Danielle Ramsay - Broken Silence

He pushed it towards Wolfe.

‘What’s this?’ Wolfe asked as he looked at the two tickets inside.

‘I booked these for Claudia and I before …’ Brady faltered, shrugging. ‘Well, I’ve got no use for them now.’

‘How did you get hold of these? I heard they’d sold out within a few days?’

‘I have my contacts.’

‘I can’t,’ answered Wolfe, as he ran a hand over his smooth, bald head. ‘It wouldn’t feel right. Why don’t you give them to Claudia instead?’

Brady shook his head.

‘She’s in London and from what I’ve heard she’s got no intention of coming back.’

Wolfe still looked unconvinced.

‘Seriously, you’d be doing me a favour. Take a date with you,’ Brady suggested.

John Tavener was one of the few contemporary British composers that Brady really liked. In particular, ‘The Protecting Veil’ was an evocative and haunting piece that had remained with Brady from the first moment he had heard it, more than a decade earlier. But, despite his appreciation of the piece, the last place he wanted to be was at The Sage in Gateshead, sat on his own, listening to music that would painfully remind him of everything that was wrong with his life. He could do that at home, sat in the dark holding on to a bottle of Scotch.

‘When the hell have you ever known me have a date, laddie?’ snorted Wolfe as he resignedly accepted the tickets.

For once Wolfe had him. Brady couldn’t answer because he couldn’t remember either. It was fair to say Wolfe was married first to his job and then to drink. Ormaybe it was the other way round? Brady wasn’t that sure any more.

Regardless of his relationship with alcohol, Wolfe was always impeccably dressed. He wore tailored suits, silk shirts and matching ties. And he always sported a silk handkerchief in his suit pocket. But his jowly face was starting to show the telltale signs of his affair with booze.

‘Right!’ blustered Wolfe, eager to leave his personal life behind. He ran his hand over his gleaming head before getting down to business.

‘I’ll obviously email you the report once it’s been put together. But I thought you might be interested in some of the things I uncovered during the post-mortem.’

Brady bent forward, keen to hear what Wolfe had found out.

‘Time of death was approximately between 12.30 am and 2.00 am.’

‘Can you be more precise?’

‘I thought I was being. I’m not the bloody detective here. All I’ve got to go on is the victim’s body temperature, rigor and liver mortis and stomach contents. But if you can do better, laddie, then by all means!’

Brady kicked himself. He knew better than to tell Wolfe how to do his job.

‘Can I continue?’

Brady nodded apologetically.

‘There was no evidence of finger-shaped bruising or nail marks on or around the neck, but there were signs of swelling. Petechial haemorrhaging was present above and below a red ligature mark, and when I opened her up the hyoid bone had been fractured. All typically in keeping with ligature strangulation. Manner of death was without adoubt, homicide,’ Wolfe concluded. ‘However there were self-inflicted scratches at the front of the neck. They matched the skin tissue found under the victim’s nails. Presumably the poor girl must have struggled to loosen the scarf from her neck while she was being choked.’

Brady had expected this. The scarf around Sophie’s neck had turned out to be more than just a fashion statement. Someone had used it to strangle her to death.

‘The skull was fractured and bone matter was present in the brain, but there was no bleeding between the skull and dura. Which means, as I’m sure you know, she was already dead before any trauma occurred to her face and head.’

Brady edged forward in his seat for what was coming next.

‘The examination of her pelvic area indicated that the victim had not given birth and was not pregnant at the time of death. But,’ Wolfe paused to get his breath, ‘I found evidence of recent sexual activity but no indication that the sexual contact was forced. As you’d expect, I’ve had vaginal and anal fluid samples removed for analysis.’

‘There’s definitely no evidence that she might have been raped?’

‘That’s what I said. There was no indication of sexual aggression,’ Wolfe repeated.

Brady nodded.

‘How recent was the sexual intercourse?’

‘Within the hour before she was killed,’ answered Wolfe. ‘But that’s not all, there was also a significant amount of internal and external vaginal and perineum tissue scarring roughly dating back four years.’

‘Suggestive of sexual abuse?’

‘With that sort of severe trauma, I would say it was more than likely,’ answered Wolfe.

Brady nodded, not surprised. He had had a gut feeling that there was a lot more to the victim’s life than her parents would have him believe.

‘Anything else?’

‘Isn’t that enough?’ asked Wolfe, raising his eyebrow at Brady. ‘We’ll have a clearer idea of whether she was high on drugs or alcohol once the lab comes back with the samples I’ve submitted.’

‘Sure,’ Brady replied.

‘They grow up damned fast nowadays, laddie,’ Wolfe added as he picked up his glass.

Brady didn’t disagree. Given what he already knew, it would come as no surprise if the toxicological reports found traces of drugs and alcohol in her blood and urine. But the fact was, she was just a kid; a kid who was having sex. Add to that forced sex from as young as eleven.

Paul Simmons immediately came to mind.

Statistically, step-fathers were not only more likely to kill a step-child than the biological father, but also four times more likely to sexually abuse a step-child. Brady couldn’t shake the bad feeling he had about Simmons. It had been there from the moment he had met him. That coupled with the fact that Simmons had walked into Sophie’s life over four years ago, around the same time that Wolfe suggested the sexual abuse had started.

But there were also the photographs of the victim that Brady needed to consider. Photographs which uncannily echoed Wolfe’s sentiments that in today’s society, kids grew up fast. Too damned fast.

‘She was just fifteen,’ Brady stated as he looked at Wolfe.

‘Well, the evidence is there whether you like it or not,’ Wolfe said as his sharp eyes scrutinised Brady. ‘The question is what are you going to do with it, laddie?’

Chapter Thirty

Brady picked up the evening edition of The Northern Echo.

Someone had thoughtfully left it on his desk; along with an in-tray of emails he needed to answer and a pile of reports marked urgent. He noted that Rubenfeld had made the front page. Not only that, he had also got the newspaper to put up an award for any information leading to the apprehension of Sophie Washington’s murderer. Brady knew it was a canny ploy at selling papers and gaining local respect. The cynic in him understood that the reward had nothing to do with helping the police but more to do with inflating the newspaper’s profit margin.

Brady hated this kind of empty publicity stunt but he knew it had to be done. Sophie Washington’s murder might last a few days in the headlines before the public got bored and circulation figures dropped. The public had an insatiable, even ghoulish appetite for murder and sex, sometimes in that order. Sophie Washington’s life would be picked apart until there was nothing left. Then the scavengers, like Rubenfeld, would move on to sabotage someone else’s life.

Still, Brady had to admire The Northern Echo ‘s coldblooded attitude. It was clever; of all the rewards the paperhad ever offered, he couldn’t remember a single one being paid out. The paper couldn’t lose, it was a win-win situation. And the credit was down to one man: Rubenfeld. No other paper would have that headline yet, so getting in first with a big reward was all the sweeter; it meant they had some kind of ownership on the story. And a reward of twenty-five grand would attract a lot of attention; this was the North East after all. Money was short and times were hard. There was a recession on, and unemployment was at a record high which meant people were desperate. Families had to be clothed and fed and the rent still had to be paid. In reality it meant a shed load of extra work for the police who would now have to screen thousands of bogus calls from people who would stitch their granny up if it meant they were better off by twenty-five grand.