A Shred of Evidence (18 page)

“What circumstantial evidence?” challenged Cochrane. “You’ve got a letter that could be from anyone. You’ve got a detective sergeant who doesn’t believe any man washes his own clothes. You’ve got the fact that I chose not to run across the Green, which was a departure from the norm. You can’t charge me with murder on those grounds. This whole thing is ridiculous. I had nothing to do with any of it.”

“We don’t want to charge you with murder,” said Lloyd. “But, like it or not, you have come under suspicion. Looked at another way, we have been told—and give considerable credence to the information—that Natalia was seeing a married man. A teacher. And we have a letter inviting you to meet a female person—who uses the school’s internal mail system—on the Green on Tuesday evening, with the promise of sexual favours. The letter indicates an ongoing relationship with you.”

Cochrane sighed. “I’ve told you. It’s some sort of fantasy.”

“And Natalia was found murdered on Ash Road Green last night, at a time that you could very easily have been there. You were twenty minutes later than intended getting home, and you account for this by saying that you added half a mile to your run. You do see, do you, why we must regard you as a possible suspect?”

Lloyd looked out the high window at the sunshine touching the trees that ringed the station car park. It was a shame to be cooped up in here on a glorious day like this, he thought. Even more of a shame for Cochrane if he was telling the truth,
which, despite the scenario he had just outlined to Judy, Lloyd thought he was.

But there wasn’t a policeman alive who hadn’t learned the terrible lessons of others’ mistakes, of other times when inconclusive circumstantial evidence was discounted because the interviewee seemed to be telling the truth.

It didn’t go down very well with the families of victims if they found out that the murderer had been interviewed at the outset, and his less than perfect explanations accepted. Especially not if he went on to kill again, and that was clearly Judy’s fear. But less than perfect explanations were often all that the innocent could provide; all the police could do was keep up the pressure.

He left the next bit to Finch. His aggressive style was odd, compared to Judy’s, with which Lloyd was much more familiar. But it was time to let him have another go.

“Weren’t you surprised to find that your wife wasn’t at home when you got back last night?” Finch asked.

“You know that I thought she was,” said Cochrane. “I thought she’d gone to bed.”

“Didn’t you think it odd that your wife didn’t call hello to you?”

“No.”

“But you were late, and that was very unusual, wasn’t it?”

“I didn’t think about it.”

“Do you always wash your own clothes?”

“No.”

“How often do you wash your own clothes?”

“Not often.”

“How often? How many times have you done it before?”

“A few. When Erica’s been away, or sick, or something.”

“If she’s in bed watching a film?”

“Not necessarily.”

“Which film?” Lloyd asked, interrupting the rapid questioning which Finch favoured in the hope that the interviewee would trip himself up. Lloyd preferred to let them talk, but that wasn’t why he was interrupting, because Finch’s method often worked.

It was the mention of a film that he was interested in. He had checked the TV listings yesterday; that was why he had gone out to that Godforsaken pub in the middle of nowhere. He’d already seen the only film that was on—he’d even checked the regions, to see if he was missing anything by not being at home.

“I don’t know!” Cochrane said.

“A video?” asked Lloyd. “Or a satellite channel?”

“No, we don’t have satellite. Just some film on the television.”

“I think there was only one on,” said Lloyd. “And it finished at ten.”

“That’s right. That’s why I said I’d be back at ten.”

“But your wife left the house at quarter to ten, according to her statement,” Lloyd went on. “The film wouldn’t have been finished by then. Why would she leave just before the end?”

“Perhaps she didn’t watch it after all.”

“Perhaps not,” said Lloyd. “But if she didn’t watch it at all, why wouldn’t she have taken the dog out earlier, when it was still light?”

“You’d have to ask her that!”

Lloyd went back to his contemplation of the sky. He very possibly would ask Mrs. Cochrane about that. It was another little puzzle. And little puzzles always interested him. Finch was convinced that Mrs. Cochrane wasn’t being straight with them, and if she hadn’t been watching a film at all, that might explain why.

“Do you deny that what is described in that letter ever took place between you and the writer?” demanded Finch.

“Of course I do!”

“Do you deny meeting Natalie Ouspensky on the Green at any time last night?”

“Last night or any other night! I was nowhere near the Green!”

Lloyd took a hand again. “In that case, tell us where you were during the extra twenty minutes.” He turned to face him. “Now.”

Cochrane sat for a moment without speaking, then took a breath. “I was running,” he said. “I never had anything to do
with Natalie in my life. I don’t know how I’ve got involved in any of this.”

“Then try to remember if anyone saw you on your run,” said Lloyd.

Cochrane shook his head. “I run that way because it’s quiet,” he said. “There’s very little traffic, and no pedestrians.”

“How convenient,” said Finch.

“There was a lorry in the industrial estate,” Cochrane said. “The people with it saw me, but I don’t know who they are, so what good does that do? They’re probably not even local.”

Probably not. Lloyd sat down and looked across at Cochrane. “In that case,” he said, “your only hope is DNA, Mr. Cochrane. And you have refused to let us do a test.”

“If it will get you off my back,” Cochrane said, “you can do whatever you like.”

Theories. Lloyd felt that his always seemed to come to grief as soon as he uttered them; perhaps that was why he did utter them. “Good,” he said, and he meant it. He just hoped that Cochrane really did understand what DNA was all about. “We’ll arrange for that to be done.”

Now, they would have to hope that the rest of the team had come up with something, because unless Cochrane was stupid—and he seemed to be far from that—he had not been with Natalie last night.

“Does this mean the interview’s over?” asked Cochrane.

Lloyd nodded. “Interview terminated seventeen twenty-five,” he said. “Thank you for coming in, Mr. Cochrane. We’ll be in touch about the test.”

“And, just so that we’re not in any doubt,” said Cochrane, as he rose, “it will prove, beyond any doubt, that I was not with Natalie?”

“It’ll prove you didn’t have sex with her last night,” said Finch. “Unless you did. It’s as simple as that, really. It doesn’t prove that these letters aren’t true.”

Cochrane nodded. “Last night will do,” he said.

Finch stood. “I’ll show you out,” he said.

Lloyd rubbed his eyes. It had been a long day; he’d had an early drive back to Stansfield, and had come straight to work.
He needed some rest and recreation, but he had a briefing to attend, and lots more work to do before he could knock off for the day.

Judy was already in the murder room; Lloyd asked her to do the honours, and confessed that his theory had just been knocked on the head by Cochrane’s changing his mind about the test.

The room filled up as he brought her up to date; she made notes, as ever, then called the murder team to order, waiting until the murmur of conversation finally ceased.

“The house-to-house has turned up two people who saw Natalie waiting at the bus stop at about quarter to nine,” she said. “One of these people came back to get something she had forgotten, and Natalie was no longer at the bus stop. That was at ten to nine, but the bus was late and didn’t get there until five to nine, according to the driver. He doesn’t remember picking anyone up at that stop.”

“So she went off with someone?”

“Perhaps,” said Judy. “Or started walking. We need to find anyone who saw her after that, but there’s been no joy so far. She may have been offered a lift, and the tyre marks near the scene make that likely, so we need to find anyone who saw a car arriving at or leaving the service road at Ash Road Green. We’ve had no response to the radio appeal so far.”

“What about the ex-boyfriends? Are any of them possibilities?”

“The most recent is one David Britten, and you have his description. He isn’t a strong suspect, and there is a possibility that the killer had access to a car, which makes any of the boys unlikely.”

“What about Cochrane?”

“Colin Cochrane has been interviewed—the chances are that he will be eliminated from the enquiry by DNA analysis. It looks as though Natalie may have been seeing a married man, but probably not Cochrane.”

“Does that mean we’re back to square one?”

“Not quite. There’s a strong possibility that Natalie went to the Green from the bus stop. I’m hoping we might come up
with something from the bingo club regulars tonight. We want to know if anyone saw her hanging around the Green from about nine. And ask them about cars. You have details of Colin Cochrane’s car in front of you, but, once again, we are not regarding him as a prime suspect.”

Lloyd skipped the rest of the briefing and went along the corridor to his office to try to shift some of the work that persisted in coming in whether there was a murder to be investigated or not.

The theory was that murder room personnel dropped everything but the murder; he was supposed to have someone who took over the day-to-day running of the department. In practice that wasn’t possible, and it was after seven before he felt that he had made enough of a dent in it to be going on with, and turned his thoughts back to the matter in hand.

He had believed Cochrane, even before his decision to cooperate, if only because the man had no pat explanation for the things that had happened to him. He was bright; if he had murdered Natalia, he would have thought of something better than anonymous love letters, a last-minute decision to take a detour from his normal route, and refusing to say why the last half-mile apparently took him twenty minutes. Everything he had said had rung true; Cochrane struck him as someone who simply didn’t know why this was happening, and resented it.

Time to pack it in, he told himself. Time to winkle Judy out of her office and have her to himself at last. He walked through the deserted CID room and knocked on her door, but she wasn’t there; in the quiet building, he could hear her making calls from the murder room, and he resigned himself to wait.

He picked up Judy’s copy of the letter to Cochrane and read it again for some sort of clue to the personality of the writer, but it was difficult, with the purple prose, to get hold of anything, except that it began and ended like a letter from a youngster, and the bit in between wasn’t quite the same.

It was good to be back, he thought, sitting on the edge of Judy’s desk. He had missed Judy, missed her professionally as well as personally. He had been sorely in need of her sheer common sense when he had been faced with his theoretical
problems; he always allowed himself to be distracted by non-essentials.

Judy could cut away the wood and find the trees; she was the sort of person who should be in command, because she always was.

“What’s wrong with the chairs?” she predictably asked, as she came in.

“Any thoughts on this?” he asked, waving the letter at her.

Judy nodded and took it from him, sitting behind her desk. “You know what it reminds me of?” she said.

Lloyd twisted round to face her, and grinned. “Modesty forbids,” he said.

She gave him one of her looks. “It reminds me of those big fat books that women write,” she said. “You know, sex and shopping sagas.”

Lloyd’s eyebrows rose. “I’ve never read one,” he said. “Are they like that?”

“Very. I’ve tried to read a couple, but I tend to give up at about page sixty when I get to saturation point with descriptions of sexual gymnastics and interior decor.”

Lloyd took the letter from her and read it again. Like Tom, he had been rather too taken with the advanced sexual techniques it described to notice that it was a little too advanced, grammatically, for the average fifteen-year-old, given that he thought they were all entirely uneducated in the first place.

That was what had seemed different about the bits in between the sexy bits; the syntax, of all things.

“You think she copied it from a book?” he said.

Judy shrugged a little. “I think she could have,” she said. “But she could have written it from experience, I suppose, if she’s good at that sort of thing.” She smiled a little sadly. “I mean at writing about it,” she said. “She seems to have got the knack of the practical side.” She took a breath, almost as though she had something to confess. “I think she might have been quite good at spelling, if that’s any indication,” she said, her voice light, trying and failing to sound cheerful. “I wouldn’t know about her literary ability.”

Lloyd heard then, for the first time, of Judy’s original
encounter with Natalia, when she had seen her on the bus home. It didn’t have any bearing on the case, but it was unlike her not to have told him before now. It still upset her to think of it, obviously, so he didn’t dwell on it.

“The punctuation and grammar are good,” he said. “Even the bits in between the lurid passages. But they are more basic—the whole style is more basic. You’re right. It does read as though it’s copied from a book, but I think it’s by someone who knew what she was doing.”

Judy looked a bit puzzled.

“You know—like when you paraphrase what it says in history books for an exam. So that you’ve not too obviously memorized it—alter the vocabulary slightly—bring it down to your perceived level.”

Judy smiled. “I was more your maths and science type,” she said. “You don’t get many marks for making artful alterations to the text books.”

“But I didn’t notice any books in the house,” Lloyd went on. “In her room or anywhere else. The two usually go together—writing ability and reading.”