The Last Straw

by Paul Gitsham

  Once they were settled in the interview room, Jones indicated that he should begin.

  “Well, I were talking to me mate, Kevin, who does the tills. Anyhow, he said that the police had been in asking about this bird that he served on Friday night. He said that he remembered her, like, ’cause she was well fit. Anyway, I asked him what she were in trouble for and he said he didn’t know, but it must have been serious, ’cause the police was after her.”

  He paused and glanced at both Hastings and Jones, clearly hoping for some more information that he could take back to the staff canteen. None was forthcoming.

  “Anyway, he says he was unlikely to forget her, because she was wearing a dead skimpy top and he could see right down it when she bent over. Said she had a picture of a rose tattooed on her tit. Well, I served her earlier on, like, but it was really weird because I was on the customer service desk. She come up to me with this massive trolley of shopping, all embarrassed, like, ’cause she’d forgotten her purse. She asked if I could look after her shopping whilst she nipped home to get her wallet. I said, yeah, sure thing. It’s dead quiet at that time of night and she didn’t have any frozen food in the trolley, so I stuck a label on it and wrote a note for whoever came in next to put it all back in an hour if she didn’t return.”

  “And did she return?”

  “Dunno. I went home about five or ten minutes later. I ain’t been back in until today.”

  “What time did you leave?” Jones mouth was dry.

  “Ten o’clock.”

  Ten p.m.… It started to come together in Jones’ mind. He turned to Patel.

  “I believe that you have kindly brought in some information for us, Mr Patel.”

  “Yes — not sure how important it is, seeing as it’s been lying around the store for the past few days.” He looked pointedly at Hastings, who blushed slightly. Jones, who regarded it as his job to bollock sloppy officers, simply smiled politely.

  “As I am sure you can imagine, Mr Patel, an investigation of this magnitude has many different threads running in parallel. Thank you for your assistance.”

  Patel grunted and handed over a DVD in a jewel case. Whilst Hastings went out to rustle up a TV and DVD player, Sutton, who was a surprisingly fast typist for a man with fingers like sausages, used a laptop to write up Aaron’s witness statement. He also put out a call for Kevin Peterfield to be brought down to the station to sign a formal witness statement.

  Eventually, Hastings arrived with a wheeled TV/DVD combo unit.

  “OK, Mr Patel, so what have we got here?”

  “I had one of the boys in Security retrace the young lady’s steps from the moment she entered the store to when she finished shopping and left. Obviously, I have all of the raw footage as well.”

  No wonder he was pissed that nobody had come to pick up the footage. He’d clearly put a lot of effort into this, Jones thought. Sometimes it was easy to forget that for the most part the general public supported the police and would usually go out of their way to assist officers. He made a mental note to publicly thank Mr Patel and Tesco, at some point. Always good to foster relations with the second biggest employer in the town.

  The footage started outside the store, showing Clara Hemmingway walking briskly across the car park. Pausing briefly to grab a trolley, she walked through the double doors into the store. The time stamp at the bottom of the screen clearly read 21:41h. What followed was a masterclass in speed shopping. Hemmingway raced up and down the aisles at a remarkable pace grabbing items as she went. For a cash-strapped student, she paid surprisingly little attention to the prices as she tossed food into the basket, Jones noted. As she flitted around the store, the view jumped from camera to camera. Keeping an eye on the clock at the bottom, Jones saw that it never missed a beat. Every second of Hemmingway’s whereabouts in the store was accounted for. He wondered idly if Tesco used that smart CCTV that could follow individuals around the store to help track their buying habits. He decided that he’d rather not know; the whole idea was a bit creepy and Big Brother in his opinion.

  Finally, Clara was done. Pushing her trolley, she didn’t even head towards the tills, instead going straight to the customer service desk.

  “Never even checked to see if she had her purse,” murmured Sutton quietly.

  There was no one at the desk, but seconds later Aaron Jenkins came into view. Even without sound, it was clear that Hemmingway was a good actress, seeming flustered and embarrassed. Jenkins for his part kept on flicking his hair and trying to maintain eye contact, clearly distracted by the good-looking young woman. Finally, he nodded and wrote something down on a piece of paper. Smiling gratefully, Hemmingway left. The time stamp on the final piece of footage as she walked through the double doors was 21:56h.

  Sutton, Jones and Hastings exchanged glances. Clara had left Tesco at 21:56h. Why hadn’t she mentioned that she’d had to return home for her purse?

  The display went blank for a moment, before returning, this time with Clara arriving in the reception area again. The time stamp now read 22:25h. The camera view switched back to the customer service desk, Clara’s trolley clearly visible to the left of the desk. A few moments after she approached the desk, one of the security guards came into view. They spoke briefly, before Clara took the trolley. Instead of heading directly to the tills, however, she pushed the trolley further into the store, before making a loop down the aisle with canned soup and exiting next to a till with no customers. She didn’t add anything else to the trolley or pause to look at any of the displays.

  It was clearly Kevin Peterfield waiting to serve her at the till. The two exchanged a few pleasantries as he scanned her items. Whilst doing so she bagged them in carrier bags. Finally, they were done. Hemmingway handed over her Clubcard — Peterfield clearly glanced at the name before he scanned it — then got out her bank card, and slipped it into the Chip and PIN device. The time stamp read 22:33h, the same time as that on the receipt. Pushing her trolley in front of her, now laden with white and blue plastic shopping bags, Hemmingway headed out of the exit. The time stamp read 22:34h.

  Jones and Sutton looked at each other. Hemmingway had lied.

  Chapter 53

  Back upstairs, Jones and Sutton filled in the rest of the team on what had happened. Jones said nothing about Hastings’ potential error; now was not the time or the place.

  “The timing still isn’t quite right for her to have murdered Tunbridge, but she definitely had enough time to get to the university and back to help Spencer hide the evidence.”

  Hastings groaned, looking distressed. He buried his head in his hands.

  Now wasn’t the time for recriminations, decided Warren. “What’s done is done — we’ll deal with it later. Now we have an arrest to make and I’m betting that when we find Hemmingway, we’ll also find Spencer.”

  * * *

  For the second time that day, Jones and Sutton were waiting, dressed in stab-proof vests, around the corner from a suspect’s dwelling. This time, the target premises were a small, two-bedroom student flat in a converted family home. A call to the letting agency had revealed the house to be a two-floor property; the two floors shared a common hallway, but a second, internal door had been added at the end of it to split the house into two separate units. The upstairs apartment was currently empty, awaiting new students; the ground floor was occupied by Hemmingway and her flatmate, another student at the university. This time there was no back door; nevertheless two officers were hidden in the rear alleyway in case the suspects made it out of a bedroom window.

  As before, the forced-entry team stood by with their two-man battering ram. Maybe it wouldn’t be needed this time. Jones’ radio squawked; everybody was set. With one last glance at Sutton to check he was ready, Warren set off up the short garden path. The full recycle bins in the tiny front yard confirmed that somebody had at least put the bins out in the last couple of days. The door had two doorbells, conveniently labelled A for the ground floor and B for the fi
rst floor. Warren rang both, having decided that gaining entry to the building was the first priority.

  Two chimes, one higher pitched than the other, rang inside. A nice touch, it meant the occupants of the two flats could tell who was being visited. To Warren’s surprise, he heard immediate movement and a second later a muffled voice, “Coming, hold on a moment.” This was followed almost immediately by the metallic scratching of a door chain being applied, then the heavy click of a lock being turned. The door opened a few inches to reveal a mass of dark curly hair, framing a curious left eye. Almost certainly Hemmingway’s flatmate.

  Warren held up the arrest warrant. “Police. I have a warrant for the arrest of Clara Hemmingway. Please open the door.”

  The left eye turned from curious to shocked, then disappeared without a word as the door closed again. Immediately, there was a metallic scratching as the door chain was removed and the door opened fully.

  “You’re too late, Officer. She left this morning with her suitcase.”

  * * *

  The air in the CID squad room was leaden with despair. Twice in one day the team had been pumped full of adrenaline, ready to make an arrest. Twice they had been let down. Police work, particularly crime-solving, was always a constant series of ups and downs, something that experienced officers such as Jones knew only too well. Nevertheless today had been especially trying. Hemmingway had been officially added to the manhunt along with Spencer and now it was just a waiting game again.

  The young woman had let them in without comment, confirming her identity as Mary Coates, Hemmingway’s flatmate. She’d led Jones and Sutton into the small living room that they shared, even as other officers entered the house en masse, performing a quick room-to-room search of both apartments. Empty.

  The young woman had been eager to please, more than willing to talk about Hemmingway; however, she knew little about her housemate’s life and even less about her current whereabouts. As he looked about the living room, Warren felt a twinge of sympathy again for Hemmingway. The room was sparsely decorated, with a couple of small, worn couches and a cheap, old-fashioned TV hooked up to a Freeview box and a DVD player. The only personal touches to the room appeared to be a few framed photographs on the mantelpiece above the disused fireplace. Closer inspection had revealed them all to be of Coates. None seemed to be of Hemmingway.

  Warren thought back to the interview with Hemmingway, earlier in the week. He remembered feeling sorry for the poor girl who had seemed so out of place. The feeling had become even stronger as he spoke to her housemate. The two girls had both been brought up in Essex, only a dozen miles from each other, yet they might as well have been from different continents. Coates’ accent and precise diction spoke of expensive private schools, the pictures of her on the mantelpiece showed her on a yacht with a smiling, tanned family somewhere hot; an action shot of her jumping a fence on a chestnut-brown horse; a family Christmas with three generations smartly dressed sitting around a table groaning with festive food.

  How must it have felt for Clara Hemmingway to be reminded of everything that she didn’t have even as she sat in her own living room watching TV? Then Warren remembered the torn, bloody throat of Alan Tunbridge, the lifeless eyes of Mark Crawley and the tear-filled eyes of his grieving family. His sympathy evaporated instantly.

  In the end, Coates could shed little light on Hemmingway’s whereabouts. She’d said that she had heard her come in with somebody else early the previous evening. They had been in a rush and had gone straight to her room. She had heard drawers being opened and closed quickly, before the door to her room was slammed shut and relocked. Coates had got up to go and speak to her about a gas bill that had arrived, but Hemmingway had been flustered and in a rush and said she’d deal with it later, before racing out of the front door.

  Upon prompting, Coates had been able to remember only scant details about what Hemmingway was wearing. She’d caught a glimpse of the person with her and felt certain that it was the same man that she’d seen coming and going occasionally over the last few weeks. It was clear that Clara Hemmingway’s social life held no interest for Mary Coates and they had never discussed boyfriends or significant others, but she got the impression that they were seeing each other, at least casually. Warren doubted she even knew what course her flatmate was on; nevertheless her description of the visitor was familiar. As they had finished the interview Coates’ eyes had suddenly lit up with a memory.

  “I remember one evening hearing her getting ready to go out. The man was around again and he was dawdling over something. Clara sounded impatient and shouted something like, ‘Come on, Tom, we’re going to miss the film’.”

  Sutton and Jones exchanged glances. It wouldn’t stand up in court but it was good enough for them: Tom Spencer and Clara Hemmingway had been dating.

  Chapter 54

  Karen Hardwick sat at her desk, staring at the reams of paper in front of her. The story of what happened almost exactly a week before was coming together; she was sure of it. And so was everybody else. It needed just a few final pieces and waiting for those pieces was agonising. Around the office, workers were scratching their heads, or staring at paper in the same way she was.

  The excitement of the raids on the flats of Spencer and Hemmingway had now turned to frustration as the two main suspects in both murders had vanished. It was now what the papers would breathlessly call a ‘manhunt’. Even as she sat here, discussions were under way as to whether it was time to give up the element of surprise and release the suspects’ names and photographs to the press or to hold off another twenty-four hours and perhaps catch them unawares. The fact that they had both disappeared suggested to Karen that they already assumed that they were wanted.

  In the meantime, all Karen could do was wait for news, and comb through the evidence to try and work out who this mystery fourth person was. The owner of the fourth anonymous SIM card was the biggest outstanding question at the moment and Karen felt this person could well be the key to unlock the case. But it was frustrating.

  Therefore it came as something of a relief when one of the workers from Welwyn Forensics appeared in the office. A young man, he was carrying a black plastic evidence sack. It clearly held a large, flat, rectangular object of some weight.

  “Anyone working the Tunbridge case? I’ve got his personal laptop here. We’ve copied his hard disk and there’s no need for any physical trace analysis. Figured we may as well drop it back here since we were in the area.”

  Sutton raised a hand. “DCI Jones is busy at the moment. I’ll sign for it.” The courier wound his way across the office to Sutton’s massively overloaded desk. After trying in vain to find a space to put it, he settled for the visitor’s chair. Handing over a handful of sheets of paper, he asked Sutton to sign multiple times, keeping some of the sheets himself and giving the remainder to Sutton.

  After the courier had left, Sutton looked around the office, clearly searching for a ‘volunteer’. Settling on Karen, he grabbed the black bag and its associated paperwork, and carried it over to her comparatively empty desk.

  With mock gravitas he started, “DC Hardwick. In light of your hard work this week, the powers that be — namely me — have decided to give you the opportunity to earn the privilege of leaving work…” he glanced at his watch “…thirty-three minutes early, thus allowing you to start your weekend celebrations in a timely manner.”

  Karen couldn’t help but smile at Sutton’s attempt to lighten the mood in the office. “I see, sir. And what would I have to do to earn the privilege?”

  “Do us a favour and drop this damned laptop back at Tunbridge’s, would you? We’ve got everything we need from it and it’s getting in the bloody way. I’d do it myself, but I’m on the opposite end of town and it’s almost on your way home.”

  Karen already had her handbag ready. “Love to, sir.” It was true; she had worked hard all week. She’d been coming off the end of a five-day shift when Tunbridge had been murdered and had taken
the opportunity to earn some much-needed overtime pay by working the case all week. Now she was ready for some downtime. Perhaps she’d call one of her girlfriends and go do some shopping and maybe catch a movie. She owed her best friend a phone call and then there was all that washing…

  “You’ll keep me posted, won’t you, sir, if anything significant comes up? And if you need anything doing?”

  “Of course, you’ve earned that much. Tell you what, give me your mobile number. I’ll make sure that the guv has it as well.”

  The two swapped numbers and Sutton ran her quickly through the procedure for returning a victim’s property. It was a bit naughty, but he pointed out that nobody would be likely to need the signed receipts any time soon, so she could file them when she came back on duty Monday morning. Karen made a mental note to file them Saturday; she was a little early in her career to be getting reprimands over sloppy file-keeping, she decided, even if it was something that nobody really cared about. Waving a general goodbye to the office, she grabbed the laptop and headed down to the car park.

  The drive to Tunbridge’s house was indeed almost on the way home and ten minutes later Karen was marvelling at the contrast between this wealthy, leafy suburb and the decidedly less leafy area in which her apartment block resided. She felt almost foolish for locking up her twelve-year-old Fiesta — surely her old banger would be way down the list of any potential car thief patrolling this area. Hypothetically speaking, of course, if she were a car thief, top of her wish list would be the white Porsche Boxster two doors down from the Tunbridges’, or maybe the Aston Martin DB7 parked opposite. Of course, they had state-of-the-art anti-theft devices, which her Ford most certainly did not, so maybe locking her car doors was prudent, if futile.