Silas Nash Book 1: Hush Hush Honeysuckle: Chapter 23

‘I need to speak to Inspector Nash,’ somebody said.

‘He’s very busy, miss, and can’t come to the desk. If you tell me what it’s about, I can give him a message.’

Nash wasn’t in the incident room. He heard the insistent request after making a cup of coffee.

Something about the urgency in the woman’s voice made him poke his head around the door. He’d been at the receiving end of Jessica Hunter’s pique before and considered poking it back again like a tortoise in retreat. Jessica had been on the phone at least three times a day asking for updates on the case despite Nash telling her that he’d keep her informed and share any information that they deemed safe to divulge.

‘DCI Nash, there you are. I need to speak to you, please.’

‘Ms Hunter, take a seat, and I’ll be with you in a moment.’ He needed a few minutes to find something to keep her happy but nothing that would jeopardise either the case or her safety. Not that they had much. Like all roads leading to Rome, all leads brought them back to Maxwell Jones, and he’d been eliminated from enquiries—for now.

‘Who is Silas, Inspector? Is it the killer?’

Nash stopped in his tracks. 'How do you know that name?'

Jess gasped at his reaction. ‘You know him, don’t you? You know who Silas is?’

He put a hand on her shoulder and led her through the public areas to his office. They passed the reception and the row of interview rooms. Nash took her into the back area of the building where the incident room and upper-rank offices were. She was still talking, damn her.

‘Who is it? Who is Silas? He’s got Paige’s name badge, hasn’t he? He must be her killer. Have you caught him yet?’

Every head looked up as they walked to his office.

Jessica stopped and put her hand on one of the privy screens by a desk with one of the officers craning his neck to see what was going on. ‘Inspector, it’s clear from your reaction that you know who Silas is. I’m not moving until you tell me if you have him in custody or not.’

‘This way, please, Miss Hunter.’

‘Who is he?’

Everybody had stopped working, and DI Brown had moved forward to make note of this new piece of information and an unfamiliar name being thrown into the mix.

‘Who is Silas?’ Jessica looked as though she was going to start throwing things around the room if she didn’t get an answer.

Nash moved a stapler out of her way. ‘I am,’ he said. ‘I’m Silas Nash. Now, if we can just go into my office, you can tell me what this is all about.’

His tone was still conciliatory, but inside, he was fuming. A victim’s relative was digging into his personal information, and he wanted to know why. Nash motioned for Brown to join him and slammed the door on the outside childishness behind them. He heard their laughter even though his door was closed.

They took seats on either side of the desk, with Brown next to Nash. Jessica tried to shout over him, but he was leading this conversation from now on. ‘Right. Start talking. Why have you been delving into my personal life, and which part of “leave the investigation to us” didn’t you understand?’

‘You’re Silas? I don’t understand. And you have Paige’s name badge from the café where she worked? Why?’

‘Not me personally, no. The badge is with all the other evidence in the case and has been filed properly, ready for presenting at court should we have the perpetrator.’

‘Killer, Inspector. The person that killed my sister is a cold-blooded murderer. Let’s not diminish him to the rank of a perpetrator. He didn’t steal a Milky Way from the local shop.’

Nash wasn’t coping very well with leading the conversation. ‘You still haven’t answered my question, Ms Hunter. Why have you been poking around in my personal life?’

‘I didn’t know it was you. I thought we’d found the killer?’

‘We?’

‘Look, I don’t know why you’re shouting at me. A lady came to my door, told me my dad was going to have a heart attack, which he did, and said I had to ask for Silas and that he had Paige’s badge.’

‘And that lady would be?’

‘Amanda Keys.’

‘Amanda Keys, the bloody psychic? Sorry.’

‘Yes, but you’re still shouting at me.’

‘Because I had you pegged for an intelligent woman, but if you believe a word that comes out of that harridan’s mouth, you’re as crazy and deluded as she is. We’ve had many dealings with Miss Keys, and none of them has been productive.’

‘Have you ever taken her seriously and listened to her?’

‘Are you serious? “Inspector, my seven hundred-year-old ghost has instructed me to tell you to look under the sofa for your missing comb.” The woman’s a crank. Look in the phone book for my name, did she?’

‘Is it listed in the phone book?’

‘Of course not. I was making a point.’

‘Well, it wasn’t a very valid one if you aren’t listed. And nobody uses a phone book these days. She told me my father was going to have a heart attack, and two hours later, he did. How do you explain that?’

‘Just bloody lucky, I guess. Or she put something in his tea.’

The rest of the conversation didn’t go well, and Nash felt incompetent and as though he was letting all of the victims down, not just Paige Hunter.

That afternoon they had a break in the case, but it made no sense at all. A spot of blood had been found on Robert Dean’s body. And while they hadn’t been able to source its owner from DNA sampling due to the number of proteins in the blood, Nash wrote up his report and added the new information to the whiteboard. It wasn’t Dean’s.

He was at the house in Ulverston when they returned Jones’ camper van to him. The idiot was like a kid at Christmas.

‘I can go away for a few days, right?’

‘Do everything you would normally do. However, you’ve had a couple of episodes while you’ve been in custody. I think it would be my civic duty to take your licence and put it out to the cars that you’re to be pulled and charged if you’re seen driving in your condition.’ Nash must have been going soft in his old age because he felt pity as Jones pleaded his case.

‘It’s my medication. I promise you. I didn’t get all of my meds in there. Now that I’m out, I can regulate it so that I don’t get dizzy spells and nausea. Please. I can feel when it’s coming on and have time to pull over. I swear, I’m not a danger. I’m begging you. I don’t have long. Don’t take my licence away.’

Nash handed Max his keys. ‘Don’t drive under any circumstances, and if you do, I’ll have to report you— of course, my memory’s not as good as it used to be, and I believe things are backed up for a few months. I can only do my best. Do not bloody kill anyone.’

Max grinned, ‘Never have, never will, boss.’

Nash grunted and turned to his paperwork. They concluded what they had to do, and Nash left without trying to hide his presence.

He went home and turned the television on. He sat through half an hour of University Challenge and didn’t understand many of the questions, let alone answer them. It made a decent analogy for this case. In the TV quiz, some of the maths questions had their origins based in Latin, and the whole question might as well have been read in the ancient language for all the sense it made to him. The case was the same. If you have no understanding of the evidence, it might as well be in a foreign language. Nash worked by logic, reasoning, patterns, and elimination. He would disseminate every piece of information until it formed a conclusion, but in this case, once they took Max Jones out of the equation, they had nothing in the way of suspects.

There were, however, plenty of clues, and one of them was turning into a furry beast.

He thought about the dog. It kept cropping up. Hairs from the same dog had been found at all of the more recent staging sites. That afternoon they’d confirmed that all of the dog hair found on the victims came from one animal. It was the dog that Jones had taken from the thug, Ryan Beck. Only the four sites before Max took the dog from him were clear of any dog hairs. Ryan Beck had a clump of hair in his hand. This was planted, but he had owned the dog, so it’s not impossible that it would have been there. It was unlikely during the violence of the murder, but not impossible. The two boys had hair from the same dog in their praying hands, and Paige and Zoe both had fur on them as well. With Paige, it was found during the post-mortem in the mouth of her severed head.

Nash worked on the whiteboard in his home office and added information as he tried to make sense of it. DNA testing showed that the semen found in Zoe Conley’s vaginal cavity belonged to Maxwell Jones. That wasn’t surprising. He openly admitted to having intercourse with her. If anything, it helped because it pinned another piece of evidence to the timeline. They’d had sex soon after three in the morning. That meant that Zoe was murdered sometime within twelve to eighteen hours of that. It was another stable time element.

There was no dog fur at the sites of the first four bodies because, in Max Jones’s world, the dog didn’t exist yet. It was planted at the later sites as an afterthought when the victims were killed. The killer had had access to that dog, even if it was only long enough to pull a few hairs from it.

And then there was the blood spot evidence to think about and log—it was there but may have nothing to do with Robert Dean’s murder. If it wasn’t Dean’s, where did it come from?

He erased the blood spot finding from its place on the whiteboard and put it on the far right-hand side under incidentals. Now the picture was clear, and a new name jumped out at Nash. It had to be.

Bingo.

Pleased with his findings, this one would keep. The new suspect was secure in his lack of detection and must have felt invincible at this point. It wouldn’t last long with surveillance on him. Nash wanted to track his movements for now. He locked doors, checked windows, shut down the house and called it a night. There was nothing to stay up for.

Nash sorted out his bag for the next morning and left it by the front door. He took his mug to the kitchen and washed it, and then he climbed the stairs and fell into bed.

Sleep didn’t come. He missed Sandy and couldn’t stop thinking about all the times they’d shared this bed together. As he drifted off, thoughts of Sandy intermingled with pieces of the case and thrashed around in his head. Maybe he’d made a mistake ending their relationship, and he’d ring tomorrow just to see how the land lay.

He told himself he’d be a fool if he did.