Authors: Elizabeth Corley
* * *
In his excitement about the discoveries at the golf club Fenwick forgot that he was due to give evidence on another case in court the following day. He only remembered when he arrived in his office at MCS early with the aim of clearing any work that wasn’t related to Malcolm Eagleton or Paul Hill and saw ‘COURT’ writ large across his diary. He swore but offered a silent prayer of thanks that he’d prepared well in advance. There would probably be a wait before he was called so he filled his briefcase with emails and a copy of the only original papers on the Paul Hill investigation that he’d been able to track down.
On his way he rang Clive Kettering.
‘Clive, Andrew Fenwick.’
‘Morning, and isn’t it a delight to see the sun again?’ Clive sounded in remarkably good spirits.
‘Lovely. Look, the lab is going to process the clothes today and I want us to be able to confirm whether or not they’re Paul’s or Malcolm’s as soon as possible.’
‘Good idea.’
Kettering had a reputation for being a charmer and never losing his cool. It made him popular, particularly with the ladies. He was going for promotion to Inspector and worked hard to prove himself. So there was no logical reason why Fenwick should dislike him, but he did. There was something about him that smacked of the smart arse and Fenwick wasn’t sure he could entirely trust him.
‘We already have DNA samples for Malcolm but we need to pay a visit to Paul’s mother, Sarah Hill. Interview her and follow up on anything you feel necessary. Cook should go with you.
‘I’m going to be stuck in court so I’ll leave you to it and we can talk later. Oh, and make sure I’m sent a message if anything comes from the fingerprints.’
Clive waited on the cracked doorstep for his knock to be answered. The doorbell looked past it.
‘Mrs Hill,’ he called through the letterbox, bending uncomfortably over his breakfast. ‘It’s the police. May we come in?’
The door was flung open without warning and he fell forward before recoiling from the musty odour of decay that assaulted him.
‘You’ve found him!’ A wild woman stared at him with fanatical eyes.
‘No, Mrs Hill, not exactly.’ The curtains at a neighbouring front window twitched. ‘Look, can we come in? It would be better if we were inside.’ Even as he said it his nose was protesting.
He introduced himself and Cook once the front door was shut behind them.
‘And this is Julie Pride. She’s a family liaison officer.’
‘Oh my God.’ Mrs Hill gave way at once to noisy tears.
It was undignified crying. Her nose ran and her face was covered in tears and slime long before she pulled a man’s handkerchief from her sleeve and started to wipe her face carelessly. Clive was surprised to see that it was freshly laundered, in stark contrast to everything else.
Clive and Julie Pride held her gently under the elbows and eased her into a small sitting room. Between caring for Mrs Hill and trying not to gag on the smell, Clive failed to notice the shrine to Paul on the wall behind him.
‘I’m here because we’ve discovered new evidence, Mrs Hill, not because we’ve found Paul or a body. Can we get you some water?’
‘Yes. It’s just that whenever family liaison officers are mentioned…well it’s usually bad news.’
Clive stood up, desperate to get away from the woman who smelt worse than some vagrants he’d had cause to arrest.
‘I’ll go and get you that water,’ he said, much to Julie’s surprise.
His footsteps raised small puffs of dust from the carpet, glinting in the faint daylight that filtered through the filthy glass of the front door. The kitchen was at the end of the hall and reeked of rancid milk. An irregular line of part-empty bottles lined the window sill and more were clustered by the back door. The bowl in the sink held scummy water and streaked washing-up was stacked in a plastic draining rack, the corners of which were thick with slime. He found a reasonably clean glass and rinsed it under the tap before filling it.
‘Here you are, Mrs Hill,’ he said, holding the glass out at arm’s length.
‘Thank you.’ She drank it noisily and calmed down. ‘Where are my manners? Would you like a cup of tea?’
‘No!’ Clive responded so quickly that the others followed his lead and shook their heads vigorously. ‘Don’t trouble yourself.’
His gaze strayed at last to the wall and shelves of memorabilia. She noticed.
‘My Paul.’ Love and pride shone from her face. ‘He was a wonderful little boy.’
‘I’m sure he was.’
Clive sat down and tried to compose the words with which he would tell her that they thought her wonderful boy’s bloodstained clothing had been found, having been buried for twenty-five years. Surprisingly, she helped him.
‘So, you’ve found something serious enough for a liaison officer and for a crime scene technician but not a body. What is it?’ Her mood had changed abruptly and she was now perfectly matter-of-fact.
‘We’ve discovered some clothing, Mrs Hill: a uniform from Downside School; a blazer, shirt, vest and grey flannel trousers.’
‘Is that all?’
‘The clothes had been buried not simply discarded, which suggests that they’d been hidden deliberately.’
‘That might mean nothing.’
‘Maybe but there are traces of human blood on the clothes,’ he said gently.
‘But no name tags?’
‘No.’
‘I never had time to sew them in,’ she said, apparently not appreciating the significance of her words. ‘So why do you think they’re Paul’s? They could belong to that poor Malcolm Eagleton boy.’
‘He didn’t go to school at Downside but we’re looking into it anyway just in case.’
‘They still might not belong to Paul.’
‘That’s what we have to determine. We need to take some samples from you so that we can try and match them to the hairs and blood we’ve found on the clothing.’
‘DNA; I’ve read about that, though I can’t say I understand it. You seem to use it all the time.’
‘We do and we need some from you. It’s only a swab from the inside of your mouth. My colleague will take it. After that I’d like to have a chat with you about Paul and what happened on the day he disappeared.’
Cook removed a buccal swab from its protective container and scraped the inside of Mrs Hill’s cheek before returning it to the tube and snapping off the stick.
‘Is that it?’
‘Yes, it will be enough for us to retrieve your DNA,’ Cook said confidently.
‘And that will be the same as Paul’s?’
‘No, his is unique – he’ll have received part from you and part from his father. I was going to ask you where we might find him.’
‘No idea. He left me after Paul disappeared; hasn’t been in touch since. Does this mean that you’ll be able to tell for sure if it’s Paul’s blood?’
‘Not one hundred per cent but we’ll be able to tell whether the blood is from someone related to you and that should be enough to—’
‘It’s not right after all this time,’ she muttered turning to touch one of the photos of Paul as an infant dressed in tiny dungarees. ‘Where are you, baby?’ she crooned to him. ‘Whose blood is it? Is it yours? Why did you get your nice new blazer dirty?’
Clive coughed in embarrassment and she turned back to Cook.
‘How can you get DNA from my mouth?’ she asked.
‘The little brush scrapes cells from inside your cheek; it’s all we need.’
‘A little brush…a little brush.’ She looked at them in triumph and stood up. ‘Like a toothbrush you mean?’
‘We’ve been able to recover DNA from a used toothbrush in the past. A hairbrush can be good too, though sometimes it’s only mitochondrial DNA and…’
But Mrs Hill was off, moving with more focus than Clive had believed she possessed.
‘Come on.’ She clambered up the stairs raising more dust as her feet pounded the threadbare carpet.
There was a small L-shaped landing onto which three doors opened with space for an airing cupboard that had lost its door at some point. Underwear in various shades of grey hung from its wooden slats. Clive averted his eyes.
Mrs Hill took a key from beneath her blouse. It was suspended on a long silver chain alongside a locket. She slotted it into the door at the top of the stairs and walked inside.
‘I keep it locked in case I’m burgled. No one comes in here but me and Paul.’
Clive came to an abrupt halt as she stopped him on the threshold. The whole room was shrouded; ghostly shapes glimmered in the light that seeped through unlined curtains. As his eyes adjusted he could make out the design of fighter planes on them, faded to grey memories of their original glory. He watched in fascination as Mrs Hill threw back a dust sheet from what turned out to be a chest of drawers
‘Here.’
She pushed a toilet bag into his hands. It still had a Woolworths price tag on the zip, 12p.
‘It’s his wash things. I’ve left everything else untouched but his favourite flannel was getting dusty and he liked the Action Man toothbrush so I put them in here to keep them safe and clean. You can take it but bring them back as quickly as you can. Oh,’ she almost skipped back to the chest, ‘his hairbrush.’ Cook put the samples into bags and sealed and dated them. She watched, delighted. ‘You’re proper policemen, you are, not like the rest of them. I know you’ll find him.’
Clive tried to step into the room but she moved to block his way.
‘Apart from me only Paul can come in here. You might damage something and I couldn’t have that.’
He did his best to persuade her otherwise but she remained adamant so he had no option but to precede her to the dowdy front room so that he could interview her. Even though they’d been in the house for fifteen minutes her smell still caught in his throat and he was desperate to leave.
Clive tried but failed to glean any real information from Mrs Hill. She was obsessed with the idea that Paul was still alive and became angry when his questions challenged that reality. The few facts she uttered were embedded in streams of endless diatribe against the police, her husband and various male relatives who she felt had let her down. Her opinions about Paul were biased to the point that Clive considered them almost worthless and her memories of his final days airbrushed to a rosy glow. When he considered that he’d done his best he left, followed gratefully by Cook and Julie. They sucked in fresh air as they walked to their cars, like smokers lighting up after a long-distance flight.
‘That’s about the creepiest experience I’ve ever had.’ Clive wiped his face and looked at the dust on his fingers. Julie blew her nose vigorously on a handkerchief, sniffed for good measure and put it away.
‘She reminded me a bit of Miss Havisham,’ she said and Cook nodded agreement with a muttered ‘bloody right’.
‘I don’t think I’ve met her,’ Clive mused, missing the smiles that were directed at his retreating back.
At eleven-thirty Fenwick checked his mobile phone for messages; nothing. He still hadn’t been called to give evidence and resented the sacrifice of his time to court procedure. A vending machine grudgingly gave up another cup of bitter, over-brewed coffee and he took it into a corner by himself where he could read his papers in private. The emails he’d been avoiding for days sat on top, accusing, but he ignored them. Underneath was a summary case file of Paul Hill’s disappearance. It wasn’t long and he knew it by heart but he opened it anyway in a search of fresh insight.
Paul Hill had disappeared on the first day of the school year. After the last lesson he had avoided his friends and cycled away from the town centre on his new racing bike. The alarm was raised by his mother at eight p.m., too early to be taken seriously; the police search started at ten when he failed to return home. Police spoke to some of his friends who said that Paul might have been going to Beecham’s Wood. A search discovered cycle tracks and a patch of blood in a dirt car park but that was all.
More than one hundred police and volunteers combed the wood over the following days without success. The search area was extended while officers continued house-to-house inquiries and interviews with Paul’s teachers and school mates. At its peak, eighty officers were involved in the hunt for Paul Hill and a chief superintendent was appointed SIO replacing the then Inspector Quinlan, who had originally been in charge.
Pictures of Paul, an angelic child who looked younger than his age, appeared all over Britain and the sightings started at once, as far apart as Brighton, Cornwall, Edinburgh, Birmingham and, inevitably, London. Each one had to be taken seriously and police resources across the country were diverted to find the fourteen-year-old. Some witnesses reported him in the company of a man. The official police statement was that they were ‘seriously concerned for Paul’s safety’. Unofficially, it was clear from the file that within days the police feared their hunt for a kidnapper would become a murder inquiry.
Three days after Paul disappeared, the police had the breakthrough they desperately needed. The mother of one of his friends, Victor Ackers, overheard her son talking in his bedroom. She distinctly heard him say
‘all this fuss for that poncy fag. I bet he’s gone off with Taylor
’. When challenged, Victor admitted that he thought Paul was ‘a poof’ and that the extra pocket money he boasted of wasn’t from odd jobs as he claimed but because
‘he was some old man’s tart
’.
His suspicion had started over the summer when Paul bought a new bike and started paying for his friends’ ice creams and sweets with crisp five pound notes. When he was seen in the company of Bryan Taylor in Beecham’s Wood by a girl from school, curiosity turned to speculation, speculation to rumour and, like a spark igniting a blaze, rumour swiftly became accepted fact. With the unique cruelty of children, Paul was alternately ostracised and taunted, his summer turned into a hell of isolation punctuated by episodes of verbal abuse.
Victor’s revelation turned the police investigation inside out. At first they continued to consider the boy a kidnap/murder victim, not wishing to fall in with the growing local opinion that he was a runaway, but as they reinterviewed his friends and followed up the emerging leads, independent facts began to corroborate Victor’s story.
Taylor was a well-known handyman who sometimes did work for the council. He lived on his own in a semi-detached house on the outskirts of town. When the police called, a neighbour told them he hadn’t been around for a week. His car wasn’t in the garage and his dog was being cared for by a neighbour who couldn’t take its howling in the backyard any longer. Questions about his personal life prompted non-committal shrugs. No, there didn’t appear to be a girlfriend on the scene, or boyfriend for that matter. But people in the street knew Paul Hill, who they said did odd jobs for Taylor. The police obtained a warrant to search the house for signs of Paul.
In a cupboard in the dining room, behind false panelling, they found a supply of hard-core child pornography: magazines, films, photographs. Some was home-made and in one bulging folder they discovered pictures of a young Paul Hill being abused by a man whose upper body was out of shot. There was photographic equipment in the loft and a bedroom had been converted into a darkroom.
The police search switched to Taylor. His bank card had been used to withdraw cash in Dorking on the evening of Paul’s disappearance but there hadn’t been a trace of him since. Suddenly the sightings of a man and boy resembling Paul became more relevant and the main investigation was refocused to a nationwide hunt. After twelve weeks the police search for Paul eased, despite protests from his parents, who denied any possibility of a relationship with Taylor. Their complaints were handled sensitively but they couldn’t persuade the police away from their theory that Taylor had kidnapped Paul, with or without his consent, and had either then murdered him or was still on the run with the boy.
Police opinion about Paul polarised. Some officers saw him as an innocent corrupted by an evil man. Others considered him a male prostitute who’d become greedy and then grown fed up with life at home where he was dominated by a smothering mother, nagged by an ineffectual father and victimised by his school friends. As time passed with no new leads Paul’s critics went unanswered. Sightings of Paul and/or Taylor continued to be followed up but a month would go by without a report being filed, then three and then nothing. The investigation stumbled to a halt.
Fenwick closed the cover of the report and stood up to stretch his muscles. His knee ached and he had the start of a headache. After another coffee and three paracetamol he looked back over the notes he’d made. All he had to go on was the summary file, one that had been kept at Harlden because the case was never officially closed. The rest of the material from the investigation had moved to secure storage years before. He called the team at MCS to ask how they were getting on with tracking it down. Almost a week had passed since he’d first asked for the reports and evidence to be retrieved and there’d been an ominous silence since.
A sergeant called Welsh had the misfortune to take his call.
‘Thing is, sir, we haven’t had much luck finding the stuff.’
‘What do you mean? You’ve had almost a week to locate it.’
‘Four days, sir,’ Welsh objected.
‘That’s plenty of time. What have you lot been doing? Sitting on your backsides drinking coffee?’
‘No, sir! It’s not our fault. The files were transferred to civvie premises sixteen years ago. It turns out that there was this flood in 1999 that destroyed evidence from Harlden cases between 1976 and ’83. The index for evidence stored from before 1990 is only partially computerised and finding the Hill boxes will be like searching for a needle in a giant haystack, assuming anything still exists.’
‘So what’s happened since you found all this out and decided not to tell me? How many have you got searching the premises?’
There was an ominous pause.
‘Please, tell me that you
are
searching the premises.’
‘Well, we don’t think we’re going to find anything, see. We did recover evidence for the Eagleton case because that came from Crawley and it was stored safe.’
‘So you’re telling me no one’s looking for the Hill files?’
‘Not right at this minute, no.’
Fenwick swore under his breath. They weren’t a bad team at MCS but they resented work they considered beneath them and sulked when he made them do it. He should’ve known that no news was bad news. He told Welsh to organise a search for the Hill files personally, using as many officers as he thought it would take and not to go off duty until he’d found something.
It was at times like this that he missed Nightingale. She was good for him, sharing his obsession with cases that looked impossible. The way they worked couldn’t have been more different. He relied on his instinct and inspiration to create theories that were then tested by detailed investigation he typically delegated. Nightingale was the opposite; she worked bottom up, rigorously going through every logical step, gathering evidence systematically as she went. It could have made her an uninspiring colleague but she had the uncanny knack of finding patterns in the detail that she then wove together until she had a picture. Together they were a formidable team and they had consistently produced results, unlike the original investigators into Paul’s disappearance who had left him virtually nothing to work with.
He suspected that they’d become distracted by the rumours about Paul, with the consequence that their later work was less thorough; there were no references to interviews with Taylor’s associates, the Hills’ house hadn’t been searched thoroughly and Taylor’s car, a Volvo estate, had never been located. More worryingly, there was no trace of a follow-up by the vice squad into Taylor’s activities making and potentially distributing child pornography. Worst of all, he couldn’t find a list of the identities of the other boys in the material that had been recovered from Taylor’s house and which was now missing. It was too late to fill in all the holes, but he’d made a list of Taylor’s known acquaintances and employers from what he had so that they could be re-interviewed, and every one of Paul’s one-time friends was going to receive a visit.
After the recess for lunch, Fenwick was summoned into the courtroom and delivered his evidence with practised competence. Two hours later he was driving back to Harlden listening to Radio Three in an attempt to ease away his frustration with the day. Unfortunately, as the hour changed they started broadcasting one of their ‘educational’ programmes. A twenty-first-century composer he’d never heard of was explaining why he found any structure in composition a constraint and consequently aimed to produce
‘disharmony from the creativity of anarchy and thus reinvent the symphonic form for the new century
’. Fenwick gave the excerpt from his latest work less than fifteen seconds before judging it bollocks and switching to Classic FM. He’d heard the violin concerto they were broadcasting too many times for it to be pure pleasure but at least it had a tune he could follow. During an advertisement explaining how he could sell his unwanted endowment policy his phone rang and he switched the radio off with relief to take the call. It was Clive telling him about the time capsule he’d discovered in Sarah Hill’s house.
‘So what did Colin recover?’
‘Paul’s toothbrush and some of his hair, even after all this time,’ Clive said with pride.
‘Is that all, when you had the whole room to go for?’ Fenwick was still in a bad mood despite his strong performance in court and didn’t bother to disguise his disappointment. ‘If you’d have asked, his mother would’ve given you the lot.’
‘No chance. She treats his room like it’s sacred. It’s all she’s got left and she has it ready for when he comes back. She’s gone nuts with the waiting, I reckon.’
‘And we’re trying to end that waiting, aren’t we? You’ll need to go back if we identify the clothes as Paul’s.’
‘Sir! You’re joking.’
‘No I’m not. I’ll get a warrant and you can take Colin with you to do a thorough search. You can promise her that we’ll return anything we take in due course.’
‘But—’
‘Don’t argue.’
He broke the connection, fuming, and his message service buzzed him at once. The forensic lab had rung while he was talking to Clive so he called them back and was put through to the scientist in charge.
‘Tom, Andrew Fenwick.’
‘Good. We’re about to do the detailed processing of the clothes. I thought you might want to stop by.’
‘I’ll be there within the hour.’
When he arrived he put his jacket in a locker and donned coveralls. Even though it was a cold case and there was virtually no chance of him cross-contaminating the evidence he wasn’t allowed past the receiving area until he was suitably covered. Tom Barnes was waiting for him in the Biology Unit with a scientist he introduced as Nicolette who’d already spread out the clothing inside the safety cabinet. Fenwick could hear the hum of the filter and instinctively followed the extractor pipe up to the ceiling above them. Music was playing loudly and Tom mistook his glance.
‘Sorry about the choice of CD. It’s Nicolette’s turn and she’s a classical music freak. Later on we’ll be back to Duran Duran.’
Fenwick grimaced.
‘I’m with Nicolette and Elgar.’
The accuracy of his observation brought an appraising look from her before she returned her eyes to the clothing in the cabinet. She’d laid them out in the shape in which they would have been worn: vest and shirt side by side with trousers and socks below. The blazer was placed separately.
‘So far we’ve only managed to confirm the presence of human blood because we’ve been so busy with another incident.’ Tom was apologetic. ‘But we’ve taken samples successfully from the containers and each item of clothing and they’re being worked on. I’m afraid the fertiliser sack was plastic so the hydrocarbons may have affected the traces on the clothing. We’ve done our best to reduce that by sampling from areas deep within the bundle and from creases where there will have been least contact with air.’
‘How long before we know whether you’ve been able to extract DNA?’
Tom pointed to a young man at a bench near the corner. ‘He’s working on it now, together with the buccal and toothbrush you had brought in today. We’ll know whether there’s DNA in the samples in a few hours, then it’ll take two to three days to extract it, match against the samples from Sarah Hill and run a check against the database.’
‘What can you tell me from the bloodstain pattern?’
Tom nodded to Nicolette and she slipped her heavily protected hands into the airtight cabinet so that she could illustrate her remarks.
‘There’s heavy staining on the blazer front, little on the back. It’s particularly thick at the end of the right sleeve, as if the wearer had his arm close to a major wound. The neck area of the clothes is relatively free of blood suggesting that if they were being worn when the injury occurred, the blood didn’t come from the head or neck. But as the staining is generalised all over the front and sleeve I can’t be more precise about the location or number of wounds.’