The Swap Skills Killer Read online

  In fact, Jake’s father knew of the murders and was the DSupt. involved with the case. He would get Frank over to the station and see what he could remember about the case, if anything, as it had been a long time, and his memory was not so good these days.

  CHAPTER 13

  Frank was jubilant when DSupt. Oliver Blackwell rang him to go down the police station to get their heads together relating the old investigation. He remembered it briefly but he was sure that looking through the files would help jog his memory.

  Frank Hammond arrived at the incident room; it brought pleasant memories back to him. The place appeared brighter and modern, new filing cabinets and desks and new fancy glass stand storyboards, but the smell of sweat, smelly socks and night duty bottom was the same. The thing that hit him was how young the uniformed officers looked; he reckoned that they all looked like they had bum fluff on their chins.

  The noise got to him, the incessant ringing of the telephones, and the shouting across the room and the opening and shutting of the drawers and filing cabinets drove him nuts.

  There he saw DSupt. Oliver Blackwell, his saviour, who had been working on the same old case with him fifteen years ago. He had gained a few pounds, grown salt and pepper hair, but he had still more hair on his head than bristles on his wife’s solid silver set hairbrush. He always put the benefit of a good head of hair down to his liking of scorched wholemeal toast and honey of which he indulged in every morning.

  “Hello Frank, glad you could drop by, not too soon either not seen you in a while have we?”

  “Wonderful to see you again Oliver, here’s a couple of freshly baked plum breads from Maria, for us to have with a brew when its refreshment time and half a pound of butter to spread on it as an extra indulgence as Maria won’t let me butter it at home.”

  The case was similar, women went missing and were savagely raped, murdered and were found in the same dump area off the Horncastle Road.

  “What do you think Frank, same modus operandi, hit with blunt object, hard enough to knock them out but not enough to kill them, beaten and tortured, stabbed in the heart and raped post mortem, dumped here? Same thing with the staging and earth in the mouth too.”

  Frank had a familiar crawling sensation across the top of his head and felt shudders down his spine. Nevertheless, if it were the same killer why had he waited fifteen years to kill again?

  Why had he come out of the closet now, change in his circumstances? Memories flooded back to Frank, he nearly lost his life back then when he came across the killer. He pounced out of a closet, and came up behind him, bashed him on the head with a mallet. DSupt. Blackwell and the Task Force saved the day by stopping him finishing him off. The killer escaped out of the back door and across the fields to freedom and was never seen again.

  Frank felt all the horror coming back to him and brooded to himself “God help us if this is the same man.” The press were already having a field day over another body found, and fear mongering that it might be a copycat killer as the killings fifteen years ago were in the press, giving all the sordid details. They decided to go to see the Forensics Pathology lab later to see the autopsy results and speak to the crime scene investigator.

  At that point, DSupt. Douglas Farmer stomped into the room at the same time as Jake and Amelia. No one had confidence in Farmer since bad feeling had built up on a previous case. Every time he opened his mouth, it was negative and pessimistic and he did not have two kind words for anybody. In addition, he was peeved that Gemma Fletcher would not cooperate with him.

  DSupt. Farmer stormed across the room firing a barrage of questions. “Anything new on the storyboard? Anything new on the Gemma Fletcher case? Do we have a face to the other body yet? Have descriptions of clothing worn and belongings gone out to press? Furthermore, who is this?” rudely pointing a finger at Frank Hammond.

  Jake stepped forward, and promptly replied. “Firstly, this is Frank Hammond, retired Detective Superintendent Hammond on job fifteen years ago when a Serial Killer smacked him on the head, and left him for dead. The MO is similar to the killings DSupt. Frank Hammond and DSupt. Blackwell dealt with fifteen years back. Secondly, I have Adam Forrest the Development Manager from the Forum working on the Swap Skill Site database.

  “Well, I want…” DSupt Farmer said.

  Jake frowned and cut him off short. “Please don’t interrupt me when I haven’t finished speaking. Thirdly, do you think you have the right to come in here and bark orders at us in that tone of voice? Frank here happens to be my father, and no one talks to him like that. You are not in bloody Derbyshire now you know and I don’t know how you have the audacity to think you can do that. We adhere to codes of conduct and we talk to each other in a civilised manner, no matter how stressed or worked up we are.”

  “Err, well, I did not mean to upset anybody, please accept my apologies as I know I can get a bit tetchy sometimes, and why doesn’t the Fletcher girl want to speak with me.” Farmer said.

  “Doesn’t like your bloody attitude and neither do I,” Jake barked.

  Oliver tried to calm things by saying that he had got the house-to-house team out to go through the listings of service users on the swap site, to see who had been doing swaps with who, and were they successful or not. Had anyone spoke to Penny or knew about any swaps she had done previously, or any problems arising from any of the swaps.

  CHAPTER 14

  Jake and Amelia entered the Morgue to the low background sound of Hip Hop from an IPOD placed on a shelf above Natalie’s desk. Jake knew that they had to go through the autopsy and DNA gathering process urgently to progress the case. The bodies were laying on the tables, and had the ‘Y’ cuts and an assistant pathologist was just cleaning them up.

  Jake always felt eerie when visiting the Morgue, it was as if the bodies were crying out to tell him what happened to them. He sometimes got hunches during or after he had visited, and sometimes, more often than not, it lead onto something positive.

  His mother always told him that since he was a child he had a sixth sense, knew when the phone was going to ring and stand there waiting, knew when his mum and dad were going to get sick. His mother told him he could use this talent at work in his investigations. He vowed not to broadcast it because he did not want people to think that he was a weirdo, so he put it all down to a police officer’s hunch. Jake hated weird people, he liked to think he was normal, but he knew that he had “The Gift” as his grandmother would call it.

  Doctor Natalie Brown, the best-looking pathologist this side of Lincolnshire, was hunkered down relishing her sandwich whilst flipping through paperwork at her desk, her body swaying to the sound of Hip Hop. She stood up to greet them, knew that the low background music would chill Jake as he knew one of the cadavers. Jake told her to sit down to finish her lunch, and that they would wait.

  “God knows how you can eat when you are doing an autopsy, it makes me want to honk just thinking about food.” Jake said.

  “All in a day’s work. Jake you know it’s not the body, blood and gore of the autopsy itself that bothers us, it’s thinking of what the bastards have done to them, and whether they were alive when they sustained these atrocious injuries that puts us off our food,” Natalie said with a mouthful of cheese sandwich and her hand plunged in her crisp packet.

  “Well the smell definitely puts me off my food, it smells like rancid butter and stinky blue cheese, or is that your sandwich” Jake replied.

  “Get over it you wimp, and get your Vick’s Vapour Rub on your top lip,” said Amelia laughing and trying to take his mind off Penny.

  He glanced round the room and saw the waist high aluminium tables, slanted to facilitate blood drainage as well as plumbing to wash away bodily fluids. There were white dissection trays, jars lined up of liquids with labelled specimens. The white clinical feel along with the shine of stainless steel and smell of chemicals and coffee always sent shivers down his spine, and he would never get used to it as long as he was in this job.


  He always disguised the morgue odour with a touch of Vick on his top lip under his nose as it took the smell of death away. Natalie’s cheese and onion sandwich wafted across the room, the thought of her eating turned his stomach.

  “Erm, right Natalie we will get kitted up in our bunnies whilst you eat your food and then you can update us on your findings,” Jake said.

  He did not particularly want to see Penny carved up but the victims were on the tables and the autopsy was complete with the ‘Y’ shaped incision.

  Natalie walked across to them and announced, “I know this is going to be hard for you Jake as Oliver rang and told me you identified the first victim as your sister in law. As you can see, the modus operandi and signature are same on both victims. They have been bludgeoned on the head with what looks like the indent of a crowbar; the beating to the head was not the cause of death.

  The victims were tortured with what appears to be indentations of nippers, and they have bruises on their thighs, and their faces beaten and swollen, very sadistic perpetrator who finished them off by two stabs to the heart. The only difference is that Penny did not have vaginal mutilation; this other one had torn vagina resembling raw liver and tools of torture inserted into her. They were both raped post mortem, and soil shoved into their mouths. He had picked their legs up and rested them on rocks by the indent and bruising on the calves.

  “Natalie, we believe the modus operandi is same as an unsolved case that took place fifteen years ago in the same dumping ground. Oliver is looking into it now. My father was Chief Super at that time, and he nearly lost his life. Fearless Frank was his nickname at the nick” Jake professed.

  Jake could smell another scent that was strange to the morgue and at that moment at the side of Dr Brown Penny appeared holding something on a glass tray. She smiled at him with compassion whilst looking down at herself asking him to help her. She was leaning over her own cadaver and handing the dish to him, offering him what looked like wrapped rock; she was giving him a sweet. Jake cast a glance around the room to see whether anyone else had noticed the apparition of his sister-in-law, but no one else had seen her. She was trying to contact him, a message or something, and then she disappeared as quickly as she came to him.

  He leaned down to the body on the table and whispered “Alright Penny I will find the person that has done this to you, I know you are trying to tell me something and I can feel and smell something but can’t quite get it at the moment. Be assured I will get your message so do not worry yourself over it. I promise you I will look after Jeremy for you and we will put behind us all this silliness. You rest in peace and we will find the person that has done this, I promise you.”

  Amelia trembled “Jake you aren’t half putting the shits up me, whatever are you on about. Are you talking to Penny? If so, I don’t know whether you have noticed but she is stone dead, you are going to be waiting a long time before she answers.”

  Natalie Brown laughed and uttered, “Amelia you haven’t been to the Morgue with Jake before have you, he gets all his best hunches here, that’s why Oliver sends Jake. Oliver says dead people talk to him.”

  Amelia cocked her head. “No way, is that true Jake.”

  Jake admitted with a nod. “Yes it’s true. She was urging me to take a sweet, and there was a sweet aromatic smell, like some sort of spice or herb. I can’t make head nor tail of it at the moment but it will come to me,” Jake declared.

  “Oh now it feels real creepy and I can’t wait to get out of here. I have this eerie feeling a cadaver is going to jump out of the freezer at me, and I won’t dare open the fridge at home tonight – I’m well spooked,” Amelia quaked.

  CHAPTER 15

  He tried to concentrate on watching the Forum but the traffic was passing by, honking of horns, music blaring from one of the cars parked on the other side of the road. He could smell chips and hot dogs from the burger van parked in the lay-by further up the road. He could not stand the smell of fried food, it made his stomach turn, and he grilled all his food because he had to think about his heart. The only fried food he would partake of was Fish and Chips, and that was the occasional treat when he went to the seaside.

  Harry Mason sneakily watched from his car parked across the street. He was eating a very boring ham salad sandwich, which had onions and salad cream on, when he had distinctly asked for no onions. He absolutely hated onions and it enraged him that people could not obey simple instructions when he asked for no onions. He had a good mind to take it back but he did not particularly want to get himself noticed unnecessarily. He watched people walking in and out of the Forum. He took note of the different people that went in and out.

  He strolled across the road and into the Forum and asked the receptionist seated there filing her nails, whether he could speak to the person in charge of volunteering.

  It was a nice reception area, two trendy red comfortable couches with a light oak coffee table with an assortment of magazines. A pile of volunteer application forms placed on it to urge people to sign up immediately.

  Rachel Hammond sitting at a nearby desk overheard his request so she got up and went and introduced herself. He instantly turned on his charm and asked whether he could sign up as a volunteer for the Forum and join in upcoming events and outings. Amelia then asked him to take a seat and fill in a short application form and then when she had finished off what she was doing she would tell him all about the Forum.

  “Hi my name is Harry Mason; I wonder whether I could sign up as a volunteer for the forum. I have more than a couple of days free a week that I am sure you could put to good use.”

  “Certainly, here’s a Volunteer Application Form, can you fill this in please. You can take a seat over there if you want to fill it in now.”

  He had to give his name and address, contact number, e-mail address. The types of events he was willing to take part in, e.g. day trips, marketing events, fund-raising, leaflet dropping, etc. References if he had undertaken work as a volunteer for any other voluntary organisation of charity.

  He was so glad they did not do a Criminal Record Check as it would bring up his background, and he was no angel, and it would have shown up that he had been inside for a couple of stints when he was younger, and that would go against him.

  He shuddered suddenly, it brought back awful memories of thin mattresses and old sheets, the dampness in the air, and the night whispers, yelling and moaning of fellow inmates and the disgusting food. He never wanted to live that life again, that’s why his research and planning was a reiterative cycle.

  Rachel gave him her business card and informed him that they were quite busy but if he did not hear back from her within a week to give her a call.

  A couple of days later the killer, Harry Mason, went to the Forum and asked whether they had processed his paperwork and were there any particular jobs that he could volunteer to do immediately. Rachel said that he could help with the mailing, sticking stickers on envelopes and placing flyers in ready for the office junior to frank and take to the post office.

  They took his enthusiasm to be that he was happy to be able to do some volunteer work. The killer was just interested to find out more about the Hammonds as it had been in the press about the killings and the name Penny Hammond came up, and that she had been a part time volunteer at the Forum, managed by her sister in law Rachel Hammond. It also mentioned that Rachel’s father was a retired police officer in Horncastle who was involved in a similar case before his retirement.

  He remembered that Hammond was one of the police involved in his work fifteen years ago, and if he had not hit Frank Hammond over the head and legged it out of the place they would have caught him. It was too much of a co-incidence not to investigate.

  All this investigatory work was making him feel hungry, and it was well over his lunch break so he asked Rachel if he could take his break now.

  As he galloped to the sandwich shop, he could imagine the layers of light crispy pastry on the Danish and he could smell t
he fresh baked crusty rolls. As he stepped through the door, he spotted the dopey girl that served him last time and hoped that one of the other customers took her turn.

  He glanced along the display and there was an array of buns to choose from assorted muffins, tarts, egg custards, apple charlottes, brownies and two trays with slices of quiche, sausage rolls and other savouries.

  When it came to his turn, unfortunately the dopey girl served him. A creature of habit he ordered his usual, which was either a cheese salad or a ham salad, but decided on ham today.

  “Can I have a ham salad, please? No onions on my salad sandwich this time, the other day you gave me onions when I distinctly asked you to leave them off the salad. I dislike onions immensely, they make your breath smell and give you indigestion and they play havoc with my stomach giving me wind.”

  The dopey woman said snappily, “Well, they don’t me darling, my old mam used to say they kept the germs away. In fact, she always put half an onion on the toilet windowsill to stop germs, and said it worked better than any disinfectant. Anyway duck you should have brought it back and we would have made you another one.”

  “It doesn’t matter, just get it right this time, please, and don’t call me duck, if I were a duck I’d be quacking my order across the counter,” he replied crossly.

  “That’ll be two pounds eighty pence. Here you can have a free egg custard tart to go with your lunch as I gave you onions on your sarnie last time perhaps that will put a smile on your face.”

  He slapped his money down hard on the counter, grabbed his sandwich and the free tart, and stormed out of the shop, without a word.

  The dopey assistant was glad to see the back of him, he repelled her, and he reminded her of one of the men that tried to rape her in the women’s toilets in Ibiza a few years back. She decided if he ever came into the shop again she would head for the kitchen and prepare an extra container of salad.