Jane Casey - Cruel Acts

Derwent grunted, not convinced.

I leafed through my notes. ‘There was nothing to say Sara was being stalked – no concerns for her safety, no threats. On the day she disappeared no one was following her – at least as far as the investigators could determine.’

Derwent had slowed down to a crawl, creeping down Bloemfontein Road. ‘So what happened then?’

‘She parked just where that Volvo is. It was eleven at night but it was a Saturday, a summer night. There was a lot of traffic on the main road and there were people around. It was a warm evening – there’d been thunderstorms earlier but it was clearing up. When she got out of her car, she was seven hundred and eighty yards away from her home at 37 Haddaway Road.’

Today the light was flat, the clouds brooding over our heads. It was hard to imagine the street wrapped in the dark heat of a humid summer night.

Derwent pulled in a few cars ahead of the Volvo and parked. ‘Then what?’

‘Then she sent a text message to her fiancé telling him what had happened.’ I flipped to the relevant page and read it out. ‘Flat tyre!!! I don’t know what to do.’

‘The poor bloke was in Latvia. How was he supposed to come to the rescue?’

‘She probably just wanted to tell someone what had happened.’

‘No, she wanted to make him feel guilty for being off on a stag weekend instead of here.’

I raised my eyebrows at him. ‘That’s a very jaundiced view, even for you.’

‘She was high maintenance. I have limited patience for that.’

Melissa, Derwent’s girlfriend, was not the sort of person who would be low maintenance. If it had been anyone else I might have said as much, but Derwent had made it clear time and time again that while my personal life was endlessly entertaining, his was not available for discussion. Beside me, Derwent drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, as if he knew what I was thinking. ‘Then what happened?’

‘He replied: “Oh shit. Where r u? How bad is it? Driveable?” Obviously it wasn’t. She checked their AA membership and discovered it had lapsed so she decided to walk home. She sent him a message to that effect at 23.15.’ I showed Derwent the relevant page.

I can’t drive it. Left the car on Bloem Rd and I’m walking home. You can sort it out when you get back tomorrow. <3 <3

Derwent grimaced. ‘Something for him to look forward to.’

‘He replied, “Typical! Call me when you get in.”’ I flipped the page. ‘According to this, “No further calls were made or received from Miss Grey’s phone and no further messages were sent by her. Mr Mitchell did not hear from his fiancée again after the message sent at 23.14. Cell site analysis revealed the phone remained switched on for a further twenty minutes, at which point it was powered down. Mr Mitchell informed police that it was highly unusual for Miss Grey to turn her phone off.”’

Derwent peered out of the car. ‘It looks like a safe enough area.’

‘It is. And they’d lived here for a year. She knew exactly where she was and she knew the quickest way home was going to be on foot.’

‘She should have been safe here.’ After a moment, he focused on me again. ‘So what route did she take?’

‘We don’t know.’ I pulled out a map I’d printed off. ‘This is Haddaway Road where she was heading. The direct route is along this road here, Haigh Road, leading into Radcliffe Road.’

‘Any reason to think she didn’t go that way?’

‘A bit of her mobile phone handset was found on Radcliffe Road in a hedge.’

‘OK. Sounds promising.’

I flattened the map out and pointed to a star I’d drawn. ‘It was here. Quite a long way from the path. I wonder if it was thrown out of a moving vehicle.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘This sighting of a couple arguing.’ I leafed through the file and pulled out the witness statement. ‘The witness was a Mrs Hamilton. She lives on Cordray Road, here.’ I showed him where it was on the map. ‘She was driving home and happened to glance along a side street in this area – she couldn’t be specific about which street it was but it was somewhere off Simpson Road.’

Simpson Road was about a quarter of a mile south of Haigh Road. ‘That’s way off the route she should have been taking,’ Derwent said.

‘Exactly. It was around the right time though. The investigators spent a lot of time trying to get Mrs Hamilton to remember anything else but she wasn’t a great witness, reading between the lines. She got more and more confused and in the end she said she couldn’t be sure of anything she’d told them. She withdrew her statement.’

Derwent groaned. ‘Good work, lads.’

‘It was a dark night, she was driving, she glanced down a side street and sort of saw two people who might have been arguing. It wasn’t going to make or break the case even if she remembered every detail.’

‘What did she say about the man?’

‘Nothing. He was standing behind a white van. She didn’t see more than the back of his head.’

‘Leo Stone’s pretty distinctive. He’s tall, for one thing. She’d have noticed that, surely.’

‘She said not. All she could say was that he was taller than the woman.’

‘How tall was Sara Grey?’

‘Five two.’

‘Right, so my nan would be taller than her.’

‘Yeah. It wasn’t altogether helpful testimony. Wrong place, right time, few details.’ I tapped my pen on the map. ‘The van, though.’

‘I like the van.’

‘We all like the van. It’s one of the only points of comparison we’ve got, apart from where the body ended up and how it was left, and that’s Dr Hanshaw’s territory.’ I didn’t need to say the rest because Derwent knew as well as I did that if that was called into question, we could lose Sara Grey altogether. The pathologist’s evidence was a big part of what had put Leo Stone behind bars. Without it, he could walk for good.

Derwent opened his door. ‘Let’s follow her route. Work out the timings. What time did Mrs Hamilton see the arguing couple?’

‘Half past eleven.’

‘So how long did she have to get there?’

‘Fifteen minutes or so.’

He looked me up and down. ‘Your legs are about twice as long as Sara Grey’s. You’ll have to take baby steps.’

Even with Derwent slowing me down (‘Oi, giraffe, put the brakes on’) it was possible to walk as far as Simpson Road in fifteen minutes. The area was middle-class, quiet, the houses well kept. It had been two and a half years since Sara Grey disappeared and there was no point in looking for evidence but I imagined her walking home, moving fast, her head down, and I wondered how she could have ended up so far off course. For once, Derwent was thinking the same as me.

‘Why would you go this way?’ He pulled the map out of my hand and studied it, frowning. ‘If we assume Mrs H was right about what she saw.’

‘These are busier roads than the direct route. Maybe she wanted to stay where there were more people around. Alternatively, something was making her uneasy. If someone was following her, she might have taken a different route home, trying to shake them off.’

‘Wouldn’t she have wanted to go straight home? Get indoors where she was safe?’

‘Not if she was concerned about them knowing where she lived. She’d never feel safe again if she led them to her door, even if she made it inside without coming to grief.’

Derwent shook his head and walked away.

‘What?’

‘Just …’ He swung back to face me. ‘What a way to live, that’s all. Working out what risks to take. Who to trust. Walking fifteen minutes out of your way to give yourself a better chance of making it home in one piece.’