Someone just has to recognise this lady he thought.
- ooOoo –
CHAPTER TEN
DAY FOURTEEN: 6th September.
Barnwell:
Hunter never heard Grace approaching, his thoughts were elsewhere and he jumped as she slapped a fresh sheet of paper on top of the small pile of vehicle enquiry forms he was checking. The paperwork had been left on his desk from the previous day’s tasks carried out by Mike Sampson and Tony Bullars and he was checking if all the outstanding enquiries had been completed before he handed them over to the DI.
“Come on get your lazy butt in gear, we’ve got a prime witness to interview.” She stabbed at the pink coloured form she had deposited across his papers.
As Hunter started to read she snatched it up. “Isobel from the HOLMES team has just handed this to me, she said it’s the breakthrough we’ve been after.”
He tried to grab back the paper she was waving but she spun quickly away snatching her jacket from the back of her seat with her free hand. She fixed him a look. “What are you waiting for Sarge?”
He picked up his own coat and wrestled the car keys out from a pocket before following on her heels out of the office.
* * * * *
“Are you going to tell me what we’ve got then?” Hunter asked as he swung the CID car out through the gates of the station’s rear yard and drove towards the traffic lights that gave them access to the main road. “All you’ve said so far is drive to the hospital.”
Grace pulled down the passenger seat visor and checked her make-up. She smoothed a hand across her nose and cheek before exchanging looks with Hunter. “We’re off to see a junior doctor name of,” she paused and took a quick glance at the paperwork that the DI had handed her earlier, “Chris Woolfe. He works on Medical Ward Three at the General. Isobel says that he rang in last night after the late news and said he’s certain he knows who the victim from the lake is.”
* * * * *
Taking the back roads through the woods Hunter was able to push the car faster than the speed limit because there was no traffic and he made the hospital in just over quarter of an hour. He parked the car in one of the mortuary visiting bays, took the POLICE VISITING card from out of the glove box and slid it on top of the dash and then he and Grace took a rear entrance to one of the lift areas. They knew the hospital layout like the backs of their hands.
“Ward Three you say?” asked Hunter pressing the button for the lift.
Grace double-checked the document and returned a nod.
They rode the lift in silence. It squealed and juddered up the two floors before opening up to a directional sign for the ward they required. They followed coloured coded tramlines painted on the corridor floor, taking a sharp left when the yellow line they were following peeled off from the red and blue ones. Medical Ward Three lay behind a double set of closed doors; Hunter could hear voices and activity beyond them and they were still a good ten metres away. Dispensing a large dollop of hand wash he pushed through the doors with his shoulder rolling his hands together as he entered the bright fluorescent-lit ward.
It seemed as though he had entered a world of chaos; there was so much activity and it stopped him in his tracks.
For a split-second it reminded him of his experience a fortnight ago to the day when his mother and father had been seriously injured and rushed into Scarborough District Hospital. The thought of it again caused a state of panic to sweep over him. He felt his stomach turn turtle.
Yet even though if gave him bad memories he couldn’t help but continue to watch, mesmerised by it all. Everything seemed to be happening behind a screen around one of the beds on the ward.
He shook himself out of his trance, exchanged looks with Grace, shrugged his shoulders and widened his blue eyes. He gave her a ‘something’s obviously going on’ look before stepping towards the nurse’s station. That was busy as well.
After a few seconds he caught the attention of an auburn haired plump woman dressed in dark blue. He snatched a glance at her name badge pinned above her breast pocket; it stated, Helen – Ward Sister. His wife Beth was a sister; he knew she was in charge. He finally caught her gaze and flashed his warrant card. “I bet the last people you want to see right now is us?” he said, rocking his head backwards where he could still hear the commotion.
The Sister let out a sigh. “They brought in a twenty-two year old girl in the middle of the night, suffered a stroke just after she’d had a baby – looks like we’ve just lost her.”
He offered a look of empathy as he pushed his warrant badge back into his jacket inside pocket. “We contacted the hospital this morning, we were told a Dr Woolfe would be on duty here.”
“That’s right. He’s tending to the girl behind the screen.”
Hunter and Grace took another look down the ward. The activity behind the shielded bed appeared to be dying down.
“We need to speak with him I’m afraid,” said Grace returning her gaze back to the ward sister. “We can disappear for half an hour for a coffee and then come back.”
“Is it urgent?”
“Could be. He contacted us last night.”
“Okay, just give him a couple of minutes. It looks as though we can’t do anything else for her anyway. They’ve been working on her for over ten minutes now, he’ll be calling it time soon and so he should be out in a bit.” Her response towards the young girl’s death was so matter-of-fact, devoid of any feeling. Hunter guessed her job was very much like his, in times of crisis you remove the emotion in order to cope.
They hadn’t even taken a seat in the sister’s vacant office before Dr Woolfe tracked them down. Dressed in a white, open necked shirt tucked into a pair of jeans he looked very young. In fact if it hadn’t been for his nametag and the stethoscope draped around his neck Hunter would never have guessed he was a doctor. He remembered Grace mentioning he was a junior but this guy didn’t even look as if he had started shaving yet.
The doctor shook both their hands and dropped into the ward sister’s empty seat behind her desk and then beckoned them to sit in low-set seats positioned next to a filing cabinet opposite.
“We’ll try not to take up too much of your time, we can see how busy you are,” opened Grace.
“A bit like your job eh? No rest for the wicked.” He ruffled his fingers through his light brown, collar length, curly hair, leaned back in his seat and crossed his legs. “Is this about my phone call last night?”
“You left a message with one of our teams stating that you think you know who the victim is?” Grace passed across one of the colour photographs taken of the facial reconstruction.
He accepted it and took a long lingering look, gulped several times, then nodded his head. “The guy on TV said this is the girl who you’ve found at the bottom of Barnwell lake right?” He sounded nervous.
“Yes a couple of weeks ago. She was murdered and dumped there.”
“I can’t believe that.” He shook his head. “I had a right shock last night when I saw it on the news believe me”
“Do you recognise her?”
“Well it certainly resembles a girl I used to go out with. It looks like Samia, but I can’t believe it, she’s such a lovely girl – or was - if it’s her.”
“Samia?”
“Yes, Samia Hassan. She lives – or rather she used to live with her parents in Hoyland before we went out together.”
“Are you absolutely certain about that? That photo as you know is just a facial reconstruction, the body was in a bit of a mess I’m afraid,” interjected Hunter.
“Even so it’s an incredible likeness of Samia. Has anyone else phoned in – her mates from uni, and given Samia’s name since you showed it on the news yesterday?”
“You’re the first.” Hunter paused gathering his thoughts. “You said you used to go out with her?” he pointing towards the photograph Dr. Woolfe was still holding.
“We were at Sheffield Uni together. I was in my last year when
she came. I took her round on her first student’s rag week, that’s how we met.”
“When was this?”
“Year before I started my training – two thousand and six.”
“Do you know how old she was then?”
He thought for a moment. “I’m twenty-three now so I would have been twenty-one back then,” he appeared to be talking to himself. “She would have been eighteen – nineteen.” He paused and then blurted out. “We went out for a short time - well until we had all that bother.” He gulped again.
Hunter directed a quick glance at Grace. She was looking engrossed.
“Bother?” Hunter enquired.
“Yeah from her cousins.”
“You’ve got me hooked doc, tell us more.”
“Call me Chris please. Where do you want me to start?”
“From where you think best. I’ll stop you if I need to ask a question.”
“Well as I say we met on rag week. She was with a couple of girls and she joined our group to go round town. We got chatting – she was doing her first year medicine and she wanted to know what to expect. We just hit it off you know and she’d come round to my place from time to time to borrow some notes and chat. After a couple of months I asked her to go out for a meal and she agreed. Things just worked out for us from there. I was in students accommodation and she was in halls of residence and one night after we’d been to the cinema I asked her if she wanted to stay at mine. After that night she’d stay on a regular basis. Sometimes even at weekends when she should have gone home. That’s when the trouble started.”
“What trouble?”
“Let me just give you some background. Samia’s parents are Pakistani but she was English. She told me they owned a shop in Hoyland and lived in the flat upstairs. She had her heart set on being a doctor but she said that they continually badgered her to go to Pakistan for an arranged marriage to her cousin. Apparently the only way they allowed her to come to University was because she promised she would go to Pakistan to meet the cousin during the summer break. She told me she was dreading this because she had never been to Pakistan in her life and didn’t want to marry any cousin. She’d seen a photograph of him and he was a lot older than her – in his thirties I think she said, and she didn’t fancy him. She wanted the freedom to chose who she married. I heard her a few times on her mobile having a row with her father over this.”
“What about the trouble?”
“That was about a year ago now. I had just finished uni and had started my medical training. She had moved in with me into a newer flat. She hadn’t told her parents because she was so scared, though she had told them she was seeing me. They had another blazing row. She told me they were threatening to disown her and that she was bringing shame on the family and that she should marry the cousin in Pakistan. I know it upset her a great deal. She tried to speak with her mother a few times but she would hang up on her. Then one night we had just come out of this bar and this car pulls up. Two Asian guys get out and just set about me, gave me a right hiding. They tried to drag Samia into the car but there were quite a few people about that we knew, thank God and they intervened and phoned the police. The two guys took off before the cops arrived. Samia told me they were relatives; she’d seen them before at her house. She didn’t like them. She said one of them had been in trouble with the police. She persuaded me not to make a complaint and that she’d sort it. She guessed it was because her parents had found out about us sharing a flat.”
“So you never made a complaint?”
“I wanted to. My face was in a right mess. I couldn’t work for a couple of days and I got a rollicking from my consultant for turning up to work all bruised. Said I didn’t set the right image for a doctor.”
“Was that the end of it?”
“Christ, no. There was a couple more. One night we came home and the flat was trashed, and I mean trashed. Everything was in pieces and they had cut up all of Samia’s clothes.”
“Did you report that?”
“I did that time. I had to for the insurance. We told the police about Samia’s relatives but there were no witnesses and they didn’t find any evidence to connect them, so that was that. The final straw came when I was on lates one day. I finished my shift about midnight and I was just walking across the hospital car park when the same two guys waylaid me. They’d wrecked my car. And they told me in no uncertain terms I had to finish with Samia or I would end up at the bottom of a lake. Those were their exact words.”
* * * * *
Stirling, Scotland:
DCI Dawn Leggate had finally got home at midnight. It had been another long day. She took a quick shower, checked her answer machine; there were no messages, and fell into bed.
The alarm woke her at six-thirty am and despite having only had five and a half hours sleep, it had been undisturbed and she felt remarkably refreshed. It was strange, she thought to herself, as she brushed her teeth, but she always felt like this when a big investigation was running. It had to be the adrenaline rush she mused.
She made herself coffee, placed bread from the freezer into the toaster and then dialled Alex McBride’s mobile.
She could tell from his voice that she had woke him up. She apologised as he told her it had been two am before he’d finally got to his own bed and offered to ring him later but he responded by telling her he needed to be up himself to brief his own team.
“Likewise, that’s why I’m ringing you so early,” she replied. As soon as it had come out she could have bit her lip. Her retort had come out all wrong. She hoped he wouldn’t take her response as being a dig - that he was still in bed and she wasn’t - especially that now they were managing a joint investigation together.
She needn’t have worried. He gave her an update of the Belshill murder; she scribbled notes into her police daily journal, her concentration only momentarily distracted when the toast popped out. Then prior to hanging up she thanked him and felt the need to apologise once again for waking him up. Before she rang off DI McBride promised to send over a DS and a DC from his team to join her own morning briefing.
She hit the end call button and then dialled the HOLMES supervisor at Stirling and was brought up to date as to the status of the Killin murder enquiry. She made more notes. It was seven-thirty am when she hit the road.
* * * * *
Entering the office Dawn could see that several new incident whiteboards had been set up. The Glasgow city centre and Belshill murder had a board each and they had been abutted onto their Killin enquiry. These all contained very important components of the investigation and from experience she knew that thorough updates on those charts kept them all in touch with the case. More than anything it helped get a feel for things and could point them in the direction of the perpetrator.
She realised they must have been erected the previous day whilst she and DS John Reed had been at the Belshill murder scene liaising with DI Alex McBride.
Looking at their contents and recollecting the notes she had transcribed in her journal a half an hour ago she knew that the morning’s briefing was going to be very intense.
She checked the three timelines – the handwriting was wonderfully neat; she couldn’t help but think that was a rarity amongst police officers.
Also attached were photographs of the victims, gruesome Scenes of Crime shots plus crime scene locations and maps of each of the surrounding areas. Her eyes darted from log to log. Except for a few things from the Belshill scene everything was here.
Dawn knew she must find out who’d made the effort and congratulate them.
She opened her journal, picked up a dry-erase felt pen and added further notes to the boards doing her best to replicate the script. At this moment she could see that the chain of events link was the stolen silver BMW presently with forensics.
Ten minutes later, standing in front of the incident boards, Dawn Leggate waited for the incident team to finally settle down. The compilation, which included the three victims na
mes, addresses, witnesses, timelines and photographs took over the entire frontage of the room. She rubbed her hands together and studied the faces of her team. She could tell from their expressions that they were fired up.
Dawn knew that it had been a long time since they had been involved in a major joint investigation and the fact that each of the victims had been one of their own would make them even more determined in their efforts to catch the culprit.
She banged a hand over the nearest board. “Guys we’ve got a busy day ahead of us, lots of work to do, so give me your eyes and ears for the next half hour,” then pointing to the furthermost panel she continued. “Firstly our own Killin enquiry. Ross McNab aged sixty-four and his wife sixty-three were murdered on the afternoon of the thirty-first of August at their isolated bungalow. As you know they were both beaten and Ross was tortured prior to his death. Everything about that scene indicates that more than one person was involved in their deaths. A sharp instrument was used to remove three fingers from his right hand and those have not been found. It looks as though the killers took them from the scene and then left behind a box of fish fingers with a handwritten note which stated,” she paused and glanced at a photograph of the message that had been recovered next to Ross McNab’s body. ‘These are to replace the missing ones.’ Before the killers left they set fire to Mrs McNab using an accelerant. The PM indicates that she was still alive when they lit her.” Dawn paused for maximum effect. She scanned the detectives’ faces again. “A woman walking her dog in nearby fields spotted smoke coming from the bungalow and called the fire brigade. The same woman also spotted a silver BMW driving along a track close to the scene. She had noticed this car earlier driving around the village and thankfully had noted its number because she thought it was acting suspiciously.” She added, “She’s part of the Neighbourhood Watch in Killin.” The DCI glanced at the board again. “The resulting fire has damaged forensics but we might be lucky with the note and box of fish fingers. As you all know Ross was a retired detective. He retired thirteen years ago in nineteen-ninety-five.” She took a side-step, “Okay moving on,” she stabbed a finger below one of the scenes of crime photo’s depicting a battered face, barely recognisable as a man’s. “Alistair McPherson, sixty-one years, another retired cop, was found, as you can see, beaten to death, near a subway close to Sauchiehall Street at seven-fifty pm on the twenty-seventh of August. We have him captured on CCTV cameras coming out of Lauders bar on that street ten minutes prior to his body being discovered. A very small time frame. CCTV also picked up several sightings of our silver BMW driving in and around Sauchiehall Street before and after the attack. The images have been enhanced but both the driver and passenger had their visors down and so there are no clear images of their faces. What we can distinguish however is that it is not the two young men we have trapped up in the cells.” Dawn moved back from the second board. “Finally,” she slapped her hand over several photographs, which had all been taken from different angles, of an elderly man slumped upright in a carver type chair. “Donald Wilson a retired DS, sixty-nine years old. His body was discovered two days ago in the lounge of his home at Belshill. His hands had been nail-gunned to the arms of his chair and there was an iron burn mark in the centre of his chest. His throat had also been cut. The pathologist has indicated he was killed approximately two weeks ago; the body had early stages of decomposition. The silver BMW on false plates which we have recovered belonged to him.” The DCI latched onto several faces amongst her team. She could see they were focussed. “There are two links to all these three killings, firstly the BMW owned by Donald Wilson, which was stolen from outside his house, and which has been sighted around the locations of the other two murders. The two young men, Sandie Aitkinson and Bruce McColl, whom we still have in custody, who were caught driving it, do have form but it’s petty stuff, and one of them has a cast iron alibi for the Killin murder. They are sticking to their story that they found it parked up with the keys on the front passenger seat, and we can’t knock that. By the end of play this afternoon the Procurator Fiscal has indicated we should bail them.” She was in full flow now. “There is another incident involving the BMW but I don’t know if that is linked yet or not. On the twenty-fourth of August, three days before the murder of Alistair McPherson, it was involved in a hit and run road accident in North Yorkshire. The driver and his wife were injured in that accident and we have discovered from statements that they have Scottish surnames.” She hadn’t told the team about her telephone conversation when she was at the McNab’s with the man who had called himself Jock Kerr, though she had previously mentioned it to DS John Reed. That was one enquiry she and her sergeant were going to follow up personally. “Coincidence or not, we will be looking into that as one of the actions. The other link as you all now realise is that they are all retired detectives who at one time worked out of Shettlestone CID. The key tasks, which are being pushed out from this briefing, are related to that. I want to know the relationship, working or otherwise, that these three had and what jobs did they work on together. There are checks to be done with Personnel and the Retired Police Officers Association. I want everyone traced who knew these three. I am convinced our answer lies in their past association. I want the evil bastards who did this trapped up as soon as possible.”
Cold Death (D.S.Hunter Kerr) Page 12