Killing Christmas (2019 Reissue) Read online

  I would recommend close consultation with the forensic officers of the fire service regarding this, and other aspects connected with the cause of the fire.

  Identification of the victims via dental records has not been possible. The NHS dental database contains no records matching either of the victims. The quality of the dental work on one of the victims, the male, tends to suggest private practice, in all probability overseas. I will return to the condition of the female victim’s teeth in paragraph 8. For identification to be possible, the best remaining option would be via familial DNA. If close relatives of the deceased can be found, or their DNA matched with that already on the national database, there is every chance of obtaining the requisite information. I have posted the results from the DNA test, but have not had any match. Failing that, the victims’ identities, as with the cause of death, must remain unresolved.

  There is one other, highly significant fact that came from analysis of the blood sample taken from the female victim. This revealed a significant amount of a variant of methylamphetamine, together with a masking agent and another, at present unidentified substance.

  The poor condition of the female victim’s teeth suggests that ingestion of the drug referred to in the previous paragraph had been taking place over a prolonged period.”’

  Curran looked confused. ‘What do you make of all that? And what was that drug business about? Mexican Pete didn’t give an explanation, so presumably he thought you’d know all about that methyl-whatsitsname stuff.’

  ‘Methylamphetamine is a recreational drug that’s widely used by people seeking high levels of sexual pleasure. Its more common name is crystal meth.’

  ‘Ah, I’ve heard of that.’

  ‘Right, so have you heard the expression, meth mouth?’ Nash asked.

  Curran shook his head.

  ‘Crystal meth destroys the user’s teeth, eventually, or with heavy use, rotting them right back to the gums. It’s one of the best ways to check for this type of drug abuse. Whether the fact that the woman was a user is significant or coincidental is quite another matter. What interests me more is the cyanide aspect. What did you make of the findings regarding the fire?’

  ‘I think he’s highlighted a significant point. If he’d not drawn my attention to it, I might have missed it. To be absolutely sure, I’m going to get our boffins to check the material that formed the fabric of the building and contents. If there isn’t sufficient toxic content, that would tend to suggest the victims were poisoned. For them to have ingested so much smoke, that would mean it had to have been administered either just before the fire started, or even after the house was ablaze. I’m afraid, Mike, this is getting to look more and more suspicious.’

  ‘Damn right, Doug. I’m already tempted to treat it as murder. But I’ll hold off for the minute, until we’ve got your test results.’

  Pearce was already in the office when Nash and Clara arrived next morning. ‘Our burglar friend’s been at it again,’ he greeted them.

  ‘What now?’

  ‘He got into the butcher’s in town last night; managed to disable the alarm. They’d been extra busy with it being market day. Lee Giles, the owner, was in the middle of cashing up when he got a phone call from home. His daughter fell off her bike and broke her wrist. Naturally he rushed off, but in the panic he forgot to put the takings in the night safe at the bank. Looks as if the burglar got away with somewhere close to seven thousand pounds.’

  Nash whistled. ‘Some pay day, that. Have you alerted SOCO?’

  ‘They’re on their way there. I was waiting for you, thought it would look better if we both went.’

  ‘Good idea.’ Nash thought about it. ‘Damned shame though, he’s a nice chap is Lee.’

  Pearce grinned. ‘His pork pies and sausage rolls are tasty too.’

  ‘I don’t understand you sometimes,’ Clara said. ‘If you’re not actually eating, you’re thinking about food. You should be the size of a house side. Food’s an obsession with you.’

  Nash smiled. ‘Let him indulge his fixation then. You two go and interview Lee and his brother. Oh, and one more thing,’ he added as they were about to leave.

  Clara turned. ‘Yes, Mike?’

  ‘Bring me a pork pie back, will you. Either that or a sausage roll.’

  Lee Giles looked like a butcher. Slightly over six feet tall, strongly built, with a fresh complexion and a normally cheerful expression. That day, however, the expression was somewhat less than cheerful. SOCO had been and gone, customers were beginning to arrive, and the shop was in the process of being cleaned. ‘Can’t blame your blokes,’ he explained to Clara and Viv. ‘They were only doing their job, but I can’t afford this place to be anything other than spotless and hygienic. I don’t just mean what you can see with the naked eye. I’ve my customers to think of. And Health and Safety,’ he added darkly. ‘It’d be the last straw for that lot to descend on me.’

  ‘Any idea who might have done this?’ Pearce asked, without hoping for much.

  ‘How long a list do you want? It must be someone local. They knew where to cut the alarm wires. That’ll be another expense. And no payout from the insurance either.’

  ‘Is that because you didn’t use the night safe?’ Clara asked.

  Lee nodded. ‘I’ll ask of course, but I’m not holding my breath. They won’t take any account of me having to dash off because of our Kirsty’s accident. That’s how insurance companies are.’

  Clara nodded sympathetically. ‘That suspect list, I know you were being flippant, but have you noticed anyone hanging around recently? Someone you might not have seen before, or somebody you don’t usually expect to see in this part of town.’

  Lee shook his head. ‘The problem is, with it being such a small town, and us being in the market place, everybody passes here from time to time.’

  Lee’s brother, Simon, had just finished serving a customer and joined them in time to hear the last part of the conversation.

  ‘There was that young lad,’ he volunteered.

  ‘Young lad?’ Clara looked at him questioningly.

  ‘I’d forgotten about him,’ Lee confessed.

  ‘He was around yesterday and the day before. Surprised me, because he looked as if he hadn’t eaten meat in his life,’ Simon commented.

  ‘Aye, skinny little runt he was. I served him,’ Lee told her. ‘Not over keen on the personal hygiene either. You wouldn’t stand down wind of him for long. Looked as if he’d been sleeping rough. Had to dig around in every pocket to come up with enough for a sausage roll. I was on the point of taking what he had in his hand just to get rid of him. I’d a shop full and the other customers were beginning to look sideways.’

  ‘The thing was,’ Simon chipped in, ‘he’d been about all morning. Didn’t notice him the first time or two, but when he kept passing, I started looking out for him. It was the same yesterday. We didn’t want him coming in again, in case it upset other customers.’

  ‘Can you describe him?’

  ‘About five feet eight inches tall, skinny, painfully thin. I’d be surprised if he topped eight stone,’ Lee told her. The butcher’s reputation for being able to gauge the weight of beasts at auction mart was a local legend.

  ‘Any distinguishing marks?’ Pearce was writing the details down.

  ‘None I can bring to mind,’ Lee looked at his brother for confirmation.

  ‘There was a mole. On the right side of his chin,’ Simon said after a moment’s thought.

  ‘Hair colour, length, style?’ Clara asked.

  ‘Black and greasy, lank, down to his shoulders; looked as if it hadn’t been washed for months. He must have shaved recently though. He’d stubble, but only a few days’ growth.’

  ‘What about clothing?’

  ‘Jeans, some sort of dark top, maybe a sweatshirt, anorak with a hood on. One of those padded ones. And trainers: none of it looked new, or clean.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘If I’d to guess I�
��d say he might be on drugs,’ Lee said. ‘His eyes were odd. Glassy looking, small pupils.’

  ‘Did our forensics people say if they’d found anything useful?’ As Clara was speaking she noticed Pearce had closed his notebook and was buying what looked like a small mountain of sausage rolls from Simon.

  ‘They weren’t sure. They said they’d collected a fair number of samples, but they couldn’t be sure if they were relevant or not.’

  Chapter Five

  Wonderful. Better than fantastic. Words can’t describe how good ‘trips’ are; but waking from them is hell. The better the ‘trip’, the worse the reaction. He knew he’d gone too far. But he had the money, so he bought the gear and took it. Now it was time to wake up, to work out where he was. How long he’d been there.

  The first thing he noticed was the smell. As he opened his eyes, he realized he was in a barn and that the smell wasn’t from animals. It was him. Sometime, during the ‘trip’, he’d soiled himself. As if that wasn’t bad enough, his jeans felt wet. He looked down, moving his head slowly, painfully. Yes, he’d pissed his pants as well.

  Hatred and self-loathing swept over him. How could he have got to this state? How could he allow the stuff to take over, to rule his life? But it had, it did and it would continue to do so. He knew that, just as he was hating himself. He knew at the next opportunity he’d have to get a fix. He began to tremble, to shiver, with a sort of cold, like he’d never experienced before. He sat up and felt nauseous as a fresh wave of stink, his own stink, wafted over him.

  ‘You need help.’

  He jumped in alarm, hadn’t noticed the man before, couldn’t see him properly now. There wasn’t much light in the barn, and his face was in shadow.

  ‘What? Who are you? What are you doing here? Where am I?’

  The man ignored the questions. ‘This is a small town. How long do you think you can continue getting away with it?’

  ‘Away with what?’

  ‘Oh, come off it. I’ve been watching you. You did the filling station a couple of weeks back, then it was the pub, and two nights ago you did the butcher’s.’

  Panic. ‘What’s it to you? You a copper?’

  ‘No.’ The man laughed as if this was some very funny joke. ‘I’m definitely not a copper. Here,’ his hand came forward.

  North squinted at what the stranger offered. A small case. Easily recognizable. ‘What’s that?’ Like he didn’t know only too well.

  ‘The makings. Don’t worry, everything’s clean. The best gear and the needles are brand new.’

  ‘Are you giving me this? Why? Are you a homo, or what?’

  ‘You don’t for one moment imagine I’d go near your arse, the state you’re in.’ There was no mistaking the tone of the man’s voice. Anger: and disgust. ‘Let’s just say I’m a friend of the family.’

  ‘I don’t know you.’

  ‘Your mother and father did. I was quite close to them, before they died. That was tragic. I’m sure you must miss them terribly.’

  ‘What do you mean? They’re not dead.’

  The stranger took out a copy of The Gazette. ‘I’m sorry, I assumed you knew.’

  Adam scanned the headline. He didn’t need the photo to recognize the house. Even as a smoking shell. ‘Oh God, no,’ he reached for the kit. For refuge; for an escape away from reality.

  ‘That’s it.’ The stranger encouraged him. ‘I’m sure it’s going to make the pain easier to bear.’

  Adam scrabbled with the case, removed the contents and filled the syringe from the phial. He pressed the plunger and waited for the drug to take effect. He looked up. ‘I still don’t know your name.’

  ‘Barry, you can call me Barry. Shall we go?’

  ‘Go, go where?’

  ‘Away from here. I’ve got a special place lined up for you. I’m going to take care of you.’

  ‘It’s not a rehab clinic is it? Because it won’t work.’

  The stranger burst out laughing. It was some moments before he stopped. ‘No, it’s definitely not rehab, Adam.’ Another chuckle escaped him. ‘You’ll be the death of me, you will.’ He paused and added under his breath, ‘But that’s only fair. Because I’m going to be the death of you.’

  ‘Forensics has come back with results from the butcher’s,’ Nash told Clara and Viv as he examined the internal mail. ‘There was nothing inside the shop, but they found a mucus sample immediately outside the back door. The DNA extracted matches a known drug user.’ He paused as he read further details from the report.

  ‘He’s listed as Adam North, aged twenty-one. No recent address. Three convictions for possession; the last of them a short custodial.’ Nash stopped.

  He was silent for so long that Clara asked, ‘What is it, Mike?’

  ‘The DNA also gives a familial match to that of the female victim from the Gorton house fire. According to the forensic evidence, the woman who was killed there was Adam North’s mother.’

  ‘What about the male?’

  ‘Apparently, he was no relation.’

  ‘What are we supposed to make of that?’

  ‘Two choices. North’s mother had an affair with someone else from which Adam was conceived, or, the man who was killed in the fire wasn’t her husband. Either way we have to find Adam North. Both to question him about the robbery at the butcher’s, and to find out what he knows about the fire that killed his mother.’

  It took the local vicar more than half an hour to drive from Bishop’s Cross to Gorton. Not that he resented the journey. In fact he quite enjoyed it. The time spent behind the wheel on the lonely country roads gave him time to ponder his sermon. He just felt sad that it was necessary. Time was when each of the villages had its own minister. Now he had to divide his time between Bishop’s Cross, Gorton and Kirk Bolton.

  Even so, he was aware that he’d be lucky if there was more than a handful of parishioners prepared to rise so early in order to receive The Sacrament from him. And those few that were present would be well into their pensioner years, concerned principally, as his bishop had cynically remarked, with ‘paying their after-life insurance premiums’.

  When they shuffled off the mortal coil what would become of the churches in those villages? Turned into second homes, holiday cottages and the like. Or craft centres. Certainly something secular. The vicar sighed, he was approaching the village now, and this was no state of mind in which to approach an act of worship.

  When he rounded a couple more bends the village would come into view, and that would cheer him up. It always did, Gorton was that sort of place, what he thought of as a proper village – built around the green that doubled as a cricket field, despite the slope, and the presence of an ancient oak tree at deep-long-leg. Despite the fact that the road ran inside the boundary, and that the boundary on one side was the pub wall.

  The green was fringed by the pub, the church and a pleasing mix of old stone cottages and newer bungalows designed to blend with their older neighbours. If Hollywood ever wanted to find a traditional English village location, Gorton must surely come high on their list. It even had a pair of stocks, one of the last remaining sets in the county, to remind visitors of a time when punishment was more direct, community led. He smiled at the thought. The positioning of the stocks close to the church gate was an obvious inducement to the wrongdoer to repent their evil ways.

  He ditched his reverie and parked close to the church gate and got out, avoiding the light dusting of snow covering the icy puddles. He began searching in his cassock for the keys. Another sign of worsening times, once, the church would have remained open, service or no, without fear of theft or vandalism. He sighed, locked his car and made to walk through the lychgate into the churchyard.

  One hand on the gate, he paused: something was wrong; something he’d noticed out of his peripheral vision. Slowly, unwilling to acknowledge what his brain was telling him his eyes had seen, he turned and looked again, directly this time. He let out a long, whistling breath of horror and disb
elief. ‘Oh dear Lord, no,’ he muttered. He went slowly forward to check what his heart told him he didn’t need to.

  One or two of his parishioners were making their way along the road towards the church. He had to stop them. He had to get to them before they saw the horrible sight that was behind him. The vicar strode to intercept them, his footsteps urgent.

  Celebration of Holy Communion was deferred. When the screens had been erected to shield the crime scene, one or two villagers went into the church to join the minister in praying for the soul of the victim who had been placed in the midst of their community.

  Outside, forensics officers were examining the remains and the surrounding area, supervised by Professor Ramirez. Alongside the pathologist, DS Mironova watched, averting her eyes occasionally from the corpse.

  ‘It’s a long time since the stocks had an occupant, I’ll bet.’

  They turned in surprise. Mike Nash was standing only a couple of yards behind them outside the screen. At his side was Becky Pollard. ‘Mike, what are you doing here?’ Clara demanded. ‘You’re supposed to be having three days off.’

  Ramirez snorted. ‘You don’t imagine a minor detail like that’s going to keep him away, do you? It’s clear you’ve no understanding of the power of necrophilia. Nash probably scented the corpse from twenty miles away.’

  ‘Actually, I didn’t. We were going to the pub for lunch’ – Nash gestured to The Buck Inn – ‘and saw you lot over here.’

  ‘And of course Mike couldn’t keep away,’ Becky contributed. ‘The fastest I’ve seen him move for weeks is when he legged it across the village green to get here.’

  ‘What’s the story?’ Nash asked.

  ‘The stocks are kept padlocked. The killer probably picked them, placed the corpse inside and secured the padlocks again. Then the man was pelted with tomatoes, eggs and a variety of less pleasant substances.’