Dead of Night, page 22
part #7 of D.I. Tom Mariner Series
‘Sure,’ said Anwar. ‘But don’t you want to see the next day too?’
‘He came back?’ said Mariner.
‘Eight forty-five last Thursday morning. He was here for about half an hour. He parked at the far end, so you can’t see him get out of the car this time, but you can see him leaving.’ Anwar scrolled to the relevant clip, and they watched as Hayden’s car drew up alongside the barrier once again and the window slid down as he reached out to swipe his security card. ‘That’s the last we’ve got of him on our system,’ said Anwar. ‘Nice watch,’ he added. ‘Tag Heuer, by the look of it.’
Mariner had no idea what that meant, or how Anwar could possibly tell from that distance, but he got the footage downloaded, along with the rest, to a memory stick, which he was able to take away with him.
It was with some reluctance that Mariner returned to the critical care ward to see Ellen Kingsley; this was all getting a bit too close to be comfortable. Today she was able to leave the ward and they went to her office to talk.
‘You’re looking for Leo in connection with this enquiry,’ she said straight away. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘We had a tip-off to go to his home,’ Mariner told her. ‘We found his cleaner there. She had been strangled.’
‘What? Oh my God.’
‘Ellen we need to talk to him urgently. If you or any of your staff has the slightest idea about where he could be, you must tell us.’
‘But I can’t see how that is even possible. He’s such a lovely guy. And I haven’t a clue where he might be. I’ve been thinking about him a lot and it’s made me realize how little I know about him. He’s one of those people who seems quite chatty but manages to give away very little about himself.’
‘Did he come here last Thursday morning, first thing?’ Mariner asked.
‘No. It’s not one of his regular times and we didn’t call him in for anything. The last time he was here was Wednesday afternoon. I’m sure of that.’
‘I have to ask you again,’ said Mariner. ‘Are you absolutely sure there’s been nothing going on between him and Dee?’
‘I’m as certain as I can be, working alongside them both,’ she said. He could see her trying to make sense of it.
‘Is it possible that Hayden could have developed an infatuation for her?’
‘Not that I noticed.’ She blushed.
‘What is it?’
‘Oh, God.’ She looked away. ‘Leo and I, we had a bit of a fling when he first started here. It was very brief. Over before it started really.’
‘Why?’
‘It was a bad idea when we were working so closely together.’
‘Was there anything unusual about his behaviour, any particular tastes?’
‘Like what?’
‘Was he into tying you up, for example?’
She shot him a look. ‘The relationship didn’t really last long enough for that.’
Mariner took the car park footage back to Granville Lane. Following the nationwide alert, there had been a couple of possible sightings of Hayden’s car. ‘It’s hardly a distinctive model,’ said Charlie. ‘But one of them is on the Wednesday evening, quite close to the hospital.’
‘We need to revise our parameters,’ said Mariner. ‘Hayden was back there again for half an hour on the Thursday morning, leaving at nine fifteen. It’s after that he disappears, so that’s when we need to get him on CCTV to see which direction he took from there.’
‘The postmark on Rosa Batista’s parcel is generated by the machine in the main hospital post room,’ said Charlie. ‘If Hayden is our killer, maybe that’s where he went?’
‘So why haven’t we had a parcel of Dee’s clothes?’
‘Perhaps it’s got lost in the post, or he was thwarted that morning in some way?’ said Glover. ‘Shame we can’t actually see him get out of the car.’
‘Where’s Vicky?’ Mariner asked.
‘One of Hayden’s ex-girlfriends got in touch. She’s gone out to talk to her.’
Jesson returned a couple of hours later. ‘Anything useful?’ Mariner asked her.
‘Not sure,’ said Jesson. ‘The relationship was short-lived. They met through an Internet dating site. They emailed a bit, then spoke on the phone and went out a handful of times. According to her, he was the perfect gent: kind, courteous and attentive. Pretty ordinary in fact.’
‘So why did it end?’
‘That’s where it does get a bit more interesting,’ Jesson said. ‘She ended the relationship, partly because he spent a bit too much time going on about his ex – whose name she thinks was Priya, with a P. Hayden took it quite well, she said, but she left him in a city centre bar. It was the same night that Grace went missing.’
By late Thursday afternoon Charlie Glover, working alongside a couple of bleary-eyed uniforms, had done his best to scour the available CCTV footage from around the QE, but it was of limited use. ‘It’s fragmented,’ Charlie explained. ‘We can see the Audi leaving the hospital site and just about piece together his journey to the Five Ways roundabout from GATSO footage, but that’s where we lose him. If he’s used any motorways in the vicinity, we can hope that he’ll be picked up by those cameras, but if he hasn’t, there’s no way of knowing where he went from there. We’re too late to set up ANPR, and wouldn’t know where to target.’
‘And the footage we have, there are no passengers in the car?’ asked Mariner.
‘Definitely only him driving,’ said Glover.
‘Not looking very promising, is it?’ said Jesson.
‘He’s had a long time to get away,’ Mariner agreed.
Winter came on suddenly the next day, with an icy front from the Antarctic bringing a hard frost and early morning fog. With it, in the middle of Friday morning, came a call from much closer to home than might have been expected. West Mercia Police at Cleobury Mortimer had been contacted by a farmer. ‘He went up to bring his sheep down from the hill, and noticed a car parked behind one of the walls of the old quarry,’ the station inspector told Mariner. ‘He didn’t see it until he drove right up there on a quad bike. We sent a couple of uniforms up to have a look and they’ve confirmed that it’s the Audi you’re looking for, belonging to Dr Leo Hayden. From a distance they thought it had been abandoned, but now it looks as if there’s definitely at least one person in it, presumably Dr Hayden. Scenes of Crime are making a start, but I’ve asked them not to move anything until you can get out here and take a look for yourself. He’s not going anywhere.’
Titterstone, the larger of the Shropshire Clee Hills, was, like its neighbour, Brown Clee, visible on a clear day like today from the Stourbridge Road going out of Birmingham.
‘The only hill named on the Mappa Mundi in Worcester Cathedral,’ Mariner told Jesson as, an hour later, they arrived at its foot. ‘The high reared head of Clee.’
‘Great,’ murmured Jesson. ‘He’s going all Adam Dalgleish on me.’
‘A. E. Housman,’ Mariner corrected her. ‘And don’t get too excited. It’s about the only bit of poetry I know.’ They’d left the main road now and were winding their way up along the narrow lane and ascended the hill, passing a row of what were once miners’ cottages.
‘Must be lonely up here,’ said Jesson.
‘Now perhaps, but it didn’t used to be,’ said Mariner. ‘All they quarry for now is the dhustone used for road building, but years ago it was a whole mining community, digging basalt and limestone, and there was a fully operational iron-smelting mill. There was a great little pub up here too, The Dhustone Inn. Good Banks’s beer, a roaring fire and a game of dominoes. Nothing like it.’
‘I can’t imagine why you’ve never married,’ said Jesson in reply. She shivered. ‘Too bleak for my liking. And what the hell are they?’ she added, as the two enormous white dice came into view. ‘There’s a Civil Aviation Authority navigational relay station just at the top of the hill,’ said Mariner. ‘I’m pretty sure this is a favourite spot for the army’s winter manoeuvres too,’ he went on. ‘So lonely isn’t really the word.’ Branching off to the left, he steered the car carefully around some lethal potholes and into the gorge of the disused quarry, between scree slopes that banked away from them on either side. He stopped beside the disordered collection of West Mercia response vehicles. ‘All right,’ Jesson conceded, as they got out of the car to suit up. ‘Perhaps there is something in this hill-walking malarkey.’ From this height and now that the mists had cleared, the counties of Shropshire and Worcestershire were spread out below them like a chequered quilt, stretching all the way to the Welsh borders and the Black Mountains beyond.
When they were dressed in protective clothing, and after brief introductions, the crime scene co-ordinator led them round to Hayden’s car, tucked in the shade behind one of the remaining quarry walls. Random concrete structures rose up from the derelict smelt mill, overshadowed by the giant receivers, and now the white-suited West Mercia SOCOs moving into the area made it look like the set of a low-budget sci-fi film. A couple of uniformed officers were pacing around the perimeter of the scene trying to keep warm, their breath condensing in misty puffs in the frigid air.
Up close Jesson and Mariner could see the car’s passenger window a half-inch or so open, with a hose pipe trailing from the exhaust and in through the tiny vent. Cloth of some sort, tightly wound, had been wedged in to plug the remaining gap. The driver’s door hung open on Leo Hayden, who was slumped in the reclining driver’s seat, his eyes closed. He could have been taking a nap, but for the telltale purple hue of his eyelids and lips. Inside the open boot was a woman’s body, curled in the foetal position and perfectly preserved in the cold. Dee Henderson still wore her nurse’s tunic. The brown nylon scarf, tight around her neck, was identical to the one they’d found on Coral Norman. Mariner took out his mobile and rang Sharp to report the find.
‘So that confirms it,’ said Sharp. ‘Leo Hayden was our washerwoman.’
‘Looks like it,’ said Mariner. ‘Either his conscience got to him, or he thought the game was up.’
‘It doesn’t really matter in the end, does it?’ said Sharp. ‘The important thing is that we’ve got him and put a stop to it. Well done, both of you. We’ll celebrate when you get back.’
‘Well done?’ said Mariner to Jesson as he ended the call. ‘We didn’t do anything.’
A bitter wind blew across the hillside, and once a thorough forensic search had been conducted, the bodies were removed and the vehicle transferred to a covered loader to be transported to Birmingham for closer examination. By now it was mid-afternoon and Mariner was cold and hungry. Not far along the road he and Jessson passed another favourite pub of his, the Angel Inn, and he suggested that they stop off for refreshment and to warm up a bit. ‘It’s not as if we’ve got anything to rush back for, is there?’ he said.
TWENTY-FIVE
Jesson and Mariner sat in the pub in companionable silence. ‘It’s funny,’ said Jesson. ‘We should feel good, but all I’ve got is this strange sense of anti-climax.’
‘Fatigue,’ said Mariner, lifting his half pint to his lips. ‘It’ll hit home soon.’ But like Jesson, he too felt peculiarly disengaged.
‘There are so many things we’ll never know, like why he did it, or even exactly how he did it,’ she continued. ‘Pity he didn’t leave a note.’
‘We can speculate, though,’ said Mariner. ‘I think we’ve figured most of it out. Hayden strikes up a conversation with Grace and Rosa in the hospital cafeteria. He can see their names on their badges; he can even see where Grace works. We know he’s outwardly charming and they would no doubt be flattered by the attentions of such an important man. He gets enough information out of them to know where they work and what their shifts are, so that a few days later he can engineer to “accidentally” run into them again in the city centre. And he talks them into going with him, at least far enough to allow him to get them into his car.’
‘Rosa, I can understand,’ said Jesson. ‘A lift home would have been helpful. And Dee is obviously different. She’d have no qualms about going with him. But Grace had arranged to meet her friends. Why would she change her mind and go with him?’
‘She was a rebel,’ Mariner reminded her. ‘Who knows what she’d told him about her frustrations with her parents and her life in general. He’s an exotic. He’s travelled the world, so she took a risk. Maybe she saw Hayden as her way out. Remember, we don’t know how many women Hayden actually approached in the first place. He chose Grace and Rosa, presumably because he thought they’d be compliant, and he was right. Once we make this public, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we get other women coming forward to say he tried it on with them too. Dee must have tumbled him, or he thought she had. She had to be got out of the way. Coral, the same.’
‘But I still don’t understand why he’d leave Coral behind,’ said Jesson. ‘As soon as we found her it was obvious that he was our man. If we’d found his house empty, his disappearance would only have been circumstantial.’
‘I think by that time he was in over his head,’ said Mariner. ‘Dee and Coral weren’t part of the plan, plus he knew them personally, so killing them brought home to him the enormity of what he’d done. No, what I can’t work out is where he took Grace and Rosa. There isn’t any firm evidence yet that either of them had even been inside his house.’
‘He’s a bugger for cleanliness, though,’ Jesson pointed out. ‘Perhaps he’s just very thorough.’
‘But to leave no trace at all? That would be quite an achievement. Do you think there’s anywhere in the hospital or at the clinic he’d be able to take them?’
‘Without anyone else seeing or suspecting? It’s hard to see how,’ said Jesson. ‘I’d love to know why he did it too.’
‘He’s screwed up,’ said Mariner. ‘His fiancée dumped him, and that, combined with the horrors of what he must have seen in the Congo, sent him off the rails.’ But as he said it, he was already thinking that it was too convenient an explanation.
‘And what brought him out here, to this hill?’ Jesson went on. ‘Conscience or cowardice?’
‘Conscience, surely,’ said Mariner. ‘He had every opportunity to run away. He left the hospital last Thursday morning, with Dee in the boot and Coral dead at his home, but at that stage nobody had a clue. We weren’t on to him until nearly a week later and we haven’t found a passport. He could have quite easily disposed of Dee’s body and completely disappeared. So why didn’t he do that?’
‘Like you said, he suddenly came to his senses,’ said Vicky. ‘Everybody’s been telling us what a nice guy he was. Perhaps what he’s done to these women was an aberration, a period of madness.’
‘That simple?’ said Mariner doubtfully.
By the time Mariner and Jesson got to the appointed city pub in the late afternoon, celebrations seemed to have happened without them and people were already starting to drift away; some to catch up on work that had been left untouched for days, and others back to their families for an early start to the weekend. Here, too, the atmosphere was subdued, and few people seemed inclined to stick around. Jesson and Glover both decided to get back to their families and Mariner couldn’t blame them. Soon only he and Sharp remained.
‘There’s bound to be a certain lack of satisfaction because we didn’t catch him,’ said Sharp, perceptive to his mood. ‘In a weird way Hayden gave himself up, didn’t he? And not all cases are neat and tidy, with explicit and rational motives. You know that as much as I do. Anyway I’m off to brief the ACC, and you should get yourself off home, too.’
‘Yeah, I will,’ said Mariner. But just not yet. Jamie wasn’t due home for another hour and he wanted to write some of this up while it was still fresh in his mind, so instead he went back to the incident room. He was still there when the forensic report from Leo Hayden’s house came through. It contained nothing very illuminating, except to confirm that Leo Hayden might have been very good at clearing up after himself. There was nothing to place Grace, Rosa or Dee there at all. APR had identified most of the fingerprints as naturally belonging to Hayden and to Coral Norman. There were however several prints, and other trace elements from person or persons unknown, mainly in the kitchen and bedroom. For Mariner that simply meant that Hayden had gone on more than one Internet date, and that some of those women had made it back to his house.
Mariner called through to Max, the IT technician. ‘Nice one, bro,’ he said. ‘You got him.’
‘He got himself really,’ said Mariner, without enthusiasm. ‘Is there anything interesting on his computer?’
‘A bit of porn, but tame stuff,’ said Max. ‘No special proclivities showing up, but there are a couple of email rants about his clients at the Gannow. Dude was having some trouble reconciling that kind of work with his experiences in Africa. I’ll send you transcripts.’
And Mariner could do no more today. Last one out, he switched off the lights in the incident room and was home in good time for the day-centre bus. The escort today was an older woman who Mariner hadn’t seen before. ‘Where’s Declan?’ he asked.
‘Called in sick,’ the woman said. ‘It’s meant to be my day off today. Still, I don’t mind the extra money.’ It made Mariner feel bad about Mercy all over again.
Millie was ambivalent about Suli’s shooting trip with Greg Easton on Saturday morning. ‘Are you sure you still want to go?’ she asked, over breakfast.
‘I’m looking forward to it,’ said Suli. ‘It’s not often that I get the chance to play with boys’ toys.’
‘Be careful,’ she said, as he was leaving. ‘I don’t want to end up a single parent family.’
