Authors: Elizabeth Corley
The constable, in full swing now, volunteered a suggestion. ‘Two ideas, sir: a reconstruction at the same time tonight and release of the information to the press and local radio – it can’t do any harm.’
Fenwick thought a moment.
‘Agreed. Cooper, see to the arrangements and then join me in the staff common room.’
Half an hour later, Cooper discovered Fenwick patiently going through Katherine Johnstone’s papers and pigeonhole in the staff room.
‘What are you looking for?’
‘A letter, Cooper. A recent letter to Johnstone without its envelope.’ He recounted his discovery and the conclusion he had reached while in her house.
‘It’s a bit of a long shot, isn’t it? I agree – if you’re right, it’s something more to go on, but why would a letter be so important? Why open it there? And how can we be sure it wasn’t thrown away?’
‘But supposing it was opened by the murderer – why? It’s that that bothers me and makes me think the letter
wasn’t
from the murderer but from someone he knew, knew well enough to recognise the handwriting. It looks as if he was more interested in its contents than concealing its existence, which makes it important that we find out who sent it and what it said.’
‘Can I see the envelope?’
Fenwick passed him a photocopy of the original which was already on its way to forensics.
‘Can’t tell much from this – what was it like?’
‘Expensive, good-quality paper. Peculiar handwriting, I thought. Looks as if someone practised it for a long time or it’s someone’s best, not a natural scrawl at all.’
‘It’s that calligraphy writing, isn’t it, written with one of those italic pens. My daughter’s got one she uses for cards and
invitations – things like that. Anything else at the house?’
‘Not that I found, and the other stuff isn’t back from forensics yet. Find the postman, Cooper, and the time he delivered yesterday’s post.’
At six o’clock Fenwick and Cooper reported back to the Superintendent at Division. The murder of a school teacher was sensitive, headline news; the ACC had already phoned the Superintendent from HQ demanding a written progress report by the next morning. Superintendent Beckitt had decided his team should concentrate on solving the crime, not pushing paper, so he had already written most of the one-page summary. He just needed Fenwick to fill in the details and sign the damn thing without getting into a semantic debate about its relevance. Knowing Fenwick he had more chance if Cooper was there. The man wouldn’t reveal his complete lack of respect for the ACC, and what he stood for, in front of lower ranks.
‘This is stupid, sir. The case is only twenty-four hours old and the idiot wants us pushing pens. It’s bloody typical.’
‘That’ll do, Fenwick. It will take very little of your time and, believe me, a fast response will count when you expect me to go back and beg for more resources!’
‘With respect, sir, even so—’
‘Chief Inspector, I said enough. Leave it.’
Fenwick took the warning and Cooper started to relax. Sometimes there was no point in wasting energy fighting the inevitable. The report was, in any event, depressingly brief. So far, they had no idea who the man was that had killed Katherine Johnstone and rifled her house. From his shoe size and the flaky eyewitness accounts of the cyclist seen on the route to Hedgefield, they believed the murderer to be a tall man, fit
enough to have cycled away from the scene quickly, clever or lucky enough to have dropped out of sight.
‘Pity you didn’t surprise him at the house.’
‘Yes, sir, but we cut the sirens before we were near enough for him to hear them so it was just bad luck. We were there within twenty-five minutes of the crime being reported.’
‘Why so defensive all of a sudden? I wasn’t accusing you!’
But the Superintendent knew why and now Fenwick knew too that the fact they had so closely missed the intruder at Johnstone’s house would be put in the most positive possible light.
‘Can we be sure the person at her house was the murderer, not just an opportunist thief who took her keys?’
‘We can’t be one hundred percent sure yet because we still haven’t received the forensic report on the samples from her house, but it looks very likely. We’ve got bike tracks at the school that match those at her house, sightings of the same cyclist en route, footprints that are roughly the same size so far as we can tell. We’ll know better tomorrow morning when we get the next reports.’
‘Are you getting what you need from forensics?’
‘They’re doing their best but half of them seem to be away. We’ve got priority it’s just lack of resources.’
‘Much outstanding still?’
‘Well, the report on her house, research on the knife – Pendlebury gave us an idea to follow up – detailed analysis of all the footprints. SOCO did a bloody good job at the scene itself, preserving prints despite the rain. Then there’s hairs from her house, elimination on those once we’ve found out who’s been there recently; the tyre tracks, like I’ve said. Anything else, Cooper?’
‘There’s the envelope, sir. They’ve got that.’
‘The envelope?’
Fenwick had to explain about the envelope. The Superintendent looked no happier once he had finished.
‘So no motive, no suspects, no theory, nothing.’
‘No suspects, no, and to call it a theory would be pushing it
but I have some ideas.’ Fenwick hesitated.
‘Well, go on then, don’t stop there.’
‘They’re not for the report, right, sir? Not yet.’
‘All right, all right.’
‘Well, somebody has gone to a lot of trouble to make this look like a random killing, but I don’t think it was.’
‘Why not?’
‘There’s the hypodermic, for a start. No trace of drugs on it – and how many addicts do you know who use clean needles, let alone are stupid enough to lose them? Then there’s the killing itself. Pendlebury describes the death wound as precise, almost professional, and the damage done to her after death was restricted to her clothes. There was no frenzy.’
‘The photographs looked bloody frenzied to me!’
‘I can understand that, sir. With that sort of death the blood is spectacular but the mess is created by the sheer pressure of the blood as it left her body. And that’s another thing, we’ll know more when I get more information from forensics, but I’ve asked them to work out how much she moved around after her throat was cut. You see, Pendlebury’s view is that she was held still while she died. Not many people would do that once they’d cut someone’s throat.’
‘So this is someone who knew what they were doing. Had done it before, perhaps. Any matches to HOLMES?’ He was referring to the Home Office computer on which data from major investigations was held.
‘None at all.’
‘Hmm. What about boyfriend or family?’
‘No trace of the former, and the immediate family all appear to have alibis. We’re checking on them now. Her father’s coming in tomorrow to identify her.’
There was a silence. All the men in the room had daughters and for a moment they could think of nothing but the horror the man would face.
‘Nothing more for now then?’ The Superintendent spoke briskly. Fenwick and Cooper shook their heads. ‘We’ve got to get this bastard, Fenwick. Get out there and do it, will you?’
‘Andrew, I don’t care what case you’re working on, you have to come with me to the specialist on Monday. He’s your son, for heaven’s sake, and there’s something seriously wrong with him.’
Fenwick had had no peace since arriving home late and dejected after his meeting with the Superintendent. The case was slipping away from him. His mother had been waiting for him with a contained but palpable determination. She was a patient woman until she became fixed on an idea and she had nagged him incessantly about the importance of the appointment with the specialist. Over the previous six weeks Christopher had become more withdrawn – sliding from communicating in short sentences, to monosyllabic grunts until he had finally retreated into a silence not one of them could penetrate. And all the while he stared out at the world, confused and frightened.
Fenwick wanted to hug him and take away the awful pain he could see lurking behind his eyes but when he tried, the boy remained stiff and wooden in his arms. Or worse, only the day before Chris had screamed, a high-pitched, insistent wail, from the time his father had touched him to the point where he had given up and stepped away.
‘Monday’s a difficult day. I’m in the middle of a murder investigation, remember.’
‘As if you’d let me forget. But this time I’m not letting go. He’s only a wee boy – and he needs you there. There is
simply no one else to go in your place.’
Chewing and swallowing his meat pie was suddenly too much for Fenwick and he pushed his half-finished meal aside. Another delay in the detailed forensic reports meant he was already losing twelve hours, and further delays would only make matters worse.
He had few ideas left to go on. The crime had happened too late for the copy deadline for the local paper and, although the story of the man with the yellow cape would be carried by the nationals, giving the case fresh prominence, he was expecting the local coverage of the reconstruction to produce more results. But that was still a full week away.
‘I’ll spend a few hours with the children tomorrow before I go in; I can’t take the day off because forensics will be delivering their report.’
‘And Monday?’
‘I’ll see.’
‘That’s just not
good
enough, Andrew.’ His mother brought the flat of her hand down sharply, making the cutlery jump and Fenwick flinch with reflex memory. ‘You simply don’t realise what’s been happening over the last few weeks. He’s a very sick boy.’ She abruptly quietened her voice, which had been rising in anger. ‘He really is very, very poorly, Andrew. And he needs your help. I’m not exaggerating. I know how important this case is to you, particularly after Monique’s illness. I’m not daft, you know. I know you need to push yourself back into work, not least to rebuild your reputation. So I’m not asking for this lightly.’
Fenwick was taken aback by his mother’s sympathy and understanding, in what was for her a surprisingly personal observation. She was a dour, hard-working and tough Scotswoman. He knew, or thought he knew, that she loved him in her own way, and he was sure of the deep affection she held for her grandchildren but not because she had ever told him. Her unexpected sympathy worked where her temper had failed.
‘All right, what time’s the appointment?’
‘Ten o’clock, sharp, at Mount Cedar Hospital. I arranged it for as early in the morning as I could so that you’d have the rest
of the day – and I appreciate you may have to go in first thing but please be prompt!’
Fenwick made a habit of looking in on his children whatever time he returned from the station. Invariably, they were asleep, innocent and unaware of his attention. But he hoped that somehow the sense of caring would last until they woke in the morning and ease the loneliness that he sensed his frequent absences brought to their lives.
As he gently pushed open the door to their bedroom, he was greeted by silence. Since the days of their birth, he’d fight down the irrational dread that he would find them cold and lifeless. He froze as he was, ears straining to catch an intake of breath, eyes pushing into the dark to follow the hoped-for rising and falling of bedclothes.
He offered up an instinctive ‘thank you’, to whom he was not sure, as he satisfied himself they were both breathing and sleeping in their goose-down cocoons. He walked softly to stand between their twin beds. Bess lay sprawled in an untidy, fairytale-covered nest, a loose smile on her face, a faint snore as she exhaled. He stroked her hair gently and kissed her brow. Opposite her his tiny son was curled tight as an ammonite into a foetal ball, only a few strands of fair hair showing against a plain white pillow. There was nowhere to kiss. Fenwick touched his fingertips to his lips and rested them for a moment on the covers where he assumed the boy’s head to be. All that he truly loved lay in this room. If he were to lose one of them now he would fall apart. Pulling back from the brink after Monique’s illness had been tough but it was achieved in silence, on his own. Only he knew how much the necessity to care for the children had carried him through.
In his own bed minutes later, a silent tear trickled icily from the corner of his eye to soak the hair above his ear, to be followed by another, and then another.
The forensic report on samples from Johnstone’s house was waiting on Fenwick’s desk when he arrived in a filthy
temper at ten o’clock on Saturday morning.
A message on his desk, timed at 8.45 informed him that DS Cooper had taken a copy and was in the incident room at the school. Apart from the report there was little new: a few reports on possible sightings of the cyclist that had been followed up and led nowhere and a large envelope from Downside School enclosed Katherine Johnstone’s personnel file. He ignored them and opened the envelope containing the report on Katherine Johnstone’s house. He read it methodically, jotting down notes on a pad, referring to the set of black-and-white photographs that he spread over his desk in careful order. From left to right he set out the photographs of the hall, living room, kitchen with close-ups of the tyre marks, stairs, large bedroom, bathroom. All of these showed orderly rooms, small traces of a careful search.
Then there were the photos of her bedroom and the mess that had been left on the floor. Fenwick arranged these directly in front of him. As he came to the part of the report that covered this chaos he paused and took a deep breath then resumed his reading. Here at last was trace evidence, detailed with scientific practicality.
First there were the two dark hairs. Forensic had confirmed that they were definitely human and not the victim’s, and there was an initial analysis. The hair was circular in cross section, which meant it came from the head; the colour natural; no dyes. It was short, no split ends at the tip suggesting the hair may have been cut recently. It was straight, black, with evenly distributed pigment in the cortext which made it very unlikely that it was Negroid. One of the hairs had follicular tissue attaching to the root so they were going to test for blood factors to cross-match to the blood found on the carpet. There were also promising results from neutron activation analysis as well as an attempt at a DNA profile from the root.