Irrefutable Evidence: A Crime Thriller (22 page)

C
hapter 26

“Y
ou’ve been notching up the miles lately, Ms Cotton,” called Sally as she walked down her drive, Claudia-Jane in her arms. “You must be knackered.”

Jennifer climbed out of her car and stretched, working her neck muscles back and forth to remove the stiffness of another long stint behind the wheel.

“You can say that again,” she said. Then she grinned and held out her arms. “But I’m never too tired to have a cuddle with Claudia-Jane.”

“Jen-fer,” squealed the two-year-old in delight.

“Wow! Flavour of the month or what!” exclaimed Sally. “You should consider yourself very privileged.”

“Soulmates,” said Jennifer, swinging Claudia-Jane around and skipping up the drive with her to giggles and gurgles of delight.

“Seriously,” continued Sally as she closed the front door, “you can stay the night if you want.”

“Thanks, Sally. Let’s see how it goes. I should really get back to Nottingham.”

Sally pulled a face. “Not the best of roads through Macclesfield, and the rush hour traffic can get busy. Anyhow, it’s up to you. The offer’s there and I don’t see how you can pass up on an opportunity to bath Claudia-Jane, and of course enjoy some relaxing red stuff once she’s gone to bed.”

Jennifer shook her head. “I can’t drink on my own; I’d feel guilty.”

“You wouldn’t be,” laughed Sally. “I haven’t made Ced give up just because I can’t drink.”

“What time does Ced get back?” said Jennifer as she put Claudia-Jane down on the sitting room carpet. “I’m warming to the idea already.”

“He’s not been out, except to pound the tarmac; he’s upstairs in his office. He does much of his work from home.”

“Of course he does. How brilliant.”

“Tea? Coffee?” asked Sally.

“Coffee would be lovely, thanks,” said Jennifer as she shifted several members of Claudia-Jane’s prehistoric menagerie from the sofa so she could sit. “I’m awash with tea after my visit to Mrs Taverner. I had to make two loo stops on the drive down here.”

“I’ve been thinking through your investigation,” said Sally a few minutes later as she stirred her lemon and ginger tea. “It’s one of the great things about having a two-year-old: you can use about five per cent of your brain power on them and they think you’re giving everything, while quietly you can use the other ninety-five per cent thinking about other stuff, and junior doesn’t even notice.”

“Ced must find that useful too,” said Jennifer, “with all the forensics floating around his brain.”

“You must be joking,” spluttered Sally through her tea. “Multitasking and man might begin with the same letter but that’s about as close as they get.”

She put down her mug and leaned forward.

“Anyway, what I was thinking is that while you’ve got some difficult-to-explain circumstantial stuff — difficult from your ex-boss’s point of view, I mean — it’s still only circumstantial. OK, you have five hotels over the years where she appears to have stayed under one of two assumed names on the nights when there were murders linked to someone staying in the same hotels, which is weird, sure. But if your boss is clever, and there’s every indication that she is—”

“She’s clever,” agreed Jennifer.

“Exactly. Well, she would have seen the risks and covered herself.”

“How do you think she’d do that?”

Sally shrugged. “One way would be to throw in a lot of white noise. What’s she like? Presumably she’s not a people person.”

Jennifer’s derisory snort summed up her feelings. “That’s the understatement of all time. She’s positively antisocial. She almost never joins in anything with her squads — ok, she’s a detective superintendent and meant to keep a certain distance, but she’s also meant to give out pats on the back from time to time, roll up the sleeves and lead by example. She does almost none of that. And she’s a ruthless taskmaster. One slip and you’re mincemeat publicly; two or three and you’re on a transfer to nowhere.”

“She sounds delightful,” said Sally, with a sneer. “Actually, she sounds insecure. But she’s not alone. I’ve met several senior officers, both in the police and the lab, who were like that. Far more common in the police though. With the police, most of the more difficult ones were in the funny-handshake brigade, which didn’t help since they always look after their own to the exclusion of others. It’s interesting; there are still a lot in the police. Obviously they don’t advertise their membership, but I get the impression that women aren’t over welcome. Not that most female police officers would want to be part of their weird rituals. So if she’s something of a loner anyway, she’s probably even more so amongst her peers.”

She interlaced her fingers and cracked her knuckles, stretching her arms above her head.

“Let’s think about it. For whatever reason, she’s made a plan to kill prostitutes and frame men. Which is the more important to her, do you think? Killing the girls or creating abject misery for the men?”

Jennifer took a sip of her coffee.

“I think it’s the men. Killing the girls is no more than a means to an end. She might have chosen prostitutes because they are easy targets and the mud of apparently using them will stick harder to the men she’s framing.”

“OK,” said Sally, chewing a sliver of lemon peel she’d tossed into the brew in her mug, “let’s not worry about the whys at the moment. She must be psychopathic so the whys are always harder to fathom. If she’s got these two credit cards that she has renewed every two or three years, she must have been planning this lifestyle for ages, probably long before she put the plan into action.”

“It could be, of course,” mused Jennifer, “that there are many other murders where her MO was different, meaning I would have missed them. The thing that occurred to me was that her aim is to get her targets found guilty and sent down. The evidence would be strong, albeit circumstantial, and the trial short and sharp. The target will have been imprisoned on remand upon arrest and almost before he knows what’s hit him, he’ll be serving a long prison sentence. His head will be reeling. I certainly think that’s where Henry still is, even though his case hasn’t yet gone to trial. Despite trying to maintain an outward appearance of cool, his head must be in turmoil.”

Sally was watching Claudia-Jane engrossed in a dinosaur turf war, but her mind was completely focussed on Jennifer’s conversation.

“What a cold-hearted bitch. Do you think she knows her targets or picks them at random?”

“I don’t think she knows them personally. I’m sure that she’s never had anything to do with Henry. The apparent culprits in the other four cases I’ve found out about were something of a mixed bunch. I suspect she’s read about them and chosen them as targets for some reason. But I’m also pretty certain that there’s nothing to link them together other than the fact that they are men.”

Sally scratched her head. “Right, let’s think about her and the MO we know about. She’s got these two credit cards that she seems to alternate using, cards that she probably never uses for anything else.”

She paused as a thought occurred. “No, perhaps she does. Makes a few purchases to muddy the waters. And presumably she uses them in the hotels because that’s what everyone does these days. People don’t use cash in hotels any more. If she did, it might stand out in a receptionist’s memory, which is something she doesn’t want. However, she has to consider the possibility of some bright cookie like you rumbling her. She would need to explain herself.”

Jennifer was nodding, working it out. “Yes, I can see where you’re going. You’re thinking she might develop a pattern of use in hotels for a night or two, hotels that are nothing to do with any murders. That would make the five we know about seem far less significant; they’d just be five in a large number of hotel visits.”

Sally smiled. “Exactly. Makes sense, don’t you think?”

“Actually, Sally, I’m not sure it does. You see, even if she could come up with some reason to use those cards rather than her own for hotel visits, anonymity or something, we mustn’t forget she’s a senior police officer. If she happened to be staying somewhere there was a murder, even if the murder weren’t discovered until later, she’d be duty bound to report her stay, whatever name it was under. And for that to happen five times … No, if it were ever discovered, she’d be in all sorts of trouble.”

“Good point,” agreed Sally. “The police officer thing didn’t occur to me. Nevertheless it would be good to link her more definitely with those cards. At the moment her using them is deniable. It’s a pity you can’t get access to the credit card statements.”

Jennifer’s eyes lit up as she remembered her visit to Grace Taverner.

“I wonder if I already have, for one at least,” she said, reaching for her bag and retrieving the envelope she’d found earlier amongst Catherine Doughthey’s photographs. “Have you got a knife? I’d like to open this with the minimum of damage.”

Sally fetched a kitchen knife and Jennifer explained about the letter’s origin.

“Bingo!” cried Jennifer as she read the contents. “This is a credit card statement for the card in Catherine Doughthey’s name covering six months of last year. We were right; there’s a pattern of spending here that now we’re suspicious looks totally calculated.”

She looked up excitedly as she slapped a hand on the statement.

“And it includes the stay at the Bristol View. Wow! This is great.”

“Or not,” said Sally. “I don’t want to pour cold water, but firstly, there’s the chain of evidence. You’re sitting there holding the letter and there’s only your word to say where you found it, and secondly, if she’s hit with the suggestion that she stayed in the hotels on the nights of the murders using those names, she’ll deny it.”

“Shit!” mouthed Jennifer without saying the word. She was aware that Claudia-Jane was reaching the age where she would be repeating at random many words she heard, and emphatic expletives were a prime source of material. “We’re really going to need something else.”

Sally sighed. “Yes, you’ve got to remember that she’s one of theirs, a senior officer, and they’re going to find it hard to get their heads around the idea of her being a psychopathic killer.”

Jennifer finished her coffee and put the mug on the tray. “There has to be something else or no one will listen. Is there nothing else on the forensic side that could be done?”

Sally took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, her lips put-puttering. They both laughed as Claudia-Jane tried and failed to copy her.

“I can’t think of anything,” said Sally, running over the lab tests in her mind. “Everything’s been covered, as far as I can see.”

As Jennifer exhaled her frustration, she glanced down at her business suit, and then across at Sally’s leggings and long, loose top. She tapped her lips with a finger and thumb as an idea focussed in her mind.

“Could you talk me through the procedure for fibre evidence again?” she asked. “When you have a piece of clothing like, say, Miruna Peptanariu’s jacket or Henry’s pullover, what exactly do you do?”

“It’s pretty straightforward,” said Sally, dropping to her knees to wipe Claudia-Jane’s nose and mouth. “You have a garment on which you think there might be foreign fibres — fibres that aren’t from the garment itself or from anything else worn by the garment’s owner. These fibres would be there from contact with something that someone else is wearing, contact that is normally fairly firm, like when we think that Henry Silk, or rather someone wearing his clothing, carried Miruna’s body into the woods. There would have been strong physical contact and an abrasive action as she was carried, her clothes rubbing against his. So fibres would be, indeed were, transferred.

“What we do is lay out the garment on a large examination table in a room dedicated to the purpose of searching for this kind of evidence. The room will have been previously cleaned — clearly there must be no chance of contamination from any other source or recovery of any foreign fibres would be meaningless.

“In a modern lab, the examination would be in one of a suite of search rooms. These can be designated. For example, there will be one for the examination of victim’s clothing and one for suspect’s. Garments like Henry’s pullover would be laid out on a clean sheet of card or non-shedding paper and any fibres on the surface lifted using adhesive tape. We call it taping the garment. It’s a bit like removing fibres with one of those lint rollers, only the adhesive isn’t as sticky — we don’t want the tape to be full of fibres from the garment itself.

“We literally tape the outside of the garment, then stick the tape to a pre-cut piece of PVA sheet. The tapings are therefore effectively sealed and protected from any further contamination. They can now be stacked and stored for examination under a microscope without worry.”

“Sounds like a time-consuming process.”

“It is,” agreed Sally. “In fact it’s bloody laborious, especially the part where you’re staring down a microscope for hours on end, but experienced people develop an eye for it and can search tapings pretty fast and efficiently.”

Jennifer put her chin into her steepled hands. “Would you only tape the outside of the clothing?”

“Yes, of course,” said Sally. “The contact will only have occurred on the outside. What’s the point of looking on the inside?”

Jennifer wasn’t satisfied. “Supposing someone dressed up in the alleged culprit’s clothing. Wouldn’t any fibres from the real culprit’s clothes or underclothes that were on his or her body then be transferred to the inside of the garment rather than the outside?”