The Truth Will Out (3 page)

“Believe me,” he continued, grinning. “When you’re this size, it’s always a soft landing.”

“Everyone alright up there?” Alan shouted from below.

“Yes, thank you,” she called back. “Sergeant Pemberton’s just testing out the floorboards.”

“Make sure you keep to the white paper!” Steve called back.

Pemberton pulled a face as he shuffled back onto the paper. She watched him rub the base of his back. “Sure you’re okay?”

“Fine.”

They turned their attention to the source of the noise. A small blackbird fluttered around their heads in panic. “Must have been looking for a warm place to roost, away from the snow,” he said. “Come in through a gap in the roof tiles, I bet, and got stuck.”

She pressed her lips together. “Anyway,” she looked back up at the hatch, “what did you see up there?”

He rubbed his back some more, but when he met her gaze she could see a twinkle of recognition in his eye. “I think we need to get the ladders in and take a closer look.”

***

Eva screwed up her eyes to focus on the road as she drove north, the soft snowflakes almost mesmerising her as they floated into the windscreen. Naomi. Why hadn’t she responded to her calls, her messages? Unless she couldn’t. A hard lump expanded in her throat as her mind switched back to last Friday, the day this nightmare began.

It was the end of their week’s holiday. They were driving through France, en route to the ferry port, breaking the journey intermittently to photograph pleasant views, ancient churches, old farmhouses.

They stopped for lunch in a little town on the top of a hill, an hour north of Paris. It was a bright spring day, the sky a milky blue. Neither of them spoke French apart from the odd word and she recalled her chagrin at not being able to read the menu or converse with the locals. When she was young, her mother and stepfather had taken language courses before their annual holidays. It was one of her stepfather’s pet peeves and she could still hear his words now, ‘If a visitor to another country makes an effort to speak a little of the language they will be treated with respect by the locals.’ He would have been very disappointed.

She remembered their apprehension at what they’d chosen to eat. Afterwards they howled with laughter when
croque-monsieur
turned out to be a toasted cheese and ham sandwich. It was a rare moment of real belly laughter. Tears flooded Naomi’s eyes and ran down her cheeks. Eva’s breath caught in her throat. The merriment continued back in the car afterwards as they drove down the road to the petrol station.

Naomi refuelled the car and Eva leant back in her seat. She wound the window halfway and stretched her hands to the roof, enjoying the rush of fresh air on her face. As Naomi rejoined her, she ignited the engine and tried to wind the window lever. It wouldn’t budge.

She pressed harder. It moved an inch and then faltered. This was a special edition Mini, only 20,000 miles on the clock. The shiny blue paintwork and Paul Smith interior were in excellent condition. She pushed again and heard a single clunk.

“Oh, great!” Naomi said. “That’s all we need!”

Eva sighed as they both jumped out. Naomi was right to be frustrated. This was a car they were delivering to the UK for a friend, a bargain struck in return for a free holiday. He would not be pleased if it was delivered with a faulty window. They both played with the winder to no avail. Eva tried to prise the door panel apart, flinching and jumping back as she caught her nail.

They stared at each other. “We can’t leave it like this,” Naomi said.

Eva scanned their surroundings. They were in the middle of the small French town. Opposite was a patisserie with a colourful window display, flanked by a boulangerie on one side, a coiffure on the other. She turned and glimpsed a garage, set back from the road, a single grey car parked out front. She couldn’t read the sign but it had to be worth a try.

They drove across and parked next to what they now recognised as an old grey Peugeot outside. Although the workshop door was open, it looked deserted. They left the car and stepped over pools of dried oil in the entrance into a dimly lit garage. The walls were lined with cans containing lubricants and ancient-looking tools. A strong smell of diesel hung in the air.

“Hello?” Naomi called out. Her voice echoed back at her. The girls glanced across at each other, bewildered. Eva had just decided to give up and retreat to the car when she heard a scraping noise and spied a body rolling out from beneath the single Renault parked at the far end, bright torch in hand.

They crossed the garage and towered over the olive skinned man who stood to face them. Smears of grease covered his blue overalls, oil marks were set into the crows’ feet around his eyes. He spoke in a deep French accent and both girls stared at him, momentarily baffled. Eva pointed to the Mini and the French man followed as they walked across to it. With a series of strange noises and actions she showed him the window.

He nodded and moved into the workshop. When he returned he held a screwdriver and jemmy. He pointed at the lever and nodded in approval. Eva imagined that he didn’t get many modern cars with electric windows in here. In fact, she couldn’t imagine he got many cars in here at all. The girls stared as he unscrewed five screws and prised at the panel.

The process took less than three minutes.

The panel wobbled as he lifted it away, and then he gasped. Eva jolted forward. Tucked into the door casing were several brown parcels, tightly wrapped in shrink-wrap, bound in the centre with duct tape.

The world closed in around Eva. She was aware of the French man’s presence. Excited words spilled out of his mouth, his arms waved about animatedly. Naomi clutched her arm…

A car swerved in front, snapping Eva’s attention to the present and forcing her to brake. In normal circumstances she would curse the driver. But not right now. Right now, she was still reeling from the memories of last Friday. Tears welled up in her eyes. How could their lives change irrevocably in the course of one day? And now this. She lifted a hand from the steering wheel and raked her fingers through her long blond hair. Not for the first time, did she wish they hadn’t taken that holiday.

Chapter
Three

Helen glanced around the room at her sparse team. With Hamptonshire being a small force, she was often pressured to lend detectives out to sub-divisions to assist with local operations. But at least, with the current pressure to solve the cold cases, she had the comfort of most of her own team back with her at the moment, even if wide scale reductions in the policing budget had reduced her civilian support by half. And, as it was the closest office to the crime scene, they would be able to adapt their own offices at Hampton Headquarters where computers, phone lines and white boards were already set up into an incident room. At times like these you had to be thankful for small mercies.

“Right then, everyone,” she said winding up her briefing, “what motivates somebody to climb through the open loft space to gain access to a property, ransack the house, fight the occupant and then kill her?”

Following Pemberton’s discovery, a thorough search of the terrace revealed that somebody had broken into the back of an empty house, three doors down. They had crawled through the open loft space that linked the adjoining properties and dropped down onto Naomi’s landing using her extendable, folding ladder; carefully folding it back as they left.

“Why creep through loft space? Why not break a back window?” Rosa Dark, a petite detective in her mid-twenties with short dark hair, olive skin and an attractive face asked as she looked up keenly from her pile of notes.

Pemberton shrugged a single shoulder from his position at the back of the room, “Element of surprise.”

“They could have skulked about upstairs for ages without her knowledge,” Dark said. “Maybe they’d even searched first?”

Helen thought back to Naomi’s house: the drawers pulled out, the bookshelves emptied. She shook her head. “The state of the victim’s house indicates a frenzied search. They made no attempt to keep quiet. The victim would have heard them, gone to investigate.” She hesitated for a moment, percolating her thoughts. “And the tussle between the victim and the killer was restricted to the lounge. We’re pretty sure of that.”

“So, it looks like they searched the house after she was killed?” Helen followed the voice to DC Steve Spencer, a short slender man perched on the edge of a desk in the corner. Spencer’s time as a detective preceded Helen’s ten-year career in the police service.

“I think we’ll work on that premise for the moment,” she said. Helen felt the onset of a shiver and fought to suppress it. The idea of Naomi locking her doors and checking her windows before settling down for the evening, unaware that a killer lurked upstairs waiting to pounce, made her skin crawl.

“They must have known her habits, been aware that the house down the road was empty, that the loft space of that terrace was open,” Pemberton said. “A lot of terrace attics are bricked up, isolating each house these days. Often it’s a stipulation for house insurance.”

“I agree,” Helen said. “They knew the area, were armed, prepared that she may be home. A well planned attack.” The room was silent. “We also need to find out what the killer was so persistently looking for.”

Helen’s mind turned to number two Brooke Street, where the killer accessed through a broken window. An immediate search of the garden had discovered a couple of footprints in the smattering of snow. These were quickly measured and photographed. They suggested that the killer escaped over the fence, their prints joining a plethora of others on the main pavement beyond. As she shared this information, something puzzled her - CSI estimated the footprints were size eleven. The informant was female, but surely few women could claim such a shoe size?

“We’ve sealed off the house three doors down. It appears to be empty, but we’ll need to contact the landlord, find out who has keys and get details of previous tenants that may know about the open loft space.”

“Right,” Helen continued. “Let’s find out everything we can about Naomi Spence.” She raised her eyes to the clock. Ten thirty. “We’ll focus initially on where she had been today. Had she been to work? Who are her friends there? Who would she confide in? What time did she leave? What sort of mood was she in? I want to know her every movement right up until we were called out this evening. Memington Hall is a hotel so there should be somebody there around the clock.”

“Sergeant Pemberton and I are off to deliver the bad news to the family.” Helen watched a sea of shoulders relax around her as relief flooded the room. Usually delegated to the lower ranks, the death message was a part of the job dreaded by all officers. But, in a major investigation, Helen preferred to do it herself. People’s reactions could bring a lot to the case. They may say something, often an inadvertent comment, which may lead the investigation in a certain direction. Also, as most victims are killed by somebody they know or somebody close to them, they may provide an insight into Naomi’s social life and family background. And Helen didn’t believe in delegating a job she wouldn’t do herself.

Helen watched them retreat to their desks and begin the laborious task of piecing together Naomi’s final hours. With her inspector absent on long-term sick leave, it never ceased to impress or amaze Helen how much they all pulled together to get the job done. She moved back to her own office: a cubicle in the far corner, with a window that overlooked the car park at the rear of the building. White venetian blinds sat open at the other window that looked out into the incident room. She could see Pemberton outlining their current priorities on a whiteboard, Spencer pinning up the first tranche of photographs.

As she grabbed her coat and bag and headed back out into the main office, a thought rushed into her mind. She turned to Spencer, “Get me a copy of the informant’s phone call to the control room, will you? I want to know whose voice is on that call.”

***

Over the years, Helen had faced many different reactions to the death message. Some people collapsed dramatically into floods of tears, crushed by the news. Others are numbed, unable to comprehend the incomprehensible. Some are even physically sick. Occasionally people get angry, aggressive even - she’d never forgotten an elderly mother who slapped her across the cheek when she’d told her that her son had died in a car crash. There were those who displayed active disbelief, accusing her of lying to them, ‘I only spoke to her an hour ago’ or, ‘it couldn’t possibly be him’, while others strangely accepted the news as if they were being told that they had just failed their driving test, and later it hits them like a bolt of lightning.

As she delivered the news to Naomi’s parents, Helen watched the colour slowly drain from Olivia Spence’s face before she stumbled, body trembling, legs buckling beneath her. Everyone rushed forward. Her husband, aided by Pemberton, managed to catch her just in time and manoeuvre her into a nearby armchair. For several minutes, Olivia sat motionless, head dipped. Henry Spence positioned himself on the arm beside her and clasped her hand in his.

“I’m so very sorry,” Helen said, after giving them a few minutes. The words were inadequate and she knew it.

Naomi’s parents sat in silence. Pemberton retreated to the kitchen. A sweet smell lingered in the room. Helen followed it to a vase of pink roses mingled with white spray carnations on the dresser. Beside it was a photo of Naomi in mortar board and gown, a smile stretched from ear to ear. The only resemblance this photo bore to the corpse at Brooke Street was a mass of ginger hair.

Olivia Spence lifted her head as Pemberton returned to the room with two mugs of what Helen guessed were very sweet, milky tea to calm the initial shock. The white hair that framed Olivia’s face was cut very short and with her striking green eyes, clear complexion and petite nose, Helen could see where her daughter’s beauty had derived.

Olivia’s hand trembled as she instinctively brushed a fleck of dust from her navy trousers and straightened the striped scarf that decorated her white jumper. She opened her mouth as she reached for the mug but no words came out. Instead she nodded, despair etched into her face.