Dead Girl Found

by Giles Ekins

  ‘Simeon, she asked, ‘whose voice do you think that is on the recording?’ You must have wondered how genuine it was.’

  ‘Of course, but after the meeting, I naturally assumed it to be Josie Jowett, after all, her mother and father thought it was, so why should I think any different. I simply thought it must have been something she recorded before, before her unfortunate death and it had only just come to light.’

  ‘Could be’, Shakira said, nodding as if the thought had only just occurred to her. But of course, it already had.

  ‘And you have no idea who sent it to you, is that correct?’

  ‘Absolutely. Look, does it have to come out that it was not a genuine message from…beyond the grave. That it was a recording I played. I’ll be ruined if that comes out.’

  ‘Just like the poor sod whose life you’ve ruined by accusing him.’

  ‘But it still could be a genuine message, couldn’t it? From beyond the grave, I mean, if the voice really is that of Josie Jowett.’

  ‘Hold on to that thought, Simeon.’ said Shakira, ‘it might just be the only saving grace you’ve got.’

  ‘This is a fucking nightmare.’

  ‘Welcome to the real world, pal, this is real life, not the mumbo jumbo garbage you peddle to susceptible old ladies,’ Shakira had to have the last word.

  Ninety-Seven

  Getting to the heart of it now, Chloe thought, as she spell-checked and saved the latest chapter of her account.

  ‘Won’t be long now,’ she said to Jeremy in one of her imaginary conversations. ‘Then I’ll read it all out to you and you can tell me what you think. OK?’

  Ninety-Eight

  ‘Simeon, whose voice do you think that is on the recording?’ Petra Collinson had asked.

  And that is the crucial question, isn’t it? Whose voice was it?

  Was it Josie’s?

  Could she have bought an untraceable second or third hand iPhone 5 and recorded the message before she died and arranged to have it posted with the instruction letter?

  Perfectly plausible. Plenty of second-hand phone shops around in north London.

  But no, she didn’t.

  The voice on that recording was mine All mine.

  Right from the start, when I conceived the scheme, I realised that for it to be plausible, to be believed, the accusations against Dennis Jowett had to come from ‘Josie.’ It had to be her voice that damned that Dennis Jowett as a child molester who had abused her.

  And to be believable, less is more. No graphic descriptions of rape or enforced fellatio, keep it simple.

  All those things you made me do. The things you did to me. Our little secret. That’s what little girls are supposed to do

  Devastating and believable.

  And Mummy Joyce certainly believed it, as did the majority of West Garside.

  All my life I had consciously (and possibly sub-consciously) sought to eliminate any trace of a Yorkshire accent and spending so much time with Josie I did pick up her vocal mannerisms. Almost by osmosis. I had always been a good mimic, you should hear my version of Adele’s ‘Make You Feel My Love’ and so it was really not difficult to imitate Josie’s slightly prissy voice.

  We had a laugh sometimes. I would call her Mum and Dad on her mobile, maybe asking for some money or permission to stay out late at a party and they never twigged on that it was me.

  They were the good days before the ‘rapists of this parish’, the renowned double act of Dennis and Damien Jowett, literally fucked things up.

  I practised that speech over and over and over, recording it and re-recording it until it was as close to Josie as it was possible to achieve. Only a digital voice analysis would be able to discover those minute inflections of tone and intonation that could lead an expert to state that in all probability the voice was not that of Josie Jowett but that of somebody else.

  I don’t doubt that the police will carry out such a procedure. That stupid bastard Simeon Trynor should have destroyed that iPhone, binned it as soon as he had played it at the meeting. You’d have thought he would have done so for his own safety, first rule of criminality, get rid of incriminating evidence.

  Ninety-Nine

  ‘So, what do we think about our colourful friend in there? asked Petra Collinson, ‘is he just full of shit or just full of shit?’

  ‘Both, all that bollocks about doing the right thing, he simply saw an advantage to make himself famous, the spiritualist who conveyed a message from a dead girl accusing her father of abuse,’ answered Shakira. ‘I think he’s a phoney, a phoney with a capital F.’

  The two officers sat in the bar of the ‘Shoulder of Mutton’ just off the A1 near Richmond. They had stopped for a drink on the drive back from Gateshead towards West Garside. Petra nursed a glass of Australian chardonnay, whilst Shakira, as a Muslim (and the driver) had soda water with ice and a slice of lime.

  ‘The thing is, is he part of the plot, whatever the plot was, was he an accomplice or just a convenient dupe, what are your thoughts?’ Collinson asked her colleague.

  Shakira took a contemplative sip of her soda water before responding, ‘Maybe, just maybe, he did think he was doing the right thing, despite what I said earlier. He has good reason to hate paedophiles having been abused as a boy, and so yes, possibly he thought he was doing right.’

  ‘Do you believe he was abused as a child?’ All that shame in the family issue?’ asked Collinson.

  ‘Oh yes, if I believed nothing else, that I do believe. It happened in my family, my sister was abused by an uncle and for a Muslim family, the shame of such a thing becoming known in our society would be so very shameful. Such things are never talked about in our culture.’

  ‘But sweeping it under the carpet that just perpetuates the situation doesn’t it, the more nothing is done the more it will happen?’

  ‘True but the shame culture is so deeply rooted in Muslim society, nothing will be done.’

  Petra Collinson shook her hard in bemusement, drained her wine and went to the bar to order another.

  ‘And so no,’ Shakira continued when Collinson sat back down, drink in hand. ‘I don’t think he was the accomplice to whoever it was who put the message on that mobile and I doubt we’ll have much success in tracking down who bought that phone or where. So, yes, to my mind, he was duped, and I don’t think there is any mileage to be gained in trying to prosecute him for anything, even assuming we could even think of something to charge him with. To my mind, that would be a waste of resources.’

  ‘A lot of damage has been done, Dennis Jowett has been well and truly traduced, he might want to sue for defamation of character.’

  ‘Who is he going to sue, all Trynor did was play a recording in the belief he was exposing a child abuser. And for all we know, Jowett may still be an abuser. The voice on the mobile could well be that of Josie Jowett. In which case he might have a case to answer.’

  ‘Agreed! You know, what intrigues me most about all this, who made that recording? That really is the issue. Did Josie record it before she OD’d? If so, where has it been all this time, who had it before sending it to Simeon Trynor? It had to someone who knew that Joyce Jowett attended spiritualist meetings and was likely to be at Trynor’s’

  ‘Somebody local.’ said Shakira ‘Absolutely. Has to be. Somebody local’

  ‘But the first thing is to establish the veracity of that voice. The Jowett’s are the sort of people who would have home videos, videos of Josie, preferably in her teens.’

  ‘OK, I’ll get on to that. What do we tell the Jowett’s? That the message could be a hoax. How do we play it?’

  Petra Collinson thought for a second or two, gathering her thoughts. ‘Just say we are collating background information relative to her OD. That’ll be painful enough without the drama of thinking that the accusations, came from a possible hoax. That information does not leave the nick.’

  ‘OK, I’ll get on to that tomorrow,’ Shakira answered.

  One Hundre
d

  ‘You will let us have it back, won’t you?’ pleaded Joyce Jowett as she reluctantly handed over a precious video, a record of the last holiday the Jowett’s had spent together, a cruise to the Caribbean. ‘Josie did so love Antigua’

  ‘Yes, of course, Mrs Jowett, you’ll get it back as soon as we can. Thank you,’ responded Shakira Amin.

  ‘I still don’t really understand why you need it, I mean in relation to …Josie’s…’ Joyce’s voice faltered, she could not bring herself to say, ‘Josie’s death’.

  ‘To be honest Mrs Jowett, neither do I, but you know how it is, I’m just the messenger, they instruct me to go there and I go there, don’t question why.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so, in your case.’

  Shakira decided not to take offence at the implied racial slur, that because she was Pakistani woman, going here and there without question was the natural order of things.

  One Hundred One

  The voice analysis, using specially designed software, compared both samples of ‘Josie’s’ voice; the one from the home video and the one used in the Garside spiritualist meeting. Three tests were carried out, firstly a sound spectrograph analysis (acoustic phonetic studies) then an average pitch analysis followed by a statistical analysis taken from a database with millions of voices, producing a percentage evaluation on a scale of 0 to 100.

  Additionally, a forensic analyst made detailed comparisons of accent, syntax and breathing patterns.

  The result was transmitted to DS Petra Collinson nine days later; it was more than 90% certain that the voice on the iPhone recording was not that of Josie Jowett.

  ‘Shit!’ she said and passed the report across to Shakira Amin.

  ‘So, where does this take us? I mean, it still doesn’t mean that our man Dennis Jowett is in the clear, does it?’ Shakira asked, disappointed that the recording was a fake.

  ‘Hard to convince anybody otherwise, now, it’ll classed as a hoax. We’ll not get the resources to follow up a wild goose chase, not the way budgets are these days,’

  ‘Always comes down to the budgets, keeping the bean counters happy, not what’s best for catching paedophiles and child abusers.’

  ‘You’ll get no argument from me.’ answered Collinson.

  ‘I know Petra, I’m just blowing steam is all. It just gets frustrating, we know they are out there, but sometimes we can’t even act on the information we do get and even I’m called racist if I dare to mention that most grooming gangs are Asian, mainly Pakistani. Sorry. I’ll get down from my hobby horse.’

  Petra Collinson read through the report again, but the result was unequivocal, indisputable. It was not the voice of Josie Jowett claiming that she was abused by the father. But as Shakira says, it did not mean he had not.

  ‘We’d best take this upstairs, I think,’

  ‘Yeah, reckon so.’

  One Hundred Two

  The case conference took place two days later, headed by DI Evelyn Makepeace, with Petra Collinson, Shakira Amin and two officers from the specialist Apollo rape and sexual assault investigation unit, DS Sarah Garrett and DC Diya Patel. All the detectives sat round a circular table, with case files in front of each.

  DI Makepeace opened the meeting. ‘Good morning everybody. Now, we are all aware of the allegations of sexual abuse made against Dennis Jowett from ‘beyond the grave.’ The investigation has now taken a dramatic turn. Petra, do you want to take it from here.’

  ‘Thank you, Evelyn. In the course of our investigations, Shakira and I interviewed the spiritualist Simeon Trynor. It was during his appearance in West Garside that the apparent message from ‘beyond the grave ‘or ‘from the other side’ was received, a message accusing Dennis Jowett of sexual abuse, allegations apparently made by his deceased daughter Josephine.’

  The two Apollo detectives nodded to indicated that they were aware of the circumstances of the allegations but still turned to the relevant pages in their case files.

  ‘It was like pulling teeth,’ Petra continued, ‘Trynor prevaricated, was generally unhelpful until finally he said, ‘I wish to God, I had never agreed to do it’ When questioned further about what he had agreed to, he produced the letter you find in the case files, document CX.34.

  Pages rustled as the assembled detectives searched for the document.

  ‘Then Trynor produced an iPhone and played this recording.’ and Petra pressed the play button.

  The two Apollo detectives rocked back in their chairs at the impact of the recording, the vile words raw and toxic, like acid thrown in the face.

  ‘Holy shit’ muttered Sarah Garrett.

  ‘What a bastard,’ someone, Petra Collinson did not catch who, exclaimed.

  Even DI Makepeace, who had already heard the recording was stunned again at the impact and mouthed ‘fucker’ under her breath.

  ‘So, we have a message which is very much not from beyond the grave and, following voice analysis, we now conclusively know that the voice on the recording is not that of Josephine Jowett.’

  ‘Then who?’ asked Sarah Garrett.

  ‘Whoever made the recording has been very careful and I doubt we shall find much of use in the way of fingerprints or DNA from the phone, but even so, we do what has to be done. The phone will be sent to forensics, but on initial examination, there is nothing on it which gives us any assistance.’ said, Petra as Diya Patel made a note on her pad.

  ‘What do we know about the phone? asked Diya, making another note.

  ‘It’s an iPhone 5, obviously second hand, the glass face is cracked, as you can see and is about five years old. You can pick up these old phones in this condition practically anywhere for less than forty pounds; street markets, car boot sales, mobile phone shops and unless somebody remembers selling it to somebody, it is almost untraceable, which does not mean we are not going. to try. We’ll obviously check out the serial numbers and we might be able to track down the original owner but it’s unlikely to lead us anywhere.’

  The girl, Josephine Jowett, is there any other evidence of abuse, I mean, the recording is useless so far as an accusation goes,’ asked Diya Patel’

  ‘No, and as you say, on its own it is meaningless,’ answered Petra.

  ‘Which does not mean to say that abuse has not taken place, simply that somebody else is making the accusation,’ added Shakira, reluctant to let the case go, the suspicions she harboured that Dennis Jowett was hiding something still in her mind.

  ‘Without any more evidence, I don’t see how we can run with this.’ Sarah Garrett said, ‘we simply don’t have the resources. To me, it sounds like a malicious attack on Jowett. A hoax and we should not be wasting our time on it. We have enough to do on live cases without chasing down an unsupported accusation found on an old iPhone.’

  ‘I agree.’ added Diya Patel.

  ‘Petra?’ DI Makepeace asked.

  ‘I want to try and track down the ‘recording artist. If we can identify her, she may be able to provide more details of any abuse,’ she answered, Shakira gave a nod in agreement.

  The detectives tossed the case around for another thirty minutes, but without coming to any further agreement. The Apollo detectives felt that the case was not one for them but thanked the DI for including them in the discussion.

  And that was how it was left.

  One Hundred Three

  Meantime.

  What has happened to Dennis Jowett?

  He has been castigated and vilified as a paedophile, the more he protests his innocence, the more people believe it to be true, there’s no smoke without fire was the general attitude. The fact that the accusation came from ‘beyond the grave’ meant that the source of the allegation was believed to be unimpeachable. And unchallengeable.

  Dennis Jowett was a paedo and child molester, end of.

  He was ruined. Ruined financially, as customers called to cancel contracts and to take their business elsewhere. Ruined socially as he was forced to resign from the golf club, as was Joyce
, and he was ejected from his Masonic Lodge, even though he was due to take the chair as Master the following year.

  Damien Jowett was beaten up in the ‘Hammer and Pincers’ pub when challenged about his father, the filthy child abuser, and Joyce Jowett was shunned by her lady’s luncheon club based on guilt by association and ‘she must have known’ what her husband was up to.

  She was not much liked anyway, tolerated rather than accepted, being too sharp of tongue, ever ready to take offence but happy to dish it out. Joyce Jowett was not a pleasant woman, and this was a good reason to exclude her.

  I am not one to gloat, but…Dennis Jowett, the vile rapist fuck, was ruined.

  One Hundred Four

  We shall probably never know who broke the story to the ‘Garside Gazette’, all the attendees at the case conference swore it was not them, but in every police station there is always somebody willing to sell a story to the newspapers or television,

  And so it was.

  ‘WAS ‘BEYOND THE GRAVE’ MESSAGE’ A HOAX?

  Sensational new evidence in abuse allegations.

  ‘The ‘Gazette’ can exclusively reveal that the supposed message from ‘beyond the grave’ purportedly from Josephine Jowett accusing her father, Dennis Jowett, of sexually abusing her may have been a well-executed hoax.

  A source close to the investigation has revealed that the ‘message’ may have been achieved by ‘audio manipulation’ such as performed by stage magicians or illusionists.