The Unquiet Grave (28 page)

A boot print found on the shoreline was cast in plaster and found to be a match to the assistant’s boot, but with Ealy employed as a woodsman, the evidence of the cast had to be set aside, especially as no other evidence that Matilda’s body had been dumped from that spot could be found.

At this point, the two-pronged inquiry’s emphasis switched from the woods around Osmaston Lake back to the site of Matilda’s abduction in Mackworth. On the evening of her disappearance, several people who knew Matilda had seen her with Ebony, the family’s black Labrador. Most were respectable neighbours and included an Arthur Barney. Brook wondered if Barney was connected to the general store where Matilda had just started working. He made another note.

To all who encountered her that night, Matilda had appeared to be her usual cheery self and no one had seen anything suspicious. However, the last sighting of her had been at the top of Radbourne Lane, where the road swept up the hill towards Radbourne Common and then on in the direction of Kirk Langley, nearly three miles away.

Trevor Taylor, a local bachelor who lived alone, had been walking to a pub on nearby Station Road at 8.30p.m., and claimed to have seen Matilda running towards the common. Taylor hadn’t seen the dog.

‘Trevor Taylor,’ said Brook, as though Noble was there to listen. ‘The last person to see the victim is often the killer. What are the stats on that?’

Brook’s instincts were right. Taylor’s testimony was at odds with all the other witness statements gathered by Bannon and Laird. Every other witness who had seen Matilda had testified that they’d encountered her on the estate, with Ebony. And these sightings were all between 8 and 8.30p.m.

In addition, George Copeland testified that Matilda only walked the dog around the estate with its wide avenues and green spaces. The roads leading to the common had no pavements and no lighting and the Copeland children were forbidden from taking the dog along the lane in which Matilda had been spotted, especially in poor light.

To Brook it wasn’t a surprise that Trevor Taylor became an immediate suspect. Even in today’s enlightened times the unmarried loner is a red flag to officers hunting a sexual predator. In 1965, alarm bells would have been sounding long and hard in the heads of experienced detectives.

Trevor Taylor was subsequently arrested, interviewed under caution and forced to surrender his clothes from that evening for tests, as well as having his house searched. However, nothing to connect him to Matilda was ever found and eventually the police were forced to release him without charge.

But it didn’t end there. Taylor was formally interviewed about Matilda Copeland’s disappearance on three other occasions but, each time, experienced officers had been unable to punch any holes in his testimony. He insisted Matilda had been running up to the common that night. He’d recognised her, even in the failing light, by the way she moved and had checked his watch seconds after the sighting.

Brook ploughed on through the next few pages, providing painstaking background on Trevor Taylor. There were original documents from 1965, in addition to in-depth biographical reports compiled by a zealous Copeland on his first review of the case in 1977.

Taylor, a twenty-nine-year-old hospital porter at the time of Matilda’s death, was an unremarkable man. He wasn’t highly educated and had left school at fifteen to work in various menial jobs before joining the NHS as a porter in 1956, a job he kept until his death.

Taylor frequented pubs in the Mackworth area seven nights a week. This was nothing unusual in the fifties and sixties. Pubs were in their heyday as there was little in the way of home entertainment to keep people, particularly men, in the home. In addition, the cost of heating drove many to seek out the warmth of the tavern and it was Taylor’s habit to walk to the pub at the same time every night, drink four pints of beer then return to his modest house in Mackworth on foot.

Bannon and Laird could find no evidence that Taylor indulged in any deviant behaviour; certainly he had no criminal record. And people who knew him said that he was quiet, kept himself to himself and was never drunk or aggressive when socialising.

Brook flipped back to the front of the file. Taylor had died in early 1978 at the age of forty-two. According to Clive Copeland’s notes and a copy of the autopsy and inquest findings, Trevor Taylor had either fallen or jumped from a railway bridge in Derby, as a train approached. His body was mangled almost beyond recognition and his elderly mother was unable to recognise him. The railway bridge from which Taylor had fallen, or jumped, was on London Road, close to the hospital where he worked.

Even though suicide was indicated, an open verdict had been returned because 42-year-old Taylor had not left a note and medical reports and the autopsy had revealed nothing that might have led Taylor to take his life. He had no record of depression and no terminal diseases to push him to take the easy way out.

That didn’t, of course, mean that Taylor couldn’t have committed suicide for some other compelling reason; guilt maybe, especially if Copeland’s review of the case had brought back memories of the night of Matilda’s disappearance and subsequent murder.

Finally, Brook found the information he’d been looking for – a list of all the cars owned by friends, neighbours and businesses on the Mackworth Estate at the time of the abduction. There weren’t many. Car ownership in 1965 was still the preserve of the few.

Brook looked down the short list. Trevor Taylor didn’t own a car, though Bannon and Laird had been careful to note that his mother, who lived nearby, owned a ten-year-old Ford Zephyr Zodiac, which had sat undisturbed in the garage after the death of Taylor’s father. They’d also made a note that when tried, the car had started first time. Brook looked either side of the report but couldn’t find any notes on, or statements by, Trevor Taylor’s mother. Odd.

Five other households on the estate were listed as car owners. At the bottom of the list was the name Derek Barney who had owned a Morris J-type delivery van. Brook flicked back through the file. Barney was indeed the owner of Barney’s General Store where Matilda had just started to work. He was also the father of Arthur Barney, one of the eyewitnesses who saw Matilda on the night of her disappearance, walking her dog.

Brook underlined the name in his notebook. The Barneys lived close by, had their own transport and knew Copeland’s sister well enough to approach her without setting off alarm bells. Brook rocked back on his chair, certain that he wouldn’t be thinking anything that Bannon, Laird and subsequently Copeland hadn’t considered before him.

‘Plenty of suspects here, Clive,’ muttered Brook, flicking through background reports on Derek and Arthur Barney. Derek Barney had been fifty-two years of age in 1965, a widower with two grown sons, Arthur and Winston, aged nineteen and seventeen respectively. Both sons worked in the family business and both were old enough to be boyfriend material, although there was no mention of Matilda and boyfriends anywhere in the file. For an attractive sixteen-year-old girl who was no longer a virgin, this seemed another odd omission to Brook.

He ran a finger down the next report. At least Bannon and Laird had asked the right questions. According to statements given by Derek Barney, Arthur, the eldest son, drove the van on a daily basis, making deliveries to customers and collecting stock from various outlets. Also, younger son Winston was taking lessons and was capable of driving the van if necessary.

Brook alighted upon a photograph of the van and frowned. It was covered in a livery for Barney’s General Store. Would any of the Barneys seriously consider abducting, murdering and disposing of Matilda Copeland using such a distinctive van? Even assuming one or all of them had a motive, it seemed unlikely.

Starting to tire, Brook turned a page. Derek Barney had died in 1985 and eldest son Arthur had followed in 2007. From the lack of further notation, Brook assumed both had died natural deaths. However, the file hadn’t been updated since 2008: at least the official file hadn’t. Brook had no doubt that Copeland, obsessed with finding his sister’s killer, wouldn’t just walk away from CID, shrugging his shoulders. Regulations or not, Copeland would certainly have made copies of all the material in the Derby Division files for use at home.

Brook had been in the same boat when he’d made the move from London; before his transfer to the East Midlands he had taken photocopies of all the Reaper documents held by the Met. There were some cases that detectives couldn’t let go.

Brook looked sideways at the remaining pile of documents – he was only halfway through. He pushed back his chair and went to stretch his legs in the car park, glancing enviously at a pair of WPCs sucking joyfully on their cigarettes.

Scott Wheeler woke with a violent shudder, banging his head for the umpteenth time on the wooden roof of his tomb. He screamed and nursed his forehead, feeling delicately around the days-old swelling from that first blow on the night of Chelsea’s party. Gradually the pain subsided and it took a moment to remember where he was but the awful realisation flooded in before the back of his head had come to rest on the damp plastic. The sunny light of his bedroom remained in his dreams; he was back in his damp, dark prison.

All was dark. All was quiet. It was night outside because the faint glow of daylight from the air pipe was gone. With a surge of panic Scott wondered if the pipe had been pulled up and he slithered on his back across to the reassuring flow of cold air. His breathing slowed in immediate relief. He could see stars. The universe was still there, though strangely it had decided that it could continue without Scott Wheeler.

How many days? Six? Seven? And how much longer would he have to be here? The passage of time brought a pinprick of a tear to Scott’s eye but he brushed it away.
No more crying. Got to stay strong
.

To forget the ebbing of his life, Scott listened for the sound of anything other than the now-familiar trickle of soil dropping on to him through the cracks in the planks where the heavy plastic sheeting was holed. Nothing in the world at the other end of his air pipe stirred. Nothing suggested the noise of a search.
They must think I’m dead
.

A few days ago he’d heard, or imagined he’d heard, voices somewhere in the distance, somewhere above ground, shouting to each other. Shouting for him? The more he thought about it later the more he heard his name. People were looking for him. He was important. People wanted him back in their lives. Scott Wheeler mattered. He’d shouted back with all the strength he could muster, even risking pushing against the shaky wooden boards, but many hours later, when night had fallen and the voices had gone, Scott had sunk back on to the damp plastic, distraught and terrified that the soil he’d dislodged would engulf him.

After that day, he could fight no more. Without fail, every time he’d pushed and hammered his fists and feet against the wood, more soil had fallen, sometimes into his mouth, sometimes into his eyes, forcing him to sit up and bang his head again, freeing up more dirt to drop and fill his dwindling space.

After a long time screaming, hammering and kicking after he first woke in the tomb, he was defeated. There was no way around it. He was trapped. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t sit up. He couldn’t go to the toilet. He couldn’t wash. He couldn’t even turn over without dislodging more soil. All he could do was lie on his back in almost perpetual night and exist, ignoring the stomach cramps, the pain from his spreading rashes, the stench of his waste soaking his clothes and steeping his once-soft skin in filth. He’d tried to pass the time rubbing his limbs to keep warm in the cold ground and occasionally even sleeping if he could ignore the smell from his soiled clothing. How long had he been here?

Don’t think about it. Time passing was bad. Stop thinking about time, about anything
.

He took a long slow breath of the cold clean air blowing down the pipe, the most important ally in his fight for life, and it calmed him. Keep still, he’d learned. Be like a robot, turned off for a while. Don’t move. It’s a game and the only way to win was to survive. With little choice, he’d adapted to his situation as far as possible, forced himself to abandon futile attempts to escape and finally cut out movement altogether. Even turning over on to his stomach was an issue, although he was young and supple and could do it at a pinch, at the cost of soil invasion.

But why bother? Stay still. Right. That was his ace. He was young and strong, a good footballer, a cyclist, good on a skateboard. Movement was everything to him. Even with the TV on, his mum complained he could never keep still. The TV. Scott had a surge of yearning.
Don’t think about that. You’re a robot, turned off for a while. Like a Transformer. Keeping still, waiting to show your power
.

Back at his desk, Brook started on the rest of Matilda’s file. The two-pronged investigation into her death seemed to have hit a dead end when there was a sensational development which appeared to unlock the case. Five days after the discovery of Matilda Copeland’s body, Colin Ealy, the estate’s apprentice woodsman, disappeared and was immediately promoted from a person of interest to the inquiry’s prime suspect.

‘Why isn’t this at the front of the folder?’ Brook wondered aloud. He soon found out.

For the next two weeks, in tandem with a nationwide manhunt, Bannon and Laird proceeded to take Colin Ealy’s life apart. His bedroom at his mother’s house in Osmaston, his clothes, his tools and equipment, his workplace – all were methodically searched and all artefacts removed and subjected to detailed analysis, piece by piece, fibre by fibre, undergoing the most rigorous examinations available at the time. Nothing incriminating was found.

Unsurprisingly, Briggs and Ealy had access to a vehicle for their work, an old 1952 Bedford CA Panel Van, supplied by the estate owners. It had been in Ealy’s possession on the night of the abduction and it had already been searched but now it was subjected to lengthy forensic and fingerprint tests.