Cold Sacrifice (19 page)

Apart from emergency vehicles, there were two smashed-up cars in the car park, beside a forensic tent. A pick-up truck was standing ready to tow the cars away once SOCOs had finished with them, and a row of police vehicles were waiting along one side of the car park. Looming above the scene, the massive metal structure of a disused rollercoaster swept eerily across the evening sky. After glancing at a badly damaged red Mini, Ian went over to take a closer look at the Honda that belonged to Henry. A faint stench of rotting flesh grew stronger as he approached the car and he wished he had put on a mask to diminish the smell. He called out to the scene of crime officer who was working inside the vehicle.

‘Have you found anything?’

The officer clambered out of the car and straightened up, wiping his brow with the back of his sleeve.

‘You’ve only got to stick your mug in the boot to know she wasn’t involved in a fatal accident this morning. The body was in there for a while.’

‘A while?’

‘I’d say a day at least, but don’t quote me on that. I mean, it’s pretty obvious, but we need to get the DNA results before we can say for certain that the body on the tarmac was the cause of the stench in the boot.’

Briefly, Ian told him about Martha’s fatal stabbing. The forensic officer nodded and said he had heard about it. His eyes widened when he heard that the Honda belonged to the husband of the woman who had been murdered.

‘So is he a suspect then?’

‘He’s the only suspect so far.’

Ian didn’t add that he wasn’t convinced Henry was guilty.

‘Leave it to us, Sarge. He’ll have left something incriminating here. They always do. We’ll find it if it takes all night.’

With a parting grin, he climbed back in the car and resumed his scrutiny of the upholstered front seats.

Ian wasn’t sure what to do next. An officer who was trained to interview juveniles had gone to the hospital to talk to the two children who had been in the Honda when it crashed. Ian was impatient to know exactly when they had taken the car from outside Henry’s house, but there was nothing he could do to speed up the process. All he could do was wait for the report. He was going to speak to the driver of the Mini himself, although he wasn’t sure how talking to her was going to help. Before he left, he pulled on a protective suit and went into the forensic tent to see what was happening in there. He recognised the doctor kneeling beside the body at once from his skinny frame. Dr Millard was skeletal, from the dome of his large bald head to his bony fingers. Ian stood for a few seconds, watching the doctor at work. His hands flitted deftly around the dead woman’s throat, searching, probing. As though he could feel Ian’s eyes on him, he twisted his head round and looked up.

‘Oh, hello again, Sergeant. How are you keeping? I hear you’ve lost your sharp inspector.’

‘She’s been transferred to the Met.’

‘Well, I can’t say I envy her.’

Ian grunted in acknowledgement, if not agreement.

‘So what have you found for us, doc?’

‘If you think she was run over and killed, you can think again.’

Ian nodded. He already knew the victim had been dead for at least a day, and had probably been stored in the boot of the Honda.

‘You’re thinking it was the kid in the Honda who knocked her down,’ Millard went on.

With a non-committal grunt, Ian waited to hear what the doctor had to say about it.

‘Well, it wasn’t. And before you ask, it wasn’t the driver of the Mini either. Are you surprised?’

Ian didn’t answer.

‘Oh, I know there was a car crash,’ the doctor went on briskly, ‘but that wasn’t what killed her.’

‘Are you telling me this death had nothing to do with the crash here this morning –?’

‘If she was knocked over and killed this morning, she must have been one of the walking dead,’ the doctor replied, getting to his feet and facing Ian. ‘She died at least thirty-six hours ago, and she wasn’t run over. She was strangled and then kept in a confined space.’

Gently he lifted a tress of her hair with a plastic gloved finger. One side of her face was livid where blood had pooled while she lay on her side after she died. Her flesh was already beginning to acquire a faint greenish tinge of putrefaction but the blackened line around her neck was still clearly visible where she had been strangled with a cord of some kind.

‘D’s the initial on her key ring,’ the doctor said. ‘It might not be hers, of course, and we don’t have a full name yet.’

‘It’s hers, all right,’ Ian replied, staring at the dead girl’s face. ‘She called herself Della, although her real name’s Jade Higgins.’

‘You know her?’ Millard didn’t seem surprised. ‘Was she connected to the owner of the Honda? I take it he’s the one you’re investigating.’

Deep in thought, Ian left without answering.

Polly was standing just outside the tent, chatting to a gloomy middle-aged constable in uniform. Ian joined them.

‘I was just telling the detective constable here how Dreamland used to be the number one place to visit,’ the uniformed officer said. ‘Looking at it now, you’d hardly credit there was a time when it was one of the top ten tourist attractions in the UK, would you? Back in the day, people used to come from all over. You know we had a Big Wheel here, years before the London Eye. They’re all over the place now, of course, Manchester, Liverpool, Brighton, Torquay – you name a town, they’ve got a big wheel. But I remember the Dreamland Big Wheel from when I was a kid, and that’s going back a bit. It was something special in those days. Then they took the Big Wheel down and sold it off to some theme park in Mexico in the mid-nineties, and the whole place shut down about ten years after that.’ He gazed around and heaved a sigh. ‘And look at it now. It’s like a graveyard.’

‘Literally,’ Ian muttered.

Ian led Polly back towards her car. On the way he told her about Della.

‘So Henry’s been unlucky and lost his alibi,’ he concluded.

‘Or he’s stopped her from admitting she lied about being with him the night his wife was killed,’ Polly said.

‘Does it strike you as odd that she was strangled thirty-six hours ago and yet she turns up here, at the scene of a car crash, looking for all the world as though she’d been run over?’

Polly shrugged and he went on.

‘It seems so clumsy, doesn’t it? Obviously we would know straight away that she hadn’t been killed in the accident, but had been brought here and left at the scene. Why would anyone do that?’

‘Perhaps it wasn’t like that,’ Polly said. ‘Perhaps she was sitting in Henry’s car all the time, and she was thrown out in the crash.’

She wasn’t being serious, but Ian seized on the idea.

‘Of course! That’s it. Millard said she had been kept in a confined space –’

They both turned to stare at the Honda. The answer was staring them in the face. The door to the boot was open. It was the work of a second to establish that it had been like that when the first officer had arrived on the scene. As the Honda had crashed, head on, the nearside doors and boot must have burst open on impact. The body had been thrown out onto the tarmac behind the car without anyone involved in the accident noticing it. Jade’s body had been in the boot of Henry’s car all morning, possibly longer.

‘I wonder if he can come up with an alibi for that,’ Ian commented grimly.

‘W
HAT CAN YOU TELL
us about the victim?’ Rob asked when they were all assembled in the Major Incident Room that had been set up in the police station in Herne Bay. It was cramped, but saved travelling time and more importantly meant they wasted less of the precious few hours they had to question suspects before they had to release them.

It was not much more than a week since they had last gathered together as a team to investigate Martha’s murder. Now a second body had been discovered ten miles away in Margate, that of a woman closely associated with the case. The mood in the room was unusually solemn.

‘You met the victim, didn’t you?’ Rob added.

Everyone on the team knew by now that the woman who had provided Henry Martin with his alibi was dead. What had yet to be established was how she had died, and whether he was again their number one suspect.

‘The victim’s name was Jade Higgins. She was known as Della. That was what she called herself when I met her last week. She was barely twenty.’

All eyes turned to gaze at the image of a young woman, her flesh deathly pale and already discoloured with the early signs of decomposition.

‘She was born in Clacton and brought up in care after one failed adoption,’ Ian went on.

An eager young constable raised his hand to request clarification, as though he was still at school. Ian explained that a couple had applied to adopt Jade as a baby and had then changed their minds. After that she had gone to a succession of childcare institutions. None of it made any difference now. By the time she was sixteen she had moved to London and was earning her living on the streets.

‘She had a sugar daddy for less than a year and when that came to an end she found a job as a dancer in a strip club, which is where I met her.’

The hushed atmosphere erupted with whistles and jeering, and a few colleagues called out suggestive comments. While Rob scowled at the light-hearted ribbing, Ian felt reassured. They couldn’t afford to be overwhelmed by the scenes they witnessed in the course of their duties. Each officer had to find a way to remain emotionally detached from the case if they were to cope with the job at all; inappropriate humour wasn’t a bad way of dealing with the horror.

Briefly Ian went over what they already knew. Jade had been involved in the investigation into Martha’s murder.

‘So Henry’s lost his alibi in a car crash,’ a constable said. ‘Where does that leave him then?’

‘We’ve still got her statement,’ someone pointed out.

Rob reminded them that Jade had never gone to the police station in Margate to make a formal statement. She had given her story to Ian, but they didn’t have her signature or anything in her hand writing. In a court, there was a risk Ian’s account might be dismissed as unreliable, despite his detailed notes on the interview.

‘It’s not that detailed, sir,’ Ian muttered. ‘She wasn’t exactly forthcoming.’

He had asked her where she had been on Friday evening. Without hesitation she had confirmed that she had been with the man in the photograph Ian had shown her. She said she never knew his surname.

‘He was just Henry. I don’t ask no questions. Why do you want to know anyway? What’s he done?’

Although she had been adamant she had spent Friday evening with Henry, she had been vague about times, and claimed not to remember where he had taken her.

‘But we was together the whole evening,’ she had insisted.

Ian gazed at a picture of the dead woman. Her face looked horribly pale. Her eyes were closed but it was obvious she wasn’t sleeping. She looked inhuman, like a dirty doll that had been thrown on the ground and left there. She hadn’t looked much better when he had seen her alive, but she was only twenty when she died. If she had lived, she could have changed. There had still been some hope for her, however slight.

‘Does Henry know she’s been run over?’ someone wanted to know.

A couple of constables were whispering together somewhere behind Ian.

‘She wasn’t run over,’ he said loudly and the muttered conversation stopped.

Everyone was listening now.

Carefully Ian went over what had happened. As far as they could make out, kids had taken Henry’s car from right outside his house on Sunday morning, with Jade’s body in the boot.

‘Her body was in the boot when the car was stolen?’ a constable repeated.

‘SOCOs are still examining the car, but that’s how it appears, yes.’

‘So these kids jacked a car, not knowing there was a body in the boot, and then had an accident,’ Polly said with a hint of a smile.

Someone laughed.

‘And we think the body somehow fell out of the boot of the car in the crash?’ Rob asked.

Ian nodded, slightly irritated by the reaction in the room. What made it worse was that he had to agree the story sounded unlikely. But recalling the stench in the boot of the Honda, he affirmed there was little doubt the body had been kept there.

‘The boot and back nearside door flew open on impact,’ he added.

When Ian had finished, Susan, the constable who had spoken to the children in the Honda, gave her report. According to their statements, they had found the car in the car park in Margate with the keys in the ignition. Both children had insisted they had not driven the car away from outside Henry’s house where he claimed to have left it.

‘There was no reason for them to have gone to Herne Bay, and I don’t think they even had enough money for the bus to get them there. They said they never took the car out on the road, only round the car park.’

‘They might have been covering up the fact that he drove on the highway,’ Rob said.

‘Henry said it was taken from outside his house,’ Ian reminded them. ‘He was quite clear about it. He told us he left the car there on Saturday evening and on Sunday morning it had gone.’

‘Yes, that’s what he
said
,’ Rob agreed. ‘But someone’s lying. Henry, suspected of murder, with a second victim stashed in the boot of his car, or these kids out joyriding not wanting to get in trouble for driving on the road. Take your pick who to believe.’

‘I think those kids were telling the truth,’ Susan repeated. ‘They understood how important it was not to lie. We explained it all very carefully to them and they appreciated what was at stake. There was no reason for them to lie. We made it very clear they wouldn’t be in any trouble over it.’ She paused. ‘They weren’t bad kids, sir. They’ve learned their lesson.’

‘Let’s say Henry killed Jade, in Margate or Herne Bay,’ Rob said after a short pause, ‘why would he drive around with her body in the boot, leave the car in Margate, make his way back home and then alert the police to look out for it?’

No one answered for a moment, then people all started talking at once. There were so many possible reasons for him acting that way: guilt, panic, confusion, or a misplaced optimism that he might somehow get away with it by claiming his car had been stolen.