The Domino Killer (2 page)

Joe Parker wiped his eyes as he locked his car door. Just before six o’clock in the morning, it was no time to be parking up in a town centre, even if it was close to the police station. There were threats in the shadows. As a defence lawyer he couldn’t use the police station car park, so he left the car on a side street flanked by shops protected by steel shutters. There would still be those who stalked the streets in the early hours, looking for unlocked doors; this was the regular nightshift for those wanting something for nothing.

He yawned and looked around. The coffee he’d gulped down before he set off was starting to take effect, but thirty minutes earlier he’d been in bed and hoping that the next sound he heard would be his alarm.

Police station visits were disruptive. Either they took place during office hours and wrecked his plans for the day, so that an evening or weekend was lost to catching up, or they were at some God-awful time of the night. But the best way to get a client was to be there at the beginning of the case, so if he got a call, he always turned up.

This visit didn’t seem anything special. A burglar, so he’d been told. He must have been caught inside the premises, whatever they were, because a cold forensic hit, like DNA, would have resulted in a daytime arrest, when there would be the resources to deal with him. He would have to say sorry and hope for a sympathetic judge, or keep quiet and buy himself a few weeks to come up with some lies.

Joe jabbed the button on the intercom and drawled, ‘Joe Parker from Honeywells,’ when the speaker fizzed into life. A loud buzz told him that it was time to push. A short corridor led towards another door, where another buzz allowed him into the custody suite.

Wherever Joe went, custody suites were the same. A high desk, so that prisoners couldn’t leap over easily and attack the sergeant, and a large space in front, enough room for the brawlers to carry on their disputes with whoever had handcuffed them. Most prisoners were led in meekly, but there had been a few occasions when Joe had stepped into the cell corridor to avoid the flying fists and feet as someone protested their arrest. They always started the same way, with the steady rumble of the police van and then shouts as the rear doors opened. The worse they behaved, the harder the ride in, with the driver aiming for speed bumps and plenty of stamping on the brakes, so that the prisoner’s anger had turned to rage by the time the doors were thrown open. Metallic clatters announced the struggle into the station, and then there’d be the strangled obscenities as a tangle of uniforms and dirty clothing tumbled into the custody area.

This morning it was quiet, and Joe preferred it that way. He’d seen enough fights – they were no longer exciting, and being a witness ruled him out of a case. The money wasn’t good in criminal law, so there was no point in cutting yourself out of a case just because the human drama became more interesting. Lawyers learned to look away.

Someone banged on a cell door and shouted something, but it was strangled rage. The sergeant ignored it, just part of the soundtrack of a night behind bars. The noise would get louder before it stopped.

Two plain-clothes officers were waiting for Joe: the duty detectives. Any hope they’d had of spending the night catching up on paperwork had been ruined by whatever his client had done. They didn’t make to shake Joe’s hand and he didn’t proffer.

‘Is he mine?’ Joe said, tilting his head back towards the source of the screams that echoed along the tiled corridor.

‘No. He’s just someone too drunk to know when to take heed of an instruction to go home. Your guy is very quiet.’

‘So what have you got?’ Joe opened his folder, a pen poised over a notepad.

‘Mark Proctor,’ said the taller one, the scruffier of the two. His tie was a little looser, his mauve shirt faded from too many washes. The shorter one liked his shirts tight and well-pressed, clean and rigid, like his posture.

‘They told me burglary on the phone,’ Joe said.

‘That’s right,’ the tall one said. ‘Broke into the vehicle compound and stole his car back.’

Joe raised his eyebrows. ‘The police compound?’

‘That’s the one. We subcontract it these days; use an old mill towards Royton.’

‘So he went in to take his own property?’ Joe said. ‘That makes it a tricky burglary.’

‘Unless it was never really his.’

‘I’m intrigued,’ Joe said, but the weariness in his voice hinted that he was far from that. ‘So how did you catch him?’

The smaller one puffed out his chest and put back his head. Joe knew his type. It wasn’t in his nature to cooperate. Joe preferred the taller one, who seemed like he just wanted to get through his shift and go home.

‘He set fire to the car,’ the smaller one said finally.

‘Unusual, after all the effort he put into getting it back.’

‘That’s what we thought,’ the other man said. ‘His car flashed up as uninsured when he passed a traffic patrol so the car was seized. It was taken to the compound, and within an hour, he’d climbed over the fence. Once he was inside, he just opened the gate and took it, all on camera. A mile away, he was caught running from a burning car. So we’re guessing it’s stolen.’

‘If it’s only a guess, looks like he’ll be staying quiet,’ Joe said.

The smaller one took a deep breath through his nose and stepped closer to Joe.

‘Don’t bother,’ Joe said. ‘I’ve had all the intimidation before. I’ll do my job, you’ll do yours, and somewhere along the line it will be decided whether there’s a case.’

The taller one tried not to smirk as his colleague jabbed his finger towards a small door. ‘Get in there. I’ll fetch him.’

Joe smiled, his first of the morning, and opened the door into a small space in front of a glass screen. His client would appear on the other side.

Defence lawyers couldn’t be trusted to have too much privacy with a client; some have provided more than legal advice to get their clients through the night. Tiny holes in the glass would allow them both to talk, just, but Joe knew the detectives would be waiting outside the door to hear what was said when voices were raised.

The door closed behind him and Joe sat down, mild claustrophobia settling in. There was only just enough room for his chair, and the glass screen prevented him from using his notepad comfortably. Joe understood: if he was tempted to drag out the hours, just to frustrate an investigation, it was going to be uncomfortable.

The sound of voices drifted in from the corridor that ran behind the space on the other side of the glass. Joe pulled out the form he would complete with his client and waited.

The civilian jailer was first, obscuring the client behind him. Joe smiled a greeting and then yawned. He needed another coffee.

Joe was still looking down, sorting out his paperwork, when his client sat in front of him, the small space filled by the sound of his forearms slapping on the desk.

‘Hello, I’m from Honeywells,’ Joe said, his voice quiet as he looked at his papers. ‘I’m Joe Parker.’

‘I’m Mark Proctor. Thank you for coming.’

When Joe looked up, everything changed.

His vision swam and his throat clammed up. His mouth dropped open and his pen fell to the floor. He gripped the desk to steady himself and clamped his eyes closed.

He took deep breaths to fight back the rise of bile. Sweat from his hands made the desk damp. It couldn’t be. Not after all this time. He was making a mistake. Too many years had gone by.

‘Are you all right?’ the voice said on the other side, a finger tapping on the glass.

Joe knew that he wasn’t, but he had to pull himself together. He couldn’t lose his grip. Not now.

He looked up again and nodded. ‘I’m fine. Just a migraine. It’ll pass.’ He bent down for his pen. He swallowed. ‘Just give me your details for the forms and then we’ll start talking.’

His handwriting was shaky as he took them down, but that didn’t matter. All that counted was the information.

‘Tell me what you were doing with your car,’ Joe said, trying to keep his tone even, but as he looked through the glass, he was transported back. A woodland path. A hooded figure. His darkest secret.

‘Who says it was me?’ Proctor said.

Joe tapped the notepad with his pen, making sharp blue points in the paper. ‘They do,’ Joe said, and he pointed towards the door.

‘They’re just going to have to prove it then,’ Proctor said. ‘Unless you can come up with a story for me.’

‘I don’t do stories,’ Joe said, regaining his composure. ‘Either talk or stay quiet, that’s your choice, but don’t expect me to come up with an excuse for you.’

Proctor shrugged. ‘Fair enough. Can we get on with it, then?’

Joe banged on the door. The detectives answered immediately. They’d been right outside.

When Joe was back in the openness of the custody suite, he reached for his handkerchief and wiped it across his brow. He wasn’t sure he could do this. But he knew he had to.

For Ellie’s sake.

Sam Parker was one of the last detectives to arrive at the park. He’d had to leave his car on the nearest main road so he was panting as he arrived at the scene. The access road was clogged with police vehicles, the team assembled ahead in white forensic suits, stark and bright against the dark stone walls. The uniformed officers were at the top of the road, keeping away the ghouls, but there was a regional office for a newspaper at the junction and Sam could see a camera lens poking through an open window.

There would be more officers arriving soon, vans filled with those used to search in a long line, a sweep with sticks and dogs. They didn’t reveal much usually, not in a public space like this. It was partly cosmetic, to show that they were doing something, one less fault to pick up on later.

The day hadn’t really got going. A light mist hung over the park, the dew evaporating in the early morning sun, but the Murder Squad was assembled. There was another horror story to decipher.

The park was a retreat, accessed through a metal gate, a cluster of trees and gently rolling lawns, a children’s playground in the middle. Sam knew it from visits with his own children. The Pennine hills were behind, the rural vibe spoiled by the occasional rumble of a lorry from the haulage yard next door. The allotments running alongside would get busy later, as the curious gave in to the urge to tend to overgrown plots so that they could peer over the fence at the activity in the park.

Charlotte Turner put her hands on her hips as Sam approached. They’d formed an unofficial partnership, the newest recruits to the Murder Squad, even though Sam had been on the squad for a couple of years now. Above them were egos and reputations, pressed shirts and puffed chests, so they looked after each other, made sure their contributions were recognised. It was the little things, like suggesting in the team briefings that the other had thought of something, even though it was pre-planned, taking it in turns to remind people they were there.

‘Not eager for the action?’ she said, her eyebrows raised but her eyes shining her smile. She tapped her watch theatrically, her hood down, her long dark curls stark against the pristine white of the forensic suit.

‘I had children to say goodbye to,’ he said, as he ripped the plastic bag containing the forensic suit he’d grabbed from a crate. ‘So what do we have?’

‘Another day in paradise,’ she said. ‘Someone beaten to a pulp.’

Sam looked around. It wasn’t the best part of Manchester, but it wasn’t the worst, more tired old cotton-town than inner-city concrete. The park was a magnet for gangs of kids at weekends, with poor lighting and dark corners. Fences along one edge bore the multicoloured scrawls that the artists proclaimed as art, whereas in reality they were just names that shouldn’t go beyond the cover of a school exercise book.

‘Any idea who it is?’ Sam said.

‘No, not yet, except it sounds like someone who shouldn’t have been here,’ Charlotte said. ‘I haven’t been to the body yet, but the uniforms first on the scene said that it was someone in a suit. There were crushed flowers in the blood.’

Sam frowned. ‘A romance gone wrong, around here? It’s not a cruising place, is it?’

‘I don’t think so. The door-to-doors might give us more of an idea, a bit of local knowledge, but nothing has come up on intelligence.’

Sam pulled on his paper suit. As he snapped his face-mask into place, he said, ‘Who’s the SIO?’

‘Brabham.’

Sam rolled his eyes. ‘Looks like we’ll be getting more work then.’

Before Charlotte could respond, Brabham walked over.

‘Just in time,’ he said to Sam. ‘Ready to go?’

‘As I’ll ever be.’

Brabham was the DCI most detectives wanted to avoid. He was known for loving the cameras but ducking the difficult issues. Whenever there was a high-profile arrest or conviction, he was first to the microphones on the police station steps. His favoured look was a shirt, sleeves rolled to just below the elbows, as if he’d been dragged to the cameras straight from an interrogation. Behind his back, people scoffed that he’d created the look on the way to the exit. If cases went wrong, he sent someone else along, disowning the bad results as if he’d never been involved. He was an expert in presenting himself, though, always smart, his tan just right, his hair dark and well-groomed, his shirts tight enough to show the work done in the gym.

They walked along the grass together in silence. The crime scene investigators ahead were working on the path, where small numbered stickers were being photographed. Blood spots, Sam guessed. There were more white suits ahead.

Sam pointed to the streets visible alongside the park. ‘That might be a good place to start. Even if it was too dark to see anything, any screams or shouts might give us a quicker time of death.’

They slowed as they reached the group of crime scene investigators clustered around the body. More photographs being taken, more numbered markers pointing out spots of blood on the path, and what looked like footprints, some tread pattern visible.

Sam let out a long breath.

It was a man’s body, there was little doubt about that, from the clothes and hands and the size of the feet. From the neck down, he looked respectable. Dark suit, patent black shoes, yellow silk tie. From the neck up, however, there wasn’t much to see. Blood had congealed on the concrete in a wide pool and the head was distorted, like a punctured football, caved in, the dull grey of brain matter showing through the gleaming white of his skull.

‘Another one,’ Sam said.

‘What do you mean?’ Brabham said.

‘Nothing really,’ Sam said, realising he’d just sparked Brabham’s interest. A series would make the news. ‘We’ve got another murder at the moment, that’s all. A teacher stabbed by the canal in Mossley. Respectable middle-aged man, on his own in a quiet spot one evening. Discovered by a dog-walker in the morning.’

‘But stabbed?’ Brabham said. ‘They might not be connected. This is different.’ And he pointed towards the dead man.

‘It certainly is,’ Sam said, looking at the blood and brains pooled on the floor. ‘And it’s going to get messy when they take him away. What do we know so far?’

‘About him? Nothing much,’ Brabham said. ‘There’s no wallet in his jacket, so it could be a robbery gone wrong.’

‘Do you think so?’ Sam said, gesturing to the bouquet. ‘Robbers grab and run, they don’t stamp and kill. Robberies are spontaneous. This seems different.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘The flowers,’ Sam said. ‘He was waiting in a park for a romantic meeting and ended up dead.’

‘He could have been robbed as he was waiting?’

‘So why didn’t the person he was meeting call it in? Even if it was extramarital, there would have been something – a scream or an anonymous call.’

‘Those were my thoughts,’ Brabham said, nodding to himself.

Sam tried not to roll his eyes. That was Brabham’s other skill: adopting ideas as his own.

‘Why here, though?’ Charlotte said. ‘His suit doesn’t look cheap, so he could afford something better than here.’

‘The wedding ring,’ Sam said, pointing. ‘Look around. We’re a hundred yards into the park. He wasn’t meeting his wife here, that’s for sure. It wasn’t about the romance; it was about the privacy, as seedy as it is.’

‘The robbery could be a disguise, then,’ Charlotte said. ‘A jealous husband?’

‘Or even his own wife,’ Brabham said.

‘Which makes it well planned,’ Sam said.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Frenzied makes it look random, spontaneous, but if he was lured here it was exactly the opposite: planned.’

Brabham nodded to himself. ‘That makes the victim even more important. Who is he and why was he here? And we know which way the killer went.’ He gestured along the path they had just walked alongside. ‘Footprints heading away, where the attacker had stepped in the blood. And it was dripping from something. If it’s the victim’s blood, that suggests a weapon. If it was on his hands, he’d have wiped it on his clothes.’

‘Unless the victim got some strikes in first,’ Sam said. ‘There might be some of the attacker’s DNA on those spots.’

‘This is going to get expensive if we don’t get lucky,’ Brabham said. ‘Analysing each swab to see who the blood belongs to will take some approving.’

Sam knew how budgets were stretched, and getting authority for forensic submissions got harder with every case. Murder trumps everything, but money spent on one case means less for another. Policing wasn’t just about feet on the beat.

‘Any missing persons reports yet?’ Sam said.

‘Someone’s checking,’ Brabham said. ‘But if he’s married, his wife might have put it down to another dirty stop-out.’

‘If there’s no call from a worried wife, don’t you think it helps to rule her out?’ Charlotte said. ‘If she was behind it, wouldn’t she be play-acting the frightened wife, sitting at home and calling it in?’

‘Not if he’s given himself an alibi,’ Brabham said. ‘Working away, that kind of thing. His fingerprints might help, or DNA, but he might not be the sort to get into trouble. When we find out, though, I want you to go through his life, every detail, however small.’

Sam was pleased with that. His area of expertise had always been financial fraud, picking through the fine detail, looking for patterns. In cases like this, with husbands playing around, changes in behaviour gave up the secret.

‘I’ll start with those,’ Sam said, pointing towards the flowers. ‘I’ll go round the florists, see who sold some of those flowers yesterday. What are they?’

‘Calla lilies,’ Charlotte said, and then, ‘Why can’t men ever identify flowers?’

Sam smiled as he pulled down the zip on his white suit and pulled out his phone. He took a photograph of the paper that the flowers were wrapped in. ‘I’ll think about that as I ring round.’

Brabham nodded his approval as he turned to go.

Identifying the body was the most important thing, although finding the answer just meant that someone somewhere was about to receive bad news, and be left for ever wondering what her husband was doing in a park, holding a bunch of flowers.