Little Boy Blue: DI Helen Grace 5 (A DI Helen Grace Thriller) (25 page)

Charlie held her hand to her mouth, sickened by the sight in front of her. It shouldn’t have made a difference to her that their third victim was a woman, but it did. Charlie could see the naked terror frozen on her pretty face, she could feel her desperation to breathe, to live, even as the oxygen in her lungs ran out. Her nostrils were dilated, her mouth wide open – one almost felt she might lurch back into life suddenly with one big breath. But her lifeless eyes, staring monotonously at the low ceiling, gave the lie to that.

She went by the professional name of Angelique, but her real name was Amy Fawcett. The flat was registered in her name and the imprint of her real life could be seen in framed photos hung up in her private space at the back of the flat. She was a musician and performance artist, who paid the bills by her extracurricular work at night. She didn’t appear to be a prostitute – there were no condoms in the flat, no history of arrest – in fact this work appeared to be a sideline, which made her death all the more tragic. There was a photo next to her bed of a young Amy gripping a viola awkwardly under her chin. It had brought tears to Charlie’s eyes when she first saw it, such was the guileless innocence and optimism of the image, and she’d had to absent herself from the team for
a few moments. She needed a break – she realized that now – but quite when and how she would get one was another matter.

They were still in the midst of a major investigation with no clear suspect in mind. Charlie had crunched the credit card details and sent them to Helen, but progress was incremental rather than revelatory and Charlie had the uneasy feeling that things were starting to go south. Normally, Helen would have been all over this, stalking the crime scene, bullying the forensics team and coordinating the uniformed officers on the street. But she was notable by her absence this morning. Charlie hadn’t been able to raise her on her landline or mobile. Was she sick? Surely not, Helen was
never
sick.

She had tried Sanderson, thinking it might be wise to defer to her greater experience, but she couldn’t get hold of her either and was told by one of the girls at the station that the DS was ‘unavailable’ and ‘on operational duties’. What those were Charlie couldn’t fathom – what could be more important than a triple murder?

It fell to Charlie then to marshall the troops. This should have felt exciting – calling the shots at a murder scene was the natural culmination of her career thus far. But the gnawing uncertainty that something bigger was going on, from which she was excluded, was sapping her energy and optimism. Equally debilitating was the sight in front of her – a beautiful and talented spirit whose life had been brutally cut short.

Helen hadn’t wanted to leave Angelique like that, but she’d had no choice. She could hardly call it in, so instead she had deliberately left the front door open. She had no doubt that one of Angelique’s neighbours would notice and investigate further. It wasn’t ideal and might delay her discovery for a few hours, but there was no other way. Helen couldn’t risk incriminating herself and, besides, she had work to do.

She had lowered the blind and turned off her phone. The whole of the kitchen table was covered in papers and files – the sum total of their work on these murders so far. She had the strong sense that they had been looking the wrong way the whole time, guided to do so by a killer who was organized, diligent and determined. Helen blamed herself – she had been wilfully blind to the growing evidence in front of her, burying her personal connection to the victims because it was inconvenient and unsettling. By retrieving her private phone, by summoning her to the third murder, the killer had let it be known that he would not let her involvement with Jake, Max and the unfortunate Angelique remain hidden.

Helen had a growing sense of who might be responsible, but she refused to let paranoia guide her thinking.
She had to follow the evidence, focusing on the choice of victims, the manner of their deaths and the way their killer had gone about organizing these murders. The devil was in the detail in these cases and Helen returned once more now to Charlie’s credit card searches.

This was their killer’s only weak point, the one area where he might show his hand. They now had a third victim to work with and two new instruments of torture – Japanese soft cord bondage ties and a ball gag – which had presumably been purchased for the occasion.

Helen knew that their perpetrator favoured online bondage retailers so, plugging into the police network via remote access, she started to run the searches. She eschewed the chain sex shops in favour of the more boutique operations. And before long she found what she was looking for – the necessary items paid for by a Geoffrey Plough, an 87-year-old former teacher, now living in Shirley. He was an unlikely recipient for S&M products, but more telling still was the fact that the delivery address did not match Plough’s. The items had instead been delivered to a vacant retail outlet in Woolston.

Helen didn’t hesitate now, emailing Plough’s bank and using her name and reputation in the subsequent phone call to persuade the manager to release the necessary information to her. Moments later, her home printer was spewing out Plough’s debit card activity for the last three months.

Helen was excited to see that the list of transactions was
fairly short. Whereas the other two credit card victims were keen shoppers, spending frequently at a large number of stores and sites, Plough was parsimonious. He presumably didn’t have much in the way of income, given his meagre spending, and he didn’t seem to shop online, preferring face-to-face transactions. He was also a man who didn’t like to go too far afield. Most of his purchases were made locally in Shirley and he was clearly a repeat customer. One location particularly stood out – one he seemed to visit daily. Wilkinson’s on Park Street.

Helen knew that Wilkinson’s had figured on the other fraud victims’ transaction lists and she pulled them from the files now. Her finger ran down one, then the next and sure enough both had been regular shoppers at the same store.

Which is where Helen was heading now. If she was right, the answer to this deadly game of riddles was waiting for her there.

Sanderson paced up and down, fervently wishing she were a smoker or a nail biter. But she was neither – never had been – so there was nothing to do but wait.

The divers had been in the lake for nearly twenty minutes and Sanderson had by now got used to the strange, repetitive rhythm of their work. Dive, resurface, discuss, dive, resurface, discuss … Each time they came back up, she was convinced that this would be the breakthrough she needed. And each time she saw that they were empty-handed another little part of her died.

This was a massive gamble on her part. She had gone over Gardam’s head straight to the Chief Constable. It had been hard enough to get him to agree to surveillance, it was harder still to get them to agree to the expense of a dive. But in the end the Chief Constable had agreed that there were grounds for concern and Sanderson’s decisiveness initially appeared to have paid dividends. Helen Grace had had a five-person team on her as she made her way across Southampton Common. They had lost her initially as she disappeared in the depths of the woods, but a pair of young officers posing as lovers had picked her up again a little later on, as she emerged back on to open ground.

Sanderson had been beyond relieved at this news – she’d feared Helen was on to them and had deliberately lost her tail – and had radioed another member of the team to watch her from a safe distance. This officer had clearly seen Helen throw something in the lake and from then on Sanderson hadn’t stood still, petitioning the Chief Constable for a dive, detailing more people to the surveillance effort and drawing DS McAndrew into her confidence to run some further checks.

Standing by the side of the lake, a brisk autumnal wind whipping around her, she wondered whether she had made a mistake. What if the item that Helen had discarded was something else entirely, something personal and unrelated to the case or, worse than that, merely a piece of rubbish. She shuddered at the thought of how she would explain that to her paymasters.

A shout made her look up. One of the divers was signalling that he’d found something and was returning to the shore. Sanderson set off towards him and moments later she was in possession of a mobile phone, neatly encased in an evidence bag. She didn’t recognize it but it could be Helen’s – there was a lot they didn’t know about her boss, it appeared. Slipping on gloves, she opened the back of the phone, but there was no SIM card inside. Sealing the bag, Sanderson now pulled her phone from her pocket and called McAndrew – even without the SIM card there was lots they could do with the phone’s memory, the serial number and so on. Concluding her call, she handed it to a colleague to ferry back to Southampton Central and resumed her position
on the edge of the lake, hopeful that there might yet be more discoveries.

They were inching forward, but painfully slowly and Sanderson wondered how long it would be before Helen smelt a rat. Time was ticking and Sanderson knew her case against Helen would have to be bulletproof before she made her move. If she fudged the execution or, worse still, was just plain wrong, it wouldn’t be Helen’s neck on the block – it would be hers.

‘Check again.’

Helen virtually barked her order at the startled manager. Peter Banyard, the new manager of the Park Street Wilkinson’s, was not used to dealing with police officers, but he knew bad manners when he saw them and bridled at the request.

‘I’m more than happy to check again, Inspector, but I can assure you that this is the complete list of all our employees.’

Helen ran her eye down them again. Jeff Armstrong, Terry Slater, Joanne Hinton, Anne Duggan, Ian McGregor … There was nobody here she recognized, no one who might be relevant.

‘Could these names be fake?’

‘Of course not,’ the aggrieved manager responded. ‘We check their ID, get National Insurance numbers, their bank details –’

‘How far does this list go back?’ Helen interrupted.

‘Eighteen months.’

‘Ok, I’ll need a list going back five years, everything you’ve got.’

‘Then I’ll need a warrant. I think we’ve already gone way beyond the call of duty –’

‘You’ll have one before the end of the day. Thank you for your time.’

Helen was already halfway out of the door, heading fast for the store exit. The fraud victims had all shopped here for several years, so it was possible their credit and debit card details had been garnered some time back. And yet … she had only known Paine for eighteen months and Angelique considerably less than that. This felt recent and Helen knew that she was missing something significant. Their killer was still out there, thinking, plotting, waiting for his moment to strike.

‘Amy Fawcett’s body is currently at the mortuary – Jim Grieves is working on a more accurate time of death –’

‘But …’ Sanderson interrupted, wishing McAndrew would get to the point.

‘But I’ve run the Automatic Number Plate Recognition and DI Grace’s bike was in the vicinity of Fawcett’s flat last night.’

‘What do you mean, “in the vicinity”?’

‘Three blocks away.’

‘What time is this?’

‘She heads into the docks area around nine p.m. And leaves via the same route shortly before ten.’

‘Ok, call Grieves on the hour every hour until he gives you a time of death. He won’t like it, but he’ll have to wear it.’

‘Sure thing.’

They were standing in Helen’s office. It was the least suspicious place for a private conference, but even so it felt profoundly odd to be talking about her while standing in her space.

‘Look, Ellie, if you feel uncomfortable doing this,’ Sanderson said quickly, ‘you just have to say –’

‘It’s ok. I’m fine. And you can rely on me to be dis—’

‘I know I can. Why do you think I asked you?’

This earnt a crooked smile from McAndrew, so Sanderson continued:

‘Have we got anything from the phone yet?’

‘Not much but we’re still doing most of the checks. The serial number shows that the phone was stolen five years ago. I’d imagine it’s been used with a bastardized SIM card since. The phone’s history has been deleted, I’m afraid, and the boys aren’t convinced that we’ll be able to retrieve it.’

‘What about prints?’

‘Only partials, unfortunately. It’s been rubbed down pretty well.’

‘Shit.’

‘That said,’ McAndrew added, ‘Amy Fawcett’s phone was still in her bag and the boys have had more luck there. She sent a text message last night to an unregistered mobile number – 07768 038687 – asking someone to meet her at her flat. We’ve looked at the phone contacts of Jake Elder and Max Paine – this is the only number that links all three. We’ve got Elder and Paine’s phone content going back years. The same unregistered user used this number to make appointments with them – just as he or she did with Fawcett.’

Now Sanderson smiled – the first time she’d done so in a while.

‘Ok, let’s run with that. Go back to the phone company – who is it?’

‘Lebara – a pay-as-you-go service.’

‘Go back to them and do a location search. Find out which mobile masts that phone has been pinging over
the last few weeks, months. I want to find out where that person has been.’

McAndrew nodded and headed off, leaving Sanderson to contemplate her next move. She had already received several phone calls from Emilia asking for progress, but she would have to wait. They didn’t yet have the smoking gun, but the case was steadily building and, if they were going to bring Helen in, there was something she needed to do first.

‘I’m sorry, I just don’t believe it.’

Charlie tried to keep her voice steady, but there was no hiding the emotion she felt.

‘What you
believe
isn’t really relevant. We have to be led by the evidence,’ Sanderson countered.

‘DI Grace is a highly decorated officer – she has more commendations to her name than the rest of us put together. Her integrity and professionalism have never been questioned –’

‘That’s not true. She was nearly kicked out of the force for shooting her own sister.’

‘She saved my life that day.’

‘And you’ve been peas in a pod ever since, haven’t you?’

Charlie was about to take Sanderson’s head off, but Gardam intervened, holding up his hand to silence her. He had called Charlie to his office as soon as Sanderson had brought these latest developments to him – Charlie was of equal rank and needed to be included. She was very grateful he had – Sanderson clearly wasn’t going to fight Helen’s corner.

‘This is difficult enough as it is,’ he said calmly. ‘Let’s try to keep personal issues out of it. So what have we got?’

‘We have a personal relationship with all of the victims –’ Sanderson began.

‘According to a journalist,’ Charlie countered.

‘Garanita has a number of photos showing DI Grace visiting Elder’s flat, plus I now have the testimony of a neighbour who saw her there on numerous occasions. Max Paine was brutally attacked nine months ago by a female police officer – a client who’d turned on him. Interestingly, Paine left a voicemail for Emilia Garanita hours before he was killed, saying he had important information relating to Jake Elder’s murder.’

This time Charlie said nothing.

‘We can place Grace’s bike near the scene of the latest murder at exactly the right time.
And
we believe we can link DI Grace to all the victims via an unregistered mobile phone she attempted to discard on Southampton Common last night.’

‘Come on, Sanderson, that’s speculation and you know it.’

‘We’ll see,’ Sanderson said confidently. ‘We also found a partial boot print near the crime scene at Paine’s flat. It’s a size six – DI Grace is a size six – and the pattern on the bottom is deep, wavy tread, reminiscent of soles you often find on biker boots. As you know, DI Grace –’

‘I get the picture. Can we place Grace at the scene of the first murder?’

‘Not yet.’

‘What about Paine and Fawcett’s flats?’

‘Still processing the evidence, sir,’ Sanderson replied, sounding slightly hesitant for the first time. ‘But the fact
remains that DI Grace has been evasive and secretive from the off. She has been behaving erratically and emotionally, making decisions and calls that the evidence just didn’t justify. The use of clingfilm on the third victim can’t be a coincidence, given her history. Perhaps she got bored of waiting for us to work it out.’

‘But why? Why would she do something like this?’ Charlie virtually shouted.

‘Maybe they blackmailed her and she killed them. Now she’s trying to cover her tracks, make it look like a serial killer, when actually she’s just covering her arse. Or maybe she’s just snapped, she’s been doing this stuff for so long and nobody has a closer affinity to this type of killer than her. After all, it runs in the famil—’

At this point, Sanderson’s phone rang out, loud and shrill. Apologizing to Gardam, she answered it and retreated. Charlie saw this as her opportunity and leapt in.

‘With the greatest of respect to my colleague, I really don’t think arresting DI Grace is the right thing to do. We need to evaluate these leads, for sure, but I don’t think an arrest – with all the attendant publicity – is a smart move.’

Gardam looked at her, but said nothing.

‘Look, I know hunches and personal relationships don’t count for much,’ Charlie acknowledged, ‘but I’ve known Helen Grace longer than anyone here and she just isn’t capable of these crimes. Her first and
only
priority is to save lives, to serve the ends of justice. Whatever may have happened in her personal life, she wouldn’t do this. She would never murder someone in cold blood, so
for everyone’s sake, let’s not rush into something we’ll regret. She is
innocent
, please believe me.’

Charlie finished her impassioned speech and now became aware of Sanderson standing by her side.

‘That was Meredith Walker at the lab,’ Sanderson said, failing to keep the note of triumph from her voice. ‘We’ve got a match, sir. A cigarette butt found in the corridor by the crime scene at the Torture Rooms has DI Grace’s DNA on it. She was there that night.’

Charlie felt physically winded, stunned by this development. And her discomfort increased still further as Gardam now turned to them both and said:

‘Ok. Let’s bring her in.’