The Fifth Grave, page 14
part #1 of DCI Jacob Series
“And what’s life like, working for Jacob?”
She shrugged. “Fine. Is there a problem, sir?”
“There are concerns, DC Innes. Concerns about professionalism.”
Her mouth fell open. “I’ve not done anything wrong, sir. I swear.”
“Not with you, Innes, but with Chief Inspector Jacob.”
A wave of relief flooded over her and her heart started to slow down to its normal rate. “I don’t understand.”
A crocodile smile appeared in the centre of his five o’clock shadow. “You don’t have to understand, Innes. Not at all, but it might be useful if I were able to follow the Chief Inspector’s progress a little more closely, if you see what I mean.”
She saw instantly. “You want me to report on him?”
A casual nod. “It’s regrettable, but if there are any problems then I need to know about them as soon as possible. Any corners cut, any ‘T’s left uncrossed and ‘I’s left undotted, as it were. He’s a good detective but he’s a maverick and the last thing we need now is any unwanted nastiness involving the press. This is turning into a high-profile case and the scrutiny will only intensify until the killer is caught and brought to justice.”
“I see, sir, but he is my superior officer and the SIO on the entire investigation. I’m not sure what I can do to help, and I’m not even sure if it’s the…” she hesitated, knowing only too well not only the power the Chief Superintendent wielded over her career but also Kent’s formidable reputation for using it without mercy.
“Not sure if it’s the right thing to do?”
She felt herself blushing. “Well… yes, sir.”
He gave a business-like nod and joined his fingertips together, turning his hand into a sort of cage. “Ask yourself this, Innes. It’s unlikely DCI Jacob will be around too much longer, but I will be, and I’ll be overseeing your promotion to DS when the time comes. How soon that time comes is very much in the balance. Do you catch my drift?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good, think about it – but not for too long.”
She watched him walk away and turned around the corner at the end of the corridor. When he was out of sight, she knew she had a hell of a thing to think about, and she didn’t like it one bit.
*
The old dashboard lights of the Alvis lit Jacob’s face a warm amber as he drove the vintage car south across the downs to Salisbury. It was a clear night, with a wild grove of stars scattered high above the ancient landscape, and for a moment its awesome beauty almost swept him away from his troubles.
This vast chalk plateau stretched across much of southern Wiltshire and over the borders into Berkshire and Hampshire. Endless acres of ancient downland, shivering with rock-rose and bedstraw and the echoes of a primitive Iron Age past wherever you looked.
He glanced down at the well-worn passenger’s seat and made sure he had remembered to bring the bottle of wine. Check – one dusty bottle of Merlot nestling in a case of paulownia wood and wheat straw, courtesy of his father’s extensive wine cellar. A year since the fire, and tonight he had started to think that maybe there was a future for him after all. Things had started to perk up after the arrival of a certain criminal profiler in his life, but he was too weary of the world to hold any real hopes.
He checked his mirror, squinting at the headlights. “You’re far too close, idiot,” he mumbled, and then heard his phone ringing.
“Bill, hi.”
“Hello, got a minute?”
His normally thick accent sounded thin and tinny in the speaker. “Sure, what about?”
“About DI Dunn.”
“Found something else?”
“No, nothing new, but I couldn’t speak in the MIU today.”
“What do you mean?”
Morgan sighed. “The archive files seem very thin to me, for such a long enquiry, Jacob.”
“Funny you should bring the Russell files up,” he said, checking his mirror.
“Why’s that?”
“Because you’re the second person to mention them to me this evening.”
“How so?”
“I had a call from Sophie Anderson earlier. She wants to speak with me about the very same subject.”
“How’s that, then?”
“I’ll tell you later. What have you got?”
“I know how it sounds, but I think that either vital information about the Emma Russell case was left out of the report, or someone’s gone back into it since then and stolen information from it. I think that someone was Dunn. And guess who were line manager was?”
“Don’t tell me.”
“The then-DCI Maercus Kent.”
Jacob flicked his eyes from the road up to the mirror. The car was still following him. When he looked back to the road, his headlights were lighting up the snowflakes like sparks. “You realise what you’re saying?”
“Of course I realise what I’m saying. That’s why I’m only talking about this to you. You’re the only one I know I can trust.”
“Sounds half-baked to me, Bill. What have you got, really? A file that seems too thin? An unexpected retirement after the case? Not enough to risk your career by throwing murder accusations around the force.”
“I’m not accusing anyone on the force of murder. I’m just saying that something about this report isn’t right, and maybe someone on the inside knows a bit more about the case than they’re letting on.”
“Keep digging, but for God’s sake keep it to yourself.”
“I recommend you do the same with your little trip to Sophie Anderson tonight. If Kent finds out he’ll burn you, and he’ll enjoy doing it too.”
“That’s my problem.”
“As you wish,” Morgan said. “There’s one more thing.”
“What?”
“In the early part of the manhunt for Emma a local poacher was arrested and interviewed on suspicion of her murder, but he was released without charge. He dropped off the radar after that claiming we’d ruined his life with our false accusations.”
“Name?”
“Jim Latimer.”
“See if you can get him back on the radar, Bill. Definitely worth talking with him once again.”
“Will do, boss.”
Jacob hung up and signalled to leave the main road. Pulling up outside Sophie’s flat, he grabbed the wine and walked up her path. When she came to the door she was wearing casual jeans and a baggy white jumper and looked somehow younger with her hair down. When she saw the wine she smiled.
“You read my mind.”
“As long as you don’t read mine,” he said. “I’m not a big fan of psychologists peering inside my head.”
“I promise,” she said. “Now, come in! It’s freezing out there.”
CHAPTER 19
“Thank crunchie for that.” Innes swung open her fridge door and scanned for any sign of alcoholic relief. Strictly medicinal, she located a bottle of perfectly chilled pinot gris and instantly liberated it from the confines of the shelf above the salad crisper. It would be rude not to, she said, and poured the wine into a glass roughly the size of a small goldfish bowl.
Her tiny, one-bedroom flat was the top floor of an Edwardian house just off a main road in Marlborough, and now she walked along the narrow corridor to the front room, switched on a lamp and drew her curtains to block the winter gloom. If only she could block out the memory of that bastard Marcus Kent, but now at least she knew why he had put her on Jacob’s team. He wanted her to be his spy.
Collapsing down on her long, soft sofa, she gave a sigh of relief. It was time to put thoughts of work behind her and relax, but that time ended when she heard a knock at her door. She swore loudly as she swivelled off the couch and opened the bay window to peer down at the front path.
“Who is it?”
“It’s me.”
She saw Vincent and silently cursed. “What do you want?”
“Can we talk?” The face of her on-again, off-again boyfriend stared up at her from the little tiled path leading from the pavement to her front door. “Any chance of letting me in? It’s freezing down here.”
“It’s not much better up here,” she said. “Wait a second.”
She found herself sighing as she walked down the narrow stairs to the front door. Vincent Goddard had been quite the catch when she first moved to Marlborough but now she was starting to think again.
He had told her his property development company was worth seven figures and judging by the Lamborghini she had no reason to doubt him, but none of that mattered. It was fun, but if the man behind the money wasn’t right then she knew it had no future. Working out whether he was right or not was the hard part.
Lately, he’d started hinting at marriage. Instead of being excited at the prospect of becoming Mrs Laura Goddard, wife of millionaire property tycoon, she found herself getting nervous about it and trying to dodge the subject. Now he was on the doorstep in the cold with a dozen red roses in his hand and she knew what that meant.
She opened the door with trepidation and they kissed and walked back upstairs. Inside the flat, he handed her the roses. “For you.”
“Thanks,” she said, grateful there was no question attached to them.
“Any cold beers?”
She held up the wine with an apologetic smile. “Just this.”
“Fine, I’ll grab a glass.”
*
Thirty miles south in Salisbury, Jacob followed Sophie through to her kitchen where she opened the wine and poured two glasses. “I’ve been going through your emails concerning the original Russell case files,” she began.
“Anything interesting?”
“Maybe, but it’s a bit early to tell.”
“You sound hesitant. What have you found?”
“I was analysing some of the statements actually.”
“Of the witnesses?”
“Yes, but that’s not the interesting bit.”
“No?”
“The stuff that really caught my eye was the reports and statements made by the SIO of the case, a DI Miranda Dunn.”
Jacob stopped sipping his wine and fixed his eyes on her. “How so?”
She ran her finger along some lines of the scanned document he had emailed her. “The way she writes – I mean the vocabulary she uses and where she uses it strongly implies that she knows more than she has included in the report. My assessment of her statements is that she was hiding something from the investigation.”
He gave her an anxious look. “I’m not liking where this is going. First Kent launches a major and unreasonable objection to your being on the team – knowing your success rate – and now I find out that his number two at the time of the original investigation was lying in the reports.”
“Not lying, necessarily,” she said. “I never said that. We’re not interpreting or translating her statement here but carefully analysing what she has said and asking why she chose that particular way to say it. I wouldn’t say she is lying exactly, more concealment by omission.”
“It adds up to the same thing, Sophie. We’re going to have to do some more digging under her. If she knows more about Emma Russell’s disappearance then I want to know what it is. It would certainly explain why Bill Morgan says the archived files are so thin.”
Sophie closed the folder with a smack and looked him in the eye. “Have you eaten?”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
“Good, follow me.”
They walked back through into the kitchen where she started to chop up some vegetables and set a pan of water on the hob. “Pasta okay?”
“It seems to be what we eat when we’re together,” he said. “So why not?”
He poured more wine as she served up the fresh pasta, and they sat at the table together, desperately trying to avoid the subject of work, but without much success.
“Thanks again for giving me this break,” she said. “I know you’re putting yourself at risk for me.”
“Not at all.”
“It’s just that after the Keeley case I wondered if I’d ever work again.”
“You mentioned him earlier today at The Lamb,” he said. “What really happened? I only know what I read in the press.”
She set down her fork and sat back in her chair. “I posed as one of his students,” she said quietly. “I allowed him to get close to me so he would make me one of his victims.”
“Risky.”
“He nearly strangled me,” she said. “With his victims the official cause of death was homicidal ligature asphyxiation, which as you’ll know is relatively rare, the usual method being manual strangulation.”
“That’s right,” he said. “Depending on the country, homicide strangulation accounts for between ten and twenty percent of all murder cases, and three-quarters of victims are women and children. As you might expect, children are the majority of victims of female killers who use strangulation but this is nearly always manual.”
“But the Ferryman’s victims were all killed with ligature strangulation, and that was one of the main leads we had. Some studies suggest that there’s a strong correlation between ligature strangulation and cruel, predator murder patterns, as opposed to manual strangulation which is more closely associated with an explosive, violent outburst.”
“In other words, you could tell Keeley was a sadist who was carefully planning his attacks?”
Sophie gave a confident nod, but suddenly she felt like a rank amateur. It was something about the way he was looking at her. Momentarily when she looked into his eyes, she saw the face of the man on the television news, the senior investigating officer of the so-called Witch-Hunt murders instead of the real man she had started to get to know.
“Yes, and he performed a very strict ritual with his victims. They were all wrapped in a shroud and…” she hesitated. “And those coins…”
“I know.”
“All the post-mortem reports of his victims were frighteningly similar. Cause of death was always compression of the neck leading to suffocation, and substantial quantities of gamma hydroxybutyrate in their systems.”
“Coma in a bottle?”
She nodded grimly. “That’s a slang name for it because of its powerful effect as a depressant drug which slows down brain activity. It rendered his victims helpless to defend themselves while he choked them to death. God, how I hated reading those post-mortem reports. All those horrible words, so surgical and impersonal. Compression. Hypoxia. Soft tissue trauma.”
She closed her eyes and massaged her temples.
“Try and forget about it all for tonight,” he said. “I brought the videos over of the interviews that you wanted to see, but leave them for now. Wait till morning, please.”
*
After she had shown Jacob out and watch his car drive away, Sophie looked at the carboard box full of old police CDs and wondered exactly what would happen to him if his boss ever found out what he had done. She contemplated making a start now but thought better of it and went upstairs to bed.
But when sleep finally came, it brought a nightmare landscape with it.
The Ferryman was there somewhere. She couldn’t see him, but she felt his presence in the darkness and strained to see where she was. Her breathing intensified and her legs felt like lead. She realised she was in the warehouse in London’s Docklands. The abandoned meat-packing plant where he had nearly killed her.
Rust on the metal walls and fungus on the wood. Cobwebs hung like vines from broken ceiling beams.
She felt his breath on her neck.
His gloved fingers around her throat.
The sting of his needle in her flesh.
Her mind raced with terror as she twisted around and saw the crumpled shroud he would wrap her body in when she was dead and now he was holding one of his silver coins and trying to push it into her mouth. She screamed as hard as she could and tried to push him away but his animal bulk was too heavy to shift and now he was pulling her head back and sliding the coin over her lips.
“I do this because I love you,” he breathed into her ear.
She screamed again and leapt out of her bed, dragging the duvet with her, wrapped tightly in her hands as she strained to see in the darkness of her room. Her heart hammered as she searched for the Ferryman.
But he was nowhere to be seen.
Except for in her mind.
*
If he goes away, it all goes away.
The man they once called Magalos pushed back in the leather seat of his car and dragged on his cigar. The blue smoke gathered in his mouth and he savoured the taste. These were good cigars, and a different world from his cigarettes, he mulled. New, but better, with a robust earthy flavour – peat, truffles, undergrowth. When he exhaled the spicy fumes it masked an uncertain sigh.
After following Jacob along the back roads since the Old Watermill, he was parked up outside the flat and watching both of them now. The hotshot FBI woman was in there too, and the two of them were sharing a joke over a pan of bubbling water. How nice. Very domestic, but he somehow expected more of DCI Jacob. Wasn’t he supposed to be some sort of genius detective? Where was the sad, lonely figure with his hands wrapped around a whisky bottle? Instead, he was laughing with this woman.
Maybe she was where the trouble lay?
Now she was dropping pasta into the pan while he filled two wine glasses.
The newspapers had talked about a high-profile case in which she had tracked down a man from the north and snared him like a hare. That had put an end to his killing spree and made her a celebrity in her field.
Another long, slow drag on the cigar as the car slowly filled up with the smoke.
Simply have to stay calm, he mulled. Just stay calm and it will all blow away.
Was taking Jacob out of the picture a possibility? Maybe, but not yet. He was cleverer than the detective but one slip and it would all be over.
The smoke tasted so good, he thought, watching as they sat down and started their meal.
But this must end and it must end now.
