A Place To Bury Strangers (Atticus Priest Book 2) Read online

  “Hello?”

  Atticus turned to the street. An elderly couple had stopped at the foot of the drive. They were dressed as if to go on a walk. A terrier sat in front of them, his tail brushing against the ground as he looked at Bandit.

  Atticus smiled warmly at them. “Morning.”

  “He’s not there,” said the man.

  “Really?”

  “Left early this morning. What time did I say it was, Jenny?”

  “Around five, you said.”

  “That’s right. I couldn’t sleep, so I came downstairs to read. There was a police car outside. I remember thinking how odd it was, that time of day.”

  “And after that? You say Mr. Burns isn’t here—how do you know?”

  “The police car left, and ten minutes later I saw Derek put his dog in the back of his car and drive off.”

  “Did he have anything else with him? A bag, maybe?”

  “A suitcase. One of the ones on wheels. He put it in the back next to the dog.”

  “Thank you.”

  The woman squinted at him. “You didn’t say who you are?”

  “I’m a police officer,” Atticus said, hoping they didn’t think it odd that a police officer would bring a dog to work with him.

  “He’s not in trouble, is he?”

  “No,” he said. “Not at all.”

  Atticus took Bandit out to the field at the back of the house where he had spoken to Burns the previous day. He had run. Why?

  His telephone buzzed in his pocket.

  “Hello?”

  “Mr. Priest?”

  “Mr. York, how are you? How’s Molly?”

  “Not good. I’ve lost her again.”

  “When?”

  His tone was despondent. “Last night. She went to bed, but when I got up this morning, she wasn’t there. She’s packed her things and gone.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Clothes, some books—her suitcase, too.”

  Atticus slowed his pace. “She didn’t do that last time.”

  “No, she just went. Do you think you could look for her again?”

  “Of course. Let me make a few phone calls.”

  Atticus ended the call, promising that he would let him know the moment he found anything out.

  Bandit had lowered his snout to sniff at something interesting at the side of the field. Atticus whistled to bring him in and clipped his lead to his collar. He turned and headed back to his car, navigating through his phone’s memory for the number he wanted. This was going to be an awkward conversation, but there was no way around it; if he wanted to save himself another trip to London, he was going to have to ask for help, however uncomfortable that might be.

  He dialled the number.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s Atticus Priest.”

  Jessica Edwards sighed. “Oh.”

  “How are you?”

  There was a pause and, for a moment, Atticus thought that she had ended the call.

  “You didn’t hang around the other morning,” she said.

  “I’m sorry about that. I had to get back to Salisbury.”

  “You couldn’t even have said goodbye?”

  “You were asleep. I didn’t want to wake you.”

  “Right,” she said, and he could tell that she had seen through his excuses. She was right, too. He had bailed. They had both got very drunk, and he was embarrassed that he might have said something that he might have regretted. He was worried, too, that she might have regretted taking him to bed, and it had just seemed better to make a clean break. He knew that was cowardly.

  “I’d like to say this was a social call, but…”

  “You want something.”

  “My misper has gone AWOL again. I wondered if she might have gone back to London.”

  “To be with Mullins? I haven’t heard anything like that. We arrested him—him and his brother. They’ve been charged with conspiracy to supply.”

  “Remanded or bailed?”

  “Joseph’s in Pentonville, but they let Shayden stay out. He’s supposed to be living with his mum.”

  “Could you check? See if she’s with him?”

  “I’ll call you back.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  There was no answer. She had already ended the call.

  Atticus had just put Bandit into the back of the car when Jessica called him.

  “Any luck?”

  “He isn’t there. He told his mum he was going to stay with his dad. She spoke to him, and he says he hasn’t seen Shayden for weeks.”

  Atticus leaned against the side of the car. “So, he goes missing at the same time as Molly.”

  “It’s not a coincidence,” Jessica said. “I checked. He has been in Salisbury. His mum says he stole her debit card. She checked with the bank, and there was a transaction at Waterloo at nine fifteen on Thursday morning. The trains to Salisbury ran from Waterloo, and the amount on the card is the same as a single ticket. The next charge was at a cash machine in the Old George Mall.”

  “He came down to get her,” Atticus mused aloud.

  “And breached his bail,” she said. “He’s supposed to stay in London. His mum’s beside herself. I said I’d come and get him.”

  “You want a hand?”

  “Maybe,” she said, although her tone was still a little defensive.

  “I haven’t been over to see Molly’s dad yet,” he said. “That’s probably not a bad place to start. I could introduce you to him.”

  “What about this afternoon? If I left now, I’d be there at lunch.”

  That would depend upon whether the police were able to get into Burns’s drive, but there was no sign of that happening just yet.

  “That ought to be fine.”

  Atticus gave her his address and said that she should give him a call when she was near so that he could suggest somewhere to meet. They finished the call, and Atticus opened the driver’s door and dropped inside. He looked back at the house, wondering where Derek might have gone.

  He started the engine, turned the car around and set off back to Salisbury.

  57

  Mack was filtering through a stack of outstanding emails when she heard a tap against the glass of the door.

  She turned. It was Atticus.

  “Can I come in?”

  She gestured that he should, and that he should close the door behind him.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked him.

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  “Your bruise is coming out nicely.”

  He absentmindedly touched his temple. “A little sore, but I’ll live.” He stood just inside the door; Mack could see that he was nervous. She tried to think of what to say, but couldn’t find the right words. She realised that she was nervous, too.

  “I…” Atticus began. “I, um… What happened last night. Look, I don’t know what you’re going to say, but I just want you to know that I don’t see it as a mistake. I could probably make a pretty good case that you took advantage of me, but—”

  “What? I didn’t take advantage of you!”

  Too late, she wondered whether he was being sarcastic. He was infuriatingly hard to read; being on the spectrum often meant that he said things that others would consider inappropriate, and the way that he occasionally spoke without inflection made it difficult to tell when he was speaking truthfully and when he was being sarcastic. Now was one of those times.

  Atticus was about to respond when they were interrupted by a knock on the door.

  “Come in,” Mack called out, grateful for the distraction.

  The door opened to reveal a middle-aged man in a crumpled grey suit.

  “DCI Jones?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Bob Oldfield. I’m the manager of the data forensics unit at South-West Forensics. You asked for a drive to be analysed?”

  Mack had availed herself of the unit’s assistance before. A suspect’s mobile phone had been
cracked, and a cache of illegal images uncovered. There were eight investigators together with examiners and technicians, and the team had a range of tools and software to extract and analyse data from electronic devices. Mack’s previous case had been assigned to a young female investigator, and she had hoped that she might have been given this case, too; it seemed not.

  Oldfield seemed to anticipate her disappointment. “You dealt with Bella Wilson before,” he said. “I’m her manager. I know the case you’re investigating—all over the news, isn’t it?”

  “It is.”

  “I decided, given that it’s obviously sensitive, that I’d better take this myself.”

  “Of course,” Mack said, already irritated with his presumptuousness.

  Oldfield aimed a glance at Atticus. “I’m sorry—you are?”

  Mack looked over at Atticus and saw him bristle. “This is Atticus Priest. He’s working on the investigation.”

  Oldfield shut the door and came inside. He was carrying a bag. He unzipped it, withdrew a flash drive and laid it down on Mack’s desk.

  “So,” he said. “Here we are. We’ve transferred the data from the drive you gave us to this.”

  “Was it encrypted?” Atticus asked.

  “It wasn’t.”

  “So what took you so long?”

  Oldfield frowned. “We only got it early this morning. And it’s not the same as taking it to a shop and asking for the data to be recovered. It’s forensic data recovery. The clue is in the ‘forensic.’”

  “He wasn’t suggesting otherwise,” Mack said, sensing that Atticus’s temper was beginning to bubble up. Oldfield was clearly angling for praise, and Atticus would have no time for that.

  Oldfield continued, oblivious. “What we do wouldn’t be obvious to a civilian,” he said, laying emphasis on the last word. “The end result is the same—a list of files, of data—but the way we get there is different. It’s important. If this were your hard drive and I buggered it up, the worst thing that could happen is you lose your data. If I bugger this up, maybe your defendant’s brief is slippery and finds an error and then, boom, the defendant gets off.”

  “I appreciate the thoroughness,” Mack said, mollifying him as best she could. “Perhaps you could tell us what you’ve found?”

  “I’ll show you. Could I borrow your machine?”

  Mack nodded and moved out of the way. Oldfield inserted the drive into the port of Mack’s computer and tapped the keyboard to wake the screen. Mack saw an open window that listed a single file.

  160681/Drumcliff/RM.jpeg

  “It’s a scan of a photograph,” Oldfield said.

  “Have you looked at it?”

  “Just briefly, to make sure it wasn’t corrupted. It’s not.”

  Mack looked over at Atticus and saw a gleam of excitement in his eye. He wanted to look at it.

  “Thank you, Bob,” she said, taking the hint. “I appreciate how quickly you’ve turned this around.”

  Oldfield bid them goodbye and left the room.

  Atticus came around the desk to stand beside her and pointed at the screen.

  “Open it.”

  Mack closed the blinds and double-clicked the file, and a photograph appeared. They were looking at what appeared to be a modestly sized bedroom. There was a bed, a chest of drawers that held a lamp and an old-fashioned cathode ray TV set, and an open fireplace covered by a wire mesh guard. The walls were covered in floral-print wallpaper. The view out of its single window suggested it was on the first floor of a building, with rooftops and the spire of a church visible through the glass. It would have been unremarkable save for the two men standing in front of the window and the two people—a man and a woman—who were on their knees before them, facing the camera. The men were dressed in black, and both held pistols that were pressed down so that the barrels rested against the tops of the heads of the kneeling couple. The man and the woman had their hands linked behind their heads and stared into the lens of the camera with a mixture of fear and hatred. The men with the pistols were both grinning.

  Mack turned to look at Atticus. He was staring at the photo intently. He leaned in closer to the screen, as if greater proximity might grant him the opportunity to identify the people in the shot.

  He held his finger over the armed man on the left. “Recognise him?”

  Atticus withdrew his finger so that Mack could examine the man more closely. She guessed that he was in his early twenties, with a solid build and a mop of thick black hair. His grin was especially wide, an exultation that was incongruous given the plight of the couple in front of him.

  “Alfred Burns?”

  “It is,” Atticus said. “Definitely. Much younger.”

  “He still has his leg.”

  “He lost it in Northern Ireland.”

  “So you think this was taken there?”

  Atticus pursed his lips as he examined the photograph. “How old would you say he is?”

  “Early twenties?” Mack suggested.

  He nodded his agreement. “He enlisted in 1976, when he was nineteen. He’s older than that in the photo—right?”

  She nodded.

  “Burns did his first tour in Belfast in ’79 when he was twenty-two, and the bomb was in ’82 when he was twenty-five. On that basis, I think we can assume that this was taken somewhere in Northern Ireland between ’79 and ’82.”

  “Fine,” she said. “So who are the others?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. We need to identify four people.”

  “Four?”

  “Yes,” he said, as if that was obvious. “The man next to Burns and the two on the floor.”

  “The fourth?”

  “Someone took the photograph.”

  “Of course,” she said. She pointed to the filename that ran across the top of the image. “That’s got to mean something.”

  Atticus read aloud.

  “160681/Drumcliff/RM.”

  “160681,” Mack said. “That must be the date.”

  “Sixteenth of June, 1981,” Atticus mused. “That would make him twenty-four. It fits.”

  “‘Drumcliff’?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “RM? Initials?”

  Atticus shrugged. “Don’t know.”

  Mack ran her fingers through her hair; it felt like they had made progress, but the way ahead was blocked. “This is frustrating.”

  Atticus didn’t respond and, when he did speak, it was as much to himself as it was to Mack. “What do we know? That’s Alfred Burns, most likely in Northern Ireland in 1981. The photograph was on a drive that was hidden in Burns’s flat. He’d just received a large amount of money, and someone broke into his flat looking for something. I think it is reasonable to assume that someone in the photograph was being blackmailed. My money would be on either the other man with the gun or whoever took the picture.”

  “Or both of them,” Mack said.

  “Yes—or both.”

  “What about the man who attacked you in Burns’s flat? Could he be one of them?”

  Atticus paused, thinking. He pointed to the man next to Burns. “How old would you say he is?”

  “Mid-twenties?”

  “Give or take. If we’re right on the date, then that’s forty years ago. He’d be at least sixty-five now. The man last night was much younger than that.” Atticus moved Mack aside, leaned over and opened her email browser and emailed the picture to himself. “I’ll look at it in the office. I have some software that I can use to clean it up a little.”

  Mack ejected the drive and stood. “I’ll show this to the team. Do you want to be there?”

  “Can’t,” he said. “My misper has gone missing again, and it looks like her boyfriend broke bail to come down from London to get her. The investigator who was looking for him is on her way now. I’m supposed to meet her at lunch.”

  “The investigator from before? The same woman?”

  Mack felt a blush of jealousy and was annoyed w
ith herself for her inability to suppress it. Atticus read it in her face immediately, but, just as always, had no idea how to respond to it. Instead, he got up and made for the door.

  “Tell me if you get anywhere with the photo,” he said.

  “Ditto,” she said.

  He left the room and, as the door closed behind him, she realised that they hadn’t finished talking about what had happened between them.

  58

  It took Jessica three and a half hours to drive from London to Salisbury. She had timed her departure to avoid the end of the rush hour, but there had been an incident on the A40 and then another on the M3, and it was just after one in the afternoon when she saw the spire of the cathedral poking through the damp mist that had not yet relinquished its grip on the hills and fields around the city.

  She found a car park, slotted her car into a space and paid for three hours’ parking. She took out her phone and checked the address that Atticus had given her. The offices of Priest & Co. were on the nearby New Street. The rain was hammering down on the windscreen and, despite what looked like a short walk, she knew that she was liable to get soaked if she didn’t wear her waterproof. She hurried around to the boot and opened it, moving aside her kit—a pair of rigid cuffs, her MPS flak jacket, a can of dog deterrent spray—and fetched out her waterproof. She tugged it over her head, locked the car and, with her phone in hand, followed the map to New Street.

  Salisbury reminded her again just how pretty it was. There were ugly parts—the nineteen-eighties multistorey car park to her right was a dreadful addition—but the majority of the architecture, protected by council regulations that forbade anything tall enough to disrupt the view of the cathedral, was beautiful. She followed a line of centuries-old buildings until she reached a hairdresser’s salon and a bridal shop. There was a passageway that led between the two businesses, and she turned into it, grateful for the shelter that it afforded from the rain. She passed through the passageway into a courtyard that was ringed by buildings, each accommodating a small business. There was a flight of metal stairs to her right that led up to an external landing, which, in turn, served two doors. She climbed the steps and looked through the door to the right. A dog started to bark from inside; she remembered that Atticus had mentioned that he had a dog, and guessed that she was in the right place.