‘It’s good of you to come in, Sir David,’ Longley said with what Thackeray felt was a touch too much deference in his voice. ‘But my officers feel that you might be able to help us in a matter of identification.’
Murgatroyd raised an eyebrow at that but his solicitor filled the slight pause.
‘My client is very happy to help in any way he can, if it is within his power,’ he said.
‘DCI Thackeray is the senior investigating officer in this case, so I’ll leave him to pursue this with you.’
‘Thank you,’ Thackeray said, flicking through his file although he knew exactly what it said since he had picked it up from his desk as soon as he got into the office. Mower had been hovering by the door, with excited eyes, and had followed him into his office.
‘I think we may have a lead to this bastard,’ he had said. ‘At least a link with Bradfield, even though our man seems to be a Londoner born and bred.’ Thackeray had read his report carefully and then nodded.
‘We need to talk to this man, Murgatroyd,’ he said. ‘I’ll see the super as soon as he’s in and tell him what we’ve got. It may be that Murgatroyd’s not even in Bradfield. He seems to have interests all over the country, but we’ll get hold of him somewhere. Hopefully he’ll remember our Leroy, may even know where he is now.’ But it had turned out that Murgatroyd had been at home at Sibden House, had agreed readily enough to an interview and had arrived at the station with his solicitor precisely at the time agreed.
‘If I may inquire exactly what case we are talking about here?’ his solicitor now addressed himself to Thackeray. ‘Your officer was not very explicit on the phone, apparently.’ The two men waited for Thackeray’s answer with expressions of mild curiosity on their faces.
‘As you may know, we are investigating the particularly brutal murder of a young woman whose partially buried body was found two days ago on a lonely stretch of moorland between Bradfield and Manchester.’ An expression of surprise flickered across the solicitor’s face and he glanced at his client, who remained completely impassive.
‘You mentioned a question of identification…?’ the lawyer asked, more tentative now as he took on board information that had obviously been a shock to him.
‘Yes, we have forensic evidence that leads us to wish to question a man called Leroy Jason Green who was living, some nine or ten years ago, in West London,’ Thackeray said, watching Murgatroyd closely. ‘Did you ever meet Leroy Green, Mr Murgatroyd?’
Murgatroyd met Thackeray’s gaze directly for the first time and he shrugged slightly.
‘Not that I can recall,’ he said. ‘Is there any particular reason why you think I might have done?’
‘You both had some connection with a church in Bayswater, I understand,’ Thackeray said. ‘Do you remember that?’
Murgatroyd continued to stare at Thackeray blankly for a moment and then slowly nodded.
‘You must mean Stephen Wright’s worthy effort? What did he call it – the Congregation of the Blessed? Something like that? I do remember Stephen. A good man, if somewhat disorganised. But a bit out of his depth, I always thought, with some of the young people he recruited from Notting Hill and Paddington. Is this young man Leroy one of his lost sheep? It is possible I met him without taking his name on board. I take it he’s West Indian?’
Thackeray nodded.
‘By descent,’ Thackeray said. ‘Mr Wright seemed to think that he might have joined one of the training schemes you were involved in yourself at that time. Do you remember him in that context?’
‘Not individually, no,’ Murgatroyd said with what sounded like genuine regret. ‘There were a lot of young black men on those schemes. Some went on to make a success of their lives, others didn’t. Presumably if Leroy Green is now a murder suspect, he was one of the ones we failed with. I have always thought, looking back, that I was too preoccupied with my business interests at that time to give the charitable activities I was involved in as much attention as they deserved. But then, if I hadn’t done that, I certainly wouldn’t have been able to become involved in education as heavily as I am today.’
He offered a self-deprecating smile and glanced at his solicitor.
‘I do have a photograph that might jog your memory,’ Thackeray said. ‘Green has a criminal record.’ He took the police snapshot of a sulky-looking prisoner from his file and handed it to Murgatroyd, who did little more than glance at it before handing it back.
‘I’m sorry, but no,’ Murgatroyd said. ‘This is all a very long time ago, Mr Thackeray, and I really don’t think you can expect me to remember every youngster who went to Stephen Wright’s church, much less the even greater number who Mr Wright tried to help in other ways. My input was largely financial not personal. I did my best to help, but was not really actively involved.’
‘This is what our computer people think he might look like after ten years or so,’ Thackeray persisted, handing Murgatroyd another picture which Murgatroyd studied briefly again.
‘Have you met that man, or anyone who looks like him, more recently, in Bradfield perhaps?’ Thackeray pressed him. But Murgatroyd shook his head again.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘You’re sure?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Is there anything else my client can help you with, Superintendent?’ the solicitor said, closing his own file with a snap of finality. Longley glanced at Thackeray who shook his head slightly.
‘Thank you for coming in, Sir David,’ Longley said and watched as Thackeray opened the door for them and summoned a passing constable to escort them out of the building.
‘Not much joy there, then,’ Longley said. Thackeray shrugged.
‘I’m not sure I believed him,’ he said. ‘But we’ll have to take his word for it for the moment.’
‘Keep me up to speed, Michael,’ Longley said. ‘I’m already getting hints from the top that there are complaints coming in from some of the men you brought in yesterday for further questioning. Not that I want that to stand in the way of your investigation in any way, but tread carefully with these people. They can’t all be guilty and some of them can make our life uncomfortable in one way or another.’
Thackeray looked at his boss for a moment without speaking.
‘I’ll take that in the spirit in which I’m sure it’s meant,’ he said, and walked out, closing the door very firmly behind him.
Sergeant Kevin Mower waylaid him on the way downstairs to his own office.
‘Has Murgatroyd gone, guv?’ he asked. He was clutching a sheaf of papers in his hand and looked as excited as his perpetually cool exterior ever allowed.
‘He says he doesn’t recall Green in any shape or form,’ Thackeray said.
‘Well, that could be bullshit,’ Mower said. ‘Take a look at this and see what you think.’
Thackeray waved Mower into his own office where the sergeant spread a photocopied sheet of newsprint onto the DCI’s desk, together with the artist’s impression of what Leroy Green might look like ten years after his police mugshot had been taken. The page, which had been taken, Thackeray noticed, from a copy of the Bradfield Gazette of a week previously, included a photograph of a group of people outside Sutton Park School, above a brief item on the academy plans over Laura Ackroyd’s byline.
‘So?’ he said, reading the caption underneath the photograph. This identified the head teacher, Debbie Stapleton, Sir David Murgatroyd and Councillor Peter Maxwell, all of whom he recognised. It had been taken as Murgatroyd arrived to make his first visit to the school after the local council gave provisional approval to the academy proposal, and there were half a dozen people clustered behind the main party, none of whom looked familiar to Thackeray.
‘Look here,’ Mower said, pointing to a blurred image at the very back of the group. ‘How like our computer impression is that?’ he asked.
Thackeray pulled the computer image from his own file and laid it close to the newspaper photograph where a solitary dark face
was half obscured by a figure in front of him. He glanced at Mower doubtfully.
‘There’s a resemblance, I suppose,’ he said cautiously. ‘Find out who he is. Don’t be fooled by the colour of his skin. It could be anyone, a teacher or a governor at the school, perhaps. There’s not necessarily any connection with our inquiry. But it’s certainly worth a couple of phone calls, one to Laura, if you must.’
‘I’ll get a digital image of the picture from the Gazette if I can and see if we can enhance it,’ Mower said. ‘The other thing you need to know is that we’ve got an interesting result from forensics. It’s very tentative as yet, but they think they’ve found DNA on the body itself that is not the same as the traces they’ve got from the fingerprints. In other words, they think at least two people have been in contact with the body. It’ll take a while to confirm – the traces from the fingerprints are minute, you know how it goes. But they thought we would want to bear it in mind.’
‘Good, we’ll bear it in mind,’ Thackeray said. ‘Then we can do some elimination. We’ve got too many people under suspicion at the moment. If we can persuade some of them to give us a sample voluntarily so they can rule themselves out, everyone will be a whole lot happier, including the super.’
‘Getting a bit close to the golf club, is it, guv?’Mower asked with a grin. ‘Or his cronies in the Clarendon bar?’
‘That thought’s unworthy of you, Kevin,’ Thackeray said, with a wry smile. ‘But I think it’s safe to say that if we offer some of our doggers a way of eliminating themselves from a murder inquiry, they’ll jump at it.’
‘I’m sure you’re right, guv,’ Mower said.
Back in the murder incident room, he did a quick check on how far detectives had progressed with their various tasks. Ten minutes later DCI Thackeray came down to the incident room himself to conduct the day’s review of the progress in the case and to discover that a few more new elements had been thrown into the mix.
‘We may have got something significant from our trawl through misper records,’ Mower said. ‘We asked other forces if they had any missing women who had been involved in swingers or dogging groups and we’ve had a few possibles. Obviously it’s hit-and-miss. Not every investigating officer would have asked questions like that of grieving husbands or boyfriends. But there are half a dozen where questions were asked and which seem to bear some similarities to Karen Bastable’s disappearance. None of them has ever been seen or heard from again, and in a couple the male partner was suspected of unlawful killing for a time, but there were never any charges. We’ve asked all the areas involved to send us full details.’
‘So you think there’s possibly a serial killer out there who’s generally made a better job of hiding the bodies?’ Thackeray asked.
‘It looks like a possibility,’ Mower said. ‘But as to who it is, the only identification we have is still the fingerprint evidence from the plastic wrapping Karen was found in.’
‘Right,’ Thackeray agreed. ‘So our top priority has to be tracking down Leroy Green. Any progress there?’
‘Again, we’ve circulated other forces, and looked at all the databases, but without any positive response so far. There’s no record that he’s dead, but no other record of him, either, for the last nine years that we can trace. No driving licence or vehicle registrations, his NI number hasn’t been used, he’s not come to police attention in any way, he hasn’t joined any of the services. He’s either gone abroad or very successfully gone underground.’
‘With a new identity, perhaps?’ Thackeray said.
‘That’s not easy for a lad of nineteen, twenty to organise,’ Mower objected.
‘Did he have a passport?’
‘Yes, issued when he was sixteen for a school trip. But it’s long expired and hasn’t been renewed,’ Mower said. ‘He could have gone abroad for a while, but he would need a passport to get back into the country, and we know he was here in Yorkshire just days ago. That wasn’t a blurred or partial print they found, it was a good clear image. There’s no doubt he was there when Karen’s body was parcelled up like that. He’s an accessory if not a killer.’
‘Anything else?’ Thackeray glanced around his assembled detectives who appeared to be in sombre mood.
‘I was looking at the Internet,’ Mohammed Sharif said. ‘There are sites run by various groups with unusual sexual preferences.’ The Asian DC’s deadpan delivery gave nothing away to indicate his personal views of such activities, but none of his colleagues had any doubt that he had found this particular inquiry profoundly troubling.
‘That includes doggers?’ Thackeray asked.
‘Yes, it does, though there’s nothing specific to this area, sir. But it might be somewhere someone who wanted to set up a group would start. I reckon the next step is to make contact with some of these other people – see if anyone knows anything.’
‘Absolutely right,’ Thackeray said. ‘If there are networks, our man may well be exploiting them to find new victims, using the groups to make contact with women for his own purposes. Make that a priority, Omar.’
Sharif nodded.
‘And his purposes might be…’ Sharif hesitated. ‘He likes perverted sex, or he hates it?’
‘You never know with these psychos,’ Mower said. ‘What’s going on in their heads is a mystery and no psychologist I’ve ever come across has ever explained it adequately. Fortunately in this case we’ve got some good, strong forensic leads, so we don’t need to go delving into perverse motivation just yet. Just follow your Internet links, Omar, and see where they take you. OK, guv?’
Mower glanced at Thackeray for approval and received a brief nod. The sergeant knew that the DCI would not hesitate to call in a forensic psychologist if he thought it was necessary but, with only one body and strong leads to follow, that point had not yet come. Old-fashioned detective work looked as though it might yet get a result and, as the briefing ground to its inconclusive end, Kevin Mower and the rest of the team were clearly keen to get on with it.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
‘His name’s Winston Sanderson, and he’s David Murgatroyd’s gofer, right-hand man, gatekeeper, whatever,’ Laura Ackroyd said, glancing again at the photograph she had printed off the Gazette’s database for Kevin Mower, who was sitting across a table in the Lamb that lunchtime. ‘From my point of view, the man’s a complete menace. He guards Murgatroyd like a well-trained Rottweiler. You’d think bloody Sir David was some sort of premier-league footballer, he’s that well protected.’
‘Perhaps he’s had some bad experiences with the tabloids. Not everyone is keen on this business of selling off state schools to dubious millionaires, after all, especially not the religious ones,’ Mower said, sipping his pint reflectively. He had been shocked, when Laura joined him, to see how pale and unwell she looked but he did not quite know how to broach the subject too directly.
‘Maybe,’ Laura said dubiously. ‘It looks as if tabloid culture’s claimed another victim in Debbie Stapleton. Did you hear about that?’ Mower nodded.
‘She’s going to be all right, isn’t she?’
‘I think so,’ Laura said. ‘She’s out of intensive care, though there’s various nasty little pieces appeared in the London papers which won’t make her feel any better when she reads them. I’m not sure I’ll ever forgive Bob Baker for starting this all off.’
‘The man’s only fit for a tabloid himself. I don’t know why the Gazette puts up with him.’
‘Ted Grant not only puts up with him but encourages him, because at heart Ted’s a tabloid vulture himself,’ Laura said. ‘He’s never got over some brief stint he did on the Globe. Everything up here on a local rag is just a pale shadow of what he’d really like to get up to. But I can’t see him ever leaving. No one else would have him now. So we’re in for years of him getting more bitter and frustrated.’
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Mower said. ‘So Sanderson is Murgatroyd’s minder, protecting him from the likes of Bob Baker? Is that righ
t?’
‘Seems to be. Though Sir David seems to be a little more open to my approaches. I have met him, with Sanderson’s reluctant approval.’
‘No doubt the result of your undoubted charms,’ Mower said. ‘But why do I get the impression that this man Murgatroyd is not bringing much except trouble to Bradfield?’
‘My feeling entirely, though I can’t take sides so openly in reporting it. But it’s difficult to see how the protesters are going to get their case over to the powers that be with the remotest chance of success, let alone win the battle. The council stands to gain too much from this academy scheme: a brand new school to replace a crumbling ruin and, if he keeps his promises, a whole lot of troublesome kids taken off their hands. Councillor Peter Maxwell thinks it’s Christmas with bells on.’
Mower laughed and then thought better of it, burying his face in his glass again. Laura was doing no more than sip at her vodka and tonic, he noticed.
‘What?’ she said, quick to pick up on his hesitation.
‘Let’s just say that Councillor Maxwell has got a few other things on his mind just now that I couldn’t possibly tell a reporter about,’ he said. Laura gave him a sharp look.
‘And what, exactly, am I supposed to make of that?’ she asked.
‘Anyway, tell me what you know about this man Sanderson? Is he local?’ Mower knew he had gone too far, and shifted the subject sharply.
‘No, I don’t think so. He sounds like a Londoner. Though I can’t say he’s ever got very personal. He seems to think the sun shines out of David Murgatroyd, though. Gods’ gift, in Sanderson’s view.’
‘Can I show you something, strictly off the record?’ Mower asked carefully.
‘I suppose so, if it’ll help,’ Laura said.
Mower pulled the police mugshot of Leroy Green from his inside pocket and spread it out on the table.
‘D’you think that could have been Sanderson nine or ten years ago, when he was about nineteen, twenty?’
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