‘Not inside, but outside. You can hardly see it, but Mr Hall showed it to me, it’s in the wall but it wasn’t working properly but there’s another one in the keypad on the front gate. Sometimes Mr Hall would see me and open the gate before I’d even put in the code.’
‘You said the front door was open when you arrived this morning, but what about the gate?’ Henley asked.
‘It was locked,’ said Odette.
‘You need to call Ezra,’ Henley told Ramouter as the police officers escorted Odette out of the café. ‘If the camera caught Odette going in, then it would have caught whoever Nathan Hall let in last night.’
31
Stanford stood in front of Eastwood’s desk searching for a clear space to place the cup of tea that he was holding. ‘Hello. Earth to DS Eastwood,’ he said loudly.
Eastwood looked up from her computer screen. ‘Why are you shouting at me?’ she asked.
‘I thought you might have been one of those people who literally drop dead at their desk.’
‘Not dead, just deep in thought about Fox-Carnell,’ she said, taking the tea from Stanford’s hand.
‘Thinking that there won’t be many people who will mourn her, but that there will be a lot of people saying she got what she deserved?’ Stanford pulled up a chair and sat down.
‘Last week, before Fox-Carnell turned up on our active cases pile, the guv asked me to go through all the applications that we’ve received from the other forces to see if any of them qualified as serial cases,’ Eastwood continued. ‘The majority of them were just other departments looking for an excuse to reduce their caseload but Sussex, Cleveland, West Midlands and Greater Manchester have all had a run of vigilante cases.’
‘Vigilante. Like Batman?’ Stanford sniggered.
Eastwood pursed her lips and fixed Stanford with a stare.
‘Jesus Christ, it was just a joke.’
‘No one has ever told you that you’re funny,’ Eastwood snapped. ‘The point is, I went down a rabbit hole with these cases. A lotof them were just your usual gangs of disgruntled dads hunting down and entrapping suspected paedophiles and grooming gangs. Sometimes they were bang on the money and there were successful arrests but more often than not, they targeted the wrong person or completely fucked up ongoing investigations.’
‘Fox-Carnell and Tabitha Ashcroft were neither paedophiles nor in a grooming gang. Fox-Carnell just had a penchant for knocking off her patients.’
‘But someone targeted her, Ashcroft and – from the looks of things – Nathan Hall. My point is that all three have something in common.’
‘The court verdicts,’ said Stanford.
Eastwood handed Stanford a printout. ‘February 2019, a man called Douglas Mantell was reported missing,’ said Eastwood. ‘He was last seen at a pub in Fairfield, Manchester. Two and a half months after his disappearance Mantell’s body was found in the Ashton Canal.’
‘Drunk man falls into canal. What’s that got to do with us?’ Stanford asked as the office door opened and Henley and Ramouter walked in.
‘Post-mortem report concluded that Mantell died from multiple stab wounds so Greater Manchester Police’s investigation went from a missing person to a murder. One that had no further leads until—’ Eastwood raised her wrist and checked her watch, ‘ninety-five minutes ago, when you were still in bed.’
‘What did you find, or shall I just call the boss over and you can do a big reveal?’ Stanford folded his arms.
‘Call her over,’ said Eastwood.
‘Douglas Mantell was acquitted of historical sexual offences on the day he went missing,’ Eastwood told them.
Henley stepped back and took in the full body photograph of Mantell’s waterlogged and slightly decomposing body on anexamination table like a macabre museum exhibit. ‘Who was he alleged to have sexually assaulted?’ she asked.
‘His daughter,’ Eastwood replied.
Ramouter tutted loudly with disgust.
‘How long was he in the canal for?’ Henley asked
‘Nearly three months but it was a record-breaking winter when Mantell disappeared. Temperatures dropped to −8°C, the canal was frozen over and he was basically entombed in ice. Post-mortem details multiple stab wounds but more importantly for us a 2.36 inch by 1.37 inch wound on his head.’ The image of the back of Mantell’s head filled the screen, the wound visible in the middle of his scalp. ‘Pathologist concluded that the wound was caused by a knife, but that’s not all.’ Eastwood tapped the board several times. ‘I found another case.’
A custody photograph of an Asian woman in her fifties filled the screen. The harsh, unflattering light brought out the anger in the woman’s eyes, her mouth fixed in a thin, unamused line.
