The Lost Victim, page 9
‘Who did you do it for? Family? A friend? A crazy fan? You know, Peter Conway had a fan a few years back. The copycat murderer who broke him out.’
‘A woman. She said she’s a journalist.’
‘A journalist from where?’
‘London.’
‘What does she want?’
‘She wants an interview with Peter Conway. She wants to record a phone call with him. A private phone call.’
‘And used for what?’
‘I dunno. An article.’
‘Did she pay you?’
Darren nodded.
‘How much?’
‘A grand.’
‘You get good at reading liars in this job. How much, really?’
‘Three.’
Psycho whistled. ‘Three grand. Is that the going rate for a little chat with the Nine Elms Cannibal?’
Darren shook his head. He thought he was going to be sick. ‘I’m in debt,’ he said, and regretted it the moment it was out of his mouth.
‘We all are, mate. Does this journalist want you to do any other courier work for her?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I’m not judging. Lots of the screws do a bit of courier work on the side. With the wages they pay, I’m surprised it’s not all of us.’
The lights turned green, and Darren had to put on the windscreen wipers. The sky was suddenly very grey, and the road ahead was shrouded in the gloom of the cloud cover.
‘You work at Kingfisher, Waltham, Paxley, as well as Monster Mansion?’
Psycho was referring to the three young offenders institutions where Darren assisted the dentist.
‘Listen. That was just a one-time thing, smuggling in the phone. And I said to her, I won’t do it if there are drugs involved. I hate drugs,’ said Darren, the panic rising in his chest.
‘That’s very moral of you,’ said Psycho. ‘Give me her phone number.’
‘What? No.’
‘No? I don’t think you have the luxury of telling me no.’
‘I’m sorry. I just think that—’
‘Shut up. You are going to give me her number. And then you’re going to text her and introduce me as her new courier. Capiche? You might lose out on another fee, but you’ll keep your job. Us guards live in a more rough-and-tumble world. A bit of courier work might lead to a suspension. If I lose my job, I can work in security. But you. No one likes a crooked quack . . . What are you?’
‘I’m a dental anaesthesiologist.’
Psycho held out his hand. ‘Unlock your phone. Show me her number.’
Darren bit his lip. He wasn’t going to cry. He took one hand off the wheel and unlocked his phone, scrolling through.
‘Here,’ he said. Psycho brought the phone close to his face and, using his stubby thumbs, tapped in a message and pressed send. Then Psycho’s phone pinged in his pocket, as he sent the contact to himself. He slid the phone into Darren’s top pocket and then patted his leg. ‘You can drop me here.’
He pulled the car over at the bus stop. Psycho got out and slammed the door and joined the queue of people on the pavement. He winked, and only the bus honking behind Darren broke him out of his fear.
Peter sat back on the bed and turned the phone over in his hands. He hadn’t had much experience with mobile phones beyond seeing them on TV. When he escaped prison a few years back, the method of communication then had been decidedly analogue, with notes written on paper.
How had it ended up in his pocket? He’d been knocked out by the anaesthetic. And there certainly hadn’t been a phone in his pocket when he arrived at the dentist’s.
It was maybe a guard, but why would a guard put it there without telling him? Or asking for payment? That stick-up-her-arse dentist looked like she was by the book . . . That scally lad with the blue hair.
Peter mused on this for a moment.
The phone wasn’t one of the ultramodern touch screen ones. When he flipped it open, he saw it had large buttons, the type for old biddies. Taped to the back were two black squares. He peered at them closer. One was a battery, the other a magnet? He held the phone near to the hot-water pipe running down the wall beside the bed. It leapt out of his hand and adhered to the metal.
Ching.
The magnet was strong. Peter pulled the phone off. If he switched it on, would it make a noise?
He heard footsteps in the corridor. They stopped outside his door, then moved on. Peter knew you could take the back off the older mobile phone models. It was fiddly, but thankfully, he had long nails and managed to unclip the thin plastic backing. A small, neatly folded piece of paper was tucked inside, between the battery and the cover.
He put the phone down on the bed and unfolded the tiny note. The text had been printed off by a computer.
BATTERY AND BACKUP BATTERY FULLY CHARGED. LOADED WITH £100 PREPAID CREDIT.
THE PHONE IS ON MUTE/VIBRATE FOR WHEN YOU SWITCH ON + WHEN IT RINGS.
PRESS 1 FOR SPEED DIAL TO SPEAK TO ME. I’M A JOURNALIST, WITH A PROPOSAL. CALL ANYTIME, DAY OR NIGHT. LINE IS SECURE.
He wondered what kind of proposal a journalist could have for him. He was banged up for a whole life sentence, so there was no chance of parole. If they wanted to pay him for a story, he couldn’t spend the money. And if he was honest, the thought of leaving his prison cell . . . It scared him. A few years back, when he’d escaped, he had been a lot younger. And he’d been committed to one last roll of the dice. But now, he was old beyond his years, and toothless.
Still. This was entertaining. It wasn’t every day in prison that a mobile phone fell into his lap. Or out of his pocket. He put the note back inside the phone, and the back cover with the magnet clicked back in place easily.
Peter quickly looked around his cell. There wasn’t time to wonder who was writing to him. Didn’t that old fucker Thomas Black say that someone would be in touch? He didn’t expect this, though. Peter held the phone a few inches from the pipe, and the magnet pulled it onto the metal again with a satisfying ching.
The phone was grey, and the hot-water pipe was white. The pipe snaked its way from above the door, along the ceiling above his bed, and then down the opposite wall into the floor. On his desk were his books, writing paper, and the felt-tip pens they allowed him. His hands were now so shaky that his solicitor had managed to get him approved to use correction fluid, for when he wrote his letters, he made so many mistakes. After the tooth extraction, Peter was desperate to sleep and still very drowsy from the anaesthetic, but he knew he had to hide this phone – and hide it well – before he went back to the land of Nod.
Working as quickly and neatly as possible, Peter opened the correction fluid and, with the small brush, painted the front curved grey shell of the phone white. The sides were black, and it took two coats of correction fluid to cover it all, but when he was finished, half the phone and the sides were white. He placed it down on a blank sheet of paper. Luckily, the correction fluid dried fast, but the room was beginning to stink of whatever chemical was in the white stuff, and if someone stopped outside the door, they might think he was trying to get high, so he opened the window despite the cold air.
Fifteen minutes passed, and Peter had to stay by the window to keep awake. Finally, with the phone dry, he stood on his bed and stuck it on top of the pipe where it ran along the wall above his bed.
Ching.
It almost matched in colour, but you could still see it. Peter moved it along where the ceiling met the wall and the pipe curved around and down.
Ching.
The pipe cast a little shadow on the wall, but in that sweet spot, the phone was invisible, even if you looked pretty hard.
Peter finally lay down on the bed and slept. Dreaming of who might answer the phone.
18
Late the next morning, Kate and Tristan met Varia Campbell at the Caffè Nero on the Strand. She was waiting for them at a table in the corner.
‘My God, Kate, and Tristan. I never expected to see you up in London,’ she said, beaming.
‘Thank you for meeting us,’ said Kate.
‘Not at all. You intrigued me – a cold case involving Peter Conway!’ She gave Kate a hug. ‘And look at you,’ said Varia, turning to Tristan and grabbing him in a hug. ‘All the boy has been rubbed off, and now you’re a man.’
‘You look amazing – I mean, great,’ said Tristan.
Varia laughed. ‘I think London suits me far better than the West Country. Although I do miss the sea.’ When Varia had been a police officer in Exeter, her hair had been a sleek, shiny helmet, and she’d dressed like a bank clerk. Now she wore her hair in long dreadlocks tied back, and a long black dress with huge pockets. Tristan thought how comfortable and confident she looked compared to the nervous, on-edge police officer she’d been eight years ago. They sat down at the small table.
‘I’m sorry I haven’t got a lot of time,’ said Varia. She picked up a big white carrier bag from the floor and put it on the table. It was filled with a stack of folders. ‘I had to go deep into evidence stores for this one. As far as I can see, it hasn’t been touched since Robert Driscoll was sent down in 1989.’
‘This is the original Janey Macklin case file?’ asked Tristan, peering into the bag and seeing the yellowing paper.
‘It is. I had the whole thing copied, but my bird-brained assistant gave me the wrong one, so guard this with your life. There’s also a VHS inside of the Crimewatch TV reconstruction. And I brought this,’ she said, picking up another carrier bag.
‘A VHS machine,’ said Tristan.
‘I figured you might not have one, and you’re away from home. All the leads and the remote are in there. We still use them, when we have to pull surveillance videos or evidence that hasn’t yet been digitised. This is a spare one I’ve had in my office drawer for ages.’
‘Thanks, Varia,’ said Kate.
‘You’re welcome. But I have to say, if you solve this case or come close to a breakthrough, I’ll be sharing in the glory.’
‘Of course. How long can we have this all for?’ asked Kate.
‘I’m on annual leave for the next two weeks. I’ll need to meet you when I’m back and for all that to return to me, pristine and accounted for, in the bag,’ she said, tapping the case files. ‘What’s your feeling about this one? You think Peter Conway did it?’
‘That would be the logical option,’ said Kate. ‘But if he managed to get rid of Janey Macklin’s remains and they haven’t been found in thirty years, it’s going to be hard to prove.’
‘Yes. The CPS will only be interested in revisiting this if you find her body. Robert Driscoll’s acquittal led to the resignation of the two police officers who worked on the case.’
‘Where are they now?’
‘DCI Peter Berger, who led the case, died six years ago. Alcohol abuse. And DI Nathan Barrett is in a nursing home up north, and he suffers from dementia. There might be some names of the other officers who worked on the case in the files. I only had the chance to skim through.’ Varia placed both hands on the table in a gesture of finality. ‘I’d love to stay and talk to you more, but I have to get back. And this meeting never happened. Okay?’
‘Are you going away anywhere nice on leave?’ asked Kate as they all got up.
‘Yes. St Lucia with my husband.’
‘Wow. Enjoy the sunshine,’ said Tristan.
She smiled and put her hand on his arm. ‘I’ll be in touch.’
They watched her go and then looked around at the crowded coffee shop. The front doors were open, and a cold breeze was blowing inside. Tristan hitched up the bag and peered at the contents.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s find somewhere quiet.’
They moved to a Starbucks on New Oxford Street with a huge upstairs section, which was half-empty. They got settled at a couple of chairs in a quieter corner near the back, ordered coffee, and then settled down with the plastic bag of case files.
Inside were four folders bursting with papers and photos. They took two each and started to read.
‘I’ve found a report on the Met Police canine sniffer dog they sent in to try and locate Janey,’ said Tristan. ‘She was called Molly, an ironical name for a dog who looks for drugs. It was on 28 December 1988. Police were given two items of Janey’s clothing from Doreen Macklin, a T-shirt and a pair of leggings. The dog was taken first to Robert Driscoll’s van, and she detected Janey’s scent in the front passenger seat and also detected Janey’s scent in the back of the van against the right-side panel,’ said Tristan. ‘The search team then moved to Reynolds newsagent, which had only been closed on Christmas Day; it had been open all over Christmas.’
‘Newsagents only close on Christmas Day. That’s the only day of the year they don’t print newspapers,’ said Kate.
‘Yes, and the police were concerned that there would have been too much footfall since Janey was seen there on December the twenty-third and the dog wouldn’t get anything. However, the dog detected her scent on the floor of the newsagent, close to the entrance, next to the racks of magazines and behind the till, where there was a door leading out to the yard. Molly then detected Janey’s scent in the small hallway leading to the back door. They let Molly into the garden, and she was there for a couple of minutes before she found Janey’s scent on the metal lid covering a drainage pipe.’
‘Was Jack Reynolds there when they did the search?’ asked Kate.
‘It doesn’t say. Wouldn’t the police clear the premises for when they do a dog search?’
‘Normally, yes.’
‘It says that the drainage pipe wasn’t used anymore. It had been there when the houses had a septic tank in the 1950s, but now the whole street was on the sewage system. The tank had been removed, but the pipe was still there. They lifted the lid, and Molly found Janey’s scent on the inside of the lid, and all along the pipe for four metres. Forensics then went into the pipe . . . They took blood samples from inside the clay pipe and another sample which was found on the butt of a cigarette, but they weren’t large enough to yield an accurate DNA sample to match Janey’s blood.’
Kate and Tristan flicked through the photos in the case file. The back garden of Reynolds had been a tiny, overgrown square surrounded by high brick walls. A picture showed three police officers standing next to the metal lid on a small length of concrete path with Molly the sniffer dog, a German shepherd, with her nose down and her back arched up.
The final two photos were of the dark-grey pipe inside, and the space was filled with soil, some broken glass, and a couple of cigarette ends. Molly was inside the pipe.
‘That pipe is quite big,’ said Tristan. ‘Molly was a German shepherd and could fit inside standing up.’
‘I wonder if the pipe was some kind of hiding place for teenage kids? It could have been a place where someone flicked their cigarette ends.’
‘No, look at the cover on top of the pipe,’ said Tristan, indicating the big metal cover standing up against the wall. ‘It must be a couple of metres wide and heavy.’
After a moment, he asked, ‘Can the results of canine sniffer dogs be used in UK court trials?’
‘Not if key evidence is based solely on a sniffer dog detecting something. Then a judge would explain that canine sniffer dogs aren’t 100 percent reliable and can be influenced by outside factors.’
‘How long are DNA samples kept by the police?’
‘If it’s a serious crime, a violent attack, murder, or sexual assault, and the case remains unsolved, then it should be indefinitely,’ said Kate.
‘Robert Driscoll was sentenced for Janey Macklin’s murder, then acquitted, but her body has never been found. Would the case now be classed as a murder or a missing person?’
‘Varia said the case file hasn’t been touched since 1989, so I doubt the CPS has even reviewed it. There’s been so many breakthroughs in DNA profiling since 1988. If the blood samples are still on file, we could have it retested. It could tell us if Janey’s body was stashed in that pipe.’
19
Peter woke in his cell later that afternoon. His mouth throbbed, and his sweater was covered in drool again. He pulled himself up and went to the mirror, flicking on the small overhead light. His tiny cell lit up behind him, framing his swollen face. He’d never been vain, but it had been easy in his youth to look good. And he’d always been an attractive man. Losing that and seeing the gaunt, swollen, hunched-over little creature staring back at him was difficult to handle.
He rinsed his face with cold water and slowly opened and closed his mouth. Despite the dull, throbbing pain, he felt better. He leaned into the mirror and saw the neat row of black stitches in his gum. He went to switch off the light and noticed the little bottle of correction fluid sitting in the middle of the desk, and then it all came back to him. He heaved himself up onto his bed, retrieved the phone from the pipe, and switched it on.
The screen lit up, and a moment later, he saw he had full bars. Back in his day, a full bar had been a busy pub.
‘Pee-cher pie-char piched a peach of pichled peppersch,’ he said. He repeated the same sentence a couple of times, trying to work the feeling and dexterity back into his tongue. The numbness and swelling were affecting his voice, but he was keen to know who had taken the risk and trouble to plant a contraband phone in his pocket.
He pressed the speed dial number on the one key, and it rang for a long time before a woman answered.
‘Hello?’ she said shakily. He could hear people talking in the background.
‘Hello, this is Peter Conway,’ he replied. There was a long pause. ‘Please excuse my voice. I’ve just had dental surgery. Although you probably know that,’ Peter added, speaking slowly and carefully to minimise his slurring and lisping.
‘Thank you for calling me,’ said the woman. ‘I can do most of the talking.’
‘Please do.’
‘I won’t tell you my name. It’s easier to keep these things anonymous.’
