Buried Secrets

by Lisa Cutts

  ‘We know Aiden was there, and might well have inflicted some of the blows, even taken the hammer from his mother. We’ve had something else come back from the lab too.’

  When Hazel had made her call to the DI, she intended to show him an innocent explanation of how Aiden’s DNA was on the murder weapon. Now she seemed to be adding to his guilt. It wasn’t that she had any problem with the guilty going to prison for taking another life, far from it. Her concerns lay with Travis. She preferred the scenario whereby Travis at least had his best friend on his side, if never by his side again. He had lost so much and this was proving a test too far for him.

  With a certain amount of trepidation, she said, ‘What else has happened?’

  ‘There can be no innocent explanation for this one – we found traces of Aiden’s DNA in Linda’s bedroom. This time, it was semen.’

  Chapter 63

  Huddled in a corner of the incident room at East Rise, the interview team consisting of Pierre and Sophia made a call to their counterparts, Tom and Pete at Riverstone Police Station. The four of them wanted to get their heads together to discuss what their prisoners had said so far.

  ‘Have you heard the news?’ said Sophia into the telephone on loudspeaker. Without waiting for a reply, she said, ‘There was semen on the bed sheets and a couple of other places in Linda and Milton’s bedroom. It was no great surprise as Milton was sleeping there with his own wife. Samples went to the lab, and we’ve been told that they matched to Aiden’s DNA.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Tom, leaning closer to the speaker. ‘One possibility is that Aiden was in bed with Linda when Jenny got there.’

  ‘Apparently,’ said Sophia with a grimace that only Pierre could see, ‘the CSI thought it looked like old semen.’

  Tom and Pete made noises of displeasure and Pierre’s contribution was, ‘Don’t fancy a crime scene investigator’s job much.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Tom, ‘our plan is to get back into interview when Jenny’s calmed down and see what else she’s got to say about the hammer. It’ll be interesting to see where she goes with this. Now she’ll either have to say that Aiden was there and touched the hammer, he brought it with him, or that she took it with her from home.’

  ‘Personally,’ added Pete, ‘I’ll find it very interesting whether she’s prepared to distance her son from murder by saying that she took the hammer with her from her own house, or whether she’s prepared to take him down with her and deny that she planned to go to Linda’s house with it in her own hand.’

  All four of them mulled over the possibility of whether a mother’s love would stop her from admitting that she had lied about finding the hammer in the kitchen.

  ‘What enquiries are we doing around the origins of the murder weapon itself?’ asked Pete.

  ‘Pierre can update you on that,’ said Sophia.

  ‘I got some time to run out and find out where the hammer came from,’ said Pierre. ‘What I can tell you is that it matches the set in the garage at the Bowmans’, plus there’s one missing that’s the right size and shape.’

  ‘How do we know this?’ said Pete.

  ‘Haven’t you looked at the scene photos on the Photoshare Drive?’ asked Sophia. ‘Or looked at the three hundred and sixty degree video footage that the CSIs took?’

  ‘Er, no,’ said Pete.

  A tutting noise came down the line at Pete.

  ‘Which one of you did that?’ said Pete.

  ‘It was me,’ said Pierre, ‘but Soph’s shaking her head at you. Barbara Venice will have your guts for garters if she finds out that you haven’t even looked at the scene photos and made yourself familiar with the layout of the house.’

  ‘First off,’ said Pete, ‘just don’t tell her. Secondly, what’s that got to do with the hammer?’

  ‘If you’d have looked,’ said Sophia, ‘you would have seen that the garage was one of the most obsessively tidy places ever. The walls were lined with tools everywhere in neat rows. Every item had a number of nails or hooks suspending it or holding it in place.

  ‘The hammer was one of six in a set, the entire tool range comprising forty in the Hard As They Come range.’

  ‘They’re a good make,’ said Pete. ‘If I was going to choose an implement to crack someone’s skull in two, it would most likely be my choice.’

  Unperturbed, Sophia carried on. ‘If you look at the photographs of the garage, you’ll see a gap where the hammer should have been. This is where Jenny was either brilliant, or very stupid.’

  As Tom and Pete sat focusing on the telephone carrying the tale of Jenny’s downfall from one incident room to another, they heard the voice change from Sophia’s to Pierre’s.

  ‘The Hard As They Come range is available mostly online and via reps in sales vans. It’s very difficult to buy the stuff in the shops. In fact, there’s only one shop in the county that has the exclusivity to sell them. And it’s not many miles from where we are now. It’s in North Downs. I made a couple of phone calls to them and the only hammer they’ve sold in the last couple of weeks was to a woman.’

  ‘As luck would have it,’ said Sophia, ‘the shop assistant remembered her because she was particularly attractive and flirty. Fortunately, most of you men are alike. Well, not you, Pierre. I know that you and Frank are very happy together. I mean the likes of Tom and Pete.’

  ‘That’s a bit sexist, isn’t it?’ said Pete.

  ‘Well, anyway,’ said Sophia, ignoring him, ‘Pierre’s already asked if this woman’s on CCTV. The store manager seems to think that the footage will still be there. So, if it’s recorded properly, we’re likely to have our murderer buying the murder weapon several days before she swore blind she ever held it in her hand.’

  Chapter 64

  Before she considered herself ready, Hazel was back with Travis at Una and John’s dining table again. She was starting to feel exhausted and would have loved nothing more than to take a couple of days off. Even one of her scheduled rest days would have been enough to see her through the next stage. She knew how impossible that would be with two suspects in custody and, by the looks of it, one or both of them about to be charged with murder.

  She knew that she would and should be Travis’s first point of contact with the police, even though any number of people would have been more than willing in the circumstances to update him. There was little point in having a family liaison officer if everyone else was the point of contact. It didn’t stop her hoping that she could step away from the tragedy for a moment. It was all about dealing with it, and that was her job – to help Travis deal with it as best he could manage.

  The time would come for them both when the grief was under control, and when she could do no more for him Hazel would leave Travis with Victim Support Services and make her exit.

  Right now, she had work to do.

  ‘Are you sure you’re OK to carry on with this?’ she asked him.

  ‘At least I’m doing something. It feels useful, even if it’s not.’

  ‘Everything you tell us will be useful, Travis, it’s just that I may not be able to tell you why.’

  She paused and gave him a wry smile, and then added, ‘That’s about all you’ve heard from me. As soon as I can tell you more, I promise that I will.’

  ‘Do you like being a police officer?’ he asked. ‘I only say that because my dad loved it, but I know it’s not for everyone.’

  ‘I have good days and bad. What happened to your mum and dad was awful, and as a direct consequence, something terrible also happened to you. I get to help you as much as I can, so that part, I like. The helping aspect makes up for some of the unpleasantness. It has to, or else we’d all be insane.’

  ‘What about doing what you’re doing for me? The FLO stuff. Do you get a choice?’

  ‘It’s not a role that can be forced upon anyone. That’s because it’s not something everyone’s prepared to do. It means putting yourself forward for it, completing the course and being considered suitable.�
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  ‘I keep crying on you every five minutes. I’ve sworn at you, I’ve lost my temper, told you to fuck off, rung you in the middle of the night. Why do you do it?’

  Never had Hazel felt such a compulsion to tell the truth to a witness. This was a teenager who had lost both of his parents within hours of each other. A young man he might be, but he was no fool and perhaps by telling him something of her own life, it might show him a promise of a brighter future than he could currently glimpse.

  ‘I was fifteen when my dad was killed in an accident on his way home from work. The truth is, I’ve never got over it. You don’t get over it.’

  Neither of them spoke for a minute or so.

  Hazel hadn’t meant to shock him or try to match his misery. Besides, that was in a league of its own. The only reason she told him was to let him see that he wasn’t the only one to have suffered, there was always some way forward and out of today’s mess. At some distant point, life would feel different, only now it was a long way off.

  ‘No one will insult you, least of all me, by telling you that any of this will get better. It won’t. You just find ways of dealing with it, getting through it. Grief and rage are exhausting. You’ll be too worn out to hate for so long and wonder ‘what if’. I’ve thought a hundred million times, what if I’d gone downstairs that morning and hidden my dad’s car keys, what if I’d bunked off school and gone missing, meaning he came home earlier and missed the accident. I didn’t do any of those things and I can’t change it. I’ve learned to accept it.’

  ‘Isn’t accepting the same as giving in?’

  ‘What would you be giving in to? Moving on and putting everything behind you. Travis, it’s far too early to be doing that at the moment. I’m not suggesting you even attempt it yet. Give yourself time, but please don’t be too hard on yourself if in months’, even years’ time, you’re still getting tearful. There’s really no shame in it.’

  He sat staring at the lacy doily on the table underneath the fruit bowl.

  ‘I’m angry at all of them,’ he said. ‘I’m angry at Aiden and that bitch Jenny. I’m angry at my dad for having his accident, I’m even angry at my mum for getting herself murdered. How stupid is that?’

  ‘It’s not stupid at all.’

  ‘What else do you need to ask me?’ he said, nodding in the direction of her notebook.

  ‘It can wait if you’re not up to it.’

  ‘No. Let’s get on with it . . . Please.’

  ‘OK. I need to ask you about the time that George Atkins came round and spoke to you and your mum about your dad.’

  He looked up at the ceiling and said, ‘You’ve been honest with me; I’m going to do the same with you. Up until now, I didn’t want to tell you about that George fella, I’d tried to put it out of my mind, didn’t want you to think I didn’t love my mum and thought badly of her in any way. First, I have to tell you something unpleasant about my mum.’

  Chapter 65

  When Travis made eye contact with Hazel again, she held his gaze. It was too early to tell him about his mother’s real family, a family of organized criminals she had fled from in the middle of the night in the back of an unmarked police car. That would have to wait for another day. The time was never going to be right for that, only at that moment she needed to let him talk.

  His eyes were brimming with tears, holding back the flood. Neither of them was sure how much longer he could keep himself together.

  ‘I know that you’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead, least of all your own mother, but she had a spiteful streak to her. She could be really mean and unpleasant. I don’t know where it came from. The thing was . . .’

  As he trailed off, he gave a dry laugh and ran a hand through his hair.

  ‘Well, the thing was, she didn’t usually let people see it. It was as if she was always hiding something. She could be as manipulative as my dad if she wanted to be. In fairness to her, it might have been because of the way he behaved towards her.

  ‘She flirted a bit. I suppose that we all do to an extent. I watched her flirt with Aiden and I’ve never been really sure that it never went any further. If it did, I certainly didn’t know any details about it. She was a master manipulator. I even watched my mum flirt with blokes like Harry Powell.’

  At the mention of his name, Hazel glanced down at her notebook, keen that her expression didn’t give her away. She went back to concentrating on what he was telling her, frustration building that she wanted to specifically ask him more about Harry, and the guilty feeling that Travis was only unburdening himself to her because he considered that she had bared her soul to him.

  ‘Most of all, Hazel, is that I wound Aiden up a bit about my mum too. I told him that she’d asked about him a couple of times, and did he have a girlfriend. That sort of thing. I could see that he was interested. Even worse was that I used to talk to my mum about him and how he couldn’t get a girl to go out with him more than once. We even had a right laugh that he was probably still a virgin. It was something she seemed to find hysterical.’

  Once again, Hazel paid attention to her notebook, not trusting that her eyes might somehow reveal the knowledge that Aiden’s semen had been discovered in Travis’s mother’s bed.

  ‘The reason I’m telling you this,’ he said, ‘is because both Aiden and Jenny are in a cell and I can’t help but feel there must have been a reason why one or both of them killed her. It’s not as if they turned up to rob the place and it went wrong. What could have made two people attack her like that?’

  ‘That’s what we’re trying to find out,’ said Hazel, drawing her eyes level with his again when she felt she couldn’t keep looking away for any longer.

  ‘That’s why we have a team of officers with each of them, going over and over in interview what happened, when, how and why. You and I still have a lot to talk about too.’

  ‘Me and Aiden used to try to outdo each other. We had a bit of a point-scoring thing going on with each other’s mums. It seemed funny then. I think I told you that Jenny asked me to hang a photograph in the hallway last weekend.’

  He shook his head at the memory of something so seemingly innocent.

  ‘I remember thinking at the time that it was a strange thing even for Jenny to do. Only reason being that it was a photograph of Aiden. I thought it was something she would automatically ask Aiden to do or wait until her husband came home from Dubai. She asked me to do it but Aiden got annoyed and grabbed the hammer off her, then went out and started banging a nail in the wall.

  ‘Jenny then embarrassed him by saying he’d hung it— Fucking hell.’

  That was the point that his hand flew up to his mouth, saliva absent, mouth gone dry.

  ‘When we went to see my mum at the chapel of rest, you said she had head injuries. What caused those injuries?’

  For only a second Hazel thought about telling him the truth. Today’s witness might be tomorrow’s suspect: so far they hadn’t charged anyone with murder, and not every arrest meant the guilty parties were in custody.

  She opted for discretion.

  ‘When the pathologist carries out a post-mortem, they give a cause of death and what kind of instrument was likely to have caused the injuries to the deceased. Sometimes, they can’t be specific. Only if we provide them with something we think was the possible murder weapon are they able to say whether it was likely to have caused those injuries.’

  For the first time, Travis appeared to struggle with taking in what she was saying, seemingly not because of his anxiety or torment. This time it was because he was trying to lock on to her words and failing. She saw the opening and closing of his mouth and vacant expression and wanted to lean across the table and take his hand in hers.

  ‘What I’m saying to you,’ she said, voice as soft as she could make it, ‘is that it isn’t always possible so early on to say. It might have been a hammer, yes.’

  She bit her lip as he said, ‘Pretty fucking sick then, giving me the hammer sh
e planned to kill my mum with. What was that about? It was only Aiden taking it from her that stopped me putting the picture up.’

  Hazel’s mind was also working overtime from a detective’s forensic point of view as to whether Jenny Bloomfield had planned for Travis’s DNA to be on the hammer all along.

  Chapter 66

  ‘Right then, Aiden,’ said Pierre, DVDs recording their every movement and word in the interview room. ‘Tell me about the hammer.’

  The officer pushed a colour A4 photograph of the murder weapon towards Aiden and his solicitor. She craned her neck to see the picture, pushing her glasses up her nose as they slipped forward down her face.

  ‘This is a photo of exhibit JS/282, found by senior CSI Styles. It’s got your DNA and your mother’s DNA on the black-and-yellow handle.’

  Even though every one of them knew what a handle was, Pierre pointed with the end of his pen.

  ‘And here,’ he said, looking up so that he didn’t miss the opportunity of seeing Aiden’s expression as he moved his biro towards the hammer’s head, ‘this is the part that connected with Linda Bowman’s skull as someone swung at her cranium more than once. Look, it’s this smoother end here with the blood and hair on it, not the tapered end for pulling out nails.’

  All colour from the suspect’s face had long since fled.

  ‘I didn’t do it,’ he croaked.

  ‘Yet, you can’t tell me how your DNA ended up on the hammer?’

  ‘I put a picture up,’ he said, suddenly weary and feeling that, whatever he said from now on, no one was going to listen. ‘My mum asked Travis to put up a picture of me in the hallway and I said that I’d do it. It didn’t seem right another bloke doing it.’

  He slumped forward in his seat, elbows on the table, at a loss as to how he could get anyone to believe anything he said.