The Last Straw (44 page)
Authors: Paul Gitsham
Warren looked at Sutton, his blood starting to sing again. “I think we’ve entered the end-game, Tony. Time to bring him in.”
Jones stood around the corner from Tom Spencer’s student flat. He raised the radio to his lips. “How are things your end, Tony?”
Sutton’s voice, coming from the rear of the house, was quiet but clear. “We’re all set, guv. The curtains are still closed, no sign of life.”
“We’re good to go. Ten a.m. on the dot. Don’t let him get near a phone — we don’t want him letting any accomplices know what’s going down.”
Sutton acknowledged, then fell silent. The second hand on Warren’s watch crawled around the clock face, achingly slowly. At thirty seconds to go, he glanced around at the team with him; Gary Hastings would be at his shoulder, whilst two detective sergeants on loan from Welwyn were with Sutton around the back and a specialist forced-entry team were hidden around the corner. Everyone wore stab vests.
Finally, the hand ticked around to ten a.m. Immediately, Warren and Hastings burst forth from behind the white van that they had used for cover. Three long strides and the two men cleared the short garden path and were up the steps in front of the doorway.
Spencer’s flat was a typical shared student house, according to the records held by the university’s housing association. Four rooms, all leased to postgraduate students, with a shared kitchen and lounge. Spencer and his housemates had rented it for three years. The house had a single front door and a rear kitchen door, opening onto a concrete yard just big enough for recycle bins and a rusty barbecue. Spencer had the rear ground-floor bedroom, hence the need for additional officers around the back of the house, in case he bolted.
Jones and Hastings paid only lip-service to the rules of entry, hammering on the front door and ringing the doorbell only once. “Police! Open Up!” Jones hollered through the letter box. Silence.
Jones paused for as long as it took the forced-entry team to make their way up the garden path, before shouting again, “Police, stand aside from the front door.” This was punctuated by a loud crunch as the two-man battering ram wielded by the forced-entry team made short work of the flimsy wooden door and cheap, student-landlord supplied locks.
Warren jumped quickly over the threshold, heading down the narrow hallway; behind him he heard the other members of the team starting to pound their way up the stairs to check out the upstairs bedrooms and communal bathroom. Everybody shouted the same thing over and over again: “This is the police. Stay where you are!”
The kitchen was untidy but empty and the open door to the lounge showed it to be similarly unoccupied, allowing Warren to keep on heading towards his goal, Spencer’s back bedroom. The door was closed. A cheap laminate affair with a thick coating of cream emulsion, it had a cheap-looking handle with a simple Yale lock. Warren banged once on the door, shouting again “Police, open up.”
No response.
No need for the battering-ram this time, Warren judged, and simply put his shoulder to the door. It gave way almost too easily, and Warren had to grab the door-frame to stop himself falling through.
The room was empty.
* * *
Tony Sutton came down the steps at the front of the house. His tread was heavy and Warren didn’t need to turn around to see that the energy that had filled him barely twenty minutes ago was gone. Warren closed his phone and glanced at Sutton.
“Flat’s completely empty. It looks as though Spencer is the only person living here — the rest of the rooms have been cleaned out. I guess it’s the end of term and the new tenants haven’t moved in yet.”
“We’ll see what we can find and return to the station.”
“Understood, guv…” A pause. “You know it’s not your fault, right? We didn’t have enough to charge him with last night. Crawley’s death was officially still a suicide and Spencer’s alibi was still, in theory, water-tight. All the evidence against it was circumstantial until that fibre matched. Arresting him would have been a waste of time.”
Warren sighed. “Let’s just hope the powers that be see it your way, Tony, because if we don’t catch him soon, they’re going to be looking for a scapegoat.”
* * *
Lunch back at the station was a subdued affair. It looked as if Spencer had gone on the run. Unfortunately, there were no witnesses to Tom Spencer’s comings and goings for the previous couple of days. However, a search of the house had proved interesting and useful. The absence of any sort of bag or rucksack in his room, coupled with a lack of any toiletries in the bathroom, suggested he had packed and left. Rather more worryingly, a search of all the drawers in his room had failed to unearth a passport. A recent photo pinned to his noticeboard of him standing next to a poster at a San Diego conference suggested that he did own one. Warren put out a ports and airports alert for him, in case he decided to skip overseas.
The contents of the top shelf in his wardrobe proved to be more illuminating. The large tubs of protein powders confirmed Spencer’s obsessive interest in building muscle-mass. A number of unlabelled pills had been sent off for pharmacological analysis; Warren fully expected them to be identified as anabolic steroids.
With a nationwide manhunt approved, Warren was able to call upon a lot more resources, including those who specialised in such searches. And he soon realised that he would need them. Spencer didn’t own a car, so number-plate recognition was out of the question. Assuming that he had escaped the immediate area, that left the trains, buses or, in the worst-case-scenario, a lift from a friend.
A trawl of the CCTV at the nearest local railway stations had proved fruitless, as had direct questioning of the rail staff. Unfortunately, Middlesbury was part of a well-connected public transport network. An hour-long bus journey could get him to any one of a dozen small, local railway stations and from there the national rail network. Scanning the CCTV footage at each station was technically possible, but would take too long to do much more than retrace his steps. Unfortunately, chasing down a domestic murderer, who was unlikely to pose a significant threat to the public, was well down the priority list when compared to the need to keep tabs on any would-be jihadists on MI5’s watch list.
The decision was instead made to focus on his past life. Would he flee to somewhere that he felt safe, or would he be wise enough to keep away from known associates and try to remain anonymous? Hoping that he sought the familiar, rather than the unknown, the team sifted through what information they had on the fugitive’s past. Local police forces were put on alert in Greater Manchester and Sheffield in case Spencer returned home or decided to seek refuge at his former university.
Now, it just became a waiting game.
* * *
Warren sat in his office, brooding. It seemed almost certain that Spencer had committed the murder and now he was missing. There was little Warren and the team could do but wait and hope to hear from the teams searching for him. Nevertheless, there were still things that didn’t add up.
The web of mobile phone messages had clearly hinted at a conspiracy involving at least four people. Buried in a drawer full of random junk in his room was the box that Spencer’s iPhone had come in, which contained a piece of paper with the phone’s IMEI number written on it. This confirmed Spencer as Anonymous Phone User Number Two. With Crawley’s Nokia confirmed as Phone Number Three, that left only phones numbers one and four to link to individuals. Who was the mysterious young woman, the apparent owner of Phone Number One, who it seemed had seduced Severino and stolen his swipe card and clothes? And what about the owner of Phone Number Four? What was their role in the sordid affair?
As Warren mulled over the unanswered questions, hoping to come up with a new approach, his phone rang. Glancing at the caller ID, he was glad to see that it wasn’t from Superintendent Grayson; he wasn’t looking forward to that particular conversation.
“Callum Foster, Image Analysis here. I’ve got some preliminary news on the nightclub footage you sent us from the Tunbridge case.”
Warren grabbed a pen quickly, “That’s great, Callum, thanks for the quick turn-around.” Seventy-Two hours was a frustratingly long time to wait in a fast-moving case, but a surprisingly quick response from the overworked and undermanned Image Analysis department. Besides which, Warren had been taught long ago that making the effort to be polite and sounding grateful for any assistance given to you by the people whose services you relied on was rarely effort wasted. You never knew when you might need to ask them for a favour.
“Well, don’t thank me just yet. We’ve barely started looking at the feeds from the cameras in the club and have only just located her. It seems that he was doing all of the buying — she doesn’t go to the bar once. No full facial shots there, I’m afraid.”
“Oh, well, I’ll take whatever you’ve got so far, Callum” Warren did his best to hide his disappointment.
“I’ve just sent you an email of some enhanced still images taken from the video footage on the door. I think you might just find them useful for identification purposes. The pictures are blurry, but they are the best we can do, I’m afraid. See what you think.”
At that moment, a new mail icon popped up on Warren’s desktop computer. Double-clicking, he saw that it contained several JPEG images. Opening the first image revealed it to be a close-up of the woman’s left ear. Despite the poor quality of the hugely amplified image, Warren could clearly make out the shape of her earring. A small metal trinket, in the shape of a teddy-bear. He made a quick note to have any future suspects’ houses searched for just such a trinket. Two more images showed the same picture with different enhancements, adding more detail.
The next images were a close-up of her left hand. Her little finger had a gold sovereign ring on it, her ring finger was unadorned, whilst her middle finger appeared to have a simple band with a small stone embedded in it. Warren dutifully added these to his note. The presence of any one of these items of jewellery would mean nothing in court, but the presence of all three, although circumstantial, might be worth admitting as evidence.
“The final image is a beauty, in more ways than one. We discovered it quite by accident when we were enhancing her ring finger. Thought it was a shadow at first, but then we took a closer look.”
Warren opened the image, then gasped loudly, his heart rate leaping.
“Er, you OK, guv?” The voice on the end of the phone sounded slightly worried.
Somehow finding his voice, Warren reassured him that he was fine. Hanging up the phone, he continued to stare at the image. He now knew exactly who the mysterious woman was, but it didn’t seem possible. Everything had just got even more complicated.
* * *
Warren strode into the main office, heading for Tony Sutton’s workspace. On his way he called Karen Hardwick over to join them. Gary Hastings was nowhere to be seen. With a flourish he laid out the enhanced nightclub pictures, still warm from the laser printer, on the only clear space on Sutton’s desk.
“I know who the mysterious young woman is that seduced Severino.”
The two officers eagerly pored over the photos, their expressions turning from excitement, to recognition, then confusion. Sutton spoke up first.
“Well, that doesn’t make any sense.”
Hardwick said nothing at first, but her expression spoke volumes. She too was at a loss to explain the woman’s identity.
“Are we sure it’s her? It could just be a coincidence.” She didn’t sound convinced.
“That’s what I’m about to go and find out. In the meantime, I want you guys to try and come up with an explanation.”
With that, Jones turned on his heel and left the two officers standing at Sutton’s desk staring at each other. Sutton broke the silence first.
“Any suggestions, DC Hardwick, would be gratefully received, right about now.”
Karen managed a tight smile.
“I’m just a rookie, DI Sutton. I defer to your wisdom.”
“Yeah, I was afraid of that.”
Warren parked in the same spot as before, in the street adjacent to the White Bear. It was a little later in the day than his Tuesday visit and the pub doors were unlocked. Walking in, Warren noted the familiar smell of cigarette smoke. The room was empty, with nobody at either till.
Behind the bar, an open doorway led through to the rear of the building; cigarette smoke drifted over the threshold. Warren could hear muffled voices and what sounded like cardboard boxes being moved around.
“Hello, anybody in?” Warren called.
“Yeah, ’ang on. Hold your bleedin’ horses,” the wheezy voice of Larry Stribling replied loudly.
Hardly a textbook example of good customer service, Warren mused as he waited. A few seconds later, the landlord arrived, concealed from view by the three cardboard boxes of McCoys crisps he carried.
“Oh, it’s you again,” Stribling greeted him, unenthusiastically. Warren remembered the smouldering bar towel from his last visit and wondered if it had caught fire in the end; that would probably account for his lukewarm reception today.
“Good afternoon, Mr Stribling,” Warren proclaimed, forcing a wide smile. “I was wondering if I could ask you and your family a few more questions. It shouldn’t take too long.”
Stribling opened his mouth to say something, then looked around the empty bar and let the lie die on his lips. He clearly wasn’t too busy to help.
“Kids are out the back.” He turned and yelled through the open doorway. “Kel, Dazza, get down here. That detective’s back, wants to ask some more questions.”
It took a further two more attempts, before the two teenagers finally appeared. Either Dazza had bought a multi-pack of
same shit, different day
T-shirts or he was attempting to reduce his carbon footprint by wearing clothes for several days at a time. A quick whiff of sweaty teenager suggested to Warren it was the latter.
“Do you remember that girl I was asking you about? She came in here a couple of Fridays ago?”
