Irrefutable Evidence

by David George Clarke

  “Fine. Give me your email and I’ll send the address and directions.”

  Two days later, shortly after eleven thirty in the morning, Jennifer drew up outside the Fishers’ town house on a quiet estate on the outskirts of Knutsford in Cheshire. Her assessment of the street was automatic, her policing skills still finely tuned. Well-maintained gardens, newish cars, a few casually but stylishly dressed mothers with pushchairs, some joggers. Everyone looking comfortable and relaxed. No sign of any disaffected, out-of-work youth.

  She rang the bell and the door opened immediately.

  “Hi,” said Sally. “I saw you pull up outside. You are Jennifer, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” replied Jennifer, reaching into her pocket for her warrant card, then stopping herself. That was in the past.

  She held out her hand. “Pleased to meet you, Sally. Thanks so much for agreeing to see me.”

  “Come in, come in. Excuse the mess. Claudia-Jane has taken over almost every room downstairs this morning. There are toys all over the place.”

  On cue, her daughter appeared at the living room door dragging a huge cardboard box.

  “Mumma?”

  “No, sweetheart, you don’t really want that one as well, do you?”

  “Mumma?” persisted Claudia-Jane.

  Sally stooped to pick up her daughter with one arm as she grabbed the box with the other. Jennifer was impressed by her physique. At nearly six foot one, Sally’s well-toned body showed that her mention of iron man wasn’t idle talk: she was seriously fit.

  Sally was steering her daughter’s interest back to the living room.

  “Let’s bring it in here, sweetheart. Mummy wants to talk to Jennifer.”

  Claudia-Jane’s brows furrowed as she looked back at Jennifer, who in turn smiled at her.

  “May I get you something to drink? Coffee? Tea? Have you come far?”

  Jennifer was sitting on a sofa holding a large fabric dinosaur that Claudia-Jane had presented to her with the word, ‘Dino’.

  “Coffee would be great, thanks. Black, no sugar.”

  She took a stegosaurus that was now being offered in addition.

  “He’s lovely, what’s his name?”

  “Steg-gy.”

  Jennifer looked up. “Not too far. Nottingham.”

  “It’s far enough,” said Sally, surprised. “I could have saved you a journey. I know some of the people in the new lab there.”

  “Forefront Forensics?”

  “Yes, I used to work for them in the main lab here in Knutsford.”

  Jennifer was hesitant. “I didn’t really want to go there.”

  “Really? What is it you want to know about? They haven’t screwed up, have they?”

  “No, not at all,” said Jennifer, opening a notebook she’d taken from her bag. “What I wanted to ask is—”

  “What did you say you did?” interrupted Sally.

  “I didn’t, actually. Why?”

  “It’s just that you have the air of a police officer.”

  Jennifer laughed. “Oh dear, how transparent. Let me explain.”

  Sally put up her hand. “Continue with your prehistory lesson for a moment. I’ll fetch the coffee. Claudia-Jane, show Jennifer the tyrannosaurus.”

  “Got big teeth!” roared Claudia-Jane.

  Jennifer gave Sally a summary of the case and the evidence against Henry. She had also explained the discovery of her relationship with Henry and what had happened as a result.

  Sally moved a camper van from the coffee table to make room for her cup. The camper had a fabric shark crammed into it looking uncomfortable.

  “They gave you a pretty rough deal. Isn’t there some sort of appeal process?”

  “They didn’t sack me. I resigned because I knew that even the best-case scenario would see me ending up somewhere I didn’t want to be, probably forever. It’s done and dusted now and I’ve come to terms with it.”

  It was immediately clear to Sally from Jennifer’s body language and general tone of voice that she had anything but come to terms with it; that her decision was still an open wound.

  Jennifer looked up from her notebook.

  “What I was really hoping to discuss with you was that given the ton of forensic evidence implicating Henry as the culprit, how likely is it that he’s been set up? I suppose what I’m really asking is whether that is too ridiculous a notion.”

  Sally scratched her head. In her time as one of the smartest forensic scientists with Forefront Forensics, and previously at the now-disbanded Forensic Science Service’s laboratory at Chorley near Manchester, she had seen several cases where evidence had been planted. A couple had involved corrupt police officers while others involved colleagues or relatives of the person originally arrested for whatever crime was being investigated. Only one of the cases had been a murder, but the principles were the same: the aim of the actual guilty party was to divert attention away from himself by associating someone else with the crime.

  “First question,” she said, “is how certain are you that Henry Silk is innocent? Because the evidence is stacked against him all right.”

  “Obviously I’m not a hundred per cent sure since I’ve only met him a few times,” replied Jennifer. “But the more I think about it and about him and what he’s like, the more convinced I become of his innocence. And it’s not only because I’ve now discovered that he’s my father; I had my doubts before. I must admit I haven’t much experience with murderers, but all along Henry struck me as a very genuine man. He doesn’t come across as some psycho spinning me a tale while really plotting the slaying of his next victim; he’s truly confused and bewildered by the whole thing. I suppose what I’m asking for is a fresh but experienced and impartial mind to look at the alternatives.”

  Sally nodded. She loved this sort of challenge and missed it.

  “OK, I should say that it’s possible, certainly, but extremely difficult. It would take a lot of planning and a detailed knowledge of what the lab was looking for and how we go about our work. Obviously there have been cases in the past where people have been set up, but whoever it is doing the framing, the normal mistake they make with trace evidence is overkill, mainly because they want to be sure that the evidence is found.”

  She paused to break up an imaginary fight between two prehistoric creatures that Claudia-Jane was orchestrating and getting quite heated about.

  “You can imagine, as an ex-police officer, how it might go,” she continued. “If, for example, they want glass fragments from a broken window to be valuable evidence, rather than content themselves with planting a few shards like you’d normally find, they’ll scatter half a broken window over a significant piece of clothing and for good measure shove a large glass fragment from the window in one of the pockets. That amount of evidence would always raise flags in the lab and there would be discussions about how to proceed, since the case officer himself might be the person who’s planted the stuff. It can be tricky, a minefield of diplomacy, which isn’t normally a scientist’s strong point.”

  “Do you think that could be true in this case?” asked Jennifer. “After all, there is a lot of evidence.”

  “Well, you know the police officers; I don’t. Is there anyone involved, directly or indirectly, who strikes you as someone who could do it?”

  Jennifer took a sip of her coffee as she thought about it.

  “No, no one,” she said, shaking her head. “I mean I don’t know many of them well, but they are a cohesive and competent team, both the police officers and the civilians. They’re impressive. And it’s not as if Henry’s a local. He comes to Nottingham from time to time in plays, but that’s all, I think. I was on the ground from the start with the evidence; I certainly don’t think there’s been any tampering, and no one behaved oddly, drawing attention to evidence.” She winced. “Except me, of course.”

  Sally smiled. “I’m confident we can rule you out. But I think the answer to your main question is yes and no. There’s a go
od variety of evidence — fibre transfers, hair, fingerprints from the victim, positive DNA matches, the shoe in the car, a tyre print and so on. But for each of those, apart from perhaps the fibre evidence, the amount found is within the normal range you’d expect. And for the fibres, the rather large quantity can be explained by the fact that the culprit almost definitely carried the victim some distance while he was wearing a pullover and scarf that would both shed good amounts with such strong physical contact.”

  “But surely,” said Jennifer, “given that Henry isn’t an idiot, he would have been aware of all that. Why would he be so stupid as to leave all that evidence just waiting to be found?”

  Sally absently straightened out the stegosaurus’s spines.

  “I agree, it does kind of beggar belief. But, you know, most criminals are not brain of Britain. They’re driven by lust, greed, hatred, passion, malice and spur-of-the-moment loss of control. Seldom do you see the cold-hearted assassins that feature in so many crime shows.”

  She paused, her brow furrowed. “You know, the one thing that really bothers me is the scratches on Henry’s neck and the corresponding debris of blood and skin under the victim’s nails that are a match with Henry.”

  “Yes,” said Jennifer morosely, “and I was the one who noticed them.”

  “Planting them would really take some planning and execution,” continued Sally. “I’m struggling with that one. And then there’s the CCTV. You say it tracked him more or less from his room, through the hotel to his car, then to the pick up, out of the city, and then back into the city, the hotel car park and then back inside the hotel?”

  “Exactly.”

  “How good was the ID from the CCTV?”

  “It gave the car registration number, which is what led us to Henry so quickly.”

  “No, I meant the images of his face. How good were they?”

  “There aren’t any. His face isn’t visible once in any of the footage.”

  Sally pursed her lips in thought. “Now that is interesting. You’d think that someone as careless as Henry appears to have been would have been almost jumping up and down waving at the cameras. But that’s not the case. If fact it’s the only time that precautions seem to have been taken.”

  “Yes,” said Jennifer, “the visor was pulled down to mask his face, which is an odd thing to do at night.”

  “Very odd and very deliberate. You know, Jennifer,” said Sally, sitting back and smiling, “I find that extremely suspicious.”

  “Why, exactly?”

  “Well, you’re thinking that the killer wasn’t Henry but someone setting him up. Let’s imagine the scenario. The killer would have to have dressed up in Henry’s clothes and deliberately got himself videoed on the CCTV, but he couldn’t risk his face showing. So he’d keep his back to the camera, or if he couldn’t do that, keep his head down. In the car, in order to avoid any CCTV shots that could show the driver’s face, he would pull down the visor — traffic cameras are almost always way above car level so that precaution would be most effective. Was he wearing anything on his head in the videos?”

  “A baseball cap.”

  “Was that normal?”

  “Yes, he wears it all the time to reduce the chances of being recognised in the street.”

  “OK, the killer probably knows that. Now, the killer also wants to make sure there’s good forensic evidence and of course he would want to use Henry’s car, whereas if Henry is guilty, you’d think he wouldn’t have used his own car.”

  “No,” disagreed Jennifer, “he’d only not use his car if the whole thing was premeditated. If he’d only gone out to pick up a prostitute, there’d be no problem with using his car.”

  Sally tapped a brontosaurus against her lips. “Yes, but in that scenario, you’re saying that there must have been a fight that got out of hand, he killed her, panicked and drove back to the hotel.” She shook her head. “No, makes no sense, not even if he panicked. I mean, what would you do?”

  Jennifer was with her. “I’d drive back towards the city, perhaps, and then dump the car somewhere quiet and claim it was stolen. I wouldn’t need to clean up the car in that case.”

  “No, but you’d dump your clothing, surely?”

  “Beyond question. And I definitely wouldn’t return to the hotel with the car and be able to act calm and collected, perform in a play and go merrily on my way.”

  Sally smiled. “Good. OK, back to the framing scenario. If the killer is impersonating Henry, he must have access to Henry’s hotel room to get his clothes. And Henry would have to be absent — no, that doesn’t make sense because we know Henry was wearing them earlier. And there are still the scratches. How would the killer do that?”

  “Remember,” said Jennifer, “that he claims total memory loss after returning to the hotel until he woke up the next day feeling wasted.”

  “So he might have been drugged. You need to get him to think harder; it could be crucial.”

  “Don’t think he doesn’t know that; he’s done little else since he was arrested.”

  “Listen, Jennifer, let me think it all over and I’ll give you a call. Ced will be interested; he’s got a brilliant mind, and if I get a chance, I’ll talk to Claudia-Jane’s parent guardian — we don’t do godparents — she’s red hot.”

  Jennifer stood. “Of course. Thank you. And thanks so much for listening; it’s really helped. I’m more than ever convinced now of Henry’s innocence. You’ve given me more hope than I’ve felt in this case so far.”

  Sally nodded. “My pleasure. Unfortunately, none of what we’ve floated around would mean much in court, not without something else. But perhaps it’ll help in the long run, who knows?”

  Chapter Twenty

  Early the following Monday morning, Jennifer was on her regular run around The Park. In the six weeks since she’d resigned, one advantage of not working all hours was that she had sharpened her fitness. Her eating habits had also improved — three nourishing meals a day instead of snatched sandwiches, pub snacks and filthy coffee from the machine in the corridor. However, she still had no idea of how in the long term she was going to fill the aching hole in her life. Never having contemplated another career, she was floundering emotionally.

  But for now, at least, she had the all-consuming challenge of Henry. She had visited Charles Keithley in his offices in Hampstead, talked at length to Dr Pauline Merriton, the retained DNA and forensic expert, reviewed and reread copies of everything the defence had so far from the CPS. She’d been back to the crime scene in Harlow Wood, now no longer screened off, she had driven the route Henry’s car had taken, both in the daytime and at night, and she had sat in the bar of the Old Nottingham Hotel, walked its corridors and stairways, and examined the car park. None of it had taken her much farther forward.

  It had now been five days since her visit to Sally Fisher and she was itching to talk to her again but reluctant to call. She had felt a resonance with Sally; she’d immediately liked her, been impressed by her clarity of thought, and hoped that she would become a friend. She imagined that Ced, Sally’s husband, would likely be the same as his wife — world renowned in his field of art forgery detection and the author of a groundbreaking computer program for comparing paintings from the analysis of their brush strokes, he had to be pretty special. She’d seen a photo of the Fishers in their living room and been taken by Ced’s open, friendly face, his loose-limbed athleticism obvious in the easy way he stood holding his beloved daughter, his other arm looped around his wife.

  Jennifer pounded up Park Drive towards Newcastle Circus, turned right and was intending to sprint the final hundred yards along Duke William Mount to her apartment when her phone rang. It was strapped to her arm, monitoring her performance and she ignored it until it occurred to her that it might be Sally.

  It was still ringing when she ground to a halt on a path in the middle of Lincoln Circus and grabbed it from its pouch.

  “Derek!” she panted, after hitting the accept
button. “You caught me … in a sprint. What … do you want … at this hour?”

  She heard a laugh from her ex-colleague. “Chasing bad guys, Jennifer?”

  “Those days are over. What can I do for you?”

  “Make me a cup of coffee?”

  “Really? I didn’t think you’d be allowed to even talk to me.”

  “No law against it. And I think you might be interested in what I’ve got to tell you.”

  “OK. Have you had breakfast?”

  “I’ve heard about those. Remind me.”

  “It’s a meal taken in the morning after you wake up. Sets you up for the day.”

  “Interesting concept. I don’t think it’ll catch on in the nick.”

  “Time you tried it. Get your backside round here. The gate code is eight nine four five; I’ll leave my front door on the latch. Help yourself to coffee if I’m still in the shower.”

  Derek looked wide eyed at the plate of bacon and fried eggs Jennifer presented to him at her breakfast bar in the kitchen, her own plate equally large.

  “Do you eat this every morning, Jen?”

  “Yup. Being a lady of leisure has some advantages.”

  “What about all that fat? Isn’t it bad for you? And no toast to soak it up?”

  “You know, you shouldn’t believe all the rubbish the government puts out about diet, Derek, it’ll send you to an early grave. This is paleo, what our genes and bodies are programmed for, and it’s magic.”

  “Where d’you get these eggs? They’re huge, and what a colour.”

  “Organic farm out near Southwell. They have this novel notion that chickens are meant to run free, peck at things in the ground, be the little omnivores they’re supposed to be.”

  “Wow!”

  “Now, enough of Cotton’s Nutritional Tips, what have you got for me? You sounded enthusiastic on the phone, or was that just the blood coursing through my ears?”

  Derek put down his knife and fork, and wiped his mouth on a paper napkin.

  “I was down in Bristol at the weekend seeing a mate from training school, Norrie Frampton. He joined CID down there early last year, about the same time I did here in Nottingham. We like to get together for a few beers from time to time, compare notes. We’ve got a sort of ongoing competition about who’s going to make sarge first.”