Dead and Gone (9 page)

‘I spoke to the hospital soon after you left. They told me Kirby had been taken down to theatre for an investigative procedure because of massive internal injuries. They couldn’t tell me much more, but they said it would be a few hours before they’d know what exactly the problems were. I asked them to keep me informed. I got a call from the ward half an hour ago and they said he’d died on the operating table. Apparently the additional trauma of the procedure was too much. Either that or the injuries were too severe in the first place. They couldn’t be sure, and with what he’d done, I wasn’t really that interested, to be honest.’

‘I was talking to Jackie and the chief about him last night,’ Nash told her, ‘and we all agreed that it would probably be for the best if he didn’t pull through. I’ll nip across to HQ and bring Jackie up to speed on things, and then I’ll ring Lisa.’

‘I could do that if you want me to,’ Clara offered.

‘What, and drag you away from your reports? I wouldn’t dream of it.’

‘To be honest, Mike, I’ve almost finished them and there’s nothing else come in today that needs my attention. Uniform seems to be coping all right. The problem you have is you might not be able to raise Lisa. I needed to check something with her earlier and her phone seems to be dead. There are signal problems in the Gorton area.’

‘I hope she’s all right. As you’re about clear with the paperwork, would you do me a favour? Nip out to Gorton and check she’s OK. I know she reassured us this morning, but I don’t want to take a chance.’

‘No problem, Mike.’

The breakthrough came suddenly, with a blow from the sledgehammer that hardly differed from the countless previous ones. This time, however, the impact resulted in a large crack appearing, running from side to side. Levering with the pickaxe yielded no result, until a further hammer blow produced a second crack that ran at right angles to the first.

A short time later they had managed to remove almost all of the six-inch-deep concrete. ‘No wonder it took so much bloody shifting,’ one of them remarked. ‘I hope this effort turns out to be worthwhile.’

‘If nothing else it will help your fitness,’ Lisa told him.

After loosening the hard-packed earth below with the blade of the pickaxe, they stretched a length of tarpaulin on the floor, brought a pair of shovels from their van and set to work removing the soil. Aware that at any point they might make a discovery of some sort, they slowed down and worked more carefully now. A further fifteen minutes had passed, and they had gone down over two feet, without anything untoward coming to light. Lisa surveyed the pile of earth removed from the hole. She was on the point of calling a halt when the SOCO leader shone his torch into the hole. ‘There are a lot of worms in that soil,’ he remarked. ‘Makes you wonder what they find to feed on down there.’

Lisa was still pondering this statement when one of the diggers stopped work suddenly, straightened his back and stared down at where he’d been excavating. After a moment, he called to his superior. ‘Shine your torch here, will you?’

As the beam illuminated the hole, the digger bent down and smoothed the soil back with his hand. ‘I think you’d all better come and have a look at this.’

They moved forward to look. ‘Well, now we know what the worms found so attractive here. It wasn’t a false alarm after all,’ the senior officer said.

Seconds later they all jumped at the sound of a voice. They had been so intent on their discovery that none of them had heard the arrival of a car. ‘What are you doing in there?’ Clara demanded.

Lisa hastily explained.

‘Heavens! I dread to think what else this place is going to throw up. Does Mike know?’

‘Not yet. My phone’s playing up. We’ve only just made the discovery.’

‘Here,’ Clara said, offering her phone, ‘try mine.’

Lisa pressed the speed dial and waited.

‘Clara?’ Mike answered.

‘Sorry, Mike, it’s Lisa here. My phone’s on the blink. Clara’s lent me hers. She’s back here with me.’

‘Yes, I asked her to check in. Has she told you that Kirby died a couple of hours ago? I think when we have the results back from forensics the evidence will show that he murdered his wife, their children and her lover, so perhaps it’s the best outcome. Anyway, apart from tidying up loose ends and seeing to the paperwork, I guess that means it’s probably all over.’

‘No, Mike,’ Lisa contradicted him, ‘that’s why I was trying to phone you. It isn’t all over. Far from it.’

When Nash pulled up, he spotted DC Andrews, a slightly forlorn figure, walking to and fro on the parking space leading to the outbuilding. He immediately asked how she was feeling.

‘Strangely enough it didn’t affect me in the same way as yesterday.’

‘That’s a relief. Still not pleasant, though. Where are the boffins?’

‘As soon as we found the body I ordered them to stop work. I thought it best not to disturb what I assume to be another crime scene to avoid possible contamination. Clara’s in the garage with the SOCO lads, waiting for your instructions. They were muttering about the amount they had to do, until I reminded them they would be on overtime. They cheered up immensely after that. They sent me out for a breath of fresh air.’

‘That’s good work, Lisa. The first thing I’d better do is tell Mexican Pete and ask him to come, if Clara hasn’t done already.’

‘No, she hasn’t. She told me to contact you first.’

Nash took out his mobile. ‘Here goes.’

‘This should be a laugh a minute.’

Nash eyed Lisa. ‘You’ve got a strange sense of humour,’ he said as he waited for the call to be answered.

Ramirez was caustic in his response. ‘Another body?’

Nash explained that he would be required back at the holiday cottage.

‘You’ve really excelled yourself, haven’t you? You’ve got me bouncing around the county like a demented yo-yo, going from crime scene to crime scene. Why don’t you take a nice long holiday somewhere thousands of miles away? Six months would be ideal; then the rest of us could get some peace.’

‘Come off it, Professor, you’d be bored stiff within weeks. You’d be sending me text messages begging me to return.’

The pathologist’s reply was unrepeatable, even though it was in Spanish. Nash grinned. ‘I thought that as a doctor you would realize that what you’re suggesting is physically impossible.’ Nash ended the call, cutting off the flow of Castilian invective that followed. He looked across at Lisa. ‘I’d better take a quick look inside. Mexican Pete’s going to be a while before he gets here.’

‘He didn’t sound awfully happy.’

‘Don’t let that fool you. He’s never happier than when he’s got chance to insult me, or liken me to Dracula. You stay outside. I guess you’ve seen more than enough horrors,’ he said as he struggled into yet another paper suit. ‘I might decide to wear one
of these permanently; it would save me a lot of time.’

The interior of the workshop was much as Lisa had described it, but for the addition of the slabs of broken concrete stacked in uneven disorder at one end of the hole, and the pile of soil. Soil that would need sieving, Nash thought.

He stared down at the makeshift grave, his expression sombre. In a way, the cold-blooded nature of what he felt to be a premeditated crime affected him more deeply than the original murders he had been called to at the property. This was different; this was planned and executed in a ruthless, clinical way that lent it an extra degree of horror. Nash wondered about the motive and the identity of the victim. He had already discounted any connection to the other bodies. The difference was so much at odds with yesterday’s savage handiwork. This crime might never have been uncovered but for DC Andrews. Her intuition and persistence had ensured that the victim had been found, and might even be given the justice he or she deserved.

Two days later, Nash came from his office, a broad smile on his face, and briefed Mironova and Pearce. ‘I’ve just taken a call from the forensic lab. Case, or should I say cases, closed.’

‘You’ve got some results?’ Clara asked. ‘Is it the Kirby case?’

‘That and the Golden Bear. The fingerprints in the hotel room belong to Nigel Kirby, as do several fibres found at the scene; those same fibres were found on the bodies of Mrs Kirby and the children. The shirt removed from Kirby at Stark Ghyll after the crash was covered in blood; some of it was his, the majority of it belonged to Paul Jennings. Once the tech boys got to work on his car, they recovered a knife from the glovebox, which tested positive for blood from his wife. In the cottage, they found a second shirt which he had obviously worn when he killed his family.’

‘He wasn’t very careful, was he?’ commented Viv Pearce.

‘Why should he be? He wasn’t planning on hanging around to get caught,’ Mironova reminded him.

‘Perhaps it’s as well he didn’t survive the operation, then.
They love child-killers in prison.’

‘I still don’t understand why he felt he had to kill his children,’ Clara said, sadly.

‘I can answer that,’ Nash said. ‘One more piece of information I got was that the two younger children weren’t his; their DNA was a match to Paul Jennings. Perhaps Kirby’s wife taunted him with it and on top of everything else it would have been the last straw. One thing the professor did say was that the children hadn’t suffered; they had been drugged.’

‘One man’s actions affecting so many families,’ Viv added.

‘And I can’t imagine there will be many mourning his death either,’ Nash said. ‘However, we still have the body in the workshop. The first thing we need to establish is how long that corpse has been there. For that, we’re waiting on Mexican Pete. I’ll be attending the post-mortem, later this morning – yes, I know what you’re both thinking,’ he said, in response to their expressions, ‘another one. Still, it has to be done. At least I got yesterday off while he attended his meeting. Hopefully, he’ll give us a clue as to the dates we should be looking at and also some idea of how the person in that grave died. I can’t think it was accidental, or natural causes, unless someone wanted to continue claiming an allowance by pretending the person was still alive, and that seems highly unlikely.’

‘It’s been done before,’ Mironova pointed out.

‘Yes, but hardly for such a long time. The remains were almost skeletal, so I don’t think we’re looking at something that happened recently. That leads me to the next part, which is going to be the identification. What I suggest in the meantime is that we all concentrate on compiling reports as far as is possible and submitting them to Tom Pratt. Let’s get ahead of the game, because I’ve an idea we might get rather busy in the next week or two.’

Nash arrived at Netherdale General Hospital for the third time that week and made his way to the mortuary. He greeted Professor Ramirez and the post-mortem examination began.

‘I have good news for you,’ Professor Ramirez told him.

‘Please tell me. I’m not exactly overwhelmed with glad tidings at present. It has been quite a week.’

‘The victim is a woman; I suggest she was between twenty and forty years old. Cause of death: garrotting. Unfortunately, this lady’s teeth have been removed, which suggests the killer didn’t want her to be identified, even if she was found. I believe the removal was conducted after death.’

‘Can you estimate how long ago she was buried there?’

‘I’d say no less than two years and no more than five, but at present that’s all it is, a guess. I’ll need time to conduct further tests and get the results back from samples I’ll send off for analysis before I can be more definite, and even then I can’t give much in the way of certainties.’

‘Thank you, Professor; that is so comforting.’

‘If that’s comforted you, my other news should make you ecstatic. There is a possibility that we might be able to get DNA from the remains. It will take some time, and even longer to analyze it, and at this stage I can’t make any promises.’

‘You rarely do, Professor, and I’ll forego my ecstasy until I know one way or another.’

When he returned to his office, Mironova and Pearce were in the CID suite. He told them what the pathologist had said. ‘Given the time span we could be faced with a long list of potential victims and equally large number of suspects. First off, I want to know more about the owners of that cottage, and the letting agents involved in renting it out. Viv, start with the agents, will you; they must know who the owner is. At the same time, find out how long they’ve had the property on their books. If it’s more than eighteen months, they’ll have to provide us with the names and addresses of all the tenants they let it to from before. If we’re really lucky, they might have had the property in their portfolio for the whole of the period we’re interested in, which would save us more work.’

‘I doubt we’d be that lucky,’ Pearce commented gloomily.

‘Probably not, but we can always hope. I know it sounds like
a mammoth task. You’ll need help with all the information from the agents. I think you should ask Tom Pratt to collate the details as they come in, and then we can spot any that might be missing, or periods when the cottage was vacant. Of course,’ he added with a rueful smile, ‘the body could well have been interred during the winter, which would mean all that work would have been for nothing. However, it’s the sort of job that Tom will enjoy.’

Pearce looked slightly more cheerful, from which Mironova guessed that the bulk of the work would fall on their civilian support officer, former Superintendent, Tom Pratt. Boredom had prompted Tom’s return to work following early retirement caused by a heart attack some years earlier. His knowledge of the area and expertise were of great help to the team. ‘Tom’s going to be kept busy,’ she remarked with a wicked smile in Pearce’s direction.

Their attempt to obtain any information from the lettings agency was going to be delayed, as Pearce reported to Nash later the same afternoon. ‘The firm is a husband-and-wife affair. I spoke to the receptionist, who is a bit on the dim side, to put it mildly. She told me her boss and his wife run the business and they’re both on holiday until next week.’

‘Couldn’t the receptionist give you any information?’

‘Couldn’t or wouldn’t, take your pick. I tried several different approaches, but all I got was “You’ll have to speak to Mr or Mrs Baines when they get back from holiday.”’

‘Did you think about doing a Land Registry search on the property?’

‘I did, but it would have cost us, and it might take even longer before we get the results.’

‘OK, I suppose we’ll have to wait, but it’s frustrating, to put it mildly. However, if that poor woman has been buried as long as Mexican Pete thinks, I guess another week isn’t going to make a lot of difference.’

Much as Nash had predicted, there was a lull as the team waited for the forensic evidence to be sifted and analyzed. Nash was at
last able to brief Superintendent Fleming and the chief constable on the closure of the Jennings and Kirby deaths.

Gloria O’Donnell was relieved. ‘I suppose it will look good on the stats, although I can’t say it’s the sort of crime anyone wants on their patch. Well done, Mike.’

‘Actually, ma’am, we didn’t do much. The evidence was all there, it was SOCO who deserve any praise. They did all the work.’

‘What about the remains Lisa recovered from the workshop?’ Fleming asked.

‘The body is that of a woman aged between twenty and forty. That’s all we know at present. SOCO sifted the soil from the grave but that gave us nothing. There were no scraps of material, or fibres even, so we believe she was naked when she was put into that hole.’