Dead of Winter Tr (5 page)

The first officer on the scene had walked into a house of blood and butchery: one woman in the lounge, her naked body split open from her chest downwards; in the kitchen another woman . . . the
same. Upstairs, a little girl’s arterial blood dripped from the ceiling in the bedroom, her throat cut. The first officer at the scene was Callum Carmichael. The woman in the kitchen was his
wife Louise; the little girl upstairs was his daughter Sophie.

Carter followed Harding into Davidson’s office. Harding sat in a chair by the window, beneath the framed portrait of Davidson meeting a retired Prime Minister. Davidson
turned to see Bishop walking in behind them.

‘Trevor? You didn’t make the meeting?’

‘Sorry, got delayed. But it was worth it.’ He closed the door behind him. Davidson sat down behind his desk. Bishop put two A4 printouts on Davidson’s desk next to one another.
‘Let me show you. I ran a check on a print I found last night in Blackdown Barn. See the points highlighted in yellow? It’s a perfect match to one from a cold case.’

Davidson smiled. ‘Great result, Trevor. What was the cold case?’

‘This one—’ Bishop tapped his finger on the print to Davidson’s left, ‘was found at Blackdown Barn. And this one?’ He looked up at Davidson. ‘Found next
to the body of four-year-old Sophie Carmichael thirteen years ago.’

Carter was struggling with the name for a few seconds before the realization crossed his face and he turned to Trevor. ‘Sophie Carmichael? As in Inspector Callum Carmichael?’

Trevor nodded. Harding said nothing. She was watching Davidson’s reaction as he bent over the prints and his hands gripped the edge of the desk. Carter looked around at the others. His
eyes rested on Harding. She was still watching Davidson. He could see that she needed no reminding about the case. But then, he knew she had been there. She’d been the pathologist then.
Davidson looked up after what seemed ages. He had composed himself a little.

‘Do you have a name for me, Trevor?’

‘No, sir. But there is no doubt.’

‘There was someone in the frame for it at the time, wasn’t there, sir?’ Carter looked at Trevor and then Davidson. There seemed to be an awkward silence. Davidson didn’t
answer; he looked deep in thought. The room had become charged, poised. Trevor answered.

‘Maria Newton. She was the mother of the other woman murdered in the cottage along with Carmichael’s wife Louise. Her name was Chrissie Newton. She was there with her baby son Adam
who survived the attack. Maria Newton died before we could take her prints, two weeks after her daughter was murdered.’

‘Shall we allocate officers from the team to reopen the case, sir?’ Carter asked. Davidson still didn’t answer. He continued studying each photo in turn as if hoping to find a
discrepancy in the match; but he couldn’t. He glanced Harding’s way. She stared back at Davidson but gave nothing away. She knew, more than anyone else in the room, what this news meant
to him: not a great opportunity to clear up a cold case, especially one that he had failed to crack first time round. It meant his failings would be under scrutiny again.

‘No. Not at this present time. Not until we have something more to go on. We don’t have a name. We only have a match. We can’t spread our resources too thin. We don’t
have the money to chase up a cold case at the moment. We are stretched to the limit already.’

‘Sir?’ Carter waited. Bishop wasn’t hurrying to put the prints away. Everyone was waiting. ‘This is a hell of an opportunity, sir.’

‘Maybe . . . maybe.’

‘Sir?’ Carter looked confused. Harding and Bishop said nothing.

‘I will not be rushed into a decision. I need time to consider the implications of this. Before I am ready to reopen the Carmichael case I want to know what we are letting ourselves in
for.’ He looked around the room. No one was moving, everyone waiting for him to say more. He sat back in his chair. ‘You forget I was the SIO then too. We took on the case because we
felt we owed it to a fellow MET officer to handle the case within the MET. I thought I was taking on a fellow officer’s case and we would come out of it getting justice for him, but we
didn’t. We came out of it with two women and a child brutally murdered and seemingly the only person who could have done it was him. We came out of that case with more questions than we went
in with.’

Davidson stared down at the prints on his desk.

Bishop spoke; ‘It was difficult. Louise and Sophie weren’t meant to be there that evening. Carmichael was supposed to pick them up but he didn’t show. He was the first on the
scene the next morning. He said he arrived at about eleven. On that Saturday evening someone went to Rose Cottage and they brutally murdered everyone in the house except for the baby, who they left
sedated, perhaps they had plans for him and ran out of time.’ He shook his head. ‘This wasn’t a quick process. These women were butchered, tortured over many hours. Louise was
raped.’

‘Yes,’ Davidson agreed as he looked down at the prints on his desk. ‘And the only DNA apart from a handprint,
this
handprint—’ he pointed to the partial
palm, finger and thumb print on his right, ‘was Carmichael’s.
That
was everywhere in abundance. He was covered in his daughter’s blood. He said he moved her. But why would
a trained police officer do such a thing?’

‘Different when it’s your family, I suppose,’ said Carter.

Davidson shook his head, a worried man. ‘The more we looked into it the worse it looked for Carmichael. Things began to be uncovered about him. It turned out he was going through a bad
time. He’d been behaving strangely, out of character, before it happened. He was diagnosed with massive mood swings. He was ex-military. He had Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.’ Davidson
sighed. ‘Carmichael was our chief suspect for the murders at Rose Cottage. But we didn’t have enough evidence to charge him. He was in no state to tell us what happened. So, we
protected our own that day. We closed ranks. It left questions but no answers.’

‘Could he have done it?’ Carter asked.

‘Easily.’ Davidson nodded his head slowly. ‘Would have been very easy for a man trained like he was. He was in the Special Boat Service. He’d been held captive at one
time.’

‘Did he ever show signs of cracking beforehand’ sir?’

Davidson looked across to Harding for an answer.

‘No,’ she said. ‘But we know a lot more about Post-Traumatic Stress now than we did then. It could have come out at any time.’

‘And,’ said Davidson, ‘the women would have trusted him. Carmichael could have walked in, killed his daughter Sophie without anyone knowing and then come back downstairs and
killed the women. He could have been there all night. He had no witnesses to back up his alibi that he arrived the next morning. He could have been there all night.’

Carter shook his head. ‘What’s the motive, sir?

‘He inherited a lot of money when his wife died. Maybe that was it, or maybe he was not himself that night. Maybe he went in there with one of his military buddies, off his head with
drink, drugs, PTSD. It took a madman to do what someone did at Rose Cottage and Carmichael fitted the bill.’

‘What about Chrissie Newton’s mother? What made her a suspect?’ asked Carter.

‘She had known mental problems,’ said Bishop. ‘She was on medication and was volatile. She and Chrissie had fallen out in the weeks before Chrissie’s death. The scene
looked like a maniac had done it. People, the press, made assumptions that she had killed herself out of remorse for her actions and set her own house on fire.’ Davidson looked up at Harding
and then around the room at the others. ‘We let that presumption ride. Maria Newton died before we could verify that it was her print next to Sophie.’

Davidson gathered the prints together and pushed them across the desk to Bishop. ‘You can go, Trevor. I’ll let you know what we’re going to do about it in due course. And
Trevor? This whole conversation stays within this room, understood?’ Davidson looked at each person in the room and waited to get their individual agreement. Bishop nodded, picked up the
prints and left. Harding remained. She sat watching from the sidelines. Her top leg twitching. Davidson looked at Carter. ‘I want you to find out everything you can about Carmichael now. Go
and see him. He lives on a remote farm in Yorkshire. Find out what he’s been doing for the last thirteen years. He didn’t explain some things at the time. Find out why he moved his
daughter at the scene. He was a trained police officer – why would he move one of the bodies? I want to know what the state of his marriage was. If he was screwing someone I want to know . .
. ask around. Ask Robbo in Intelligence. He worked with Carmichael. Now, after all this time, people might be willing to open up. If there is anything about Carmichael we didn’t know thirteen
years ago I want it out now, do you understand, Carter?’ Davidson waited. Carter nodded.

‘I would like to send DC Willis down to Rose Cottage, sir. We need to get the whole picture.’

‘Okay, but DC Willis is to be made aware that the only leads we are looking for are ones that will help to solve the Blackdown Barn case. I repeat, I am not reopening the Carmichael case
at this stage. Understood?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Concentrate on the bodies we have now.’

‘I’ll go with her to Rose Cottage,’ said Harding.

Davidson looked over at Harding and Carter could see his mind working.

‘Do you think that’s necessary? Our priority is here.’

‘Any help I can give might be useful at this stage. I went there the first time round. It’s surely better to have her go with someone who worked on the case last time.’

Davidson nodded but he didn’t look pleased about it.

Carter left Davidson’s office and walked back down the corridor to the second largest office on the floor, the Major Incident room. It was the room where all the initial
calls came in and the information was loaded onto HOLMES, the central program which sifted and collated Major Incident data. The room had four long desks and housed eight staff in all, at the
moment there were just two: Robbo and Pam the civilian employee who answered the phone and logged the calls.

Robbo had worked in nearly all the departments within the ‘Dark Side’ of MIT17.

‘Did you hear about the print Bishop found?’ Carter sat down next to him and helped himself to the bag of Haribo sweets next to Robbo’s PC.

‘Yes. It’s a turn-up for the books.’

‘Any thoughts about it?’

‘Plenty.’ He pushed the plunger on his cafetière down and indicated that Carter could grab himself a mug. Robbo looked across to Pam to ask if she wanted coffee. Pam was the
woman Robbo’s wife had been convinced he’d been having an affair with at the last social. Robbo was flattered his wife thought he could still muster up some interest from the opposite
sex but Pam was happily married and Robbo had never been remotely tempted to stray in his twenty-three year marriage to Arlene.

‘We’re trying to put together a whole picture of Carmichael. You served with him, didn’t you? What kind of bloke was he?’

‘Yes, I served with him. There’s a few of us here that were around then: Davidson, Harding, Bishop, Sandford and me.’

Robbo had joined the Force at the same time as Davidson. They had worked together often along the way but while Davidson had flown up the ranks, Robbo had clipped his own wings. He loved what he
did and he knew he did it well but he would stay a DC because he couldn’t take the stress of being in command. He never sat the exams to take him any higher.

‘I didn’t socialize with him. He wasn’t one for going off to the pub after work. He was fanatical about the job: you got the feeling Tactical Firearms Inspector was the role
he’s been made for. Plus he had a huge knowledge about Intel work. I wish I had him working in here now. He was allowed access to stuff in the SBS, spyware that we can only dream of. There
was nothing Carmichael couldn’t hack into.’

‘I’ve been asked to look into the Carmichael case by Davidson.’ Robbo stopped pouring out the coffee and looked at Carter with an inquisitive expression.
‘Discreetly,’ clarified Carter. ‘So I need you to dig it all up for me; all the stuff they didn’t want to talk about at the time; all the things they
really
don’t want dug up now.’

‘That discreet, huh?’

‘Yeah . . . If they didn’t want me to they shouldn’t have given me the job. The first thing I want to do is look into who else was in the frame for it.’

‘There was Chrissie Newton’s mother Maria, who died in a fire.’

‘I need the report into that.’

Robbo wheeled his chair across to his PC. ‘Okay, I’ll get it for you now. I remember it at the time. She died two weeks after her daughter was murdered. I remember people trying to
interview her about it. She was barking. She had collected ten years’ worth of newspapers in her house, piled up in the rooms. The place went up like a matchbox. Okay . . . here it is . .
.’ He printed off the report. ‘Inconclusive, basically.’

Carter took the sheet from him and skim-read it. ‘Not obviously arson as in petrol through the letterbox. It was blamed on faulty electrics. She had antiquated wiring in her house. It
wouldn’t have taken much. The whole house was gutted and most of it fell down. It made for an impossible job forensically.’

‘Chrissie Newton’s father, James Martingale, was he in the frame?’

‘No. He wasn’t here; he was working in one of his hospitals abroad.’

‘Is he still working as a surgeon?’

‘Very much so. He operates on the rich and famous. He’s become a big name in these last thirteen years. He’s the brains behind that chain of private hospitals – the
Mansfield Clinics. They’re big money, with hospitals all over Europe and South Africa. They specialize mainly in cosmetic procedures.’

‘There must be stuff to dig up on him.’

‘I’ll give it a go but I know he’s Mr Charity. He gives away a massive chunk of the hospitals’ profit mainly to children’s charities. He set up a charity in his
daughter’s name after she was killed: the Chrissie Newton Foundation. At the time he put up a million-pound reward for information leading to the arrest of the murderers. Still didn’t
get us anything – in fact it slowed things down as we had half of our officers out on wild goose chases as so many of the calls that came in were false.’ He shook his head sadly.
‘I remember the whole thing was a mess; nothing went right. Forensic exhibits were not stored properly. We didn’t have a drying cupboard for the blood-stained clothing then. Louise
Carmichael’s was hung up next to her husband’s and Christine Newton’s clothes to dry – bound to be cross-contamination. There were no leads that didn’t keep doubling
back to Carmichael. In the end it was damage limitation rather than justice. Maria Newton was killed in the fire and the press pointed the finger at her and we just let it stay pointed. Carmichael
went to live like a hermit – he doesn’t keep in contact with anyone so far as I know – and the case just gradually faded away and slipped down the list of things to deal with.
Tell you what, Carter. It feels good to see it back at the top of the agenda.’