Geraldine checked with the team of officers who had been searching CCTV footage for images of the victim approaching Pope’s Head Alley, to see if anyone had been nearby when he had entered the passageway. One camera had recorded a figure walking along Peter Lane travelling in the direction of the snickelway at eleven forty on the night Grant was killed. Geraldine studied the grainy image of a man, staggering slightly as he made his way along the pavement. His face wasn’t easy to distinguish, and forensic image enhancement had only enabled them to make a positive identification because the time he appeared fitted in with the time of the attack, so they concluded it must have been Grant.
‘If this was TV, not only would the victim’s identity have been obvious straightaway, but all the other images would have been magically enhanced to give us a clear view of a manageable pool of potential suspects to find and interview,’ Ian grumbled.
‘If only,’ Geraldine agreed.
In real life, the film was of little use. There was no sign of anyone following the victim, which suggested the killer had entered Pope’s Head Alley from the opposite end. High Ousegate had been busier than Peter Lane at that time of night, and several pedestrians had been caught on film passing along the street in the direction of Pope’s Head Alley, but there was no camera directly facing the entrance to the snickelway so once again the footage was of limited use. Several indistinct figures who passed by one camera and didn’t reappear later could have turned into the passageway but they might just as easily have entered a side street, a building, or a car, or even turned around and walked back in the opposite direction, away from Pope’s Head Alley. Technical officers were working on different sections of film trying to isolate images and improve them, but they remained blurred. In the absence of any other evidence, this was a potentially crucial line of enquiry since any one of the passersby might have seen something helpful, if they could only be identified and tracked down for questioning. And one of them must be the killer.
With that in mind, Eileen was preparing an item to be broadcast on the local news, asking anyone who had been in the vicinity around the time of the attack to come forward. It was hard to believe, but the forensic team had come up with no evidence whatsoever, and it actually seemed that finding a chance eye witness was the best they could hope for.
‘Do you still think this was a random unplanned attack?’ Geraldine asked Ian. ‘Even now we know the killer left nothing behind?’
He glanced up from his desk and sighed. ‘It’s our worst nightmare,’ he replied. ‘A lucky criminal.’
‘Luck can only get you so far,’ she replied. ‘It can’t hold out against tenacity and hard graft.’
She hoped she was right, but they both knew her words were empty rhetoric. The fact was they had no suspect, and no leads. The killer had struck and vanished without a trace.
‘This doesn’t seem unplanned to me,’ she insisted.
Geraldine had arranged to see her twin sister in London that evening, but called to postpone her visit. Helena didn’t work, so Geraldine could go and see her later in the week. Right now she wanted to speak to the woman who had discovered the body in the snickelway. Her twin remonstrated, but caved in readily enough when Geraldine promised to make it up to her. Geraldine knew there was need for her to do that, but she lived in fear of Helena reverting to her former drug habit and, well aware of that, Helena did what she could to make Geraldine feel guilty.
‘I hate to let you down at the last minute like this,’ Geraldine said, wary of succumbing to Helena’s habitual moral blackmail, ‘it’s just that something’s come up at work.’
‘And of course that’s got to be more important than seeing me.’
‘You know I’d rather see you, but things are time sensitive in a murder investigation. The longer we leave it, the colder the trace becomes.’
‘Oh yes, your all-important work. And the all-important investigation that would grind to a halt if you weren’t there for one afternoon.’
Although Geraldine tried not to feel crushed, Helena had a knack of penetrating her defences. Of course Geraldine knew the police investigation would continue unhindered whether she was working on it or not, but she was stung by Helena’s readiness to assume it was her ego that fuelled her desire to succeed. In fact her dedication to her work wasn’t driven by vanity, but by the need to feel that what she did actually mattered.
‘You know it’s not that I don’t want to see you,’ Geraldine said, trying to conceal her annoyance. ‘You must know by now that I care about you. I’m here for you, and I’m going to go on doing everything in my power to support you. I’ll never let you down. But I have to show my commitment at work and make sure I keep my job.’
She stopped short of saying what they both knew, that she was paying Helena’s bills in addition to her own, and living in London wasn’t cheap. If she lost her job, it would affect them both. Eventually Helena tired of baiting her and ended the conversation, confident she had gained the moral advantage by excusing her sister for letting her down. Geraldine did her best to overlook Helena’s machinations. Her twin had struggled to survive, growing up in poverty and succumbing early to drug addiction. In some ways she had proved stronger than Geraldine, the successful career woman. Certainly she had faced greater hardship in her life, and had done well to overcome her habit. But it was hard to forgive her efforts to take advantage of Geraldine, who was already unnecessarily generous towards her.
Banishing her family problems to the back of her mind, Geraldine turned her attention to her next task, which was to question the young woman who had stumbled on Grant’s body. Still upset by her discovery, she had taken a few days off work to recover from her experience. A police officer had spoken to her shortly after she had found the body, but Geraldine was keen to find out whether she could add anything to her original statement. Witnesses were not always coherent immediately after so shocking a discovery and it was possible she might recall some detail that she had failed to mention the previous day.
A middle-aged woman opened the door to the house in Driffield where the girl lived with her parents.
‘You’ve come to see Chrissie?’ she asked.
Geraldine nodded, holding up her identity card.
The witness was in her early twenties, although she looked about thirteen. Wearing no make-up and dressed in jeans and a loose T-shirt, she smiled miserably as Geraldine joined her in a small living room.
‘I know you’ve given us your statement,’ Geraldine said as she sat down, ‘and we’re very grateful to you for your help. I just wanted to ask if you can remember anything else from yesterday morning? Anything at all?’
The girl shrugged her narrow shoulders. ‘Do you know who did it?’
Geraldine didn’t hesitate. ‘We’re following up several leads,’ she fibbed, ‘and we hope to make an arrest very soon.’ That much, at least, was true. ‘But anything you can tell us would be helpful. The slightest detail could be significant, however unimportant it may seem.’
‘What else do you want to know?’
Gently, Geraldine prompted her to go over her statement once again, but the girl could add nothing to what she had already told them. As soon as she had seen the body, she had turned away and called the emergency services. She retained only a hazy memory of seeing blood everywhere, up the walls and pooled on the ground around a heap of blood-drenched clothes that blocked the walkway.
‘I didn’t even see his face,’ she added. ‘But the thought of it… that it was a dead body…’ She broke off with a shudder.
Geraldine couldn’t recall ever experiencing a similar reaction on seeing a corpse. Not for the first time, she wondered whether she was missing some common characteristic of humanity, because for her the dead prompted only a fierce longing to discover the truth, as though each corpse was a voice crying out for justice.
‘It was horrible,’ the girl resumed. ‘It
really grossed me out. I mean, like I said, I didn’t actually see who it was, but just the idea that it was a dead body… I couldn’t go near it…’
As she walked back to her car, Geraldine wondered what path her own life might have taken had she shared that girl’s revulsion for the dead. If it had been less frustrating, it would probably also have been less challenging. Refusing to be downhearted at her lack of progress so far, she set off to visit Grant’s neighbours and find out whether any of them could add to what the police knew about the dead man. But as before, she learned nothing useful. The neighbours on both sides of Grant’s house, and over the road, reiterated what she had already heard. Grant and his wife had impressed everyone as a pleasant young couple, polite and friendly, and they had appeared very happy together.
‘That poor young woman,’ was a refrain Geraldine heard several times, along with assurances that Grant had been ‘really nice’. The question, ‘Who would do such a thing?’ was repeated, in one form or another, by everyone she met.
Having spent the best part of the afternoon knocking on doors and talking to people living in the same street as the victim, Geraldine went home to her empty flat to write up her notes. With a glass of wine in her hand, she pored over all the documentation pertaining to the case, but it was pointless. The depressing truth was that there was no obvious suspect, and the killer had left no trace. Geraldine had no compelling reason to challenge the theory that Grant had chanced upon a mugger or, if not a mugger, an opportunistic psychopath seizing on a random victim. But she remained convinced that his death had been deliberately planned and executed by a killer who was all the more dangerous because he was cunning enough to evade detection.
7
The mood at the police station was lively on Tuesday morning. Reasonably even-tempered as a rule, Geraldine had arrived feeling unusually despondent, but the cheerful banter among her colleagues soon dispelled her bad mood.
‘Blinking muggers,’ Ariadne complained as she sat down.
‘Don’t you worry, we’ll sort them out,’ a constable told her.
‘They’re just a bunch of kids,’ someone else agreed. ‘It won’t take long to find them, not now we’re on the case.’
‘Brought your crystal ball to work then, have you?’ someone called out.
‘And when we get our hands on them, we ought to tan their backsides,’ a sergeant close to retirement chipped in.
‘You going to do it, grandad?’ someone called out. ‘Mind you don’t strain yourself.’
‘Kids these days, they’re a bloody nightmare,’ the sergeant said.
‘Let’s not tar all young people with the same brush –’ Geraldine began.
‘They’re a spoiled generation,’ her older colleague interrupted her. ‘And God help anyone who says anything to upset them. We mustn’t hurt their tender feelings. What about other people’s feelings, that’s what I want to know. Aren’t we entitled to a little consideration for our tender feelings in our old age?’
‘Nothing tender about you,’ one of his colleagues replied. ‘Tough as old boots, you are.’
‘No one worries about having a go at us,’ the sergeant continued, ignoring the interruptions, ‘or whether any criticism of us is justified or not. And most of the time it’s a load of bull.’
‘Fake news, fake news,’ someone called out.
‘Oh, stop complaining and get on with some work,’ Ariadne said, giving the speaker a good-natured tap on the arm with a rolled-up paper.
‘Just as well I’m not sixteen or I’d have had you for assault,’ the sergeant laughed. ‘Ow, ow! I think you’ve broken my arm.’
‘Now you’re confusing teenagers with footballers,’ someone else said.
‘Hey, less of that,’ protested a constable whose son was a footballer.
‘Let’s get going on those muggers,’ Geraldine said.
In a way she was relieved to abandon her own theory about the murder in favour of the consensus that he had inadvertently come across one of the muggers currently plaguing the city streets. The local intelligence team who had earlier been tasked with tracking down the gang of muggers were now working alongside the serious crime unit. By combining their expertise and manpower, even Eileen was confident they would soon find the muggers.
‘Let’s hope her confidence doesn’t prove to be misplaced,’ a local intelligence officer murmured to Geraldine. ‘We’ve been looking for this gang for months, and we’re no closer to finding them now than we were when we first started the search. And believe me, it’s not for want of trying that we’ve drawn a blank. It’s an impossible task. We’re like a foreign army fighting guerilla warfare in the mountains against an indigenous army who know the terrain.’
‘They’re kids,’ she replied. ‘They can’t hide from us forever.’
‘That’s what we said when we started looking for them. They’re just kids. We’re the fucking police, goddammit. They can’t stay hidden from us. But it’s been nearly four months, and we haven’t found them yet. Not even a sniff of them.’
‘We’ll just have to keep looking. It’s only a matter of time.’
‘Easy to say,’ she heard him mutter as she walked away.
In the light of what she had heard from several of her colleagues, Geraldine began to revise her opinion of Eileen. It couldn’t be easy to remain upbeat in the face of a constant barrage of negativity. For a long time the police had been under attack from the media and some sectors of the public, but now the rot seemed to be spreading. Not only had public distrust of the police grown, but many of her colleagues seemed to be affected by it. The change had come about quite rapidly, due in part to the government constantly chipping away at recruitment until the police were running almost a skeleton service. But corruption within the force itself had done more to wreck the image of the police than anything else and, as was so often the case in life, a corrosive minority threatened to undermine the whole system. The media were quick to pick up on rumours of thugs in uniform bullying and intimidating members of the public. A small fraction of the reported abuse of authority was undoubtedly true, which wasn’t helpful.
Geraldine had noticed a change in the way people reacted to her identity card, which was treated with increasing suspicion and even hostility. The days of the friendly local bobby were over, and society was the poorer for it. She was afraid the police had only themselves to blame for their diminishing popularity. Her fleeting good mood gone, she returned to her desk and spent the rest of the morning organising a team to gather details of anyone convicted or accused of a knife crime in the locality over the past twenty years, cross checking their details on the National DNA Database. If they failed to find what they were looking for, she would extend their search further back in time, and over a wider area.
It was a huge job that would have taken the team at her disposal years to complete without the technology now available to them. But, of course, before everything was digitised the task couldn’t have been attempted at all. An initial search of the national database for a match for their sample from the murder victim’s sleeve had yielded no results. Meanwhile, a search of the crime scene was still ongoing. With her team set up, Geraldine joined Ian who was studying reports from victims of recent muggings. There were around two dozen of them in total.
‘It all happened so quickly,’ was a common refrain to explain why none of the witnesses was able to give a detailed description of their attackers. All the victims had been alone when they were attacked. A few were women whose bags had been snatched; most were men who had been forced at knife point to hand over their wallets and phones. A couple of men had lost a few hundred pounds each, but mostly the pickings were small. While the effort and risk for so insignificant a return suggested the muggers were young, the speed and efficiency of the attacks indicated an intelligence directing their activity. They had certainly been successful in avoiding any serious police
attention. Until now.
‘They must realise the murder was a game changer,’ Ian said.
‘Hardly a game,’ Geraldine muttered.
‘You know very well what I mean. They must know we’ll be throwing everything we have at finding them after this. They’ve put themselves in the firing line in a way that simply wasn’t the case before. The chances are the killer’s a rogue psychopath in a gang of kids who were happy just nicking phones and wallets, and the rest of the gang are going to be running scared now. Why should they cover up for him? There’s a good chance one of them will come forward, as long as we pitch this right in the media and frighten the rest of them enough. They’re only kids. At least one of them’s bound to respond to the threat of being treated as an accessory to murder.’
Geraldine shook her head. ‘More likely they’ll be terrified of the killer in their midst and, worse, they’ll look up to him. After something like this, he’ll be the leader of the pack. They won’t betray him. They’ll revere him.’
‘He killed someone,’ Ian protested.
They exchanged a miserable glance. He knew she was right. In silence they continued reading witness statements. A picture emerged of three or possibly four caucasian youths, probably not yet out of their teens. They wore hooded jackets, jeans and trainers, a description that fitted most of the youngsters in the area. Short of questioning every teenager in the region, they had no way of narrowing down the search. And even if they did set up a search on a large enough scale, there was no guarantee they would find the youngsters they were looking for. The muggers had managed to escape the police so far. It was likely local officers had already spoken to them without identifying them as the wanted gang. Tracking them down was an almost insurmountable task.
Rogue Killer Page 4