Songbird

by Peter Grainger

  A flight risk? Waters looked around at the assembled officers and wondered which of them had imagined Oliver Salmon might already be planning to grab his passport as soon as he got back to the apartment before heading for Norwich airport and chartering a small plane to take him to Bergerac. Was he the only person here who thought the entire business was absurd? Even Serena hadn’t said much this morning.

  Reeve was saying, ‘… the CPS will without a doubt hand us a shopping list of what else is required. We’ve anticipated that and DI Terek will be briefing teams shortly. We’re going to need a full work-up on the suspect…’ – and Waters thought “the person in question” and now “the suspect”; she’s avoiding saying his name – ‘taking a look at every aspect of his life leading up to the events of Thursday the 27th. Someone will have the unenviable job of going over every aspect of the forensics again to see what else there might be to support the case, while others will be getting out and about, visiting family members, other places he spends time, where he went to school, all involving the taking of statements. It won’t be comfortable and you’ll come up against incredulity and possibly some anger. Don’t let those deter you. As far as the collection of intelligence and evidence is concerned, this is just like any other investigation – the processes remain the same.’

  No, not a single face looked even faintly bemused at the prospect of pinning this on Oliver Salmon. Marta Dobrowski was here – if anyone else had doubts, it would surely be her but the two of them had never spoken face to face. Serena had her bag propped open on her lap, fiddling about with her phone inside it, and Ford was sitting very upright and paying very close attention to DCI Reeve. It wasn’t often Waters found himself impatient to get to a briefing with his detective inspector, but that’s how he felt this morning.

  ‘I’m happy to take on the forensics, sir.’

  Terek glanced up over the spectacles, first at Waters and then at the other detectives from his and Wilson’s teams.

  ‘Really? I see it as a one-person job, Chris. I don’t need a team on that. It’s basically a checking exercise, eliminating the possibility that defence counsel might…’

  ‘Absolutely, sir. I’d be happy to do it.’

  He could feel Serena’s stare from his left side – any competent and experienced DC could go over the forensics files at this stage. Later, and closer to a trial, more senior officers and prosecutors would do so, of course, but it was routine at the moment. More to the point, he guessed, was her realisation that if Terek agreed and he was in here on a one-person job, where was she going to end up for the rest of the day?

  ‘Very well, let’s do that. Serena and Richard, then. We’re going to need a statement from Oliver Salmon’s mother in Norwich. He has a mobile but doesn’t seem to use it much. When I say he has one, of course we have it now… But anyway, there are messages from his mother. We need to interview her. I’m told there are other children, so you’d better telephone and arrange things.’

  Terek waited, perhaps to see if Serena was going to write any of this down. When she didn’t do so, he looked away from her and said to the group, ‘We’re looking for any indication that Oliver Salmon was showing interest in the opposite sex, and any indication that he could be violent or threatening. As DCI Reeve said, people might feel uncomfortable about this but it’s the job we have today. Persistence pays. As an example of that, I’m going to share with you something we got in only a couple of hours ago.’

  He pushed a button on his laptop and the whiteboard came back to life. More buttons and they were looking at a blurred black and white image, an abstract at first but which slowly resolved itself into a brick pillar on the right-hand side, then a footpath in the centre and on the left, half of a road.

  Terek said, ‘This is a recording from a video camera on a gatepost. The house is the one on the road between Pinehills and the town. The camera was first noticed on the Friday morning when we there at the caravan site, and we’ve been trying to contact the owners ever since. Last night they finally got in touch, and early this morning an officer from Hunston brought us this. There is still work to be done but we have something in this clip. Bear in mind that the camera is used by the owners to see who is at the gates before they open them electronically – it isn’t designed to video the road or the path. Here we are. Note the time in the bottom left corner.’

  27/07/18: 22.42. It wasn’t clear whether Terek had pressed play – nothing seemed to be happening. Something at the scene was giving enough light to make a picture, and Waters guessed that if the people had cameras they also had security lights mounted on the gateposts. A few more seconds elapsed and then a figure appeared on the footpath at the base of the picture, walked jerkily up across the screen and disappeared into the top right. The image was grainy and only a rear view but it was plainly a woman wearing a skirt and a light-coloured blouse, heading along the road towards the town.

  Terek said, ‘This is the first thing we’ve pulled out. There might be more, but we think this could be Michelle Simms. As I said, persistence pays.’

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  As does attention to detail – he’d had that drummed into him often enough. Waters sat down, took out an A4 pad and opened on his screen the file of forensics results. He intended to read it all meticulously, line by line, and to make notes for himself of key points. Death had been caused by asphyxia resulting from strangulation, leading to cerebral hypoxemia. The strangulation was almost certainly manual because any implement or materials used would have left their mark. The bruising on and in the throat was consistent with considerable and sustained pressure; the vertebrae were intact but there was significant internal damage to the trachea, blood vessels and nerve structures. In other words, whoever had carried out the attack meant business.

  Dr Robinson had been right in his guess that there might be a hairline fracture to the right cheekbone – it was slight but was very likely to have resulted from the heavy blow she received to the face. Waters underlined “the right zygomatic bone” once in his notes and then double underlined the word “right”. Then he sat back and thought. Personally, he had never punched anyone in the face – the situation had never arisen, it was as simple as that. He had been punched in the face, of course, not long after he began working with DC. The two events were undoubtedly linked in some odd, orphic way… But the point was that it had been a really heavy punch in the face that had broken his nose. Instinctively he felt it now with his fingers, feeling the little protrusion of bone where the kink was. So how hard did you have to hit someone to fracture their cheekbone, the zygomatic one? With a single blow – the post-mortem results stated clearly that there was evidence of just one blow. He returned to the picture of Oliver Salmon sitting on the bench in the cell, the one in his head that had been haunting him since he first saw it.

  Was it conceivable a boy, that boy, had delivered such a blow? Was there sufficient power in those arms and rounded shoulders to knock down Michelle Simms? And then in those fingers, to close them around her windpipe and deprive her brain of oxygen for what – three, four, five minutes?

  No evidence of sexual assault other than the fact her clothing had been pulled about – and that, obviously, was not evidence of any such thing. It was cause for speculation, though. The killer might have derived some satisfaction from exposing her, from looking at her, but if he had then gratified himself – as some do, he knew this from his rather gruesome wider reading – then Sally Lonsdale would not have missed the proof of it. Maybe a killer who liked to look but not to gratify himself? It takes all sorts, Waters. Or, as they had already discussed, perhaps this killer wanted her to look as if she had been molested. But if you go that way, he told himself again, you’re into a whole new ballgame. And before we finish this point, how much sexual interest do eighteen-year-old males with Down’s syndrome have? Marta Dobrowski had said they vary from having mild to severe disabilities. How does that affect their libido? Can they become so frustrated they are capable
of losing control, of extreme violence?

  Another question was easier to answer. The scratches on her scalp were consistent with Michelle Simms being assaulted and most likely murdered at the spot close to the road. The briars there had provided samples of her hair and skin, torn out as she struggled for breath. So, she had been carried from there to the place where Waters had seen her and been with her for most of the following day. Carried bodily, nine stones and a few pounds, placed on the ground, rearranged a little, her clothing pulled about, the shoe put down, perhaps even the other one put back onto her foot, before the perpetrator took a final look at his handiwork and walked away. Oliver Salmon?

  But the results for the saliva were incontrovertible. His DNA was present on the front of the blouse in three places; the files contained a number of images, and there were four of the blouse. One was of the whole garment, the others were close-ups of where each trace had been recorded. Two were on the upper front of the blouse, close to the line of buttons, the other was on the collar, the left side. All these locations were circled in red on the image of the whole thing, and numbered for reference to the individual sample tests.

  At some point one has to trust the science and the system. It was conceivable, just, that during the process of labelling the samples on that Friday afternoon two had become transposed – that he was actually looking at another man’s DNA profile in these files. Conceivable but extremely unlikely. There was a reason why Reeve had called in experts to do the work. And if such a gross error had been committed, it would be discovered anyway, because if charged, Oliver would undergo repeats of all the personal tests specifically to address such a remote possibility. Proceed, then, on the basis that Oliver Salmon’s saliva is present on that blouse. There is worse for him, we know, but for now, think about the blouse.

  Standing upright, standing on our two feet, our saliva doesn’t usually reach another person doing the same unless we spit at them, or unless they embrace us sufficiently to hold our face close to their body. It was difficult to calculate which of the two possibilities was the most unlikely but Waters concluded that it was the first. Was it possible that Michelle Simms, in her inebriated condition that night, had encountered Oliver on his walk, spoken to him and put her arms around him? If she had pulled him close enough, saliva could have been transferred to her clothing. In doing so, if she had done so, she had committed no offence other than perhaps recklessness, but alcohol was thought to have played a part in 55% of non-domestic violence with injury cases in the years 2014 to 2015; the Institute of Alcohol Studies concludes that this figure significantly under-records the true situation. Drinking makes you more likely to commit a crime and to be the victim of one.

  Waters stared down at his notes. He was on the second page of them, and aware of just how many question marks he was writing. He was also dimly aware someone else had just entered the office, and that he’d lost track of the time. When he looked up, he saw Marta Dobrowski standing at the printer, her back towards him. He watched and waited until she turned, and then he put up a hand – not a come over here gesture, just a hello, but he hoped she would speak to him anyway.

  From the printer, she said, ‘You look busy.’

  ‘The forensics. There’s a lot of it.’

  She took two sheets out of the tray and tapped them together.

  ‘You still working the Simms’ case?’

  Yes, he said – was she? He knew the answer but we go through these rituals of civility, don’t we? She held up the papers and told him this was her account of the interview with Oliver Salmon last night. Then Waters asked if she had a few minutes to spare, and she came towards him and sat in the chair that faced his across the desk.

  She was almost painfully thin, and it was difficult to see how she had sufficient strength in her arms to meet the fitness tests on the dyno. Once upon a time, female officers had to be at least five feet two inches tall, before it became illegal to discriminate against short people, and she would barely have made that either. Of course, Smith had occasionally wondered aloud whether there ought to be a maximum height for male candidates, a figure that was somehow related to his own height – that is, no one should be accepted onto the force who was a certain number of inches taller than himself, unless they had a body mass to match. It was useful, he said, to have a few really big ones like John Murray to do the heavy lifting.

  Waters said, ‘I’ve only watched the end of the interview. Did he say anything about going for a walk that night, or meeting anyone?’

  ‘No. But I don’t think he was able to recall the specific night, not after so many days. I would be surprised if he could. Quite unlikely, I think.’

  Long dark hair, long dark eyebrows, blue eyes and little if any make-up. Marta looked down at the notes and said, ‘You find anything? You looking for anything in particular?’

  He told her the truth – that he was searching for some explanation of the saliva samples other than that Oliver Salmon had attacked Michelle Simms. She frowned and pursed her lips.

  ‘You trying to prove he didn’t do this? I don’t think you do your job properly.’

  Now she raised the long eyebrows and smiled.

  ‘It’s part of the job, testing the evidence before someone else does in court.’

  ‘Someone paid a lot more than you or me!’

  He nodded and she sat back in the chair, not seeming to be in a hurry to go now she was here.

  Waters said, ‘The woman had been drinking. I just wondered whether she might have met him on the caravan site and behaved really inappropriately. She doesn’t seem to have been the most stable of characters.’

  Marta said, ‘Maybe. Doesn’t seem very likely. In my experience – I mean just my brother and the others I met through him – these young men, they don’t have much interest in, you know, the having sex. They want the girlfriend because they see that’s what we do, the other people around them? They want to be like everyone else. They like the interaction, often they want to be sociable. But not the sex so much. Maybe this doesn’t help you!’

  He thought she might be thirty or thereabouts, and he wondered whether she’d been in the police in Poland. Could you get a transfer? The requirements and regulations would surely be quite different.

  She said, ‘Another thing is probably useless information. Down’s syndrome produces many peculiarities because of the genetic linkage. One is that saliva is unusual, more alkaline. Sometimes this causes problems with the teeth as well. I thought you should know – as you are going so deeply into it.’

  She was teasing him, of course, and he smiled at her, before he said, ‘Honestly. What do you make of all this?’

  He waved a hand over the notes he’d made. For the first time, she seemed a little wary – she was a detective constable, he a detective sergeant, and it wasn’t clear to whom she was reporting in Kings Lake Central.

  After a more than usually expressive shrug, Marta said, ‘Not my case, as they say. I think I will soon be back in Norwich. I have some experience but no qualifications. If the CPS decide to charge, they will find experts to interview. They will handle this one with the kid gloves.’

  ‘Your idiom is very good.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘But I was asking you as Antoni’s sister, not as someone from Regional Crimes.’

  ‘You remember his name?’

  She was genuinely surprised but his head was full of useless information which very occasionally was of some value after all.

  ‘OK, then. I have seen Antoni very frustrated sometimes. People say they are stubborn but this is almost always frustration. They feel and understand much more than they can express to us. I have seen him upset, banging a table until you intervene to stop self-harm. I saw him throw a bicycle over a fence one day because he could not ride it. But I never saw him hit anyone or hurt anyone. I would say this is not in his nature.’

  Waters was watching her, waiting, encouraging her to move to a conclusion.

  ‘
So what has happened here… What might have happened here would be very strange to me.’

  ‘And to me. So that makes two of us. But his saliva is on her clothes and in her mouth – that’s not in any doubt.’

  After a moment, Marta said, ‘Another thing from the linkage – a large tongue. In proportion to the mouth, the tongue is larger. You can hear this in the speech sometimes, like a lisp. When Antoni is excited, sometimes he spray a little, you know? Maybe…”

  Maybe, but that seemed like a stretch the prosecution would deal with easily enough. Waters added her point to his notes anyway, and Marta asked whether he thought Oliver Salmon would be charged or bailed later in the day. Just a guess, he replied, this all being far above his pay grade, but he thought bail was most likely. He’d heard discussions going on about the difficulty of holding Oliver in custody, which was what they would have to do if he had been charged with murder or manslaughter – it would take time to arrange something like that. The investigation would go on, and the search for more evidence.

  Voices outside, and then Serena and Ford entered the office – they’d been to Norwich and back, and Waters hadn’t even had lunch. It was the middle of the afternoon. They didn’t come over straight away. Serena was talking, Ford nodding and then he went back out into the corridor.

  Marta looked around, nodded and said to him, ‘Well, I wish you the best of luck with it, whatever you try to do.’

  Waters said, ‘Thanks. But I’m not sure what luck is going to look like yet in this one.’

  She got up and left. When she passed by Serena, the two women smiled at each other and exchanged some sort of greeting, and then Marta went out of the office. He watched Serena as Serena watched Marta go, before she made her way across towards him, the look arriving long before she did.

  Waters asked how things went in Norwich but it didn’t work, so he just waited, and after a few more moments Serena said, ‘That looked cosy!’