Paul Gitsham - The Last Straw

Jones stood around the corner from Tom Spencer’s student flat. He raised the radio to his lips. “How are things your end, Tony?”

Sutton’s voice, coming from the rear of the house, was quiet but clear. “We’re all set, guv. The curtains are still closed, no sign of life.”

“We’re good to go. Ten a.m. on the dot. Don’t let him get near a phone — we don’t want him letting any accomplices know what’s going down.”

Sutton acknowledged, then fell silent. The second hand on Warren’s watch crawled around the clock face, achingly slowly. At thirty seconds to go, he glanced around at the team with him; Gary Hastings would be at his shoulder, whilst two detective sergeants on loan from Welwyn were with Sutton around the back and a specialist forced-entry team were hidden around the corner. Everyone wore stab vests.

Finally, the hand ticked around to ten a.m. Immediately, Warren and Hastings burst forth from behind the white van that they had used for cover. Three long strides and the two men cleared the short garden path and were up the steps in front of the doorway.

Spencer’s flat was a typical shared student house, according to the records held by the university’s housing association. Four rooms, all leased to postgraduate students, with a shared kitchen and lounge. Spencer and his housemates had rented it for three years. The house had a single front door and a rear kitchen door, opening onto a concrete yard just big enough for recycle bins and a rusty barbecue. Spencer had the rear ground-floor bedroom, hence the need for additional officers around the back of the house, in case he bolted.

Jones and Hastings paid only lip-service to the rules of entry, hammering on the front door and ringing the doorbell only once. “Police! Open Up!” Jones hollered through the letter box. Silence.

Jones paused for as long as it took the forced-entry team to make their way up the garden path, before shouting again, “Police, stand aside from the front door.” This was punctuated by a loud crunch as the two-man battering ram wielded by the forced-entry team made short work of the flimsy wooden door and cheap, student-landlord supplied locks.

Warren jumped quickly over the threshold, heading down the narrow hallway; behind him he heard the other members of the team starting to pound their way up the stairs to check out the upstairs bedrooms and communal bathroom. Everybody shouted the same thing over and over again: “This is the police. Stay where you are!”

The kitchen was untidy but empty and the open door to the lounge showed it to be similarly unoccupied, allowing Warren to keep on heading towards his goal, Spencer’s back bedroom. The door was closed. A cheap laminate affair with a thick coating of cream emulsion, it had a cheap-looking handle with a simple Yale lock. Warren banged once on the door, shouting again “Police, open up.”

No response.

No need for the battering-ram this time, Warren judged, and simply put his shoulder to the door. It gave way almost too easily, and Warren had to grab the door-frame to stop himself falling through.

The room was empty.

* * *

Tony Sutton came down the steps at the front of the house. His tread was heavy and Warren didn’t need to turn around to see that the energy that had filled him barely twenty minutes ago was gone. Warren closed his phone and glanced at Sutton.

“Flat’s completely empty. It looks as though Spencer is the only person living here — the rest of the rooms have been cleaned out. I guess it’s the end of term and the new tenants haven’t moved in yet.”

“We’ll see what we can find and return to the station.”

“Understood, guv…” A pause. “You know it’s not your fault, right? We didn’t have enough to charge him with last night. Crawley’s death was officially still a suicide and Spencer’s alibi was still, in theory, water-tight. All the evidence against it was circumstantial until that fibre matched. Arresting him would have been a waste of time.”

Warren sighed. “Let’s just hope the powers that be see it your way, Tony, because if we don’t catch him soon, they’re going to be looking for a scapegoat.”

* * *

Lunch back at the station was a subdued affair. It looked as if Spencer had gone on the run. Unfortunately, there were no witnesses to Tom Spencer’s comings and goings for the previous couple of days. However, a search of the house had proved interesting and useful. The absence of any sort of bag or rucksack in his room, coupled with a lack of any toiletries in the bathroom, suggested he had packed and left. Rather more worryingly, a search of all the drawers in his room had failed to unearth a passport. A recent photo pinned to his noticeboard of him standing next to a poster at a San Diego conference suggested that he did own one. Warren put out a ports and airports alert for him, in case he decided to skip overseas.

The contents of the top shelf in his wardrobe proved to be more illuminating. The large tubs of protein powders confirmed Spencer’s obsessive interest in building muscle-mass. A number of unlabelled pills had been sent off for pharmacological analysis; Warren fully expected them to be identified as anabolic steroids.

With a nationwide manhunt approved, Warren was able to call upon a lot more resources, including those who specialised in such searches. And he soon realised that he would need them. Spencer didn’t own a car, so number-plate recognition was out of the question. Assuming that he had escaped the immediate area, that left the trains, buses or, in the worst-case-scenario, a lift from a friend.

A trawl of the CCTV at the nearest local railway stations had proved fruitless, as had direct questioning of the rail staff. Unfortunately, Middlesbury was part of a well-connected public transport network. An hour-long bus journey could get him to any one of a dozen small, local railway stations and from there the national rail network. Scanning the CCTV footage at each station was technically possible, but would take too long to do much more than retrace his steps. Unfortunately, chasing down a domestic murderer, who was unlikely to pose a significant threat to the public, was well down the priority list when compared to the need to keep tabs on any would-be jihadists on MI5’s watch list.

The decision was instead made to focus on his past life. Would he flee to somewhere that he felt safe, or would he be wise enough to keep away from known associates and try to remain anonymous? Hoping that he sought the familiar, rather than the unknown, the team sifted through what information they had on the fugitive’s past. Local police forces were put on alert in Greater Manchester and Sheffield in case Spencer returned home or decided to seek refuge at his former university.

Now, it just became a waiting game.

* * *

Warren sat in his office, brooding. It seemed almost certain that Spencer had committed the murder and now he was missing. There was little Warren and the team could do but wait and hope to hear from the teams searching for him. Nevertheless, there were still things that didn’t add up.

The web of mobile phone messages had clearly hinted at a conspiracy involving at least four people. Buried in a drawer full of random junk in his room was the box that Spencer’s iPhone had come in, which contained a piece of paper with the phone’s IMEI number written on it. This confirmed Spencer as Anonymous Phone User Number Two. With Crawley’s Nokia confirmed as Phone Number Three, that left only phones numbers one and four to link to individuals. Who was the mysterious young woman, the apparent owner of Phone Number One, who it seemed had seduced Severino and stolen his swipe card and clothes? And what about the owner of Phone Number Four? What was their role in the sordid affair?