Silent Witness (A Dylan Scott Mystery)

by Wells, Shirley

  Her words shocked him to the core. He’d assumed Kaminski would fester behind bars until he was an old man. Why the hell did she have to rake it all over again?

  “Really? I didn’t know you were thinking of employing someone. I didn’t think you could afford to—with this place to worry about, I mean. Still, why not, eh?”

  “It isn’t costing me a penny,” she said. “I would pay. God, I’d give every penny I had, borrow as much as I could. I’d do anything if I thought it would bring Alek home. But no, this is all thanks to Alek’s parents. They used to live near Dylan’s mother. That’s the investigator’s name, Dylan Scott. He says that’s why he’s come up to see Alek, as a favour to his mother and to Alek’s parents.”

  “That’s handy then. As they say, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”

  “Quite.” She chewed on her bottom lip. “I daren’t even think about it. If I start to imagine Alek coming home—God, I’ll die if it all comes to nothing.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course you won’t.” He smiled to take the sting from his words. “You’re tough, Sue. Strong and brave.”

  She laughed that off. “I wish. Anyway, I’d better get on.”

  “Me, too.” He checked that he’d put everything in his bag and reached for his coat. “I’ll see you on Monday, if not before.”

  She grinned at him. “Don’t forget to bring your wallet.”

  “I won’t.”

  Sue led the dog to its kennel and, with no excuse to linger, Jamie walked back to his car. The sky was grey, the land wet and dreary. It suited his mood.

  Sue had said this private investigator hadn’t agreed to take on the case. Hopefully, he wouldn’t. Jamie felt sure it would come to nothing but, all the same, he didn’t want Dylan Scott or whatever his name was poking his nose where it wasn’t wanted.

  He’d put a stop to it if he had to.

  Chapter Three

  Despite the coat and socks Sue Kaminski had loaned him, Dylan had been chilled all day. Now, finally, he was thawing out. After leaving Pennine View Rescue Centre, he’d checked into his hotel and spent the afternoon on the internet, finding out as much as he could about Aleksander Kaminski and the ex-wife he may or may not have butchered. He searched for information on Sue Kaminski and her animal rescue centre, as well as Dr. Walsingham, the victim’s husband. Nothing of interest had come to light, nothing he hadn’t already known.

  He was meeting ex-DCI Frank Willoughby and ex-DI Lewis Cameron at seven-thirty. Dylan was half an hour early but that was okay. On previous visits to Dawson’s Clough, the Dog and Fox had become one of his favourite pubs. Passing time in the company of a pint of good beer was no hardship.

  This corner of east Lancashire, with its stunning views and hardworking, close-knit community, had grown on him. He found the tall chimneys, relics of a long-dead cotton industry, strangely romantic. Some of the old mills had been left to take their chances with the elements, but others had been turned into luxury apartments. The area was a mix of old and new, and he liked it.

  He’d chosen a table at the far end of the pub’s lounge, one close to a crackling log fire. A gale still raged outside, hauling rain clouds across a threatening sky, and the fire provided cheer as well as warmth.

  A few customers crowded round the bar but, other than that, the place was quiet. From experience, he guessed more people would call in later.

  He’d settled down with his second pint when Frank and a man Dylan assumed was Lewis Cameron came in. With a wave of his hand, Dylan indicated that he didn’t need another drink.

  He wondered if anyone else was watching the two men at the bar and thinking they both looked like coppers. Dylan didn’t know what it was, perhaps the erect carriage or the well-polished black shoes, but they oozed policeman from every pore.

  Unlike Dylan, who’d been kicked off the force in disgrace—not that he was bitter, or not too bitter—these men had retired with commendations. A heart attack had forced Frank to retire, whereas Lewis Cameron had decided to spend more time with his family after years of excellent service.

  Ex-DCI Frank Willoughby was sixty and, thanks to a stringent diet and exercise regime, looked good. His hair was short, thick and dark, his back and shoulders straight. Ex-DI Lewis Cameron was a couple of years younger, not as tall as Frank, and about twenty pounds heavier. Dylan wondered if he kept his hair slightly longer to conceal the fact that he was going bald.

  “Well, Dylan.” Frank gave him a hearty pat on the back. “Long time no see. This is Lewis Cameron. Lewis, Dylan Scott.”

  Once the handshaking was out of the way, they took their seats around the table.

  “So how’s life treating you, Dylan?” Frank asked. “Congratulations, by the way. How’s the new baby?”

  “Life’s good, thanks, mate.” Dylan couldn’t resist. He reached for his wallet and took out the small photo of his daughter. “The new baby is gorgeous. Here. We’ve called her Freya.”

  “Freya?”

  “Yeah. Apparently, it comes from Norse mythology. I think Freya was the goddess of fertility as well as being the most beautiful of the goddesses.”

  Lewis Cameron smiled as he looked at the photo. “She’s lovely.”

  “She is.” Dylan returned the photo to his wallet. “It just goes to show that not all babies look like Winston Churchill.”

  “How’s Bev?” Frank asked. “Is she okay with you coming up here when you should be helping with the new addition?”

  “Okay isn’t quite how I’d describe it.” Dylan took a swig of beer. “She hasn’t forgiven me for missing the birth yet so everything I do is wrong at the moment.”

  “How come you missed it?” Frank asked.

  Dylan had asked himself that same question a dozen times and he still found it hard to answer. “In my defence, Freya was a couple of days early. She was born Wednesday night, when Arsenal were playing Chelsea at home. I had my phone with me, of course, but there’s a lot of noise when Arsenal play Chelsea and I didn’t hear it ring. I came out of the ground, checked my messages and raced to the hospital. It was all done and dusted by that time. The birth was short and quick, and my mother was there to take charge of everything. Bev was in hospital less than forty-eight hours so it’s all okay.”

  “You like to live dangerously.” Frank shook his head and added for Lewis’s benefit, “Dylan’s wife chucked him out. She went the whole way—even found him a flat of his own. It took months for him to worm his way back into her good books. If he’s not careful, he’ll be back in that flat again.”

  “Don’t.” Dylan shuddered at the thought.

  He hadn’t been in “that flat” above five minutes when his mother moved in, and if there was anything worse than living with his mother, Dylan hadn’t yet stumbled across it. He loved his mother, God knows why, but he couldn’t live with her.

  He often thought that if Bev hadn’t got drunk that night nine months ago, and if that night hadn’t resulted in her falling pregnant, he’d still be living in that shoebox the bastard of a landlord chose to call a studio flat. The whys and wherefores didn’t matter though. He was back in the marital home and, God willing, he’d stay there.

  He made a mental note to keep on the right side of Bev. He’d take flowers when he went home.

  “What about you, Lewis?” he asked. “You’re obviously married. Any children?”

  “Two boys. One’s in Scotland and the other’s in Canada. Why obviously? You said I was obviously married.” He glanced down at his left hand as if he expected to see a shining band of gold on his finger. It was bare. “How can you tell?”

  “You winced. When I was explaining how I missed Freya’s birth because of the Arsenal game, you winced.”

  “Christ, you must be a direct descendent of Sherlock Holmes.” He laughed loudly at his own joke.

  Dylan smiled, but they clearly didn’t share the same sense of humour. “How are you liking retirement? Do you manage to fill your days?”

 
He knew a lot of coppers who were totally lost without the job.

  “Easily.” Lewis tapped the side of his nose. “I do some consultancy work. Security, you know? It has its perks.”

  “Lewis’s just back from a fortnight in New York,” Frank explained. “All expenses paid and a decent bonus.”

  Dylan tried to look suitably impressed. And failed.

  “I had a chat with Sue Kaminski this morning,” he said, keen to get to more important matters. “She’s adamant that as soon as I see her husband, I’ll know he’s innocent. Is that likely?”

  “No.” Lewis was firm on that. “Kaminski will tell you he’s innocent, but even he doesn’t sound terribly convincing. It was one of the most straightforward cases I’ve ever worked on.”

  “Tell me about it.” Dylan sat back, glass in hand.

  “Carly Walsingham was supposed to collect her children from school. They’re five years old. Twins.” Lewis pulled a face. “William and Harry.”

  “After the royal princes?” Frank asked.

  “Yes. Apparently, Carly was a huge fan of Princess Di. She even had the same hairstyle. She was obviously an impressionable teenager when Diana married her Prince.”

  “Wait a minute,” Dylan said. “How come the kids were at school? It was August.”

  “There was a series of activity days for anyone interested. It was supposed to benefit the working mothers but anyone could pay a fiver to dump their kids there. A poet visited, a drama society put on a show, that sort of stuff. Anyway, when Carly didn’t turn up to collect them, a teacher tried phoning the house. There was no response so she tried Carly’s and then Neil Walsingham’s mobile phones. She got hold of Neil and, as he couldn’t raise a response from his wife either, he left work, collected the children and took them home. He found her in a bath of blood. Her throat had been slit.”

  Dylan hated this. Instead of hearing stories second or third-hand, he liked to be at the scene. Failing that, he liked to see photographs. Cameras didn’t miss things.

  “Okay. No sign of a break-in?”

  “Nothing. The front door was locked but the back door wasn’t. She’d go to the garden via the back door and her husband said they rarely locked it when they were at home.”

  She’d been killed in early August when the warm weather tempted people into their gardens. “Did you find the murder weapon?”

  “No. And believe me, we searched every inch of the surrounding area. Fingertip search. Dogs. The lot.” Lewis ran a finger around the rim of his glass as if bringing the murder scene to mind. “She was in the bath. Her attacker had come at her from behind and put a pillow over her face. There was a large bruise on one wrist and, from that, we were able to get a print.” He looked incredibly pleased with himself. “Her other wrist had been cut, but not fatally. The same weapon—small, sharp and precise, like a surgical blade—cut into her carotid artery. She would have died in seconds.”

  At times like this, Dylan wished he was still a member of the police force. No officer, regardless of the number of years he’d served, liked seeing a body. Especially a body in a bath of blood. If Dylan was still on the force, though, he would have been able to see the bathroom with all its clues.

  “Where was the pillow?” he asked.

  “On the floor by the side of the bath,” Lewis said.

  “Why cut her then? Why not just put the pillow over her face and drown her? It would have been a lot less messy.”

  “It takes a long time,” Lewis said. “Carly was young and fit, and would have put up a fight. It would have taken too long, possibly ten minutes.”

  Dylan supposed he was right. Also, if the killer was angry, drowning her wouldn’t satisfy him. He’d have to slash, to hurt, to make her bleed.

  He drew a mental picture of the bathroom that was probably totally inaccurate. There was no probably about it. The room could be fourteen feet square or a cramped six by six.

  “Anything else odd in the room?” he asked.

  “Nothing.” Perhaps Lewis knew that Dylan wanted to visualise the room. “The Walsinghams’ house is large, spacious and worth a fortune. The bathroom is attached to the main bedroom by the only door. When you open that door, you see a huge bath in the centre of the room. Anyone lying in that bath would have their back to the door, as Carly did. To the right is a large walk-in shower. There are plenty of cupboards filled with white towels. More cupboards crammed with expensive toiletries. Electric toothbrushes for Mr. and Mrs. Walsingham only, as the children used the family bathroom.”

  The room had made a strong impression on Lewis Cameron. It would, though. Even the longest-serving detectives rarely saw a body in a bath of blood.

  “There were fingerprints everywhere,” Lewis said, “so that was easy enough. We were soon able to eliminate the victim’s prints, her husband’s and the cleaner’s.”

  “I assume her husband had a watertight alibi?” Frank voiced the question Dylan wanted answering.

  “He’d been at the hospital since eight o’clock that morning.” Lewis emptied his glass and Dylan supposed he ought to show willing.

  “Are we ready for another?”

  They were, so Dylan walked up the bar and waited to be served. He’d been right in that trade would soon pick up. The pub was becoming more crowded as the evening wore on. He wasn’t surprised. The Dog and Fox offered clean, warm, convivial surroundings, service that was quick and friendly, and, most important, good beer. There were no televisions, no loud music blaring out and no slot machines. Several pubs were closer to his hotel, but the Dog and Fox made forking out for a taxi worthwhile.

  Dylan carried their drinks back to the table and retook his seat.

  “So,” he said, “you had your murder scene with its array of prints. What next?”

  For some reason he couldn’t fathom, he was becoming intrigued by this case. It was madness, surely? Lewis Cameron was an experienced detective and, as senior investigating officer, would have handpicked an equally experienced team. There was no way Kaminski could be innocent, despite what his wife claimed.

  Dylan would do well to remember that he’d only come to Lancashire to escape the madhouse that was currently his home. That, and as a favour to his mother and her old friends. Getting involved in this case on anything more than a superficial level was absurd. There was no mileage in it.

  “We started on the usual house-to-house questioning,” Lewis explained. “A neighbour had seen a man leaving the house around a quarter to four that afternoon. He left through the back garden. Because she was up a ladder, hosing leaves off her conservatory roof, she had the perfect view of him. If she’d been standing in her garden, she wouldn’t have seen a thing. No one would.”

  “Her description matched that of Kaminski, I take it?” Dylan said.

  “It was a good description, yes.”

  “He must have been walking away from her though. She couldn’t have seen his face, could she?”

  Lewis smiled at that. “She saw a man wearing black jeans and a grey hoody striding down the garden. We checked with some CCTV of Kaminski that day and he was wearing black jeans.”

  “And a grey hoody?”

  “We didn’t find that on CCTV, no, but it was a warm day. He would only have pulled that on to try and hide his head and hair as he left the house.”

  “So the neighbour saw a man in black jeans?” He glanced down at his own black jeans. “That description would fit about forty percent of the population. And isn’t it a bit odd? Not volunteering the information until your officers went knocking on doors, I mean. Didn’t it occur to her that something might be wrong?”

  “No. She said she assumed it was a tradesman. The houses have large gardens, and gates in the fences at the back of those gardens lead onto Peebles Road. There are shops there and, sometimes, tradesmen nip out the back way to buy sandwiches or newspapers.”

  “Right,” Dylan said. “So the shops on Peebles Road must have cameras?”

  “Unfortunately, there�
�s very little CCTV in the area, but we checked with all nearby shops, offices and garages to see what they had. Kaminski had gone into a newsagent’s and bought a packet of cigarettes. That’s how we caught him on film. Better still, the newsagent knew him. Kaminski’s a builder and he’d done some work for him.”

  As Dylan took a swallow of his beer, he was shocked to realise how badly he wanted to find a hole in Lewis’s reasoning. Perhaps he was more bitter and twisted about his dismissal from the force than he’d believed. No, surely not. While he couldn’t find a good thing to say about those at the top—those who, for purely political reasons, had him banged up on an assault charge on the say of a habitual criminal—he’d always admired and respected the hardworking detectives.

  Frank wasn’t saying a lot, he noticed. Perhaps, like Dylan, he was trying to find arguments in the case.

  “There’s more,” Lewis said. “Neil Walsingham told us how his wife had been on the phone the night before. He came home from work and heard her talking to someone. She was agitated and upset, apparently, and was telling the person on the other end to stop threatening her. When she realised Walsingham was in the house, she cut the connection and, when he questioned her, she said it was a salesman trying to force her to buy health insurance. Walsingham didn’t believe her.”

  “And?” Dylan asked.

  “It was easy enough to check the phone records and there was only one outgoing call made from the Walsinghams’ house that day. Mrs. Walsingham had phoned Aleksander Kaminski’s mobile. It was Kaminski who was threatening her.” Lewis took a long appreciative swig of beer. “In less than twenty-four hours, we were able to pick up Kaminski and get his prints checked. A perfect match. Not only were his prints all over that bathroom, including the edge of the bath, his thumb was also responsible for the bruise on Mrs. Walsingham’s wrist.”

  Lewis didn’t so much look pleased as smug.