“We still have one more hurdle.”
“Sir?”
“What if she talks?”
Groat could not prevent a small portion of his disquiet clouding his expression. What was the man about to propose? Have her bumped off while she was in prison? Developments really were getting out of hand. Waters way too murky and deep.
“What do you mean, sir?”
“Well, I don’t suppose it will matter much what she says to the screws, or the other inmates. It’s a well-known fact the prisons are full of innocent people. What I mean is, what if she manages to bend the ear of some journalist, or we get some random busybody researching old case files or something.”
“Sir?”
“We need a contingency plan for the possibility that at some time in the future she may attempt to sell her story to the papers, write a book or something.”
“What were you thinking of?”
“Well, we could consider all sorts, but I think the best approach would be to bury it completely. No evidence, no records, no witnesses. Nothing.”
Groat grimaced. “How could we achieve that sir? It’s blackmail so it’s got to go to the big house. Even if we managed to lose all the documentary evidence, the file and all the papers, there will still be the court records of the case – everything that is said during the trial – and we can’t get at them.”
“All right, set those concerns to one side for a moment. If we could bury it, erase it, rewind time, however you want to put it, I think you would agree that it would be better if it had never happened, any of it?”
Groat heaved a tortured sigh. More than you’ll ever know. “Yes sir, of course.”
“So let’s go through it a step at a time. We have the trial. You’re right, it’s blackmail, so the victims will be known simply as A, B; X, Y or whatever. So that’s all that will be on the court’s record of evidence. We can deal with all the police documentation after the trial. I realise we can’t lose it completely. That in itself would raise suspicions. But I’m sure that after the trial you can edit or redact it, sanitise it to the point that in future no one can be identified. The victims themselves won’t need any persuading to stay anonymous, shtum. We need to be in a position where a journalist, or anyone else researching the case, eventually comes up against a dead end. The crime took place, there was a trial, and the perpetrator was sentenced, but there’s no way of identifying any of the victims. OK?” He paused, “Your team, what do they know?”
“Apart from Ted, er, D/S Pearson that is, sir, nothing. They were assigned to keep obs on the drop sites and make the pickups. I suppose there’s an outside chance they might have recognised one of the victims, but I doubt it somehow. I’d be surprised if many of them vote, let alone go to church. They wouldn’t even recognise their own senior officers, half of them.”
The DAC coughed. Somehow managing to combine delicacy with ostentation – and at the same time raised his eyebrows. “And D/S Pearson?”
“Sound as a pound, sir. Loyal to the last.”
“Good. Any bases not covered?”
“What about the victims appearing in court?” Groat worried, “The press, the public gallery and all that.”
“Well for a start we will only need one, maybe two complainants in any event. I’m sure that if we put it to the defence how much it would undoubtedly add to the inevitable prison sentence, if they insist on making our witnesses endure the ordeal of having to appear in person… After all the stress and worry that the defendant has already put them through…” He smiled for the first time. “If they kick up too much about it, we can always arrange for the victims to appear behind a screen or something. Anything else?”
“The interviewing officers.”
“I’ll deal with them.”
Groat raised an eyebrow ever so slightly. Nothing surprises me any more.
“So we can do it.”
Groat smiled, “Sir – we can only give it our best shot.”
“One last thing. I suppose…” He paused, “No, not suppose; that would be churlish. I owe you. We all owe you a debt of gratitude, Chief Inspector.”
Groat smiled, “Thank you sir.”
The DAC subjected him to that look again. “That does not mean you can come on my ear for favours every two minutes.”
No, but it does mean I’ve got a ‘get out of jail free’ card to play, if I ever need one.
“Yes sir, thank you.”
“Don’t mention it. And NEVER mention it. I mean that. Never even a hint to anyone. Ever.”
He paused to let it properly permeate.
“Ever. Understood?”
SIXTY SEVEN
Commander Morrison and his team soldiered on with their enquiries, although already he felt as though his premonition was going to be fulfilled.
The only vehicle known to have been used by the Panther was the stolen Morris 1300, TTV 454H, so the team concentrated on winkling out every last scrap of evidence from it that they could. Its chassis and engine number revealed it to be FDH 878H, stolen from a car park behind a block of flats on Wigmore Farm Estate, West Bromwich. This was close to the M5 and only a few miles from Dudley. The vehicle was stripped down to the last nut, bolt and washer. The forensic scientists vacuumed up every fibre, hair and speck of dust. They even dusted the tyres for fingerprints, but it yielded no clues. The contents were a different matter, however. There was a receipt for the trousers in the vehicle and they were found to have been bought at the C&A store in Leeds on 20th November 1974, only nine days after the murder of Sidney Grayland and paid for, in all likelihood, with some of the £861 cash from the Langley post office. The knickers were likewise followed up and traced to the manufacturers who had sold three hundred dozen pairs to two wholesalers, one in Cardiff – which the team ruled out – and one in Smethwick, virtually right next door to Dudley. The wholesalers were unable to provide precise details of who they had supplied, so that line of enquiry petered out. The number plates used by the Panther to disguise the vehicle, had been made up using a kit made in Sheffield, but the manufacturers had supplied over six hundred retailers, so it was impossible to trace one specific set. The original number plates, however were to prove more interesting and dedicated, painstaking enquiries were to establish a potentially valuable link.
Six months before Lesley’s body was found, an innocuous event at Peacocks Hay, at the southern end of Bathpool Park, now assumed some significance. Around five thirty in the morning of 24th September, Sergeant Ernest Payne was on routine patrol with one of his constables, when they found a dark blue Ford Escort van, parked three hundred yards down a farm track. As they approached they heard a scuffling, rustling noise, but saw no one and thought it was most likely to be the cattle in the adjoining field. Sergeant Payne was of the opinion that the van was kitted out for camping. There was a yellow foam rubber mattress, a camping kettle, saucepans, two grey blankets, a rubber torch, a tartan holdall, a bottle of milk and some canned food. They checked, but it had not been reported stolen. The officers were sufficiently suspicious enough to let down the two rear tyres and keep checking the vehicle every so often. Over the next days, the contents were gradually removed. It was later reported to them that a small, dark haired man had been snooping around the nearby hillocks and spinneys after parking a dark green 1300 saloon.
Enquiries later showed that the registration plates, NCH 622K were false and the correct registration was in fact SOA 902H, stolen from the drive of a butcher’s home in Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham on the night of the first of December 1972.
Morrison’s team went further and found that the registration numbers on the false plates fitted to each of these vehicles, belonged to doppelgangers in Nottingham. The genuine NCH 622K was usually parked on Upper Street, and the real TTV 454H, the twin to the one found in Dudley, was left regularly on Cottage Terrace car park, not far away. A team of twenty detectives descended on the area, but house to house and other enquiries proved fruitless. The link, if there was o
ne, apart from the prowling Panther, was never resolved.
In spite of two police searches of Bathpool Park, local children were still finding and handing in items of interest. A Kidsgrove schoolgirl riding her bike in the park found a stopwatch. Some lads playing there found two vacuum flasks (which they had emptied of their chicken soup contents) a black plastic raincoat and two sugar buns in a polythene bag. The buns had been quite soft when they’d squeezed them. Later another schoolboy had found a tangle of cassette tape and a tape recorder trampled into a muddy path through nearby woods. The tape was painstakingly treated to remove creases and scratches and wound into a new cassette case. When played, it proved to be another version of Lesley’s Kidsgrove ransom message.
Yet another girl told the police she’d ‘found some stuff’. She led them to a spot where they recovered a pair of Zeiss binoculars, a dark coloured anorak, a new hammer and tartan holdall which had split open. She had first seen them whilst out riding, two days after Ron Whittle’s abortive attempt to deliver the ransom. They were lying in long grass, on a bank close to the main shaft entrance. The serial number of the binoculars was traced to a dealer in Manchester. He had sold them for £88.54 on the twenty seventh of October 1972, to a man who had completed the guarantee card in the name of Turner, giving an address on Water Lane, Wilmslow. The address turned out to be a high class furriers, Glynn and Liendhardt. They had no one by the name of Turner at the address, or working for them, but at that time they’d had some plumbing work carried out by a firm of that name. All the plumbers’ employees were traced and interviewed, but seven weeks work by that team of a dozen detectives also led to nothing.
More sightings of TTV 454H rolled in. A lorry driver had seen the car on Castle Mill Road, Dudley, a couple of weeks before Lesley was kidnapped. This was a short distance from the zoo grounds and may have been the Panther on a reconnaissance sortie. The lorry driver described the driver alighting from the car. “He struck me as a man who had military training. He walked quickly and very upright. He was aged about 35 to 40-ish, about 5’6” tall, with a fawn coloured raincoat down to his knees, a pair of heavy shoes and a black and yellow scarf.”
Another sighting came from a taxi driver in Redditch, following which a team of fifty detectives executed a tactical sweep of two sprawling council estates in the new town, questioning more than three thousand residents.
It, too, proved fruitless.
The cause of Bob Booth’s fall from grace was discovered and investigated. His ‘arrest within twenty four hours’ boast, arose from his conviction that the kidnapper cum murderer had to be someone with intimate knowledge of the Bathpool Park underground tunnel workings. Wanting desperately to upstage the insurgents from New Scotland Yard, he wagered everything – including his reputation – on being able to flush out one of the men who had worked on the project. There could not be that many, he reasoned. What he had not realised was that ten years before, at the height of the work to convert the former mine waste tip into a recreation ground, over three thousand men beavered away, many of them itinerant workers, helping to construct the drainage complex. As well as drainage engineers, the police had to trace men who had worked on the electrification of the main railway through the park, and casual labourers who had laid the road through the area. Commander Morrison offered an amnesty to those ‘on the lump’, building workers; cash paid casuals who tendered false names and addresses to evade paying income tax.
As Lesley’s funeral took place in Highley amid a light sprinkling of powdery snow, a police reconstruction took place close to the scene of her demise. David Miller, an actor with the Stoke-on-Trent repertory company, chosen for his similarity in physique, donned kit similar to the Black Panther’s and drove TTV 454H around the park for an hour. The publicity and the playing on local radio of tape recordings of calls made to the Whittles, brought hundreds of phone calls, mainly from women reporting their husbands and boyfriends as suspects. The police were convinced that ninety five percent of the calls were motivated by reasons other than a genuine belief that their loved one was the Black Panther…
The only certainty was that not one brought them any closer to establishing his real identity.
SIXTY EIGHT
Gradually, normality began to prevail once more within the Groat household. The stresses created by their extraordinary high octane, white knuckle adventures slowly subsided as they settled back into their groove. To start off with, he had given Gloria an almighty dressing down. He realised that he was being heavy handed, but did it anyway. He knew he was also venting on her, his frustrations and self-recriminations about Olivia, but he did not feel that bad about it. Going off like she did. It was a wonder that she had not been raped – and not only by Bonehead, knowing that individual’s proclivities and associates. He felt that she – they – had got away relatively lightly, all things considered. Gloria had been remarkably cuddly since they’d got home and they had made love more frequently than usual – and with an added degree of intensity.
Not exactly Olivia, he sighed. Built for comfort rather than exhilaration, but that said, a much better bet. Olivia and he would probably have burned out after a while, such was the heat of their passion, but him and Gloria? They’d rattled along together happily enough for fourteen years or so, they could go on for a bit yet. On a couple of occasions she had again raised the idea of getting a villa (or two) telling him that the opportunities were real, that they should not be blind to the idea because of Bonehead’s involvement. Groat bit her head off. Haven’t you learned your lesson yet? But that was more about keeping her in her place and to remind her of her stupidity (and therefore of his moral superiority) than it was to do with investments, or resources.
A few days later, Groat received a telex:
To: Detective Chief Inspector L. Groat, CID Metpol, London. From Capt. J. Fonseca, Guardia Civil, Malaga. Message begins: Sidney Bulstrode in custody, stop. Charged with kidnap and false imprisonment, stop. Will advise when case concluded, stop. Give Gloria my regards, stop. Message ends.
He took a copy home for her. Technically he should not have done so, but he had witnessed her smothering the man with hugs and kisses. He wasn’t that obtuse.
He spoke to Ted Pearson. Emphasised the need for absolute secrecy on the case in order to protect national security. Ted swallowed the story totally, regarding Groat with such a serious look on his face as he listened to him, that he had difficulty not cracking out loud with laughter. He refrained, however, reminding himself of what could have been, had he not been able to enlist the assistance of the DAC. He would have ended up leaving Gloria (or more likely, her leaving him and taking half the house, half his pension and god knows what else) losing his job and ending up with nothing. He shuddered.
Finally, with the DAC’s words ringing in his ears, he decided to take all the documentation home and store it in a safe place. Against all rules and regulations, but that way only the court file would remain in the public domain and he could ensure that it was effectively doctored when the case was concluded. But what was a safe place? The garage? The shed? Anywhere in the house was likely to be examined by Gloria. Bury it in the garden? The idea had a certain appeal, as the DAC had wanted it buried, but he thought not. He was not an expert on burying things, but he had considerable experience of Sod’s Law; the principle that many plans and courses of action seemed to end up working backwards; having the opposite effect to what was desired, or the way that you would assume would be the natural order of the world. Had not Doctor Crippen buried his wife, wanting her to be consumed by the quicklime, only to preserve her – or what was left of her? And how about those countless tales of buried treasure? Trove so precious to the owner, lost, because someone else found it first, or the person responsible for the burial had simply forgotten precisely where they had secreted it. No, it was too risky. He would have to conform with the norm and do what everyone else wanting to hide something would do. Put it up high.
He retrieved the steplad
ders from the spare room and carried them to the landing. He placed them underneath the hatch to the loft, picked up the box of papers and carefully balanced it on top. Slowly, he reached up to lift the hatch and almost as carefully knocked the box off again. There was nothing careful, or slow about the way it fell, landing on one corner, spilling its contents.
“Bollocks, bollocks and double bollocks.” He fumed.
Gloria heard the thump from downstairs. “What’s the matter?” She called, “Are you all right?”
“Yes, yes.” He said peremptorily, in his best Piss off and leave me alone tone of voice. He started putting papers back together, stacking them back in the box. Even as a small child he gained a reputation for reading everything put in front of him. His mother swore he would sit at the breakfast table reading the back of the Shredded Wheat packet. Even now, he couldn’t stop himself reading snatches of the reports as he reassembled them. One caught his eye.
“That’s not right.”
He retrieved the report in its two page entirety and scanned it. It was Ted’s final report, on the last night’s drops. All was in order until the penultimate paragraph.
…six out of the eight drops were positive…
“That can’t be right. It was ten, then two lots of nine. I’m sure”
He put the report to one side and continued repacking the papers until he came to the notes he had made from the blackmail letters. There were definitely to be nine drops on the third night.
What the hell?
He found the briefing prepared for his team. He had only transferred eight across from his notes.
You stupid bastard. What have you done?
He examined his list.
The Perfect Crime Page 25
