Chapter 1

I was driving from my apartment, in Boston, Lincolnshire, to Skegness, on the east coast, when my mobile rang. I was lucky to be near a layby, so I pulled over and took the call. It was Angela Williamson and just the person I wanted to talk to. She sounded excited and wanted to meet me at the café, near the bank where she worked. I agreed and we made a time to have lunch.

I had been going to Skegness to see a few estate agents as I needed to re-locate to be close to my new work. I was looking at various agents’ windows, making notes, when my phone rang again. It was Chief Superintendent Strachan, part of the team that broke the previous case and the boss of the Divisional Headquarters, here in Skegness. His request was that I should look for somewhere to house the new Research Unit, as there wasn’t any spare room at the station. I told him that I’d look around, while I was looking for my own place.

When I met Angela, she provided me with possible answers to both of my problems. There was a gleam in her eyes that hadn’t been there before. After seeing her walking arm in arm with Steve, a colleague of hers, going off to a hotel room in London, I wasn’t surprised when she showed me a nice engagement ring.

“I know it looks quick, but Steve and I have been spending a bit of time together since that meeting at the police station. Bernard and I hadn’t had sex for a few years, and I didn’t take much coaching to go to bed with Steve. He’s the sort of man I hadn’t enjoyed for a long time. He proposed that Saturday night of the arrest, and we spent most of the Sunday in bed. He wants me to move in with him as soon as I can. It will be a new life for me, and I’ll sell my old home. It had been Bernards’ home and there are too many memories there.”

“Funny that you say that; I’m here to look for somewhere to live. They asked me to come back to the force to head up a new unit. Would you consider selling to me, it will save you the agents’ fee and we can work out the change-over amicably.”

“Of course, you can buy it. How much do you have to spend?”

I told her the limit of my savings and we agreed on a very reasonable figure, there and then. She said that she would get Steve to write up a contract and he would be happy to help her move out, seeing that she would end up sleeping in his bed.

“This is wonderful, Polly, will you be a bridesmaid when we get married? I have a life-long friend who is going to be the Maid of Honour.”

“Thank you for asking me, Angela. That will be my pleasure. I’m so glad to see you happy, again.”

“I am happy again. Bernard was a wonderful husband for most of the time but finding out that he was another guys’ girlfriend was a shock. All I have to do, now, is find someone to take on the shed.”

“Would you consider a long lease to the police? I have to find a place for my new unit. The shed, if altered in a few places, could be ideal.”

“For you, Polly, I’d be happy to help out the team that found my husbands’ murderer. I’ll let them have it at sixty percent of the normal lease rate if they agree to sign for ten years. With five-year roll-overs, lease to be renegotiated at those times with an option to buy.”

“I’ll take that back to the station when I’m next there. It’s been an interesting lunch. If you let me know when, I’ll pop into the bank and sign the paperwork and make a deposit. Can you arrange a mortgage for me for the rest, please?”

“That will be my pleasure, see you later, I’ve got to go back to work. Here is the key to the shed, I changed the locks, and this will open the gate and the door. Go and have a look for yourself, I don’t think that you’ve seen it empty.”

That afternoon, I had a close look at the shed. The fencing was good but would have to be upgraded. The land at the front was big enough for several cars. When I went in, the part which had racks of boxes with car parts was now cleared and was quite large. I paced it out and saw that it would take four workstations, easily. The garage area looked huge, now there wasn’t ten cars parked. The two sliding doors were able to open half the frontage at a time, and the workbench had been cleaned.

The end room which Bernice had used as a dressing room was almost as big as the one at the other end. It did have a properly plumbed toilet and shower. One of the good things was that all the natural light came from skylights, so we didn’t have windows to secure. I stood and thought about things. If we reworked the toilet and shower area to allow three or more people to use, we could put in a stud wall and make the rest of the room a bit smaller, ideal for an office that I could use, I had no false ideas about what the job would entail, it would be me doing the paperwork and keeping the Unit Log. The room at the other end would be where all the research took place, while I was sure that we would find something to do with the garage area, if only walling some of it off as a rest room with vending machines and a sink.

The whole place would look good with cladding on the walls, perhaps with some insulation. It had a good power supply, as befitting a place built for industrial use, and was somewhat isolated from the factories around it. The only thing it didn’t have was a landline or internet connection. If need be, we could always set up a satellite connection for both, depending on the budget. There were plenty of places in the industrial park where we could get carpeting and air conditioning before we installed anything else. If we did take it on, it wouldn’t be Fort Knox, but as close to that as we could make it.

Two days later, I was standing outside the place with Cathy Chatterton, soon to be my DS, and CI Dawlish, in charge of the station admin. We walked through the place, and I described my ideas, Cathy added a couple of her own and Dawlish told us that everything was possible and well inside the budget he had been given. While we were standing outside, he dropped a bombshell on us.

“Polly, the higher ups have got excited about all of this. They now think that you will be able to give other divisions your expertise. To that end, you have been allocated a Detective Constable and a WPC, You will have two cars signed off to the Unit, and the Commissioner has asked us to get a large van and install a mobile research unit with satellite links, so that you can take it anywhere to aid the detectives on the ground, in real time. Thredbolt got word of that and has insisted that the van have forensic investigation capabilities, with a similar set-up here. Your new detective constable is likely to be Jessica. She has the forensic training and good computer skills, and is very happy to come into your team, should you want her.”

“Of course, we’ll want her, Inspector. She has put some effort into winding up the current case. All that means is that we’ll have to make any changes here able to look after four women, plus a small toilet for blokes that may be allowed to visit.”

“Right, tell Angela that we’ll take the place, on her terms, and that she should work up the lease paperwork. By the way, you’ve been kept on the consultancy books and will be until you start as an Inspector. The current case has been added to your record. If you come into the station in a couple of days, I’ll give you your new warrant card. You do realise that you’ll have to buy a dress uniform for the official opening. That will go for you, as well, Cathy.”

He and Cathy left to go back to the station so Cathy could continue to work on the trial to come. She had kept me up to date with the progression of the evidence. They had found more of the fentanyl at Whistler’s workshop, as well as Bernice’s DNA in the van. The two guys in Sheffield had agreed to plead guilty to being in the robbery and, in a plea bargain where they ended up with suspended sentences, agreed to be prosecution witnesses should the other two go to trial for that one as well.

The case against Cuthbertson had been strengthened when the other finger was found in a drawer in his office, along with another three that matched the families of the three other missing persons reports. That made seven we could bring to court, leaving out our AC and his daughter.

With everything laid out to him, and now that the protection that Cuthbertson gave him had disappeared, Whistler started telling everything he knew. He even took Carson to the tourist park and showed him roughly where the bodies were buried. Carson was extremely upset when the beautiful roses were all dug out.

Over the next three months we took over the shed and it became the Research Annex. The changes we wanted had been made and we now had a cosy working room with air conditioning and three workstations and a row of filing cabinets. Cathy and Jessica were in there. The internet and phones had been connected and we also had satellite back-up. My office had been built and it had two desks, mine and our WPC, Julia Wilson. She was in her second year in the force and a really positive person, determined to be a sergeant inside ten years, with Cathy and I as her heroines. Because we were a separate unit, we allowed her to come in in normal clothes, and leave her uniform and belt in her locker, should she need it. We had divided the garage area, with our new van living in one side and the other as two rooms, one a rest room and the other for Jessica should we need to do any forensic work. Outside was now a covered area for our two police cars and our private vehicles.

I had moved into Angelas’ old house and sold my office and apartment. I didn’t bother about selling the business, just letting agents know that it could be taken over. Life had been busy, even if I wasn’t part of the trial, which approached with alarming speed. The media coverage had been relentless, especially as the evidence was refuted by the defendants’ lawyers as fabricated, without them even seeing it.

When we had the official opening of the Annex, it was a star-studded audience, with a number of officers from other divisions inspecting the rooms and asking what sort of things we could provide. Most were interested in our van and that we could take it to the scene of a crime and process paperwork and research links while their detectives were at the scene. That’s where the bulk of our work started coming from, with the van being out most days of the week. As the results started to come in, other divisions started asking us to help them set up their own Research Unit.

The trial came around and the defence folded as soon as they had been shown everything. Cuthbertson pleaded guilty and threw himself on the mercy of the court. It didn’t do him any good, as he got twenty years. Before he was taken away, he was charged with eight cases of kidnap and murder of children under ten, our AC having told the team that his case was to be considered and that he had officially resigned. The defence team could hardly believe their ears as the arrest was made, there in court, and the dates and names read out. The judge had a big grin on his face as he went to his rooms.

Whistler got fifteen years; the reduction due to his helping the police. He was also charged for the kidnappings and other murders. Both were in prison for a long time, soon to be a lot longer. After that, the promotions for the rest of the team came through. Strachan was elevated to AC, to replace his friend Gerald, Dawlish was bumped some ranks and took over the control of the division; my old friend, George, was allowed to retire with the rank of Acting Inspector. Carson became a Chief Inspector and his sergeant, Roberts, replaced him as Inspector.

We all continued to do our jobs, the Annex becoming a go-to place for a lot of officers, from white collar to murder investigations. I was spending a fair amount of time on the computers to help out and we were building a considerable reputation. Of course, sooner or later we would get something utterly stupid and that one turned up in June of the next year.

It started with an email from one of our uniformed branch. They had gone to the Natureland Seal Sanctuary to investigate the disappearance of two baby common seals. There had been signs of a forced entry during the night, but the camera had been smashed, so no vision of the seal robbery was available. Some bright spark had read, somewhere, that seal meat was a delicacy in some countries and asked us if we could locate any Eskimos in the local area.

I gave that one to Julia to look into. She took one of our cars and went to the seal sanctuary to talk to the owners. She had a lot to tell us when she got back. One thing that the original report had not shown was that there had also been a break-in at the Blue Lagoon Restaurant and that some food had been taken from the freezers. This, it seemed, was only discovered after the original visit by our officers. She told me that the owners were so upset at having the pups stolen, they hadn’t looked anywhere else. She had a disc with a lot of compressed video of the place, which would keep her busy for a while, so we put her on one of the workstations and sent Jessica to the sanctuary with the van and her fingerprinting equipment.

When she came back, she said that she had some good prints and had taken prints from all the restaurant volunteers to eliminate them. Julia watched the CCTV vision diligently and then called us to look at a short piece that she had extracted. It was a group of six men, who could be seen, from the back, as they looked at the baby seal rearing pen. Three went into the restaurant and came out with ice creams. They stood next to the wishing well and ate their ice creams while talking, a couple looking directly at the camera. Then they walked straight across the grass, past the penguins, and onto the other path and out.

The main thing was that they looked nothing like Inuit men, more European. So, what we needed to do was to look further. We looked up seals as food and found that a number of countries still ate seal, after it had been hung and dried. Japan, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland stood out and we could rule out Japan for the moment because they didn’t look Japanese.

When we did a random search for Iceland within a hundred miles of Skegness, we got one return that looked promising. It was the Icelandic Seafood Factory in Grimsby, a large concern that employed a lot of fishermen. A telephone enquiry resulted in us finding out that they do, indeed, recruit fishermen and workers from Sweden and Norway. We asked if they had employed six recently and they came back with a positive answer. They had brought six Norwegian sailors over from Bodo, up near the Arctic Circle, and had housed them in a property they rented at North Somerton. They gave us all the names and the address.

We emailed the original officer who had made the enquiry with the names and the address, as well as a group picture of the men eating ice cream and told him to look for drying seal meat.

Two days later, we had a phone call from Dawlish, who told us to go to North Somerton with the van and to make sure Jessica was with us. We left Cathy in charge of the Annex, and I drove one of our cars, while Julie and Jessica were in the van. When we arrived at the address, we were met by a Detective Inspector and his sergeant from the Grimsby station. The house had police tape across the front.

Jackson, the Inspector, told us that when our two officers, with two from his station, had visited the house, the pictures we had sent had matched the suspects and that there was, indeed, drying seal meat hanging in an outhouse. He said that one of his men had been looking through the garden shed when he saw an old, wooden, ammunition box on the floor. Being a war history buff; he had opened it and saw bones. He had not touched any more.

The six men were now housed in remand cells at the station, arrested for breaking and entering, destruction of property, theft of the frozen food and theft of two baby seals. They said that that they hadn’t been into the shed because they were not gardeners.

Julie and Jessica got suited up and went through the house to see what they could find. The bones could be innocent, plastic replicas or an old school skeleton with the wire links. I got a power cable from a plug in the hall, and turned on the computers then tuned the dish to the satellite.

The factory had told us that they rented the house, so the first call was to the agents who told me that they had bought the house from a deceased estate, a few years ago. They would look in their files and email me with the details. In the meantime, I entered the address into a search of our police database. I was surprised to get a result.

The house had been the address given, in an interview, in a case some ten years earlier. It had been searched at that time, so the bones post-dated that. The suspect was a forty-two-year-old teacher of English at a school in Grimsby. He fitted an identikit drawing of a person seen near where a body of a young woman had been found. The young woman had, subsequently, been positively identified as a young man. The teacher had a solid alibi, having been miles away, having a meal with his headmaster, his headmasters’ wife, and another teacher from their school, discussing the curriculum for the following year, with special attention on what play they would put on at the end of the year. The report made a note that the school was well known for the quality of their plays. When I saw the interviewing officers, I went outside and spoke to Jackson.

“Inspector, this house was named as the residence of someone you interviewed, back in ’15. You were still a DS.”

“I did a lot of interviews then, tell me more.”

“It was a result of an Identikit drawing; the suspect was a teacher, and the case was finding a body that turned out to be a transexual or transvestite.”

“Shit, shit, and even more shit! My DI told me that we were climbing the wrong tree. The teacher had an alibi and my DI had gone to the school he taught at. I remember now; the witness was a worker at the Tesco Extra at Hewitts Circus. He saw the man drive by, well after closing, then turn around to go back again. The car was the same type and colour that the teacher drove at that time. The body was in grassland between the Poundstretcher store and the Vauxhall car dealers. It wasn’t found for two weeks. In that time, the teacher had written the car off when it had been torched while parked at his school.”

“So, it’s still an open case, then?”

“One of several, Inspector Ibbotson. We had a spate of bodies found, all young men dressed as women, and all in car parks or gardens from Cleethorpes to Grimsby. The last one was a genuine “up yours” gesture as the body was left in the car park of Sainsburys, just across the river from the police station, in 2016. There are a lot of officers who would like to see those closed, I can tell you!”

“Can you send me all of the paperwork, you never know, this may put a crack in the cases.”

Jessica came out of the house, pulled the hood of her suit back and shook her head.

“It gets hot in that little shed! Now, what I can tell you is that the bones are human, most likely male, aged in the late teens to early twenties. The ammunition box is the sort that used to be sold through the Army and Navy Stores in the sixties, it’s one of thousands and has no bearing on the contents. Also, in the box, there are newspaper clippings. They’ve been damaged with dampness and age, and I’ll have to get them back to see what Thredbolt can make of them, unless you want the forensic lab in Grimsby to have them.”

“No, no. You take them, lass. I’ve more faith in you than all the boffins we have here. We generally send anything important over the water to Hull, should we want something done.”

“Right, then. The bones have been cut, as if someone was turning them into smaller parts. Julia and I had a good look around, back there. There is an old copper boiler which could have been used to render down the flesh. Do you want us to go through the house, it won’t take long if it has been used as accommodation for a while.”

Inspector Jackson told her to do just that, he would wait with us until she finished. The Norwegians would only be allowed back to collect their things and the house would then remain a crime scene and he would put a uniformed officer on duty to stop any vandalism.

Jessica nodded and pulled the hood back up. As she was about to go back into the house, she stopped and turned her head back at us.

“Oh, do you know anyone who was putting on the Shakespeare play, Hamlet? Only, we didn’t find a skull.”

I heard a knocking noise behind me and turned to see Jackson kicking the gatepost and swearing fit to bust. He saw me look at him.

“That’s one of the plays that the school put on, two years after the last body.”

Marianne Gregory © 2023.