‘I wonder why he’s changed his mind.’
‘His lawyer must have made him see sense,’ Adam replied as he strode along the corridor beside her.
Chris stared miserably at Geraldine across the table. Wearing a dark green jacket, his squat lawyer resembled a giant toad. He watched Geraldine without seeming to blink. The atmosphere in the room was heavy with expectation. Beside Geraldine, Adam was sitting squarely on his chair, leaning back slightly in a relaxed proprietorial position.
‘You said you had something you wanted to share with us?’ Adam prompted the suspect.
Although he was doing a good job of hiding his feelings, his voice held a note of suppressed excitement, and his eyes were brighter than usual. Geraldine knew he was thinking this was it, the moment that would wrap the case up properly. Chris gave no response. No one spoke as they waited for him to answer.
‘You want to tell us something,’ Adam repeated softly. ‘Take your time, and tell us in your own words.’
Instead of answering the detective chief inspector, Chris turned to his lawyer. ‘I can’t do it,’ he muttered.
‘It will help you a great deal if you simply come clean,’ Adam urged him. ‘Tell us what happened, and why you did it. The court will be far more lenient with you if you co-operate. I’m sure your lawyer will advise you it’s best if you just tell us the truth.’
Chris didn’t answer.
‘You came here to confess to killing your wife. Let’s get that out in the open straight away. We all know you did it, but if you take this opportunity to explain yourself, it will really help you. That’s why your lawyer brought you here to record your confession. Crimes of passion are…’
‘No, no,’ Chris blurted out, casting a terrified glance at his lawyer. ‘That’s not it at all.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I didn’t kill my wife. I already told you I didn’t kill her. Why won’t you believe me?’
Adam made no attempt to conceal his irritation. ‘What the hell’s going on then? We came here to listen to your confession.’
The fat lawyer heaved himself up in his chair. ‘My client gave you no indication that he wanted to confess to anything.’
‘Why did he ask to see us then?’
‘He has an additional line of defence he wishes to disclose.’
Adam flung his hands up in the air in a gesture of despair. ‘What is this? First you come up with a belated alibi you didn’t want to tell us about, now another line of defence suddenly and conveniently crawls out of the woodwork. Why didn’t you bring it to our attention before now? And, given that you didn’t, what makes you think we’ll listen to it now, when it’s clearly something you just fabricated?’
The lawyer smiled pleasantly. ‘And yet, despite your histrionics, you are obliged to listen to what my client has to say.’
‘He’s not saying anything,’ Adam grumbled. ‘Unless he confesses, there’s not a great deal he can say that would possibly interest us.’
‘This concerns my client’s relationship with his recently deceased wife.’ The lawyer turned to Chris, nodding encouragement at him.
‘Chris,’ Adam addressed the suspect. ‘We know you used to beat your wife.’
Before Adam could continue, Chris burst out, ‘You don’t know anything about me or my wife, and you don’t know anything about our relationship.’
‘Why don’t you tell us then?’ Geraldine prompted him.
But Chris dropped his head in his hands, mumbling, ‘I can’t. I can’t.’
‘We know you used to beat her,’ Adam resumed.
Chris raised a tearful face. ‘No. I never touched her, not in any way that might hurt her. I couldn’t. I loved her.’
Adam lowered his voice. He sounded almost sorry for the suspect. ‘Chris, we’ve found evidence of your beatings. There were traces of your skin under her nails from where she resisted your attacks. There are scratch marks on your neck. You can’t continue to deny it.’
‘My client’s deceased wife was not defending herself,’ the lawyer said.
Chris was sitting, stony-faced. Now he spoke. ‘It was her. My wife used to hit me. I never hurt her. She – she – I tried to help her, but I couldn’t stop it. She didn’t want to be like that, but something drove her to do it. She never meant to hurt me. She was always sorry afterwards, but…’ He dropped his head in his hands once more and sat, sobbing silently.
‘That went well,’ Adam snapped as they left the room. ‘The trouble is, the story’s credible. I know innocent until proven guilty and all that, but sometimes these lawyers are too bloody clever for anyone’s good. If Chris didn’t have legal representation, he would never have cooked up a defence like that on his own.’
‘You’re assuming it’s not true,’ Geraldine added quickly, annoyed with Adam for his intransigence. ‘It’s possible his wife used to beat him up. He never struck me as a violent sort of person. Quite the opposite, in fact. He seems quite a weak character. I think it’s possible he’s telling the truth.’
Sam thought it must be humiliating for him to admit that his wife used to beat him up.
‘No man would admit to that unless it was true.’
Geraldine refrained from pointing out that Sam was hardly an expert on men’s behaviour in the context of intimate relationships. She was not sure she agreed with Sam’s opinion. All the same, she had to concede that a jury might be swayed by such speculation, as Adam pointed out with a scowl. All Geraldine could do was set out to talk to everyone who might have known the truth about the Cordwells’ relationship.
53
Early the next morning, Geraldine drove to Chris’s workplace to see what she could find out about him. Chris worked as a heating engineer, travelling round to residential properties fitting and servicing central heating systems. The company he worked for was based in Camden. It was a relatively small business, comprising a boss and his son, an office manager, and three other engineers. Geraldine went to the office and spoke to the boss first, explaining that she would like to speak to each of his employees in turn. The boss was not particularly co-operative. About fifty, balding and sturdily built, he gave the impression that he was used to getting his own way.
‘Will this take long?’ he asked. His face, already florid, turned a darker shade of pink. ‘I need to get my engineers out. We’ve got customers waiting. You wouldn’t be best pleased if your heating packed up and the engineer was late.’
Geraldine explained the nature of her enquiry and he shrugged. ‘Terrible business. I couldn’t believe it when I heard what had happened. None of us could. I would never have thought it of Chris.’
Although she was interested in what he had to say, they agreed she would speak to the engineers first as they needed to go out to appointments. The boss would be in the office all morning.
‘Not that I’m not busy,’ he added, ‘there’s always work to do. But I can take a few minutes off to speak to you. Once my lads go out, that’s it, you won’t catch them again until this evening.’
The first engineer was tall and thin, and monosyllabic in his responses.
‘Did you ever see any sign that Chris might behave violently?’
‘No.’
‘Did he talk to you about his wife at all?’
‘No.’
‘Were you surprised to hear he’d been arrested on suspicion of murder?’
‘Yes.’
Despairing of prising any information out of the man, Geraldine finally asked whether there was anything he could tell her about Chris. She wasn’t surprised when he said no. The second engineer was equally taciturn. He only uttered one whole sentence, telling her that ‘Chris was a decent bloke.’ The third man was altogether different. Small and bright-eyed, he entered the room with a swagger and extended his hand.
‘Robby,’ he announced with a cheery
smile. ‘How can I help?’
Geraldine suspected he was more of a salesman than an engineer. Inviting him to take a seat, she asked him how well he knew Chris. He shrugged, still smiling.
‘How well did I know Chris?’ he repeated. ‘How well did I know Chris?’
Geraldine waited.
‘He kept himself to himself really,’ was the disappointing reply. ‘He was never in any trouble, as far as I was aware, and I never heard of any complaints against him. You could’ve knocked me down with a feather when I heard he’d bumped off his missus. I mean, he didn’t strike me as the aggressive sort. But I didn’t really know him.’
For all his attempts to be helpful, he was no more informative than the other two engineers had been. Questioning the boss was equally useless. He more or less repeated what his chatty engineer had said, but in a more long-winded way.
‘He was punctual,’ he said, ‘and he was a good worker. I still can’t believe it. But of course you never really know what people are like, do you? You just get to see their public persona. Behind closed doors, who knows what goes on?’
It was the same with the boss’s son, who looked uncannily like his father, and spoke in a similarly pompous manner, and with the office manager who, Geraldine discovered, was the boss’s wife. They all reported that Chris had appeared to be mild-mannered and conscientious, while admitting that they hadn’t really known him.
Next Geraldine visited Chris’s doctor.
‘Do you have an appointment?’ the middle-aged receptionist asked when Geraldine reached the front of the queue.
Quietly Geraldine explained the reason for her visit and the receptionist said she could go in next. Five minutes later, Geraldine was facing a lively young Asian doctor.
‘He was my patient, yes, and we heard about his wife,’ he said. ‘Is it true that he was responsible for her death?’
Geraldine told the doctor that was what they were trying to establish.
‘And how can I be of assistance, Inspector?’ he asked, glancing at the clock on his wall.
‘Did he or his wife ever come to see you with injuries consistent with physical abuse?’
The doctor hesitated before he answered. ‘These injuries are not always conclusive,’ he hedged.
‘But in your opinion?’
‘Might this be treated as evidence?’
‘Yes.’
He paused again, checking his records before he replied. ‘Chris came to see me a couple of times, presenting injuries consistent with having been assaulted. The first time he told me he had been involved in a pub brawl. He had a black eye and split lip and it was pretty clear he had been fighting. I questioned him on the second occasion, and he was adamant that he had accidentally fallen down the stairs in his house.’
‘What about his wife? Was she your patient too?’
The doctor checked his records again and frowned. ‘She was registered with one of my colleagues here, but there’s no record of her having come to the surgery with any injuries. In fact, although she was registered with us for five years, she never came to the surgery. Her records here are blank.’
‘What about prior to the last five years?’
The doctor shook his head. It seemed Jamie had only once been to the doctor in the past twenty years, when she had been suffering from flu.
‘Is that odd for a patient to only go to a doctor once in twenty years?’ Geraldine asked.
‘It’s unusual, certainly, but some people are healthy, and not everyone likes going to the doctor.’ He smiled.
Chris had told them that his wife didn’t go out much, and had no friends. Geraldine suspected that she had been agoraphobic. She was beginning to wonder what other psychological problems Jamie might have suffered.
‘Doctor, I’m investigating the murder of your patient. If she had any problems, or if there’s anything at all that you can tell us about her, you really do need to share that information with me.’
The doctor shook his head once more. ‘You probably know more about her than I do. We never saw her here after she registered with us.’
‘Did she come here alone when she registered?’
The doctor tapped a few keys and checked his screen. ‘Her husband registered with us on the same day, so I’d guess they came in together.’
While Geraldine had been talking to Chris’s workmates and doctor, Sam had been talking to his neighbours. A consistent picture began to emerge of a woman rarely seen leaving her house. Several of the neighbours described Chris as polite and quiet, others claimed never to have spoken to him. None of them had heard any sounds of fighting in the house, although he had been heard raising his voice a few times. There was nothing to substantiate Chris’s report that his wife had physically abused him.
Late that afternoon, Geraldine went to see the pathologist. Miles smiled when she walked into the mortuary. For once he wasn’t about his grisly work but was sitting in the office with Jasmine, a young anatomical pathology technician who worked with him. They were discussing Jasmine’s wedding plans. Geraldine suspected Miles wasn’t as interested in weddings as she was, but he was putting on a good show of enthusiasm.
‘I’ve just got to make sure I don’t put on any weight until after the wedding,’ Jasmine was saying as Geraldine entered the office.
‘Hi Geraldine,’ Miles looked up and greeted her. ‘Did you know Jasmine’s getting married?’
Geraldine had already spoken to the young technician, but she repeated her congratulations.
Miles stood up. ‘I was going to call you first thing in the morning, Geraldine. I’ve got something to show you.’
‘Must be my lucky day,’ she replied with a laugh.
‘I wish,’ he answered, ‘but the wife would kill me, and then I’d need a post mortem and I really wouldn’t want any of my colleagues let loose on me.’ He turned to Jasmine in mock horror. ‘You wouldn’t let anyone carve me up, would you? Who knows what they might uncover about my ill-spent youth?’
After a little more banter, Miles led Geraldine into the mortuary. ‘Here it is.’
Geraldine looked at two bodies he was showing her, Jamie Cordwell and Louise Marshall, the two women whose deaths she was investigating. Watching Geraldine’s reaction closely, Miles told her that traces of the same DNA had been found on both corpses. It wasn’t a match with anyone so far involved in the case.
‘So you’re telling me DNA was found on both of them and it definitely couldn’t have been from either of their husbands?’
‘Exactly. To spell it out, it wasn’t a match for either Tom Marshall or Chris Cordwell.’
‘But how do you know it was the killer’s?’
The pathologist shrugged. ‘I don’t know who the killer is. I find out everything I can from the bodies about how they died, and when they died, and where they died. But it’s not for me to establish who killed them. I seem to remember that’s your job.’
The unidentified DNA was a physical link between the two dead women. Apart from Chris, there was no other reason to suppose they were connected in any way. Given that Jamie rarely went out and so probably didn’t come into contact with many people, it was quite likely the owner of the unidentified DNA had killed both of them. It might be a dead end, but the lead couldn’t be ignored. It was imperative they discovered whose DNA it was, but that was impossible without a match.
‘Can you tell me anything about this DNA, anything at all?’
‘The individual is male, Caucasian, with brown hair and eyes. That might not narrow it down much, but it might help you to eliminate potential suspects.’
Geraldine sighed.
54
On Saturday morning, Geraldine sent a team to take Chris’s garden apart, searching for any trace of DNA. It was a fairly hopeless task, but she still wondered if an elusive killer could have set Chris up by plant
ing the murder weapon in his shed. It would make sense of the fact that the chisel hadn’t been found when the shed had first been searched. It was one more piece of the puzzle that pointed to Chris being innocent. Of course, it would be virtually impossible to find traces of DNA in a garden, but searching inside the shed might prove more helpful.
In the meantime, while the shed was under scrutiny, Geraldine set to work looking for anyone who might have held a grudge against either of the Cordwells. Louise’s death appeared to have been collateral damage. She had probably been killed to prevent her from giving Chris an alibi. If Jamie hadn’t been murdered, Geraldine suspected Louise would still be alive.
Adam saw the investigation very differently. ‘We know Chris had motive and opportunity to kill them both,’ he said, addressing a meeting of the team. ‘Let’s start with motive. First, his wife. They were hardly happily married. Granted, we’ve established she was the violent one in the relationship. We should have considered that possibility from the start, instead of jumping to the conclusion that he was the aggressor in their fights, just because he was the man. But it comes to the same thing. She was physically abusive and he resisted too violently, or maybe he snapped and fought back. We need to press him on that point and find out what really went on between them on the night she was killed. Who else would have known where the bin was?’
‘Anyone could have seen it outside,’ Geraldine said.
‘As for Louise,’ Adam continued, ignoring the interruption, ‘we know Chris was relying on Louise to give him an alibi for the night his wife was murdered. When she refused, he panicked. He might not have intended to kill her, but things got out of hand.’
When Geraldine reminded him that Louise had tried to leave a message giving Chris an alibi, while she was dying, Adam dismissed that as speculation, impossible to prove.
‘Just because it was written in her blood proves nothing. We can’t be sure what she was trying to tell us. We do know the only name she wrote down in her blood as she was dying. We’ve got enough here to build a case against Chris Cordwell,’ he went on. ‘But if you can find any evidence to indicate that he’s innocent, I want to see it, and sooner rather than later.’
Deadly Alibi Page 23