‘Why Roxanne?’ she asked instead.
‘Could have been random,’ he said. ‘Sheer bad luck.’
‘You don’t really think that?’
‘No. That would have to mean Rachel Moston was a random victim, too.’
‘And cancel out any connection with Pawel Zawodny.’
Lance nodded. ‘I still think it’s him. I figure he was putting himself back at the centre of attention tonight by hijacking the vigil for Polly. Those flowers were yet another performance.’ He patted the phone in his shirt pocket. ‘Word has spread. Looks like everyone who was there or heard what happened has told everyone else they know. All the social media sites have gone viral. So far as our guy’s concerned, this is like the shooting of John Lennon. His big moment.’
‘And another scoop for the Courier,’ she said bitterly.
‘Afraid so. Serial murder scores higher as a headline than any celebrity event. Higher than a rock concert, a film premiere, a royal wedding. This second killing puts him right up there.’
‘She was my friend.’
Lance nodded. ‘I know. Eat your toast.’
Grace did as instructed, and he waited until she’d finished the first slice before speaking again. ‘Seriously,’ he began, ‘this makes him really dangerous. He’s got a lot to live up to now. He’s unlikely just to drift back into obscurity.’
‘So you reckon we’ll have more victims?’
‘Don’t you?’ asked Lance.
‘Do you think he chose Roxanne because she was a journalist?’
‘Maybe. She’s the local reporter. The Mercury is fairly widely distributed.’
Grace wasn’t convinced. ‘Did we drive him to this, Lance? I deliberately humiliated Zawodny in interview. You saw how furious he was. Was this his way of retaliating? Of getting at me because she was my friend?’
‘How would he know that?’
‘She might have told him. She might have been in contact with him for days for all we know.’
‘Surveillance didn’t pick it up.’ Lance handed her a cushion from his end of the couch. ‘Here. We’re not going to solve it tonight. We should try and catch some sleep.’
Grace took a deep breath and blew it out again very slowly. ‘This sounds crazy,’ she said, ‘but do you know what upsets me most? That he didn’t put anything under her head. That he didn’t care. He wasn’t sorry.’ She twisted the empty tea mug around in her hands. ‘Like Roxanne wasn’t good enough for him to bother. Was that deliberate? A signal to someone? To me?’
‘I think we’re over-thinking it,’ Lance said gently. ‘If I fetch a rug and another pillow, will you be OK here?’
‘Yes,’ she said, trying hard to follow his example and subdue her anxiety. ‘Thanks.’
He returned moments later, checked she had everything she needed, turned off the lights and then headed off to his bedroom. Grace lay still, letting her eyes adjust to the pale light that came through above the shutters that covered the tall windows. She was grateful to Lance not only for providing sanctuary but also for offering friendship despite the many reasons he had not to. Yet, try as she might to empty her head of the night’s events, she couldn’t stop herself shivering at the thought of Roxanne in mortuary storage. She knew enough of the autopsy process, of what Samit would do to the body, for it not to bear thinking about. Then she began to imagine Roxanne’s parents preparing themselves for their journey from Sussex to identify her. She must distract herself! To avoid being alone with such meditations, she reached for her phone and searched for Roxanne’s name on Twitter. Just as Lance had said, the timeline was packed with dozens – hundreds – of different people wanting to talk about her, to reach out to one another. Grace was evidently not alone in her mourning. Comforted, she fell asleep clasping her phone to her heart.
THIRTY-THREE
Keith looked like he’d had even less sleep than Grace. In fact, thought Grace, right now he looked like a man you ought to worry about: her dad’s skin had gone that same pasty grey in the days before his heart attack. She watched the SIO’s expression become even grimmer as he handed Duncan a large brown envelope.
‘Roxanne Carson, age thirty-one,’ he began, as Duncan added the post-mortem photographs to the board. ‘Cause of death was ligature strangulation. Time of death estimated at less than an hour before she was found. No reason to think she was killed elsewhere. No indication of a violent struggle, nor of recent sexual activity except that an empty white wine bottle had been inserted into her vagina, probably after death.’
A ripple of voracious interest passed through the packed MIT office: this was the first time the rest of the ever-increasing team had been permitted to learn the full significance of the vodka bottle they’d read about in the newspaper.
Grace was pretty sure that if Roxanne was working she wouldn’t have been drinking, but she asked anyway. ‘Was Roxanne drunk?’
‘We’re waiting on the blood alcohol level,’ replied Keith. ‘But stomach contents suggest not.’
‘It’s possible that matey may have just picked an empty wine bottle up off the ground,’ said Duncan. ‘I saw quite a few discarded bottles.’
‘There were hundreds of people there last night,’ said Keith. ‘And they left a lot of litter. Forensics are going to be a nightmare.’
‘Same as the demolition site where Rachel Moston was found,’ said Lance. ‘A deliberate choice?’
‘May well be. Which means that matey’s organised and prepared. So, as with the first murder, unlikely to have left fingerprints.’
‘We might get lucky on DNA this time,’ said Duncan.
Keith nodded. ‘Possibly. There are certainly enough points of similarity to assume that Rachel Moston and Roxanne Carson were killed by the same person.’
‘There was nothing placed under Roxanne’s head, though,’ Grace pointed out.
Keith ignored the interruption. ‘A handbag, which we’ve identified as belonging to the victim, was recovered nearby and, so far as we’re aware, nothing obvious appears to be missing from it. She was found with a pair of knickers inside her mouth, also probably placed there post-mortem. Her own weren’t recovered, and we should be able to confirm that this pair was not brought to the scene but belonged to her.’
‘So why this further elaboration?’ asked Lance. ‘He must mean something by it. It’s a kind of conversation, isn’t it? Either with himself or with us.’
‘Let’s stick to facts, shall we?’ said Keith drily.
‘When Ivo Sweatman found the body, he already knew that a vodka bottle had been found with the first victim,’ said Duncan.
‘So did everyone who read yesterday’s Courier,’ said Lance.
‘Yes, but do we need to rule out the idea of a copycat?’
‘Ivo told me earlier in the evening that it had been Roxanne Carson who gave him that information,’ said Keith. ‘But I don’t believe either of them knew the precise details of the positioning of the vodka bottle.’
‘All the same, she might have been getting information about Rachel’s murder directly from the killer,’ said Lance eagerly.
‘That’s certainly a possibility,’ agreed Keith, his expression bleaker than Grace thought possible. ‘In which case, we have to ask ourselves why a journalist knew more than we did.’
Keith paused as if battling to stop himself uttering the words he really wanted to say. In any case, no one in the room needed telling: this killing had happened on their watch. Everyone had seen the morning TV news bulletins and copies of today’s Courier had already been passed from hand to hand around the station. Below the battle cry of a single-word headline – SLAIN – Ivo Sweatman had excoriated the police for their failure to protect the young local reporter and demanded an official inquiry into what had gone wrong and in particular why two separate suspects had been released by the police. It was the question they were all asking themselves.
Keith sighed heavily. ‘We don’t yet know exactly what Roxanne knew, or how or when she
found it out. Whether or not she knew her killer or had arranged to meet him last night remains speculation.’
‘Do we know if she’d had any contact with Pawel Zawodny?’ asked Lance. ‘He was at the vigil.’
‘After he’d been escorted to his vehicle, officers observed him drive out of the campus car park. They then alerted the mobile surveillance unit,’ Duncan explained reluctantly. ‘But the tracking device shows that his Toyota remained stationary on the exit road for twenty-six minutes. Close enough for him to have made his way down to the murder scene and back.’
‘What happened to the surveillance?’ Keith asked sharply.
‘They had a car waiting to follow him off once he reached the main road. Their brief was not to crowd him.’
Keith’s jaw clenched tight. Grace could easily guess what he was thinking: by releasing Zawodny from custody on Monday, had they allowed a killer to strike a second time right under their noses?
‘Where did Zawodny’s Toyota go once it got moving again?’ Keith asked.
‘Straight back to his flat,’ answered Duncan. ‘As soon as the surveillance unit got word of the murder, they knocked him up. It wasn’t long after, but he’d already showered and put his clothes in the wash.’
Keith swore under his breath. ‘What did he say he’d been doing in those twenty-six minutes he was parked on the exit road?’
‘That he was upset at the way he’d been treated, so pulled over to calm himself down.’
‘There were still plenty of people about,’ said Keith. ‘Did anyone see him?’
‘Nothing so far,’ said Duncan. ‘We’ve still got hundreds of statements to take. But plenty of people saw him with his bouquet of flowers, so at least there’s a chance they’d remember if they’d spotted him again later on.’
‘The switchboard has been totally jammed all morning,’ said Joan. ‘We’re also working through all the social media postings. It’ll take a while, but we should be able to make a pretty accurate timeline of the victim’s movements, too.’
‘The Mercury’s editor was on the phone first thing,’ said Duncan. ‘He says he’ll help in any way he can.’
‘Someone’s still on our side, then?’ Keith said with heavy irony as the room fell silent. This second death was a crisis for the Essex force, and everyone was aware that urgent discussions were already going on upstairs. Discussions that were unlikely to make their jobs any easier.
‘Do we re-arrest Zawodny, boss?’ asked Duncan.
‘Not yet. I don’t want the clock ticking until we’re ready, and we’ve a long way to go before we are. But make sure you put the fear of God into the surveillance unit so they’ve got tabs on him every second.’
‘The media know his identity, know he’s still on police bail,’ said Duncan.
‘You think I don’t know that?’ snapped Keith. He ran a hand to and fro across his head, his grey hair springing vigorously back into place. ‘We’ve applied to a judge for a phone tap. But we need to get him charged, so that anything the media gets becomes sub judice. We need evidence, enough evidence to take to the CPS and get Zawodny off the streets and into custody.’
‘Then, boss, I still think there’s something to be got from why he’s staged this differently to the way he displayed Rachel Moston,’ Lance said stubbornly. ‘Why the knickers in her mouth?’
‘Forget the symbolism!’
Lance turned to Grace, enlisting her support. ‘We asked Zawodny if he masturbated over women’s underwear,’ he argued. ‘We humiliated him. Now he’s humiliated us. And the underwear is to shove that message home. Stuff the way we shamed him right back down our own throats.’
‘I think he’s right, boss,’ said Grace. ‘It was the only time in all the interviews that Zawodny showed any real emotion. He was very angry.’
Keith considered for a moment, then nodded. ‘It’s an attractive argument. But Roxanne Carson was a reporter. She might also have been killed simply because of what she knew.’
‘Would Roxanne’s editor know who she’d been talking to, what story she was putting together?’ Grace turned to Duncan, only too aware of the ways in which the answers to such questions might expose her.
‘You’d better get down there,’ ordered Keith, when Duncan shook his head. ‘Gareth Sullivan is the editor. Ask him if we can see her notes, whatever’s on her work computer. Find out if she’d made any kind of approach to Zawodny.’
‘I’ll get you the data off her phone as well,’ said Duncan.
‘And talk to Ivo,’ Keith said to Grace. ‘See if he can add anything to the statement he made last night.’
‘Me?’ Grace instantly regretted her exclamation but, as every face turned to her, she straightened her spine and held her head high: she owed it to Roxanne.
‘Yes,’ said Keith, raising his voice slightly so that everyone heard that he wasn’t only speaking to her. ‘Let’s use the fact that you knew the victim to our advantage.’
Grace dared to glance around the office and was relieved to find that the appraising stares were not as universally hostile as she feared.
‘Is there any point talking to Sweatman?’ asked Lance, surprised. ‘After the garbage he wrote about us this morning?’
‘What Ivo writes and what Ivo says in private are two very different things,’ said Keith, although he must have seen that it was not only Lance who remained unconvinced. ‘We’re under attack,’ he told everyone. ‘And it’ll probably get a whole lot uglier before we’re finished. But that, so they tell us, is the price we pay for our uniquely vigorous press.’
A growl of anger and dissatisfaction rolled around the room, barely quelled by Keith’s roving gaze seeking out any final comments or questions. ‘OK, let’s keep the information flowing,’ he said. ‘I appreciate how hard you’ve been working, and I want to thank you, all of you. But now you have to double it. Then double it again. The next arrest we make has to stick.’
The SIO disappeared into his own office and as everyone else dispersed Grace found herself beside Lance. He smiled encouragingly just as her phone vibrated in her pocket. He waited as she read the text: Hope you’re OK. She was your friend, wasn’t she? Hope you know you’re not alone. Love Trev xx.
THIRTY-FOUR
Gareth Sullivan, the editor of the Mercury, had a neatly trimmed gingery beard and silver-rimmed glasses. He looked shocked and distracted as he led Grace and Lance through the main open space where his staff were hunched intently over keyboards. ‘This is terrible,’ he said. ‘I ought to send people home but instead they’re all working overtime putting together tomorrow’s special tribute edition.’
Sullivan showed them into his partitioned office. ‘No one can take it in,’ he continued. ‘Colchester only ever has a couple of murders a year at most, and they’re generally drug-related. Well, I don’t have to tell you that. Please,’ he gestured to a couple of faded, utilitarian chairs. ‘Sit down.’
He took a seat behind his desk, leaving the detectives to address him through a canyon of newspapers piled up on either side of its cluttered surface. ‘So what can you tell me? Do you know yet what happened, who is responsible?’
‘We’re here to ascertain Ms Carson’s movements last night,’ Lance replied. ‘Was she following any particular angle or story?’
‘No, I don’t think so. Just general coverage of the event.’
‘But she was at the vigil on behalf of the paper?’
‘Yes, absolutely. We had a photographer there, as well.’
‘Great. It would be really helpful if we could have access to everything he shot.’
Sullivan shook his head. ‘I’ll gladly help as much as I can. I hope that’s obvious. But I hope that you also understand that it’s impossible for me simply to hand over unpublished journalistic material.’
‘We’re hunting a killer, Mr Sullivan,’ said Lance.
‘I think we’re all aware of that here.’
Grace bit back the impulse to tell him she’d been at uni with Ro
xanne: clear boundaries were important right now.
‘She may very possibly have been killed because she knew or suspected the identity of Rachel Moston’s murderer,’ explained Lance.
‘Which is why disclosing any journalist’s sources is such a sensitive matter. The betrayal of a reporter’s sources puts every journalist at risk.’
‘I’m all for a free press, but you may be suppressing vital evidence.’ Lance spoke politely but made no attempt to hide his irritation.
‘My reporters speak off the record to a wide range of people, from criminals to whistleblowers. If those people believe I’m simply going to hand their names straight over to the police whenever I’m asked to do so, we wouldn’t have a free press.’
‘What if your reporter was talking to an active paedophile, for instance? Would you still protect a source then?’
‘The police would be able to go before a judge and ask for a production order.’
‘We need to take whoever murdered Roxanne Carson off the streets as soon as possible!’
‘Are you saying there’s an immediate and demonstrable direct threat to public safety?’ Sullivan asked heatedly, as Lance glared back, infuriated.
Grace decided swiftly that boundaries should be fudged after all. ‘Mr Sullivan,’ she said gently, ‘I was at university with Roxanne. We were old friends.’
Sullivan nodded, accepting the offer of appeasement. Grace had the impression she’d told him something he already knew and was struck by the acutely uncomfortable thought that maybe her own name was amongst those he was fighting to protect.
‘I’m sure she’d applaud your defence of journalistic principle, but I’m even more certain that she’d damn well want us to catch her killer,’ Grace told him robustly. ‘And she’d expect us to make sure no one else comes to harm. So are you really sure there’s no way you can help us without compromising confidential material?’
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