Authors: Paul Britton
‘If that made you feel uncomfortable or nervous, I wouldn’t be upset if you wanted to ask someone else to help.’
‘Absolutely not. I’m asking you.’
When I hung up, I felt relieved. One of the ways I tend to deal with problems is to carry on doing what I always do. It helped to keep my eye on the ball.
That afternoon I drove to Nuneaton, a small market town just south of the A5, between Coventry and Leicester. The town centre is quite compact and encircled by a busy ring road. Right in the middle is the police station which looks like a vast shoebox resting on its side.
As I pulled into the adjacent carpark, I saw a van with blacked out rear windows moving away. Suddenly it stopped and reversed. I’d been recognized by a TV crew, but managed to duck inside before being challenged.
Detective Inspector Tony Bayliss had a broad Midlands accent that sounded informal and chatty, yet a sharp mind lay behind his genial exterior. A family man, Bayliss had a reputation for being old-fashioned and had spent a number of years at Leamington Spa, where I grew up.
‘What some people will do to get their name in the paper,’ he joked, referring to the Nickell case.
‘And all I want is a quiet life,’ I said.
He took me upstairs to a suite of rooms on the second floor - the largest of them being used as the incident room. Clearly, a lot of thought had gone into the layout. Numerous computer terminals were set up in logical relationships with each other, depending upon the task of each operator. The paper flow generated by the investigation was already significant but being well controlled by the office manager. Equally, the police and civilian staff had an easy confidence, despite being obviously tired.
What flagged the set-up as being different from many others that I’d seen was that Bayliss had put a dedicated Intelligence cell immediately next to the incident room. The officers involved had two special functions, to consolidate and evaluate information received, transforming it into useable ‘intelligence’, and to assist in the consideration of how it could be used.
Another room had been set aside for confidential management policy meetings and this is where we settled into chairs. Glancing up at the door, Bayliss motioned to his deputy Gino Varriale to join us. ‘I’ll run through the chronology and then we’ll look at the details,’ he said. ‘It seems to bear all the hallmarks of a thoroughly planned abduction and robbery that went tragically wrong.’
At 8.35 a.m. on Monday, the body of a well-groomed middle-aged woman had been found beside a lay-by on the A444 Weddington Lane, two and a half miles from Nuneaton. Police immediately launched a murder inquiry and began checking missing persons’ files.
Just over an hour later, staff arriving for work at the Woolwich Building Society in Nuneaton reported a suspected bank raid. The safe had been opened and there were papers strewn across the floor. Nearby, a discarded sandal matched the one found lying near the woman’s body in Weddington Lane. The two scenes were now connected and the police had a name - Carol Wardell, the assistant manageress at the Woolwich.
Police went to her home in Bonneville Close, Meriden, twelve miles from Nuneaton and found the curtains drawn, milk on the doorstep, but no signs of forced entry. Just before 2.00 p.m. two officers approached the front door and heard muffled cries. They found Gordon Wardell lying on the floor of the lounge wearing only his underpants. He was gagged with a strip of cloth around his head and tied to a refuse sack holder with his legs over the horizontal bar and his wrists bound with a plastic ratchet-type tie.
Clearly distressed and showing signs of having been beaten, he was taken to hospital and treated for trauma and superficial injuries. Mr Wardell continually asked after his wife until his father broke the news that Carol had been killed. A tear ran down Gordon’s cheek.
‘We waited twenty-four hours before we could interview him,’ said Bayliss. ‘He says the gang jumped him when he arrived home from posting a letter on Sunday night. They drugged him and held a knife to his wife’s throat. Next thing he remembers is waking up next morning.’
Gino said, ‘In the meantime someone used Carol’s personal access code to break into the Woolwich.’
‘How much is missing?’ I asked.
‘About Ł14,000 worth if you include the cheques.’
Bayliss added, ‘It’s not much money for the planning and risk. A professional gang would have been after much more…’ Thinking aloud, he continued, ‘And why would professionals kill Carol? It just draws the heat. One of them must have spoken out of turn or let her see his face.’
‘Or it could have been unintended, an accident,’ I suggested.
‘What about the security code?’ said Gino. ‘A computer at the Woolwich recorded Carol’s access code being punched in at 5.22 a.m. on the morning of the robbery. But each key-holder has a “duress code” with a single digit different from their normal entry number. It’s designed for this sort of abduction. Carol could have punched it in and secretly let us know without triggering the alarms. We would have been there within minutes.’
‘I wouldn’t read too much into that,’ warned Bayliss. ‘In my experience people behave very differently in real life to the way they think they will.’
I agreed. ‘Just because you have a duress code doesn’t mean that when the time comes you’ll have the courage and presence of mind to use it. She would have been terrified: her husband was at home being held hostage; perhaps she thought she couldn’t take the risk.’
Bayliss had already discussed my role in the inquiry. He wanted me to provide an independent crime analysis, which meant evaluating all the facts, reports and observations without reference to any particular theory the police might have. If, independently, I came to the same conclusions, it would reaffirm that the inquiry was heading in the right direction. If not, then they would have to consider other possibilities.
Already, there were aspects of the case that concerned me. It was like looking at a jigsaw puzzle that had been carefully put together and the picture that emerged was of an abduction and robbery that had gone wrong. Yet I couldn’t help feeling that the pieces had been shoe-horned in too tightly.
Bayliss could see my disquiet. ‘You don’t think it looks right?’
‘No.’
‘Well, it’s interesting that you should say that.’
He explained that he’d given me the straightforward scene of crime facts and statements, withholding some of his own concerns so as riot to prejudice my opinion.
‘There’s something in Mr Wardell’s past, isn’t there?’
Bayliss nodded.
‘He attacked a woman twenty-four years ago in front of her two young sons. Almost killed her. He served four years in prison for grievous bodily.’
‘Who was she?’
Gino replied, ‘His geology teacher’s wife.’
Instantly, I grew uneasy. Teenage boys don’t usually launch unprovoked attacks on women they have never met unless they have some form of personality disorder or sexual pathology, or they are mentally ill.
‘You’ll have the original statements,’ said Bayliss. Gino made a note.
But from my point of view this wasn’t enough - so often formal statements don’t contain the fine details that can indicate motivation and state of mind.
‘Can the victim be reinterviewed?’ I asked.
Bayliss raised an eyebrow. ‘It’s been twenty-four years.’
‘I know that, but I need to know what he said, what he did, how he looked … all the nuances.’
A glance at Gino and a nod confirmed that this would be done.
I wasn’t suggesting that Gordon Wardell was anything other than a bereaved husband who had gone through a terrible ordeal. He hadn’t made any attempt to hide the previous conviction, telling the police at the hospital. He also answered questions at a news conference and said how much he regretted the incident being brought up again. ‘I feel it is almost another injustice to my wife,’ he said.
The bearded forty-one-year-old had appeared in a wheelchair wearing tinted glasses and said that Carol had meant everything to him and he couldn’t imagine life without her. He appealed for anyone with information that might help identify his wife’s killers to contact the police.
Bayliss handed me a statement.
Wardell had been interviewed for two days and eventually signed a lengthy statement. He described himself as a warehouse manager for a motor components distribution company, Veng UK, based in Hinckley, Leicestershire. He’d joined the company in June 1994 with prospects of early promotion and elevation to the board of directors.
On Sunday, he and Carol had spent a fairly ordinary day together, pottering around the house and watching television. After dinner Carol had put on a video and watched a movie, Delta Force, which ran out just before the end because she hadn’t recorded it all.
Then she asked Gordon to post a letter for her. It was addressed to a Mr Taylor from Exhall and he imagined it was something to do with her work. Assuming it was important, he ignored the local box which didn’t get collected until 7.30 a.m. next morning and drove instead to the post office in Bishop Street, Coventry, six miles away, which had a large sorting office and would deliver the letter first thing on Monday. Bishop Street, he said, had a video camera on the wall covering the postbox.
Afterwards, he drove towards home and stopped off at the Brookland Pub for a drink. He remembered Paul the barman telling jokes in the lounge and motorcycle racing being on the TV.
After two pints, Gordon drove home, arriving at about 10.00 p.m.
‘As I shut the front door I got a whiff of cigarette smoke. This was strange as my wife and I don’t smoke. I saw the lounge door was partially open. I could see a light from the kitchen. The lounge was in darkness. I pushed the door open and took one step in at which point I was grabbed by the arms from both sides. I could see there were two hands holding my arms on each side and then a cloth was put over my mouth and nose.
‘I remember saying, “What the bloody hell.”
‘I could smell something on the cloth that smelled acrid and dried my throat. My arms were pushed up behind me and then the wall light directly behind me switched on. The dimmer light had been turned down.
‘As the light came on I saw a man wearing a clown’s mask and dark blue boiler suit holding Carol by the chin with his right hand. Her head was held under his right arm in a sort of headlock. In his left hand was a knife with the blade held to her throat. I saw that she was gagged with something and looked petrified …’
‘This man said, “Keep quiet, do as you are told, get down on your knees.” He had a soft Irish accent but it was a bit muffled because of the mask. I was struggling, trying to free myself … I was pushed down onto my knees. As this happened, I felt a blow in my stomach. I don’t know who did it. I was starting to go woozy. They forced my head forward, I felt something being put on the back of my legs hard. The last thing I remember was looking down at the person’s shoes to my right who was holding me. These shoes were black in colour, the lace-up-type with thick black rubber soles. They were highly polished. I remember he was wearing black trousers…’
Gordon estimated that from the moment he stepped into the lounge, to the point he lost consciousness, three or four minutes had elapsed. He woke the next morning tied to the refuse sack holder. He heard the answering machine pick up several calls and the postman arrive at about 8.00 a.m. Distraught and in great pain, he struggled to free himself until the police found him at 2.00 p.m.
Mr Wardell’s long and complex statement recounted a dreadful story yet aspects of it perplexed me. People generally imagine that at times of great stress we have the most astonishing extended recall for detail but the reality is very different. It’s actually very difficult to help people remember, yet Gordon recalled small details about shoes and light switches.
Similarly, he said that three or four minutes had elapsed from the moment the attack started until he lost consciousness. This is really quite a long time, yet the sequence of events he related probably took no more than thirty seconds. What happened to the missing minutes?
Maybe I expected too much. After all, Mr Wardell had lost a wife and had been deeply traumatized by a brutal attack; wasn’t it reasonable for there to be anomalies in his statement?
The SIO had his own questions. The letter posted on Sunday night had informed ‘Mr Taylor of Exhall’ that his cash-point card was ready for collection. ‘Surely it could have waited until the next day,’ said Bayliss. ‘So why go out on a Sunday night and drive all the way to Coventry?’ Even more intriguing was the strange coincidence that the only envelope that had obviously been opened at the building society had also been addressed to Mr Taylor of Exhall.
We mulled it over in silence, looking for explanations. Something had happened which was far more complex than originally described, although I couldn’t yet give it a shape or colour.
‘I need to know more about the state of their marriage,’ I said, making notes. ‘And also more about his work. Find out what he’s been doing for the last twenty years. How long had they been married?’
Bayliss said, ‘Twelve years.’
‘With no children?’
‘Apparently they tried but when Carol couldn’t fall pregnant she began concentrating on her career.’
‘That sort of issue doesn’t go away very easily,’ I pondered.
It had grown quite late and would soon be dark. Checking my diary, I arranged to come back in daylight to visit the crime scenes. Then I collected copies of statements and photographs.
‘Sky News are waiting downstairs,’ Bayliss said.
‘Well, I can’t tell them anything. I don’t know enough, myself, yet.’
‘No, they’ll want to talk to you about the Nickell case.’
I sighed.
‘I’ll send someone down with you,’ offered the SIO.
‘That’s all right.’
‘No, someone can help carry your bags.’
As I pushed through the swing doors, a camera appeared in front of me.
A voice said, ‘Mr Britton, what are you able to bring to this case?’
‘You will have to ask Mr Bayliss,’ I said.