Closer To Home

by Heleyne Hammersley

  She turned back to the kettle and mugs on the worktop, keeping her back to the two police officers but Kate could see that her shoulders were shaking as she tried to control the range of emotions that she was battling with. Even though she’d had little or nothing to do with her grand-daughter, the grief was obviously raw and she was struggling.

  ‘Here you go,’ she said, passing a steaming mug of tea to Kate. ‘Sugar’s just there.’ She pointed to a tin with the word sugar stencilled on the side. She placed her own mug on the table and drew up a chair.

  ‘I’ve not told our Dave yet. To be honest, it hasn’t sunk in with me. I was just at the hairdressers and I heard off Winnie who lives up Crosslands, around the corner from Jackie. Terrible shock it was.’

  ‘I bet,’ Kate said, blowing ripples across the surface of her tea in an attempt to cool it. ‘I don’t suppose anybody will tell your Dave before you can ring him?’

  Mrs Porter shook her head. ‘No chance. He can’t take incoming calls. He works on the rigs and he’s at sea for the next week or so. He does a fortnight on and a fortnight off. Been there since last week. I rang him just before he went and he rang me two days ago. I’ll have to wait for him to ring again.’

  It seemed typical to Kate that Aileen Porter would follow the rules to the letter. It reflected her tidy appearance and her sense of order and propriety.

  ‘If you ring the company they can probably get hold of him for you,’ she suggested. ‘Or we could do it for you?’

  The older woman shrugged.

  ‘I don’t see what good that will do really. They could helicopter him off but then what? If he came down here she’d probably not let him be involved. It might be best to wait.’

  ‘I think he’d want to know,’ Hollis said, gently. ‘She was his daughter even if he didn’t have anything to do with her. If we let him know, at least he’ll have the option of coming home. Then it’s up to him what he does.’

  ‘Aye, you’re probably right,’ the older woman conceded. ‘I think it would be best if one of you did it though, make it official. Then he can ring me if he wants.’

  Hollis nodded. ‘We can arrange that, if you can give us the details of his employer.’

  ‘I’ll just drink this tea. I’ve got contact details in my address book in the other room, I’ll get them in a bit.’

  She was stalling, Kate sensed, probably for a number of reasons; reluctance to hurt her son, fear of being left on her own with her grief and possibly the inertia that bereavement brings. Kate sipped her own tea. No rush.

  ‘How did Dave end up on the rigs?’ Hollis asked.

  Mrs Porter smiled at him, grateful for the distraction.

  ‘He’d had a lot of dead-end jobs for years after he left school. Factory work and warehouseman – but he couldn’t work out what he wanted to do. Then he decided to go to night school, in Doncaster. Did engineering for two years. Paid his own way by working in The Lion and doing a milk round at the weekends. Never had any money but he knew that he could make something of himself. I was heartbroken when he got that Jackie Loach pregnant but he told me that he’d make it work. He could finish his studies then they could move to somewhere where he could get an apprenticeship. Course, it didn’t end up like that. I think it was just a bit of a fling for both of them really and when Jackie said she’d got rid of the kiddy I think he was a bit relieved. Then he got a job up in Dumfries and when he got a chance he applied for the rigs.’

  ‘So, he never met his daughter?’ Kate wanted to know.

  ‘He saw her once when she was nearly a year old. Jackie’d taken up with that Craig Reese by then and didn’t want to have anything to do with Dave. Told him that his name wasn’t even on Aleah’s birth certificate. To be honest I think she thought he wasn’t good enough for her. He didn’t talk about his plans, his ambitions, much. Aleah would’ve been a lot better off with our Dave than with that Reese bloke.’

  ‘You don’t like Craig Reese?’ Hollis prompted.

  ‘I don’t like his family. His dad’s a troublemaker and his sisters were a right pair. I was glad when they moved away.’

  ‘Troublemaker?’ Kate asked.

  ‘Aye. Jud Reese worked at the pit with my Eddie. Caused a lot of bad feeling during the strike, stirring up men against the scabs. Not that they needed much stirring up. But he was the sort that would cause trouble then leave others to it and keep his own nose clean. Sneaky, like.’

  Hollis was jotting again and Kate knew exactly what he would have written. It might be well worth doing a background check on George Reese just to see what sort of trouble he might have caused thirty years ago. There might be some old resentments there which could shed some light on Aleah’s kidnapping and murder. It was a long shot and a long time ago but worth a look.

  Mrs Porter pushed her empty mug away and stood up.

  ‘I’ll get you the phone number for our Dave’s company.’

  As soon as she left the room Hollis whispered, ‘Jud is George Reese, right? Check his record?’

  ‘And his son’s. I’m not getting a good feeling about this family.’

  ‘Here you go,’ Mrs Porter announced, thrusting a piece of paper at Kate. ‘Like I said, he’s at sea but they’ll be able to get hold of him, won’t they? And please ask if he can ring me.’

  Kate passed the paper to Hollis who slipped it into his notebook.

  ‘We’ll do just that,’ she said, standing up to leave. ‘Thanks for the tea, Mrs Porter, and we’re so sorry about Aleah.’

  Mrs Porter nodded her appreciation.

  ‘Aye, well. Just catch whoever did it and string him up.’

  I sometimes wish we could, Kate thought as the front door closed behind them.

  ‘What now?’ Hollis asked as they got back into the car. ‘I don’t think there’s much else we can do here.’

  Kate agreed. The best decision would be to head back to Doncaster and start to collate information from the rest of the team. She checked her email. One from O’Connor confirming Reese’s meeting with Darren Thomas and one from Raymond informing her about the next briefing, in just over an hour. She quickly emailed Cooper with a request for background checks on Craig and Jud Reese and, as an afterthought she threw Carl Loach, Jackie’s dad, into the mix as well.

  7

  2015

  A text pinged in to Kate’s phone just as they were pulling in to the car park at Doncaster Central. She checked the time. Much later than she’d anticipated. The traffic around Balby had been slowed down by a lorry crash and she was surprised that they had made it back in time. The text was from Raymond. Apparently, he wasn’t impressed with her time-keeping. The preliminary PM results were in and the team was assembled for their next briefing. Where was she? As Kate closed the text she saw the next one down in the list of messages.

  ‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Forgot all about him.’

  ‘Who?’ Hollis asked.

  ‘Rigby. The PC that searched the Reeses’ house yesterday. He missed the betting slips. I wanted to give him a bit of a pep talk.’

  Hollis grinned. ‘Is that code for an arse-kicking?’

  ‘Something like that,’ Kate said. ‘And we’ll be in for one ourselves if we don’t get upstairs to see what Raymond has to say.’

  Her prediction proved correct. The team was already gathered around the conference table as Kate and Hollis entered the room, the sense of anticipation almost palpable. It was always the same with a serious case – any meeting needed to add information to the investigation and the PM would certainly give them something else to look at.

  ‘Good of you two to join us,’ Raymond growled as they slipped into seats around the conference table. ‘Had a lovely morning?’

  ‘We–’ Kate began but Raymond held up a hand to cut her short.

  ‘I don’t need to know just yet. I’m just back from the PM on Aleah Reese. There’s still a few test results to come back but Doctor Kailisa gave me the basics.’

  He picked up the remote cont
rol from the table in front of him and the interactive whiteboard sprang into life.

  ‘First, no sign of sexual assault.’

  There was a collective exhalation as the team recognised that their worst fear hadn’t been realised.

  ‘She was wearing the clothes that she’d been wearing when she went missing. There’s no sign that she was interfered with in any way. So, we’re probably not looking for a paedophile.’

  ‘Unless he didn’t get to finish with her,’ Barratt interrupted. Raymond scowled him into submission.

  ‘Cause of death, manual strangulation. There’s bruising on her throat consistent with adult thumbs and her hyoid bone is fractured. No water or froth in her lungs. She was already dead when he put her in the pond.’

  O’Connor was frantically scribbling notes.

  ‘Now the interesting bit. The yellow cord around her wrists was probably tied post-mortem. There’s no bruising or abrasion consistent with that cord being used to tie her hands in front of her.’

  ‘So why tie her up after she’s dead?’ Hollis mused. ‘It makes no sense. It’s not like she needed restraining. Why bother?’

  ‘That’s what we’re going to find out,’ Raymond said. ‘The cord is unusual. It’s quite thin but very strong, some sort of nylon blend. And the colour, bright yellow. The knot was a standard reef knot. Nothing special.’

  ‘It could be tent guy line,’ Barratt suggested. ‘My tent’s got high-vis ropes so that you don’t trip over them. They’re thin and strong. Just a thought.’

  ‘And a good one,’ Raymond said. ‘We need to check whether the Reeses’ have a tent and whether any of the ropes are missing.’

  ‘Do we have a time of death?’ Kate asked. ‘We’ve narrowed down the time she went missing to sometime after half past eleven on Tuesday. The CCTV footage shows her leaving the bookies around then. Do we know if she was strangled soon after that?’

  Raymond shook his head. ‘Hard to say. Stomach contents show the remains of some sort of breakfast cereal. Kailisa thinks that either she was killed soon after she was snatched, so her stomach didn’t have time to fully digest her breakfast, or the fear might have slowed down the digestive process. He thinks she’d not been in the water more than ten or twelve hours. He can’t be more specific at this point.’

  ‘No sweets?’ Kate asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Craig Reese sent her off to buy sweets. She bought some Haribo’s but it doesn’t look like she ate them if there was only breakfast cereal in her stomach. What happened to the sweets?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Raymond sighed as though Kate was deliberately trying to throw his train of thought. ‘All I know is what I’ve just told you. Breakfast in her stomach so she was probably killed soon after she was taken.’

  ‘So, Craig Reese could have kept her body hidden and then dumped her when he went out on Tuesday night?’ Cooper suggested.

  ‘Or Ken Fowler,’ Barratt countered. ‘He was at the pond that night.’

  ‘Look,’ Kate said. ‘I don’t think we have evidence to link Craig Reese or Ken Fowler to the murder. We need to keep our minds open. Reese and Fowler have no known connection with each other and they alibi each other. We should find out if they are linked in some way. Does one have something to gain by covering for the other? What about the background checks?’

  She looked at Cooper whose normally pale, freckled face was pink. She’d obviously taken Kate’s outburst as a telling-off which wasn’t Kate’s intention. She’d seen too many cases get side-tracked and stalled due to people making assumptions and not looking at other possibilities. Her gut was telling her to look more closely at Craig Reese but she knew that it was only one possible line of enquiry.

  ‘I checked Reese and his father first,’ Cooper was saying, looking flustered by the sudden focus of attention on what she had to say. ‘Craig Reese has three points on his licence for speeding which is a bit moot as he doesn’t have a car at the moment. George Reese is clean. He’s mentioned in a couple of cases of affray in 1984 and 1985 but he’s never been charged with any offence.’

  Exactly what Dave Porter’s mother had suggested, Kate thought.

  ‘Carl Loach’s record tells a different story,’ Cooper continued. ‘Two cases of ABH in 1985. Nothing since.’

  ‘More detail,’ Raymond demanded.

  Cooper consulted her notes, shuffling the print-outs like an expert card sharp.

  ‘He was arrested outside the Miner’s Welfare Club in Thorpe for an attack on a Paul Hirst in October 1984. Apparently, he attacked the man after calling him a scab. The two fought, cheered on by a crowd, according to statements given by two onlookers. Both men were arrested but Loach was found to be the instigator and fined. The second one was in January of the following year. He attacked the same man.’

  Raymond stared at Cooper, obviously thinking about the implications while she sat like a rabbit in headlights wondering what was coming next.

  ‘We need to find this Paul Hirst. Maybe he’s harbouring a grudge.’

  ‘He’s not,’ Cooper said.

  Raymond looked sceptical. ‘How can you possibly know that, Cooper?’

  ‘He killed himself in June 1985.’

  Raymond snorted his disgust at the loss of a promising lead.

  ‘How?’ Kate asked. She’d seen a couple of cases where the initial assessment was suicide but they later turned out to be murders.

  ‘Hanged himself off Samson Bridge. That’s…’

  ‘The bridge to the pit. I know,’ Kate said. ‘Don’t suppose it’s there now though?’

  ‘The site was landscaped sometime in the early nineties,’ Barratt said, eager to please. ‘They built some sort of outdoor education place on it. You know, bush tucker and all that.’

  Kate found that hard to imagine. When she’d been growing up in Thorpe the whole area round the pit was grimy gravel tracks, black with coal dust, moonscape spoil heaps and red-brick buildings that housed the pit head baths and the canteen. Not exactly the great outdoors. She’d walked the old railway track behind the pit once with her dad and they’d had to cross Samson Bridge to access the start of the path. It had spanned a narrow-gauge railway line and a rough road, allowing miners safe access to the squat buildings that surrounded the winding gear. A bit public for a suicide.

  ‘Fletcher?’ Raymond was talking to her. ‘Find out what you can about this Paul Hirst. Ask around. You know the area and the people – see what they’ll tell you.’

  Cooper and Barrett both looked at her, suddenly suspicious. It looked like Hollis wasn’t the only one who hadn’t been aware of her background.

  ‘You’re local?’ Cooper asked.

  ‘Thorpe born and bred.’ Kate could hear the defensiveness and pride in her own tone as though Cooper had challenged her South Yorkshire credentials. It was instinctive even though she’d have denied any loyalty to her home town. She’d felt uprooted when her father had moved them south but that had been wrong – the roots were still there, entwined in the streets and parks of her childhood and she knew that, given the chance, they would spring to the surface and trip her up.

  ‘Didn’t see that coming,’ Barratt said under his breath.

  ‘Enough about DI Fletcher’s family history,’ Raymond said. ‘Let’s get back to the slightly less interesting matter of this girl’s murder, shall we?’

  Murmurs of ‘sorry,’ from Cooper and Barratt.

  ‘So, where does this leave us? What are our next steps?’

  ‘The rope,’ Kate said. ‘We need to find out what it is and where it came from. Craig Reese has been a bit cagey. I wonder if it’s worth having a look around the house and garden – see if he likes camping.’

  ‘Those Search and Rescue blokes are usually outdoorsy,’ Barratt added. ‘Ken Fowler might have a tent.’

  Kate sighed. Barratt was obviously trying to make a name for himself on the small team but his relentless pursuit of Fowler was getting boring. They were all taught to ‘think
outside the box’, to ask difficult questions and to challenge everything but this was getting a bit tedious. If she’d been in Raymond’s position she’d have been tempted to let Barratt run with it and get it out of his system. Fowler had no motive and hadn’t even been asked for an alibi for the time when Aleah went missing.

  ‘Why don’t you find out?’ Raymond said, as Kate suppressed a grin. ‘If you really think he’s a viable suspect then go and do some legwork.’

  Barratt grinned broadly. ‘Okay, I’ll get on it.’

  ‘Fletcher, Hollis. I want you to have a look around at the Reeses’ house. Ask nicely. A warrant takes time but we’ll get one if we need to. If they’ve got nothing to hide they won’t have a problem with you poking around.’

  ‘O’Connor, I’m interested in this spat between Loach and Paul Hirst. I want to know what Loach had against him and I want to know why Hirst killed himself. It might be nothing but then again it might be somebody wanting revenge on Loach. You know people in Thorpe – ask around.’

  ‘Cooper might be best digging around to see what she can find,’ Kate suggested. ‘She could try the Free Press and the Times. See if there’s anything in there about the fights and the suicide. It might help to pick out the facts from any gossip and speculation that O’Connor gets from anybody.’

  Raymond nodded his approval.

  ‘Come on then,’ he said, clapping his hands together. ‘Let’s do our jobs.’

  O’Connor pulled Kate to one side as they left the briefing room. He waited until the others had passed before speaking.

  ‘Are you really from Thorpe?’ he asked, his mouth twisted into a half grin above his dark brown beard.

  Kate nodded waiting to see where this might be leading.

  ‘Well, I’ve been doing a lot of work over there. Somebody’s distributing smuggled cigarettes and booze. It’s mainly small scale but that’s how these things often start. I’ve got contacts.’