Fatal Act (29 page)

T
he top corridor of the rehearsal block was closed. The building remained open, with the staircase and lift that led to the top corridor out of bounds. By using a staircase in an adjoining theatre building, the students were able to access the lower storeys and continue their work. It was inconvenient for them not being able to use the upper floor at all but no one raised any objections. The college principal assured the police they could take all the time they needed to examine the crime scene free of interruption. By the time Geraldine and Sam arrived, scene of crime officers were at work on the stairs and along the corridor. The identity of the victim was known from the outset. Apart from the fact that everyone in the building knew him, his bag was found a foot or so away from the body with his wallet, phone and student card.

T
here was no need for a forensic tent in the enclosed space of the narrow corridor, which was closed off by a fire door at one end, and an outside wall at the other. Several doors leading to rehearsal rooms were locked. So far nothing had been found on the stairs. Each step was being examined for traces of blood or any other evidence that the killer had escaped down them. CCTV film from surveillance cameras on the stairs and in the lift had been sent to Hendon for scrutiny. It was fortunate that the college took security very seriously, to protect expensive equipment kept on the premises.

‘The cameras here are state of the art,’ Sam said admiringly. ‘At last we’ll be able to get a close up view of the killer as he’s leaving.’

‘Unless he’s done another vanishing act.’

‘Don’t joke about it!’

Geraldine didn’t say that she hadn’t been joking.

M
iles arrived soon after Geraldine and her sergeant. They waited anxiously for his report. It wasn’t long before he straightened up and turned to them with a grin. Geraldine returned his smile. She liked the brisk young pathologist. He was obliging and relatively quick at his work. Some doctors she had worked with were more measured in their approach, reluctant to voice any opinion before conducting a thorough post mortem. Either Miles understood her impatience, or else he wasn’t so punctilious in his approach to his work. Whatever the reason, he was willing to offer an unsubstantiated opinion straight away. ‘Don’t quote me on this,’ was a refrain he often repeated, in case he later had cause to revise his first impression. He hadn’t misled them so far.

‘W
hat do you want first, the good news or the bad news?’ he asked.

Geraldine stifled a groan. Miles liked to crack immature jokes.

‘Go on then, surprise us,’ she answered.

‘The bad news is – he’s dead.’

‘OK. And the good news?’

‘The good news is it all looks pretty straightforward. I’ll be able to tell you more once I’ve had a chance to take a proper look, but he’s been badly beaten with some hard object – a metal pole or something.’

‘A pole?’

‘I can’t be specific, I’m afraid. A stick, a pole, something along those lines.’

‘How do you know it was metal?’

‘I don’t. It could have been wood, or plastic, anything very hard, long and rounded, with very smooth surfaces. He was beaten on the back of the legs while still alive. Look.’

He pointed to bruising on the back of the dead man’s knees.

‘To knock him down?’

The pathologist grunted.

‘He bruised his shoulder, probably against the wall as he fell. It looks as though he crashed into it.’

S
cene of crime officers had already marked an indentation on the plaster of the wall. Geraldine stared at it, then at the position of the body. Although the victim had been turned over, she could see he might have fallen against the wall at that point. The size of the bruise, depth of indentation on the wall, height of both from the floor, everything would be meticulously photographed, measured and compared. Meanwhile, as far as they could tell by simply looking, the injury matched the damage to the wall. She nodded then turned back to Miles who had resumed reporting on his initial findings.

‘T
here are two head wounds,’ he said. ‘They could have been inflicted with the end of the weapon that was used on the back of his legs, but that’s just more speculation. The first blow caused a relatively superficial injury, enough to break the skin and do some damage. It might have caused internal bleeding so could be more serious than at first appears, but I can’t confirm that until I’ve had a look inside. Anyway, his assailant missed. Perhaps the victim saw it coming and rolled out of the way, because he was on the ground by then. The second blow – probably with the same weapon – that one did for him straight away.’

‘Did for him?’ Geraldine queried.

‘It smashed his skull. That tells us his killer was strong. You can quote me on that.’ He looked thoughtful. ‘Unless the victim had osteogenesis imperfect – a brittle skull.’

‘What are the chances of that?’

‘It’s very unlikely, but we can’t rule it out completely yet.’

‘So you think we’re probably looking for a man then?’

Miles shrugged. ‘You said it, not me. Although you can’t rule out a female killer. There are some strong women around,’ he added, a hint of bitterness in his voice.

Geraldine wondered what lay behind that comment, but there was no time to dwell on it. She and Miles both had work to do.

R
EG
WAS
LOOKING
SERIOUS,
reflecting the mood in the room. For the third time in the investigation they were facing a conundrum. There was no way Zak’s fatal injuries could possibly have been self inflicted. Apart from any other consideration, there was no weapon anywhere along the top corridor or on the ground outside. Once again the killer had vanished impossibly, and without trace. The security guard couldn’t be everywhere at once. His brief was to patrol the premises. Not only was there more than one exit from the building where the murder had been committed, but the college had more than one building.

T
he top corridor where Zak had been discovered early on Saturday morning was protected by electronic surveillance equipment. A team of constables was watching film of the lift and the staircase leading down to the ground floor. At ten o’clock the previous evening the cast and crew had left their rehearsal room. Only Zak had remained behind to fix some damage to the scenery. The others could be seen trooping along the corridor where someone had turned out the light before they all descended the stairs together. No one had returned upstairs. Reaching the ground floor, most of them had headed straight for the exit. A few had gone back into the main building, to the toilets or the bar. No one had gone back up to the top floor where Zak was working alone.

F
or nearly an hour the corridor had remained dark and empty. Two constables were watching the film in real time in case they missed anything by speeding it up. So far nothing had happened until shortly before eleven, when the door to the end rehearsal room opened. Zak appeared, silhouetted in the doorway. Then darkness returned. Suddenly the corridor was brightly illuminated showing Zak standing by the light switch, his back to the camera. Before he could make his way to the door, a figure leapt out of the shadows and hit him on the back of his legs, felling him. The light flicked off. It was difficult to work out exactly what happened next. Even with the image enhanced, they could see only vague shapes moving around. Zak appeared as a dense patch on the floor, while a second figure bent over him.

‘That’s the killer,’ Geraldine whispered.

T
hey watched in horror as the hazy image hovered over Zak, waving its arms and striking down twice.

‘Two blows to the head,’ someone said as the figure turned and ran down the corridor, away from the camera. A second later they saw an outline in the doorway, lit up by light from the stairs. Then the figure disappeared.

‘Rewind,’ Geraldine said, ‘and freeze the frame so we can examine it.’

The figure was visible briefly in the doorway. They could only see it from behind, shrouded in a long hooded coat.

‘It’s hopeless,’ Bill said wearily. ‘We’ve tried everything possible to enhance the image sufficiently to get a look at his face, but the only time we got him in enough light to see anything, all we can see is the back of his hood. There’s no reflection in a window, nothing.’

‘W
hat happened after he reached the stairs? And why didn’t he turn the lights out there as well?’

‘The lights on the stairs can only be switched off by the maintenance staff.’

‘So you must have got a good view of him on the stairs?’

Bill shook his head. ‘No, I’m afraid not, because he didn’t go down the stairs.’

‘Well, the lift then?’

‘No. The lift wasn’t used.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Geraldine said. She had a horrible feeling she already knew exactly what Bill was going to say next.

‘No one used the lift and no one went down the stairs,’ was how he put it.

‘But there was no one there when the cleaners went in the next morning.’

‘No one used the lift or left by the stairs this morning either.’

‘So you’re telling me the killer just vanished?’

Bill shrugged his shoulders. ‘That seems to be what happened, yes ma’am.’

A
team had been sent to search Zak’s flat looking for names of contacts in whom he might have confided, drugs, or large sums of money, anything that looked irregular. A constable had returned from the search team to report back to the detective chief inspector. The momentary frisson of excitement faded as soon as she began to speak.

‘All we could find was a load of rehearsal schedules and lists of props, paints, colours, scraps of fabric, his room was littered with them,’ she said. ‘But we did find this.’

She held up an envelope.

‘What is it?’ Reg asked.

Carefully removing a sheet of paper in her gloved fingers, the constable unfolded it and read aloud.

‘“Hello Zak, It’s a long time since we met. You won’t remember me. You were just a baby when I saw you last. Your late mother was my sister. Perhaps I can take you out for dinner? Please give me a call on the number below and I hope we can spend some time together soon. And it’s signed, Darius (your uncle)”.’

‘O
K, follow that up,’ Reg said, ‘although it sounds innocuous enough. Is that what you came all the way back here to show us?’

‘So far that’s all we’ve found. He doesn’t seem to have kept a personal diary, or a record of friends’ names or anything like that. No phone either, so we reckon the killer must have taken it because he didn’t have one on him, did he?’

‘Still nothing to help us find his killer then,’ Reg said miserably.

‘Oh for crying out loud, this is getting ridiculous,’ Sam burst out. ‘What are we dealing with here? The invisible man?’

No one answered. Somehow Sam’s outburst didn’t sound as far-fetched as it should have done.

O
nly one thing was clear. All the victims had been directly involved with Piers. Sam insisted he couldn’t have killed his own son, but Reg wasn’t so sure.

‘I think that’s crazy!’ Sam insisted.

‘Let’s not be under any illusion that this killer is sane,’ Jayne said.

She smiled at Reg like an indulgent mother amused by something her child had said. Geraldine could see Sam bristling with irritation at the profiler’s patronising tone.

‘I
agree with Sam,’ Geraldine said firmly. ‘This was a vicious brutal murder. The victim was beaten to death. And it was carefully planned. The killer knew where Zak would be –’

‘Unless he stumbled on him by chance,’ someone said.

For a moment no one spoke. They really had no idea why any of the victims had been killed.

‘No,’ Geraldine said firmly. ‘The killer must have worked out in advance how to get in and out of the building. That couldn’t have happened by chance. So he was familiar with the set up there. He would have needed a swipe card to get in, and he’d worked out his escape route, whatever it was.’

J
ayne stepped forward to stand at Reg’s side. He shifted to make room for her, as though they were joint senior investigation officers.

‘It’s quite feasible for a man to kill his own son. There are plenty of precedents –’

‘Please don’t quote them all at us,’ Sam muttered under breath.

Jayne ignored the muted interruption and continued. ‘It’s not unknown. Remember we’re dealing with someone who is seriously unbalanced.’

‘I wish she’d lose her balance and fall flat on her face,’ Sam whispered in Geraldine’s ear.

G
eraldine couldn’t help smiling. When she had first arrived in London, alone, she had been grateful to Sam who had been kind enough to befriend her although they had only just met. After an initial misunderstanding, the acquaintance had developed into a genuine friendship. Geraldine really liked her colleague, although recently she had begun to see a different side to the sergeant. Sam had been quite vindictive in her remarks about Nick. She would have to be careful. One day Geraldine might have to write a reference for her, if Sam went chasing after promotion. There was now a question mark in Geraldine’s mind about Sam’s ability to get on with her colleagues. She hoped it wouldn’t become a problem.

B
UOYED
UP
BY
J
AYNE
’
S
confident assertion that other men had been known to kill their own children, Reg remained convinced that Piers was guilty. When Geraldine challenged him for his evidence he looked irritated, although claiming to welcome her scepticism.

‘That’s your job, to challenge theories, Geraldine, and you do it very well. I’m impressed with your doggedness in questioning everything, but there’s really no need to carry on now we know what’s what. Once we’ve picked him up, I want to get inside his mind, find out what makes him tick, and Jayne will be able to help us with that.’