Tim Vicary - A Game of Proof

‘Not obviously, but there are a lot of stains. If forensics find something, then we’ve got him. We found this, too.’ He held up a second bag for every to see. Inside it was a large strongly made breadknife with a black handle.

‘The pathologist says the cut was so deep it almost took her head off. Now in order to do that you need a weapon that’s big, sharp, and very strong — an ordinary blade would snap under the pressure. But this isn’t an ordinary breadknife, it’s an expensive one — tempered steel nearly two millimetres thick, from young Newby’s kitchen. It looks clean, but if forensics find something …’

‘Then we’ve got him,’ Tracy Litherland said softly.

‘Exactly,’ Churchill agreed. ‘Anything else from the crime scene, Jack?’

‘Not so far, sir. We’re combing it carefully for hairs and fibres, but that’ll take time.’

‘Never mind. The key evidence is in the body, not the grass.’ Churchill surveyed the room triumphantly. ‘Our man left his calling card, in the proper place. Semen, for us to identify him by. So if we catch him, boys and girls, that’s it. Tracy can take a sample of his sperm …’

‘You what, sir?’

‘Joke, Tracy, joke. And if the DNA matches we lock him up for life. Even his clever barrister mummy won’t be able to break a case like that, eh, Terence?’

Terry Bateson rang the bell of a small terraced house to the south of the city. The front of the house was fifty yards from the tree protest at the new shopping centre, the back looked over fields to the river bank where Jasmine’s body had been found. A slightly built young man in a dressing gown peered out. ‘Yes?’

‘David Brodie?’ Terry showed his warrant card. ‘It’s about Jasmine Hurst, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh … yes. You’d better come in.’

Terry followed him into a small but immaculate kitchen. All the surfaces were clean, the cups on hooks, the knives in a wooden block screwed to the wall. ‘She’s dead, isn’t she? Her mother rang me last night. I’ve not had much sleep.’ He sat down at the table, his eyes red-rimmed with tiredness.

‘I’m sorry, Mr Brodie. Would you rather I came back at another time?’

‘No, it’s OK, let’s get it over with.’

‘You have no idea who might have done this?’

Brodie shook his head. ‘No. He’d have to be a madman, wouldn’t he?’

‘I understand Jasmine lived here with you. Is that right?’

‘Yes. Most of the time. Except when she’s at the protest. She sleeps … slept there sometimes. I go there too when I have time.’

‘Really?’ Terry looked at the young man in his neat, comfortable kitchen, and tried to imagine him in a treehouse. Brodie interpreted his look with smile. ‘Doesn’t seem likely to you, does it? Well, I agree, I hate the mess and the dirt, so I don’t sleep there. But it’s a principle those people are standing up for. So yes, I support them when I can.’

‘What about Jasmine? Did she sleep there this week?’

Brodie hesitated. ‘Once or twice, yes. I’m on the late shift, you see. I leave here about one and don’t get back until about eleven at night.’

‘So when you got back on Thursday night, and she wasn’t here, were you worried?’

Brodie looked away, out of the window, his eyes filling with tears. ‘Not really. I just thought … hoped … she was at the protest. My mistake, I see now.’

‘So when was the last time you saw her?’

‘Thursday morning. We … had a row, you see. She walked out.’

‘What was the row about?’

Brodie shook his head sadly. ‘I can’t really say. I’m sorry, this probably sounds stupid, but it was just … one of those emotional things where you think everything’s fine, and then find it’s not, you know? It started about cleaning , for heaven’s sake; she said I was too fussy, but ….’

‘Was it about her other boyfriend, Simon Newby?’

Brodie’s eyes widened in surprise. ‘Part of it was, yes. How do you know about him? Oh, I suppose her mother told you.’

Terry remembered the Simon Newby he had met two days ago. A fit, muscular young man, quite unlike the slight, almost delicate boy he was talking to now. There was something about this young man that repelled him slightly. Too clean, too sensitive somehow.

‘So what did she say about Simon?’

‘She said — oh, stupid things — that I wasn’t tough or strong, that I wasn’t a man like him. Well, we knew that already — he’s a yob, isn’t he, a lout. That’s why she left him in the first place, because he used to beat her up. I said if that’s what she wanted she could go back and welcome — to live in a pigsty with a yob instead of a decent house where somebody cared for her.’

‘He used to beat her up?’

‘Yes. He even threatened me , for Christ’s sake.’

‘When was that?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, six weeks ago. When she first left him.’

‘Did he hit you?’

‘No, he didn’t, but he used to follow us around. It was weird.’ He paused, staring at Terry with those pale, red-rimmed eyes. ‘Sometimes we couldn’t see him but we could feel it.’

‘You could feel it? How do you mean?’

‘It’s hard to describe. We just knew. Or we’d see a jogger in the distance and she’d say it was him. She often felt she was being followed. I wrote down some of the times.’ The young man took out a diary. ‘There, see. On a Monday. And then again the next Sunday.’

Terry leafed through the pages. There were five or six entries: Simon outside house. Jogger near protest, Simon? Simon(?) near river. And so on. He thought of Helen Steersby, and shuddered. ‘Do you mind if I borrow this?’

David hesitated. ‘It’s … got some private entries in too.’

‘I’m sorry about that. But this is important. I’ll photocopy it and give it back to you. It must have been very frightening for you, all this.’

‘It wasn’t very pleasant, not for me anyway. But you know, Jasmine was never scared of him. I even think she enjoyed it, in a way.’

‘ Enjoyed it?’

‘Yes. I mean, having two men to choose between. That was what our quarrel was about. She’d seen him again and I called her a bitch — God help me! I didn’t know she was going to die!’

‘Jasmine went back to Simon? When was this?’

‘Last week. I didn’t think she’d go again but it seems she did. If I’d stopped her she’d be alive now, wouldn’t she?’

Terry looked at him thoughtfully. ‘So, when she wasn’t here on Thursday night, where did you think she was?’

‘At Simon’s, of course. Either there or at the protest.’

‘Did you look for her?’

‘Not that night. Yesterday morning, yes. I went to the protest, but she wasn’t there. Then I went to Simon’s house but she wasn’t there either.’

‘You didn’t think of informing the police?’

‘No. She’s an adult, after all. I went to work, hoped she’d be here when I returned. Then her mother rang.’ He wiped his eyes with a tissue, and blew his nose. ‘It’s hard to come to terms with, really … I’m sorry.’

‘I understand, Mr Brodie. But if you could write all this down in a statement …’

Sarah was defending in a shoplifting case. Her client was an old lady who had been stopped by a store detective outside a small supermarket. Inside her shopping bag was a packet of bacon which had not been paid for. Also inside the shopping bag were eggs, milk, and bread, all of which had been paid for. Sarah’s client claimed that she had taken the bacon by mistake, in a fit of absentmindedness. The supermarket, however, disagreed.

It was the prosecution’s case, based on the evidence of a tight-lipped, humourless store detective, that the bacon had been found concealed underneath the old lady’s library book , this being clear evidence of mens rea in a deliberate, malicious, and diabolically cunning criminal act in direct contravention of the Theft Act of 1968.