by M K Farrar
He shook his head. “You can’t think I had anything to do with it?”
“It’s simply a formality. I would like to record our conversation, however, and I do need to tell you that you do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.”
“What is this? Am I under arrest?”
“Not at all, Mr Smales. You’re free to go at any time. But considering what’s happened, I’d like to think you’d want to do everything you can to help us find whoever did this to your son and ex-wife’s family. Unless you have a reason not to.”
“No, of course I don’t,” he spluttered.
“Good then, we’re on the same page. You haven’t been an easy man to track down. Where have you been for the past twenty-four hours, Mr Smales?”
“I’m a lorry driver. I did a delivery to Newcastle yesterday. I left at eight a.m., drove eight hours, what with traffic and a couple of stops, and then had to wait for the lorry to be unloaded, which took several hours, and then drove back again. I didn’t get back until the early hours, and then I turned off my phone so I could sleep.”
“You’re saying you’ve been at home, but your phone was switched off?”
“That’s right.”
“I went to your flat yesterday, Mr Smales, and banged on the door. Why didn’t you answer?”
He shrugged. “I obviously didn’t hear you. It’s hard to sleep when you’re working strange hours, so I tend to put in ear plugs.”
She struggled to hide her disbelief. “You wore ear plugs all day and had your phone switched off?”
“There’s no law against turning off your phone. I don’t always want people to be able to get in touch with me, night and day.”
Even your own son? she didn’t say.
“If we were to check with your phone company, we’d see a pattern of that behaviour? It’s not unusual for you to switch it off?”
“No, it isn’t.”
Mallory jotted a note down to make sure she remembered to do just that. She folded her hands on the table. “Do you live alone, Mr Smales? Is there anyone who can attest to your whereabouts?”
“No, there isn’t. It’s just me.”
“When was the last time you saw or spoke to your ex-wife or your son?”
He frowned slightly as he thought. “I last saw Sheldon couple of weeks ago, I suppose. I couldn’t tell you when I last saw Liz, but it’s been months.”
“That seems like a long time.”
“I’ve been busy. Please don’t judge. Sheldon is almost an adult.” Conrad caught himself, and his gaze flicked away. “I mean, he was almost an adult. He wasn’t interested in spending time with his dad anymore.”
“How did you get on with your son?” she asked.
“We probably weren’t as close as I would have liked.” He swiped tears from his eyes. “Something I’m going to regret for the rest of my life.”
“How would you describe your breakup with Liz?”
His lips thinned with displeasure. “It was a long time ago.”
“Was it her decision or yours?”
“More hers, if I’m honest. I was pretty broken up about it at the time. She wanted a trial separation, and then she met someone else and that was that.”
“Someone else who took over your family? I imagine that would leave you feeling very bitter?”
His head shot up. “Not bitter enough to murder my ex-wife’s family and my own son, if that’s what you’re implying. Besides, it was almost thirteen years ago. Don’t you think, if I’d felt that way, I’d have snapped a lot sooner?”
Mallory watched his body language and tone. Did he have a short temper? Was his defensiveness what she’d expect or was he hiding something? “People can hold onto grudges for a very long time, Mr Smales. I notice you’ve never remarried, never gone on to have another family yourself.”
His jaw tightened, and he glanced away once more. “No, I wasn’t going to put myself through that again. I was better off on my own. Only have myself to rely on or worry about.”
She got the feeling he still harboured a lot of pain and resentment about his marriage breaking down. “You didn’t worry about your son at all?”
“He was in good hands,” he paused, “or so I thought.”
Mallory switched tactics slightly. “Did Sheldon ever give you any hint that he was a violent person?”
Conrad met her eye. “You mean because of all the black clothing and the heavy metal? You don’t think Sheldon could have hurt them?”
She offered him a sympathetic smile. “We’re just covering all bases right now. Could he have got involved with someone who might have wanted to hurt them? Maybe he mentioned someone he met online?”
“I have no idea what he did online. What are you suggesting? That Sheldon met some deviant on the internet, and he let them into the house so they could come in and slaughter him and his entire family?”
“We need to remain open to all possibilities. Our digital forensics teams have taken all phones and laptops from the house and are working through them. If there’s anything incriminating on them for us to find, then we will find it.”
“Good.” He bunched his fists. “I want you to find out who did this. I promise you, Detective, I didn’t have any involvement whatsoever.”
She wasn’t sure whether to believe him or not.
“Oh, one more question, Mr Smales. Do you have the codes to the alarm system or keys for the house?”
“No, of course not. It’s not my home.”
“Can you think of anyone who might have had them?”
“You’re asking the wrong person. I really wasn’t close enough to the family to know.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You weren’t close to your son’s family?”
“Like I said, that’s something I’m going to live to regret. When can I see Sheldon? I want to see him one last time.”
“There will be an autopsy due to the way he died, but I can arrange for you to visit his body soon.”
He nodded. “Yes, I want to say goodbye.”
She gave him a sad smile. “I understand.”
“What about a funeral? When will I be able to get him back?”
“Not for a while, Mr Smales, I’m sorry. I’ll have a Family Liaison Officer get in touch with you and they’ll be able to explain what to expect.”
Mallory thought she’d covered everything. “Thank you for your time, Mr Smales, and I truly am sorry for your loss.” She slid her business card across the table towards him. “There may be some further things that come up during the investigation that we’ll need to talk to you about, so I would like to request that you make yourself available to us—no more turning off your phone—and if you think of anything that may help, please do call.”
He nodded and took the card.
Chapter Nine
Ryan glanced up from his desk to find Mallory approaching.
“How did it go with Smales?” he asked her. “Did he give any explanation why we weren’t able to contact him over the past twenty-four hours?”
“It went well. He says he sleeps strange patterns due to his working hours and that’s why he was out of contact. I’ve got some things I need to follow up on, mainly contacting his mobile provider and making sure their records fit his story of him regularly switching his phone off for lengths of time to sleep.”
“Did he have an alibi?”
“No, he was home alone, and he didn’t finish his job until one a.m. the morning of the murders.”
Ryan pursed his lips. “But could he have had time to kill them all?”
Mallory nodded. “If he was at the depot at one a.m., that still would have given him time to murder the family and get home. If his phone was conveniently off, there’s no way of proving he was home all that time as we wouldn’t be able to trace it.”
“What about motive?”
“I’m not sure. H
e seemed to have a lot of built-up pain and resentment about his marriage breaking down, even thirteen years later. Liz met Hugh, and so Conrad was a jilted husband. Then there’s Sheldon to consider. Conrad says they didn’t see much of each other now that Sheldon was older, so perhaps he felt that as another rejection? Maybe that was enough.”
He exhaled a breath and shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s been a long time since they broke up. Why wait until now?”
“Maybe the son not wanting to see him made things worse? There could have been arguments that we’re not aware of, I mean, it’s not as though we can interview the victims.”
“No, but we have their phones and their laptops. We might find something on there, emails or text messages. If the phone records show him calling any of the family members more than normal, it could indicate there was more going on than he’s let on.”
Ryan’s phone rang, and he held up a finger to Mallory to tell her to give him one minute.
He answered the call, “DI Chase.”
“Ryan, it’s Nikki. I thought you’d want to know that we’re finished with the post-mortems on the victims.”
“That was fast.”
“I brought in a couple of extra pathologists. It’s a big case, and I know time is of the essence. You want me to run through the findings?”
Ryan was already on his feet. “I’ll come to you. See you shortly.”
He ended the call and turned to Mallory who was still standing beside his desk. “You want to come and get the post-mortem reports with me?”
She nodded. “Absolutely. Let’s hope they can shed some light on what really happened.”
***
Thirty minutes later, Ryan pulled up into the car park of the single-storey building, and both he and Mallory climbed out. The public mortuary was located just outside Bristol and had been purpose-built.
Nikki was waiting for them at reception. “Come on down. I think you’ll find this interesting.”
“Any chance the killer left his business card embedded in one of the bodies,” Ryan only half joked.
She smiled. “Nothing quite as convenient as that, but eye-opening just the same.”
She led them down the corridor, and they all donned protective outerwear and entered the autopsy room.
Four stainless-steel tables were positioned at equal spaces across the room. On top of them, beneath sheets, lay the bodies of the family—one noticeably smaller than the others.
Nikki Francis wasn’t the only pathologist in the room. An older man, Brian Stewart, was also assisting, though the others must have moved onto other cases. With this many bodies to get through, and with time being of the essence for them to unravel exactly what had happened in that house, it was important they have all hands on deck.
Both Ryan and Mallory nodded a greeting to him as they entered.
“Where do you want to start?” Nikki asked.
“Let’s start with Sheldon Wyndham. I feel like he holds more of a key to what happened than the others.” Ryan didn’t know exactly which bodies were beneath which sheets, but he could take a good guess from the sizes of the shapes underneath them.
Nikki nodded. “Very well.” She approached the third table and pulled back the sheet to reveal the teenager’s body beneath. “Sixteen-year-old Sheldon Wyndham, five feet eleven inches, one hundred and eighty-one pounds. The fatal injury is a vertically placed knife wound to the abdomen which perforated the abdominal aorta. He would have died within minutes.”
Was that a lucky strike to have hit the aorta or did whoever stab Sheldon have some kind of anatomical knowledge? There was one big question Ryan needed answering. “Did he stab himself, or did someone else do it?”
“Vertical knife wounds tend to imply murder, where horizontal wounds are more likely to be self-inflicted. The track of the knife wound is upwards and backwards which also tends to indicate murder. If you were going to stab yourself in the stomach, how would you do it?”
Ryan thought for a moment, picturing a large kitchen knife in his hand. It had a weight to it—not heavy by any means, but solid. Mentally, he turned it inwards and pictured the point of the blade aimed for his guts.
“I’d hold it in both hands,” he said. “One behind the other. I’d want to go fast and deep, so I’d want as much power behind the knife as possible.”
“So, the blade would be straight or possibly slightly downwards?”
“Yes. I suppose so.” Holding the knife in both hands at an upwards angle would put his shoulders and biceps into an awkward position.
“The way this knife has been driven into the body looks to me as though it’s come from an upwards strike.” She mimicked the motion of someone bringing a knife underarm rather than over and down. “The other thing that caught my attention is how deep the wound is. What do you think the natural thing to do is when you’re stabbing yourself?”
Ryan shook his head. “I’m not sure.”
“You’d pull back. Even if you wanted to die, the body’s natural reflexes are to avoid pain, and so even if you knew what you were doing, it would be hard not to.”
“Hard, but not impossible?”
“No, not impossible, but this knife wound is deep—almost to the victim’s spine. It would have taken not only considerable force, but also some steely determination to keep going that deep.”
Ryan remembered what they’d learned from the prints on the knife, how it had only been the prints from Sheldon’s right hand. Could he have stabbed himself with that much force with only one hand? It seemed unlikely.
“I also checked the victim for any scars or cuts that might indicate previous self-harm and found none. Someone who was considering suicide would most likely have self-harmed at some point, but there’s no evidence of that here.”
“What about the blood found on the body?” Ryan asked.
“I can say that the blood found on his body does match each of his family members, but the blood spatter is all wrong. If you check photographs taken at the crime scene, the blood spatter of the mother when her throat was cut went in an arc. There’s no way he could have avoided that if he was leaning over her with the knife.”
“That’s the same conclusion forensics came to with the clothes,” Ryan said. He turned to Mallory. “So far it seems far more likely that someone has tried to make it appear as though he killed his family rather than him actually being the one responsible for the deaths.”
Mallory nodded. “I agree. Someone has done a bad job of trying to cover their own tracks.”
This job would have been far easier if it had been the boy who’d killed the family. An open-shut case of a teen who, in a mental health crisis, decided to take out his anger on those closest to him. Now they had a killer out on the streets who’d somehow got in and out of a locked, and alarmed house, and had planned the attack enough to fool the police, at least initially.
“There’s something else,” Nikki said. “Something came up in the tox screen that I think you’ll find of interest.”
“What?”
“All four of the victims had traces of diphenhydramine in their systems. It was in the boy’s system as well, which also helps to build the case for him being a victim and not the perpetrator.”
“Diphenhydramine,” he repeated. He knew that name.
Mallory filled it in for him. “Sleeping pills. It’s the drug most commonly used in over-the-counter sleeping medications.”
Nikki smiled approvingly. “That’s right.”
Ryan frowned. “Someone didn’t want them to wake up. It explains why someone was able to move around the house and take their phones, and why they didn’t wake up quickly enough to raise the alarm when the attack started.”
“But for that to have worked,” Mallory said, “they’d have needed to be drugged earlier that evening.”
Ryan agreed. “Someone must have had access to the family’s food for them to have slipped them something. We need to find out exactly what they ate and drank that e
vening. Did they go out to eat, or did they order a takeaway, or cook at home?”
Nikki took a couple of steps around the table. “I can help with that. They all had the remains of some kind of beef stew in their stomachs when they died.”
Beef stew wasn’t the sort of thing people normally ordered for a takeaway.
Ryan thought for a moment. “If they cooked at home, and didn’t bring anything in from the outside, we might be looking at someone who was able to gain entry to the home. Just because it wasn’t the boy doesn’t mean it wasn’t someone they knew. Maybe they even had dinner with that person the evening before they died.”
“Like the boy’s father,” Mallory suggested.
Ryan shook his head. “He drove his lorry to Newcastle that evening. He wasn’t in Bristol. He couldn’t have slipped anything to them.”
“Unless he’d already done it,” she said. “If the killer knew their habits, perhaps he could have pre-planned what they were going to eat or drink and then laced whatever that food or drink was with drugs. If it was enough to make the victims sleep so deeply that they wouldn’t hear the alarm being disabled or reset and allow the killer to make their way through the house without being disturbed.”
Ryan blew out a breath. “That would have taken some planning, but I guess it’s possible.”
“So, this person was creeping around their house while the family was drugged and sleeping,” Mallory said, “moving their things around, jamming chairs under door handles, and basically getting the house ready for them to all be slaughtered, all while they slept.”
Ryan was starting to build up a mental image of the killer. Cold, calculated, a forward planner, someone who wasn’t easily spooked. Could it really have been Conrad Smales? He hadn’t met the man himself, but perhaps that needed to change.
“We’re going to need SOCO to go through every consumable item in the kitchen and find out if any of it has been laced with diphenhydramine.”
“They might have disposed of it when they left the house,” Mallory said.
“Yes, but it’s still worth checking.”
Ryan remembered they still had three more family members.
