Blood Lines

BLOOD LINES

TONY NASH

Copyright © Tony Nash 2015

Smashwords Edition

This is a work of pure fiction, and any similarity between any character in it and any real person, living or dead, is purely coincidental and unintentional. Where actual places, buildings and locations are named, they are used fictionally.

Other works by this author, all published as ebooks:

The Tony Dyce thrillers:

Murder by Proxy

Murder on the Back Burner

Murder on the Chess Board

Murder on the High ‘C’

Murder on Tiptoes

The John Hunter thrillers:

Carve Up

Single to Infinity

The Most Unkindest Cut

The Iago Factor

Historical saga:

A Handful of Dust

A Handful of Salt

A Handful of Courage

Other books:

The Devil Deals Death

The Makepeace Manifesto

The World’s Worst Joke Book

Panic

The Last Laugh

Hell and High Water

And The Harry Page Thrillers:

Tripled Exposure

Unseemly Exposure

Hardrada’s Hoard, with Richard Downing

I must have been slightly sub par or I’d have been more aware that it was a Thursday, my day for weirdoes. At four thirty-five and feeling weary as hell I dropped my backside onto my chair, knowing that if I tried to type up the report it would mean a frustrating, start-stop drive home in the middle of the rush hour. The traffic had been bad enough during the afternoon, with even more idiot drivers than usual doing their damndest to cause another inconsequential blip in my life insurance company’s files.

Jane smiled sweetly across the desk, ‘Why the huge sigh, darling? Have the little devils been getting at you again?’

I knew why I was out of sorts: I’d missed having her with me at the crime scene to bat ideas back and forth, as we always did. Hell, no, not just that; I missed having her with me, period. That afternoon our boss, DCI Angela Crane, had given Jane the weekly stats to bring up to date just before the call came in, and for the first time in months I’d been alone on the job while she beavered away in the office. Better her than me; like most officers I hated that task, but Jane took it in her stride as she did every other duty and when it came to worksheets and graphs I didn’t even know how to access, though she’d tried to teach me often enough, she could make a computer stand on its head and whistle ‘Waltzing Matilda’ backwards through its rear fundamental orifice. No new tricks for this old dog.

I grumbled, ‘Why can’t the guys on the beat find bodies at a civilised hour of the day so that we can get it all done and dusted in time to go home?’

The cheeky grin her smile turned into always made me feel better, and she knew it, ‘Ah, come on, John, you know you love having something to complain about. It could be worse; we could’ve pulled the night shift.’

She was right of course; she always is; brain sharp as a pin.

‘If we had I wouldn’t be saddled with this one.’ It was a reasonable grumble; I liked something I could really get my teeth into, not just a plain old domestic.

‘What was it like?’

I shrugged, ‘Pretty straightforward; the old man did it, as per usual.’

Her right eyebrow lifted and her lips pursed in a gesture I was well used to; not one of actual disbelief, but a healthy reluctance to accept facts until they were facts.

‘That was quick. Is he under arrest?’

‘When I can find him.’

‘You mean you haven’t spoken to him?’

‘Not yet. He’s a self-employed electrician, and someone in that kind of trade will soon go bust if he ignores calls to his mobile, but he isn’t answering his if the number listed on the house phone memory is correct, and we have no reason to think it isn’t.’

‘That could mean anything.’

‘But usually doesn’t. We’ve left a message on his answering service for him to call us urgently.’

I could see that she wasn’t convinced and held both hands up in partial surrender, ‘Okay, let’s say I’m ninety-nine percent certain it was him; a slam-dunk.’

I should have known better; that bloody one percent gets you every time. Just one of the reasons I don’t play the lottery.

‘Tell me more.’

‘Come round this side and plug in. You can listen in while I type.’ Who was I kidding?

She laughed, that delicious, almost breathless laugh that gets right deep down into my heart, and corrected me, ‘Don’t you mean I can listen while I type?’

She was right again. Her touch-typing speed of a hundred and twenty words a minute made my veteran cop’s two-fingered, ‘hunt-and-punch’ efforts look decidedly second-rate, and we’d be on the way home a bloody sight faster if she did it.

She came round to my side of the double desk and rolled up a spare chair, elbowing me playfully to the side, plugging her earphones into the second jack and settling her fingers on the keyboard, the faint and highly erotic shampoo smell of her hair close to my face triggering my libido, as it always did.

She was perfectly aware of the effect she had and murmured, ‘Down, Fido!’ She knew me too well, ‘Ready when you are.’

I put my sexy thoughts on hold and switched on the recording:

"Time fourteen twenty-six, eighteenth April, location: flat sixteen B, 74 Aylsham Heights, Brixton. Lead detective DI John Hunter. Also present: Doctor Janet Keller, pathologist, and Ken Bryson, SOCO. The deceased is a female Caucasian of British nationality, approximately thirty years of age, brunette, brown eyes, five feet five inches in height. No passport ID or other useful documents found in the flat, but possibly located inside a locked wall safe in the living room. Note: urgent visit by a locksmith required; Bryson organising. Tentative identification given by the neighbour in sixteen A, a Mrs Jane Coulson, who found the body when she noticed the neighbours’ front door slightly open as she left her own apartment at thirteen thirty-two. Since that was unusual she went in to investigate, after giving a shout and getting no response. She gave the deceased’s name as Caroline Carter, originally from Portsmouth, and the husband’s name as Max. She said that in her opinion they were a devoted couple; whenever she saw them in the street they were holding hands and smiling. The husband’s van, a white Ford Escort, which DVLA identified as having registration number LI55BOR, was in its normal parking place the previous evening at ten-thirty or thereabouts according to the neighbour, who came home with some fish and chips at that time, but is not there now. Request issued at fifteen-thirty-five for all officers to be on the lookout for the vehicle. On the table is a mug, containing half a cup of cold coffee, and a cereal dish with a small amount of milk and a few pieces of corn flakes. The spoon is lying next to the dish. Another mug, spoon, and a similar dish are in the sink.

The corpse is fully clothed and in an upright sitting position, with its back tight up to a kitchen cupboard, the head hanging down onto the chest. A heavy, cast-iron frying pan is on the floor next to the body, with hair and blood on its base, and the back of the skull has been crushed in. Old, smudged fingerprints on the pan handle, possibly those of the woman.

The fourth finger of the left hand, the ring finger, has been amputated neatly at the second joint and that finger is missing from the scene. A hunter’s knife, with a serrated bone cutter on one side, is held in the right hand of the corpse. Ms Keller’s first estimation of TOD is between eight and nine this morning. There are no defensive wounds, and it must be assumed that she knew her attacker.’

Jane stopped the recording, ‘The finger was missing, and she was holding the knife? Was there blood on the blade?’

‘Yes. Janet bagged it up and will check that it is the deceased’s blood, but you can bet it is.’

‘That’s damned clever; she cut her own finger off after she’d bludgeoned herself to death with an iron skillet, and then made it disappear? Hey presto! A bit far-fetched that scenario, don’t you think?’

I gave her my alternative: ‘Her old man killed her with the pan during an argument over breakfast, cut her finger off, sat her up by the cupboard and put the knife in her hand, then did a runner, taking the finger with him.’ I wanted to say ‘Case closed’, but my twenty-plus years’ experience in SCD1, the Met Serious Crimes squad, made me hold back. Forensics would sort that one out.

‘You don’t want me to put that in the report, do you?’

‘Not bloody likely. Let’s wait and see.’

‘There must be some deep significance to the removal of the finger; a symbolic removal of the wedding vows, or something to that effect. Should we get a profiler in on the case?’

‘Let’s locate the husband first and see what he has to say for himself.’

‘You’re hedging again, John. Was there something else that struck you?’

Jane knew me too well; my sixth sense had so often been right in the past, to the point where I trusted it more than actual evidence at times. With this one I had not wanted to mention it, but she had asked the question.

‘I thought the whole thing looked staged.’

She nodded, pleased that she’d read me right yet again, ‘Why?’

‘Well for a start off, if she’d been biffed on the bonce with that heavy pan she would have collapsed on the floor where she’d been struck. Janet reckoned that the blow was so heavy that she would have died almost instantly; tremendous force was used and the skull was crushed right in, so there’s no way that she could have crawled over to the cupboards and lifted the top of her body upright. Secondly, the pan was lying virtually parallel to her legs, so close that it could not have just fallen there; artistically posed, if you like.’

‘You said there was no ID. Wasn’t it in her handbag?’

‘That was another thing that doesn’t jell. According to Mrs Coulson the woman’s favourite everyday bag was grey with silver mountings. There was nothing like that in the flat. There were about a dozen others in the bottom of a wardrobe, along with her shoes, but they were all empty, and she would not have put the bag she was using with the others anyway. It would be lying around the flat somewhere.’

‘And if it was the husband, he would not have taken the bag, just some of the contents; her credit cards, for instance, and maybe any money she had in it.’

‘Was her mobile number on the home phone memory list?’

‘No, unfortunately. There was not one in the flat and it’s quite possible she didn’t have one. Ken is checking with the servers, but with only the name and address to go on it will take them a while to come up with the number, if one exists. Doing a search like that doesn’t earn them any money, and they’ll treat is as non-urgent.’

‘Are you going to do anything else this afternoon?’

‘I’ll need to check the CCTV for the streets around the address to find out what time the husband drove off, but that might take hours, so I’ll leave that till the morning. Ken Bryson has ordered a triangulation on Max Carter’s mobile if it is switched on, which it is not at the moment, apparently, and Ken has one of his team ringing the number every half hour. He’ll let me know if he gets through. Let’s just finish that report, then I’ll write it up on the white boards and we can go home.’

Jane’s twinkling, almost mesmerising fingers finished typing it up at five to five, I wrote it up on the boards and we left on time.

At home it was my turn to cook and I dished up sushi as a starter, made from one of the trout our friend Tony had sent by special delivery, caught the day before at the lake owned by his club, Norfolk Flyfishers, followed by a chicken and leek dish in a cheese sauce laced with loads of garlic and ginger. Dessert was a cheesecake I’d made the day before, with lashings of double cream. Bugger worrying about the waistline!

Afterwards we cuddled on the sofa, watching a very outdated, boring old detective movie with a dreadfully predictable plot on Film Four, ‘Twenty-two paces from Baker Street’, different only in that the detective, Philip Hannon, played by van Johnson, was blind, and then went to bed and made leisurely love.

I dropped off to sleep with no worries. The murder was a simple one, with just one suspect, and would be easily solved.

And the Easter Bunny really does lay eggs!

CHAPTER TWO

I found Max Carter almost immediately the next morning, or at least the sight of his van, in the next street to his flat. The time registered on the CCTV clock was seven twenty-five. The speed of the van was not excessive; he did not seem to be in anything like a great hurry.

Jane, going through the records, stopped me for a moment with, ‘They married on the third of May 2010 at Brixton Registry office. Witnesses were a William and Lakshi Panjami.’

‘Sounds to me like they grabbed the nearest janitors. So no close friends.’

By quarter to twelve, using dozens of CCTV sightings, I had followed Carter from Brixton, through Westminster and Hackney up to the M11, which he joined at the southern end, heading determinedly north.

I told Jane, ‘He’s doing a runner.’

‘Where will he be going?’

‘God knows. Possibly onto a ferry at Newcastle, or somewhere he knows up north. There are plenty of cameras on the trunk roads, so I’ll have a better idea when I’ve had time to look at them. I can work out his average speed, so that I’ll only need to look at a certain time-frame on each of them.’ He was still my sole suspect, and his flight added to my certainty. The only fly on the wall was the slight time discrepancy in Janet Keller’s estimate of time of death. I dialled her number and asked her, ‘Can you give me a more accurate TOD, Janet?’

‘Why? Have you come up with something that makes it look wrong?’

‘A little. Could it have been earlier than eight o’clock?’

‘Had you said ‘later’ I might have agreed, but not earlier.’

‘Not even by three quarters of an hour?’

‘No.’

‘Is that a positive ‘No’?’ There had been a time when we were lovers when ‘No’ had often meant ‘Yes’.

‘As positive as I can make it. I’d say she was killed between eight-thirty and nine.’