‘Okay Claire, no results on the DNA, but let’s charge him anyway.’
Chapter 9
Friday
Gillard was accompanied by DC Colin Hodges for the eight a.m. interview of Jason Waddington. If they could get a confession from him before he was taken to the magistrates at ten, that would lift all the pressure. If not, there was always a chance that the request for a remand would be denied. The custody sergeant had already warned them that Waddington was a bundle of fury. The moment the two detectives walked into the interview room, they could see for themselves that the prisoner had not been calmed down by another night in the cells.
The swearing began as soon as Waddington clapped eyes on Gillard, and went on for a couple of minutes as he called him every name under the sun.
‘You don’t know who did it, so you’re bloody fitting me up. It’s an excuse for you lot being crap at your jobs.’ Waddington’s finger jabbed towards the DCI in time with every word. The veins were standing out on his forehead, and his teeth were bared. Gillard and Hodges tensed, in case Waddington tried to have a go. He had form for that.
‘I’d advise you to calm down,’ said Gillard, as the duty solicitor, a dishevelled young man who looked like he had slept in his suit, wandered in with a large takeaway coffee and a battered briefcase. Waddington glowered at the detectives as they set up the tape recorder, answered the solicitor’s questions and ran through the introduction for the recording.
Finally Gillard began: ‘Jason, I’d like to ask you to account for all the time between your presence in the Feathers public house on Saturday and midday the following day.’
‘I told you all that before. I got nothing to say.’ He folded his arms and looked with disdain at the solicitor sitting next to him. ‘He can’t make me, can he?’
‘He can only ask. You don’t have to reply,’ the brief said.
‘Fucking right, then.’
For the next forty-five minutes, Waddington ignored every question, staring around the room as if bored. Finally he said, ‘You’ve got Michelle’s statement, right? She told you I was there with her, didn’t she?’
Hodges leaned forward, caught Waddington’s eye and shook his head slowly and sucked his teeth as if to say: She stitched you up, mate. The duty solicitor, looking down at his phone, seemed to have missed the silent communication. Gillard knew it was a dangerous trick, trying to sidestep the tape. As well as lying about the contents of a witness statement.
‘You’re bullshitting me,’ Waddington said, but his face was freighted with anger at the apparent betrayal. The solicitor looked up, wondering what he had missed.
‘Jason, I’m asking you again. Can you explain why your DNA is on the lapel of Mrs Roy’s coat?’
The prisoner closed his eyes, and wiped a hand over his face. His shoulders slumped. ‘I didn’t do it,’ he wheezed thickly. ‘You have got to believe me. I didn’t do it.’
Hodges smirked, clearly pleased at the change of tone of their charge. Gillard beckoned the detective outside with a finger, then closed the interview room behind him.
‘What’s the matter, boss?’ Hodges asked.
‘Michelle Davies backed his alibi, didn’t she?’
Hodges crinkled his face and held up one hand which he waggled ambivalently. ‘It was a bit lukewarm, to be honest. She couldn’t give me any details of what time she arrived or when she left. I think she was caught on the hop to be asked.’
‘You have got to be careful, Colin.’
‘Why? The brief never saw me, it ain’t on the tape. I think I nutmegged him good and proper.’
‘Well, before you go congratulating yourself, take a look at Waddington’s previous.’
‘It’s nothing. Single conviction for affray.’
‘There’s a lot more if you read the callout log. Domestic violence, half a dozen police attendances in the last two years. Ms Davies would never press charges. The woman is separated from him now. And you’ve just given Waddington a massive excuse to go around and smack her one by hinting to him that she wouldn’t give him an alibi.’
Hodges face fell. ‘I didn’t realise that.’
‘Okay, now get the custody sergeant to take him back down the cells. I suppose you’ve just created another reason to oppose bail.’
As Hodges slouched away, resentment woven into his shoulders, Gillard’s phone pinged with the arrival of an email.
An email from the lab. First up was an apology for failing to get results to him by the close of business yesterday, followed by some bad news. The sweat sample of DNA on the murder weapon did not belong to Jason Waddington. Nor to anyone else on the national database.
* * *
After the interview Gillard returned to his office to get up to date with the paperwork. Before he had the chance to sit down, DC Carl Hoskins called to him. He was dressed in sweatshirt and jeans and nursing a coffee. He looked tired, even by his hangdog standards. ‘We made a couple of arrests last night at the Ashtead crime scene.’
Gillard glanced up only briefly at the officer. Hoskins’ tone of voice and expression, jocular rather than earnest, telegraphed that this was an anecdote rather than evidence. Nothing with a significant effect on the case. That would be a shame. With the extra resources Alison Rigby had allocated, Gillard had chosen teams of two plainclothes officers to keep an eye on the crime scene day and night, watching out for the proverbial assailant returning to it. He didn’t particularly expect it, but there was always a chance. From long experience Gillard knew it was always a slightly difficult judgement in any location where a surveillance car did not have access, and the officers would be seen. Two men walking in woodlands together at night looked pretty suspicious to many people, as indeed did a couple, especially if the woman was young. They could generate as many calls from the public as a real crime. The best insurance was a dog, a ready-made excuse for being in parkland.
‘Yeah, it was me and DC Helen Gough. With her stupid animal.’
Gillard had heard about Ian. It was a stupid name for a dog, especially a small white shivering poodle that barked at its own shadow. That’s the trouble with rescue dogs, you never know what you’re getting. Helen had said the animal wouldn’t respond to any other name.
‘So we were wandering up towards the crime scene tape, and we could hear these moaning noises in the undergrowth.’ He grinned, trying to spin out the tale.
‘Shagging couple?’ Gillard said, flicking through some of his paperwork.
Hoskins held up a finger ‘Let me continue. We heard some giggling, and the fucking dog was going apeshit. So I left Helen and her joke on a rope and went to take a look.’ He shook his head. ‘A couple of goths, made a nest for themselves amongst all the flowers that people had left, all the messages, all the teddy bears, jars of brinjal bhaji, and they were going at it like billy-o.’
Gillard looked up. ‘Some people have no respect.’
‘She was dressed like a corpse, face all white, black lipstick, skinny as anything. Both of them pierced all over. Got them down to the station, charged them with a few public order offences. Then Helen asked them why they did it. “Because it’s exciting,” the girl said. Turns out she had this diary, documenting no fewer than thirty-seven crime locations where a body has been found, that they had been bonking. By Christmas Day she’s hoping to have done fifty, including one in every county.’ He laughed. ‘He showed me pictures on his phone that he taken at all these places, with her impersonating a corpse. Sick puppies.’
The DCI shook his head. ‘I just hope they’ve never been on any cold case crime scenes, or done any breaking and entering.’
‘They did say one thing, though,’ Hoskins said. ‘When they were first getting down to it, some bloke on a bike came past, and stopped to watch them.’
‘Did they get a description?’
‘Not really, as it was dark. She thought he had light-coloured hair, but she was more interested in making a performance out of it for the audience. He took some p
hotos on his phone.’
‘So he was definitely male?’
‘Yep. But not Asian. British, and posh looking.’
* * *
Hoskins announced that he was going home to bed, but that he would undoubtedly still be hearing the irritating bark of that animal in his sleep. Gillard returned to his paperwork. Now reading in greater detail that morning’s email from the forensic lab, he saw a second attachment, which was the analysis of all the CSI equipment discards. In every crime scene investigation there are dozens of pairs of latex gloves, forensic instruments, polythene booties, Tyvek suits and other protective gear, all potentially contaminated and all discarded after a single use. These are bagged up and labelled by date and by wearer, then routinely tested for DNA. After the known markers for members of the team have been eliminated, any unknown DNA samples are checked against the evidence accumulated elsewhere.
He wouldn’t normally read this attachment, merely filing it for reference, except that it was flagged up for attention by the lab. Reading through he saw that Jason Waddington’s DNA had turned up in specks of blood on Gillard’s discarded gloves from two crime scenes. One, unsurprisingly, was the Feathers public house fight, where Waddington was punched. The detective had picked up his spectacles and a tooth. But the other was from the Ashtead crime scene.
That must be a mistake.
Gillard didn’t think he had touched Mrs Roy. Lifted the plastic dry-cleaning bag that had been placed over her, yes. But not touched her, so he wouldn’t have touched the hair that was found on her lapel either, nor any markers that Waddington might have left behind. So how did Waddington’s blood get on that glove?
Gillard stroked his chin. There was one horrible possibility that he hardly dared to consider.
When he had finished at the crime scene at the Feathers pub on the Saturday night, he’d tossed the discarded latex gloves and booties into his own discards bin bag before heading off to Ashtead Common. He knew that he had put on fresh gloves and booties when he got there. That was such an ingrained forensic habit he knew he would not have made a mistake. What he could not be sure of was that when he was wearing gloves at Ashtead, either when putting them on or discarding them in the separate bag, he hadn’t touched or gone into the discard bag from the pub fight. Modern DNA techniques were so sensitive that even the tiniest contamination of human blood or sweat could be passed from one glove to another and registered against the wrong crime scene.
Cross-contaminated evidence would be a disaster.
It was always possible, of course, that a junior investigator at CSI had made the mistake, mixing up the two bags of discarded gloves and booties which he had passed across for sending to the lab. Even the lab itself might have made the mistake. There were precedents for each of those errors. Either way, there was a distinct possibility that a huge balls-up had been made, and that Jason Waddington was entirely innocent. He was going to have to let the CPS know, which was embarrassing enough. But what truly terrified him was what Alison Rigby would say.
* * *
Gillard sat in the Mount Browne refectory with a big mug of milky coffee and a Danish pastry to mull over the possibilities. He knew that the further down the line this investigation went, the more trouble there would be if Waddington turned out to be innocent. Mixing up the discarded gloves after they were handed in could not in itself have caused a hair from Jason Waddington to end up on Mrs Roy’s coat lapel. Only Gillard’s own mistake could have caused that. He was experienced enough to know that context was everything. The single hair of Jason Waddington’s they’d found on the lapel of Mrs Roy’s coat was no longer a reliable piece of evidence. The mix-up would legally have to be disclosed to the defence, and any half-decent defence lawyer would use it discredit the entire forensic process. That hair might simply have somehow got attached to Gillard’s wrist or jacket cuff, or been floating around the boot when he put on the second pair of gloves. If Waddington was to be convicted, they could not rely on this. They would need other evidence directly linking him to the scene.
And there simply wasn’t any.
Claire Mulholland sat down opposite him, carrying an orange juice and a panini. Gillard had texted her as she was on her way back after a final trip to the Ashtead Common crime scene, which was now being released back into public use.
‘How likely do you think it is that you mixed up the gloves?’ she asked.
Gillard shook his head in exasperation. ‘It certainly could have been me. You know how it is. I was thinking about something else. I’m usually very careful, particularly on those rare occasions when we have two CSI jobs in a row.’ He sighed and took another bite of his Danish pastry. ‘Is there anything else we can hang the Jason Waddington connection on?’
She shook her head. ‘Circumstantial only. He lives nearby, he’s a cyclist, and he lifts weights. It’s not enough.’
‘Okay, I’m going to speak to the CPS this afternoon. It’ll be embarrassing, but I’m sure they won’t have any objection. But first I’m going upstairs to speak to the big boss.’
Claire widened her eyes in sympathy. ‘Good luck with that.’
* * *
‘How on earth did they get cross-contaminated?’ Rigby said as she paced her office, leaving Gillard standing facing her desk. ‘What is CSI playing at?’ she asked.
‘It’s probably not CSI, ma’am.’ She was behind him now, prowling. ‘The DNA was found on one of my gloves, which may have been discarded into the wrong bag.’ She felt so close to him the hairs stood up on the back of his neck, but he dared not turn round to look at her. He sensed her by his left shoulder, her breathing audible.
‘Craig,’ she whispered. ‘You are one of the most experienced officers in the force. This shouldn’t be possible, should it?’
‘No ma’am.’
‘It’s particularly unfortunate that this error was not realised until after the suspect was charged, so as well as making a grave investigatory error we now have a PR disaster too. The press will want to know why we charged someone and then realised we were wrong.’
‘Yes ma’am.’
She rested her hands lightly on his shoulders from behind. ‘Would you like me to make you available for interview to explain to them?’
‘No ma’am.’
‘No ma’am, indeed,’ she said, walking in front of him and pulling herself up to sit on her desk, looking directly at him. The intensity of her blue stare was almost unbearable. After holding it for a few seconds he blinked and looked down. The chief constable’s long legs were crossed, one knee over the other. She was wearing thick ribbed black tights. He spotted a small ladder in them just by her ankle, just above her black patent leather kitten heels.
‘I’m very sorry, ma’am.’
‘I need results, Craig. You are disappointing me, and I do not like to be disappointed by my officers.’ She sighed, slipped off the desk and walked to the window, looking out at Mount Browne, mistress of all she surveyed. ‘Who have you told about this?’
‘Nobody really. Well, just DI Mulholland.’
‘Not the custody officer?
‘No.’
‘Not the CPS?’
‘No, I was going to call them now.’
‘Don’t.’ She turned around hands on hips. ‘I’ll deal with Mulholland. Keep the cross-contamination to yourself for now. Carry on the inquiry as if it hadn’t happened. As for you, your deadline is a week. Next Thursday. Get me a suspect by then, with enough evidence to convince the CPS. You can get Waddington released only when we have someone else to put in his place.’
Gillard stared at her. The question was written on his face but he dared not articulate it. Rigby answered it anyway.
‘I cannot allow the Surrey force to treated as a laughing stock. We need to have a suspect in place.’ She pointed a stern finger at him. ‘This meeting never took place, understand?’
He nodded.
‘Now get out of my sight.’
Gillard turned to go, but was c
alled back.
‘One more thing. Despite charging Waddington, I’ll be telling Christina that we’re not releasing Waddington’s name. We owe him that kindness, I suppose.’
* * *
The first thing that Gillard did after he left Rigby’s office was to ring Claire. The call went to voicemail, and he asked her to ring him urgently. He thought about a text, but decided against. He was horrified to realise he was already thinking like a corrupt cop. He had to avoid any electronic trail of the cover-up he was now enmeshed in. He was far from happy about Alison Rigby’s decision. Perverting the course of justice, that’s exactly what it was. Deferring Waddington’s release not only meant that an innocent man spent more time unfairly banged up, but it also guaranteed the investigative team, the team he was responsible for as SIO, would continue to waste a lot of time compiling evidence against Waddington, evidence that would be discredited. And he knew who would be blamed for that. Rigby had made him complicit in this obstruction of justice in order not to look stupid in front of senior officers from other forces. She had done it to protect her own career.
He prayed that Claire had kept quiet. His most trusted friend in the force, she was extremely discreet. Still, it would only take the slightest hint of cross-contamination to a colleague on the investigative team for the whole place to be in uproar. He was sure it wouldn’t be long before the press heard about it.
DC Carl Hoskins knocked on his door and walked in. ‘Sir, got a press call. We are being asked to confirm the name of the suspect. I can’t get hold of Christina McCafferty.’
‘Were not releasing it,’ Gillard said, without looking up.
‘No, sir. They’ve got the name, they are just double-checking.’
Gillard spun around on his chair to look at the detective constable. ‘Who gave them the name?’
The Body in the Snow Page 13
