The Inspector Walter Darriteau Murder Mysteries - Books 1-4 by David Carter (microsoft ebook reader TXT) 📗

‘There, Guv,’ shouted back one of the SOCO guys, pointing to the windowsill, and the modern expensive phone that looked as if it had been abandoned to fend for itself.

‘Good,’ said Walter. ‘If we can’t mine a bucket load of information from this scene, we don’t deserve to be paid. None of you, that is!’ he shouted, and everyone knew that Walter Darriteau was angry.

This time the killer had made mistakes; he must have made mistakes.

‘And another thing,’ shouted Walter.

‘Yes, Guv?’ she said, trying to listen, while doing three things at once.

‘Get his phone records. I want to know who he’s been ringing, and who’s been ringing him.’

‘Yes, Guv, I’m on it,’ and Karen grinned at him as the adrenalin pumped through her body, reminding her of why she enjoyed her job so much, and why she enjoyed working with him.

‘Has he got an answering machine?’

‘Can’t see one, Guv.’

‘Mmm, well we can’t have everything,’ mumbled Walter, thinking of other things. Was Jago gay? Homosexual? Were the preachers closet homosexuals? The lonely fisherman too? Could be. Maggie O’Brien certainly wasn’t. The preachers had kids, not that that meant anything. No, it didn’t stack up. There must be something more. Why and where had the killer found Jago Cripps, and more pertinently, why had he ended his life?

He wondered what Cresta Raddish would make of this mess. She had said he would kill again, except she was stuck in the he-she thing nonsense, but she’d been right about the killing.

There was one tiny consolation, too late for the unfortunate Jago. At least it hadn’t been a child. But what about next time? What then? They had to catch him before that. They had to. Walter didn’t want a child killing on his hands. He had to catch him before that, and at that moment he knew there would be another ill spelt letter winging its way through the mail.

The gloating season was about to re-open.

‘And another thing, Karen.’

‘Yes, Guv. What?’

‘Find out if he had money worries.’

‘Sure, Guv.’

‘And another thing...’

Karen shook her head and half smiled and shared a look with a dishy SOCO guy and said, ‘Yes, Guv?’

‘I’ll tell you in a minute.’

Chapter Twenty-Five

Desiree Holloway came from an archetypal English middle class family, brought up in the green hills above Lancaster. Her father was a bank manager at the local branch of a Hong Kong-based bank. It was a steady job that paid well, and Desiree and her elder sister Louise wanted for nothing. Both of Desiree’s parents adored books, indeed dabbled with writing themselves, and both read stories to Desiree and Louise as soon as the infants were old enough to pay attention.

By the time they went to primary school, the sisters were competent readers and capable writers. It gave them a head start they would maintain all the way to university, and beyond. Louise became a maths teacher at the best school in Lancashire, while Desiree majored in the sciences in which she excelled.

When Desiree was fifteen, she discovered boys, and by the time she was sixteen, she’d discovered sex. When she was seventeen, she ran two passionate affairs, one with the nineteen-year-old head boy from the same high school, and the other with a twenty-three-year-old local builder who specialised in lowering the colours of the local fifth and sixth form young women.

Desiree wanted them for one thing.

Sex, and if they weren’t good at that, she’d cut them dead.

She was not a beautiful girl in the classical sense, but was comfortable with her striking looks. Her straight shiny black hair, parted in the centre, worn below her shoulders, and red tinged skin gave her an appearance of a native American. She rarely applied lipstick, she didn’t need to, indeed behind her back some of the more unkind pupils referred to her as Marcus’s squaw, Marcus being the blond tanned head boy who had a following all of his own.

Desiree didn’t waste a moment’s thought or sleep over spiteful gossip. There were far more important things to think about, and for so long as Marcus continued to cut the mustard, she would visit him after school at his house, where he would remove her school uniform before his parents came home.

In the previous two years she had discovered a great deal about herself, most of which had been enlightening, educational, and pleasurable, though one discovery troubled her, something that she could never discuss with anyone.

When she was nineteen, she walked through the school gates for the last time, never to return, and headed for university where she could be free. Marcus offered to write. Desiree declined, and wished him well in the future, and boarded the train out of town, armed with her straight A’s in Chemistry, Physics, Biology and Mathematics, and headed south for Liverpool, and the famous university there that majored in the subjects that were Desiree’s true loves.

She excelled at university in all things.

Bedded several of her contemporaries, and two tutors for good measure, but never once let her affairs and outside interests, few though they were, interfere with her work. Desiree Holloway was a high flier. Everyone knew that, including an aging professor by the name of Jack Robertson. He had been recruited as a talent scout way back by some faceless London organisation.

Jack recommended her, gave her his full five star rating, something he’d only ever awarded twice before. Once, years ago to a future prime minister, and once, more recently, to a highly-strung young man who turned round and murdered his lover, Julian, in a dispute over a darts score in The Eagle & Child.

In the mundane London office that peered out through dusty windows over the grey Thames, Jack Robertson’s recommendations were always treated seriously. A missionary was dispatched to the far away territories of the Duke of Lancaster, one Mrs Bloemfontein, a woman who bred roses and black Labradors, whose family had returned a generation before from the South African town that was famous for roses, and