Smith had to check the source of the intelligence first. No, it had not been Charlie himself but DC Waters who had seen and recognized the back of his superior’s head in a cosy alcove in Sandrine’s.
‘And what was Waters doing there? We’re over-paying these young DCs if you ask me.’
Charlie said, ‘As it happens, I asked him the same thing. He said it was his and his girlfriend’s six month anniversary.’
Smith thought back to the day that he and Waters had entered Pisces Marine and the attractive young receptionist had caught sight of the rookie detective constable in his first week out in the wide world. Six months would be about right.
‘So, nice try, DC – but who was this woman of mystery?’
Smith told him, and Charlie remembered the name, remembered taking the phone call when Jo Evison had first called the station in search of Detective Chief Inspector Smith.
‘And now, thanks to the message that I passed on - I might even say, thanks to the introduction that I made – it’s intimate dinners in classy French restaurants. Whatever next? Is she actually going to write this book?’
Well, Smith had said, it looks like a definite possibility – she wants to talk to some of the other people involved first. Charlie had wondered whether he would have to go to Sandrine’s to be interviewed as well but Smith thought it unlikely, and anyway, they did not serve Yorkshire pudding with gravy. Far from being insulted, Charlie Hills had thanked him for the warning.
Sally Lonsdale insisted that as she was wearing the disposable plastic suit of her profession, Smith must wear one too, if he wanted to be in the room when she was at work. He had to be there and so he had no choice – he thought to himself, it’s just going to be one of those cases in which I have to wear silly things. But the look it brought to Lucy Bell’s face was one of horror, and he was grateful that she had taken the little girl to the Flemings before any of this had started. Now Lucy was sitting quietly with Serena Butler.
Scenes of crime officers work meticulously, and Smith was still fascinated by it, after all this time. He had been a detective when everything had been done by CID officers; he had voiced doubts when civilian specialists had first been introduced, like many others, but had long since accepted that the work had become so complex it was better done by trained experts. Sally began by measuring and then photographing the bathroom from a number of angles. When she put the close-up, magnifying lens onto the indentations in the end wall, Smith was relieved to see that the hairs he had seen there were still in place – in fact there were more than he had suspected. She took pictures whilst lying on the floor to capture the blood spots under the sink, and said to Smith that from the shape of them she was certain that they had splashed upwards from a body close to or actually on the floor. Dust and hair samples from the floor were taped up and placed into sealable bags, each one labelled with the details that might one day be needed – if Smith and his team could make sense of it all. Then tape was used to collect the hairs from the wall. There were fingerprints on the walls, the tiles and around the door handle; these were dusted, photographed and then lifted with tape. Smith ventured a question, and Sally looked closely at four of them through a lens before she said, ‘My guess, it’s the same adult. There are some child’s prints on the door. Don’t forget to ask Mrs Bell for hers before we go. And now, the moment of truth.’
From her bag she took a roll of black fabric and with Smith’s help, fixed it over the window with adhesive tape. Then the door was closed. Next, she took out two lower face-masks, handing one to Smith. Finally, a spray bottle was used to lightly treat an area of the wall adjacent to the sink. Smith said, ‘Fluorescin?’ and she nodded. ‘OK – lights out.’
The ultraviolet beam of the torch illuminated a fine spray of dots on the tiles – a strangely beautiful mauve or pink, depending on the angle of the light. Smith held the torch while she changed the lens on the camera and then took pictures.
He said, ‘It’s been cleaned at least twice since. I can still smell bleach.’
‘I’m surprised it’s so clear on the tiles but bleach won’t eliminate bloodstains entirely. More than a few people have made that mistake. On a surface like this floor covering, which will be slightly absorbent, plenty can show up. Let’s see.’
With each spray onto the floor, more traces were revealed; in the darkness they resembled nothing so much as the dust clouds of deep space, faint, nebulous reminders of dreadful events long past – except that in this case, Smith guessed, the dreadful events had taken place about ten days ago.
When she had covered most of the floor, Sally stood up and took more photographs. The densest area of staining was close to the bent pipes, those that Smith had realized had been pushed back with such force that the tiles behind them were cracked. Smith pointed, his hand glowing an eerie purple in the beam.
Sally came back down and traced the outline.
‘I’d say that blood pooled here for a while. It’s quite dense. There are no splash marks around this – it didn’t come from any height.’
‘Someone was lying on the floor and bleeding?’
‘You know you can’t quote me on it, DC, that’s someone else’s job. I just gather it in – but that would be my guess. There was quite a lot of blood here.’
‘Pity it doesn’t light up differently for different people…’
‘No such luck. You could have more than one here. I’ll swab it in different places, as many as I can, and it’ll go to serology this afternoon. That’s the best I can do.’
‘You’re a star, Sally.’
He watched as she carried out the meticulous process; soaking each swab in saline before rolling it across the glowing patches on the floor, working not randomly, he realized, but in an invisible, rectangular grid. Then she would move on to the tiles.
She said, ‘You have this missing bloke’s DNA? If not, we’ll have to find something. There’s never a hairbrush these days.’
‘Yes. He was a naughty boy with someone else’s credit card three years ago. Looks as if he should have stuck to that.’
‘Might not be his blood, though.’
‘You’re right. But either way, something nasty happened in his bathroom, and now he’s gone. You don’t need my help to finish up in here? I’d better go and think of something to tell his Mrs.’
Lucy Bell held out her hand palm upwards, and Sally Lonsdale wiped away the traces of ink with a tissue. She was looking at Smith as he spoke.
‘We think we’ve got everything that we need, but if you could leave the bathroom as it is for a little longer, until we’ve got the results back, that would help us.’
She looked a little more numb, and her eyes had dark surrounds now.
She said, ‘I’m sorry to ask… It sounds mercenary, but what about the money? I don’t have anything else. Am I allowed to spend it, some of it? Leah needs things.’
He had already considered this. The money might be the proceeds of crime but he was a long way from proving that – and he had the numbers. That would have to do.
‘Yes, you can. You should look into what support you can both get, Lucy.’
‘I’ve never done that. I wouldn’t know where to start.’
‘A lady called Ann Crisp should be in touch with you soon. She’s a police officer, family liaison, victim support, that sort of thing. She will know what you can do.’
There was a pause, and Serena Butler glanced from Lucy Bell to Smith and then back again.
Lucy Bell said, ‘Am I a victim, then? Are we victims? What of?’
It seemed that everyone had had a busy morning. Smith moved the meeting to Incident Room 2, where there would be less likelihood of interruptions, and asked John Murray to lead off.
‘Bell has two bank accounts, one current and one for savings.’
He handed round copies.
‘As you can see, he doesn’t have any savings. Last summer he did get some good cash bonuses from a tar-laying company which he put into the
savings but that has gradually disappeared since then. It went out as cash withdrawals, so we don’t know what he spent it on. On the current account, at the bottom you can see that his first pay from Marinor did go in last week, but, as far as we can tell, he hasn’t touched it yet. The last transaction is the direct debit to the council for rent on the flat. I phoned the bank just before lunch to double-check – no cash withdrawals and no pending transactions. So that money didn’t come from either of these accounts.’
Smith said, ‘How have you left it with the bank?’
Murray knew exactly what he meant – ‘They’ll contact me if there is any activity.’
It was clear that Reeve had something she wanted to add to this and so Smith nodded to her.
‘I telephoned James Bell’s father, Alec Bell. We talked for quite a while. To cut a long story short, Alec Bell is a gentleman, and his son is something of a disappointment to him, to put it mildly. He was very concerned about what might happen to Lucy and his granddaughter – I think he intends to come down soon and help out as far as he can.’
Smith said, ‘When did he last see Jimmy?’
Reeve smiled – it was uncanny how often Smith asked the right question.
‘Mr Bell senior calls his son James. He hadn’t seen him for over a year – until the Wednesday before that last weekend. Jimmy simply turned up at lunchtime, as if it was a regular weekly thing. He was in good spirits and took his father out to lunch at a local pub. He paid for everything with cash – I asked. Jimmy seemed to think that he had turned a corner, that things were on the up.’
‘Did Mr Bell ask why?’
‘Yes, and he didn’t get a straight answer. What he did get was a little of the money back that James had borrowed from him over the years. He was told that it was just a down-payment.’
‘How much?’
‘A thousand pounds.’
Smith allowed everyone to absorb that in their own way.
‘How did Jimmy – James – get up to Newcastle?’
‘Train, and he left the same way later that afternoon.’
‘So he would have been back in Lake, back home late that evening. We’ll check that with Lucy… Were they new notes? Did you ask?’
Reeve was ahead of him there.
‘I’ve got a local DC going in to take the numbers. He might end up with the cash – Alec Bell said that if it was dirty money, he didn’t want it.’
Smith was making notes as he spoke.
‘Under no illusions, then?’
‘About his son? I don’t think so.’
He turned to Waters.
‘Right, Chris. You didn’t have much to do, so I hope you’ve made a good job of it.’
One-to-one, Waters could deal with Smith’s irony most of the time but in front of others, it could still make him blush a little.
‘I chased up the helicopter passengers and I’ve got responses from twelve - that’s two thirds-’
Smith tutted and said, ‘The things they teach ‘em these days!’
‘But no-one is prepared to say that they noticed him. I checked back with a couple and they confirmed that it was full – there were no empty seats. So he was there but no-one actually spoke to him or noticed him for any reason. Also, I’ve got the name of the Marinor personnel manager – she actually started quizzing me about what was going on as it’s causing her some staffing problems. I said you’d have some answers when you met with her.’
Even Serena Butler joined in with the smiles that passed across and around the table.
‘Very good. Laptop?’
‘I took it to Sergeant Wallis. He said three sets of prints – or, to be precise, prints from three individuals as far as he could tell, one a child just from the size. We took copies but he said to tell you that if you want it as evidence, it will have to go through forensics management. He said you’d know that anyway.’
Smith considered it.
‘More delays and more cost… Get him to check the prints against what we’ve got for Lucy Bell and against Jimmy’s record data. If they match, we needn’t bother. What’s on it?’
He was mildly astonished when Waters took a small notebook out of his jacket pocket.
‘I’d say that they both used it. There was the usual Amazon and eBay stuff, looking at things that I can’t imagine would have interested Bell. Some online betting sites had been put into favourites, and an online poker-playing thing, which was used in the week before he disappeared. But I couldn’t tell whether he won or lost, just that he had been on there.’
Smith said, ‘Even so, those sites will pay by bank transfer. And he wouldn’t have got any winnings that quickly. Go on.’
‘There isn’t much more…’
‘But there is something?’
Waters was hesitating.
‘It’s set to delete browsing history on exit, which lots of people do. But I had a look at what cookies had been retained. There were some adult ones. You can sort of guess from the names but I checked a few out to be sure.’
‘Pornography?’
‘No. Adult dating sites. People looking to meet like-minded others for – well, to meet like-minded others. You know the sort of thing.’
Smith looked round.
‘Well, I don’t actually know but I can make a good guess. And these were easy to find – not hidden away?’
‘If you knew where to look. He’d probably deleted the history thinking everything would go but it doesn’t.’
‘Dear me…’
He wrote in his own notebook, and everyone around the table must have wondered what went into there on these occasions. He looked up and saw them all watching.
‘Just making a note to get my cookies fixed tonight.’
He got up and went to the store-cupboard at the back of the incident room. The stand that he had pushed back into there when they had finished looking into the death of Joan Riley was still in place and behind it one of the A1 pads that he had taken charge of as they were heading out towards the skip behind the canteen. He manhandled both out and set them up.
‘Sorry, but this is turning into a proper case.’
He felt through his pockets, and then remembered – on a shelf in the cupboard was a box of board markers. In black, at the top of the first sheet he wrote ‘Timeline’. Then he turned back to the expectant faces.
‘This is what we found in the Bells’ bathroom this morning. Blood, and plenty of it, splashed on one wall and pooled on the floor. Also, other DNA evidence, possibly from more than one individual. The bathroom has been cleaned and tidied up since whatever took place there that weekend but not thoroughly, not by someone who knew what they were doing.’
Waters had raised a pen. Smith stopped and nodded him in.
‘We know that Jimmy Bell used to get drunk and physical. Lucy Bell was honest about that, and she’d obviously cleared up after him before. What made you think something different had happened in the bathroom?’
It was a good question, and Smith thought before answering. He could not say ‘Instinct’ but that’s how it came to him; now he had to be able to rationalize how he had reached the correct conclusion.
‘In my experience, when a man loses it and lashes out, he has a typical way of doing it, a characteristic way. He punches or he kicks or he headbutts if he’s from north of Carlisle, but not all three, not on his own in a small bathroom. There was damage from floor to head height in there, and it just didn’t look right to me. And then there was the blood under the sink – how did that get there if he was on his own? He would have to have been crouched down, banging his head on the floor. It didn’t add up.’
Waters accepted it but asked another question.
‘And you think it’s Jimmy Bell’s blood?’
‘We can’t say, can we? That’s why we have labs. But I do think that someone did someone else some serious harm in there, and with everything else we’ve got, it has to be connected to his disappearance, one way or another.’
Then point by point, he summarized just what they had now.
‘Jimmy Bell was coming to the end of his first fortnight off, and preparing to go back onto platform Elizabeth. He doesn’t seem to have especially enjoyed his first spell there, though he gave no indication that we are aware of that he did not intend to go back. Either way, he decided that he was going out for a beer or three on his last Saturday night, and Mrs Bell decides to get the child and herself over to her brother’s place in Wetton – which reminds me, we need to pay him a visit. This seems a bit odd but I think we can assume that James and Lucy Bell were not by now, if they ever were, Romeo and Juliet.
‘We’ll also assume,’ with a look at Waters, ‘that Jimmy did go out on the Saturday night. We don’t know where, and we might have to go and show his picture in some likely watering holes – Lucy Bell suggested a couple. He goes home at some point. Then it’s all quiet until the Sunday afternoon, when he calls in sick, saying that he’ll come in on the Tuesday flight if someone can arrange it, which they do. Mrs Bell arrives home mid-morning on Monday, finds Mr Bell has gone as she expected but also finds the mess in the bathroom. She can see that he has cleared it up but the damage is still there. She goes over it again, which makes sense as the rest of the flat is clean and tidy. She doesn’t find any message from Jimmy, no apology which he sometimes left, but otherwise isn’t surprised that she’s heard nothing from him at that point. A psychologist friend of mine would say that James Bell is strongly inwardly focused; I’d say he is a selfish bastard – apologies, ladies, but it’s the same thing in my simple world.
‘Anyway, Jimmy catches the Tuesday flight from East Denes. He’s perhaps still not feeling well, still hungover maybe, so he goes straight to his berth. The young man he shares with is already on shift and doesn’t see him. At some point – no, at about one a.m. - Jimmy gets up and goes for a wander around obscure parts of the platform. There is some grainy CCTV footage of him doing so which you can all have a look at now it’s arrived here – like me, you probably won’t be recommending it for a BAFTA. And that’s the end of the story – he was due to be at work at 06.00 on the Wednesday but never arrived. In his bedside drawer is a phone that Mrs Bell has never seen. On it is his contact list but there is no call history. We’re waiting to hear if there ever was one on it.
Luck and Judgement Page 12
