Never Dead

Book 7: DCI Phelps

by Wonny Lea

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

Newly promoted DI Matt Pryor is disappointed when his first case seems to be a simple death from natural causes ? that is, until the post-mortem shows something quite unexpected ? The elderly man who died on a Cardiff train was murdered ? poisoned ? by one of the other passengers. But who? There?s a photograph in the dead man?s pocket ? a photograph that matches one owned by young professional Ellie Bevan. Is it just a coincidence that Ellie?s the one who stayed with the body until the police arrived ? or did she have a more sinister reason for sticking around? Matt?s boss DCI Martin Phelps is delving into a tricky case of his own. The new superintendent is determined to clear up any old cases with a whiff of police corruption about them and Phelps is sent to investigate the decade-old murder of a young Somali man. He soon discovers that the police reports are filled with errors. Sloppy detective work ? or a cover-up? Both Pryor and Phelps soon find themselves surprisingly drawn towards investigating a respected humanitarian charity. Feted by important people, the organisation isn?t quite what it seems ? and a wrong move could spell disaster ? Never Dead is the fifth in Wonny Lea?s Cardiff Bay Investigations featuring DCI Phelps.

Release date: May 4, 2015

Publisher: Accent Press

Print pages: 272

Sample

Chapter One

Ellie was grateful that her mother was staying with a friend, and so she hadn’t needed to explain why a police car brought her back yesterday. She’d forced herself to concentrate on getting ready, but the thought of breakfast was so nauseating that she simply poured herself another cup of coffee.

Just as it had been doing all night, her mind went back over yesterday’s events – a day that had started the same way as this one, with Ellie getting herself ready for work and catching her usual train to Cardiff Central. Her boss hadn’t been too pleased when she rang to tell him what had happened on the train, and he was less than enthusiastic about her having to go back to the police station again this morning. He could understand why, as the person who had discovered the body, she would need to be interviewed – but surely that should be a five-minute formality and not require a return visit?

Ellie had tossed and turned all night. There was something she hadn’t told her boss about. She was positive that she didn’t know the elderly man who had died on the train yesterday morning. So how was it possible that the police had found that photograph in his pocket? She had recognised it instantly – a photograph of a young woman and a baby. A photograph identical to the one she had discovered inside her favourite book.

The book had belonged to the man that Ellie had always known as her father. Gwyn Bevan had died when Ellie was just ten years old, but the news that she was not her parents’ biological daughter had only come during one of the increasingly frequent teenage rows with her mother, Joanne.

The photograph too had only been revealed through chance.

After her father’s death, Ellie had asked if she could keep his most treasured book, a copy of Animal Farm from his schooldays. Although Ellie had kept her dad’s book safely in her bedside drawer ever since, she had only discovered the photograph during an uncharacteristic burst of anger a couple of weeks earlier. It had been her father’s birthday, a day she always celebrated, but Joanne hadn’t even remembered. Upset, Ellie had sworn at her, storming off and slamming her door. She had thrown herself onto her bed in her temper, knocking the book to the floor and dislodging the small paper pocket that was glued to the inside of the front cover. She’d always known it was there, but as far as she was aware it only contained the prize-giving card, etched in beautiful copperplate, from when her dad’s teacher had presented it to him.

Picking it up to stick it back in place, Ellie noticed that there was something else beneath the card, folded and wedged snugly in place. The photograph. She didn’t recognise the baby or the woman pictured there, but her heart had turned somersaults when she read the single word printed on the back – Harriet. Instantly her mind had gone back to the time of her father’s death, eleven years earlier.

Ellie and her father had been putting the finishing touches to her bedroom makeover on a Saturday morning, ready for her tenth birthday. At the time Ellie had loved Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and in spite of her mother’s insistence that a Barbie bedroom was more suitable for a ten-year-old girl, Ellie had prevailed. She remembered her father stepping off the last rung of the ladder and standing back to admire his handiwork. That was when her whole world had turned upside down.

She’d been unable to do anything other than watch as her father’s face distorted and, in obvious agony, he clutched his chest and fell to the floor. Even after all these years the memory brought fresh tears to her eyes and it was only recently that she’d been able to make any sense of what he’d said before he died. Ellie remembered how she’d held his hand and begged him to get better. She had become even more upset by the fact that he didn’t seem to know who she was in those final moments. Her dad kept looking at her but calling her Harriet.

Ellie, frightened and confused at the time, couldn’t really remember what had happened next, but according to her mother she’d screamed for someone to help her father. The little girl had never seen anyone dead, but even before the ambulance arrived she knew that her father was gone forever. She’d refused to go back into her bedroom after his body had been removed and slept in the spare room until the day of her father’s funeral. It was arranged that Ellie would stay with a neighbour, but when the woman called to collect her Ellie was nowhere to be found. Gwyn’s sister Julie, who had travelled from Swindon for the funeral, eventually opened the door of Ellie’s room and found a bewildered little girl sitting cross-legged on the floor, sobbing pitifully, and almost completely covered in shredded Ninja Turtles wallpaper.

Ellie remained eternally grateful that it was her Aunt Julie who had found her. Instead of screaming at her, as her mother most certainly would have done, Julie had called down the stairs to inform the departing mourners that she would not be coming. Joanne, tearful and drunk, and some of her friends returned to the house four hours later to find Ellie and Julie sitting at the kitchen table eating toast and drinking hot chocolate. Joanne was usually no more than a social drinker, having a routine few drinks at the working men’s club every Saturday, and so Ellie had never seen her mother under the influence of alcohol until that day.

Despite revealing her daughter’s true parentage in a fit of anger, Joanne had never gone into the reasons for why she and her husband had adopted Ellie. Joanne had always disliked anything changing her routine and that had included becoming pregnant. Watching her friends grow fat on the fruits of love made her determined not to follow suit. Gwyn had assumed that having a family would be the natural outcome of their married life together, but after the wedding Joanne had made it very clear that she was never going to allow her body to be distorted by some ‘little parasite’, as she mentally pictured a baby growing inside her, though she was careful to present quite a different picture to her new husband. She told Gwyn that she was terrified at the thought of giving birth and related graphic descriptions of nightmares she pretended to have had. Her performance succeeded in persuading her young husband that if she became pregnant it would end in disaster, and he looked on sadly every time he watched his wife swallow her contraceptive pill.

Outwardly, though, the early years of their marriage would have seemed perfect. Gwyn was a hard-working and doting husband, and they always had a nice home and surplus cash. He was proud to be able to indulge his wife, but struggled to come to terms with the fact that he would never have a child, especially with his parents constantly reminding him how much they looked forward to becoming grandparents. Worried that she was in danger of losing her husband, Joanne suggested that they consider adoption, and before she could change her mind Gwyn put the wheels in motion.

Although they were questioned as to why they were not starting a family naturally, Joanne managed to convince the psychiatrist who assessed her during the adoption process that her fear of childbirth was real and deep-seated, and he sympathetically signed the couple’s papers. After that there were nine months of waiting, and though Gwyn pleaded with the social worker she reminded him that it was no longer than the time it would have taken if Joanne had conceived and carried a child naturally.

Joanne and Gwyn had asked the adoption services many questions about the baby they had taken into their lives, but for the most part they would have to take her on trust. They were not entitled to know specific details regarding her genetic family and were simply told that their new daughter’s mother had been very young and the family had decided that placing the baby for adoption was in everyone’s best interest.

Joanne accepted this information at face value, but there were many times when Gwyn stared intently at the little girl he soon came to love so deeply and wondered how anyone could give up such a precious gift. He knew that his wife would never really love Ellie, would just use her to prove to the world that she had the perfect family. As Ellie learned to talk and walk, and was later recognised by her teachers as gifted, it was Gwyn who hugged her and shared in her delights.

Even Detective Inspector Pryor had been sceptical about the photograph being an exact copy of the one Ellie kept in her dressing-table drawer. He’d suggested that it wasn’t difficult to mistake one baby for another, especially as the photograph was old and had been folded.

After some initial questions DI Pryor and DC Cook-Watts had driven Ellie home from Cardiff, but Pryor had been obliged to swallow his words when Ellie had shown him her photograph. Beyond all shadow of a doubt the two were identical. Yet even with some gentle prodding Ellie had been unable to throw any light on the mystery of how the photograph had been found in a dead man’s possession for, other than on the train in the last week, she had never seen the man before.

Ellie looked at her reflection in the long mirror, attached to the end wall of the small hallway, in what she always referred to as her mother’s house. She had wondered many times why she didn’t call the house her home. Ellie had been twelve weeks old when a social worker had taken her to the Bevans’ freshly painted house in Ton Pentre, and since then apart from the occasional sleepover at a friend’s and a few short holidays she had spent every night of her life there. Her friends and colleagues always talked about ‘going home’ but when asked about her plans for the evening, if Ellie didn’t have a date, she would simply say she was going to her mother’s house. Perhaps it just didn’t feel like a home to her since her dad died. She tried to remember what she would have said when he was alive, but his death, the most tragic day of her life, had been just before her tenth birthday. She was going to be twenty-one next week.

Ellie felt unable, or possibly unwilling, to ask her mother about the photograph and since she had discovered it she had pondered every possibility regarding the identity of Harriet. Common sense told her that it was a picture of her and her mother, but where had it come from? Was she Harriet or was that her mother’s name?

And just who had that poor old man with the sad eyes been?

Chapter Two

‘I really wasn’t expecting that!’

Helen Cook-Watts fastened her seatbelt and turned to look back at the house she and her colleague had just visited.

‘Me neither! I thought Ellie must have made a mistake about that photo.’

Matt Pryor slammed on his brakes as a handful of children suddenly poured out of a lane, seemingly hell-bent on hitching a ride on his bonnet. Both detectives shook their heads in unison. Today’s kids seemed to be scared of nothing, and even the sight of a marked squad car didn’t stop them randomly hopping on and off the kerb.

‘Times have certainly changed,’ Matt said dryly. ‘When I was a kid we’d have run off with our tails between our legs at the mere sight of a police car. Now anyone official seems to be fair game, and it’s a case of “take us on if you dare”.’

Helen nodded. ‘I only came back last Monday from that two-week training course, and one of the best lectures was from our very own Sergeant Evans. One of his stories was about the sessions he’s done over the years with local primary schools. Back as a young constable he’d have to persuade the kids that he wasn’t there to lock them up because they’d been naughty. On his last visit, a six-year-old boy announced to the class that they shouldn’t listen to the police, because his dad said they were all a bunch of liars and should be locked up in their own jails.’

‘Bloody hell. What chance have we got if kids are fed that sort of stuff? I wouldn’t be a teacher these days for all the tea in China – I probably would end up locked in one of our jails, because there’d only be a certain amount of cheek I could tolerate before strangling the little blighters.’

Helen laughed at what she knew was a suggestion alien to Matt’s nature. She was new to CID, but had known Matt since she was in uniform, and like the rest of the staff had been treated to his anecdotes regarding his twelve nieces. It was obvious to everyone that he was a doting uncle, though lately Helen had heard a hard edge to his voice that was uncharacteristic. She knew he was only joking about strangling cheeky kids but over the last couple of weeks she’d noticed something different about him.

Matt looked tired. The decision to promote him to detective inspector had recently been announced, along with a number of other substantial changes to the setup in Goleudy, and Helen knew Matt was more than pleased with the outcome of the recent ‘root and branch’ organisational review. Not only had he got the rank he’d been hoping for, but the new setup meant that he would still be working with DCI Phelps, albeit in a slightly different capacity.

Helen also knew, via station gossip, that Matt had recently become involved with a nurse, rumour having it that he was quite smitten. Maybe things weren’t working out between them? Helen felt for him, but she didn’t feel able to broach the subject: the man was still her boss, and despite her concern it was none of her business.

‘How come Ellie got to see the photograph that was in the dead man’s pocket?’ she asked, changing the subject.

Matt was driving faster now as they’d left the twists and turns of the small Valleys roads behind. ‘Of course! I’d forgotten you didn’t actually see the scene on the train. We’re not sure, as yet, when the man died, but as the train pulled into Central Station it lurched slightly, and the deceased, who’d been propped upright in his seat, fell sideways, virtually into the lap of an elderly woman. Ellie rushed forward to help as apparently she knows the woman and she’d seen the man on the train before.’

‘But she didn’t actually know him?’

Matt turned onto the road leading to Cardiff Bay. ‘No, the older lady, a Mrs Wiseman, gets the train every Monday and Thursday, when she’s met in Cardiff by her daughter. Ellie usually sits next to her, and she said she’s got to know quite a bit about Mrs Wiseman and her family – but she only saw the dead man for the first time last week. He was already on the train every day when she got on, all week.

‘Apparently, as soon as it became clear to the other passengers that the man was dead the carriage emptied quicker than rats leaving a sinking ship. Only Ellie and the elderly lady stayed and so they were the ones interviewed.’

Matt parked the car and carried on speaking as they walked up the back steps towards the office that for the moment he still shared with two detective sergeants. ‘It was PCs Davies and Mullen who were first on the scene, and in an attempt to discover the identity of the dead man they looked through his pockets – that was when the photograph was discovered. According to Davies he was more surprised by Ellie Bevan’s reaction to the photograph than to finding the dead man on the train.’

‘He’s getting a reputation for finding dead bodies,’ laughed Helen. ‘We were first on the scene when that body in Coopers Field was discovered. But this sounds more like the man had a heart attack or something. Was there anything else in his pockets to tell us who he is?’

‘No, that’s the weird thing. Apart from the photograph all he had on him was his train ticket, a set of car keys, some notes and loose change, a folded handkerchief, and a half-eaten packet of wine gums. No bank card, driving license, nothing. I spoke to Professor Moore and he’s agreed to do the post-mortem this afternoon. I’m to take the lead on the investigation. We have to treat it as a suspicious death due to the circumstances, but I guess you’ll be proved right.

‘Give me a few minutes,’ Matt said as they reached the door of his office, ‘and then ask Davies, Mullen, and DS Matthews to join us in Incident Room Three. As it looks likely that it’ll be you, me, and Matthews working together when the new structure is fully implemented, we may as well cut our teeth on something simple. At the moment we have an unexplained death in a public place, and it’s likely to be due to natural causes. The photo link will probably turn out to be a thing for the family to sort out, and nothing to do with us.’

‘OK, guv,’ Helen said, heading off to round up the others.

Matt allowed himself a brief grin as he noted it was the first time he’d been called ‘guv’. As a DI heading up his own team it was a title he’d be happy to get used to. The problem was that he felt anything but happy. Despite the good news at work, the rest of his life seemed to be falling to pieces.

He was grateful to find the office empty and sat at his desk. Ignoring the usual pile of paperwork in his in-tray he leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. His mind ran briefly over the scenario at the train station. Although there were one or two points that needed addressing, he couldn’t see that CID would have much input. The death would of course be referred to the coroner, and he would be called to give evidence, but it wasn’t as if he had a major crime to solve and so it wasn’t enough to distract him from thoughts of more personal problems.

He had last weekend, for the first time in his life, got seriously drunk for a reason other than social pleasure, and a nagging thought was telling him that the oblivion it had brought was something worth repeating. It didn’t seem all that long since he was happy, playing the field both on the rugby pitch and with a succession of girlfriends. An injury sustained in capturing a criminal had put paid to the rugby, at least for a while, but the women – or woman – was another matter.

Since Matt had met Sarah he had thought for the first time about settling down and having a family of his own, but now, with the thought barely ignited, it was being extinguished.

What was it about life? He had to admit that, in spite of what could be considered a traumatic childhood, he’d done well at school and university and his chosen career was proving to be everything he’d hoped for. It would be the icing on the cake if he and Sarah could join his sisters and play happy families but on more than one front that dream was fading fast. He knew that the thought of losing Sarah was the main reason for him feeling at the lowest ebb he could ever remember, but the potential breakup of not one, but two, of his sisters’ relationships was also keeping him awake at night.

Matt thought back to his own childhood. His parents had separated when he was seven, and as far as he knew his father had returned to his hometown of Tropea in Italy. For years Matt had avoided asking questions about his father, as they inevitably resulted in his mother crying and his older sisters shouting at him. It had been his sisters who brought him up after their mother died. He couldn’t remember a time when his mother hadn’t been ill, although there was no specific problem that he could recall other than chronic anaemia, which he now knew had been the result of years of almost constant pregnancy and numerous miscarriages. Their mother’s last wish had been that her children revert to her maiden name, and so at the age of thirteen Matthew Fattore had become Matthew Pryor.

Although he hated himself for having the thought, he had to admit that in many ways things were easier after his mother died. His sisters were old enough to take over the running of the house and although Carlo Fattore had abandoned his Welsh family there was, up until Matt’s twenty-first birthday, a generous monthly cheque.

As, one by one, his sisters flew the nest, Matt ended up alone in the family home in Pontprennau. He had since become the favourite uncle to twelve nieces, and his eldest sister Cara had been known to joke that there was more Italian than Welsh in all of them than they would care to admit, as on one occasion all three sisters were pregnant at the same time. Matt got on well with his sisters’ partners and was included in all aspects of their family lives, so it was a terrible shame that things were going wrong for two of them.

The sound of his phone ringing caused him to jump out of his skin, and feeling a bit unsure of what he was now supposed to call himself he stuck with what he knew.

‘DS Pryor.’

‘Good afternoon DI Pryor, and congratulations on your promotion – you’re going to have to get used to your new title! This is Mrs Williams, Professor Moore’s assistant. The Prof has asked if it’s possible for you to look at something he came across during his post-mortem examination of the gentleman found dead on the train this morning.’

‘Thanks, Mrs Williams, I’ll be with you in a few minutes.’

Matt replaced the receiver and dragged his mind back to what he remembered about the body. The man looked like he’d simply fallen asleep, and there had been nothing obvious to suggest anything other than death by natural causes. However, it was extremely unlikely that the Prof call him in to look at the damage caused by a massive coronary thrombosis, or a cerebral haemorrhage, or any other naturally occurring fatal phenomena.

As he walked up towards the domain of Professor Moore on the fourth floor of Goleudy, Matt wondered what exactly was going on. He’d been hoping for a meatier case, but now he was wondering if he should have been more careful about what he wished for.

The familiar smell of the hypochlorites and alcohols used for general laboratory disinfectant reached Matt’s nose as he got nearer to his destination and as always it made him feel slightly queasy. He could see Mrs Williams hovering at the doorway of the changing rooms and made his way towards her.

‘We’re in his usual room,’ she said. ‘The Prof’s suggested you look at the trousers. . .