The Unquiet Grave

by Steven Dunne

  And if DS Morton was correct, Copeland had performed every subsequent review until his retirement, persuading close colleagues to sign off on his work despite minimal involvement – first Walter Laird in 1977 and 1981 then a long list of other CID names, only some of which Brook knew. All were complicit in bending the rules for their obsessed colleague. Since Copeland’s retirement, the case had been revisited only once, by Brook’s former colleague Detective Inspector Robert Greatorix.

  ‘This stinks,’ murmured Brook, and if he hadn’t been under a disciplinary cloud, he might have marched into Clive Copeland’s office and told him so. All those reviews, taking place over decades, under the aegis of CID officers who didn’t have a clue what had been actioned in their names.

  Brook closed the file, unsure what to do. Was this a mistake? Had Copeland accidentally shuffled his sister’s file into Brook’s caseload? It seemed unlikely.

  ‘No harm in having a look,’ he reasoned, opening the file. He could take it back later as though he’d just discovered it. He could even pretend he hadn’t made the connection between brother and sister, if this was a genuine mistake.

  Matilda Copeland had been dead for over forty-seven years and her younger brother had lived with her unsolved murder all that time. According to Morton, Clive Copeland had joined the force as a direct result of her killing and the eleven separate occasions the case had been revisited were testimony to Copeland’s dedication to his sister’s cause. But despite all his efforts, her killer had escaped justice.

  ‘You were too close to it, Clive. Too close to see, too close to think. That’s why we have a rule.’ Maybe Copeland knows that. Maybe he knows it’s time for an impartial review.

  Brook read on, skimming the wealth of material in the report before turning back to the beginning for a more methodical read-through. He had to admit, Copeland had been meticulous in compiling background on the case, over the years. Details rarely found in a murder book filled the page and, at times, Brook felt as though he was intruding on a private dialogue between Copeland and his sister.

  To his credit, Copeland had forced himself to maintain a level tone throughout the written reports, even when touching on what must have been painful memories. It was as though he knew the day would come when he wouldn’t be around to search for his sister’s killer and that, to colour the facts in any way, might hinder a future investigation.

  The late DCI Bannon had again been the original SIO, as in the Billy Stanforth case in 1963. Clearly, Bannon was – to use one of Charlton’s irritating phrases – the ‘go-to guy’ when it came to homicide. Walter Laird had accompanied Bannon again but this time as a detective sergeant.

  In 1965 Clive Copeland and his family had lived on Radbourne Lane at the edge of the Mackworth Estate, overlooking fields to the north of Derby, and, even to this day, the lane was the dividing line between Derby’s north-western suburbs and open countryside. At that time, according to Copeland’s notes, Mackworth was a modern development of desirable homes, giving easy access to the countryside and providing a suitable location for a solid, well-to-do family.

  George Copeland, Clive and Matilda’s father, had worked in engineering for Rolls-Royce, one of Derby’s main employers. During the Second World War, George had remained in Derby, maintaining Tiger Moths and Miles Magisters for the flying school at nearby RAF Burnaston. Later, when the Air Ministry needed a site to train glider pilots to deliver British Airborne Forces into combat, Burnaston was chosen and Copeland’s father had worked on them too.

  Copeland’s mother, Mary, had met George working as a secretary for Rolls-Royce and had given up her career to be a housewife when the first of her two children had been born: Matilda, in 1949, and Clive two years later.

  The Copelands were just another average family until Matilda Copeland’s disappearance in the late summer of 1965. The story had been big news in Derby, and the local paper, then the Evening Telegraph, had led with it on several consecutive nights.

  Brook skimmed through the chronological newspaper reports. Local journalists wouldn’t have known more than CID officers so Brook restricted himself to looking at pictures of the Copeland home, maps of the area and a portrait of young Matilda taken the year before her murder, when she was fifteen.

  According to family and friends, Matilda had been a normal, happy-go-lucky sixteen-year-old girl, fresh out of school with a good report and impressive exam results. She had recently started work in a local shop, Barney’s General Store, on Prince Charles Avenue, just three streets away from the Copeland family home.

  On 31 August, a warm Tuesday night, Matilda Copeland had taken the family dog, Ebony, for its evening walk around the estate. She had set off just after 8.00p.m. but never returned and the family never saw her alive again. At ten o’clock, the dog Ebony returned unaccompanied. Two hours of searching and shouting along all the usual walking routes had produced nothing and the police had been called in.

  For four nights and three days, the search continued until, on Saturday, 4 September 1965, Matilda’s naked body was spotted floating in Osmaston Park Lake by a couple of hikers. Osmaston Park was a local beauty spot, part of a large private park a few miles north-west of Mackworth, along the A52 past Kirk Langley towards Ashbourne.

  Brook knew the lake well. It was on his way home and sometimes, when he was unable to get back to his cottage before dark, he would park his car outside the Saracen’s Head in the village of Shirley and take the circular walk around the wooded grounds. In summer, the circuit would only take about ninety minutes but in winter, the ground around the lake became boggy and walking was difficult.

  Brook checked the distance between Mackworth and Osmaston Park on his laptop. It was just over nine miles. ‘Transport required,’ he mumbled, flipping to a new page of his notebook and writing ‘Van or car’ under the heading ‘Matilda Copeland’. Brook poured more tea from his flask and ploughed on.

  The body of Copeland’s sister was recovered and taken for autopsy, where she was found to have been strangled with a cord, before being dumped in the lake. Forensic scientists determined that she’d been in the water for around four days before her bloating remains were spotted on the surface amongst reeds. They further concluded from the lack of rigor mortis and discolouration of her neck that Matilda had died shortly after her abduction and must have gone into the water no more than a few hours later.

  Unfortunately the long immersion in the lake had destroyed any evidence adhering to her corpse. Her fingernails were scraped but no evidence of the murderer’s tissue was found beneath. No semen or foreign pubic hair could be detected in and around the vagina and no other clues were found on her body. Her clothes were never recovered.

  With a naked corpse, determining whether Matilda had been raped before death was an important line of inquiry and here the case took a twist. It proved impossible to establish whether Matilda had engaged in sexual intercourse before her death. Apart from the lack of semen and pubic hair, the pathologist could find little in the way of bruising or other injuries around the sexual organs. However, this couldn’t rule out the possibility that Matilda Copeland had submitted to sexual intercourse before death to try and save her life because, importantly, she had not been a virgin at time of death. Moreover, from the wording in the forensic report, it was made absolutely clear that Clive’s sister had not lost her virginity on the night of her death. Matilda Copeland had been sexually active well before the night of her abduction.

  As the father of an abused daughter, Brook closed his eyes to empathise. How painful it must be to Copeland every time he read the details of Matilda’s death, especially as suspicion about her sexual partners would have been rife and, given her age, might have been stretched to include male members of the Copeland family.

  After finding Matilda’s body, search teams hunted for evidence in the surrounding woodland where Matilda might have met her end. However, the police were never able to identify any viable location where the killing had taken place,
despite calling on extensive manpower, canine power and conducting a fingertip search of the dense woods.

  According to Laird and Bannon’s contemporary reports, the ground that summer was dry and firm, making it impossible to track the killer’s movements around the heavily wooded park, even with dogs. No tyre tracks were found. No items of clothing were recovered. No scraps of torn material, no stray handkerchief, no detached buttons.

  The absence of wounds on Matilda’s body presented a similar problem, though that didn’t prevent Bannon and Laird calling in the bloodhounds in the hope that, in her struggle to live, she might have drawn blood from her attacker. But again nothing was found. No blood, no fluids, sexual or otherwise were located by the dogs. There was no trace of human urine or faeces so often expelled during the death throes, making it impossible to determine the route taken by the killer to the lake’s edge, despite having to carry a body. Indeed, there was no evidence to indicate that the murder had taken place in the woods at all.

  Bannon and Laird were forced to conclude that the murder and any possible intercourse had happened elsewhere, before her naked body had been carefully packed then transported through the woods, possibly in some kind of body bag to contain fluids, before being dumped in the estate’s lake. Somebody had been very careful to cover their tracks.

  At the lake, attention focused on the estate’s gamekeeper, John Briggs, and his seventeen-year-old assistant, Colin Ealy, who were both interviewed at length about their whereabouts on the night of Matilda’s abduction. Both men had flimsy alibis, claiming to have been alone that night, Briggs at home and Ealy working on the estate until late. Neither could provide corroboration.

  A boot print found on the shoreline was cast in plaster and found to be a match to the assistant’s boot, but with Ealy employed as a woodsman, the evidence of the cast had to be set aside, especially as no other evidence that Matilda’s body had been dumped from that spot could be found.

  At this point, the two-pronged inquiry’s emphasis switched from the woods around Osmaston Lake back to the site of Matilda’s abduction in Mackworth. On the evening of her disappearance, several people who knew Matilda had seen her with Ebony, the family’s black Labrador. Most were respectable neighbours and included an Arthur Barney. Brook wondered if Barney was connected to the general store where Matilda had just started working. He made another note.

  To all who encountered her that night, Matilda had appeared to be her usual cheery self and no one had seen anything suspicious. However, the last sighting of her had been at the top of Radbourne Lane, where the road swept up the hill towards Radbourne Common and then on in the direction of Kirk Langley, nearly three miles away.

  Trevor Taylor, a local bachelor who lived alone, had been walking to a pub on nearby Station Road at 8.30p.m., and claimed to have seen Matilda running towards the common. Taylor hadn’t seen the dog.

  ‘Trevor Taylor,’ said Brook, as though Noble was there to listen. ‘The last person to see the victim is often the killer. What are the stats on that?’

  Brook’s instincts were right. Taylor’s testimony was at odds with all the other witness statements gathered by Bannon and Laird. Every other witness who had seen Matilda had testified that they’d encountered her on the estate, with Ebony. And these sightings were all between 8 and 8.30p.m.

  In addition, George Copeland testified that Matilda only walked the dog around the estate with its wide avenues and green spaces. The roads leading to the common had no pavements and no lighting and the Copeland children were forbidden from taking the dog along the lane in which Matilda had been spotted, especially in poor light.

  To Brook it wasn’t a surprise that Trevor Taylor became an immediate suspect. Even in today’s enlightened times the unmarried loner is a red flag to officers hunting a sexual predator. In 1965, alarm bells would have been sounding long and hard in the heads of experienced detectives.

  Trevor Taylor was subsequently arrested, interviewed under caution and forced to surrender his clothes from that evening for tests, as well as having his house searched. However, nothing to connect him to Matilda was ever found and eventually the police were forced to release him without charge.

  But it didn’t end there. Taylor was formally interviewed about Matilda Copeland’s disappearance on three other occasions but, each time, experienced officers had been unable to punch any holes in his testimony. He insisted Matilda had been running up to the common that night. He’d recognised her, even in the failing light, by the way she moved and had checked his watch seconds after the sighting.

  Brook ploughed on through the next few pages, providing painstaking background on Trevor Taylor. There were original documents from 1965, in addition to in-depth biographical reports compiled by a zealous Copeland on his first review of the case in 1977.

  Taylor, a twenty-nine-year-old hospital porter at the time of Matilda’s death, was an unremarkable man. He wasn’t highly educated and had left school at fifteen to work in various menial jobs before joining the NHS as a porter in 1956, a job he kept until his death.

  Taylor frequented pubs in the Mackworth area seven nights a week. This was nothing unusual in the fifties and sixties. Pubs were in their heyday as there was little in the way of home entertainment to keep people, particularly men, in the home. In addition, the cost of heating drove many to seek out the warmth of the tavern and it was Taylor’s habit to walk to the pub at the same time every night, drink four pints of beer then return to his modest house in Mackworth on foot.

  Bannon and Laird could find no evidence that Taylor indulged in any deviant behaviour; certainly he had no criminal record. And people who knew him said that he was quiet, kept himself to himself and was never drunk or aggressive when socialising.

  Brook flipped back to the front of the file. Taylor had died in early 1978 at the age of forty-two. According to Clive Copeland’s notes and a copy of the autopsy and inquest findings, Trevor Taylor had either fallen or jumped from a railway bridge in Derby, as a train approached. His body was mangled almost beyond recognition and his elderly mother was unable to recognise him. The railway bridge from which Taylor had fallen, or jumped, was on London Road, close to the hospital where he worked.

  Even though suicide was indicated, an open verdict had been returned because 42-year-old Taylor had not left a note and medical reports and the autopsy had revealed nothing that might have led Taylor to take his life. He had no record of depression and no terminal diseases to push him to take the easy way out.

  That didn’t, of course, mean that Taylor couldn’t have committed suicide for some other compelling reason; guilt maybe, especially if Copeland’s review of the case had brought back memories of the night of Matilda’s disappearance and subsequent murder.

  Finally, Brook found the information he’d been looking for – a list of all the cars owned by friends, neighbours and businesses on the Mackworth Estate at the time of the abduction. There weren’t many. Car ownership in 1965 was still the preserve of the few.

  Brook looked down the short list. Trevor Taylor didn’t own a car, though Bannon and Laird had been careful to note that his mother, who lived nearby, owned a ten-year-old Ford Zephyr Zodiac, which had sat undisturbed in the garage after the death of Taylor’s father. They’d also made a note that when tried, the car had started first time. Brook looked either side of the report but couldn’t find any notes on, or statements by, Trevor Taylor’s mother. Odd.

  Five other households on the estate were listed as car owners. At the bottom of the list was the name Derek Barney who had owned a Morris J-type delivery van. Brook flicked back through the file. Barney was indeed the owner of Barney’s General Store where Matilda had just started to work. He was also the father of Arthur Barney, one of the eyewitnesses who saw Matilda on the night of her disappearance, walking her dog.

  Brook underlined the name in his notebook. The Barneys lived close by, had their own transport and knew Copeland’s sister well enough to approach her without setti
ng off alarm bells. Brook rocked back on his chair, certain that he wouldn’t be thinking anything that Bannon, Laird and subsequently Copeland hadn’t considered before him.

  ‘Plenty of suspects here, Clive,’ muttered Brook, flicking through background reports on Derek and Arthur Barney. Derek Barney had been fifty-two years of age in 1965, a widower with two grown sons, Arthur and Winston, aged nineteen and seventeen respectively. Both sons worked in the family business and both were old enough to be boyfriend material, although there was no mention of Matilda and boyfriends anywhere in the file. For an attractive sixteen-year-old girl who was no longer a virgin, this seemed another odd omission to Brook.

  He ran a finger down the next report. At least Bannon and Laird had asked the right questions. According to statements given by Derek Barney, Arthur, the eldest son, drove the van on a daily basis, making deliveries to customers and collecting stock from various outlets. Also, younger son Winston was taking lessons and was capable of driving the van if necessary.

  Brook alighted upon a photograph of the van and frowned. It was covered in a livery for Barney’s General Store. Would any of the Barneys seriously consider abducting, murdering and disposing of Matilda Copeland using such a distinctive van? Even assuming one or all of them had a motive, it seemed unlikely.

  Starting to tire, Brook turned a page. Derek Barney had died in 1985 and eldest son Arthur had followed in 2007. From the lack of further notation, Brook assumed both had died natural deaths. However, the file hadn’t been updated since 2008: at least the official file hadn’t. Brook had no doubt that Copeland, obsessed with finding his sister’s killer, wouldn’t just walk away from CID, shrugging his shoulders. Regulations or not, Copeland would certainly have made copies of all the material in the Derby Division files for use at home.