Secrets and Lies

"Good morning dear," Mrs. Whitmore greeted me as I came down the stairs and joined her in the parlour of her home. I couldn't miss the disapproving tone in her voice as she added, "Although just barely, another few minutes and I'd have had to bid you a good afternoon instead."

I really hadn't meant to stand around talking to her, I was hoping to grab some lunch at the pub across the street before continuing on down the road to the little police detachment. Instead I slowed to a stop since the older woman obviously wanted to make conversation, and I didn't wish to appear rude.

Unfortunately it wasn't shaping up to be a fun chat as her expression shifted to match her tone, "My memory's not what it was Miss Sharpe, so forgive me if I forgot to inform you of the expectations here when you arrived yesterday evening. It's preferred that guests aren't coming and going at all hours of the night, but if you must be up and about after ten-thirty then please do your best to keep the noise to a minimum."

"Complimentary coffee is available in the dining room from six-thirty until ten each morning, and breakfast is available between seven-thirty and nine. Which sadly has long since passed, so if you're hungry you'll have to fend for yourself I'm afraid," she wrapped up her little speech.

I grimaced slightly, "Yes ma'am, you did explain all that last night. I didn't mean to be out so late, but something came up. Sorry if I woke anyone, I did my best to keep quiet."

There was more I could have said, like it wasn't my fault all the doors and steps in the place creaked like crazy. In fact I was half convinced she liked it that way, since there was literally no way for her guests to move around without making enough noise to keep her appraised of their movements.

The widow didn't sound the least bit convincing as she replied, "That's quite alright dear. I know you young people like to enjoy yourselves, and it was Friday night after all. I hope you had a good time across the street?"

That was an obvious cheap shot, and I'd endured enough of that sort of thing from my mother that I really didn't need it from this small-town B&B proprietor. So I responded with a slightly saccharine smile, "Not really. I barely had time to start on my dinner when Inspector Carter and I had to rush into Whitby on some urgent police business."

"And speaking of," I cut her off as she opened her mouth to reply, "I need to get back at it right now. Have a lovely day Mrs. Whitmore."

With that I turned and headed out the front door, with my purse over my shoulder and my laptop bag in hand.

Like the older woman said, it was almost noon on Saturday. And despite that brief unpleasantness with her I was still feeling pretty good. I'd slept in till eleven this morning then had a nice hot shower, and finally I'd dressed casual again since it was the weekend. So comfy sneakers, well-worn dark jeans, and a soft cotton t-shirt was the outfit for the day, along with my trusty hoodie. And I let my long blonde hair hang down past my shoulders in loose waves. Best of all we actually had some decent weather today. All that together was almost enough to make up for the fiasco Carter and I endured the night before.

After our strange time-loss experience in the lift we quickly ascertained that there was no trace of those two men in or around the premises. Our next thought was to check the security camera footage, but that led to our second disappointment of the night. The whole system had suffered some kind of fault, resulting in the loss of all recorded video footage and security data for the entire day.

As a last resort the inspector called in some crime scene techs from the Whitby station, and we spent the next two hours or so trying to find fingerprints or other physical evidence that the ME's office had been compromised. And that was our last big disappointment, the results were resoundingly inconclusive. We couldn't even tell if anything had been tampered with, although we certainly suspected that to be the case.

In the end there was nothing more we could do. Carter sent Dr. O'Conner a message to advise her of what happened, and asked her to review all her notes and autopsy data to try and figure out if anything had been altered. Then we drove back to Castleton in defeat, and it was somewhere around one o'clock in the morning when he dropped me off in front of Mrs. Whitmore's B&B.

I tried to put that out of my mind though as I entered the pub, to discover it had only just opened. That meant it was mostly empty and fairly quiet, which was fine with me. After a quick look at the menu I decided to try their 'country burger' with a side of chips, and cola to drink. And for the first time in a day and a half I was finally able to enjoy a full meal without any interruptions. It was pretty good too, so I was well satisfied when I left the place some forty-five minutes later.

My walk from there to the local police detachment was nice, I got to enjoy some rare November sunlight and it also gave me time to get a better look at the town. Or part of it anyways. The main street was lined with a combination of small homes and shops, and part-way along my route I passed their local primary school.

When I reached my destination I wasn't at all surprised to see the inspector's vehicle already there next to the building. There was also a small marked police car in the little driveway as well.

Inside I found another new face seated at the front desk, a thirty-something year old man with messy black hair, light blue eyes, and a pale complexion. He was in uniform, but looked a little dishevelled as he slouched back in his chair listening to music through a pair of ear-buds connected to his mobile.

It seemed to take him a couple seconds to realize I was there, then he straightened up and removed the earphones as he apologized. "Sorry about that luv, didn't notice you there. What can I do for you?"

He spoke with a strong east London accent, and now that he wasn't slouching I could tell he was probably rather tall, with a slim lanky build.

"I'm Detective Trillium Sharpe," I introduced myself. "Here to see Inspector Carter."

The constable's expression shifted to a wide smile as his eyes flicked up and down over me, "Oh right, the new gal! Welcome to the family, I'm Nigel Goodland."

"Go right in ma'am," he added as he gestured to the door behind him. "The boss is waiting for you."

I thanked him as I moved past the desk, while he slipped his ear buds back in and resumed his slouched music listening. The larger office area was empty, but the inspector's door was open so I made my way over there. He had a laptop open on the desk in front of him, but the way he was frowning and two-finger typing made it clear he wasn't very comfortable with the thing.

"Ah there you are," Carter looked up as soon as I appeared in his doorway. "Good afternoon Sharpe. Have a seat, I trust you slept well after all that last night?"

I settled into the guest chair and replied, "Yes sir, well rested and well fed now too, after a nice lunch at the pub. Although Mrs. Whitmore didn't seem very happy with me this morning."

He grimaced, "Sorry about that. She's a good woman and runs a good establishment, but she can be a bit of a stickler when it comes to some of her rules. If that becomes a problem let me know and I'll try and have a word with her."

"Thank you sir," I smiled. "I'm sure it'll be alright."

With that aside the inspector got straight on to business, "That photo you sent me of the men in the pub last night, was that the only one you took? Or do you have more of them?"

"I managed to get a couple," I replied. "The one I sent you was probably the clearest though. Why do you ask?"

He frowned, "I thought we could maybe run their faces through the computer, see if it could find a match for them. I'm not having much luck at it myself though. George Mallory's our resident whizz when it comes to these things, but he's not in today. Anyways I was hoping if you had some different pictures we could try those as well, maybe a different angle would do the trick."

I pulled my phone out of my purse as I replied, "It's worth a shot. We'll probably need to clean the images up a bit first though, since they're at odd angles and the lighting wasn't the best. But that shouldn't be..."

My voice trailed off and a deep frown settled on my expression when I found a few more pictures from last night on my camera roll than I remembered. And even as I looked at them, I had absolutely no recollection of taking those last three photos. According to the timestamps they were snapped a few minutes after seven, and appeared to be from the carpark outside the ME's office in Whitby.

The first dark fuzzy image looked like it was taken from inside Carter's Rover, and depicted a luxury SUV that had just parked a half dozen meters away. The second image was from the same vantage point, and featured our two persons of interest just after they'd emerged from that same vehicle. The last one was the real winner though. It was a clear photograph of the suspects' ride, a copper coloured Vauxhall Grandland, with a perfectly clear and legible licence plate.

"Sharpe?" the inspector asked. "Something wrong?"

My face was probably a little pale as I looked up at him, "They got there right after we did. They pulled into the same lot before we'd even left your Rover. We watched them exit their SUV, and apparently I took a few more pictures."

"We must not have confronted them in the carpark though," I added with a frown, as my mind raced to try and piece things together.

"We probably let them go in ahead of us, so we could catch them in the act. And in the meantime that would have let us take a closer look at their vehicle. Then we probably followed them inside and stopped them there. Maybe in the lobby? And that's when they... I don't know what they did to us."

Carter frowned as that news sank in. He didn't dwell on it for long though, it was only a second or two before he focused on the most important part. "Are any of those new pictures going to help us ID these people?"

"Yes sir," I replied as I turned my phone around to show him the last image. "I got a clear shot of their license plate."

He smiled as he grabbed his pen and notepad, "Excellent work detective!"

A moment later he had the license jotted down, then keyed it into the appropriate search tab on his laptop. And just a few seconds after that we had our first big break in the case.

"The vehicle's registered to a Colin Campbell. Originally with an Edinburgh address, until two months ago. In September that was changed to Cardiff," the inspector read off the screen. Then he commented, "Expensive taste. He's driving a top of the line Grandland Ultimate, barely two years old. That's probably a fifty-thousand pound ride."

I responded, "So odds are Mr. Campbell is the one I overheard with the Scottish accent."

"We'll know for sure in a moment," Carter replied.

The vehicle registration led us to the rest of man's ID, and the drivers license photo confirmed it. The man I'd overheard in the pub with the red hair and beard was Colin Robert Campbell, age forty-one, originally from Edinburgh but now living in Cardiff.

"So what now?" I asked.

The inspector thought about it for a moment then decided, "I'll start making some calls. If our Mr. Campbell is staying in the area I might be able to find out where, just by asking around."

"Maybe you can try and get a positive ID on the other one? Clean up the photos like you said, see if 'Mr. Smith from Croydon' is his real name or not," he suggested.

That sounded like a good plan, so I left his office while he started calling the various B&Bs and inns in the area. I got my laptop set up again at that desk I'd used the day before and got to work. It didn't take long to clean up one of the photos into an acceptable image of Mr. Smith, then while the ID search was chewing on that I decided to try see if there was any more information I could dig up on Mr. Campbell.

That turned out to be an excellent use of my time, and by the time the inspector called me back to his office an hour later I had plenty to report. Enough that I brought my laptop with me, so I could read all the information from the dozen or so tabs and apps it was spread across.

"Got them!" Carter announced with a wide smile. "Campbell and Smith are staying together in a rented cottage just south of Ainthorpe. They've been there since Saturday October twenty-sixth, about a week after Jane Doe number five was found just up the road in Danby."

I asked, "Isn't Ainthorpe where one of the missing men was from? The farm labourer, I think."

"Are we considering Campbell and Smith to be suspects?" I added warily. "Do you think they're behind the killings?"

The inspector frowned, "They're definitely involved. From what you overheard in the pub last night they may not be our killers, but they're wrapped up in this somehow. After whatever happened in Whitby last night I'm treating them as suspects, but not necessarily as murder suspects."

Then he gestured towards the laptop I was holding and asked, "What have you got for me? Were you able to find our Mr. Smith's real name?"

"That and more," I smiled. "Turns out he was telling you the truth, sort of. Martin Wallace Smith age thirty-six was originally from Croydon, but he's been living in Cardiff for at least the past ten years. And he really was employed as an insurance adjuster... For all of three months, from July through September of this year."

I continued, "Smith's now working for an import company in Cardiff. But prior to his brief time in the insurance industry, I couldn't find any record of employment at all for the man. So I checked Campbell's history as well, and found almost the same thing. No record of employment whatsoever, until September. He was hired by that same firm as Smith, at the same time too. That also coincides with Campbell's move from Scotland to Wales."

Carter looked thoughtful as he asked, "Do we know anything about this firm?"

"We do indeed," I replied with another smile. After switching to the appropriate tab on my laptop I elaborated, "According to the Companies House database, Llewellyn Import and Export Services was originally registered in the late eighties. It looks like it ceased trading in twenty-fifteen though, their various import licenses lapsed in twenty-sixteen and the firm was listed as 'dormant' after that. Until August twenty-eighth of this year, when the business was purchased and re-activated."

After a brief pause to switch tabs I continued, "Their new management has yet to re-apply for any of their old import licenses, and the company has no listed website, phone numbers, or any other contact information apart from an office address. Companies House has the required information on the executive and board though. Chairman and CEO is one Mr. Owen Powell, President and CFO is a Dr. Grace Bishop, and the secretary is a Miss Alys Powell."

"Which one's the new owner?" the inspector asked. "Powell, or Bishop?"

I grimaced slightly, "Neither I'm afraid. The corporation is owned by another business, Caer Aeronwy LLP, allegedly based in Aberaeron. That's a town in Ceredigion, Wales. However I was unable to find any more information on that business, either in the Companies House database or anyplace else."

Carter looked thoughtful as he asked, "What do you think, Sharpe? Sounds like someone's taken over a defunct corporation to use as cover for some other purpose. Some sort of covert operation perhaps? Are we chasing our own tail here, are these men with the Security Service? Or Special Branch maybe?"

"The business is definitely a cover for something," I agreed. "It appears legitimate at first glance, but dig a little deeper and it seems like it's all just lies."

I shook my head as I added, "I can't believe they're our people though. Not after what happened last night."

I couldn't keep the anxiety out of my voice as I continued, "That had to be some kind of magic they used on us, right? Tampering with our memories? I mean, we lost two and a half hours. Who knows what else they're capable of. Or what else they might have done. I can't believe anyone in law enforcement would do something like that, especially if they knew we were on the same side. And they must know who we are. You already met Martin Smith, and they were warned in advance I was coming here to work with you."

The inspector frowned and leaned back in his chair as if considering all that. His gaze slowly shifted over to his whiteboard, and he ended up staring at the names of the six missing men for another minute or so.

He finally sighed, "Whatever's going on here Sharpe, we're in over our heads. We're trained to deal with theft and burglary, assaults, the occasional murder. This magic business though, we don't have the tools or the training to cope with it. And yet we still have a job to do. Those six men need justice. Or if I'm wrong about my theory, then those six men need to be found. And the six murdered women need justice. Regardless, we can't just turn our backs and walk away."

"I understand sir," I replied quietly. "I don't think we can do this on our own though."

Carter gave me a curious look, "Go on then? What do you have in mind?"

I glanced down at my laptop then made a face, "I really hate to say it, because I don't like or trust these guys at all, but I believe Campbell and Smith are hunting whatever's responsible for those deaths. Maybe instead of trying to arrest them, we could approach them about joining forces?"

"Hmm," he responded while another thoughtful frown settled on his face.