Slias Nash Book 1: Hush Hush Honeysuckle Chapter 5 (a)

Nash’s bones creaked as he pulled himself up the last flight of stairs to the room allocated to the task force. Who was he kidding? He loved it. He’d tried retirement—pruning roses and baking cakes. He even went on a few dire cruises full of old people with bunions and arthritis—but it wasn’t for him.

When the call came in from Chief Superintendent Bronwyn Lewis, he couldn’t get away from the cackling Loose Women fast enough.

It was the first time anybody on the force had decided to come out of retirement, but Nash couldn’t put up with the loneliness anymore. This case fell into his lap at just the right time. He said he worked on intuition, but some of the guys believed he had psychic powers when it came to tracking down the bad guys. Nash laughed. The puppies coming up these days didn’t train in the Old Ways. He paid attention, that’s all. He listened, he looked, and observation was key to finding what you wanted.

He knew every leggy spider in this place, and most of the cobwebs were there from the last time he’d worked. He’d been stationed in Barrow-in-Furness pretty much from boy to man, and the city squad weren’t going to take this one away from them—not if he could help it. This was his home and his work. Right on the southern tip of the beautiful Lake District, he always bragged that he was within five minutes of ocean, river, lake and mountain. Barrow was a blue-collar town with none of the neighbouring town’s tourism to rely on, but the shipyard kept the place in employment, and the people were good. Most of the crime was petty—but not today.

This wasn’t his first murder case. Back then, he was a sergeant stationed for a few months at Morecambe nick, forty miles away, or five minutes if you swam across the bay. A little girl was murdered in 1988. She was five years old, and the bastard drowned her in a puddle of mud while he raped her. She was a gipsy girl, so nobody in authority cared. Except for Nash and the team, both above and below him in rank. They cared. They worked through the nights to find her killer and bring him to justice.

He remembered the day when the little girl’s cousin was caught. He was seventeen and old enough to know what he was doing. They booked the Broadway Hotel for a policeman’s piss-up to release all that post-case tension—but it was a bitter-sweet affair. They’d got the bastard off the streets—but there was still a dead little girl at the heart of it.

He’s out now, John Johnston, walking the streets as a free man with a new identity. Little Marga was still dead. Lest we forget, he thought, lest we forget.

This time Nash was on his own stomping ground in Barrow-in-Furness. The team had been set up, a task force of forty people initially. They didn’t even know if their hunch was correct yet. And the term serial killer was only spoken in hushed whispers. Three bodies. Three.

They didn’t know, but Nash did. Nobody else had connected the dots between the crime scenes yet, and at this stage, he was keeping the flowers and the music between him and the spiders. He wouldn’t reveal his cards too early and wanted to see what the rest of the guys had come up with. Showing his hand at such an impressionable stage of the investigation would be to send the team out blinkered. Going down a single lane might mean that they’d miss other possibilities.

It was up to Nash to prove there was a serial killer on his streets.

He walked into the incident room, and in a five-second scrutiny, he checked everything was in order and that he had what he needed.

The whiteboard was empty apart from one statement. Now it was up to him to build a case.

The big dick is back.

‘Right, guys, settle down. Thank you for the vote of appreciation. If only my name was Richard, eh?’

They laughed at the reference.

‘What is your name, sir? We had a book running on it before you retired.’

‘Should you ever be my superior officer, Lawson, I’m sure you will find out. Until then, let’s move on to the matter at hand.’

‘Welcome back, sir.’

A round of applause rippled through the room.

‘Right, we have another body. That’s three in eight weeks.’

‘I think it’s a serial killer, sir,’ PC Bowes said

The rest of the room laughed at him, stating the obvious, and Nash held his hand up for silence.

‘Technically, if it’s all done by the same perpetrator, you could be right. Three is the classification, Bowes. However, here’s the crux. Until we know otherwise, we will be treating this as three unrelated incidents. There’s nothing, not one shred of evidence or even a good hunch, to connect these murders. We’re in a county that, by the grace of God, isn’t generally crawling with killers. It’s likely we have one of two scenarios. Either three killers have each killed one person. Or we have one who has murdered three people but made them look like separate killers. Before we can catch him, that’s what we need to find out. Three murders in Barrow makes my nose twitch.’ He didn’t feel guilty for lying to them and withholding vital evidence. There was a connection. They just hadn’t spotted it yet. It was as plain to them as it had been to him, but to see things, you had to know how to look.

‘Do we know it’s a man, sir?’

'No, we don’t, Molly. However, there may be indicators. It depends on how you define sexual abuse. In post-mortem positioning and planting, we have had some unusual indicators—but more for effect than sexual gratification, I suspect.’

‘You have to be non-binary, sir. You can’t call him a him unless you know the perp is male.’

‘And yet, you just did. Molly, honey, I’m sixty-five years old. I’m a misogynistic old bastard, and that isn’t going to change. I’ll always open the door for a lady and always feel that a woman’s place is not at the gristly end of a murder investigation. That’s just me. If I get kicked in the balls for it, so be it. Right. Focus, team. Here’s what we’ve got.’

His hands moved like lightning as he refamiliarised himself with an incident board. It felt bloody good to swap a TV remote for a marker.

‘Three vics. The first is William Armstrong, known in the community as Billy. Sixty-eight, a private piano tutor. He was killed at home. Stabbed with a tuning fork. This wasn’t pretty, and it looked like a frenzied attack, but the positioning of the body, the blood spatter, and the arrangement and staging say anything but. His was the first body found, but until the post-mortem, it didn’t have to follow that it was the first murder. Bill Robinson, our esteemed coroner, has since confirmed it was. However, we also think it’s the first time this person has killed. It lacks strength and conviction. We have evidence of practice cuts. The killer underestimated how difficult it is and how much pressure it takes to kill somebody this way. The victim was stabbed sixty-eight times. Keep in mind that’s how old he is, but we haven’t found a correlation to that yet. Any questions about William?’

‘What was the staging?’ Bowes said.

‘We’ll get to that.’

‘Sir.’

‘Victim number two. Chelsea Green, interior designer. She was thirty-three and killed in a client’s home. They found her swinging from a crystal chandelier with music playing on a loop. Interesting fact, he didn’t go for mock-frenzy this time. He wanted us to know that he’d gone to a lot of trouble with this one and had worked on it. A mechanical device was used to keep the chandelier moving, and he’d set Spotify to repeat the same piece of classical music. In this one, he was going for artistry, and he was fixated on the detail. We’ll get to more of that as well.’

‘How did the chandelier take her weight, sir?’

‘Good question, Lawson. He reinforced the fixings. It took time, and he constructed some kind of pulley to get the body up there. Otherwise, he’d have had to be a weight lifter to get her in place and hold her in position. Okay, the residence was unoccupied, but he made more than one visit to the home to complete his work. He wasn’t averse to taking risks.’

The room was silent apart from the scream of the marker as he added information to the board. Nash saw Molly Brown shudder as if he had dragged his nails down a chalkboard.

‘Victim three. The most interesting and the one that I think will give us valuable information about our killer. Robert Dean, thirty-three and unemployed. The lad had hit rock bottom and was no stranger to a can of strong lager. This killing was personal. It meant more to the perp. Dean was killed off-site and taken post-mortem to the bridal suite of The Abbey House Hotel.’

Molly Brown stood up and addressed the room. ‘No clues from the hotel booking. It was under the victim’s name, and payment was made by direct transfer from his bank account. His benefits went in, and the perp made sure the payment was taken before Dean had the chance to empty his account as was his custom by ten am on the day it cleared.’

‘What is it about this one that separates it from the others?’ Bowes asked.

‘This wasn’t random. The others are ambiguous, but with this one, we know that the perp knew Bobby Dean.’

‘How, ma’am?’

‘Because he cared about him.’

‘Yeah, enough to bump him off.’

A ripple of laughter went around the room.

Molly sat down, and Nash stopped scribbling on the board. ‘Somehow, he got into that room and evaded the cameras. He was in there long enough to bathe the body. It’s a big risk in a busy hotel. He bathed the victim, dried and shaved him, and then rubbed baby lotion on every inch of his body. He dressed him in white silk pyjamas and positioned him comfortably in bed before calling room service for a mug of hot chocolate. He recorded Dean’s voice giving instructions for the waiter to walk in and put the chocolate on the bedside cabinet. The perp had a window of six minutes to get out undetected. The phone call was time-stamped, and the waiter’s key card was recorded from the moment he opened the door.’

‘Brazen. How was number three killed?’ Lawson asked.

‘Cyanide poisoning—sodium cyanide, to be exact. His death was fast, and we believe Dean died elsewhere and before he had the chance to vomit. It was orchestrated to the smallest detail. The perp didn’t want a mess. All three of these scenes were staged. He wanted a tableau to show off to the world. If this is one guy, he wants to be seen.’

‘Do you think it’s a serial killer, sir?’ Bowes leaned forward, eager to hear the answer and almost overbalanced his chair.

‘There’s not a single thing to connect these murders. But three in eight weeks, when we don’t get many murders around here, makes that a connection in itself. It’s either that or the world’s gone mad. We have to keep an open mind. It could be three unconnected perps. However, off the record, I’d bet my kidneys on it being one person.’

‘Spooky, sir. Did you check your crystal ball before coming out?’

‘No, just my waters.’