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HE GAVE HER A WAN SMILE. “If that’s meant to reassure me, I’m afraid it hasn’t.”
“Sorry,” Carol apologised. “But there is one thing you can do for me, Bill. Add my sword thrust victim, Damien Farrah, to your list. Something about his death never sat right with me – and I don’t just mean the odd way in which he died. I see a lot of grieving families, and there’s no one-size-fits-all with how it takes people, but even taking that into account, there was something very off about Farrah’s family.”
Bill’s curiosity was piqued. “Off? In what way?”
Carol puffed her cheeks out. “I suppose I could say it was the way that they came in mob-handed to see his body, but then I’ve had lots of families where they’ve all wanted to come in – especially from those whose religions demand a fast burial or cremation. By the time they’ve got their loved one to the undertakers, there’s often no time for a few days when the remainder of the family can go to a chapel of rest and pay their respects. I totally understand that.”
“But with a surname like Farrah he doesn’t sound like that – more upper class English through and through.”
“Exactly! And that’s what they looked like. But for a start off, it was a baking hot day – one of those freakish spring days we had back in April when it was hotter than most of our summer days, and which came on us out of the blue. All of us were rolling our sweater sleeves up, or peeling sweaters off altogether because we were roasting. But Mrs Farrah, his mum, kept her sleeves buttoned right down, and it wasn’t because she was cold! The sweat was practically standing out on her forehead.”
“Oh bugger,” Bill sighed, immediately guessing where Carol was going with this. “Another battered wife, you reckon?”
Carol nodded. “Unless I’ve totally lost my touch, yes. I saw her wince at the way her husband held her arm. There was nothing supportive about that, Bill, he was keeping her under control, and I’m sure she had bruises under those long sleeves which hurt like hell with his grip. But what can you do? I managed to slip her my card and told her to contact me if she needed any help, but you have to be so careful in those situations. The last thing I wanted was to make things worse for her.
“The father was a big man, and you could see that in a few years time Damien would have been as portly. Not particularly strong men compared to another fitter man, but way big enough to be able to dominate a woman, and especially a dainty lady like Mrs Farrah. Well there were two brothers with them, who absolutely ‘had to’ come in too. The one was physically small like his mother, but had the same hard eyes as their father. He stood right close to his brother, who was a big ox of a lad, and I’d guess the youngest, and who kept trying to shuffle sideways away from the other one. But each time he did it, the smaller brother just closed the gap until the big lad was wedged up against the wall – it was most bizarre! The little one was in charge, even though he was half his brother’s size.
“And there was a sister, too. You have to remember that, at this stage, I wasn’t party to the investigation’s findings of the woman he’d become smitten with, so my immediate reaction was to ask if she was Damien’s wife. Did I ever get my head snapped off by the father over that! I was told in no uncertain terms that none of the ex-Mrs Farrahs were to be allowed to see the body, and that they were going to excluded from the funeral altogether.”
“What did Lucinda Smythe say to that?” Bill wondered, having got the distinct impression that DI Smythe had been the sharp one of Shropshire team, and not a woman to miss a hint like that.
“Made a note of that and said she’d be visiting all four ex-wives to have a word with them.”
“Four?” Bill was shocked. “How old was he?”
“Thirty-nine.”
“Bloody hell, he got through them a bit fast, didn’t he?”
“The last I heard from Lucinda, none of them had lasted beyond three or four years with him, and the last of them had been a while back. In his earlier days he’d been quite a looker, you know, and Lucinda had got the impression that all of them had chased him, rather than the other way around. They were the ones who pushed for a wedding, and I think his father was hoping young Damien would start knocking out heirs like rabbits. Significantly, there’s not one kid between the four, but I saw Lucinda because she came to me with the medical records of the four, asking me to take a look. Every one of them had had at least one miscarriage, Bill, and Lucinda reckoned that Damien had been heavy-handed with them.”
“Would none of them testify to that?”
“It looked very much as though his father had bought their silence. One-off payments of a substantial kind, but I think in every case those women just wanted to be free of him. Even though it might have been the lesser amount compared to a regular alimony, Lucinda said that all of them just wanted to get as far away from him as possible. The first two had remarried to nice normal chaps, and had solid alibis for the time of Damien’s death – one being a nurse on shift, and the other one away on a family holiday in Turkey. Wife number three, Lucinda said, was such a wreck she never left her house any more, living with her mum, who was at her wits end with trying to cope with a daughter who still screamed the house down every night.”
“And wife number four?”
“Had to be interviewed by video link from South Africa, where she’s been since four months after the divorce.”
“Good grief! That’s one hell of a way to go to get away from someone.”
“Isn’t it! But I think that tells you what sort of man Damien Farrah turned out to be. The only reason he hadn’t had multiple restraining orders on him was because his family was well-heeled enough to be able to pay hush-money.”
Carol poured them all another coffee before saying, “But the thing is, I didn’t see the similarity until you told me what an evil shit Justin Pickersleigh turned out to be. You wouldn’t see the connection between an upper-crust bully-boy whose money kept him out of trouble; a meek mouse of a mummy’s boy; and your inner-city delinquent, would you? Not without the apple tree link, anyway...”
“...But once you see them all as pretty violent predators on those weaker than themselves...” Bill finished for her.
“Exactly! And even so, we almost needed to have Sanay Costa before the link becomes apparent.”
“Then I promise I will give Damien Farrah’s case a thorough looking at as soon as I get back to the station,” he promised. “But just as a thought... Do you think it’s possible that Damien died the most violent death of the three, because of all of them, he wouldn’t have hesitated to have fought back? Pickersleigh was never going to stand up to a grown woman, I don’t think. And for all of Sanay’s bluster, I can tell you that it’s his mother who rules the roost in his family too. But the man you’ve just described makes me wonder whether his instant response was to not be tricked in whatever way they’re doing it, but to become violent? Because I’d expect it to be the other way around if we were looking at a normal escalation of violence on the killer’s part, wouldn’t you?”
Carol immediately picked up on what he meant. “Of course! You’d expect Sanay, as the latest victim to be the one whose death was most violent. But as best we know, Farrah was the first. So why was he the one who incited such a violent response? If – and I do understand that we can’t be sure about this – we are looking at just one killer, then that’s a very atypical pattern. On the other hand, if we’re looking at a separate killer for each one, then what’s going on with the locations? Why are they so alike?”
Those were questions Bill couldn’t begin to answer while he was with Carol and Sylvia, but once back at his borrowed desk, the first thing he did was to pull up Damien’s case file. It was at that point that he saw the other bookmark he’d put on the computer, which was for the old farmer.
“Why not,” he muttered, as he pulled a brand new memory stick out of his pocket, ripped open its packet, and copied both files across to it. That way he’d be able to look at them when he was back at his own desk if needed, and with that thought in mind, he also copied Sanay’s file. Yet it was at that point that he realised that Justin’s case was the oddity in that it was south of the Shropshire border, albeit not by many miles. Had someone not been aware that they’d crossed the county line?
If you went by the main roads there were the usual large signposts telling you which county you’d just come into. But what if someone was using the back ways? If you wanted to get someone like these men to a quiet spot with the intention of doing them harm, then wouldn’t you give them directions which would take them away from any traffic cameras? That made sense to Bill, but another thing occurred to him, and he dug out his large-scale map again. Yes, looked at geographically, where Justin had dumped his bodies and where he himself had then been found, were both in the same tumble of hills and valleys as where Sanay had been found.
So what of Damien? Finding the coordinates of the deposition site, Bill found it on his map and then swore softly. It was almost exactly halfway between the two they already had, and that troubled him enormously. Yet even as he read the report and looked at the map, he knew he’d have a terrible job convincing anyone else that Damien’s case should be looked at with the others. For a start off, this time it was no semi-deserted old farm orchard, and nor was it down in a river valley. This time it was up on a hill on a good sized farm, and the farmer was not so much growing the apples himself as the trees. He had a few prime specimens of good cider apple trees, and was taking cuttings off them and grafting them onto modern root stocks – a common enough practice – but then he was selling the saplings on.
But what bothered Bill even more was the presence not half a mile away of a big country house hotel. Damn it, the place even had its own static caravan site for those who couldn’t afford the price of the hotel itself, and that meant that it was a far busier site than either of the others.
“How the hell did someone kill you and never get seen?” he wondered aloud. “I know it was late March, but even so, by that time the hotel would have been starting to pick up with folks having short breaks. Easter wasn’t until into mid April this year, so a lot of places wouldn’t have been open for visitors yet, but even so...” Then he thought to look at a lunar calendar. “Oh you have got to be joking!”
There it was, the thirtieth, which was when Damien had died, was another new moon. Justin had died on the twenty-sixth of July, and Sanay on the twenty-fifth of August. Glancing up to check whether anyone else was about to walk in on him, Bill then made a note of the other new moons of the year. If this really was a pattern, then he needed to check those dates, but equally, he wanted to do it without somebody looking over his shoulder who would ask why on earth those dates were significant. Mercifully, when he came to feed the dates into the system, June, May and April were devoid of incidents, which was faintly reassuring.
And so he was almost hoping that this moon thing was just a really weird coincidence by the time he’d realised that there had been no new moon in February, because it had come at the end of January and on the first of March, and therefore nothing besides Damien had come up for both new moons in March. But that technically made the date of Damien’s death the new moon equivalent of the full moon’s blue moon – in other words a rare second event within one calendar month. So was that significant? Was that why his death had been more violent?
Groaning at the very thought of that, Bill moved on, determined to keep his feet as firmly on the ground as possible. But when he put in the thirtieth of January, what should pop up but the old farmer who had died in his orchard. Muttering dark oaths under his breath, Bill now knew that he must add the farmer’s case to his own list, even if he might never be able to convince anyone else of the pattern without a lot more information. It was worrying enough to make him retrieve the dates of last year’s new moons and go through all of them, and it was with surprisingly intense relief that he found no other cases. Okay, then. So whoever was doing this had only started this year. Why?
He had to break off at that point to deal with more immediate issues, but at the end of the day, large mug of tea in hand, he managed to settle down to review Damien Farrah’s case notes. And the first thing that really leapt out at him was that this was no casual choice of location. Damien and his family regularly took short breaks at the hotel, and if they hadn’t been the most popular of guests, Bill certainly got confirmation of what Carol had told him of Mr Farrah senior buying his family’s way out of trouble time and again. An exasperated restaurant manager told of losing waitresses over and over because of the unwanted attentions of Damien and the middle brother, both in terms of some very inappropriate comments when you bore in mind that many of the waitresses were school girls working in the evenings and at weekends, but also the occasional groping.
“Oh you really are a bunch of charmers,” Bill muttered as he read on. “You rely on intimidating these girls into not complaining in case it goes on their employment record.”
But then he sat up and really took notice as he came to the witness statements which said that Damien had come to the hotel several times on his own, always with a different woman. ‘The last woman I saw seemed really upset at breakfast,’ a waitress had said, ‘and she seemed to be rubbing her arms a lot – like she’d been hurt.’ Another described seeing the woman – who had been the last but one before Damien’s death, if you assumed there had been a woman that time too – wearing sunglasses down to breakfast, and then begging the staff to get her a taxi to the station at Knighton, but to not tell Damien Farrah that they were doing it. He’d been very angry about that, shouting and swearing at the receptionist until the under manager had had to step in. Yet when Lucinda and her team had spoken to the housekeeping staff, all had said that they had seen no signs of violence in the rooms at any time. Nobody could recall ever seeing any blood, or the place looking badly disturbed – not even as though someone had tried to put it right afterwards.
“So where did you take them?” Bill murmured as he read on. “Was it out into the grounds of the hotel? Was that how you got spotted?”
The more he looked at the map, the more he could see the network of paths around the hotel, both through the woods and out across the open land.
“Did you con them into thinking that they were going for a romantic walk under the stars, only to find that you tried to rape them?” he wondered when he cross-checked, and found that none of the Farrah family had recognised any of the young women’s names once they’d been retrieved from the hotel’s register.
But then the confirmation Bill had hoped for turned up.
‘He had a new woman,’ Mr Farrah senior had told Lucinda, virtually scoffing at the suggestion that his son might have been having trouble finding women who wanted to spend time with him. ‘Absolutely besotted with her, he was. Classy bit of skirt, too, by the sound of her. Tall and slim and with natural golden blonde hair. He said she was his ray of sunshine, his summer sun. Told me, ‘you won’t be wanting for grandsons once I get ploughing her field, Dad,’ and you could see he couldn’t wait to get at her. But something about her made him realise he had to be a gentleman about it. No rushed fumblings with this one.’
However, nobody at the hotel knew anything about this mystery woman. Whoever she was, she hadn’t checked in with him on his last visit like the others had. And she hadn’t dined with him that night either. What the staff had noticed was that he was very agitated, but in an excited kind of way, as though he was going to get something he’d been waiting for. Even odder, the farmer who owned the field where Damien had been found, had spoken with real anger of previously having to warn Damien off from trespassing on his land, having found some of his precious saplings broken and ripped up after Damien had been seen walking through with various women. Yet on the night of the murder, he’d seen nothing of Damien, much less the woman. And there was one vital thing missing from everyone’s accounts – not one person knew her name!
“You have got to be kidding me!” Bill breathed. “Okay, this goes beyond coincidence now. Two women with no name, and a third with something that’s probably a nickname? That can’t be a coincidence.”
It was enough to have him thinking that tomorrow night he must read through the farmer’s files, but just as he was getting his jacket and car keys, Ray came dashing in.
“You are not going to believe this, gov’!”
“Oh God, not another body?”
“Not exactly.”
Bill frowned. “What do you mean, ‘not exactly’? Please don’t tell me it’s in bits.”
However Ray shook his head. “No, it’s odder than that.”
With a sigh, Bill draped the jacket around the back of his chair and sat down again, gesturing Ray to take the seat on the other side of the desk. “Go on then, hit me with it. What’s happened?”
“Vijay Bose’s gone missing!”
“What? Now? After his cousin’s vanished?”
“No, gov’, that’s the really weird bit. You see, as far as the family were aware, Vijay and his mate Tufty had gone over to Italy. Remember me telling you about how we’ve always been suspicious about Mr Costa – Marissa’s husband – supposedly going home? Well the gang have used the story of them going to ‘visit’ him as a reason for them to leave the country whenever things have got a bit hot for them at home. So nobody questioned them when first of all Tufty disappeared, and then Vijay started making veiled comments about setting up a new base of operations. They all just thought he was being coy about needing to take a month or two away – and there were reasons why that fitted which I’ll come to in a bit.
“But the thing is, Vijay had promised to be back for his kid sister’s eighteenth birthday party. And so when it got to a day or so before it was due and still no sign of Vijay, his mum got onto Marissa Costa, and together they started making phone calls. Well God knows who they were calling. All my mates in Walsall have been able to establish is that it was to mobile phones somewhere in Italy – probably burner phones that got ditched after one use. But my mate Likesh just rang me from the station to warn me that both women are screaming the place down now, because they think that whoever did for Sanay has done for Vijay.”
