by Mike Craven
Fluke mentally recapped while Jiao-long searched the Internet. He believed there were at least three crime scenes, and he had two of them: the murder site and the deposition site. The third crime scene would be the car the body had been transported in.
He also still had some numbers stubbornly resisting identification and a mobile phone that the techs were trying to recover data from.
While he waited for Jiao-long, Fluke got out the card Skelton had produced for everyone and had another look at the numbers. Sometimes sneaking up on a puzzle was the best way of solving it. He stared at them but the answer remained as elusive as before. He’d noticed his team picking up their cards and staring at it when they had downtime, discussing it with their colleagues when they were having a brew. Just like Fluke was. A bit of paper that you had to take out of a file or unfold wouldn’t get the same attention. Fluke reminded himself to thank Skelton. It was something he’d probably replicate in future investigations.
He turned his thoughts to Samantha. It was clear she was obsessed with secrecy. The only sensible answer was that she was hiding from someone. Someone serious. She was well resourced, that was obvious. Expensive surgery, nice clothes. Refined taste with the coffee. But he had nothing else to go on. Rogers was right, she seemed ready to leave at a moment’s notice. She’d have left if the crisps were broken when she returned. She’d have regretted leaving her coffee grinder but would have left anyway. There was nothing else in the flat of note except some weird gadget.
Was it the killer she’d been hiding from? Fluke wasn’t sure. Common sense said ‘yes’. It had taken a professional to find her. If all the cosmetic surgery was relevant, someone was looking for her long before the Diamonds entered her life. So who killed her, the Diamonds or someone else? That was the key question and one that wouldn’t be answered until the DNA results from that morning’s raids were in.
Best-case scenario was that the killer was one of the Diamonds or someone connected to them. That a Diamond had sex with her was beyond doubt. A rape charge was more than enough motivation for some men to arrange a murder.
Worst-case scenario was that the Diamond’s DNA hit was unconnected to the murder. Fluke might struggle and secure a rape conviction but that would be scant consolation if Samantha’s killer remained undetected.
Fluke tried to organise his thoughts into some sort of logical SOE, sequence of events. He dismissed the order in which things had been discovered – it had little relevance to each piece of the puzzle’s importance, and was misleading. There were four to reorganise: first there was Samantha getting surgery, then there was the rape. The rape was followed by the murder and finally, there was the body deposition. Eventually, everything else would fit into that timeline somewhere. Something must have preceded the surgery, something that may have started years before.
Now he’d seen her flat and the extraordinary lengths she’d gone to protect herself, something was nagging at him, a slow insidious thought and one that he couldn’t share. If he did, he’d leave himself wide open to a professional standards investigation and an article on the front page of the News and Star.
If she was that scared why did she report the rape at all? Why risk the exposure?
Fluke had attended all the relevant training and took rape investigations very seriously. They were horrendous crimes, a personal violation that most women never fully recovered from. But report it she did. Fluke was prepared to believe that the rape had been so unacceptable to her, so abhorrent, that she’d put her personal safety at risk to see justice done, but he wasn’t closing his mind to the possibility that there were other factors at play here, factors that he didn’t yet know about. He wouldn’t share it with anyone, not even Towler. He wasn’t even comfortable thinking about it himself.
Jiao-long interrupted his train of thought with a satisfied exclamation. Fluke leaned over his shoulder to see what he’d found. There was a photo of a device on his phone. Newer and a slightly different-coloured control unit, but essentially the same.
‘What the hell is that?’
‘A bed-wetting alarm, boss.’
Fluke didn’t know what he’d been expecting but it certainly wasn’t that. ‘Does that mean what I think it means?’ he said, incredulously. If he’d had ten years, he’d never had guessed.
‘Yep, here, read the description on the manufacturer’s site,’ he said, handing his iPhone over.
There was a photo of a smiling child but the corresponding text was too small for him. He handed it back, ‘Just read it out, Hawkeye.’
Jiao-long grinned, looked as though he was going to comment on Fluke’s age but clearly decided it wasn’t the time. ‘Basically, that flat bit here,’ he said, pointing at the part Fluke had thought resembled a heat pad, ‘that goes under the sheets, and you lie on it. If you start to have a piss, it sends a signal to the control unit which triggers the alarm here.’ He pointed at the squarish box. ‘It’s supposed to wake you after the first few drips.’
They walked over to the van and retrieved it from the evidence bag. They put it together and worked out the mechanics of it all. Fluke was satisfied Jiao-long was right.
‘So it’s exactly what it sounds like then. Why would she have one? Wouldn’t this type of thing be for kids? Who pisses the bed at her age? I tell you, Longy, every bit of evidence we get in this case just makes it harder to see what’s happening.’
Fluke mentally reviewed the post-mortem. There had been no medical problem in the preliminary findings that he could recollect. Of course, some of the tests weren’t back, so he’d need to ring Sowerby and check to be sure. As someone who suffered from nightmares himself, he believed that Samantha had demons in her head, demons that came out at night, causing serious psychological problems.
Towler had walked up and caught the last part. ‘What’s next, boss?’
Fluke thought about actions that needed be undertaken. There weren’t any. The chaos of the raid then the rush to the flat. Armed police, excitement and blood. It was too late to re-interview Diamond. Not legally anyway. Gone were the days when you got confessions just because the suspect wanted to sleep. Fluke also wanted to rest before he went back in with him. He’d been caught off-guard last time – it wouldn’t happen again.
‘Wait for the DNA results to come through, I suppose,’ he said.
‘What you gonna do, boss? You want me to drive you somewhere?’
He looked at his watch. It was still the middle of the afternoon, and even though they’d been up for hours, it was too early to go home. He had a couple of calls to make. ‘No point going back to HQ just yet, Matt. We’ll head back to Durranhill.’
The phone rang half a dozen times before a gruff impatient voice answered. ‘Sowerby.’
‘Henry, it’s Avison Fluke. You got two minutes?’ Fluke was in a temporary office at Durranhill.
There was a noise in the background. Metal on metal. Sowerby was probably in a mortuary somewhere, prepping for another post-mortem.
‘As long as you don’t mind being on speakerphone, Avison. I’ve already scrubbed up. I have Lucy with me.’
Fluke’s second call was going to be to Lucy to let her know what a help she’d been with her coffee theory, so he quickly brought her up to date and thanked her. She sounded pleased but Fluke could tell she’d rather it had been entomological evidence that had led to the breakthrough.
‘Anyway,’ he continued, ‘did you find anything in the PM, Henry, that would have made her incontinent?’
‘Incontinent? Don’t think so, why?’
‘I’ve got evidence she was a bed-wetter.’ Fluke explained what they’d found.
‘You mean adult nocturnal enuresis, then,’ he said, after a short pause.
‘Do I?’
‘Just the doctor in me coming out, Avison, don’t worry. I’ll check my notes but there was nothing I can remember. I’ll have the report finished by end of play tomorrow, hopefully. It’s being typed up now. I just need to proof it.’
/> Sowerby’s voice faded in the distance. Fluke was used to it; Sowerby frequently forgot he was talking on the speakerphone and drifted off, assuming everyone could still hear him.
‘He’s gone to find his notes, Inspector,’ Lucy explained.
‘Thanks, Lucy. And thanks again for that coffee link. We wouldn’t have found her without it.’
‘How’s the investigation going otherwise?’
‘Honestly? Nowhere. Well, not nowhere, but we don’t seem to be able to get a bead on this bloke. It’s taken me nearly four days just to find out where the victim lives. I’m not sure I even have her real name yet. I’ve found a motive to kill her, I’m just not sure it’s the right motive.’
‘Oh, dear. Surely finding the murder scene is going to help?’
‘Hopefully, but so far every time I find something, all I end up with is more questions.’
They were interrupted by the sound of shuffling papers as Sowerby came back in range of the speakerphone.
‘No, nothing here, Avison. There was very little wrong with her when I got inside. Liver had a little scarring. If she drank, it was minimal. No evidence of drug use. Bladder normal. Bloods showed nothing of note. I can re-check them for levels of the ADH hormone if you’d like?’
‘In English, doc.’
‘The antidiuretic hormone. It’s a signalling hormone that tells the kidneys to produce less urine at night. Don’t ask me how it works – this is something I’m dredging from med school. I’ve certainly never come across it in this field before. You want me to run the tests?’
Fluke thought about it. The shotgun approach to forensic evidence gathering had its uses but he preferred the targeted approach wherever possible – asking for forensic evidence when he knew what the answers were going to be. Never ask a question you don’t already know the answer to, his first DSI had told him.
What would a hormone deficiency prove one way or the other? That she wet the bed. So what? That she had a bed-wetting alarm to manage her problem. So what? And if it wasn’t a medical problem, then it was the type of evidence that only made sense after the fact. It wouldn’t move the investigation forward. The samples would be there if he needed tests later.
‘No thanks, Henry. I was just curious. I can’t see how it’s relevant. I’m not wasting taxpayer’s money finding out why a woman wet the bed.’
Fluke had just put down the phone when Jo Skelton stuck her head round the door. ‘Early DNAs are back, boss.’
As the results were computerised, they came in by email to the investigation address that linked directly to HOLMES. Fluke could see that there were at least ten emails from the lab. As each one linked to a different suspect, they were coming in one at a time. The top one was red, and the time next to it indicated that it had only just come in. All the rest were black, telling him that they’d been read.
‘Anything?’ he asked.
‘All negative so far, boss. Everyone we locked up this morning has been cleared, including Wayne Diamond – his was the third result in. The ones we’re waiting for are the samples taken from clothes, combs and toothbrushes. They take longer as we have to send off the whole thing. They have to find the DNA before they can profile it.’
Fluke gave her a look. She laughed.
‘Sorry, boss, teaching you to suck eggs there. But someone round here might not know,’ she said. ‘Anyone here not know that?’ she asked the team crowded round the computer.
The chorus of boos and other sarcastic remarks told Fluke that Jo had been the only one who’d found it interesting.
‘Scraping the underpants of the Diamonds. Think I prefer my job today,’ Towler said, to general agreement.
Jo laughed again and pressed F9, the refresh button. Another red email appeared. As she opened it, Fluke leaned forward, as if being closer to the screen meant he’d get the result quicker.
He read it to himself as it flashed on the screen. Although there were several attachments with photos of evidence labels, scientific graphs and other indecipherable bullshit, Fluke was only interested in the second line. The name the sample was taken from and the result: a cousin who was in HMP Durham but had been out at the time of the rape. An interfamilial match but negative. Fluke leaned back, disappointed.
‘How many are interfamilial?’ he asked.
‘Everyone bar one, boss. They’re all related to the sample we have, apart from Uncle Jonna or whatever it is he calls himself. My guess is he’s one of those family friends who’s been called uncle from such an early age, it becomes fact. I bet if you asked any of them they wouldn’t know he wasn’t a blood relative.’
Fluke knew it was likely. He also knew it wasn’t a class or criminal thing. Towler’s daughter, Abi, called him Uncle Avison. With extended and complicated families like the Diamonds, just identifying who was who was going to provide valuable intel for years to come.
Another email came in. Another negative.
‘This could take ages,’ Fluke said. He decided he’d go back to his temporary office and ring Chambers to let him know where he was, in case Fluke was needed at HQ. He rang and was put through to Chambers’s PA. After they exchanged some banal pleasantries about Fluke’s health, she asked him to wait while Chambers finished a call. As Fluke was listening to the hold music, he got a text. It was from Towler.
Got him!
Fluke put down the phone.
‘Old man Diamond,’ Towler said, when Fluke got to the room the team had colonised.
Fluke was genuinely surprised. Kenneth Diamond was the only one of the family who seemed to be an upstanding citizen. He was a businessman. He had the big house in Stanwix. When compared to the rapist profile in Fluke’s head, Kenneth was twenty years older than Fluke had imagined. ‘Wasn’t he was away at the time of the rape?’
‘Dunno, boss,’ Skelton said. ‘He’s been away for a short while now, no one seems to know where he is. He’s supposed to have distanced himself from the family though. Disowned the lot of them. He did it publicly, if I remember. We only checked his house to rule him out and to see if anyone else of interest had been there.’
‘Are we sure the sample’s definitely from him?’
‘Sure as we can be, I suppose. Until we actually take a sample from his mouth, we can never be one hundred per cent.’
‘They probably wear each other’s undercrackers in that family,’ Towler said, unhelpfully.
‘Good enough,’ Fluke said, eventually. ‘Until we know anything otherwise, our number one priority has to be finding him. When we have him, we’ll swab him so we know for certain. Good work today, everyone.’
Chapter 25
By the time Fluke had organised teams to search for Kenneth Diamond locally and sent out a nationwide alert on him to all territorial police forces, he was exhausted. Luckily Skelton had already warned off the Border Agency. He left Towler to organise searches into Diamond’s personal and business life.
As Fluke left the building, he smiled to himself. Towler had done exactly what he’d have done, he’d shouted for Jiao-long. It looked like his plan to send him home for some sleep wasn’t going to be a reality for a while yet. With the investigation in full flow and a manhunt being organised, Fluke felt he should really stay but he reminded himself that the nosebleed earlier had most likely been caused by overworking. It was time to go home and get some rest. His car was still at HQ so he got a lift home with uniform, and arranged for someone to pick him up first thing.
It was still light enough to sit outside for a while and he opened a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale, poured it into a pint glass and sat on the porch of his log cabin, staring out across the lake. Long shadows were being cast on the fell on the other side of the lake. Fluke stared across and marvelled at the heat and pressure that must have forced the enormous fell up from the earth’s crust, only for great rivers of moving ice to chip away at it, eventually forging a way through. Ullswater, the permanent reminder to the glacier that cut the mountain in half.
He li
t a cigar and opened up the file he’d brought with him. Years before, Fluke had discovered his brain worked best looking at things in isolation, in small batches. That way, when he came to look at the thing as a whole, he knew he had an intellectual grip on everything. So instead of taking everything home, he’d only take the things he either hadn’t read or wasn’t sure he fully understood yet.
That evening, he’d taken the evidence log from Farrar’s flat. He also took out the card with the numbers and clipped it to the top of the file. The list was short and there was nothing that stood out. The SOCO officer had obviously started in the bathroom.
Toothbrush, electric, still charged.
Toothpaste, half-empty.
Floss.
Assorted toiletries and make-up, used.
Hand mirror.
Coins, from window ledge.
Paracetamol, bottle, 15 tablets remaining.
Toilet paper, two rolls.
Bed wetting alarm and attachments.
The list continued, going from room to room. Her clothes were listed and Fluke’s first suspicions were right. They were all brands he knew to be expensive. SOCO had attempted to separate out her personal items, from items that were part of the furnished flat. Fluke knew that efforts were underway to get hold of the landlord in London for an inventory, up to then without success. They would need to know how long she’d lived there, as William had been vague. Fluke also wanted to know how she was living there without any bills being paid. He suspected she’d paid the landlord a large amount of cash to keep it in his name, but Fluke needed confirmation.
Despite the cold, Fluke felt his eyes closing so he shut the file. He wasn’t in the right frame of mind and would do more harm than good if he persevered. He considered ringing one of his sisters to try and get back some normality but decided against it. He usually enjoyed hearing about his nephews’ and nieces’ latest adventures but he wasn’t in the right frame of mind. He relit his cigar and finished it, drained his beer and went to bed.