The Perfect Crime (28 page)
Authors: Roger Forsdyke
Groat. Two fingered typist. In spite of acknowledging his inferior skill – as compared with the ladies of the typing pool – and the concomitant reduction in efficiency, he preferred to type his own reports. He needed to see what he had already written and be able to recap before moving forward. Soon the office echoed to his stabbing fingers laboriously attacking the keys. The staccato clack clack of the type bars hitting the ribbon against paper onto the platen, the thump of the shift key, the more muted knock of the space bar, the ting of the bell as he reached the end of each line, the rattle of the return lever engaging with the pawl on the roller and the whizz of the carriage as it returned to the beginning of the next.
It took him over four hours with the occasional telephone interruption and a short break for lunch.
He phoned Mrs Isaacs. “Would you let the DAC know that the final report is done and I will be putting it in the internal mail this afternoon?”
“Actually, he wants to see you. You might as well bring it with you.”
Christ
,
what
now
?
And so it was that once again, shortly before sixteen hundred hours, Groat waited in the presence of the redoubtable Mrs Isaacs.
The DAC read Groat’s report carefully, then, putting the pages together, tapped them on the desk top and placed them in his top right hand drawer.
He said, “I am going to speak to you man to man. Nothing that is said here and now, must ever be repeated outside these four walls. Do I make myself absolutely crystal?”
Oh
yes
,
absolutely
. Groat had been in this sort of situation before. His bowels threatened to act in a manner that he could not risk.
“Absolutely, sir.”
“You need to realise that I know exactly what has gone on here.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Because of that young woman, many people nearly had their fingers burned, so to speak.”
“Yes sir.”
“Including me,” he looked at Groat. His eyes drilled straight through him and then beyond, “and you.”
Groat looked down, nodded, “Yes sir.”
“But, because of your quick thinking and with some not inconsiderable string pulling on my part, we have averted a potential catastrophe for all involved.”
“Yes, sir.”
Apart
from
poor
Olivia
.
His heart still tugged painfully whenever he thought of her. He had a bad conscience about what the whole situation, but as he had perversely blamed her in the matter of him falling for her, he now blamed himself for the blackmail attempt. He reasoned that she would not have been able to make her plan work, were it not for him being a police officer. He was still unreasoningly blind to the reality of the situation.
“We still have one more hurdle.”
“Sir?”
“What if she talks?”
Groat could not prevent a small portion of his disquiet clouding his expression. What was the man about to propose? Have her bumped off while she was in prison? Developments really were getting out of hand. Waters way too murky and deep.
“What do you mean, sir?”
“Well, I don’t suppose it will matter much what she says to the screws, or the other inmates. It’s a well-known fact the prisons are full of innocent people. What I mean is, what if she manages to bend the ear of some journalist, or we get some random busybody researching old case files or something.”
“Sir?”
“We need a contingency plan for the possibility that at some time in the future she may attempt to sell her story to the papers, write a book or something.”
“What were you thinking of?”
“Well, we could consider all sorts, but I think the best approach would be to bury it completely. No evidence, no records, no witnesses. Nothing.”
Groat grimaced. “How could we achieve that sir? It’s blackmail so it’s got to go to the big house. Even if we managed to lose all the documentary evidence, the file and all the papers, there will still be the court records of the case – everything that is said during the trial – and we can’t get at them.”
“All right, set those concerns to one side for a moment. If we could bury it, erase it, rewind time, however you want to put it, I think you would agree that it would be better if it had never happened, any of it?”
Groat heaved a tortured sigh.
More
than
you’ll
ever
know
. “Yes sir, of course.”
“So let’s go through it a step at a time. We have the trial. You’re right, it’s blackmail, so the victims will be known simply as A, B; X, Y or whatever. So that’s all that will be on the court’s record of evidence. We can deal with all the police documentation after the trial. I realise we can’t lose it completely. That in itself would raise suspicions. But I’m sure that after the trial you can edit or redact it, sanitise it to the point that in future no one can be identified. The victims themselves won’t need any persuading to stay anonymous, shtum. We need to be in a position where a journalist, or anyone else researching the case, eventually comes up against a dead end. The crime took place, there was a trial, and the perpetrator was sentenced, but there’s no way of identifying any of the victims. OK?” He paused, “Your team, what do they know?”
“Apart from Ted, er, D/S Pearson that is, sir, nothing. They were assigned to keep obs on the drop sites and make the pickups. I suppose there’s an outside chance they might have recognised one of the victims, but I doubt it somehow. I’d be surprised if many of them vote, let alone go to church. They wouldn’t even recognise their own senior officers, half of them.”
The DAC coughed. Somehow managing to combine delicacy with ostentation – and at the same time raised his eyebrows. “And D/S Pearson?”
“Sound as a pound, sir. Loyal to the last.”
“Good. Any bases not covered?”
“What about the victims appearing in court?” Groat worried, “The press, the public gallery and all that.”
“Well for a start we will only need one, maybe two complainants in any event. I’m sure that if we put it to the defence how much it would undoubtedly add to the inevitable prison sentence, if they insist on making our witnesses endure the ordeal of having to appear in person… After all the stress and worry that the defendant has already put them through…” He smiled for the first time. “If they kick up too much about it, we can always arrange for the victims to appear behind a screen or something. Anything else?”
“The interviewing officers.”
“I’ll deal with them.”
Groat raised an eyebrow ever so slightly.
Nothing
surprises
me
any
more
.
“So we can do it.”
Groat smiled, “Sir – we can only give it our best shot.”
“One last thing. I suppose…” He paused, “No, not suppose; that would be churlish. I owe you. We all owe you a debt of gratitude, Chief Inspector.”
Groat smiled, “Thank you sir.”
The DAC subjected him to that look again. “That does not mean you can come on my ear for favours every two minutes.”
No
,
but
it
does
mean
I’ve
got
a
‘
get
out
of
jail
free’
card
to
play
,
if
I
ever
need
one
.
“Yes sir, thank you.”
“Don’t mention it. And NEVER mention it. I mean that. Never even a hint to anyone. Ever.”
He paused to let it properly permeate.
“Ever. Understood?”
Commander Morrison and his team soldiered on with their enquiries, although already he felt as though his premonition was going to be fulfilled.
The only vehicle known to have been used by the Panther was the stolen Morris 1300, TTV 454H, so the team concentrated on winkling out every last scrap of evidence from it that they could. Its chassis and engine number revealed it to be FDH 878H, stolen from a car park behind a block of flats on Wigmore Farm Estate, West Bromwich. This was close to the M5 and only a few miles from Dudley. The vehicle was stripped down to the last nut, bolt and washer. The forensic scientists vacuumed up every fibre, hair and speck of dust. They even dusted the tyres for fingerprints, but it yielded no clues. The contents were a different matter, however. There was a receipt for the trousers in the vehicle and they were found to have been bought at the C&A store in Leeds on 20th November 1974, only nine days after the murder of Sidney Grayland and paid for, in all likelihood, with some of the £861 cash from the Langley post office. The knickers were likewise followed up and traced to the manufacturers who had sold three hundred dozen pairs to two wholesalers, one in Cardiff – which the team ruled out – and one in Smethwick, virtually right next door to Dudley. The wholesalers were unable to provide precise details of who they had supplied, so that line of enquiry petered out. The number plates used by the Panther to disguise the vehicle, had been made up using a kit made in Sheffield, but the manufacturers had supplied over six hundred retailers, so it was impossible to trace one specific set. The original number plates, however were to prove more interesting and dedicated, painstaking enquiries were to establish a potentially valuable link.
Six months before Lesley’s body was found, an innocuous event at Peacocks Hay, at the southern end of Bathpool Park, now assumed some significance. Around five thirty in the morning of 24th September, Sergeant Ernest Payne was on routine patrol with one of his constables, when they found a dark blue Ford Escort van, parked three hundred yards down a farm track. As they approached they heard a scuffling, rustling noise, but saw no one and thought it was most likely to be the cattle in the adjoining field. Sergeant Payne was of the opinion that the van was kitted out for camping. There was a yellow foam rubber mattress, a camping kettle, saucepans, two grey blankets, a rubber torch, a tartan holdall, a bottle of milk and some canned food. They checked, but it had not been reported stolen. The officers were sufficiently suspicious enough to let down the two rear tyres and keep checking the vehicle every so often. Over the next days, the contents were gradually removed. It was later reported to them that a small, dark haired man had been snooping around the nearby hillocks and spinneys after parking a dark green 1300 saloon.
Enquiries later showed that the registration plates, NCH 622K were false and the correct registration was in fact SOA 902H, stolen from the drive of a butcher’s home in Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham on the night of the first of December 1972.
Morrison’s team went further and found that the registration numbers on the false plates fitted to each of these vehicles, belonged to doppelgangers in Nottingham. The genuine NCH 622K was usually parked on Upper Street, and the real TTV 454H, the twin to the one found in Dudley, was left regularly on Cottage Terrace car park, not far away. A team of twenty detectives descended on the area, but house to house and other enquiries proved fruitless. The link, if there was one, apart from the prowling Panther, was never resolved.
In spite of two police searches of Bathpool Park, local children were still finding and handing in items of interest. A Kidsgrove schoolgirl riding her bike in the park found a stopwatch. Some lads playing there found two vacuum flasks (which they had emptied of their chicken soup contents) a black plastic raincoat and two sugar buns in a polythene bag. The buns had been quite soft when they’d squeezed them. Later another schoolboy had found a tangle of cassette tape and a tape recorder trampled into a muddy path through nearby woods. The tape was painstakingly treated to remove creases and scratches and wound into a new cassette case. When played, it proved to be another version of Lesley’s Kidsgrove ransom message.
Yet another girl told the police she’d ‘found some stuff’. She led them to a spot where they recovered a pair of Zeiss binoculars, a dark coloured anorak, a new hammer and tartan holdall which had split open. She had first seen them whilst out riding, two days after Ron Whittle’s abortive attempt to deliver the ransom. They were lying in long grass, on a bank close to the main shaft entrance. The serial number of the binoculars was traced to a dealer in Manchester. He had sold them for £88.54 on the twenty seventh of October 1972, to a man who had completed the guarantee card in the name of Turner, giving an address on Water Lane, Wilmslow. The address turned out to be a high class furriers, Glynn and Liendhardt. They had no one by the name of Turner at the address, or working for them, but at that time they’d had some plumbing work carried out by a firm of that name. All the plumbers’ employees were traced and interviewed, but seven weeks work by that team of a dozen detectives also led to nothing.
More sightings of TTV 454H rolled in. A lorry driver had seen the car on Castle Mill Road, Dudley, a couple of weeks before Lesley was kidnapped. This was a short distance from the zoo grounds and may have been the Panther on a reconnaissance sortie. The lorry driver described the driver alighting from the car. “He struck me as a man who had military training. He walked quickly and very upright. He was aged about 35 to 40-ish, about 5’6” tall, with a fawn coloured raincoat down to his knees, a pair of heavy shoes and a black and yellow scarf.”
Another sighting came from a taxi driver in Redditch, following which a team of fifty detectives executed a tactical sweep of two sprawling council estates in the new town, questioning more than three thousand residents.
It, too, proved fruitless.
The cause of Bob Booth’s fall from grace was discovered and investigated. His ‘arrest within twenty four hours’ boast, arose from his conviction that the kidnapper cum murderer had to be someone with intimate knowledge of the Bathpool Park underground tunnel workings. Wanting desperately to upstage the insurgents from New Scotland Yard, he wagered everything – including his reputation – on being able to flush out one of the men who had worked on the project. There could not be that many, he reasoned. What he had not realised was that ten years before, at the height of the work to convert the former mine waste tip into a recreation ground, over three thousand men beavered away, many of them itinerant workers, helping to construct the drainage complex. As well as drainage engineers, the police had to trace men who had worked on the electrification of the main railway through the park, and casual labourers who had laid the road through the area. Commander Morrison offered an amnesty to those ‘on the lump’, building workers; cash paid casuals who tendered false names and addresses to evade paying income tax.
As Lesley’s funeral took place in Highley amid a light sprinkling of powdery snow, a police reconstruction took place close to the scene of her demise. David Miller, an actor with the Stoke-on-Trent repertory company, chosen for his similarity in physique, donned kit similar to the Black Panther’s and drove TTV 454H around the park for an hour. The publicity and the playing on local radio of tape recordings of calls made to the Whittles, brought hundreds of phone calls, mainly from women reporting their husbands and boyfriends as suspects. The police were convinced that ninety five percent of the calls were motivated by reasons other than a genuine belief that their loved one was the Black Panther…
The only certainty was that not one brought them any closer to establishing his real identity.
