by M K Farrar
He plucked one off the shelf and added it to her total. She quickly paid and grabbed the items and stuffed them in her bag. Keeping her head down, she hurried back out of the shop.
Her tiny flat was right around the corner.
She used her key to unlock the front door and stepped inside. It opened straight onto the living area of the flat. Calling it a flat was probably a misnomer. The place was little more than a glorified bedsit. Admittedly, she had a long stride, but she could walk from one end of the property to the other in as few as ten steps. Once upon a time, it would have probably been just one room, but the owner had put up a stud wall between what made up the kitchen and living area, and the bedroom at the back. The only way to access the bathroom was through the bedroom, and the bathroom was barely more than cupboard size. Black mould crept over the ceiling because of the lack of ventilation, and no matter how many times Clara had wiped it down with bleach, it always returned.
A breakfast bar separated the tiny kitchenette from the narrow spot where she had her sofa and television. She carried her groceries over to it and pulled them out onto the side. It was after three now, which seemed like an okay-ish time to have her first drink. She took down a glass from the cupboard and poured herself a finger of vodka. Downing it in one, she poured another.
The warmth of the alcohol worked its way through her veins, blurring her worries and anxieties at the edges.
It was the loneliness that was the worst part, the feeling that there was no one out there she could turn to. She hadn’t always felt this way. When she’d been younger, it had just been her and her dad. She’d helped out with his business, working side by side with him, adoring every moment they spent together. Her mother had died when she was about five, and she barely remembered her, just fleeting moments that she wasn’t sure were even real memories rather than things she’d been told about so often that she’d pictured them in her head, or perhaps had been shown photographs or old video clips and formed them into memories instead. She always found it strange when people acted sorry for her when she mentioned her mother dying at such a young age. Maybe she had missed out on a mother’s love, but she didn’t feel like she was ever missing something from her life. Her dad had been both mother and father. It was just the two of them, and she liked it that way. She’d never wanted to share him with anyone.
She carried it over to the sofa and sat, drawing her feet up under her body. Her thoughts went to the homeless man who hadn’t shown up for lunch that day, Kyle. Kyle was one of their younger regulars, and he had issues with drugs and drink.
She had no idea if he was okay or not. Sometimes people on the streets just vanished. Often, the names they gave the people they knew weren’t even the right ones, and it was rare that someone shared a surname. Plenty ended up on the streets because they wanted to vanish, and the last thing they wanted was someone from their old lives poking around. The police wouldn’t care either. They didn’t have the resources to waste on one possibly missing homeless man. They’d say he was an adult and free to come and go as he pleased. Maybe he’d even returned home—it was impossible to say. But the streets were a dangerous place, and even if harm didn’t come to them, sometimes they brought harm on themselves, through drug overdoses or suicides.
Clara finished her drink and got up for another. The hours stretched on ahead of her, yet another night alone and with no one to talk to. The alcohol had given her a little extra confidence that she didn’t normally possess. Maybe she should take a quick shower and put on something that showed off her legs—easily her best asset—and head into the city. She could find an anonymous bar, and an anonymous man who perhaps was a few drinks worse for wear and figured he’d rather put his bets on someone who paid him some attention than risk not having anyone to take home at the end of the evening.
It would ease the loneliness, if only for one night.
Chapter Four
Ryan took a gulp of his almost cold coffee, grimaced, and checked his watch. It was getting late.
It had taken another eleven hours of searching before five more body parts had been found. They hadn’t ruled out there being more, but they also had to consider that not all the body parts had been dumped into the river—some may have been disposed of in different locations. Perhaps whoever had been getting rid of them had been disturbed? Or maybe it had been strategic and only a few parts had been left in the river, so they’d be less likely to be either found or identified if they were. Then again, they could have just been washed out to sea and become food for the fishes.
There was nothing more they could do at the scene, so he and Mallory had headed back into the office where he brought his DCI, Mandy Hirst, up to speed on the events of the day. He called a briefing with his team to make sure each detective knew what actions they needed to work on the following day. Though his sergeant was his right-hand man—or woman—he relied on his detective constables to deal with many of the more time-consuming points of a case. Being a detective might sound glamorous to an outsider, but it involved hours and hours of sometimes mind-numbing research, going through files and making phone calls, trying to track people down.
Ryan addressed his team. “I know it’s getting late, but thank you for staying, everyone. I want to make sure we can jump straight onto this first thing tomorrow.”
Photographs of each of the body parts were attached to a board on the wall, together with a map of the park and the river with pins on each spot where each part was found. A line was drawn correlating the photograph of each part to its location.
“At approximately nine-thirty this morning, a severed arm was found by two fishermen in Conham River Park. Once search teams were brought in, another four body parts were also located—another arm, which we believe to belong to a second victim, two legs, and a lower torso. Each of the body parts were wrapped in supermarket carrier bags and weighted down with rocks from the river. The first bag had split open, and no rock was found inside it, so that’s most likely why the fisherman was able to catch it as it started to float. Several of the larger parts were found in the middle of the river, where it was deeper.” Ryan paused for a moment and looked around at the room full of detectives, giving them a second to let things sink in before he continued.
“It’s unlikely the victims had been murdered at the park, and instead were killed elsewhere and then the body parts transported to the river. That means it’s most likely the perpetrator used a vehicle to get to the park.” He pointed at the map on the wall. “The river wraps around one side of the park in a horseshoe shape. That side of the river is only accessible through the park, with only one road and a carpark giving access to it. The other side of the river is more highly populated, with a housing estate bordering onto it which makes access far harder.”
“Perhaps the killer owns one of those houses and was able to dump the bodies from his back garden?” DC Shonda Dawson suggested.
Ryan nodded at the constable who was in her thirties and wore her afro hair in tight braids. “Yes, it’s a possibility, or someone who had access to those houses. A neighbourhood canvas was done at the scene, but I want one of our team to link in with the uniformed officers there. I want to know if anyone has seen anything or anyone unusual hanging around over the past couple of weeks. I’d say it’s more likely the body parts were dumped from the park side of the river, but we can’t rule anything out at this stage. There are also a couple of businesses along that side of the river, a pump house and a rowing club. They might both have CCTV, which we’ll need to access.” He selected two of his DCs for that job. “Shonda and Linda, can I put you both onto that?”
DC Linda Quinn was in her fifties and had been in the job for years. Shonda Dawson was newer to the role, but both women were steadfast and capable.
“Dev,” he looked to DC Dev Kharral who was jotting things down in his notebook, “can you track down any CCTV from the area?”
Dev stopped writing for a moment. “On it, boss.”
The CCTV
was going to take some long man hours to get through, and they didn’t even know they’d get anything from it. That was part of the job, however, no matter how tedious.
That they didn’t have an exact time that the bodies had been dumped made it harder for them to know when to check CCTV cameras as well. They’d be looking for anything suspicious over days and weeks, which was a big drain on their resources. Ryan wanted to assume whoever had done this had dumped the bodies during the hours of darkness, so as not to be seen, but even that wasn’t for certain. The park was well populated during the day, and someone throwing carrier bags into the river wouldn’t have gone down well. Littering was highly frowned upon these days. Even though no one would have known what the bags contained, he suspected the killer would have been confronted by a considerately minded person if they’d spotted them throwing bags into the river. Again, that didn’t mean anything for sure, though.
“Are there any experts in river tides and flows who we can use to get an estimate on how far the body parts might have moved from their original positions?” Mallory suggested. “If we can get someone to confirm that the strength of the tide is only strong enough to move something the weight of an arm a certain distance, then it’ll give us a better idea of not only our search area, but also for surveillance.”
There was no way of knowing at which point the pieces of the bodies had been thrown into the river. Though the river flowed into the Bristol Channel, it was also tidal, so when the tide was high, the water would flow in the opposite direction, pushing it farther inland. That made things difficult for them, because they wouldn’t know if the body parts were more likely to have been pushed upstream or downstream, or if they hadn’t moved at all and had simply rested on the bottom of the riverbed until they’d been found.
“Bristol University might have someone,” DC Craig Penn advised.
Ryan nodded. “Good thinking.”
Mallory chipped in, “There’s also the Environment Agency. Don’t they monitor the river levels at certain points in case of floods?”
“Yes, excellent. Craig, can you look into that. The more we know about the workings of the river, the better we’re going to be able to narrow down the location the killer used to dump the body parts.”
“They might not have all been dumped at the same place,” Mallory said. “For all we know, they might have scattered the parts as they went.”
“Whoever dumped the bigger parts must have carried them out to the middle of the river, so they either got wet or they used a boat.”
“Or they’d been thrown in and the river carried them to the deeper parts where they settled on the bottom,” she said.
Ryan rubbed his fingers over his lips. “Good point. That’s why we need an expert in this kind of thing. I want to know how things move through a river.”
The body parts had been taken to the mortuary where they would be examined by the pathologist. At a guess, Ryan assumed they had at least two different bodies, but there was a possibility the parts had come from more than two people. The park had been completely shut off to the public, and uniformed police were conducting a search for the rest of the bodies, but he wasn’t hopeful. They could be anywhere. The killer might have even kept certain parts as mementos.
In this case, it was going to be the size of the area they needed to cover that was going to give them the biggest headache. The stretch of the river that ran through the park was forty-five minutes long on foot, but if someone wanted to, they could walk all the way to Bath. He had to assume the body parts had been dumped somewhere along that stretch, or else it would have been unlikely that so many had drifted down from farther upstream, but something being unlikely didn’t rule it out completely.
“Hopefully, the forensics and post-mortem reports will give us more to go on, but for the time being, go home, get a good night’s sleep, and we’ll hit the ground running first thing tomorrow.”
Everyone rose from their seats, heading back to their desks to finish up what they were doing, or gathering their belongings.
“You fancy a quick drink, boss?” Mallory asked, jerking her head towards the door.
“Nah, I’d better not. I want to get an early start tomorrow, especially if there are developments overnight.”
She raised her fine black eyebrows. “It’s been a while.”
“Yeah, I know. I’ve just got...stuff on.”
“Maybe next time,” she offered with a smile.
“Absolutely,” he lied.
He didn’t want to go out for a drink because then it would throw off his evening routine. It was different if he needed to stay out because of work, but the idea of willingly choosing to alter how he’d behave when he got home chilled him with unease.
Besides, Mallory was a good decade younger than him and could probably still go out clubbing and be back in work the following morning, raring to go. More recently, he was finding that even if he got to bed an hour later than normal, he was more tired the next day. God, he was getting old. In another few years, he’d be approaching fifty. The thought was beyond depressing, especially considering how little he had to show for it. His heart clenched, the pang of sorrow striking him afresh.
Things weren’t supposed to be this way. Only a few years ago, he’d been on the right path—doing well with his career, a beautiful wife and daughter at home—but then a tragedy had struck down everything in his life like a bowling ball at a set of pins. Okay, maybe if he was really honest with himself, things weren’t exactly perfect even then. His wife, Donna, resented the amount of time he spent at work, and things had been strained between them for some time. When they’d been living together, he’d often found himself deliberately avoiding her, coming home late and sleeping in the spare room, using the excuse that he didn’t want to disturb her, and then getting up early again the following morning. It had been a cowardly thing to do really, but he hadn’t wanted everything to blow up, and he’d been sure that all it would have taken was a bit too much time in each other’s company for that to have happened.
As it was, it had been an outside force that had caused their relationship to finally shatter. Ryan had never been the same since. Though, being in the job he did, he knew bad things happened to good people all the time, it had still torn the solidity of the world out from under his feet. His need to control things—which had been bad to start with—had worsened over time, and now he clung to whatever routines he could to try to keep hold of what little stability remained.
RYAN PARKED HIS CAR on the street outside his building and used his key to open the front door. There were two flats on the ground floor—his and Mrs Furst’s, who, though in her eighties, remained sharp upstairs and religiously walked three miles every day, and never held back on telling him exactly what she thought—and another two with identical layouts above. He didn’t know much about his upstairs neighbours except that they liked to play music until the early hours of the morning, the bass thudding through his ceiling, though not loudly enough for him to be able to complain about it.
Before stepping inside, he paused, something niggling at his mind. Without bothering to shut the front door again, he turned back to the car.
He checked he’d pressed the fob to lock the car door, and then checked the handle to make sure he’d done it. A nagging voice insisted that he’d hit the unlock button on the key fob instead of the locked one, and he repeated the process. He tightened his fist around the keys and forced himself to turn away, even though he knew that voice would continue to nag at him, telling him he needed to check it again. There were some days where he was stronger than that voice, but on other occasions it beat him completely and he’d find himself still standing there, ten minutes later, repeatedly checking and rechecking.
What was the worst that could happen even if he did forget to lock it? Someone might steal his car, but did that even matter? He was a detective—he could find out who did it. But even those rationalisations didn’t always work.
Ryan finally
entered his flat and threw down his car keys and took his wallet from his jacket pocket and stashed it on the side. He hung his jacket over the back of a chair at the two-seater table in the kitchen. He didn’t even know why he had two chairs in here, no one had ever sat in the second one. He opened the fridge to retrieve a microwave meal—lasagne tonight, he’d never been much one for cooking—punched a couple of holes in the top, and chucked it into the microwave. While it was turning on the plate inside, he opened a bottle of red wine and poured some into a stemless glass.
Carrying his wine with him, he wandered aimlessly through the small flat. He’d lived here for a couple of years now, but he struggled to think of it as home. Home was a place people had pets and family. This was just a place he ate and slept. He’d once lived in a decent detached three-bedroom house with its own garage, and now he lived in this shithole while his wife lived in their old house. She had a new man, too, and when he had a bad night, he’d lie awake, imagining his wife shagging her new bloke in their marital bed.
He didn’t have any family photos framed and displayed on his shelves. He’d put them out when he’d first moved into the one-bedroom flat, but he’d had to take them down again. He felt guilty about it, like it was a betrayal to his daughter’s memory by not having her face smiling out at him, but he just couldn’t handle the punch of pain every time he caught sight of it. In the end, he’d slipped the framed photographs into a drawer and only took them out when his memories grew fainter and he became fearful that he’d forget the details of her face—the gap-toothed smile, the freckle on her cheek, the ring of grey around her irises that had morphed into blue. It was too hard to be reminded every day, not that he ever really forgot.
The microwave pinged, signalling his food was ready. Using a tea towel, he took out the steaming tray and slid it onto a plate. He didn’t even bother to take it out of the plastic, figuring it would mean less washing up. He glanced at the single plate, glass, and fork. It wasn’t as though he had much to do to start with.
