The Truth About Murder

by Chris Collett

  ‘But you said it yourself, she had lapsed.’

  ‘You don’t get it. She might not have been practising, but she still believed in the fundamentals. She refused to divorce Dad in spite of all that happened, and I know she believed in the sanctity of life. As far as she was concerned, only God has the power to end it.’

  ‘Suicide isn’t the only possibility,’ I reminded her.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘The police say it could have been an accident. But that doesn’t add up either. They found Mum in the river. I don’t know what she’d have been doing anywhere near it. She wasn’t a strong swimmer, so I’m sure she wouldn’t have taken any risks.’

  ‘I don’t suppose she was expecting to fall in. Andrea, this is all speculation. You need to talk to the police. They’ll explain their thinking to you.’

  ‘I’ve tried, but they just keep saying the same thing. There’s something about this that isn’t right. I know it, and I think you do too.’ She frowned, deep in thought, before looking up at me. ‘This friend of yours, in the police . . .’

  ‘He’s not so much a friend. We met through . . . through something else.’

  ‘But you could talk to him?’

  ‘I don’t know how that would help. Believe me, the police know what they’re doing. And I heard it from the pathologist. There’s no reason to suspect that there are any other complications to your mother’s death. It was either suicide or a terrible accident. And as I’ve said, it’s not my place to investigate.’

  ‘You’re a lawyer, aren’t you, and you were going to represent Mum? You’re meant to find out things. Can’t you do it for me, and for her?’

  That was the killer, as it were. There was still a part of me, whatever had happened, that felt I had somehow let Rita Todd down. If she really had been suicidal on that afternoon, then I should have recognised that and been able to do something to dissuade her. At the very least, I should have made more effort to find out more about her situation.

  Andrea got up to leave. ‘My mum was a good and dedicated nurse,’ she said, ‘who died in strange circumstances. Talk to your police friend. Please.’

  * * *

  Plum showed Andrea out, so I was left alone for a while with my thoughts. After some time, I picked up the phone to talk to Mick Fraser. I had some difficulty getting past a receptionist who clearly thought my garbled speech was that of a pervert, but eventually I managed to convince her it was a legitimate call and Fraser’s voice came on the line.

  ‘Stefan, what can I do for you?’

  ‘I wanted to ask you a favour,’ I said. ‘Rita Todd’s daughter came here. She’s upset about the suggestion of suicide.’

  ‘Och, I know, she said the same to me. It’s a tough one to hear, especially for loved ones. They can blame themselves.’

  ‘But you’re sure about it?’

  ‘Well, as I said, the other possibility was an accident, but that’s looking less solid. The toxicology results have come back and there are high levels of venlafaxine in Rita Todd’s blood. Did Andrea tell you that her mum was on antidepressants?’

  ‘No.’ Did she even know? But it could explain why Rita hadn’t seemed particularly low when I met her.

  ‘Rita was found in the river adjacent to one of the fields off Mill Lane,’ Fraser continued. ‘So forensics worked out that she must have gone in somewhere between there and the town centre bridge. Some of our lads walked the bank and found Rita’s backpack a little way upstream at the spot where she must have gone into the water,’ he said. ‘It had been carefully positioned, partially concealed, as if whoever left it there didn’t want it found immediately, which suggests that she had time to take it off and place it first. The riverside path is pretty sound at that point so it’s doubtful that she could have fallen in by accident, and the SOCOs have done a light touch search of the area and found nothing to indicate any kind of struggle or anything else that would point to foul play. Her bag was intact too — purse, money and credit cards all untouched. We haven’t recovered her phone, but Andrea received a text from her mum at around ten on Friday evening. That seems to be the last anyone heard or saw of her, so although we can’t exactly pinpoint the timing, the probability is that it happened sometime after that.’

  ‘What did the text say?’ I hoped that somehow it might exonerate me from blame.

  ‘Just that as Rita was off work, she might go and stay with her friends in Hoyland. We checked with these friends and they knew nothing about her plans, so that would point to Rita buying herself some time. Perhaps at that stage, she hadn’t made up her mind. There’ll be an inquest, of course,’ Fraser reminded me. ‘All the evidence will be looked at.’

  ‘Do you know when?’

  ‘Not yet, but I’ll let you know as soon as there’s news.’

  ‘Thanks, I appreciate that.’ I ended the call as Jake appeared, and relayed both conversations to him. ‘So it looks as if the most likely explanation is suicide,’ I finished. ‘Sometime just after she came here.’

  ‘Rita didn’t kill herself because of you,’ Jake said.

  ‘I didn’t exactly make much effort to uncover what was happening to her, though, did I?’

  ‘That’s not the business we’re in,’ said Jake. ‘You gave her the chance to talk and she chose not to take advantage of that. What else could you have done?’

  ‘I might have been the last person she spoke to.’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  ‘Ellen Campbell even presented us with the mitigating factors. Tension running high on the ward, excessive workloads — especially for Rita, victimisation by the head consultant. I mean, she didn’t put it that strongly but . . .’

  ‘And what about if Rita was guilty, if she had caused the deaths of those infants?’ said Jake. ‘I know you don’t want to believe it, but you have to at least consider it. Even if she only thought she did, it would all have contributed to her state of mind. She’s walking by the river, perhaps a little numbed by the medication, and suddenly sees a way out of it all. No, it’s not an easy thought, but it does make some kind of logical sense.’

  ‘Except for one fly in the ointment,’ I said. ‘Rita was Catholic. Andrea maintains that although Rita had ceased practising, she still held to the main tenets.’

  ‘Andrea is clutching at straws,’ said Jake, only voicing what was obvious. ‘Having her mother return to Catholicism would conveniently help to rule out an inclination to suicide. And the police are as certain as they can be that it wasn’t an accident?’

  ‘It would seem so,’ I said. ‘They’ve found Rita’s backpack carefully arranged on the riverbank.’

  ‘So the alternative is what? That someone helped her on her way?’ He was right, that would be ludicrous. ‘If there is any change to what the police think, I’m sure Fraser will keep you informed,’ Jake said. ‘He’s a good contact to have.’

  Chapter Twenty-six

  When I went to my locker on Friday morning, I got the strangest feeling that it had been gone through. My habit was to leave my spare shirt lying on the top where it was least likely to get creased, but today I found it buried under other things, halfway down. I dismissed the idea almost immediately as paranoia. The last few days, my head had been all over the place and keeping my locker tidy had definitely not been at the top of the list of priorities.

  A message had been left on my voicemail from Tony Sutton, giving me an address for Kevin Booth, but no phone number. Whatever had happened here with Booth, he had certainly wanted to get away from it all. I’d never heard of the place Tony named and when I entered it online I could see why — the location was what looked like a farm in a remote, unpopulated area adjacent to the Forest of Bowland, just south of the Lakes. Policing to farming signalled a radical career change, too, and made me all the more curious about what had prompted the move. Sonia might get to visit her parents sooner than she’d expected, though I’d need to be subtle about it.

  And that wasn’t the only research I had planned
for today. Superintendent Bowers was out at the weekly council meeting, sucking up to Ashley Curzon, so I could take advantage of not having him breathing down my neck for at least a couple of hours. Taking out of my pocket the list of names I’d made at the weekend, I logged onto the PNC. I had no case numbers yet, but I was hoping that the names alone would be enough.

  I got a hit on the first query. According to the incident report, Lloyd Jones was an eighteen-year-old who had been set upon as he returned home from an early evening computer club, eight months previously. He’d been to the chip shop and then got on the bus coming out of town. In her statement, his mother had been particularly distressed because it was unusual for her son to get the bus. On most occasions she drove him to the club and picked him up afterwards. Jones had been attacked just a street away from his home, but no one had heard the commotion and no witnesses had come forward, despite a number of appeals. He’d been kicked and beaten, and had banged his head so hard on the pavement, he’d sustained a massive blunt force trauma and subsequent brain haemorrhage, which had put him into a coma, or ‘pervasive vegetative state’ as it was so poetically called.

  Although a couple of leads had been followed up, they’d run out of steam early on and no arrests had been made. According to the report, Jones’ wallet and mobile phone had been stolen, so the incident was recorded as aggravated theft. Except that as I now knew, they hadn’t been stolen at all. Instead, they had found their way into Denny Sutton’s locker.

  Ian Whiteacre had been stabbed and killed while walking home from the pub. Details of this were even more sketchy — even some personal details such as place of employment had been overlooked. As with the Jones case, no persons of interest had been identified. As his wallet, phone and a gold chain from around Whiteacre’s neck had been ‘taken’, homicide with aggravated theft was the recorded crime.

  J. Marshall turned out to be a female, Jodie. This crime was recorded as homicide and her attack had a completely different MO. She lived alone and her house had been broken into. During the course of the burglary she had been assaulted and fatally injured. Marshall had also been subjected to a sexual assault and had then been strangled with a pair of tights. Bruising on her body indicated that she had struggled and made attempts to fend off her attacker, but at ‘five foot three and of a slight build’ she probably wouldn’t have stood a chance. It must have been terrifying, poor woman. According to the report, no conclusive DNA material had been recovered. Since her ground-floor flat had been ransacked and her sister had reported a number of personal items, including jewellery, to be missing, despite the seriousness of the physical assault, once again the incident was recorded as homicide with aggravated burglary. I felt sick thinking about the hoard from Denny’s locker.

  There seemed to be nothing to connect the victims, although there were a number of depressing commonalities in the way that the cases had been handled. All were unsolved, yet, despite this, there was a marked absence of any follow-up activity beyond the first week or two. I was reminded of what Denny had said about prioritising investigations that would get a result. Did that explain it? All the incidents had been described as theft, even though I now knew this to be a false classification. They had all occurred within the last four years, but happened in different parts of the town, and with different MOs, though interestingly I noticed from the log that the response times were all very short, an indication that Denny and his partner had been close by when the emergency calls were made. That could, of course, be simply coincidence — there were not enough incidents to prove that one way or the other, and it was hard to know how Denny and Booth would have known where to be when the calls came through, unless they were getting some kind of tip-off. But if they were, what was special about these particular crimes?

  Denny seemed to have taken responsibility for writing up the final crime reports, though he had not necessarily been the sole attendant. Mostly he’d been with Booth, the man who had abandoned his career in the police force to go to a remote dwelling in the far north, six months ago. I wondered if Booth had believed at the time, like I did, that the victims had simply been robbed.

  The question that just kept screaming out at me was why Denny had taken things from these particular victims, and why now? He would have been at dozens of similar call-outs over the years, so why these? One possibility was opportunity. Perhaps these were the occasions when, at some point, he’d found himself alone with the victim and had taken the chance. While I was on the system, I did a search of Denny’s incident attendance. There had been a number of assaults in the past, but that was nothing unusual, in fact it would be par for the course. There was that spate of them two or three years ago, but again, it didn’t necessarily mean anything.

  It’s well known that trends in petty crime are changing all the time. House burglary and car theft have declined in favour of easier thefts of mobile electronic devices that can be easily sold on. The pattern of incidents here could simply reflect that shifting pattern. When had the pattern changed for Denny? Out of curiosity, I looked up the assault case recorded that immediately preceded Lloyd Jones. The victim’s name was Richard Donnelly. It was another street attack, but it appeared that no trophy had been taken on that occasion. Of course, it could have been that Denny was doing it over time, but that he’d offloaded or cashed in his haul prior to this.

  Despite the contents of Greaves’ wallet, there was a slim possibility that money was behind this and there was a simple way of ruling it out. The property cage was quiet when I went down there, the civilian clerk updating records in her efficient way. I gave her the crime numbers and she turned to her computer screen and the database that recorded logged property. Nothing had been checked in for those crimes.

  ‘What were you after?’ she asked.

  ‘Just checking if Denny Sutton logged anything for those incidents,’ I said.

  ‘I can do a search using his name,’ she offered. ‘Yes, here we are.’ A couple of small amounts of cash had been submitted, attributed to other random incidents. I’d have to look them up and do the sums, but I was pretty sure that Denny had at least checked in some of what he’d taken. It was a relief of sorts and I felt it was enough to allow me to rule out the possibility of Denny lining his own pockets. But if Denny hadn’t taken the wallets for the money, then what the hell had he taken them for, and why keep them? These incidents had been dressed up to look like theft, but why?

  I must have missed some detail that would point to the common factor. With neither Booth nor Denny available, the only other option open to me was to approach the victims’ relatives. I was hesitant. It was pretty likely that the emotions would still be raw, but I couldn’t see any other alternative.

  The contact details for Lloyd Jones were for his parents. His mother answered the phone. Naturally, her first anxious question after I’d introduced myself was, ‘Have you caught them?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Jones, we haven’t yet,’ I said. ‘But I wondered if I could just ask you a couple more questions? How is your son doing?’

  ‘What?’ After a pause, there was scuffling at the other end of the line and for a moment I thought we’d been cut off, but then a male voice came on the phon.

  ‘Who is this?’ he demanded.

  ‘I’m PC Fraser from Fulford Road,’ I said. ‘I was just following up . . .’

  ‘Have you found our Lloyd’s killer?’

  For a second too long, I was speechless. ‘I’m sorry, I thought . . .’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure you did. Yet another example of the wonderful communication within your department, no doubt. His mother and I were persuaded to turn off his life support two months ago. Until you catch the bastard who murdered our boy, we have nothing else to say to you.’

  He put the phone down on me. Shit! Why hadn’t I thought to check that out first? So much for sensitivity. Until that point, I hadn’t thought too much about the fact that these crimes had not been referred to CID — there were no leads to investigate. Bu
t this one had become a homicide. The case should have been reopened or, at the very least, re-examined.

  Jodie Marshall’s sister’s response was also lukewarm, if more politely framed.

  ‘Unless you have anything positive to tell me, I’d really rather not talk about it,’ she told me, and put down the phone.

  I tried ringing Ian Whiteacre’s home next, and got through on the third attempt, but the lady I spoke to had only moved into Whiteacre’s flat a couple of months ago, and was certain that the previous occupant had been another single woman on her own. Whiteacre had apparently moved on some time ago and failed to leave a forwarding address.

  The responses didn’t come as any great surprise. These were people who were justifiably aggrieved, and though they couldn’t know the reason for it, the lack of any kind of closure would have made matters worse. There was a phone number listed for the neighbour who’d found Jodie Marshall. Chances were, she would be a little more emotionally distanced and therefore more cooperative. And so it proved: she agreed to see me the following morning.

  I was just considering whether to enter the appointment into my electronic diary when I looked up to see Superintendent Bowers looming over me from the other side of the desk.

  ‘How are you bearing up, Fraser?’ he asked, as he had done almost every day since Denny’s murder. On the previous occasions, I could do no more than give the automatic response ‘Fine’, while barely thinking about it. But this time, in a fit of pique, I made my views about my lack of involvement in Denny’s investigation known. There was an inevitability to Bowers’ reaction, though at least he had the courtesy to listen first.

  ‘Sorry, you know better than that, Fraser,’ Bowers said, after my rant had come to an end. ‘You’re way too close to it, as well as being a key witness. What are you working on right now?’ he asked, not because he really wanted to know, but to engage with one of his officers, deemed to be ‘vulnerable’. I gave him a brief outline of the Greaves case and he indicated some vague recognition from keeping up with the daily bulletins. ‘Ah yes,’ he said. ‘I remember PC Sutton mentioning that. How’s it going?’