Blood Marked Pages, page 1
part #9 of DI Angus Henderson Series
Blood Marked Pages
Iain Cameron
Copyright © 2020 Iain Cameron
The right of Iain Cameron to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of the copyright owner. All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental. All rights reserved. To find out more about the author, visit the website: www.iain-cameron.com
To all the health and care workers of every nation who worked tirelessly throughout the Covid-19 crisis, despite the obvious risk to their own health - this book is dedicated to you.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
THIRTY-SEVEN
THIRTY-EIGHT
THIRTY-NINE
FORTY
FORTY-ONE
FORTY-TWO
FORTY-THREE
FORTY-FOUR
FORTY-FIVE
FORTY-SIX
FORTY-SEVEN
FORTY-EIGHT
FORTY-NINE
FIFTY
FIFTY-ONE
FIFTY-TWO
FIFTY-THREE
FIFTY-FOUR
FIFTY-FIVE
About the Author
Books by Iain Cameron
ONE
The train pulled into Brighton station, engine wheezing and brakes squealing. Stuart Livermore had been asleep since East Croydon, booze and tiredness leaving him exhausted. He wasn’t aware they had arrived until the woman beside him banged into him with her bag as she rose from her seat.
‘Oh, sorry about that,’ she said. ‘I can be so clumsy at times.’
He looked at her through half-opened eyes, a ghostly apparition. ‘It’s all right,’ he managed to blurt out, ‘I’ve got another arm.’
‘Ha, ha. Very funny. Be seeing you then,’ she said, giving him a regal wave.
Not before I see you first, he thought but didn’t say.
It was evening, on a Sunday, he thought. The first part he could tell by the darkness outside the station, the other a rough guess. Where had he been? His brain slipped into gear with all the speed and agility of an old grandfather clock. He’d been a guest speaker at a literary event in Norwich, the Noirwich Crime Writing Festival. Today had been the final day, so yes, it was Sunday.
Afterwards, he and a couple of other authors had gone out for a few drinks before he had to catch his train. It was unfortunate, but he didn’t possess the control that normal people possessed - a stop button. It didn’t matter if this was in connection with biscuits, puddings or alcoholic beverages. When someone asked if he wanted another, his mouth answered instead of his brain.
He collected his bag and stepped off the train. He liked Brighton station - its high vaulted glass and steel roof and long platforms, making locals and tourists alike feel as if they were coming into an important place. The variety and quantity of theatres, cinemas, hotels, and all the rest which the city had to offer existed, not only to feed and amuse the local populace, but the numerous visitors as well.
If he’d arrived in daylight, he would have walked home; his house in Queen’s Park wasn’t far from the train station. Instead, he headed towards a bus stop and, a few minutes later, boarded the number seven bus. It was a short journey, but the vibration from the engine and the occasional puff of diesel fumes was making him feel queasy. He was glad when it reached Eastern Road, and he could get off.
He walked up Park Street, through the stone gates marking the entrance to Queen’s Park, then along South Avenue to East Drive. He loved living here. It gave him the sensation of city life with the fine pubs and restaurants of Kemptown on his doorstep, and the impression of country living. This, courtesy of the trees, grass, and flowers of the park which could be seen from his front window.
He turned up the garden path and glanced towards the house of his next door neighbours, hoping to see Steph. More often than not it was her partner, Mark, at the window. Tonight, there was no one; the house was in darkness. The houses in this part of the road were large and semi-detached. Livermore could choose the colour scheme for each room in the house, and what to plant in the borders around the back garden. Unfortunately, he had no say in the people who lived on the other side of the dividing wall.
Stuart Livermore and Mark Wallace did not see eye to eye. Mark’s wife, Steph, on the other hand, was thirty-one, a decade younger than Livermore, with a pretty face and a stunning gym-honed physique. He liked her; she was sparky, a keen observer of the quirky, and possessed what his father would call, a docker’s sense of humour. She was not averse to making fun of her own, or her husband’s bodily functions, or giving Livermore the cut and thrust of what went on in the bedroom. Mark, however, was a big guy, who liked a drink and had a large jealous streak. If Livermore was as smart as he purported to be, he should only talk to Steph when Mark wasn’t around.
He turned the key and stepped inside. He bent down and picked up the mail from the mat. Flicking through the small pile, he noted that his girlfriend, Hannah Robbins, hadn’t visited the house while he had been away, despite his suggestion that she might. There had been several burglaries in the area, and he didn’t want to return to a house cleaned out of all its valuables, or finding two hundred people gathered inside, drinking and smoking themselves into a stupor.
He placed the bag containing his weekend clothes, information picked up at the festival, and his laptop in the hall and walked into the kitchen. He put the mail on a worktop, a job that could wait until tomorrow, and took a bottle of beer from the fridge. Opening a cupboard, he pulled out a packet of Jaffa Cakes.
He knew what he needed to do was open the packet, remove a couple, then return the rest to the cupboard. If he took the packet into the lounge, as a normal person might do, it would be empty by the time he went to bed, with the inevitable negative effect on his waistline. The booze had made him reckless, though, it always did. He picked up his beer and, tucking the packet of Jaffa Cakes under his arm, headed to the lounge.
The lounge door was shut, making him pause for no more than a second to wonder why. He never closed the door except when sitting in there. Perhaps Hannah had come over and done her good deed after all. He turned the handle and walked inside.
‘Well, if it isn’t that famous scribe, Stuart Livermore. Come in, park your arse over there.’
Livermore shuddered in surprise at hearing the disembodied voice in the darkness, spilling beer over his hand. Had he imagined it? Or was there someone outside? Perhaps it was his neighbour, Mark Wallace, hiding below the window, trying to play a trick on him. He was about to write it off as that, or the holler of a drunk in the park, when the lamp in the corner of the room burst into life.
Livermore screwed his eyes up at the sudden glare, but when he finally focused, he recognised the ugly and evil individual sitting there at once. ‘You!’ he cried. ‘How did you get into my house? What are you doing here?’
‘Shut the fuck up, you stupid fuckwit and stop asking me all those bloody questions. Park your arse over there in that chair like I told you,’ he said pointing. ‘First, you’re gonna listen to what I’ve got to say.’
TWO
The noise of the ringing phone invaded Detective Inspector Angus Henderson’s dream. It was so vivid, he thought the sound had to be part of it. It took him a couple of seconds to realise it wasn’t his mind playing tricks. He moved an arm out of the duvet and pulled it straight back as the bedroom was freezing cold. He tried again and retrieved the still-trilling lump of annoying electronic components.
‘Yes?’ he said.
He listened while the controller at Lewes relayed the information. ‘Right.’ He tried to sit up, no easy task with slippery pillows, and pins and needles running up his left arm.
‘Where?’
He jotted down the details on a pad that he kept close to the phone, also noting the time: 01:40 in the morning.
‘Who else has been alerted?’
After hearing the response, he said, ‘Okay. I’m on my way.’
He ended the call, left the phone on the bed and headed into the bathroom. God, it was cold. He walked into the shower and switched it on. He didn’t need the revival qualities of a cold shower to wash away a hangover, he didn’t have one, but he did need the effects of a wa rm one to wake him up. It had been a late night, as he’d been in the company of a few colleagues playing poker.
He made it to the car in less than half an hour after receiving the call, and ten minutes later he was pulling up outside a house bordering Queens Park in Brighton. It was a quiet road with most of the houses in darkness, but one was lit up like a Christmas tree with numerous parked vehicles, giving the semblance of a used car dealership.
Climbing out of the car, he spotted Detective Sergeant Carol Walters walking towards him.
‘Evening gov,’ she said, ‘or should I say good morning, as it’s…’ she looked at her watch, ‘two-twenty. The time when most good people should be in bed and fast asleep.’
‘This has got to be the easiest commute you’ll ever have. What is it, three streets away?’
‘Close enough for me to leave my car behind for once.’
‘What do we know? Lewes Control said it’s a male with multiple stab wounds.’
She pulled out her notebook and flicked to the appropriate page. ‘The victim’s name is Stuart Livermore. He’s an author.’
‘Who found him?’
‘Hannah Robbins, Livermore’s girlfriend. She’d rung him several times during the evening without success. He’d been away for a few days at some literary event and was due home about eight-thirty. She got fed up waiting for him to call her back, so she made her way here from Hove and opened the door with her spare key.’
‘Where had Mr Livermore been?’
‘To a literary festival in Norwich.’
‘I’d like to speak to his girlfriend after I take a look at the crime scene.’
She shook her head. ‘No can do, I’m afraid, gov. She didn’t take the sight of her dead boyfriend well. The doc sent her home in a patrol car with a couple of sedatives.’
He sighed. It wasn’t a good start. ‘In that case, let’s take a look at the body.’
They crossed the road to the house. Henderson knew not to look for the Austin Healey car belonging to their regular pathologist, Grafton Rawlings. He wouldn’t be here today. He had another death to attend, one much closer to home; that of his mother.
The road seemed quiet and well-maintained. Even though the house was semi-detached, it looked substantial in size, and with such fine views of the park, Henderson imagined it wouldn’t come cheap. Clearly, Stuart Livermore had been successful at the work he did. At the door, Henderson and Walters donned oversuits, boots, and gloves before stepping into the hallway.
The bulk of the activity seemed to be coming from the door to his right. He walked inside and found himself in the lounge, in the company of enough people to start a party: scene of crime officers - SOCOs, a police photographer, the Crime Scene Manager, the pathologist and, under his expert gaze, the inert figure of the victim.
Henderson headed over to the pathologist who, on hearing his approach, looked up.
‘Morning, I’m Detective Inspector Angus Henderson, Senior Investigating Officer,’ Henderson said, offering his hand.
‘Howard Emerson.’
They shook hands.
‘Another Scot. I can’t seem to escape from you lot.’
Henderson bristled at the ‘you lot’ reference. ‘What do you mean?’
‘My wife’s from Edinburgh, you see, and we’ve got a load of her family staying with us at the moment. Wall-to-wall teuchters and enough empty whisky and beer bottles to start my own glass recycling service.’
Henderson bent down to examine the victim. His face had been bashed up, as if he’d gone a couple of rounds with a heavyweight boxer. A large patch of blood had bloomed on his chest. There was blood on his jeans, not the bleeding of a single wound, but multiple blobs of dark staining, as if made by a leaking fountain pen.
‘What do you think happened?’ he asked the pathologist.
‘He has a broken nose, compression of the right cheekbone, and bad bruising to his face. It suggests to me a concerted beating.’
‘Before or after death?’
‘Most definitely before, perhaps to subdue him. He was stabbed in a succession of thrusts to the arm, the leg, and the chest. I don’t know the exact order of the wounds, but one thing I am certain about, even after a cursory examination, is that the chest thrust is the one that killed him. The position of the wound suggests the knife went straight through his heart.’
‘So, these wounds to the arm and leg could have been what? Signs of a struggle?’
‘I don’t know and it’s for you, Inspector, to try and find out.’
The pathologist’s on-site examination complete, stretcher bearers were called to move the body to the mortuary for the post-mortem. Henderson stepped aside to let them in. When the body was stretchered out, and with the room now less crowded, he started to look around.
THREE
Stuart Livermore’s house was a traditional red-brick, semi-detached with bay windows top and bottom, not much of a garden out front, but modern inside. The floor was of grey wood, the television stand, coffee table, and lamp all chrome, and the sofa and chair light brown and contemporary in style.
‘He’s a crime author,’ Walters said from behind Henderson.
‘How do you know?’
She pointed to a row of books on the bookshelf, built into a recess at the side of the chimney breast. ‘These are all his.’
Henderson could tell that the bookshelves, with two cupboards at the bottom, had not been a DIY job. The shelves fitted flush with the space available, and the wood and fittings used were of such quality, he imagined they would still be standing in twenty- or thirty-years’ time.
Henderson removed a book and, without opening it, reckoned he knew what it was about. The cover was dark, bearing the image of a dead body, and the strap line, ‘You Can Run, But You Can’t Hide’, a giveaway to the contents inside.
‘Is he popular?’
‘I looked him up on my phone. One of his books has been made into an eight-part drama for television.’
‘I would certainly call that popular. What was it called?’
‘Black Night.’
‘That’s a song by Deep Purple.’
‘Who?’
‘It doesn’t matter. I think I watched it, or at least some of it.’
Henderson remembered the programme. He’d watched one episode and soon got bored with the intricate story line: a serial killer preying on children. Serial killers were rare in the UK, although he could excuse their inclusion in a television drama, but what he couldn’t abide was the perpetrator leaving clues; in this case, pages ripped from a scrapbook.
In his entire police career, he had never heard of any criminal deliberately leaving clues that could be used to catch them. In fact, some criminals knew more about forensics than many police officers and were meticulous in avoiding leaving anything behind. Either way, every criminal he had ever come across would do anything to make sure they weren’t implicated, even blaming their best mate or a family member.
‘This room looks a bit of a mess,’ Henderson said. ‘Do you think the victim was the untidy sort, or is this the work of the killer looking for something?’
Many items from the bookshelves to the right of the chimney were strewn across the floor, as were the contents of the two cupboards at the base. A standard lamp was also on its side, and framed pictures had been taken from the walls and smashed. By way of contrast, the matching bookshelves and cupboards on the other side of the chimney looked untouched.
‘Might have been a burglary, and the victim came back while it was still in progress. Could be they were looking for money or valuables.’
‘It’s not a bad assumption, given he’s had a book serialised on television and, looking around this place, he doesn’t look to be short of a bob or two.’
A few minutes later, the detectives moved into the hall. There were no signs of confrontation here, only a bag containing Livermore’s clothes from his stay in Norwich, and his laptop. Later, SOCOs would remove the bag and send the laptop, and the phone which had been found in the lounge, to the high-tech unit in Haywards Heath for analysis. The only other item of interest they could see was in the kitchen where a fingerprint officer was dabbing the broken window on the back door with his brush. Henderson walked towards him.
‘Morning, Eddy. Is this how they came in?’
