Case
Bernadette Kissel (mother of Daniel Kissel)
Daniel Kissel (son of Bernadette Kissel, deceased)
FAO A.C.C. D M Mitchum
Date As Postmark
M.I.T.
Partickhill Road,
Partickhill
Glasgow
Dear Sir,
Ref; Detective Inspector W. P. Costello
Please accept this letter in lieu of my resignation with immediate effect.
I’d like to say that this is a decision I have thought long and hard about. It isn’t. It was a decision made for me by those who believe that competent policing is having meetings and moving bits of paper around. Effective policing would have prevented the tragedy at Balcarres Avenue where a seven-year-old boy and his mother were stabbed to death. His name was Malcolm. Her name was Abigail.
He liked Glasgow Celtic and Star Wars. She was a qualified doctor. They are not statistics. They are people, sorry, were people.
A more interesting statistic is that of the family of four who once lived on Balcarres Avenue, three are now deceased. In case that didn’t come up in a meeting: George Haggerty’s wife Abigail is dead, his son Malcolm is dead and his adopted daughter Mary Jane is dead. Even when the DNA tests showed that Mary Jane was actually the biological daughter of DCI Colin Anderson, i.e. one of our own, you still don’t pursue George Haggerty as the obvious suspect. Even when it was revealed that Haggerty is walking away with a two-million-pound life insurance pay-out from Abigail’s death, you don’t investigate him. No, you hide behind Haggerty’s claims that I’m harassing him. You are being manipulated by a murderer.
If Police Scotland and the might of social services cannot join the dots and deduce that George Haggerty, the one man related to three dead people, might have something to do with their passing, well, it’s no longer an organisation that I want to either work for or be associated with. I can see a hundred ways through his alibi, but I am not allowed to pursue it. Such a cast-iron alibi as being caught speeding by Police Scotland is highly suspicious. I also saw a hundred ways to protect his child but social services did nothing. From this case you gained a promotion and I lost respect for the police service where I have worked for over twenty years.
So please accept the letter as my resignation with immediate effect.
Yours sincerely,
Costello
PROLOGUE
WEDNESDAY, 8TH OF NOVEMBER
Costello pulled her car up outside the Haggerty family home. The large house on Balcarres Avenue would always be that to her – the family home. Now it looked cold and dead in the bright winter sunshine, rays glinted off the ivy-covered slates giving a sparkle to the bricks of the red chimneys. She looked at the stained-glass window, the multi-coloured mosaic of Botticelli’s Primavera was just visible through the reaching branches of the monkey puzzle tree. Behind the tall wrought-iron gates the grass was verdant, the pebbles still raked into the neat furrows that had so impressed Archie Walker. On that day.
That dreadful day when she and Archie had walked up the path, Costello ignoring the sense of dread in her stomach.
The trees were tall and mature, even devoid of leaves they cast long spindly shadows over the wide road, old-fashioned, gently cambered. The kind of surface that leant itself to roller-skating, so Costello’s granny had once told her.
She turned the Fiat’s engine off, slipping down in the seat, thinking about another night she had parked in this very spot, that cold night she had seen Malcolm try to climb out the window above the porch, attempting to get away from his father. And Costello was convinced that was exactly what the boy was doing. Involuntarily, she picked up her mobile, looking at the blank screen. Malcolm had left her a message on her phone. A twelve year old wanting help from a detective to escape from a monster, to get away from his father. George Haggerty.
The bastard.
But she’d got the voicemail the following morning. When it was too late.
Six hours after he had summoned up enough courage to defy his father and call Costello, she and Archie had walked up this path, entered the family home and found Malcolm’s body, curled up on the beige carpet at the foot of his parent’s bed, Abigail Haggerty had her arms still wrapped round Malcolm, holding him close, giving her only son some solace as his short life slipped away. No doubt her own last breath had swiftly followed.
That image was seared into Costello’s memory, Abigail and Malcolm, and the speckles and spatters of crimson blood on the mirrored wardrobe doors. She could recall the events up to that, walking into the house, opening the unlocked back door; the first warning sign. Then the music floating from above; ‘The Clapping Song’. The element of theatre. Then upstairs past the little teardrop of blood on the magnolia wallpaper, the stain the killer thought he’d cleaned away. Then into Malcolm’s bedroom, too quiet. The Star Wars posters on the walls, the smooth R2D2 duvet cover decorated with a Celtic top, a pair of black leggings, two woollen socks, the trainers. They were arranged as if the child had been lying there, dressed and then spirited away, shedding his clothes and leaving them behind.
In the car, Costello wiped an angry tear from her eye, remembering how she had paused on the top landing, alert to the smell of blood. She had hesitated, not wanting to go any further but the door of the master bedroom was open, intriguing and beguiling. And all the time that song was playing.
Clap clap.
At that moment Costello had known, that was George Haggerty’s little joke. Clap, clap. He had looked right at her as he stood at his stepdaughter’s funeral, smirking, slowly clapping his gloved hands.
Standing in the doorway she had seen the blood on the doors, the walls, the ceiling. She had to force herself to carry on willing herself to think past the iron-rich stench of the blood, the sweeter mulch of faecal matter. Her last memory was of Abigail lying curled, her arm up and over the smaller figure of her son; Malcolm’s hands wrapped round her elbow, his fingers still gripping the lilac silk of her blouse.
At the time, Costello had presumed she would have the next day to sort it out.
She had been wrong.
What would happen if she didn’t act now? What if she ran out of time? She gripped the steering wheel in frustration; her colleagues in major investigations had accepted George Haggerty’s alibi as cast iron. To her mind only the guilty had alibis as good as that. George’s alibi for the night his wife and child were killed was Police Scotland.
Costello knew she’d get the bastard, she had been watching his every move since.
She only had to wait. Bastard.
She looked back at the gates, closed now to keep the media away from the ‘Monkey House of Horror’. What secrets
