Reckless Endangerment--A Brock and Poole Police Procedural

by Graham Ison

  ‘From what we’ve learned about Sharon, it seems that she had quite a few lovers, Cindy,’ I began, getting straight to the point. ‘I’ll be quite frank with you: a number of witnesses we’ve interviewed have led us to the conclusion that she’d happily share a bed with anyone who asked her.’

  ‘They weren’t lying,’ said Cindy. ‘And I reckon that Miami was usually the place where she spent time in the sack with most of them.’

  ‘And you know this for certain,’ said Dave.

  ‘Sure do. There was one occasion when I’d asked her if she fancied a swim and she agreed to meet me on the beach ten minutes later. I got so annoyed when she didn’t show after half an hour that I left the beach and went up to her room. She was in bed with a man.’ Cindy wrinkled her brow. ‘Actually, they were on it rather than in it.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘It must’ve been a couple of months ago. Yes, it was the beginning of June. In fact, it was an incident almost identical to one that occurred a year ago.’

  ‘How did you get in? From what I know of hotel doors they can only be entered with a keycard.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said Cindy. ‘Anyway, there was a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door, a dead giveaway, that. But my room was next to Sharon’s, so I went along the balcony. It was a hellishly hot day and she’d left the doors open. It was no problem because we were on the fifth floor and there was only a low wall between the two rooms and I vaulted over it. I swim a lot and work out whenever I get the chance, so I keep myself in pretty good shape. Mind you, I did bark my shin,’ she added ruefully.

  ‘Did she say anything when you barged in?’

  ‘No, but the man she was on the bed with did. The saucy bastard asked if I’d come to join in. But I was only wearing a bikini, so I suppose he thought I was up for it. Or that Sharon had arranged a threesome. It’s the sort of thing she might’ve have done. I don’t mean she’d ever done it before, but I wouldn’t’ve put it past her.’

  ‘What did this man look like, Cindy?’ asked Dave, pocketbook at the ready.

  ‘Dishy,’ said Cindy.

  ‘Could you be a bit more specific than that? How tall was he?’

  ‘He must’ve been about six-three, I should think,’ said Cindy. ‘Well, I guess he was. It was a bit difficult to tell because he was lying down. He was well-built – very well-built, if you know what I mean.’ She flashed Dave a mischievous smile. ‘To be honest, I didn’t stay long enough to take too much notice of the rest of him. I wasn’t surprised that Sharon was having it off with some guy, particularly that one. But I was annoyed that she’d stood me up. If she’d told me what she was going to get up to, I wouldn’t’ve bothered to ask her for a swim.’

  ‘What was he wearing?’ asked Dave, pretending to be naive.

  Briefly puzzled by the question, Cindy stared at Dave for a moment or two and then laughed when she realized he was teasing her. ‘Nothing, of course,’ she said, and giggled. ‘Neither was Sharon. Mind you, as I said, it was a very hot day.’

  ‘Did Sharon say who this man was?’ I asked. ‘Did she tell you his name or whether he was English or American? In fact, did she say anything at all about him?’

  ‘Not until we were on the flight home and she had a little dig at me for barging in on the two of them. She told me that he was British and a frequent flyer, but that was all she said.’

  ‘Was he on that return flight?’

  ‘He may have been, I don’t know. But if he was, Sharon was careful not to pay any more attention to him than to the other passengers.’

  ‘Because of you having caught them in the act?’

  ‘No, that didn’t worry her, but because chatting up the passengers is a sacking offence in our airline. I’m not saying that it doesn’t go on – the girls hooking up with passengers, I mean – but they don’t brag about it and they certainly don’t show out when they’re on duty. It’s OK for us to meet a guy away from the job, and a few of the girls have married men they’ve met on flights, but you don’t make a song and dance about it. Anyway, I don’t think I’d’ve recognized the guy again, not once he had his clothes on.’ Cindy giggled again; she seemed to giggle a lot.

  ‘Was that all Sharon said about it?’ asked Dave.

  ‘Yes, she never mentioned the incident again, and I didn’t either. After all, she was entitled to fuck anyone she liked. It’s just that I was a bit pissed off that she’d agreed to come for a swim and then didn’t show. Like I said just now, if she’d refused and told me that she was having it off with a guy instead, I couldn’t have cared less about it. And I certainly wouldn’t’ve gone looking for her.’

  ‘You did know she was married, I suppose?’ said Dave.

  ‘Married! What, Sharon? I don’t believe it.’

  ‘She was,’ I said. ‘What’s more, her husband was murdered two days before Sharon.’

  ‘Bloody hell! I never knew she was married. What a deceitful little bitch.’ Cindy shook her head in disbelief. ‘I must say she kept that pretty quiet. She never mentioned a husband and she didn’t wear a wedding ring. Is there a connection between Sharon and her husband both being murdered?’

  ‘We’re still working on it,’ said Dave, unwilling to disclose that we had sufficient evidence to leave us in little doubt that Sharon was responsible for the death of her husband.

  ‘About this man you saw Sharon in bed with, Cindy,’ I said. ‘D’you think she was seeing him on a regular basis?’

  Cindy shrugged. ‘I really have no idea. I know one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but Sharon was very much someone who put herself first. And she was a bit of a loner, too. She only very occasionally socialized with the crew on stopovers. The rest of us would spend most of our free time beside the pool or down on the beach soaking up the sun. Not Sharon, though. As I said, she’d sometimes join me for a swim, but I think she probably spent most of the time in bed, and not by herself either. One thing’s for sure: if she did shack up with a guy, he’d have to have been filthy rich. She always said that she was on the lookout for a man who could afford to give her the high life.’

  ‘Do you happen to know any of the other men she was seeing?’

  ‘No. I certainly didn’t blunder in and find her at it. Not after that time in Miami.’ Cindy paused. ‘Hang on, though. I’ve just remembered. It was about a year ago. Same hotel, of course, and I’d called her and suggested a swim, just like I did last June. But I told you about that just now. She agreed to meet me on the beach in ten minutes’ time, but she never showed up. After about an hour, I rang her from the beach and she said something about having had to take a call.’

  We hadn’t learned anything we didn’t already know. Sharon indulged in serial promiscuity. That she was looking for a rich man didn’t narrow the field either; the men who had been interviewed were all well-heeled. We thanked Cindy for her time and wished her a safe flight.

  On Monday morning I received a report from the forensic science laboratory. The DNA sample taken from Sharon Gregory’s unborn child had been compared with the swab taken from Frank Digby, the wine merchant from Chalfont St Giles, but had proved not to be a match. Not that that took him out of the frame for her murder.

  Later that day we received similarly depressing information: the sample that Lizanne Carpenter had taken from the hairbrush in Gordon Harrison’s bathroom at Fulham didn’t match either. As with Digby, that didn’t mean that he hadn’t murdered her. But from what Ken Sullivan of SOCA had said, Harrison was probably heavily engaged in some other nefarious activity at the time of the murder.

  There was one piece of encouraging news. The DNA of a hair that Linda’s people had found on the pillow at the Dickin Hotel had been found to match that of the father of Sharon’s child. We were getting closer, but not close enough to make an arrest.

  That apart, it looked very much as though our enquiry had stalled. We’d gathered all these DNA samples, but they meant nothing until we actually found the man who’s DNA could be matc
hed to them, and none of them was on the database. We might get somewhere once we’d identified the fingerprints found in the room, but those could, of course, belong to anyone who had used the room over the preceding weeks.

  I walked out to the incident room.

  ‘Dave, I think we’ll have another run out to the Gregory house and have a look around. What’s the position? Is it still under police guard?’

  ‘No, guv. It was handed over to Peter Gregory shortly after we’d interviewed Jill Gregory on Friday. But I’ve kept a key, just in case we needed it.’

  ‘Give him a ring, or Mrs Gregory, and ask one of them if it’s all right for us to have another poke around.’

  We arrived at West Drayton at about eleven o’clock. It was immediately apparent that Clifford Gregory’s brother and sister-in-law had paid a visit. The house had been cleared up and there was no sign of the chaos that we’d encountered on the night of Clifford’s murder, apart from the wine stain on the dining room carpet and the broken television set.

  ‘Are we looking for something in particular, guv?’ asked Dave.

  ‘I wondered if there was a laptop computer anywhere here that might shed some light on more of Sharon’s bed mates, Dave. More than we’ve turned up so far.’

  ‘We didn’t find one the night Clifford Gregory was murdered, and we didn’t find one when we came back looking for Sharon. Why should we find one now … sir?’

  ‘It was just a thought,’ I said.

  ‘We examined the one in Clifford’s study,’ said Dave, ‘but the only files on it were those connected with his job as an accountant. Anyway, Sharon wouldn’t have been stupid enough to put details of her extramarital affairs on a computer that her husband might find, would she? And there wasn’t one in her locker at Heathrow.’

  I still wasn’t convinced. ‘Nevertheless, we’ll have a last look round, Dave. When the house was searched, Sharon was still alive, and we were only looking for evidence in connection with her husband’s murder.’

  ‘Very good, sir,’ said Dave.

  That was the second time he’d called me ‘sir’ in a short space of time. However, he was right to doubt the value of conducting a second search. We went through the house – even the loft and the garage – but didn’t find another computer or anything else that would help us to identify who had killed Sharon Gregory.

  ‘Give Peter Gregory a call, Dave, and ask him if he’s removed a computer. And while you’re at it, ask him if a date’s been set for the funerals.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Dave. I think he thought I was becoming obsessed about finding another computer.

  We left, just as an estate agent was erecting a ‘For Sale’ board in the front garden.

  ‘Good luck,’ said Dave. ‘They’ll have a job selling a house where a murder’s been committed.’

  Dave and I had not long returned to ESB from West Drayton when Colin Wilberforce burst into my office. It is extremely rare for Colin to make a hurried entry without knocking, and I knew instinctively that he had something to say that was both important and urgent.

  ‘What is it, Colin?’

  ‘Two minutes ago I received a call from a traffic unit in Saint James’s Street off Pall Mall, sir. They’re in the process of arresting Julian Reed for driving under the influence.’

  ‘Interesting.’ It was just after two o’clock in the afternoon. ‘I thought it was only ladies-who-lunch who got caught. And they usually say, “But I’ve only had one glass of white wine, Officer.”’

  ‘It happens, sir. But I dare say Mr Reed had a few lunchtime bevvies at the Dizzy Club,’ said Wilberforce. ‘One of the PCs did a PNC check and found that we were interested.’

  ‘Are they still at the roadside?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Get back to them and ask them to do a fingerprint check on that magic machine they carry with them these days.’

  ‘I did that already, sir.’ Wilberforce gave a smile of satisfaction. ‘They’re a match for one of the prints found at the scene of Sharon Gregory’s murder at the Dickin Hotel.’

  Give or take a few hours, it was now exactly a week since Sharon Gregory had been murdered. All we had found so far were an unidentified vaginal fluid, a few fingerprints and a few hairs on a pillow, one of which was a DNA match to whoever was the father of her unborn child. And in all probability it was he who was her killer. Maybe.

  But now, it seemed, we’d had that stroke of luck that so often results in the apprehension of someone whom CID officers have spent hours trying to identify. And, as not infrequently happens, it was a uniformed constable, albeit in this case a specialist, who was almost accidentally responsible. This sort of extrinsic contribution to solving a murder, although not exactly commonplace, occurs more often than is realized.

  When I did a senior investigators’ course at the Detective Training School, I remember being told of at least two examples of it happening in the past. In 1961 a man named Edwin Bush murdered a woman, Elsie Batten, in an antique shop in Cecil Court off Charing Cross Road, and an Identikit likeness was prepared from the descriptions of witnesses. Four days later a young uniformed PC was patrolling the Soho area of London and arrested the murderer whom he’d identified from that depiction.

  And twenty-two years later, a drain-clearance operative had found human remains in the blocked drain of a house in North London, resulting in the arrest of Dennis Nilsen, a multiple murderer.

  Now it was my turn. Perhaps.

  ‘Where are they taking him, Colin?’

  ‘Charing Cross nick, sir.’

  ‘Ask them to take Reed’s car there, too. I presume it was his Mercedes that he was driving?’

  ‘It was, sir, and they’re taking it in anyway.’

  ‘Tell them that they’re not to search it. We’ll do that when we arrive. And just to be on the safe side, ask Linda Mitchell to get a team down there.’

  ‘Right, sir.’

  ‘And advise the nick that we’ll be there as soon as possible.’

  ‘I’ll get a car, sir,’ said Dave. ‘Looks as though we might’ve cracked it.’

  ‘Maybe, Dave,’ I said cautiously. All too often in the past I’d believed myself to be on the point of solving a murder, only to find that I was wrong. ‘There’s one problem. The Simpsons, they of the swingers’ club in Dorking, were certain that Julian Reed was there with his wife at the time of Sharon’s murder.’

  ‘People have been known to make mistakes, guv.’

  ‘Yes, and I’m not usually one of them.’

  ‘No, sir,’ said Dave. ‘By the way, guv, I checked with Peter Gregory and he didn’t remove a laptop from the West Drayton house.’

  SIXTEEN

  By some method I didn’t wish to know about, Dave had laid hands on an unmarked police car that was fitted with a siren, and flashing blue lights positioned behind the radiator grille. He made good use of this equipment and we covered the five or so miles from Earls Court to Charing Cross police station in just over as many hair-raising minutes. It was one of the few occasions on which I would rather have been driven by a traffic unit officer.

  I identified myself to the custody sergeant and enquired about Julian Reed.

  ‘He’s providing a second breath test at the moment, sir,’ said the sergeant. ‘I’ve no doubt it’ll be positive. According to the arresting officers, he was slightly more than twice over the legal limit when they breathalysed him at the roadside.’

  ‘Julian Reed is a strong suspect for a murder that I’m investigating, Skip,’ I said, ‘and I should like him to be kept in custody until he’s sober enough to be interviewed.’

  ‘I presume there’s sufficient evidence to support the allegation, sir.’ The custody sergeant was only doing his job; in normal circumstances the responsibility for deciding whether a prisoner should be admitted to bail rested with him. Nevertheless, I could overrule him if I thought that detention was warranted.

  ‘There is,’ I said, ‘substantial fingerprint and forensi
c evidence.’ I thought it better not to mention that Reed had furnished an alibi which, on the face of it, appeared to place him at a swingers’ party in Dorking at the time of Sharon Gregory’s murder. But I still had reservations about that.

  ‘Right, sir. In any case, he’ll have to be detained until he’s sober enough to be released.’ The sergeant paused as a traffic officer entered the custody suite. ‘Got a result?’ he asked him.

  ‘The lowest reading was eighty micrograms, Skip. Just over twice the limit.’

  ‘That settles it, sir,’ said the custody sergeant, turning back to me. ‘We’ll have to keep him in custody for at least eight hours before he can safely be released.’

  All of which was a confounded nuisance. If I were to interrogate a man with that amount of alcohol in his system, anything he said would undoubtedly be challenged by his solicitor, to say nothing of defence counsel. If we ever got to court on a murder charge, that is. Given that I accepted the custody sergeant’s prediction, which I was bound to do, it would be at least eleven o’clock this evening before we could speak to him. And as the Police and Criminal Evidence Act stipulated that a prisoner must be afforded rest, usually at night, we would be unable to talk to him before tomorrow.

  ‘We’ll be back in the morning, Skip,’ I said. ‘In the meantime, I’d like to have a look at his car.’

  ‘No problem, sir. It’s in the yard. I’ll get a PC to show you the way. Incidentally, a couple of forensic examiners are out there already. They said they were meeting you here.’

  Linda Mitchell and an assistant were waiting for us as Dave and I walked out to the station yard.

  For a moment or two, Dave stood in open-mouthed admiration of Julian Reed’s silver-grey C-Class Mercedes.

  ‘That is some car, guv,’ said Dave. ‘It must’ve set him back at least thirty-five grand, possibly more. And presumably Mrs Reed paid for it.’

  ‘She didn’t,’ I said. ‘According to Charlie Flynn’s sources, she’s not worth a bean.’

  ‘All right for me to take a look inside, Mr Brock?’ asked Linda, donning a pair of latex gloves.