Хилари Боннер - Deadly Dance

‘Yes Mrs Court,’ he said. ‘I am afraid there is no longer any doubt.’

‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘I’ve thought for years he wasn’t right in the head. But this? Nothing like this.’

The woman may have already guessed, but now that Vogel had confirmed her suspicions, she seemed totally in shock.

‘Mrs Court,’ continued Vogel gently. ‘There’s more. It appears that John is holding one of our officers hostage. We have grave fears for her safety. We need to find her, and John, as quickly as possible. Have you any idea where he might go, where he might take someone in a situation like this?’

Vera Court shook her head.

Vogel persisted.

‘He didn’t have another property. A lock-up anywhere?’

‘No, not that I know of, anyway.’

‘Was there any place, I don’t know, somewhere remote, where he might hide, or hide someone else?’

Vera Willis shook her head again.

‘Mr Vogel, I lived with John for nearly seven years, and I realised long ago that I didn’t really know him at all. I have no idea where he might go, or where he might take someone, but I dread to think what he might do to that someone.’

Right after Vera Court left, Vogel called forensics to see if there’d been any results yet, following his request for an urgent check on the DNA and fingerprints on record for Willis. He wasn’t surprised to learn that there were still no matches found for Willis’s DNA.

‘The fingerprint record on file has just been checked and found to be unidentifiable,’ the forensic technician told Vogel.

‘What does that mean?’ Vogel asked.

‘Well, it’s not a properly obtained record,’ came the reply. ‘The prints are distorted.’

‘Distorted?’ queried Vogel. ‘How?’

‘Simple really,’ said the forensics technician. ‘You only have to drag your finger a fraction of a centimetre and the prints are rendered useless. Of course, with members of the public, who are on suspicion of offences, the results would immediately be thoroughly scrutinised by the officer in charge. But with a copper? Well, you know…’

Vogel did know. The taking of a new police officer’s fingerprints was just a matter of routine. Nobody was likely to check them very thoroughly. As for DNA, Vogel thought back to his own experience. Samples were usually taken during a recruit’s training. In Vogel’s day, the instructing officer was inclined to build the taking of such samples into training procedure. Vogel remembered being teamed up with another young copper. They took samples of each other’s saliva using a swab. That way, not only was their DNA put on record as required, but they learned the procedure of doing so.

It seemed clear that Willis had falsified his own records one way or another. Unfortunately, Vogel could see only too clearly how it might have been done. Advanced technology and tighter regulations had combined to make it increasingly more difficult for anyone so inclined to do such a thing, but John Willis had joined the force thirteen years previously.

One of the most frightening aspects of this was why had he falsified his records all that time ago, long before the recent spate of killings that he was almost certainly responsible for? The obvious answer was that Willis had already committed some kind of serious crime, most likely a murder or murders. At the very least, he was covering his tracks for the future.

Vogel thought it was probably both.

He clicked into Willis’s file again to see who his training officer had been, the man who would have overseen his DNA testing and finger printing. DI Phillip Marcus was long retired, but his contact details were all there. Marcus answered his phone straight away. He sounded surprised but not alarmed.

No, he didn’t remember John Willis in particular. But yes, he always used to ask recruits to take each other’s DNA samples. Two training jobs got done at once that way. And yes, of course he’d always checked that recruits’ fingerprints were identifiable. Only when pressed by Vogel, did Marcus finally admit it.

‘Well, no, I was probably not as thorough as you would be with a suspect. I don’t think anyone was. Not in my day, anyway. I mean, you’re dealing with police officers and it’s a routine process.’

Marcus told Vogel nothing he did not already suspect. Things were going from bad to worse. The DNA must have come from a real person and someone not on the PNC or the national data base. Various scenarios came to mind, all of them chilling. Vogel had read of a case in America where a suspect had paid a down-and-out to allow him to take a DNA sample, which he later substituted for his own. Vogel had no knowledge of any suspect having manipulated DNA that way in the UK, but it would clearly be much easier for a trainee police officer to do so.

Which led Vogel’s train of thought onto the muddle over Melanie Cooke’s father’s DNA. They’d put it down to a rare forensics cock-up. Now it seemed likely that Willis had deliberately substituted his own, previously unrecorded, DNA and prints for Terry Cooke’s. He’d almost certainly done something very like it before.

Willis, at Vogel’s own request, had gone to Patchway to babysit Cooke’s processing. More than likely he took over, thought Vogel. The custody boys wouldn’t have questioned an MCIT sergeant.

Of course, Willis would have known that, sooner or later, it would be discovered that the samples he submitted were not Cooke’s. So why would he do it? Vogel remembered the absolute loathing Willis had expressed for Cooke, the alleged wifebeater. As the son of a mother who had been beaten, that alone could have been Willis’s motive for framing Terry Cooke. Or Willis may have been playing for time, trying to wrong-foot his own team, which he certainly succeeded in doing. Vogel wasn’t sure, but he reminded himself that Willis was mad. He might have switched the samples just because he could.

Whilst he was still contemplating this latest piece of news, PC Polly Jenkins knocked on the open door to his office and entered.

‘Boss, traffic have spotted Willis heading out of the city and onto the M4 towards London. The boys want to know what to do. They are currently following but keeping their distance. They think Willis has spotted them, but he doesn’t appear to be reacting.’

‘Tell them to back off,’ said Vogel quickly. ‘The car’s on a motorway. We can track it without physically following it, make sure we do and make sure everyone knows that no approach must be made.’

‘Right boss.’

‘Most importantly of all, could the boys see if there was anyone else in the vehicle? If Willis still has Saslow with him?’

‘We asked that straight away, boss. They couldn’t say for certain but, if Dawn is in the car, they’re pretty sure she’s not sitting next to him in the passenger seat.’

Vogel grunted. Jenkins looked as concerned as he felt. He knew what the young woman was thinking. Dawn could be lying on the back seat out of sight of the cameras. She could be locked in the boot. She could be unconscious, or already dead.

Vogel shook himself out of it. She could be alive and secreted somewhere Willis/Aeolus was confident she would not be discovered, as the man himself had said on the phone. Aeolus wouldn’t lie, would he? He wouldn’t see the need to lie, Vogel told himself. They just had to find her.

But where was she?

Thanks to the CCTV cameras along the B4057 and Hemmings’s local knowledge, it was strongly suspected that Willis had driven straight to his home, after being alerted by Vogel’s phone call to Saslow. It was reasonable to assume, from the timeline, that Saslow had still been with him and quite probably still with him when he arrived at his home.

Vogel struggled to keep calm. Not for the first time he was glad that he wasn’t naturally an emotional man. Nonetheless, when the life of a fellow officer was at stake, it was difficult even for him to remain composed, and this wasn’t just any officer. This was Dawn Saslow. His Dawn.