Grave Doubts (15 page)

At ten o’clock that evening, Superintendent Quinlan returned to Harlden police station after a dull dinner. He was surprised to see a light coming from an office on the second floor and went to investigate

‘Anything I should be concerned about, Andrew?’

‘No, just catching up on some reading.’

All ranks from inspector upwards were having to do increasing amounts of unpaid overtime but working past ten o’clock when there were no serious crimes to investigate was excessive.

‘Looks like a closed file.’ Quinlan took a step forward and Fenwick suppressed a sigh. He had been hoping to avoid this conversation.

‘It’s the Griffiths case. I went to see him in prison today, trying to establish whether he’s connected with the attacks against Nightingale.’

‘And, is he?’

‘I don’t know.’ Fenwick leant back in his chair and rubbed his forehead wearily.

‘He’s locked up and has no known acquaintances or family to act on his behalf.’

Quinlan raised his eyebrows, as articulate as a spoken word. They had known each other for too long for him to be fobbed off with half a story.

‘OK. For some reason he lied to me, and on the most trivial matter – the name and address of someone who is writing to him in prison. Why would he do that?’

‘To be awkward?’ Quinlan sat down in one of the chairs facing Fenwick’s desk and winced as the metal frame bit into his legs. ‘Why don’t you have these replaced, man? They’re so old there’s no padding left in them.’

‘Really? I never sit there.’ Fenwick dismissed the chairs from his mind and went over to a large corkboard attached to the wall opposite his desk. It was full of photos of Nightingale’s flat and printouts of hate mail from her computer. To one side was a photograph of Griffiths. ‘Are we sure that he doesn’t have a friend or relative?’

‘Never saw any sign of them.’

‘No family at all?’

‘None. You’ve read the file.’

‘Yet he was socially well adjusted enough to hold down a decent job at a software company for two years and be regarded by his colleagues as, I quote, “a normal bloke, a bit quiet but all right”. There should be someone.’

‘Maybe they cleared off when he was arrested. Happens all the time.’

‘True but why no mention at all on file? There’s another odd thing about him. He never stayed put in one place.’ Fenwick pointed to another piece of paper. ‘His first job was in Telford, then Birmingham. Both software development companies and well paid. Seems he was highly skilled, so why move on?’

‘You should ask Blite but be sensitive, it was a bloody awful investigation. The attacks against women went on for nearly a year and putting the case together was incredibly difficult, even after we caught him.’

Fenwick looked at him, intrigued.

‘Of course, you weren’t here, but you can imagine the flak when woman after woman was assaulted and we appeared powerless to catch the man doing it. Using Nightingale to draw Griffiths out was a last ditch idea. If it hadn’t worked we would have had to wait and hope that a friend turned him in. There was no trace evidence you see. And his method kept changing. One minute he was stalking them outside, the next he had charmed himself into their homes.’

‘But you were certain that it was the work of one man?’

‘Positive. We received anonymous letters from the perpetrator boasting of the crimes and giving us details that only he could know. And then there was the souvenir taking. In each incident the poor girl lost part of a finger. We missed it at first, thought the injuries were defensive, but when the bastard mentioned them in his bloody letters we realised they were a link.’

‘But despite that CPS wouldn’t let you take all the cases to trial.’

‘No, our evidence was so thin. When we searched his flat it was spotless. No clothes to link him to the attacks; no PC, printer or paper to connect to the letters; and definitely no fingers!’

‘What about DNA on the envelopes or stamps.’

‘Letters were sent unstamped and the envelopes were sellotaped. Now you can see why Nightingale’s testimony was so crucial. Without it he could have walked. Only the cases that were identical with the attack against her were tried. The others remain open on file and there they’ll stay, including the murder – a poor woman who died of her injuries. It’s bloody for the relatives but at least when we caught him the attacks stopped.’

‘Why wasn’t there more about the souvenirs in the papers at the time.’

‘It was in our interests to play it down because they were a link to the crimes we weren’t able to bring to trial, and for some reason the defence didn’t use it. We never released the information to the press. Check that confidential folder there and you’ll find more information.’ He turned to go. ‘Goodnight. Don’t work until the small hours, not when you don’t need to.’

Fenwick opened the red-edged envelope and pulled out a bundle of photographs and medical examiners’ notes. Victim one had the top of her little finger sliced off. She had been semi-conscious when it happened.

The second victim had the top of her ring finger taken. Another, the poor girl who later died, lost several fingers. The missing fingers intrigued Fenwick. He logged on to PACE and input his search criteria then waited impatiently while it checked hundreds of thousands of cases. There were ten matches, but eight were domestic incident injuries so he dismissed them and concentrated on reports of two women who had lost parts of their fingers during sexual attacks. One woman had been raped and later died of her injuries making the case murder. She had lived in a village five miles from Birmingham and had invited her attacker into her own home. The other lived in Telford and had been raped at a nature reserve.

Given the problems that Blite had faced bringing his own investigation to trial Fenwick could see why he’d been unwilling to follow up unsolved crimes outside his own patch, but the detail of the missing finger joint was compellingly similar and Griffiths had lived close to where both attacks took place. He checked the file again and found notes of conversations that Blite had had with the Forces involved. At the bottom he had typed in capitals:

NO OBVIOUS CONNECTIONS OTHER THAN FINGER AMPUTATION. LIKELIHOOD OF A LINK REMOTE. HAVE FAXED MATERIALS TO TELFORD AND BIRMINGHAM FOR THEM TO FOLLOW UP AT THEIR DISCRETION.

It was typical of Blite not to pursue tangential leads that he would have seen as a distraction. True, he hadn’t had enough to suggest a firm connection but at the very least he had been faced with interesting coincidences that Fenwick would have found impossible to leave alone. He printed off the information and tacked it to his corkboard.

‘There is no record of an Agnes teaching at any of the schools Griffiths says he attended.’

‘So he was lying. Why?’

Cooper trotted out the same theories that Superintendent Quinlan had a few days earlier but Fenwick remained unconvinced. Something about the stalking of Nightingale and the whole Griffiths case disturbed him. He even spoke to Blite and asked for his ideas but the inspector didn’t respond well to what he saw as Fenwick’s dabbling in one of his cases.

‘Your problem,’ Blite had said, ‘is that you’re bored, Andrew. Your secondment to the Met has spoiled you for our more provincial way of life.’

At the time he had treated the remark as a joke and laughed it off but there was an element of truth on its barb. He was bored. His detection rate was impressive, the highest in the Division and good enough to warrant a call of congratulation from the ACC, but his brain remained unchallenged. The Nightingale case, with its potential link to Griffiths, intrigued as much as it concerned him. If the connection was real then there were elements of Griffiths’ past that remained hidden.

He sent Cooper off to dig deeper and studied the printouts from PACE. On impulse, he called Birmingham City Centre Police and was eventually put through to an inspector involved in the original enquiry.

‘We never found a trace of him. The girl’s body had been thoroughly washed, there was no physical evidence and no one saw her leave the pub she was in. One minute she was there, the next gone.’

‘Where was her body found?’

‘That was the strange thing, on her own bed. The bastard hacked her about so the missing finger didn’t seem significant at the time, though I wondered later whether it was linked to a couple of other cases we had up here, but it was so tenuous…’

‘What other cases?’ Fenwick sat up straight in his chair and reached for a pen to take notes.

‘We had three other sex attacks within eighteen months of each other. One was a sexual assault where the bloke tried to cut the girl’s finger off but failed. It received a lot of publicity at the time. The next was a rape out in the suburbs but the hand injuries looked incidental. It was my case and we never caught the bastard. I didn’t make a connection as the description of her attacker was different but I thought I should mention it all the same. The third one was a murder. The medical report described the injuries to her hands as defensive cuts. She lost two fingers and the tendons of the rest were damaged.’

‘Could you send me the details? I know you’re short-handed but it would be helpful. I think we may have your man in prison but proving the connection will be difficult.’

As he replaced the receiver, Fenwick wondered again how Blite could have ignored such a tantalising coincidence but he knew why. He would have concentrated on securing a prosecution on the local crimes. It would be the expedient thing to do and Blite was nothing if not expedient.

The fax from Birmingham arrived at six o’clock and Fenwick called his housekeeper to say he would be late. By seven o’clock he had summarised the facts and added to them details of the unsolved crimes from Harlden. He studied his notes, the frown line between his eyebrows deepening as he recognised significant consistencies yet baffling contradictions: