‘So? What’s so urgent we had to be called out in the middle of the night?’ Sam repeated her question as they drove out of the car park.
Ignoring the exaggeration, Geraldine related what little she knew about the incident. A car had driven into a van. The damage to both vehicles had been out of all proportion to the speed indicated on the car’s dashboard, where the speedometer had smashed on impact.
‘So it’s a car crash,’ Sam replied. ‘Big deal. Like I said, traffic should be dealing with it.’
‘Yes, but they felt something wasn’t right about it, so they called the Homicide Assessment Team out, and they also thought there was something wrong and so here we are, doing what we’re paid to do. Someone died in that crash,’ she added solemnly.
Sam grunted. Geraldine continued, hammering her point home. She was aware that she sounded pompous, but she didn’t care. What she had to say was more important than maintaining her image as a tough detective.
‘Whatever time we’re summoned makes no difference to the dead. Just because they have no voice doesn’t mean they have no rights.’
‘I know, I know, but this isn’t a suspicious death, it’s a car crash.’
‘Well, let’s wait and see what we find when we get there. We must have been called out for a reason.’
‘A cock up, more like.’
The rain began to fall more heavily as they drove in silence the rest of the way.
Even on a Saturday morning the roads were congested as they approached central London and crawled along the Marylebone Road. Neither of them spoke. Sam stared ahead sullenly. Geraldine made no attempt to engage her in conversation, accepting that in her present mood the sergeant was best left alone. If Geraldine had been at home, she would have been tidying her spare bedroom in readiness for her niece’s arrival. Celia would have been on the way to London. It would have been strange for Geraldine, not having her flat to herself, even if it was only for one night. She was surprised that her initial relief had turned to disappointment, now the visit had been cancelled. Forcing herself to focus on the task ahead, she ran through what little she knew about the incident so far.
At last they reached the entrance to Ashland Place, which was blocked by a police vehicle spanning the narrow side road. They had to park round the corner in Paddington Street.
‘What happened exactly?’ Geraldine asked as they entered the cordoned off area.
She felt her usual frisson of excitement, rapidly followed by a twinge of guilt because the summons meant there had been a fatality. Up ahead, a white Porsche had driven into a black van. From a distance, she surveyed the heap of crumpled metal and shattered glass, the mangled remains of two vehicles. A forensic canopy had been erected over the cars as protection from the rain that was now falling steadily. The highway glistened with rainbow patches of oil as she bent down to pull on blue overshoes before approaching the vehicles.
Beneath the canvas, white coated scene of crime officers were industriously measuring and photographing, collecting samples of glass and fabric. Apart from an occasional shout, the only sound was the muffled hum of traffic passing along the main road. Approaching the white car, she looked at its shattered front. The Porsche had slammed head first into a van, which had probably shunted it backwards. The car must have been travelling at speed because its front section had concertinaed, as though it was made of tin. The driver hadn’t stood a chance.
‘Someone’s in there,’ Sam muttered.
‘Yes, someone’s in there,’ a scene of crime officer echoed, in a curiously hollow tone.
‘What about the driver of the van?’ Geraldine asked sharply.
No one answered.
Geraldine peered inside the Porsche. The air bag had been deflated to allow access to the dead woman seated at the wheel. Her face was covered in pools and rivulets of blood, making it difficult to distinguish what she looked like. From the little Geraldine could see of a turned up nose and neat chin, she thought the victim looked very young.
‘Don’t worry, we’ll find out who did this to you,’ she whispered under her breath to the dead woman.
She made her way along the narrow gap between the vehicles and the side wall of the building that bordered the road, to the front of the van. The side windows were intact, but the windscreen had been smashed. A scene of crime officer had the driver’s door open and was examining the seat carefully.
‘Was the van empty?’ Geraldine asked. ‘There can’t have been anyone driving it. No one could’ve escaped unhurt from that,’ she added, nodding to indicate the crash.
The scene of crime officer who was working on the interior of the van straightened up and shrugged.
‘Yes, it’s hard to see how anyone could have survived a collision like that. The Porsche must have been going at a cracking pace, although the speedometer was smashed in the crash and that indicates the vehicle was travelling at under twenty miles an hour. There’s no sign of the other driver. We’ve searched the entire street in case he was somehow thrown clear, and managed to crawl away, but we’ve found nothing yet. The van must have been parked here, with no lights on, and the Porsche rammed straight into it. Which means she must have been doing more than twenty miles an hour to do this much damage. A lot more. We’re getting the speedometer checked.’
‘But what about the van? There must have been a driver at some point. Who’s it registered to?’
The scene of crime officer shrugged.
‘Someone called Trevelyan. Your colleague over there has the details.’
Geraldine returned to the Porsche and stared at the blood spattered face of the victim for a moment before turning to look for Sam. The sergeant was talking to a uniformed officer standing by the cordon. Geraldine suspected Sam was happy to avoid viewing the victim.
‘We’re still checking the interior of the van,’ a scene of crime officer replied, ‘it’ll take a while.’ He frowned. ‘But so far there’s been no sign of any injured party. No blood stains. Nothing. The whole thing’s weird, actually, because the van’s facing the wrong way. It must have been parked here. Either that, or else a ghost was driving that van.’
He grinned as though he had cracked a joke. No one laughed.
It was all quite straightforward. No one sitting in the driver’s seat of the van could have survived the crash. Someone had parked irresponsibly, the Porsche had come along travelling far too fast, and a woman was dead. With a sigh, Geraldine turned her attention back to the Porsche which had been shunted sideways across the street by the impact, so that the passenger door was almost flat against the wall. Only the driver’s door was accessible. She leaned down to peer inside the car. There wasn’t much to see from there, just the back of a head of long blonde hair soaked in blood like some ghastly lowlights.
‘Don’t touch anything,’ the scene of crime officer warned.
‘This isn’t our first potential crime scene,’ Geraldine snapped.
The initial rush of adrenaline had faded and she felt exhausted.
Having studied the interior of the car, she went over and joined Sam who was still deep in conversation with a uniformed constable manning the cordon. He was gesticulating and seemed to be ranting about something, while Sam alternately nodded and shook her head.
‘What was he going on about?’ Geraldine asked, when she and Sam were on their way back to the car and the constable could no longer hear them.
‘He was pissed off about some bloody reporter turning up earlier on, just before the Homicide Assessment Team arrived. It makes you sick, the way they exploit something like this, just for a story.’
‘How did the reporter get here so quickly?’
‘Apparently she was just round the corner. Aren’t they always? Anyway, she heard the accident. It must have been an almighty crash, and she came running up hoping for a story. They sent her packing before she could get anywhere near the Porsche. Imagine if she’d got a picture and someone who knew the victim saw it! These people are vultures. They’re
shameless.’
Geraldine nodded.
‘Still, it would have been useful to speak to her. She might have seen something.’
Sam shook her head.
‘We can’t have those bastards trampling around here one minute, and the next minute they’re complaining the police are doing nothing about it, when they’re the ones who contaminated the crime scene in the first place.’
‘Did she say which paper she was with?’
‘No. All the constable could tell me was that she was tall and busy poking her nose in where it wasn’t wanted.’
‘Oh well, never mind. She was probably a freelance reporter. The constable was right to send her packing, anyway.’
As they drove off, Geraldine continued airing some of the puzzling aspects of the accident.
‘So what do you make of it all?’ she asked at last, adding, ‘we need to know when the van was left there.’
‘It was the van driver’s fault, really,’ Sam agreed.
‘The victim drove slap into him.’
‘But he shouldn’t have been parked there in the first place. A black van like that is hardly going to be easy to spot at night.’
‘Could a collision like that have been planned?’ Geraldine asked. ‘I mean, it’s an odd place to leave a vehicle.’
After some discussion, they dismissed that idea. No one could have predicted that the Porsche would come round the corner too fast for the driver to stop.
There was nothing more to do but return to the station and find out as much as they could about the victim, and the owner of the black van.
‘Well, that was a waste of time,’ Sam said as they made their way back to the police station through slow moving Saturday traffic. ‘Whoever summoned us was way off the mark. I don’t think there was anything dodgy, unless you consider bad driving suspicious. It was just an accident.’
‘What about the speedometer in the Porsche? Don’t forget it showed the car was travelling far too slowly to cause that kind of damage.’
‘So there was a fault with the speedometer. Big deal. Tell you what, why don’t we stop for breakfast on the way?’
‘Always thinking of your stomach,’ Geraldine grumbled good-naturedly.
She wondered if Sam would have felt as hungry if she had seen the dead driver of the Porsche close up.
Chapter 4
DETECTIVE INSPECTOR REG MILTON was observing the team assemble when Geraldine arrived. Although in some ways he was an effective leader, with his large frame and domineering personality, she wondered if she would be able to count on his support if she ever messed up. She was fairly sure he would always put his own career prospects first. He looked slowly around the room, sizing up his team. Despite greying hair and deep creases on his forehead, there was a sense of physical power in his broad shoulders and upright carriage, which was accentuated by his well-spoken voice. But if he was keen to get results solely to further his own career, that didn’t really concern her. Reg had a reputation for running successful investigations. A young woman had died in a car accident because someone had been irresponsible enough to leave a black van blocking a narrow road at night without any lights on. All that mattered now was to identify the victim, establish the circumstances of her death, and track down whoever had left the van blocking a narrow one way street.
‘It sounds like something out of Sherlock Holmes,’ Sam whispered, when Reg referred to the case of the curious disappearance of the van driver.
‘What’s wrong with traffic?’ a detective constable grumbled. ‘If it’s a hit and run, why the hell’s it come to us? As if we haven’t got enough to do.’
Sam raised her eyebrows at Geraldine who nodded. She was relieved that the sergeant had recovered her good spirits. In a vast and anonymous metropolis it was a comfort to be on friendly terms with her sergeant, especially as Geraldine hadn’t been living in London for long enough to have met anyone outside work.
‘This won’t take long,’ Reg went on briskly. ‘But something’s come up that we need to look into. At first sight it appears to be a clear cut case. A Porsche slammed head on into a stationary van that had been left parked in a narrow one way street, facing the wrong way. The driver of the Porsche was killed in the crash. It shouldn’t have been beyond the wit of traffic to deal with it and we shouldn’t have been involved at all, only the Homicide Assessment Team wanted to be sure there was nothing iffy about this accident.’
He looked around the room slowly.
‘As I said, it looks straightforward. There was something wrong with the speedometer on the Porsche, so we’re looking into that, and then we’ve just got to tie up a few loose ends and we’ll be done.’
Turning his attention to the incident board, he pointed to the image of a woman’s pale face. She had been cleaned up. While one side of her face was unblemished, the other was badly scratched from smashed glass. The detective chief inspector turned back to the assembled officers.
‘This is the victim,’ he said.
Geraldine studied the vaguely familiar face of a woman in her early twenties. She had dishevelled blonde hair and blue eyes. Apart from the ghastly pallor of her damaged face, she would have been beautiful. The inspector stuck some more images of the dead woman on the board and the assembled officers fell silent, watching.
‘Even with an air bag the collision was almost certain to be fatal, according to the boys in traffic. The windscreen was shatter proof, but she suffered multiple lacerations to the side of her head and face, as you can see, caused by splinters of glass from the doors. It was some crash. She drove straight into a van at considerable speed, travelling along a narrow one-way street. She went into it head on. She didn’t have a chance.’
He paused and glanced up at the incident board before referring to his notes.
‘She was driving a white Porsche.’
He read out the registration number.
‘Nice,’ one of the uniformed officers remarked.
‘Not any more,’ Reg replied, showing an image of the crumpled front of the vehicle.
‘The victim was a twenty-two year old white female called Anna Porter.’
He paused and the assembled officers looked appropriately subdued on hearing how young the victim was.
‘Anna Porter?’ one of the constables piped up suddenly, staring at the photo of the young woman’s bloody face. ‘I thought I recognised her. She’s Dorothy in Down and Out, isn’t she?’
‘What’s Down and Out?’
‘It’s a hit series on the TV. You must have heard of it.’
Reg gave a noncommittal grunt. Several of the younger officers muttered, recognising the actress.
‘The key task is to question the driver who parked the other vehicle involved in this accident,’ Reg added.
‘Bloody idiot,’ someone muttered.
He nodded at a sergeant who had been researching the vehicles. Anna had been driving her own white Porsche when she had crashed into a black van registered to a man called Piers Trevelyan.
‘Anna and Piers lived at the same address,’ the sergeant added and a murmur of interest rippled around the room.
‘It’s a crime of passion!’ Sam whispered.
Geraldine smiled at her young colleague’s enthusiasm.
‘So,’ the sergeant resumed. ‘the victim was living with Piers. They’d been living together for about six months.’
‘That seems to be fairly conclusive then,’ Reg said complacently, ‘let’s go and pick up the boyfriend. See what he has to say for himself, and what his van was doing parked in Ashland Place just where Anna was driving.’
Geraldine scribbled down the address as the sergeant continued.
‘Anna was an actress on the TV. Her boyfriend, Piers Trevelyan, is a big shot casting director, a well known figure in the film world by all accounts. He’s worked with quite a few well known film stars, according to his website anyway. And this year he won a lifetime award for services to the British film industry.’
‘There’s one more thing. A business card was picked up from the floor of the car: Dinah Jedway, the victim’s agent.’
‘I can’t believe that’s Anna Porter,’ someone commented, and a faint murmur ran round the room.
‘She was so beautiful,’ another voice agreed.
‘I wonder what they’re going to do on Down and Out now.’
‘Come on then, let’s sort this out,’ Reg said firmly.
He sounded slightly agitated. The significance of the victim’s identity wasn’t lost on anyone in the room. The media was bound to go into a frenzy at the tragic death of a glamorous young celebrity. The police investigation would be a target for critics if they didn’t wrap up the case quickly.
‘We need to find out what Piers Trevelyan was doing, driving the wrong way along a one way street, and leaving his van parked there so dangerously,’ Geraldine said.
‘Just look at that,’ a sergeant added, gesturing at a picture of the Porsche. ‘It looks like she drove into a tank!’
Reg interrupted. ‘The front of the van was smashed in. According to the traffic officers, there’s no way anyone could have survived that impact.’ He paused, frowning. ‘But traffic can’t believe the damage was as severe as that, if the van was stationary and the Porsche was only travelling at about twenty. They reckon it must have been travelling at least three times as fast as the speedometer indicated. That’s what aroused their suspicion in the first place. They thought there might have been something odd about it, because the car had only just turned the corner.’
Fatal Act Page 2