Kirsty nodded: ‘The first hour after a crime gives the best chance for a quick result.’
‘Particularly now, with all this,’ he said, indicating the slushy coating on the grass.
The detective chief inspector made a couple of quick calls asking for assistance at all exits to the common, particularly looking for bicycle tyre tracks made since the snowfall. Leaving the two newly arrived uniformed officers in charge of the crime scene, Gillard suggested that they both follow the tracks left by the cyclist. ‘You look like you’re kitted out for a run, so shall we?’
* * *
They jogged easily along the path towards the nature reserve, moving through mixed woodland where in many places the snow had not yet melted. The tracks were easy to follow, and there were several muddy patches where Gillard knelt down to take photographs, placing a coin beside the impression to give a sense of scale. The type of tyre thus recorded, they upped their pace, finding no other bike tracks since the snowfall to confuse the route. It was not yet eight, and Gillard hoped that on a Sunday morning luck might well be on their side.
Finally they emerged by a public footpath sign onto a main road, the A243, close to Leatherhead Golf Club. It was here that the tyre tracks disappeared. There were no parking places or pull-ins designated nearby and no evidence of vehicles parked on the snowy verge. Gillard flagged down a passing patrol car, and got them both a lift back.
Half an hour later, Kirsty was sitting in an interview room in Epsom police station, having given her statement, and now watching DCI Gillard consume an enormous bacon sandwich. ‘Are you sure you don’t want one?’ he asked, as he wiped ketchup from the corner of his mouth with a napkin.
‘I’m a vegan,’ Kirsty said.
‘Then I suppose I’m committing an unforgivable crime against the animal kingdom,’ he said.
‘Look, I’m not a crusader. But you’re not doing yourself any good.’
He nodded and raised his eyebrows, and tossed the napkin into a bin, signalling the end of the conversation.
‘So what happens to Bertie the boxer?’ Kirsty asked.
‘Given that we have a dead body on the slab, I’m interested that’s the first question that you asked. But he’ll be looked after by the local dog handling section.’
‘Have they done a DNA check around his mouth?’
Gillard looked up quizzically.
‘I definitely saw bloodstains around his mouth, as if he had bitten the assailant.’
‘I’ll ask them to do it, but I’m a little dubious that we will get anything. Any human DNA traces may well have been overwhelmed by doggy saliva. On the other hand, we can look out for fragments of clothing, which may contain the cyclist’s DNA.’
‘Do you know who the victim is?’
‘Yes, she’s Mrs Tanvi Roy, quite a notable businesswoman apparently,’ Gillard said. ‘Yaz Quoroshi of CSI say there’s plenty of ID on the body, though no purse. I shall be going round to see her next of kin this evening, though it seems they’ve already picked up the bad news, according to my family liaison officer.’
Kirsty nodded.
‘When is it you are due to start as a CSI?’
‘Tomorrow. Based in Mount Browne to begin with, reporting to Mr Quoroshi.’
Gillard smiled at her. ‘Well, this morning has been quite an induction for you, hasn’t it?’
‘To put it mildly.’
‘I think you should be very pleased with yourself. And I think we should both go over this afternoon and have a look at this snow sample that you collected.’
‘Okay,’ she said and checked the time on her phone. It was almost ten o’clock ‘Can I go now? I’ve hardly got any food in the house, and I haven’t ironed anything for my first day’s work. I’m horribly behind.’
He gave her a steady stare. She had the kind of face that made it easy. ‘Sorry, Kirsty, I need half an hour more of your time. There’s a good chance the murder weapon is somewhere nearby, and having you with me will give me a better chance to find it. So if you don’t mind, I’d like to go back to the scene now and join the half-dozen officers who are already there.’
‘Okay,’ she said quietly.
Gillard smiled. ‘I promise that when we’re done I’ll give you a lift to the supermarket.’
‘And the ironing?’ She grinned.
‘Don’t push your luck.’
She laughed. Gillard decided that he liked her.
* * *
DCI Gillard wasn’t exaggerating in his praise for the young investigator. There were so many things she could have done wrong, but hadn’t. She hadn’t put her own footprints into the crime scene, she hadn’t touched the body herself, she’d attempted to photograph the tyre tracks and footprints, and she had restrained the dogs. Using the pizza box to hold a crucial sample of snow was an act of genius.
Back at Ashtead Common the corner of Woodfield Lane was a hive of activity. An articulated low loader carrying a large white Portakabin was just reversing in through the open vehicle barrier, guided by one of the Ashtead Common rangers.
‘That’s our mobile incident room, God help us,’ Gillard said to Mockett. ‘It’s universally known as the Khazi because of the smell.’ He recalled many long hours in its stale air, listening to officers come and go through the squeaky plywood door, and trying to make himself heard over the drone of the extractor fans. Black mould grew readily on its institutional off-white paint, however many times it was washed with fungicide.
The crime scene was marked by half a dozen police vehicles, a large white CSI tent, and an encircling loop of crime tape which fluttered in the breeze. Though it was by no means warm, the temperature was several degrees higher than it had been when the body was found and only the vaguest traces of slush could still be seen. Duck boards had been laid across the damp grass to allow vehicles to come and go across the 200 yards to the edge of the tape without churning up the turf. That had been insisted on by the City of London Corporation, owner of this precious piece of green space so close to the metropolis.
Gillard was greeted at the edge of the tape by a uniformed PC, and then by a woman in a crackling plastic Tyvek bodysuit. It was DI Claire Mulholland, Gillard’s protégé. He introduced her to Kirsty Mockett and then asked, ‘Any luck finding the murder weapon?’
‘Not so far. Based on photographs of the wounds, Yaz reckons we’re probably looking for a hammer, or something similar. Certainly something with quite a bit of weight.’
Gillard nodded and turned to Kirsty. ‘Did you see whether the cyclist was carrying anything?’
‘No, like I said I really just saw him from the corner of my eye. I can’t exclude that he was carrying something the size of a hammer. If it was as big as a baseball bat, I guess I would have noticed.’
‘The larger and heavier the weapon, I imagine the more likely an assailant would be to ditch it quickly,’ Claire said.
‘Agreed,’ Gillard replied. ‘I’m going to grab half a dozen of your team and search the bushes of the twenty yards either side of the path that Kirsty here saw the cyclist take.’
‘If you wait five minutes, the ranger and his colleagues should be here,’ Claire said. ‘They’ve offered to help. A sniffer dog is on its way from Crawley too, and should be here any time.’
* * *
Noon arrived under a glowering, snow-laden sky, as two dozen men and women in wellington boots and rainproofs combed through the undergrowth on either side of the cyclist’s route that Gillard had marked on his map. All sorts of interesting things were found: discarded condoms, a sock, numerous dog toys, chewed tennis balls and fast food polystyrene clamshells. They also found bottles, most plastic but a few glass. The latter, some of them conceivably large and heavy enough to have been the murder weapon, were marked on a map, their locations tagged with either spray paint or labels on the undergrowth, and packed up into evidence envelopes. Snow flurries began again, and the temperature dropped sharply as the sniffer dog, a spaniel called Jimbo, and his male ha
ndler went again over the ground that had been covered.
The dog, having been taught the victim’s smell from her clothing, raced around with its nose to the ground in seemingly random loops, going back and forth before plunging off to the right into the woods, and then re-emerging further up the path.
Gillard turned to Kirsty and said: ‘I better get you back now, otherwise you’ll die of starvation. The search will go on all afternoon, and there’s not much else you can do for the moment.’
Following her instruction, he dropped her off at the nearby Sainsbury’s and said: ‘Thank you. You’ve done a really fantastic job giving us a head start on what could be a really difficult case. I’ve already spoken to Yaz to ask him to go easy on you tomorrow. I’ll be in touch. Good luck with the ironing!’
As the grey Vauxhall pulled away, Kirsty gave a brief wave. She was hungry and high on adrenalin. Only then, on her own in a crowded shopping street, did she think about the victim, and that first glimpse of her damaged skull. Those open eyes with snowflakes gathering on the lashes came back to her. The thought of food was suddenly repellent. Shopping would have to wait.
Chapter 3
The inaugural incident room meeting for the case of the murder of Mrs Roy took place at one p.m., just a few hours after the body was found. Crammed into the Khazi with Gillard were DI Claire Mulholland, Research Intelligence Officer Rob Townsend, DCs Colin Hodges and Carl Hoskins, press officer Christina McCafferty, and family liaison officer DC Gabby Underwood.
‘Right, let’s keep this brief,’ Gillard said, pointing to an ordnance survey map that he had taped to a whiteboard. ‘What we know so far is that businesswoman Mrs Tanvi Roy, fifty-seven, was walking her dog on Ashtead Common at around 7.20 a.m. when witnesses heard a scream. The first arrived at the crime scene within three minutes, and could see from the severity of head injuries that the victim was dead. We have been very lucky on this because that first witness was, as you will have heard, Ms Kirsty Mockett, a trainee crime scene investigator. You have her statement in front of you. In the first five minutes and with the snow already melting she managed to secure the scene, keep bystanders and their dogs away, and preserve an impression of a potentially significant cycle tyre imprint and accompanying footprint.’
‘That’s well impressive,’ said Colin Hodges, tucking into a sandwich from a paper plate stacked high beside him. Hodges and his fellow DC Carl Hoskins were almost identical mid-thirties, overweight, working-class detectives, with metal-framed spectacles and close-shaven heads. Known as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the only easy way to tell the difference between them was Hodges’ newly-grown beard which, to his horror, turned out ginger. ‘I hope she’s coming to work for us,’ he said.
‘She is, starting tomorrow,’ Gillard said.
Claire Mulholland stuck up her hand. ‘Is the cyclist formally a suspect?’
‘Informally, yes. But I think at this stage we should stick to the formula that he is somebody we are anxious to trace. I’ll say more about this when we cover the PR angle because it’s potentially going to be a big story.’ He looked at Christina McCafferty, whose emphatically nodding head signalled agreement.
Claire made some notes, while Gillard continued. ‘I was able to get there by 7.40 a.m. When uniforms arrived five minutes later we were able to try to follow the cycle tracks before the snow melted. We can look at the tyre track images later.’ He turned to the map. ‘We traced the line of tyre marks along a public footpath which exited onto the A243 here,’ he said tapping the map. ‘This is where the track was lost.’
‘She didn’t get much of a description of the cyclist,’ Claire said. ‘Do we have anything from other witnesses?’
‘Not much. Mr Douglas Boyle, a dog walker and the second witness on the scene, said he saw a cyclist in the distance a couple of minutes before he heard the scream. All he could say was the rider was heading down the bridleway from the direction of Ashtead railway station towards the place where Mrs Roy was found. We have a good description from Ms Mockett of the three vehicles parked at the start of bridleway thirty-three, here, which is the junction of Woodfield Lane and Woodfield Road. We are currently tracing owners. She didn’t recall any of the vehicles having a cycle rack. Although it is possible to store a bicycle in a large car, I think we should probably assume for now that our cyclist arrived and left the area on two wheels.’
‘If he came up Woodfield Lane and over the level crossing we will have him on CCTV,’ Claire said. ‘I’ll chase that up with Network Rail.’
‘What about tracing the bike?’ Carl Hoskins asked.
‘It’s not going to be easy, despite some pointers,’ Gillard replied. ‘From the photographs Ms Mockett took we should be able to establish the type of tyre, and possibly even the frame size. But there are millions of bikes out there, and records are much poorer for obvious reasons than they are for cars. Having said that, we’ve been granted a bit of a manpower resource, and I’ve asked for searches under every bridge over every stream or canal in the area, and every bit of waste ground to see if the bike has been dumped. I do want to find that bicycle, because judging by the savagery of the attack it is possible that there are blood spatters on it.’
He turned to RIO Rob Townsend. ‘Is there anything from the victim’s phone so far?’
Townsend, a young and fresh-faced officer, said: ‘We’ve extracted all the metadata, and there’s nothing obviously suspicious. It will take weeks to go through it all, but most recent calls and texts were from family and business associates.’
The plate of sandwiches, already depleted by Hoskins and Hodges, was passed around by Gabby Underwood. Claire Mulholland took one, and then asked. ‘Based on the absence of her purse are we treating this as a mugging? CSI’s initial impression of the body is that there wasn’t a sexual assault.’
‘Bike rage,’ Hoskins said.
‘Got to be random, unless somebody knew that she came here regularly to walk her dog,’ Hodges said.
‘These are good questions but I really don’t want to speculate at this stage,’ Gillard replied. ‘That’s certainly the line we should be taking with the press.’
‘There will be plenty of press interest,’ Claire added. ‘You do know this woman is the same Mrs Roy from the TV advertisements for curry pastes and sauces, don’t you?’
‘Is that her?’ Hodges asked, then mimicked an Indian accident: ‘Orissa Originals, made with the freshest spices, and just the tiniest caress of coconut.’ He finished off with a little sideways head wobble. Claire and Gabby rolled their eyes at each other.
‘She’s been on Celebrity Cook Off as well,’ Gabby added. ‘Last series. Homemade samosas, I think it was.’
‘Okay, so perhaps this is a good time to tell you a little more about who she is,’ Gillard said. ‘Christina, you want to fill us in?’
The brunette went over to the laptop and began her PowerPoint presentation. ‘Mrs Tanvi Roy was the chief executive of Empire of Spice Plc, stock market value £120 million. It employs 800 people at production facilities in Slough, Redhill, and Shadwell in East London. Sales were more than £300 million last year, and it reported a pre-tax profit of £12.5 million.’ She flicked through two or three slides which listed salient financial points ‘In a word, she and her kids are very rich. Number twenty-nine of the Sunday Times UK female rich list, at £47 million.’
‘Okay, there’s now a motive,’ said Carl Hoskins, as he posted a sandwich into his mouth, and nodded his head with approval. ‘Money,’ he chewed.
‘But not very professional,’ said Hodges. ‘For that amount of dosh, you should be using a gun with a telescopic sight and a silencer. Not a bicycle and a hammer, or whatever it was.’
‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,’ Gillard said, holding a hand in the air. ‘We’ve secured our evidence, we got active lines of inquiry on bikes and in seeking extra witnesses, but the main immediate task is to restrain speculation in the public domain. We need to preemptively manage the press, which
might otherwise distract us from our work.’ He turned back to Christina.
‘I’ve had my first couple of press calls already, and I just want to make sure we are singing off the same hymn sheet,’ she said. ‘One, we are keeping an open mind. Two, we urgently want to contact a cyclist who was seen passing through the area at about the time the attack took place. I’m circulating the description, such as it is.’
Gillard interjected: ‘I know a number of you are likely to be contacted directly by the press, particularly those reporters you have dealt with in the past. I think it’s very important that nothing we say ends up being used to prop up speculation that members of the press will inevitably make. We are going to keep close to the evidence we have. Is that understood?’
They all nodded their agreement.
‘One more thing I’d like to add,’ Christina said. ‘Alison Rigby has signed off on half a dozen extra staff to deal with calls from the public, one of whom I shall be retaining for dealing with the press.’
Surrey Police’s feisty chief constable was a rising star. Having made her name more than a decade ago in one of the toughest apprenticeships possible, the drug squad in Hull, Rigby had been rapidly promoted for her ability to get results. Such early decisive action was typical of her style.
It was left to Gillard to wrap up the meeting. ‘Dr David Delahaye will be undertaking the post-mortem at East Surrey Hospital on Tuesday. The initial DNA samples have already been sent away. Gabby has already spoken to Mrs Roy’s PA and her son, Harshil, the middle child, who is the finance director of her businesses. There are two daughters as well. Prisha is the eldest and runs a spa in Marylebone, while Kiara is an up-and-coming fashion designer. Gabby and I will hopefully be seeing them all tonight in London. I’m eager to learn a lot more about the late Mrs Roy.’
* * *
The Body in the Snow Page 2
