Ridley, Steve Lewis and Superintendent Maxine Raeburn sat in Ridley’s office going over everything that each of their teams could bring to the table at this early stage of the investigation — and Steve was doing all of the talking. The Drug Squad had so much evidence to work with that they’d drafted in extra officers in order to work round the clock. Ridley was not best pleased. He had to beg for extra officers and even then rarely got them.
Steve Lewis was the same rank as Ridley but whenever he worked in tandem with a second team, he invariably took the lead. The problem with that was that Steve had tunnel vision: he didn’t care about Ridley’s case or whether Ridley got a result. The last time their paths had crossed, Ridley had taken Steve to one side and asked him to be more of a team player, and in response, Steve had had Ridley removed from the investigation, resulting in the only complaint against him in his otherwise blemish-free file.
Right now, Ridley’s day was about as bad as it could get. He hated to admit just how little his team knew. They knew Avril Jenkins’ name but nothing much else; they knew where Adam Border had come from, but not where he’d gone; they’d managed to lose track of a key witness, Jessica Chi; and, worst of all, the only two things they had found, a drugs farm and a missing silver Porsche, had both been sitting right under the nose of Ridley’s ‘best man’ for nearly a week.
As Raeburn silently listened, she too was visibly frustrated. At some stage, she’d have to justify why Kingston had to all intents and purposes ignored a woman who was now in four pieces in her mortuary. And why Ridley’s team couldn’t get a foothold in the subsequent murder investigation.
Ridley stood up from behind his desk and moved to his office window, where he looked out across the city. ‘Arnold Hutchinson shared with me that Terence Jenkins, the brother-in-law in California, is the main beneficiary of Avril Jenkins’ will. He’s coming over as soon as he can get a flight. We’ll see what his input brings.’
Raeburn was watching Ridley carefully as he talked, noticing how his shoulders hung down and his back was bent. She brought the meeting to an end, thanked Steve for attending and said that she wanted daily updates.
Once Steve had gone, Raeburn’s expression turned stern. ‘Good God, Simon, snap out of it. You’ve not gone yet.’ Ridley turned and perched on his windowsill. ‘You don’t have to tell your team, of course, but perhaps you should. Put them out of their misery and stop all of the speculation.’
Ridley shook his head. ‘I’ll tell them when this case is closed. They don’t need to know yet.’
By early evening, Mal and Josh were packing up, ready to leave. They’d retrieved everything they needed from the greenhouse and from the two outbuildings in the back garden. The extensive supply of pure fentanyl had been removed from the second outbuilding, and both were now secure as they still needed to be fully processed by SOCO. An excavator puttered its way towards the greenhouse, to take down the remaining structure before it fell down.
Josh shook Jack’s hand. ‘Great to meet you, Jack. And by the way, I’m baking tomorrow! Any requests?’ Jack laughed at the thought of Josh baking, but said he’d eat anything in the cake line and was happy to be surprised. Josh then handed Jack a bin bag full of rubbish from the Drug Squad van and asked if he wouldn’t mind throwing it away as he passed the bins next to the house.
To the side of the house was a brick structure about four feet tall, split into four sections, each with its own wooden door. Inside each section was a different coloured wheelie bin and on top of each section was a lid through which you could access the bins without having to take them out. Unfortunately for Jack, the lids were all padlocked shut so when he found the black bin, he had to pull it out of its pen in order to discard the impressive amount of junk accrued by the Drug Squad in just one day.
The bin stank. Remnants of food clung to soggy cardboard that had become wedged in the bottom. As Jack pulled the bin out far enough to fully open the lid, he could see discarded cigarette butts on the ground behind it. Being fairly certain that Avril wasn’t a smoker, he got a latex glove from his pocket and crouched to pick them up. He then turned the glove inside out, trapping the butts inside. He’d transfer them to an evidence bag once he got back to the station. He jotted down a note, giving his name and time he had used the bin, as it was more than likely the bins would be searched for evidence. From this new position near the ground, Jack could now see that this bin store had been built over air bricks that led into the cellar.
The cellar had been gone over with a fine-tooth comb, just like the rest of the house. Jack knew this for a fact because he was one of the people who’d explored it; but now, as he looked in through the air bricks, he could see that the internal back wall of the cellar stopped short of the external back wall of the house. This discrepancy was something he hadn’t noticed when he’d been inside but, from the outside, the size difference was obvious. Jack jumped to his feet, pocketing the latex glove containing the cigarette butts. He paced the outside wall of the building from front to back, heel to toe, then raced indoors, through the kitchen and down into the cellar. Jack measured the internal wall in the same way. It was six feet narrower than the depth of the house.
Through the air bricks, Jack could hear people running towards the back garden, and he could hear Mal shouting for everyone to stay back. Next to the greenhouse, a Wacker Neuson mini excavator had been stood down. Mal and Josh stood in front of it, looking at the pile of charred wood, collapsed metal shelving and general fire debris that used to form the back half of Avril Jenkins’ greenhouse. Hearing their shouts, Jack now ran to their side and followed their gaze into the centre of the debris where he saw a tangled mass of singed, jet-black hair entwined around slender fingers.
Chapter 9
Jack, Anik and Laura were once again forbidden from entering the greenhouse as it had immediately returned to being an unprocessed crime scene. Kitted out in paper suits and masks, they stood next to Mal and Josh, watching Angel tiptoe her way towards the body. The dismemberment of Avril Jenkins had made Angel extra cautious: from the position of the exposed hair and fingers she, of course, knew where the rest of the body should be lying in order to avoid standing on it; but that was only if it was still in one piece. It was hard to watch Angel move painstakingly through the debris, trying not to disturb a single piece of potential evidence along the way. When she was close enough, she leant forwards and gently moved the tangled hair away from the face beneath.
Her mouth, chin and neck were badly burnt, and her visible clothes were melted onto her skin. Her hair had been singed away from one side of her head, leaving raw, blistered scalp beneath.
‘It’s Jessica Chi,’ Jack said.
Mal asked what the link was between the two dead women. ‘Adam Border,’ Jack replied. ‘Adam Border’s the link.’
As night drew in, spotlights were erected in the garden to aid the tireless work of Angel’s CSI team. Foxy had been called in to assess the victim in situ, in case the body didn’t come away clean from the various surrounding materials. Foxy was thirty minutes from the scene, and Ridley was just pulling into the driveway.
He looked stern as he strode around the outside of the house to the new crime scene. He pulled Jack to one side and asked him the question he’d already asked himself a hundred times: ‘How come two women, both recently interviewed by you, have now been murdered?’ Then Ridley added something that really got Jack’s back up. ‘What did you miss?’ Of course, Jack had also asked himself that question, but he didn’t expect his senior officer to ask it too.