No Smoke Without Fire (A DCI Warren Jones Novel - Book 2)

by Paul Gitsham

  As she strode along the darkened side street connecting the main road housing Middlesbury Sports and Leisure Centre to the busy thoroughfare that led eventually to her housing estate, she was suddenly bathed in the bright white lights of a vehicle behind her. Glancing over her shoulder, she was a little surprised; it was unusual to see one at this time of night. Then she remembered that she was walking home at least an hour later than usual.

  Mentally dismissing it, she turned her attention back to her music. Lady Gaga was describing how she was stuck in a bad romance. Carolyn smiled to herself; twelve months ago she could have related. All over now though, she thought. She’d finally seen sense and given that creep the boot. It would be the first Christmas she had celebrated on her own in four years; as daunting as that was, it would also be the first New Year’s Eve and who knew what might happen as Big Ben rang out?

  Turning the music up slightly, she fought the urge to sing along. Steady on, girl, she admonished herself. Don’t want to wake the neighbours up!

  The song ended and she realised that the glowing lights behind her had stopped moving some time ago, yet in the silence before the next track started she could still hear the growl of the engine.

  It was the sudden change in her pace as she turned instinctively that threw her attacker off balance. She caught a glimpse of the man as he stumbled past. He was dressed in a dark hoodie with the lower half of his face covered in a scarf; the rest of his face looked strangely rubbery in the gloomy glow of a distant street light.

  Time seemed to slow for Carolyn, her senses taking in information from all directions. The rational part of her brain had no idea what was going on; the next song on her iPod had started, distracting her. Fight or flight? The question that would for ever seal her fate. Adrenaline surged around her body and her muscles tensed. Her attacker had recovered quickly and he turned on the spot. In his hand he held what seemed to be a white cloth. Carolyn’s nostrils flared at the pungent, chemical smell.

  Chocolate cake and Riesling notwithstanding, Carolyn was a fit woman in her twenties. She was wearing training shoes and still dressed in her loose, casual gym clothes. If she’d chosen flight, she might well have made it to the well-lit main road before her attacker. Would he have followed? Disguised as he was, he might have chosen to risk exposure by bringing her down and dragging her back into the murky shadows. More likely, he would have given up, slinking away, back into the darkness.

  Neither of them would ever know.

  After an hour spent hitting punchbags in the gym, Carolyn followed her instincts and struck out at her assailant. It was a good blow, her fist catching him squarely on the jaw, rocking him backward. He had yet to get his feet under him and for a moment his arms pin-wheeled as he stumbled backwards off the kerb.

  Had she turned and run at this point, she might still have made it to safety. Unfortunately, there was one thing that they neglected to tell you in boxercise classes — hitting somebody hurt; and hitting somebody on the jaw really hard hurt even more. Carolyn felt as though she had shattered every bone in her hand. Not even alcohol and adrenaline could mask the pain. The shock was so unexpected, she just stood there.

  And then he hit back. A short, vicious jab to the abdomen that drove the air from her lungs. Carolyn doubled up in pain, gasping as her diaphragm spasmed. With no air she couldn’t make so much as a squeak, let alone scream for help. And she was powerless to resist as the white cloth was forced over her face. Whatever chemical the cloth had been soaked in smelt oddly sweet. She clawed wildly at the cloth as the portion of her mind still working rationally warned her not to breathe, to hold her breath, to avoid inhaling the toxic fumes. But it was useless; her lungs weren’t listening. With a choking sob, she finally drew breath. Immediately, she started to feel light-headed and the rushing noise in her ears grew louder and louder. A wave of nausea passed over her for a brief second, before finally the world started fading away, even the pain in her fist becoming muted. Her last thought before everything finally disappeared was one of sadness. I’m going to miss your wedding, little sis…

  Friday 9th and Saturday 10th December

  Chapter 21

  The next two days passed slowly, filling Warren with a sense of mounting frustration. One by one potential leads petered out. His team made endless phone calls and arranged countless interviews with Sally Evans’ acquaintances, both old and new. Each person contacted had an alibi and none of them could suggest a reason why the apparently popular young woman had been killed.

  As he’d predicted, Det Supt Grayson had recommended enlisting the help of the public and on Friday evening called another press conference to update the media with the progress so far, including an account of Sally Evans’ last known movements and a detailed description of what she had been wearing that day. He also confirmed that she had been raped; an indisputable fact that needed to be part of the public record, but also one that might just engender enough revulsion in somebody protecting the perpetrator to step forward.

  With the case now several days old, it had slipped down the news agenda somewhat and so the conference was more of a briefing and recorded footage of the event didn’t make it any further than the local, late-night news. The next day’s newspapers chose to use stock photos of Sally Evans and the spot where she had been found, rather than Superintendent Grayson in his dress uniform with Warren sitting uncomfortably beside him.

  There was limited success to the appeal, the most promising call from a worker in the building next door to Far and Away, who claimed to have seen Sally being picked up by Darren Blackheath the evening she disappeared. Unfortunately, deeper questioning revealed that the well-meaning member of the public had got his dates confused and was describing the previous evening. At least it confirmed that Darren Blackheath did regularly pick her up.

  There was also a full confession; however Caller ID had identified the phone used as that of a local crank who over the years had confessed to everything from shoplifting to 9/11. His inability to describe Sally Evans’ hair colour, despite her photo being splashed everywhere, ruled him out in seconds.

  So far, the team was left with three possibilities: her father, Richard Cameron or a complete stranger.

  Something wasn’t quite right about Bill Evans, Warren felt. As yet, no evidence of the existence of his clandestine lover had been uncovered. The dating site, run by an overseas company, was reluctant to disclose any details to the team and so Welwyn’s legal experts were busy drafting a case for court orders; unfortunately, the mobile-phone number was an anonymous Pay As You Go.

  Late on Friday, forensic analysis of Bill Evans’ car came back. As expected, evidence existed of Sally Evans’ presence in the vehicle — particularly the passenger seat, but nothing in the boot nor any traces of blood. The results were consistent with Bill Evans’ story about meeting Sally the day before her disappearance. In addition, the team working the traffic cameras had placed Bill Evans’ car near to Sally Evans’ workplace at lunchtime the day before her disappearance. The lack of cameras immediately adjacent to the scene meant that they couldn’t say with certainty that he’d met her there, but it was a reasonable explanation.

  None of the evidence so far ruled out Bill Evans as a suspect — but then, as Warren had pointed out to his team on more than one occasion, it was up to the police to provide evidence in favour of his guilt; it wasn’t up to him to provide evidence for his innocence.

  Richard Cameron was proving difficult to rule out or in. The only leads that the police had to go on were the similarity of Sally Evans’ attack to Cameron’s attacks over a decade before, plus the huge coincidence that he had only recently been released from prison into the immediate area. The Crown Prosecution Service would laugh Warren out of the room if he tried to raise an arrest warrant and charge Cameron based on such flimsy evidence. They’d argue, quite rightly, that one couldn’t really claim that a similar lack of forensic evidence in two cases was as strong a link between the crimes as finding similar
positive evidence at both scenes.

  Furthermore the first argument about similar methods could equally well apply to the other two, unrelated, unsolved attacks in Reading and Bristol. He’d had long conference calls with both local forces about what was known and they had agreed to send their files over for him to examine.

  It was looking increasingly likely to Warren that the murder was a random, stranger killing. The hardest kind to solve. Reasoning that Sally Evans almost certainly must have been removed from the scene in some sort of vehicle, it was decided to increase attention on the CCTV surrounding the alleyway. Assuming that she was taken within the fifteen-minute window between her leaving work and Darren Blackheath arriving to pick her up, a total of one hundred and fifty-four different vehicles had been identified as within the vicinity. This rather daunting number had been whittled down to a more manageable forty-eight, when each vehicle’s possible routes and timings through the camera-free zones were calculated and the practicalities of them being involved in Sally Evans’ kidnap determined.

  Nevertheless, the number soon grew in size again when it was decided that if the killer knew Sally Evans’ routine, he or she must have observed her on previous days. If he did so on foot, then Warren knew that the likelihood of identifying him amongst the tens of thousands of commuters caught on CCTV in that area was next to zero. Furthermore, as it was during the six p.m. rush hour, it was likely that many of the same faces would crop up time and time again on different days, making patterns difficult to spot. The same argument could be made about cars, Warren supposed. Nevertheless he instructed the team to go back over the previous fortnight’s recordings to look for any suspicious vehicles. It would be a long, slow slog and Warren wasn’t expecting results any time soon.

  * * *

  It was late Saturday afternoon when the investigation took an unexpected and unwanted twist. Warren and Tony Sutton were in Warren’s office drinking coffee and rehashing what little facts they had for the umpteenth time. There was a knock at the door and Gary Hastings entered. The younger officer looked annoyed and embarrassed at the same time. Warren could feel the bad news hanging in the air. Sutton looked up expectantly. “Spill it, son, no point waiting.”

  “It’s Blackheath, sir. He might not have been parked outside his house that night when he said he was.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Sutton in surprise. “We have an eyewitness. Bloke across the road. Let’s face it, it’s not the most subtle of cars. Surely, you’d know if the Twat-Mobile was parked opposite your house.”

  “Well, none of the other neighbours can remember if they saw it or not.”

  “So what’s he done — changed his statement?”

  Hastings looked embarrassed, although it surely wasn’t his fault; he only processed the information.

  “We’ve just had the witness’ daughter on the phone. She visited her old man this morning to find him talking excitedly about the visit he’d had from the police. Turns out the old boy has Alzheimer’s. He seems quite lucid when you first meet him, chats nineteen-to-the-dozen, but he’s hopeless with dates and times.”

  “Shit!” Sutton threw his pen down in disgust.

  “Can we verify what his daughter claims? Is his memory as bad as she says it is?” Warren was clutching at straws and he knew it.

  Hastings nodded glumly. “That wife he was supposed to be picking up from bingo has been dead three years — and the venue became a Wetherspoon’s pub eighteen months ago. The daughter had to come pick him up that evening after she got a call from one of the door staff who realised he was confused, not drunk, and did the decent thing. Neither of them were in a position to comment on whether Darren Blackheath was parked outside his flat at the time Sally Evans was being raped and killed.”

  Warren put his head in his hands with a loud groan. “You know what this means, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, we have to start all over again with Blackheath.” The three men were silent for a few moments, contemplating the new twist.

  “Do you think he could be guilty?” asked Hastings. “Up to now, you’ve seemed pretty certain he’s innocent.”

  Warren exhaled loudly, before shaking his head. “At this point, Gary, I just don’t know.”

  He glanced at his watch. “What I do know is that it’s getting late and I’ve had enough. My brain has turned to sponge. I’m going home. I’ll be back in tomorrow.”

  Chapter 22

  The call came at seven p.m. as Warren and Susan were just settling down in front of the TV with a takeaway curry and a DVD. After such a frustrating day, Warren needed to relax for a few hours with his wife. He knew from experience that he required at least a few hours’ distraction and a good night’s sleep to let his subconscious chew over events and come up with new strategies in the morning.

  Susan had spent a rather more productive day, having decided that she wanted to shift as much of her marking pile as possible before the Christmas holidays — not least because she would be taking in a new pile of coursework next week for marking over the break — and she was now tired and hungry.

  The couple looked at each other for a few long seconds, before Warren sighed and fished the phone off the arm of the settee. He glanced at the screen and all thoughts of a lazy evening evaporated. Reading his expression, Susan tried to look supportive as she placed the cardboard lid back on Warren’s Chicken Jalfrezi and carried it out into the kitchen, giving him some privacy. By the time she’d replaced the cork in the unpoured wine, Warren was in the hallway, phone pressed to his ear as he wrestled his heavy-duty, insulated coat on.

  Susan didn’t need to hear both ends of the conversation to work out what was being said; the grim cast of Warren’s face told her everything. Finally he hung up and turned to Susan.

  “Go,” she ordered before he could say anything. “It can’t be helped. Your dinner will be in the fridge. If you return at a decent hour, we’ll have a late-night snack together.”

  Warren leant over and kissed her on the lips. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart. I’ll call as soon as I’m able and let you know what time I’ll be back.”

  With that, he finished zipping up his coat, slipped his boots on and stepped out into the dark.

  Susan stood at the window and watched as Warren pulled away from the kerb, his headlights illuminating a few lazy snowflakes. She looked over at the DVD sitting in its rental case, a comedy that they’d both wanted to see for a while. A few months previously, they’d got as far as the cinema queue when Warren’s mobile had rung and they’d had to get back in the car.

  For a brief moment she was tempted to sit down and watch the damn thing now and tell Warren the ending whenever he got back from wherever he’d been called to... But no, the film was something that both of them wanted to see and she was determined that they’d see it together, even if it meant watching it on catch-up TV in twelve months’ time.

  Flicking on the television, she skimmed the channels, seeing that at this time on a Saturday night the schedules were wall-to-wall rubbish, nothing but talent and game shows. With a sigh, she turned it off, walked back over to the dining-room table and picked up her red pen.

  * * *

  This time, the woods were on the opposite side of Middlesbury; nevertheless Warren felt a strong sense of déjà vu as his car slowly bounced along the dirt track. As usual it seemed that Tony Sutton had been the senior on-call officer when the body had been found and he had been the one to phone Warren. One of these days, Warren vowed, it would be his turn to call Sutton out of his nice warm house to some godforsaken corner of Hertfordshire in sub-zero temperatures.

  The scene as Warren parked up was depressingly familiar: to his left was Sutton’s Audi, to his right a patrol car and a SOCO van. It had been barely five days since Warren had been through this exact same routine when Sally Evans’ body had been found and already the connections were disturbing. Two bodies, less than a week apart. He shuddered; was it a coincidence or was there a predator operating around Middle
sbury?

  After showing his warrant card to the young female constable logging visitors, he pulled on his white paper suit, grabbed his torch and followed the directions to the site where the body had been found.

  This time, the dumping spot was barely inside a thick, wooded area bordering a barren field, the portable field lights clearly visible. The poor weather had turned the soil into a boggy marshland and Warren found himself alternately slipping and sticking as he navigated the treacherous ground, carefully following the police tape to make sure that his footprints didn’t obscure any left by the killer. It was good procedure, but Warren doubted there would be much to find. The rain had almost certainly obliterated any impressions; realistically their best hope lay in the area around the body, sheltered as it was by the trees.

  Finally, he reached the forensics team and Sutton, who were standing on plastic boards that allowed them to move around without disturbing the scene. They also reduced the likelihood of slipping over on the slimy mud, although the dark stain that covered the back of Sutton’s white suit suggested that he’d taken at least one tumble.

  As usual in this area of Hertfordshire, Andy Harrison was the Crime Scene Manager and he greeted Warren with a wave, before turning back to what Warren assumed was the body. Seeing the arrival of his boss, Tony Sutton carefully moved along the plastic walkway to greet him. This time, neither man joked about their appearance. Two bodies in less than a week hinted at something neither man wanted to contemplate. Even Andy Harrison appeared subdued as he busied himself with a digital camera.