Stranglehold

by J M Gregson

  For his part, Lambert found that the new CC had one great advantage: he had no exaggerated reverence for the media.

  He did not dissolve into apology and explanations at the sight of a television crew; still less did he extract Lambert from the urgency of his investigations to confront the media representatives. When the official Press Officer could no longer hold them at bay with his routine announcements on police progress, George Harding saw them himself.

  His Chief Constable’s uniform and badges sat easily upon him, whereas Douglas Gibson had always looked and felt like a station sergeant in fancy dress. He took the questions of press men and television women calmly, refusing to answer if he thought them not in the public interest, dealing equably with those queries which were disguised insults to the force, giving precisely the information he had planned in advance and no more.

  It was all a great relief to Lambert, who sat beside his Chief at the morning press conference on what the tabloids had already dubbed the Cotswold Strangler. He had needed to do little more than reinforce the Chief’s highly articulate account of the investigation and explain a little of police procedure. Where Douglas Gibson, an honest cop of the old school, had usually looked shifty and defensive in front of the cameramen, Harding gave the impression of a Chief Constable and a force that were operating smoothly and were confident of success.

  It was only when he sat down to compare notes with Lambert and his team leaders in the Murder Room afterwards that he allowed the strain to show. No one liked a serial killer. The police like everyone else were left wondering where the next strike would be, how many victims there would be before the murderer was identified. The mistakes made in the pursuit of the Yorkshire Ripper were never far from policemen’s minds, and they knew that the press would be delighted to hark back to those confusions if the CID did not get a result quickly in this one.

  ‘I’ve just told the organs of enlightenment how much we’re on top of the case,’ said the Chief Constable with a sardonic smile. ‘Now tell me how much we really know.’

  Rushton, at a nod from Lambert, took this as his cue to report on the findings he had been gathering together at the centre of operations. He would normally have been in his element with the CC in his audience, taking the opportunity in his slightly officious way to demonstrate his grasp of detail, his efficiency in documenting and cross-referencing the bewildering collection of data the men on the ground were bringing in, his insight into what might be key areas for further investigation.

  Instead, he was for once a little hesitant. He looked white and strained, almost as though he wished this task had fallen to someone else. He was having to work hard to summon the concentration necessary to summarize a mass of information. Lambert wondered if he was sickening for something, or whether the absence of any definite lead made him nervous of the new Chief Constable’s wrath.

  Rushton said, ‘We have accumulated a lot of knowledge, but as yet nothing that would point to an arrest, sir.’

  ‘You mean you’ve produced bugger-all as yet. Don’t try and fob me off as if I were Joe Public, lad. I was putting out statements like that when you were in nappies.’ By police standards, it was a gentle rebuke, amiably delivered; a modern Chief Constable has no need of vehemence.

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Rushton coloured and looked at his notes. ‘We still haven’t got a definite time for the death of Julie Salmon, the first girl. She wasn’t found for a couple of days, as you know. She was last seen at seven o’clock on the evening of Wednesday, 25th May, and the autopsy confirms pretty certainly that she died that night. We don’t know what time: it could be any time within about eight hours. We may never know more precisely than that.’

  ‘Not until we arrest her killer,’ said Harding drily. ‘What suspects do we have for Julie Salmon?’

  ‘There’s an ex-boyfriend. A Darren Pickering. Neanderthal type, not averse to a bit of violence. We’ve had him in before. Once in connection with football hooliganism a punch-up between rival groups of so-called supporters once for a fight outside a pub. Neither came to court.’

  ‘How recently?’

  Other officers would have gone to the computer, where Rushton had made sure the information was available to anyone who pressed the right button. Instead, he pulled out a card covered in his own neat handwriting. ‘The football incident was during last season. The pub fight was almost two years ago. The officer who interrogated him is still here; as I say, neither incident came to court.’

  ‘Any history of violence towards women?’

  ‘Not as far as we’ve been able to ascertain, sir. But he did admit in interview that it was the girl that had ended the affair. And it was only ten days before she was killed.’

  ‘And off the record, Inspector, would you put him in the frame for these killings?’

  Rushton was thrown a little by the direct question. He never liked to commit himself: you could end up looking very silly if your opinions were thrown back at you later. And this might be the CC’s only contact with him in months. He said, ‘I couldn’t say, sir. I didn’t conduct the interviews with Pickering myself.’

  ‘I saw him, sir. I’d rate him a possible, along with several others with no alibi for either of the killings. Nothing stronger than that.’ It was Bert Hook, the most junior officer in the room of high ranks, who had spoken up unexpectedly. ‘He’s rough, and I don’t mean a rough diamond. You’d prefer him to be on your side in a fight: he’s strong and hard. I don’t know whether he’s a man who’d go round killing girls: I’ve been trying to answer that ever since I saw him.’

  ‘How did he react to being questioned about the girls?’

  ‘He was shaken. He pretended not to be, that it was police victimization and no more than he expected. And he had the duty solicitor summoned pretty promptly, so that he said no more than he had to. But he was shaken when we questioned him about Julie Salmon. Less so about Hetty Brown. That’s what you might expect, of course. He knew Julie Salmon well, and Hetty Brown hardly at all, according to his statement. And we haven’t found anything to connect him with her. He doesn’t seem to have been among her clients.’

  ‘Is there anything to connect the two girls?’ Harding knew the CID men would have asked themselves this, investigated exhaustively all the things he was asking about. But he was briefing himself on the investigation: these were the most serious crimes so far on his new patch, and he would have to account for the police reaction to them in various contexts. He had better be fully informed, even if his days of direct contact with detection were far behind him now.

  Lambert said, ‘Beyond the fact that they were killed in the same area and in the same way, not very much. Julie Salmon was an attractive girl, living at home with her parents. They reported her missing that first night, though she wasn’t found for another forty-eight hours. She worked in an estate agent’s office. Her parents didn’t approve of her relationship with Darren Pickering, as you might expect, and were quite relieved when it broke up.’

  ‘No suggestion that Julie Salmon was on the game? Or dabbling with it?’

  ‘None at all. She was on the surface rather a shy girl, without many boyfriends before Pickering. She kept a diary, but there’s nothing in it that seems significant. She appears to have had a brief relationship with an older man before Pickering – there’s a reference to this man calling Pickering ‘a lout’ after she took up with him. Sounds like a professional man; we went through all her associates at work, but came up with nothing.’

  ‘A married man?’

  ‘Quite possibly, though there’s nothing to indicate that definitely. The meetings seem to have been only sporadic from the diary. But it’s very vague anyway, like most of the other entries. She never refers to the man by name. Her mother produced the diary for us immediately, and I wonder if Julie was a bit guarded in writing because she suspected her mother might get hold of the diary when she was out. Of course, they may be nothing more than a young girl’s fantasies about an older man: she wa
s only nineteen when she died, and these entries are a few months before her death.’

  ‘What about Hetty Brown?’

  ‘No diary to help us there, I’m afraid. Be useful if there was, even if it was no more than a list of her meetings with men.’

  ‘No mysterious professional man there?’

  ‘None apparent, no, sir. Our source of information is mainly her flatmate, Debbie Cook. They worked together at ICI in Gloucester for a while, then were laid off. Took to the game to pay the rent, according to her. It certainly looks like that: they’ve neither of them been at it long.’

  There was a little silence in that room of hard professionals. It was a familiar enough story, more frequent in these days of the slump which the government still called a recession. A prospect of easy money in hard times. And now a girl of twenty-one was dead.

  The Chief Constable voiced the question which had nagged at them all as they gathered information. ‘Similar killings. Same murderer?’

  Lambert smiled wryly; in this situation, any kind of certainty was a comfort, but they were difficult to come by. ‘The method of dispatch is identical. Dr Burgess is away, but our police surgeon, Dr Haworth, has been good enough to come in this morning.’

  He nodded to the only man in the room who had not so far spoken. Don Haworth took it as his cue to summarize his findings. He had been sitting on the edge of his chair, apparently fascinated by his first view of routine police procedures. ‘I was the first medical man at the scene of both killings, in my capacity as police surgeon. Both girls were killed by vagal inhibition; gloved hands were expertly applied to both throats. Probably plastic gloves of some kind, since I understand forensic have found no traces of material on the skin.’ He looked interrogatively at DI Rushton, who nodded confirmation.

  ‘My opinion would be that it would be the same pair of hands in each case, but I could not swear to that in court; you would need other evidence, which it seems at the moment you do not have.’

  It came out like a suggestion of police negligence, so that Lambert, who was the man who had sanctioned Haworth’s rather irregular presence in this group, was moved to say, ‘It was Dr Haworth who helped to pinpoint the time of death in the case of the second murder.’

  Haworth smiled that boyish, self-deprecating smile that made him seem younger than his thirty years. ‘I thought between twelve and one on the morning of the eleventh of June. Again, I couldn’t make that more than an opinion in court. I’d have to go with the four-hour period the pathologist came up with after the PM.’

  Harding looked for a moment at the eager young man with his slightly untidy mop of fair hair. It was useful to have a medic in on this session; typical of Lambert, that, he thought. ‘Any other thoughts, Doctor? Now is the time to speculate: we won’t throw your thoughts back in your face later, even if they prove to be wildly mistaken.’ The words were intended as much for the policemen in the room as for Haworth. There was nothing like the fear of being wrong in front of top brass to keep ideas bottled up.

  The police surgeon shrugged. ‘Nothing to add to forensic findings, I’m afraid.’

  Lambert said, ‘It’s useful to know that Don thinks it probable the same man killed both girls. There are some differences as well as the obvious similarities. The first girl was violently raped. The second had had intercourse, but there were no signs of violence.’

  Rushton, anxious now to get back into the discussion, said, ‘The first girl obviously resisted fiercely. The second one was a prostitute. Maybe she had the sense to take the line of least resistance with a sexual assault. Perhaps if she’d resisted, there would have been the same marks on Hetty Brown as there were on Julie Salmon.’

  Rushton, terse and strained, sounded almost as though he was delivering a moral judgement. Perhaps the Puritan in him thought that Hetty Brown should not have allowed intercourse without a fight.

  Lambert said, ‘Despite her struggle, there were very few signs of the killer left on Julie Salmon that have so far proved useful to us. No skin under her fingernails. A few clothing fibres, but even those not necessarily from her killer. She was murdered in a derelict house, which was why she wasn’t found for a couple of days.’

  ‘But you have semen samples?’

  ‘In both cases, yes. The first one doesn’t tally with any of the few DNA records we have for violent criminals. It will be useful when we get our man, but perhaps not until then, except for eliminating the innocent. The semen from Hetty Brown is still being tested at Chepstow. We shall know within twenty-four hours whether it came from the same man as raped Julie Salmon before he killed her.’

  ‘First one in a house awaiting demolition. Second one on a building site. Any connection there?’ Harding’s mind still worked like a detective’s, seeking out any connection which might narrow the hunt.

  Rushton said, ‘We’ve combed through all the construction workers in the area: easier than usual because temporary workers have almost disappeared in this recession. It didn’t produce anything definite. One or two we’re still watching because they were around without an alibi at the time of both murders, but there are plenty more like that, unfortunately.’

  ‘No motive common to both deaths?’

  ‘Not that we’ve found so far. Darren Pickering was Julie Salmon’s rejected lover, of course, but no obvious motive for Hetty Brown.’

  Don Haworth said, ‘He did know her, though. I’ve seen both of them in the Roosters club.’

  Rushton nodded. ‘He admits to a nodding acquaintance, but nothing more. And we haven’t dug up anything closer, yet.’

  They were silent, contemplating the bleak probability of an unbalanced mind which had struck without reason and might do so again at any time. Lambert said, ‘The bodies were found within a mile of each other, both in deserted places which yet were not far from the town. It might argue a local man. But of course, we don’t know that it wasn’t the girls who sought out the location: they may have had no fear of being killed when they went to these places.’

  ‘That could apply to the one strong suspect we’ve so far turned up from outside the district.’ Rushton looked at Lambert, wondering whether he should bring this out in front of the police surgeon, and received his nod of assent. ‘A certain Vic Knowles.’ Don Haworth, with his football club connections, leaned forward involuntarily at the mention of the name.

  Rushton checked his notes. ‘He admits to picking up a prostitute from the Roosters on the night Hetty Brown was killed. He had intercourse with her in the back of his car, according to his story. Forensic confirm from an examination of his car that that is probably true. He claims not to know her name, and he claims that she chose the spot where he should park. It was within a few hundred yards of where Hetty Brown was found dead. Incidentally, we’re now certain she was killed where she was found, so he didn’t kill her in the car and dump her. If, of course, it was Hetty Brown and not some other girl altogether in the car, as he’d prefer us to believe.’

  Lambert said, ‘The sooner we have that semen analysis, the better.’

  Rushton said, ‘One thing that we do know is that although Knowles lives a hundred miles away, he was also in the area on the night when Julie Salmon was killed.’

  ‘Reason?’

  ‘He says he was watching a testimonial match at Oldford. The match did take place that night. But even if he was there as he says, he could still have killed the girl later.’

  ‘Have the Scene of Crime team turned up anything that might tie him in with the first murder?’

  Rushton rustled through his notes again, though he knew the answer: he had tried hard to pin these killings on the man who was to be the new manager of Oldford Football Club. ‘Nothing from the first killing, as yet. There are various hairs and clothing fibres from the house where Julie Salmon’s body was found, which forensic are in the process of comparing with the materials the boys gathered from Knowles’s car yesterday.’

  Lambert said, ‘The SOC stuff from the Julie Salmo
n house is proving very difficult to use, so far. Lots of people had been in and out of that house – it’s been empty for months – and it’s very difficult to isolate what was there before the night when she was killed. We’re looking for stuff common to both sites, but there’s nothing significant as yet.’

  Harding looked grim. ‘What about the Hetty Brown SOC findings?’

  Lambert said, ‘Again, far too many people have been in and out of that site: kids mostly. The team did find one footprint, of a city-type shoe, in the clay near where the body lay. We don’t know for certain that it was connected with the crime, but forensic think it was made not more than twenty-four hours before we found it. Needless to say, we haven’t found a Prince Charming to fit it yet, or I’d have let you know before the news conference.’

  ‘Not enough evidence to warrant a search warrant for any of your suspects, yet, I presume.’ Harding was more conscious than anyone of the way investigations could be hindered by the necessary safeguards of the law. ‘Sergeant Hook said you had a few men in the frame.’

  Lambert nodded. He might not be worried about promotion, but he was human enough to want to show that his team had not been idle, even though there was no sign of a result for them yet. ‘We’ve mentioned Darren Pickering and Vic Knowles. Both of them have changed their stories in the course of interrogation. We’re still gathering more information on both of them. We’ve got their fingerprints, but one of the things about this business is that there’s a notable absence of dabs at both scenes of crime. It suggests that our man didn’t kill on impulse, but went carefully prepared, knowing what he was going to do.’