A Case Gone Cold

by Paul Gitsham

  ‘A neighbour says the burglar alarm went off on the Wednesday evening of that week, but she walked around and saw that the house was secure, with no sign of a forced entry. She didn’t have keys and didn’t want to call them back off holiday for a fault, so she just put up with the flashing light and periodic ringing until they got back.’

  ‘I assume the burglar was checking to see that they wouldn’t be disturbed?’

  ‘Yeah, we’re seeing that more and more these days. Thieves see that the driveway is empty and figure the owners are probably on holiday. But they don’t want to run the risk of some overzealous neighbour coming around to see what’s going on and catching them inside, so they sneak around the back and set off the motion detectors.

  ‘If the blue light is still flashing twenty-four hours later, then obviously the owners are away and nobody has any keys. Then they come back that night and break in. Even if the alarm goes off again, it doesn’t matter since nobody bothered to investigate before. It clearly isn’t linked to a security company and you know what response times are like for us; it’s unlikely we’d even come and look, let alone arrive in the five minutes they’re in the house.’

  ‘So walk me through it.’

  ‘Nothing especially unusual. Entry was gained through the French windows. Most of the safety glass was knocked in, but a few fragments remained; enough for the CSIs to pick up some fibres and a spot of blood. It had been raining on and off all week, so the kitchen floor and the stairs were a complete mess, but we isolated a couple of usable footprints on the patio and one on the kitchen floor. There wasn’t much of a search; he grabbed an iPad and a laptop from the downstairs office, then went straight to the master bedroom and helped himself to the owner’s jewellery, which was in a small wood and glass display cabinet. Nothing too expensive, but lots of sentimental value. The CSIs found two more spots of blood on the stairs and another next to the display cabinet.’

  ‘And you have arrested the alleged thief?’

  ‘Yeah. He was picked up two days later when he was stopped and searched. He was equipped to burgle and carrying a knife. That was enough to raise a warrant and go have a look-see at his flat. No sign of the jewellery, but underneath his bed was enough electrical equipment to stock a branch of PC World. Loads of it was marked with UV pens or SmartWater, including the iPad and laptop from Abbey View Terrace.’

  ‘And that was enough for him to confess?’

  ‘He admitted it and asked for a dozen other offences to be taken into consideration within an hour of meeting his solicitor at the station. He’s not daft. He knew there was no point fighting it, he may as well put his hands up and hope the court takes that into account when sentencing.’

  There was a pause at the end of the line.

  ‘If you don’t mind me asking, sir, why the sudden interest? It’s a bit run-of-the-mill for a DCI to be getting involved.’

  ‘Most of the blood spots match the accused, Aaron Wallace, but one of them is a positive match for a cold case. I’m trying to work out who else was with him that night.’

  There was another pause, this time longer, and when he finally answered, Stibbald sounded apologetic.

  ‘We found a second set of footprints on the patio outside. The footprint that we found in the kitchen and the fibres on the remains of the French windows matched Wallace and he confessed immediately, so we didn’t pursue it any further. To be honest, I completely forgot about the pending DNA tests and the other footprints. Sorry.’

  His story matched the report in the computer. Warren decided there was nothing to be gained from giving the officer a hard time for not tying up all the loose ends; it wasn’t just CID feeling the pressure of the government’s swingeing budget cuts.

  ‘Does Wallace have any acquaintances that you know about?’

  ‘You’re asking the wrong person, sir. But, I can give you the name of the officer who arrested him. She knows him a lot better than I do. That’s why she stopped and searched him; she knew there was a good chance something would turn up.’

  * * *

  PC Fiona McGinty was busy in court and it was after midday before she returned Warren’s call.

  ‘Yeah, I know Aaron. He’s one of my regulars. What’s he done this time?’

  PC McGinty’s tone reminded Warren of his wife when she spoke about one of her naughtier pupils. Mild exasperation, tinged with a degree of affection.

  ‘It’s about the burglary, up on Abbey View Terrace.’

  ‘Sorry, the name doesn’t ring a bell. Is this a new or historic offence?’

  ‘Recent. It’s one of the cases linked to the Stop and Search you executed back on the tenth of September.’

  ‘Oh, now I remember. I spotted him hanging around the back of Park Street at half past nine at night. Claimed he was meeting a mate for a pint, but he had his burgling bag with him, a zip-up holdall just the right size for anything he likes the look of. I asked him for a look inside and he was a bit reluctant. Normally, if he hasn’t got anything to hide he’s pretty cooperative. He knows I play fair with him and he’ll be on his way soon if he doesn’t play silly buggers. So I did a Code A Stop and Search.’

  Warren had the form on the computer screen in front of him.

  ‘I see that he had a toolkit and a knife.’

  ‘Yeah, silly sod. He always tries to claim that he’s going to do some odd jobs around a mate’s house, but he has too much form for us to give him the benefit of the doubt.’

  ‘What about the knife? Is he violent?’

  ‘Nah, the blade was a rusty old lock-knife wrapped in cloth at the bottom of the bag. He probably uses it to cut things when he’s on a job. But it was enough to raise a warrant so we could search his flat. That’s when we found all of the stuff he’d nicked, under the bed …’ She paused. ‘Look, Wallace isn’t some gentleman thief from one of those old black and white movies. He isn’t going to put his hand up and say, “It’s a fair cop, guv’nor.” But he’s not violent. I don’t know him that well, but, from what I can see, he has the usual crappy background – broken home, persistent truancy, parents out of their depth – but as far as we can tell, he’s mostly steered clear of drugs and street crime. He basically ekes out a living fencing stolen property; either his own or stuff he’s been given.’

  ‘We know that for at least one of his jobs, he had an accomplice. This person left footprints and blood, neither of which are in the system. Any ideas?’

  ‘Hmmm. Let me think …’ The noise at the other end of the line suggested that she was tapping her teeth with a pen.

  ‘He does have a few acquaintances that he hangs around with, but they’re pretty well known and all in the database. I know that he has a half-brother. I’m pretty sure that he isn’t in the system.’

  Warren felt his pulse rise slightly. ‘What can you tell me about him?’

  ‘Not much, I’ve never met him properly. Tyler’s his name, if I recall correctly. I think he stays with him occasionally. I saw him briefly a couple of years ago when I went around to arrest Aaron. He came in the kitchen, took one look at us all and disappeared out the back again. I did a PNC search on him but nothing came up.’

  ‘Can you describe him?’

  She paused for a moment.

  ‘Mixed race, quite a big lad. I’d say about ten years older than Aaron.’

  Ten years older would have made him about eighteen around the time of the sexual assault.

  ‘Big enough to have size eleven feet?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised.’

  * * *

  PC McGinty agreed to meet Karen Hardwick and Tony Sutton and go and visit Wallace, armed with a search warrant.

  ‘Bloody hell, McGinty, what are you after now? I haven’t done anything?’ Aaron Wallace was a scruffy, scrawny man who looked significantly younger than his twenty-nine years. The man’s left eyebrow sported an impressive number of studs, and what Hardwick initially took to be a tattoo beneath the same eye turned out on closer inspection to
be an almost perfect crucifix-shaped birthmark.

  Despite it being after noon, Wallace’s messy blond hair and reddened eyes suggested that he’d been asleep when they’d rang the doorbell.

  McGinty introduced Hardwick and Sutton, who passed over a copy of the search warrant.

  Wallace sighed. ‘Shit.’

  ‘Any help you give us at this stage will be noted,’ said McGinty, an indirect reminder that he was still on bail from his September arrest.

  Wallace pointed wordlessly towards the half-open bedroom door, before wandering back into the lounge and retrieving his tobacco and papers.

  Within thirty minutes, several pieces of jewellery, a collection of laptops, tablets and mobile phones and a half-full Cancer Research collecting tin were all sealed in plastic evidence bags in the boot of Fiona McGinty’s patrol car.

  ‘I can’t believe he’d get caught with so much when he’s already on bail awaiting trial. You’d think he’d keep his nose clean,’ Karen Hardwick muttered to Tony Sutton.

  ‘It’s not unusual. He knows he’s going down, so what he’s doing now is stealing as much stuff as possible to raise a little nest egg ready for when he comes out, or to tide any family over when he’s inside. He’ll ask for it to be taken into consideration in court; it’ll add a bit of time to his sentence, but it means he can’t be done for it again at a later date.’

  ‘It’s just a game for these guys, isn’t it?’ asked Hardwick rhetorically.

  By now, Wallace was sitting opposite McGinty who was formally arresting him.

  Sutton sat down next to her, and introduced himself again.

  Hardwick slipped out the room.

  ‘OK, Aaron, obviously you’re in a lot of trouble, but you’ve been helpful and that will go well in your favour.’

  Wallace shrugged.

  ‘But you can help us out even more.’

  Wallace said nothing.

  ‘Who do you work with?’

  Wallace’s eyes narrowed slightly. ‘Don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Come on, Aaron, when you go on your jobs, who goes with you?’

  ‘Nobody, I work alone.’

  ‘Now we know that’s not true, Aaron.’

  Wallace’s eye twitched. ‘Bullshit. Nobody’s ever worked with me.’

  ‘That’s not what it says in our files.’

  ‘All right, I haven’t worked with anyone recently. I haven’t even seen any of the old crew for years.’ He smirked slightly. ‘They’re a bad influence.’

  ‘Then whose footprints were mixed in with yours on the job you did at Abbey View Terrace between Wednesday the fourth and Sunday the eighth of September?’

  Wallace said nothing for a few more seconds. ‘Must have been the owner’s.’

  ‘Really? Because they look very similar to the pair of size eleven trainers we found in the back bedroom.’

  ‘I ain’t saying nothing until I speak to my lawyer.’

  * * *

  PC McGinty left to take Aaron Wallace back to the station to meet his solicitor and be formally charged for handling stolen goods, leaving Sutton and Hardwick to finish searching the flat for any further clues to the identity of his accomplice.

  ‘This must be his brother—’ Hardwick was looking at some pictures in cheap frames on the mantelpiece ‘—and I guess those folks must be their parents.’

  The photographs spanned decades, ranging from faded Christmases populated by people wearing the latest Eighties fashions to more recent holiday snaps. Only in the more recent photos were the two brothers together. All but one of the photographs featured the same individual, a tall, gaunt-looking man, whose thick blond hair thinned and greyed over the space of two decades, ageing faster than anyone else in the pictures. The newest picture featured both brothers. The older man was absent.

  ‘I guess that must have been their dad,’ noted Hardwick. She stared at the photos thoughtfully.

  ‘Penny for them,’ offered Sutton.

  ‘I don’t know …’ Hardwick pulled out her mobile phone and took snaps of all the pictures.

  ‘What say we go and have a chat with the neighbours whilst we’re here?’ said Sutton, when she’d finished.

  * * *

  The harsh lighting in the interview room did nothing to improve Aaron Wallace’s pallor.

  Warren introduced himself and reminded him who PC McGinty was. His solicitor, an older woman, looked at them curiously. She’d already read the disclosed evidence and had to be wondering why such a senior detective was taking part in an interview over an apparently unremarkable burglary offence.

  After setting up the PACE recorder, Warren sat back and let McGinty start. Wallace was cooperative, up to a point. A recent Community Policing initiative distributing UV pens and SmartWater kits meant that almost all of the merchandise retrieved from Wallace’s back room had been positively linked to its rightful owners. Wallace had readily admitted to the thefts, demonstrating his ‘willingness to cooperate with police’ as repeatedly stressed by his solicitor.

  Unfortunately, that willingness to cooperate didn’t extend as far as naming the person who had accompanied him on his uninvited visit to the Bedfords’ house.

  ‘No comment.’

  Wallace folded his arms and that was that.

  * * *

  The block of flats where Aaron Wallace lived wasn’t the most welcoming environment for the police. Less than half of the doors that Sutton and Hardwick knocked on were actually answered, even when it was clear that somebody was home. Of those that opened up, many of the occupants suddenly developed an inability to speak English or closed the door in their faces.

  It was starting to get dark and Sutton was reluctantly concluding that it was looking unlikely that they’d get anything useful from Wallace’s neighbours when they finally got a result.

  Kasun Ranatunga was clearly lonely. A small man, impeccably dressed despite only expecting to greet the supermarket delivery driver that day, he welcomed them into his home immediately.

  Sutton and Hardwick were grateful for his offer of tea and biscuits and were soon seated in his immaculate front room. The apartment apparently had the same layout as Wallace’s, but it couldn’t be more different. Where Wallace’s flat had little in the way of decoration beyond some football posters, a few photographs and a bookcase filled with DVDs, every surface in Ranatunga’s home was covered in nick-nacks or photographs, all meticulously dusted. The result was a visual cacophony that almost overwhelmed the senses.

  ‘My wife and I loved to travel. In the fifty-two years we were married, we visited sixty-three countries.’ He smiled ‘One of them doesn’t exist anymore and two came into being after we started travelling. She was starting to write a book about it, when … well anyway, that’s all in the past now.’

  Turning, he shuffled towards the settee, lowering himself slowly. Hardwick noticed the walking frame partly covered in a crocheted blanket next to the front door.

  ‘Aaron and his dad lived there for years,’ said Ranatunga in response to Hardwick’s question. ‘It was a bit of a complicated set-up. They moved in when Aaron was just a little lad. There was a woman on the scene for a while; both boys called her “Mum”, but you only had to look at them to figure out that she couldn’t be Mum to both of them. Anyway, she left in the end and it was just the dad, until he passed away, around the same time as my wife.’

  ‘You said “both boys”, could you describe the other boy?’

  ‘He is a good few years older than Aaron, Tyler his name is. Very different, brown skin – mixed race, I’d say – and really quiet. Aaron was always very polite, he’d say hello if he saw me and he even helped my wife carry the shopping up the stairs a few times. Tyler used to grunt or just ignore me. I don’t think we’ve ever spoken in all the years I’ve known them.’

  ‘And did Tyler live with Aaron and his father?’

  ‘He did for a bit, then when he was older I started seeing him around a lot less, he’d be gone all week, and I�
�d only see him on weekends. When their dad died, I saw him even less. These days it’s just Aaron on his own.’

  ‘And he doesn’t have anyone else living with him?’

  ‘I don’t think he has a girlfriend, if that’s what you are asking, or a flatmate.’

  ‘Can you remember the last time you saw Tyler?’

  Ranatunga’s brow furrowed. ‘It was a few months ago . . . no wait, I remember now. He turned up banging on their front door one afternoon. He was all upset about something. I couldn’t hear what he was shouting about, his voice was really slurred. In the end, I remember Aaron saying “OK, you can stay for a few days, but I have to let them know you’re here.” I guess it was around the beginning of September.’

  Hardwick closed her notebook and glanced over at Sutton. They’d found their accomplice.

  * * *

  ‘No match, I’m afraid, DCI Jones.’

  The technician at the other end of the line was apologetic.

  ‘None at all?’ Try as he might, Warren couldn’t keep the disappointment from his voice. He knew that Sutton and Hardwick would be similarly disappointed; they’d been excited when they’d returned to the station earlier that evening.

  ‘Well everyone in the world is slightly related, but the combined probability index between the crime scene sample and that of the suspect is well below that you’d expect to see between siblings, half-siblings or even cousins.’

  ‘Thanks for your help.’

  Warren hung up, before immediately dialling again.

  ‘Tony, it’s me. The DNA from the blood sample found at the crime scene and linked to the rape is not from Aaron Wallace’s brother.’

  * * *

  It was already early evening, but Warren decided to call a briefing. With Aaron Wallace in custody, time was precious.

  ‘I was sure that Tyler Wallace was our man,’ said Hardwick. ‘He turns up at Aaron’s out of the blue at the time of the burglary. He’s big enough to fit those trainers that we found under the spare bed and they match the footprints at the crime scene. He’s old enough, by all accounts, to have committed the rape, and who else would Wallace be protecting, by refusing to name them?’