Chapter 31
THIRTY-ONE
DAN
‘Ahh, Dan!’ Archer looks at the gift bag I’m holding, cocks her head. ‘You really shouldn’t have!’
‘I didn’t, ma’am,’ I say, placing it onto her fastidiously tidy desk.
Archer is a neat freak, obsessively so in my opinion.
Even her pens are colour-coordinated and in a perfectly aligned row – black, blue, green and red.
It’s the antithesis of my own ‘organised chaos’, which isn’t even that organised when I think about it.
She stares at it before moving it a millimetre to the left, making it more symmetrical, in line with her staple gun.
‘What is it?’
‘It’s perfume.’
She raises her eyes.
‘Bit early for Christmas shopping, isn’t it?’
‘I bought it in a department store in Leeds, ma’am. Don’t worry, I put it on expenses.’
‘I’ll bet you did, Riley.’ She smirks.
‘It was a snip at ￡250.’
If she thinks I’m joking, I’m not. My heart almost stopped when the assistant had rung it up on the till: ‘She’s a lucky lady, whoever she is.’ She’d beamed at me with a set of dazzling white teeth as I’d handed over my credit card, palms sweating.
‘Erin Santos claims this is the perfume that Samantha Valentine wears, her “signature” scent.’ I wonder if Archer has a signature scent, and if so, what it might be. Something a little spicy that gets up your nose, I imagine.
She snatches the box from her desk, starts to unwrap the cellophane. ‘OK. What does that have to do with anything?’
‘We spoke to a woman named Zoe Brookes while we were in Leeds, ma’am. She’s the head receptionist at Austin Marz Productions, the film production company where Erin worked in the months leading up to her arrest. She remembers her well.’
I watch her as she struggles with the wrapping, reaches into her desk for a pair of scissors. I imagine the inside of her desk drawer is as precise as a brain surgeon’s knife tray.
‘She also claims to have met Samantha Valentine.’
She looks up at me sharply then stops what she’s doing.
‘Erin was seen by this colleague with a woman who fits the description both Erin and Tilly Ward have given us of Samantha Valentine – a blonde, attractive woman, memorable, in her thirties, well-dressed, wearing red-soled designer shoes… wearing that perfume…’
She takes the large, square red bottle from the box.
‘It’s Baccarat Rouge, ma’am. It’s a favourite with all the celebrities, apparently. The assistant in the store told me that Rihanna wears it.’
‘And this Zoe Brookes, this receptionist, she remembers all of this seven years on and hasn’t said a word until now?’
‘It appears she was never asked about it until now,’ I reply curtly. ‘How would she even have known it was important? Samantha Valentine’s name was never released to the media back then and no one was looking for her. They wrote off Erin’s account of what happened. They didn’t believe her story.’
‘But you do, Riley?’
‘The people Erin worked with, they all expressed how shocked they were at the time about what happened to her; none of them knew why she did what she did. They say she was nice, she was normal…’
‘She had mental health issues, Riley,’ she cuts in.
‘She’d been in a psychiatric hospital before she went on to kill Radulovic.
She’d had a traumatic childhood, problems with drugs and alcohol, she no doubt wasn’t in her right mind at the time.
I feel sorry for the woman, really, genuinely, I do have compassion for her.
’ She meets my eyes. ‘Don’t look so surprised, Dan! ’
‘I didn’t realise I was, ma’am.’
She sprays some of the perfume on her wrist, waves her arm around a little. I’ve seen women do this before and have always wondered why.
‘It helps the scent to settle.’ She sniffs her pulse point, as though I’d asked the question aloud. ‘Hmmm… not bad…’
It hits my nose instantly, that strong, woody, musky amber-type smell, earthy, yet somehow sweet too. I’m almost certain it’s the same perfume the red-headed journalist was wearing at the press conference. It’s very distinctive. Intoxicating.
‘What I’m saying, ma’am, is—’
‘I know what you’re saying, Riley.’ She squirts herself liberally with a couple more blasts from the bottle – probably somewhere around thirty quid’s worth.
‘I think we should get this Zoe Brookes in to make a formal statement, ma’am, like she should’ve done seven years ago.’
‘And she was introduced to this person as Samantha Valentine, was she? Does she have any evidence, CCTV footage, photos, witnesses, anything to support this?’
‘No, ma’am, but the description alone and…’
‘Did she positively identify her as Samantha Valentine from the sketch?’
‘Well, she said it “could’ve” been her, ma’am.’
‘… It could’ve been anyone, Riley,’ she snaps.
‘Look, Erin Santos’s DNA was found at Milo Harrison’s crime scene.
Her hair was found on his corpse, for Christ’s sake, mixed in with the poor man’s blood!
There were only three sets of DNA found in that apartment: the victim’s, the perpetrator’s and… Erin Santos’s.’
‘Yes, ma’am, about that…’
‘Even after what DI Pritchard told you,’ – she ignores me, continues – ‘and what Dr Wainwright said, if you’re so convinced this Samantha character exists, then how do you explain that?’
She’s sort of got me on that one, I’ll admit. But I do have a possible explanation, a possible explanation I’m pretty sure she won’t want to hear.
‘DNA doesn’t lie, Riley, you know that. Erin Santos was there at the crime scene. Erin Santos is Samantha Valentine, or thinks she is, and we need to find her – fast.’ She replaces the lid on the perfume bottle, smacking it shut with the palm of her hand.
‘So, with your shopping expo complete, perhaps now you can get back to the job in hand of finding our suspect and bringing her in before this bloody story breaks the internet? Have you seen the insane nonsense people are coming up with on social media? No doubt Netflix will be sniffing around for the rights to turn it into a docudrama in no time at all. The Woman Who Wasn’t There…
or something,’ she says with an uncharacteristic theatrical flourish.
‘But what if she really was there, ma’am?’ I know I’m pushing my luck, but I can’t just ignore conflicting information, and now a potential sighting from a witness. Moreover, I can’t ignore my intuition.
She isn’t listening to me, I can tell.
‘Has Erin contacted you again?’
‘No, ma’am. I think my TV appearance may have put paid to any ongoing communication with her.’
‘Yes, well, that’s regrettable,’ she sighs. ‘But our duty is to protect the public – the innocent must always be our first priority, Riley.’
‘What if Erin is one of the “innocents” herself in all of this, ma’am?’
‘Well, then her DNA wouldn’t be on the body of our victim, would it – and yet it is, Riley?’ I can feel her irritation rising.
‘What if it was planted there, ma’am?’
I’d taken a call from the forensic lab on the journey back to London and spoken with a very jovial lady by the name of Muriel Barnes-Jones. I needed to know their exact findings.
‘We extracted over ten or more hair fibres from the blood at the scene and from the victim himself,’ she informed me.
‘Could the victim have reached out and pulled at her hair while he was trying to defend himself perhaps?’
‘Well, you might automatically assume so,’ she’d agreed, ‘given the number of hair fibres found, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.
There was no hair found in, on or around the victim’s hands, no DNA underneath his fingernails, as you might expect.
Rather, it was largely recovered from his torso, and more were mixed in with the blood found around his chest, around the wound.
The hair fibres themselves are interesting in that they’re small snippets of hair, no more than a centimetre or two in length, blunt in shape, like they’d been cut.
’ She sounded perplexed. ‘It’s not what I would expect from an ordinary hair sample found at most crime scenes, one which has somehow shed or been pulled out.
You would generally expect them to be longer or to have a root attached maybe, if they’d been ripped from the scalp.
The pattern in which they were distributed on his body was unusual as well, like they’d been randomly sprinkled… ’
This had really made my head spin.
‘Planted by who exactly?’ Archer is up out of her chair now. I can still smell those few squirts of perfume lingering in the air – mind you, at ￡250 a pop, I’d hope to.
‘I haven’t got time for this, Riley,’ she says, shortly, ‘and frankly, neither have you. While you and DS Davis were shopping in Leeds, intel has come in on Erin Santos’s whereabouts.’
‘Oh?’
‘CCTV picked her up at Leeds Central railway station. She boarded a train and was again picked up on camera at the other end in London King’s Cross. ‘They’ve identified an address.’