Death Track Read online

  Death Track

  Sally Rigby

  Top Drawer Press

  Copyright © 2019 by Sally Rigby

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This story is a work of fiction. All names, characters, organisations or places, events and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to any persons, alive or dead, events or locals is almost entirely coincidental.

  Edited by Emma Mitchell of @ Creating Perfection.

  Cover Design by Stuart Bache of Books Covered

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  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Read more about Cavendish & Walker

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Sunday, 9 June

  Detective Chief Inspector Whitney Walker sucked in a breath and let off six successive shots at the target facing her. It was impossible to see how accurate she’d been from where she stood, but she was confident she hadn’t missed.

  ‘Cease fire,’ the instructor shouted at the ten officers lined up in the individual booths of the shooting range.

  She’d spent the last three days on a firearms training course, and today was their final assessment. She had a good eye when shooting, and even though she rarely used it in her job, she made sure to keep up to date.

  She was hoping to finish early so she could get in an extra visit to her mum and brother, Rob, both of whom had recently moved into care facilities following her mum’s dementia diagnosis several months ago, which meant she couldn’t look after her brother who had brain damage and was unable to fend for himself. Whitney resented having to move them, but her job made being a full-time carer impossible. The guilt was horrendous, but she knew they were in the right places.

  ‘Don’t move while I check your targets,’ Ray, their trainer, yelled.

  She pulled out her phone to see if she’d missed any messages, as her phone had been on silent. There was one from her Detective Sergeant, Matt Price. Please call. Urgent.

  Damn. It had to be serious if he was messaging. He’d never been one to overdramatise or panic.

  ‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ she said to Jeff, the guy in the next booth, as she hurried past him and made her way out of the range.

  She pushed open the side door leading to the training centre’s car park, and once outside, she called Matt.

  ‘It’s me,’ she said when he answered.

  ‘Sorry to bother you, guv. A teenage boy’s been found dead on a train. Knife attack.’

  ‘Shit. Do we know what happened?’ Her body tensed. A murdered kid. It didn’t get worse than that.

  ‘No. All we know at this stage is he was found on the Newcastle to Lenchester train. I’m on my way to the station now. I wanted to let you know straight away.’

  A knife attack on a teen was going to attract media attention, and as much as she trusted her DS, this wasn’t something she would allow him to handle alone.

  ‘I’ll meet you there. I’m about forty minutes away.’ Leaving the training before the end wasn’t ideal, but there was no alternative.

  ‘Are you sure? What about the course?’

  ‘Leave it with me.’

  She ended the call and returned to the range, heading straight to where Ray was examining the targets. ‘I’ve just had a call from one of my officers. I’ve got an emergency to deal with,’ she said as he glanced up from the pile of targets he was examining.

  ‘You haven’t finished the assessment. Don’t you have people who can work on it for you?’

  ‘Normally, yes. Not this time.’ She debated telling him about the murder, then decided against it. It wasn’t relevant, and she really didn’t have time.

  ‘I can’t pass you unless you complete all the course components.’ The trainer shook his head.

  ‘Can I come back and take the remainder another time?’

  If she didn’t, she knew her immediate boss, Detective Superintendent Jamieson, would come down on her for wasting police resources. These courses were expensive, and he hadn’t wanted her to go in the first place. He believed that, as a DCI, she should be more involved with the metrics and algorithms of twenty-first century policing, rather than what was happening at a grass roots level. She disagreed. Which wasn’t surprising, as there was little on which they saw eye to eye.

  ‘Give me a call and we’ll see what we can arrange,’ Ray said.

  ‘Thanks. I appreciate it.’ She flashed him a smile.

  Why did criminals seem to sense when she had personal plans? She not only had to leave the course, which she was loving, but she had to cancel her family visits, with no idea when she’d be able to rearrange them. Murders took precedence over everything else.

  Chapter Two

  Sunday, 9 June

  Whitney drove down the side road leading to the rear of Lenchester’s railway station. She parked in one of the empty taxi rank spaces. Officers had been strategically placed at all the entrances, not allowing anyone in. Closing the station on a Sunday shouldn’t be too much of a problem, and she was sure they could arrange bus transport back to the city from the next station on the line. Tomorrow would be a nightmare for commuters and traffic, though, if it remained closed. But until she’d assessed the scene, she couldn’t make a decision on how they were going to deal with it.

  There was a cordon around one of the trains, and a police officer was standing on duty.

  ‘Morning, Beth. How’s it going?’ she asked the constable.

  ‘Everything’s in order, guv. I was first officer attending. DS Price is here, speaking to the Station Manager, and the pathologist is on the train.’

  ‘Have the British Transport Police been here?’ She didn’t want the BTP involved, however much they wanted to be. This was her investigation.

  ‘Not to my knowledge, guv.’

  ‘Good.’

  Whitney checked all the relevant steps had been taken to secure and protect the scene from unnecessary evidence contamination, then scanned the log to see who’d been allowed into the scene, signed it herself, and walked towards the train. As she got closer, she saw Matt talking to a grey-haired man in a suit. When Matt saw her, he came over. He still had a slight limp from the gunshot wound he’d received a few months ago when he was acting as a decoy in a sting operation to catch a vigilante seeking revenge on men who groomed young girls on the internet.

  ‘Sor
ry to drag you away,’ he said.

  ‘No problem. Tell me what you know.’

  ‘This is the journey’s end, so the conductor was checking everyone had got off, when he found the body. It was the fast train from Newcastle, stopping at Leeds, Coventry, Banbury, and terminating here.’

  ‘Any witnesses?’

  ‘None, so far. By the time the train arrived at Lenchester, there weren’t many people on board.’

  ‘Are any of them still here?’

  ‘Unfortunately, not. The body wasn’t found until everyone had left the train. The victim was in the last carriage to be inspected.’

  Coincidence? Or well planned?

  ‘We’ll put a call out for passengers to get in touch,’ she said. ‘What about the conductor?’

  ‘Stanley Crabtree. He’s in the manager’s office at the moment. In shock.’

  ‘I’ll need to speak to him.’

  ‘He knows that. I’ve asked him not to leave until after we’ve interviewed him.’

  She nodded. The conductor may have been the last person to see the boy alive. He could be a person of interest, too. They’d need to background check him, a-sap.

  ‘Which pathologist is here?’

  ‘Dr Dexter.’

  Thank goodness for that. Claire Dexter was the best there was. She might have an awkward manner, but Whitney didn’t care. She was in a class of her own, and in cases like this it was imperative to have the best.

  ‘SOCO?’ she asked, hoping he’d organised for the scene of crimes officers to attend.

  ‘They’re on their way.’

  ‘Good. Take me to the body, then we’ll speak to Crabtree.’

  They walked along the platform to the last carriage. After pulling plastic booties over their feet and putting on disposable gloves, they stepped onto the train. It was old and had blocks of discoloured plastic seats with faded blue-and-green striped upholstery, all facing the same way. As they walked through, they came to two cream tables with seating for up to four people.

  ‘This way,’ Matt said as they headed to the rear.

  ‘A perfect spot to kill someone, as there’s no chance of anyone wandering through the train,’ she muttered to herself.

  ‘Stay where you are.’ The booming voice of Dr Claire Dexter brought them to an abrupt halt.

  In front of them was the Lenchester pathologist, whose looks belied her true personality. Smaller than Whitney’s five feet four inches, and rounder than the detective’s slight built, she had short red hair, which always looked like it could do with a comb, and she wore the most bizarre clothes imaginable. Always loud, and never matching. Peeping out from the neck opening of her protective suit was the collar of a bright orange shirt with purple spots. A pair of red and green enamel parrot-shaped earrings dangled from her ears.

  ‘Hello, Claire. What have we got?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s not pretty. Young boy. Stabbed in the heart region. Let me finish taking photos and you can come over.’

  Whitney swallowed hard. What the hell had happened?

  ‘Rigor?’

  ‘Not yet. But that’s hardly surprising seeing as he’s on a train and the murder only happened a short while ago.’ There was no mistaking the sarcasm in Claire’s tone. Some things never changed.

  ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’ She impatiently moved from foot to foot while the pathologist carried on taking photographs in the confined area.

  ‘You can come over now,’ Claire said as she stepped back from the double seat where the victim was situated, leaving room for them to move forward.

  Whitney headed over, with Matt following. The boy was leaning against the window, his face white and jaw relaxed. A smattering of freckles across his nose were a stark contrast to his pallor. It was as though they’d been painted on. To all intents and purposes, it looked like he was asleep, until her eyes fixed on the dried blood on the front of the grey sweatshirt he was wearing. She shuddered. He was just a kid. Fourteen, if that.

  There was a maroon and black rucksack on the seat beside him. ‘Have you photographed that?’ she asked, pointing to it.

  ‘Yes. It’s all yours,’ Claire said as she put away her camera and packed up her case.

  Whitney took hold of the rucksack and unzipped it, hoping to find some identification. Inside there was an iPad, a food container holding a half-eaten ham sandwich, an empty crisp packet, and the wrapper from a bar of chocolate. At the bottom was a dark-brown leather wallet. She opened it, and in one of the slots found a photo ID card from Westfield Independent School, in Banbury. The name on the ID was Hugo Holmes-Reed. She glanced at the card, at the smiling face, and then at the victim. There was no mistaking the likeness. It was definitely him.

  ‘Hugo Holmes-Reed.’ She shook her head and looked through the rest of the wallet. Inside was a train ticket with today’s date. ‘It looks like he got on at Coventry and was going to Banbury. He must have been going back to school, as he has an ID for Westfield.’

  She’d heard of the school but didn’t know much about it, apart from it being independent.

  ‘A Westfield boy. Good school,’ Claire said, nodding.

  ‘You know it?’

  ‘Of course. One of the top ten schools in the country. My brother went there.’

  Whitney shook her head. Of course he did. And no doubt the forensic psychologist, Dr Cavendish, who she worked with sometimes, would know the school, too. Whitney had suddenly surrounded herself with posh people. And it was just plain weird. That aside, this was the sort of case on which she could use George’s professional capabilities. Except she couldn’t call her now, as she was spending the weekend with her parents. Most inconvenient.

  ‘We need to contact his family. Hopefully his address will be in here.’ She went through the remainder of the wallet, but it wasn’t there. She then searched through the rest of his backpack but still no address, though she did find a mobile phone, which she dropped into an evidence bag. She’d take it back to the station for her resident research guru, the young Detective Constable Ellie Naylor, to check. She was trained in extracting information from mobile phones, which saved them enormous amounts of time, as it meant they didn’t have to send phones to the digital forensics unit and wait for their analysis. She’d also get Ellie to do a quick background check on the conductor.

  ‘Matt, contact the school and get the victim’s address.’

  ‘Yes, guv.’ He walked to the other end of the carriage.

  She glanced out of the window and noticed Jenny and Colin, two members of the forensics team, walking down the platform.

  ‘SOCO’s here,’ she said. ‘We’d better get out of the way and let them do their work.’

  ‘How come I don’t get the same treatment?’ Claire said, locking eyes with her and arching an eyebrow.

  ‘You love me being here. Who would you moan at, if I wasn’t?’ Whitney quipped.

  ‘If you say so,’ the pathologist replied, rolling her eyes.

  ‘When will you have something for me?’ she asked Claire.

  ‘You expect me to dignify that with a response?’ the woman said, shaking her head.

  ‘I’m not asking for an exact time. I know it depends on what you find. But I was hoping for something approximate, like tomorrow morning, maybe.’ She knew Claire wouldn’t give her anything concrete, but she asked anyway, just in case. Usually, she’d ask a question and Claire would refuse to answer.

  ‘Some time tomorrow, yes. I’m not committing myself to a time. I’ll be in touch when I’m ready.’ The pathologist dismissed her with a flick of the hand, picked up her equipment, and squeezed past her and Matt, who was heading back towards Whitney.

  ‘Did you contact the school?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. They gave me his address in Coventry.’

  ‘Let’s speak to Crabtree, and then we’ll head out to see his parents.’

  They left the train and went into the red-brick building housing the ticket office, waiting room, and station offi
ces. When they arrived at the room labelled “Station Manager”, Matt knocked and a man answered the door.

  ‘Mr Hughes, this is DCI Walker,’ Matt said, nodding in Whitney’s direction. ‘We’re here to speak to Stanley. Is he still with you?’

  ‘Yes. Come in.’ He held open the door and they walked through.

  ‘We’d like to speak to him alone,’ Whitney said as the manager was about to close the door.

  ‘Okay. When can we open the station again? Having it shut is playing havoc with our timetables.’

  She understood where he was coming from, but it hardly showed respect for the body of the young victim. That aside, she couldn’t answer his question until SOCO had done their work and her officers had started investigating. She also wanted to hear from Claire before a final decision was made.

  ‘Not today. We’ll be in touch to let you know.’

  ‘Can we at least move the train into one of the sidings? It makes it easier for trains passing through,’ he said, his tone impatient.

  ‘Once forensics have finished then, yes, it can be moved.’

  Moving the train would help preserve the crime scene and stop people going on board.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said as he opened the door and left the room.

  She walked over to where the conductor was seated at a round table with Matt.

  ‘I’m DCI Walker, from Lenchester CID,’ she said, holding out her warrant card. She sat on an empty chair next to her officer. ‘Please could you take me through exactly what happened.’