NOW
Ian knows he shouldn’t pay too much attention to his hunches. Senior investigating officers are supposed to apply the ‘ABC principle’, where the ‘A’ stands for ‘assume nothing’. Besides, his gut feeling, as he knows from experience, is often incorrect. But although it seems more likely the footprint was made by a first responder, he’s still convinced it was made by the murderer. The offending shoe was a unisex trainer, so theoretically it could belong to a man or a woman. If it was a man, though, he has rather small feet. Could they be dealing with a young killer? A child or teenager? Or are they looking at a female murderer?
Ian knows the killer couldn’t possibly be his goddaughter any more than it could be his own daughter. But he should never have said what he said to Ash about the footprint. Seriously, what was he thinking? He’s on his first case as SIO and already he’s making a balls-up of it.
His frustration is compounded by the fact he has several members of his team (far too many, in fact) following up supposed tip-offs they’ve received over the phone in response to the Knolls’ promise of a reward. Nothing useful will come out of all these calls, Ian would bet his boots on it. So far, the information they’ve been given has all turned out to be false and they’ve received God knows how many different descriptions of dodgy-looking individuals lurking in the vicinity of Lower Buryknoll Wood. One woman has denounced her husband and another has suggested they should check out her father-in-law’s alibi. Ian could wring Richard Knoll’s neck. He should be charged with causing wasteful employment of the police.
He’s sitting in his office at the Devon and Cornwall Police Headquarters, in Middlemoor, a suburb of Exeter. It’s a recent, state-of-the-art building with lots of glass windows. He’s looking out of one them as he thinks about his best friend, his goddaughter and his career. In that order. Sighing, he turns back to his computer screen. Before he allowed his mind to roam, he was reading through statements and transcripts relating to the case.
An email lands in his inbox with a ding. The forensic results. Ian opens it straightaway and spends the next few minutes reading through the report. Then he leans back in his swivel chair, locking the fingers of his hands together behind his head, and thinks of Edmond Locard.
According to Locard’s Exchange Principle, the culprit inevitably leaves something at the scene of the crime as well as taking something away from it. Locard was a French criminologist and he came up with this theory a hundred years ago, but police officers still bear it in mind today. Every contact leaves a trace. In the Major Incident Room this morning, Ian reminded his team of that very concept.
Unfortunately, Joshua Knoll’s murderer was either careful not to leave anything at the scene of the crime and on the victim’s body, or most (all?) of what they did leave was washed away in the rain.
But the hair that was left on the victim, the one Lorraine Davies, the Home Office pathologist found on Joshua Knoll’s sternum, has grabbed his attention. Ian asked the lab to extract DNA. It was clutching at straws, if he’s honest. They had nothing else to go on. The hair definitely didn’t belong to the victim. And there’s only a slim chance it belonged to the murderer. After all, the hair could have been transferred to Joshua’s body, especially to that part of his sternum, which his hoodie left exposed, by anyone he came into contact with.Every contact leaves a trace.
Ian studies the report again. The hair had no follicle, which, as Ian knows, makes DNA extraction difficult, although not impossible, and some mitochondrial DNA markers have indeed been successfully extracted from the shaft of the hair. So, they have a partial DNA profile. But no matches in the database.
The microscopic analysis alone, however, has coughed up quite a bit of information. About the hair itself (length, diameter, colour) and about the person whose head it came from (sex, race, approximate age). Ian unclasps his hands and rereads the paragraph in question. The hair is 30.3 cm long; 101 microns in diameter; dark brown, almost black in colour. It belonged to a female, Caucasian, aged between fifteen and twenty-five. Ian closes his eyes. But the info that really stands out and that Ian can’t unsee, even with his eyes squeezed shut, is that the hair came from the head of a blonde. A young blonde who dyed her hair dark brown.
Hearing a voice, Ian snaps his eyes open. DC Ward is standing at the open door to Ian’s office. He always leaves it open, unless he mustn’t be disturbed. ‘Sorry. Miles away. What did you say?’
‘The Spencer-Lyles are here. Sasha and her parents. Both of them. Without a solicitor.’ She raises her eyebrows. ‘Don’t know how you wangled that, but well done, sir.’
He has given up trying to get DC Ward to call him Ian when they’re not in front of a member of the public or a suspect. He’s on first-name terms with every member of his investigative team in private except for DC Ward, which means he can’t very well call her by her first name (Gail) either. So he doesn’t call her anything, not to her face. In his head, he calls her DC Ward.
‘Coming,’ he says. ‘Go on ahead.’
He wangled this interview by using his wife, but he’s not going to admit that to DC Ward. He’s not proud of it. They absolutely have to talk to Sasha Spencer-Lyles (what a mouthful!), who was Joshua Knoll’s girlfriend right up until he died. But Sasha’s parents have been damn uncooperative. Because Sasha’s still only seventeen (she was a year ahead at school, apparently), they need to talk to her in the presence of an appropriate adult. When Joshua died, Sasha was at university, so they had to wait for her to come home. First Mrs Spencer-Lyles claimed her daughter was in no fit state to talk to the police. Then Mr Spencer-Lyles insisted he wanted a ‘lawyer’ present. Ian’s officers insisted how urgent the matter was, but Sasha’s parents wouldn’t budge.
‘I’ve got a good mind to charge them with perverting the course of justice,’ Ian had complained to Jo over breakfast earlier that week.
‘They’re probably just worried that suspicion will fall on their daughter,’ Jo had reasoned. ‘They’re nice people.’
‘How do you know them?’
‘Sasha did maths A level. She’s a bright kid. She was in my class. I still see Sandra Spencer-Lyles at my Zumba class.’
‘Isn’t your Zumba class this evening?’
‘Yes,’ Jo said warily.
‘I don’t suppose you could …’ Ian didn’t finish his sentence. This was far from professional. He wasn’t supposed to tell his wife all this, let alone ask her to intervene.
‘Leave it with me,’ Jo said, with a sigh, then muttered something inaudible under her breath. Ian didn’t ask her to repeat it.
So here they are. Like Ash with Iris, Mr Spencer-Lyles insisted that he wanted Sasha to talk to Ian. As the SIO, Ian wouldn’t normally conduct a preliminary interview with a friend or relative of the victim’s. And he would have preferred Sasha to be interviewed at the Spencer-Lyles’ home, where she would undoubtedly have felt more relaxed. Never mind. He has requisitioned one of the small rooms where they usually carry out more informal interviews. It has sofas that look more comfortable than they are, but it’s bright and airy and hopefully not too daunting. There are some glasses and a jug of water on the coffee table.
DC Ward does the introductions.
‘So, Sasha,’ Ian begins, ‘I’m sure you know why you’re here.’ He then proceeds to spout more or less verbatim the same spiel he used on Iris about building up a picture of how Joshua Knoll lived in the hope that they can work out more about how he died and eventually arrest the person responsible for his death. ‘Anything you can tell us about Joshua would be helpful. Let’s start with how you knew him and how long you’ve known him, shall we?’
Sasha looks at both her parents before replying. ‘He was in my year at school. I’ve known him for years, but he’d only been my boyfriend for nine months or so when he … um … died.’ Her voice wavers a little.
Ian does a discreet calculation on his fingers. Since last November, then. If he remembers correctly, Iris put an end to her relationship with Joshua last October, a couple of weeks after his eighteenth birthday. He didn’t hang around before replacing her.
Sasha goes on to give a description of Joshua’s likes and dislikes, talents and inabilities, which adds nothing new to the mix. Ian and his subordinate let her talk. DC Ward scribbles notes on a pad. Ian tries to sneak a peep, but he can’t decipher the tiny, spidery letters, although that might be due more to his eyesight (does he need varifocals?) than to DC Ward’s handwriting.
