‘They would probably have had nuns who were trained nurses,’ Chrissie pointed out. ‘You should check that out. I’m not expressing a professional opinion here, because I’m as outraged as you are about all this. But it may not have been quite as grim as you fear.’
It was small reassurance. After the call, he turned to the reports Chrissie had sent over. The stark facts on the screen hit even harder than her words had. He thought about the way his own kids drove him to distraction sometimes. But he’d have cut his hand off before he’d have struck one of them. The idea of breaking a child’s bones filled him with rage. He wished he hadn’t given up his boxing training. There was nothing he’d have liked more right then than half an hour with the heavy bag.
54
A lot of people have a low opinion of the police. And over the years, I’ve met my fair share of officers you wouldn’t want to break bread with, for all sorts of reasons. But most of the cops I’ve ever worked with aren’t just dedicated to doing the job. They’re committed to going the extra mile to get the right answers.
From Reading Crimes by DR TONY HILL
Stacey Chen had already decided that she didn’t like DCI Rutherford’s way of doing business. So while she understood that the way to a quiet life was to provide him with the information he required, she had no intention of letting that interfere with her personal work habits. There were two kinds of detectives, she’d realised over her years of quiet observation. The ones who listened to instructions and fulfilled them, often very efficiently. Full stop. Then there were the ones who paid attention to what they were told to do and then went about it in their own sweet ways. Stacey liked to think of herself in that second group. It gave her scope to do what the hell she wanted, as long as she ticked the boxes of what the investigation needed.
Carol Jordan had had a knack for picking detectives with a well-developed maverick streak whose effective result rate ran well above the average. So Stacey had always felt validated and vindicated by what she saw around her. The remnants of her old squad all had that same tendency of coming at things from an unexpected angle. She knew where she was with Paula and Alvin and, to a lesser degree, Karim. But Sophie Valente and Steve Nisbet were a different matter.
She’d checked them out online, of course. Her trawl had been disappointing; there was nothing there to suggest either of them was anything other than a rather dull straight line.
So, it was up to her and the old crew to prove ReMIT was worth its budget. Stacey had been trawling the databases for days, some of them via legitimate access, some via a variety of back doors she’d developed or invested in over the years, a couple thanks to favours exchanged with friends with more than a toe in the Stygian waters of the Dark Net.
She’d drip-fed details of the locations and official names of the Bradesden nuns to Sophie’s incident room, and she’d filleted all she could lay hands on about missing young men in the right age range. The numbers filled her with dismay at the waste of potential they represented, even after she’d whittled the total down by cross-referencing them with criminal records, registered deaths and those who had resurfaced in their old lives years later.
And now the DNA results were coming in from the labs, she’d set her systems crawling through the databases again, trying for formal identifications of eight young men whose families and friends would finally find answers to the questions they’d been asking for years. Or, as Stacey suspected in some cases, not been asking. Because they didn’t notice, didn’t care or preferred an absence to the problems a presence brought.
The forensics teams had swept Martinu’s vehicle for anything evidential but so far they’d drawn a blank. There appeared to be no DNA from any of the identified victims, and it wasn’t because Martinu was a clean freak. His car contained the usual detritus of food wrappers, soft drink cans and parking receipts. Just nothing to indicate any of the victims had ever been there.
That made sense if he’d just been the gravedigger. But they only had his word for that. Stacey hadn’t interviewed him, so her overview wasn’t contaminated by having directly heard his version of events. It was easier for her to come at the case laterally. What if there wasn’t anybody else? What if Martinu was himself the killer, putting on a performance that would protect him from the worst consequences of his actions? What would he need to have put in place to cover his back? He wouldn’t be the first serial offender who had led investigators up the garden path. Literally, in his case.
Stacey had let the idea tick over in the back of her mind while she worked on what she’d been officially tasked with. And now she had cleared some space for herself to put her conclusions to the test.
If Martinu was the killer, how did he get his victims to their graves? Those young men didn’t walk from the centre of Bradfield to the convent. They probably didn’t come by bus, because the nearest bus stop to the village was a mile away on the main road and, frankly, Bradesden was the kind of place where lads like these walking through would provoke a call to the local community bobby. They didn’t drive there, because none of them owned a car. She’d checked with DVLA. That was a matter of record.
The obvious answer – the only answer – was that Martinu had access to another vehicle. If it belonged to a friend or
