‘I suppose that’s why the media portrayed the protesters as loony lesbians,’ Kate said.
‘Oh, there were a fair few loony lesbians, and non-loony ones as well. And a few part-time ones,’ she added with a lewd wink. ‘Nothing wrong with a bit of company on a cold night.’
‘Do you keep in touch with any of the women?’ Kate asked.
Bev shook her head. ‘It wasn’t so easy in those days. We couldn’t just swap mobile numbers or friend each other on Facebook. I had a couple of addresses and phone numbers, but people move around and we just lost touch.’
Kate asked if Bev remembered Julia Sullivan, or Anastasia Cohen or a woman called Eleanor but none of the names were familiar. She tried showing her photographs of each of the women but her reply was still negative. Then she flicked to a recent picture of Olivia Thornbury and passed her mobile phone back to Bev.
‘Oh! That’s a familiar face. I shared a bender with her for about a week when she first got to Greenham. She was a bit lost so a couple of us showed her the ropes. She hasn’t changed much. Hair’s grey but her eyes are the same.’
Kate’s heart rate picked up. Here was something concrete – finally. Liv Thornbury had been active at Greenham Common. ‘I don’t suppose you remember her name, or the names of any of her friends?’
‘She was called Sarah. No idea what her surname was. She was friendly with a young girl – only about eighteen or nineteen – funny name she had. What was it…?’ She closed her eyes, deep in thought. ‘Nope. It’s not going to come. Nice kid though.’
Kate drained her glass. ‘I really appreciate you talking to us,’ she said. ‘It’s a big help.’
She stood up and Hollis followed her lead, allowing Bev no option but to show them out. Just as Kate closed the car door the woman tapped frantically on the window. Kate pressed the button to lower it slightly, reluctant to allow too much warm air into the vehicle.
‘Taz. The girl that Sarah was friendly with was called Taz. I always thought it was short for something but buggered if I could work out what.’
30
‘I’ve got Thornbury’s reports from Greenham,’ Cooper said as soon as Kate stepped into the office. She’d sent Hollis up to the canteen for coffee and had hoped for a quiet few minutes to respond to a series of texts from Barratt as well as an email from Das about O’Connor.
‘Das came through? That was quick. She must have known exactly the right strings to pull.’
Cooper’s lack of response prompted Kate to look up. The DC’s head was lowered over her keyboard but her blonde hair did little to cover her flaming cheeks.
‘Sam! What did you do?’
Cooper squinted up at Kate as if in anticipation of a hard slap. ‘I contacted a friend who has a friend in–’
Kate held up her hand. ‘No. Don’t tell me. If Das finds out I want to be able to tell her honestly that I didn’t know.’
‘I’ve not done anything wrong,’ Cooper said defensively. ‘I just know it can take ages to get historic files, especially if they’re sensitive. I cut a few corners, that’s all. It’s just background anyway – I doubt there’ll be anything of evidentiary value after all this time, but they might tell us who Thornbury was friendly with at Greenham. If there is anything then, if I could get hold of them Das will be able to. I’m speeding things up, that’s all.’
Kate knew that, technically, Cooper was right. There was no reason why they shouldn’t access Liv Thornbury’s files as part of an active murder investigation but, if the timeline were to be called into question, they might be on tricky ground. ‘Have you looked through them yet?’ Kate asked.
‘No. I thought I’d best wait for you. I’m happy to give them a quick scan if you…?’
‘No. Email them to me and I’ll have a read. Anything on the phone records?’
Cooper shook her head. ‘Bugger all. The number that appeared on Liv Thornbury’s email is on her records. She rang it six times and received calls from it on three occasions. It’s not on Julia Sullivan’s phone records and I’ve had a look at Peter and Eleanor Houghton’s calls – nothing there either. Eleanor did have five calls from the same number four times in the days before she died. It’s not in her earlier phone records so it’s a new contact. I’ve tried ringing but it doesn’t connect. There’s nothing on the laptop that was found at the bungalow so the killer must have been contacting her by phone rather than email. Unless she had a device or an account we don’t know about. I’ve also been looking at camera footage to try to find Anna’s car for the last hour. Nothing so far.’
Burner phones then, Kate thought. Bought anonymously and no doubt in a skip somewhere by now. It didn’t help but it was another sign that their killer was a careful planner which would make them more difficult to catch. If he or she had been active at Greenham Common in the early 1980s, that would put them in their mid-fifties or older – assuming that they’d been aged between eighteen and thirty at the time. Olivia Thornbury may have been the first victim because there may have been a genuine sense of grievance that Thornbury had been an undercover police officer; but what had the other victims done to deserve their fate?
Kate picked up her mobile phone and scanned through Barratt’s texts. He’d been unable to get in touch with either Lincoln or Sadie Sullivan, and Eleanor Houghton’s nephew had no idea what his auntie had been doing in the eighties but thought it unlikely that she’d been a protester at Greenham. There was one useful aside from the conversation – the nephew gave them his aunt’s maiden name – Eldridge. At least it saved a trawl through the register of births, deaths and marriages.
Logging on to her computer she saw that Cooper had already sent her Thornbury’s reports. Even though she was itching to read them she had to deal with the fallout from O’Connor’s extra-curricular activities. Das still wasn’t convinced that Kate hadn’t been involved despite their earlier conversation and she was insisting on being kept up to date on a regular basis which, judging by the email, meant at least twice a day. A quick ‘nothing further to report’, and Kate finally felt free to open Cooper’s message.
‘Coffee!’ Hollis announced, backing through the door with a tray of cardboard cups. ‘I didn’t know if Matt would be back but I’m happy to drink his if he’s not.’ He passed a cappuccino to Cooper and a latte to Kate before taking his own coffee and plonking himself down at his desk and looking around expectantly.
‘Eleanor Houghton was Eleanor Eldridge before she got married,’ Kate said. ‘See what you can find out about her, especially anything from the eighties. There’s a lot of online stuff about Greenham and it’ll all need wading through.’
Hollis looked disappointed. He wasn’t fond of spending hours in front of the computer – none of them were, apart from Cooper – he’d rather be out in the field. Kate knew he wouldn’t complain though; and that he’d do a thorough job.
‘Start with any news reports. Then have a look at anything recent – looking back to that time. Sam, I want you to do the same with Anastasia Cohen. Barratt’s trying to find a next of kin but, until he does, assume she was there. I don’t know if Cohen’s her married name but I’m sure you can find out. Her boss says she’s recently divorced if that helps. Oh, and see if you can link her to the nickname Taz. Matt’s auntie remembers a young girl by that name, and it could easily have been her using a nickname.’
Jobs allocated, Kate finally opened Cooper’s email message. There were five reports in all, each one had a reference number which seemed to refer to a date. The first. OT140383 was from March 1983 and was a scan of a typed document. The print was blurry in places where the ink ribbon had dumped too much black on the page, but every word was legible. It appeared that Olivia Thornbury was using the alias Sarah Burton and had told the women that she met that she’d been a social worker, but she’d given up her job to help with the protest. Thornbury commented that she’d managed to gain the trust of a small group of women and had established friendships with two others from outside the gro
up. These two women seemed to be the focus of her report as they were involved in organising the previous demonstration which had resulted in a number of arrests. She labelled these women as militant in their beliefs and actions, but she only had their first names which was of little use to her superiors.
The second report was much more interesting. Dated later in 1983 it contained an account of the ‘Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ protest and the fallout from the arrest of one of the organisers. It seemed that the thinking behind placing an undercover officer amongst the women was to destabilise at least one group and sow dissent in the hope that they would either abandon the protest or turn against each other and fracture the unity of the camp. DC Thornbury’s report expressed concern that some of the women suspected a ‘mole’ and that her position had been compromised. There was a rumour that the police had been ‘tipped off’ about the plan to breach the fence and there was an air of suspicion turning group against group. She didn’t say so, but Kate got the impression that Thornbury may have started the rumour.
A comment in the last paragraph stood out:
One of the women is the wife of the radical artist and socialist, Lincoln Sullivan. I recommend investigating his patrons and sponsors with regard to funding protests at the camp.
Julia had been there.
‘Cooper, Hollis?’
Both DCs looked up from their computer screens.
‘Julia Sullivan was definitely at Greenham at the same time as Olivia Thornbury. We’ve got a confirmed link.’
‘Nice one,’ Cooper said with a big grin. ‘And I’ve found out that Cohen is Anastasia’s maiden name. I’m on her Facebook page at the minute but everybody there seems to call her Anna. No sign of Taz.’
Kate wondered if the nickname was a red herring. It had just been a hunch. Anastasia – it seemed to make sense but there had been tens of thousands of women at the peace camp over the years and Taz could have been a diminutive form of any number of names.
‘Okay, keep at it.’ She took a sip of her now lukewarm coffee and opened the next report. This one detailed the effect of some of the tactics the police were using against the women and it seemed especially insidious to have one of their own on the inside to suggest ways to further intimidate and undermine. It appeared that the policy of following random women for hours on end was especially effective as was raiding their encampments at night and evicting them. Thornbury went on to detail encounters between hardened protesters and women who wanted to leave, even suggesting that there was a culture of indoctrination and the leavers were regarded as traitors.
This theme was developed in the penultimate report where Thornbury seemed to have become involved with a group of younger women who were ‘fixated’ on ‘overthrowing the establishment by any means necessary’. She was especially concerned about one, a teenager who was trying to decide whether to leave the camp to go to university or to ‘stay and fight’. There were accounts of conversations between this girl and some older protesters and then:
The girl, Taz, has decided to leave and take up her place at Newcastle University to study law. It seems that the indoctrination doesn’t work on everybody.
Something about the tone suggested that Liv Thornbury may have had a hand in the girl’s decision.
‘Sam, where did Anastasia Cohen study law?’
Kate heard Cooper typing rapidly.
‘Newcastle, according to her Facebook page.’
Still too much of a coincidence? Kate didn’t think so.
The final report was from early 1984 and it had a strikingly different feel. Kate couldn’t help but wonder how the person who’d transcribed Thornbury’s words would have interpreted her state of mind as she phoned in this account. It seemed that the young DC was becoming increasingly paranoid about being found out and punished by the women at the camp. She seemed to be showing some empathy to their cause and some genuine concern for some of her ‘friends and family’. It wasn’t uncommon for undercover officers to become so immersed in their fake identity that they started to lose touch with who they really were and lost focus on their brief. Was it possible that Liv’s promotion after she left Greenham hadn’t been a reward but a bribe? The police force had been an entirely different beast at the time and Kate knew that officers had been placed in stressful situations without proper psychological assessment. Had Thornbury cracked? Or at least come close?
She read on. There was a list of names further down the page; women Thornbury suspected of knowing she was a police officer. All first names and, among them, Eleanor.
31
As Cooper and Hollis continued their internet searches, Kate pushed back her chair and grabbed a pen and paper. Often she thought more clearly when she could write her ideas down and look for patterns and discrepancies. With her team she’d usually do this on the whiteboard in the incident room, but she didn’t want to distract the other two from their work.
First, she jotted down the names of the four victims and the dates that she believed them to have been at Greenham Common. The most likely period of overlap seemed to be from winter 1983 to the end of 1984 – almost the whole of Thornbury’s assignment. Not overly helpful. She noted down the ages of the victims – all different – from Anna in her mid-fifties to Eleanor Houghton in her early seventies. Again, no pattern. The only common factor was that they lived in South Yorkshire but it was a big area and the distance between Liv Thornbury’s house and Julia Sullivan’s was nearly thirty miles – not what Kate would regard as local to each other.
They weren’t from the same socio-economic group, two were married to men, one was a lesbian and one was divorced. The lack of a clear pattern suggested that there was nothing random about these murders. The victims hadn’t been targeted because they were the same age, or body type or used the same shop or car wash. The murders were personal. But why? Kate looked again at the names and the dates and arrows she’d written around them. They may as well have been Egyptian hieroglyphs for all the sense they made.
She glanced up as Barratt pushed open the door, looking as frustrated as she felt. ‘No luck with either of the Sullivans,’ he announced, slumping down into his seat. ‘I’ve been to Lincoln Sullivan’s studio and Sadie’s house twice. Eleanor Houghton’s nephew didn’t know if his aunt was at Greenham and didn’t appreciate being woken in the early hours. I’ve also managed to have a chat with Anna Cohen’s ex-husband, but he couldn’t tell me much about her life before they met. He said he wouldn’t be surprised if she’d been at Greenham as she had some fairly ‘out-there’ views.’
‘That doesn’t tally with her most recent case,’ Cooper said, peering at him from over the top of her monitor. ‘She defended a man accused of beating his wife. Got him off. Not very sisterly.’
‘But if he was innocent…’ Barratt began.
‘He probably was,’ Cooper said. ‘That time. I’ve had a look at his record, and he’d been questioned twice before about injuries to his wife. Both times she refused to make a statement.’
‘Any press reports?’ Kate asked, an idea forming in her mind.
‘A few, local papers.’
Julia Sullivan had also been featured in reports in the local press, as had Olivia Thornbury. And Eleanor Houghton had been married to a prominent businessman who was often in the local papers – not always for positive reasons. Whilst not being ‘high profile’, these women were far from anonymous. Was that how the killer had found them? Perhaps seeing Liv Thornbury’s photograph in a local paper had sparked a memory and prompted the killer to research other people associated with their time at Greenham. If that was the case, could they work out who was next? If they scoured every local news report for women in the right age bracket and then tried to find out if they’d been at Greenham, Kate would have probably been comfortably retired before they found a suitable candidate. There had to be a better way.
She opened her email again, seeking inspiration and saw two new messages. The first was a preliminary forensics report on Anna Cohe
n and her possessions. Nothing to get excited about. No fingerprints other than Cohen’s own, no DNA and nothing from her clothing.
‘Bloody invisible,’ Kate muttered to herself.
‘What?’ Hollis asked, leaning back and stretching his improbably long arms above his head.
‘Just talking to myself,’ Kate admitted. ‘This killer’s bloody invisible. Nothing from the forensics on Anna Cohen. I’ve got the report from Julia Sullivan’s house as well. Fancy a tenner bet that it’s the same?’
Hollis shook his head. ‘Too rich for my blood. Fifty pence?’
Kate smiled at his response as she clicked on the second message which contained a detailed report of the findings at Julia Sullivan’s property. Kate scanned it, expecting to find the same lack of evidence as at the Houghton house, handles wiped clean, carpets vacuumed, dishes washed.
‘Shit,’ she said aloud.
‘Problem?’ Hollis asked as Barratt and Cooper meer-katted up from behind their monitors.
Shattered: a gripping crime thriller Page 18
