‘All right, let’s say he did make a mistake,’ she said, not convinced yet, but indulging him for the moment. ‘How? What could he have done that would identify him?’
‘The only thing that was overlooked in the original investigation was the semen stains on the victim’s clothing – which anyway was planted evidence.’ Fennimore shook his head. ‘And that belonged to a man who died three and a half years ago – by definition it can’t directly incriminate the killer.’
‘So,’ Simms said, ‘it must implicate him indirectly.’
The look on Fennimore’s face was pure admiration. ‘That’s what I love about you, Kate,’ he said. ‘You cut right through the crap.’
Simms felt her cheeks flush at the word love, but she tried to keep her expression bland. ‘I … do my best,’ she said.
‘It’s about access, Kate. The man who planted David Hazle’s banked semen on Kelli Rees’s clothing would have to’ve worked in the hospital – and only a limited number of people would have access to the storage units. That was his mistake. Maybe he knew he’d fouled up from the start. It didn’t matter then, because the police didn’t find it, and anyway, they’d already decided Mitchell was guilty.’
‘But you came and stirred things up, and he knew the trail would lead back to him eventually.’
Fennimore grinned. ‘Find out who had access to those semen samples, we identify the killer.’ The weariness dropped away from his face. ‘Identify him and he has no reason to harm Lauren – you could bring her home to her family.’
Simms looked at the hope in his eyes and felt a sharp pain below her breast bone.
Focus, she told herself. ‘We need to look at specialist nurses, lab techs, pathology techs, even porters,’ she said.
‘Which means getting the co-operation of the hospitals’ HR departments,’ Fennimore added.
‘And your tame consultant can’t help with that,’ Simms said. ‘I’ll talk to Enderby.’
‘It would help if we had a physical description – was the survivor any help there?’
Simms dipped her head. ‘He wore a mask, but she said there was something odd about him.’ She related the victim’s description of the man with disproportionately long arms, who had crawled out of the boot of her car. ‘Someone like that would stand out – other staff might remember him.’
Fennimore nodded, frowning.
‘What?’ she said.
‘That description – it sounds familiar …’
‘Call me when it comes to you,’ Simms said. Fennimore carried a library’s worth of obscure knowledge around in his head. If it meant something to him, she knew he would eventually match it to the relevant label in his mental database.
She was about to end the call when he spoke again.
‘If he’d left a clean scene, no trace, the police would have put it down to forensic awareness. But he deliberately contaminated the scene – he went to the trouble and risk of stealing semen to plant someone else’s DNA on Kelli Rees’s clothing. That’s odd, isn’t it?’
‘The CSI effect,’ she said. ‘They always think it’s about the DNA. It’s why your guy Mitchell was found guilty before he even got to trial – all those press photographs of Mitchell, big, physically intimidating. Bad DNA, XYY-guy, all that guff.’
Fennimore half-stood, gripping the table edges. ‘That’s it.’ Despite the barriers of computer technology and a physical separation of hundreds of miles, the space between them seemed to pulse with energy. ‘Every one of those bogus stories said something about Mitchell’s chromosomal abnormality – it is about the DNA.’
Simms frowned. ‘Take a breath, Nick. You’re not making sense.’
He shoved his chair back and stepped over to the coffee table. Simms watched him cascade papers to the floor. He uncovered his e-tablet and returned to the desk, his image blurring because of the digital time-lag. He typed something on the tablet as he spoke.
‘The description your survivor gave of the man who attacked her – long arms and legs – out of proportion to the body—’
‘Ye-es?’ Simms said.
‘What if it’s a genetic abnormality?’
‘Such as?’
He turned the tablet around for her to see.
‘Klinefelter syndrome?’ Simms read from the screen.
‘A genetic condition,’ Fennimore said. ‘Males born with an extra X chromosome. XXY?’
‘XXY,’ he repeated. ‘Unlike Mitchell, who had XYY, sufferers of Klinefelter’s have an extra female, rather than an extra male chromosome. Klinefelter’s often goes undiagnosed: sufferers are average intelligence, unremarkable in many ways.’
‘But I’m guessing it affects their physical appearance?’
‘It varies, but it does include elongation of the limbs and fat deposition in the torso.’
‘Like Mitchell,’ she said.
‘Not quite. XYY males tend to be taller, but well-proportioned. In Klinefelter’s, there’s an imbalance – short body, long limbs; narrow shoulders, wide hips. Think pear-shaped.’
Adrenaline surged through Simms’s veins. ‘Like the survivor described,’ she said.
‘And a lot of sufferers develop breasts, so the body shape can look very odd. Yet many only find out they have the condition when they can’t start a family,’ Fennimore said. ‘Because one of the primary features is a low sperm count – even azoospermia.’
Kate sat upright, exhaling in a rush. ‘No sperm? That’s why he stole samples from the sperm bank?’
‘He was covering for something the police would never even have considered,’ Fennimore said. ‘Classic overcompensation.’
35
Simms picked up her mobile phone from the table and stared at her own reflection in the blank screen for a full half-minute. She needed to pitch this right to the chief constable and she would only get one crack at it. The room seemed to have become hotter in the last ten minutes, and she got up and splashed her face with water at the kitchen sink. After another fifteen seconds, she took a deep breath, blew it out and fast-dialled her boss.
It went to voicemail.
Damn it! She chewed her lower lip. You can’t chicken out now. ‘Okay,’ she murmured, ‘here goes …’
She texted: ‘I have vital information about the Myers case—’ She shook her head, irritated with herself, deleted the message and started again.
‘Fennimore arrested,’ she began. ‘Journalist on MOJ murdered. Need to speak urgently.’
A second later, her mobile rang.
‘Fennimore – arrested for murder?’ Enderby sounded incredulous.
‘He believes the miscarriage of justice he’s working on is connected to the Myers abductions. He thinks the journalist was murdered to protect the killer’s identity.’
‘Kate—’
Simms heard the warning in Enderby’s voice. ‘You asked me to keep you informed, sir – that’s all I’m doing. Fennimore thinks he’s found a link between his miscarriage of justice and the Myers case.’
He sighed. ‘All right, let’s have it.’
She summarized their conversation, the discovery of semen stains on the victim’s clothing, the probability that it was stolen from sperm samples banked on behalf of an oncology patient, and planted on Kelli Rees’s clothing. She went on to the links between the victims and hospitals, ending with Fennimore’s theory that Kelli Rees’s killer had Klinefelter’s syndrome.
‘The convicted man in Fennimore’s MOJ – what’s his name?’
‘Mitchell.’
‘Mitchell could just as easily have planted the evidence himself.’
‘It’s possible,’ she agreed, ‘but if he did, why didn’t he demand to have the clothing tested? And anyway, Mitchell didn’t have access to the hospital’s sperm bank.’ Simms winced; she had shown her hand and maybe too soon. She gripped the phone tightly.
Enderby was silent for so long her hand began to cramp.
‘Is this why you called me,’ he said, enunciating precisely,
‘to smooth the way for Professor Fennimore’s enquiries?’
‘No, sir. He already has access to everything he needs to build his defence,’ she said, stretching the truth a little. ‘If Fennimore is right – if it is the same man – it could help us to find Lauren Myers.’
‘Yes, thank you,’ Enderby said. ‘I can join the dots to make this ugly picture. But the connection seems tenuous at best.’
With Lauren Myers still missing, Simms knew he couldn’t ignore the lead, tenuous as it was. So she waited and held her tongue.
‘Here’s what I’m prepared to do,’ Enderby said. ‘I will ring my counterpart in Essex and give him a breakdown of the situation. I will request an exchange of information with Manchester Royal Infirmary and the hospice our survivor was campaigning for. I’ll need names and dates.’
‘You’ll have it in ten minutes,’ Simms said.
‘But any further enquiries or investigation will be delegated to others in the respective forces.’
He was telling her that she was still locked out. But Simms didn’t care who took the credit if they brought Lauren home safely.
‘Understood. I’ll let you know if Fennimore turns up anything else,’ she added, wanting to keep that line of communication open.
She hung up before he could say no, but she could swear the chief constable gave a short laugh as she disconnected.
Simms hurriedly collated her notes, put them in a short document and emailed them. This done, she put in a call to a detective sergeant she knew at Police Scotland. The sergeant had been very helpful on the I-44 murders she had just concluded with St Louis PD in the United States. He agreed to talk to colleagues in Aberdeen City Police and ask someone to swing by Fennimore’s apartment building.
36
Aberdeen, Thursday Afternoon
Josh Brown went straight to Fennimore’s flat from the airport, to pick up the Mitchell case files and move them to safety. Thirty minutes later, he stopped by the new university campus at Garthdee and sought out the office manager, Joan. He needed to borrow her mobile phone.
She sat at the centre of a thirty-metre-long open-plan office and she didn’t look happy. He told her a story about drowning his own phone in a cup of coffee. That made her laugh and confirmed her sense of superiority over hopeless males. Invoking Fennimore’s name as the recipient of the call completed the charm. He sent Fennimore a coded text to say where he’d hidden the files, then quietly deleted his message from Joan’s sent messages folder before he handed the phone back to her.
She eyed him quizzically. ‘I thought you were south of the border for a few days.’
‘I was,’ he said. ‘Nick asked me to check on some files in his flat.’
‘Oh, that’s where he’s shifted them to, is it?’
Of course, Joan would have checked Fennimore’s old office and found it empty.
‘Well, I hope he’s binned some of it, because he won’t fit much into the wee office he’s been designated.’
‘You’re not keen on the new place, then?’
Joan looked around her as if the new building with its bright painted walls, clean, carpeted floors and low-level shelving had paid her a personal insult. ‘All this colour, you’d think we were running a primary school.’
‘I know,’ he commiserated.
‘And am I supposed to keep track of things in all this hullaballoo?’ she demanded.
Josh glanced around, thinking there were advantages and disadvantages to open plan. The biggest advantage was line of sight, but only if you positioned yourself right. Here, Joan’s desk was central to the space, but she would have her back to half her colleagues; added to that, a large support pillar practically blinded her to the elevator and a further quarter of the room, and Joan did like to keep an eye on things.
‘If it was me,’ he said, ‘I’d take that spot over there.’ He nodded towards an empty desk near the wide expanse of glass overlooking the river.
She looked sceptical. ‘Stuck at the back of the room? I think not.’
‘Come and have a look.’
She pressed her lips together and fluttered her hand at the paperwork awaiting her attention.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘It’ll only take a sec.’
She stood reluctantly, and followed him, passing five workstations on the way. At the window desk, he angled his body, first towards the elevator, then the water cooler, then he crouched next to the desk and did a slow scan of the room. ‘Yup,’ he said. ‘This is the one.’
She frowned, looking a little petulant, but he rolled out the office chair and invited her to try it. With a sigh, she sat down, and immediately perked up.
‘Oh, I see,’ she said, positively beaming.
‘View out the window’s nice an’ all,’ Josh said. She wheeled her chair around, and from her look of satisfaction he guessed she was more pleased by her vantage point over the footpath below the window than by her river view.
His next stop was to pick up some reference texts. Josh had taught some of Fennimore’s summer school classes while the professor was away in the United States, and had been allocated shared office space with a sessional lecturer and another Ph.D. student. He preferred the tiny common room he’d used as his unofficial office in the old building, but Josh had learned to be comfortable in most places, and he’d set up quite a library in his corner of the room. He stuffed as many texts as he could into his rucksack, but he’d have to go back to his flat, then drive the car round to pick up the rest.
He stacked the remaining books on his desk and paused, remembering that he’d saved some notes to his P drive – the secure compartment of the university’s system set aside for him. He would need those notes and he couldn’t access them from anywhere but the university. How long would it take to set up a new email address, forward everything to that – a few minutes? Time. It all took time, and he needed to be gone. Was there any point, anyway? Fennimore said they would make it work, but you couldn’t partially disappear – all that did was put everyone you cared about in danger.
To hell with it – he wasn’t ready to give up yet. He shoved the books to one side, sat at the computer and opened his university email account. There was a message from Fennimore: it looked like they were closing in on the killer. He read on, shocked that there might be a link between the Manchester case and Mitchell’s miscarriage of justice. Maybe he should work out a way to stay and help. But Fennimore quashed that notion in the next sentence:
‘You can’t stay, Josh,’ he wrote. ‘You aren’t safe there – the killer doesn’t know what we have on him – and if we’re to have even the slimmest chance to save the child, he can’t know. But he might have followed you. He might even be there already. Your family knows your connection to me – they could be looking for you as well. Aberdeen isn’t a big city – you’ll be easy to find. Get out and stay out.’
On the next line: ‘I’m sorry I got you into this. Watch your back.’
Josh stared at the words on the screen. He couldn’t remember anyone caring enough to say those words to him since he was fifteen years old.
His throat tight with emotion, he copied his files and forwarded them to a new account via an anonymous remailer, then he digitally shredded the files on his drive.
Josh rented a one-bedroom flat in Rosebank Terrace, twenty minutes’ walk from the old campus, but a good forty minutes away from Garthdee; he would have to take a bus. He headed out, towards the riverside path, intending to double back to the bus stop when he was sure he wasn’t being followed. He heard a rattle from above, but ignored it; a moment later Joan’s voice fluted from one of the windows on the first floor.
‘Woo-hoo! Halloa there, Josh!’
He looked up.
‘Wait,’ she called. ‘I’ll come down to you.’
He met her at the entrance.
‘It completely went out of my head,’ she said. ‘Someone was asking after you earlier.’
‘He leave a name?’ Josh said, his stomach musc
les clenching.
‘No. He said he would catch you later.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘Thirtyish. Tall. English. As a matter of fact, he sounded a bit like you.’
Josh felt a weakness in his limbs. Family.
He kept his tone level. ‘Did you give him my address?’
‘What a question!’ She glared at Josh, outraged. ‘I told him you were unavailable. He declined to leave a message.’
‘Sorry, Joan,’ he said, attempting a smile. ‘It’s been a hell of a day.’
She didn’t smile, but he saw a softening of her features, perhaps even a hint of concern. ‘If he comes back, what will I say to him?’
‘Tell him I’m taking a leave of absence. I’ll be away for a while.’
‘And will you be coming back?’ she said, watching him closely.
Joan’s fussy persona might fool the majority, but she had a sharp mind and even sharper eyes.
‘Probably not,’ he said truthfully.
He found a bench and sat in the cold, watching people come and go. Mostly foreign students and conference visitors, this time of year. He didn’t recognize anyone and nobody seemed to be paying him any special attention. He couldn’t complete his thesis without the notes he had at home. It was a calculated risk, but he intended to go and pick them up. He’d stayed under the radar, paying his rent in cash every month: it would take his family a while to get an address for him – even with their police connections.
And he needed his car – a nondescript grey Toyota Corolla, bought for cash in Leeds, no questions asked. It was still registered to the previous owner – an extra few hundred over the asking price had persuaded the guy to hand over the registration documents instead of sending his portion to the DVLA. Normally Josh kept it in a lock-up, under wraps, further down the street, but he’d parked it near home after dropping off the files for Nick Fennimore.
He caught the next bus into the city centre, staying on for a couple of extra stops, then swinging off in Union Street, by Gilcomston South Church. A banner outside the door read, ‘TRY PRAYING’. He hoped it wasn’t prophetic.
Truth Will Out Page 20