by Bill Rogers
‘Myra! Get back here.’
They glanced at each other.
‘Myra?’ muttered Max. ‘Who names a dog after a Moors Murderer?’
The door opened. Jason Dalmeny stood there dressed in tracksuit bottoms and a Newcastle United football shirt. His feet were bare. One hand held the collar of a little border terrier that was desperately trying to leap up at the two police officers. They held up their ID cards.
‘Joanne Stuart and Max Nailor,’ Jo told him. ‘We’re senior investigators with the National Crime Agency. May we come in, Mr Dalmeny?’
There was a flash of resignation in his eyes.
‘Of course,’ he said, backing down the hall, dragging the dog with him as he went.
They followed him into a lounge at the back of the house where two young girls were curled up on the sofa watching television. The elder of the two stared over her shoulder at the visitors, was rewarded with a smile from Jo, and turned her attention back to the TV.
‘Perhaps we should discuss this somewhere else, Mr Dalmeny,’ said Jo. ‘The kitchen, or the room we just passed?’
He nodded and led them into the adjoining kitchen, closing the door behind them.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘what the hell is this all about?’
‘You’d better sit down, sir,’ said Max.
Dalmeny shook his head and balled his fists. ‘I’d rather stand if you don’t mind. This is my house.’
The change in his tone and manner put Jo on alert. The initial risk assessment had not flagged up anything suspicious, and with the two girls in the house, surely he was not going to kick off? She scanned the room for potential weapons, then moved slowly around the kitchen table, placing herself between Dalmeny and a crowded wooden knife block.
‘Be that as it may,’ said Max. ‘It really would be better if you were to sit down.’
They looked as though they were about to square up to each other, a pair of rutting stags.
‘Please, Jason,’ said Jo, ‘think of your daughters.’
Dalmeny hesitated for a moment, then pulled out a chair and sat down.
‘Thank you, Mr Dalmeny,’ Jo said. ‘To answer your question, we are here in relation to an investigation into the abduction and rape of a young woman.’
His jaw dropped. Shocked and uncomprehending, he stared at her and then at her colleague. If it was an act, it was a pretty convincing one.
‘What the hell . . . ?’
He seemed unable to complete the sentence.
‘Furthermore,’ said Jo, ‘I have a warrant to search these premises and I’m now handing you a Notice under Section B of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act setting out my powers and your rights, in relation to that search.’
Dalmeny stared blankly at the words in front of him.
‘I’m also arresting you on suspicion of involvement in the abduction and rape of Susanne Hadrix, on or about the nineteenth of December two thousand and fifteen, in the County of Greater Manchester. 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. Do you understand, Mr Dalmeny?’
He stared up at her.
‘The girls . . .’ he said.
‘Do you understand, Jason?’ she said.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t understand. I don’t know what you’re talking about?’ He began to rise. Max placed a hand on his shoulder and firmly eased him back on to the stool.
‘Did you understand the caution?’ Jo said. ‘About your being under arrest and about your rights?’
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘And I can’t wait to get it sorted, and have you get the hell out of here.’
‘When we do leave, you’ll be leaving with us,’ said Max before Jo could respond. ‘You’ll be questioned at the station.’
Now Dalmeny looked panicked. ‘But what about my girls?’
‘Is there someone you could leave them with?’
‘My wife,’ he said. ‘She’ll go spare. It’s my turn to have them this week. And what’s she going to think?’
‘I suggest you ring her now,’ said Jo, ‘and ask her to come immediately. I’d much prefer not to search the house while they’re here.’
There was a phone in the kitchen. While Dalmeny rang his wife, Max drifted into the lounge to check on the girls. He sat down in a vacant chair, and pretended to be watching the video. The elder of the two looked across at him.
‘Are you police?’
Max smiled. ‘No flies on you then,’ he said.
‘While you were talking, I went into the front room and had a look,’ the girl told him in a very serious voice. ‘There’s a police car out there. That’s how I know.’
‘Well done,’ he said. ‘You’d make a good detective.’
She leaned closer and lowered her voice.
‘What’s our dad gone and done?’
‘He’s just helping us with a problem we’ve got,’ he told her.
He sensed that she was going to ask a follow-up question and got in first.
‘Why’s your doggie called Myra?’ he said.
She ran over to a stack of DVDs beside the television, found the one she was looking for and brought it back. She handed it to him and pointed to one of the characters on the back of the sleeve.
‘Mira,’ she said. ‘From the Silent Hill movies.’
He stared at the cute little dog sporting a pair of headphones.
She lowered her voice. ‘Our dad says it’s not really suitable for us, but we watched it with one of the babysitters. You won’t tell him, will you?’
Chapter 36
Dalmeny turned his head, and stared into the camera lens high up in the corner of the interview room in the North East Regional Operations Unit building.
‘I don’t understand what I’m doing here.’
The two investigators exchanged a glance. Was Dalmeny attempting to claim procedural weakness in their investigation? Was that why he had refused legal representation?
‘You do remember my telling you that I was arresting you on suspicion of having been involved in the abduction and rape of Susanne Hadrix?’ said Jo. It was too early to talk of manslaughter. Not without the Crown Prosecution Service having taken a view.
‘I remember you saying something like that,’ he replied, ‘but I wasn’t really concentrating. I was in shock. I don’t even know anyone with that name.’
‘And you’ll recall that I repeated it again in front of the custody sergeant when we arrived at this station?’
He folded his arms. ‘That doesn’t mean I know why you arrested me.’
Play it by the book, she reminded herself. Spell it out for the camera.
‘Because I have reasonable grounds for suspecting that you committed the offence in question, and I arrested you to allow the prompt and effective investigation of the offence, and to prevent the possibility of your harming another person.’
‘On what grounds?’ he said.
Jo looked at Max. It had not been part of their interview strategy to tell him this early on. On the other hand, it was such an incontrovertible piece of evidence that it would either force him to confess or to construct some implausible alibi. Max must have been thinking the same thing because he nodded.
‘Very well, Jason,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you can explain how your DNA came to be found on the person and the clothing of Susanne Hadrix?’
Dalmeny flinched as though she had slapped him hard. He searched her face and that of her colleague for evidence that this was a joke. Finding none, he slammed his hand down on the table.
‘No! You can’t do this!’ he shouted. ‘I told you, I’ve never even heard of her.’
His face was pale with shock and his hands were shaking. It was a while since Jo had seen a reaction like it.
‘Calm down, Mr Dalmeny,’ said her partner. ‘Now is your opportunity to sort this all out.’
Jo signalled to the constable
standing by the door and asked him to bring their suspect a beaker of water. They waited for the water to arrive and for Dalmeny to take a drink.
‘That’s better,’ she said. ‘Now, I need you to account for your whereabouts between ten pm on the evening of Saturday 19th December 2015 and nine am on the morning of Sunday 20th December 2015.’
He took a moment to process it, then he smiled with relief.
‘Saturday?’ he said. ‘You’re talking about Saturday?’
‘That’s right. Saturday evening, and all night right up until nine am.’
His smile became a grin. ‘There you go then. It can’t possibly have had anything to do with me. I never left the house.’
Out of the corner of her eye, Jo saw Max shaking his head in disbelief.
Dalmeny leaned forward, both forearms on the table, urging them to believe him.
‘I had the girls with me. The wife dropped them off on Saturday morning. I took them to McDonald’s for lunch, and then we went to the cinema in Cramlington to see the Peanuts movie. After that we picked up a KFC Double Bucket Deal, went home and never went out again till around lunchtime Sunday so they could play in the park.’
He sat back and crossed his arms defiantly. ‘You can ask them. Go on, ask them.’
‘You could easily have slipped out while they were asleep in bed,’ she said.
He shook his head vehemently.
‘I wouldn’t. Besides, after they’d gone to bed I had a mate round. We had a few cans and watched the Barclay’s Premier League review and then a late-night movie.’
‘Which movie, Mr Dalmeny?’
He looked embarrassed and his cheeks reddened.
‘It wasn’t strictly a movie.’
‘What was it then?’ said Max, knowing full well what he was going to say.
‘One of the adult channels, alright?’
His eyes brightened as he remembered something.
‘The wife rang me on the landline about eleven o’clock Saturday night to check the girls were okay. Then again Sunday morning at eight o’clock to remind me that I’d promised to take them both to the park.’ He pulled a face. ‘Silly cow woke me up.’
‘At what time did your friend leave the house?’ she asked.
‘Three-ish.’
‘Can you be more precise?’
‘Roundabout three am.’
‘Before or after three am?’
He studied her, trying to gauge which answer was the right one. He made up his mind.
‘After?’
‘Your friend,’ said Jo. ‘I need his name and contact details.’
Max wrote them down. He handed them to the constable and whispered instructions in his ear.
‘PC Bozdoğan is leaving the room,’ Jo said.
She waited until the door had closed.
‘Now then, Mr Dalmeny,’ she said. ‘I’d like you to explain how you think it was that your DNA was found on the body and clothing of a woman you claim not to know?’
He was about to reply with another vehement denial when something clicked in his brain.
‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘What do you mean, body?’
Neither of them replied. He sat up straight and placed his hands on the table, gripping the edge as though to support himself.
‘What are you saying – that this woman is dead?’
‘That’s exactly what I am saying,’ Jo replied.
Now his face was ashen. He stared from one to the other and then back again.
‘No,’ he said. ‘You’re not pinning this on me. I told you I never met this woman.’
‘Perhaps you knew her by another name,’ said Max. ‘Perhaps you never took the trouble to find out her name?’
‘This DNA,’ he said. ‘Maybe I brushed up against her somewhere, in the movies, McDonalds, KFC? That’s it. They were all packed with people.’ He sat back triumphantly, as though he thought he had cracked it. ‘There you go.’
‘There are two problems with that,’ Jo said. ‘Firstly, we know that the victim was nowhere near Morpeth or Cramlington yesterday and secondly, the samples containing your DNA could not possibly have been transferred to her person or her clothing in the way you describe.’
Dalmeny stared at her. It was clear that the penny had still not dropped.
‘Let me spell it out for you,’ she said. ‘How do you account for the presence of your seminal fluid both inside and on the body of Susanne Hadrix, as well as on her clothing?’
His face it seemed had been through the full gamut of emotion. Now it was fixed with an expression of total disbelief. It was a full half a minute before he managed to respond.
‘That can’t be,’ he said, his voice almost a whisper. ‘It isn’t possible.’
‘Let’s see if we can help,’ said Max. ‘When did you last have sex with a woman? With anyone of either gender come to that?’
Jo expected him to take offence, but he did not. The full import of what they were accusing him of had finally hit home. He shook his head slowly and stared straight at her. His voice and his expression were full of anguish and self-pity.
‘I haven’t,’ he said. ‘Not since the wife left me.’
‘When was that?’
‘Twelve weeks on Friday.’ He stared down at the table in front of him, and slowly shook his head. ‘But the writing was on the wall for months before that. We hadn’t had sex in over a year.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
It was two hours since they’d suspended the interview and had him taken back to his cell. The friend who allegedly spent the evening with him had been and gone. Max sat on the edge of the desk kicking his legs to and fro.
‘That’s it then,’ he said. ‘His alibi stands up. There’s absolutely no way he could have made it to Bury and back. His wife confirmed the phone calls. So far, the search has turned up nothing apart from a stack of porn magazines in his wardrobe. The first indications are that his van’s clean. So how come his semen’s all over the victim?’
‘I have no idea,’ Jo admitted. ‘We need them to take another look at those samples and double-check the DNA analysis. Hopefully, we’ll be able to get them to make it a priority. The same with whatever they manage to retrieve from the van, including soil samples from the tyres and the tread pattern.’
‘I assume,’ Max said, ‘that you’re going to keep him in custody until the forensics come back?’
‘Absolutely. What if his friend’s lying? What if Dalmeny left immediately after we know that the victim left for home at two forty-five pm? Given the condition we’re assuming she was in, it could have taken them half an hour to walk the half a mile to Turf Moor. Her friend was hazy about what time she actually got in. If Dalmeny left immediately after his wife’s first phone call at eleven pm, he could have driven over to Burnley in time to snatch her off the street, take her to wherever he takes them, drop her off at the reservoir, and belt back home before the wife made that second phone call.’
‘Assuming that was the case,’ Max said, ‘it would have been unplanned. A random opportunist rape. There’s no way he could have spiked her drink or followed her from the pub.’
‘He could have had an accomplice?’ she said, thinking of the man who had arranged her own abduction. Knowing that she was clutching at straws.
There was a knock on the door. It was the custody sergeant.
‘Excuse me, Ma’am,’ he said. ‘There’s a solicitor arrived in the custody suite wants to speak with Jason Dalmeny. Apparently his wife asked him to come.’
Jo sighed.
‘Tell him I’ll be with him shortly, would you? Until then he’s to have no access to Dalmeny.’
‘Right, Ma’am.’
‘What are you going to do, Jo?’ asked Max.
‘Tell him that despite our having twice reminded him of his right to be represented, Dalmeny has declined the services of a lawyer. Given the gravity of this case, I don’t want anyone trying to unpick the way I’ve handled the investigation so I’m
minded to let him see Dalmeny in my presence, and he can ask him himself if he wishes to be represented.’
‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘The DNA’s enough to hold him overnight, even if he does agree to a solicitor.’
He slipped off the desk and stretched.
‘While you were emailing the forensic service, I booked us two double rooms with breakfast at the Travelodge. A hundred and eight quid in total.’
Jo smiled wearily.
‘You really know how to treat a girl,’ she said.
Chapter 37
‘My client has asked me to state that he is completely innocent of the offences in relation to which you arrested him, and since he has nothing to hide, he is more than willing to respond to any questions that you wish to put to him. I wish to place on record that this is against my advice as his legal representative.’
Dalmeny’s solicitor looked at his client to give him a chance to change his mind. When nothing was forthcoming, he picked up his biro and waited for the interview to begin.
‘Thank you,’ said Jo. ‘I’m sure that with your cooperation, Jason, we should be able to sort out this mystery in no time at all.’
‘Good,’ Dalmeny said. ‘That’s exactly what I want. Then I can get home to my girls, and get on with my life.’
‘Let’s start where we left off last night,’ she said. ‘You stated that you had not had sexual intercourse in over a year. Do you stand by that statement?’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I do.’
Jo smiled sympathetically.
‘Given that you and your wife had not been sexually active for over a year, and that you have now separated, no one would blame you for having an affair.’
‘I haven’t.’
‘Or for using the services of, say, a prostitute or an escort?’
He shook his head vigorously.
‘I haven’t. I wouldn’t. I never have.’
The solicitor was scrutinising his client as closely as the two investigators.
Jo nodded her head as though accepting Dalmeny’s assurances.
‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Let’s move on. I’m going to show you a list of names and addresses of universities and colleges in the North West of England and in West Yorkshire. I’d like you to have a look at this list and tell me if you have ever had cause to visit or work at any of these places, or any student halls of residence or other forms of accommodation associated with them?’
