Clean Cut (14 page)

‘Won’t you need your keys to get into the flat to move all this crap out? Your bicycle, your rowing machine?’

‘I’ll let you know when I can get them moved out over to my place.’

Then he was gone.

All the shelves in the bathroom where he’d kept his rows of pills were empty. She was quite shocked, not at the available space, but how he had in such a rage remembered to take them all. He’d left some socks and a pair of shoes, his dirty laundry in the basket, a few shirts and one suit. She felt like taking a pair of scissors and cutting them to shreds; instead, she slammed the wardrobe door and went to clean up the broken champagne glass. Tipping it into the bin in the kitchen, she noticed a number of empty pill bottles. She took them out. They were all his painkillers but some of them, she noticed, had different strengths and, oddly enough, various labels, all from different chemists. She threw them back into the bin, tied up the plastic bag and placed it by the front door to take to the bins outside the next morning.

Anna had a terrible night. She couldn’t sleep, yet she didn’t feel like crying. The more she tossed and turned,
the more angry she felt at the way he had behaved. She would not contact him; she was sure that, when he thought about the entire situation, he would apologize. She’d wait, because she did not feel she had in any way been at fault; all she had ever done was consider his recovery to be the most important thing. All
he
had very obviously done was selfishly make it his sole priority. Well, he had achieved what he was so determined to do: he had been reinstated as a leading detective in the Murder Squad. She would no doubt read about him in the
Police Gazette
, and by next week he would be attached to a murder enquiry.

Arthur Murphy’s trial would soon be over and she would be onto another case, obviously not with Langton. If he went down on bended knee for her to join whatever team he was selecting, she would never work alongside him again. In fact, by four o’clock in the morning, she had worked herself up into such a fury that she dragged down one of her own suitcases and hurled into it everything she could find that he had left behind. She then went into the hall and chucked it onto his rowing machine.

When Anna returned to bed, she decided she would ask Harry to help her remove everything and leave it at Langton’s flat. She punched her pillow with her fist and dragged the duvet cover around herself.

The next thing, she was jolted awake by her alarm clock. She reached over to slap it off with the flat of her hand and lay there for a moment, her heart thudding. The silence, the total silence, did it to her; she broke down and sobbed. It was over, he’d gone, and already she missed him.

Arthur George Murphy was sentenced to life with a minimum term of fifteen years for the murder of Irene Phelps. His mother, Beryl Dunn, sat almost hidden at the end of the gallery. Three of Irene’s co-workers from the library sat in the centre of the gallery, staring at the smug gloating face of their friend’s killer, unaware his mother was so close. Irene’s parents wept, holding each other’s hands. Murphy showed no remorse, and shrugged his shoulders in the dock as if the sentence meant nothing.

As Anna left the court, Beryl Dunn hurried towards her.

‘Excuse me? Hello!’

Anna had seen Beryl but didn’t really want to face her again.

‘I’ve still not heard from our Gail,’ she said loudly. She was wearing the same clothes she had worn in the café, and her make-up looked as if she’d just given it another layer. ‘Did you do anything about it for me?’

Anna saw Brandon making a quick exit, and she hesitated.

Mrs Dunn continued. ‘Like I said, I’ve not heard from her. Something’s got to be done–I mean, she’s not even called me.’

‘I gave the local police near her bungalow the details, and they will have no doubt contacted social services.’

‘Did you report her missing?’

‘No. I told you that you would have to make a formal report.’

‘But that’s not right; she’s never not kept in touch and I got her social cheques and her child support. I told you they get sent to me, now why wouldn’t she want them?’

‘Mrs Dunn, if you really think something is wrong then–’

‘I know something is.’

‘–then make a report.’

‘Fuck off,’ she said, and pushed past Anna.

It was then that Irene’s ex-husband walked towards Anna. He introduced himself and thanked her, as Beryl banged out of the court. He was a tall, rather gaunt man, with thinning sandy hair and a dark navy suit.

‘I am Kenneth Phelps,’ he said, then hesitated, as if saying his name was somehow embarrassing.

‘How is your daughter?’ she asked.

‘Natalie is gradually settling down with us in Devon, but it’s very hard; she misses her mother, obviously. We have some help from a counsellor, but of course, she has nightmares. Her grandparents visit when they can. Eventually, she’ll make new friends at the school, but right now, we just take it day by day.’

Anna watched him walk over to join Irene’s mother and father; at least he was not alone.

Outside, Harry Blunt made Anna jump as he put his arm around her.

‘Want a lift?’

‘Yes, thanks. That’s Irene’s ex-husband and her parents,’ she said, watching their car go past.

‘I know,’ he said, then burst out: ‘Bastard got fifteen years, will probably serve even less; while that little girl will be twenty-seven years old when he gets out.
She’s
the one with the life sentence.’

‘Actually, Harry, I think I’m going to walk for a while, but thanks for the offer.’

‘Up to you.’ He started to walk away then stopped. ‘Eh! I heard Langton’s back–bloody unbelievable. We all thought he was a goner; tough bastard, isn’t he?’

She nodded and walked away, not wanting to discuss
it or now to ask Harry to help her move the exercise equipment, after all.

‘Been good working with you, Travis!’ he called after her.

She turned and forced a smile. ‘Thanks, Harry.’

Anna knew she would have a couple of days before she was assigned to another enquiry, so decided to put them to good use: maybe take a weekend at a spa and pamper herself. She tried not to think about Langton, but it was very difficult, with her hallway still occupied by his stuff. At home, her answerphone light was blinking; her heart thudded with the expectation of a message from him, but it was Brandon, saying he’d missed her after the trial. The second message was from Mike Lewis, congratulating Langton: he’d just heard the news–it was going round the Met like bushfire! She deleted the messages and then jumped as her doorbell rang.

It was a short square Indian, with a terrible striped sweater. He showed Anna his pick-up order and delivery drop.

She watched the poor man almost give himself a hernia as he carried out the bicycle and then took apart the rowing machine. He said he couldn’t take the suitcase, as that was not on his list. Anna grabbed her purse and took out a ten-pound note.

‘Just take it to the same address, would you?’

He agreed. After he’d left, she opened the kitchen windows for a through draught and lit a scented candle, to reclaim her space. She had to hand it to Langton. He didn’t do things by halves–walking out and then hiring the van and driver, without even one call to her. Well, she could be just as cold. There was no way she would contact him now. She was just going to get on
with her life and think back to that list she had made about how difficult it was living with him. Well, he was not living with her any more–and she hoped
that
went round the Met like bushfire!

T
om Adams, the landlord of the property in the New Forest rented by Gail Sickert, had done little with it since she had gone. The partly built henhouse that Sickert had been working on was left boarded up; stacks of planks leaned against it. The chickens had been sold, but Adams still made regular visits to feed the pigs and goat. Finding another tenant was not easy; the bungalow required extensive renovations.

Everything had been left half-attended to, from the manure heap to the broken fences. Children’s toys still littered the bare lawn, and the drive had even more potholes due to the heavy rain. Driving his old jeep, as he arrived to feed the animals, Adams crashed the gears as it plunged into a small crater. Swearing, he continued round to the pigsties.

Tipping their food into the troughs, he was thankful that they at least had been left behind. The pigs had come as part of the deal; Gail had agreed to feed them and clear out the walled pens. When the time was right, they, too, would be sold. Adams sloshed through the mud to get the rakes for clearing up the sties, turned on a hose and began to swill down the pens as the pigs gobbled up their food.

Moments later, a patrol car hit the same mud-filled crater as it drove into the yard. Two uniformed local officers got out and approached the stinking pigpens, mindful of the mud and sewage that covered the old cobbled yard.

‘You found my tenants then, have you?’ Adams greeted them, switching off the hose. ‘I was just thinking, at least they didn’t take me effing pigs, but they left the place in about the same state. I don’t think that woman cleaned the house once since they moved in.’ He crossed to a small digger, and climbed up.

‘Mr Adams? We’ve had an enquiry about your tenants; have you had any contact from them?’

‘I’m not likely to, am I? They left owing me two months’ rent.’

One of the officers put his hand over his mouth. ‘The stench is terrible,’ he said, gagging.

‘It’s worse than usual, ’cos they’ve not been cleaned out. I was just hosing down the pens before you came.’ The man turned, pointing to the manure heap. ‘I’m going to have to shift that over to the back field; they just bloody dumped it! You see the henhouse? They got me to pay for the wood to rebuild it–and look at it!’ He started up the engine and headed for the manure heap.

The two officers stood around for a few more minutes and then took off, climbing back into the patrol car. They were almost at the end of the drive, when Adams came running after them, waving his arms and hollering at the top of his voice. They pulled up and the officer in the passenger seat rolled down his window.

‘Jesus Christ, you’d better come back and see what I’ve found!’ he said, then rested his hand against the side of the patrol car and threw up.

The partly decomposed body was minus limbs. But even in the appalling state of mutilation, the body half-caught in the shovel of the digger was obviously a female.

Anna was in bed reading, when the phone rang. It was Brandon. He didn’t waste time apologizing for the late-night call.

‘I thought you’d like to know: the local police sent to check on Gail Sickert reckon they have found her body.’

‘What?’

‘Yeah, and it gets worse. They think she may have been partly fed to the pigs; her limbs are missing. They can’t be one hundred per cent sure it is her.’

‘Dear God.’

‘Yeah. So far, they’ve not found any remains of her kids. They asked for you to be contacted.’

‘Why me?’

‘You called them to check on her whereabouts, right?’

‘Yes–yes, I did.’

‘Well, they want to see you. They’ll also need her mother to identify the remains. You’ve got her contact numbers, haven’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘No need to do anything tonight; call them in the morning. The murder enquiry will be out of our jurisdiction, so nothing more to do with us.’

‘I’ll do that, thanks.’

Anna replaced the phone, and then lay back on her pillow. There was no way she would call Beryl Dunn herself; she would give her details to the station and hopefully that would be all. At the same time, she could not help but feel guilty; it was hard to take in the full
horror of what might have taken place. She couldn’t get out of her mind the memory of the dirty little child in her play swing.

Unable to sleep, she got up, made herself a cup of tea and telephoned the station in the New Forest. She was told that there was no one she could speak to at that time of night, and that she should call the next morning and ask for a Detective Inspector Brian Mallory. She gave her name, and said that she had been an investigating officer on a murder enquiry dealing with Gail’s brother, Arthur Murphy.

‘I’ll pass the message on.’

‘Has the victim been identified yet?’

‘I’m unable to give you any details, DI Travis.’

She was afraid he was going to cut her off. ‘Just one moment–I also would like to give you a contact number, in case the victim needs to be identified. Mrs Beryl Dunn is Gail Sickert’s mother.’

It seemed to take an interminable time for the duty Constable to take down the details. Anna ended up leaving her mobile number with him.

At seven-thirty the following morning, as Anna stepped out of the shower, her mobile phone rang. It was Mallory. He sounded very edgy.

‘Detective Inspector Travis, I would really appreciate it if you would come to the station first thing this morning. You apparently called last night? I would really like to talk to you.’

‘Have you managed to contact Beryl Dunn?’

‘Not as yet.’

‘Has anyone identified the victim?’

‘No, and we have as yet not found any other remains.’

‘Thank God.’

There was a pause. ‘Detective Travis, the victim is still at the site. Could you meet me there?’

‘Is it necessary?’

‘Yes, it is. We have got a management team organized. How soon can you get here? It’s just I would like as much information as possible, before an MIT team comes on board.’

Anna said she would meet him at ten, which gave her plenty of time to drive there. She wasn’t stupid; she knew they were unable to say whether or not the body was Gail Sickert. That’s what they needed her for; only then would they contact a relative for a formal ID.

Nowadays, the police system was run so differently from the way it had been in the past. Most local police stations dealt with traffic, burglary and any locally connected crime; murder was now only dealt with by a qualified and experienced team of specially trained detectives. An incident room would be set up at the local station and used as a base by the new team. Pathologists and forensic scientists would be brought in as quickly as possible. Anna hoped that by the time she did get to the bungalow, the murder team would be in motion and she could therefore get away as soon as possible.

The rain was lashing down and the drive to the bungalow awash; a number of patrol cars were parked up on the edges. She drove through the puddles and potholes as far as she could before a uniformed officer, wearing a cape, signalled for her to stop. She gave her name and said that she was here to meet Detective Inspector Brian Mallory. She was directed round to the back yard and asked to leave her car parked in the designated area.

Anna was glad she had put her Wellington boots and umbrella into the passenger seat-well. She wove her way round thick pools of mud and slime, and approached the yellow police crime scene cordons. She could see a lot of white-suited forensic officers moving in and around the area, their wagon parked up. The digger had been moved back and they were erecting a big white tent to cover the partly dug manure heap.

‘Is Detective Inspector Mallory here?’ she asked a female officer, who was standing with a big black umbrella.

‘Far side of the piggery, under the tarpaulin,’ she said.

Anna skirted around the crime scene ribbons towards the makeshift shelter. The officers were huddled together, as the rain was now even worse. Parked over to one side, away from the action, was the catering truck known as Teapot One.

Anna ducked beneath the tarpaulin and shook her umbrella outside.

‘Hi, are you Detective Inspector Travis?’

Anna gave a tight smile. ‘Yes, I’m DI Travis. Are you DI Mallory?’

‘Yes.’ Mallory was a thick-set man with iron-grey cropped hair and a red face with puffy cheeks. He reached out a big, thick-fingered hand to shake hers. ‘Thanks for coming; you want a coffee or tea?’

‘No, thank you.’ She looked around. ‘This is pretty grim.’

‘We’ve got masks if you go into the forensic tent, but it’s pretty well stinking all round. The pigs have been shut up, but they’re going to be moved out this morning by the landlord.’

The stench was getting to her, and she wrinkled her nose with distaste. ‘Wow, this is bad, isn’t it?’

He nodded. ‘We can talk in one of the patrol cars.’

‘I’m fine here, but I would like a mask.’

‘Right, I’ll get one for you.’

The other men under the tarpaulin were all in uniform; she gave a small nod to them, as Mallory returned with a mask in a plastic bag.

‘Have you found any other remains?’ she asked.

‘No, but then we didn’t do much of a search until we had the forensic teams in. We didn’t know what we should do. You know these murder teams like to get busy and not have their crime scene messed up, so I did it by the book. To be honest, we can’t cope with a major incident like this.’

Ripping open her plastic bag, Anna took out the mask, hooking the strings round her neck and pushing it up over her nose and mouth.

‘Who’s handling the investigation?’ she asked, her voice muffled.

‘Not been informed; being here, I’m not up to speed about what’s going on at the station.’

‘Anyway, you wanted to talk to me?’

‘Yes. You came here to interview Gail Sickert, or Summers, as she was called. I know you came back for a second visit.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, we took your report seriously. I sent two men out here, but they didn’t get into the place; then when you contacted us again, I sent them back and…’ He nodded over to the white tent that was now almost fully erected and the forensic experts getting ready to check over the corpse. ‘We will have to pull down the
henhouse and check around the pigpen, but we can’t really do that until the animals have been moved out.’

Anna nodded and then, without being asked, gave a detailed explanation of why she had been at the bungalow and her subsequent meeting with Gail Sickert’s mother. ‘I did explain to the station last night.’

‘Yes, I know, but the phone number for Mrs Dunn has been cut off–bill unpaid–so we are getting someone from Newcastle on standby to visit her. We’ll need to ID the victim if possible.’

‘She had three children,’ Anna said quietly.

‘I know. Like I said, we’ve not done a thorough search so we won’t know yet. I’m praying to God we don’t find them, but they could be anywhere around this awful place.’ He turned away, his red cheeks puffing out like a blowfish. ‘Worst scenario is they might have been cut up and…’ He shook his head. ‘Terrible to even think about it, but it’s been done before. Pigs’ll eat anything.’

Anna pressed her mask to her face and glanced over to the white tent. ‘Well, let’s do it. Have you asked the landlord to look at her?’

‘Yes. He couldn’t say either way. She’s pretty decomposed, partly due to the manure eating away at her.’

Anna stepped out and put up her umbrella. Mallory followed and they headed towards the tent.

Inside the tent, the only good thing that could be said was that it was dry. The stench was overpowering and her mask didn’t give much relief. She was guided towards the white plastic floor sheeting; lying exposed was the head and torso. Anna had by now been on a number of very gruesome murder cases but this was, if possible, one of the worst.

The dead woman was naked, apart from a pink brassière around her exposed breasts. Her arms and legs were missing, and her face and body were covered with manure and millions of maggots. Her thin blonde hair covered one side of what was left of her face. Anna could only see her profile.

‘Can you move the hair away for me, please?’ Anna asked one of the scientists. He knelt down and, using a thin wooden spatula, eased back the mud-clogged hair.

Anna had to lean in very close; she moved around to the other side, staring down at the remains. She straightened up.

‘I can clean her face up a bit more if you like?’ the scientist suggested; Anna nodded. With a tissue, he carefully wiped some mud and grime away and gently turned the dead woman’s head to face upwards.

Again Anna bent down; this time when she straightened up, she was certain.

She looked towards Mallory. ‘Yes, that’s Gail Sickert.’

‘Oh,’ he said flatly, and gestured to the body. ‘I was just hoping it wouldn’t be her, because of the children.’

Anna thanked the forensic scientist who had cleaned Gail’s face. He gave a rueful smile. ‘This is going to be a very unpleasant job. We’ve got a lot of area to search for any other remains. I’m getting help shipped in; we are going to need it.’

Anna returned to the station with Mallory, who would now give the go-ahead for Beryl Dunn to be contacted and brought to the mortuary. At least she would not have to see the state in which her daughter had been discovered.

Anna followed Mallory into the local station’s small
car park. He was talking on his mobile as he gestured for Anna to go in ahead of him. By the time he joined her, he was looking even redder in the face. Anna thought that perhaps he had been given more news about the children.

‘Have they found more?’ she asked.

‘No no, that was from Scotland Yard homicide division; they’re sending in some DCI to handle the case.’

‘Did they give you a name?’

‘No, they didn’t. But it’s unusual, isn’t it? I mean, we’re in the sticks out here. To be honest, I’m way out of my depth,’ he continued as he ushered Anna towards his office. ‘We’ve had a number of bodies over the years–you know, dumped in the forest–but not like this. I’ll be glad to hand over the reins.’

He plumped his wide backside into a swivel chair, saying, ‘I just need to take down all the information,’ and searched in a desk drawer to take out a statement notepad.