Impression (DI Gardener 4)

“Do they have CCTV at the car lot?”

“Yes, we’ve collected all the tapes, but we simply haven’t had the chance to check them yet.”

“I reckon somebody defo did ’em both,” Patrick Edwards spoke up.

“That’s what we think, because there is yet another connection that ties up both scenes. One of the windows in Morrison’s flat was open. Within minutes of us finding him, a CD player started cranking some more of that Nick Cave stuff.”

“Same song?” inquired Rawson.

“No.”

“There was definitely a third party involved here,” said Briggs.

“Did we find a mobile with Morrison?”

“No,” said Gardener. “And we couldn’t find one for Stapleton. So someone really is trying to cover their tracks. It’s all the usual stuff to begin with until we build a picture: forensics, witness searches, passive data. We need the CCTV evidence. I have two more officers at Morrison’s flat collecting everything they can lay their hands on. Once it’s all back here, I need someone to go through it all, start joining the dots. I also want someone doing the rounds of the factories to see if they can find the two men who found the body.”

“What was the address on the rent book that Morrison had?” asked Anderson.

“The house the prostitute was staying in on Hume Crescent,” said Gardener.

“So he owns the house, then?”

“It would appear so. I logged a call with the council this morning to check their records of when and whom it was sold to. They confirmed it was an ex-council property.”

“How long had Morrison lived in the flat above the butcher’s?”

“About five years.”

Gardener glanced at the ANACAPA chart, and then at his team.

“This case will be a nightmare. It’s only the second time I’ve run a double murder investigation, and the last one was no picnic. Once we’ve cleared the grass from under our feet with the evidence gathering, I think we’ll end up in a TIE strategy.”

“What’s a TIE strategy?” asked Patrick Edwards.

“Trace, Interview, and Eliminate. They’re a bit difficult to explain, Patrick. I’m not insulting you when I say I’ll try and keep it simple. Imagine the population of the world. You know your killer is among this group of people, but you want to narrow the search down a bit. So you need to come up with a set of parameters, which still may contain a number of individuals, any one of which might be your killer. You can have more than one group – in fact, you normally have several.

“So, if we start with the prostitute, you’d have a group of her clients. You’d have another group of people known to have visited her flat. You’d probably also have a group of known registered sex offenders, or RSOs, linked to the area – and so on. Our hope would be that the killer would be among one of these groups of people somewhere. It’s like having lots of different bags of stones, and in one is a gold nugget.

“I’ll set action teams off in tracing these groups of people. So, as an example, Action Team One would have ‘go find everyone who has been to her flat in the past two months’. The team would draw up a list, then go and interview each individual to account for their movements during the relevant time of the murder, and usually a few hours either side. When someone says, ‘I was with my wife during this time’, the action team will go and confirm this information with his wife. So effectively, we’ll take one stone out of the bag, tracing, interviewing, and then eliminating each one in turn.

“For the ones we can’t eliminate, they stay in the bag until everyone else is out. Hopefully we’d be left with only a few stones in the bottom, which need a closer looking at. Our persons of interest. In amongst these may be our killer.”

Gardener studied the team. He knew how much work was already involved, but sadly, he wasn’t finished.

“I’m afraid we have one more very serious connection to the murders.”

Chapter Seventeen

Gardener pointed to the photo of the girl on the second ANACAPA chart, before introducing Sarah Gates.

“Sarah works for the West Yorkshire Police at Trafalgar House, on Nelson Street in Bradford. They’re investigating the abduction of Chloe Summerby, headed by DI Karen Goodman. Sarah is our single point of contact, because Chloe now has a connection to our double murder.”

Gardener nodded to Gates for her to take over from there.

Gates stood and cleared her throat. Sensing something serious was coming, Gardener’s team took notes. “Chloe Summerby is a healthy five-year-old girl. Her only recent ailment had been chicken pox. She is talkative and intelligent, well liked, has a number of friends, attended and loved the school in the village. Like

most girls of five, she has a stack of dolls that she would play with, but her favourite had only one arm. It went missing with her. She likes picture books, and educational games on the family computer.”