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A LESS AMIABLE MEETING was the one Bill was called in for on Monday afternoon with the Assistant Chief Constable, Superintendant Williams and with Pete – who was Sean’s DS – with him as his union rep. He wasn’t surprised at the summons. In fact he’d been expecting it ever since the dreaded TV news conference. His home TPU would have had to be idiots if they hadn’t wanted to make very sure that none of the blame was going to head their way.
So luckily Bill had already thought through how he was going to play this, and what his answers ought to be. The harder part was delivering them so that they didn’t sound as though he’d rehearsed them.
Why had he been out in the Kington area? ...Because after spending time with the Shropshire guys, he’d realised that this was a part of the country he’d not explored much.
Did he do that often? ...Well here were the photos he’d taken on Wednesday up over Wenlock Edge, and the ones he’d taken the next day across in Wales on one of his favourite walks up the side of Cadair Idris.
Had he been anywhere on Friday? ...No, because his knee had been telling him he’d overdone it a bit on the last few days.
So had he walked anywhere while he’d been in Knighton? ...No, because he’d only just got to the hotel when he’d had the thought about which way Sanay Costa might have been brought, and rung Likesh Setty as a result. But he’d been planning a nice walk along the River Teme, had he had the chance.
Why there? ...Because of what he’d just told them – he’d been to the crime scene as soon as he’d arrived in Shropshire, but had thought it a lovely spot regardless of the crime. He’d half been thinking of trying a section of the Offa’s Dyke long-distance path, except that he’d not had the chance, as it turned out.
Had he had any inclination or suggestion as to what he might find when he was asked to go and search the area? ... (Bloody hell, that was too close for comfort!) No, how could he? He’d thought he was just going to check on the location of a couple of missing vehicles. For all he knew, Bose and Harbottle could have had someone who knew their vehicles, and who had removed and subsequently dumped the tracking devices there. Wasn’t that what the Walsall guys had said Caesar Costa was good at?
What had been his impressions of DI Likesh Setty at that point? ...On the phone he’d come across as a switched-on and amiable kind of guy. In fact Bill had been taken aback at his attitude at the crime scene. Hadn’t understood why he’d been so damned quick to scurry off, until the TV report had come on in the morning!
Had he thought DS Chaudry had known what his boss was going to do? ... (Much easier to answer!) If you’d seen his face that morning you would know that the answer to that was absolutely not. DS Chaudry behaved impeccably throughout, and was respectful to the Powys DI, Dafydd Parry.
On and on it went, sometimes doubling back to things, sometimes jumping forwards, as if they were trying to catch him out. But Bill stuck to his guns. Yes, he’d guessed immediately what the context was of what he’d found, but purely because he’d been told that Vijay Bose and Tufty Harbottle had gone missing even before he’d returned from Shropshire, and well before he’d taken his fortnight’s leave. And it had been acting-DI Ray Villavarayan who’d told him of the Walsall division’s suspicions about Bose being wrapped up in prostitution but also people trafficking. So it didn’t take a genius to work out that this had to be where the girls who’d gone missing in the city had ended up. However, he’d had no idea what had gone on between Harbottle and Bose until Dr Whitmore had told him a few days ago, and no, he couldn’t even begin to shed any light on the strange death of Bose, though it did look as though Harbottle hadn’t been the total villain the West Midlands DI had painted him as if Bose had killed him.
When they staggered out over two hours later, even Williams was too wrung out to argue, and the only thing he said to Bill was,
“At least you’ve confirmed that there’s no blame to be attached to us,” before hurrying off to his office alone.
“Hmph!” snorted Pete in disgust. “Not so much as a kiss-my-arse for having ensured that the blame for that unholy fuck-up stays with Setty! I despair of that man, I really do. ...Bloody well done in there, Bill! I’m not sure I’d have stayed that cool if they’d kept asking me to repeat myself like that. There’s a witch hunt going on at the higher level, you mark my words, but I reckon you’re well out of it after today.”
Bill grimaced. “I’m just hoping I did enough in there to make sure that Harbir Chaudry stays blameless too. God, I feel so sorry for that lad. He was right to fear that he’d be the scapegoat, because unless I’m very mistaken, that glory-seeking superintendent won’t want to throw Setty to the wolves unless he has no choice. Setty was the one who brought him his moment of TV fame, after all, so it might be that he could it again in his boss’ eyes. But it was Harbir who stayed and did the dirty work, and who’s having the nightmares after what he saw.”
“Request him as your new DS,” Pete suggested. “Tony’s only got another couple of months before he goes back to his old job after covering Jess’ maternity leave. Jess has already said she’s not coming back after her maternity leave is up, and Tony’s said to me that the commute is too much for him – he’s hardly seeing anything of his family, and his missus is complaining – so he won’t want to make it permanent, though he told me he’s dreading telling you that. He loves working with you. It’s just that he lives too far away to be based here, and he can’t move his kids because they’re coming up to important exams at school.”
“I’ll come down to the office and do that now,” Bill decided. “I wish Tony had said something to me earlier, though. I would have understood, and I could have sounded Harbir out without his boss being present.”
What he wasn’t expecting was to get a phone-call off Carol the following evening.
“Bill, why do you do it to me?” she began.
“Me? What have I done?”
“Well you personally, nothing,” she admitted. “But you know you prompted me to expect a call from the Hawthorn House Hotel?”
“Yeah...” he didn’t like the way this seemed to be going.
“One body, you said!”
“Yeah...?”
“There were bloody three!”
“What? Oh you are fucking joking! No!”
Carol obviously heard the shock in his voice and relented. “Aah, you weren’t expecting that, then?”
“God, no! Do they all look as though they might be Damien Farrah’s victims?”
Carol huffed. “Hard to say. Okay, I know you were ‘told’ that one was, but at the moment I’ve only just got them into our morgue. If we hadn’t been so clogged up with the bodies you found out with Bose and Harbottle, I could get onto them faster. As it is, I might be able to prioritise them over the girls from the quarry on the basis that I’ve done those bodies which looked the most recent from there, and the others can wait a day or two.
“I couldn’t get that much off most of Bose’s victims, but I will tell you this – that bastard strangled at least two of those girls, and I’m pretty sure at least one more. They weren’t all shot. I’m hoping I might even have got some DNA, because it doesn’t look as though he had the wit to wear gloves while he was doing it, and the most recent one certainly didn’t go peacefully.
“There’s something curious about the way some of them were found, as well. They don’t all match up. One lot look as though they were practically thrown down. Tossed on top of one another like sacks of rubbish. Like a couple of men had got their arms and legs and just swung them out to behind the stones. But there were three other girls who were laid out almost reverently.”
“Really?”
“Oh yes. Honestly, Bill, it’s like someone was genuinely bothered about what they’d been made to do, and my guess is that that someone was Harbottle. Three of the girls were laid flat, and their arms crossed over their chests almost like they were properly laid out. Very dignified and off to one side. They show no sign of violence, and if we’re lucky, toxicology might even show that they died of an overdose, because I can’t think of any other way they’d have died so peacefully in that dreadful place.”
Bill found himself nodding, even though Carol couldn’t see him. “It makes sense, doesn’t it? Bose was going into a very dark place that an old-fashioned villain like Harbottle wasn’t happy about. He probably protested once too often about what Bose was asking him to do, and that was what got him killed. ...But come on, then, what about these new bodies? I presume they’re all women?”
“Oh yes. I got called in because there was a real panic that they might be more of Bose’s victims, you see. Understandable when you’ve suddenly unearthed what amounts to a mass grave, even if they weren’t actually buried. But these new women were of a totally different sort. All of them were definitely English, going by my preliminary glance at the dental work, and my initial assessment is that they look far better nourished. We’re in with a good chance of getting proper identification of these three.
“Of course I can’t say to the investigating team that they’re Damien’s victims as yet, though I have high hopes of getting something from the samples we’ve taken from under their fingernails – or at least the most recent one. And with the way they’ve all been placed in the same spot up at the hotel, I think it’s fair to assume that if we can nail him for one, then it will be accepted that he’d been the murderer of all of them. God, I hope we can put all three at his door! I’d love to see that obnoxious father of his deflated once and for all.”
Even so, Bill was now worried. “It bothers me, though, that I was shown only one of those women. Do you think they are all of the same timescale? The same generation? It’s just that I would have thought that my mysterious guides would have shown me all three if they’d known about them. That dream was so vivid, Carol. Why show me one when showing me three would have been even more convincing?”
“I can’t answer that one. You’ll just have to ask them. ...You are going to speak to them again, aren’t you?”
“I think I’m going to drive over to the Mulligrew’s farm on the full moon, which is Sunday. It’s not ideal, because I’m back at work on Monday, but I don’t want to wait until the new moon, because I’ll be fully back at work by then, and I might be so tied up that I can’t get away. But you’re right, I do want to have that conversation with them. This can’t go on. I have to make them see that what they effectively stumbled upon is an aberration. Because I really don’t want them to see something like a normal domestic row, and completely misinterpret it.”
“Lord, no! That could be disastrous, couldn’t it!”
“Absolutely.”
Yet before he got the chance to drive over on the Sunday evening, he got another call from Carol.
“You’re not going to believe this!” she told Bill excitedly. “It looks as though the other two victims are Damien’s father’s!”
“How on earth have you established that?”
“Aah! The first thing is that the dental records came up trumps. The most recent body is that of Melissa Troughton, who went missing from Solihull in October last year. When I got her file through, it was a very sad story. She’d had a miserable marriage to a man with mental health problems, who’d then committed suicide. On the file it said that Melissa’s friends at work had said, to the officers who investigated her going missing, that she’d been all of a jitter over having met what she described as a ‘strong man.’”
“Oh bollocks. I suppose bloody Damien could have come across like that in an urban setting, where he’d need to behave.”
“That’s what I thought. Apparently they’d met up in hotels for just the odd evening, but not for what you’d think. It seems that Melissa had been brought up religious, and even though she was hardly a virgin, she wasn’t about to start sleeping around with the first bloke who came on to her.”
“God, that really is tragic, isn’t it? She must have come out here really believing that this was the start of something very serious, and yet all Farrah wanted was to get into her pants. No wonder I felt her confusion and panic. She’d probably not even expected him to do any heavy snogging until they were back in the room, and then there she was, flat on her back on the cold ground and fighting for her last breath. Damn it, I really wish we could have got the bastard in jail for that. He got off too easy in my books, even if he was crapping himself in fright at the last. It didn’t go on for nearly long enough for it to be real justice.”
“I have to agree with you there.”
“But come on, Carol, don’t keep me in suspense. Why do you say that the other two are his father’s victims?”
He heard Carol laugh softly. “Oh, that’s too delicious for words! Mr bloody Montgomery Farrah went rummaging through his son’s room after the body had been found, and before the original murder team could seal the room. So of course he had to provide a DNA sample in order to exclude him from the search – although I think Chris Masters, who was the leading DI on that one, would have liked to nail him for something, even if it was only perverting the course of justice. Well I’ve taken great delight in ringing DI Masters up and telling her that it looks as though we’re going to get him on the much bigger charge of murder. God was she ever chuffed about that!
“You see, once I’d got the three of them on the table, it was obvious that those two had been there much longer than Melissa – and I’m talking here about at least ten years more for the one, and closer to fifteen for the other. And given the women’s ages, which were in their forties or thereabouts going on their bones, I just couldn’t see the then very young Damien being attracted to them. Not at the age he’d have been then. So I did some very careful scraping under their nails, and although what little DNA we got came back as a familial link to Damien’s, it was equally obviously not his. That was the stage when I checked them against what we had on file, and who should pop up as an exact march but his father!
“So when I reported that back to DI Masters – who’s practically chewed her DCI’s arm off to get the case – she didn’t hang about. Some fast going back over files and some research showed that back then, Montgomery Farrah had done a lot of travelling about, supposedly with his job. A dig back in the hotel’s records then showed that he, too, had gone there with various women.”
“Really?” Bill was surprised. “The hotel kept their records for that long?”
“Not things like credit card receipts, but those guest registers they did. Apparently they’d had some fairly well-known guests stopping there over the years. Oh, not real celeb’s! Just regional TV stars, and some local footballers. But enough that they wanted to be able to brag about it, and so they kept the registers because they’d got the signatures on them – sort of like an autograph book.”
“Well I never! And I suppose that there amongst them was old Farrah and his various flings?”
“Yep!” He heard Carol give another titter of amusement. “And in one of those strange ways that things come around, because one lot of the West Mids have so pissed off your lot, the ones over in Solihull have been falling over themselves to be helpful. They’re tracking all of the names nasty Monty put on the registers like so many bloodhounds, because the last thing anyone wants is to find that all of them are missing. Some are obviously false names, but Damien seems to have been much more clued up than his father as to how easy it would be to track names, whereas the old man for the most part let his women sign themselves in. You can see the different handwriting, because Jeff’s got the books in his lab, with his assistant deciding which is the old man’s handwriting and which the women’s.”
Bill sighed with relief. “But that’s something else, isn’t it? If we can prove that his father had already disposed of two women deep in the rushes whom he’d probably got too heavy-handed with, then for Damien to have dumped his victim exactly there too, his father had to have told him about how his corpses had never come to light. And what’s the betting that the subject never came up until Damien rang him in a panic saying, ‘she’s not breathing?’ So the father is an accessory in Melissa’s death too.”
“Indeed he is,” Carol said with satisfaction. “He won’t be seeing the outside world again for a very long time, and with any luck, his poor brow-beaten wife will have got far away from here by then.”
“But it also makes his aggression at your identification more explainable, doesn’t it? Farrah senior must have been horrified that some vengeful father or brother had come after Damien, given that he had to have already known what his son had done a few months before that; and presumably how brutal he was continuing to be with his women? That’s before you get onto the way that Damien’s ex-wives had had to be paid off. He’d always got away with it, but Damien didn’t. But on top of that, he must have been shitting bricks that the police would do a fingertip search of the whole hotel site. I mean, it’s not unknown for TV reports to show police divers dredging rivers or canals for missing weapons, is it? He had to have known it was a possibility.”
“Oh my God!” Carol gasped. “Of course! He’d have been frantic underneath all that bluster! And it was only because it had been a soaking wet day when Damien died, and the area all around the pools was so soft that you couldn’t have set foot on it without leaving a trace, that stopped the team from doing just that. It was just so clear that whoever had killed Damien couldn’t have gone that way – not even close enough to have thrown something as heavy as that sword that far into the water. Good grief! They scoured all the rest of the grounds, though. Jeff waded through tons of bits of soggy remains that had been dumped by careless guests, I do remember that.”
“Yet Farrah hasn’t evaded justice in the long run,” Bill said with satisfaction, “and at least in his case, the bastard has had to sweat for several months too.” Then another thought came to him. “Carol, can you pinpoint when Melissa went missing?
Had Melissa’s death tied in with when the mystery people would have been aware of it?
“It was the first weekend in November,” Carol said. “Halloween was on the Thursday night, and it looks like she died on the Saturday, because Damien checked out early on the Sunday even before breakfast, saying that his girlfriend was already in the car and that they’d had a row, so they were going home instead of staying any longer.”
But Bill was already looking up the moon phases. The new moon had come on the Sunday in the very early hours of the morning! Right within hours of Melissa’s death! So had he got this all wrong? Had the strange folk got involved because they’d witnessed Melissa’s death first? In which case, no wonder they had felt the need to rescue the two Mulligrew daughters if they’d feared that might also be their fate. Thomas wasn’t the first of the cases, one of Damien’s was – it just hadn’t been him who died that time!
