Need You Dead

37 Friday 22 April

Like everyone in Major Crime, Guy Batchelor was still getting used to his new surroundings. For all the inadequacies of their old HQ in Hollingbury, at least there had been parking in and around the place. Here most of the team had to leave their private cars a good fifteen to twenty minutes’ walk away from the entrance, angering the local residents by taking their parking spaces, to the point where cars were being vandalized. Officers heading home, exhausted after a long shift, were finding they had flat tyres, or worse, keyed paintwork.

One of the perks for Batchelor of his current role was that he was permitted to use an HQ car park.

At a quarter to six in the evening he settled into one of the twenty red chairs arranged around the long, light-coloured table in the narrow conference room on the first floor. The cream walls were bare, apart from a large flat-screen monitor and a round white clock. On one end of the table sat a Polycom telephone conferencing device that looked a bit like a three-legged drone. It had a round, brushed-metal head on a stalk that, voice-activated, would swivel disconcertingly like a robot towards whoever might be speaking.

He’d set up four whiteboards. On one, headed OPERATION BANTAM, were crime-scene photographs of the victim; on the next were postmortem photographs; on the third was an association chart for Lorna Belling, to which was also pinned a police mugshot of her husband, Corin; and on the fourth a street map of the area around her flat, with the building ringed in red.

He suddenly noticed one of his team had stuck on the door the name of the operation, together with an image from the old film Chicken Run. It brought a smile to his face.

In front of him, Guy had placed a mug of coffee, his Policy Book and the notes for the briefing printed out by Roy Grace’s secretary. He ran through them, feeling apprehensive at managing his first ever murder briefing as an SIO, yet confident they were already close to a conclusion. Supremely confident, actually, thanks to the information that had just come in.

Ten minutes later his team was assembled around the table. There were the trusty regulars that Grace favoured, DS Norman Potting, DS Jon Exton, DC Jack Alexander, as well as DC Kevin Hall, the temporary replacement for Tanja Cale who was away on holiday, David Watkinson, the Office Manager, Georgie English, the Crime Scene Manager, Sergeant Lorna Dennison-Wilkins, the POLSA, and Annalise Vineer, the HOLMES indexer. In addition there were two new detective constables, Velvet Wilde, a slim, attractive woman in her late twenties, with close-cropped blonde hair and a distinct Belfast accent, who had recently moved from uniform to CID, and Arnie Crown, a short, wiry American of thirty-six, who had been seconded to Major Crime from the FBI as part of an exchange.

In addition they were also lumbered with the Direct Entry detective inspector, Donald Dull. He looked fittingly named, a quiet, mild-tempered man in his late thirties, in a slightly old-fashioned suit. With his porcine figure he looked like he would have struggled with the ‘beep’ test — the fitness test that officers had to pass every year. But maybe Direct Entries were exempt from this, Guy wondered — especially if they were Cassian Pewe’s pet. Peering into a tablet in front of him, over the top of a pair of half-frames, Dull exuded all the charisma of a back-room accountant. Batchelor sensed he was going to be trouble.

‘This is the first briefing of Operation Bantam, the investigation into the death of Lorna Jane Belling,’ Batchelor read from his notes, and went on to outline the circumstances surrounding her death, and the initial findings of the pathologist. ‘After an assault, causing a head trauma, and a possible attempt at strangulation, resulting in severe bruising round her neck and sufficient oxygen starvation to cause petechial haemorrhages, death appears to have been caused either by electrocution from a hairdryer dropped into the bathtub where she was partially immersed or by head trauma. We are not ruling out suicide at this stage.’

Norman Potting raised a hand, and Batchelor acknowledged him. ‘Yes, Norman?’

Potting’s hair was short, after having his head shaven for a recent undercover operation. Everyone thought this style suited him, and looked a lot better than his usual limp comb-over. It also knocked a good decade off his fifty-five years. Wearing a smart blue suit he’d been given for the same operation and new glasses, he was looking almost cool. His rural West Country accent was the only remnant of his former persona. ‘Guv, is it established it was the same offender who strangled her and put the hairdryer into the bath?’

‘Good question, Norman. No, not at this stage. On the balance of probability it would seem likely, but there were no prints found on the hairdryer nor round her neck, so we can’t be certain.’

‘Unless this lady had a lot of enemies,’ Jon Exton said, with his usual serious intensity, ‘it would be a bit of a stretch to think that one person strangled her and left her for dead, and another person entered the flat and finished her off.’

‘I have some further evidence that has just come in this afternoon,’ Batchelor said. ‘As I mentioned to a number of you earlier, we have a prime suspect, her husband, Corin. There is already considerable evidence linking him to the crime. During the past year Lorna has called the police to report instances of domestic abuse by him. The most recent was on Monday of this week, when she complained he had tried to push dog crap into her mouth. He was angered by the mess the litter of puppies she had bred was making. He was arrested, but she refused to press charges, out of fear I understand, and he was released on Tuesday evening, a day before we believe she was killed.’

‘What a bastard,’ Potting said.

‘His fingerprints were found on a couple of empty beer cans at a flat she had rented in Hove — possibly as a bolthole to get away from the husband.’ Batchelor pointed at the red-circled area on the street map. ‘There were also a number of cigarette butts of the Silk Cut brand he is known to have smoked found at this same address — we’ve established from the victim’s sister that she was a non-smoker. We had these butts and the beer cans sent for fast-track DNA testing and the results have just come back in. His DNA has been found present in saliva around the tops of two cans, as well as on two cigarette butts. During the postmortem, Theobald found semen in her vagina, indicating she had intercourse sometime shortly before her death.’

‘Could it have been after, boss?’ Kevin Hall asked in his friendly but blunt voice.

‘A bit of necrophilia?’ Potting butted in. ‘Dead good sex, eh?’

He looked around, but no one laughed, or even grinned.

‘Thanks, Norman,’ Batchelor said, sharply, then replied to Hall. ‘It’s a possibility — we’ll know more when it has been analysed. At this stage my hypothesis is that once released from custody, the husband went to the flat and killed her. We’re hoping that the DNA from the semen will add strength to this theory. If it is him, there will need to be a review and of course the Independent Police Complaints Commission will become involved, looking into the circumstances of his release. It’s just unfortunate that the husband will never be brought to trial — I think all of you know the circumstances of his death? Detective Superintendent Grace and DS Exton went to his office to talk to him, and he did a runner, which is a fairly good indicator of his guilt.’

‘A good defence brief would get him off, guv,’ Potting said.

‘Oh?’

‘He’d just say he was legless at the time.’

Even Batchelor found himself grinning at this. As the SIO, perhaps he should have considered coming down on him like a ton of bricks. But he knew the old detective was still in a fragile state following the death of his fiancée, Detective Sergeant Bella Moy. And, dammit, when he’d first joined Major Crime, gallows humour had been everyone’s way of coping.

DI Dull raised a hand. ‘Guy, I don’t want to be the party pooper—’

‘But you’re going to be, right?’ Batchelor retorted, interested to see what this new addition to the team had to say.

‘Well, I hope not. I’m just bothered by this bolthole idea.’ Dull tapped a key on his tablet. ‘From what we already know, Lorna Belling had been renting this flat for some time. I’ve done a spreadsheet on rents in the area.’ He began to pass round copies. ‘The rent she has been paying is relatively low for the area, because of the condition of the place, but even so, how could she have afforded it, working from home as a hairdresser? I’ve done another spreadsheet on the charges made by home hairdressers — compared to those in salons.’

‘Huh!’ interjected David Watkinson. ‘You should see my wife’s hairdressing bill. The bloke she goes to could afford to rent Buckingham Palace!’

‘Not as much as our young DC here spends on his barnet!’ Norman Potting said, ruffling Jack Alexander’s hair, much to his irritation.

‘Well,’ Dull said. ‘That’s not exactly my point. If she rented a bolthole to escape from her husband, she’d have done a runner there a long time ago. I think we might be making a dangerous assumption here.’

‘OK, Donald, so what do you think?’ Batchelor said.

‘Maybe it’s not a bolthole but a secret love nest, boss. A year and a half on, something’s gone wrong. They had a lovers’ tiff that turned violent?’

Batchelor nodded. ‘It’s a possibility, but don’t dismiss the DNA evidence from the beer cans and cigarette butts. We need to find out if any neighbours heard arguing or a fight. I will make it one of our lines of enquiry.’

The Crime Scene Manager, Georgie English, raised her arm. ‘Sir, I’ve a number of concerns about what we haven’t been able to find. The first is any laptop belonging to Lorna. We found a Mac charger plugged into a wall in the kitchen of the home she shared with her husband. We know he was a PC user — from the laptop that was recovered from his office. Also, we found her mobile phone on the kitchen table in the house. Isn’t it a bit strange for anyone to leave home without their phone these days? Unless of course they’ve forgotten it?’

‘Good thinking, Georgie,’ Batchelor said. ‘That would explain why there was no mobile phone at the flat.’

‘But not the computer, right?’ Arnie Crown said.

‘If we work on the hypothesis that the husband murdered her,’ Batchelor said, ‘perhaps he took the computer because he was worried it might contain something incriminating him. Maybe she had been keeping a log of his abuse? Does he have anywhere he might have hidden it? The other possibility is he dumped it somewhere. The phone has been sent to Digital Forensics — let’s see what their analysis and interrogation of it brings.’

She nodded, satisfied, and then continued to give the team an overview of the forensic search of the flat to date. ‘There is some evidence to suggest many of the surfaces have been wiped clean, possibly with a disinfectant; there are a number of marks that we have developed for fingerprint assessment; we have taken multiple swabs and we have seized a number of items that will be subject to further forensic examination. I hope we will have finished our work there in the next twenty-four hours.’

Batchelor jotted a reminder in his Investigator’s Notebook to update his Policy File after the briefing, then continued. ‘If we recap, we have a known abusive relationship; we have fingerprint and DNA evidence putting Lorna’s husband, Corin, at her flat; we have the fact that he did a runner when approached by Detective Superintendent Grace; we have the fact that he assaulted Roy when apprehended, and ran on. If we get a positive result back from the lab on the DNA from the semen in Lorna’s vagina, confirming it’s her husband — then things wouldn’t be looking too good for him.’

‘I’d say they’re not looking too good for him right now,’ Arnie Crown said. ‘He’s in a mortuary fridge minus his legs, with his head cracked open like a coconut.’

‘Yep,’ Jack Alexander said. ‘If you think you’re having a bad day, you know what? His is probably worse.’