The Dead Speak Ill Of The Living (The Dead Speak Paranormal Mysteries Book 1) (45 page)

  
“Yes, yes we can.”

  
“Oh thank the lord. It gets so lonely out here.” Dee noted this and turned to
make sure Joe wasn’t about to forge anymore connections. He was expecting this,
caught her eye and shook his head.

  
“Hello, Joan, I’m Detective Inspector Maquire…”

  
“You didn’t tell us you’d been promoted!”

  
Everyone looked at Maquire, who then appeared a bit embarrassed.

  
“I told Dee,” he explained.

  
“Must have slipped my mind” she hissed.

  
“Why are you here?” Joan asked.

  
“Could you give me a description of the man who killed you?”

  
“After all this time? Haven’t you caught him?”

  
“Therein lies the problem. We have two people both saying they killed you.”

  
“You’re very popular,” Joe added until everyone glared at him.

  
“Oh, he was six foot, easily, very well built, and had brown hair.”

  
“Brown hair?”

  
“Yes.”

  
“Spectacles?”

  
“No.”

  
“That’s very interesting.”

  
“And?” Dee prompted.

  
“Spall is a bespectacled ginger man. The person who confessed to me was a tall,
broad, brown haired man.”

  
“Then Spall lied.”

  
“Yes. And this opens up a whole can of shit.”

  
“What happens now?”

  
“I’m going to the prison, see if I can’t get him to confess, which would make
everything much easier. You, can you go look up the killings, and try to find
more ghosts, get more descriptions. Let’s see what we’re dealing with.”

  
Dee half smiled. “Knowing the answer before you ask the question. Always the
best way.”

  
Maquire didn’t like prisons, and he wasn’t alone. But he didn’t like them
because they were filled with people who hated him and who’d, at best, stab him
to death if he ever found himself in one. No, he didn’t like them because of
the claustrophobic sense you couldn’t get out, not just for a walk, even if all
hell broke loose. And as they admitted him through the doors and safety
precautions it was explained that, in the event of hell or even a similarly bad
riot, no one would negotiate him out.

  
Trapped again, he thought to himself, but he was soon waiting in a room while
Spall was fetched, and they’d even allowed him a cup of coffee in a
non-threatening cardboard cup. It tasted like oil and slurry, but it was still
coffee and he hadn’t slept that night.

  
Spall, however, very much had, and he was grinning when invited into the room.
Maquire had never seen him in real life, and was taken by how easily the wiry
man moved. You could imagine him being deadly, even if he had the face of
someone who could recite every episode of the Big Bang Theory.

  
“You’ve come to see little old me,” Spall grinned, and Maquire took an instant
dislike. The man is pleased to see me. He’s an attention whore, he wants police
here as often as possible. That could be important.

  
“I’ve come to speak to you about the murder of Joan Zager. In…”

  
“Oh yes, I remember her, how she choked as I tightened the belt around her
little neck.” Spall grinned, leering, watching Maquire for a reaction. So he
received one.

  
“I’ve received a tip off, which suggests someone else killed Zager.”

  
“What?” Was that genuine indignation?

  
“You heard. So we’re going to be looking into it. Closely. If you want to be
exonerated, now would be a good time to tell us all about it.”

  
“I gave you a full description of that night. I killed her. I’ve never tried to
deny it.”

  
“So you are adamant you killed all those women?”

 
“And men!”

  
“Okay, all of them.”

  
“Should I have a lawyer here?”

  
“You don’t need a lawyer to tell me yes or no. Did you kill everyone you’ve
been convicted of?”

  
“Oh yes!”

  
Maquire nodded. So he lies about this. What else could he be lying about?

  
Maquire didn’t have to give the quartet any information from a police file, all
he needed to give them was one of the books on the subject, and he’d pulled the
most academically worthy out of a bookshop that morning. The question was, how
academically worthy was it really?

  
The team turned Dee’s third bedroom into an operations centre, with a map on
the wall pinned with each murder, scans of the victims, a large picture of Spall
himself from his TV court pomp, and post it notes filled with information. It
looked smart, it looked impressive, and when they finished they stepped back to
consider.

  
“I think we’ve done a great job,” Pohl concluded.

  
“Although,” and Nazir had to be the dissenting voice, “perhaps we should get
out there and find, I don’t know, the actual killers?”

  
“Learn to appreciate pure bureaucratic beauty,” Dee smirked.

  
“The thing I love about bureaucracy is how easy it is to get fake papers and
hide in it, not the six colours of post it notes and you pinning like it’s a
voodoo doll.”

  
“Spoilsport. Right, who’s driving?”

  
Joe bought the car to a halt, rain hammering off the windscreen.

  
“Are you sure this is it?” Nazir said, peering out of the windows and seeing
only offensive raindrops.

  
“Sat nav says yes, and I’m sure this is a ninety degree bend on the road.”

  
“Alright, that’s good enough.”

  
Joe now opened his door and some of the wetness struck him on the leg, but Dee
shouted “close the door!”

  
“What? We have to ask the ghosts…”

  
“Yes, we have to ask the ghosts, but why exactly do we have to get out of the
car? We can talk in here, they’re ethereal or what have you. Us getting wet
doesn’t make a difference.” Dee was adamant.

  
“But it’s polite!” Joe protested.

  
“Polite? They’re dead Joe.”

  
“But still thinking.”

  
“To be fair,” Pohl added from the back, “it is very, very wet out there.”

  
“It’s wetter than a paedo at a child’s beauty contest.”

  
“And that Nazir is why you don’t write for a living.”

  
“All right, we’ll do it in here, pass the machine, careful, don’t knock your
eye out, okay.” The machine was turned on. “Is anyone there?” Silence.
“Anyone?” Still silence.

  
“Shit, no ghost,” Dee concluded.

  
“Final chance,” Joe said.

  
“Wait, wait, sorry, you’re not some of those tourists are you?”

  
Everyone looked at the box and the voice. “Tourists?”

  
“Yes, sickos who go to all the murder scenes, take pictures. Can you believe
one group even posed like they found me! And they found me showing my pants!”

  
“So you’re definitely Cara O’Conner?”

  
“Yes. And you are?”

  
“Investigating cold case murders with our new technology.”

  
“Good. So I give you a description of the killer and an account of my movements
that night?”

  
“Oh yes,” Dee said, pulling out her recorder. Cara filled the next twenty
minutes with a detailed account, the sort of thing you prepare when you’ve had
years stuck on your murder site. Then she got to the man who’d done it.

  
“Six foot six, Nordic, blonde, real Nazi type.”

  
“So he definitely wasn’t ginger?”

  
“No, not at all, why would he be ginger?”

   
Dee decided to tell the truth. “Well, before we came along, the man in prison
for killing you was ginger and definitely not six foot six.”

  
“Oh. Well they cocked that right up.”

  
“Yes, but the question is how?”

  
“So will you find him?”

 
“We work with the police Cara; and we promise you they will attack this like
never before.”

  
Nazir knew not to make a smutty comment about Maquire and Dee. He didn’t want
to have to walk home.

  
This time the car pulled up and it was dry, sunny and beautiful. Dee attributed
this to her driving skills. They were on a woodland track, but the body had
just been dumped in a ditch to the side. A ditch which was now filled with
plants.

  
“Strange to think isn’t it,” Pohl began, “that somebody was killed and left in
this place of natural power.”

  
“Don’t get all ley lines on me mother,” Dee smiled.

  
“I mean the real power of nature, the awe, the intricate network of forces.”

  
“No more David Attenborough for you.”

  
“Shall I switch on?”

  
“Yes Joe, yes.”

  
“Hello, is anybody there?”

  
“Why have you stopped?” The voice was clearly annoyed. “This is my part of the
woods. Go away.”

  
“Are you Nick Dolan?”

  
“Yes, how did you know?”

  
“We’re looking for you.”

  
“Well bugger off!”

  
Dee had a hand to her head. Sighing, she explained “we’re looking for your
murderer. I don’t suppose you can give us a description?”

  
“No, I can give you a name. I know exactly who the bugger was.”

  
“Well that’s handy,” Nazir conceded.

  
“It wasn’t Ralph Spall was it?”

  
“No young man it wasn’t. It was the bastard who pinched my wife.”

  
“I see a common theme,” Pohl concluded.

  
“And you have a name?”

  
“I can give you an address so you can go round and kick him in the cock.”

  
“That would be very helpful. Although we can’t promise we’ll do that, we will
make sure the police re-examine your case.”

  
“What? They got that wrong as well did they? I blame Thatcher for…”

  
“Just turn him off,” Dee commanded.

  
Everyone was holding a bowl of Chinese food sourced from the marvellous place
round the corner, and this included Maquire, who Dee had let cross her
threshold again with all the reluctance of a virgin inviting in a vampire.
Nazir had organised food, and the Inspector was taken up to the operations
room.

 
“This is very impressive,” Maquire said.

  
“Thank you,” Pohl replied, “we took care to get it as organised and useful as
possible.”

  
“Oh, sorry, I meant the food.”

  
“You’ve got their special Chinese Style Duck, simple but lovely” Joe explained.

  
“It is…” then he saw Pohl, “but the work you’ve put into that wall is
excellent. We could do with hiring you.” Didn’t do to piss everyone off.

  
“Thanks,” Pohl grudgingly conceded.

  
“So what did Spall say?” Joe asked.

  
“Said he’d done everyone. Was most keen to stress it. But you’ve discovered…”

  
“We’ve been to six of the murder sites, and spoken to four ghosts. All gave
descriptions of people who definitely weren’t Ralph Spall. So we’d conclude,
from our end, that he’s lying about a shitload of these.”

  
“I agree with you Joe, with all of you, he’s lying. Probably about a lot of
them.”

  
“Why would he do that?” Dee asked.

  
“Have you seen him on television? He loves this court case being in the news.
Loves the attention. And when I saw him, saw his face, I think he loves being a
serial killer too. But no one pays attention if you kill two or three hookers,
not a month later. So somehow he claimed all these very real murders as his
own, and he became famous.”

  
“What a toss sock” Joe exclaimed.

  
“Do people actually use those?”

  
“Focus Nazir, focus” Dee said.

  
Maquire was thinking out loud. “He wants them to be his because he won’t deny
them. But he didn’t actually do them.”

  
“What do you do now?” Dee asked.

  
Maquire tilted his head at the wall. “That murder there, why is there an
address and a name on it?”

  
“The deceased knew who killed him. The marvellously titled Tom Kipper.”

  
“Kipper?”

  
“Yes.”

  
“Sure he wasn’t having you on?”

  
“He’s still in the phone book at the address we were given.”

  
“Oh really…now that’s very interesting.”

  
“What are you thinking?”

  
“I might go pay Mr Kipper a visit.”