There were steps to ground level on Albion Street, where she wanted to be, but the car park was laid out in a grid, and underground, in the dark, it was hard to get her bearings. She stood by her car and turned threesixty. A car pulled into a bay thirty feet from her own; its brake lights flashed once, then the engine fell silent. The late-night hum of traffic washed around her like fog, and she started off down the main inlet, hoping to pick up a sign so that she could get her bearings. Halfway down the row, she saw it: Peter Street and the Midland Hotel. The arrow pointed back the way she’d come – she was heading the wrong way.
Cursing softly, she turned – saw a movement off to her left. The driver of the car that had followed her in, maybe. But she couldn’t see him. She stood still and listened, heard the gritty slither of shoe leather on cobbles. She peered into the shadows. Saw the movement again; closer this time – a hooded figure. He ducked back behind one of the archway pillars. She looked in the opposite direction, back along the bays. A second figure seemed to be lurking near the stairs to the street.
The hooded figure had disappeared. Go forward, or back? Every archway was a hiding place. A place for someone to lurk and pounce. Going back the way she’d come would take her to the quieter end of the street – further from help, if she needed it, and towards the waiting figure and the foot of the steps. Forward would take her nearer the Midland, and safety. Forward, then. She took a few steps, saw a movement deeper into the shadows.
Her heart thudding, keeping her eyes fixed on the spot where she’d seen the movement, her ears straining for the slightest sound, she reached for the Casco baton in her shoulder bag. The weapon weighed just a pound, but it was made from hardened aircraft alloy steel; used deftly, a seven-stone woman could bring down a rugby prop forward with a couple of well-aimed strikes. She headed north, towards Peter Street, keeping to the centre of the bay, hearing sly footsteps in the echoes of her own. A car revved somewhere behind her and she heard a distant squeal of tyres. Ahead she saw a sign for the stairs and she cut right fast, taking the steps two at a time, waiting at street level for whoever was following.
Nobody came.
At the head of the steps, fifty yards down the road, she thought she saw someone, but he ducked down when he saw her. She waited. Still nothing. A young couple strolled past her, arms entwined. The girl turned in her boyfriend’s arms to get a look at her and whispered something. They laughed and they walked on, the girl snuggling closer. Simms crouched at the steps. Nobody. She deployed her baton, flicking the steel shaft to its full twenty-one inches, and inched carefully down the stairs.
Fifteen feet from her, a figure in dark clothing, moving fast. He was on her in a second.
‘Police,’ she yelled. ‘Stay back!’ She took a step back, raised her baton over her right shoulder, her elbow tucked neatly to her side, her left arm forward to maintain distance between them.
His face white with shock, he raised both hands, as if she’d pointed a gun at him. He was no more than a kid. Nineteen, twenty years old, maybe, dressed in black, his sweater badged with the Midland Hotel’s logo.
‘Shit,’ she muttered. Shit, shit, shit.
25
‘Rule no.1 – they always keep the shoes.’
PROFESSOR NICK FENNIMORE
They settled for sandwiches and a beer in the Octagon Lounge.
‘You look pale,’ Fennimore said. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Fine,’ Simms said, scanning the foyer.
‘Kate?’
She looked at him, and for a second he thought she looked spooked. ‘I’m fine, Fennimore. Long shifts, and Tim’s been cranky at night, me not being there.’
They found a table and ordered beer, and Simms ran through the latest findings, including the lack of evidence on the sauna owner’s premises and the fact that the blood had been smeared onto George Howard’s shoes from a piece of fabric.
‘Hmm,’ Fennimore said. ‘Planted?’
‘Is there any way of knowing that?’ Simms asked. ‘I mean for certain?’
‘Unlikely,’ he said. ‘The lab will have retained any fibres but even if the evidence was planted, you would have to find the original piece of fabric they used, and my guess is that it will have been burned or dumped.’
‘Sounds about right,’ she said. ‘Howard’s story is he noticed blood on his clothing and shoes when he woke up and assumed he’d been in a fight, so he got rid of his clothes, but not the shoes.’ She shook her head, puzzled. ‘Why do they always keep the shoes?’
‘Easy to replace a pair of trousers,’ Fennimore said. ‘But breaking in a new pair of shoes – bloody nightmare.’
She half smiled.
‘You haven’t identified the victim yet?’
‘No. And Howard still maintains he has no recollection of her.’
Their food arrived. The waiter lit the candle on their table and Simms began to object, but then she shrugged as though to say it wasn’t worth the fuss, and focused on her sandwich.
‘D’you think you’ve convinced your boss to give you more time?’ Fennimore asked.
She raised her right hand, wobbled it, her left hand still holding her sandwich. ‘His instinct for self-preservation might keep him onside for a bit longer.’ She sank her teeth into her salmon on wholemeal and rolled her eyes back in her head, groaning with pleasure.
He watched her, admiring the creamy-white skin of her neck, the artless way she tore into her food.
She chewed and swallowed. ‘First bite I’ve had since breakfast.’
It was close to 10 p.m., and she had picked him up from the airport just after eight that morning. He wanted to tell her she should take care of her health, but thought better of it and turned to his own plate, deciding how best to attack the burger he’d ordered.
‘So, shall we brainstorm?’
She’d taken another bite of her sandwich and she rotated her finger, inviting him to go ahead.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘We have more hints of another presence, but we’re still hobbled by that four-hour gap in the timeline.’
‘I’ve got people working on that,’ she said, wiping her mouth with her napkin. ‘But don’t hold your breath.’
‘And we have behavioural and physical anomalies.’
‘Are you talking about blood on the shoes?’ She eyed him shrewdly, the sandwich halfway to her lips. ‘Or are you holding out on me?’
He smiled. Nothing much got past Kate Simms. ‘I’ve been looking at the DNA results.’
‘What DNA results?’ She put down her sandwich. ‘Are you telling me you got the DNA results from the teeth and perineum in less than twelve hours?’
‘No, I’m telling you I got them in less than seven hours.’ He shrugged modestly, like it was no big deal, though he had schmoozed and promised help with review papers and called in favours to move Kate’s samples up the waiting list.
‘There’s not much to do here except wallow in hedonism,’ he said, gazing up at the high vaulted ceiling, gold-edged mosaics, and swatches of bronze chiffon draped across the arches. ‘Boredom sets in fast.’
She read him in a second. ‘You pulled in a few favours. That was a nice thing to do.’
‘Like I said, I was bored.’
‘Keep working on those social skills, Nick.’ She smiled and picked up her sandwich happily. ‘So what did you get?’
‘I’m afraid they weren’t good enough to load onto the database as a scene sample.’
‘You couldn’t search the database?’
She was so crestfallen he felt bad for stringing her along. ‘But that doesn’t matter at this stage – we wanted to compare the profile from the victim’s swabs with George Howard.’
‘You’ve lost me,’ she said. ‘If we can’t check the scene profile against the database …’
‘A direct comparison of profiles is nothing to do with the database – it’s a job done in the lab by your friendly local scientist.’ He gave her a slow smile. ‘Or in this case, by my friendly local scientist.’
She sat forward, eagerly.
‘The DNA from the back of her teeth did not come from Howard.’
‘Proof there was more than one attacker,’ she said.
She looked so pleased that it pained him to have to say, ‘Proof she had oral sex with someone other than Howard shortly before she died. It doesn’t prove that person was her attacker, Kate. And it could be a mixed profile – some of the DNA could have come from Howard.’
She waved away his objections. ‘You’re not going to spoil it for me – this is the best news I’ve had all day.’ She took a swallow of beer. ‘You said the results told you two things.’
‘The perineal swab yielded a partial profile which contains some of the same DNA as the swab from the teeth.’
‘Same person.’
‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Or maybe not. With what we’ve got at the moment, we can’t exclude two donors. Now, that might be Howard and A. N. Other, or it might be just an unknown male – no Howard there at all.’
She sighed. ‘Look, Nick, I’ve been sitting on committees and organizing community partnership meetings for the past four-and-a-half years, so I’m a bit rusty on the DNA stuff. Plus, I’m really, really tired. Can you break it down for me?’
‘Okay. In crime scene stain analysis we don’t try to type the entire DNA molecule – that’s actually the Human Genome Project, and thousands of scientists are working on that full time. Instead, we look at a more manageable ten loci on the DNA and see what version – or allele – of the DNA is present. Sure, there are some alleles on the swabs that match Howard’s profile, but all of us share four or five alleles.’
‘You’re saying it could just be a coincidence that Howard and the attacker share some common alleles?’
He nodded.
‘So, what d’you need to rule him in or out?’
‘A full profile from the partials would be nice,’ he said.
‘You’re thinking LCN?’
She was talking about Low Copy Number; the LCN process could be used to produce a DNA profile from just a single cell isolated at a crime scene.
‘We call it LTDNA these days – Low Template DNA.’
‘You say tom-ayto, I say tom-ahto – it won’t tell us anything we don’t already know – that there’s someone on her that isn’t Howard.’
‘Actually, it might – you haven’t forgotten how we actually create a DNA profile?’
She gave him a look that said, I might be rusty, but I’m not brain dead. ‘We take a tiny sample of DNA from a swab or whatever, then multiply it lots of times to provide us with enough DNA to analyze by SGM whatsit.’ This was Second Generation Multiplex Plus – the current set of probes used in the UK to analyze the ten loci used on the database.
‘Correct,’ he said. ‘Now, most of our DNA is the same – mine, yours, the waiter who served our meals – and that’s not much good for identification purposes.’
Simms rolled her eyes at the mini-lecture, but used it as an opportunity to finish her sandwich.
‘Fortunately, we also have bits of junk DNA which don’t code for anything, and are highly variable from person to person, making it easier for us scientists to differentiate one person’s bits of junk from another’s. These unique sequences of base pairs are called short tandem repeats because they’re short – just two to five base pairs long – and they repeat many times in tandem.’
She mumbled something that sounded like, ‘It does what it says on the tin.’
‘So we take the fragments of DNA and multiply them – typically twenty-eight times for SGM Plus, but with LTDNA, that’s increased to thirty-four times. Which might not sound like a lot more, but each iteration doubles the amount of DNA. With SGM Plus, you’re well into the hundreds of millions, but LTDNA multiplies the original fragments by billions.’
Simms dabbed the last few crumbs from her plate. ‘So we’d see stuff that was previously invisible?’
‘Or we might see “stuff” that isn’t actually there.’
She sighed. ‘Because?’
‘Because every time you double your DNA fragments, you also double any degraded material, so you can get mini-peaks on your graphs – alleles which drop in and out, appearing and disappearing at random, like background noise.’
‘If it’s unreliable, why do it at all?’
‘Because the real peaks will still be there, and in the same proportions – you just have to apply stronger protocols for collection and interpretation, so you don’t botch the results.’
She nodded thoughtfully, wiping her mouth with her napkin. ‘Call it what you like, it sounds expensive and time-consuming.’
‘It is.’
‘And not something I could ask you to do in your university lab.’
‘No,’ he confirmed. ‘There are only two or three labs in the country equipped for LTDNA.’
‘And I’m thinking this process can’t be rushed.’
‘Your thinking is, as always, impeccable. So, the question is, are you willing to bet a few thousand of your budget on a test that might tell you nothing?’
She shrugged. ‘My only other option is to charge Howard with murder and hope nothing turns up in the future to make his lawyers scream miscarriage of justice.’
She sat back, pensive, an anxious frown creasing her brow. Requesting the LTDNA tests would also be tantamount to telling her boss, ‘You’re a fool. You’re wrong, I’m right, and I’ll prove it if it kills me.’ Which was not the best way to make friends – especially when you already had a reputation for bloody-mindedness. Fennimore didn’t envy her position, and he certainly wouldn’t try to influence her one way or the other. But maybe he could give her something else to think about, something that might even help the case.
‘Want to hear my other news?’ he said.
She took another thoughtful sip of beer. ‘Sure.’
‘I also checked the National Injuries Database for the cross-hatch whip marks.’
She looked at him over the rim of her glass. ‘You have been busy.’
‘It was that or bet my entire consultation fee on an outsider in the three o’clock at Chester.’
‘What consulation fee?’
‘The one you’re going to pay me retrospectively.’
Her eyebrows twitched. ‘So, what did you get?’
‘Three examples showing exactly the same injuries: same weave, same thickness, same sort of force, by which I mean just drawing blood. And exactly the same crisscross pattern of strokes. Which I’m reliably informed is very unusual in consensual S&M, and could only have been done if the victim was fully restrained.’
‘Only three on the database? I wish Tanford was around to hear that,’ she said.
He raised his eyebrows in question.
‘He said there’s nothing unique about men hurting women.’
‘That’s true, but it’s the means that sets this sadistic misogynist apart from the common herd. The database turned up something else – all three victims were addicts and prostitutes, and all three reported kidnap-assault.’
She set her drink down and stared at him. ‘Kidnap-assault?’
‘Sounds a bit like our victim, doesn’t it?’ he said.
‘I don’t suppose we have a name for the abductor?’
‘We’ve got E-FITs.’ He reached into the breast pocket of his suit jacket and handed her a sheet of paper.
She scrutinized the three computerized images. ‘These are different men,’ she said.
‘I don’t think so.’
She pointed to each image in turn. ‘Middle-aged, with collar-length hair. Young, with buzz-cut. Youngish, closecropped hair.’
‘One of the victims was eighteen, the other two were in their thirties – to a teenager, twenty-five is middle-aged,’ he said. ‘Plus, the attacks happened six months apart, and hair length is … adjustable – as you would know.’ He eyed her tragically short hair and she rolled her eyes.
‘Look at the shape of the jaw,’ he said. ‘The
same. The nose is … similar.’
She snorted, and he turned the paper to get a better look. ‘Okay similarish – and they all said he had big hands.’
‘Not much of a description, is it? A dark-haired, squarejawed man with a nondescript nose and big hands.’
‘Addicts,’ he said. ‘Minds on the fix beforehand; out of their minds on the fix after.’
‘If the injuries are so distinctive, why weren’t the crimes flagged as a possible serial offender?’
‘A database is just a sophisticated list,’ he said. ‘You have to ask it questions if you want it to tell you what it knows. As you said, from the descriptions, they might have been three different men. He shrugged. ‘Prostitutes. Addicts. Easy to dismiss. The investigators probably didn’t even consult the database.’
A shadow crossed her face, but she nodded, accepting the reality. ‘All right. The victimology’s the same: all three victims addicts, all of them prostitutes – like Rika – and maybe our murder victim, too.’
‘Yes – interesting factoids for Professor Varley to consider when he works up a profile for you.’
‘Was this in the Manchester area?’
He shook his head. ‘That’s where the similarities end. Two incidents were in Newcastle, one in Hull.’
‘We should speak to them,’ she said.
‘Sorry, Kate,’ he said. ‘One OD’d, one committed suicide.’
‘That’s a high mortality rate,’ she said. ‘This was when?’
‘The first attacks happened four years ago, the last, eighteen months later.’
‘We both know that serial offenders like this never stop,’ she said.
Fennimore nodded. ‘Which means he moved away, or something stopped him – like a prison sentence, an accident, illness.’
‘Or he got better at covering up,’ she said. ‘What about the third victim?’
‘Tanya Repton – the girl from Hull.’ He took out an image he’d printed off from Tanya’s police file that afternoon.
Tanya Repton was the eighteen-year-old. She looked ten years older. She had arrests for possession of heroin and cocaine, shoplifting, and soliciting – these last two she claimed were to support her habit. Her skin was the pale sick colour of dead fish. She had a small pointed face with thin, greasy blonde hair – brown at the roots – and a cold sore on her lower lip. But the most striking thing about her was her eyes: they were flat and grey, and would have been unremarkable, except the iris of her right eye had what looked like a jagged brown tear from the pupil to the outer rim. She stared into the camera lens with a look that said she knew what life held in store for her and it was completely without hope.
Everyone Lies Page 19