He let it run through to the place where he’d arrived and the hooded man had fled. Then he skipped back to the beginning, to the part he was interested in: the first five minutes when Dundas had spent time alone in the room, strapped to the bench, before the hooded man began the beheading. Caffery pressed the headphones to his ears and shuffled forward in his seat, his face close to the screen.
The name ‘Operation Norway’ was arbitrary. The case had had nothing to do with Norway, the country, and everything to do with Africa. The hooded man – ‘Uncle’, as they called him – had been running a scheme among the African community in Bristol. Through greed, sadism and chance he’d tapped into the community’s ancient belief, called loosely ‘muti’, or African black magic, that some parts of the human body could be used to treat certain medical and spiritual conditions. Over the last ten years there had been just eight cases like this in the whole of Europe and for the British police it was uncharted territory, but what they had learnt was that a human head, the head of a young man, especially one that had been removed when the victim was alive, would fetch a huge amount of money in some circles. That had been Dundas ’s misfortune.
Operation Norway was broken apart before the head could be trafficked on and the police had arrested two people: the hooded man, who was local, and an illegal African immigrant, who’d been teaching him the customs, helping him to open up a network of customers for his merchandise. The African was in custody now, still trying to convince the police that his name was Johnny Brown and that he held a British passport. They’d searched him and found he was carrying a key fob with the Tanzanian national flag on it and that the T-shirt he was wearing was by a Tanzanian manufacturer, so MCIU was combing records from Dar Es Salaam to get a hit on him.
‘What’s all this?’ Superintendent Rolf Powers, the head of MCIU, opened the door at ten past nine. ‘No lights? It’s like my teenage son’s bedroom in here.’ He switched on the fluorescents. ‘Where were you? I’ve just done a whole press conference on the Kitson case without you.’
Caffery froze the DVD and rotated the monitor to face the superintendent. ‘Look at this.’
Powers did so. Frowned. ‘That’s Operation Norway. We’ve finished with that. The files should be with the prosecution service by the end of the month.’
‘Watch this.’ Caffery tapped the screen. ‘It’s important.’
Powers closed the door and came in. He was tall, wide and well dressed, and must have been athletic once. The lifestyle had taken its toll, though, and his body was spreading around the middle, the neck. He put the wallet he was holding on the desk and pulled the chair up to the screen.
The freeze frame of Dundas alone in the room before the attack showed another shape, standing close to Dundas ’s head, its back to the camera. It was bent over, concentrating on doing something. After the arrests, when they’d got Dundas ’s head to the morgue and examined it, they’d discovered that clumps of his hair were missing. In the same place on which the figure in the video was concentrating now.
Powers shook his head. ‘It’s the Tanzanian, Johnny Brown, or whatever he’s really called. The one we’ve got in the bin.’
‘It’s not him. He’s lying.’
‘Jack, the little shit’s ’fessed to it about a thousand times. Straight cough – said he cut Dundas ’s hair, wanted to make some voodoo bracelet with it. And if it’s not him, then who the hell is it? The support group emptied that place out, raked the place clean. There was no one. And no way out.’
Caffery stared at the shape on screen. No one who’d seen the video had ever stated the obvious: that the figure on the screen didn’t look quite human. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s not him. I had the guys in the custody suite measure him. He’s five four. Short, but not this short. The camera was set at exactly one metre fifty high and was two metres from the table. I’ve looked at the CSI plans. Johnny Brown would have stood here.’ He pointed at a place on the screen. ‘More than a head taller. And look at those shoulders. There’s something wrong there, seriously wrong.’
‘They dressed him up – he admitted it. They sent him out to scare people into buying their voodoo crap. Pretty crude beliefs, these people have – not that those exact words ever came out of my mouth, of course.’
Caffery stared at him stonily. ‘How’d they “dress” someone up to look like that? Look at it.’
‘Prosthetics. Lighting.’
‘There weren’t any prosthetics when we searched the place. And Brown didn’t have Dundas ’s hair on him when they took him in, did he?’
‘Says he tossed it. And call me slow, call me a woollie, or however you Met people refer to us, but out here in the boonies someone ’fesses up to something like that, we kind of find it easier just to go ahead and believe him. No.’ His voice was suddenly efficient. ‘No, Jack. Let’s pretend we haven’t had this conversation. Operation Norway is over, OK?’ He stood. Pushed the wallet he was carrying across the desk to Caffery. ‘This is where the chief wants our time spent. This is the case I’m taking the beta-blockers for now. Open it.’
Caffery did. It contained six eight-by-ten glossies. Photos of clothing laid out next to a measuring tape. Women’s clothing. A dress. A pair of high-heeled sandals. A purple velvet coat. A silver mobile. ‘Misty Kitson?’
‘Of course. These are reproductions of what she was wearing. We’ve circulated them force-wide. Every person in every office across the force is going to have a copy of these pinned above their workstation by this evening, so even if they don’t read the papers or watch the telly they’ll’ve heard of her.’ Powers went to the map on the wall, put his hands in his pockets and studied it. ‘I can’t fathom it. I really can’t. A two-mile radius, the biggest search I’ve ever seen in the force, every inch gone over and we haven’t turned up a thing. Not a sausage and-Christ, you’re not listening to a word I’m saying. Are you?’
Caffery was sitting forward, staring at the post-mortem photograph of Dundas pinned up on the wall, at the way his hair had been clipped.
Powers picked up a photograph of Misty’s clothes and stuck it, pointedly, over the one of Dundas. ‘Jack, you’ve got three DSs and four DCs out there waiting to hear what you want them to do. They all want to find her.’
Caffery opened his drawer and pulled out the photographs of another post-mortem that had taken place two nights ago. It had come to him yesterday on the Centrex Guardian database and had everything he needed. He got up and pinned it over the photo of Misty Kitson’s clothing.
‘Ben Jakes. Twenty years old. Student at Bristol University. Can’t face his exams, girlfriend leaves him, ends up with a penknife and a case of wkd reds. Down in the Elf’s Grotto area. It’s pretty there. You can see the lights of Bristol. Very popular suicide spot.’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘His phone was missing – still hasn’t been found. He’d been robbed. Roommate said he had money, a twenty at least, plus cards, never been used. Even sandwiches in his rucksack. They were gone. Oh, and he was naked.’
‘Stripped off to kill himself? What was it? A full moon?’
‘No. The thief took the clothes too. At first the officer in charge had it down as a murder. It was in the “too hard for district” file for a while, even flagged up on a watchlist for us, until the PM came back as suicide. The clothes came off him more than twenty-four hours after he died, says the coroner. Plus the other evidence – depression. No one’s got any doubt it was a suicide; even his parents said they’d half expected it. But this is what I want you to look at.’