A Narrow Margin of Error

by Faith Martin

  So when she’d picked up a stalker, and he’d found himself thinking of a possible way for them to flush him out, he was not sure if it was his brain or another part of his anatomy that had come up with a solution.

  Hence his reluctance to discuss it with her.

  But when he looked up to find her regarding him steadily he took a deep breath and decided to go for it.

  ‘You and I could always go public with a relationship.’

  Hillary Greene blinked. She almost said ‘What relationship?’ before common sense took over. ‘Oh. You mean pretend to be going out with each other and see if it presses his jealousy buttons?’

  Steven Crayle nodded. ‘That’s got to be his default setting, isn’t it? Don’t most stalkers have a problem with their ego? And it’s clear from his texts that you and he are already an item – at least in his sick mind you are. So if he does work at the station, and he starts seeing us going out and about together, it might make him lose his cool enough to do something reckless.’

  Hillary nodded slowly. ‘It might just work – and the gossip mill in this place will certainly help feed the fire and keep the pressure on. The way the desk sergeants alone like to speculate about everyone’s private life would put a bunch of old women to shame.’

  Crayle laughed. ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘Then again, if we were too convincing, it could just piss him off to such an extent that he just gives up on me and goes on to make some other poor woman’s life a misery,’ Hillary pointed out. ‘Which isn’t exactly the result we’re after.’

  ‘No. I want to catch the little pervert as much as you do. Well – think about it and let me know if you’d like to go ahead with it. In the meantime, I’ve got another murder case for you.’

  And so saying, he reached into the top of his in-tray, and pulled out a thick beige folder. ‘This is just the preliminary dossier.’

  Hillary gave a wry smile. ‘I know. Let me guess – there are boxes and boxes of more stuff waiting for me in the stationery cupboard.’

  The stationery cupboard was what she called her office – since that was what it had been before becoming her office.

  Steven Crayle’s smile utterly lacked sympathy. ‘They wouldn’t all fit in there. Most of them are in the main office,’ he admitted, without missing a beat.

  It was the main difference between taking on a fresh new case, and taking over a cold one, Hillary mused an hour later, as she contemplated the piled-high documents concerning the killing of Rowan Thompson. When you’re presented with a person whose dead body has only just been discovered, all the information to be gathered is stretched out ahead of you, and in the pursuance and gathering of it, if you were lucky, you would find the killer.

  But when you are handed a cold case, all of it has already been done for you. The autopsy has been performed and the results are in; the reams and reams of forensic information are neatly catalogued, the witnesses have all been seen and interviewed, in some cases many times over, and the deceased family and friends have all been contacted and questioned.

  And through the blizzard of paperwork, and many years later, you are supposed to go over someone else’s case, and follow in the footsteps of some other Chief Investigative Officer who has already tried and failed to solve the crime.

  Hillary sighed and poured herself another cup of coffee and reread the initial reports, trying to get her own take on what she was being told, and gazing at the scene-of-crime photographs whilst trying to imagine herself actually there.

  The facts were simple enough.

  Rowan Thompson had been just twenty years old when he was killed on December 21 in 2001. The photographs of him – both alive and dead – showed him to have been five feet nine-to-ten inches tall, with spiky fair hair and big brown eyes. A good-looking kid, Hillary acknowledged, he was originally from Birmingham, having been raised in a typical middle-class home in Solihull. He’d been bright too, which is why he’d won a place at one of Oxford’s many colleges, where he’d been reading PPE – Philosophy, Politics and Economics. According to his parents, he’d wanted to be either a banker or a stockbroker – and maybe go into politics later in life.

  Hillary gave a wry snort and sipped her coffee. With the way the economy was nowadays, if he had lived to make it in the banking world, he’d have probably been widely loathed and vilified by one and all by now. But he’d been spared any of that.

  Instead, someone had taken a large pair of sharp scissors and had buried them deep in his stomach.

  He had been rooming, along with several other students, in a Victorian property not far from Keble College, where the old house, like many others of its ilk, had long since been converted into bedsits. He was due to go home to Solihull the next day, for the start of the Christmas celebrations with his family.

  Instead, his parents had spent the seasonal holidays arranging his funeral.

  Hillary picked up a picture of the murder victim taken when he was still alive. It was a group shot, taken in his bedroom at the murder site and the four other people in the frame comprised the other students who shared the house.

  She began to make her own notes – part of the process of claiming the case as her own.

  Marcie Franks had been twenty-four years old at the time of the killing, and was thus a post graduate student, who was studying for a D.Phil. in biochemistry. In the photograph she was standing to Rowan’s right, and stood just fractionally taller than him. She had long brown hair and brown eyes, and regarded the camera with a steady, slightly bored look on her face. She and Rowan were not touching, she noticed, but her arm was casually slung around the waist of the man beside her.

  Dwayne Cox was by far the best-looking of the bunch, and at six feet in height one of the tallest. With black hair and blue eyes he must have presented serious competition for Rowan, and she wondered idly if the murder victim had been jealous of him. From the quick run-down she’d given the notes so far, Rowan had had a voracious sexual appetite. And although he was good-looking himself in a more quirky, almost gamine kind of way, Cox was much more classically handsome. At twenty-one, he was a year older than Rowan, and was in his final year of reading experimental psychology.

  Darla de Lancie matched her cute name, and was tiny – perhaps five feet – with red hair, freckles and big green eyes. She had a heart-shaped face and in the photograph had her arms flung around Rowan Thompson’s neck, and was giving the camera a wide, infectious smile. She was also, according to the CIO’s notes, the victim’s main girlfriend. The CIO at the time had been Detective Inspector John Gorman, and he’d made it clear that Darla de Lancie knew full well that she did not have exclusive rights on the promiscuous Rowan, and had to be well up on the list of suspects. She was also a year older than Rowan, and was in the process of gaining a BA in English literature.

  The odd man out in the photograph was easily Barry Hargreaves. A mature student, at the time of the killing he’d been forty-one years old. Six foot two and balding, he looked like the construction worker he’d been until having what DI Gorman clearly thought was a somewhat typical mid-life crisis. Hargreaves, married for twenty years with teenage twin daughters, had apparently woken up one morning and decided that he should put his brains to better use, and had taken A-levels in mathematics and physics at night school. He’d left regular school at sixteen in spite of a raft of excellent O-Levels in order to earn money, and had, until then, never seemed to regret it. He’d gained a place at one of the newer colleges through the auspices of some government scheme or other, and was in the first year of a three-year course in Mathematics.

  Idly, Hillary wondered if he’d ever finished the course, and wondered what he was doing now. But then, no doubt, within the next few days she’d be finding out, for all four of them were suspects in Thompson’s murder.

  Along with the house’s owner, sixty-four-year-old Wanda Landau, who lived in the basement flat, it seemed unlikely that anyone else had access to Rowan’s room.

  Wanda
Landau had discovered him in his room at about ten o’clock in the morning. He’d been lying on the floor, roughly halfway between his bed and the sofa, with the scissors which had killed him lying beside him. From the crime scene photos, it was obvious that the room had been used as some sort of workshop, for swathes of coloured fabrics draped a lot of the unfashionable, brown wood furniture, and a sewing machine was set up on his table.

  Gorman quickly established that Darla often made her own clothes, and tended to use Rowan’s room to do so, because it was bigger than her own, and gave her more space.

  She’d admitted that the scissors were hers, and were kept sharp in order to cleanly cut the silks and satins that she preferred.

  Forensics had discovered that whoever had killed him had washed the scissors at the small washbasin beside the bed – and probably their hands too – before tossing the scissors down beside the body and leaving.

  Gorman had ascertained that it was almost certain, due to the amount of blood at the scene, and the probability of arterial spraying, that the killer must have had a considerable amount of blood all over him – or her. But no witnesses came forward who could remember seeing anyone in the area at the time, walking down the street with blood on their clothing. Of course, it was the middle of winter so the killer could have taken off their coat, stabbed Rowan, and then donned probably a long coat to cover their bloodstained clothes.

  Or, far more likely, it was someone in the house. Although Rowan’s bedroom door had not been locked – and indeed, according to Gorman, the rest of the students were also in the habit of leaving their individual room doors unlocked – Mrs Landau always kept the main front and back doors locked, as well the door to her own flat.

  So it seemed unlikely that a stranger would have been able to just wander in and gain entry that way, and Wanda Landau was adamant that she’d never let anyone in that morning. Rowan had been seen by all the others earlier on, and the ME had put the time of death at between 8.45 and 9.00 in the morning.

  Of course, it was always possible that Rowan had answered the front door and let the killer in himself, but again the landlady’s evidence seemed to rule this out. She’d heard no one enter the hall whilst she’d been in her flat, and no one had rung the main doorbell. But she’d admitted that Rowan could be ‘a sneaky little so-and-so’ especially when it came to smuggling in girlfriends.

  Not that she barred her ‘boys and girls’ from having friends in: it was more likely that he wanted to make sure Darla De Lancie was kept in the dark about what he was up to.

  So it was possible that Rowan had let a woman in and had taken her up to his room for some hanky-panky, and got far more than he’d bargained for. Gorman seemed to think that it was also possible that, given the victim’s habit of bedding anything agreeable, an aggrieved boyfriend or a cuckolded husband might also be responsible. Although why Rowan would let in a male rival, of course, couldn’t be ascertained from the facts available.

  According to Gorman’s notes, Thompson was something of a sexual athlete, not averse to experimentation and had a voracious appetite for sexual kicks with very little sense of discernment.

  From time to time, Hillary caught a whiff of distinct disapproval in Gorman’s rather dry, rather pedantic notes, but since the man was now dead, and thus couldn’t be consulted, she couldn’t be sure how much Gorman’s own prudish nature had coloured his judgement of the victim.

  But from the little she’d read so far, Gorman was nothing if not thorough.

  Her coffee finished, Hillary turned to the first of the forensic reports.

  The room, as was to be expected, was awash with fingerprints, nearly all of them belonging to the victim, his girlfriend, and the other housemates. Some were traced to an electrician who’d been called in to see to a fault the previous week, others that were much older were never tracked down. But given the history of the house as a student residence, there was nothing much unexpected in that.

  Likewise, the victim’s clothes had many fibre traces on them, some inevitably from the carpet, some from clothes that were a match to Darla de Lancie’s, but again, given their close relationship, that was hardly earth-shattering. And since there was no way of knowing when the traces had been left on the victim, there was no way to put Darla actually at the scene at the time of the killing.

  The only blood found on the victim belonged to the victim. Sometimes, with a stabbing, the killer cut himself, and thus left valuable DNA behind. But in this case, the murder weapon hadn’t been an unwieldy knife, but a neat pair of scissors, complete with rounded plastic handles, making it almost impossible for the killer to wound himself in the stabbing process.

  The medical report was the usual mixture of hard-to-understand medical pronouncements, but the summary at the end made it clear: there was only one blow – but it had been delivered deep and low, probably in an up-and-under underarm movement, and with a fair amount of force. A woman could certainly have done it, since the blades penetrated the lower part of the abdomen, where it was mainly soft tissue, where you wouldn’t encounter bone or any other obstacle that would have required brute force to penetrate.

  The victim had died of blood loss and shock, so again, no surprises there, but one thing did stand out.

  Tox screens showed that Rowan Thompson had minute traces of some sort of drug in his system that the labs hadn’t been able to identify. Gorman, of course, had been straight on to Thompson’s GP, but the murder victim had not been prescribed drugs of any kind for a medical condition. In fact, Rowan seemed to be in the peak of health, and the only time he’d consulted his GP had been for regular screenings for various STDs. He’d been clear of those too, so he had obviously been a careful boy.

  That left a whole raft of illegal drugs to consider.

  Hillary sighed cynically. It was Oxford, he was a student, and a young man who probably thought of himself as immortal and, moreover, was the kind who liked to experiment. Where the hell to start? On the party scene nowadays there were always new drugs popping up overnight, some even technically legal. The law seemed to be constantly playing catch-up when it came to outlawing designer drugs.

  No doubt Rowan had taken something either at a rave, or a private party, or just between friends – probably sometime within forty-eight hours of his death.

  But since the ME made it clear that the unknown drug could in no way have contributed to the cause of death, Gorman hadn’t wasted too much time pursuing it.

  Hillary could understand why, but she didn’t much like it. She trawled through the boxes of stuff to find Gorman’s personal notes, and was glad to see that he’d copied the information and passed it over to the narcotics squad, but she could find no follow-up on it from them.

  She made a mental note to get either Vivienne or Sam Pickles, the other young wannabe on her team, to see if they could find any report on it from the drugs squad. It would probably come to nothing but you never knew.

  If Rowan Thompson was a regular drug user, he must have had a dealer. And drug dealers and murder went together like whales and pilot fish. Perhaps he’d refused to pay up, or had grassed on the dealer to someone, or, even worse, taken his business elsewhere.

  People had been killed for far less.

  Apart from that, science wasn’t able to help much. Although the public was used to seeing crime shows where forensic science wrapped up even the most baffling of cases in one hour flat, with some very fancy microscope work and a scrap of esoteric knowledge, real life was seldom that cut and dried.

  And although a lot of the CRT’s work consisted of reopening cases when new advances in technology made re-examining retained evidence practical, there were the odd cases, like this one, where simple, good old-fashioned detective work was needed.

  And it was this little niche that was Steven Crayle’s own. And now hers.

  ‘OK, Rowan,’ Hillary said to the photograph of the cheeky-faced youngster who’d been in his grave for nearly a dozen years now. ‘Let’s see if we
can’t find out who killed you.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  At the end of the day, Hillary wearily pushed the stack of folders aside, and stood up to stretch. She had taken a mountain of notes from the Thompson case, and had a list of to-do’s for her team tomorrow that would make Vivienne grumble for a week at least. She’d already informed them that they had been handed another murder inquiry, which had met with considerable enthusiasm from Sam Pickles, a vague excitement from Vivienne, and quiet satisfaction from Jimmy Jessop, the retired sergeant she’d begun to think of as her right-hand man.

  Tomorrow the hard work began in earnest. She’d already set all of them on the task of tracking down the current whereabouts of the various witnesses and asked for any updated background information on them to start being collated. Since there would be little help from the new advancement in forensics, this case, she could see, was going to rely very heavily on the fact that new eyes were taking a look at it, coupled with any fresh information witnesses might be able to offer.

  Which wasn’t as forlorn a hope as some might think. Often, the passage of time could be a good thing, in that people who might have been more reticent at the time of the murder now felt more at ease and less threatened by the passage of over a decade. People who might have kept silent from sheer fright or unease might now be persuaded to talk. They might not even be aware that they knew anything of significance, which was where Hillary’s overall view and experience came in. All she needed was to spot one little thread to unravel, one loose end that had never been tied in, and the case could suddenly come alive.

  One thing was for certain: if she could not get any new insights, or didn’t have luck on her side, the case was going to stay closed. And she was realistic enough to know that you couldn’t win them all. She’d struck gold with her very first case for CRT, but that didn’t mean her second case was bound to follow suit. If her close rate was only 20% on these hard-nut cases that Steven Crayle was determined to give her, then the brass would be happy with that.