“I don’t believe so, Gus,” said Matt. “Warren was an odd character. There were rumours when he first arrived at Bourne Hill.”
“Rumours that suggested he left Southampton under a cloud,” said Gus.
“Something which never resulted in a censure that appeared on his record. We wouldn’t have employed him if it had. The younger female uniformed officers and forensic staff avoided getting left in a room alone with him. Nobody ever made a complaint, but Billie overheard comments in the ladies' toilets that Warren gave them the creeps just by the way he looked at them.”
“How did he relate with the guys at the station?” asked Gus.
“Warren kept himself to himself. He never socialised with anyone from the station during my time at Bourne Hill. He was peculiar; Warren would collar a married officer in the canteen and show him photos of his wife on his mobile phone. She wasn’t much to look at, but Warren doted on her and thought she was beautiful. He’d ask whether the bloke had a photo of his wife he could see. It could have been innocent enough, but after a while, the blokes were doing the same as the young women and keeping their distance.”
“What happened after you and Billie arrived at the white tent?” asked Gus.
“The Crime Scene Manager fetched us from the external cordon. We’d already suited up while we were waiting. He took us to the tent, and we found Warren Baker and two of his forensic team gathering evidence inside. The police surgeon leaned in from the driver’s door, carrying out his black arts on Marion Reeve’s body. We heard him detailing every step as he went. His recorder sat on the dashboard.”
“Had forensics removed evidence from inside the car already?” asked Gus. “Could you see the victim’s handbag?”
“I couldn’t see much at all because the police surgeon was in the way. Billie made her way around to the passenger side for a better look at the body. I couldn’t get further than the bonnet for a while because one of the forensic guys was still working there. When I joined Billie, the only thing left inside the Lexus was Marion’s dead body.”
“Someone removed the handbag before you reached the murder scene. Was it properly bagged and recorded, with separate bags for each item it held?”
“Everything was by the book according to the crime scene logs we studied later.”
“When was the last time anyone saw the phone?” asked Gus.
“We never saw it, Gus,” said Matt Price. “The Crime Scene Manager’s logs listed everyone in or near that car from the second Phil Youngman and his PC arrived. As Billie remarked when we stood at the bottom of Stephenson Road, when you added up the uniformed officers, Baker and his forensics people, and the police surgeon, there were a lot of people in the vicinity.”
“So, the handbag and its contents supposedly got entered into evidence and stored away at Bourne Hill,” said Gus. “When did you realise it was missing?”
“I don’t need to tell you what it’s like to work on a murder case such as that one, Gus,” said Matt. “You get on with interviewing people connected to the victim as soon as possible. Forensic analysis can take hours, days, or even weeks, so you concentrate on what you have at hand. When results started filtering through later, Billie queried why there was nothing on the phone’s call history. We sent a young Detective Constable to the evidence room, and he spent hours hunting for that phone. It wasn’t where it was supposed to be, but time is always against you. We couldn’t leave the guy there opening every box looking for a phone that got misplaced. It could still be there, for all I know. We just didn’t find it before we got assigned to a new case. That was five or six weeks later.”
“When did you and Billie Wightman stop working together?”
“She moved to Gablecross after her promotion came through at the end of 2015. My elevation to DI came through in May in 2016, and I secured a post here at Portishead.”
“The rumours suggest you haven’t stopped smiling since,” said Gus.
“Billie had a rough deal with her husband, Gus. It became tough to work alongside her. I was always walking on eggshells in case I said something to set her off.”
“Did either of you review the case before you left Salisbury?” asked Gus.
“We had another stab at it together in 2014. That would have been in the summer, June, or July. We couldn’t put a dent in any of the alibis we got during the first investigation. The evidence, or lack of it, didn’t point us towards having missed an obvious suspect. We spent two or three days on it and moved on.”
“What did you make of Martyn Street when you interviewed him in 2014?” asked Gus.
“He wasn’t much help on the original investigation, nor the review. His alibi was rock solid. Martyn is a bit backward if that’s the right term to use these days. He answered our questions with as few words as possible. Martyn looks like the strong, silent type. The sort that many women might go for until he opens his mouth. Sorry if we’ve left you with an even harder nut to crack by losing that mobile phone, Gus. I hope you and your team find something we missed.”
“I don’t blame you or Billie, Matt. Let’s hope the phone is misplaced and not lost. Thanks for your time.”
“That didn’t sound good, guv,” said Neil after Gus ended the call. “Do you think Marion Reeves’s phone got lost in transit?”
“Before they had the chance to retrieve the call history, which could have identified our killer,” said Blessing.
“Losing evidence is a rare occurrence, thank
