The Death Collector Page 6

  Then Joe realised something else: for the first time in a while he was interested in his job.

  Nine

  Sam Parker arrived back at the police station, an old redbrick building that was due to be sold, part of the drive to find savings in the budget. It was crumbling slowly, but the Murder Squad occupied the first floor, using the rooms at the furthest end. It had no front desk, nowhere for the public to make any complaints. The squad just provided a reason to heat the building to stop it getting damp.

  The walk down the corridor was along a ragged blue carpet worn thin over the years and past rooms filled mostly with boxes, the walls decorated with old posters, some faded and stuck fast to the walls, others hanging from one corner so that they flapped in whatever draughts blew through the building.

  He put his head round the doorway of DI Evans’s office. She was working her way through some kind of noodle dish that had been brought to life by the kettle.

  ‘I’ve got the witness summonses,’ he said, waving the pieces of paper.

  She looked up, her trouser suit grey, her hair grey and short, her face tired-looking. ‘Good. Get them served.’

  ‘I thought I’d get a uniform to do it.’

  Evans raised one eyebrow and shook her head slowly. ‘In a murder case, where we need those witnesses so much? I don’t think so. Start this afternoon.’

  Sam stifled his sigh. ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said, and went into the main squad room, heading for his usual seat in the corner, closest to the windows, so that his computer screen was often bleached out by the sun. In summer, the heat through the window made his shirt cling to his back and in winter the wind blew in around the old sash frames and made his neck ache from the cold. It was all the fun of being the newest on the team.

  Charlotte looked up from behind the screen opposite and smiled, her white teeth and light brown skin framed by black curls that tumbled down to the light blue of her suit. ‘How was your trip to the courtroom?’

  Sam shrugged. ‘It was okay. Got a grilling from the judge about what we had done to persuade the witnesses to go to the trial, but Kim said he was always going to issue the summonses. He wouldn’t let nervous witnesses derail a case.’

  ‘So now these decent people, who were just there when it all happened, have the threat of prison if they don’t get in the witness box against violent gangsters?’

  ‘That’s the way it has to be,’ Sam said. ‘Do you want them to get away with it?’

  ‘Honest opinion?’ Charlotte said, her eyebrows raised, tweezed to a thin arch. ‘It doesn’t matter whether we convict the killer or not. There’s one dead gangster and another one will replace him. Sometimes a jostle for power makes it worse. For some of these lads, it’s the only prospect they have. Some money. Some status.’

  ‘And some prison, and some danger.’

  ‘That’s just part of their life, but these witnesses will spend a large part of their lives scared now, just for doing the right thing.’

  ‘It’s a civic duty,’ Sam said. ‘That’s what the judge said, and he’s right.’

  ‘Okay, okay, I give in,’ Charlotte said, grinning.

  Sam pointed towards a small pile of papers on her desk. ‘Anything new here?’

  She shook her head. ‘Couple of missing person reports. They’ve been mentioned to us but not getting any attention just yet. Been told to be aware of them, that’s all, in case they escalate. One of them has got Hunter twitching, though.’

  Sam looked over her shoulder to the DCI in the other corner of the room, who was tapping a pen on the desk and staring at a screen. ‘How come?’

  ‘Do you remember David Jex?’

  Sam frowned, and then he remembered. ‘The detective who went missing?’

  ‘That’s the one,’ Charlotte said. ‘I worked on the same team as him when I first started out. He worked with Hunter until about a year ago, when he requested a transfer and ended up on community policing. Then six months ago, he just went missing.’

  ‘Breakdown?’

  ‘So they reckon. Some rumours about becoming withdrawn, as if something was on his mind. I don’t know what his wife puts in their food, but she called in earlier saying that now her son has gone missing.’

  ‘That’s unusual,’ Sam said, intrigue creasing his forehead.

  ‘Not really. He was arrested last night for being a peeping Tom. Just a kid and probably too ashamed to go home.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe. What’s the other?’

  ‘Some married woman who went out all dolled up and never came home.’

  Sam gave a wry smile at that. ‘Someone slept in and too scared to go home to her husband?’

  ‘That’s my guess. That’s at the bottom of the list. So what now for you?’

  Sam held the witness summonses in the air. ‘Going to spoil a few people’s evenings and drop these on the witnesses.’

  ‘Beats sitting in here. Why did you come back?’

  ‘I was hoping to get a uniform to do it. Evans said no. And anyway, my sandwiches are in the fridge.’

  ‘How very rock ’n’ roll,’ she said, laughing.

  He grinned. ‘I eat, and then it’s back on the mean streets, playing at postman.’

  Ten

  Joe saw out the day by answering correspondence and going through his filing cabinet, writing chase-up letters to clients, reminding them of appointments they wouldn’t keep and court dates they would forget. He had to keep the paper trail going to make sure they couldn’t blame him, because when they got lifted on a fail-to-appear warrant they would try to do just that; their need to get free was always stronger than the desire to protect Joe. He visited their lives in brief patches and he was forgotten about as quickly as he had been needed.

  He tried not to think too much about what the senior partner, Tom, had said about thinning the workforce. He would make his decision when he was forced, and a big case might yet rescue him – something like a large fraud, which would keep Tom from carrying out his threat for a while.

  Joe didn’t move as he listened to the office wind to a close, the secretaries saying their goodbyes, the clerks not far behind. He could go, he knew that, and he was too tired to do much more, but he was waiting to be alone.

  So he drank coffee to keep himself awake and listened as the main door closed and the final farewells were said. He turned in his chair to watch them head back to the home lives that Joe hoped he wouldn’t wreck. When all he had left was the tick of the clock in his office and the noise of the traffic that filtered through his window, he moved the mouse on his computer to bring up the screen again.

  He opened the client search facility. He went to the archive section, just a drop-down tab, and typed in ‘Molloy’. There were a few, but only one Aidan. He had a file number and a location.

  The archive files were kept in the basement for three years before being stored off site until they received their destruction date another three years after that. Except for the murder files, because murder files never go quiet. Aidan Molloy’s file was in the cellar.

  As Joe went down the stairs that swept into the reception area, the office was quiet apart from the faint chatter of one of the family lawyers working late; there was always someone willing to put in the hours, and it was better for a career to do it late than do it early. No one spots the early starters.

  The way to the cellar was down a set of stairs just off the reception. It was a well-worn stairway as it was also the route to the staff toilets and a small kitchen. Beyond that there were rows of shelving that stored the files that shuffled their way along until they reached the date when they were shipped out to the external storage.

  Joe rarely went into that part of the cellar; there were other people who located old files if ever there was a need. He clicked on the light, a pull switch that turned on a dusty yellow bulb, a cobweb arching to the ceiling. The room smelled of damp paper and it made his nose itch.

  As he went through the room, he tried to make sense of the sys
tem. The archive number was different to the client number, and seemed to be based on the destruction date. Only murder cases were kept separate. Unlike the victims, murder cases never died. A prisoner always wanted to proclaim his innocence, and for as long as they did, they would stay in prison. It was a high-risk strategy, that an eventual finding of innocence would set them free, but people wanted to leave prison without a stain and with no life-licence hanging over them, as if they couldn’t trust themselves not to do it again. The murder files were kept in the cellar so that no slim chance of a quashed conviction was given up to the shredder.

  Joe found the file eventually. It had its own box. He sneezed as he lifted it down and removed the dusty lid, just to check the contents. Five black files: the prosecution statements, defence statements, exhibits, correspondence and unused material. It was usually in the unused material that appeals were won, that collection of papers the prosecution decided not to use but often led to inquiries that should have been followed. There were some scraps of papers, receipts and legal aid forms, and a wrapped-up bundle of papers tied up in pink ribbon, the barrister’s brief.

  He carried it up the two flights of stairs and was breathing heavily by the time he thumped it onto his desk. More coffee was needed, and once he had filled his cup and returned to his desk, he flipped the lid open again and lifted out the file containing the witness statements. With all cases like these, there were a lot of statements that didn’t say much. They exhibited the paper trail, like search records and small pieces of evidence found in bedrooms, or bus tickets and train receipts. The crucial ones were the direct eye witnesses and the forensic statements.

  As he read, Joe saw that the case against Aidan Molloy was good. It had stayed in the public conscience because of the identity of the victim’s father and the casual way in which the body was discarded.

  A young couple had driven to Saddleworth Moor, to do whatever it is young people get up to in cars in the darkness. As they pulled into a small track they often used, someone ran to a car ahead and drove off at speed, but they saw enough to get a glimpse, and even managed a partial registration: the letters ‘DDA’.

  Once the car had gone, their headlights caught something pale in the distance. They were curious, and when they went over to look, they wished they hadn’t. They found a woman, Rebecca Scarfield, twenty-nine years old, naked and dead.

  The police were under pressure right from the start. Her father was Desmond Archer, the assistant chief constable, and she was a respectable woman, married to a local car salesman, two children. They wondered if it was a revenge attack connected to her father, but then attention turned to Rebecca’s love life. That was when the case turned against Aidan Molloy.

  Rebecca’s marriage was in trouble. She had craved attention, and when her husband stopped giving it to her she went looking for it elsewhere. Her phone logs showed one regular caller: Aidan Molloy. So the police visited and the case started coming together.

  Rebecca had been seeing Aidan, an impressionable young man caught in the glare of an attractive older woman. But when the police visited him, he lied. About whether he knew her and about where he had been that night. Once the lies started, he became a man with something to hide.

  When the police ran the partial vehicle registration through the computer, ‘DDA’, there were a few matches, and one of the local ones was Aidan Molloy’s car.

  There was no DNA on Rebecca. There was no sign of a sexual assault. It was just circumstantial and Aidan’s failure to nail an alibi made him a major suspect. When his mother was first spoken to, she told the police he had got in at two thirty in the morning, but Aidan had said it was half-past midnight. None of the neighbours remembered him coming home. The only thing Aidan could say was that it wasn’t him.

  And then there were the threats. Three young women gave statements claiming that Aidan had threatened Rebecca, saying he would kill her if she ever tried to leave him.

  The spade was the clincher, in the boot of his car. Brand new, with a wooden handle and clods of peat stuck to the blade, the same sort of soil found on the moors near to where she had been found. The prosecution’s case was that he had been caught in the act of burying her and when the young couple came along, he panicked.

  Joe put the file down. The case was a good one. Aidan had made his protestations of innocence to the jury, and they had looked him in the eyes and not believed him.

  He put his head back and closed his eyes, suddenly tired, aware that he had given some of his evening to satisfy his curiosity and it had come to nothing.

  But it was more than that. He was trying to salvage something from his job, a spark to relight the fire that had dimmed after Monica’s death and the guilt he felt because of it. It was as if he wasn’t allowed to enjoy it any more. He was looking for a cause to inspire him.

  It was time to go home. He stood up to put the file back into the box, just flicking through it one more time, the names and typed paragraphs merging into one spool of grey and white.

  Then he saw it.

  He stopped, went back through the statements, trying to see what had attracted his attention, his eyes skimming over the words. He saw it again. A single word. A name: Jex. Detective Sergeant David Jex.

  It was an unusual name, an unlikely coincidence. Carl’s father, or uncle? Brother?

  That made Joe pause, his mind suddenly started to whirl, the gears clanking together. There was something else going on. Someone related to Carl Jex had been a detective on Aidan’s case and now Carl had become interested in it. But Carl had been wary of the police whilst Lorna, his mother, was worried that the police might have done something to him. But why hadn’t either Carl or Lorna mentioned the involvement of David Jex? And why would either of them be worried about the police?

  Joe carried on flicking through the file, turning the pages faster, looking for anything else that seemed familiar. Then he saw something that surprised him. It was another name: DCI Hunter. He had been at the police station the night before. Lorna had mentioned him.

  Joe allowed himself a small smile. Now he was interested.

  Eleven

  Carl Jex hid behind the leaves of a large laurel bush as he waited in the back garden of the house he had looked at the night before. There was just a long rectangle of neat lawn between him and a stone patio at the back. He was hungry and tired, having spent the day lying low, trying not to be seen by anyone.

  He had been holding out for darkness and observing from afar, trying to see what was going on inside. Carl knew that he would be visible to anyone who looked out of the window, as his pale face gleamed in the fading sun, but he had to get closer, to keep watching. He had come this far and he wasn’t going to stop now.

  Carl could see the man inside, just walking around, cleaning up. All Carl could do was sit on the cold ground, his knees drawn up to his chest, and wait.

  A light dimmed at the back of the house. Carl sat upright, more attentive, his hand moving the branch to one side. Something was changing. He listened out, heard a door closing and then the clunk of a car door being unlocked, the flash of the orange lights noticeable in the gloom. He waited and then there was the sound of an engine. The man was going out.

  Carl waited for the engine noise to fade and then moved out of his hiding place slowly, crouching, wary that it was a trap. It all seemed quiet, though, and when he was sure that he wasn’t being watched he straightened and ran across the lawn, his soles squeaking on the damp grass, seeking the shadow of the house, unsure if a security light would light up when he got against the wall. It stayed in darkness.

  He closed his eyes and waited for the thumping in his chest to calm down. The bricks were jagged against his cheeks, his stomach turning nervous loops. After a few minutes, he bent down to the small flowerpot by the back door. He had been watching the house for long enough to know that there was a key hidden underneath.

  The door opened slowly onto the empty house. Carl paused and listened out for a burglar ala
rm, but all he heard was the steady drip of a tap. He stepped inside and closed the door, the click of the latch loud.

  Carl pulled out a torch from his pocket and shone it around. He gasped. Even in the moving shadows of the torch beam the house was like a museum piece. The kitchen in front of him was old-fashioned, with a deep ceramic sink that was riddled with veins and a free-standing kitchen with units in light blue. The hallway was further ahead, towards the wooden front door under a small arched porch, the door handle low and old, the brass plating long since worn away. The wallpaper was deep red, making the hallway seem dark, even with the streetlight shining orange from outside.

  He twitched his nose. The house smelled of aftershave, rich and spicy, as if its owner had sprayed himself before he went out.

  He shone his torch to the ground as he went towards the stairs, so that the flickering light didn’t alert any neighbours. There was stained glass in the door, with panels alongside, so the beam would be visible from outside. Upstairs seemed like the place to begin. Carl guessed that was where most people kept their secrets.