Irrefutable Evidence: A Crime Thriller (19 page)

She pulled a face. “Shit, I was convinced that one of them would be on the list.”

“That’s bad luck,” said Frampton, taking the phone from her. “Does that screw up what you’re doing?”

Jennifer nodded. “Well, it’s certainly a bit of a setback. Listen — Norrie, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“Norrie, despite the big wind-up, I’m really grateful to you. I think without your intervention I might well have blown it here, jumped in with both feet. I’ll need to think through my strategy some more before I try anywhere else.”

Back in her car, Jennifer sat and stared through the window as she thought through the implications of the names she’d seen on Norrie Frampton’s phone, or rather the absence of the ones she was expecting to see. Her despondency only increased as she realised that if there was nothing apart from tenuous similarities to link the two cases, the chances of proving Henry’s innocence would become slim at best. She needed to talk to someone about it. Someone sensible.

She grabbed her phone and pressed a couple of buttons.

“Sally. Hi, it’s Jennifer. Look, are you busy? Oh, sorry, that’s a daft question to someone with a two-year-old.”

“Hi Jennifer. It’s fine, Ced’s taken Claudia-Jane for a bike ride.”

“She can ride a bike?”

Sally laughed. “How much do you know about children, Jennifer? Ced’s put a totally secure seat on the back of one of his bikes; he straps her into that. She sits there like the Queen of Sheba telling him what to do. She loves the helmet he’s bought her; wanted to wear it to bed the night he brought it home. He’ll be dressing her in Lycra next. Now, what can I do for you? You sound rather flat.”

Jennifer sighed and launched into an account of events that morning, leaving out Norrie Frampton’s wind-up.

“So you see,” she said, as she finished, “my investigation has gone down the tubes. I was banking on either Amelia Taverner or Sharon Peterson being at the Bristol View on the night of the Natasha Pircu murder. Convinced, in fact, that one of the names would be there.”

Sally didn’t agree. “I don’t think it’s the end of the trail, you know. Think about it. Assuming that we’re right about the murderer being a woman, she’s demonstrated that she’s pretty clever, really thought things through. Suppose the name she registered at the Old Nottingham is false, not her real name, which is extremely likely. If she’s a serial killer with a mission, would she really use the same false name at the hotels where she’s set people up? It would be a flaw in her strategy, something that if noticed would make someone like you want to investigate further.”

“So you think she might be using more than one name?” Jennifer’s lack of conviction sounded in her voice. “But both Amelia Taverner and Sharon Peterson used credit cards, which means that if she’s not one of them, she’s somehow got hold of the real Taverner’s or the real Peterson’s cards. I know that credit card theft is common, but it would be pretty risky to use a stolen card in these circumstances. It might have been blocked, which would flag if she tried to use it.”

Sally was nodding as she listened to Jennifer’s objections.

“So perhaps she got the card some other way. Have you checked up on these two women?”

“As far as I can, yes. It turns out that Amelia Taverner is an extremely unusual name. In fact, I could only find one person with that name in the whole of the UK, using Google and the White Pages for my search. Unfortunately, Sharon Peterson is more common; there are quite a few scattered around the country.”

“OK,” said Sally, “let’s start with Amelia Taverner. Where does she live?”

“In North Yorkshire, a place called Pateley Bridge.”

“I know it,” replied Sally. “It’s in the Dales, really pretty area. How old is she?”

“I don’t know. I checked the electoral register, but that doesn’t always give ages or even approximate ages, and for her, it didn’t.”

“What about the other name you turned up down there?”

“Catherine Doughthey?”

“Yes. You said that was the only name on the list that was a likely candidate, didn’t you?”

Jennifer sighed. “Yes, I think so. I doubt that the killer would spend more time than necessary in the hotel. She wouldn’t want to draw attention to herself. Of course, she could have been using one of the foreign names.”

“How do you spell Doughthey?” asked Sally.

Jennifer spelt it for her and immediately heard Sally tapping on her keyboard as she muttered to herself.

“Let’s see if we can find where … Wow!”

“What?”

“I’ve looked her up. Like Amelia Taverner, it’s a pretty rare name. According to Google, there’re only three in the UK, but guess where one of them lives?”

There was silence on the other end of the phone; Jennifer didn’t dare guess.

“Pateley Bridge!” declared Sally triumphantly. “Now that’s got to be more than a coincidence. What about the credit cards? Are they the same issuing bank?”

“I hadn’t considered that,” said Jennifer as she leafed through some papers in her bag. “Here are the numbers. Yes, they start with the same digits.”

“Could be significant,” said Sally. “I’ve called up the coding list. Sing them out.”

Jennifer quoted the first six digits, the bank identifiers, and waited.

“Visa cards from the North Western Bank,” announced Sally after a few seconds. “Right area, so it could mean something. What about Sharon Peterson?”

Jennifer found the number. “It’s different,” she said. “It’s a MasterCard from NatWest. I know that because I have one. It starts with the same digits.”

As she was speaking, she was busy tapping on her phone.

“I wonder if there’s anything more about Doughthey. Here’s the electoral register. Bugger! Her address is there, but again no age. It’s a different address, by the way, so they are not living under the same roof, assuming they are in fact really two people.”

She paused, thinking through the information. Then she added, “Sally, that’s brilliant. You always buck me up; I was really floundering. Now, I think I really need to continue my search for other cases around the country. If there are some, I’ll try to think of some way of checking out guest lists at whatever hotels are involved. If either Amelia Taverner’s name or Catherine Doughthey’s pops up, we’ll really be onto something.”

“Or,” added Sally, “perhaps there’s a third name, or even a fourth, and they all live in Pateley Bridge.”

She gave her voice a mysterious air. “The Pateley Bridge Murder Club.”

Jennifer laughed, but was unconvinced. “This isn’t the telly, Mrs Fisher, it’s the real world.”

C
hapter 23

I
t was five days before Jennifer called Sally again, five days of progress. Jennifer’s excitement echoed down the phone.

“Sally, hi, it’s Jennifer.”

“Jennifer, I thought you’d be calling soon. You sound far more buoyant than the last time we spoke. Where are you?”

“I’m on the A1 driving back from Newcastle. I couldn’t wait to tell you the latest developments, but I’ve also got to get back to Nottingham. I’m seeing Henry this afternoon. Are you free to talk?”

“Actually, Claudia-Jane and I are at a toddler group, but right now the kids are all involved in an activity, so the mums are standing back. I’m outside the room, but I’ve got her ladyship in sight in case there’s a meltdown. So, tell me all.”

“Well, first, after we spoke the other day, I went home and really hit the searches. It took ages but it was worth every minute. I found a total of three other prostitute murders in the last seven years where there has been strong forensic evidence to implicate the killer, but where the killer has completely denied any involvement. In each case, the culprit was traced back to a hotel in the city where the prostitute was working. Three cases, three easy convictions and three men languishing in prisons around the country wondering what’s hit them and, as far as I know, still protesting their innocence.”

“Where were the murders?”

“The first was in Leeds in 2007, the next in Newcastle in 2009, and the other one in Manchester in 2012.”

“And you’ve got details from each?”

“Yes, once I’d identified them, I searched through all the newspaper reports, pulled out all the relevant info from them, and everything else I could find online. Then I hit the road to visit the hotels.”

“You didn’t try the Old Nottingham approach, did you?”

“No, I decided that would be too risky. The Michaels of this world only work in small hotels and each of the hotels in the three cases I was following up was more like the Bristol View than the Old Nottingham.”

“But you got what you were after.”

“Oh yes, although the receptionist in Manchester was so difficult to start with that I really thought she wasn’t going to play ball. In fact, I thought she’d made the connection between the dates I was giving her and the murder that occurred at that time. But I then realised that difficult was her default position. I won her over by switching on the tears, quivering my chin, the lot. I was proud of myself; I reckon I’ve inherited Henry’s acting talents.”

“That’s my girl. What was your spin?”

“I told them I was trying to trace my sister Abigail, that she was the rebel in the family, five years older than me, who’d disappeared in 2005. I said that a rich relative had died leaving the bulk of her fortune to the two of us, and that it seemed only fair to try to trace her. I then got a bit weepy again and said that I’d dreamed of finding her after all these years, that we’d been so close as kids even though she was much older than me. Sniffle, sniffle, snuffle. I said that we, the family, had used a private detective to try to trace her and he’d discovered that my sister had been using three pseudonyms over the years — Amelia Taverner, Sharon Peterson and Catherine Doughthey — and that she’d moved around the country quite a bit. I realised, of course, that if our killer has used other names, I might get nothing, but I thought it worth the risk. I told each of the receptionists that my sister often stayed in hotels and posed as an antiques dealer.”

“Antiques dealer?”

“Yes. She had to do something and so I had her going to antiques fairs which happened to coincide with the dates of the murders. I was trusting my luck that the receptionists I was talking to wouldn’t remember whether there were antiques fairs on those dates or not. So, for the Manchester case, I told the receptionist that my sister was known to have been living somewhere outside Manchester in 2012 and that she had stayed in a hotel or hotels in the city centre in August of that year when there was a big antiques fair on. The murder was on the fourteenth of August.”

“Did she swallow that?”

“After the tears, yes. In fact, she told me she remembered the fair. But, as I said, I’ve no idea whether there was really one at that time or not.”

Sally laughed. “Funny what people remember when they’re trying to help. It shows you how unreliable eyewitnesses can be.”

“Yes, after her initial resistance, she became my new best friend; couldn’t help enough. I was really stretching out the story by the time I left, promising to let her know if I found my sister. Anyway, what I discovered was that an Amelia Taverner stayed at the hotel on the fourteenth of August 2012, the night a young Scottish woman who had been working as a prostitute in Manchester for the previous six months was murdered. A man called Timothy Norton Backhouse, who had been also staying in the hotel that night, was quickly arrested on suspicion of killing her and subsequently tried and found guilty. Of course, all the receptionist told me was Amelia’s name; fortunately she didn’t make the connection about the date.”

“Wow! That’s fantastic! What about the others?”

“The Newcastle murder, which was in June 2009, involved a Polish prostitute who’d come to the UK from Holland three months previously. I’ve just come from the hotel there. I was passed on to the manager once I’d spun my tale, which worried me a bit — I thought the shutters might come down — but he seemed keen to impress me so it was easy enough. In fact, he was so helpful that I thought for a moment he was going to show me the computer screen with the guest list, but he backed off. Anyway, for that case, Catherine Doughthey’s name was there for the night of the murder, and the fall guy was a Gregory Jonah Walters.”

“Better and better,” enthused Sally. “You know, that name rings a bell. Let me think; in 2009 I was working in the Forefront Forensics lab here in Knutsford. We did cases from all over the country; perhaps we did that one. I’ll have to look back at my casebook; I kept a note of all the major cases I was involved in for when I write my memoirs, you know.”

“Bound to be a bestseller,” laughed Jennifer.

“You bet, as long as there’s plenty of blood and gore, and I can wax eloquently for hours on that. So, what was the third case? Two thousand and seven, did you say?”

“Yes, in Leeds. I used the same approach and it worked a treat. If anyone with the name Abigail Cotton ever registers as a guest in any of those hotels, they’ll be straight on the phone to me, except they won’t get through ‘cause I gave them a fake number.”

“Which name was used there, in Leeds? Amelia Taverner or Catherine Doughthey?”

“Amelia Taverner. It looks as if our killer alternates the name she uses. Amelia Taverner in Leeds 2007, Manchester 2012 and Nottingham 2014, and Catherine Doughthey in Newcastle 2009 and Bristol 2013.”

“That’s brilliant, Jennifer. Actually, there’s an interesting trend there. Have you noticed the time between the murders is getting shorter? There have now been three in three years. Our killer is getting more ambitious.”

“Yes, if in fact they are all connected.”

“You’re doubting it?”

“Well, suppose there are two women out there called Amelia Taverner and Catherine Doughthey who have nothing to do with each other and who happen to travel the country for whatever reason. One happens to have stayed in three hotels in the past seven years where there happen to have been murders of local prostitutes on the same nights—”

“By men who happen to have also been staying in the hotels,” interrupted Sally. “Come on, Jennifer, don’t try and talk yourself out of the positive aspects of what you’ve found. For there to be no connection between the cases and these two women would involve ridiculous coincidences.”

“Maybe, but they might also have stayed in a hundred other hotels where there were no incidents. If that were the case and the whole thing is no more than a series of coincidences, then it would completely pull the rug out from under my investigation and wreck the chances of proving Henry is innocent.”

“You can’t get cold feet now, Jennifer. What does Charles Keithley say about it?”

“He wants to go to the CPS with it. But I’ve told him that we don’t have enough, that we’ve got to get more. We don’t want to screw up the chances of getting Henry’s case dropped. Charles has somehow arranged to get me a visit to see Henry late this afternoon. Normally it takes a couple of weeks, but he’s managed to swing it. I’m going to tell Henry everything I’ve found out and try to persuade him to tell Charles to hang fire.”

“What else are you going to do? Check back before 2007?”

“I went back as far as 2005. I could go farther, but if we are dealing with a serial killer, she has to have started sometime. Oh, God, I’ve just had a thought.”

“What?”

“Well, I’ve been concentrating on the murders of prostitutes, that was the key to my searches. Suppose she’s been murdering other women who aren’t prostitutes?”

“It’s possible, but if there were too many cases happening around the country that were apparently clear cut, each with an obvious culprit based on amazing forensics, and yet with culprits protesting their innocence, someone would notice and start making connections like you have, but for different reasons.”

“I hope you’re right, but it underscores what I’ve got to do next, which isn’t going farther back in time.”

“So, what is it?”

“I’m going to visit Amelia Taverner and Catherine Doughthey.”

“What! That could be extremely dangerous if one or both of them is behind these cases.”

Jennifer’s laugh betrayed her nervousness. “Don’t worry, I can look after myself. The police give you good personal defence training. I went way beyond the required basic stuff; I took every course there was and passed. I left a good number of bruises behind me, you know, although I picked up a few too. Anyway, I’ll spin a tale to them, tell them I’m lost, looking for someone.”

“I’m not sure about this, Jennifer. I don’t think you should go on your own. Ced could go with you. He’s strong and knows a lot about self-defence. He’s put it to the test too.”

“Really?”

“Long story. But I know he’d be more than willing to go with you.”

“Thanks, Sally, but I think it would be less threatening if I were to arrive on my own. I’ll perhaps dress down; look a bit old-fashioned. That should relax them.”

“OK, but at least tell me when you’re going so when you disappear, I can tell the police where to look for your body.”

“Very reassuring,” laughed Jennifer.

She took a deep breath. “Let me think. It’s Friday today and I’m seeing Henry later. I could go over the weekend, but it would probably be better to wait until Monday, do a bit more searching online. Turning up on a weekday will give me a broader range of options for a story.”