Fallen Angel (16 page)

‘Interview resumed at …' Collins glanced up at the clock at the back of the room. ‘23.18 hours. Present in the room are DI Stacey Collins and DCI Colin Blackwell. Also present is Mr Richard Morgan and duty solicitor Muhammad Sharma.' The lawyer nodded as his name was read out.

Richard Morgan was looking more confident with a solicitor by his side.

‘Richard, if we can go back to your whereabouts earlier today – can you now remember where you were?' asked Blackwell.

‘I've told you before, I don't recall.'

‘Look, Richard, we don't have time to play games. We need to know where you were.'

‘I don't have to tell you. I haven't done anything.'

‘By telling us where you were, we can eliminate you from our enquiries. If you have nothing to hide, you have no reason not to tell us.'

Sharma coughed by way of interrupting the conversation. ‘I think my client has made it clear that at present he is unable to recall his exact whereabouts. I think it serves no one to keep going over the same ground.'

Blackwell turned to Collins, who picked up a sheath of papers from the table in front of her. ‘For the benefit of the recording,' she began, ‘I am now showing Mr Morgan
copies of telephone records relating to his mobile phone.'

Collins leaned across the table. ‘Richard. You told us earlier that you were out on call last Wednesday afternoon, but that you couldn't remember the customers who had requested your services.'

‘That's right.'

‘In that case perhaps you could explain to us why it is that your phone shows no activity between eleven on Wednesday morning and four that same afternoon.'

Morgan looked pale. ‘No comment.'

‘According to the phone company,' Collins continued, ‘your phone was actually turned off during that time.'

Morgan said nothing.

‘That's not very good business practice for someone whose livelihood depends on people being able to contact them.'

‘No comment.'

Blackwell took over. ‘You don't get it, do you? You're being questioned over the murder of one little boy and the kidnap of another. You're talking about offences that carry the highest possible penalty. Do you really want to reply with no comment to all of this?'

Morgan swallowed hard. ‘No comment,' he said weakly.

‘Did you kill Daniel Eliot?'

‘No.'

‘Where is Michael Dawney?'

‘I don't know.'

Collins shuffled more papers from the pile in front of her. It was time to play her trump card. ‘I am now showing the suspect a still photograph from CCTV footage taken close to the area where Daniel Eliot was last seen.' She
flipped the photograph and thrust it in front of Morgan. ‘The van in this picture was seen following Daniel Eliot and his friend as they made their way home on Wednesday afternoon. The van has been identified as belonging to you.'

Morgan studied the picture closely, then looked up, meeting Collins's eyes for the first time. The look on his face was one she had seen many times before. It was the look of a man who knew he was beaten. The look of a man who was about to give it all up.

Morgan turned to his solicitor and whispered something in his ear.

Sharma nodded and scribbled something on the notepad in front of him.

‘My client wishes to have a private consultation with me,' he said. ‘I would ask that you switch off the tape and leave the room.'

‘You think he's stalling for time?' asked Blackwell, as he and Collins stood outside the interview room.

‘I don't know. He's not the person I envisaged.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘I didn't question it until I showed him the picture of the van. His whole body language changed. He stopped being the cold, calculating killer that I'd expected. It was almost as if he panicked. Up until then he'd always shown such control.'

‘Well, he needs the money. He's got debts of more than £50,000.'

‘His voice never sounded right to me either. When we first arrested him and I heard him speak, I presumed he
just put on a deeper, more menancing tone with the parents. But I've not heard it once.'

‘He could always change his voice electronically. A lot of kidnappers do. The devices are so advanced that the human ear can't tell.'

‘But we didn't find anything like that at his house.'

‘No, but it could be where he's keeping Michael.'

‘Or he could be an accomplice. Maybe someone else was driving the van that day.'

A knock on the inside of the door of the interview room told them that Morgan was ready, and the two officers entered.

When Collins and Blackwell returned to the room, Morgan did not look up at them. He kept his eyes fixed on the floor in front of the table.

Everyone in the room remained silent as the recording equipment was switched back on. Muhammad Sharma was the first to speak. ‘My client now wishes to cooperate fully with your investigation.'

‘Thank you, Richard,' said Blackwell. ‘In that case can you tell me where Michael Dawney is?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Where were you this morning?'

‘I was with a girl called Patricia.'

‘What's her surname?' Collins said.

‘I don't know.'

‘Richard, you said you were going to cooperate.'

‘I am.'

‘Then tell us everything you know.'

‘I don't know her surname. I've known her for two years. I see her three or four times a week.'

Collins suddenly understood. ‘Is Patricia a prostitute?'

‘She's not a prostitute. She doesn't walk the streets.'

‘Okay. Do you pay her for sex?'

He moved awkwardly in his chair. ‘Yes.'

‘What's her number?'

Morgan knew it off by heart. Collins smoothed out the sheets of paper containing the phone records and looked through them. The number appeared on many occasions.

‘Why didn't you tell us this when you were first questioned?' asked Blackwell.

‘I'm about to get married. I don't want her to know.'

‘I take it that's why you're more than £50,000 in debt.'

Morgan nodded. ‘For the benefit of the recording,' said Blackwell, ‘Richard Morgan is nodding his head.'

Collins flicked through the papers until she found the picture of the van once more. ‘It still doesn't explain where you were on Wednesday afternoon.'

‘I was with her then as well.' Morgan saw the disappointment in the officers' eyes. ‘Look, guys. Why would I take a child and kill him? I'm not into children.'

‘Then why are you on the register?' countered Blackwell.

‘Why do you think?'

Collins couldn't resist the temptation. ‘Because you're a danger to children?'

‘You trying to be funny?' said Morgan, his tone changing. He was now struggling to keep his temper.

He cleared his throat. ‘Two years ago I was on a night
out with the lads. We ended up getting a bit merry and hit a club. I meet this girl, we get chatting and end up back at her place and do the business. I'm not proud of it, but I'm no angel and these things happen.' He lifted his eyes to look sheepishly at the detectives, hoping for a nod of acknowledgement. They remained stony-faced. ‘When I wake up in the morning, in bursts this bloke. At first I think it's her fella, but it turns out to be even worse – it's her dad. She's only fifteen. How the hell was I supposed to know that? She looked at least twenty. Then her dad calls in you lot and I get nicked. My brief gets it knocked down to a caution, but I have no choice but to go on the register. So rumours spread that I'm a nonce and I get people trying to burn my house down.'

A knock at the door led Blackwell to pause the interview. DS Woods had received a report from Forensics and needed to speak to Collins and Blackwell urgently outside the room.

‘Two bits of news for you. First, the hand doesn't belong to Michael Dawney.'

‘Who does it belong to?'

‘Daniel Eliot.'

The relief was visible on the faces of both officers.

‘So Michael could still be alive,' said Blackwell.

Collins looked at her watch. ‘For the next thirty-seven hours at least. Morgan's come up with an alibi. I need you to check out a local prostitute.'

‘No problem,' said Woods. ‘I'll do it now. But you should know that the lab say the tyres on his van don't match the tracks from the scene where Dawney was taken.'

All three stood in silence for a moment.

‘We must be looking at a different van with copied number plates,' said Collins.

‘If we are, then this isn't our man,' said Blackwell. ‘And whoever has Michael Dawney is still out there.'

The middle-aged woman with long dark hair, gold wire-framed glasses and thin pale lips walked in through the open door of the incident room and looked around disapprovingly as if she had detected a bad smell.

Tony Woods, sitting a few desks away, caught a whiff of an unfamiliar fragrance in the room and whipped around to see who it belonged to. The striking woman he found himself staring at was just his type. Her smooth hair was scraped back tightly over her scalp, and her glasses seemed to accentuate her brown eyes. Her clothes were businesslike: a grey trouser suit and an off-white blouse, with sensible black shoes. She carried a slim brown leather briefcase. Woods was at her side in an instant.

‘Hi, I'm Tony. And you are …'

When she lifted her hand to meet his own, Woods clasped it eagerly, then clamped his other hand on top, startling the woman enough to make her pause and draw breath.

‘My name is Dr Rivers. I'm here to see DCI Blackwell.'

Woods's lips curled into a charismatic smile, one he had used many times before, usually to devastating effect. ‘Ah, you're the profiler? I'm sure you're going to be incredibly busy, but it would be great if we could find some time to chat. It's an area I've always had an interest
in. I actually have a degree in Experimental Psychology from Cambridge. In fact, I considered going into profiling before I decided to get involved in nuts-and-bolts police work.'

Dr Rivers gently shook her hand out of Woods's grasp. ‘You do know that there's no such job, don't you?'

‘What do you mean? The FBI's full of profilers.'

The woman shook her head. ‘I assure you there is no one in the FBI whose job title is profiler. What they do have, down at the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime in Quantico, Virginia, is the best unit in the world for analysing the most deviant criminal minds in the world.' Her tone put Woods back in his place.

Woods cocked his head to one side and tried to twist his features into his most charming smile. ‘So what does that make you?'

‘I'm a senior lecturer at the University of Durham. I have a Ph.D. in Forensic Psychology and an MA in Behavioural Science. I'm an expert in the motivations that drive the criminal mind. My job is to work out what leads people to make certain decisions and take certain actions.' Her voice was condescending and put Woods back in the place she wanted him to be: as far away from her as possible.

Woods nodded, realizing that his chances of getting this gorgeous woman to go out for a drink with him were virtually zero. He looked up, his eyes searching the room for his colleague.

‘Dixon,' he called out to a passing detective sergeant, ‘the profiler's here, go tell your guv.'

The woman's face revealed her anger at once again
being called a profiler. Woods, with a smug grin, turned and went back to his desk.

The radio played quietly but just loud enough for him to hear. All the talk was of Michael Dawney and Daniel Eliot, he noted with satisfaction. Pundits and experts were giving their half-formed views and hastily cobbled-together, paid-for opinions. Not many were near the mark. Most seemed to think his handiwork was that of a madman. What did they know? One man's madness was another man's sanity, of that he was sure. One man's death, another's redemption. That's what the Bible said.

He had spent the morning fighting the Battle of Culloden. He took such pride in each of the miniature figures and armaments he had painted. They looked so exact. But something had gone wrong. One figure was missing – how could he have forgotten? When it happened, he felt his muscles tense up and a surge of stress well through his veins. He took a spare figure from the cupboard and began to paint.

Almost at once he lost control of the brush. The white oil paint that he had been applying to the face flicked over the red uniform. His hands stopped still, and he held the soldier for some time – maybe thirty seconds – before slowly moving the brush away and removing the offending item from under the magnifying glass. He stood up, walked out of his bedroom and down the stairs into the kitchen. He opened the back door and threw the soldier into the garden.

He couldn't return to painting now – it was all ruined – so he washed the brush meticulously and left it on the draining board to dry. He was so angry with himself that he slapped himself hard on the forehead, leaving a vicious hand mark on his face.

But that wasn't enough, so he made his way down to the basement. He pulled the chain that held the key to the cell from around his
neck and opened the door. Michael Dawney sat on the corner of the bed, shivering with fear. His body was covered in dry blood and bruises. The man locked the door behind him. He turned and, as he approached, Michael began to scream.

Dr Michelle Rivers emerged from the office where she had been reading through all the files on the case that had been given to her an hour before. Her eyes searched the room until she found DCI Blackwell, who was talking to DS Dixon. She strode over towards him, her confident demeanour apparent in every step.

‘DCI Blackwell, I'm ready when you are. Do you want to talk in private or shall I address the whole team?'

‘We'll talk in private first. Let's go into the meeting room.'

Collins had watched the two talk, and, as they passed her desk, she pulled Blackwell to one side. ‘Do you mind if I sit in on this?'

She could see the tension in the muscles around his jaw. Their relationship had reverted to what it had been before the raid on the plumber.

‘Fine,' said Blackwell tersely. ‘But try to keep your opinions to yourself.'

The two officers sat on one side of the large oval table in the centre of the room while Dr Rivers sat opposite.

‘Are you up to speed?' Blackwell asked.

‘Only in the most general sense. Under normal circumstances I'd require several more hours with the files to form even the most superficial profile. In addition I'd need to visit the place where Daniel Eliot's body was found and retrace his last-known movements as well as
those of Michael Dawney. But I'm all too aware that the clock is ticking. Forty-eight hours is –'

‘Twenty-eight,' Collins corrected her.

‘Twenty-eight hours isn't very much time at all,' she agreed. ‘First, I'll need to see the videoclips that were emailed to the parents as soon as possible.'

‘I'll have Dixon get those ready for you,' said Blackwell. ‘In the meantime are you ready to answer some basic questions?'

‘Sure.'

‘What I want to know', said Blackwell, ‘is exactly what kind of person we're dealing with. I've been assuming it's someone of higher-than-average intelligence.'

Rivers sighed deeply. ‘Hollywood has to shoulder a lot of the blame. Everyone goes around thinking that serial killers are always super-clever, just like Hannibal Lecter, but the truth is that most of these people are of only average intelligence. If you dig into the history of it, you find most multiple killers are working in pretty mundane jobs, doing only semi-skilled work. They're certainly not doctors or psychologists.'

‘What about Harold Shipman?' asked Collins.

‘I guess he's the exception that proves the rule, but even then he was hardly brilliant. A pretty mediocre doctor by all accounts. Certainly not a high-flyer in the Hannibal Lecter mould.' Rivers smiled in a slightly condescending way. ‘If anyone like that really got involved in murder, you people wouldn't stand a chance.

‘People think they must be smart because it always takes the police a long time to figure out who they are, but that's far more to do with the nature of the crime
than anything else. If you live in a big city and you kill someone who is a complete stranger and no one sees you do it, the police don't have an awful lot to go on. Of course it's going to take them a while to work out who's responsible.'

‘I need to know about this man's motivation,' said Blackwell. ‘Why he's doing what he's doing.'

Rivers nodded. ‘What you want to know is whether you're dealing with a genuine serial killer or a genuine kidnapper. If it's the latter, then paying the ransom is your best chance of getting Michael Dawney safely home. If it's the former, then there's every chance that Michael is already dead.'

‘So which is it?' asked Blackwell eagerly.

Michelle pulled her briefcase up on to her lap and took out some academic stuides. ‘Here's the situation. There isn't a great deal of research about any of this in the UK. Most of what we have comes from the US. That said, apart from a few obvious cultural differences, the data we have from there is actually pretty useful when it comes to working out exactly what is likely to happen over here.

‘You have to understand at the outset that this is a singular crime. Unique, I would say. The data we have for profiling in these situations is scant, to say the least. Most kidnappings are gang-related and don't come to police attention very often. When they do, there are obvious sociological indicators that obviously don't apply in this situation.

‘Those kidnappings that aren't gang-related are almost exclusively money-motivated: generally the children of extremely wealthy parents who pay the ransom without
question. Clearly only the second crime could fit into this category.'

‘We believe he may have killed Daniel Eliot in order to prove that he was serious, in order to ensure the second ransom was paid,' said Blackwell soberly.

‘That's very much my opinion too. I don't know a great deal about the standard procedure within the Kidnap and Extortion Unit, but I understand that standard policy is not to pay the full amount of the ransom.'

‘That's correct.'

‘So, regardless of whether this kidnapper had asked for one hundred pounds, one million pounds or ten million pounds in the first instance, you would have paid only a small proportion of the amount, even if the parents had wanted to pay it all.'

‘That's right, but we would get the parents to leave a note asking for more time.'

‘But my understanding is that you're now going to hand over the full amount.'

Blackwell looked at Collins. ‘That's right. The parents are trying to raise it as we speak.'

This was the first Collins had heard of all the money being handed over, and it gave her an uncomfortable feeling.

‘What this tells me is that the kidnapper's main motivation has been to get hold of a large sum of money. He's prepared to kill, maim and torture for it.'

‘I'm still finding it hard to believe that anyone could live with themselves after killing a completely innocent child in that way, just as a stepping stone to a bigger pay day.'

‘Of course you are. This is Britain, not Colombia. In almost all of the kidnappings you deal with, the victim isn't in any genuine danger. It's the threat of violence that makes people pay up, not the actual use of it. This is different. Here we have someone to whom life means so little that killing a child means nothing.'

‘How can that be?'

Rivers flicked through files until she found the photograph of the page torn from the Bible that had been found in the church. ‘Because of this. An interesting piece of Scripture. In the wrong hands, this can be used as the justification for any act of violence or brutality. If you read the entire passage, what you're effectively saying is that all men are sinners and therefore that all men deserve to die.'

‘And that applies to children?'

‘Absolutely. It applies to everyone.'

Collins shook her head.

‘DI Collins, is there something else you'd like to say?' asked Rivers pointedly.

‘No. As I said we already know all of this. DS Woods got most of it from the theologist. And in any case you're contradicting yourself. You're saying his motivation is to get hold of the money, but at the same time he wants to derive pleasure from the suffering of a child and his family. It doesn't make sense.'

‘Such cases rarely make sense. You're talking about someone who wants to obtain a large sum of money and believes the best way to do that is through kidnapping and murdering children. It's hardly rational, is it? But, at the end of the day, I can only tell you what the profiling
suggests, DI Collins. I can't tell you whether to listen to me.'

‘You still haven't told us what kind of man he is. How old, married or single, children of his own – that sort of thing,' said Blackwell.

‘The fact that he's planned everything so meticulously suggests that he's very much in control of his actions. That sort of control comes with maturity, so I would expect him to be at least in his forties. And he's a single white male living alone.'

‘What makes you say that?' asked Blackwell.

‘Because most child killers come from the same ethnic group as their victims and because he needs privacy for his work.'

‘Work,' Collins interrupted. ‘You mean murder.'

‘He would definitely consider it as work: work is how you make your money, and this is how he intends to make his. It gives him another layer of justification.'

‘Is he working alone? It would have taken a man of some strength to get the body into the church and then string it up all by himself.'

‘Almost certainly,' Rivers replied. ‘My preliminary profile suggests that he's a loner, so I believe he would definitely be working by himself. He's a man of great strength, maybe even working in manual labour.'

‘But that doesn't fit in with his knowledge of computers and telephone networks. He had software that alerted him to the fact we were trying to trace his location when he logged on to Hotmail.'

Rivers gave Collins a sideward glance. Her voice showed she was getting weary of what she considered
petty interruptions. ‘Detective, it's not hard to find the information you're talking about on the Internet.'