When a Killer Strikes, page 11
Stood alone in the reception area of Harrowfield Police Station was a pale faced youth sat on a bench that was screwed down to the floor with thick metal bars. He was dressed in a dark blue hoodie and the same colour jeans.
The officers ushered him into a side interview room where they could speak to him privately.
Dylan introduced them both to him. ‘I’m Detective Inspector Jack Dylan heading the murder enquiry, and this is my deputy Detective Sergeant Vicky Hardacre. We have been told by our colleague at reception that you want to speak to us in respect of Patti’s murder?’
The youth with froggy green eyes sat in the wooden slatted chair, again bolted to the floor at the other side of the desk where Dylan and Vicky sat.
‘Yeah, it were me,’ he said fiddling with the toggles on his top. ‘I did the crime.’
There was a pregnant pause. ‘Did what crime?’ asked Dylan.
Again there was silence.
‘I know what you’re thinking, but it were me. I keep seeing her face so I had to come in to confess.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Elvis?’
‘Elvis Cooper?’ said Vicky.
Elvis stopped. He looked at Vicky with his unblinking, weird green eyes. ‘Yeah, you’re good,’ he said. He turned to face Dylan. ‘She’s good.’
‘You’ve been talking to some of the uniformed officers today who were making enquiries on Burford Avenue, haven’t you? Didn’t you also tell them you were called Robbie Williams?’
‘How did you know that?’ Elvis swallowed hard. ‘Okay, so I lied. That’s till this giant of a guy grabbed me round the neck and threatened me. And even when I told him my right name he still didn’t chuffin’ believe me. Wanker!’
‘How old are you, Elvis?’ Vicky’s brows furrowed.
‘Nineteen.’
‘Moving forward, we need to take a swab from you.’ Vicky inserted her hands into the plastic gloves. She stood and removed the swab from the packaging.
Elvis only had eyes for Vicky. He noticed tiny details, like the wrinkles around her eyes, and the red dry patches down the side of her nose. His lip trembled, the feeling spread up his arm, and slowly through his body.
Vicky stifled a giggle. ‘I promise. It doesn’t hurt,’ she said in a kindly way.
‘You want to put that earbud inside my gob?’ said Elvis opening his mouth, at Vicky’s request. She rolled the swab up and down, in circles, against the inside of his cheek before removing it. He watched her with interest as she opened the vial by twisting off the cap, popped the used swab inside and sealed the vial’s cap shut.
‘Now,’ she said sitting back opposite him. She rolled off her gloves. ‘You said you wanted to confess to a crime?’ Vicky read Elvis the caution.
‘Now, tell us what you’ve done,’ she said.
Elvis’s eyes fluttered. He shuffled around in his seat. ‘I did the girl in. Her that was in the papers.’
‘Okay, but I need you to tell me from the very beginning, exactly how you did it?’
He looked at both the officers perplexed faces, as if he was expected to give an account of his actions by way of a detailed confession. ‘I smashed her head in,’ he said.
‘When? When did you do it?’ Vicky continued as Elvis was directing his responses at her.
Elvis looked up into the corner of the room. His smile revealed his crooked, yellowing teeth. His attention returned to Vicky. ‘I followed her.’ A slow grin spread across his face, an eyebrow raised, his lips tightened. He turned his head back to the camera and ran his fingers through the hair above his ear and he feasted his eyes on the camera he had found there, once more.
‘Where did you follow her?’
‘Home.’
‘Where from?’
‘School.’
‘What she was wearing?’
‘What she always wears,’ he said with a glint in his eye. ‘I used to go t’same school as her, didn’t I?’
‘Okay then, so you followed her, then what?’
‘I followed her. I were talking to her… She didn’t answer me. She got to the door and tried to shut me out. That’s when I did it.’
‘Have you ever been in trouble with the police before?’ asked Dylan.
Elvis recoiled in his chair. ‘Just stealing mainly.’
‘Mainly? What does that mean?’
‘I got told off for having sex with a girl.’
Dylan sat up straight, tucked his tie inside his jacket and leaned in towards the table.
‘Told off, you mean you were given a caution? Was the girl under sixteen?’
‘Yeah, but it weren’t my fault. She told me she were sixteen.’
‘Is that it?’
‘Well, I were once cautioned for burglary.’
‘Is that it?’
Elvis nodded his head. ‘Think so.’ He frowned. ‘I can’t think of ought else I got caught for.’
‘Do you work?’
He sat up, puffed out his chest. ‘I’m doing work experience and my boss says I’m good.’
‘What’re you doing?’
‘Digging graves.’
‘And do you enjoy your work? Is that something you’d like to do full-time?’ said Vicky.
Elvis looked directly into her eyes. His flabby face was suddenly suffused with purple, spittle formed at the edges of his mouth. ‘Dead bodies don’t frighten me.’
‘Can you explain to us how you killed her, and how you knew she was dead?’ said Dylan.
‘I picked up a stone and smashed it on the top of her head. I knew she was dead. I’ve seen lots of dead bodies – up close and personal.’
* * *
‘What does the Tier 3 course tell you? Keep an open mind and don’t always accept the first thing that they tell you,’ said Vicky as she followed in Dylan’s footsteps down the corridor to the incident room.
‘And we have a DNA profile that will prove he didn’t do it,’ said Dylan. ‘Wasting police time is a serious offence. Get hold of his care worker and get them to come in to have a chat with us.’
‘It’s a sad state of affairs when you’ve got to admit to committing murder to be institutionalised to feel as if you belong. Years ago he’d have been sent to the gallows based on an admission like that, and the murderer would be free to murder again.’
‘On a positive note, it’s one less person to eliminate as we have his DNA. Which I’m certain will come back negative.’
‘That sure? By your own standards you’ll be baring your arse if it’s him.’
‘Not a problem,’ said Dylan.
Chapter Eleven
The results from Forensics came back in a slow, steady stream, all negative. Now added to the list was Malcolm Parkes, Patti’s coach, and, as expected, Elvis Cooper.
On another positive note, the purchase of The Station House was going through, and the building work required to make it habitable had been agreed. Jen had been the driving force and Dylan knew her well enough to know she was never more content than with a project on the go, and this was some project. It would be a long time before the old house was as comfortable as their present home. The rooms were smaller, there were no luxuries such as en suites, the heating wasn’t instant, there was no gas, a septic tank but, if his mum and dad could manage to live in it happily with five young children, then he was sure they could, too.
When work allowed, instead of reading bedtime stories to Maisy, Dylan had taken to reminiscing about his life at the house. Never before had Jen seen Maisy so eager to climb the stairs to bed. However true those stories were, as funny as Dylan relayed them, Jen didn’t know. There were many nooks and crannies for Jen and Maisy to yet explore and often Maisy would come home from a site visit with a treasure to behold for her daddy – an old railway ticket for a pram, a piece of crockery, a rusty tin she’d found laying around in the grounds – in the hope she’d found a boyhood token from which Dylan could invent a tale.
The moonrise ended an eighteen-hour shift for Dylan, and with Jen and Maisy up early and out of the house the next morning, he found himself home alone and eager to make it a productive morning. Today he would go back to the house – estate agent’s diary permitting. Mystifyingly, he didn’t feel a connection to the building nor the euphoria that Jen did about the move. Should he?
Dylan was pleasantly surprised that the present owner had begun to remove the clutter from the old station yard, which made the driveway to the house easier to access. He parked his car under the thirty-metre-tall English Oak where under its open canopy forest floor flowers grew in the spring, and where he also knew a few pet budgerigars had found their final resting place. He stepped out of his vehicle directly onto a blanket of shed-dry, brown leaves and a scattering of acorns – the tree was indeed over twenty-five years old to his knowledge.
He stood momentarily, slammed the car door, and looked skywards as an exodus of birds caused more leaves to fall on him like confetti. The woodpecker holes where he remembered bats roosting, could still be seen, and the log the tree had given up to his dad one Christmas for the table decoration, that Mum had adorned with mistletoe and holly, showed him its stump. He felt a stirring inside him. There was silence, real silence. A few steps, scuffling the leaves in childlike fashion, and he found himself standing under the wrap-around porch. This time he was encouraged inside by the low sun on his back. The worn key had been easily recognisable to him when the estate agent handed it over. Its curvature, decoration and size made it unique for the lock his father had fitted. Could this be the one he used to carry in his school satchel?
The door’s heaviness, and no doubt the rust on the hinges, made it resistant to opening, but nothing that a little nudge with a fisted hand didn’t rectify. Due to Natalie being off sick, it was trusting of the owners to allow him access alone, when the house sale had not yet completed and he was grateful for the time they had afforded him alone in the property. The house smelt of what it was: an old damp shell where human life had been extinct for some time, and day had turned to night without anything other than insects in occupancy. It was much darker within and he felt compelled to switch on the light that worked instantly this time round. The bulb in the centre of the room dangled on a wire from the ceiling that splayed a paltry glow on the faded yellow wallpaper peeling away from the wall in places. He shivered, his eyes drawn to the open fireplace and the logs that lay in its hearth, beckoning to be lit. There was something about that fireplace… something Dylan’s faded memory wouldn’t fully form in his mind. Looking down he saw a familiar grip-shaped dent in the wood – was the old tin bath below? Excitedly he knelt down and touched it hesitating, before hoisting the connected planks that made a door. A grave-sized vault was revealed, but the bath had gone. Dylan scoffed at himself for being sentimental but nonetheless felt a slight tinge of sadness.
The stairs were steeper, narrower than he remembered, the years in between spinning faster and faster with every step he took until finally he reached the top. HIs bedroom window gave him the light he needed and he walked towards it as though pulled by some magnetic force. Dylan stood at the door, his hand on the door jamb casting his eyes upwards to see a handful of nails embedded uselessly therein. The old paint felt brittle to his touch but there was no getting out of this room unheard if the door was shut as well he knew, the wood swelled it tight in the winter, and it rattled with the wind in the summer – hence why he and his brothers, on the odd occasion, had had to shimmy up and down the drainpipe outside into the ginnel below. Dylan chuckled at the thought of his backside hitting the stone flags. It was a far cry from the risk assessments he now had to do, and the protective gear his officers had to wear, just to walk up a ladder.
The sun’s rays revealed a dirty window. However, such was their strength they managed to light up the corner of the room where a nylon carpet had been torn from the grippers and the disintegrated foam backing had resorted to crumbling dust beneath. Too many times to recall, Dylan had hurriedly brushed fallen crumbs into that corner to hide them from his mother’s prying eyes – the brothers’ treasure: packets of wafers purchased at the ice cream van, because they took longer to eat than an ice cream. Spread out on the bedroom floor back then was a rag-rug he and his siblings had painstakingly made on dark winter nights in front of the open fire, whilst listening to the wireless. ‘The devil makes work for idle hands,’ their mother would say, throwing hooks, mismatched strands of material and a hessian sack the boy’s way. There was no chance of idle hands in this house. Dylan was sniggering at the thought when his eyes caught the remnants of tyres that they’d cut in half and filled with bulbs in front of the shed outside. Under Dad’s army coat they had laid on their bed, all three brothers huddled to keep warm. Here was where Dylan’s love of storytelling was born. In the absence of a blank piece of paper, an old station ledger and a coveted pencil had to do. He looked behind the bedroom door and there was the cupboard where his treasured possessions had been kept. Once more he was drawn to open up a memory, but the cupboard was bare. This time there was a moment not of just sadness but of disappointment. He had nothing substantial to hold onto from his youth, not like Jen and her keepsakes. Sentimentality for objects didn’t sit well with Dylan – he was obviously more like his dad than he cared to admit. But was he also unintentionally going to starve Maisy of the past? Or was he trying to protect her, like his dad had done with him from the horrors of man’s inhumanity to man? Joe never spoke about his time in Burma and the war.
‘Look back not forward,’ Dylan heard his dad say in his ear – so there was no surprise that nothing was left of his for Dylan to find. How strange it was for someone who didn’t talk about the past to have such a passion for photography, Dylan thought. To capture a moment in time, as he knew he had done, for the future and then not to leave it for them to savour. Dylan looked around, trying desperately to remember where his dad had developed his photographs. He remembered the strings of pictures, clipped to the old washing line with pegs above a sink. He knew it was in this house. He was puzzled as he counted the rooms. There was a bedroom where his mother and father had slept, a room that was his younger sister’s and that left only the room that he was in – the boys’ room. Was his mind playing tricks with him, like the light?
* * *
‘No luck with the CCTV?’ Dylan’s frustration was tangible.
‘I’d have liked to think we’d have a sighting of her going or returning from school – it’s over a mile,’ said DC Wormald. ‘But as yet, absolutely nothing, sir.’
‘The images from her mobile – make sure we identify, trace, interview and eliminate all the males. I want to know what relationship they had with Patti, and who they hang around with.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Andy.
Vicky was unusually quiet, studious even, as she flicked through the images. ‘Cor, who’s the hunk on the photo she sent Gail and Debbie? He shouldn’t be hard to find?’ said Vicky, with a wink of an eye in Donna’s direction.
Dylan shook his head. ‘Andy, see who we’ve got to assist in identifying him, regulars at the pool and any others from the complex that may know Patti.’
‘Do you not think it might be beneficial for the house team to look at the logistics of us having a couple of officers sat at the reception area, requesting DNA from the males who enter?’ said Vicky.
‘That’s a good idea.’
‘And Donna and I can do the follow-ups.’ Vicky’s smile was from ear to ear. ‘I bagsy the hunk…’ Vicky took a can of Coke out of her bag and sprung the can’s tab.
‘Vicky…’ Dylan made a long low growling sound.
The detective sergeant shrugged her shoulders as she put the can to her lips. ‘What’ve I said now? Come on, boss, there has to be some perks to this god-damn job.’
‘There was some suggestion in Gail’s statement that her older brother Michael Carpenter asked Patti out on a date and she turned him down. He might be worthy of a visit?’ said Andy.
‘Absolutely, write up an action for someone to see and eliminate,’ said Dylan. ‘And an update on the would-be window cleaning leaflet droppers needs to be done.’
‘We also need to eliminate the lad seen by the elderly lady, the one wearing the hoodie. I’ve a feeling that could be Elvis, who has admitted to following her home,’ said Vicky. ‘We know he didn’t murder her, but that part of his story might be true.’
‘And it could have been somebody else. Somebody we haven’t eliminated. We’ve still a lot of ground beneath our feet to clear before we move on.’
‘Do we know if the house-to-house team have managed to complete all their callbacks on Burford Avenue?’ Vicky asked.
‘I’ll get Sergeant Scott in the Incident Room to do a review for us, for debrief.’
* * *
Jen lifted the bolt-hole to the loft and tentatively hoisted herself up to sit with her legs dangling towards the hallway. It was dark and warm. The previous owners had installed a fluorescent bar light affording her to see where they had boarded, beam to beam. Maisy’s nursery furniture and early toys around her, she slowly started to take them one by one to the landing below. Eventually it was done and the shiny boards were empty. As she reached to switch off the light and pull over the door a twinkle caught her eye. Puzzled, but with the object out of reach, she pulled herself up into the loft. Standing was doable down the apex but she had to go on her hands and knees to get to the bags that were arranged in haphazard fashion to her left. Then a memory came to her… the last time she had been here she was putting out of sight everything that reminded her of their loss. How shocking was it then, to lose her mum to a tragic accident after her initial shock that she may not have children, and her fiancé Shaun had abandoned her for another? She sat staring at the packages, contemplating her life now. The light flickered and distracted her for a moment. She heard a thump and recognised it to be Max dropping to the floor on the landing below. He moaned before resting his head, presumably on her slippers she’d abandoned at the bottom of the ladder. Things that made no sense to her flooded into her head as she pulled a carrier bag to her – the sound of the sea, the smell of her mothers’ perfume, Dylan’s smile when they’d first met – that had stirred a heart she had thought forever numb.
