Chapter 49
Chapter Forty-Nine
Detective Sergeant Freya Sloan walked into the petrol station.
She hadn’t quite woken up yet having missed her morning coffee after Chris woke first and had the last of the milk.
She was about to pay for her petrol when her eyes fell on a newspaper on the counter.
DNA SOLVES TEN-YEAR-OLD MURDER, the headline screamed at her.
She grabbed the tabloid and took it back to the car with her.
She started reading it, parked by the pumps until the attendant told her over the Tannoy to move.
At her desk, she read about fifty-six-year-old Maureen Evans who was murdered while walking her dog in Greenwich Park in Southeast London.
Despite an extensive police investigation, her murder was never solved.
However, a dot of blood, smaller than a one penny coin found on her handbag revealed the blood belonged to her killer.
In the struggle, he must have cut himself.
Now, thanks to new DNA technology, the dot of blood could be analysed and there was a match with already convicted killer Alex Last. According to the newspaper report, detectives went to visit Last in prison and he admitted it once they presented him with the evidence. Case finally closed.
Freya angled her computer screen from the prying eyes of her colleagues and logged onto the internal system where she entered the reference number for the Alice Patterson case, which she knew by heart.
She occasionally did this to remind herself of the finer points of the investigation.
She scrolled through the so-called witness statements she now knew to be a lie and shook her head.
How many lives had DI Bishop ruined with his false evidence?
Anthony’s and Pauline’s to begin with. Then there was Leo’s.
Alice’s parents, Geoff and Judith who would be back at square one wondering who killed their daughter when this all came out.
Also, had the killer gone on to rape and murder more women over the years?
Freya shuddered. The horror didn’t bear thinking about.
As she took in the crime-scene photographs, something niggled at the back of her mind. She tried to fish it out, but she couldn’t get a hook on it.
‘You’re looking pensive. Or is it wind?’ DC Simpson asked her.
She looked up and smiled at the new recruit to the team. She tried to get on with him, but he was too cock-sure of himself. He needed bringing down a peg or two.
‘I’m fine,’ she said with a smile, as something dawned. She grabbed a pen and quickly wrote down the reference number of where the original files would be located, turned off her computer and jumped out of her seat. ‘If anyone asks for me, tell them I’m in the toilet with women’s problems.’
DC Simpson blushed and hurried back to his desk.
Freya left the room with a smile on her face.
In the basement of the police station, boxes of files ran the length and breadth of the room from floor to ceiling.
Investigations and cases ran back years, decades even.
There was no natural light down here, no moisture, either.
The mass of cardboard and paper had sucked out any air and, when Freya inhaled, she could taste dust motes ashy in her mouth.
She looked at the reference number on the bit of paper she’d torn from her pad and hoped it wouldn’t take her long to find the shelf where Alice’s case file lay.
She walked along the narrow walkways between the hastily stacked boxes. They seemed to wobble with every step she took. It wouldn’t take much to bring them all crashing down around her. More dust was disturbed, and she could feel it coating the back of her throat.
She looked at the reference numbers written in faded marker pen on the boxes. There didn’t seem to be any organisation to them at all. They all seemed to be randomly plonked. She breathed in and let out a rattling cough.
Down the next aisle, and the one after. She seemed to be on a losing streak, but then, she found it. She checked the piece of paper against the box a few times to make sure the numbers matched. They did.
‘Thank Christ,’ she said to herself.
She grabbed another box to stand on so she could gently take off the top couple, find hers, then put the others back, before grabbing the Alice Patterson box and heading for the exit. She needed to get out of this room and get a glass of water quickly.
Sitting on the iron stairs leading up to the main part of the police station, Freya removed the lid and looked inside.
It was mostly filled with folders and paperwork.
More lies Bishop had paid for, no doubt.
She moved them to one side and thanked whoever was looking down on her for what she’d been praying to find.
The clothing Alice Patterson had been wearing when she was murdered had been placed in individual, sealed, evidence bags.
Shortly after Alice Patterson’s murder in 1983, Dr Alec Jeffreys had a eureka moment in his lab when he noticed similarities and differences between strands of DNA in samples taken from his own family.
From there, he deduced that every single person’s DNA was different and as unique as their fingerprints, and that the variations of genetic information could identify a person, particularly, a person wanted by police for a crime.
All they had to do was leave a little piece of themselves behind, and, according to Locard’s Exchange Principle, with contact between two items, there would be an exchange.
Basically, every contact leaves a trace.
Carefully, Freya took out a small bag containing Alice’s pink underpants. Hopefully, somewhere on this garment, a trace of the killer would be found.
When Alice was killed in 1983, Alec Jeffreys had yet to make his discovery, and during Anthony Winstanley’s first appeal, the information was not widely known.
However, seven years had now passed, and technology had significantly advanced.
Even a scrap of DNA, providing it didn’t belong to Anthony, could be enough evidence to re-open the case and release Anthony from prison.
There was no reason to contact Jennifer Ripley just yet and let her know what she thought she might have found.
She didn’t want to get her hopes up. With DI Bishop being the officer in charge, she wouldn’t have put it past him to take all the clothing home and run it through the wash once Anthony Winstanley had been convicted.
She put the box of evidence in the back of her car and drove to the forensics laboratory just outside Guisborough in North Yorkshire.
The police station in Whitby was only a small building so they had to share resources with their counterparts over the border.
It saved money, but not wear and tear on the tyres.
It was a forty-five-minute journey by car, that took Freya over the rough terrain of the North Yorkshire Moors.
She’d been there many times in the past and knew the majority of the staff by sight.
For the life of her, she couldn’t remember the name of the man in charge and she spent most of the journey racking her brain.
It was only once she’d pulled up, entered the building, walked down the corridor and saw the man through the round window in the door leaning over a bench that his name sprang to mind. Dr Caspian Tandy.
Tall and lean with a shock of jet-black hair, Dr Tandy was in his mid-thirties, but the bushy beard with a hint of grey aged him. He had dark eyes and pale skin. He wore an off-white lab coat that looked a couple of sizes too big for him and hung from his shoulders like a coat from a wire hanger.
Freya knocked and stood in the open doorway. She gazed around at the hectic lab.
‘Dr Tandy?’ she called out to him, after her weak knock failed to penetrate his concentration.
He looked up and gave her a wide smile. ‘Detective Sloan, lovely to see you. Come on in,’ he said. Any trace of an American accent was almost lost after he’d spent the past eighteen years in England.
‘I’m not interrupting you, am I?’
‘I would explain to you what I’m doing, but I don’t want you to die of boredom.’
‘I’m sure I wouldn’t. I find what you do fascinating.’
‘Listen, I’m bored, and I live for this kind of thing. Trust me, you’d be the first registered case of death by boredom, and I don’t want to do that to you.’ His smile widened. ‘So, is that box for me?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
Tandy made room for it on the bench, and she placed it down with a thud.
‘Do you remember the Alice Patterson case? 1983?’
‘I do,’ he said, furrowing his brow. ‘Young woman raped and murdered. She had a medical condition, didn’t she?’
‘She had Down’s syndrome, yes.’
‘Isn’t that case solved?’
‘Officially, yes.’
‘There’s doubt?’
‘Anthony Winstanley was convicted, though he always claimed his innocence. Recently, I’ve discovered some of the witness statements were falsified. We’re not officially opening the case, but I was wondering if you could do something for me.’
‘You want me to test Alice’s clothing for evidence of DNA?’
‘Wow. A mind-reader as well as a top forensic scientist,’ she grinned.
‘It’s a gift. So, what’s in the box?’
Freya removed the lid. ‘From what I can gather, it’s all of the clothes Alice was wearing at the time she was raped and murdered. I’m hoping Locard’s Principle is true.’
‘Trust me, it’s true.’
‘So, you should find evidence of the killer on these items?’
‘We should, yes. However, before you get excited, let me tell you that seven years have passed since 1983. I’m guessing these haven’t been stored in a lab.’
‘No. They’ve been in the basement of our station.’
‘OK. I’m not making any promises, but I will take a look. Also, keep in mind that DNA fingerprinting is in its infancy. Just because we don’t find anything today doesn’t mean we won’t find anything in a few years’ time as our understanding of DNA increases and technology advances.’
‘I’m aware of that.’
‘How do you want me to process this?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I can’t simply test something unofficially, or we’d get people walking in off the streets asking us to check their husband’s underpants to see if he’s cheating.’ He smiled again.
‘I see. Ah. I hadn’t thought of that.’ Freya chewed her bottom lip.
Tandy looked at her, taking in her worried expression.
‘Leave it with me. I’ll make up some reference numbers and attribute one sample to one case I’m working on and another to something else. I’ll figure something out.’
‘Caspian, you’re a star.’
‘Please tell my wife that. I missed our anniversary last week.’
Caspian Tandy’s workload was immense. His in-tray was overflowing.
He had reports overdue and lectures to write.
Add on the physical laboratory work, and it was little wonder that he had missed his wedding anniversary.
He left the house before seven every morning and didn’t get home until eight o’clock every evening.
How he and his wife had managed to produce four children was anyone’s guess.
After lunch – a pathetic excuse for a turkey sandwich – he rummaged around in the box Freya had given him, snapped on a pair of latex gloves and opened the sealed evidence bag containing a pair of pink underpants.
He took a swab, running cotton buds over various parts of the garment, before sealing them and arranging for them to be tested later.
He then put the pants under a microscope and, using a high-powered lens, looked at the individual strands of fibres.
At this degree of magnification, it was easy to spot what shouldn’t be there.
A few curly hairs, which could have belonged to Alice, were lifted with tweezers and bagged individually.
There were also two dark blue fibres which could have come from whatever Alice was wearing over the top of her pants, but perhaps not.
Either way, this one item alone was a forensic scientist’s dream.