Irrefutable Evidence: A Crime Thriller (2 page)

C
hapter 3

The previous Wednesday, 28 May

A
melia Taverner studied the poster outside the Theatre Royal in Nottingham’s city centre.

The Ripper Returns.

A twenty-first century Victorian crime thriller from award-winning playwright Tobias Monkton. Starring Henry Silk of TV’s Runway Two-Seven

She ran her eye down the rest of the cast. It was quite a gathering of TV celebs drawn from a number of soaps, guaranteed to pull in the punters, put bums on seats. She took her stalls ticket from her pocket and walked towards the entrance. She doubted she was going to enjoy the play, it wasn’t really her thing, but she wanted to see her man in action, get a feel for him, learn how he moved his arms and body, watch how he walked.

Three hours later, she felt well rewarded. To her surprise, she had enjoyed the play and been drawn into the plot. More importantly, Henry Silk’s character had appeared in many of the scenes, giving her plenty of opportunity to study him. Although Silk was acting a part, the character he was playing didn’t have any peculiarities — he didn’t limp or have strange twitches — so there was probably a lot of the real man on stage. She’d learn more when she followed him back to his hotel.

As the applause died down and the audience stood to leave, Amelia took another look at her programme, turning to the page devoted to Henry Silk. He was a good-looking man of around fifty with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair and far softer features than the unsmiling brute he played in the TV soap. He was a good actor, far better than she’d realised, but that didn’t lessen her resolve. She’d chosen him, researched him; he was on her list. She already knew much about him from articles in the gossip magazines. He was higher profile than the others had been, but that was good; it was time she upped her game, took a few more risks. The rewards in terms of self-satisfaction would be that much greater, and the abyss that much deeper for a man like Silk.

After zipping up her cheap tracksuit top, she adjusted the plain, forgettable frames of her over-sized tinted spectacles and tied her headscarf over her shoulder-length mouse-brown wig. No one would give her a second glance, which was the way she wanted it. She didn’t hurry leaving the theatre; it would be a while until Silk appeared from the stage door.

From her research on the actor, she knew that he was something of a loner, a man whose intellect outshone many, but who had a limited number of friends. He had a reputation for being distant, wary of others in his profession.

It all seemed rather unfair. He had blotted his copybook many years before, having been blamed for the death of Dirk Sanderley, a young up-and-coming hero of the stage and screen — Britain’s James Dean, they had described him — a potential colossus in the making robbed of his place in history. The country had mourned the young actor and as far as the country was concerned, it was Henry Silk’s fault.

Perversely, while the country had now largely forgiven him, the profession had not. Directors and producers used him grudgingly, forced by their bean counters to cast him if it was thought he would add to revenue. Which he did. In his role in Runway Two-Seven as a misogynistic brute, he was the character the fans loved to hate.

Half an hour after the performance ended, the ‘Ripper’ cast, minus Henry Silk, appeared at the stage door in a guffawing, self-aware fluttering mass. Several autographs were signed, petulant tosses of the head thrown by those who hadn’t had programmes thrust at them, after which they all floated away, heading for the nearest pub.

Five minutes later, Henry Silk emerged alone. Amelia shrank into the shadows as she watched him politely sign the programmes of several women who had waited excitedly for him, smiling at their thanks and regally offering a few words to the eldest and youngest of them. Then, with a wave, he was gone, striding up the street in the direction of Standard Hill and the Old Nottingham Hotel.

Amelia fell in behind him at a distance of about fifty yards. She wasn’t worried about losing him since she knew exactly where he was going, but she didn’t want him to disappear once he entered the hotel. As she studied his walk, she thought about his height. She estimated he was about six foot tall, some two inches more than she was, but lifts in her shoes would deal with that.

She was pretty sure he would head for the bar — his after-performance drink something of a ritual according to some air-headed journalist in one of the glossies who had been granted a rare interview with him. Amelia remembered the article read as if the girl had spent more time telling Henry about herself than getting him to talk. But that was the egocentric way of the young, she thought. She smiled to herself; she sounded like someone’s grandmother.

As she pushed open the hotel’s main door, Amelia was in time to see Henry wave to the receptionist as he turned left into the bar. The receptionist, who at this late hour doubled as barman, scuttled after him.

“Evening, Mr Silk, sir. How was the show tonight?”

“Excellent, thank you, Michael, an appreciative audience. They always are in this great town.”

His empty smile was lost on the barman, as was the oft-repeated platitude. By using the phrase ‘this great town’, Henry didn’t even have to remember where he was.

“Vodka, sir?”

“Yes please, Michael. Would you like one yourself? I’m sure you’ve got a long night ahead of you.”

“Thank you, sir, that’s very kind. A small one, if I may.”

Amelia slipped out of line of sight of the bar. She had visited twice before in the past two months and she knew exactly where the CCTV cameras were. She wanted to check once again that there were no new ones and that none of the existing ones had been moved. She glanced around and was pleased to find everything was the same and that standing where she was, her presence was not being recorded. The only camera aimed in her general direction was focussed on the main door, and Amelia had been careful to keep her head down as she passed through its field of view.

She strolled over to a table on which a dozen tour brochures were laid out. ‘City Walks’, ‘The Castle’, ‘The Old Markets’, and one that caught her eye, ‘Visit Sherwood Forest’. All in good time, she thought.

“Can I help you, madam?” said Michael on his way back to the desk.

“I’m fine, thank you,” said Amelia, using a soft Edinburgh accent. “I’m waiting for a friend.”

Michael turned away, his duty done, and immediately forgot her.

Amelia looked back to the brochures.

A few seconds later another voice sounded behind her.

“Goodnight, Michael.”

Henry was heading for the lift.

“Goodnight, sir, and thank you.”

Once the doors had closed, Amelia turned to watch the lift’s progress on the indicator. It stopped at the second of the four floors before returning empty to the ground floor.

One more task for the evening, then home. She walked to the rear of the lobby where a door next to the washroom doors led onto stairs that would not only take her up to the guest rooms, but also down to the guest car park, a gated, open area behind the hotel. She knew that while there was a CCTV camera aimed at the lift doors at the car park level, the door from the stairs fifteen feet away was not in its field of view. She would still have to be careful but she didn’t need to move far from the door since she was merely checking that Henry Silk’s car was there.

She opened the door from the stairs. and glanced into the car park. The lights only triggered with movement so she waited while her eyes adjusted before looking around. There it was: a dark green Nissan X-Trail. She smiled, having ticked the final box, and climbed the stairs back to the lobby.

Slipping quietly through the door, she was ready with an excuse that she’d lost her way to the loo, but Michael was engrossed in a card game on his computer screen and didn’t even register her presence. She crossed the reception and left through the main door, walking across town to where she had left her white van on a meter in a street with no cameras.

C
hapter 4

Thursday 29 May

F
or her final checks the following evening, Amelia swapped her drab, shoulder-length wig for something darker, the hair shorter but with strong waves set in it, the style old-fashioned. Her shapeless pleated skirt, full cotton blouse buttoned up to the neck and slightly too large navy-blue acrylic jacket labelled her ‘holy-roller’ to anyone whose glance lingered on her for more than a moment. She had fattened her face with cotton pads in her mouth, removed all make-up and scrubbed her cheeks. To reduce the visual impact of her face even more, she had put on the plainest spectacles in her collection, their bottle-bottom lenses making her eyes water.

She was sitting in the lobby of the Old Nottingham, seemingly engrossed in a copy of Christianity Digest but actually looking over the rims of the spectacles to watch Michael’s movements and checking yet again on the locations of the CCTV cameras. She was also waiting for Henry Silk to return following his performance. If he was true to form, he should stride through the main door in the next five minutes or so and head to the bar for his nightly glass of vodka.

Exactly six minutes later, she heard brisk footsteps approaching the hotel. As the door opened and Henry walked through, Amelia reached down to her bag on the floor as if to retrieve something, turning her head away from Henry’s line of sight as she did. But he didn’t even notice her, his attention taken by Michael who had looked up as the door opened and called a greeting across the lobby.

“Good evening, sir, I’ll be with you once I’ve finished logging this booking. It’ll only take a jiffy.”

“Take your time, Michael. There’s no rush.”

In anticipation of Henry Silk’s nightly generosity, Michael’s tapping on his keyboard became more urgent, reaching a crescendo with a noisy stab at the return key and an eager glance in the direction of the bar. As he stood, he looked around the lobby in case there were any guests requiring attention, but there was only the drably dressed, God-bothering type sitting sideways to him in the far corner. Michael half-squinted his eyes as they settled on her, imagining an assignation with a local high-up from the church. Good luck to him, he thought. I reckon her knees are probably glued together.

As she heard Michael walk from the reception desk, Amelia turned her head. In the reflection from one of a pair of open glass doors separating the lobby from the bar, she could see Henry sitting on a bar stool. He appeared to be looking at something above eye level. Then she remembered; there was a television on the wall.

“One of yours, sir?” she heard Michael ask as he glanced at the movie playing on the screen.

There was a dismissive bark from Henry. “Well, as it happens, I
am
actually in it, but I don’t think I could call it one of mine. In a few moments you’ll see me step forward from that line of centurions and utter the immortal words, ‘Immediately, commander,’ with all the thespian talent I could muster.”

He gave a wry smile as he glanced at the barman.

“I was only nineteen and I was keen to do anything. Burton was rumoured to be taking the lead, but he upped and died, so the part went to someone else. I was on set for all of two days, so it was hardly the big time I imagined it would be. We were all decked out in thermals for that shot. It was freezing and those uniforms were not made for warmth.”

He took his drink, waving a hand at the bottle to indicate that Michael should pour himself one.

“Happy days,” he said, emptying his glass. “I’m off, Michael. Enjoy the movie.”

Michael’s ‘goodnight, sir’ followed Henry out of the bar as he walked towards the lift, his back to Amelia who was waiting to double-check the floor where Henry was staying.

Satisfied, Amelia picked up her bag and headed for the door.

Three hundred yards along the main road from Standard Hill, she stopped by a telephone booth she had earlier confirmed was unvandalised. She opened her bag, found the card she’d picked up at the Old Nottingham and dialled the number. It took a few rings to answer since Michael was away from the desk in the bar watching the movie.

“Old Nottingham Hotel. Good evening, Michael speaking. How may I help you?”

“Hello. Yes, I’d like to book a room for tomorrow evening.”

Amelia had shed the Scottish accent and was now slightly strident Home Counties.

“Certainly, madam. May I take your name?”

“Taverner. Mrs Amelia Taverner.”

“Thank you, Mrs Taverner. Could I possibly have a credit card number to guarantee the booking?”

Amelia read out a number and followed by asking if she could have a room on the second floor. “I stayed at your hotel a couple of years ago. Like to be on the same floor, if I may.”

“Absolutely, madam, that’s no problem at all,” replied Michael, wondering what could be so special about the second floor. The views were pretty ordinary on all the floors.

Amelia put down the receiver and stared across Maid Marion Way towards the lights of the city. She smiled to herself. Everything was falling perfectly into place.

C
hapter 5

Sunday 1 June, 9 a.m.

J
ennifer Cotton ran up the stairs to the first floor of the old police station that was now the Nottingham City and County Serious Crime Formation HQ, the handbag bouncing on her hip in danger of knocking her phone and coffee cup from her hand.

Before pushing open the door to the incident room, she peered through its scratched plastic window to see if the meeting had started. To her relief, she saw her team’s boss, detective chief inspector Mike Hurst, walking slowly to the front of the room while deep in conversation with the ‘guv’, DI Rob McPherson.

Jennifer shuffled past several rows of seats to a vacant spot Derek Thyme had kept for her. He grinned at her triumphantly as she sat down.

“Don’t look so smug, Derek. Arriving before me once in a lifetime doesn’t wipe out your reputation.”

“Perhaps I’ve changed my ways.”

“Perhaps that bright yellow sun out there is about to reverse direction and set.”

Derek wasn’t about to throw away his brief advantage. “Not like you to be late, Jen.”

“Sodding alarm didn’t go off and then the cat I’m looking after for a neighbour threw up over my shoes.”

Derek wrinkled his nose in distaste. “Can’t expect anything else from a cat; they’re all the same: parasites. No time for them, me.”

“It’s just as well your mother didn’t take that attitude when you were decorating her blouse as a babe-in-arms.”

Derek grunted. On the athletics track, his sprinting was world class and he was currently shortlisted with the Olympic squad for the one hundred and two hundred metres. However, in the game of last words with Jennifer, he always came a poor second.

DCI Hurst reached the front of the room and looked around, making sure he had everyone’s attention before he started. The group was a mixture of detectives, some old school, some not, and the increasing number of civilian officers recruited to take on many of the office-bound and routine investigative tasks previously carried out by police officers. For Hurst, it was a strange new world, completely different from the police force he had joined thirty-four years before, and one he wasn’t fully sure he liked. But at approaching fifty-five and three months from retirement, he no longer found the machinations of the senior command to be of much interest to him. This was likely to be his last big case and he wanted to leave on a high.

“Morning everyone; sorry to ruin your Sunday but we need to get moving. Just to ensure we’re all on the same page, last night at around nine thirty, the body of a young woman was found by a courting couple in Harlow Wood, a part of Sherwood Forest three miles south of Mansfield. Unfortunately, I was a hundred miles away visiting my wife’s relatives, so I couldn’t attend the scene. However, as DCI, I shall be leading the investigation as required by the SCF protocol.

“At first sight, it looked as if the young woman had been killed by blows to the back of the head, but the pathologist reckons she died of suffocation, probably from having a polythene bag pulled over her head. He’ll be confirming that at the pm tomorrow.

“Documentation from a purse in the inside pocket of her jacket has identified the woman as Miruna Peptanariu, a 19-year-old Romanian working as a prostitute in the Forest Road West area here in the city, although according to the anti-prostitution squad, to whom she was known, she had also been seen working in Mapperley. So she might have been treading on toes and killed to set an example, depending on who’s running her. That’s our first line to look into. To this end, DI McPherson will allocate duties at the end of the meeting.

“We’ve had uniforms talk to a couple of her night shift companions and it seems she was last seen late on Friday night, shortly after midnight. She told one of them that she had a client picking her up. No name as yet but we have her mobile number from the women the uniforms spoke to and we’re in the process of tracking calls and messages.

“The timing ties in well with the pathologist’s initial findings at the scene. He estimated that she had been dead between fourteen and twenty hours, which puts the time of the murder in the early hours of Saturday morning.”

He turned and pointed to a large-scale map of Harlow Wood.

“SOCOs found a fresh tyre print here at the edge of an unpaved forest track, which as you can see is about fifty yards from where the body was found. Could be from a four by four, but not one of the forestry vehicles.

“From the general lack of disturbance at the scene, apart from that definitely from the courting couple who found her, the SOCOs’ initial thoughts are that Miruna’s body was carried to where she was found rather than dragged — there’re what appear to be some fibres of the same colour as the fluffy collar of her jacket caught on a couple of the bushes along the path — so it could be she was killed in the car.

“As we speak, traffic are looking at CCTV footage from the early hours of Saturday morning from cameras covering Forest Road West and adjacent streets. With luck, we’ll see Miruna being picked up and maybe we’ll get a number plate. The killer’s probably using a stolen vehicle, but information on the location of the owner could help.”

He paused and waited for the group to catch up with their notes. Jennifer raised her hand.

“Yes, Cotton?”

“Did the pathologist say any more about the blows to the head, boss? How hard they were?”

Hurst nodded. “He reckons they were hard enough to knock her out but not intended to kill. However, the skin was broken and there was minor bleeding.”

Still scribbling on her pad, Jennifer called out another question.

“What about the weapon? Could the pathologist say what it might be?”

“Up to a point, yes. It had a rounded end, probably a cosh of some sort. Maybe hard rubber rather than metal. We’ll get more on that from the pm.”

“So we could be looking at premeditation as opposed to, say, an argument that escalated,” persisted Jennifer.

“What makes you think that?”

“Well, boss, not many people drive around with coshes in their cars. It could have been brought along for the purpose of killing her or knocking her out.”

“Good point, Cotton.”

Hurst noticed Derek Thyme’s hand hovering in a tentative wave.

“Something to add, Thyme?”

“Was there any sign of the polythene bag at the scene, boss?”

“No,” said Hurst, shaking his head. “But of course the killer could have shoved it in his pocket.”

He turned to a whiteboard behind him covered in photographs and notes in felt-tip pen.

“Now, the other thing that’s important is the girl’s clothing. As you can see from the photos, she was wearing a short denim skirt, a red sleeveless top and a thin shiny black plastic jacket with a fluffy fake fur collar. Her underwear appeared to be in place so it seems that if there was any sexual activity, it could have been oral. The mouth swabs should confirm that.

“However, we only found one shoe, which she was wearing on her right foot.” He pointed to a photo. “As you can see, it’s quite dressy with a high heel and a pointed toe. So far, there’s no sign of the other one. The SOCOs conducted as thorough a search as they could last night and they’ll be back about now to check the whole area again in daylight.”

A hand went up at the back of the group, one of the civilian intelligence officers.

“What about the couple who found the girl? Can they be ruled out of any involvement?”

Hurst turned to Rob McPherson to answer the question.

“Totally,” said the DI. “Firstly, Miruna had been dead for over half a day when she was found so they would’ve had to murder her somewhere else and then take her to the scene. Secondly, they arrived on a tandem, not in a car, and thirdly, they are, in my opinion, genuinely spooked by the whole incident, the girl especially. No, we can rule them out.”

Mike Hurst checked his watch. “Right, if there’s nothing else, I’ve got to brief Superintendent Freneton. The pm’s set for tomorrow morning at ten. Horace Lawson has kindly agreed not to start until after the morning briefing. DI McPherson and I will attend. Thyme, you will be coming with us. You’ll be exhibits officer so you can bag and label the girl’s clothing for submission to the lab. Meanwhile, go and join in with checking out the CCTV recordings. The more eyes we get on those, the better.”

Jennifer felt Derek shrink into his seat beside her.

“Christ, what did I do to win that one? I hate post mortems and the boss knows it.”

“Stand at the back and close your eyes if it all gets too much,” said Jennifer as she caught Hurst’s eye, wondering what he had for her.

She soon knew. “Cotton, we have the address where Miruna was staying. Go with Sergeant Bottomley and see what you can find out about her. There are a couple of uniforms already there to stop the two other women she apparently shares with from disturbing her things.”

“Lucky sod,” muttered Derek.