DARK CRIMES a gripping detective thriller full of suspense (13 page)

CHAPTER 11: A New Romance

Friday Night, Week 1

Lauren Duke was going to have an evening out and enjoy herself. She’d parted from her last boyfriend earlier in the week, having discovered that he’d been two-timing her. It wasn’t a great loss. He was an immature, self-centred idiot who liked drink rather too much and her company rather too little. Definitely not someone to settle down with. She’d met up with a fellow student from Southampton University and, after a drink in a city centre pub, they had decided to go clubbing. So here she was, on a crowded dance floor, her slender legs keeping perfect time to the beat. Her friend Kirsten had vanished with a young man she’d had her eye on for weeks. Lauren smiled at the tall figure who’d moved into the vacant spot opposite her. He looked cute.

* * *

She awoke the next morning in a slight daze, always the sign of a good night out. She turned onto her side and found herself looking into dark brown eyes. She smiled shyly, and he smiled back.

‘Hi,’ he said.

Her smile widened. ‘Thank you for a lovely time last night. You were very thoughtful, not like most of the boys I’ve met. They just seem to want to get it over with once we’re in bed.’

‘Well, there’s the thing. I’m not a boy, so I do know how to treat a lovely lady like you. And I must thank you as well. You’re a gorgeous person to be with. The least I can do is to offer you breakfast. I don’t really want to share it with your student housemates, so how about coming out to a great café that I know? I’m starving. I don’t think it’s more than five minutes’ walk, if I’ve got your place situated right.’

‘That would be lovely. I don’t usually do breakfast, but I’m hungry as well. You can tell me about yourself while we’re eating. We seemed to spend all of our time last night talking about me. I’ll go for a shower, if one of my housemates hasn’t got there first.’

She self-consciously slipped on a baggy T-shirt and went to the door.

‘Can I join you if it's free?’ he suggested. ‘I do a fantastic back scrub.’

She gave him a soft smile that seemed to open up her face.

‘Oh, of course!’

Then she became embarrassed as she realised she’d responded to his suggestion rather too enthusiastically. The T-shirt revealed the flawless skin of her shoulders, a delicate pale-pink colour. She held out her hand.

* * *

The café breakfast was the best Lauren had tasted since she’d left home. Perfectly cooked eggs, bacon and mushrooms, followed by toast and marmalade and several cups of hot tea. She looked at him over the top of her teacup as she answered his questions about what she wanted to do after uni.

‘That’s still ages away yet. I’ve only just started my second year. But geographers do all kinds of things. Many don’t even use their degrees directly, but work in other areas.’

‘Like?’

‘Well, the tourist industry, journalism, the environment, general management, even law, if you do a conversion course after graduating.’

‘You added that last one deliberately. Why was that?’

‘It’s what my dad wants me to do.’

‘And are his plans for you important?’

‘Yes, because I love my dad. But I don’t want to go into law. It’s just not for me. I’d be happy working for the environment in some way.’

‘Is he a lawyer?’

‘Goodness, no. He’s a dock worker in Poole. Or he was until he retired last year. He’s only ever wanted the best for me. I’ve always been the apple of his eye, you see. My brothers are both brawny types, one’s a car-mechanic and the other a plumber. My dad has always said that I must have fallen out of the sky as a baby angel because I’m so different from the rest of the family.’

‘That’s very sweet.’

‘But it isn’t true.’

He laughed. ‘No, even I don’t believe in angels.’

She looked mildly irritated. ‘No, I don’t mean that, obviously. I do take after someone, an aunt on my mother’s side. She was a petite blonde, and went to university, when few women did. She became a doctor, did missionary work in Africa and got killed during an uprising. That was when I was a baby, so I never really met her.’

He reached out and put his hand on top of hers as it lay on the table-top.

‘I’m sorry. I did understand what you meant.’

Her face turned pink. ‘I always take things that people say too literally. My friends at school used to tease me about it, saying I was much too gullible. That may be so, but I was the only one of my friends to make it to university. Some of them got pregnant before they were eighteen. My dad always says, who are the gullible ones now?’ She paused. ‘Anyway, tell me about your last girlfriend. When did you break up with her?’

‘Shaz? She was a waitress in a café, which is where I met her. And I broke up with her some time ago. Why do you want to know about her?’

‘No reason. It’s just nice looking at you while you talk.’ She hesitated. ‘I really like you. Shall we go back?’

Despite her shy nature she looked him steadily in the eye while she made her suggestion. Was she being a bit too forward? Maybe, but she didn’t really care. She was enjoying herself after weeks of arguments with her previous boyfriend. Why not let go a little? Or maybe a lot?

* * *

That afternoon Lauren walked hand-in-hand with her new man through the local park, laughing at the antics of some children trying to get a kite airborne. They weren’t having much success.

‘Maybe you should help them,’ Lauren suggested. ‘You have a definite height advantage.’

‘Well, that might be true, but it still wouldn’t work. There just isn’t enough wind today, even up at my head-height.’

‘So the climate’s no different up there in Andy-land?’

He looked at her and laughed. She was dressed in tight jeans, trainers and a pink fleecy jacket. A pink woolly hat was pulled down as far as her ears, with her blonde hair showing below.

‘Did you love your last girlfriend?’ Lauren suddenly asked.

He frowned. ‘What, Shaz? No, not really. She was a convenient person to have around for a while, and I liked her a lot. But no, I didn’t love her.’

‘So you weren’t too upset when it finished?’

He shook his head. ‘It was a bit of a relief to be honest. I think we both felt the same.’

‘Have you ever been really in love with someone?’

He stopped walking. His face darkened and he didn’t answer.

‘So the answer’s yes?’ she continued.

Finally he nodded. ‘Sorry, I wasn’t expecting that. Yes, there was someone really special. She broke my heart when she left me. I’m only just beginning to get over it. In fact, meeting you has been the best thing that could have happened to me.’

Her smile returned, lighting up her features.

‘That was a lovely thing to say. Do you want to talk about her? I wouldn’t mind.’

‘No. I don’t want to talk. It’s just something that I want to bury now. It’s over, and I can’t go back and undo what’s been done. And anyway, now that I’ve met you, I wouldn’t want to.’

She clung onto his arm even more tightly. ‘It’s funny, but I feel really safe when I’m with you. You have such a protective aura about you, did you realise that? I’m such a small person that I notice these things. You make me feel so secure. Maybe it’s because you’re that bit older than my previous boyfriends. They were all about my age, and I suppose it showed in their attitude to me. They weren’t as mature and thoughtful as you. I can just sense that you really want to look after me, that somehow you take that gentlemanly protective role quite seriously.’

‘Maybe,’ he replied, then shrugged his shoulders. ‘Do you go back to Poole during the holidays?’ he asked.

‘Yes. It’s so convenient for me. I always take up the same job at a local travel agent. I’ve been working there since I was at school. I suppose it might explain my love of geography, all those trips to exciting and exotic places on the covers of the brochures. I work on one of the desks, selling holidays.’

‘Are you in a uniform?’

‘Yes, I am. And I’ve been told I look really good in it. Why? Would you fancy me in a tight, blue, office-dress and high heels?’

‘I’d fancy you in anything, but it does sound appealing.’

She suddenly looked more serious. ‘Going home also gives me the chance to look after Dad properly. My mum died when I was twelve and although he’s sort of got over it, I still worry about him. He doesn’t bother very much with decent food when I’m not there, and my brothers, who both live quite close to him, aren’t the cooking types. They live on takeaways and microwave ready meals most of the time. When I’m home I try to cook him healthier stuff. I go home some weekends during term time just to make sure that he’s okay, and that there’s stuff in the freezer for him. You ought to meet him sometime. You’d like him.’

‘I’m sure I would like anyone who had a hand in producing you. But maybe not just yet.’

She laughed. ‘I’m not sure that hands had a major part to play in it, you silly.’

She slipped her hand out of his, reached up to his neck and pulled his head down to hers, kissing him softly on his lips. Her fingers played with his dark, curly hair.

They had dinner in a local pub. Lauren managed to consume a pile of roast potatoes and vegetables, three Yorkshire puddings, and several thick-cut slices of beef. Then she’d finished off the uneaten vegetables in the serving dish, followed by the leftovers on his plate. This was followed by a sizable dish of sticky-toffee pudding for dessert.

‘How can you eat so much and stay so slim?’ he asked.

‘I always eat like this,’ she giggled. ‘I’m one of the lucky few. And sex makes me even hungrier.’

CHAPTER 12: Holiday Snaps

Saturday Morning, Week 1

First thing on Saturday morning the team members waited quietly for the briefing to start. They were all now aware that there would be no quick breakthrough in the case. Sophie Allen watched her detectives assemble and cluster into small groups, all looking serious as they chatted among themselves. Finally Kevin McGreedie came in, accompanied by Tom Rose, the station’s commanding officer. Sophie walked to the front of the large office and stood beside the display board as the room fell silent.

‘Good morning, everybody. I hope that you’ll all manage some time off over the weekend, because there is unlikely to be any let-up next week. It’ll probably be only a couple of days before we start to get awkward questions from the press about the charges against Vilis Berzins. His cooperation has bought us some time, but some of the more canny reporters will soon start to realise that all is not what it seems. There were some stirrings at yesterday’s press release, I understand. You were out there, Lydia. Could you tell everyone what you heard?’

Pillay had positioned herself in the middle of the small knot of reporters for Friday’s short press briefing. ‘Nothing definite, ma’am. Mainly the weekend’s football fixtures, but there were a few murmurs about the lack of any news since we announced that we were charging Berzins. But the news about the search for the red hatchback had reached them somehow.’

Sophie said, ‘I do want to say that Barry did exactly the right thing in the circumstances. The witness who’d seen the car doing a turn in the lane late last Monday night said it was an old 02 reg even though he couldn’t read the rest of the number plate. He also said that he’d seen it before, possibly at the local petrol station. That’s why Barry went down there. If they had been able to identify it, it could have saved us days of work, so it was worth a try. Unfortunately the manager chose to release the fact that we were looking for the car to someone from the press. I called in to see him late yesterday to tell him exactly what I thought of this. Anything else that the team should know about, Lydia?’

‘Not really, ma’am. It was the usual mix of press and local people. The locals are still shocked by the murders.’

‘You all know that there is a parallel investigation going on in Bournemouth, headed up by DI McGreedie here. He’s agreed to visit us this morning to summarise progress so far. Over to you, Kevin.’

McGreedie spoke quietly in his soft Borders accent. ‘There’s a summary of the victim’s details on your own board here, so I’m sure you’re aware of them. Susie Pater was a twenty-two-year-old, and worked out of a small flat in the red-light district close to Bournemouth station. She wasn’t a street girl. She worked from phone appointments and tended to stick with clients that she knew. That’s why she hadn’t been picked up on our radar. She’s never been in trouble with us, and, as far as I can tell, none of the help agencies knew of her. Yet from what her friend said, she’s been working in Bournemouth for at least three years, and has built up quite a reputation. This all tends to indicate that her killer was probably known to her. We haven’t found any evidence yet that she knew Donna Goodenough, but it is possible that their paths crossed, since Donna lived in Bournemouth when she was at university.’

He took a sip of water. ‘Susie worked out of a small studio flat that she rented, but she also owned a property somewhere else in the town. There were no clues as to its whereabouts in her working flat, but one of her friends remembered some comments that Susie made about having a flat of her own near the central gardens. We found it early this morning and have a forensic team there at the moment carrying out a search. Like you, we were desperate to find some names and addresses since there were none in her working flat, and we're in luck. They’ve just turned up an address book and a couple of notebooks. We’re also examining a laptop computer that was there, so our computer expert will be looking for emails and anything else that might prove useful. We’re hopeful that this stuff can help us, since it’s likely that the murderer didn’t know of the flat’s existence. We’re going over to have a look at the flat once this briefing has finished.’

‘Thanks, Kevin,’ said Sophie. ‘Yesterday evening Barry, Bob Thompson and I paid a visit to a pub in Bournemouth that Donna had been seen in after dropping out of university. We didn’t hold out much hope. The student who claimed he had seen Donna there with a man seems to have a memory that’s all over the place. But we struck lucky, after a fashion, and a couple of people there remembered her. But that was as far as it went. They didn’t know names, and couldn’t remember much about the man she was with, apart from the fact that he was tall. What intrigues us is why they went to that pub. Was it their local? Was one of them, or both of them, living nearby? It’s not an especially attractive place, so it’s not likely to pull people in from a wide area. We plan to start house-to-house enquiries in the area later today, trying to jog a few memories with a photo of Donna. But more and more, we wonder if this tall man is the one we’re after. It’s our only lead, so we have to make the most of it. The student who gave it to us thinks he was older than Donna, and a bit aggressive.’

Barry Marsh interrupted. ‘How close is the pub to Susie’s flat? The one that’s been discovered? It could provide the link between Susie and Donna.’

McGreedie answered. ‘Ten minutes’ walk, maybe. We’ll certainly follow it up.’

‘We started to look for similarities with other domestic assaults in the records. Do we have anything yet?’ said Sophie.

Melsom answered. ‘There are some similar assaults in the records, none in this area, but a lot in Bournemouth and Poole. We’re wading through them all, but it’s slow and nothing has shown up yet.’

Sophie continued. ‘There’s usually a fairly long past history to an abuser like this, and the behaviour does tend to show itself sooner or later in any relationship he has. It’s a trap, really, that too many vulnerable women fall into. It usually starts with a sense that he’s protecting the woman. It’s reassuring, giving them a feeling of being looked after. But then it slowly mutates into control and, sometimes, aggression. What we are looking at is a worst-case. Only a tiny minority of abusive men take it this far — to murder. Even then, most of the murders are done in a fit of temper at the point of break-up or soon after, and that makes the job easy for us. This one is very different. I think it’s probable that we have a psychopath here, someone who has no empathy for others and who can blank them out of his mind totally. He has probably planned this over a matter of weeks or even months. We’re dealing with someone who is violent without scruple. He is far beyond the type of petty criminal that we deal with for most of our working lives. I’m not even sure how he fits into the spectrum of psychopathic behaviour, because of the amount of premeditation.’

‘What, even the murder of Brenda, the mother, was planned well in advance?’ interrupted Melsom.

‘Yes, and there are two possible motives for that. There’s the obvious one that she’d met him or knew who he was. But let’s look at the other. The son has told us that his mother was a beaten wife herself, knocked about by a drunken husband. And she’d put up with it for years before she finally left. Then, all these years later, her daughter starts to show signs of the same kind of partner abuse. What’s she going to say to Donna? Dump him. Dump him immediately, now. Get out, now. And if he got to hear of that somehow, he’d view her as the person who made Donna leave him. It’s striking how many wife-murders of this type also involve the mother. Most mothers will fight for their daughters until their dying breath. The maternal instinct never leaves us, Jimmy, and our daughters are precious beyond description. To see a daughter tortured by a man who should be loving and cherishing her would cause us such anguish that we couldn’t fail to get closely involved. Such a man would see the two women conspiring against him. No wonder that both are killed, if it gets as far as that. As we think it did on this occasion. The need for revenge is very powerful in such men.’

‘And Susie Pater? How does she fit in?’ asked Pillay.

‘It’s possible she was only killed to help throw suspicion onto Berzins, Donna’s boyfriend. Again, another aspect of this type of personality is that vengeance must be handed out to all those who’ve played a part. Berzins has to pay for his relationship with Donna. What better than this elaborate construction that sets him up as the killer? And Susie’s murder puts him so perfectly into the frame, since he was nearby at the time. Our man must have been on cloud nine when he thought it all up. It must have seemed perfect and it all seemed to go so well. But it was just too elaborate to hold together once we picked up on a couple of flaws. But to get back to Susie, I wonder why she was chosen. It was unlikely that she was a random choice since she didn’t work the streets. She was picky and only saw her clients by arrangement. It tends to point to her knowing her killer. So was he one of her regulars? Again, we wonder if her murder solved two problems. It provided another nail in the coffin for Berzins, but it also removed someone who knew the murderer well enough to finger him.’

‘Did her body show any signs of physical abuse?’ asked Marsh.

McGreedie replied. ‘No. There were none of the scars or marks that you found on Donna’s body. But that doesn’t surprise us. She wasn’t a street girl. She used the flat where she was found, but also worked the upmarket hotels in the area. She didn’t have to put up with anything heavy from her punters. And I’d guess that whatever relationship she had with our man was the same. According to her friend who found the body, Susie would have walked away from anything even remotely violent.’

‘Are there any more thoughts about the umbrella that was found in her flat?’ asked Pillay.

Sophie said, ‘we think it was left there to provide the link. To ensure that we’d make the connection that whoever killed Donna also killed Susie. That worked fine when we thought that Berzins was our man, but it’s a double-edged sword. We don’t think that Berzins killed Donna, and he definitely didn’t kill Susie. But the two deaths are linked by the umbrella.’ She paused. ‘As I said, I want everyone to get some sort of a break during the weekend, however short. Jimmy, you can have the rest of today off since you did the overnight stint at the house. By the way, did Berzins remember anything else?’

‘Didn’t get an opportunity to ask him, ma’am. He slept all the time I was there. I don’t think he got much kip while he was here in the cells.’

‘Okay, I’m seeing him later so I’ll check then. Lydia, can you follow up on the domestic violence records? We’re looking for a pattern of bruising on arms, legs and face, with possible strangulation attempts. Anyone else spare can help you. There’s also a chance that he’s called Andy, Andrew or similar, if he is the guy that the student talked about. See what comes up. Then take tomorrow off, and get a break from all of this. I want you feeling fresh on Monday. Barry, you go home this afternoon. Meanwhile are you going to keep digging for information about the car? Is there any CCTV that might have caught it on its travels? And all of you, make sure that we can contact you if needed. And phone me if you find anything that I need to know about, particularly the knife. Okay, everyone? Everything goes through me, unless it’s only Bournemouth-related. Then it goes to DI McGreedie. Right, let’s get cracking.’

* * *

An hour later, Sophie, with McGreedie and Thompson, entered a two-bedroomed, luxury apartment in a quiet residential area of Bournemouth. Sophie looked out from the lounge window over the flower beds and shrubs of the central gardens. ‘This is worth a bit, surely?’

‘Close to three hundred thousand, we think. You have to hand it to her, there are not many who manage to stay clear of drugs and pimps to bank that much,’ said McGreedie.

‘But she is dead, Kevin. Despite all her care in picking her punters, the total compartmentalising of her life, the tight control she exercised, she couldn’t escape it in the end. She was gambling with her future when she started this life, and she probably knew it. Poor girl. And the place hasn’t been ransacked in any way?’

‘No signs,’ said Bob Thompson. ‘Everything was pretty well as you’d expect. We found address books in the telephone desk, a wall calendar with birthdays and anniversaries marked on it, bills, receipts and everything else you’d see in a normal home. The only difference is that it’s almost too perfect, as you can see. It doesn’t really look lived-in.’

‘Maybe she only spent a day or two a week here. Either that or she was obsessive about cleanliness and tidiness. That wouldn’t be surprising would it? Anything of interest in the address book?’ Sophie asked.

Yes. Family members, addresses, phone numbers. And we found an Andy.’

He handed her the address book, opened at the letter R.

‘Andy, but no surname. It is under the letter R, though. That must be significant, surely? It’s just a mobile number with no address. Even so, that’s brilliant. It might give us a better handle on him,’ said Sophie.

‘There’s more.’

He took the book back and turned back to an earlier section. Under the letter G was written the name Donna Goodenough.

‘So they did know each other. I wonder how?’

‘You might also be interested in this.’

He passed over a wall calendar, open at the month of August. There was an entry for the twenty-fifth, with simply the name Andy.

‘Probably his birthday? Shame it doesn’t show his age. Still, it’s better than nothing. I’ll phone this through to Lydia. She’s searching the records on domestic abuse. When will you start to work through the phone numbers?’