Paul Gitsham: No Smoke Without Fire

Without wanting to prejudice any future conclusions too much, Warren was already thinking: work clothes, possibly an office worker or similar. He noted her shoes, shiny black with substantial heels, and decided that she probably had a fairly sedentary job. He knew that his wife, Susan, a science teacher who spent most of her day on her feet, always wore flats or modest heels.

“My preliminary observation is a white Caucasian female between the ages of twenty-five and thirty of average build. Possibly raped. Judging by the smell, she’s been dead for at least twenty-four hours, probably more. The body and clothes are wet, suggesting it has rained since she was left here, which gives us a time frame of some time prior to yesterday morning. The scarf is certainly tied in a manner consistent with a ligature, although I can’t determine cause of death here. That’s up to the pathologist.”

“What about the scene?”

“Not much yet. I suspect that the killer carried her here down the same path that the walkers and we have used; that and the rain have probably obliterated any footprints from there, but there looks to be a couple of boot prints around the body.” Harrison motioned towards the small squares of white plastic pinned to the ground around the victim’s head, protecting the imprints until casts could be made.

“The bloke that found her claims not to have approached the body, so hopefully they can be linked to the killer.”

“You said ‘carried’. Was she killed elsewhere and dumped here?”

Harrison shrugged, his suit rustling. “That I can’t tell you yet, but I’m pretty sure she didn’t walk here.” He pointed at the woman’s shoes. “Look, almost spotless. Her heels in particular would be caked in mud if she had walked here under her own steam.”

Warren eyed the young woman again. She was of average build, he judged, certainly no heavyweight, but even if she was dead or otherwise incapacitated it would have taken a fairly strong man or more than one person to have carried her down the path.

“Anything else?”

Harrison shook his head. “Nothing but speculation at the moment. I wouldn’t want to put any wrong ideas in your head at this stage. We’ll secure the site and get a full team up here in the morning. I’ll email you a clear headshot for ID purposes; her face is probably OK to show to relatives — I’ll leave that up to your judgement.”

Warren glanced at the young woman’s face again. She looked almost serene, with no visible cuts and bruises. Mercifully it didn’t look as if anything had taken a nibble of her face whilst she’d lain waiting to be discovered. Only the waxy pallor suggested she was anything other than asleep. Warren decided to run the photo by Family Liaison; they might even add a little pink in Photoshop to soften the blow.

With nothing more to be done, Sutton and Jones trudged back to the clearing, before continuing back to their cars. Neither man said anything, each lost in his own thoughts.

It was the beginning of December and somewhere a family would never look forward to the festive season in the same way again.

Tuesday 6 thDecember

Chapter 4

“Sally Evans, twenty-six. Reported missing four nights ago by her boyfriend when she failed to meet him at their usual pick-up point in the side street behind Far and Away travel agents, where she worked.”

It was eight-thirty a.m. and Warren was holding a team briefing in the conference room at Middlesbury’s small CID unit. Behind him a projector showed a close-up photograph of the body taken at the scene by Andy Harrison and beside it a much happier image, taken that summer on holiday. The victim had shoulder-length light brown hair; the smiling young woman in the holiday snap had longer, sun-kissed blonde hair, but it was clearly the same person.

“We have a positive ID from the victim’s boyfriend, with whom she lived, and her mother and best friend. Family Liaison broke the news last night.”

“The body is still in situ up at Beaconsfield Woods, where it was found by a group of dog-walkers at approximately six-thirty p.m. yesterday evening. The body will be moved to the morgue at midday and a PM is scheduled for early afternoon. Preliminary indications are that she may have been sexually assaulted; cause of death is unknown at this time, but her scarf was wrapped around her throat and may have served as a ligature. Her body was almost certainly carried to the woods, but we don’t know if she was dead or alive, or when and where any assault took place.”

The atmosphere was sombre. Everybody in the room knew that the three days between Sally Evans’ disappearance and the discovery of her body could prove to be a major hindrance to the investigation. Valuable trace evidence from the site could have been lost, contaminated or destroyed; similarly the killer or killers had had over eighty hours to cover their tracks. The team couldn’t afford to lose any more time.

Reading from the list he had prepared before the meeting, Warren started to assign jobs to the officers present. “DS Kent, can you set up an incident desk and get HOLMES up and running, please? I want you to start entering everything as it comes in, especially the particulars from the autopsy. I want to see if the MO matches any known cases. See if we can find links to any previous attacks. DC Hastings, I want you to assist.” The older sergeant was the unit’s expert on HOLMES2, the Home Office’s crime management database. Used across the country, the system employed a degree of computer intelligence to link cases together and manage all of the documents relating to a crime. Although all officers used the system to some extent, it was experts like Kent who could really make the system work for them.

Working with him would be Detective Constable Gary Hastings. Newly returned from several months’ sick leave after being stabbed in the summer, the young officer was on light duties whilst he continued to recuperate. He was keen to learn and quick-thinking, and Warren had assigned him to the older sergeant’s care, having decided that putting the young man back into the heart of a major investigation was probably the best way to help him exorcise any demons remaining from the summer’s horrors. Besides which, it hadn’t escaped Warren’s notice that DS Kent was approaching retirement age. He had no idea what the older man’s plans were — and the new age-discrimination laws made him wary about asking — nevertheless, training up other officers seemed prudent to Warren.

Of course, as with any system, HOLMES2 was only as good as the information put into it and the next stage was to gather that information.

“DI Sutton, I want you and DS Khan to co-ordinate the interviewing of all of Ms Evans’ known associates. Start with her workmates, then her friends. Let’s see if we can find any witnesses. Use the missing person file as a jumping-off point, but remember it isn’t a crime for a twenty-something not to come home of an evening, so there probably won’t be much in there.”

Sutton and Khan nodded, already casting their eyes around the room at the various other officers they would second to their teams.

“DS Richardson, speak to Traffic and any CCTV operators in the area. Let’s see if we can find any useful images from around the time that she went missing. I doubt that there will be much in the way of CCTV footage up near Beaconsfield Woods, but you never know, we might get lucky and pick up something on the speed cameras on the main road.

“In the meantime, I’m going to speak to her family again and see what her boyfriend has to say for himself.”

* * *

Warren chose Detective Constable Karen Hardwick to accompany him to interview Sally Evans’ family. The young woman was relatively new to CID, but had shown a lot of promise. Warren firmly believed that a small unit such as Middlesbury should be careful to ensure that more junior colleagues received the full range of learning experiences, and so he regularly took detective constables and sergeants out with him to interview witnesses or suspects.