by Paul Gitsham
“And even if he was on shift, it doesn’t mean anything,” agreed Sutton. “He spends half his time out of the office God only knows where. Unless he was sitting in front of us, this doesn’t mean anything. And this assumes that he was working alone.”
Warren decided not to pursue that angle for the time being. “Well let’s see what he was doing in the eighties.”
Warren opened up the force’s personnel database. A biographical summary of Grayson’s career immediately appeared, along with a recent photograph of him in uniform. “Richard John Grayson. I always wondered what the ‘R’ stood for,” mused Warren. “I wonder why he doesn’t use it?”
“Rumour has it, his nickname was ‘The boy wonder’. I think if my parents had named me ‘Dick Grayson’ I’d have stopped using it in the sixties as well.”
Warren thought for a moment before making the connection. “Ouch. If I had to be named after a superhero sidekick, Robin wouldn’t be my first choice.” Despite the frustration and emotional stress of the past few days, Warren suddenly found himself laughing. “I wonder how he looks in spandex?”
“I’ll bet his mum used to tell him his tea was ready by calling, ‘Dinner, Dinner, Dinner, Dinner, Dinner…’” added Sutton, chuckling.
“To the Batmobile, Superintendent!” Warren managed, before losing control completely.
“When he makes an unwilling arrest, there are big coloured speech bubbles saying ‘Pow’.” Sutton was leaning against the desk, his eyes watering slightly.
Warren struggled to regain some control. “Oh, God, I’ll never be able to hear the phone ring in his office again without thinking, ‘Bat phone’.”
“I wonder if they call him down to Welwyn by projecting a bat symbol into the night sky?”
The two men roared with laughter, before Warren shushed them. The last thing he wanted was one of the support workers to overhear them and for word to get back to Grayson; the man wasn’t famed for his sense of humour. However, it felt good to laugh.
Finally under control, Warren clicked on the next link.
Grayson’s service history was disappointingly brief, with only key dates. A link at the top of the screen offered more detail. Warren moved the mouse pointer over it, but stopped before selecting it.
DSI Grayson was Warren’s superior officer; as such Warren had no automatic right to see information about him beyond ‘public knowledge’. Clicking the link would have triggered a request to personnel, who would have asked for justification. Warren could think of no satisfactory answer that he was prepared to give at this time and he was unwilling to lie unless he had to. He said as much to Sutton.
“Let’s make do with what we’ve got.”
“OK, most recent posting, DSI Hertfordshire Constabulary, Middlesbury CID. He took over a week or so after Gavin’s removal,” read Sutton.
“Before that he was based at Welwyn Garden City—it just says CID. Doesn’t tell us what he was doing, or what unit he was working with. He was made DSI back in 2009.”
“Look at that.” Sutton pointed at the screen. “Before his promotion in 2009, he worked out of Welwyn for eighteen years as a DCI. That’s a hell of a long stretch at such a low rank—no offence, Boss—for someone as ambitious as Grayson.”
“Especially since he was made DCI at thirty-three,” agreed Warren. Was Grayson just average ability, or had he stepped on toes?
“And he was promoted to DI at thirty—that’s someone on the fast track,” opined Sutton.
But Warren was suddenly less interested in why John Grayson had gone from being ‘the boy wonder’ to stalling in the middle ranks, than what he was actually doing around that time.
“Look at that,” he muttered. “The promotion to DI came with a secondment—to West Midlands eighteen months before Delmarno’s conviction.”
“And his promotion to DCI came with his return to Herts, a year after,” finished Sutton.
* * *
The realisation that John Grayson—the man who sat in the office across the corridor, the man who had tried to discourage Warren from pursuing the investigation into the decades-old conspiracy that seemed to be at the heart of the whole affair— might himself be involved, left Warren out of breath.
Sutton was more sanguine; nevertheless, he could see that his boss wouldn’t be dissuaded. “OK, what do we do now then? Who do we take this to?”
Warren shrugged helplessly. The police by its very nature was a hierarchical organisation. But the logical place to take their concerns, the next level in the chain of command, was the very place they couldn’t go. The whole affair must have been orchestrated by somebody of a senior rank back in the 1980s. John Grayson may or may not be the person they were looking for—but the same could be said of anybody else of similar rank. If they bypassed Grayson, they could very well end up taking what they knew to somebody else at least as involved. What a bitter irony, Warren thought, if Grayson was entirely innocent but the person they reported to was in fact the one who they were looking for.
“What about Professional Standards? They are looking into Gavin’s case already and they are surely best placed to deal with this?”
Warren shook his head, the warning from Bob Windermere ringing in his ears.
“Can we trust them? It’s been twenty-odd years. Those involved in the conspiracy could be working literally anywhere in the force. Hell, if we want to really go down that road, what better place for somebody that dirty to end up working? They are the most secretive unit in the whole force. They have the ability to go anywhere, speak to anyone. If something needs burying, who would be better placed?”
Sutton shifted in his seat. “I see what you’re saying, but don’t you think that’s a bit paranoid?”
“No!” snapped Warren, before apologising. He rubbed the bridge of his nose wearily. “OK, maybe you’re right. But what can I do? Who can I trust?”
* * *
An hour later, Warren sat alone in his office. Sutton had finally gone home. The older man had looked troubled. Maybe he was right; maybe Warren was paranoid. Ever since he’d got to know Tony Sutton, the man had made it clear that he disliked John Grayson and was suspicious of the man’s motives. The fact that he, of all people, hadn’t immediately warmed to Warren’s suspicions about Grayson’s involvement gave Warren pause for thought.
His mobile rang. He looked at the caller ID.
“Professor Jordan,” he mouthed, feeling a sudden surge of excitement.
It was short-lived.
“Warren, I’ve been doing some digging around into Beno Richter, the pathologist who conducted your father’s autopsy.” Jordan’s voice was grim and Warren felt his heart sink.
“I’m afraid that he died in 1996 from alcoholic cirrhosis.” Warren felt his hopes dashed; he’d known it was a long shot, but Warren had prayed that the man would still be alive, would perhaps be able to answer some of the many questions he needed answered.
“The man was dodgy though.” Jordan’s tone now switched to one of anger. “I started putting a few feelers out amongst some older colleagues, since West Midlands, London and the South East are under the same group practice. It seems that Richter had quite the reputation.
“He used to be some sort of surgeon but he’d turn up to theatre with shaking hands, smelling of mouthwash. After one near miss too many, they figured it was only a matter of time before he killed someone and so they stopped him practising.
“He should have been struck off, but you know how it is, he was a good old boy who went to all the right schools and knew the right people, so they brushed it under the carpet, and made him retrain as a pathologist. I guess they figured he couldn’t do too much damage if the patient was already dead.” Jordan clearly regarded that type of thinking as an insult to his profession and a personal affront.
“So they assigned my father’s autopsy to the departmental drunk.” Warren’s tone was bitter. “That still doesn’t explain why he changed the report and fiddled the time of death.”
“There’s more. Apparently there were rumours of sexual misconduct swirling around at the time. The details are a bit hazy, but it seems that he was accused of trying to force himself on one of the junior office workers when drunk. The police were involved, statements were taken and he was questioned, but the young woman dropped the charges then resigned.”
“When was this?”
“Back end of 1986, beginning of 1987.”
“That was over a year before Dad died,” Warren mused. “They can’t have been planning that far ahead, surely?”
Jordan sighed. “I don’t know, but it’s worrying.”
It certainly was. The suggestion was that whoever orchestrated his father’s killing had a tame pathologist in his pocket. How many other autopsies had been compromised? How many other murders covered up?
Warren felt a chill run through him as he realised that the implications went even further. How did the killers know about Dr Richter’s predicament in the first place? An allegation of sexual misconduct was unlikely to have been public knowledge at that stage. It would have been whispered about perhaps on the grapevine but how would someone outside of the coroner’s office have heard about it?
The only logical suggestion was that somebody in the police had tipped off Delmarno who’d then persuaded the young woman to drop the charges, ensuring that Dr Beno Richter was now beholden to him.
Warren wasn’t naïve; he knew that corruption existed and the weekly revelations from the investigations into the News of the World phone-hacking scandal were uncovering more and more examples, but a pathologist and a police officer, in the pay of a serious criminal like Delmarno? It was like something out of 1920s’ Chicago.
The chill turned to hopelessness. How could he possibly clear his father’s name and work out what happened that awful night when the whole thing had been covered up so comprehensively and the only people who might have been able to tell Warren what happened were dead?
Warren felt helpless. Whoever orchestrated the conspiracy all of those years ago not only had senior enough rank to arrange the killing of his father, but had also been able to successfully bury it for decades by bribing senior public officials. What chance did Warren have of uncovering this person and seeing that justice was finally served for his father and those others? And yet again, the question that kept on haunting him, “Who could he trust?”
Saturday 7 April
Easter Saturday
Chapter 30
Warren had booked Easter Saturday off months ago. The plan had been to spend the long weekend with Susan’s parents up in Warwickshire, but Warren had begged off a couple of days ago. He could still go. Perhaps he ought to. The excitement of Friday’s insights had been swiftly followed by the realisation of what an impossible task he now faced.
Outwardly, the investigation into Reggie Williamson’s murder appeared to be proceeding as expected. In contrast to the frenetic pace of Warren’s most recent cases, most murder inquiries took months, even years to conclude. A small team could expect to spend weeks sifting through evidence. And whilst his team no doubt felt frustration at the clear suspect column and apparent lack of progress, they were experienced enough not to worry yet.
And as far as Zachary Eddleston was concerned, they were still awaiting final toxicology reports, and so the death remained unexplained for the time being. In fact the only person in the team who knew the true state of affairs was Tony Sutton. He too had come in on his day off but had finally gone home after Warren had pulled rank and ordered him out.
The telephone made him jump and he almost dropped the handset.
“DCI Jones? It’s David Liebig here.”
He wondered what the man could want—and what he could tell him? At this stage in the investigation, the last thing Warren wanted was to let it be known that he thought the coroner’s death was anything but ill fortune.
“Mr Liebig, what can I do for you?”
“I was right about your visit the other day being good for me. I finally decided to get my parents’ affairs in order and move on.”
“I’m glad to hear it. I hope you find peace.” The words were trite, but he wasn’t really sure what else to say.
“The thing is, my parents had a safety deposit box. Mostly full of the usual: deeds to the house, some stock certificates, a couple of pieces of expensive jewellery handed down from my grandparents. But there were also some papers from Dad’s work. I don’t really know what to do with them.”
“What sort of papers?” Warren’s voice caught in his throat.
“I’m not sure, but there’s what appears to be an autopsy report from the 1980s. Why do you think he kept that?”
* * *
Warren arrived at Liebig’s house in record time, his mind spinning. There was no doubt in his mind that the mysterious autopsy report was his father’s, or that it had been the target of the break-in of the Liebigs’ house the night they were killed. The unsuccessful break-in it would appear. It had taken all of his self-control not to rip it open there and then, but his detective’s instincts won over and he took care not to touch the brittle paper before he placed it in the plastic evidence bag. It was unlikely that there were any fingerprints on the document—getting ridge patterns off paper was a hit-and-miss affair at the best of times and he had no idea what effect twenty-plus years of gathering dust would have—but he was determined not to destroy any potential evidence.
Professor Jordan had been almost as excited as Warren and they agreed to meet at Middlesbury CID, rather than wait for Warren to drive the extra twenty miles to his office at the Lister Hospital in Stevenage. He was already waiting when Warren arrived.
Jordan eyed the plastic evidence wallet as Warren placed it carefully on his desk and put on a pair of gloves.
“You know there’s unlikely to be any trace evidence on there, don’t you,” he reminded him.
“I know, but too much has gone missing or been buried. I’m not going to risk losing anything else.”
Jordan pointed at Warren’s signature in the chain-of-custody box. “And you know that it’s unlikely that will stand up in court.”
Warren ignored him and carefully opened the brown paper envelope and spread the typewritten sheets out across the table. Opening a desk drawer, he removed a digital camera.
“I’m not risking contamination by handling the papers or photocopying them. We’ll look at photographs initially.” Warren’s voice was brittle; it was clear that he still hadn’t slept properly since Jordan had last seen him. The stains on the coffee mug and the slight tremor in the detective’s hands hinted at how the younger man was still functioning.
With the photography complete, Warren packed the sheets back into their envelope, sealed them in the evidence bag and signed it again. Jordan gave up protesting about the futility of trying to maintain the chain of custody and dutifully countersigned the bag. Warren had transferred the photos from the camera’s memory card to his laptop, but at Jordan’s suggestion copied them across to the Professor’s iPad, the tablet computer being an easier way to view the documents.
The differences between the original autopsy report and the faked report were immediately obvious, even before they started to compare them properly, with the typewritten text neatly aligned with the boxes on the proforma.
The fake report had copied much of the original report verbatim, making sense of the discrepancies that Jordan had noted before.
“I’m pretty sure that Dr Richter didn’t write the fake report. I’m guessing somebody else with limited forensic knowledge rewrote it and he just signed it. That would explain these mistakes.” Jordan pointed to a section on the fake document.
“The fake report states ‘a core body temperature of 35.1°C (95.2°F), and degree of rigor mortis suggest a time of death within one hour of his body being discovered’. The original document records the core temperature as 34.9°C and states a time of death between four and six hours; rigor mortis would be in its early stages, whic
h makes more sense given the wording. Lividity would be starting to be fixed.” Temporarily switching away from the autopsy report Jordan opened an app. “This is what I use to estimate time of death. It’s a bit more accurate than the method used here.” He quickly entered the details from the report, “six point five hours with ninety-five per cent confidence that death occurred between three point one and nine point three hours previously. How does that stack up with the events that night?”
Warren thought back. “The last I saw of Dad was about five-thirty. We had tea and then Dad went down the garden. Mum went out to see her friend up the road and I was upstairs in my room reading. My brother, James, was probably hanging around with his mates up the park. Mum must have got back about eightish and put the kettle on. I remember her calling down the garden to ask if Dad wanted a cup of coffee. He didn’t reply.” Warren paused. “Mum made him one anyway—Dad never turned down coffee—and sent me down to the garage with it… The rest you know.”
Jordan jotted a few numbers down. “That means five and a quarter hours between you last seeing him and his core temperature reading, which is within the range calculated by Richter and myself just now. Rigor would have started to set in and the lividity may have started to fix.”
He pointed to the next line. “No mention of red flushing.”
“What about the rest of the report?”
Jordan flicked to the next page. Both men saw it at the same time and Warren gasped quietly. The amendment was just a few words, but it changed the meaning of the report entirely.
“Lungs contain some vomitus and stomach contents. Larynx shows some swelling and bruising. Petechiae in both eyes are consistent with strangulation.”
“Christ…” It was a whisper.
“I want to see the toxicology reports,” stated Jordan and Warren could almost hear the cogs turning in the pathologist’s brain as he flicked forward several pages.
“Carbon Monoxide 2.8%; Blood alcohol content < 0.01%.”
He flicked back again.
“Stomach contents reveal a significant volume of alcohol, probably whisky, consistent with bottle found at the scene and remains of food consistent with deceased’s last meal. (Blood toxicology report to be completed.)