The senior CSI had shed his plastic suit and was now wearing a pair of crumpled, straight-leg jeans and a t-shirt with a faded motif of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on the front. A pair of wire-rimmed glasses sat on the end of his nose.
“We spent all of last night and most of today going over the basement and Henderson’s personal items. Firstly, I should mention that we found large quantities of bleach sloshed on his kitchen floor and concentrated in one area. When will they ever learn that bleach doesn’t mask blood residue?” Faulkner wondered aloud. “There were specks of it beneath the bleach and we sent the samples to the lab, who tested it immediately against Alice Chapman’s blood type. There was an initial match.”
Ryan nodded. It was just as he had expected.
“Henderson’s shoes?”
“Yes,” Faulkner nodded. “The shoes he was wearing when he died were also covered in bleach, which still hadn’t managed to cover up traces of blood which was, incidentally, another match for Alice Chapman’s type A-positive. It seems likely he trudged around her body looking for Victor Swann’s phone and then came home with bits of her still clinging to his shoes.”
“Charming,” MacKenzie muttered.
“Sorry, Mac. Force of habit,” Faulkner said. It was easy to talk of bodies as inanimate objects, no longer invested with thoughts or feelings, but they’d all been people once.
“That adds weight to what we already know, which is that Henderson killed Alice Chapman,” Ryan said. “But what about the person who killed him? Did they leave anything of themselves behind?”
“There’s always a trace,” Faulkner agreed. “Unfortunately, that trace was well covered by somebody who clearly thought ahead. We swabbed Henderson’s clothing for skin cell or sweat impression marks, where they might have used their hands to push him. Unfortunately, all we found were fibres of the kind you might find on thick gardening gloves or something of that ilk. We’d need to seize clothing to find a match.”
Ryan nodded.
“What else?”
Faulkner reached inside a cardboard box file and retrieved a plastic evidence bag containing a few torn fragments of paper.
“We found these bits of paper behind the fire grate at Henderson’s cottage. They’re too small to decipher any words but we’ll get around to testing them for prints and DNA.”
“You’re thinking it could have been a note torn up by Henderson and the rest was burned?”
Faulkner shrugged as he shuffled the bag, then put it back inside the box.
“One of the fragments reads ‘p.m.’, which suggests a time was mentioned. It would explain why Henderson was up at the house at that specific hour, if someone had left him a note with a designated time and place.”
Ryan smiled.
“They were sloppy, there, and perhaps a little desperate.”
“If it’s like you say and the first two deaths weren’t meant to happen, there was a police presence at Cragside that might have been completely absent if Henderson had been the only person to die in a tragic fall,” MacKenzie said. “The killer knew we were closing in on Henderson and their chance to kill him would disappear as soon as we took him into custody.”
“They had to act quickly,” Ryan agreed. “As do we.”
He stood up and paced around the floor to work off some adrenaline.
“Martin Henderson—previously Jennings—changed his name in the summer of 1975 at a time when he was working as a fitter on The Valiant. That ship went up in smoke thanks to somebody’s negligence and, though we can’t yet prove it, my hunch is that young Martin Jennings was involved in some way or another. That inferno killed nearly a hundred men whose families were left behind to pick up the pieces.”
Ryan paused to think of it and found he could hardly imagine the devastation.
“Wives who were left widowed, children who were left fatherless, siblings who lost a brother,” he said. “Any one of them could have found out about Henderson’s involvement and harboured a grudge all these years, waiting to even the score.”
They all turned to look at the faces of the remaining suspects on the wall and Ryan studied each of them in turn.
“Imagine finding out that your worst enemy was coming to work with you, here at Cragside. Or imagine deliberately hiring him, to have him within your net. Any one of these people could be the right age and, now that physicality is less of an issue, even Lionel himself could have trotted upstairs like a mountain goat to see off his estate manager. Problem is, we can’t prove which of them it was.”
Just then, they heard the click of the front door opening and closing. Phillips ambled into the room looking hot and bothered.
“Stuck in traffic for half hour,” he grumbled.
“Did you have any luck?” Ryan asked, eyeing the plastic wallet in Phillips’ hand.
His sergeant waggled it enticingly.
“Aye, I’ve brought home the bacon, as usual.”
MacKenzie rolled her eyes but gave him a peck on the cheek as he took a seat beside her and rolled up his shirtsleeves.
There was a pregnant silence as they waited for Ryan to cast his eye over the list of those who had died the day The Valiant had gone up in flames. They watched him drag a finger down the columns, his face softening as he thought of all those who were lost, until he found a name he recognised.
“Bingo,” he murmured.
Ryan wasted no time feeling surprised, or even upset, but instead splayed his palms on the table top and thought of how they could set a trap.
“Everything we have is circumstantial,” he said. “Even this name. There isn’t a jury in the land that would convict ‘beyond all reasonable doubt’, so we need to find a way to prove it.”
He surprised them all by flashing a smile.
“I think I know how to do it but we need to move quickly. This person is volatile and unpredictable now they’ve taken a life. It creates a sense of invincibility in the minds of some killers and, if they suspect that another person saw them or might know something, they could kill again to protect themselves or their family.”
There were nods around the table.
“So what are we going to do?” Lowerson asked.
“We’re going to beat them at their own game, Jack.”
*
Sunset over Cragside was an almost religious experience. For a short while, the sky seemed to ignite and spread amber flame over the treetops, dazzling the person who looked out from the uppermost turret and remembered a day many years ago when fire had filled the sky.
There was no smell of burning flesh here, and no ghostly screams of those long dead, only the quiet sound of a carriage clock on the mantelpiece.
Its incessant tick, tick, ticking seemed to grow louder and louder, as if to remind them that time waited for no man and there was still work to be done. There were loose ends to tie up, it seemed, and the prospect gave them no joy.
But there were others to think of, those who needed to be protected.
It was all for the greater good.