Behind Dead Eyes Read online

  Howard Linskey

  * * *

  BEHIND DEAD EYES

  Contents

  Letter Number Three

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Letter Number One

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Letter Number Two

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Howard Linskey has worked as a barman, journalist, salesman and catering manager for a celebrity chef. Originally from Ferryhill in County Durham, Howard now lives in Hertfordshire with his wife and daughter.

  HowardLinskey.com

  @HowardLinskey

  Facebook.com/howard.linskey

  By the Same Author

  No Name Lane

  THE DAVID BLAKE SERIES

  The Drop

  The Damage

  The Dead

  For Erin & Alison

  LETTER NUMBER THREE

  * * *

  Perhaps you think I’m a monster. Is that it?

  Maybe that’s why you’ve not been in touch. Have you read terrible things about me, Tom? Heard stories that disturbed you? None of them are true.

  I’ve done bad things of course, who hasn’t? None of us are saints. Let’s not bother to pretend we are. I know the one thing you truly understand is human frailty, Tom. I’ve had to account for my actions and I’ve paid a very heavy penalty for my misdeeds but I can assure you I never killed anyone.

  Did you believe the poison that drips from the pens of those so-called reporters? They’re not interested in the truth, none of them. They spend their lives wading through other people’s trash looking for dirt, turning over rocks to see what crawls out. And they have the nerve to call me names.

  The Lady-killer.

  What chance did they give me?

  Please see me. I’d visit you but clearly they won’t allow that. If we were to meet face to face, I’m certain I could convince you I am not the man they say I am. If you can look me in the eye and actually believe I am capable of such savagery, then I promise I won’t blame you for leaving me here.

  I think you are a truth-seeker, Tom, but you don’t seem to be at all interested in my truth. That’s disappointing.

  You are my last and only chance, Tom Carney. Please DO NOT continue to ignore me.

  Yours, in hope and expectation.

  Richard Bell

  1995

  Chapter One

  Tom Carney was having a very bad day. Maybe it was the new kitchen cupboard doors and the way they refused to hang straight or the boiler going on the blink again or perhaps it was the letter from a convicted murderer.

  No, it was definitely the boiler.

  He hadn’t owned the house long but it seemed virtually every part of the offending boiler had failed and been replaced at great cost, only for another of its components to buckle under the strain and cease to function. He should have got a new boiler when he bought the creaking old pile but funds were short then and virtually non-existent today, so he’d opted for the false economy of replacing it bit by bit instead of wholesale. How he regretted that now, as he stood tapping the pipes with a wrench in an attempt to knock the ancient thing back into life. Tom exhaled, swore and surveyed the stone-cold water tank ruefully. It came to something when a personal letter from a man who had beaten someone to death with a hammer was the least of his concerns.

  He went back downstairs and tried to phone the plumber again but the guy didn’t pick up. If events ran their usual course, Tom would have to leave several messages before the plumber eventually got back to him. He might then grudgingly offer to ‘fit him in’ towards the end of his working week. If Tom was really lucky, the bloke might even turn up on the actual day but he knew this was far from guaranteed.

  Tom recorded a message then picked up the letter from the hall table. The words ‘FAO TOM CARNEY’ had been scrawled on the envelope in large block capitals with a marker pen, above an address handwritten in biro. It was disconcerting to realise one of the relatively few people who knew where Tom lived these days was a murderer.

  For the attention of Tom Carney? Why not some other reporter? One who was actually still reporting, and not so disillusioned he’d turned his back on the whole bloody profession, to plough what was left of his money into renovating a crumbling money pit? This was the third letter he’d received from Richard Bell. Tom had read then studiously ignored the previous two, hoping one of the north-east’s most notorious killers would eventually tire of contacting him but, just like his victim, Tom had clearly underestimated the killer’s resolve.

  Bell was a determined man, but was he a psychopath? He read the letter again, surveying the handwriting for evidence of derangement but this wasn’t some rambling, half-crazed diatribe, scrawled in crayon and inspired by demonic voices. It was angry, and there was an undeniable level of frustration at Tom’s failure to engage with him, but that was all. Having singled Tom out, Bell presumably felt the hurt of rejection. The handwriting was neat enough and it flowed evenly across the page. Tom couldn’t help wondering if this really was the same hand that brought a hammer crashing down repeatedly onto a defenceless woman’s skull until she lay dead in the front seat of her own car? A jury thought so and the judge had told Bell he was a monster. Tom remembered that much about a case that dominated the front pages for days a couple of years back. Was Richard Bell insane, or was he really an innocent man; the latest in a long line of miscarriages of justice in a British legal system discredited by one scandal after another?

  Tom took the letter into his living room, if he could still accurately call it that with the carpet ripped up and tools scattered everywhere. He sat in the armchair and read it once more. Richard Bell’s message in all three of his letters was consistent and clear. He wasn’t mad and he wasn’t bad. He hadn’t killed his lover. Someone else had done that and he was still out there.

  Chapter Two

  Detective Sergeant Ian Bradshaw stared at the woman’s face and wondered what she had
looked like. Was she pretty once? He couldn’t tell from this photograph. No one could. Someone had done one hell of a job on her.

  All of the woman’s teeth had been pulled out with pliers and the flesh on her face burnt with a strong acid; sulphuric most likely, of an amount sufficient to scorch away the lips, nose, eyelids and the flesh from her cheeks, leaving discoloured skin that looked like it was part of a melted waxworks dummy. In a final brutal act, the tops of her fingers had been snipped off with pliers to prevent the collection of prints.

  Thankfully, these horrific injuries had all been inflicted post mortem. According to the report, the cause of death had been strangulation with a ligature of some kind. The victim would have had no knowledge of the gruesome things done to her to erase her identity. This might be some small comfort to her family but, since they would probably never be able to positively ID the body, tracing them seemed an unlikely prospect. In the absence of teeth, they’d had to resort to scientific analysis of the bones in order to put an approximate age to the corpse, which was estimated at somewhere between fifteen and nineteen years of age, according to the experts. This was all to do with the amount of cartilage present in the joints of the limbs, which transforms into bone as a body develops. The corpse was not yet fully matured, so they were attempting to identify a relatively young woman.

  The body had been found three months ago, following a tip-off about illegal goings on at a scrapyard with suspected links to some of the region’s shadier ‘businessmen’. The officers who attended had hoped to find drugs or money, but figured they would more than likely have to settle for stolen goods or perhaps the discovery of a hot car awaiting the crushing machine. They didn’t expect to find a body. They certainly weren’t ready for one missing its face.

  Predictably, the guy running the scrapyard swore he knew nothing about the body found at the back of his premises. The place was a vast out-of-town site with cars piled up all round it, so a heap of dead bodies could have been hidden in one of its messier corners without anyone spotting them. It didn’t stop them giving the guy a thorough going over.

  He had no idea why anyone would dump a body at his scrapyard.

  He had not been asked to dispose of it.

  He had no clue as to its identity, nor did he ever hang out with known criminals.

  Nobody believed him of course. Nathan Connor was a shifty and feckless loser with a minor-league criminal past, presumably granted custody of the yard for those very reasons. He would do as he was told without asking questions, but was he actually a killer? It seemed unlikely and, aside from the fact that he oversaw the yard where the body was dumped, there was nothing to link him to the murder.

  Efforts to trace his employer proved frustrating. They were able to interview one other man who was described as the owner but under questioning from the police he couldn’t remember too much about the place. It wasn’t long before he was dismissed as a front man, whose name was on the door and ownership papers, with no actual involvement in the day-to-day running of the enterprise, which was ideal for laundering cash and ridding its real owners of awkward items like a body. The detectives gave up trying to get anything more out of either man and they were released on police bail. The threat of a lengthy prison sentence was not as frightening a prospect as grassing up whoever really owned that scrapyard.

  Usually senior detectives in Durham Constabulary vied with one another for murder cases. They were rare in these parts and a successful conviction would be a feather in the cap that could ultimately lead to promotion. However, an unidentifiable victim meant the usual enthusiasm for a murder case was absent.

  The Detective Superintendent placed responsibility for the case with DI Kate Tennant, a newly promoted outside-transfer who was the only female detective on the force with a rank higher than Detective Constable. She was also bright enough to realise she had been stitched up like a kipper. Nothing in those intervening months had altered Tennant’s view, even if she steadfastly maintained an outward conviction that her team, which included DS Bradshaw, would ultimately solve a case that saw them plodding through a seemingly endless number of box-ticking enquiries for more than three months, with nothing in the way of concrete leads.

  How could they hope to solve this murder, Bradshaw wondered for the umpteenth time, if there were no witnesses, nothing from the usual public appeals, zero intelligence from sources in the criminal world and they could not even identify the victim?

  ‘What are you doing?’ he hadn’t noticed DC Malone’s approach until she was standing over his shoulder. He could tell she was perturbed to find him staring at images of the burned girl, as she had become known to them.

  ‘Looking at her photos.’ He deliberately included the word her.

  ‘Why are you looking at them?’ Bradshaw knew DC Malone thought he was just being ghoulish.

  ‘To remind myself,’ he said eventually as he stared at the blackened skin on the disfigured face, ‘that she used to be a person.’

  LETTER NUMBER ONE

  * * *

  You don’t know me, Tom, but I suspect you know my name. I’m infamous I suppose, ironically for something I did not do. I did not kill my lover and I think you can help me prove that.

  Two years ago I was convicted of murdering Rebecca Holt; a woman I was seeing. We were both married, so when the police told me she had been beaten to death I panicked and said we were simply friends. I have deeply regretted that lie ever since – because it was used to discredit me. I lied about that, so I must have lied about everything else, or so the story goes.

  There was no real evidence against me though. I was arrested by police officers too lazy to search for another suspect, prosecuted by a CPS who thought motive was everything, my name was blackened by journalists jealous of my success with women and I was convicted by a jury who wanted to punish me for my lifestyle.

  I read your book, Death Knock, and was mightily impressed. You solved a sixty-year-old mystery that baffled everyone else and it gave me hope. I haven’t had much of that lately.

  Visit me at HMP Durham. You’re only round the corner. Hardly anything of any real substance ended up in the newspapers and most of that wasn’t true. I can give you something no other writer has had: access to the truth. All I ask in return is that you keep an open mind.

  Yours sincerely

  Richard Bell

  Chapter Three

  The radio was on but it always crackled inaudibly in Tom’s car, unless it was tuned to a particular local station that only played adult-oriented rock. As Tom drove, Foreigner were loudly pleading with him to explain what love was.

  An upbeat jingle was followed by the affected transatlantic voice of the local DJ, who sounded part-Geordie-part-American as he read out a series of local events ‘coming your way this weekend’. Tom listened to a predictable weather forecast for autumn; cloudy and overcast, chilly with a strong likelihood of rain later then a traffic bulletin explained why he’d barely moved; road works in Durham city centre. It was the change of tone from the talk show host that captured his interest.

  ‘Our next guest is no stranger to this show,’ he announced solemnly. ‘Well-known in the region before he resigned as leader of Newcastle City Council earlier this year, Councillor Frank Jarvis has placed politics firmly on the back burner to undertake a very personal quest and he is here today to tell us all about it.’ The radio host paused. ‘Frank, a very warm welcome from everyone here and thanks so much for coming on.’

  ‘Thanks for having me, John.’

  ‘Would you like to tell us why you’re on the show?’

  ‘I’m looking for my daughter.’ The councillor spoke slowly, as if he was trying to control his emotions.

  Tom may not have been a journalist any more but he still devoured the news and recalled reading something about the politician in Newcastle who was worried about his teenage daughter. He was aware of Frank Jarvis too. The man was something of a firebrand, with an old-fashioned opposition to big business a
nd unrestrained urban development that set him aside from the modernists in his party.

  ‘Your daughter, Sandra?’ offered the talk show host gently, as if coaxing the details from his guest, ‘who is nineteen?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And she has been missing for some time now?’

  ‘Eight months,’ answered the politician flatly.

  That didn’t sound good. If she had been missing for that long the very best you could say was that she really did not want to be found. The worst-case scenario wasn’t worth contemplating. Tom didn’t hold out much hope for poor Sandra or her father.

  The radio host sighed in sympathy at the councillor’s plight. ‘That must be incredibly difficult for you and your family?’

  ‘It is,’ said Jarvis, ‘it has been a terrible time for my wife Elsie and I. I can’t tell you …’ He seemed to falter then and there was a silence for a moment. The dead air time seemed to stretch out and Tom found himself concentrating hard while he waited for the councillor to speak once more.

  ‘Take your time, Frank,’ his host told the former councillor but he was really urging him to say his piece.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ And Tom’s heart went out to the poor man. A politician lost for words? It would have been comical if it hadn’t been so tragic.

  ‘That’s absolutely fine, we all understand what you are going through right now,’ the host assured him. How could you, Tom wondered? ‘Perhaps you could begin by describing her.’

  There was another pause while Jarvis attempted to find the words. ‘Sandra is five feet five inches tall with long blonde hair. When she was last seen she was wearing jeans and a blue T-shirt, with white trainers and a dark brown coat.’

  ‘Now why don’t you tell us, in your own words, what happened on the day she disappeared?’

  ‘My daughter told us she was going out with some friends,’ he began. ‘She was in her second term of her first year at Durham University and was home with us in Newcastle during reading week. We thought she was staying with a friend and were expecting her back the following night but she never came home.’ When he said that Tom could clearly detect the disbelief in his voice, even after all this time.