The Thirteenth Coffin (17 page)

Stripping off her clothes and leaving them where they fell, she made her way out into the garden, to where Richard had set up the hot tub jacuzzi. She had turned on the heater as soon as she got into the house, and she was looking forward to a good hot soak. As she made her way into the garden she stopped by the full-length mirror on the wall and looked at herself. She was a
little less than six feet tall, with what she knew was a perfect body. She knew because everybody said so. Flat stomach, high breasts, long legs, long dark hair, green eyes and a perfect mouth that didn’t need any work done on it to make it pout.

She really would have to start charging more for her shoots, she thought.

Walking out into the garden, she made her way over to the hot tub and dipped her hand into the water to check the temperature. It was perfect. Climbing the few steps into the tub, she slowly slid under the warm waters. It was the most relaxing experience possible. She felt the tensions of the day just melt away into the water. She ducked her head under, staying there for a few seconds and rubbing her hair between her fingers before she emerged and wiped the hair away from her face.

Leaning back, she decided to switch on the jacuzzi and let the bubbles massage away the aches and pains and frustrations of the day. The hand control was only a few feet away, and she could reach it easily. There were three levels: gentle, medium and full-on. She wanted full-on: she wanted the water to pummel her body, smashing out the knots and the twists. She could turn it back to gentle after that, and drift the rest of her time away.

She turned the dial hard to the right. The giant electrical surge filled the hot tub at once: thousands of volts crackling
through Clair Brett’s perfect body. She only felt the pain for a second. It wasn’t even long enough to scream, never mind try and get out. Death was almost instantaneous, and as the charge continued to flow through the water and along her nerves, the hot tub which had been Clair Brett’s sanctuary slowly began to cook her from the inside out.

*

On the way back from Hereford Lapslie had decided that his next stop would be the senior chief investigating officer for the nurse’s murder in 2007. Fortunately he was an old friend: former Chief Inspector Alan Day. Bradbury had managed to get him after just a couple of calls. The Chief Inspector had retired two years before after thirty-two years’ service, and now spent most of his time gardening and working in his allotment. He had arranged to see Lapslie there at 2 p.m. the day after the Hereford trip. Lapslie left Bradbury behind at force HQ, checking on the progress of the team. Also, he had it in the back of his mind that Alan was a very old-fashioned copper and investigator and the force had been glad when he finally went. He’d had little time for female officers, saying that they were only good for two things: sex, and bringing the coal in on a cold winter’s night. That kind of attitude was not only wrong, it was
unsupportable in the current political climate. However, Lapslie reminded himself, it wasn’t Alan’s politics he was interested in, but his opinions on the Jane Summers case. He found Day in a small greenhouse behind his house, cutting away some very red-looking tomatoes.

‘Hello, Alan.’

He turned. ‘Mark: how good to see you.’ His voice was dry grass and clover. ‘Just cutting you a few tomatoes. Seem to remember you were quite fond of them.’

‘I am, and they are beautiful. Thanks a lot.’

‘I’ve picked you half a dozen. Cherokee Purples, they are. They go great with a bit of cheese. Come over to the shed: I’ve got the kettle on.’

Lapslie followed him out to his garden shed where an old kettle was boiling on a small gas burner. Day mashed the tea and added a dash of milk from a thermos flask before the two of them sat down in a couple of old deckchairs just outside the shed.

Day’s allotment was quite wonderful, Lapslie reflected. Full of a variety of vegetables and fruit: a real green haven away from the rigours of the city. And Lapslie would lay money on the chance that not only could Day name all the varieties, but that they were rare or heirloom varieties as well. Day had a thing about generic,
tasteless fruit and vegetables becoming the only kind that consumers knew about, because of the pernicious cost-saving manoeuvrings of the big supermarket chains.

After sipping quietly at their tea for a while, and discussing long-dead colleagues they had known – a popular subject when old officers got together, like an ongoing competition to see who could live the longest – Lapslie brought Day back to the point. ‘Do you remember the murder of a nurse called Jane Anne Summers in 2007?’

Day put his tea down. ‘First of July 2007, to be precise. Mother found her dead on her bed, strangled. Never did get anyone for it.’

‘Why not?’

‘Usual reason: no evidence, no witnesses. She was a nice girl, well thought of by her friends and work colleagues. She was engaged to be married: nice lad with a cast-iron alibi. She never played around, not that we were aware of, anyway. No jealous former boyfriends in the background. She was a beautiful girl too, and yet there’d been no sexual assault. Whoever killed her got in through an open window. It was a warm summer – everyone was leaving their windows open. Manual strangulation, it was, so in the end the only thing we
were sure about was that it must have been a man, based on the size of the bruises on her neck.’

He sipped his tea again. ‘She lived on a busy estate, lot of people about, yet he still got into her bedroom in the middle of the afternoon, strangled her, and then left without a single person seeing a thing. We had half the bloody force doing door-to-door, appeals on local radio and TV; even got that Nick Ross bloke to make an appeal on
Crimewatch
. We did a reconstruction and everything. Not a bloody thing.’

‘Forensics?’

‘Not a jot. No fibres, no hair, prints, shoe marks, nothing. He was like a bloody ghost.’ He sighed. ‘Most frustrating case I’ve ever worked on. Thanks for reminding me of it.’

The description of a ghost seemed to fit Lapslie’s man perfectly, he considered. ‘So there was nothing out of the ordinary about the case?’

Day shook his head. ‘Other than it was the only murder case I never solved, no. Why the renewed interest after so many years?’ He fixed his gaze on Lapslie. ‘Got a fresh lead, have you?’

Lapslie looked across at Day. He certainly wasn’t going to go over everything about the dolls again; besides, a
copper of Day’s generation would think he’d gone mad. But the link to Leslie Petersen’s murder might be worth a spin, now that they had a possible suspect.

‘Maybe. Did the names Leslie Petersen or Mike Stowell ever come up while you were investigating?’

Day sank into thought for a moment. ‘No. Can’t say that they did.’

‘And there were no other nurses murdered during your time, were there?’

He shook his head. ‘No. Well, not that I heard of, and I am sure I would have.’

‘What about her parents?’

‘Both dead now. I swear it was the shock of losing her that helped them along the way. I kept in touch, seemed to be the decent thing to do. If anything came up I let them know at once. Not that much did, and what did turned out to be rubbish. They only lasted a few years after her murder. They seemed to age rapidly, every year like ten. I’ve seen it before. It’s like the shock closes the body down.’

Lapslie had seen that too, far too many times.

Day continued. ‘She was an only child, you see. Her mother had her later in life. Both parents were a bit surprised, but delighted. She was the apple of their eye and
from all accounts a wonderful girl.’ He sighed again. ‘Then I let them down by not catching the bastard. Pity, really, because her old man was foreman on a jury I once gave evidence to, managed to steer the jury towards the right verdict. I recognized him. Would have been nice to have returned the favour.’

‘You didn’t have a bad hit rate, Alan.’

Day sipped at his tea again. ‘It’s funny, really: it’s not the nicks you remember in the end, but the ones that got away. I’ve always remembered Jane Summers, and it bothers me. It rankles. If you get anywhere, you will let me know, won’t you?’

Lapslie nodded. ‘Of course I will.’

Finishing off his tea, Lapslie picked up the bag of tomatoes and stood. ‘I’d better be getting off.’

They shook hands. ‘Heard you’d gone doolally tap,’ Day said with a question mark in his voice. ‘Everything okay, is it?’

Lapslie smiled. ‘Everything’s fine. You’ve been very helpful.’

As Lapslie turned to go Day called out to him: ‘There was one thing, now I come to think of it.’ Lapslie turned, his interest sparked. ‘Our killer, he cut her nurse’s uniform up. Took a large section of the dress and the hat
away with him. We never found it. Some sort of trophy, I guess. The rest of the uniform was bagged up: might still be in the exhibits cupboard. Might not be, of course. You know how things are. Of interest?’

Lapslie nodded. ‘Yes, Alan, could well be.’

Lapslie knew he had to remain calm, but his stomach was turning over. From everything that Day had said, he had strongly suspected that Jane Summers had been killed by his man – but the damage to the uniform was a clincher, and that opened all sorts of doors. The nurse’s had been the first doll in the line, so, given the meticulous nature of the killer, she had almost certainly been the first victim. That would then give him a starting point. He could look into both the nurse’s life and the bride’s, and see if there were any links. People, places, events . . . Stowell, or, as he increasingly suspected, an ingenious killer who’d been murdering undetected for seven years, and as his team had become involved, had put Stowell in the frame.

As soon as he got to the car he called the Essex Constabulary’s exhibits officer and gave him what information he had. The amount of evidence that got lost or was disposed of, especially when it looked like a case had gone cold, was a scandal, and the exhibits officer
had been put in place to try and stop it. He had, by all reports, done a good job, and quickly discovered that most things that were supposed to have been lost had actually just been mislabelled or misfiled, or not labelled at all. He came back to Lapslie after about five minutes. ‘Yes, the clothing is still here, sir. Still in its bag. What do you want me to do with it?’

‘Call Detective Sergeant Bradbury, tell her what you’ve got, and get her to pick it up at once and take it to Gillian Holmes at the forensics lab. She will know what to do with it.’

*

Bradbury had reached the lab with the nurse’s uniform ahead of Lapslie. By the time he had managed to get through the various security checks, Bradbury and Holmes already had it open on a table and were examining it. The clothes smelled musty. The doll, which had been undressed, lay naked beside them.

‘Afternoon.’ Both women turned to acknowledge his arrival. ‘Afternoon, sir. Hope you didn’t mind us starting without you?’

Holmes smiled. ‘We knew time was important, so we thought we would get on with it.’

‘That’s fine. How are you doing?’

Gillian Holmes beckoned him over. ‘Come and see.’

Lapslie walked over to the table. The two women were comparing the damage to the nurse’s uniform with that of the doll’s uniform. With the exception of a few sections which had clearly been removed so that it fitted the doll neatly, it was a perfect match: much the same as the bridal doll’s dress had been to the real thing.

Lapslie walked over to where the other dolls were lined up, still inside their exhibit bags, and looked at them. Picking one up at random, he gazed at it. It was a female doll, dressed in a red bikini. Bizarrely, a song lyric began to unspool in his brain: ‘She wore an . . . itsy-bitsy, teeny-weenie, yellow polka-dot bikini . . .’

Holmes joined him.

‘How was this one damaged?’ he asked.

Holmes shook her head. ‘It wasn’t. Bit of a mystery, that one. The only odd thing about it is her hair.’

Lapslie looked at it again. The doll’s hair seemed to be sticking straight upwards, and its face had a look of surprise. He replaced it in the bag. ‘Perhaps she had seen what was coming.’

Lapslie considered. He now knew who his first victim was, and who his last, or latest, victim was. What he needed to know now were the names of the other ten.
More important, he needed to know who the next two were going to be – the last two. Maybe now he would have a chance of stopping this doll-maker before he killed anyone else.

*

Lapslie dreamed about the dolls again that night; and, as before, there was a thirteenth doll that remained obscured, its image blurred, however hard he strove to bring it into focus. It was as if he knew it was significant, but couldn’t work out how or why.

If he could just see it more clearly – he saw part of a dark uniform on the lower part of the doll, but as he moved up and towards the face . . .

He awoke sharply, catching at his breath. Had he seen the face in that final second, or had it remained obstinately out of reach, out of focus? Certainly he couldn’t recall any clarity to that image now – though another significance suddenly struck him about the number thirteen.

He looked over at his bedside clock: 5.18 a.m. Too early to make the call, so he brushed his teeth, freshened up and made some fresh coffee to kill the time while his thoughts gelled. Finally, he picked up the phone and made the call.

*

Emma Bradbury looked at her phone through bleary eyes and checked the time as she picked it up: 6.04 a.m.

‘Yes . . .?’

‘Emma. We’ve got a trip to make, and I’ve called early because we should move sharpish. How long before you could meet me at King’s Cross Station?’

She noticed her partner, Dom McGinley, stirring at her side. Thirty-forty minutes to get ready, she calculated, then getting into central London. ‘Uh, I suppose just under two hours.’

‘Fine. Meet me by the entrance gate for the train to Edinburgh. I’ll have already bought your ticket for you. Oh, and pack a small overnight bag, in case we don’t make it back tonight.’