The Moor (DCI Ryan Mysteries, #11)(47)

“I dunno—it just looked like she was reaching for the floor.”

Phillips thought back to Samantha’s memory of her mother’s murder and imagined the horror of being unable to put it into words.

“Think back to the caravan, Duke. Did you see anything else?”

“I went inside…I nearly tripped over the coffee table because somebody had shifted it out of its usual spot, and then I snatched up Samantha to give her a cuddle. She was in a state, and it was really loud because the radio was blasting. I turned it off, then called out for Esme and went to look in each of the rooms, but she wasn’t there.”

“Did you see a note?” Ryan threw in.

Duke looked confused.

“What?”

“The note she left for Charlie,” Ryan repeated. “Was it there?”

“I—yes, I think so.”

He snatched up the water again, draining the glass this time.

“Is—is there anything else? I’ll be late for the show starting.”

“Just a couple more questions,” Ryan said. “We appreciate you being so co-operative.”

“It’s just, I don’t know what else to tell you.”

“You could start by telling us whether you believed that Esme had gone off with another man?”

Duke shook his head, vehemently.

“Esme wasn’t like that,” he said. “I know that’s what Charlie thought and since he found that note…I know it looked bad. But when you came to the circus that day and told us she’d been killed, it all seemed to make sense. It must have been some crazy person, who snatched her. Or maybe she went off to get something, really quickly, and they kidnapped her from the road—”

“They’re good suggestions, and we’ll bear them in mind,” Phillips said, in a fatherly manner. “Is there anything more you can tell us about the caravan? For example, was anything overturned, or messed up? Anything out of place?”

“Not really, although the coffee table was in the wrong place, and I think the fridge had been left open because there was a stale smell. That could have been Samantha’s nappy,” he reasoned.

“One final thing, for now, Duke. What was Esme’s relationship like, with your brother? Was she happy?”

His shoulders slumped as he was torn between family loyalty and the truth.

“She never said anything to me, but I—I see things,” he said. “I don’t think Charlie was ready to be married. He was no good at it; always shouting at her, saying she wasn’t doing things right. He was struggling to be a father, too. You never met ours,” he said, meaningfully. “He wasn’t exactly the touchy-feely type.”

They nodded their understanding.

“All the same, Esme would never have gone off and left Samantha. She adored that baby.”

And, not for the first time, he thought of everything he had failed to do for her; everything he had failed to be.

But then, as she had observed, there were some who were born with strength and others who weren’t.





CHAPTER 25


After marking out a route to allow people to access their cars—under police supervision—and exit the multi-storey car park on Dean Street, Lowerson and Yates dipped inside the protective tent Tom Faulkner had set up around the remains of the man lying splattered on the pavement at their feet. As they entered, he looked up from his grisly task.

“Jack, Mel,” he said, his voice muffled behind the mask. “This is becoming a daily habit.”

Lowerson chewed furiously on a stick of menthol gum, which Yates had offered him as they’d approached the tent. It didn’t quite cover the stench of blood, but it helped, most of all, to distract him.

He sent her a grateful look, and she smiled, chewing her own gum.

“I heard you had another one to deal with, earlier today,” Lowerson said. “The body up on the tracks at Stocksfield?”

“Yeah, that’s looking like a professional hit,” Faulkner said, moving across to where they stood. “In fact, if I hadn’t got your call to come down here, I was going to ring you, myself.”

“Oh?”

“There are certain similarities between the body I saw this morning and the one you picked up from St Peter’s Wharf. In both cases, their fingertips had been removed, there were contusions all over the torso, and their faces had been beaten to shreds.”

“Could be a serial,” Yates suggested, and felt immediately guilty for the excitement that followed.

“Or, more likely, it could be a professional hitman with his own style,” Lowerson said, with a note of apology. He liked the big cases as much as the next murder detective, but you couldn’t imagine serial killers around every corner.

Besides, that was Ryan’s specialist subject.

“What about this one?” Yates asked, nodding towards the mess on the floor. “Any similarities?”

“I’d say almost certainly. I can’t tell you much about his torso, or even draw conclusions about whether his face was beaten—for obvious reasons. But I can tell you his fingertips are missing, so it’s almost certain that he died elsewhere, before being brought here and dropped from a height.”

“It seems strange,” Yates remarked. “Why would anyone in the gangs want to draw attention to themselves like this?”