Blood Line

Anna looked at the body; the long hair was matted and the face was ravaged, with his skin hanging loose and the open eyes sunken into their sockets.

‘We’ll check his fingerprints, obviously. There’s no wallet or anything to ID him, but from the clothes I’m positive it’s him.’

Anna shivered as Williams zipped up the body bag and gave instructions for the stretcher to be moved into the ambulance.

‘That was lucky, wasn’t it?’

Williams looked at her. ‘What was?’

‘That Paul wanted to look over the cafe. Apparently you’d already searched there, so it’ll be interesting to find out how long he’s been dead.’

Williams walked with her back to her car.

‘You get anything?’ he grunted.

‘Not much, but at least I know it wasn’t Sammy murdered in Rawlins’s flat so I’ll be returning to London first thing. If I could hang onto the car I’d be grateful and I really appreciate all of your assistance whilst we’ve been here.’

Williams knew she was being sarcastic but said he would have someone at the station come to collect the car in the morning from the station.

‘No, not the station. We’re getting the first flight to Gatwick. I’ll leave the keys with the landlady and we’ll order a taxi.’

Williams gave a curt nod, watching as she hurriedly got into the car and out of the cold. He knew he would be at the beach for some time as they checked out the interior of the cafe.

‘Goodnight,’ he said, watching as she began to back out, manoeuvring the car round all the accumulated vehicles. He was damned sure she must have gained some kind of a result, but as he had no direct connection to the case involving the disappearance of Alan Rawlins, he would have to wait to find out.

He blew into his freezing hands, turning to head back down the beach to the Smugglers cafe. Someone was going to get a severe bollocking if it was determined that Sammy had been murdered some considerable time ago and his body had been rotting in the gents toilet whilst they had run around like headless chickens, trying to trace him.

Chapter Nineteen

The first thing Anna did when they both arrived at the Hounslow police station shortly after eleven the next day, was to have the hairbrush, razor and toothbrush taken over to Forensics. She gave Brian the job of tracking down the phone company for Alan Rawlins’s other mobile and didn’t wait for him to explain why he’d not been around the previous day.

‘I tell you who isn’t alive any longer. They found the body of Sammy Marsh last night so you can write that up on the board with “deceased” underlined,’ she announced.

She then went into her office as Paul related to everyone the trip to Cornwall, observing that whilst the Newquay police had been sitting on their butts, he had been the one to discover Sammy’s body. Helen ignored him as she was viewing the hours of CCTV footage from the Asda store, beginning to think it was a waste of time, when she suddenly let out a yell.

‘You are not going to believe this! Oh my God!’

Everyone looked over to her desk as she waved her hands.

‘Let me replay it . . . yes, it’s her! It’s definitely her!’

Paul and Brian leaned on her chair as she rewound the clip and then replayed the sequence.

Anna was in her office on the phone to Langton, bringing him up to speed and loving it.

‘Added to being able to hopefully get some DNA, we also know that the blood in Tina’s flat was not Sammy Marsh’s, as I insisted Paul search the Smugglers cafe where he found the body.’

Paul interrupted by knocking and walking straight in. ‘Gov, you’d better come and look at the—’

‘Do you mind?’ she snapped, covering the phone.

‘I don’t think you’ll want to wait – it’s the CCTV footage from Asda and . . .’

She could tell from the look on his face that it was urgent so she stood up and told Langton that she would get straight back to him. She hurried into the incident room, where most of the team were gathered around Helen’s monitor.

‘What is it?’ Anna asked as they parted for her to stand directly behind Helen.

‘The store manager called in to say he’d made a mistake and that he still did have the interior store CCTV footage from the till that Tina Brooks was served at.’

‘Yes, but she’s not denying she bought the bleach, is she?’

‘I know, and I found her on the CCTV at till ten buying the bleach and carpet cleaner just like she said, on the sixteenth of March, but the footage the manager gave us was for a two-week period, so I thought I would look beyond that day and—’

‘Get to the point, Helen!’

‘It’s till number thirteen, the next day – the seventeenth. Let me just rewind it . . . no, sorry, too far. It’s amazing, because each till has its own CCTV camera, as it’s one of their biggest stores and . . . Okay, this is it.’

Anna watched intently as the footage played. Standing in line at till thirteen behind an elderly woman was Tina Brooks. She didn’t have a basket or trolley, but carried her purchase in her right hand, placing it onto the counter as the cashier picked it up and ran it by the electronic barcode reader. She then placed it into a carrier bag and passed it over to Tina.

Anna’s mouth felt dry as she asked for the tape to be replayed. It was clear to every one of them that Tina Brooks was buying an axe, not an overly large one, but it was without doubt an axe.

‘How long have you had this CCTV?’

Brian was red-faced as he confessed that he had been off sick when he’d been due to pick it up; Helen had thought he was checking it out with Asda, but due to the mix-up they had only got it the previous afternoon.

Helen explained that she had been wading through hours of CCTV footage as it covered days prior to and after Tina’s purchase of the bleach.

Anna was shaking as she returned to her office to digest what she had seen. She had only just decided to rearrest Tina when Paul returned, not even waiting to knock this time.

‘There’s more. We’ve fast-forwarded two days to see if there was anything and there is. It beggars belief. Come and have a look.’

The incident room was ominously quiet as Helen waited for Anna to rejoin them.

‘This is two days after we now know she purchased the axe.’

Yet again, caught on the same CCTV camera, Tina Brooks was standing talking to the same cashier. She had the plastic bag in her hand and seemed to be angry. There was no sound, but the cashier was clearly pointing across to another area of the store somewhere off-camera.

‘She might have been pointing to the returns desk. It’s to the side of the row of cashier points,’ Helen said.

‘Do you think she’s returning the bloody axe?’ Paul asked in disbelief.

‘Good work, Helen. Keep looking and see if you can find her at the returns desk,’ Anna said. She looked at her watch and asked them to get a car ready to take her over to the store. Back in her office, she had to sit down to stop her legs shaking. It was hard to believe what she had just seen, even harder to get her head around the fact that Tina had not only bought something that could have been used to chop up the body, but might even have taken it back for a refund. She took a deep breath. It was a near-perfect way to get rid of evidence, but was it too perfect? Whatever she had thought of Tina Brooks before, she now had to reassess everything as she got ready to interrogate her as a cold and calculating killer.

The drive to the store was tense. Paul drove, with Anna beside him on the phone to Forensics, asking Liz