Greed: A DI Scott Baker Novel (10 page)

Had we got it wrong all this time? Was it in fact Stone who was a bigger fish and had been supplying to Fraser? Had they got in too deep with an unknown third party, and things had turned sour?

He also had to consider another possibility. With the explosion of the freedom of movement amongst EU citizens, a distinct lack of border controls, rising immigration and the financial strength of the City of London, there had been a rise of cross-border organised crime.

Recently, criminal gangs from both the UK and Europe had been showing an interest in expanding operations to the South Coast to exploit the many entry points that it had to offer. This had become an area of concern for Sussex Police.

So perhaps they had pissed off the wrong guys
,
if Eastern European gangs were involved, then Stone and Fraser were way out of their league
, thought Scott.

He’d only just read a report from Europol that as many as 1,500 gangs were actively targeting the UK, with the cocaine and heroin markets ranked among the highest in Europe. So it was plausible that Stone and Fraser had got in too deep, or tried to rip someone off, or even just been eliminated to reduce the competition.

Scott had all these questions and many more rolling around inside his mind as he figured out what steps to take next.

Chapter 12

The sun was sitting low in the sky as Scott drove along the seafront. It was a crisp morning; the sea was still, the pavements were decorated in a pure white sheet of frost that glistened in the sunlight. Even on a cold, crisp sunny morning, Brighton was absolutely magical.

There was the usual throng of people heading off to work mixed in with the early tourists taking photographs along the seafront, capturing the essence of Brighton with Palace Pier in the background.

It was views like this that reminded Scott of all the reasons he moved away from London and Essex. Out here there was freedom, fresh air and space. Even though his caseload was just as busy, being in Brighton and experiencing the laid-back atmosphere of the town helped to balance out and reduce the stresses and difficulties that the job placed on him.

He made his way over to Lewes Road. His first call was to stop in and see Cara to get an update on the post-mortem that she’d conducted.

***

As he made his way to the door he paused to watch a middle-aged lady with a younger man with his arm around her, accompanying her to the front door. Sadly he’d seen this many times before, the family of a recently deceased person coming to either formally identify or see their loved one in the chapel of rest.

Scott held back, giving them the space they deserved as they waited for a mortuary technician to let them in.

A few moments later he followed through the same entrance. The mortuary technician acknowledging Scott’s arrival as he carried on consoling the family. Scott went through to the observation room and could see Cara busy at work on the body of a young female, perhaps no older than seventeen or eighteen.

Even though he dealt with the hard end of life, he held a certain amount of respect for the job that Cara did. In Scott’s eyes, the deceased was still a person, someone’s mother, father, daughter, son, brother or sister. However he guessed from Cara’s perspective, they were just a body. A body that she needed to open up, dissect and examine to ascertain cause of death, without any emotional component.

He pressed on the intercom buzzer to get Cara’s attention. She paused midway to look up, her hands occupied with the dark red liver of the female.

“Detective Inspector, what a pleasant surprise. Why don’t you get kitted up and join me?” she said, greeting him with a smile from behind her plastic face visor.

Scott groaned quietly under a false smile. Much as he was looking forward to seeing Cara, she had this knack of making him feel sick to the stomach at the mere mention of stepping into the examination room. He slowly shuffled along begrudgingly like a child being forced to attend a compulsory maths lesson, finally entering the preparation room to get gowned up.

“Hard at work already? Dr Hall.”

“Well if you can call being elbow deep in blood and the innards of a corpse hard work, then I have to agree with you, Inspector.”

Scott gave the smallest of smiles. “I was expecting the PM report yesterday. Considering I hadn’t received it yet, I thought I’d stop in first to gather your thoughts before heading off to the station. What can you tell me?”

“Ah yes, I’m really sorry, the report’s done I just didn’t get the time to email it over to you. Had a bit of a rush job here yesterday afternoon.

Three teenagers died in a car on A27 near Polegate. Looks like all three were off their faces on cannabis when they lost control and went off the road. This poor girl here is the third of the victims,” she pointed looking down at the girl on the metal table in front of her. She had a thin frame, blonde hair with very natural looks. “What a poor waste of life,” she said with a sigh.

“Anyway back to business. Come over to this table, we can take a look at your man,” Cara pointed in the direction of the middle examination table where a light blue sheet was covering a body.

Cara pulled back the sheet to reveal Dave Fraser. The front half of his torso had a purple red discolouration where the blood had settled after he had been killed. Scott knew this to be Livor mortis having attending many PM’s in recent years. The patchwork Y of stitches extended from his collarbones down to his pubic bone.

“Long or short version?”

“Short version will do for now and I can read your report later,” replied Scott.

“Estimated time of death is between 12 a.m. and 4 a.m. He was stabbed twice in the neck.”

“Same type of blade?” Scott asked.

“My guess is yes. It’s a bit messy in comparison to the first victim, but only because of the second stab wound. Again the knife pierced the neck region. Having looked deeper into the neck cavity, it appears that the knife was thrust in, and then pushed in a further inch to the blade hilt. The piercing had a smooth edge and a rough torn edge similar the first victim.

My guess is the same type of survival blade. Then it looks like the blade was withdrawn taking some tissue with it.

What’s different on this occasion is that he has a similar large stab wound in his left hand. If I had to guess, I’d say that the victim brought his hand up to shield himself or reach for the wound, and the attacker stabbed him again trapping the victim’s hand. It was pretty messy, and the second entry point is much larger and disturbed. The knife severed the Sternothryroid and Onohyoid neck muscles. This was a far more violent attack.”

Her last few words were left hanging in the air.

Cara looked at Scott, whilst Scott stared at the corpse, lost in thought, his mind rapidly searching for answers and clues. The room took on an air of
utter desolation. Scott was jolted out of his own inner world by a cold tingle that raced down his back. Even though it hadn’t, Scott felt the temperature of the room had dropped a few degrees.

Scott exhaled deeply before looking up at Cara. “Thanks, Dr Hall, that’s been enlightening to say the least. These two crimes are connected because the victims knew each other.”

“Really?”

“Yep, I just need to find out who they’ve pissed off.”

“We’ve got several hair fibres from this victim, and they’re currently being analysed. In fact I’m expecting the results within the next few days, so I’ll get that to you as soon as I can,” Cara offered reassuringly. “So have you got any theories that you care to share?”

“A few,” he replied. “Well, perhaps one,” he added.

“How about we discuss it over a drink this evening? We could grab some pub grub too if we’re hungry. It gets pretty lonely doing this job, hardly a lot of banter,” she said waving around the room. Cara had the stillness in the air and the cold clinical appearance of the surroundings for company.

Scott paused for a moment, feeling unsure of himself before he agreed to the idea.

“Great, how about the Cricketers in Black Lion Street at 7p.m.?” she suggested.

“Sounds good to me, Dr Hall, I’ll see you then.” He was already walking to the door removing his face mask when Cara called back to him. Scott looked over his shoulder at her.

“And call me Cara,” she said, wagging a finger at him in jest.

“Scott,” he said in return.

***

Scott spent the next few hours tied up in meetings with DCI Harvey and the Chief Superintendent updating them both on the cases. They were joined by the press officer to formulate a press release on the second victim and an appeal for information on both cases that would be going out tomorrow.

Lunchtime came and went, Scott had just enough time to grab a tuna sandwich and fruit juice from the vending machine before sitting down to go through the report left on his desk from the high tech unit.

Scott made a mental note to get one of the team to start working through all the contacts in Stone’s contact list. Each person needed to be called to ascertain their relationship to Stone. He noticed that there were five numbers that he called regularly. Scott figured one of them would no doubt be Vicky Bright. The others needed to be looked into closely, as he had a hunch that one of them would be Fraser.

The laptop report came back clean. It was a Sony Vaio Core i7 2.00GHz with 8GB RAM, run on a 64bit operating system. Scott felt the description made as a much sense to him as the theory of relativity.

The laptop was mainly used for club purposes with folders for income and expenditure, promotion and marketing, staffing and payroll. There were email folders relating to Google mail addresses for the both nightclubs, On first inspection Scott could see that again they were all work related. Attempts had been made to delete browsing history and some files. The high tech team had managed to retrieve some of the data, but work was still underway to complete that task.

Scott spotted that the deleted history highlighted pages for plane arrival times at Gatwick Airport, Newhaven Ferry port timetables, the British Microlight Aircraft association, and a google search for farm landing strips and Shoreham airport. Scott started nodding to himself as he tapped his pen on the desk. This was starting to look like the background research of planned operations for the importation of drugs.

This has to be drugs related now.

He gathered up his notes and the file so he could go through it more thoroughly tonight at home. In the meantime he had to meet Cara at 7p.m., so he had enough time to grab his running gear and head out for a quick run along Marine Parade to Roedean and back.

Chapter 13

The Cricketers was set just off the seafront amidst the bustle of restaurants, bars and coffee shops. It was a popular pub with a dark red Victorian interior. Scott noticed everything was a shade of red: the carpets, the well-worn seating and the floral-textured, dark red wallpaper.

Whilst waiting for Cara to turn up, he ordered himself a bottle of Becks and spent a few moments staring with curiosity at how nearly every inch of the walls and ceiling were decorated with framed pictures of people from a bygone era, mounted stuffed deer heads and gold plates.

What amused Scott was the line of china chamber pots that were hanging from a beam across the bar which all added to the quirkiness and atmosphere of the place. It was one of Brighton’s hidden treasures tucked away that many tourists missed.

No sooner had that thought crossed his mind, he felt a tap on his shoulder. Turning around, he almost had to do a double take as he didn’t recognize Cara. She had gone to a lot of effort for this evening.

“Almost didn’t recognise you without your clothes on…” Scott remarked as he stood to greet her.

“Excuse me?”

“Sorry, I meant your scrubs,” Scott said quickly backtracking in embarrassment

“I’ll take that a compliment, kind sir,” she mocked with a bowed head.

Scott laughed. He was actually lost for words and was worried about putting his foot in it and digging himself into a deeper hole, so thought better of replying with anything for a moment.

Cara was wearing a navy blue, short-sleeve, figure-hugging dress that showed off her hour-glass figure and ample chest, which Scott thought she hid very well during the day. Her dark brown hair cascaded long and straight over her shoulders and down the front of her chest, her dark brown eyes warm and inviting.

Scott felt brave enough to comment without putting his foot in his mouth. “You look stunning.”

“It comes easy,” she replied, shrugging and flicking her hair back with one hand in a mock gesture of self-adulation.

“You could have made an effort, too,” she added, looking him up and down.

“Erm, sorry, I….”

“I’m joking, Scott,” she laughed.

In a valiant effort to defend himself, he replied, “I’ll have you know that this is a Paul Smith Suit.”

“You sure it’s not a suit from a vintage shop in the North Laines?” Cara teased.

In a fruitless attempt to quell her mischievous onslaught, he pointed around the bar, “Do you see anyone else splitting their sides with laughter?”

Cara finally calmed herself. “You know I’m just pulling your leg, but you’re an easy target.”

“I’ll remember to come in a black bin liner next time.”

“Who says there’ll be a next time?”

“Fair point.”

“Well if you do, make sure there’s nothing under it,” she winked.

Scott laughed, but reflected on the different side to her that he’d not seen before in their day to day contact. He liked her keen sense of humour, and of course laughter that had been missing in his life over recent years. At least she was good at breaking the ice and saved him having to do it.