A Case Gone Cold

by Paul Gitsham

* * *

  Nigel Fleetwood was a fit-looking man. According to the records Warren had in front of him, Fleetwood was forty-three years old, but could easily have passed for ten years younger, his hair still a uniform chestnut brown, the corners of his eyes absent of the crow’s feet that Warren had started seeing in his own mirror. He probably used Botox, decided Warren.

  ‘Thank you for your time, Mr Fleetwood.’

  The man shrugged. Warren had been deliberately vague when he’d contacted the care worker and invited him in for a voluntary interview. He wanted to see the man’s demeanour in a relaxed setting. Doubtless he would be curious about why he had been contacted. Would he also be nervous? If he was responsible for the Abbey View Terrace burglary – and perhaps more offences – then being asked to attend a police station for a voluntary interview would surely worry him. If he was in contact with Wallace, he must know that his partner had been arrested and charged. Had Wallace assured him that he wasn’t a grass? How much confidence did he have in him to keep his word? Moreover, despite extensive searches, no records of any previous interactions between Fleetwood and the police had been found. In comparison to Aaron Wallace, the man was a rank amateur.

  Even though he hadn’t been arrested or formally cautioned, Fleetwood was still entitled to legal representation if he desired. Would he insist on a solicitor, or would he decline the offer? And what would that mean? If he demanded a lawyer, was that a sign of guilt, or was he merely being prudent? If he waived his right to a solicitor, did that mean he felt he had nothing to hide, or was he just trying to brazen it out?

  Fleetwood declined a lawyer.

  ‘First of all, we’d like you to think back to the evening of the fifth of September.’

  Fleetwood shrugged again. Warren looked at him carefully; the man still appeared more curious than nervous.

  ‘If it helps, it was a Thursday.’

  ‘Nothing springs to mind. Can I ask what this is about?’

  Fleetwood’s expression was open, curious.

  ‘At the moment we are just working out if you can help us with an ongoing inquiry.’

  Again, Fleetwood shrugged. Was he naturally cool under pressure, or did he truly have no idea why they were interested in his whereabouts. Was the repeated shrugging his way of hiding his nervousness?

  Sutton leaned forward. ‘Are you familiar with Abbey View Terrace?’

  The bottom half of Fleetwood’s face frowned but his forehead remained suspiciously crease free. Definitely Botox, decided Warren.

  ‘Down by the ruins, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s correct. Were you in the vicinity of that area on the evening of Thursday the fifth of September?’

  Now Fleetwood’s eyes narrowed. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘As I said before, we’re just looking to see if you can help us with our inquiries.’

  ‘Am I under arrest?’

  Warren nodded towards the tape. ‘As I explained before we started, you are here voluntarily, helping us with our investigation. You can leave at any time and you are under no obligation to answer our questions. You can, of course, request legal representation if you wish.’

  Fleetwood stared at Warren for a long moment, before sighing.

  ‘No, I wasn’t at Abbey View Terrace on the evening of the fifth of September.’

  ‘Do you own a red Ford Focus, Mr Fleetwood?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is this your car, photographed by a traffic camera, at the junction between Abbey View Terrace and Park Street, on the night in question?’

  Fleetwood gave a little start, before folding his arms.

  Warren gave him a few seconds, before deciding to prod a little harder.

  ‘According to the DVLA, you are the registered keeper. Was it you driving?’

  ‘That’s a busy road, I could have been travelling down it for a million reasons.’

  ‘Suggest one.’

  ‘I dunno, I could have been going to Tesco.’

  ‘We can check the store’s CCTV.’

  ‘Maybe I was filling the car up.’

  ‘We’ll check the cameras on the garage forecourts.’

  Fleetwood chewed his lip.

  Warren glanced at Sutton; time to ratchet up the pressure.

  ‘Tell me, do you know an Aaron Wallace?’

  This time Fleetwood flinched. ‘What’s he got to do with this?’

  ‘Do you know Aaron Wallace?’

  ‘No comment.’

  Warren looked at Sutton again.

  Rank amateur.

  ‘I’d like to leave now.’ Fleetwood stood up.

  Warren also stood, carefully positioning himself between Fleetwood and the interview suite’s only exit.

  ‘Sit back down, Mr Fleetwood. I am arresting you on suspicion of burglary. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence’.

  Fleetwood sat back down.

  ‘I’d like a solicitor, please.’ The man’s voice cracked.

  * * *

  ‘Burglary is a recordable offence, so we’ve got his DNA.’

  ‘Good work. What are your thoughts?’

  DSI John Grayson leant back in his office chair and picked up one of the three golf balls that occupied a carved stand on the edge of his desk, next to a picture of his wife and children. He threaded it nimbly through his fingers as he spoke. It was a manoeuvre that Warren had witnessed countless times. Each of the three balls bore a scrawled signature. One of these days Warren would have to ask who had signed Grayson’s prized mementoes. He sincerely hoped it was Nick Faldo or Seve Ballesteros, since he’d struggle to fake recognition if Grayson named anyone else.

  Warren sighed. ‘I don’t know. I’m struggling to find a connection between Fleetwood and Wallace, and as Gary Hastings has pointed out, a man in his position is risking a hell of a lot if he gets done for burglary. I can’t imagine he would be allowed to work with vulnerable adults in future.’

  Warren took a deep swallow of his coffee. One of the nicer things about being invited into Grayson’s office – assuming he wasn’t in there for a bollocking – was the opportunity to sample the superintendent’s wonderful coffee. Unfortunately, although the hot caffeine boost was most welcome, Warren’s current complete inability to smell or taste anything meant it was wasted on him. Grayson, Warren noticed, was alone amongst the occupants of CID in not being red-nosed and puffy-eyed; lots of clean, fresh air on the golf course, he reflected.

  ‘Well, at least you’ve got the DNA, that’ll either rule him out or in. In the meantime, perhaps his solicitor will talk him into being a bit more cooperative.’

  * * *

  ‘I have Aaron Wallace’s probation officer on the line.’

  ‘Finally,’ muttered Warren before transferring the call from his unofficial PA, Janice.

  ‘Hello, DCI Jones, sorry it took me a while to return your call. I was on annual leave, and there was no one monitoring my calls. I believe you’re looking into one of my charges, Aaron Wallace? What’s he alleged to have done now?’

  Ten minutes later, Warren was back in the main office.

  ‘We’ve located Aaron Wallace’s brother Tyler and you aren’t going to believe where he lives. Gary, are you up for a day trip?’

  ‘Definitely.’

  ‘Tony, how are you holding up?’

  Sutton blew his nose violently. ‘Just peachy, boss.’

  ‘Well get some more Lemsip down your neck. Main briefing room, thirty minutes, I’ve a warrant to raise. This one could be tricky.’

  * * *

  Tyler Wallace was well over six-feet tall and powerfully built. Despite this, he looked like a scared child. Which, in a way, he was.

  ‘You can’t be serious?’ Senior care worker Diego Espanoza was acting as Tyler Wallace’s responsible adult until his solicitor arrived. It had been the work of seconds to confirm that Aaron Wallace called t
he care facility at least weekly to check on his brother.

  ‘You want to interview Tyler, under caution?’

  ‘Look, I appreciate that this is unusual, but we know that he was absent from here the night his brother burgled a house and we have strong evidence that Tyler was with him. We need to interview him to clear up some of the details from that evening.’

  ‘What’s the point? He’s not legally fit. Even if he was present at the scene, he’d never be convicted. You must know that.’

  ‘Look, I’m not interested in whether he was standing in somebody’s garden whilst his brother filled his pockets. I need to interview him about other aspects of our investigation.’

  ‘How could he possibly help with your investigation? He has an IQ of seventy-five. If he wants to wear proper shoes to go out, we have to tie his laces for him or we’d be waiting all day. What the hell is he supposed to have done?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I can’t go into details at this stage.’

  ‘Well, I’m not happy about this. I am legally responsible for his wellbeing and you are going to have to come up with a lot more than that to get me to give consent for you to interview him.’

  Espanoza crossed his arms and glared at Warren. The young man barely came up to Warren’s chest, and couldn’t be more than twenty-five years old, but he was clearly unimpressed by Warren’s authority. Warren had an arrest warrant for Tyler Wallace, but he had yet to serve it; Tyler wasn’t going anywhere and the moment he was arrested the custody clock started ticking.

  ‘Why don’t you tell us a bit about Tyler?’ suggested Hastings, attempting to break the impasse.

  Espanoza turned his scowl towards him, before finally letting out a puff of air.

  ‘OK. Then perhaps you’ll see what a load of nonsense this is.’ He waved his hand towards the window. Tyler Wallace was staring into space.

  ‘He was diagnosed with autism at about the age of six, when his teachers finally noticed his lack of progress. He should probably have gone to a special school, as they called them then, but places were limited and his parents weren’t – and I’m quoting his report exactly – “engaged with the education system”. To put it bluntly, he slipped through the cracks.’

  ‘So he went to a mainstream school?’ said Warren.

  ‘If you could call it that. Social services finally became aware of him in his early teens. He was a poor attender and ended up on the “at risk” register. His mum had a drugs problem and did a runner when he was about five years old. His old man brought him up alone for a few years, until he took up with another woman and had another kid.’

  ‘What did the father do?’

  ‘Sign on, mostly. To be fair to him, this new woman he was with had her own problems and she eventually drank herself into an early grave, leaving him with two boys to look after – one of them with serious learning difficulties and the other with behaviour problems.’

  ‘So going back to the night that we are interested in, we believe Tyler was with his brother that night. How does that work? Did Aaron come and pick him up and sign him out, then return him later that evening?’

  Espanoza looked puzzled.

  ‘No, of course not. We’re not a secure unit. Tyler is free to come and go as he pleases.’

  * * *

  ‘I can’t believe I missed it. I knew there was something bugging me about those photographs.’ Karen Hardwick’s eyes were shining with excitement, her running nose and painful sinuses temporarily forgotten.

  ‘Huh, missed what?’ Tony Sutton looked at her blearily over his steaming mug of Lemsip. Despite his protestations, Warren had decided not to take him to interview Tyler Wallace – Gary Hastings looked a lot sharper than the DI, who almost certainly needed to be home in bed.

  Hardwick slapped a piece of paper in front of him.

  Sutton stared for a few seconds at the scrawled family tree before shaking his head.

  ‘Sorry, Karen, my brain is complete mush, you’ll have to spell it out for me.’

  ‘Look at the snaps I took of the photos on the mantelpiece.’ She turned her mobile phone around so Sutton could see it. The first showed two men, arm in arm, bare-chested and grinning at the camera, a beach scene behind them.

  ‘Look at them, Aaron is white and blond-haired with blue eyes, but his brother, Tyler, is brown-skinned with black hair.’

  ‘So? He’s mixed race. We already know that they’re half-siblings, not full brothers.’

  ‘Which means they share the same dad, yeah?’

  ‘That’s what PC McGinty said.’

  ‘The same man that appears in all of these photos, except for the last couple?’

  Hardwick swiped through the images one at a time.

  ‘I imagine so. He looks pretty frail towards the end.’

  ‘Now look at the early photos more closely.’ She flicked back to a picture of a couple side by side in front of a Christmas tree. The man was clearly the same individual that was in the rest of the photos, the woman’s haircut and the model of TV and video recorder in the background suggested the photo had been taken no earlier than the late Eighties.

  Sutton squinted at the blond-haired child, who appeared no more than about two. ‘He certainly looks a lot like Aaron, he has that funny little birthmark on his cheek.’

  ‘OK. Mum, Dad and Aaron at Christmas. Now look at this one.’

  The next photo was significantly older. This time the man wore a loud, brown-and-orange patterned shirt with a generous collar. Standing next to him, a different woman held a young baby no more than a few months old. The child’s skin was noticeably darker than Aaron’s.

  ‘Dad, Tyler and Tyler’s mum.’

  ‘Look at the two mothers,’ prompted Hardwick.

  It took Sutton a few seconds to see it.

  ‘They’re both white, with blue eyes.’

  ‘Which means that if Tyler is mixed race, then he and Aaron can’t have the same father. Aaron and Tyler are stepbrothers, not half-brothers.’

  ‘Which means that the negative result from the sibling analysis on the DNA samples no longer rules out Tyler.’

  * * *

  Warren stepped into the corridor to take the call from Karen Hardwick. When he returned he had a new resolve. If Espanoza didn’t cooperate, he’d serve the warrant.

  ‘When did Tyler come into care?’

  ‘Not soon enough. The family avoided the conversation. Every time social services tried to discuss supporting him, his father got upset and kept on saying we couldn’t take him away. I suspect they were also worried that if he was taken into care, they’d lose his benefits, which they needed to keep a roof over their heads. Tyler did the best he could, as did his brother, but they couldn’t cope. How could they?’

  The social worker sighed. ‘The system let him down. Since he started coming here, he’s made huge progress. He’s a lot more independent and much less frustrated. Annoyingly, we’re doing this all backwards. If he’d got this support earlier, he could be living independently now, even working for a living.’

  ‘So why did he start coming here?’

  ‘They had no choice in the end. For years he lived with his dad and Aaron in that poky little flat. Sometimes he’d attend a local day centre, but every so often he’d get frustrated at someone and lash out. His dad would stop him from going to the centre to punish him for being “naughty” and so he’d disappear off the radar for six months.

  ‘Then the dad got diagnosed with cancer. That was when Aaron came to us for help. We got Tyler to start attending here a few days a week. Then as his father got sicker, he started staying overnight occasionally. When his brother went to jail, he started living here pretty much full-time. The old man died shortly after Aaron was released. Tyler sometimes goes home to see Aaron, especially if he’s upset – we’re not a secure facility – but he can’t really look after him. He usually lets him stay the night, then brings him back.’

  A flash of anger passed across Espanoza’s face, ‘Your visi
t is a case in point. What sort of an idiot takes someone with Tyler’s learning difficulties along as a lookout when he’s burgling houses?’

  ‘Look, the case we are investigating took place many years ago, when he was a young man. What can you tell me about his circumstances in 1992?’

  ‘Bloody hell, DCI Jones, he’d only have been in his teens.’

  ‘Was he staying with you then?’

  Espanoza shook his head.

  ‘No. He didn’t start coming here until the late Nineties. Until then he was still living with his family.’

  Warren felt his pulse start to rise.

  In 1992, Tyler Wallace had been living in the community, presumably free to come and go as he pleased. Warren glanced over at him again. Despite his childlike demeanour, there was no disguising his powerful build. Yet was he capable of rape? Could he have walked into a student party unchallenged, identified a helpless young woman, forced himself upon her and then left, seemingly without anyone witnessing what had taken place? Did Tyler Wallace leave his DNA at the scene of a brutal sexual attack and then, decades later, at an unrelated burglary?

  ‘What can you tell me about Tyler back then? Even if he wasn’t a resident here, you said that he had been known to social services since he was a child.’

  Espanoza looked as though he was going to refuse to cooperate, and Warren contemplated the warrant in his pocket. Finally, the care worker sighed. For the first time since their arrival, Espanoza opened the folder in front of him.

  The pages were photocopies of what appeared to be a typewritten form, yet even they had started to fade.

  ‘He first became known to Middlesbury Social Services in 1984—’ he flicked forward a few pages ‘—and there are termly reports, mostly of his academic progress, until he left school in June 1990. After then he appears intermittently in their records. He was arrested several times between 1991 and late 1994, but the attending officers recognized that he had special needs and called social services. They were able to deal with it themselves and he was never charged.’

  That explained his absence from the Police National Computer.

  ‘Does it say why he was arrested?’

  Espanoza scanned the pages.

  ‘There isn’t a huge amount of detail on some of them, but three that are written up properly include drunk and abusive at a branch of the Co-op in December 1991. Then he was picked up trying to steal some tea bags from the same Co-op the following March. The store manager agreed not to press charges, as long as he didn’t come in unaccompanied again. Three more pick-ups for public order offences, no details given. Finally, he was picked up for following a young woman home and making lewd comments in November of 1994. Again, the arresting officers agreed to release him without charge into the care of social services.’