Copycat

by C. S. Barnes

  ‘I’m DI Melanie Watton. Am I correct in thinking you’re Mrs Nelson?’

  The woman looked Melanie up and down before answering. ‘I am, yes.’ Her tone suddenly changed from her earlier abruptness, and the woman straightened up a little as she spoke. ‘Is this about the business with the Grantham girl?’

  ‘Ah, yes, it is, so you’re aware of our investigations.’ Mrs Nelson nodded in response, prompting Melanie to continue. ‘You and your son were meant to come down to the station this afternoon to speak to a couple of my officers, so I understand it, only you didn’t–’

  The woman cut Melanie off with a heavy sigh before turning into the house and shouting: ‘Jesus H, love, you didn’t call the police?’ There was a heavy tread of footsteps rushing down the stairs, ending when an equally stout middle-aged man came to stand alongside Mrs Nelson. ‘This is DI,’ Mrs Nelson said, but skipped a beat over Melanie’s name. ‘It’s about taking Pat down to the station, but you said you’d call. Didn’t you call?’

  The man rubbed at the back of his neck and stared firmly at the floor. ‘No, no, I suppose I didn’t.’

  There was another heavy sigh. ‘I’m so sorry,’ Mrs Nelson said, turning back to face Melanie. ‘Apparently I’m married to a bloody idiot.’ From behind her, Mr Nelson shrugged in a resigned fashion and retreated into the house. ‘Pat came home from college with a terrible stomach and he’s been in and out of bed with sickness ever since. My husband,’ she said the word like an insult, ‘told me that he’d call you to explain while I was tending to Pat, but he obviously found something better to do on his way to the phone.’

  ‘I see,’ Melanie replied, trying to sound neutral. ‘So, there’s no chance of interviewing Patrick this evening, not even a quick chat?’

  The woman looked amused. ‘I mean, if you’re brave enough to go up there…’ Melanie held her hands up in a jokey display of defeat. ‘Is there something I can be helping you with?’

  Melanie grabbed at the opportunity. ‘Can you confirm for me whether Jenni Grantham was here on the night of the incident; four nights ago, it would have been.’

  Mrs Nelson thought – hard, by the expression on her face – before speaking: ‘Yes, she was. They were upstairs playing their music, all three of them were; you know about Ellie, I assume? They were trying out their plans for Halloween or some such. That’s all I heard about the night and I haven’t been privy to much information since.’ She sounded particularly irked by this last admission.

  ‘Patrick isn’t saying much about what happened?’ Melanie pushed.

  ‘Truth is, he’s in a dreadful state. I think he might have been sweet on the girl although he’s never told me as much.’ Melanie nodded, encouraging the woman to continue. ‘Nothing ever happened, not that I know of, but he always had this funny look in his eye whenever he mentioned her. Now when she’s mentioned it’s a different kind of look altogether.’ She sounded sad, sympathy for her son breaking through her words.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Nelson. This has been helpful,’ Melanie said, drawing their encounter to a close. ‘When Patrick’s feeling better, perhaps you can give us a call and we’ll arrange a quick chat with him? There are just one or two things that we need to verify, you understand.’ As Melanie spoke, she thumbed at her cardholder to dig out an official business card, which she handed over to the woman in front of her. ‘That’ll put you straight through to me, if you want to get in touch when you can.’

  By the time Melanie was back in her car, the full weight of her exhaustion had settled on her shoulders. How could they not find anything? The victim and her family were squeaky clean on the surface; no one had a bad word to say about any of them, and it seemed that Jenni’s friends were in a similar boat. Something about Mrs Nelson’s admission stuck in Melanie’s side though; the idea that there was more between Patrick and Jenni than anyone knew – or maybe someone did know, or someone found out and objected. Were Patrick and Eleanor meant to be an item?

  The thoughts threw themselves around Melanie’s head for the short drive home, snapping short when she finally pulled up in front of her house. The case was leaving Melanie stumped, whichever way she looked at it. She eyed the dark house in front of her before restarting the car engine.

  These feelings called for a greasy dinner.

  17

  Melanie stood with her back to the incident room, her narrowed eyes staring down the white evidence board that the team was steadily patchworking together. The space was a mess of photographs – of Jenni, alive and dead, alongside Michael Richards’ victims that the young girl may or may not have had some connection to. Melanie shrugged; the Michael Richards link felt like anyone’s guess, but there was something about it all that didn’t sit right with her. She eyed the question marks that were appearing around Jenni’s name: Victim? Staged? Friends involved? This last one had been crossed out, and underneath it there was: Unknown killer? Random attack? The team was adding their guesses as they thought of them, but there was little in the way of hard evidence helping the case along, and Melanie was already feeling the pinch.

  Behind her, the team banded together in the hopes of some kind of progress meeting, but morale was already low. Melanie had filled DC Chris Burton and DS Edd Carter in on the situation with Patrick Nelson, and neither officer looked pleased at having their investigations halted. Meanwhile, DCs Read and Fairer were already putting their heads together to confer over a bare-looking sheet of paper that Read was holding in a determined grip.

  ‘Got something for us?’ Melanie asked, nodding towards Read’s sheet.

  The officer sighed. ‘I bloody wish.’

  ‘It’s a notice from forensics, no official results yet,’ Fairer explained.

  ‘Maybe if they weren’t busy putting everything in writing, they’d have time to do their jobs,’ Read added, folding the paper in half and scoring it with his thumbnail; the movement looked surprisingly aggressive on him. ‘What are they playing at over there; can’t we put a rush on this sort of thing?’

  ‘There is a rush on,’ Melanie said, perching on the table next to the evidence board. ‘They’re covering themselves that’s all, lads, making sure they’ve got a logged timeline in place for whatever happens next.’ Fairer didn’t look convinced by the explanation but he let the conversation slide all the same; he’d learnt that when it came to his boss’s word, there wasn’t usually much room to dispute it. ‘So nothing on forensics?’ Melanie asked.

  ‘They’ve found fibres on Jenni’s clothes that they’re trying to build up some kind of a profile for; some look like they’ve come from the college wear. Apparently one of the tech blokes has a kid at the place and he’d know the colour a mile off. But some of the samples look like they’ve come from elsewhere. Where elsewhere is…’

  ‘Remains to be seen?’ Melanie finished Read’s explanation and he nodded. ‘How certain are they that some of the fibres are college wear?’

  ‘Certain enough to have told us, which I suppose counts for something,’ Read guessed.

  ‘Okay.’ Melanie turned to write on the board. ‘The college doesn’t have a strict uniform policy, generally, but they do have hoodies, in the college colour, with emblems stitched to them. So, presumably, it’s either the hoodie,’ she paused to write this word on the board, ‘or it’s the emblem.’ She wrote this word and followed both with a question mark before circling the words and drawing a line stretched out from them. She turned to address the team again. ‘The question is, why would she have been wearing college wear on the day that she died; was there an event, a match, an anything? From there, how did they come into contact with her Halloween clothes; are we assuming this contact is with the clothes from the scene? In which case, are we assuming that they’re Eleanor’s?’

  There were so many questions, but before anyone could guess at an answer, the door to the incident room slammed open with a force that made the officers snap their attention around to it. DC Lucy Morris stood there, panting air back into her chest a
s though she’d run a marathon to get there.

  ‘High speed pursuit?’ Fairer asked and there was a low chuckle around the room.

  ‘We’ve found her,’ Morris huffed out. ‘We’ve found Jenni, on CCTV.’

  Melanie and her team crowded around the collection of screens that made up Morris’s makeshift office. She’d been watching camera reel after camera reel for two days, and the team being in here felt like an intrusion on her personal space. But the young officer shook off the discomfort at having company around her and clicked through the video files that were lined up on her desktop. She clicked one, prompting a saturated image to load onto the screen; in one edge of the frame there was a corner shop just barely visible.

  ‘So, we’re angled just above the entrance to this shop here,’ Morris explained, situating the team in the location on screen. ‘It’s off Southampton Street with owners who were kind enough to volunteer their recordings for the last week when I called them.’ With a click, the film started rolling, and just seconds later, Jenni Grantham appeared on screen. ‘There’s our girl,’ Morris said, pausing the clip.

  ‘Our girl, wearing a college hoodie,’ Carter highlighted.

  ‘Wait, did you say Southampton Street?’ Melanie asked.

  Morris spun around in her seat to face her boss. ‘I did. I wondered when one of you would notice.’ She shot a playful look at the rest of the team; finding a lead had finally given the young officer a confident streak. ‘I wasn’t getting anywhere going through the direct roads from Patrick Nelson’s house to Jenni’s house, and frankly, there aren’t that many alternative routes she could have taken. There were a lot out of her way that she could have taken though, and she did.’ She turned to pull up another video file. This one showed Jenni again walking down a small strip of independent shops. ‘This is about ten minutes on from the Southampton Street shot, which fits with how long it would have taken her to walk there.’

  ‘All of those files you’ve got,’ Edd said, pointing toward the screen. ‘They’re all Jenni?’

  Lucy nodded. ‘They’re all Jenni.’ Lucy back-clicked from the still image currently occupying the screen and, laying a fingertip on the first image icon she’d opened, she said, ‘From Southampton Street, to Indie Row, to Baker Walk, all the way through to…’ Lucy moved about between icons as she spoke, eventually pausing to click open the penultimate icon showing at the bottom of her screen. ‘Security shots from outside The Black Hound public house.’

  Jenni walked in from the top of the screen with a man trailing behind her, but it was clear that they weren’t together. The team watched on in a tense silence as Jenni turned to speak to the man, whatever she had said prompting him to grab her arm, before Jenni pulled away and walked out of shot.

  ‘Is that all we have?’ Melanie snapped, her tone sharp with what sounded like impatience.

  Again, Lucy back-clicked and dropped her cursor onto the final icon. ‘The Black Hound is a big place, so they’ve got several security cameras installed, luckily for us. But this is the last one that shows anything of Jenni.’

  Jenni tumbled into view as though she had been gently pushed before turning around and saying something to someone off-screen. A second later, the same man from before joined her in the frame. The team didn’t need an audio accompaniment to see that the pair were arguing; Jenni appeared to be doing the majority of the shouting though, her young face furious, her arms gesturing wildly. The man standing opposite her seemed, if anything, somewhat amused. He leaned toward her as though to grab her shoulders and Jenni backstepped, a warning index finger extended as though she were reprimanding a child. Mere seconds passed before Jenni stepped out of the frame; the man reached out then and pulled her back but with a tug of the shoulders, Jenni’s hoodie slipped away from her and she’d gone.

  Lucy hit pause, allowing the unknown man’s face to hover on the screen.

  ‘That’s the last we see of her?’ Burton asked, breaking her concentration on the screen for the first time since this slideshow had started. Lucy nodded confirmation. ‘Anything more from him?’ Chris nodded toward the screen.

  ‘I’m out of footage. He might appear elsewhere, but we’ll have to go digging to find him.’

  ‘I don’t want footage,’ Melanie announced. She leaned over the desk to closer inspect the man on the screen. ‘I want the real thing.’

  18

  Robert and Evie Grantham sat side by side on their sofa with DI Melanie Watton and DS Edd Carter perched on the seats opposite them. The group waited quietly while DC Ian Dixon, the Family Liaison Officer, clinked about in the kitchen, making tea and coffee as required. Melanie shared an awkward beat of eye contact with Robert, who then lowered his eyes to scrutinise the file that Melanie was holding.

  ‘Can you not just tell us what all this is about?’ Robert asked, stern, almost business-like. Melanie opened her mouth to respond but was cut short by the arrival of Dixon, who backed into the living room door and turned to reveal a tray full of steaming cups.

  ‘Who was tea and who was coffee?’ he asked the room, before distributing the drinks.

  ‘Mr Grantham.’ Melanie sat forward to lessen the distance between her and the couple. ‘We’ve found some footage of Jenni on various CCTV feeds from the evening that she was attacked.’ Evie Grantham took a sharp intake of breath which forced a pause from Melanie, but the officer knew she needed to press on. ‘In the final minutes of footage, Jenni appears with an unknown male outside a local public house. We will be putting out a call for information to try to get the man to come forward, but we were wondering whether you might be able to look at an image of the individual in question to see whether you recognise him at all?’

  ‘Did he hurt her? Is that what you’re thinking? Did this man hurt her?’ Evie Grantham asked with urgency, sitting forward in her seat, pulling away from her husband who looked physically pained by his wife’s reaction.

  ‘Evie,’ he said, as though to settle her. She threw a look back at him, but Melanie couldn’t quite spot the woman’s expression; then Evie was looking forward again, braced to catch Melanie’s answer. ‘You said the photograph was taken outside of a public house; a pub in town you mean, that’s where Jenni was seen?’

  ‘That’s where we’ve found footage of her, yes.’

  The parents shared a glance. ‘What the bloody hell would she have been doing there?’ Evie snapped, as though Melanie could, should, be able to explain their daughter’s actions.

  ‘We picked her up on a number of routes through the town centre on the evening of the attack.’ Melanie tried to soften her tone, aware of the blow she was delivering. ‘We’re hoping that by talking to this man, we might be able to get more of an idea of where she’d been, or where she was going.’ Melanie thumbed the file open to retrieve the picture as she spoke.

  ‘It’s a still image that we’ve pulled from the footage we found,’ Carter explained. ‘The quality might not be the best,’ he said as his senior handed over the sheet. ‘But our team are working to get a clearer image together, for the press release.’

  Robert took the extended sheet of paper from Melanie and eyed the pixelated image. It showed a man, his arms outstretched, and in one hand there was an item of clothing. Robert brought the image closer to inspect it in more detail, but he still couldn’t work out what the clothing was. From the expression on the pictured man’s face, he was mid-speech; his mouth moulded into a perfect O. Robert scrutinised the copy for a second longer before shaking his head lightly and passing it to his wife, who had been craning to see the image over her husband’s shoulder.

  She took the sheet eagerly, as though snatching for a prize, and stared at it with a fierce intensity. Melanie and Edd shared a questioning look but neither were prepared to rush through this moment; it was the first potential break in the case, and that would be a lot for any grieved parents to process.

  Dixon stood just inside the doorway, on call should anyone need him. The young FLO caught Edd’s eye and
nodded, to gesture out of the room, before Dixon excused himself. Seconds later, Carter followed. When Carter arrived in the kitchen, Dixon quietly closed the door and turned to face his colleague.

  ‘Where are we at?’ he asked.

  Carter shrugged and rubbed at the back of his neck. ‘This is the first major break.’ He sighed. ‘Potentially major break,’ he corrected himself. ‘DC Morris, back at the station, had been wading through security footage for the best part of two days before she found this, and she only found this because she expanded her search to include–’

  Melanie pushed open the kitchen door, cutting Edd off mid-explanation. Without a word, she nodded him back into the living room and retreated there herself. When both officers were seated in their previous positions, Melanie said, ‘So, to fill in my colleague, neither of you recognise the man in this image?’

  Robert shook his head. ‘He doesn’t look like anyone we know, I don’t think?’ He turned to his wife for verification and she nodded, solemnly, in agreement. ‘But you think he’s involved somehow, with our girl?’

  ‘That’s what we’re hoping to find out.’ Melanie slipped away the photograph. ‘The next steps will be to release this image to the press in the hope that we might be able to track down the man. He’s a person of interest, at the moment; we don’t have enough information about his involvement to go as far as calling him a suspect,’ she added, pre-empting what the couple’s next query would be. ‘But tracking him down will be a step in the right direction, of that much we’re certain.’