Читать книгу No Smoke Without Fire - Paul Gitsham - Страница 17

Chapter 4

“Sally Evans, twenty-six. Reported missing four nights ago by her boyfriend when she failed to meet him at their usual pick-up point in the side street behind Far and Away travel agents, where she worked.”

It was eight-thirty a.m. and Warren was holding a team briefing in the conference room at Middlesbury’s small CID unit. Behind him a projector showed a close-up photograph of the body taken at the scene by Andy Harrison and beside it a much happier image, taken that summer on holiday. The victim had shoulder-length light brown hair; the smiling young woman in the holiday snap had longer, sun-kissed blonde hair, but it was clearly the same person.

“We have a positive ID from the victim’s boyfriend, with whom she lived, and her mother and best friend. Family Liaison broke the news last night.”

“The body is still in situ up at Beaconsfield Woods, where it was found by a group of dog-walkers at approximately six-thirty p.m. yesterday evening. The body will be moved to the morgue at midday and a PM is scheduled for early afternoon. Preliminary indications are that she may have been sexually assaulted; cause of death is unknown at this time, but her scarf was wrapped around her throat and may have served as a ligature. Her body was almost certainly carried to the woods, but we don’t know if she was dead or alive, or when and where any assault took place.”

The atmosphere was sombre. Everybody in the room knew that the three days between Sally Evans’ disappearance and the discovery of her body could prove to be a major hindrance to the investigation. Valuable trace evidence from the site could have been lost, contaminated or destroyed; similarly the killer or killers had had over eighty hours to cover their tracks. The team couldn’t afford to lose any more time.

Reading from the list he had prepared before the meeting, Warren started to assign jobs to the officers present. “DS Kent, can you set up an incident desk and get HOLMES up and running, please? I want you to start entering everything as it comes in, especially the particulars from the autopsy. I want to see if the MO matches any known cases. See if we can find links to any previous attacks. DC Hastings, I want you to assist.” The older sergeant was the unit’s expert on HOLMES2, the Home Office’s crime management database. Used across the country, the system employed a degree of computer intelligence to link cases together and manage all of the documents relating to a crime. Although all officers used the system to some extent, it was experts like Kent who could really make the system work for them.

Working with him would be Detective Constable Gary Hastings. Newly returned from several months’ sick leave after being stabbed in the summer, the young officer was on light duties whilst he continued to recuperate. He was keen to learn and quick-thinking, and Warren had assigned him to the older sergeant’s care, having decided that putting the young man back into the heart of a major investigation was probably the best way to help him exorcise any demons remaining from the summer’s horrors. Besides which, it hadn’t escaped Warren’s notice that DS Kent was approaching retirement age. He had no idea what the older man’s plans were — and the new age-discrimination laws made him wary about asking — nevertheless, training up other officers seemed prudent to Warren.

Of course, as with any system, HOLMES2 was only as good as the information put into it and the next stage was to gather that information.

“DI Sutton, I want you and DS Khan to co-ordinate the interviewing of all of Ms Evans’ known associates. Start with her workmates, then her friends. Let’s see if we can find any witnesses. Use the missing person file as a jumping-off point, but remember it isn’t a crime for a twenty-something not to come home of an evening, so there probably won’t be much in there.”

Sutton and Khan nodded, already casting their eyes around the room at the various other officers they would second to their teams.

“DS Richardson, speak to Traffic and any CCTV operators in the area. Let’s see if we can find any useful images from around the time that she went missing. I doubt that there will be much in the way of CCTV footage up near Beaconsfield Woods, but you never know, we might get lucky and pick up something on the speed cameras on the main road.

“In the meantime, I’m going to speak to her family again and see what her boyfriend has to say for himself.”

* * *

Warren chose Detective Constable Karen Hardwick to accompany him to interview Sally Evans’ family. The young woman was relatively new to CID, but had shown a lot of promise. Warren firmly believed that a small unit such as Middlesbury should be careful to ensure that more junior colleagues received the full range of learning experiences, and so he regularly took detective constables and sergeants out with him to interview witnesses or suspects.

It was almost a cliché that whenever a murder occurred, the first place the police headed for was the victim’s home. However, as Warren’s first mentor, Bob Windermere, would often remind him, clichés and stereotypes only become such because there was more than a grain of truth to them. The vast majority of murders were committed by someone known to the victim and so when a young woman was killed the first people the police investigated were her husband, partner or any exes that might still be on the scene. Consequently, the first person that they questioned was Darren Blackheath, Sally Evans’ boyfriend.

The two had been together for almost three years and had been renting a small third-floor flat for the past eleven months, the young man explained as the two police officers sat on the small sofa opposite him.

Darren Blackheath was a twenty-four-year-old tyre fitter with no previous convictions. A Middlesbury resident all of his life, he’d lived with his parents until moving in with Sally Evans. Similarly, Sally was also in her first serious relationship, although she had shared flats with housemates and lived in student accommodation when studying for a degree in tourism management.

The couple had met in a bar one night, exchanged phone numbers and started dating ‘officially’, as he put it, a month later. A bit of delicate probing revealed that the relationship had been going well, according to Blackheath. So well in fact that he had been planning on proposing to her on Christmas morning. With reddened eyes, he had shown the two police officers the diamond ring with which he had hoped to seal the deal.

The night that Sally had disappeared had been unremarkable. He’d left work at his usual time, sending her a text message to let her know that he was on his way. Crossing town had taken no longer than normal and he’d pulled up outside the rear entrance to her workplace at a few minutes past six. As usual the street was deserted, but unusually his girlfriend was not waiting for him.

“She usually comes out on the dot of six and has a fag whilst she’s waiting for me to pick her up. I don’t mind her smoking in the flat, but I draw the line at me car.” His eyes grew moist again. “She promised she were going to quit in the new year. It’s one of the reasons I decided to propose. She always said she’d quit before she got married, ’cos she wanted a white wedding and she said there were nothing worse than a bride with a fag in ’er mouth. Nearly as bad as tattoos.” He looked embarrassed for a moment. “No offence if you have tattoos. But I figured it would give her an extra incentive, you know?”

“So what happened then, Darren?”

“Well, I checked me mobile, but there was no message. Normally she’s out the door on the dot, so she doesn’t bother replying. But if she’s going to be late she always texts me so I don’t worry.

“I waited for about five minutes before I rang her mobile but it rang out and went to voicemail. So I locked the car and tried the back door to her place, but it’s a fire door and it was locked from the inside. So I walked around the front and saw that the shop was closed. The front door was locked and no one was in.”

“Was that unusual? It was only just after six.”

“No, not really. The shop actually closes at five-thirty. They spend the last half an hour cashing up and finishing the paperwork. They all leave together at six o’clock. Most of them leave by the front door. Sal is the only one to leave by the back. The manager checks the door locks behind Sal then bolts the front door and I guess sets the alarm.”

Warren jotted this down. So far the story matched that given by Blackheath four days before when he reported her missing. Now, however, it was important to make certain that no details were missing or different — no matter how small they might seem.

“Do you know who was working that night?”

Blackheath recited a list of office staff that matched the list already supplied to the missing persons team. The office was small and on a typical weekday four of the six permanent members of staff would be in. Warren made a note to have them all questioned again to make sure their stories corroborated Blackheath’s.

“What did you do next?”

“I went back to the car, to see if she’d reappeared, and tried her mobile again. Then I phoned her boss Kelli. She said that Sal had left at the usual time and that she’d locked the door behind her.

“I was getting worried, so I phoned her mum and her best friend, Cheryl. Neither had seen her. Cheryl had sent a text message just after six saying that she was coming around for a girlie night, but Sal didn’t reply.” His voice broke slightly.

“What did you do then?”

“I drove home and started phoning all of her friends. Cheryl and Sal’s mum came around about half-seven. By midnight we couldn’t think of anyone else to call and figured that if she had gone to the pub with some other mate, she’d be back by now. That’s when we called the police and reported her missing.”

By now, Warren’s gut was telling him that Blackheath was not their man. However, if his timing was to be believed, there was a ninety-minute window between Sally Evans leaving work and her mother and best friend arriving at the flat; potentially long enough for him to have taken Sally Evans to Beaconsfield Woods, raped her, dumped her body, then returned home. Warren made a note to check with neighbours what time Blackheath’s car had arrived back at the flat.

In order to eliminate him fully, Warren arranged for Blackheath to be escorted to the police station for fingerprinting, DNA typing and a formal statement. He also arranged for Forensics to go over his car and the flat.

With Blackheath dispatched to the station and a forensic unit on its way to look for evidence, Jones and Hardwick drove the short distance to the home of Cheryl Davenport, Sally Evans’ best friend.

The young woman that answered the door was a short, slightly plump girl with bottle-blonde, permed hair. Her make-up, though expertly applied, couldn’t conceal the dark rings under her eyes and their swollen redness. The tears came back within moments of the two police officers entering her small kitchen. She offered her visitors a coffee, which they both accepted, less to quench their thirst than to give the grieving woman a few moments to compose herself.

As she fiddled with the kettle Warren took stock of the tiny room. It was pretty much what he expected of a twenty-something, single woman. Tidy and compact, the sink was already full of mugs but no other cutlery; the overloaded ashtray spoke of a person whose world had been turned upside down and who had spent the past three days living on caffeine, nicotine and worry. The kitchen units were clearly the cheap MDF beloved of low-rent landlords. A washing machine took up the only space under the counter, forcing the tall, fridge-freezer to stand awkwardly in the corner, half hidden by the open door. Stuck to its white front were the usual Post-it notes and postcards. In pride of place were a half-dozen photographs of Cheryl and her best friend Sally, mostly arm in arm, taken on beaches or foreign-looking nightclubs.

Noticing his gaze, Cheryl started to cry again. “We’ve been going on holiday ever since we left school. The last couple of years we’ve been to Greece, Turkey, Egypt, you name it — Sally kept an eye out for cheap deals when she was at work and she usually managed to wangle us some sort of discount or upgrade.” She sniffed loudly. “Even when she started seeing Darren, we still went off on our girlie trips. That doesn’t always happen you know. Some girls get hooked up and that’s it, they only go away with their blokes. But Darren was all right about it — he was pretty cool. He said she could have her week in the sun with me, as long as he could go on his footie tour.”

It was another point in Blackheath’s favour, Warren decided. Men who killed their partners often turned out to be domineering and controlling types; hardly the sort of man who’d let his girlfriend disappear for a week of fun in the sun without him. Nevertheless, they needed to pursue every lead to its conclusion. He glanced at Karen Hardwick, who picked up on his subtle cue.

“We’re sorry to put you through this, Cheryl — it must be an awful time for you — but we need to ask some questions. Will you help us?”

Cheryl nodded; underneath the tears, Warren could see a strong resolve to help in any way that she could to find her best friend’s killer.

The story she told was much the same as that of Blackheath. She’d texted Evans at about six p.m., inviting herself over with a DVD and a bottle of wine. She hadn’t received a reply, but about six-thirty Darren had called asking if she’d seen her. After he’d hung up, she’d put it out of her mind as she made herself something to eat and got ready to go out. Apparently Sally could be a bit forgetful when it came to charging her mobile phone and so she hadn’t been worried. By seven-thirty, Sally hadn’t phoned or responded to her text message and she had been just about to try her landline when Darren had called, sounding worried.

Picking up her address book, she’d set off for their flat, arriving about the same time as Sally’s mother, who Darren had also called. At first they’d been a bit jokey, trying to convince Darren that it was nothing, but as they finished calling all of her usual friends the worry had set in. Finally, at about midnight, they’d called the police to report her missing.

“If only we’d called sooner, maybe they’d have found her before…before…” Finally she dissolved in a flood of tears, her carefully constructed façade collapsing completely.

Hardwick leant over and took her hands and Warren was again glad that he’d decided to bring the young detective constable along with him. The two women were roughly the same age and some jobs needed a special touch that Warren, try as he might, would never possess.

“You don’t know that. It’s unlikely that we’d have found her any sooner — we wouldn’t have known where to start looking.” Karen didn’t mention, of course, that with no evidence of foul play a young woman missing for less than six hours — before the clubs even closed — wouldn’t merit much more than a few details in the duty log and a sympathetic, but firm, ‘wait and see if she turns up in the morning, then call again’.

After a few moments, the young woman regained her composure. Warren took over now. “Tell me about Darren. I believe they’d been together a while?”

Cheryl nodded. “Nearly three years. They’d been in the flat for almost a year. He’s been good to her. He has a heart of gold.” For the first time since they arrived, she smiled. “I teased her when they first started dating. He’s a right skinny one is Darren and he isn’t the sharpest tool in the box, but he really loves her and he’d do anything for you. He’s never really been one for nightclubbing or that, he prefers a quiet night in, but he always insists on picking us up if we’ve been out on the town. ‘No smoking and no puking’, he always says whenever he turns up in that car of his. Sally used to joke that she never worried about him having an affair, because, between looking after her and polishing his car, he hasn’t got enough energy.” The smile faded as the reality of the past few days came flooding back.

“So you would say that they had a strong relationship?”

Cheryl nodded vigorously, before her expression turned conspiratorial. “He was going to ask her to marry him.”

Warren blinked. It seemed a little odd that he would share his intentions with his girlfriend’s best friend. He said as much.

Cheryl laughed slightly. “Oh, he never said a word. Sal told me. The silly sod hid the ring in his underwear drawer — she found it one day when she was hunting for a missing sock. She knew exactly what he was planning but didn’t have the heart to let him know the cat was out of the bag. She was going to act all surprised when he asked her. She swore me to secrecy.” The brief moment of happiness passed and Cheryl’s face crumpled again. “I don’t suppose it matters now.”

The feeling in Warren’s gut was even stronger. Mentally he crossed Sally Evans’ boyfriend off his suspect list. Moving on, he asked Cheryl if Sally had mentioned anything strange over the past few days. Had any ex-boyfriends turned up on the scene or had she mentioned any disagreements with friends or co-workers?

To every question, Cheryl shook her head firmly, insisting that Sally told her everything.

“She didn’t have much of a history before Darren. He was her first really serious boyfriend. She dated a couple of lads at university, but never for more than a few months and I think they are all happy and married now.” She blushed slightly. “She wasn’t…inexperienced before she met Darren, you know, but she didn’t put it about and she’s been faithful to Darren ever since she met him — I’m absolutely sure of that.”

“What about co-workers? Is there anybody who could have perhaps mistaken friendliness for a bit more and got jealous?” Warren was grasping at straws now. The statistics showed that so-called ‘stranger attacks’ were far rarer than the public feared. Almost all victims had had some prior contact with their murderer, no matter how slight. Attacks by a total stranger were not only rare, they were also inherently more difficult to solve, because so many of the leads that the police would normally follow were absent.

In answer to his question, Cheryl was again equally firm. Almost the entire company was composed of females, varying in age from twenty-something to late fifties. Warren wasn’t quite ready to dismiss them yet; he’d interview them first. He couldn’t rule out that they were working a partnership with a male accomplice, but he knew it was unlikely, given that Sally Evans had probably been sexually assaulted as well as murdered.

The two male employees were added to the interview list, but again Warren’s instinct told him that, based on Cheryl’s description, Kevin the seventeen-year-old Saturday boy and Angus the openly gay former flight attendant, who lived in a civil partnership and took care of his elderly mother, were unlikely to be responsible.

Finally, Warren could think of no more questions. As they left he heard the sound of the kettle being filled again and smelt the first wisps of tobacco smoke, as Sally Evans’ best friend settled down again with her grief.