Episode Three, Chapter three: Foster's First Victim
"Okay, so what have I missed this time?" I murmured to Sherlock as we followed Lestrade, Dimmock and Donovan down a corridor towards their briefing room.
"You'll kick yourself when I tell you." He answered me quietly with a small smile on his face.
"That obvious, is it?" I asked.
"It's been staring them in the face for hours." Sherlock told me, shaking his head.
Lestrade held open the door for us as we walked in to discover a large square table that had numerous piles of manila folders covering it, as well as several cardboard boxes in the corner on the floor.
"So Freak, tell us what amazing clues that Hat-man has seen, but us trained professionals haven't." Donovan said cynically.
"You always see everything that I do, you just don't observe because observing something means that you need to put proper thought into it, which I highly doubt that you are capable of doing well."
"Sherlock, play nice," I said disapprovingly, even though I thought that Donovan had brought that last one on herself with the Hat-man comment. He looked to me innocently, making me shake my head. "How about you just get on with it?"
"You honestly have no idea, all of you, do you?" Sherlock asked us incredulously, a small smile playing on his lips. "How can you function at all in this profession?"
"Look, this case is a bit of a curveball for us, Sherlock." Lestrade said seriously in an attempt to get Sherlock to lay off the insults. "In fact, it's a first for me, having a murderer but no victims; a backwards case."
"But all of your essential facts are still there." Sherlock said. "This is just like every other case that you have ever had, just ignore this man if it helps, which it won't."
I looked at him in confusion as a proper smile formed on his face.
"Serial killers are always tricky, even the truly brilliant ones like Foster." He said with obvious excitement.
"On our first case together, a Study in Pink, you said that you have to wait for them to make a mistake," I said to him and everyone looked over to me. "If no one has ever found a body that belonged to one of his victims then it must mean that he's never made a mistake."
"No one's perfect, John, he's made plenty of mistakes." Sherlock told me seriously.
"But what mistakes?" asked Dimmock somewhat impatiently.
"Speeding fines," Sherlock said happily as Donovan gave a tut of disapproval. "Jonathan Foster is a quietly spoken and a well-respected man by many who know him. He is a man of extreme confidence, fairly high intellect and has an over-powering need for attention, the longer he goes without it, the angrier he becomes."
"But what does this have to do with the speeding fines?" Donovan asked angrily.
"Well, when you have a murder victim hidden in the boot of your car, sometimes the road rules seem to become less relevant." Sherlock said, glaring angrily back to her.
"Oh what, because he got his first speeding fine in the same year that his first victim was killed it automatically means that he'd stuffed a body in the boot?" Donovan laughed disbelievingly.
"Yes," Sherlock answered her seriously. "It was his first, he hadn't perfected the process, he would have done things wrong, like not observing the speed limit, for example. I bet the time of the fine would have been late at night or early in the morning, but due to Foster's good behaviour the police officer who issued the ticket didn't think that he was suspicious at all."
Donovan looked back through the case file and sighed in disbelief and looked over to Dimmock and Lestrade.
"Twenty-past-two in the morning." She told them, confirming Sherlock's working hypothesis.
"Brilliant," I murmured and Donovan glared across to me, making me clear my throat awkwardly.
"He has given us the timeframe for his first murder," Sherlock said after giving me a quick glance, the corners of his mouth twitching slightly. "That should help narrow the field of potential victims, wouldn't you say?"
Lestrade nodded thankfully, moving to the table and picked up a pile of manila folders that had to be at least one hundred thick and handed it to Sherlock.
"Earlier this morning, Foster said that he had his first victim about a week before he killed her." Lestrade said solemnly.
"So she was kidnapped around the – what, seventeenth of June?" I said, doing the math quickly in my head.
"Give or take two or three days, yes." Sherlock said, taking a seat at the table as Dimmock handed me a pile of folders.
"We'll go through the missing person case files," Dimmock instructed. "Everyone put any possible victims in the middle of the table for review."
"Just go by the dates for now," Lestrade added. "And if it's not obvious, just give the file to Sherlock; I am sure he'd be able to tell if it was relevant or not."
I gave a small laugh at Sherlock's quick, confused glance before sitting down at the desk beside him and opening my first of many folders. My smile quickly faded once my eyes met with a small picture of a young fifteen year old girl and I remember the severity of what we were dealing with. It saddened me to think that the best possible outcome was to find out what happened to only twelve of these women, but the rest of them – and there were at least three hundred folders – would remain unknown and unsolved, possibly forever.
We all worked in silence for at least an hour, one of us would occasionally throw one of our folders to Sherlock, who would either place it in the middle of the table or throw it to the floor behind him dramatically. The pile in the middle wasn't very large, which was a good thing considering what we were trying to achieve.
It was twenty-to-one in the morning when Dimmock suddenly spoke.
"I think I've found her," he said and we all looked up to him as he slid the folder across to Sherlock.
"Why her?" he asked, looking to it.
"Foster told us when we first started to interview him that the victim's boyfriend had charged with her kidnapping, but then later released due to the lack of evidence." Dimmock explained quickly, pointing down to one of the pages, which Sherlock quickly began to read.
"Catherine Dawson," Sherlock read slowly to the rest of us and I stood up to peer down over his shoulder to see a picture of a young woman in her early twenties with light, blonde hair and blue eyes staring hauntingly up at us. "Twenty-one years old, she was last seen by her boyfriend of several years on the night of the seventeenth of June 1986."
"I was right about the date," I said, surprised with myself.
"But how can we know that this is the right victim?" Donovan asked seriously.
"Check the folders in the middle of the table; see if they include the wrongful arrest of a boyfriend." Sherlock instructed and Donovan took the folders and quickly scanned through them.
"Nothing," she said, looking up to Sherlock. "Do we do and tell Foster that we have worked out who his first victim is?"
"No," Sherlock said sternly. "This is just a game to Foster, the more interaction he gets with us, the more that we are playing right into his hand. We need to keep him in the dark until we actually find all the remains. A complete media black-out wouldn't go astray either."
"But how are we going to find their remains?" I asked him with a frown. "We are talking about a murder that happened twenty-six years ago."
"He's got a point, Sherlock." Lestrade said. "I mean, normally in London people stumble across human remains all the time due to new construction works and so on. You said that Foster got the speeding fine because he had this poor girl in the boot of his car – what if he drove somewhere outside London to dump her, like at the Cliffs of Dover or the bottom of Loch Ness?"
"She is somewhere in London, she has to be." Sherlock said quietly, his hands meeting in their thoughtful position before his face.
"Why?" asked Donovan. "Why would he keep his victims in London?"
"Because this little plan of his and Moriarty's wouldn't work if the bodies were scattered all across England." Sherlock snapped at her. "He wants fame, he wants recognition for his work and for that, he actually needs me to solve this so the world can find out how brilliant he is, so everyone knows his name."
He fell silent, closing his eyes to think while the rest of us exchanged looks.
"Donovan," Sherlock said suddenly, his eyes wide open again. "The speeding fine, were there any notes taken down by the police officer?"
"Uh," Donovan said uncertainly, shifting through the folders that were before her on the table, picking one up and scanning through it. "Yeah, the PC pulled Foster over, everything ran through normally, Foster didn't kick up a stink –"
"Did Foster offer any excuse as to why he was speeding?"
"Foster said that it was his first night of the grave shift at his building site," Donovan said. "He said that his alarm hadn't gone off so he was running late."
"And what building company did he work for?" Sherlock pressed.
"Hague's Buildings," Dimmock answered.
"Hague's," I repeated. "That's a company that deals with house renovations, why would they be working through the night?"
"Oh, very clever," whispered Sherlock, another small smile playing on his lips. "Brilliant! He is much cleverer than even I thought!"
"Sherlock?" he turned to me grinning, as I questioned him.
"Well, he isn't as good as me, but –"
"Sherlock!" snapped Lestrade impatiently.
"You need to find out what job site Foster was working on in June 1986." Sherlock said, serious once more.
"Why?" asked Donovan sceptically.
"Because that's where he has buried her, underneath the concreting or in the foundations or whatever it was that they were doing on that site." He said quickly, getting to his feet.
"Bloody hell," I managed to say.
"We are going to need a list of all the locations that involved the company digging holes, laying foundations and concreting from 1986 until he was forced into retirement."
"I'm on it," Lestrade said quickly, grabbing his mobile phone from his pocket and walking from the room.
"Dimmock I am going to need access to the Met's missing person database so I can start on identifying the second victim and hopefully establishing a pattern." Sherlock told the DI quickly. "It will be quicker than searching manually. Here," he added to me as he handed me the case folder of the first victim. "I want you to read through the file thoroughly to see if you can find any possible reason why Foster chose her."