Irrefutable Evidence: A Crime Thriller (15 page)

“Lucky girl. Do you think he knows about me?”

“I really don’t know, but I somehow doubt it. My mother never talked about her early life. She always dismissed my questions as too tiresome when I was growing up. For her, it was as if life started once she moved to Milan. Anything before that wasn’t talked about. She’s led an entirely Italian life for twenty-five years, hardly ever speaking English. With her dementia, she might not even understand it any more.”

Henry looked down. His hand was still on Jennifer’s arm. He smiled slightly in embarrassment as he withdrew it.

“That’s a sad tale, for her and for you. I’m sorry. And I’m amazed that she’s managed to keep everything from you for all these years. She must have really hated me and blamed me for being responsible for the death of the man she thought was your father. Tell me, did she ever mention her own parents?”

“Only that they were killed in a train crash in Turin some years before I was born. Her father was Italian, hence her original surname, Cotone. Her mother was English.”

When Henry didn’t react, Jennifer picked up the significance immediately.

“You’re now going to tell me that’s not true, aren’t you?”

“I don’t want to upset you, Jennifer.”

“You might as well come out with it. I’m quickly getting used to the idea that my mother lied about her life.”

Henry slowly brought his hands together in front of him.

“To my knowledge, Edward and Pauline Caldmore never left these shores. He was a bank manager in St. Albans, she a teaching assistant in a nursery school. They were nice, ordinary people whose only child, Antonia, was pretty wild. She wasn’t lying about them being dead, and it was a train crash. But in the north of England when Antonia was nineteen, a year before we were married.”

“So I’m not in any way Italian?”

“I’m not so sure about that, after all, you were born there. Do you have an Italian passport?”

“I do, as well as a British one. Pietro organised the Italian one when I was very young, probably through the system known as ‘clientelismo’. He’s powerful enough to gain favours when he wants them in exchange for certain bureaucrats’ wives being dressed in the latest fashions. It’s how much of Italy works, but I don’t question it too closely.”

“And you a police officer! But it means legally you are Italian even if your parents were not. And you’re fluent in the language—”

“Native speaker.”

“—Exactly. And you love the country, like I do. Italy’s been good to me too. I’ve had plenty of work in Rome, thanks to my speaking Italian. I won’t be as good as you, but I get by.”

“You’re one big surprise after another.”

He grinned at her and held out his palms in a typically Italian gesture.

She laughed, which thrilled him.

“Look, Henry — you don’t mind if I call you Henry, do you? I mean, I don’t think I can call you daddy, or even babbo.”

“Henry is perfect, Jennifer, and I promise not to call you sweetheart or darling.”

She laughed again. “People will just think you’re a dirty old man if you do. But what I was going to say was, do you mind if I continue to work with Charles Keithley? I like him and he’s pulling out all the stops for you. I want to help, to explore every avenue for you. I don’t think the police did a particularly thorough job. We were all guilty of accepting what was there in front of us without really questioning it.”

“Jennifer, I’d be delighted. That’s the best news I’ve had since I was arrested. But please be careful. Don’t go sticking your neck out. I don’t want you getting into trouble.”

“I’m no longer a police officer, so they can’t stop me as long as I don’t use anything I found out before, and I don’t start trying to persuade any of them to help me.”

She looked around the room. “This place worries me. And you do too. You’ve lost weight and frankly, your complexion is grey.”

Henry shrugged. “The food’s terrible. I’m a fussy eater in that I avoid a lot of things that are staple here. It makes it difficult. And the sheer monotony of the place is relentless. You couldn’t begin to imagine how much cons look forward to visits like this. I’ve only been here a month and it’s such a special occasion. The thought of twenty-five years is too horrible to contemplate, especially when you’re innocent.”

He paused and fixed his eyes on hers. “You do believe I’m innocent, don’t you? You’re not just doing this out of some misguided sense of loyalty to your long-lost father?”

Jennifer took a deep breath. “My conviction of your innocence gets stronger every day, and this visit has certainly helped. But I still don’t know you well enough to work out whether you’re a bloody good actor spinning me and everyone else a clever line, or whether it’s the truth.”

Henry nodded in appreciation. “Well, that’s forthright enough. All I can say is, yes, I am a bloody good actor, but I can assure you that I haven’t been acting today. It’s all me.”

C
hapter 19

S
ally Fisher picked up her phone and glanced at the screen. The caller’s number wasn’t one she recognised.

“Hello?”

“Hello, my name’s Jennifer Cotton. I was given this number by Petra Moorfield. Is that Sally Fisher?”

“Yes, it is. Are you a friend of Petra’s?”

“Er, no, not exactly. I’m a friend of Morag, her younger sister; she was a flatmate of mine when I was at uni.”

Always suspicious of cold callers or people trying to get a backdoor to her art-forgery-expert husband Ced, Sally kept up the questions.

“I remember the name. Morag, I mean. She was at Leicester, wasn’t she?”

She knew she hadn’t been: her response was another test for the caller to pass.

“Leicester? No, I don’t think she ever went there. She was at Nottingham with me. Well, we didn’t read the same subjects, but we shared a flat with a couple of other girls. Her subject was maths, while mine was English and Italian literature.”

“And why did Petra give you my name?” continued Sally, although she was relaxing now. The voice on the other end sounded genuine enough.

“I remembered Morag saying that her sister was a brilliant biochemist with an interest in forensic science, won some prizes when she was with you at Manchester. When I spoke to her, Petra, that is, she said that she’d moved on to other biochemical studies and suggested I call you. You see, I have a few forensic questions that need someone experienced in the field to answer. I was hoping you might be able to help me. You are a forensic scientist, aren’t you?”

Sally was now happy to continue.

“I was. I’m now a full-time mother of one little girl and expectant mother of another child, sex as yet unknown. My husband is desperate for a boy; he’s already planning lots of male-bonding iron-man stuff, but Claudia-Jane and I reckon we’ll be more than a match for them.”

“Claudia-Jane?”

“My daughter. What’s it about? I’m about to go out to a toddler thing.”

“It’s all rather complicated to discuss over the phone. I was wondering if I could pay you a visit. But I don’t want to be a nuisance.”

“You’re a sort of friend of Petra who I’m still vaguely in touch with, so it’s no problem, as long as you don’t mind having Claudia-Jane crawling all over you.”

“Sounds fun. How old is she?”

“Two-and-a-half going on twelve.”

Jennifer laughed. “Would the day after tomorrow be OK? Late morning?”

“Fine. Give me your email and I’ll send the address and directions.”

Two days later, shortly after eleven thirty in the morning, Jennifer drew up outside the Fishers’ town house on a quiet estate on the outskirts of Knutsford in Cheshire. Her assessment of the street was automatic, her policing skills still finely tuned. Well maintained gardens, newish cars, a few casually but stylishly dressed mothers with pushchairs, some joggers. Everyone looking comfortable and relaxed. No sign of any disaffected, out-of-work youth.

She rang the bell and the door opened immediately.

“Hi,” said Sally. “I saw you pull up outside. You are Jennifer, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” replied Jennifer, reaching into her pocket for her warrant card, then stopping herself. That was in the past.

She held out her hand. “Pleased to meet you, Sally. Thanks so much for agreeing to see me.”

“Come in, come in. Excuse the mess. Claudia-Jane has taken over almost every room downstairs this morning. There are toys all over the place.”

On cue, her daughter appeared at the living room door dragging a huge cardboard box.

“Mumma?”

“No, sweetheart, you don’t really want that one as well, do you?”

“Mumma?” persisted Claudia-Jane.

Sally stooped to pick up her daughter with one arm as she grabbed the box with the other. Jennifer was impressed by her physique. At nearly six foot one, Sally’s well-toned body showed that her mention of iron man wasn’t idle talk: she was seriously fit.

Sally was steering her daughter’s interest back to the living room.

“Let’s bring it in here, sweetheart. Mummy wants to talk to Jennifer.”

Claudia-Jane’s brows furrowed as she looked back at Jennifer, who in turn smiled at her.

“May I get you something to drink? Coffee? Tea? Have you come far?”

Jennifer was sitting on a sofa holding a large fabric dinosaur that Claudia-Jane had presented to her with the word, ‘Dino’.

“Coffee would be great, thanks. Black, no sugar.”

She took a stegosaurus that was now being offered in addition.

“He’s lovely, what’s his name?”

“Steg-gy.”

Jennifer looked up. “Not too far. Nottingham.”

“It’s far enough,” said Sally, surprised. “I could have saved you a journey. I know some of the people in the new lab there.”

“Forefront Forensics?”

“Yes, I used to work for them in the main lab here in Knutsford.”

Jennifer was hesitant. “I didn’t really want to go there.”

“Really? What is it you want to know about? They haven’t screwed up, have they?”

“No, not at all,” said Jennifer, opening a notebook she’d taken from her bag. “What I wanted to ask is—”

“What did you say you did?” interrupted Sally.

“I didn’t, actually. Why?”

“It’s just that you have the air of a police officer.”

Jennifer laughed. “Oh dear, how transparent. Let me explain.”

Sally put up her hand. “Continue with your prehistory lesson for a moment. I’ll fetch the coffee. Claudia-Jane, show Jennifer the tyrannosaurus.”

“He’s got big teeth!” roared Claudia-Jane.

Fifteen minutes later, Jennifer had given Sally a summary of the case and the evidence against Henry. She had also explained the discovery of her relationship with Henry and what had happened as a result.

Sally moved a camper van from the coffee table to make room for her cup. The camper had a fabric shark crammed into it looking uncomfortable.

“They gave you a pretty rough deal. Isn’t there some sort of appeal process?”

“They didn’t sack me. I resigned because I knew that even the best-case scenario would see me ending up somewhere I didn’t want to be, probably forever. It’s done and dusted now and I’ve come to terms with it.”

It was immediately clear to Sally from Jennifer’s body language and general tone of voice that she had anything but come to terms with it; that her decision was still an open wound.

Jennifer looked up from her notebook.

“What I was really hoping to discuss with you was that given the ton of forensic evidence implicating Henry as the culprit, how likely is it that he’s been set up? I suppose what I’m really asking is whether that is too ridiculous a notion.”

Sally scratched her head. In her time as one of the smartest forensic scientists with Forefront Forensics, and previously at the now-disbanded Forensic Science Service’s laboratory at Chorley near Manchester, she had seen several cases where evidence had been planted. A couple had involved corrupt police officers while others involved colleagues or relatives of the person originally arrested for whatever crime was being investigated. Only one of the cases had been a murder, but the principles were the same: the aim of the actual guilty party was to divert attention away from himself by associating someone else with the crime.

“First question,” she said, “is how certain are you that Henry Silk is innocent? Because the evidence is stacked against him all right.”

“Obviously I’m not a hundred percent sure since I’ve only met him a few times,” replied Jennifer. “But the more I think about it and about him and what he’s like, the more convinced I become of his innocence. And it’s not only because I’ve now discovered that he’s my father; I had my doubts before. I must admit I haven’t much experience with murderers, but all along Henry struck me as a very genuine man. He doesn’t come across as some psycho spinning me a tale while really plotting the slaying of his next victim; he’s truly confused and bewildered by the whole thing. I suppose what I’m asking for is a fresh but experienced and impartial mind to look at the alternatives.”

Sally nodded. She loved this sort of challenge and missed it.

“OK, I should say that it’s possible, certainly, but extremely difficult. It would take a lot of planning and a detailed knowledge of what the lab was looking for and how we go about our work. Obviously there have been cases in the past where people have been set up, but whoever it is doing the framing, the normal mistake they make with trace evidence is overkill, mainly because they want to be sure that the evidence is found.”

She paused to break up an imaginary fight between two prehistoric creatures that Claudia-Jane was orchestrating and getting quite heated about.

“You can imagine, as an ex-police officer, how it might go,” she continued. “If, for example, they want glass fragments from a broken window to be valuable evidence, rather than content themselves with planting a few shards like you’d normally find, they’ll scatter half a broken window over a significant piece of clothing and for good measure shove a large glass fragment from the window in one of the pockets. That amount of evidence would always raise flags in the lab and there would be discussions about how to proceed, since the case officer himself might be the person who’s planted the stuff. It can be tricky, a minefield of diplomacy, which isn’t normally a scientist’s strong point.”

“Do you think that could be true in this case?” asked Jennifer. “After all, there is a lot of evidence.”

“Well, you know the police officers; I don’t. Is there anyone involved, directly or indirectly, who strikes you as someone who could do it?”

Jennifer took a sip of her coffee as she thought about it.

“No, no one,” she said, shaking her head. “I mean I don’t know many of them well, but they are a cohesive and competent team, both the police officers and the civilians. They’re impressive. And it’s not as if Henry’s a local. He comes to Nottingham from time to time in plays, but that’s all, I think. I was on the ground from the start with the evidence; I certainly don’t think there’s been any tampering, and no one behaved oddly, drawing attention to evidence.” She winced. “Except me, of course.”

Sally smiled. “I’m confident we can rule you out. But I think the answer to your main question is yes and no. There’s a good variety of evidence — fibre transfers, hair, fingerprints from the victim, positive DNA matches, the shoe in the car, a tyre print and so on. But for each of those, apart from perhaps the fibre evidence, the amount found is within the normal range you’d expect. And for the fibres, the rather large quantity can be explained by the fact that the culprit almost definitely carried the victim some distance while he was wearing a pullover and scarf that would both shed good amounts with such strong physical contact.”

“But surely,” said Jennifer, “given that Henry isn’t an idiot, he would have been aware of all that. Why would he be so stupid as to leave all that evidence just waiting to be found?”

Sally absently straightened out the stegosaurus’s spines.

“I agree, it does kind of beggar belief. But, you know, most criminals are not brain of Britain. They’re driven by lust, greed, hatred, passion, malice and spur of the moment loss of control. Seldom do you see the cold-hearted assassins that feature in so many crime shows.”

She paused, her brow furrowed. “You know, the one thing that really bothers me is the scratches on Henry’s neck and the corresponding debris of blood and skin under the victim’s nails that are a match with Henry.”

“Yes,” said Jennifer morosely, “and I was the one who noticed them.”

“Planting them would really take some planning and execution,” continued Sally. “I’m struggling with that one. And then there’s the CCTV. You say it tracked him more or less from his room, through the hotel to his car, then to the pick up, out of the city, and then back into the city, the hotel car park and then back inside the hotel?”

“Exactly.”

“How good was the ID from the CCTV?”

“It gave the car registration number, which is what led us to Henry so quickly.”

“No, I meant the images of his face. How good were they?”

“There aren’t any. His face isn’t visible once in any of the footage.”

Sally pursed her lips in thought. “Now that is interesting. You’d think that someone as careless as Henry appears to have been would have been almost jumping up and down waving at the cameras. But that’s not the case. If fact it’s the only time that precautions seem to have been taken.”

“Yes,” said Jennifer, “the visor was pulled down to mask his face, which is an odd thing to do at night.”

“Very odd and very deliberate. You know, Jennifer,” said Sally, sitting back and smiling, “I find that extremely suspicious.”

“Why, exactly?”

“Well, you’re thinking that the killer wasn’t Henry but someone setting him up. Let’s imagine the scenario. The killer would have to have dressed up in Henry’s clothes and deliberately got himself videoed on the CCTV, but he couldn’t risk his face showing. So he’d keep his back to the camera, or if he couldn’t do that, keep his head down. In the car, in order to avoid any CCTV shots that could show the driver’s face, he would pull down the visor — traffic cameras are almost always way above car level so that precaution would be most effective. Was he wearing anything on his head in the videos?”