Killing The Taxman

Chapter 3

The disappearance of Chloe Macbeth still puzzled Detective Chief Inspector Grace Swan.

Chloe had been on parole after serving two years of a four-year sentence for GBH but when she failed to attend a scheduled meeting with her parole officer, and it was learned that she had also left her job without notice, a recall-to-prison arrest warrant had been issued against her.

Police had been sent to her council flat in the Firth Hall estate to make the arrest but found a human body wrapped in decorator’s cloths and securely taped tight. At first, it was assumed the body must be that of Chloe Macbeth but when the cocoon was opened, it was found to contain the body of a large black male, later identified as DeWayne Radford-Mitchell, a known convicted drug dealer from the notorious Radford Boys gang in Nottingham.

Why—Grace always wondered—was a convicted drug dealer from Nottingham found dead in a council flat in the small Yorkshire town of West Garside? So far as could be established, DeWayne Radford-Mitchell had no connections or associations in the town. Known local drug dealers were questioned but they claimed they had never heard of him and had never had any dealings with the Radford Boys, who were mainly a Midlands operation.

Grace opened the file she had set up for the DeWayne Radford-Mitchell/Chloe Macbeth investigation, randomly named by the computer as Operation Pinball. Beneath the photographs of DeWayne, both in life and in death, and of Chloe, she began to read the notes she had taken at the time.