BURIED CRIMES: a gripping detective thriller full of twists and turns (17 page)

Chapter 24: Snake

Friday afternoon, week 2

As the train made its way along the northern shoreline, Harry Turner looked out onto the mud-flats of Poole Harbour. Picturesque, he thought, particularly at high tide. Harry had his pocket binoculars to hand, and used them occasionally to spot some of the birds that rested on the marshy ground on their way to some distant breeding place. He glanced at his watch. Still half an hour to go before Dorchester. This would be the slowest part of the journey, winding through the Dorset countryside, with several steep inclines between Wareham and Dorchester. He took another sip of coffee and ate the last of his sandwiches.

He thought about the task awaiting him. How best to go about the session with Sophie’s team? He decided to follow a question and answer approach. As long as he had his check list to hand it should be fine. A meal out in one of Wareham’s top pubs was planned for the evening, and then on Saturday the activity he was most looking forward to: a day spent bird watching with Martin Allen at the Arne RSPB reserve. It was a top site he’d never visited before, despite many years of promises to himself. The problem had always been its proximity to Wareham, and the protégé from his working years. He had never dared risk a meeting with her. As it happened Sophie herself had broken the impasse the previous week when she’d phoned to arrange their meeting in the pub at Waterloo. So here he was, looking forward to what might be the most enjoyable weekend he’d had for years. He felt almost young again.

* * *

‘So, now the introductions are over, you can start to tell us what you know, Harry. I think you know the background to the case. What might be relevant?’ Sophie looked across at her ex-boss and gave him an encouraging smile.

Harry Turner leaned back in his chair. ‘I’ll give you an introduction to the main ideas, then you can ask questions. I’ll try to be systematic. It’ll help you to make sense of current thinking if I cover it in a logical way, but I’m also a pragmatist. I’ll only include ideas that seem to relate to practical experiences and help to clarify things.

Who are the child killers? Let’s go through the options, starting with those who are most closely linked. Parents, step-parents, siblings, half-siblings, step-siblings, uncles and aunts, other acquaintances, strangers. The emotional ties decrease in intensity as we go down the list. What this means is that the motives for child murder are likely to be very different in each case. We also need to make allowance for gender, both of the killer and the victim. A mother who kills her child will tend to have different motives from a father.

Why would a mother kill her child? The main factors include mental illness, absence of maternal feelings, severe emotional immaturity, abnormal power play, a distorted sense of reality caused by drugs or alcohol. Fathers? Well, inability to cope with the dramatic changes to life at home, excessive jealousy of the mother-child bond, and again drugs or alcohol. Financial hardship can also be a significant factor. Any of these can play a part, and if several of the factors are present then the indicators are strong. In addition, and for both parents, we must include the possibility of psychopathy.’

At the end of his talk Turner asked for questions.

Rae Gregson was the first to speak. ‘You mentioned abnormal power play as a motive for a mother. Could you explain?’

Harry nodded. ‘A woman, particularly someone of low social status and intelligence, might never have been in a position of power before. Never chosen as a prefect or monitor at school, never given a position of responsibility at work. She might not be in work. She’s never had any power over anyone before. In fact, it’s always been she who was the victim. And suddenly she is presented with a child who is totally dependent on her, particularly if she’s a single mum. Most mothers respond amazingly well in such a situation, but in a small number of cases the mother expresses her insecurities through a mixture of cruelty and dominance. Each act might be followed with a show of love for the child.’

‘So this particular reason probably wouldn’t apply if the mother was high achieving? A doctor for example?’

‘No. There the motives might be very different. For example, suppressed anger over an enforced career break, or something of that nature. It’s important to realise that the mother herself will be unaware of these motives. They will be bubbling away in the subconscious. As we go down the list I mentioned at the start, the motives shift from ones that are primarily subconscious to ones that are more likely to be at least partly rational. You should all recognise a general truth. Child killers, as a rule, don’t do it for a rational reason. Adults who are murdered are often killed for some type of gain, although emotion and temper still play a part. Few children are killed for gain. The motivations for their murders are twisted, and have been long suppressed. I’m generalising, of course. There are always exceptions. In the States for example, there have been cases where children have been murdered for insurance money.’

Barry Marsh said, ‘there’s a possibility that these murders were committed by the gardener who was employed at the house. Where would that fit?’

‘He’d be an acquaintance. Let’s build a possible scenario. He visits regularly, maybe a half day each week. He watches them playing. Maybe they tease him. Possibly there was a sexual element in his interest. Maybe he had a proclivity for young girls or young boys. That’s where we hit the first problem. Usually it’s either girls or boys, not both. Though if one of them witnessed something, both would have to be killed.’

‘What might be the most likely method used to kill them?’

‘Strangulation or smothering. They were only six, weren’t they?’

‘Not cyanide poisoning?’

Harry Turner frowned. ‘That’s highly unlikely, though there have been a couple of cases where a parent did use powerful poisons. It’s too cold-blooded, too rational, and would require the children to drink or eat something laced with the poison. And, if it was the gardener, how would you hide it from the parents and the authorities? In fact, if it was the gardener, what kept the parents so quiet? Why didn’t they call us in? It just doesn’t follow. Or was a parent killed at the same time? Is there another body?’

Sophie shook her head. ‘We think the parents were already dead a year or two before, though we’re still waiting for the DNA profiling. We’ve had a sniffer dog in, and it didn’t react in any other spot. We’ve used all kinds of ground-penetrating devices, and nothing else has shown up. If there is another body, and my gut feeling is that there isn’t one, it’s somewhere else. And you know what that means, Harry. You taught it to me. If there’s no evidence of another body, don’t waste time looking for one. It probably doesn’t exist.’

Turner smiled. ‘Absolutely right. It can be a real time-waster. Base your investigation on what you have, not what you might have.’ He paused. ‘Cyanide, eh? How would you go about finding that after twenty years?’

‘Difficult, but not impossible. I spoke to a chemistry professor at Southampton University and she got back to me this morning. Apparently cyanide becomes untraceable in the body within a few days, but it’s still there in a different form. It bonds very strongly to the iron in the blood, forming a complex. That’s what she called it. Anyway, it’s so stable that it stays around for ages. Years, even decades. I asked her if it can be identified in soil or fabric residues and she couldn’t see why not, though it’s never been documented in the forensic analysis literature. It will be much more difficult to carry out than a simple cyanide test, but she’s willing to give it a go. Dave Nash, our forensic chief, is sending her some samples as we speak. Maybe we’ll know by early next week. As far as the original cyanide is concerned, we’re tracking back through records covering a quarter of a century. The gardener also owned a hardware store, so he may have had contacts that way. However he got it, assuming it was him, it should be recorded somewhere.’

Turner nodded slowly, and smiled. ‘You haven’t changed a bit, have you? There’s only one person I’ve ever worked with that would follow things up in such detail, and I’m looking at her right now. You’re totally relentless, and I say that in the best possible way.’ He turned to Neil Dunnett. ‘You do realise that you have a very special detective here, don’t you?’

Dunnett smiled thinly and nodded. At the other end of the table, Rae visibly relaxed. She’d been dreading this encounter with Dunnett, but so far all was going well. She realised that another skirmish was being acted out in front of her eyes, and so far it was going in her favour.

Turner continued. ‘Why do you think they might have been killed by the gardener rather than one of the parents?’

‘We can’t be absolutely sure just yet. We’re awaiting DNA confirmation, but if it comes back the way we think it will, we have a problem.’ Sophie paused. ‘Our dilemma is this. If the children are who we think they are, then, as I said, their parents both died before them. And that begs a whole raft of questions. Who was the woman who looked after them for six months and claimed to be their mother at the local primary school? Why did they move here from Bristol, where both parents seem to have been doctors? Were the parents’ deaths just coincidence? Was there some other link to John Wethergill, the gardener?’ She looked at Turner. ‘Those are questions for me to ponder, not you, Harry. But I would like to go a little deeper into his possible motives. You sounded just now as if you were unconvinced.’

‘I wouldn’t put it that strongly. And I did say that there could have been a sexual motive. But I would have thought that someone capable of killing two small children because of some pathological deviancy would have shown up on police radar well before then. Any signs of that?’

Marsh answered. ‘No. Not a mention, and I’ve gone back more than thirty years. Not a whisper. The only possibility is that he was using an alias.’

‘Which, of course, is always something we have to consider.’ Turner ran his hand through his thinning hair. ‘I just wonder whether it could have been accidental. If he had the cyanide for some reason linked to his gardening, and the children tragically ingested some. Could he have been confused and distraught enough to bury them and hide the evidence that way? It’s a possibility, isn’t it?’

‘That’s the way I’m thinking,’ Dunnett interrupted. ‘You’ve voiced my thoughts exactly. I think we need to scale things back, now that we have a strong candidate for their deaths. It was a tragic accident, he hid it for decades and took his own life on Wednesday night when he realised that the net was closing in. I’ll think about it over the weekend and speak to the ACC on Monday morning with my recommendations. This is all costing time and money that could be better spent on other things.’ Dunnett spoke as if his mind was already made up.

Rae was horrified. You utter snake, she thought. She was wondering what to say, when Turner spoke again.

‘It’s too neat and easy. I can see why Sophie is worried. At the moment there are a lot of loose ends and too many coincidences.’

‘I made a promise,’ Sophie said. ‘To the children. When I saw their tiny skeletons laid out on those benches in Benny Goodall’s lab. I made a promise to them that I’d get to the bottom of what happened, and see they got justice.’ She paused. ‘I always keep my promises. We need another week to collect all the information. It will look ridiculous if we start to close down, then have to reopen the case if something comes in that doesn’t fit.’

Marsh remembered that she’d shut her eyes as she touched each tiny forehead. So that’s what she’d been doing. ‘I agree. Another few days should see us start to get information back in. Surely that’s the time to make decisions like this, sir, not now?’

Dunnett didn’t respond for several moments. Finally he said, ‘you have until Wednesday morning. But you’ll have to do without Gregson. There’s an important job back at HQ that needs doing. Monday morning at nine, Gregson. Report to me. Don’t forget, and don’t be late.’ He stood and walked out.

There was a stunned silence. Rae held her head in her hands. Barry could find nothing to say. Even Harry Turner was surprised. He looked at Sophie and raised his eyebrows.

‘Meeting closed. Get back to work, please, everyone.’ She hurried out of the room after her boss.

She caught up with him at the bottom of the stairs.

‘Neil, don’t do this. Trust me. The case isn’t as simple as it looks. I need Rae to stay here. She’s an integral part of my team.’

‘My decision stands,’ he said. ‘The money’s running out, and you’re wasting what’s left to no useful purpose.’ He stared at her, and she could see the animosity in that look. ‘As for Gregson, that decision stands as well. I want to see him on Monday morning.’

‘Rae’s a she, not a he. That’s a fact in law.
She’s
a member of my unit, and I need her next week.’

Well, Chief Inspector, I’ve given Gregson an order. And I’ve just given you one. I suggest you make sure those orders are followed. I don’t really care what you think. You have too high an opinion of yourself and it’ll do you good to have your wings clipped a little, just to remind you where you really are in the hierarchy. It’s lower than you seem to think. You act as if the police service exists only to reflect your own grotesquely inflated ego back at you.’ He turned away.

Sophie spoke softly. ‘Don’t do this, Neil. Take me seriously, please. The situation will develop differently to how you seem to expect. You’ll regret it.’

He stopped, turned back and stood close to her. ‘Are you threatening me? Do you think your influence extends that far? In case you haven’t noticed, most of your allies have gone. You have much less power than you seem to think, you stuck-up bitch. You’ve picked a loser this time. I knew it when I saw Gregson’s name on your unit’s profiles. You know what makes me happy about all this? I’m killing two birds with one stone. And this conversation has never happened. It’s your word against mine, and I’m the senior officer. You’re nowhere, so get used to it.’