Authors: Maynard Sims
“What do you mean?”
“Let’s just say you’re not the only one to see a connection between the deaths here over the past few years.”
“Well, if he’s made the connection, why the hell isn’t he acting on it?”
“He is,” Carter said. “He came to see me.”
Chapter Seventeen
“What the bloody hell is this?” Lacey said to Sparks as he got out of his car.
“Flour,” Matthew Sparks said, pointing to the tanker.
“Who’s the victim?”
“David Scott, the tanker’s driver. He’s over there with the pathologist.”
Lacey ran his hand through his hair. Two deaths in four hours. Not a great way to start the week.
Miriam Shepherd, the pathologist, was crouched next to the body. Her iron gray hair was tied back from her lined, but still attractive face with a navy blue ribbon. As Lacey crouched down next to her she said, “Hello, Ian,” but didn’t look round at him. Her attention was focused on lifting Dave Scott’s eyelid and shining a penlight into the very dead eye beneath.
“Any idea of cause of death, Miriam?”
“There are a couple of superficial injuries to the face. I think the nose is broken, and he sustained a nasty gash to the head, but nothing serious…or life threatening. No, he appears to be suffocated by flour. Look.” She shone the penlight into Scott’s open mouth, showing the solid white blockage. “But appearances can be deceptive.”
“Meaning?”
“I’ll know more when I get him back to the lab, but I think he was dead before the bulk of the flour entered his body. I suspect heart failure.”
“So if he didn’t inhale the flour, how did it get there?”
“Your guess is as good as mine at the moment, but it looks like someone filled him up with the stuff. Look there.” She shifted the beam of the penlight to reveal slight indentations in the surface of the flour.
“Are they fingermarks?”
“That’s what they look like.” She raised her arm and made a beckoning motion with her hand. Moments later a technician with a camera arrived. “Get a picture of these,” she said, and then pushed herself to her feet, the joints in her knees cracking like twin gunshots. She leaned forwards to rub them. “I’m getting too old for this. I think I’ll retire. A nice farmhouse, somewhere in southern France, sitting drinking Pastis and watching the grapes in the vineyards ripen. Very appealing.”
Lacey stood upright. “Nonsense,” he said. “You’d be bored out of your skull within a week.”
She smiled ruefully. “Alas, you’re probably right. I’ll let you have my report as soon as possible. I have the Rochdale suicide to deal with first or else Bill Mackie will be chewing my ear off. A woman’s work is never done.” She called another assistant across. “Bag him, but carefully. Try not to dislodge any of the flour.”
Lacey watched her as she headed back to her car. He’d always had a sneaking admiration for Miriam Shepherd, and despite the fact that she could give him five years, had always found her deceptively attractive. She had the kind of sexuality that crept up unannounced and smacked you over the head like a hammer.
“Well?” Sparks said, bursting into his reverie.
“She’ll know more once she’s performed the post mortem, but at the moment she’s guessing that it wasn’t natural causes.”
Sparks looked around, taking in the abandoned tanker and the flour/snow scene. “There’s nothing very natural about this,” he said.
“I agree,” Lacey said. “Come on. I want to take a look in the tanker’s cab. There might be a clue about what we’re dealing with here.”
“Do you really think we’d be that lucky?”
“You know me, Matt. The eternal optimist.”
Lacey walked across to the tanker, hopped up onto the cab and stuck his head through the open window. There wasn’t much to see. Many truck drivers personalized their cabs with photographs of their families, lucky mascots, some even with religious iconography, with St. Christopher and the Virgin Mary being at the top of the list. In Scott’s cab there was nothing like that. A few CDs, a rolled-up tabloid newspaper and a half-eaten bar of chocolate were the sum total of Dave Scott’s possessions. Lacey scanned the titles of the CDs. The Clash, The Stranglers and Dolly Parton.
“Anything?” Sparks said.
Lacey looked down at him. “Apart from an eclectic taste in music, not a lot.” He sniffed at the air in the cab. It was there. The same, slightly cloying perfume he’d smelled in Ollie Tucker’s flat.
He jumped down from the cab. “Do we know anything about Scott’s movements before coming to the wood?”
“That’s being checked now. We’ve checked with his company, so we know his route was Leeds to Carlisle.”
Sparks was silent for a moment. He took a few steps away from the tanker, staring at it long and hard, and then he slapped his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Idiot!” he said. “A blind, bloody idiot. It was staring me in the face and still I didn’t see it.”
“See what?” Lacey said.
“The tanker. I’ve seen it before. This morning when we were coming out of Cavendish House. It was in the car park of that greasy spoon opposite the block of flats. I’ve only just recognized it. The silo was lying down before, not pointing up at the sky. It just didn’t register.”
“So it was parked outside Ollie Tucker’s place when he died. I’m betting that’s where Scott picked up the woman he was seen with. The cab reeks of her perfume and it’s the same scent I smelt in Tucker’s flat.”
“So it could be the same woman?”
“All the signs point to it,” Lacey said. His phone vibrated in his pocket. He took the call.
“That was Bill Mackie,” he said as he disconnected. “They’ve got the CCTV footage from this morning at Cavendish House.”
“Anything interesting?”
“Well, we should see who was with Ollie Tucker just before he died. I said we’d shoot over there once we’ve finished here.”
An hour later they were sitting with Inspector Bill Mackie in a small room in the basement of Cavendish House that had been turned into a makeshift security center. The room was cramped with the three of them in it. There was a cheap plywood desk and four wall-mounted CCTV screens, and one chair that Mackie commandeered. The small room smelled of industrial cleaning products.
“What is this place?” Sparks said, wrinkling his nose in disgust.
“According to the janitor, it used to be his storeroom. The local authority installed the cameras and screens after a spate of vandalism and drug dealing. The janitor seemed most put out.”
“Who monitors the screens?” Lacey said.
“A couple of agency workers signed up to a local security firm. They work in shifts.”
“Where are they now?”
“Eric Barber was on this morning. I sent him to get some tea just before you got here. He should be back in a minute and then I’ll let him run through the tapes with you. He’ll be quicker at it than me. He knows how the recorder works.”
The door to the room opened and a small, middle-aged black man with long dreadlocks spilling over the shoulders of his royal blue nylon uniform edged into the room, clutching two polystyrene cups. He handed one to Mackie and put the other down on the desk.
“This is Detective Inspector Lacey,” Mackie said.
Lacey shook the man’s hand and inclined his head towards Sparks. “My sergeant, Matt Sparks. I take it you were on duty here this morning, Mr. Barber.”
Barber nodded his dreadlocks. “That is correct, Inspector. My shift is from four a.m. to four p.m.” Barber had a mellow, cultured voice that seemed completely at odds with his appearance.
“Did you see anything unusual this morning?”
Barber smiled. “You assume that I sit here for twelve hours a day watching the screens. That would lead to insanity, Inspector. No, I check them every twenty minutes or so. The rest of the time I sit where Inspector Mackie is sitting now and read my books. I’m studying for my PhD, so this job is heaven-sent. I get an awful lot of reading time.”
“But you have a taped record of everyone entering or leaving the building.”
“Indeed I do.”
“So,” Lacey said. “Can we see the recording of the time in question?”
“Indeed you can…if Inspector Mackie would be so kind as to vacate my chair.”
Mackie grinned at Lacey and got to his feet. With an economy of movement Barber slid into the chair in his place and started hitting buttons on the recorder.
“Working on the fact that Tucker jumped from the balcony at about six, I asked Mr. Barber here to show me the tapes thirty minutes either side of that time,” Mackie said. “If you would play the tape, Mr. Barber.”
“Certainly.” Barber hit a switch.
One of the screens was filled with an image of the foyer of the building. The digital clock in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen read 5:30.
“If we just fast forward five minutes…” Barber said.
Barber edged the tape on.
At 5:36 the double glass doors opened and a young woman entered the building.
“Pause there,” Lacey said. “Is there any way we can enlarge the image? I’d like to get a good look at her face.”
Barber shook his head. “I’m afraid the system isn’t that sophisticated. You get a better view of her though once she enters the lift.”
The young woman was tall, slim and dressed in denims—jeans, jacket and shirt. Her hair was a cloud of golden curls and they tossed on her shoulders as she walked quickly across to the lift and hit a button. The doors opened and she stepped inside.
Barber flicked another switch and the second screen came to life. The camera captured her features perfectly. The eyes were blue and clear, the expression calm, almost serene. She was very pretty.
“She doesn’t look like a killer,” Sparks said. “But then, who does these days?”
Lacey was watching the screen with rapt attention, memorizing the young woman’s face, tracing every contour, scrutinizing every detail. For a second she stared straight at the camera, and Lacey could feel her eyes burning into his. And then the eyes blinked and the image vanished, to be replaced by static.
“What happened to the picture?” he said.
“A glitch,” Barber said, reached out and pressed another button.
The third screen came to life.
“This is the top floor,” he said. “Watch.”
They watched as the lift doors opened and the young woman stepped out. She looked one way along the corridor and then the other, seemed to focus in on the camera, blinked and the picture vanished under a crackling, fuzzy cloud.
“I’m figuring she’s got some kind of jamming device,” Mackie said. “She must have come prepared.”
Ian Lacey caught Eric Barber’s eye. The corners of Barber’s mouth turned up in a very slight smile and he gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head.
“Is that all there is?” Sparks said.
“Oh no,” Mackie said. “We also have her coming out…which is even more remarkable.”
“Let’s see it,” Lacey said.
Eric Barber again worked his magic with the recorder.
This time the young woman didn’t hesitate. She walked out of Tucker’s flat, glanced at the camera and killed it. In the lift she did the same. As soon as the doors closed they lost the picture.
“Now watch the first screen closely,” Mackie said.
They all focused on the lift doors in the picture from the foyer camera. After a few seconds the doors slid open and a woman stepped out. She was smaller, fatter, with frizzy, ginger hair pulled back in a ponytail.
“What the hell…?” Sparks said.
Ian Lacey stared at the screen. “Where did our blond go? And who’s that?”
Mackie shrugged. “No idea. Mr. Barber here checked the feed from every floor during the lift’s descent. It didn’t stop once on the way down. There was no opportunity for anyone to get in or out. Strange, eh?”
“Strange indeed,” Lacey said. “Can I get a copy of what we’ve just seen?”
“Sure,” Mackie said. “I’ll get it done and couriered over to Bradford.”
“As soon as you like, Bill. Thanks.”
“You’ll have a copy by this afternoon.”
Lacey turned to Barber. “Thank you for your efforts.”
“You’re very welcome,” Barber said, inclining his head courteously. “Of course, if I was an uneducated heathen, I’d say that what we have just witnessed is nothing short of witchcraft. But I’m an educated man, a man of science.”
“So what does your educated mind make of it?” Lacey said.
“My mind tells me that what I’ve just seen flies against logical and rational thought. At such times the sophisticated veneer with which we cloak ourselves peels away and we are left as frightened children, cowering, whistling in the dark, terrified of the bogeyman.”
“In other words,” Sparks said, “you haven’t got a clue what to make of it.”
Eric Barber smiled again. “No, Sergeant, you’re wrong. I know what I think. I’m just very glad that my role in this particular drama has come to an end. And I wish you luck. I think you’re going to need it.”