27
A team had been tasked with trawling through the bar’s security cameras, searching for an image of the fat man described by the coat check woman. The team was led by a constable who had been drafted in from Northallerton to help with the double murder investigation. Tall and slim, with dark hair and eyes and a ready smile, Andrew Wilder was an attractive man who specialised in surveillance and VIIDO assessment. When he asked if he might sit with Geraldine in the canteen, she was happy to be friendly towards a new member of the team.
‘Eileen seems tough,’ he remarked quietly, after glancing around to check they could not be overheard.
Geraldine smiled. ‘She is tough,’ she agreed, ‘but she gets things done.’
He nodded. ‘I’d rather have a severe senior investigating officer than a wishy-washy one who can’t make decisions.’
Geraldine wondered whether he had a particular SIO in mind, but she said nothing and the conversation moved on to the less controversial topic of the canteen. The following day, perhaps by chance, Andrew turned up in the canteen queue just behind Geraldine so they naturally sat together for lunch again. She did not mind. He was pleasant enough company. Only when he had invited her to join him for a drink after work did she become slightly distant and he took the hint at once. After that, he stopped coming to sit with her at lunchtime.
Andrew spotted the fat man entering the club at around ten thirty on Friday evening, reappearing in the entrance hall around half an hour later. He stood there for a moment conversing with a young girl, exactly as the witness had described. The girl teetered outside, and the man left straight after. It was difficult to be certain, but he could have been following her. At that time, there was a queue to enter the premises, and the camera did not record where the young girl or the fat man went after they left the bar. They simply vanished into the small crowd of people outside. It was possible they had disappeared into the alley.
Eileen was understandably eager to trace the man as quickly as possible, and an image was broadcast on the local news, asking the man to come forward to help them with an enquiry, or for anyone recognising him to contact the police. The request provoked the usual deluge of calls, and officers were drafted in from other police stations to help answer the phones. None of the callers claimed to be the girl who had been harassed at the bar, but several callers claimed to recognise the man as someone who worked as a local butcher. On Monday morning Geraldine went along, accompanied by a constable, to speak to Richard Ellis who was alleged to have been seen following a young girl out of the bar.
There was a customer ahead of her, and Geraldine waited while the woman discussed the merits of sausages as opposed to burgers with the older of the two men serving behind the counter. Around fifty, balding and clean shaven, with a plump face and round shoulders, his appearance matched the description they had been given by a witness at the bar.
‘Can I help you?’ a young man behind the counter asked Geraldine.
‘No, thank you, I’m waiting to talk to Mr Ellis.’
As soon as the customer left, Geraldine nodded to the constable who turned the ‘open’ sign round on the door.
‘Hey,’ the stout butcher cried out. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’
His face went slightly red, but he looked puzzled rather than frightened when Geraldine held out her identity card and introduced herself.
‘What can I help you with, officer?’ he asked.
As he spoke, he cast an anxious glance at the constable blocking the doorway.
‘Were you at the Livewire Bar on Friday night?’
‘I went there, yes,’ he replied cagily. ‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘A girl’s body was discovered in an alley beside the bar in the early hours of Saturday morning.’
‘Oh yes, of course, I read about that. Shocking. Just shocking. It could have happened to anyone, couldn’t it?’
That seemed a strange comment to make, but Geraldine did not respond to it. Instead, she asked the butcher to accompany her to the police station as they had reason to suspect he might have witnessed something useful. He agreed cheerfully enough to go along to the police station when he finished work.
‘We’d rather like you to come along with us right now.’
‘Can’t it wait?’
‘No, I’m afraid it can’t.’
‘Oh, very well. I can see that this is an important matter, but I’m afraid I’m not going to have anything very helpful to tell you. I was only there to take my daughter home.’
‘Your daughter?’ Geraldine repeated in surprise.
‘Oh, I know what you’re going to say.’
‘What?’
‘That I shouldn’t have let her out. But I can hardly lock her in her room at night, can I? I know there are parents who ground their teenagers but I have to say I’ve never understood how that works. If I tell Tilly not to go out, she’ll go out anyway, just to spite me. I mean, she’s not a spiteful girl, don’t get me wrong, she’s just a bit troubled, you know how it is with kids. And since her mother died a year ago, she’s been angry with the whole world, especially me.’ He heaved a sigh that made his round shoulders rise and fall. ‘Everything would have been different if her mother was alive.’
‘What were you doing at the Livewire Bar?’
‘Looking for Tilly, of course. Didn’t I just tell you? She was determined to go out on Friday night and I strictly forbade it. She’s only fourteen for Christ’s sake. Anyway, we had a massive row about it. Half an hour later, when I called her down for supper, I discovered she’d left the house. So I went to look for her. To be honest, it was only by chance that I found her. I know the kinds of places she goes to with her friends.’ He shuddered and the folds of skin beneath his chin trembled. ‘Some friends! She’s in with a crowd of older girls. They go clubbing at the weekends, so I set out to visit the clubs and bars in town and found her in the third one I tried. It was a long shot because I could easily have missed her, but once I saw her I insisted on taking her home with me. She didn’t want to leave but she was afraid her friends would see me nagging her, so in the end she agreed, if only to save face in front of these friends of hers. She was furious with me for turning up like that.’ He frowned. ‘That murder, it could have been Tilly bashed to death in an alley, couldn’t it? She’s only fourteen. I have to say it’s helped to make her see that she’s not safe going out on her own like that at night, but it’s a shocking thing to happen. Shocking.’
‘We’re interested in tracing anyone who was at the club on Friday evening,’ Geraldine said.
Richard nodded his understanding and she asked whether he had noticed anything untoward at the club on the night of the murder.
‘A lot,’ he replied promptly. ‘The whole place was a den of iniquity. It’s a foul place. I mean, I’m as broad-minded as the next man,’ he amended his statement, ‘and I don’t suppose there was anything illegal going on. That is, I didn’t see any sign of drugs, although I’d put money on it that some of the people there were high on something or other. No, what I mean is, they let girls in without checking their ID properly.’ He sniffed. ‘I think the trouble is they all know how to get hold of fake ID these days. My daughter’s only fourteen and she had a student card on her that said she was eighteen. It didn’t even have her own name on it. I had a go at the bouncer but he just said that if a girl looks eighteen, and is carrying ID which says she’s eighteen, he’s not to know she’s only fourteen, and how is he supposed to know it’s not her name on the card? I can see it’s a problem, and they can’t refuse her entry, but all the same –’ He shrugged helplessly. ‘I honestly don’t know what to do. She’s only fourteen and she was in there, prey to goodness knows who or what. It could have been her stabbed to death in that alleyway. It doesn’t bear thinking about. What am I supposed to do? I’ve tried talking to her but she just won’t listen. All she want
s to do is go out with her friends until all hours. It’s a terrible thing to say, but I’m hoping this incident may help her to appreciate the danger she puts herself in when she goes out at night.’
Muttering sympathetically, Geraldine thanked him for his help and nodded to the constable, who turned the sign around on the door. She left, aware that she was wrong to feel disappointed that far from pursuing a young girl for nefarious purposes, Richard had gone to the club as a concerned father looking out for his young daughter. But it meant they were no closer to finding the killer.
28
Jonah sighed and shook his head mournfully. ‘She could have been suffocated,’ he said. ‘It’s really impossible to say.’
Geraldine frowned. ‘I don’t understand. Surely her injuries make it clear that she was battered to death?’
‘Unfortunately the state she’s in doesn’t make anything clear. My guess – and it is just a guess – is that she died like the other girl, the one who was fished out of the river.’ He nodded at the mutilated corpse on the table. ‘She’s been dead for about a week, I’d say.’
‘A week? No, she was killed two days ago, out in the alley. I saw her lying there.’
Jonah smiled sadly. ‘But you didn’t see her die there, did you? What you saw was a body that had already been dead for at least two or three days, probably longer, that had been dumped in the alley.’
‘No, I’m telling you, she was killed in the alley. There was so much blood. She couldn’t possibly have bled that much in the alleyway if she’d been killed somewhere else.’
‘Yes, there was a lot of blood, but none of it was hers.’
‘Whose was it then?’ Geraldine failed to conceal her sudden flicker of hope.
Jonah shook his head. ‘It wasn’t the killer’s, if that’s what you’re thinking.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘Apart from the fact that there was an awful lot of it, the blood she was lying in wasn’t human.’
‘What do you mean, it wasn’t human?’
‘The body in the alley was lying in a pool of animal blood, dog’s blood, to be exact. The killer must have brought it with him to throw us off the scent.’
‘You mean the killer wanted to make it look as though the victim had been killed where the body was found?’
Jonah’s lips twisted in a contorted semblance of a smile, but his eyes betrayed his dismay. It was rare that he was lost for words
‘So she was killed elsewhere,’ Geraldine said thoughtfully. ‘And all this was carefully planned to fool us.’
‘Not carefully enough.’
‘Do you think she was suffocated?’
‘Well, that’s certainly possible, but it’s hard to say, given the nature of the post mortem mutilation.’
With nothing more definite to go on, Geraldine returned to the police station, where Eileen was as perplexed as Geraldine.
‘How the hell did someone deposit a dead body in the alley in front of all those people?’
That particular mystery was solved when one of the brown wheelie bins in the alley was found to be splattered in blood, along with hair that matched the victim’s. DNA soon confirmed that the body had been transported inside it, together with a bag containing blood.
‘But the club was busy, and the bin must have been wheeled there from somewhere,’ Eileen said. ‘Surely it couldn’t have been pushed along a crowded pavement? The lid only had to flip open and its contents would have been on view to a host of witnesses. What if someone wanted to throw their rubbish in it? Anyone could have seen inside it. A killer as careful about escaping detection as this one would never have taken that risk. And how come it’s not shown up on any CCTV?’
‘If the victim was killed a few days before the body was deposited in the alley, the bin might have been wheeled there at any time, maybe one night during the week, when the place is less busy,’ Geraldine replied. ‘Wearing a rubbish collector’s jacket and gloves, the killer wouldn’t have attracted any attention. Then all that would have remained for him to do on Saturday night would be to slip into the alley, tip open the bin, and disappear into the crowd.’ She paused, considering the idea. ‘It would have been risky, but it’s perfectly feasible.’
Eileen nodded. ‘Yes, it’s possible that was how it was done. Get all the CCTV film in the area for the past week downloaded and arrange a team to study it. We need to find whoever it was wheeled that bin into the alley, and we need to find him quickly.’
Geraldine hurried off to carry out Eileen’s instructions. She was pleased that they seemed to be making some progress, not least because it helped her to keep her mind off her own troubles, and her fear that she would never see her sister again. While they were waiting for the results of the scrutiny of the CCTV footage, Jonah submitted his report. They had no match for the victim’s DNA on the system, and no means of identifying her. A message was circulated among dentists, searching for a match for her partial dental records, but they all knew that was a long shot. Apart from any other consideration, the victim’s teeth were too badly damaged to be recognisable. Geraldine went to see Eileen again, this time to suggest that they attempt to come up with a digital image of the dead woman’s face in the hope that someone might recognise her. Eileen agreed, and asked Geraldine to implement the idea. An expert in facial reconstruction was contacted and, within a few hours, Geraldine was staring at an image of features that could conceivably match those of a faceless corpse.
‘It’s only an approximation,’ the digital reconstruction expert warned Geraldine when they spoke on the phone. ‘The process of recreating an individual face from skeletal remains is no more than a rough combination of expert deduction and sheer guesswork. It’s inevitably subjective, and that’s why it’s so controversial. People want our work to be an exact science, but it’s more a question of artistry. We’re making advances all the time, but I’m afraid for now what I’ve sent you is the best we can do, given the state of the skull.’
‘It’s brilliant,’ Geraldine replied.
‘But you need to bear in mind that it’s not necessarily accurate.’
The image the police had produced was broadcast in the media and circulated online. The Missing Persons Bureau was contacted, and after that there was nothing to do but wait. Eileen summoned the team to a briefing in the Major Incident Room, to review the investigation so far.
‘Our victims so far are Angie Robinson, twenty-four, husband Greg, pulled from the river. And then we have a second unidentified victim found in an alley outside the Livewire Club on Sunday morning.’ She paused. ‘There’s no evidence to suggest that the missing girl, Zoe Watts, is in any way linked to the two murders, but she went missing at around the same time, and in the same vicinity, so we’re keen to find her. Hopefully alive,’ she added almost under her breath.
Ian cooked steaks that evening, and opened an expensive bottle of Claret, but Geraldine struggled to respond to his tentative advances.
‘Geraldine, I know you’re still angry with me,’ he said, looking wretched. ‘Believe me, if there was anything I could do to make the situation better, I would do it like a shot. You know I’d do anything to make you happy.’
Painfully aware that she was being unfair, Geraldine bit her lip and turned away so that he would not see the tears in her eyes. She and Ian loved one another, and she knew he had acted for the best in removing Helena to a safe location, where no one could force her to relapse into her lethal addiction. Yet somehow Geraldine could not forgive him for the enforced separation.
‘Geraldine, talk to me,’ he said. ‘Tell me what you’re thinking.’
She gazed at his familiar face. Much as she hated causing him distress, she resented her own anguish more.
‘We are identical twins,’ she whispered. ‘Helena is the only surviving blood relative from my immediate family.’
‘I’m your fa
mily now,’ he replied.
For years she had dreamed of hearing him speak to her like that, but the words sounded meaningless. How could she explain that without the twin sister she had barely known, she felt alone in the world?
‘I’m sorry,’ she muttered, and she truly was. ‘I can’t help how I feel.’
29
Nearly a week had passed since Zoe had run away from home. Despite being exhausted from lack of sleep, she was feeling pleased with herself for having managed to stay out of sight for so long. It would serve her parents right if she never went home. It was their fault she had left, and she hoped they blamed themselves for driving her away. Fortunately, when Zoe had finally contacted her friend, Laura had agreed to help her without any hesitation.
‘This is going to be fun,’ she had responded, her voice bright with excitement, when Zoe explained she needed somewhere to hide out.
‘It’s just for a few days,’ Zoe had said, ‘just until I sort myself out.’
Now she was regretting her optimism. To begin with, when she had first arrived at Laura’s house, everything had gone like a dream. The two girls had hurried up the stairs to Laura’s bedroom without anyone seeing them.
‘It’s all right,’ Laura had assured her. ‘They’re both out at work all day. No one else ever comes here.’
Hearing Laura’s parents moving around in the house, Zoe had been solemn, but Laura had giggled helplessly, spluttering at the audacity of their plan. In the safety of her own home, she seemed to have no sense of caution.
‘Shh,’ Zoe had whispered angrily. ‘Your parents will hear us.’
Shaking her head, Laura had put her finger to her lips to warn Zoe not to talk any more. But they had not disturbed Laura’s parents, and with Zoe safely up in Laura’s room, it had been easy to remain hidden. Laura’s parents were both out at work all day, and she had the run of the house until they returned in the evening. Going to the toilet once Laura’s parents were home was risky, but other than that the situation presented no problem. Laura went out to the shops for food, and filched more from the kitchen, and for a change Zoe ate hungrily. Away from her parents, she seemed to have recovered her appetite. Besides, she had spent hours not knowing when she might next be able to eat, which helped her to appreciate whatever supplies Laura brought her. She was feeling comfortably ensconced in Laura’s room, when her friend dropped a bombshell.
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