No Smoke Without Fire (A DCI Warren Jones Novel - Book 2) (3 page)

“That you, DCI Jones?” he asked, without turning around.

“Yes, it’s me, Andy. Good to see you again.”

Warren had worked with Harrison at a couple of scenes since joining Middlesbury CID in the summer. The short, portly man was located at the Serious Crime headquarters in Welwyn Garden City, but lived in Middlesbury. For that reason, he usually managed to get himself assigned to any major crimes in the Middlesbury area. Warren was pleased to see him; the man was a safe, competent pair of hands.

Looking over the man’s shoulder, Warren felt a wave of sadness. As Tony had told him over the phone on the way in, the body belonged to a young woman. It was important not to draw too many conclusions at such an early stage — as his former mentor in the West Midlands Police had been so fond of saying, ‘When you Assume, it makes an Ass out of U and Me’. Nevertheless a few things were immediately apparent.

First, the body had almost certainly been there more than twenty-four hours. Even at this time of the year, a body started to decay rapidly when left to the mercy of the elements. The smell in the small tent was pretty rancid — thank goodness it wasn’t summer, Warren thought. No wonder Peanut had homed in on her so quickly.

The young woman was dressed in a smart black knee-length skirt that had been raised up above her waist. A pair of white panties were pulled down to just above her knees along with her thick black stockings, exposing her pubic region. First order of the day when she was finally moved to the pathologist’s lab would be a full rape kit. Hopefully, whoever had done this to her had left traces of his semen or other DNA sources behind.

The victim had been wearing a red woollen coat, now open to expose a smart white blouse. The blouse had been partially unbuttoned, showing a sensible bra, pulled to one side, exposing her left breast. Wrapped tightly around her neck was a charcoal knitted scarf.

Without wanting to prejudice any future conclusions too much, Warren was already thinking: work clothes, possibly an office worker or similar. He noted her shoes, shiny black with substantial heels, and decided that she probably had a fairly sedentary job. He knew that his wife, Susan, a science teacher who spent most of her day on her feet, always wore flats or modest heels.

“My preliminary observation is a white Caucasian female between the ages of twenty-five and thirty of average build. Possibly raped. Judging by the smell, she’s been dead for at least twenty-four hours, probably more. The body and clothes are wet, suggesting it has rained since she was left here, which gives us a time frame of some time prior to yesterday morning. The scarf is certainly tied in a manner consistent with a ligature, although I can’t determine cause of death here. That’s up to the pathologist.”

“What about the scene?”

“Not much yet. I suspect that the killer carried her here down the same path that the walkers and we have used; that and the rain have probably obliterated any footprints from there, but there looks to be a couple of boot prints around the body.” Harrison motioned towards the small squares of white plastic pinned to the ground around the victim’s head, protecting the imprints until casts could be made.

“The bloke that found her claims not to have approached the body, so hopefully they can be linked to the killer.”

“You said ‘carried’. Was she killed elsewhere and dumped here?”

Harrison shrugged, his suit rustling. “That I can’t tell you yet, but I’m pretty sure she didn’t walk here.” He pointed at the woman’s shoes. “Look, almost spotless. Her heels in particular would be caked in mud if she had walked here under her own steam.”

Warren eyed the young woman again. She was of average build, he judged, certainly no heavyweight, but even if she was dead or otherwise incapacitated it would have taken a fairly strong man or more than one person to have carried her down the path.

“Anything else?”

Harrison shook his head. “Nothing but speculation at the moment. I wouldn’t want to put any wrong ideas in your head at this stage. We’ll secure the site and get a full team up here in the morning. I’ll email you a clear headshot for ID purposes; her face is probably OK to show to relatives — I’ll leave that up to your judgement.”

Warren glanced at the young woman’s face again. She looked almost serene, with no visible cuts and bruises. Mercifully it didn’t look as if anything had taken a nibble of her face whilst she’d lain waiting to be discovered. Only the waxy pallor suggested she was anything other than asleep. Warren decided to run the photo by Family Liaison; they might even add a little pink in Photoshop to soften the blow.

With nothing more to be done, Sutton and Jones trudged back to the clearing, before continuing back to their cars. Neither man said anything, each lost in his own thoughts.

It was the beginning of December and somewhere a family would never look forward to the festive season in the same way again.

Tuesday 6
^th
December

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.