The Case of the Screaming Beauty Read online

  With a hotel emptied by fallout from the murder, bookings being cancelled left and right after a painful social media reaction, and Doris efficiently cleaning the mostly empty hotel, Cliff found himself with little to do. He headed for his Land Rover Defender while Graham pored over his notes.

  ‘The sounds of love’, he wrote. Interesting, but hardly conclusive, he thought to himself. I’m still missing something. The thought nagged at him, like a confounded blister, for the next hour.

  * * *

  Fiona observed with rapt attention as Bert Hatfield went about what was, for him, a relatively routine task, but which produced flurries of notes and volleys of questions from the young student.

  “I thought these were incredibly expensive?” she asked, as they both stood over a square, black machine that looked a little like a laser printer with four top compartments, each with its own thick, grey lid.

  “Oh, they are,” Bert told her. “Thermal cyclers are about £200,000 a pop,” he said, closing the lids and pressing a sequence of buttons on the LCD display at its front. “But a friend at the Met owed me a favor after I broke open a case for them last year, and he was good enough to let us have one of these priceless beauties on loan.”

  Fiona searched her memory for a second. “The Angela Forrest murder?” she gasped. “That was you?”

  Bert gave her a proud smile. “I don’t want to sound like I’m boasting, but that was the smallest sample of DNA ever successfully used to prosecute a murderer. I really didn’t think we’d pull it off.”

  The whole country had spent days in shock after the discovery of thirteen-year-old Angela’s body in a churchyard near Folkestone. She had been exceptionally bright, a gifted athlete and artist, apparently abducted after hockey practice by a “man with a white van.” The hunt for her killer had found vocal and useful support from the national newspapers, particularly the oft-criticized “gutter press” of tabloids and glossy weekly magazines, who had called for her killer’s prompt execution from the outset.

  Thankfully, Bert recalled, the death penalty wasn’t available, but there was a tremendous satisfaction when the judge handed down the stiffest penalty he could: life in prison without possibility of parole. Keith Marshall, a name now added to the list of Britain’s most hated child-murderers, would never walk free. And Bert Hatfield’s exemplary work was central to the crown’s evidence.

  “I remember something about a new technique,” Fiona said. “Using tiny amounts of DNA but copying them.”

  Bert was impressed. “You’re on the right lines. You see our sample, there?”

  She nodded. They had already swabbed the golf club and extracted a sample of what they hoped was Norah’s DNA. “Well, there isn’t all that much of it, is there? We’re talking about tiny, broken fragments of DNA. Not enough, on its own, for us even to tell if the material belonged to a man or a woman.”

  “So…” Fiona said, thoroughly engaged as ever.

  “So, we need to copy that tiny fragment as many times as we can, and from the results, we can produce an incomplete but useful DNA profile.”

  Thinking the process through, Fiona asked, “But how will we know it’s Norah’s?”

  Bert reached over to his desk and brought out a test tube with a sample swab inside. “From the post mortem. If we can match what we find from the golf club with the sample I took from Norah…”

  “We’ll know this was the golf club that killed her!” Fiona exclaimed excitedly.

  “There you go. Now, this is going to take a moment, so let’s grab a coffee while it’s doing its thing.”

  “Thing?” she asked, peering at the device.

  “It’s going to repeatedly heat and cool the sample – hence the name ‘thermal cycler’ – in the presence of an agent that will help to create new strands of genetic material,” Bert explained.

  “Agent?” Fiona asked, her notebook ready.

  “Actually an extract from a type of bacteria that just happens to be terrific at helping DNA strands to copy themselves. But let’s not get too technical.” He led her from the room, and though Fiona would have been delighted to get a lot more technical, she followed along towards the reception area where the traditional 10:30 pot of coffee was being readied.

  “Emily, you’re an angel,” Bert told her, reaching for the steaming pot.

  She was putting down the phone. “Oh, I know,” she quipped. “Sir, would you call DI Graham? He’s got a question for you, but I didn’t want to disturb you in the lab.”

  * * *

  “Bert?”

  “Good morning. How’s sunny Chiddlinghurst?” Hatfield asked.

  “Bloody frustrating,” Graham admitted. “But I’ve got a question. The kind I can’t believe I haven’t asked before.”

  Graham’s tone was more than a little worrying. He seemed genuinely angry with himself, though Bert knew him as a generally mild mannered sort of a chap. “Go right ahead,” Bert told him. “I’ve got some special assistance today, so we’re ready for whatever the world of crime chooses to throw at us.” Fiona grinned over the rim of her coffee cup.

  Graham got straight to the point. “Was there any evidence that Norah was sexually active on the night she was murdered?”

  Bert took one glance at Fiona, held up a finger in a polite request for her patience, and took this delicate conversation back into the lab. “Let me check the records again, David, but I really don’t think I remember anything…”

  “Are you sure?” Graham pressed, his tone decidedly impatient.

  Take it easy, old chap. There’s no need to get snippy. Bert reached his desk and clicked to the post-mortem file on his computer. “Well, it’s hard to ever say with a hundred percent certainty, but there were none of the classic signs.”

  “How do you mean?” Graham demanded.

  Hatfield took a couple of breaths. The DI sounded genuinely rattled, as though he was holding Bert responsible for slowing his investigation. I can’t manufacture evidence, you know. “We did all the usual tests,” he said, paraphrasing two pages of the report, “and found no evidence of sexual contact.”

  Graham was silent for a moment. “But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, right?”

  “I can’t be absolutely sure. You know… Well, we’re both men of the world, right, Detective Inspector? There’s more than one way to skin a cat, and all that…”

  Graham tersely thanked the pathologist and hung up. Bert spent a long moment with a puzzled, worried expression on his face, and then nudged open the lab door and gave his work experience student an artificial but convincing smile.

  “Fiona? The PCR machine is calling for our attention.”

  * * *

  Sergeant Harris arrived to find the DI alone, brooding over his notes, sipping tea as though it were the elixir of life. “Morning, sir.”

  “Ah, Harris. Have a seat, would you?” Despite Bert’s less-than-certain replies, Graham was building a picture of what might actually have happened in the hours before Norah’s sad departure, and the progress energized him yet further.

  “Look, this is a bit of a funny one, but I want to brainstorm something with you. In confidence,” he emphasized.

  “Fire away, sir,” Harris said. He was dressed in his summer uniform, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up, cap set on the table, and black tie neatly in place.

  “Bear with me here, Sergeant, but… what might, all other things being equal, make a grown woman scream at eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning?”

  Harris’ eyebrows performed a puzzled furrow, then raised in unmistakably amused inquiry.

  “Yes, before you ask, I want you to skip the obvious. I know Tim was here at the Lavender, but I can’t prove they were together,”

  “Well, if she wasn’t yelling out because of pain, that leaves a pretty short list of possibilities,” Harris observed.

  “Short, but I want it anyway,” Graham said. “Have a go.”

  “Right,” Harris said, considering the matt
er. “Well, she might have been hurt, like I say. Got to consider it.”

  “Bert found nothing on the body that suggested an injury,” Graham replied, and then corrected himself. “Well, except for the bloody great thwack on the back of her head from a golf driver.”

  “Yeah, let’s not forget about that,” Harris said. “But it could have been a shout of surprise. You know, a shock, or something.”

  Graham pondered this. “A spider, maybe? You know how some people are.”

  “What about a cockroach?” Harris offered.

  The DI tutted disapprovingly. “I wouldn’t let Mrs. Tisbury hear you talking like that.

  Harris grinned. “Well, was there anything scary on TV?”

  “On a Sunday morning?” Graham reminded him.

  “Or she read something on her phone. Got a surprising text. Who knows?”

  Harris meant no harm by this flippant comment, but it summed up the lamentable state of their investigation so concisely that Graham felt a sudden welling up of anger. His notebook hit the desk with a thud of frustration, to Harris’ surprise. “Not us, and that’s the bloody problem.”

  It didn’t take the experienced eye of a psychologist for Harris to recognize that his boss was taking something rather more than a strictly professional interest in this case. It had become something personal, a battle of wits, one which Graham couldn’t bear to lose. Such intense, emotional involvement was never a good sign for a professional police officer. Cases were to be sleuthed out and solved through guile and perseverance, not seen as some intense, personal battle with the perpetrator.

  “Begging your pardon, sir, but…”

  “What?” Graham snapped.

  “Are you alright?” Harris asked with very genuine concern.

  He stopped short of another short-tempered growl and sighed heavily. “Not really, Sergeant. I’ll be honest.”

  Harris spoke with great care. He knew Graham only through their work. There’d been the occasional chat in the pub, but even then, they discussed mostly cases.

  “If you need to talk to someone, sir... I’ve been on the force a long time. And I know what it can do to a man, this kind of work. The stress, the odd hours.” He paused to make sure, in himself, that he wasn’t about to overstep an important boundary. “And, if things at home are difficult, sir… well, that doesn’t help.”

  For a long moment, Graham stared at the starched, white cloth of the dining room table. Then he poured himself yet another cup of Anhui.

  Harris watched him with real sympathy. It had been five months, and it was clear that it was still too soon to bring up the shocking tragedy that was so plainly weighing on the senior police officer. This case was Graham’s first on “active duty” since it had happened. He had spent most of the intervening months alone, either on compassionate leave in an empty, silent house, or in his office, going over case files, and other “light duties.” On the nights he’d felt unable to return home, he’d slept fitfully on a cot in his office. His wife, Isabelle, had retreated even further, to her parent’s home in the wilds of north Wales, and their disappointingly, depressingly terse phone conversations were little comfort.

  Returning to lead an investigation had been a breakthrough for Graham, but after four days without an arrest, he was struggling to maintain his professional detachment. His unresolved grief was threatening the fragile emotional equilibrium he had strived so hard to create. And he knew it.

  Graham finished the cup of tea, and then stood with purpose. “You know what really helps?” he asked.

  “Sir?” Harris said, standing too.

  The notebook was slid back in his pocket. “Catching murderers. Let’s nail this bastard, Harris.” He made towards the door of the Lavender. “Come on, chop, chop. We’ve got work to do.”

  * * *

  Fiona’s eyes glittered enthusiastically with the thrill of discovery. Or, in this particular case, the satisfaction of near-certain confirmation. “We have a match,” Bert Hatfield announced. “Isn’t technology wonderful?”

  Scrutinizing the on-screen results, Fiona asked, “How certain is it? I mean, there are plenty of blond women of her age walking around...”

  “Not that many,” Bert advised, “who were recently struck in the back of a head with a golf driver.”

  “Admittedly,” Fiona said sheepishly.

  “And, according to the machine, the chances of a mistake in this case are around a billion to one. So, if it’s not Norah, it might be one of, say, six or seven other people on the whole of planet Earth.”

  The grandiosity was grist to Fiona’s already productive mill. “So, what now?”

  “Now, I tell the harassed DI Graham that we definitively have the murder weapon. The trouble is,” he said, sighing, “that we’ve got not even a smidge of a fingerprint. Which tells us something, in itself.”

  Sensing another invitation to brainstorm possibilities, Fiona said, “Does sand wipe away fingerprints?” she asked.

  “Not particularly,” he answered. “But murderers often do.”

  “So, the driver was deliberately wiped clean, and then buried in a sand trap on the golf course.”

  “Yup,” Bert confirmed. “But by whom?”

  They sat for a moment in thoughtful silence. Bert hated dead ends. They always made him feel as though he’d omitted, somehow, to take the right approach. Don’t blame the evidence, he’d been taught, forty years ago. Facts don’t change simply because you want them to. Just use better tools, and ask better questions.

  “Evidence…” he muttered. “What else have we got?” He returned to his desk and pulled up the list of Norah’s personal effects. “Worth another glance, I’d say,” he said, mostly to himself.

  Although both he and Stevens had pored over the clothing and other items from the bathroom as well as Norah’s small, bright red suitcase, he couldn’t see any harm in doing so again. He showed Fiona the list, and together, they methodically located and inspected each item. “Hair clip, plastic, green,” he read out. “Woman’s blouse, white, blood stained.”

  An hour later, they were going over the objects found in Norah’s suitcase. Nothing seemed even remotely amiss. “Hair brush, black plastic, with fibres.”

  Fiona inspected the brush and passed it to Bert. “See anything unusual?” she asked.

  “No,” Bert responded. “Neither did SOCO Stevens, and neither did I, the first time I laboriously went through this process.” Bert was known for his patience, but when such an apparent wealth of evidence absolutely refused to yield anything of value, even the most even-tempered investigator was bound to become frustrated.

  Three hours into the process, Fiona lifted a piece of paper from the plastic evidence bag. Bert read out the description. “Lottery ticket, for Saturday’s draw.” There were three other objects – chewing gum, a bottle of painkillers, which Bert had already thoroughly tested, and a packet of condoms, which Bert didn’t oblige Fiona to handle. “And that’s all folks,” he said. “The life and times of Norah Travis, deceased.”

  “Not a lot here,” Fiona sighed.

  “I need another coffee,” Bert told her. “Come along, and we’ll bother Emily for a moment or two.”

  This was a long-established and enjoyable tradition for Bert, and Emily was good enough to humor him. Between phone calls, answering email inquiries from police officers and medical staff, or taking care of the endless filing and copying, Emily’s day was brightened by a series of terrible, old jokes by Bert Hatfield. He had a legendary store of utter howlers and was in the middle of the one about the guy with the van full of penguins when Fiona, who hadn’t been paying too much attention to him, exploded brightly.

  “Sir?!” she almost shrieked. “Dr. Hatfield?!” she gasped, clutching her phone.

  “What on Earth’s the matter, child?” he asked, the rest of the joke abandoned.

  “The numbers… The lottery ticket,” she stuttered.

  “What about them?” he asked, turning her phone so t
hat he could see. And then, as he began to realize the implications, he turned to Emily. “Get DI Graham on the phone,” he said. “He’s not going to believe this.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  AFTER YET ANOTHER inspection of the crime scene, a slightly purposeless wander around the hotel to “soak up the atmosphere” and more long sessions of staring at his notes while drinking Anhui jasmine, Graham could put off the inevitable no longer. His earlier optimism had dimmed once more, and though he remained determined, he simply couldn’t see a way forward in the case.

  Hatfield had confirmed that they’d found the murder weapon, but the lack of fingerprints, or an obvious owner, was almost unbearably disappointing. To make matters worse, the conflicting evidence over Norah’s romantic life made little sense. Something, or someone, had lied to him. Either Tim Lloyd was making up the story about being “in the doghouse” on the night Norah was killed, or the post mortem evidence wasn’t revealing what truly happened. It was maddening.

  At around five, he reached his home, a quaint cottage that dated to the turn of the 1900s. So reluctant was he to be there that he’d actually stopped at a junction and turned the other way, before forcing himself to double-back and park in his own driveway for the first time in ten days. The garden needed a tidy, with leaves dotting their little front lawn. He took a deep breath as he turned his car engine off. It was going to be awful, but he knew he needed to do this.

  The silence after opening the front door was still a savage punch in the gut. It was so glaring, so incongruous, in a house where there had been such light and life and noise. The kitchen was squared away. Someone must have done that, but Graham couldn’t for the life of him remember who. Before, instead of the clean, shiny countertops that now presented themselves, he would find cheese crackers scattered on the surface, their crumbs too often scrunched underfoot. Small, brightly colored, partitioned plates were stacked in the corner. Alongside them were matching cups, adorned with the latest cartoon princess whose signature tune was sung so often that it had driven him into the garden in search of peace and quiet. Oh, how he longed to hear that song now.