Into the Darkness Read online

  ‘Last night I was called out to the scene of a double murder in Turpinfield,’ I began. ‘Jan and Mike Jameson were a couple in their mid-seventies, retired farmers. The standard background checks have revealed nothing of interest. It doesn’t look like a burglary. Nothing appeared ransacked or disturbed. A flat-screen TV, laptop and smartphone were all still in the house. The gold jewellery Jan Jameson had been wearing was still on her when she was found, and other jewellery she owned was in a wooden box on her dressing table. A wallet containing a debit card and two hundred pounds in cash was found in Mr Jameson’s pocket, and Mrs Jameson’s handbag with a hundred quid and a credit card was still in the lounge near her body. So I’m confident at this stage that we can rule that out for a motive.’ I paused for Ronnie to catch up while he took eager notes. ‘When I arrived at the scene, both of them were lying in the lounge approximately four metres from each other. The Home Office pathologist examined them, and although the post-mortems will be carried out this morning, she did estimate a time of death as between eight a.m. and eleven a.m. two days ago. Jan Jameson was shot in the neck. Mike Jameson had three bullet wounds. One in the chest, leg and also in the centre of his forehead.’

  ‘Blimey,’ Ronnie said. ‘You mean, like an assassination?’

  ‘I don’t know what it means yet until we get more information. But his wounds seem a bit like overkill to me – pun not intended.’

  ‘Maybe they were bad shots,’ Becky said.

  ‘Or maybe the offender was just making sure he was dead?’ Ronnie offered.

  ‘The couple were found by their daughter, Paula Eagan, following a spontaneous visit to see them. She says she arrived at Beech Lodge at six p.m. and found them in the lounge. The front door was closed when she arrived at the property, but the patio doors in the lounge which back on to the rear garden were open. No signs of forced entry.’

  ‘Maybe they opened the door to their killer?’ Becky asked.

  ‘There are several possibilities. They knew their killer and let them in the front, or they felt unthreatened at the time of opening the door and thus let them in, or the killer threatened them with a gun on the doorstep and then they retreated to the lounge. The shooter could have also come in through the patio doors, which may have already been unlocked.’ I stood and walked towards the satellite map I’d tacked up. ‘If you look at the whiteboard you’ll—’

  ‘Um, guv, you can’t say “whiteboard” any more,’ Ronnie interjected.

  ‘What?’ I frowned.

  ‘Haven’t you had the new Standards of Conduct diversity training yet?’ Ronnie looked nervously between me and Greene.

  ‘Why can’t I say whiteboard?’

  ‘It could be a potentially racial slur,’ Ronnie said.

  Becky rolled her eyes at the ridiculousness of it.

  I snorted and looked at Greene, who nodded and said, ‘That’s right.’

  ‘That’s bloody ridiculous! I’ve been calling it a whiteboard for thirty-odd years. I don’t think a bit of plastic is going to get pissed off with me for calling it what it is.’

  ‘Nevertheless, DC Pickering is correct. You can’t use that term any more,’ Greene snapped with a serious face.

  Was this what the top brass did all day? Dreamed up ways to waste time and money with ridiculous new training ideas?

  I threw my hands in the air. ‘What am I supposed to call it now?’

  ‘A notice board,’ Greene said.

  I bit my lip and blew out a frustrated breath. ‘Right. If you look at the map on the notice board, you’ll see that the Jamesons’ farm is in the middle of a rural area with only four properties. After the briefing I’m going to speak to the people at the neighbouring houses. Maybe one of them saw a suspicious vehicle or person passing through their land or on the lane that runs outside Beech Lodge or heard the shots. Only these two properties are apparently occupied.’ I pointed to Bill Graves’s land to the west and Parker Farm to the north. ‘This one, on the east side, is owned by an elderly lady in a care home. The property is up for sale, but there are stables there which are rented out.

  ‘Apparently, the Jamesons had no enemies. I’ve found no possible criminal connections. Paula said she wasn’t aware of any financial problems, or any other reason they could’ve been targeted. There were no bank statements at the house but a lot of people have gone paperless now so, Becky, I want you to get hold of the standard financial records, along with phone records, and see if you can dig anything up.’

  ‘Yes, guv,’ Becky said.

  ‘Was there anything else of note found at the house?’ Greene asked.

  ‘Some paperwork that needs going through. A laptop that I’ve taken to be analysed along with a mobile phone found in Mrs Jameson’s handbag. Emma Bolton will be here soon to brief us on forensics.’

  Ronnie shot his hand up in the air, a habit he had when wanting to ask a question, no matter how many times he’d been told it was unnecessary. Wilmott had ridiculed him for it but that was just Ronnie being Ronnie. ‘What if it was an assassination? It seems a bit random, doesn’t it? Or maybe so random that it’s not actually random.’

  Greene scowled with impatience. ‘What does that even mean, DC Pickering?’

  Ronnie’s cheeks flushed, embarrassed. ‘Well, what I mean is, if it’s not a burglary, they had no connection to any criminal activity, and no enemies, why would someone target a retired couple in the middle of nowhere?’

  ‘Good point, Ronnie,’ I said. ‘Which is why I want you to look more closely at the Eagans. Dig into their background and see what you can come up with.’ I went on to explain what had happened when I’d questioned Paula Eagan and told them about Grant Eagan’s past criminal record.

  Ronnie nodded vigorously and wrote something in his notebook. ‘Will do.’

  ‘Last night I checked for any similar patterns of gun crime in the county but found nothing like this,’ I carried on. ‘There have also been no recent burglaries in the area with anything that matches this MO. According to wills I retrieved from the house, Paula Eagan is the sole heir of Mr and Mrs Jameson. They both had life insurance policies totalling two hundred thousand pounds. So at the moment the Eagans are our prime persons of interest.’ I nodded at Ronnie and said, ‘I also want you to talk to the Jamesons’ friends and see if they can shed any light on their relationship with their daughter and son-in-law. Something struck me as odd when Paula was talking about them. I’m going to check her alibi that she was at work on Wednesday and find out what Grant Eagan was doing. They both work at Eagan’s Scaffolding, which is Grant’s company.’

  ‘Righty ho.’ Ronnie made a note of that.

  ‘There’s something else, too,’ I said. ‘We don’t know which victim was shot first, or how the scene played out yet. We’ll wait to hear from SOCO when they’ve done a crime scene reconstruction and the results of the post-mortems, but what they can tell us at this stage is that when Mrs Jameson was shot, someone was standing next to her, in front of the lounge wall.’

  Ronnie put up his hand to say something. I looked at him to go ahead, but he shook his head and said, ‘Never mind. Sorry.’

  ‘The spatter is in the shape of a head, basically. About five feet up the wall.’

  ‘So there were two offenders?’ Greene asked.

  ‘No witnesses have come forward to report being there so it looks that way, yes,’ I said.

  ‘Why would the offender stand so close to Mrs Jameson if the other one was going to shoot?’ Ronnie asked.

  ‘Maybe they were restraining her,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe the gun went off by accident,’ Becky said. ‘One of them could’ve been involved in a struggle with Mr Jameson and the gun went off and hit his wife. Then they had to shoot Mr Jameson because he was a witness.’

  Emma Bolton entered the room then, dressed in civvies, with dark circles under her eyes, clutching a coffee in one hand and a couple of clear plastic evidence bags in the other with her laptop tucked under her arm. ‘Mornin
g, guv.’ She nodded to Greene. ‘Sarge.’ She smiled at me, then aimed a general smile in the direction of Ronnie and Becky.

  ‘Morning, Emma.’ I smiled back. ‘I’ll let you take over now as you’re about to go off shift. What can you tell us?’

  Emma put her laptop on the desk and held up one of the bags. ‘OK, this is the bullet recovered from the crime scene that killed Mrs Jameson. It’s a nine-millimetre, most likely from a handgun, and will be passed on for firearms analysis to see if it can be matched to any previous crimes and hopefully determine the type and manufacturer of the weapon that fired it, but that’s going to take some time.’

  ‘Did you recover any other bullets from the scene?’ I asked.

  ‘No. Mr Jameson’s wounds weren’t through and through shots. All the bullets are still lodged inside him and the Home Office pathologist will recover them during the PM.’ She placed the evidence bag on the desk and held up the other one. ‘This is a pink stone. One of six we found lodged in the carpet of the lounge. All appear to be identical. They’re the kind of cheap stones commonly used in costume jewellery and applied to clothing. There are traces of what looks like glue on the underside, which is how they would’ve been stuck to whatever surface they were on.’

  ‘Those things are a bugger for falling off,’ Becky said. ‘I’ve got a black top with green stones on just like those and they come off all over the place.’

  Emma nodded. ‘According to the daughter, she never saw her mum wearing anything remotely like it. Paula said Mrs Jameson never wore costume jewellery or anything fancy or sparkly. We didn’t find any clothing in Mrs Jameson’s wardrobe, or anything in her jewellery box, that it could’ve come from, and Mrs Jameson wasn’t wearing anything of a similar nature when she was found. It’s a possibility it could’ve come from the offender.’

  ‘So we’re looking for a woman?’ Ronnie asked.

  ‘I just give you the evidence. Do with it what you will.’ Emma raised her eyebrows.

  ‘Could be a cross-dressing man,’ Becky said.

  Greene tutted under his breath. ‘Have you had the diversity training yet?’

  ‘No, guv,’ she said.

  ‘Well, I’m fast-tracking you for it.’

  I stifled a smile. Becky was a girl after my own heart. ‘Actually, it’s a good point. We should never make assumptions. Of course, it’s also possible these stones were dropped some time before the murder by an unknown person, a friend of the Jamesons perhaps, and are totally unrelated to the events of yesterday. Although, judging by the state of the rest of the house, Jan Jameson seemed very house proud. And there were fresh vacuum marks in the lounge carpet, so I’m guessing whoever came in and shot them entered after she’d cleaned in there.’ I tilted my head to Emma, indicating for her to carry on.

  ‘Also, on top of the fresh vacuum marks, we found a few blood droplets which may have transferred from the clothes of the person who was standing next to Jan Jameson when she was shot. They head towards the patio doors but there are none outside. We also found some smudges of soil on the carpet, most likely transferred by the offenders’ shoes. Their pattern indicates that the point of entry and exit was the patio doors. They only went a few metres into the lounge, as far as the coffee table, then retreated back the same way. I’ll get them analysed, see if we can come up with a useful tread pattern, but I don’t think that’s likely from the poor quality of them. Soil samples will go to the lab.’

  ‘Can you determine the height of the shooter from the evidence at the scene?’ Greene asked.

  ‘No. From the blood spatter and bullet hole in the wall near Mrs Jameson’s body, I’d estimate the relative position of the weapon when fired at her to be in this area.’ She opened her laptop and brought up a simulated computer image of the Jamesons’ lounge, complete with furniture, doors and their bodies. She pointed to a spot in front of the coffee table, where the killer would most likely have been facing Jan Jameson when she was killed and at a slight diagonal angle to Mike Jameson. ‘The pathologist will be able to determine the angles of the wounds, but we’d need forensic firearms experts to analyse everything. Even then, it’s most likely all they’d be able to tell is the height that the gun was fired from, which doesn’t necessarily translate to the height of the attacker since it would depend whether they held it at wrist, shoulder, waist height, or anything in between.’

  ‘I can’t authorise spending part of the budget on that, especially if there’s nothing to be gained from it,’ Greene said to me.

  Emma clicked a few buttons on her laptop and pulled up a photograph on screen. It was a close-up shot of the patio doors. ‘We’re still taking fingerprints, but we found three palm prints on the outside of the patio door, which are recent. All three were overlaid on top of each other.’ She traced her forefinger around the prints on the glass. ‘Mixed in with the prints was a fine dusting of grey powder. We don’t know what it is yet. Neither of the Jamesons had any similar dust on their hands at the scene, and we found no traces of it in the house, the barns, or immediate area.’

  ‘So the prints could belong to one of the offenders?’ Greene asked hopefully.

  ‘Possibly. I’ve handed them over to the fingerprint department but they’re backed up so I don’t know when you’ll get a result if they find a match.’ She slapped her laptop closed.

  ‘Did you find any tyre tracks?’ Becky asked.

  ‘Nothing so far but the SOCO team will let you know if that changes.’ She stood up. ‘That’s all I’ve got for now. The day shift is still at the house. Good luck!’ She left us with a tired smile.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’m going to speak with the neighbours first and see if they can shed any light on things.’

  Greene stood up and glanced at his watch as Becky reached for her phone and Ronnie started typing. They were a good team, hard-working, but they were only two people.

  I followed Greene into the corridor. ‘Guv, is there any chance of getting more bodies on this?’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do but everyone’s in the same boat. We’re short-staffed and overworked, and I have a dwindling budget that won’t allow me to authorise extra people power.’

  ‘This is a brutal double murder of an elderly couple! How am I expected to solve it when I have no staff?’ I slapped the wall with the palm of my hand.

  Greene glared at me briefly after my outburst. ‘I’m not promising anything.’ He walked off down the corridor towards his office, where he could push paperclips around and never come into contact with the real people whose lives were negatively affected by the ‘dwindling budget’.

  ‘Do you ever wonder why we slog our guts out to catch criminals?’ I said to his retreating back. ‘All the man-hours searching for evidence to put them away and then they just get away with it?’

  Greene stopped, turned around. ‘I suppose you’re referring to the Jeremy Wellham case?’

  ‘Yes, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Our job is to apply the law. What happens afterwards is not our concern. The CPS declined to prosecute Wellham so it’s out of our hands.’

  ‘Yeah? Well, tell that to Mandy Bowyer.’ I snorted. ‘He raped her – we all know it. And so what if she’d invited him to her house because she wanted to get back together with him. So what if they’d been drinking wine beforehand? It doesn’t mean she wanted that! I saw the bruises on her wrists and throat. I saw the girl who’d once been confident and lively break into desolate pieces. I witnessed how her life fell apart in just a few tragic minutes because of his jealous rage. She didn’t fake her pain. It was real. It wasn’t a case of consensual rough sex, even if the CPS thinks that’s how it would be seen. Wellham is a callous rapist and he’s got away with it.’ I knew my mouth was running away with me. Knew I should shut up, but I was on a roll now. ‘And what about Lord Mackenzie? That never even got to the CPS. The law most definitely wasn’t applied there.’ Mackenzie had been involved in a fake theft of his classic car collection, which turned into a multi-millio
n-pound insurance fraud. As soon as I’d started discovering Mackenzie’s involvement in it, Greene had told me the investigation had been quashed on orders from the top brass and I’d been threatened with suspension unless I stopped digging. ‘It doesn’t matter whether you’re scum masquerading as a pillar of society with friends in high places or you’re a lowlife scrote, what’s the point of it all if we can’t get these people off the streets and protect the innocent?’

  ‘You’re not still going on about that case, are you?’ He gave me an exasperated sigh. ‘And it’s person-hours. You can’t say man-hours any more. It’s sexist.’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’ I rolled my eyes. ‘Is that political correctness rubbish all that matters to you?’

  He narrowed his eyes. ‘It’s a good job you’re only here for two more weeks or you’d be in my office now for insubordination.’

  ‘What, again?’ I muttered.

  ‘Don’t forget you are speaking to a superior officer!’ His cheeks had turned a mottled, angry red. I always seemed to have that effect on him. He was probably counting down the days until my departure by the second. ‘You’re getting way too personally involved in all these cases. I’ve had it up to here with your attitude and—’ He broke off and glared at me, shaking his head. ‘And stop swearing! The force is undergoing a change, and you have to change with it. It’s not like the old days any more. You’d better get used to it.’

  But maybe I didn’t want to.

  THE VIGILANTE

  Chapter 9

  The satnav announced our destination as we pulled up in a sleepy suburb on a street lined with small, terraced cottages. They were quaint and obviously old. I had no idea how old, but knew that Bournewood had sprung up as a market town in the seventeenth century. I turned the engine off and stared at number 15, a cacophony of sounds penetrating the silence. Kids. Lots and lots of kids, shouting and screaming. There was a school somewhere very nearby.

  I glanced at the clock on the dashboard. Twelve thirty p.m.

  ‘Looks a nice area,’ Maya said, stepping out of the car and slinging her handbag diagonally across her body.