Michael Fowler - Secret of the Dead

Dawn watched Hunter pick up his loose notes from his desk. She shot him a delicate smile.

“Yes Boss. We picked up the investigation in its entirety from the Cold Case Unit yesterday. We’ve haven’t had time to go through everything, as you will appreciate, but I have read the prosecution file and the report on his appeal, and Grace is currently trying to organise the old card index system for inputting into HOLMES. She has also spoken with the Forensics lab at Wetherby. It would appear they still have the exhibit slides from the original investigation and they have their own set of comprehensive notes, which is a real plus.”

The team listened as Hunter outlined the Lucy Blake-Hall case. He gave a brief resume of her family circumstances — married with a five year-old daughter, back in 1983, and then focused in detail on the last sightings of her on Friday 26th August when witnesses saw her with her lover, Daniel Weaver, firstly in the Coach and Horses pub, and then later that same evening arguing in the market place in Barnwell.

“Jeffery Howson and a Detective Sergeant Alan Darbyshire, whom, I’ve been informed by Barry, retired as a DCI in nineteen-ninety-two, arrested Daniel the day after she had been reported missing after visiting him at his home. He had scratches to his face and refused to say how he had got them. Weaver was known to the police. He has previous for a chemist break-in and also possession of a controlled drug with intent to supply. He did eighteen months in a young offenders’ institution in nineteen-seventy-seven.”

He outlined the interrogation of Daniel Weaver at the police station, in which, after initial denials, he admitted to his affair with Lucy and confessed that she had scratched him during an argument on the evening of her disappearance. Hunter revealed how Jeffery Howson and DS Alan Darbyshire had also discovered Lucy’s handbag hidden under sacking during a search of Weaver’s garden shed and that after making another initial denial he had gone on to give a full and frank admission as to how he had strangled Lucy and then buried her body up on Langsett Moor.

“A team of police officers spent a fortnight up on the moors searching for signs of her burial site, but at that stage Weaver had been appointed a solicitor and refused to cooperate with the investigation further, so her body was never found. The trial of Daniel Weaver took place in April nineteen-eighty-four. He did go in the box and give evidence. And I’ve got the next bits from the newspaper articles covering the trial.” He paused before continuing. “He admitted to the affair and to the argument with Lucy in which she had scratched his face. He said they were caused while trying to reason with her and she had pulled away from him. He admitted making a number of statements during his interviews but he flatly denied making the one where he admitted to strangling her and burying her body up on Langsett Moor. And he accused the police of planting the handbag. After a three week trial, he was found guilty of Lucy’s murder and given life. His defence submitted an appeal but it was turned down on the grounds that the trial was conducted fairly, and that without fresh evidence the conviction was deemed to be safe.”

Hunter glanced up from his jottings. “To be honest, on my first reading of the file I thought everything was cut and dried. That was until we found that statement in Jeffery Howson’s safe. Last night I re-examined the case file. All the interviews in it were written and recorded on the appropriate forms and witnessed by the defendant, Weaver. With the exception of the last set of notes in which he made his confession. On those, where he should have signed, the words ‘refused to sign’ have been penned.”

“Sorry to steal your thunder Hunter,” said Dawn, “If I can come in there now?” She again tapped her Biro against the sides of the incident board, where reduced digital images of the paperwork recovered from Jeffery Howson’s safe were affixed in the top right hand corner.

“This find could change everything about the trial and conviction of Daniel Weaver. The originals of these are currently on their way to Forensics for chemical dating analysis and for fingerprint identification, but at the moment everything about them screams they are the genuine article. What we have here, team, is a set of recorded interview notes conducted with Weaver during the time he was in police custody on twenty-ninth August, nineteen-eighty-three. As we have heard, the interviewers were Jeffery Howson and Alan Darbyshire, and going by the handwriting, which matches that on the envelope they were found in, looks as though they have been completed by our murder victim Jeffery Howson. Prior to the introduction of PACE and taped recorded interviewing all interviews conducted in a police station had to be handwritten. The notes take the form of a question and answer session between the police officers and the defendant, known as contemporaneous notes, and had to be read and witnessed by the defendant. The paperwork found in the envelope, for the attention of Barry, has been witnessed by Daniel Weaver and bears no resemblance to any of the interviews on the original prosecution file. In fact they are a clear denial in the involvement of Lucy’s disappearance and there is certainly no admission to her murder, in fact, quite the opposite. Daniel Weaver states that he last saw Lucy after their argument in the market place at about nine-thirty pm on the Friday evening. He says she told him she was going home; that her husband had found out about their relationship and was holding onto their daughter Jessica, threatening Lucy that she would never see her again. She told Daniel that she couldn’t leave her daughter behind, so was calling it off. He did his best to make her change her mind and at one stage grabbed hold of her. And that’s how he got his face scratched when she pulled away. He goes on to say that he went straight home to his flat, drank a few whiskies and watched some TV, and then went to bed where he remained until the next day when he went to his parents’ house about eleven am, where his Mother made him some breakfast. When he was asked about the handbag being found hidden under sacking in his shed he stated and I quote ‘someone must have planted it.’

Dawn looked around at the intense faces of her new team. “This could overturn the conviction against Daniel Weaver for Lucy’s murder. If those notes are the real thing, and had been part of the original prosecution file then I am not convinced he would ever have gone to trial, in fact they would have opened up the entire investigation into Lucy’s disappearance. It would have been nice if Jeffery Howson had left a note to explain all this, but I’m guessing that he didn’t leave one because he was fully intending to explain everything to Barry when they met. And as we all know he was murdered before he could make that meeting. So, now, in the absence of any other information, we are left to speculate why they were never submitted. Their discovery certainly supports the comment he made to Barry in his telephone call on Saturday night that the wrong person was convicted and he knew who murdered Lucy.”

She glanced at the incident board, where earlier that morning she had scribbled notes in red ink.

“There are only three people who can provide the answers to the validity of those notes. One is Jeffery Howson, who is now dead, the second is retired Detective Chief Inspector Alan Darbyshire and the third person is Daniel Weaver, who is currently serving life for Lucy’s murder. Hunter has already told us that on the original file he found that the contemporaneous notes outlining Weaver’s admission were not signed. The ones we have recovered from Jeffery Howson’s safe are timed and dated, exactly the same as Weaver’s admission interview notes. Only one of those sets can be the original notes and I know which ones I am inclined to go with.”