Faraday 01 The Gigabyte Detective (9 page)

“Which one in the series would this be - er - following your theory?”

He thought for second. “That would be number three. Her name was Julia Hillman. The coincidence that interested me was that her husband was mayor at the time - the year before Cynthia Adams. The other strange aspect was the fact that the whole thing was hushed up - I suppose because he was the mayor. I was sent along to interview him but he wouldn’t even talk to me. In fact, at that early stage, nobody would admit that it had even happened. The information only became public about ten days later.”

“Then how did you know about it?” put in Paulson.

“Personally, I was just told to go along and find out what I could from old man Hillman by the editor. I don’t know where he got his information from. I asked him the other day and he said couldn’t remember.” Brace gave a lop-sided grin. “I expect it was an anonymous tip-off. That’s what people do when they want to make something public but don’t dare to be quoted. It was probably one of the council staff or an employee of the husband’s.”

Charlotte turned to Paulson. “Presumably someone from uniformed branch would have gone along at the time. Have you got a copy of the report?”

“It’s included with the record of the inquest,” said the inspector. “It’s pretty brief and factual. Nobody bothered to take any photographs.”

“I went to the inquest and reported the findings.” Brace slid a sheet of paper across the desk. “That’s a photocopy of my article. Briefly, the coroner decided the woman had taken her own life when the balance of her mind was disturbed. Her blood had three times the legal alcohol limit. She died some time in the middle of the afternoon. Lionel Hillman had left her resting with a headache while he went off to play golf with some friends. The friends collected him and returned him to the house after her body had been found, There were several people with him all the time he was away from the house, which was for a period of about four and a half hours. The household staff didn’t live in and weren’t on the premises during the afternoon. They provided satisfactory explanations of their whereabouts.”

He took a breath. “The cook found the body when she came in to prepare for dinner. She went along to Julia’s room to ask if she wanted a cup of tea. Mrs Hillman had apparently hung herself with the cord of her dressing-gown from a chandelier hook in the middle of the bedroom ceiling. There was no chandelier there at the time. It appeared that she had climbed on to a chair and then on to her dressing table which she had placed below the hook. Although she was fifty-five, she was still quite fit. She had knotted the dressing-gown cord twice. One end was over the hook and the other was round her neck. She seemed to have kicked the dressing table away because it was lying on its back with the mirror cracked. The doctor said that she would have died within minutes. It took the coroner less than half an hour to reach his verdict.”

There was a short silence while they digested the information. At last Paulson said, “Well, that seems straightforward enough.”

“You’ve got nothing else?” asked Charlotte. “You haven’t any further information or allegations which might suggest it wasn’t a simple suicide?”

“No,” he admitted. “There was no follow up in the paper. By then it was yesterday’s story.”

“So you haven’t found anything to suggest foul play of any sort. You are just proposing that it might have been murder.”

Brace looked worried. “Now wait a minute. I haven’t suggested that it was murder. The doctor who certified her death didn’t find any other injuries and I appreciate that at the time it seemed a simple suicide. My article only pointed out the coincidence of the deaths, This one happened on twenty-eighth June - four days after Cynthia Adams. I was careful to say no more than the facts that I knew.”

“OK.” Charlotte was amused by his defensive attitude. She guessed he would be in trouble with his bosses and other important people if he started making unsubstantiated allegations. “All I want from you is every bit of information that you’ve got. Then I’ll decide if there’s any need for further investigation.”

She watched as he slowly let out his breath. “Now then,” she said, “can we go through the others in sequence? According to your article, the first was Stella Parsons. That was five years ago. Did you check whether there were any similar cases before that?”

“I certainly did.” Brace seemed to have recovered his zest for the topic. “When I discovered the pattern I started working back from Cynthia Adams. I couldn’t find anything before Stella Parsons which occurred a month either side of midsummer. There were occasional deaths of course, but they were all from normal illnesses certified by doctors. There was no need for an inquest in those cases. I was a looking for inquests, and especially of important middle-aged women to fit into the pattern of the last five years.”

“So - Stella Parsons. When did that happen?”

He picked up another photocopy and checked his note at the top. “Seventh July. In time terms that was the latest in the year.”

“And what happened to Stella?”

“It was quite simple really.” Brace shifted in his chair. “Stella Parsons was a brilliant swimmer in her youth. She represented the country in the seventy-six Olympics. I believe she came fifth in the four hundred freestyle. I don’t think she ever did any better than that in anything else, but it was enough to get her into the right circles. She ended up marrying a certain Raymond Parsons who was a big businessman from her home town of Nottingham. He later made a packet by selling out to one of the big multi-nationals and they moved down to Torquay to enjoy early retirement, although he still had some business interests up-country and abroad. They had a great big house in Lincombe Drive overlooking Meadfoot Beach and Thatcher Rock. It’s the local millionaire’s row.”

He took a swig of his half-cold coffee. “Stella was a bit of a fitness freak, went jogging every day and liked to take long swims in the sea whenever the weather was good enough. Apparently she used to swim for miles. She entered the Torquay to Brixham swim when they first moved down to the area - and that’s the best part of five miles. Anyway, it was assumed that she went swimming late one afternoon and never returned. Her husband was away in Switzerland on business. Her house-keeper reported next morning that her bed hadn’t been slept in. Apparently an unexpected storm had blown in during the night. They assumed that she’d swum out too far and had been caught by the weather. Her body was washed up in Anstey’s Cove five days later. It was badly damaged by being bashed about on the rocks during the storm, so there was no evidence of any suspicious injuries. Nobody appeared to have seen her swimming or to have seen anybody else in the area at the time. There are usually plenty of boats buzzing round in the area - fishermen, pleasure craft - but there were none that evening because of the threatening storm. So the verdict was misadventure.”

“I take it there was a doctor’s report?” Charlotte asked.

Paulson nodded. “It was death by drowning, but the doctor couldn’t say whether any of the damage to the head and body had occurred before death.”

She looked at the journalist. “Do you really think there’s enough evidence to claim she’d been murdered by the same man who killed Cynthia Adams four years later?”

“Hang on,” Brace protested. “I didn’t claim that.”

“You certainly suggested the two deaths were part of a series. Did you find out anything to support your theory?”

“Only the dates.” He looked uncomfortable.

“OK. Let’s move on to the next one.”

Brace consulted another sheet of paper. “On 19th June 2006 a well-to-do middle aged spinster called Mariella Prince had an accident crossing the River Dart on rocks above Postbridge.” He ran briefly through the details, adding very little to what Paulson had already told her.

Once again there’s very little evidence to support your theory,” she pointed out. “But please continue.”

The journalist smiled tightly as he pushed two more photocopies across the table to her. “We’ve already talked about Julia Hillman.” He picked up the last sheet. “The fourth in the series, the last before Cynthia Adams, was called Joanne de Billiere.” Brace smiled at her expression. “Her husband Alfred is as English as you or I but he can apparently trace his ancestry back centuries to some French origin. Hence the flowery name. He’s a London businessman and he used to spend most of the week up in town and visited his wife at weekends in their house in Marine Drive. There’s quite a few who do that sort of thing.”

“Are you saying that Alfred de Billiere was in London when his wife died?”

“Correct,” affirmed the journalist. “He lived during the week in his London club while his wife remained in the house in Torquay. There are several people who have testified that he was there all evening on the night that his wife disappeared.”

Charlotte stopped him there. “Did you say disappeared? Didn’t they find the body?”

“Oh, yes. But that was nearly three weeks later.” Brace sighed patiently. “She was last seen alive on Wednesday evening the second of July in the Torquay marina at about seven o’clock on the deck of the family motor cruiser.”

“No-one else with her?”

“No, but there could possibly have been someone in the cabin or down below. About half an hour later the cruiser was untied and left the harbour, heading across the bay towards Brixham. The person who saw her said he assumed that her husband had come home earlier and they’d gone out for an evening cruise. It was a clear night with a calm sea. The next morning it was reported that the boat had run aground on Slapton Sands which is about twenty miles down the coast. When Start Point coastguard went aboard later in the day there was nobody there. However there was also no sign of anything unusual having occurred. The steering wheel wasn’t tied. The little dinghy was still in the davits on the stern. The guy from the coastguard said it was as though the occupant or occupants had just let the cruiser chug gently on to the beach and then stepped off the side. The tide had started to ebb so the boat would soon have been high and dry. The engine had died when it ran out of fuel.”

“
So there was no indication of what had happened to the woman?”

“Of course they got in touch with Alfred the following day when it was confirmed that she hadn’t returned home. But he was unable to give any information on her whereabouts.” He shrugged. “Eighteen days later her body was washed ashore in Pudcombe Cove near the mouth of the Dart. She had drowned and there were no suspicious injuries to the body.”

“That’s a long time to be floating around undiscovered, isn’t it?” demanded Charlotte. “Presumably there had been searches for her.”

Paulson shook his head. “You never know,” he said. “Sometimes a body turns up within hours. Sometimes it can be days before it’s found. Sometimes never.”

“The report of the inquest said it was decided that Joanne must have decided to take the boat to sea by herself.” Brace raised his eyebrows. “As far as anyone knew she had never done that before. But her husband agreed that she knew enough to be able to do it, if she wanted to. It was speculated that she might have been walking round the open deck without a safety harness and lost her balance, perhaps if the boat had been hit by a freak wave, and fallen into the sea when she was some way from land. She could swim, but not very well. So the coroner had no alternative but to find that death was due to misadventure.” He pushed the rest of the papers across the desk to Charlotte. “That’s all there is to it, really.”

“Charlotte was quiet while she read quickly through the photocopied reports. Then she looked up at the journalist. “Let me get this right. You’re suggesting that all these deaths might not be accidental. You are saying that these women could have been murdered by a serial killer.”

“Hang on,” said Brace, “I’m not saying that at all. My article says nothing about a serial killer.”

Paulson weighed in. “Come on, Julian, your article clearly links the deaths to the murder of Cynthia Adams and tells local women not to go out alone. What’s everybody going to assume from the tone of the article? - that there’s a murderer on the loose”

“People may decide to make that assumption.” The journalist had a wooden expression. “That’s their prerogative - but I haven’t said as much.”

Charlotte smiled. “OK, you may not have said it but those are the assumptions anyone is likely to make from reading your article. In each case you are making people think that there is some criminal around who killed these women.” She turned to Paulson. “I take it there were no reports at the time of anybody lurking near where the incidents took place. In the last case, was anybody seen walking along the beach or hitching a lift late in the evening when the cruiser would have run ashore? Isn’t there a road which runs almost along the top of the beach at that point.”

“It doesn’t even seem to have been considered at the inquest,” he agreed.

“If your theory is right,” Charlotte said to Brace, “then all these killings are likely to have been done by the same man - one each year. In the case of Cynthia Adams we know the person was intimate with her, was almost certainly male and was on his own. To support your theory, it seems that the man could easily have targeted wealthy women who were virtually living on their own, with the exception of Julia Hillman. The question is, could he have motives for killing them and a method for doing it. Serial killers normally follow a routine, which seems to be absent here. Do you see my problem?”

Brace nodded. “I suppose so.”