She was last seen at 11.45 p.m. walking in the direction of the railway station. There is, though, no evidence that she ever entered the station, bought a ticket or caught a train. We have to assume she did not.
We now enter the dead hours. The time between a disappearance taking place and it being noticed. Zoe vanished shortly before midnight. Her mother, Brenda, began looking for her at ten o’clock the next morning. We have no idea what happened to her during those ten hours.
The police version of events is that Hamish Wolfe, with murderous thoughts in mind, happened upon Zoe as she staggered in the direction of the station’s taxi rank. The two had more than a passing acquaintance already. Wolfe’s mother, Sandra, frequented the salon where Zoe worked and, more significantly, Zoe had become a patient of Wolfe’s some months earlier. Had Hamish offered her a lift, the police argue, she almost certainly would have accepted.
This is speculation, pure and simple. There is no evidence putting Hamish, or his car, in the vicinity of Keynsham railway station that night. On the contrary, he and his mother both claim they had dinner together that night, that she drove him home afterwards. However, as no one in the restaurant can confirm this (they were especially busy that night and weren’t even asked about it until over a year later), the alibi has largely been discounted.
Should it have been? It is a fundamental principle of British law that people are assumed to be telling the truth, until evidence suggests otherwise.
According to the police and prosecution, Hamish happened upon Zoe – tired, drunk, cold – and offered her a lift. He didn’t drive her home. He took her somewhere else and murdered her. The time frame remains indeterminate partly because Zoe’s body has never been found and partly because the remains of the other three murdered women were in a state of such advanced decomposition as to make a forensic examination practically worthless. We have no idea what happened to them in the final hours of their lives.
The search for Zoe
At ten o’clock on Saturday morning, Zoe’s sister, Kimberly, mentioned to her mother that Zoe hadn’t come home the previous night. Brenda got in touch with Kevin, who told her that not only had he not seen Zoe but that, to the best of his knowledge, she hadn’t spent the night at his flat.
A detective constable visited the Sykes’s home within two hours of Brenda reporting her daughter missing. Zoe had her purse and mobile phone with her. It was a smartphone, with a tracing application, but when the police activated it, they found it was listing the last-known location as the Trout Tavern on Friday evening. For some reason, Zoe had turned off her phone in the pub.
The hunt steps up
The next few days were spent interviewing Zoe’s friends, colleagues and acquaintances. Her boss at the salon described her as a conscientious and reliable employee. Kevin Walker was interviewed at length but maintained consistently that he had no idea of Zoe’s whereabouts.
The search was widened to the whole of Avon and Somerset constabulary by Monday evening. The local TV news programme carried a small piece. Nothing happened for several days.
The red boot
On Thursday, 14 June, a red cowboy boot was found on the roadside just outside the village of Cheddar in Somerset, a mere two hundred metres from the cave where Myrtle Reid’s remains were to be discovered, nearly two years later. The boot was identified by Zoe’s mother. Small bloodstains inside it suggested she’d been harmed.
At this point, the police search went national. All police forces in England and Wales were sent copies of Zoe’s photograph. Her disappearance made the national news and Brenda Sykes took part in a televised appeal for information.
Two weeks after the finding of the boot, three weeks after Zoe was last seen, the blood was confirmed as being hers. Kevin Walker was taken in for questioning, his house and garden were searched, as was Zoe’s family home.
Nothing. Zoe had pulled off as effective a vanishing trick as anyone had known. After time, as is largely inevitable, the police search was scaled back and Zoe joined the ranks of the missing. Arguably, that’s how she should have remained. There is not a jot of evidence that Hamish Wolfe, or anyone else for that matter, killed her.
* * *
Maggie saves the draft. It is all she has found on Zoe Sykes. Without access to the police files, it is as far as she can go for now.
‘So, you’ve decided, then?’
She closes Word and opens up her email. ‘Nope.’
‘Lot of work for a case you might never take on.’
‘Just organizing my thoughts.’
‘If I were a gambler…’
‘You’re not.’
‘I’d be placing my bets right now. Ten to one, Hamish Wolfe will be your client before the year’s end.’
Chapter 9
THREE HUNDRED FEET above sea level, above the hills, the quarries and the rivers, above the woods and meadows of the Somerset countryside, stands a painted-steel observation tower. Those who ascend to its octagonal platform can look directly down into the jagged cleft that is the Cheddar Gorge and watch it winding its way through the limestone mass of the Mendips.
The rusty old watchtower creaks and grumbles. Not with the wind, because today is quite still, but with impatience at the man who climbs its steps so often, but who never comes to look. The man who stands as still as the tower itself, with his eyes tight shut.
Detective Pete has stood here many times.
In spring, he can almost smell the world waking up; the rich sweetness of the soil as the worms churn it, as the buried bulbs send up their shoots. In the summer months, when the wind races across the levels, it brings with it the bitter tang of the ocean. In autumn, the trees of the nearby forest give off their own scent, a muskiness that reminds him of the scent of his ex-wife’s hair. Today, though, the air seems too cold to move and he can smell nothing but his own breath.
If Pete were wise, he’d wear gloves and a decent coat when he makes this pilgrimage to the tower in winter, but he never seems quite dressed for the time he spends here. Maybe he thinks suffering will bring him closer to Zoe, make it easier for him to sense where she is. Because Pete comes to this tower to find Zoe.
Every time he comes here, he stands with his eyes shut, telling himself that, when he opens them, he’ll be looking directly at the place where Zoe lies.
In his coat pocket, his phone trembles, letting him know a message has arrived. Taking it as a signal, Pete opens his eyes. No good. He is staring at the north cliff, at the area around Rill Cavern where Myrtle was found, and that area has been thoroughly searched.
Where are you, Zoe?
He turns, tucking his hands deep within his pockets, and looks north-east towards another limestone gorge called Burrington Combe and the cave known as Sidcot Swallet that became Jessie Tout’s grave.
No one has ever been able to explain quite how Hamish Wolfe got the body of Jessie Tout into the bottleneck hole that is Sidcot Swallet and he has yet to enlighten the world, but somehow he did it, because that’s where she was found, nearly four months after she vanished.
Not far at all from where Jessie lay is Goatchurch Cavern, a popular cave with those new to the sport. Boys from a grammar school in the north-east were exploring it in January, nearly five months after Chloe Wood vanished. A small group left the main route to explore one of the narrower passages and found a whole lot more than they’d bargained for.
Rill Cavern, Goatchurch Cavern, Sidcot Swallet. Pete’s team have spent hours staring at road maps, Ordnance Survey maps, cave maps and Google Earth, looking for patterns, for the fourth point that might indicate where Zoe is. They looked after Chloe was found, after Myrtle was found, and they looked again when Latimer arrived and imagined he was the first to have the idea.
There is no discernible pattern. Nothing to indicate where Zoe is. And sometimes Pete feels that, if he doesn’t find her, he might spend the rest of his life looking.
So Pete comes here and hopes that one day the idea will come. That
one day, from his vantage point on the tower, he’ll follow the track of a lone walker – like that one just now, in the white coat and blue hat, the one climbing over shingle falls to reach the northern cliff – and realize, in a eureka moment, where Zoe is.
The climber in the white coat pauses for breath and pulls off her hat. She sweeps her hair back, twisting it into a loose knot at the back of her neck, before tugging the woollen hat back on.
Pete moves quickly. He cannot run down the forty-seven metal steps of the watchtower and he certainly can’t run down the two hundred cut into the rock face that will take him back to the road. But he will make his way down into the gorge and back up the other side again as quickly as he can because the hair he just watched being tucked into a hat was blue.
Maggie Rose is climbing the northern cliff, heading for Rill Cavern.
Chapter 10
DRAFT
THE BIG, BAD WOLFE?
By Maggie Rose
CHAPTER 2, THE SHAMING OF JESSIE TOUT
At first glance, Jessica (Jessie) Tout, the second victim, could not have been more different to quiet, unassuming Zoe. Jessie was an attention seeker, a blogger and a small-time journalist, her main subject being body size. Jessie, if we are to believe what she wrote, was not ashamed of being fat.
Jessie had a day job, handling claims for an insurance company in Bristol but dreamed of making it big with her writing, of being taken on by one of the nationals. In the meantime, she wrote a column for her local newspaper, called ‘Confessions of a Fat Bird’. It was popular, by all accounts. She had over ten thousand followers on Twitter.
In her relatively small way, Jessie was becoming known. She wasn’t afraid to pitch into those she described as ‘fat-shamers’. She was controversial, combative, her blogs attracting huge, not always calm and reflective, comment streams. Her tweets were inevitably met with a torrent of abuse, hate and threats. Rarely a day went by without a spat of some sort playing out. This all happened online, of course. There is no suggestion that Jessie’s online enemies ever brought the fight into the real world.
She had a family (parents, two siblings) and a wide circle of friends. She lived alone, in a small top-floor flat in one of the older houses on the outskirts of Clifton.
Note: some potential here? An obsessive Twitter troll taking matters too far? Discovering a taste for stalking and killing fat women?
Jessie dressed for attention. She dyed her hair jet-black, was always well made-up and wore stylish, attention-grabbing clothes. Big and beautiful seems to have been her mantra.
The stealing away of Jessie Tout
Around the middle of the morning on Saturday, 6 July 2013, Jessie texted three of her friends to say that she had a ‘big’ lunch date. Reluctant to give too much information, she did admit that this man was a stranger, that it was, in effect, a blind date. She assured them that both she, and he, were being entirely sensible. They were meeting in a city-centre park and then walking to a restaurant close by. She would be surrounded by people at all times and completely safe. This was all at his suggestion, she added and, also, that although she hadn’t met him before, they’d been in touch for several months.
As far as Jessie’s friends were aware, she’d gone to meet the man as planned, and the date had gone well. Her best friend received three further texts during Saturday afternoon.
3.15 p.m.: Just finished lunch. Amazeballs. Off to beach. Going really well.
5.47 p.m.: I think I’m in love!
7.18 p.m.: And he can cook!!!
That is the last we hear of Jessie.
Enter DC Pete Weston, stage left
Jessie wasn’t properly missed until Monday, when her mother, Linda Tout, phoned Jessie at work to learn that she hadn’t shown up. Using her own key, Linda let herself into Jessie’s flat, to find no sign of her. She and her husband both went in person to report their daughter’s disappearance. The detective who took their statement was Detective Constable Peter Weston.
Something about this new case set DC Weston’s spider-sense a-tingling. It’s unclear when he made the connection between Jessie and Zoe, but we do know that his attempts to convince his bosses of a connection between the two cases went unheard for quite some time.
There was no sign of a struggle at Jessie’s flat. In fact, no sign that anyone had been in it since she’d left it on Saturday lunchtime. Her computer was removed to the station and investigated. What detectives found on it proved crucial to the investigation. It was on Jessie’s computer that the police met Harry Wilson.
Who is Harry?
Jessie’s contact with the man called Harry began with a private message on Facebook in which he congratulated her on her latest blog. As a doctor, he wrote, he’d long felt the health risks of being a certain percentage overweight were being seriously exaggerated. If people eat a good diet, exercise moderately and don’t take recreational drugs including alcohol, he wrote, they can be as healthy as anyone. Current preferences for ultra-slim women were no more than societal taste and an excuse for pack-mentality bullying.
Exactly what Jessie wanted to hear!
Harry seemed determined to be helpful and supportive. He attached a link to a piece of research. The tone of his message was respectful, professional and non-intrusive. The language he used, the technical terms he included, suggested that he was indeed what he claimed to be – a medical doctor. On the other hand, anyone with half a brain and the time to do a bit of research could probably have written the same thing.
Jessie replied to him. Of course she did. She was a young woman, uncomfortable in her own skin, whatever she might have claimed to the contrary, and here was an intelligent man telling her she was right, praising her point of view and her writing skills.
The conversation continued on the private message facility of Facebook. It was carried in full by one of the weekend broadsheets after Wolfe’s trial and what follows is a short extract:
Jessie: What frustrates me particularly is the idea that there must always be a reason behind weight gain. The woman must be suffering low self-esteem, is unsure of her place in the world. Eating is always seen as compensatory, a defence mechanism. Have you ever had people make assumptions about you, purely on the basis of how you look?
(She is trying to find out what he looks like. His Facebook profile picture shows only an extremely cute Husky puppy.)
Harry: I had weight issues growing up. My mum was an amazing cook and mealtimes were always a big thing in our house. At secondary school I started playing rugby and that turned most of the excess pounds to muscle. I do remember, though, how quickly the pack that is a group of teenage boys can turn on anyone who deviates from the norm. Good luck with the Bristol Post pitch. Let me know if you have any success.
(He’s sympathizing, but at the same time letting her know he’s a bit of a hunk. He signs off, as he always does, with an invitation for her to respond. In low-key, unthreatening ways, he keeps the conversation open.)
Unfortunately, the Facebook exchanges told the police nothing more than that Jessie was stalked. The Harry Wilson page was fake, set up using a computer with an IP address that has never been traced. The profile and cover pictures were all taken from the internet. He had a small number of ‘friends’, just twenty-four, and all of them, subsequently contacted by police, had no idea who he was. As often happens on Facebook, they’d accepted ‘friendship’ requests indiscriminately.
Harry and Jessie spoke on Facebook for several months before she suggested that they exchange email addresses. Jessie then created an email folder called, simply, Harry. In it she stored all his messages, flagged in various colours. The police were unable to work out the significance of the flags and I can only imagine they didn’t ask a needy young woman. The different flags refer to how encouraging, on a romantic level, Jessie considered the messages to be.
Still it remained professional. He helped her with her research (although one gets the impression she was making excuses to contact him – most of
what she asked she could have got herself from Google). He proofread blog pieces and articles, always getting a good balance between helpful criticism and praise. He encouraged her to submit pieces to the nationals.
Towards the end of May, her desperation to take the relationship further was becoming apparent. She initiated a conversation about the homosexual community. She was trying to find out if he was gay. He mentioned a past girlfriend.
The meeting on that last Saturday was documented on email. Red flag.
Harry: I’d love to meet you. I’d have suggested it long before now but a) I didn’t want to alarm you and b) working as a medical professional, I really do have to be careful about how I’m perceived. It sounds terribly old-fashioned to worry about ‘reputation’, I know, but in my line of business, a loss of reputation can be ruinous.
Jessie: Where shall we meet?
Harry: Don’t give me your address yet. I don’t want you to feel any level of anxiety. What about The Downs, near the children’s playground? We could walk to Al Bacio on the Queen’s Road.
Jessie: Sounds great. I can’t get away before 12.45, will that be OK?
The date
Jessie arrived on time wearing a bright apple-green dress and was noticed by several people in the park. Three of them remember her talking to a man, although the descriptions given of him are vague and contradictory. One witness claims she saw Jessie leaning on the railings, by the children’s play area, talking to a woman.
The Italian restaurant mentioned in the email conversation had no memory of Jessie and a companion dining there that lunchtime. They’d had no bookings in the name of either Harry Wilson or Jessie Tout, nor did they have any ‘no-shows’.
In court, the prosecuting barrister made much of the idea that whoever was luring these smart young women away would need to be possessed of a great deal of charm, most likely physical good looks. Few women would get into the car of a creepy-looking stranger, but if (turns dramatically to look at Hamish in the dock) confronted with a man with movie-star good looks, how much more forgiving can we be?
Daisy in Chains Page 5