The Last Straw

by Paul Gitsham

  Attached to the post-mortem findings were other reports from the scene. The vodka was a basic litre bottle of Smirnoff vodka, available in thousands of off-licences and supermarkets all over the country. Lizzi Crawley was adamant that it hadn’t come from their house, since her husband never drank and she preferred wine. Their seventeen-year-old son had sworn blind that he knew nothing about it. A batch number had been taken off the bottle in an attempt to trace where it was sold from, but it wasn’t expected to yield much in the way of useful information.

  The bottle had been dusted for fingerprints and other trace evidence. The only fingerprints found were a single set belonging to Crawley, around the middle of the bottle in a classic drinker’s hold. There were no other sets. This observation had been underlined twice in red pen. A handwritten annotation, prefaced with ‘Speculation’ in large block capitals, questioned why there was only one set of prints — suggesting it unlikely, albeit not impossible, that Crawley had only touched the bottle once with bare hands between acquiring the bottle and his unscrewing the cap and swigging a litre of the fiery spirit. Even if that was the case, what about the fingerprints from the sales assistant from where it was bought or the person who placed it on the shop’s shelf? The suggested conclusion was that the bottle had been carefully wiped clear of prints before being pressed into the hand of an already comatose Crawley. Given that Crawley was a known teetotaller, the killer would have needed to bring the bottle to the scene and it would have been difficult to justify buying a bottle of vodka in the middle of a heatwave whilst wearing gloves.

  The pills were revealed to be a legitimate prescription for Crawley’s migraines. His condition was openly acknowledged amongst his friends and co-workers, so it wasn’t surprising that the killer knew of the pills. Combined with the vodka they would have formed a lethal cocktail that would have killed Crawley just as effectively as the hanging. And maybe they would have succeeded in passing it off as a suicide, Warren thought. It was just possible that the murderer’s quite literal overkill might be their undoing.

  More fingerprints had been taken from the cardboard box and the plastic blister-pack that had contained the pills. This time the box was covered with Crawley’s fingerprints, plus a few smudged prints from his wife, consistent with her perhaps moving the box of pills around whilst looking for something else in the crowded medicine cabinet that they shared. Another handwritten note suggested that the thumbprints on the blister-pack where the pills had been pushed through the tin-foil might have been added after the pill was popped from the pack, but it had been annotated as ‘Highly Speculative’ and so Warren disregarded it for the time being.

  The next report was the preliminary findings from the Document Analysis Team on the suicide note. Since it had been typed on a Word Processor with an inbuilt spell-checker and left on screen, the amount of information that could be gleaned from the document was much less than would have been available from a hand-written note on paper. Nevertheless, the report made Warren sit up straight.

  The note was largely consistent with a letter written by an intelligent person with dyslexia. Although it appeared the inbuilt spell checker had corrected any obvious spelling errors, it had been unable to fix the incorrect usage of homonyms; that is words that sound the same, but are spelt differently and have different meanings. Examples from within the suicide note included the opening ‘Deer’, instead of ‘Dear’; ‘bare’ instead of ‘bear’ and ‘now’ instead of ‘know’. Other examples included transposed letters, such as ‘won’ instead of ‘own’. Incorrect apostrophe usage and other punctuation errors were also common throughout the letter, although the report noted that that was not necessarily a hallmark of dyslexia.

  However, some parts of the letter deviated from this, with sections containing almost none of these errors. The analyst had noted of a repetition of the sentiment ‘I can’t bear’ and had highlighted it in the text. The first two instances incorrectly used the spelling ‘bare’, whilst the third used the correct spelling. This third usage also correctly used ‘thought’ rather than ‘fought’. The analyst also noted a rare example of correct apostrophe usage in the word ‘boys’ further on in the same sentence. The analyst underlined the examples.

  Deer Lizzy,

  I am typing this because I can’t bare to look in your eyes when I tell you the truth. I am so sorry for what I did. It was a wicked thing that we planned, I can only hope that by confessing to my crime one day you and the boys will forgive me. Please now that I only did it for us. Money is so tight and with your mum and dad so ill its only going to get worse. I couldn’t bare the fought that you an the boys would be made homeless.

  I am sure that you will learn all of the details from the press but I need to confess it here to you. Antonio and I plotted to steal the labs research and set up our won company. But we realised that we couldn’t do it without getting rid of Alan first. Together we planned his killing.

  I have decided to kill myself because if I have realised one thing in the past few days, it is that I love you and the boys more than life itself. I cannot bear the thought that my boys’ father will be in prison for murder and I do not think that I could survive. I hope that by confessing my crimes I can also gain your forgiveness. This will be the last time that we are together, us and the boys.

  I love you all so much,

  Mark

  The analysis team suggested that the note had in fact been written by two separate authors. One with dyslexia, one without. A proposal was that an original note by Crawley had been edited to change its meaning. The third sentence was almost certainly added or edited and had been highlighted.

  Other sentences might also have been added and it was impossible to know what, if anything, had been deleted. The analyst suggested that an original version of the letter might be on the laptop and the IT specialists were looking for evidence of the original file on its hard drive.

  Warren sat back and waited until Sutton had finished reading all of the reports and looking at the attached photographs.

  “Thoughts?”

  “Murder, no question in my mind. And two people at least.”

  Warren nodded in agreement. “Taken individually, it’s all circumstantial, but put it together and it’s good enough for me.”

  “We really need that original note — I wonder why they didn’t print the damn thing out? Leaving it on the computer screen like that was just asking us to look at the laptop. And I’ll bet good money that even if they deleted it, it’ll be somewhere on that computer’s hard drive. IT will find it, no question.”

  Warren shrugged. “Could be as simple as them not knowing where his printer was or how it worked. I can’t believe they turned up expecting to find he’d written a note to his wife on his laptop. More likely they saw it as an opportunity and took it.”

  “Speaking of which, what do you reckon is on that original version?”

  “Well, I think it’s a given that he is confessing to his role in Tunbridge’s murder. Quite what the role was I have no idea. I would bet that he also names other people involved, probably the same people that killed him. Clearly, Severino can’t have murdered him, which really only leaves Spencer and Hemmingway.”

  “What about this mysterious woman that Mrs Turnbull claims to have overheard him talking to? Where does she fit in?”

  “Assuming that she does fit in. It could be a coincidence; he could have been filling his boots somewhere else. In fact we’re not even sure he was having an affair — all she knows is that he was making private calls in the garden and that he said he could come over because ‘he’s away’. It could mean anything.”

  “I don’t know, boss, I don’t like coincidences. My money is on him having a bit of quality time with Hemmingway. After all, we know that she’s shagged Tunbridge and almost certainly Spencer. Why not complete the set? The girl seems to be the campus bike.”

  “It’s possible,” Warren conceded, a little surprised at Sutton’s judgemental attitude, “but
I think we may need to wait for that document to be found. Or for the results to come back on any trace found at the scene.”

  Sutton nodded, dropping it for the time being. “The question I would like to know is why kill him now? How could they have known that he was going to confess?”

  “He went home early on Wednesday and was acting strange that evening. It sounds to me as if he had decided to make a clean breast of it that day. He was then killed some time on Thursday. Somehow his killers found out about his planned confession and decided to silence him. It will have taken some preparation. Unless they were intimately familiar with Crawley’s house they will probably have needed to search for his climbing ropes, then figure out how to rig up the hangman’s noose.”

  “Well, they wouldn’t have wanted to do that with Crawley awake, surely,” interjected Sutton.

  “Good point,” Warren agreed. “That means they probably subdued him and force-fed him the vodka and pills first. Or one of them could have searched the house whilst the other dealt with Crawley. I wonder how long it would have taken for him to pass out from the pills? And how much longer it would have taken for him to die — because that’s the window they had to actually rig him up. Remember it was the hanging that actually killed him.”

  “And don’t forget they had to fake the note as well. That would have taken some time.”

  “So what do we think, an hour in the house?”

  Sutton nodded. “Reasonable, I reckon. They won’t have wanted to stick around too long. So when did they do it? The coroner said he died at midday, plus or minus two hours, so he was hung between ten a.m. and two p.m. If they killed him immediately then set up the fake suicide and doctored the note, they will probably have been out of the house by three p.m. at the latest.”

  Flicking through the various witness statements taken at the scene, Warren saw that the ever watchful Mrs Turnbull had spotted Mrs Crawley and children leaving for the day at about ten a.m. The two driveways were only separated by a low wall, and the Turnbulls’ living-room bay windows afforded a full view of the Crawleys’ drive. She admitted that she could normally hear their doorbell ringing or even the front door opening and closing if it was quiet.

  Unfortunately, she and her husband had left the house themselves at about ten forty-five to attend their weekly over-sixties club and didn’t return home until after four p.m. Assuming that the killer or killers would have been spotted by the eagle-eyed neighbour — who Warren suspected was probably even more fascinated by her nearest neighbours after his visit the previous day — Warren decided that this meant that they couldn’t have been at the house any earlier than just before eleven.

  “Let’s assume that the Turnbulls would have heard anyone coming to the house before they left and after they returned. So playing it safe, that leaves a window of opportunity between about ten forty-five a.m. and four p.m.”

  Just then, Jones’ phone rang; he ignored it. A few seconds later it stopped ringing in his office and immediately restarted outside as the call was diverted. He heard Janice, one of the support workers, pick it up. Cupping her hand over the mouthpiece, she called out, “Chief, it’s Welwyn Forensics again.”

  Warren snatched up the phone, mouthing his thanks. Sutton sat opposite him clearly trying to look as if he wasn’t deliberately trying to overhear the call. Taking pity on the man, Warren switched to speakerphone.

  “DCI Jones? It’s the trace lab from Welwyn. We’ve got a match on that bloodspot and the fibre you found yesterday on the window frame of the common room. The blood matches Professor Alan Tunbridge and the fibre matches the blue denim jeans worn by the witness Thomas Spencer on the night of the murder.”

  Warren looked at Sutton, his blood starting to sing again. “I think we’ve entered the end-game, Tony. Time to bring him in.”

  Chapter 49

  Jones stood around the corner from Tom Spencer’s student flat. He raised the radio to his lips. “How are things your end, Tony?”

  Sutton’s voice, coming from the rear of the house, was quiet but clear. “We’re all set, guv. The curtains are still closed, no sign of life.”

  “We’re good to go. Ten a.m. on the dot. Don’t let him get near a phone — we don’t want him letting any accomplices know what’s going down.”

  Sutton acknowledged, then fell silent. The second hand on Warren’s watch crawled around the clock face, achingly slowly. At thirty seconds to go, he glanced around at the team with him; Gary Hastings would be at his shoulder, whilst two detective sergeants on loan from Welwyn were with Sutton around the back and a specialist forced-entry team were hidden around the corner. Everyone wore stab vests.

  Finally, the hand ticked around to ten a.m. Immediately, Warren and Hastings burst forth from behind the white van that they had used for cover. Three long strides and the two men cleared the short garden path and were up the steps in front of the doorway.

  Spencer’s flat was a typical shared student house, according to the records held by the university’s housing association. Four rooms, all leased to postgraduate students, with a shared kitchen and lounge. Spencer and his housemates had rented it for three years. The house had a single front door and a rear kitchen door, opening onto a concrete yard just big enough for recycle bins and a rusty barbecue. Spencer had the rear ground-floor bedroom, hence the need for additional officers around the back of the house, in case he bolted.

  Jones and Hastings paid only lip-service to the rules of entry, hammering on the front door and ringing the doorbell only once. “Police! Open Up!” Jones hollered through the letter box. Silence.

  Jones paused for as long as it took the forced-entry team to make their way up the garden path, before shouting again, “Police, stand aside from the front door.” This was punctuated by a loud crunch as the two-man battering ram wielded by the forced-entry team made short work of the flimsy wooden door and cheap, student-landlord supplied locks.

  Warren jumped quickly over the threshold, heading down the narrow hallway; behind him he heard the other members of the team starting to pound their way up the stairs to check out the upstairs bedrooms and communal bathroom. Everybody shouted the same thing over and over again: “This is the police. Stay where you are!”

  The kitchen was untidy but empty and the open door to the lounge showed it to be similarly unoccupied, allowing Warren to keep on heading towards his goal, Spencer’s back bedroom. The door was closed. A cheap laminate affair with a thick coating of cream emulsion, it had a cheap-looking handle with a simple Yale lock. Warren banged once on the door, shouting again “Police, open up.”

  No response.

  No need for the battering-ram this time, Warren judged, and simply put his shoulder to the door. It gave way almost too easily, and Warren had to grab the door-frame to stop himself falling through.

  The room was empty.

  * * *

  Tony Sutton came down the steps at the front of the house. His tread was heavy and Warren didn’t need to turn around to see that the energy that had filled him barely twenty minutes ago was gone. Warren closed his phone and glanced at Sutton.

  “Flat’s completely empty. It looks as though Spencer is the only person living here — the rest of the rooms have been cleaned out. I guess it’s the end of term and the new tenants haven’t moved in yet.”

  “We’ll see what we can find and return to the station.”

  “Understood, guv…” A pause. “You know it’s not your fault, right? We didn’t have enough to charge him with last night. Crawley’s death was officially still a suicide and Spencer’s alibi was still, in theory, water-tight. All the evidence against it was circumstantial until that fibre matched. Arresting him would have been a waste of time.”

  Warren sighed. “Let’s just hope the powers that be see it your way, Tony, because if we don’t catch him soon, they’re going to be looking for a scapegoat.”

  * * *

  Lunch back at the station was a subdued affair. It looked as if Spencer had gone o
n the run. Unfortunately, there were no witnesses to Tom Spencer’s comings and goings for the previous couple of days. However, a search of the house had proved interesting and useful. The absence of any sort of bag or rucksack in his room, coupled with a lack of any toiletries in the bathroom, suggested he had packed and left. Rather more worryingly, a search of all the drawers in his room had failed to unearth a passport. A recent photo pinned to his noticeboard of him standing next to a poster at a San Diego conference suggested that he did own one. Warren put out a ports and airports alert for him, in case he decided to skip overseas.

  The contents of the top shelf in his wardrobe proved to be more illuminating. The large tubs of protein powders confirmed Spencer’s obsessive interest in building muscle-mass. A number of unlabelled pills had been sent off for pharmacological analysis; Warren fully expected them to be identified as anabolic steroids.

  With a nationwide manhunt approved, Warren was able to call upon a lot more resources, including those who specialised in such searches. And he soon realised that he would need them. Spencer didn’t own a car, so number-plate recognition was out of the question. Assuming that he had escaped the immediate area, that left the trains, buses or, in the worst-case-scenario, a lift from a friend.

  A trawl of the CCTV at the nearest local railway stations had proved fruitless, as had direct questioning of the rail staff. Unfortunately, Middlesbury was part of a well-connected public transport network. An hour-long bus journey could get him to any one of a dozen small, local railway stations and from there the national rail network. Scanning the CCTV footage at each station was technically possible, but would take too long to do much more than retrace his steps. Unfortunately, chasing down a domestic murderer, who was unlikely to pose a significant threat to the public, was well down the priority list when compared to the need to keep tabs on any would-be jihadists on MI5’s watch list.