‘Highly recommended. Crime Writing at its very best’ – Kate Rhodes on The Last Straw, Book 1 in the DCI Warren Jones series

When an open-and-shut burglary case lands on DCI Warren Jones’ desk, he suspects it’s come to the wrong detective – until he learns a tantalizing detail. Despite the suspect having admitted to the crime after being found with the stolen goods, DNA found at the scene does not match the man currently on bail – but is a match to an unsolved, violent rape case dating back to 1992.

With their man in custody refusing to talk, Warren must embark on a manhunt for the mystery accomplice. And so begins a game of cat and mouse that will test Warren’s rawest instincts and resolve – and throw up a shocking twist.

Also by Paul Gitsham

The Last Straw

No Smoke Without Fire

Silent as the Grave

Blood is Thicker Than Water

A Case Gone Cold

DCI Warren Jones 3.5

Paul Gitsham

ONE PLACE. MANY STORIES

Copyright

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018

Copyright © Paul Gitsham 2018

Paul Gitsham asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

E-book Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 978-0-00-830116-3

Version: 2018-05-18

PAUL GITSHAM started his career as a biologist, working in such exotic locales as Manchester and Toronto. After stints as the world’s most over-qualified receptionist and a spell making sure that international terrorists and other ne’er do wells hadn’t opened a Junior Savings Account at a major UK bank (a job even less exciting than being a receptionist) he retrained as a Science Teacher. He now spends his time passing on his bad habits and sloppy lab-skills to the next generation of enquiring minds.

Paul has always wanted to be a writer and his final report on leaving primary school predicted he’d be the next Roald Dahl! For the sake of balance it should be pointed out that it also said “he’ll never get anywhere in life if his handwriting doesn’t improve”. Twenty five years later and his handwriting is worse than ever but millions of children around the world love him.*

You can learn more about Paul’s Writing at www.paulgitsham.com or www.facebook.com/dcijones

*This is a lie, just ask any of the pupils he has taught.

To Hugo. You’re far too young to read the nasty stories that your Uncle Paul writes, but maybe one day he’ll need a hero whose first name starts with H.

Contents

Cover

Blurb

Title Page

Copyright

Author Bio

Dedication

Prologue

Now

Six Months Later

Letter to the Reader

Excerpt

Acknowledgements

Endpages

About the Publisher

Prologue

Then

A piece of folded cloth muffled the sound of glass shattering. The intruder held his breath. The alarm began its wailing again, but that was of no concern – nobody had come to investigate during the previous twenty-four hours, how likely was it that somebody would decide to get up at 1 a.m. to see if this time it was for real? Satisfied he wouldn’t be disturbed, the man ducked his head and climbed through the jagged hole.

Now

The case folder hit the surface of Detective Chief Inspector Warren Jones’ desk with a flat smack.

‘Cold case. See what you can do with this, Warren.’

Warren picked up the folder and raised an eyebrow at the stamp on the front.

‘Burglary? Surely this comes under Volume Crime, sir?’

He looked at the date.

‘September this year? That’s barely two months, how is it a cold case?’

‘The burglary isn’t,’ Detective Superintendent John Grayson replied. ‘Look inside. It’s what it’s thrown up that’s interesting.’

* * *

‘Friday the eighteenth of December 1992, the Middlesbury campus of the University of Middle England. Eighteen-year-old Debbie Claremont attends a house party in the Charles Babbage Postgraduate Halls. It’s a pretty open affair, with dozens of people in and out. Most were postgraduate students and some were undergraduates like Claremont, however nobody was keeping count and they weren’t rowdy enough to bother campus security. It’s believed that at least a few locals also turned up uninvited.’

Warren gave his team a few moments to find the relevant pages in the photocopied pack he’d handed them. DSI Grayson had been correct; the case was interesting and Warren had wasted no time pulling together a small team to see if the new information that had suddenly come to light could close a case that had remained unsolved for more than two decades.

‘By her own admission, Claremont was an inexperienced drinker and had drunk far more than she could handle. She may also have smoked cannabis – again, a first for her. Suffice to say she was far from in control of her actions. Details are a bit sketchy, but she woke up alone at about 5 a.m. feeling sick in a back room, with vague memories of someone forcing her in there. That was when she noticed her knickers were down around her knees and she was feeling bruised and sore around her pubic area.’

‘Were there any eyewitnesses?’ asked Detective Constable Gary Hastings. Despite his deceptively youthful appearance, Hastings was one of the most experienced DCs on the team. If it looked as though the case was going somewhere, Warren intended to let Hastings take a lead role; it would look good for him during his upcoming sergeant’s selection.

‘None that came forward. Claremont was understandably traumatized by the whole thing, and probably still the worse for wear, and so her first instinct was to go home and shower.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘A lot less forensics on TV in the Nineties. She felt too ashamed to say anything for three days, before telling her housemate, who made her call the police.’

‘Did they take her seriously? We all know how rape was viewed back then,’ asked DC Karen Hardwick, a scowl furrowing her brow.

‘Apparently they did. She had cuts and bruises consistent with being forced to have sex and eyewitness testimony from earlier in the evening confirmed that she was far too drunk for it to be considered consensual, even by the standards of the day.

‘From what I can tell, the officers investigating did everything possible. However, it was the end of term and many of the party’s attendees had gone away for Christmas by the time she reported the assault. The nature of the party and delay in tracking guests meant that the investigating officers were never satisfied that they identified even half of the people who were there that night. Unfortunately, they never generated any viable suspects.’

‘But presumably they had forensics, otherwise we wouldn’t be talking about it now?’ Detective Inspector Tony Sutton’s voice was nasal. The cloud of Olbas oil decongestant that had followed him around for the past few days, making everyone else’s eyes water, had apparently had little effect on the nasty head cold he’d come down with. He shouldn’t be in work, but the man was nothing if not stubborn. Warren just hoped he hadn’t passed it on to the rest of the team, he didn’t want to have to supplement their numbers with detectives from headquarters in Welwyn Garden City; doing so hardly helped boost Middlesbury’s credibility as an independent CID unit.

‘She’d showered several times but hadn’t been able to face going out to the communal laundrette. They found traces of semen on her underwear. Back then it was standard practice to preserve the evidence for future analysis and so they eventually DNA fingerprinted it and loaded it onto the database. No hits.’

‘Until now,’ stated Sutton, his voice cracking as he tried to stifle a cough.

‘Exactly. SOCO retrieved a blood spot from a burglary over the summer. They processed it in the usual way, but a couple of days afterwards a known career burglar, Aaron Wallace, was arrested for something different and copped to this one along with a couple of dozen others. He wore gloves, but a muddy footprint found at the scene matched the other crime scenes and the pair of size nine Nike trainers he was wearing when they arrested him. He’s due to appear in court in December, but nobody bothered to chase the DNA results down, since he’d already confessed. When the results finally arrived, they’d been expecting it to simply confirm that he was in the house.’

‘But it also flagged this cold case?’ interjected Hardwick.

‘Yes. And it didn’t match him.’

‘It didn’t match?’ Hastings blinked in surprise.

‘No. Which is not surprising, Wallace would have been only eight years old at the time of the sexual assault. Besides which, he’s a frequent flyer. He’s been in the DNA database since 2005, so he’d have come up as a match years ago.’

Tony Sutton may have been feeling under the weather, however he had still managed to read ahead.

‘First question in my mind then is who was with him that night? Specifically, who was wearing these men’s size eleven Reeboks that appeared alongside Wallace’s size nines in the victim’s back garden?’

* * *

During his time in CID, Gary Hastings had dealt with some of the most serious crimes imaginable. Murders and rapes changed the lives of the victims and those around them for ever, and as such were often foremost in the public’s imagination. But sometimes that meant it was possible to forget the impact that other, less dramatic offences could have on their victims.

‘We thought that things were just beginning to look up, and then this happened.’

Hastings had a series of photographs of trainers that he wanted Helen Bedford to look at. It had taken only a few moments for her to flick through them and confirm that neither she nor her husband, Ian, owned a pair of trainers similar to those that had produced the second set of prints found on their patio that night. Furthermore, neither they, nor their adult children, had size eleven feet.

The woman looked exhausted and Hastings felt slightly guilty for disappointing her. Naturally, no mention had been made of the newly discovered link between the break-in and the historic sexual assault and so Helen Bedford’s immediate assumption when he rang the doorbell to the large, detached house was that he had tracked down the stolen property. When he’d said that wasn’t why he was there, she had been polite, but it was clear that she had more to worry about than whether two people were charged with burglary rather than one.

‘The shock of it all has set Ian back months in his recovery.’

‘Is he ill?’

She’d said that her husband was upstairs taking an afternoon nap when he’d arrived.

Mrs Bedford had insisted on making Hastings a cup of tea and he was happy to listen to her as he finished it. He could see that she needed a chat with someone.

‘It all started back in July last year. Ian started getting headaches. We put it down to stress, the law firm that he co-owns had just taken on a couple of big new clients and Ian was putting in really long hours. When they didn’t get any better after a few weeks, I tried to get him to see a doctor. When he hadn’t got around to it after a few weeks, I booked him an appointment myself. I even placed it in his diary, but he completely forgot about it and couldn’t even remember having the conversation.

‘I phoned his partner and he said that he was concerned too; apparently, they’d almost lost a case the previous week, when he misplaced some key papers. It’s so unlike him, I was worried that maybe he was ill. I went to see his partner privately to discuss what we were going to do and it was then that we got the phone call.’

Her voice caught.

‘Sorry, it’s still a bit hard to talk about it.’ She cleared her throat a couple of times and took a long sip of her cold tea.

‘He just keeled over in the conference room and had a massive seizure. They rushed him to Addenbrookes and gave him an MRI scan; he had a huge brain tumour.’

She blew her nose.

‘Addenbrookes were really good. He saw a specialist immediately and within a week he was having the tumour removed. But that was only the beginning. In the weeks after surgery, he had up to three seizures a day. Some were quite small, but others put him in Casualty; he knocked two teeth out and he’s bit the tip of his tongue off several times. It took months to find an anticonvulsant that worked but didn’t cause unacceptable side effects.’

‘And what happened to him during that time?’

‘He had to take a leave of absence from work. His partners have been really good about it. It took three months in total for the medication to stop the seizures, and they left him exhausted. But the end of August was the six-month anniversary of his final seizure – it’s why we went on holiday in September; a week in a B and B in Devon. The journey took it out of him, and he slept most of the way, but it was lovely.’ She smiled. ‘By the time we got back it was as if the last year had never happened. He was even due to start back at the firm a couple of days a week.’

The smiled faded.

‘Until we got back and found we’d been burgled.’

‘He didn’t take it well?’

She shook her head. ‘After everything else, it was just too much. The jewellery they took from me wasn’t anything valuable. I wear my wedding ring, and I’d taken the necklace he bought me for our twentieth wedding anniversary with us. Unfortunately, they stole his father’s watch and his mother’s wedding ring. Ian’s dad passed away suddenly when he was a student up in Liverpool and he couldn’t get back to Norwich in time. Then his mum died just after he first got ill and, again, he never got to say goodbye properly.’

‘And the jewellery was never found?’

Now there was anger in her eyes.

‘No. They arrested the bastard that burgled us less than forty-eight hours after we reported the break-in, but it was too late.’ Her hand shook as she poured herself more tea,

‘You know, they reckon he’ll have got less than a hundred pounds for the stuff he stole.’ She shook her head. ‘Less than a hundred pounds for the only link my husband still had to his dead parents. For what? A nose full of cocaine? An armful of heroin?’

* * *

Hastings made his excuses shortly after Ian Bedford came downstairs. To look at him, Mr Bedford could have been the far side of sixty, yet, according to his wife, he was twenty years younger. The central heating in the house was turned too high for Hasting’s tastes, nevertheless Bedford wore a chunky cardigan over a knitted shirt and thick woollen socks inside his slippers.

The saggy skin around his jowls spoke of sudden and dramatic weight loss, whilst the fine fuzz of hair on his skull did little to hide the vivid pink scar that crossed the right side of his temple. A recently healed cut on the bridge of his nose came from his first seizure in months, when he’d collapsed barely an hour after Scenes of Crime had completed their investigations. He’d had a half-dozen since.

The man’s opening question left Hastings in no doubt as to the impact of the burglary on the couple.

‘Have you found Dad’s watch? It’s his anniversary next week.’

* * *

‘According to the PNC check, Aaron Wallace is well known for burglary and handling stolen goods, but there’s nothing of a violent or sexual nature in his record. He did six months in 2011 and he’s looking at a lot longer for these offences.’ Karen Hardwick had printed out the record for Wallace from the Police National Computer and was highlighting sections of it with a fluorescent green pen.

‘Which is presumably why he put his hands up this time – he’s savvy enough to realize he’s definitely going down and he’ll get a reduction in sentence for admitting it,’ she continued.

‘What about accomplices?’ asked Sutton.

‘Two that we know of, both of whom were convicted alongside him for the 2011 offence but obviously they are both already in the system.’

‘Well, keep on digging. Gary has confirmed that the shoes don’t belong to the homeowners. Let’s also see what the attending officer has to say, before we go and speak to Mr Wallace about what happened the night of the burglary.’

* * *

PC Keith Stibbald was just about to head out on patrol when he answered Warren’s call.

Warren could hear the click of a mouse in the background as Stibbald accessed the HOLMES2 database to refresh his memory.

‘Yes, I do remember this one. Abbey View Terrace; middle-aged couple back off holiday found the French windows around the rear smashed. The exact timing of the break-in was unclear, since they had been away for a week. In theory, the best we’ve got is sometime prior to about 9 p.m. on Sunday the eighth of September, when they returned.’

Warren heard the creak of a seat as Stibbald settled back in it.

‘A neighbour says the burglar alarm went off on the Wednesday evening of that week, but she walked around and saw that the house was secure, with no sign of a forced entry. She didn’t have keys and didn’t want to call them back off holiday for a fault, so she just put up with the flashing light and periodic ringing until they got back.’

‘I assume the burglar was checking to see that they wouldn’t be disturbed?’

‘Yeah, we’re seeing that more and more these days. Thieves see that the driveway is empty and figure the owners are probably on holiday. But they don’t want to run the risk of some overzealous neighbour coming around to see what’s going on and catching them inside, so they sneak around the back and set off the motion detectors.

‘If the blue light is still flashing twenty-four hours later, then obviously the owners are away and nobody has any keys. Then they come back that night and break in. Even if the alarm goes off again, it doesn’t matter since nobody bothered to investigate before. It clearly isn’t linked to a security company and you know what response times are like for us; it’s unlikely we’d even come and look, let alone arrive in the five minutes they’re in the house.’

‘So walk me through it.’

‘Nothing especially unusual. Entry was gained through the French windows. Most of the safety glass was knocked in, but a few fragments remained; enough for the CSIs to pick up some fibres and a spot of blood. It had been raining on and off all week, so the kitchen floor and the stairs were a complete mess, but we isolated a couple of usable footprints on the patio and one on the kitchen floor. There wasn’t much of a search; he grabbed an iPad and a laptop from the downstairs office, then went straight to the master bedroom and helped himself to the owner’s jewellery, which was in a small wood and glass display cabinet. Nothing too expensive, but lots of sentimental value. The CSIs found two more spots of blood on the stairs and another next to the display cabinet.’

‘And you have arrested the alleged thief?’

‘Yeah. He was picked up two days later when he was stopped and searched. He was equipped to burgle and carrying a knife. That was enough to raise a warrant and go have a look-see at his flat. No sign of the jewellery, but underneath his bed was enough electrical equipment to stock a branch of PC World. Loads of it was marked with UV pens or SmartWater, including the iPad and laptop from Abbey View Terrace.’

‘And that was enough for him to confess?’

‘He admitted it and asked for a dozen other offences to be taken into consideration within an hour of meeting his solicitor at the station. He’s not daft. He knew there was no point fighting it, he may as well put his hands up and hope the court takes that into account when sentencing.’

There was a pause at the end of the line.

‘If you don’t mind me asking, sir, why the sudden interest? It’s a bit run-of-the-mill for a DCI to be getting involved.’

‘Most of the blood spots match the accused, Aaron Wallace, but one of them is a positive match for a cold case. I’m trying to work out who else was with him that night.’

There was another pause, this time longer, and when he finally answered, Stibbald sounded apologetic.

‘We found a second set of footprints on the patio outside. The footprint that we found in the kitchen and the fibres on the remains of the French windows matched Wallace and he confessed immediately, so we didn’t pursue it any further. To be honest, I completely forgot about the pending DNA tests and the other footprints. Sorry.’

His story matched the report in the computer. Warren decided there was nothing to be gained from giving the officer a hard time for not tying up all the loose ends; it wasn’t just CID feeling the pressure of the government’s swingeing budget cuts.

‘Does Wallace have any acquaintances that you know about?’

‘You’re asking the wrong person, sir. But, I can give you the name of the officer who arrested him. She knows him a lot better than I do. That’s why she stopped and searched him; she knew there was a good chance something would turn up.’

* * *

PC Fiona McGinty was busy in court and it was after midday before she returned Warren’s call.

‘Yeah, I know Aaron. He’s one of my regulars. What’s he done this time?’

PC McGinty’s tone reminded Warren of his wife when she spoke about one of her naughtier pupils. Mild exasperation, tinged with a degree of affection.

‘It’s about the burglary, up on Abbey View Terrace.’

‘Sorry, the name doesn’t ring a bell. Is this a new or historic offence?’

‘Recent. It’s one of the cases linked to the Stop and Search you executed back on the tenth of September.’

‘Oh, now I remember. I spotted him hanging around the back of Park Street at half past nine at night. Claimed he was meeting a mate for a pint, but he had his burgling bag with him, a zip-up holdall just the right size for anything he likes the look of. I asked him for a look inside and he was a bit reluctant. Normally, if he hasn’t got anything to hide he’s pretty cooperative. He knows I play fair with him and he’ll be on his way soon if he doesn’t play silly buggers. So I did a Code A Stop and Search.’

Warren had the form on the computer screen in front of him.

‘I see that he had a toolkit and a knife.’

‘Yeah, silly sod. He always tries to claim that he’s going to do some odd jobs around a mate’s house, but he has too much form for us to give him the benefit of the doubt.’

‘What about the knife? Is he violent?’

‘Nah, the blade was a rusty old lock-knife wrapped in cloth at the bottom of the bag. He probably uses it to cut things when he’s on a job. But it was enough to raise a warrant so we could search his flat. That’s when we found all of the stuff he’d nicked, under the bed …’ She paused. ‘Look, Wallace isn’t some gentleman thief from one of those old black and white movies. He isn’t going to put his hand up and say, “It’s a fair cop, guv’nor.” But he’s not violent. I don’t know him that well, but, from what I can see, he has the usual crappy background – broken home, persistent truancy, parents out of their depth – but as far as we can tell, he’s mostly steered clear of drugs and street crime. He basically ekes out a living fencing stolen property; either his own or stuff he’s been given.’

‘We know that for at least one of his jobs, he had an accomplice. This person left footprints and blood, neither of which are in the system. Any ideas?’

‘Hmmm. Let me think …’ The noise at the other end of the line suggested that she was tapping her teeth with a pen.

‘He does have a few acquaintances that he hangs around with, but they’re pretty well known and all in the database. I know that he has a half-brother. I’m pretty sure that he isn’t in the system.’

Warren felt his pulse rise slightly. ‘What can you tell me about him?’

‘Not much, I’ve never met him properly. Tyler’s his name, if I recall correctly. I think he stays with him occasionally. I saw him briefly a couple of years ago when I went around to arrest Aaron. He came in the kitchen, took one look at us all and disappeared out the back again. I did a PNC search on him but nothing came up.’

‘Can you describe him?’

She paused for a moment.

‘Mixed race, quite a big lad. I’d say about ten years older than Aaron.’

Ten years older would have made him about eighteen around the time of the sexual assault.

‘Big enough to have size eleven feet?’

‘I wouldn’t be surprised.’

* * *

PC McGinty agreed to meet Karen Hardwick and Tony Sutton and go and visit Wallace, armed with a search warrant.

‘Bloody hell, McGinty, what are you after now? I haven’t done anything?’ Aaron Wallace was a scruffy, scrawny man who looked significantly younger than his twenty-nine years. The man’s left eyebrow sported an impressive number of studs, and what Hardwick initially took to be a tattoo beneath the same eye turned out on closer inspection to be an almost perfect crucifix-shaped birthmark.

Despite it being after noon, Wallace’s messy blond hair and reddened eyes suggested that he’d been asleep when they’d rang the doorbell.

McGinty introduced Hardwick and Sutton, who passed over a copy of the search warrant.

Wallace sighed. ‘Shit.’

‘Any help you give us at this stage will be noted,’ said McGinty, an indirect reminder that he was still on bail from his September arrest.

Wallace pointed wordlessly towards the half-open bedroom door, before wandering back into the lounge and retrieving his tobacco and papers.

Within thirty minutes, several pieces of jewellery, a collection of laptops, tablets and mobile phones and a half-full Cancer Research collecting tin were all sealed in plastic evidence bags in the boot of Fiona McGinty’s patrol car.

‘I can’t believe he’d get caught with so much when he’s already on bail awaiting trial. You’d think he’d keep his nose clean,’ Karen Hardwick muttered to Tony Sutton.

‘It’s not unusual. He knows he’s going down, so what he’s doing now is stealing as much stuff as possible to raise a little nest egg ready for when he comes out, or to tide any family over when he’s inside. He’ll ask for it to be taken into consideration in court; it’ll add a bit of time to his sentence, but it means he can’t be done for it again at a later date.’

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