stock, knew a heck of a lot more. But they usually found it best to let the SOCOs show off a bit.
“We’re listening,” said Gristhorpe.
Emboldened by that, the officer went on. “A shotgun shell’s made up of a primer, a charge of gunpowder and the pellets, or shot. There’s no slug and there’s no rifling in the barrel, so you can’t get any characteristic markings to trace back to the weapon. Except from the shell, of course, which bears the imprint of the firing and loading mechanisms. But we don’t have a shell. What we do have is this.” He held up the wadding. “Commercial wadding is usually made of either paper or plastic, and you can sometimes trace the shell’s manufacturer through it. But this isn’t commercial.”
“What exactly is it?” asked Banks, reaching out.
The SOCO passed him the tweezers and said, “Don’t know for certain yet, but it looks like something from a color magazine. And luckily, it’s not too badly burned inside, only charred around the edges. It’s tightly packed, but we’ll get it unfolded and straightened out when we get it to the lab, then maybe we’ll be able to tell you the name, date and page number.”
“Then all we’ll have to do is check the list of subscribers,” said Banks, “and it’ll lead us straight to our killer. Dream on.”
The SOCO laughed. “We’re not miracle workers, sir.”
“Has anyone got a magnifying glass?” Banks asked the assembly at large. “And I don’t want any bloody cracks about Sherlock Holmes.”
One of the SOCOs passed him a glass, the rectangular kind that came with the tiny-print, two-volume edition of the
What he saw was an irregularly shaped wad of crumpled paper, no more than about an inch across at its widest point. At first he couldn’t make out anything but the blackened edge of the wadded paper but it certainly looked as if it were from some kind of magazine. He looked more closely, turning the wadding this way and that, holding it closer and further, then finally the disembodied shapes coalesced into something recognizable. “Bloody hell,” he muttered, letting his arm fall slowly to his side.
“What is it, Alan?” Gristhorpe asked.
Banks handed him the glass. “You’d better have a look for yourself,” he said. “You won’t believe me.”
Banks stood back and watched Gristhorpe scrutinize the wadding, knowing that it would be only a matter of moments before he noticed, as Banks had done, part of a pink tongue licking a dribble of semen from the tip of an erect penis.
Chapter 2
1
Traditional police wisdom has it that if a case doesn’t yield leads in the first twenty-four hours, then everyone is in for a long, tough haul. In practice, of course, the period doesn’t always turn out to be twenty-four hours; it can be twenty-three, nine, fourteen, or even forty-eight. That’s the problem: when do you scale down your efforts? The answer, Banks reminded himself as he dragged his weary bones into the “Boardroom” of Eastvale Divisional Police Headquarters at ten o’clock that morning, is that you don’t.
The Suzy Lamplugh case was a good example. It started as a missing-persons report. One lunch-time, a young woman left the estate agent’s office in Fulham, where she worked, and disappeared. Only after over a year’s intensive detective work, which resulted in more than six hundred sworn statements, thousands of interviews, 26,000 index cards and nobody knew how many man-hours, was the investigation wound down. Suzy Lamplugh was never found, either alive or dead.
By the time Banks arrived at the station, Superintendent Gristhorpe had appointed Phil Richmond Office Manager and asked him to set up the Murder Room, where all information regarding the Keith Rothwell case would be carefully indexed, cross-referenced and filed. At first, Gristhorpe thought it should be established in Fortford or Relton, close to the scene, but later decided that they had better facilities at the Eastvale station. It was only about seven miles from Fortford, anyway.
Richmond was also the only one among them who had training in the use of the HOLMES computer system – acronym for the Home Office Major Enquiry System, with a superfluous “L” for effect. HOLMES wasn’t without its problems, especially as not all the country’s police forces used the same computer languages. Still, if no developments occurred before long, Richmond ’s skill might prove useful.
Gristhorpe had also given a brief press conference first thing in the morning. The sooner photographs of Keith Rothwell and descriptions of the killers, balaclavas and all, were sitting beside the public’s breakfast plates or flashing on their TV screens, the sooner information would start to come in. The news was too late for that morning’s papers, but it would make local radio and television, the
Of course, Gristhorpe had given hardly any details about the murder itself. At first, he had even resisted the idea of releasing Rothwell’s name. After all, there had been no formal identification, and they didn’t have his fingerprints on file for comparison. On the other hand, there was little doubt as to what had happened, and they were hardly going to drag Alison or her mother along to the mortuary to identify the remains.
Gristhorpe had also been in touch with the antiterrorist squad at Scotland Yard. Yorkshire was far from a stranger to IRA action. People still remembered the M62 bomb in 1974, when a coach carrying British servicemen and their families was blown up, killing eleven and wounding fourteen. Many even claimed to have heard the explosion from as far away as Leeds and Bradford. More recently, two policemen had been shot by IRA members during a routine traffic check on the A1.
The antiterrorist squad would be able to tell Gristhorpe whether Rothwell had any connections, however tenuous, that would make him a target. As an accountant, he could, for example, have been handling money for a terrorist group. In addition, forensic information and details of the
While Gristhorpe handled the news media and Richmond set up the Murder Room, Banks and Susan Gay had conducted a breakfast-time house-to-house of Relton and Fortford – including a visit to the Rose and Crown and a generous breakfast from Ian Falkland – trying to find out a bit about Rothwell, and whether anyone had seen or heard anything unusual on the night of the murder.
Gristhorpe, Richmond and Susan Gay were already in the room when Banks arrived and poured himself a large black coffee. The conference room was nicknamed the “Boardroom” because of its well- polished, heavy oval table and ten stiff-backed chairs, not to mention the coarse-textured burgundy wallpaper, which gave the room a constant aura of semi-darkness, and the large oil painting (in ornate gilt frame) of one of Eastvale’s most successful nineteenth-century wool merchants, looking decidedly sober and stiff in his tight-fitting suit and starched collar.
“Right,” said Gristhorpe, “time to get up to date. Alan?”
Banks slipped a few sheets of paper from his briefcase and rubbed his eyes. “Not much so far, I’m afraid. Rothwell was trained as an accountant. At least we’ve got that much confirmed. Some of the locals in Relton and Fortford knew him, but not well. Apparently, he was a quiet sort of bloke. Kept to himself.”
“Who did he work for?”
“Self-employed. We got this from Ian Falkland, landlord of the Rose and Crown in Fortford. He said Rothwell used to drop by now and then for a quick jar before dinner. Never had more than a couple of halves. Well-liked, quiet, decent sort of chap. Anyway, he used to work for Hatchard and Pratt, the
