Confession (The Mark Pemberton Cases Book 3)

by Nicholas Rhea

  ‘A working lunch. Have you eaten?’ Pemberton asked them.

  ‘Yes, thanks, sir. A sandwich and a pint apiece — it works wonders after a long morning!’

  ‘Good. Well, what can you tell us about Dawlish?’

  ‘First, he’s not at home or at work. We gave no hint of the reason for our enquiries, the lads in Derbyshire were most discreet, so I don’t think we have alerted him or his office staff to our suspicions. I did wonder, though, if he could have got wind of our interest and done a runner. I thought you’d better know about his absence in case you need to issue a nationwide alert or an all-ports warning and have him picked up.’

  ‘Thanks, but probably not at this stage. We have good reason to think he might be heading north, John, for the Requiem Mass for his friend James Browning. It’s to be on Monday, here in Rainesbury, but the interment will be later in the week, near his family home in Staffordshire.’

  ‘That’s a relief! It ties in with what his secretary said. He has a red MG Roadster, sir, J registered. Just like Browning’s. Same year, same colour, same model. Very similar registration number too. The prefix is identical, but the numbers of Dawlish’s are 868 followed by J, while Browning’s were 688 J. It’s easy to confuse those numbers. He’s left home in that. We had a DC go to see him at the office, pretending to be a small businessman wanting advice on local advertising — Dawlish is an advertising executive, sir, with his own business in a small market town called Findford-on-Trent. HD Advertising, he calls it. Very successful too, according to local intelligence. He runs a BMW as his business vehicle — if we need to have it examined, Derbyshire police will see to it. Anyway, he wasn’t at the office and his secretary said he’d rung in this morning to say a friend had died, and he was going to Rainesbury for the funeral. He said he’d be back in the office on Tuesday morning.’

  ‘That ties in,’ Pemberton agreed.

  ‘The DC then went to his flat, pretending to be a friend, but the neighbours said he’d gone off in his MG. They said he often went off for weekends in it. He was away last weekend, they said, but they’ve no idea where.’

  ‘He came here and there’s every indication he’s on his way here again. What sort of place does he live in?’ Pemberton asked out of curiosity.

  ‘A large detached house split into three flats, one on each floor. It’s in a quiet part of Findford, backing on to the tennis courts and sports centre. Dawlish has the top floor—’

  ‘Rented or owner-occupied?’ Pemberton interrupted. He was eager to get a mental image of this man and property ownership was one pointer.

  ‘He owns it, sir — all three flats are individually owned. The middle one’s occupied by a young woman who commutes to Derby every day and the ground floor’s occupied by a retired wing commander and his wife. They see everything that’s going on, and keep an eye on the other flats during the absence of the occupiers. They said Dawlish was a busy but friendly man, a good neighbour who was courteous and helpful and not a scrap of trouble. No noisy parties or loud music. He was not married and lived alone, but seemed to spend a lot of time away from home, usually on business, so he led them to believe, although he did sometimes say he was going off in his MG to a rally or gathering of vintage cars. He had his own garage on the premises for the MG, by the way, according to the wing commander, and on those occasions he was at home, he seemed to spend a lot of his spare time at weekends polishing and maintaining his car. The DC left the premises after saying he was a business friend who happened to be in town and who had decided to pop in for a coffee, a long-standing invitation.’

  ‘He’ll be keeping an eye on the flat, will he? That detective? To alert us in case Dawlish returns?’

  ‘Yes, he’ll let us know if Dawlish turns up. He has no reason to think we’re watching him, and there’ll be no arrest or approach unless you authorise it.’

  ‘Right, so that means we must keep our eyes open for him in this part of the world. If he’s on his way now, he could be here fairly soon, unless, of course, he has some other diversion en route.’ Pemberton then told Grant and Black of Lorraine’s recent discoveries.

  It all combined to produce an urgent reason for circulating a description of Dawlish and his car to all patrolling officers, with a request that they did not stop and interview him but reported his whereabouts immediately to Inspector Larkin in the incident room, or to DI Kirkdale or Detective Superintendent Pemberton in person. Larkin said he would despatch an immediate circular to that effect — if Dawlish had left Derbyshire that morning, say ten-thirty or thereabouts, he could be in the Rainesbury district by lunch time. If there were no sightings of their quarry in the town by evening, then a wider hunt might have to be instituted. Another task was to alert all the detectives currently working from the incident room; it was vital that they should know immediately so that they could take the appropriate action. Larkin said he would contact all by radio and personal telephone.

  Having established that part of the procedure for tracing Dawlish, Pemberton asked Grant, ‘So, John, you’ve something else for us?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I had words with the local “D” Division CID in Kent — that’s Tunbridge Wells by the way, where he used to live — to see if Dawlish had come to their notice. I’ve learned he was illegitimate, born in 1966, and his mother was a prostitute. She died in 1979 from natural causes. He never knew his father and spent his early years with foster parents. He tried to hide the fact his mother was on the game, saying she worked away from home, and he would pretend she sent him expensive presents. In fact, he often bought things himself, out of his earnings — he’s always earned money, sir, newspaper rounds, window cleaning, bar work…but he went wrong. As a juvenile he was convicted of raping a schoolgirl — he was sixteen at the time and was placed in care with the local authority for two years. He joined the Scouts and enjoyed outdoor pursuits, doing very well by all accounts. He left local authority care when he was eighteen and seems to have kept his nose clean, then he went off to Swangate College in County Durham. That’s where he met Browning. But of some importance is the fact that before he was caught for that crime — the juvenile rape — he’d been cautioned for indecent assault on girls at school — three cases as a fifteen-year-old and one as a fourteen-year-old. And he’s been in the frame for a subsequent rape, sir. It occurred some years ago, in Sussex — I’ve got the date in my notebook — and a witness reported an old-fashioned red car parked near the scene, an open tourer. No one was ever arrested, and it could not be proved that the red car was Dawlish’s MG, although he was known to possess one at the time. He was interviewed and denied being responsible — it was before the days of DNA analysis and there was insufficient evidence against him to justify an arrest, let alone a prosecution.’

  ‘So, our friend Dawlish is a convicted rapist, even if he was a juvenile at the time. Gregory — I remember you said the files contained a list of known sex offenders who might have come into the frame? Dawlish avoided that, eh?’

  ‘Yes, there is a list, sir, but they were all known offenders who were living fairly close to one or other of the murder scenes, sir. None of the murders was in the south-east, so we didn’t do a trawl of sex offenders from that area. So the answer is no, Dawlish was never listed in the files. He avoided that by the tested and tried method of not offending on his own doorstep. I might add that there are thousands of other sex offenders, known or suspected, who do not feature in the file.’

  ‘So when did Dawlish move to the Midlands?’

  ‘When he set up his own business. After college, he worked for an advertising agency in Eastbourne, commuting from Tunbridge Wells, and moved to Derbyshire in 1992, to set up his own agency.’

  ‘One of the Sandal Strangler killings was in Derbyshire, wasn’t it?’ Pemberton asked.

  ‘Yes, sir, at Longwell in June 1992. Gina Gibbons, a Sheffield prostitute, was the victim. Dawlish moved there, to his new business, the following September.’

  ‘Perhaps he learned about the s
ale of the business while attending the vintage car rally near Buxton that year?’ suggested Pemberton.

  ‘It’s quite possible. Anyway, since he moved there, he’s never come to the notice of Derbyshire police. It seems he’s kept his nose clean.’

  ‘Or he’s evaded their notice and ours simply because he did not live in the area of any of the crimes. In Derbyshire’s case, he moved there afterwards. A true travelling criminal, a mobile villain, but is he a clever killer? A serial killer?’

  ‘With his background, he could be, sir.’

  ‘Well, I reckon he’s motored himself right into our net — or to be more precise, I trust he’s motoring north to get himself well and truly enmeshed. From this point onwards, we regard Hugh Dawlish as a high priority suspect even though we require more evidence before we can think of charging him. Paul, circulate all our teams, will you? Ask them to keep a watching brief for Dawlish and his car, but emphasise he must not be stopped or interrogated. Report his movements and his whereabouts, that’s all. We’ve photographs if anyone needs one. And if we can ask for help from outside forces, especially those upon the routes of the M1 and A1, we might get sightings of him heading north. Anything of that kind would be useful — I want to be sure I know where to find him when I’m ready to lift him.’

  ‘Sure, I’ll fix that.’

  Pemberton thanked Grant and Black, asking them to continue their investigations into the life and movements of Hugh Dawlish.

  When he reported this news to his teams, some of whom were in the incident room making phone calls or checking records, it breathed new life into the enquiry. Quite suddenly, a different atmosphere prevailed — instead of having a suspect who was lying in a mortuary, they had a real live villain who was driving into their trap. But complacency was not allowed; there might be other suspects to be considered, and in fact, one of the teams, Detective Sergeant Whittaker and Detective Constable Aldworth, had just produced one. Their suspect was now in the interview room and the news was passed to Pemberton. He promptly went down to the operational section and located Detective Sergeant Whittaker, who was completing the record of persons brought in for questioning.

  ‘You’ve a body in?’ Pemberton smiled. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘A local weirdo, name of Ben Baxter, sir. Reputed flasher, peeping Tom.’

  ‘Arrested, was he?’

  ‘No, he volunteered to come in for questioning — at our suggestion! He has no alibi for Sunday night and we’ve information that he’s often been seen near those woods at Crayton, spying on courting couples with binoculars.’

  ‘He doesn’t sound like a vicious rapist to me,’ Pemberton said.

  ‘He’s not, sir. I don’t think he’d cope with any woman, however willing she was, but we felt he might have seen something in the woods.’

  ‘Well done — that’s the kind of input we need. Thanks, I’ll leave you to it.’

  After intense questioning, it transpired that Ben Baxter had not been into Crayton Mill woods on Sunday — he’d been on the sand-dunes watching some nude bathing through his binoculars. The detectives discharged him with a warning. As if to complement the sudden upsurge in activity in the incident room, DS Browne and DC Cox came in early at three thirty, and they made straight for Pemberton’s office. He welcomed them.

  ‘Sir…’ The sergeant was clearly excited by the results of their endeavours. ‘We’re on the Browning action, as you know, checking his car and tracing his movements.’

  ‘And you have news?’

  ‘We’ve been trying to establish closer ties between the MG rallies and Browning’s holidays or his weekend movements, sir. Thanks to the book that Lorraine Cashmore found and thanks to Browning’s frequent use of his credit card, we’ve been able to trace most of his movements — and the recent ones do tie in with the marks he made on his own road atlas.’

  ‘And the result?’

  ‘Without going into too much detail, sir, it puts him within five or six miles of every one of the Sandal Strangler’s killings, except for the first one in County Durham. Not only that, it puts him there at the material times, i.e. the weekends before the bodies were discovered. Vintage car rallies were in the areas at the time; they were the reason for his journeys, so we are led to believe. I think we all knew that, but this book proves it — and the pattern continues. In the most recent case — our murder at Crayton — Browning bought fifteen pounds’ worth of petrol for his car at a filling station on the outskirts of Rainesbury, on Crayton Road, at 5.30pm on Sunday last. We’ve checked with the garage — the registration number of his MG Roadster is recorded, and he used a Barclaycard for the payment. We can compare signatures if we need to prove he was actually making the purchase. It puts him in Rainesbury last weekend, sir.’

  ‘That’s excellent work! It’s the first time we’ve had Browning seen anywhere in or near Rainesbury at the material time. He was here before his accident. You’ll put all this on paper, please, in great detail — we need to be absolutely sure about all these facts.’

  ‘Of course, sir. Now, we don’t have details of any routes he might have used, sir — I have no idea at this stage whether he drove straight from his home near Harlow Spa or halted en route. As it was a Sunday, he might have attended some other event or visited someone on the way. Nor do we know whether he stayed in town at a boarding house or hotel, or whether he travelled from home.’

  ‘I have teams doing the rounds of boarding houses, hotels, and so on, thanks; they might turn something up. But this is great news. Now, you’ve spoken to the filling station? Do they remember the MG? It’s quite distinctive.’

  ‘The person on cashier duty was a young girl who’s not very clued up about the different types of car, sir, and she had no idea what we were talking about. I wanted to know if he’d been alone when he called, or whether he’d had a passenger, male or female, but she can’t help. It seems it’s a very busy filling station, being on the road out of Rainesbury, especially during a Sunday in summer. Day trippers and tourists use it a lot, so the company takes care to record all registration numbers, in case of fraud.’

  ‘Right, then it seems beyond reasonable doubt that both Dawlish and Browning were in Rainesbury on the night of the murder and went home afterwards. That’s another breakthrough — well done. Even so, we still haven’t placed them actually there, at the murder scene. Not yet. But I’m sure we will! Thanks for that.’

  It was Inspector Larkin’s task to draw up a time-chart on a whiteboard in the incident room. Thanks to the positive information that was now flowing into the system, the gaps were now closing. He had Browning logged at 5.30pm on the Sunday night, just along the road from Crayton — a mile or so from the parking area that gave access to the woods where the body of Debbie Hall was found. He had Dawlish logged at 8.00pm the same night, the time he’d been positively identified as being in the company of the murdered Debbie. There was a gap of two and a half hours to fill. Where had each of those people been during that vital time?

  The answer to that should confirm the name of the murderer — or murderers. Gregory Kirkdale came to watch Larkin as he was entering the latest information on his chart.

  ‘I did one of those for each of the previous ten killings,’ he said. ‘And all I got was lots of blank spaces. Now, thanks to your teams, I can fill in some of the gaps. And the same names will appear, eh? Dawlish and Browning. Always so near, but always so far!’

  ‘How about checking your files, Gregory, to see if we can realistically consider two men as the Sandal Strangler? A deadly duo, so to speak!’

  ‘Sure, that seems to be an increasing possibility.’

  It was then that a telephone call came from one of the teams working on the hotel and boarding house enquiries. He asked for Inspector Larkin who apologised to Kirkdale for the interruption, but Kirkdale was already heading for his own office and another examination of his files.

  ‘DC Taylor, sir. I’m calling from a call box opposite the Royal Hotel. The red MG has ar
rived, sir, and a man answering the description of Hugh Dawlish has just gone inside, with a suitcase.’

  ‘Great stuff, Andy! Stay there and keep an eye on him. I’ll inform Detective Superintendent Pemberton.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  ‘This changes things,’ was Pemberton’s first reaction. ‘I’ll have to speak to all the teams, so can you fix a special conference, Paul? Call them in from whatever they’re doing, tell them it’s urgent. I’ll address them as soon as they’re assembled. Also, I’ll need extra officers brought on duty so I can put a tail on Dawlish, it’ll be twenty-four hours a day surveillance until I decide to bring him in.’

  It wasn’t a particularly difficult task to assemble the detectives that evening prior to the end of their day’s duties; several were already drifting into the incident room to complete their records. At seven o’clock, Pemberton stood before his officers. After stressing the importance of this new development he told them about the arrival of Hugh Dawlish in Rainesbury.

  ‘He’s at the Royal Hotel,’ he went on. ‘He was clocked arriving around 5 p.m. and he was in his red MG. The registration number is on the board, and at the moment, DC Taylor is keeping observations on him. We have every reason to believe he will remain here until the funeral Mass of his friend, James Browning, our deceased suspect; that’s on Monday morning at eleven o’clock at Our Lady and St Hilda’s Church here in Rainesbury. Now, the current situation is this: although there has been a shift of emphasis from Browning to Dawlish, with Dawlish emerging as our No. 1 suspect, we do not have sufficient evidence to have him arrested and interrogated, although some positive data is now being gathered. The problem is keeping him within our sights until I’m ready. I’ll be compiling a file about him this evening and the moment I have sufficient evidence to detain him, I’ll have him brought in for questioning. I have considered asking him to come voluntarily into the police station to be questioned for elimination purposes, but I suspect he’s too experienced and too cunning to agree to that. I feel he’d say nothing if we did persuade him to visit us without any apparent good reason. Remember, he is a convicted rapist and he’s been in police custody on previous occasions. He knows the procedure after arrest. My own view, after the manner in which the Sandal Stranglings have occurred and bearing in mind there’s never been a named suspect until now, is that we need to have a cast-iron case against Dawlish before we even think about questioning him. So that’s one of your jobs during this weekend’s enquiries. I want you to bear him in mind, I want you to amass whatever evidence you can against him, and keep me informed. Make sure you know what he looks like and his background — I’m having existing photographs reproduced and we’ll take a few without his knowledge over the weekend. But — and this is vital — I do not want Dawlish approached or made aware of our interest; it is very important that we maintain the element of total surprise until we arrest him.’