Paul Gitsham - A Case Gone Cold

Dedication To Hugo. You’re far too young to read the nasty stories that your Uncle Paul writes, but maybe one day he’ll need a hero whose first name starts with H.

Prologue Prologue Then A piece of folded cloth muffled the sound of glass shattering. The intruder held his breath. The alarm began its wailing again, but that was of no concern – nobody had come to investigate during the previous twenty-four hours, how likely was it that somebody would decide to get up at 1 a.m. to see if this time it was for real? Satisfied he wouldn’t be disturbed, the man ducked his head and climbed through the jagged hole.

Now

Six Months Later

Letter to the Reader

Excerpt

Acknowledgements

Endpages

About the Publisher

Prologue

Then

A piece of folded cloth muffled the sound of glass shattering. The intruder held his breath. The alarm began its wailing again, but that was of no concern – nobody had come to investigate during the previous twenty-four hours, how likely was it that somebody would decide to get up at 1 a.m. to see if this time it was for real? Satisfied he wouldn’t be disturbed, the man ducked his head and climbed through the jagged hole.

Now

The case folder hit the surface of Detective Chief Inspector Warren Jones’ desk with a flat smack.

‘Cold case. See what you can do with this, Warren.’

Warren picked up the folder and raised an eyebrow at the stamp on the front.

‘Burglary? Surely this comes under Volume Crime, sir?’

He looked at the date.

‘September this year? That’s barely two months, how is it a cold case?’

‘The burglary isn’t,’ Detective Superintendent John Grayson replied. ‘Look inside. It’s what it’s thrown up that’s interesting.’

* * *

‘Friday the eighteenth of December 1992, the Middlesbury campus of the University of Middle England. Eighteen-year-old Debbie Claremont attends a house party in the Charles Babbage Postgraduate Halls. It’s a pretty open affair, with dozens of people in and out. Most were postgraduate students and some were undergraduates like Claremont, however nobody was keeping count and they weren’t rowdy enough to bother campus security. It’s believed that at least a few locals also turned up uninvited.’

Warren gave his team a few moments to find the relevant pages in the photocopied pack he’d handed them. DSI Grayson had been correct; the case was interesting and Warren had wasted no time pulling together a small team to see if the new information that had suddenly come to light could close a case that had remained unsolved for more than two decades.

‘By her own admission, Claremont was an inexperienced drinker and had drunk far more than she could handle. She may also have smoked cannabis – again, a first for her. Suffice to say she was far from in control of her actions. Details are a bit sketchy, but she woke up alone at about 5 a.m. feeling sick in a back room, with vague memories of someone forcing her in there. That was when she noticed her knickers were down around her knees and she was feeling bruised and sore around her pubic area.’

‘Were there any eyewitnesses?’ asked Detective Constable Gary Hastings. Despite his deceptively youthful appearance, Hastings was one of the most experienced DCs on the team. If it looked as though the case was going somewhere, Warren intended to let Hastings take a lead role; it would look good for him during his upcoming sergeant’s selection.

‘None that came forward. Claremont was understandably traumatized by the whole thing, and probably still the worse for wear, and so her first instinct was to go home and shower.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘A lot less forensics on TV in the Nineties. She felt too ashamed to say anything for three days, before telling her housemate, who made her call the police.’

‘Did they take her seriously? We all know how rape was viewed back then,’ asked DC Karen Hardwick, a scowl furrowing her brow.

‘Apparently they did. She had cuts and bruises consistent with being forced to have sex and eyewitness testimony from earlier in the evening confirmed that she was far too drunk for it to be considered consensual, even by the standards of the day.

‘From what I can tell, the officers investigating did everything possible. However, it was the end of term and many of the party’s attendees had gone away for Christmas by the time she reported the assault. The nature of the party and delay in tracking guests meant that the investigating officers were never satisfied that they identified even half of the people who were there that night. Unfortunately, they never generated any viable suspects.’

‘But presumably they had forensics, otherwise we wouldn’t be talking about it now?’ Detective Inspector Tony Sutton’s voice was nasal. The cloud of Olbas oil decongestant that had followed him around for the past few days, making everyone else’s eyes water, had apparently had little effect on the nasty head cold he’d come down with. He shouldn’t be in work, but the man was nothing if not stubborn. Warren just hoped he hadn’t passed it on to the rest of the team, he didn’t want to have to supplement their numbers with detectives from headquarters in Welwyn Garden City; doing so hardly helped boost Middlesbury’s credibility as an independent CID unit.

‘She’d showered several times but hadn’t been able to face going out to the communal laundrette. They found traces of semen on her underwear. Back then it was standard practice to preserve the evidence for future analysis and so they eventually DNA fingerprinted it and loaded it onto the database. No hits.’

‘Until now,’ stated Sutton, his voice cracking as he tried to stifle a cough.

‘Exactly. SOCO retrieved a blood spot from a burglary over the summer. They processed it in the usual way, but a couple of days afterwards a known career burglar, Aaron Wallace, was arrested for something different and copped to this one along with a couple of dozen others. He wore gloves, but a muddy footprint found at the scene matched the other crime scenes and the pair of size nine Nike trainers he was wearing when they arrested him. He’s due to appear in court in December, but nobody bothered to chase the DNA results down, since he’d already confessed. When the results finally arrived, they’d been expecting it to simply confirm that he was in the house.’

‘But it also flagged this cold case?’ interjected Hardwick.

‘Yes. And it didn’t match him.’

‘It didn’t match?’ Hastings blinked in surprise.

‘No. Which is not surprising, Wallace would have been only eight years old at the time of the sexual assault. Besides which, he’s a frequent flyer. He’s been in the DNA database since 2005, so he’d have come up as a match years ago.’

Tony Sutton may have been feeling under the weather, however he had still managed to read ahead.

‘First question in my mind then is who was with him that night? Specifically, who was wearing these men’s size eleven Reeboks that appeared alongside Wallace’s size nines in the victim’s back garden?’

* * *

During his time in CID, Gary Hastings had dealt with some of the most serious crimes imaginable. Murders and rapes changed the lives of the victims and those around them for ever, and as such were often foremost in the public’s imagination. But sometimes that meant it was possible to forget the impact that other, less dramatic offences could have on their victims.

‘We thought that things were just beginning to look up, and then this happened.’

Hastings had a series of photographs of trainers that he wanted Helen Bedford to look at. It had taken only a few moments for her to flick through them and confirm that neither she nor her husband, Ian, owned a pair of trainers similar to those that had produced the second set of prints found on their patio that night. Furthermore, neither they, nor their adult children, had size eleven feet.