Silas Nash Book 1: Hush Hush Honeysuckle: Chapter 13

Nash’s third interview with Max had just started, this time with his solicitor, Jane Pearson, present. The second interview the night before was stopped after ten minutes when Max refused to speak without his solicitor. She told Nash that she’d been held up in court when the trial she was working on took an unexpected turn with a new witness for the prosecution. She and Max didn’t get off on good terms, but Max looked like he softened when she said she would never leave court serving an existing client to help a new one. And he would get the same courtesy too. She’d sent word the day before to say she was sending her junior to represent Max in the initial interviews and she would have copies of the tapes to catch up on, but Max had declined. He said on tape that he felt let down by his representation.

Nash was rushing to get the interview underway. He didn’t say anything, but he was conscious of the time. They’d had Max in for thirty hours now and could only keep him for a total of ninety-six before they had to shit or get off the pot.

There was a tap on the door, and Detective Inspector Molly Brown stuck her head in. She motioned for Nash to excuse himself.

‘Interview suspended 08:05.’

He knew what was coming before Molly said anything. ‘We’ve got another one. A young girl, unidentified at this time. This one’s in Morecambe. The connection is the honeysuckle found on her body. The Lancashire lot have taken it, but I’ve halted all operations until you get there.’

‘Sexual?’

‘No intel on that as yet.’

‘I’ll leave you to see what you can pull out of Jones,’ Nash said. ‘Watch him. He’s slippery. I’m on my way.’

Nash drove to Morecambe with his blues and twos on. The desk had forwarded what information they had and an address on Albany Road. Out of habit, he turned the sirens off before he pulled into the road, though by now, the police presence would be enough to draw a crowd. Sure enough, he didn’t need the GPS to guide him to the house.

The honeysuckle link was too strong for it to be a coincidence—but what the hell had brought our perp to Morecambe? The investigation had only opened, but it was a possibility that he thought the police had enough on him to be closing in. So, he’d panicked and widened his field. A man on the edge is likely to slip up and make mistakes. Or it could have been a crime of circumstance. That he was there for an unrelated reason, and the victim was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Nash walked up the path to her room in the middle of Bedsit Land. It was a big sandstone house, double-fronted. There were no gardens in these builds to speak of, but outside the windows, there was a walkway a couple of feet wide around to the back of the property. The lower left-hand side, as he looked at it, was neglected. It had a filthy net curtain at the window and weeds forcing their way through the little crazy-paving path. However, on the victim’s side of the house, two neat flower boxes had been put beneath the clean windows. One of them had been knocked out of place and might as well have been an arrowhead pointing to the window as the means of entrance. He was brazen. This was a busy street. The Scenes of Crime team had already processed the area for footprints.

He went in the front door that had a bedsit to either side and two more at the back of the house. Three floors and a large attic and cellar, each with four accommodations, equated to a lot of money in the landlord’s pocket. Nash wrinkled his nose. The distinct smell of cheese was coming from the door to his left—and he didn’t mean cheddar. Cheese was the name of the strong version of chemical marijuana with a heroin element. If he had to, he’d use it to his advantage and lean on the drug users to get any information they had. The door had the letters CH gouged into the wood. The markings were fresh. Somebody had picked up most of the splinters, but a little cloud of sawdust lay on the filthy carpet in the hall. A marketing strategy, get your Cheese Here, Nash mused, but the fact that it was a recent tag made him curious.

‘Hey, get a photo of this door, he told one of the Scenes of Crime officers. Has anybody interviewed him yet?’

‘No answer, sir.’

‘Okay, keep on it.’

He put gloves on and paper slippers over his shoes before going into the victim’s room. The window was closed. He saw that it had been forced open and then closed again. The perp had left through the front door, brazen as you like. The strong aroma of coffee and the more subtle smell of honeysuckle danced over to greet him and mixed with the clean scent of the victim’s room. It took away the stink of the drugs from across the hall.

The body was bagged and ready for taking to the morgue. Nash went forward and unzipped the bag to the girl’s waist. He winced when he saw the ragged neck and zipped it up fast.

‘DCI Nash,’ he said, introducing himself to the Morecambe task force. When he was working Scenes of Crime, he didn’t shake hands to avoid cross-contamination, so he nodded hello to the coroner, who was a long-standing and trusted colleague. ‘Jesus, it’s hot in here.’

Bill Robinson laughed. ‘You took your time getting here. Couldn’t you authorise a private jet? The heating had been turned up full. We’ve turned it off. But it’s still warm. I don’t usually sweat like this.’ He grinned at Nash.

‘Time of death?’

‘Can’t be sure yet. Rough estimate—not time but the day of death, about a week ago.’

Nash had thought the same when he saw the body and did a double take around the room.

‘Exactly. I expected that reaction from you. What’s missing?’ Robinson said.

‘The smell?’

‘Correct. Give that man a fiver. She wasn’t killed here. Brought roughly four hours ago, I’d say, making it about daybreak. He’s been in before to set the stage, so he came straight in the front door using her keys this time. Bedsit Land, where everybody is invisible.’ He pointed to the bathroom. ‘In there.’

Nash went to the door. The bath was filled with black coffee, long since gone cold. Robinson showed him some photos of the immediate scene on a tablet. They didn’t have the size to give clarity of detail that they would when printed out, but he saw enough to turn his stomach. The top one was easy enough. It was a photo of the girl’s ID card: Paige Hunter, aged 18.

‘Pretty girl. She was somebody’s daughter, the poor bastards. There’s a photo on the living room mantlepiece that looks like her parents. No details yet, but they’ll need to be contacted before that lot out there get to them first.’ Robinson referred to the media, who flocked like vultures waiting for rotting carrion.

The second image showed Paige lying, presumably naked, in the bath of coffee, but it was impossible to tell through the dense liquid. Her head had been severed and put on one corner of the bath to watch herself bathing. The single-flower vase with a sprig of honeysuckle was on the opposite corner. There was more of the creeper all over the room, with vines draped over the three pieces of the shelving unit and even across the toilet. The smell was thick and cloying as it mingled with the coffee. The victim had one leg raised and held in place with a cable tie. She had a yellow sponge in her hand, and it looked like a giant piece of honeycomb toffee.

‘Raped?’ Nash asked.

‘Too early to tell.’

‘Was there music playing, a classical piano piece?’

‘No. Did the others have music?’

‘The first three, yeah. Then he seems to have done away with it. Guess he didn’t feel the need, but he’s kept his honeysuckle calling card.’

‘I’ve seen a lot of RTA victims, but never anything like this. It’s horrific, and I’m going to need a tot of whiskey in my Horlicks tonight to take this lot away.’

Lawson came up to Nash and interrupted them. ‘You should see this, sir.’

Nash went into the living room, where everything had been bagged and tagged.

‘We almost missed this because it was stuck in the bag of the waste bin when we upturned it. It’s only a crumpled receipt but look at this drawing on the back.’ Lawson held the bag containing a receipt up with a pair of tweezers to view the evidence properly. It was a childishly drawn stick with two arms and legs, but the head was at the man’s feet.

‘Test it.’

‘Already ordered, sir.’ Lawson sealed the bag and attached a label. ‘Another thing worth noting is we found a clump of what looks like dog hair, but there’s no sign of a dog living here. Could have been visiting, might be nothing.’

‘Looking around the place, she’s clean. The type of girl that would have got the vacuum out if a friend’s dog had left hair in her living room. Well spotted.’

There was wilted honeysuckle everywhere, and the scent felt as though it was crawling down his throat and sticking to every organ on the way down. He imagined his lungs were contaminated with it like a smoker’s organs blackened with tar. It made Nash feel sick.

Molly had just arrived from Barrow, and she came with news. ‘You have to see this, boss.’

‘Another one? Where?’

‘Just down the road. Layby near Morrisons. It’s another two young women.’

‘Jesus Christ. Every time you walk into a room, you bring death with you,’ Nash said.

‘Well, thank you for that. I’ll add it to my CV.’

‘Sorry, Molly, one of those days.’

‘Morecambe women would agree with you. Looks like three in one day. He’s accelerating.’

‘Not necessarily. Paige Hunter was killed at least five days ago.’ Once he knew it, Nash always referred to the victims by name. It kept them human to him and set an example for the task force. ‘We’ll take my car. Come on.’

When they got there, the media was already swooping down. Several members of the public had their phones taken off them and posts deleted from social media, but once they were out, it was too late. The police had worked on shutting off the layby at both ends to prevent the public and media from getting in. Nash called Renshaw at the base to troubleshoot and get initial posts removed from the internet. It wasn’t easy as the servers and app owners had to be contacted with the relevant court orders and the poster’s account located. What was devastating leakage for the police was like all their birthdays come at once for the apps hosting the posts. It was heavy traffic—and traffic was money. It took time to have them removed.

‘It’s fortunate that the layby is a drive-on, drive-off island with a treeline between us and the roadside,’ Nash said.

‘Like a RORO,’ Molly was trying to lighten the tension, but some tension is too tense to be altered.

‘Quite.’

Even though she was virtually falling out of her seat, holding it back, Nash had asked Molly not to tell him anything about this scene in the car. He wanted to be able to see it and read it with clean eyes. Bad enough that the other teams had already been in. Robinson pulled up a few minutes behind them. He’d had to wash and change his forensic suit between scenes. Nash and Brown only had to change their paper slippers and gloves.

‘What’ve we got?’ Nash did the talking, and he took in the scene with Robinson.

The first young woman was probably in her early twenties. She was slim, with brown hair, and had been attractive. She was sitting in a camping chair naked, apart from a hat and a coral-coloured crop top that left little to the imagination. However, her private region wasn’t exposed.

‘This bastard loves his staging,’ Nash said.

‘Sir?’ Molly admonished.

‘Okay, this bastard of indiscriminate gender that might come from the planet Nanook likes their staging. Better?’

Beside the chair, the killer had put a bottle of Prosecco and a half-filled old tin mug. Nash watched a fruit fly drowning in drunken bliss. This victim wore a green floppy hat with the slogan Happy Camper and a picture of a VWT5 campervan. Her eyes were blown with the pupils fixed and dilated. Some blood vessels had ruptured, and the whites were bloodshot. There were several tracks of blood coming from beneath the hat and some staining at the rim, but it was congealed and not flowing. She put Nash in mind of Sissy Spacek at the end of Carrie.

‘We’re going to need time and cause of death, Robinson. An estimate will do for now.’

‘No need on the cause, sir.’ One of the Scenes of Crime officers lifted the hat by the middle avoiding the rim, even though he wore gloves. A paring knife had been driven through the victim’s skull and into her brain.

Robinson stepped closer and drew in a breath through his teeth. ‘Nasty and final, but it wasn’t immediate. She suffered. I’d say she was restrained while she thrashed prior to her death. There are ligature marks on both wrists and ankles, and the bodies were posed after death.’

‘Which brings us to the next one. What do we think the story is?’ Nash turned to the officer in temporary charge of the scene before he turned up.

‘Woman, mid to late thirties. No ID. Her role seems to be to finish the picture.’

The second woman was naked apart from a print top and was positioned on her knees beside the chair with her head between the first victim’s legs.

'There’s a spot of blood on her top that might give us some ID,’ the officer said. Nash noticed her long hair had been released from a ponytail. It was brushed and still had the kink where a scrunchie had held it in place. ‘The body and clothing have retained the smell of cannabis. It’s fainter now than it would have been, but it’s still there if you get your nose close enough.' Nash thought about the overpowering smell of drugs coming from the neighbour’s bedsit at Paige Hunter’s house. There could be a connection.

The intimate area of the first victim was entirely covered by the second woman’s face and hair.

‘Cause of death?’

‘We’ll need it to be confirmed by Dr Robinson, but it looks like a knife wound through the heart.’

‘Any honeysuckle or music?’

‘No music.’ The officer picked up the woman’s head by grabbing a handful of her hair, and Nash grimaced. She was somebody’s daughter, and even after death, she shouldn’t be treated like that. Nash glared at the SOCO officer. He was going to admonish him but was taken back to the job when he saw the knife sticking out of her chest. It was much larger than the paring knife.

‘This one was fast. Death was instant,’ Robinson said.

The kneeling woman had a sprig of honeysuckle in her mouth, and as her head was lifted, the other end slid out of the first victim’s vagina.

‘This woman doesn’t look as important to him. She’s a prop. She was dispatched quickly so that she could serve her purpose. The first victim was the star of the show,’ Nash said. The word cannabis niggled at him. It had come up twice in one day. The first time at Paige Hunter’s bedsit. A coincidence? Maybe. It seemed to Nash that half of today’s youth smoked the foul stuff.

‘Do you think they were lovers?’ the officer asked.

‘From what we know of the perp, I doubt it. There may be no connection at all—just somebody in the wrong place at the wrong time. However, don’t count anything out. This case has a habit of throwing us off the scent and then providing enough evidence to convict Jones a hundred times over.’

‘You still think it’s him, then? He’d have to be working with an accomplice because he’s in custody, isn’t he?’

‘He is indeed, but only a select few know that. And, with the amount of circumstantial evidence we have on him, I have my theories. Brown, find out who lives in the other bedsits in Paige Hunter’s house. Have we found and bagged the hairband?’

‘No sign of it, sir. Trophy?’

‘Maybe.’