DC JONES DROVE carefully through one of the most depressing areas in Cardiff. Blocks of flats, the ground floors boarded up and desolate, and corner shops with wire mesh protecting the windows; rusting abandoned cars and litter-strewn streets. Sitting in the passenger seat, staring at the hostile environment, Ellis’s mood began to sour.
‘The recession must be another bloody great nail in the coffin for people round here,’ he observed.
DC Jones swerved to avoid a football kicked into the road. ‘I don’t suppose,’ she replied, ‘they ever had high expectations, even before the economy took a nose-dive.’
‘What about this Chislet? You think he might be a handful?’
Jones shook her head. ‘Not if you think about the last five years. There’s been no serious criminal activity.’
‘But you must admit, Debbie, of all the youngsters who passed through Titmus’s institution, this one tops the list. His first crime was stoning a neighbour’s cat to death at the age of ten. Then a spectacular list of juvenile crimes. A serious assault on another boy in an alternative curriculum programme, and then a three-year sentence at the youth custody centre. And, after his release, when he turned eighteen, some of his crimes were stomach churning.’
Jones laughed grimly. ‘I can’t wait to meet this little charmer.’
‘You won’t have long to wait.’ Ellis pointed and tapped the windscreen. ‘That must be him with the hotdog barrow.’
On a street corner, close to a shabby pub, a man stood by a hotdog stand, smoking and drinking from a can of Foster’s. Although he was only in his early thirties, Chislet’s thin, ravaged face and receding hair gave him the appearance of a much older man. Jones had seen his photograph and read his physical details, but was still surprised by his small build.
‘He’s only a little geezer,’ she said.
‘They’re the ones you have to be wary of. It’s called over-compensating.’
She parked the car directly in front of Chislet’s hotdog stand and they both got out. Chislet watched them calmly, not a muscle moving in his face. He flicked the stub of his cigarette into the road without taking his eyes off them.
Ellis showed Chislet his warrant card. ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Ellis and this is Detective Constable Jones. We’d like a few words.’
‘What about?’
‘We’d like to know where you were on Thursday night.’
Chislet put his beer on top of the stand, next to the square cavity containing unappetizing-looking frankfurters, and lit another cigarette with a disposable lighter. Both detectives watched him carefully, aware of the delaying tactic. Once he had inhaled and let out a stream of smoke, he gave them a cold smile and jerked a thumb at the pub.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Ellis demanded.
‘Means I was in the pub Thursday night. Go in and ask if you don’t believe me.’
‘I don’t mean pub hours. I mean the middle of the night. Early Friday morning, say between one o’clock and 4 a.m.’
Chislet shrugged. ‘I was in bed, fast asleep.’
‘On your own?’ Jones asked.
Chislet gave her a suggestive smile. ‘Yeah. Too bad I never had no one to keep me company that night.’
‘So you have no witnesses who can back you up?’
Chislet’s eyes narrowed as he stared at Ellis. ‘Why do I need a witness? If I say I was in bed, I was in fucking bed.’
‘How’s custom?’ Jones asked, deliberately wrongfooting him.
‘What?’
She nodded at the hotdog stand. ‘You make much of a living at this?’
‘I get by.’
‘And do you offer your customers any other kind of stimulant?’
‘What are you talking about?’
Ellis broke in sharply, ‘She means are you using this as a front for dealing in drugs?’
Chislet laughed confidently and tapped his pockets. ‘You’re out of luck. You won’t find anything on me.’ He gestured towards the hotdog stand. ‘And you won’t find nothing in there neither. Go ahead and look if you wanna. Have a look under the sausages, if you don’t mind paying for them.’
‘That won’t be necessary,’ Ellis said. ‘Because your customers come to you on the street corners and you take their orders. That’s how you operate, isn’t it? How is it you manage to pay the magistrates’ fines selling hotdogs? Not exactly doing a roaring trade, are you?’
‘At least, not in hotdogs,’ Jones chimed in.
Chislet began to shift from one foot to the other, starting to look disturbed, and Ellis braced himself for an explosion. But just as the sergeant feared an imminent clash, Chislet’s tension seemed to evaporate as he took another long drag on his cigarette.
‘You got any proof of this?’ he asked.
Ellis smiled. ‘Let’s forget the drugs for the moment. We’re not drug squad. We’d like you to cast your mind back twenty years ago, when you were at the youth custody centre.’
Chislet stared into Ellis’s eyes, clearly wondering where this was leading, and waited for him to continue.
‘Running the institution was a man named Titmus, a convicted paedophile who abused many young boys in his care. He and another man, Gordon Mayfield, were sentenced to seven years and were paroled over two years ago.’
Chislet stared distantly at some dark memory and remained silent.
Ellis continued. ‘We’d like to know if you had any dealings with Titmus or Mayfield.’
‘Dealings?’
Ellis looked directly at Chislet and nodded.
‘You want to know if those bastards abused me, is that it?’
‘Like they abused loads of youngsters in their care.’
‘Oh, they tried it on all right. Three of them there was. That bastard Titmus, Mayfield and another screw.’
‘Screw?’ Ellis questioned.
‘Yeah, that’s what we used to call them. I’d been locked up in this room as a punishment. It was where they kept some of the leisure equipment – table tennis table, an’ that. But it was more like a cell, with a bed in one corner and no windows. Anyway, I’d been locked up for giving this older boy a good kicking. They kept me locked up all day, with nothing to eat or drink, just waiting. I knew they was coming for me and I was ready for them. There was no way they was gonna to touch me.’
DC Jones held her breath as she watched him relating his story, and she almost felt sorry for him.
‘So what happened?’ Ellis prompted.
‘They came in and locked the door. I said to them, “You touch me and one of you’s gonna lose an eye. I don’t care which one of you it is, but after today one of you fuckers’ll be blind in one eye.”’ Chislet held up a thumb and mimed gouging out an eye, his lips clamped together as he imagined it. ‘I showed them the thumb and told them how I was gonna enjoy seeing one of the fuckers squirm when he saw his eye in my hand. They left me alone after that.’
Ellis was certain that Chislet, even at the tender age of thirteen, was quite capable of committing such an act.
‘Did they ever try again?’ he asked.
‘I told you: they left me alone. Picked on some other poor bastard.’
Although it was hot standing in the sun, Jones shivered as she imagined a more vulnerable child in that situation.
Chislet eyed them both shrewdly and said, ‘So you think I killed that bastard Titmus.’
This took Ellis by surprise and he said rather lamely, ‘We’re just making enquiries.’
Chislet laughed confidently. ‘Whoever killed those bastards should get a medal. And I don’t have a fucking alibi. So what you gonna do about it? Eh? You gonna fit me up for this one? Well, I’ll tell you something: if those fuckers had raped me, I’d have gone looking for them. But they didn’t, so it’s got nothing to do with me, has it?’
‘And there’s no one who can confirm that you were at home in the early hours of Friday? Neighbour? Someone who might have heard you?’
Chislet laughed again, enjoying the situation. ‘I had my television on loud, watching some shit late-night film. My next-door neighbour might have heard it. But if I wanted an alibi, I could have left the TV on really loud, gone over to Swansea, killed Titmus, and that wouldn’t really be much of an alibi, would it? But there’s just one problem.’
Chislet, a triumphant glint in his eye, waited for one of the detectives to cue him.
‘What’s that?’ Jones said.
‘I can’t fucking drive. I’ve never learnt. So how the fuck do I get over to Swansea in the middle of the night? Public transport?’ He laughed loudly. ‘If you’d checked with DVLA – and that’s in Swansea – you could have saved yourselves a journey. Call yourselves fucking detectives.’
Ellis and Jones exchanged looks while Chislet’s mocking laughter grew. Ellis gave Chislet a cursory nod before getting back in the car. As Jones drove away, she looked in the rear-view mirror and saw Chislet staring after their car, holding up his middle finger to her.
After a silent exit from the immediate neighbourhood, Jones muttered, ‘We got that one wrong.’
Ellis shook his head. ‘He still had to be checked out. And some of these tough guys may not be licensed to drive legally, but they still know what to do when they get behind a wheel.’
It sounded hollow, and he knew he was clutching at straws.
The Cockett Inn was situated conveniently close to the police station. Normally Lambert would have chosen to drink somewhere a bit further from where he was based, but it had been a long day for all concerned, and the rest of his team wanted to get away.
But not Lambert. Lousy flat. Fridge full of nothing. Nothing but crap on television. And nothing but the sound of his own thoughts for company. In other words, a big fat nothing.
The team, wanting to be reasonably private in their conversation, thought the pub might be heaving. But it was only just gone seven, and the heavy drinking brigade from the afternoon shift had staggered off home, leaving only a few stalwarts at the bar, the kamikaze drinkers who would be talking nonsense by closing time, if not sooner. And the Saturday night shift was yet to arrive, so they were able to find a table that was relatively secluded.
After they’d bagged their seats, Lambert gave Wallace a £20 note to get a round in.
‘I’ll give him a hand,’ Jones offered, and joined Wallace at the bar.
‘Shame Roger couldn’t make it,’ Ellis said as they sat.
Lambert gave a throaty chuckle. ‘He told me how much his wife was looking forward to the show at the Grand tonight. If I’d insisted on his presence, I might be the next murder victim.’
Ellis laughed politely and surreptitiously glanced at his watch. It had been an eventful two days, and he wanted to get home to see Sharon, who had nearly gone the full term in her pregnancy. But he felt this was part of his job, the way Lambert wanted to work it, knowing that a more relaxed discussion away from the incident room could produce ideas.
Lambert saw him glancing at his watch and said, ‘I know you want to get home, Tony …’
‘No, that’s OK,’ Ellis jumped in, keen to show his commitment to the investigation. ‘Baby’s due very soon but I think I can spare another half hour.’
Once Wallace and Jones arrived with the drinks, and they were all huddled around a table, Lambert kicked off the discussion.
‘This investigation,’ he began, ‘might not be as straightforward as it seems.’
Frowning, Debbie Jones said, ‘Something to do with motive, d’you mean?’
‘No, the fact that whoever committed this crime wanted his victims to suffer seems to be a clear indication of some sort of revenge, either perpetrated by someone who was abused, or by someone who’s on some sort of ruthless crusade.’
‘Someone like that Norman McNeil,’ Wallace suggested.
‘Whoever it is has been scrupulous in not leaving any traces – fingerprints or DNA. Both murder weapons were clean, suggesting that gloves were worn. The only prints that were found on the boat belonged to the victim and Mayfield. Mayfield’s were on the handrail leading down to the cabin, where you’d expect them to be.’
DC Jones leant forward on the table, claiming her boss’s attention. ‘OK, there were no traces on or around the boat. But it seems hard to believe they didn’t find anything outside Jarvis’s mobile home. Tyre marks or footprints. I seem to recall that was rough ground around there.’
‘All forensics found,’ Lambert said, ‘were his landlord’s more recent footprints. Between the time of Jarvis’s death and him finding the body, there had been two days of heavy rain. Any traces may have been washed clean.’
Ellis said, ‘Either that or the killer’s clever enough not to leave any traces. Nothing too unusual in that, is there? These days—’
‘But,’ Jones interjected, ‘if he’d been wearing something like latex gloves, or any kind of gloves, that would have looked pretty suspicious to the victims.’
Lambert smiled. ‘Earlier on I joked to Debbie about the killer saying something like his dermatitis was playing him up, but there could be an element of truth in that.’
‘Then he’s offered a beer,’ Wallace added. ‘And he doesn’t open it because he knows enough about DNA in saliva. Or it was simply because he doesn’t want it to look like the victim had a visitor who knew him.’
Almost as if he was talking to himself, Lambert spoke softly. ‘The killer arrives at his intended victim’s place, presumably by car, and he’s probably masquerading as another sex offender. He has a bag with him, inside of which is concealed the weapon, but his victims think he has something for them. Maybe youngsters’ addresses from the internet. He’s offered a beer, which he doesn’t open. Presumably he entices them to open and look in the bag which he has placed on the floor. While they bend over to look inside, he knocks them unconscious. When they come round, they discover they’ve been stripped and trussed up, and then he tortures them by pouring sulphuric acid on their genitals. Incidentally, the post mortem result on Titmus revealed that he died from a heart attack, probably brought about by the excessive burning pain from the sulphuric acid.’
‘So why the head injuries if the victim’s already dead?’ Wallace asked.
‘Presumably,’ Lambert answered, ‘that’s his MO, which Debbie suggested earlier might have something to do with a frenzied crime following an abuse. Possibly an unsolved from years ago.’
‘Debbie’s already checked with HOLMES,’ Ellis said, ‘and there’s no match.’
Debbie Jones gestured by turning her hands palms up as she looked at Lambert. ‘So what about this case not being straightforward?’
‘Yeah,’ Wallace agreed. ‘A revenge motive with dozens of suspects. Maybe hundreds. Seems pretty straightforward so far.’
Lambert took a long swig of beer before speaking. ‘Titmus and Mayfield were paroled at roughly the same time, just over two years ago. And Jarvis Thomas had been at large for a lot longer. So whoever had committed these crimes waited a long time to get their revenge.’
‘And all this kicked off with the Sun revelations,’ Ellis said.
‘It goes back further than that, Tony.’
‘The TV documentary?’
Lambert nodded. ‘And now this TV researcher who worked on the documentary has been charged with downloading child porn. Even the newspapers have picked up on the connection. So I think tomorrow I’ll have a word with him and see where it takes us.’
Ellis’s mouth twisted into a lopsided smile. ‘He’ll have the gentlemen of the press camped out on his doorstep.’
‘That happened on Thursday. Hopefully they’ll have got their story and photos by now. And I think first thing Monday I need to appeal via the media for anyone who might identify the purchaser of the wrecking bar bought at Llanelli B & Q.’
Wallace put on a glum expression. ‘Yeah, that was a bloody bind. The guy who sold it him turns out to be a retard.’
Jones glared at him. ‘Kevin!’
‘What?’
‘You can’t use words like that these days to describe someone with a disability.’
Lambert smiled thinly and shook his head. Wallace still had a hell of a lot to learn. He pushed his empty pint glass towards him.
‘Your round I believe, Kevin.’