Splinter the Silence (26 page)

Of course there was litter. Haribo bags and Walkers crisp packets, wrappers from Mars bars and Toblerones, plastic Lucozade bottles and Diet Coke cans. They captured his attention then lost it as quickly. He was almost at the end of the reeds when he saw something odd trapped in the bare branches of a scrubby, dead-looking thorn bush. A splash of purple, the colour of the wax grapes in the old-fashioned fruit bowl on his mother’s sideboard. Was it a book? Alvin approached cautiously, as if his prey was a bird that might be unnerved into flight.

If this had been a proper investigation, if they’d had any justification for claiming as homicide this ‘rehearsal’, as Paula had called it, he would have stood still and called the scenes of crime team. But it wasn’t and they didn’t and he couldn’t. Instead, he took out his phone and started photographing the scene. Not that there was anything much to see. Regardless, he paused every couple of steps and took another shot.

And yes, it was a book. He could see that now. Purple cover with white writing. The weather had curled the cover and made it hard to decipher from a distance. There was nothing else that he could see. No footmarks, no handy bits of cloth snagged on the thorns. Alvin pulled on a pair of nitrile gloves and reached for the book.

A Room of One’s Own
, by Virginia Woolf. He dropped it in a paper evidence bag. Not poetry, like the others. But Paula had said Tony’s prediction was that there would be something by Virginia Woolf, who had apparently walked into a river with her pockets full of stones. Which thought reminded him. Rocks. He took a few steps back then cut down to the river’s edge again. The firm fluvial mud along the margin was studded with much smaller stones, milled smooth by the water. They were mostly the size and shape of avocados and mangoes, Alvin decided, knowing he was going to have to describe them later. He took more photos, setting his pen among them for scale. There was no sign that any had been removed, but it would be remarkable if there had been so long after the event, in an environment that was submerged or at least teased by the river twice a day.

There was nothing more he could think of doing there, so with a few final photos, Alvin made his way back to his car. It was a long way to have come for a cream tea and a rain-sodden paperback. But since he was here, he thought he might as well make the most of it. He dialled Paul Westmacott, who answered brusquely. ‘It’s Alvin here,’ he said. ‘A quick query. Who did the post-mortem on Jasmine Burton?’

‘What? You think he might have missed something an’ all?’

‘No, I’m just crossing the t’s. And I never said you’d missed anything.’

‘You didn’t have to. Anyway, you’ll not find anything to complain about on the post-mortem. He’s a top man. Professor John Chilton, up at the university. He did it himself, none of that passing it over to students.’

‘And that’s where I’ll find him, is it? Up at the university?’

Westmacott chuckled. ‘On a Friday afternoon? Not a hope in hell. He’ll be on his boat, probably halfway to France by now. Proper sailor, the professor. It’ll be Monday afternoon before we see hide nor hair of him back here.’

‘You got a number for him?’

‘I do, but it’s more than my life’s worth to hand it out to anybody who’s going to mess with his weekend.’

‘Oh for Christ’s sake,’ Alvin said, exasperated. ‘I’m a fucking detective. You think I can’t get this guy’s number in five minutes flat? If you want to be an obstructive bastard, go right ahead. But you can bet your pension on one thing. When I do speak to Professor Chilton, I’ll make sure to tell him I got his number from you.’

There was a moment of stunned silence. Then, in dull tones, Westmacott gave him the number before hanging up. What had been the point of that, Alvin wondered. All it had done was to raise his blood pressure and reinforce Westmacott’s idea of him as a big-city tosser. Why did people have to be so territorial? He sighed and dialled the number Westmacott had given him. The voice that answered was brisk, posh and almost feminine in its pitch. Alvin explained who he was and what he was after.

‘Ah yes, the drowning. My notes are in my office at the university, I’m afraid.’

Alvin’s heart sank. Westmacott had apparently been right. ‘When will you be able to access them?’

‘Let me see… I have to pick my car up from being serviced… Can you be there in half an hour?’

Fuck you, Paul Westmacott.
‘No problem at all,’ he said. Chilton gave him succinct directions and that was that. As he drove back up to Exeter, he called Paula and told her what he’d found. ‘I swear to God, I sometimes wonder whether Tony sacrifices goats on the high moor tops,’ she said. ‘How could he have known that?’

‘His brain’s wired differently to the rest of us. I’m going to talk to the pathologist. Not that I’m expecting anything, but I want to cover the bases. What are you guys up to?’

‘I’m waiting for Carol to finish up with the builders on the third floor, then we’re going to talk to Daisy Morton’s husband. Like you, we’re covering the bases. Listen, I know you’ve got to drive all the way back, but do you fancy meeting me in Solihull later? It turns out Jasmine Burton was on my team, and Stacey’s tracked down her girlfriend.’

‘She’s another one sacrificing goats on hillsides,’ Alvin said darkly. ‘I think I’ll be done here in an hour or so, the M5 on a Friday will be hell but I could probably meet you about seven, if that’d suit?’

‘OK. We’ll sort out the details later. Have fun with your pathologist.’

Those were two words you didn’t often find in the same sentence. ‘Fun’ and ‘pathologist’. But Professor Chilton turned out to be surprisingly jolly. He was short and slender with a thick mop of wavy blond hair shot through with strands of silver that played completely into the mad professor image. He had the tanned leathery skin of a sailor, wrinkles creating white lines spidering out from his eyes. ‘Come in, sit down, how delightful to meet you, you’re not from round here, are you?’ It all spilled out in one continuous flow, accompanied by a welcoming smile and an expansive gesture towards one of the visitor chairs that faced his desk. The office was Spartan, the desk bare. The only sign that this wasn’t some temporary squat were the framed photographs of racing yachts that lined the walls. Wherever Professor Chilton kept his library, it wasn’t here.

‘I’m based in Bradfield,’ Alvin said, stumbling over the unfamiliar location. ‘We’re looking into a group of suicides of women who have been bullied online and we want to rule out any suspicious circumstances.’

The professor rubbed his hands together, as if he were washing them. ‘Of course you do, why would you not? But you sound more like Birmingham than Bradfield, and your poor dead woman was from there, so I wondered, you know? Now, let me find my notes…’ He opened a drawer in his desk and produced a green folder. ‘Here we are.’ He opened it and frowned in concentration. He looked up. ‘I can give you a copy if you want to take one away with you?’

Alvin nodded. ‘But if you could run through the key points?’

Another cheery grin. ‘Naturally. Healthy, well-nourished young woman. The cause of death was drowning. It was estuary water in her lungs, so we know she wasn’t shoved under in the bath or swimming pool then dumped. We know she ate dinner with her friends – Thai chicken curry, green salad, apple crumble and custard – and we know they finished eating around nine o’clock. She had no alcohol in her system. I’d estimate the time of death, based on the stomach contents, at somewhere between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m.’

‘What about drugs?’

‘I won’t have the toxicology report for at least a week yet.’

‘Were there any injuries consistent with her being violently handled?’

Chilton gave him an inquisitorial look, bright eyes like a blackbird who’d caught a glimpse of a worm. ‘Interesting question, but one that’s very difficult to answer. The sea tends to give bodies a bit of a battering. Waves, rocks, soft tissue – it’s no contest. If they’ve not been in the water very long, they can look as if they’ve taken a beating even though nobody’s laid a finger on them. There were no marks on Jasmine Burton that were inconsistent with that conclusion. But equally, some of those contusions could have happened close to death. Even saying that, they could have been entirely innocent. It’s a rocky shore there. If she took a tumble on her way to the water’s edge, she’d probably have bruised herself. So my answer to you, Sergeant, is that there is no way of knowing.’

It was a long-winded way of saying ‘
no idea’.
‘Makes sense. Thanks for clearing that up. Did she have shoes on when she was washed up?’

‘One trainer. New Balance. The laces had worked their way into a tight knot, which is why it was still on her foot.’

Alvin made a mental note to check what Jasmine had been wearing earlier in the evening. It might be useful to know whether she’d gone back to her cottage in between leaving her friends and walking into the Exe. Or it might be completely irrelevant. ‘What else was she wearing?’

Chilton flicked back to the beginning. ‘What you’d expect. Relatively unscathed because she was only in the water for twenty-four hours or so before she washed ashore. Jeans, pants, sweater, long-sleeved top, bra. And over them all, a padded coat, mid-thigh length. The pockets were filled with stones then zipped up. It wasn’t a huge additional weight… Here we are, 7.93 kilos. But it would be enough to affect her natural buoyancy. And of course she would have tired more quickly if she’d had second thoughts.’ He closed the folder and sighed. ‘People have this romantic notion that drowning is a peaceful way to go. Trust me, it bloody well isn’t.’ He tossed the folder across the desk to Alvin. ‘There you go. I’ll have my secretary make me another copy.’ He stood up. ‘It’s been a pleasure, Sergeant, but other voices beckon me, as I imagine they do you.’

Alvin walked back to his car, brow furrowed in thought. From one perspective, nothing he had learned shed any light on the last hours of Jasmine Burton. But if you looked at it from the angle suggested by Tony Hill, quite a different picture began to emerge. Once was interesting; twice was a coincidence; three times was a pattern. And the rule of thumb was, three plus one is a serial killer.

34

T
here was something strangely comforting about the familiarity of it. Paula driving, Carol in the passenger seat, eyes on the road but her mind busy elsewhere. She was jacked up on a mixture of emotions – happiness at being back doing what she used to do best; anxiety that she’d lost her touch; and the low thrum of excitement that came from being on the trail of a killer. For even though a dispassionate observer might dismiss what they were doing as a crazy fantasy built on imaginary foundations, Carol knew there was something real and dangerous underpinning this investigation. She’d heard colleagues dismissing that kind of certainty as a hunch, or feminine intuition. But Tony had once explained to her that these convictions were based on a web of subtle and often subconscious indicators knotted together by the threads of experience. ‘You might not be able to provide a logical explanation. That doesn’t mean there isn’t one,’ he’d said. ‘Trust yourself. We tend to jump to conclusions for good reasons.’

‘Tell me what we know about Daisy Morton’s background,’ she said now as Paula threaded her way north through the city traffic.

‘Bradfield born and raised. Respectable working class. Dad was a plumber, mum worked in the local newsagent. Daisy married young – she had two kids by the time she was twenty-two. They’re grown up now, both at university. One in Edinburgh, the other in Bristol.’

‘That’s hard on them, losing their mother while they’re in the thick of doing their degrees. That’ll fuck you up,’ Carol said, remembering how vulnerable they’d all been in those days under their carapace of cool.

‘I see it with Torin every day, that damage. I’m amazed by how well he’s coped. I’d have gone right off the rails in his shoes. I hope Daisy’s kids find the same resilience.’

‘Hopefully they’ll have people in their lives like you and Elinor. So, Daisy had her kids early? Then what?’

‘When the children started school, she trained as a teacher. She’d been working part-time ever since she graduated. She taught four mornings a week at Harriestown Primary, the same school she went to when she was a kid. Her husband John is a full-time trade union official, and she became involved in local politics when she started teaching. She’d been a Labour councillor for just over six years. She was well-liked, although she wasn’t scared of controversy.’

‘A bit of a headline-grabber?’ Carol thought she knew the type. Heart in the right place, but not averse to the limelight.

‘Well, she was no stranger to the front page of the
Sentinel Times
,’ Paula admitted. ‘But nobody’s had a bad word to say about her since she died.’

Carol harrumphed. ‘They never do. Look at the way they treated Jimmy Savile. He was practically lying in state in Leeds Cathedral before the truth started to come out. Not that I’m suggesting Daisy Morton was anything like that. Just, you know, death puts people on a pedestal they never inhabited in life. You have to let the dust settle before you get near the truth. But tell me more about Daisy.’

‘Stayed married to John. They lived in the house that blew up for fifteen years. Bought on a mortgage via John’s employers that has five years to run. Nothing to indicate any problems in the marriage.’

‘Except that he didn’t know she was suicidal.’

‘Exactly,’ Paula said.

‘Which means either they were a lot less close than he’d like us to think, or else she wasn’t suicidal at all. So where is he staying now that his house is in ruins?’

‘He’s with Daisy’s brother Phil and his family. Phil Adamson. He owns a local chain of butcher shops, he’s done well for himself. Nice house up by the golf course, plenty of room for him and his wife and their two teenagers with a bit to spare for the grieving widower. Actually, from what Franny said, they’re all grieving. They were a close family. Phil has a place in Spain, they all used to go over there together.’

Carol felt a momentary stab of pain. She understood loss; she’d had a brother, been close, shared space as adults. She knew that for John Morton and his family, the journey of grief was only beginning. If this had been suicide, he’d know the same burden of guilt she carried too, though for different reasons. ‘Did Franny have anything to say about the threats against Daisy? Had she contacted the police?’