Detective Inspector Rhys-Morgan rubbed his bleary eyes and sank wearily into his high-backed leather chair. This suicide case was an odd one, indeed.
The bomb-blast had claimed a dozen victims. The problem was, things had been rather messy and the lab boys were not yet sure whether they were dealing with a baker’s bomb or just the average butcher or candlestick maker.
Tommo’s videos were so far inconclusive with respect to the number of persons present at the time of the explosion. They tended to focus on a particular young lady at maximum zoom and there was not even a good enough shot of her head to get a positive ID. To add insult to injury, the pause button had broken on Rhys-Morgan’s video player.
The lab boys were currently running fingerprints of the deceased against all known files. In the meantime, Ifan could do nothing more for this case.
Suppressing a yawn, he looked over at the pile of other cases on his desk. There were some real weirdoes out and about at the moment. The downtown kebab strangler was still at large, for one. Although he was in homicide, he occasionally got sent other case files too and on top of the usual criminal activity, there had also been a recent spate of bizarre thefts and vandalism in the area that had been earmarked for special attention.
St Mildred’s convent boarding school was the first victim. Some freak had broken in and stolen all the schools pets – a tank full of newts, two tortoises and gerbil. Sister Mary had been tied up, so the case was being treated as armed robbery. The young nun had been understandably upset by the experience of being gagged and bound with garden hose. (She was more used to silk stockings.) The texture of the hose had caused her to be convinced that she had been restrained by a snake, and nothing anyone could say was able to convince her otherwise.
Just as strange was the attack on Dynamo Joe’s Petting Zoo and Animal Electrical Experience next to the garden centre on the A48 Joe had lost five guinea pigs, a chinchilla, two sheep, a goat and an electric eel. Streppy, his incontinent Shetland Pony, had been found loose in a field two miles away.
Several unidentified animals had also been taken. As they had lived in hutches and ate cucumber and lettuce, Rhys-Morgan assumed they were rabbits. Dynamo Joe was in no state to give the police more information. He had been tied to a tread-wheel – also with a garden hose – and subjected to multiple electric shocks. This experience had apparently muddled his brain. When asked who did it, he would simply stare with wild eyes and cry: “Those jaws! Those terrible jaws! My babies!” and start crying.
The common use of garden hose led Inspector Rhys-Morgan to believe that the two crimes were connected. The motive was unclear, however. There was no obvious link between St Mildred’s and Dynamo Joe’s, except children and animals. (The perpetrator was unlikely to be a thespian.)
There was one final crime that, if connected to these two, may provide the missing clue. The biology department of Swansea University had been broken into and all the laboratory rats released. Only two weeks before, the department had received threats from an extreme Animal Rights organisation called ALF – the Animal Liberation Front.
Although this seemed suspicious, the ALF had yet to claim responsibility for any of these animal thefts. Normally, liberations were accompanied with vast tracts of graffiti, either in red paint or sometimes even human excrement. None of these trademarks were present at any of the crime scenes. The Swansea University break in also coincided with the theft of two hydrogen gas cylinders from chemistry and a potter’s wheel from the art unit. In addition to the rats, the biology department also lost twenty litres of sterile distilled water.
This just did not feel like an ALF attack. Nevertheless, they had no better ideas at present. Tommo had drawn his attention to a NATO Biological Research facility near Swansea. They too had been subject to online ALF rancour, although he was not sure whether they had actually received specific threats. As yet, they had not been attacked, however, and Rhys-Morgan was not even sure if they had any animals to liberate.
Annoyed by his lack of progress on all fronts, Rhys-Morgan threw the case file irritably back onto his desk. At that same moment, his telephone sprung into life.
“Rhys-Morgan.”
Rhys-Morgan pressed the earpiece close and listened intently. The back room boys had identified the first three victims from the bomb blast – they were already on the books of Swansea Metropolitan Police.
“OK. I’ll be down at once.”
Replacing the receiver, Ifan hauled himself to his feet. He was not sure of the significance of this find but it was a lead. At the very least, it gave him somewhere to start.
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