Doing her best to look baffled, Ann tried to shrug off an uneasy suspicion that David could tell she was lying. Pretending she was fine was a strain, but there was nothing else she could do.
David shook his head. ‘You just don’t seem yourself. Has something happened to upset you?’
‘No, no, I’m fine, really.’
She was rescued from David’s interrogation by Aimee who rushed into the kitchen, demanding an advance on her allowance.
‘What do you want it for?’ her father wanted to know.
‘I’m going out.’
‘Not dressed like that, you’re not,’ he said.
Aimee turned to Ann who had turned away, struggling to stifle her tears.
‘Mum, Dad won’t give me any money. What if I need to get a taxi home? You don’t want to put me at risk, do you?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ David snapped. ‘No one’s trying to put you at risk but you yourself, going out looking like a – a prostitute.’
Aimee glared at him. ‘You’re always criticising,’ she complained. ‘What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?’
‘Nothing if you want to go around showing your knickers to every Tom, Dick and Harry.’
‘I’m fifteen. I can go out when I like and wear what I like.’
‘Not while you’re living under my roof.’
‘Which hopefully won’t be for much longer,’ Aimee muttered, before appealing to Ann again. ‘Mum, will you lend me a tenner?’
But Aimee knew she was beaten. Ann would never contradict any of David’s decrees.
‘Your father’s right,’ Ann replied.
‘Now go upstairs and do your homework,’ David added.
Muttering darkly, Aimee ran from the room, slamming the door behind her and yelling that her parents never wanted her to have any fun. Ann watched her go, relieved to have an excuse for her own tears that she could no longer control.
‘It’s all right,’ David said, with an unexpected show of sympathy. ‘She has to learn.’
A moment later they heard the front door slam and, looking out of the window, saw Aimee striding down the front path. Muttering an expletive, David set off in pursuit. As she heard the door close behind him, Ann collapsed on to a chair and began to cry in earnest. Hearing raised voices, and the front door slamming, she pulled herself together, blew her nose and dabbed her eyes with a tissue, all the while listening to David and Aimee arguing. By the time she heard Aimee’s footsteps pounding up the stairs and David had rejoined her in the kitchen, she had regained control of herself. Even so, David could see she had been crying.
‘There’s no point getting upset about it,’ he said. ‘Teenagers will be teenagers, but I’m not having a daughter of mine running around town dressed like a tramp. Who knows what kind of trouble she might get herself into? Honestly, I don’t know what’s got into that girl.’
Nodding miserably, Ann breathed a silent sigh of relief that he had misunderstood why she was crying. Whatever happened, he must never discover the truth.
31
The tubby pathologist, Jonah Hetherington, looked younger than his fifty or so years on account of his high energy and good humour. Geraldine liked him very much. Not only was he sharp and efficient, he was also obliging. Several times he had made comments off the record that had helped to clarify her thoughts. On occasion he had even offered her a new slant on a case.
‘Don’t quote me on this,’ he liked to say or, ‘This is just between us, of course,’ as though they shared a guilty secret which, in a way, they did.
‘Of course,’ she would reply, returning his grin. ‘Silent as the grave.’
It seemed an appropriate phrase, given the circumstances.
This particular occasion was no different. Geraldine had gone to speak to the pathologist on her own, as Ian had told her he was too busy to accompany her.
‘You get more out of him when you go by yourself,’ Ian said.
They both knew the real, unspoken, reason why Ian was not going to the mortuary.
‘This chap here is a bit of a puzzle,’ Jonah said as soon as Geraldine entered the room.
‘In what way?’
Jonah’s usually cheery features creased in a frown that made him resemble a comical gargoyle, but his words were anything but amusing. ‘Well, it’s just that the evidence seems to be contradictory. The victim is certainly emaciated, and severely dehydrated. In fact, if he hadn’t been strangled, he would have been dead within hours anyway without medical attention.’
‘What kind of medical attention?’
‘First and foremost he needed to be put on a drip to hydrate him. But apart from that, and the fact that he was covered in carpet fibres, there doesn’t appear to have been very much wrong with him at all. I can find no evidence of any disease, and no long-term problems. In fact, you don’t need to scratch very far below the surface to reach the conclusion that he seems to have looked after himself. Granted he’s not eaten for days but one of his teeth has recently been capped, and his leg muscles are well toned and, what’s strange in someone so badly malnourished and dehydrated, is that his hair’s been dyed with what appears to be quite an expensive product, and although his nails are quite dirty, the ends look manicured and his feet are in unusually good condition for someone living on the street.’
Geraldine stared at the unshaven face of the victim. He hardly looked like someone who had taken care of himself.
‘And he has a molar implant which would have been expensive and not strictly necessary, I’d say. A lot of people would have simply lived with a gap in their back teeth. It wouldn’t have shown. Hopefully you’ll be able to discover his identity from his dental records?’
Geraldine nodded. ‘We’ll follow that up right away. So he hadn’t eaten for a few days and was severely dehydrated. Had he been ill, do you think? Or taking drugs?’
‘Perhaps, although there’s no sign of that. I’ll be able to confirm whether there were any substances in his system once we get the tox report. In the meantime, I’ve cleaned him up.’ Catching Geraldine’s sceptical expression, he added, ‘He was absolutely filthy when he was found. Not just fibres from the carpet he was wrapped in, but his trousers were covered in excrement – his own. Before they were ruined, they were a good pair of trousers, and his shirt was an expensive one as well.’
‘He could have been given the clothes.’
‘Yes, but I suppose what I’m saying is that if this was another tramp, as he appeared to be at first sight, he seems to have been a very affluent tramp. Look at his feet.’
Geraldine looked at them. Like the rest of him, they were clean and very pale. Although his toenails could probably do with trimming, they were not unusually long, and there was nothing remarkable about his feet at all, as far as she could see.
‘They’re just feet,’ she said.
‘Exactly. You’d expect a tramp to have a few blisters or bunions, wouldn’t you? The shoes he was wearing had moulded to his feet and show no signs of having been worn by a previous owner.’
‘Don’t tell me, they were an expensive brand.’
‘Not cheap anyway. Oxford brogues, fifty or sixty pounds at least. And appearances certainly suggest he wore them from new. Even his socks were cashmere wool and looked as though they’d hardly been worn.’
‘So you’re telling me you think this man wasn’t homeless at all, he just happened to be soiled and unshaven and malnourished and dehydrated.’
Jonah nodded. ‘I’m not able to reach any conclusions, but I am casting doubt on the theory that he was some kind of tramp. His clothes, shoes and teeth make that highly unlikely – but not impossible of course.’
‘Was there anything under his fingernails?’
‘Nothing useful. Just dirt.’
‘So he was well off and had recently lost his income and all his mone
y?’
Jonah inclined his head. ‘Yes, it’s possible he’d only recently fallen on hard times. Very recently, I’d say, from the look of him. Within the last fortnight. But what is it they say? We’re all only two pay days away from homelessness?’
As she drove back to the police station, Geraldine mulled over what Jonah had told her. There were any number of reasons why people might lose their homes. If there was no evidence of drink or drugs, it could be gambling or depression that had ruined his life, or he might have just lost his job and gone to pieces. Perhaps he would have recovered, given time. But he had not been given time. The team were all agreed that a killer was attacking rough sleepers, for some demented reason of his own. She wondered whether it was just bad luck for this latest victim that he had become a target so soon after becoming homeless, but at least he should be relatively easy to identify. All the same, she wondered whether it was significant or just bad luck that this third victim had looked like a tramp, yet had been wearing expensive clothes and had teeth and hair that until very recently had been well cared for. And he had not been killed in the city like the other two victims, but had been left in a rolled-up carpet in a van in a car park. It was looking as though there might be two killers on the streets.
32
Jasper had been in a cell for over forty-eight hours, with a case building against him. Uneasy about his alleged guilt, Geraldine was arguing with Ian about the arrest.
‘Why would he wear gloves and then spit on the pavement so close to his victim that some of his saliva actually landed on the body?’ she insisted. ‘It doesn’t make sense for someone to be so careful and at the same time so careless.’
‘Well, clearly he didn’t spit directly on to the body,’ Ian replied. ‘He wasn’t to know some of the spit would be carried on the wind and land where it did and incriminate him. It was just unfortunate for him that happened.’
Geraldine shook her head. ‘And why would anyone be stupid enough to stop and spit near a victim right after killing him?’
‘Oh, for goodness sake, there could be any number of reasons. To show his loathing? His disgust? Or perhaps it was an expression of his power over the victim?’
‘Where’s the power in spitting on someone? I mean, if he’d just killed him, surely that would be proof enough of his power?’
‘Well, then, maybe he spat on him before he killed him.’
‘It just doesn’t add up. In every other detail the killer was so careful not to leave any trace of his presence. He didn’t even touch the victim, and he wore gloves and a hood to make sure his face couldn’t be seen. And then, after all that, he just left a nice dollop of his DNA behind for us to find. It would be too stupid.’
‘Luckily for us, most killers are stupid.’
‘Yes, but Jasper doesn’t strike me as a complete idiot, and the murder was neatly executed in a way that hid the identity of the killer.’
‘In every detail but one,’ Ian pointed out with a smile. ‘Don’t forget we have his DNA on the second body. Surely that wraps it up?’
Initially, Eileen agreed with Ian. ‘If the same tie – if it was a tie – was used in two murders, then we have evidence that links Jasper to both victims.’
With Tommy’s confession debunked, they were pinning their hopes on Jasper. Either he had killed both men, or the investigation had gone off on the wrong tack altogether. But by now everyone had reservations. Even Eileen, who was keen to see the case resolved, seemed unsure of Jasper’s guilt.
‘We need to get him to confess,’ Ian said.
He was right. A decent defence counsel would be able to destroy their case by claiming the DNA evidence was circumstantial. Jasper had never attempted to deny his presence at the scene of the crime, but he insisted he had only arrived after the murder had been committed. And really, his presence there was all that could be established. They had yet to find a way to prove he had actually killed the victim.
‘What if it wasn’t him?’ Geraldine asked.
‘There are other questions we need to be asking,’ Eileen said. ‘Why was the third victim so malnourished immediately before he was killed? Why would a perfectly healthy reasonably affluent man stop eating and drinking and become so dirty?’
‘Maybe his wife left him,’ Ian suggested, with a trace of bitterness.
‘Perhaps he had mental health problems,’ Naomi added.
A team of constables were going door to door questioning Jasper’s neighbours. One of them had recently had a security camera rigged up above his front door, and another one along the side of his house. The constable who questioned him explained that the police would like to view the film. The neighbour expressed reluctance, as this entailed disturbing the cameras, but he had no choice. A technical team were promptly despatched to download the relevant footage and take it back to the police station where a constable had the tedious task of watching the film of the street and the approach to the neighbour’s house for hours. Only the corner of the frame caught the gate opposite where Jasper lived. He was seen going home at around six in the evening, and there was no sign of him leaving the house again until seven the following morning. His arrival and departure were both outside the time frame when the murder had been committed. At eight fifteen, a pizza had been delivered to his house. The person who opened the front door and took the delivery was out of the frame, which only covered Jasper’s gate and front path, but the delivery boy was traced from the logo on the box and the time of the delivery, and he recognised Jasper’s photo as the man who had taken the delivery. A next door neighbour confirmed the time when Jasper had arrived home on the Tuesday evening.
‘He could have gone out of the back door,’ someone suggested. ‘If he didn’t want to be seen, that would be likely, wouldn’t it?’
But the block of flats where Jasper lived had security lights and they had not been triggered all that night. The case against him had all but collapsed.
‘So, basically, he appears to be in the clear,’ Eileen said, when the team were given the news. ‘We’ll keep an eye on him, and make sure he doesn’t leave the area, but his lawyer is agitating for his release and we don’t have enough evidence to keep him any longer. We’ll have to drop all charges against him for now.’
With the discovery of a third victim killed with the same red fabric while Jasper was in a cell, the case against the suspect fell apart completely. Geraldine tried not to say ‘I told you so’ when Eileen announced the disappointing development. Once again they had no suspect.
Jasper glared at Geraldine when she told him he was free to go. He left, grumbling about wrongful arrest and police harassment. Meanwhile, they were doing everything possible to trace other suspects. A team continued scrutinising CCTV from the area in minute detail, searching for the hooded figure which had been sighted near the scene on the night of Bingo’s murder. Sophisticated software was in use to analyse the gait of that particular figure, and match it against every other hooded figure caught on camera roaming the streets that night. CCTV from shops in the surrounding area had been requested or requisitioned in an attempt to trace the hooded figure leaving the scene, and the gait of anyone who resembled the figure in question was being studied.
‘It’s tricky because he’s wearing a baggy hooded jacket that masks a lot of movement, but even so there are several distinctive features to look out for,’ a forensic podiatrist had advised the team tasked with watching hours of CCTV. ‘The suspect is slightly bow-legged, and swings his left leg out to the side when he’s walking, and his left arm moves out more than his right one.’
Any video that could possibly match the suspect was sent to the podiatrist for a meticulous frame-by-frame assessment, scrutinising every aspect of the figure’s walk, looking at the head, shoulders, arms and hands.
At the same time, a large team of officers had been drafted in to question anyone who lived near Coney Street, and anyone leg
itimately out on the streets during the night was questioned, as were the prostitutes known to the local Criminal Intelligence Unit. All the other homeless tramps they could track down were questioned. Many of them claimed to have known Bingo, but no one knew anything about his death, and hardly anyone seemed to care. Most of them seemed to be more concerned about their own safety on the streets than the fate of a fellow tramp.
While efforts were being made to find the shadowy figure spotted leaving Coney Street on the night of Bingo’s murder, at the same briefing where Eileen shared the news that they no longer had a suspect, they discussed the surprising identity of the third victim, Mark Routledge, a twenty-seven-year-old music teacher who had lived in Gillygate.
‘Everything comes back to Coney Street,’ Eileen commented. ‘So Mark wasn’t a rough sleeper, but he was strangled with the same red fabric as was used on the other two victims.’
‘And don’t forget he was possibly mistaken for a rough sleeper,’ Geraldine added.
Eileen nodded. ‘It certainly looks as though we’re dealing with one killer.’
‘And he’s not making himself easy to find,’ Ian added.
‘Didn’t anyone report Mark missing?’ Geraldine asked, slightly puzzled. ‘He can’t have been going into school in the state he was in before he died.’
‘Apparently he called in sick,’ a constable replied. ‘But that’s as much as the school secretary knew. She said they were under the impression he had the flu, but she couldn’t be sure.’
‘So it’s not only the homeless who can disappear without anyone noticing,’ Geraldine muttered.
‘What’s that?’ Eileen asked.
‘Oh, nothing,’ Geraldine replied. ‘Nothing important.’
33
Ann and David were sitting at the supper table, where he insisted the family ate together every evening. Aimee had disappeared upstairs, having eaten with them in sullen silence, while Ann and David had kept up a semblance of a normal family having dinner together. David was introverted at the best of times and Ann was not feeling chatty, but she had done her best to keep the conversation flowing for Aimee’s sake. When she stood up to clear away the plates, David glanced at his watch and announced that he was going into the living room to watch the local news.
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