Deadly Alibi

by Leigh Russell

  A Scene of Crime Officer greeted her. ‘The body’s gone off to the mortuary, but we’re still checking the site for evidence of the killer.’

  ‘Was she killed here?’

  ‘No. We think she was killed elsewhere and brought here during the night. The park isn’t well used so it’s been possible to identify several individual tracks of footprints. One set of prints is interesting. A man limped quite noticeably to this bench from the road. On the way here his left foot made deeper indentations in the muddy ground than the right one. However, on the way back, both feet made roughly equal indentations in the mud.’ He paused. ‘It looks as though he was carrying something heavy on his left shoulder on his way here, because he ran more lightly back to the road afterwards. It’s only a theory,’ he added hastily.

  ‘A theory that fits.’ Geraldine nodded. ‘That’s great work and I’m sure the footprints are going to help you find the killer, but this isn’t my case. Still, it’s a relief to have this tied up, because we’ve been looking for Louise Marshall. She was supposed to be giving our suspect an alibi. I suspect she was killed a week ago. At least we know now why she never came forward.’

  ‘Well, no, not really. She’s been dead between twenty-four and forty-eight hours. The post mortem will be able to give us a more accurate time frame for her death. She was outside overnight, exposed to the rain, which makes it hard to be precise. But she hasn’t been dead for more than two days.’

  ‘She couldn’t have been dead for a week?’

  ‘No. Two days, three at the most.’

  ‘How was she killed?’

  ‘You’ll have to wait for the post mortem to be sure.’

  ‘What size were the footprints of the person who might have been carrying her?’ Geraldine enquired.

  She had a horrible feeling she already knew the answer.

  ‘Size eleven.’

  Geraldine nodded. The bearded man who had picked Louise up at Euston station had size eleven feet. So did Tom Marshall, but they knew he hadn’t met his wife at Euston.

  When Geraldine asked the Scene of Crime Officer about Louise having wanted to contact her, he shook his head. He knew nothing about that. Puzzled, Geraldine drove to the police station in Holloway Road. She introduced herself and a detective inspector came hurrying out to speak to her. Tall and long limbed, with an earnest expression, he led her into his office and handed her a sheet of paper.

  ‘What’s this?’ she asked as she unfolded it.

  ‘That’s a printout of a screen shot of a message found in the pocket of Louise Marshall’s jeans. It was written on a piece of torn-off wallpaper. The original was a bit delicate due to the damp, because it was in her pocket overnight, outside.’

  Geraldine unfolded the paper and studied the message. All she could make out was her own name, ‘DI Steel’. After that, it was just a scrawl.

  ‘It looks like someone was trying to send me a message, but how can you be sure who wrote it, even if we could read what it says? It’s just a scribble. It barely looks like writing. I know it was found on her, but anyone could have written it and put it in her pocket. Someone who killed her, perhaps.’

  She wondered if the killer might be taunting her. They had found the missing witness, and all they had to show for their search was her dead body.

  ‘We haven’t got the actual paper here, it’s with forensics but they’ve matched the prints and confirmed she wrote it with the tip of her right index finger. It’s written in her blood.’

  37

  Geraldine stared at the printout. After refusing to come forward to confirm her lover’s alibi, it made no sense that Louise would contrive to send Geraldine an incomprehensible message from beyond the grave. She stared at the clumsy writing. It looked as though it had been written by a child.

  After thanking the sergeant, Geraldine went straight to the mortuary. She needed to have as complete a picture as possible of what Louise might have been trying to tell her before she took this new development back to Adam. She had a suspicion he would dismiss her scruples. Louise was immaterial to the case now anyway. All the evidence pointed to Chris’s guilt. If they could only be certain Louise had been lying to protect him, there would be no problem. But if Louise had been murdered by the hypothetical third man, it raised an uncomfortable question about the identity of Jamie’s killer.

  As she drove, she turned over the possibilities in her mind. It was possible that Louise had changed her mind about giving Chris an alibi. If that was the case, the only person who stood to gain by her death was Chris himself. Having killed his wife, he might well have wanted to silence Louise before she brought his final lie crashing down around him. But he had been in a police cell when her dead body had been carried to the park.

  Another possibility was that someone else had killed Louise in order to destroy Chris’s alibi. If Louise had been alive, the whole issue of Chris’s alibi could have been cleared up. Meanwhile, Geraldine was the only person to have heard Louise confirm it. There had been something deeply worrying about Louise’s subsequent refusal to come forward to substantiate or retract her story. It was ironic that finding the witness they had been searching for was now threatening to cause more, not less, confusion.

  ‘I thought you’d be along before this,’ Miles greeted Geraldine, the lines around his eyes crinkling in a smile above his mask. ‘She left a message for you.’ Before Geraldine could answer, he launched into an account of the death. ‘She was found out in the open, but when she died she was curled up in a very small space. To begin with I thought it might have been a box or a chest of some kind perhaps. She was lying on dark grey fabric of some kind, judging from the fibres we found. Forensics have confirmed that these fibres come from the kind of felt commonly used in cars. So it’s not a great stretch to assume that she was transported to the park in the boot of a car.’

  ‘So presumably she was killed somewhere else, and then put in the boot of the car and driven to the park?’

  ‘No, she was alive before she went in the car boot, assuming that was where she was.’

  ‘Do you have any evidence for that, or is it just another theory?’

  ‘Look at this scraping on her back. Post mortem someone seized hold of her under her arms and dragged her out of the cramped space where she was lying. Rigor had not yet set in. Her T-shirt must have been pulled up against the edge, which scraped her back. There’s no indication of any bruising or scratching in the other direction. It was a small space. She could only have got in there without post mortem injury if she had manoeuvred her way in there herself while she was still alive.’

  Geraldine gazed down at the body for a moment, envisaging Louise being forced to clamber inside the boot of a car. Lying on her front, she looked far too long to fit into such a small space.

  ‘She must have been threatened to make her wriggle into a confined space like that,’ Miles said. ‘She was lying in there for several hours before she died.’

  ‘Did she suffocate?’

  ‘Not exactly. Car boots aren’t airtight and there’s no sign of suffocation. She would probably have starved to death if she’d been left in there, but she died of her injuries long before then.’

  ‘What injuries?’

  ‘She’d been badly beaten while she was alive.’

  Miles nodded at his assistant who helped him turn the body over. The grazes Louise had sustained in climbing into the boot were minor compared with the hideous bruising on her abdomen.

  ‘Her internal injuries were so severe that the additional pressure of her knees pressing against her while she was curled up so tightly was too much. I could go into more detail if you want, but that’s the gist of what happened.’

  ‘Can you deduce anything about her killer?’

  ‘I’d say her attacker must have had considerable physical strength, but it’s possible her assailant was a woman. Of cour
se we don’t know that the murder was intentional.’

  ‘But it was murder all the same.’ Geraldine frowned. ‘Even before she was put in the car, it looks as though someone wanted to prevent her from coming forward.’ She turned to Miles. ‘What can you tell me about the message she attempted to leave?’

  ‘I found traces of paper under her nails matching the scrap of paper she wrote to you on. It was soft thick paper. The lab is still looking at it, but it was almost certainly wallpaper.’

  ‘What did it say?’

  They gazed helplessly down at the body.

  ‘Well, she can’t tell us,’ Miles said at last. ‘But maybe forensics can decipher it. They’re doing all sorts of tests on it. I daresay they’ll work their magic.’

  ‘I want to know as soon as anything comes through.’

  ‘Well, there’s no point in asking me,’ Miles replied. ‘I’m just the pathologist.’

  38

  When Geraldine arrived at Hendon, Adam summoned her. He looked slightly sour.

  ‘Because of the connection with the Cordwell case, Louise’s death has been passed on to us.’ He sighed. ‘I must say this could complicate matters. At any rate, there’s no longer any question of ever being able to use her testimony about Chris now. We never had a formal statement from her. The CPS will want a report on your telephone conversation with a woman alleging to be Louise, but we won’t be able to prove it was her now she’s dead.’

  ‘The two cases must be linked,’ Geraldine said. ‘Whether Chris killed her by accident while attempting to preserve his alibi, or someone else killed her in order to destroy his alibi, the two deaths have to be connected.’

  Adam nodded. ‘A man’s wife is murdered, and two weeks later his mistress’s body’s discovered. Yes, they’re connected all right. So, what’s your thinking?’

  Geraldine outlined her various theories, but she had nothing useful to add to what they already knew. They turned their attention to the discovery of Louise’s body.

  ‘She was found in an open space?’ Adam scowled. ‘Did nobody see anything? It’s overlooked by a block of flats. A team of constables spoke to local residents as soon as the body was found, but apparently no one saw anything. Someone parked a car, removed a dead body from the boot and carried it all the way across to a bench, without anyone noticing a thing. Unbelievable! Has everyone gone blind?’

  Geraldine described the narrow patch of scrubby grass. The bench was not far from the road, at the bottom of a slope, and further screened from the flats by a row of trees and shrubs. It was quite feasible that a body had been carried to the bench unobserved, under cover of darkness.

  ‘None of the lights there work,’ she added. ‘There’s only what light reaches it from the road. And the moon.’

  She wondered whether the killer lived locally, or if he had happened to drive past the park and note it as a dark and secluded spot.

  ‘There is one other thing,’ she added.

  ‘Go on,’ he said.

  Adam’s shoulders slumped as Geraldine told him about the size eleven footprints that had been discovered leading to the park bench.

  ‘The bearded man,’ he said, and swore. ‘This won’t be over until we find him.’

  Adam summoned the team together to discuss the latest development. Several officers expressed the view that Louise’s murder had nothing to do with Chris having killed his wife.

  ‘We’ve got enough evidence to prove he’s guilty. Why do we need to reopen that investigation?’ someone asked.

  ‘We’ve got the killer in custody. We know he murdered his wife. Now his mistress is found dead. It looks like he killed her too,’ someone else added. ‘If we don’t nail him, what are the chances he’s going to do it again?’

  ‘Chris was in custody when Louise’s body was carried across the park,’ Geraldine pointed out. ‘We also know that whoever deposited her on the bench had the same shoe size as the bearded man who picked her up at Euston station.’

  ‘The same size as Tom Marshall,’ Sam said.

  ‘But we know he didn’t meet Louise at the station,’ Geraldine added, ‘because he’s too tall.’

  ‘Until we know anything to the contrary, we’re not making any assumptions about whether this was the same killer,’ Adam said. ‘Presumably Louise’s husband found out about her affair…’

  A faint murmur flitted around the assembled team. Most of the officers on the team looked pleased. Geraldine wondered why they all seemed to think it would be easier to treat Louise’s death as a new investigation. Sam unwittingly answered the question as they left the major incident room together.

  ‘At least we’ve got Jamie’s killer safely behind bars,’ the sergeant commented cheerfully. ‘We’re doing the right thing, treating this as a new case. It doesn’t let Chris off the hook. If he killed his wife, he needs to go down for it.’

  Geraldine nodded. She was sure Louise’s murder was more closely related to Jamie’s death than her colleagues seemed to think. She couldn’t dismiss the conviction that both women had been victims of the same killer, and that killer wasn’t Chris. The trouble was, she couldn’t prove it.

  Later that afternoon, a call came through from the forensic laboratory. The technician asked to speak to Geraldine.

  ‘There’s a message for you.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s from Louise Marshall.’

  Geraldine had been able to read her own name at the top of the piece of paper. ‘But the rest of it was just scribble,’ she said. ‘Have you managed to make out anything it says?’

  ‘Yes. That’s what I’m phoning about. We’re sending over a detailed report about the processes used to investigate it which you’ll need for your records but, in a nutshell, we’ve been able to read it by examining indentations made on the paper. Fortunately the paper’s relatively soft and thick, so a finger pressing on it left a faint impression, invisible to the naked eye.’

  ‘What did it say?

  ‘The message was addressed to you.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know that. But what did it say?’

  She was vaguely aware of Neil glancing up at her impatient tone.

  ‘I hope this makes more sense to you than it did to us,’ the technician replied. ‘It just said: “Chris was with me the night J was murdered. Killer is a man with no face.” That’s all.’ There was a brief pause. ‘I read it out exactly as she wrote it,’ he added at last.

  ‘Can you email that to me?’

  ‘It’ll all be in the report.’

  ‘Yes, I know, but it would be helpful if you could email me the message you just read out. I’d appreciate it if you could do that right now.’

  As soon as the email came through, she went straight to Adam. They studied it together.

  ‘“Chris was with me the night J was murdered”,’ Adam read out loud. ‘“Killer is a man with no face.” This doesn’t change anything,’ he added.

  ‘She’s confirming Chris’s alibi for the night he was framed for killing his wife.’

  Adam frowned. ‘Or is she confessing she was there with Chris when he killed his wife?’

  ‘No. This proves that it was Louise Marshall who spoke to me on the phone. How else would she know my name?’

  ‘I suppose this could be taken as a written statement of what she told you, but that still doesn’t mean it’s true. We had no opportunity to question her…’

  ‘And why was that? Someone made sure she couldn’t talk. At least, they tried to.’

  ‘She was his mistress. If she was in love with him, don’t you think she might have lied about this? We can’t be certain.’

  ‘That’s the problem. But I don’t believe a woman who thought she was going to die would have spent her last efforts on writing down something that wasn’t true.’

  ‘A deathbed confession?’
/>
  ‘It’s not a confession, is it? It’s an accusation. And it’s Chris’s alibi.’

  Adam nodded. ‘Yes,’ he conceded, ‘you could be right. We need to go over every statement and every scrap of evidence that we’ve taken as proof of his guilt. There must be a hole in it somewhere. Someone’s been lying to us.’

  ‘Someone with size eleven shoes.’

  ‘Yes, the other man. Find him and we have our killer, Geraldine. That’s the priority.’

  ‘And Chris?’

  ‘Let’s leave him where he is for the time being. We don’t yet know for sure that Louise wasn’t lying right to the end.’

  Geraldine wondered about what Adam had said. She tried to envisage what it might feel like to be locked in the boot of a car, in agony from internal injuries, knowing she would probably never leave there alive. Before she passed out, she was almost certain she would think of nothing but her own survival. It was difficult to imagine what Louise had gone through.

  What was evident was that she had been determined to make sure the police carried on looking for the real killer, the man with no face who had killed Jamie and was now killing her as well. Perhaps, instead of expending all her energy on banging and kicking the sides of her prison, and yelling for help, she had devoted all her attention to scratching at her skin, until she was able to scribble down a bloody message. By concealing the paper in her pocket, she would have known that if she did indeed die, her message would reach Geraldine.

  ‘If she was locked in the boot of a car, dying, would she have given a thought to proving Chris’s innocence?’ Adam asked.

  ‘I think she wanted to tell us that whoever had locked her in the boot of a car had also killed Jamie. She wanted us to keep looking for her killer. She can’t have known who he was, or she would have given us the name.’

  ‘She gave us Chris’s name.’

  ‘No. This message was addressed to me. It’s a continuation of our conversation. Her message tells us that whoever killed Jamie also killed Louise. She was collateral damage. If she hadn’t come forward with an alibi for Chris, I don’t think she’d have been killed. Jamie’s killer had to stop Louise talking to us, so we wouldn’t continue investigating Jamie’s death. We haven’t found the killer yet. He’s still out there.’