say yes, Cam, but the truth is every penny I spend on this investigation is being scrutinised by the bean counters like it was a drug dealer’s deposit account. I’m putting in so many requests to Callie for experts, forensics, well, you know what it’s like. Look, just, see how you go. If you get up to Halifax and you’re too knackered to feel safe driving back, give me a call. I’ll try to sort something out for you.’

  ‘OK, no problem. Thanks, boss. I’m going to leave now. I’ll call in if I get anything worth telling you before tomorrow’s briefing.’

  The call ended, Cam plugged the route into her phone. Brixton to Whitechapel, to Cambridge, to Grantham, to Halifax, then back home. Slurping down the rest of her mug of coffee and carrying her second slice of toast in her mouth, she grabbed her car keys and headed out.

  Thirty minutes later, she pulled up outside Burslem Street Ropeworks in Whitechapel. Her Honda Civic Type R was perfect for zipping through urban traffic and Cam wasn’t shy about using the throttle and the horn to get where she wanted to. Noticing that the green space facing the loading bay door was called Rope Walk Gardens, she stepped through the wicket and into the yard.

  The visit yielded nothing useful – they had only ever sold one set of ropes with black and gold sallies, and that was to an African evangelical church in 2002. The sales manager produced all the shipping documents to prove conclusively that the rope had left the UK. Although he did explain that the park opposite had got its name from the trade his firm still practised.

  ‘They used to braid the ropes by walking them out with a machine that twisted the strands together,’ he told her, in the sort of voice she’d always associated with teachers.

  46

  THURSDAY 23RD AUGUST 8.30 A.M.

  BROCKWELL PARK, SOUTHEAST LONDON

  Habits of a Lifetime had catapulted its star, Sister Moira Lowney, from obscurity to the glare of the spotlights, as the British public took her to their hearts.

  After the reality show’s first few episodes had aired, the invitations to speak at public events and appear on chat shows and televised debates had started, first as a trickle, then a flood. The show’s producer professed himself baffled, but delighted, that a programme about an order of nuns could have become the surprise hit of the summer season.

  A self-described ‘progressive’, Sister Moira espoused liberal views on many of the moral issues of the day that infuriated those within the Church who cleaved to a more conservative line.

  She also practised as a psychotherapist, offering succour to those whose suffering she felt she could relieve through a personal blend of Christian teaching, Jungian psychoanalysis and female mysticism.

  The Carmelite Order of the Unified Spirit, over which Moira presided as Mother Superior, owned an acre of land on the outskirts of Brockwell Park, a southeast London suburb. In the eighteenth century a silk merchant had left the land to the nuns in his will. It offered plenty of places to film and a diverse cast of nuns, staff and patients, who were free to come and go as they chose.

  The film crew had just left her first-floor office to film elsewhere in the community. Moira consulted her desk diary. Just one morning appointment and then nothing until lunch at 1.00 p.m., after which she was due to be filmed travelling to the food bank.

  MJ Fox. 9.00 a.m.

  ‘Excellent!’ she said aloud. ‘I can finish my article in peace.’ She looked up at the ornately plastered ceiling rose, mouthing ‘thank-you’ and smiling.

  MJ had called her a week earlier claiming, like many of her newer clients, to be a fan of the show. Sister Moira didn’t mind that her fame – or ‘notoriety’ as she would jokingly refer to her raised profile – drew in those needing her help. She saw the TV show as a conduit. As something ordained. Other therapists advertised on the internet, or linked up with GPs’ surgeries. She had Habits of a Lifetime. What mattered was that she could help.

  Bending her head and closing her eyes, she placed the palms of her hands together and prayed.

  ‘Dear God. Please move through me, your humble servant, to help MJ. Amen.’

  She left her eyes closed a while, stilling her mind and allowing God to enter into the space she hoped she had created for Him.

  After a while, she opened them again, placed her palms down on the desk blotter in front of her and waited for her client to arrive. Outside her window, a blue tit fluttered, trying to find a perch beneath the eaves. She watched the little bird struggle against gravity, fatigue and the geometry of the building before finding rest.

  Ten minutes later, a tentative knock – two quiet taps, a gap, then one more – made her smile. Sometimes it seemed as if her clients had barely enough self-confidence to interact with an inanimate piece of wood, let alone a therapist.

  She rose from her chair, rounded her desk, crossed the room and admitted MJ to her sanctum sanctorium.

  ‘Please make yourself comfortable, MJ,’ she said, gesturing at a low armchair upholstered in red brocade before taking a second chair on the other side of the fireplace.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Between them, on a coffee table fashioned from a slice cut from one of the felled trees in the gardens, a box of tissues stood ready.

  Sister Moira didn’t believe in pussyfooting around. She liked to get straight to the heart of the matter. Occasionally, clients found her directness off-putting, but for the most part her approach yielded results. She spoke again.

  ‘What brought you to my door, MJ?’

  A sigh. A hand drawn down over the face. Slumped shoulders. Lack of eye contact. Sister Moira had seen them all before. A troubled soul, inching towards salvation but fearful of taking that first, vital step. She waited.

  ‘I feel so alone. As if I’m the only person who understands the world the way I do.’

  ‘Tell me, how do you understand the world?’

  ‘Oh. Well, I suppose I understand that cruelty is everywhere. That people torture each other while pretending to be kind. And that those who claim to hold the moral high ground are no better than the lowest, most-degraded forms of life.’

  ‘And when you say those who claim to hold the moral high ground, who are you thinking of?’

  ‘You know, the God Squad. Bible bashers. Tub-thumpers.’

  MJ’s voice had taken on a nasty edge and Sister Moira felt her pulse flicker.

  ‘Yet you chose me as your therapist?’

  ‘I chose
you. Just not as my therapist.’

  Realisation. The female police officer she’d seen on the TV news. The warning. She’d felt safe in ignoring it. Surely nobody would want to harm the star of Habits of a Lifetime?

  Oh, Moira. The sin of pride.

  At forty-seven, Moira was still physically fit. She was quick.

  But her killer was quicker.

  Sister Moira sprang out of her armchair. The killer followed her, arm swinging in, syringe plunging towards the gap between the nun’s white coif and the high collar of her grey tunic.

  47

  TRANSCRIPT FROM METROPOLITAN POLICE DIGITAL, VOICE-ACTIVATED RECORDER, EXHIBIT NUMBER FF/97683/SC6 3/4

  You’re must be feeling quite the fool, lying there? Maybe you’re not as clever as you think you are, eh? Don’t worry, the others were all pretty clever and look where it got them.

  Now, where was I? Oh, yes. The nun. In some ways, she didn’t deserve to die. I mean, she was pretty right-on in her attitudes. And she was working as a therapist. I bet half her clients had been abused by priests, so she was at least trying to restore some semblance of order. But still, a nun! I mean, if you get married to Jesus, I guess you have to expect a fair degree of pain in your life. Which, I have to say, she did get. Right at the end.

  After killing Niamh Connolly and Sarah Sharpe, I think it’s fair to say I had grown more confident in my abilities. You’d probably agree with me. So I gave her my speech before I drugged her. Yes, it was a risk, but I like to think it was a calculated one. I let her know who I was before I gave her the old chemical cosh. And I have to say, it was worth it to see the clear light of understanding dawn in her eyes.

  Ha! Which was, obviously, the last light of any kind that dawned in them. So, once she was pliable, I moved behind her, out of her eyeline, and I held her head tight against my hips. I took out the grapefruit knife, which, by the way, is such a useful tool. You never see them nowadays, do you? Maybe people don’t eat grapefruit anymore. Could that be it? It was a bit tricky, because I had to hold her head still and prise her eyelids apart with my left hand. But we got there in the end.