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Chapter 26
Monday 1st March
Cardiff
It’s just over fourteen hours later when the call comes in. Two police officers, Sergeant Sean Fay and Constable Danny Roberts, are coming to the end of a night shift on patrol in the Llanishen area of Cardiff when a security guard at a local business park makes a panicked 999 call. Immediately deployed, minutes later Sean and Danny arrive to find him, white-faced and sweating, standing over the body of another man in a dimly lit car parking area to the rear of a unit called The Fit Joint.
They can see, even in this pre-dawn darkness, that the man on the ground is quite obviously dead: slumped on the tarmac in an unnatural position next to the open door of a shiny, new-looking black Range Rover, his eyes are wide open, there’s a large dent in the centre of his forehead, and his face and clothes are covered in blood. As Sean asks the security guard to step back from the victim, Danny, who’s more than a little squeamish, bends to take a quick, closer look then straightens up and backs away hurriedly.
‘Christ. I think I can see his brains. Or bone, or something. No coming back from that, poor bugger,’ he hisses. ‘What the hell’s gone on here? I think I’m going to be sick, sarge.’
Sean rolls his eyes.
‘Well, if you are, go over there,’ he says. ‘We don’t need you throwing up on the crime scene.’
Danny nods and, hand clutching his mouth now, jogs across to the far side of the small car park, where he leans over a litter bin, retching. Sean, pulling on a pair of latex gloves, crouches down for a few moments to double-check that the motionless victim has no pulse –no, absolutely, definitely dead,he thinks – then turns to the guard, who’s now leaning against the wall of the building, wiping his forehead with a large, grubby-looking grey handkerchief he’s pulled from somewhere about his person.
‘Do you know who he is?’ Sean asks, gesturing at the crumpled figure on the ground.
The security man nods and swallows.
‘It’s David Howells,’ he says. ‘He runs this place. He usually gets in super early, around five. I saw him drive in around ten past this morning, so same as usual. But when I did my usual 6am patrol, I found him like that. Poor bastard didn’t even get inside, did he? Nobody else has driven in this morning yet though, so I can’t work it out. Must have been somebody on foot who attacked him, maybe, I don’t know. Oh God, I think I’m going to faint. I’m so sorry …’
He starts to slide slowly down the wall and Sean, wondering what he’s done to deserve a vomiting constableanda fainting witness, sighs and helps the man lower himself to the ground, instructs him to put his head between his knees and breathe deeply, then pulls out his radio.
David Howells, he thinks.David.The tip-off wasn’t wrong, then. Although it’s an extremely common name, obviously. Could just be a coincidence. But still …
The pre-shift briefing last night had informed them that there’d been an unspecified threat made against a male called David, at an unspecified location somewhere in the Cardiff area, at an unspecified time on the 1st of March – today – which had made them all raise their eyebrows and mutter under their breaths. Now that it has actually happened, and a dead man called David is lying just feet away from him, Sean’s wondering what on earth this is all about, and who this man is. For now though, he just needs to get on with his job, so once he’s sure that an ambulance and back-up are on their way, he takes a small but powerful flashlight from his pocket and takes a cautious walk around the car park, ignoring Danny who, remarkably, isstillheaving over the bin.
Sean’s been here before; he attended a break-in at a tyre repair shop in one of the other units a few months back, and he knows that the business park is a small one, fewer than thirty companies on site with the security guard stationed in a little prefabricated building just inside the main entrance. It’s not gated, no barrier either, so it’s very possible that if the guard is correct about seeing no other vehicles entering the park this morning, it could easily have been someone who slipped past on foot who carried out this attack. If that’s the case, the CCTV cameras he knows are positioned at the entrance and at regular intervals along the lampposts that line the criss-crossed streets of the small estate may, if they’re lucky, have captured footage of the assailant. But …
He frowns, running the torchlight along the fence at the back of the car park.
That could be another way in, couldn’t it?he thinks. This particular unit is at the far end of a cul-de-sac, the building and a fifteen-foot-high brick wall making up two sides of the square plot, and a low wall on the third side dividing it from that of the business next door, with a path running alongside it to give access to the main entrance at the front. But to the rear, there’s a fence, about five foot high, and on the other side of it there’s a field, or some sort of waste ground; he’s not entirely sure what it is, in the dark, but definitely some sort of green space anyway.
It wouldn’t be hard for someone to come in that way, he thinks.Someone with an average level of fitness could easily scale that fence.
He stands there for a few moments, scanning the ground, looking for anything that seems out of place, but nothing leaps out at him. It’s been raining on and off all night, and there are puddles on the uneven surface of the small car park, which probably has enough space for about six cars. It’s just started raining again now, and that won’t help preserve the crime scene, Sean thinks, knowing that evidence can be destroyed by such inclement weather and wondering if he should quickly find something to prop over the body to protect it. But even as he’s considering this, he hears the sirens, and seconds later sees the blue lights swirling in the sky over the building. Barking at Danny to get a grip and come and join him, and telling the security man, who’s now sucking frantically on a cigarette, to stay exactly where he is, he heads round the front to greet his colleagues.
