Secret of the Dead (10 page)

Grace looked puzzled. “But didn’t Sue tell Barry that while she was working as a reporter with the Barnwell Chronicle, they’d repeatedly covered the story because Lucy’s body’s never been found?”

“It hasn’t.”

“Well if Weaver admitted to killing her, why didn’t he tell the interviewing officers where he had buried her?”

Hunter casually hunched his shoulders. “Well he did in a fashion. In his last interview he coughed to strangling her during a later row back at his place and then, when he realised she was dead, in a panic he took her up to Langsett Moor in his works van and buried her somewhere up there. He said he couldn’t remember where because he was drunk at the time.”

“But I thought he pleaded not guilty.”

“Oh he did, but the ins and outs of that are not on the prosecution file. I know from Barry’s conversation with Sue that Weaver alleged at his trial that he’d been fitted up, so I’m hoping to find the details of his defence among the paperwork in one of the other boxes I’ve yet to go through. But on this file all there is are the main witness statements and his interview notes.”

The unexpected ringing of his desk telephone made Hunter jump. He reached across and snatched it up.

“DS Kerr, Major Investigation Team,” he offered. Then he listened to the caller, reached for his pen and began scribbling notes onto scrap paper. Less than two minutes later he was dropping the handset onto its cradle.

“Come on Grace, get your coat on,” he said pushing himself up from his seat. “That was Bully on the phone. The key found in Jeffery Howson’s stomach was for a safe which they’ve found hidden in a set of wardrobes. He wants us to join him at the scene. He said he’s found something of great interest.”

* * * * *

Jockeying his way through heavy traffic, Hunter managed the journey to Woodlands View in less than twenty minutes and he tucked the CID car behind one of the SOCO vans parked at the head of the cul-de-sac.

A TV camera crew team had set up this side of the first taped cordon slung across the road, the backdrop of their focus being Number 12. A reporter appeared to be in the middle of a shoot.

He nudged Grace. “Make sure your lippy is on girl, you’ll be on Look North tonight.” He flashed a wink as he pushed his driver’s door to and popped the locks.

Approaching the top of the drive of number twelve Hunter saw that a large blue canvas had been erected against the side door, protecting as well as hiding the entrance. He flashed his warrant card, gave his and Grace’s names to the uniformed scene-logging officer and trooped off down the crumbling concrete drive, squeezing past Jeffery Howson’s ten-year-old Volkswagen Polo, as he made for the way in.

They found Tony and Mike in the dining room at the back of the house, hunkered over an oval mahogany dining table. The well polished surface was littered with a raft of papers, many of which appeared to be official police forms covered in handwriting, all sealed within clear plastic forensic evidence bags.

Hunter noted that this room, although slightly musty, had none of the stale tobacco or urine smells which had disgusted him during his visit the day before. And it was a lot brighter. A double-glazed set of patio doors, overlooking the overgrown rear garden, took up half of one wall, allowing bleached light from the pale mid-afternoon sun to filter in.

“I thought you might want to see this little lot before Forensics take them away,” said Tony Bullars, looking up. He pushed a couple of the bagged pages towards Hunter. “They’ve all been photographed and Duncan’s promised me he will have the images e-mailed to me for tomorrow morning’s briefing, but I wanted you to read this interview record and cast your eye over these documents we found.” Tony tapped the manila envelope with its handwritten inscription. “They were inside this envelope addressed to Barry. It’s pretty interesting stuff. If it’s the real deal, then it certainly opens up our investigation!”

Hunter stared at the array of documents across the table. There must have been at least twenty pieces. Six of the clear plastic forensic bags contained newspaper cuttings, yellowed and pitted with age. Hunter saw that someone had taken the patience to cut out, organise and neatly paste a series of different tabloid articles onto separate sheets of paper. He took in a couple of the headlines ‘DISAPPEARED WITHOUT TRACE’; ‘THE LAST PERSON TO SEE LUCY’; ‘LUCY BLAKE-HALL MAN CHARGED WITH MURDER.’

Several black and white photographs were dotted throughout the articles. He recognised a shot of The Coach and Horses pub in Barnwell town centre, which he knew from reading the Daniel Weaver prosecution file earlier was one of the last places where witnesses saw Lucy Blake-Hall.

Another was a head and shoulders shot of a smiling young woman, blonde hair piled up and fashioned into a bunch at the crown. Dark mascara ringed glistening eyes and a thin slender nose complemented cherub-like features. The caption gave Lucy’s name, with the addition of ‘where is she?’

Very pretty woman
, Hunter thought to himself. It was his first sighting of Lucy; previously she had just been a name on paper.

He would like to have read them further but out of the corner of his eye he could see Tony anxiously beating a tattoo over one particular piece of evidence.

Hunter slid the plastic bag from beneath Tony’s forefinger. Spinning it around to its correct way up, he saw that the exhibit pouch contained the first sheet of a formal record of interview form identical to the ones he had seen in the murder file that morning. Reading his way down, he picked out that it was the contemporaneous account of an interview with Daniel Weaver, conducted by Detective Sergeant Alan Darbyshire and Detective Constable Jeffery Howson on Monday 29
th
August 1983. Questioning started at 2.20pm and was concluded at 3.25pm that same day. He began reading the script, penned in black biro and still very clear and legible after all this time. In fact, unlike the clipped out foxed newspaper articles, it looked as though it had never seen the light of day since it had been written.

As he inched his way down the text, he felt more and more confused. Why had such an important document been locked away in Howson’s safeI? It should have formed part of the prosecution file against Daniel Weaver.

For the next twenty minutes, Hunter meticulously read every handwritten sentence of the chronicled interview. As he put aside each separate sheet, Tony Bullars fed him another, until all the twelve pages had been digested.

Taking in the last sentence of the final page, Hunter, set it aside with the others. He let off a low whistle and pushed himself up. Supporting himself on his straight arms, he said,

“I think this is what got Jeffery Howson killed.”

DAY THREE: 26
th
November.

A gloomy early start to the day meant that the overhead fluorescent lighting in MIT had to be on for morning briefing. The bright lights bathed the room in a warm glow, masking the cold outside.

Detective Superintendent Dawn Leggate stood beside the incident whiteboard at the front, looking around and feeling uncomfortable. She took a deep breath and clenched her stomach muscles. Her insides were churning. It was at times like this she really could do with a cigarette. She had stopped smoking 10 months ago, yet there were still occasions when the craving came back and this was one of them.

She exhaled slowly.

“Good morning everyone,” Dawn said in her soft Scottish voice, gratified when no nervous inflections came out.

Casting her eyes quickly around the room, she could see that everyone was seated at their desk, with the exception of Family Liaison Officer DC Carol Ragen, who was perched on one corner of Grace’s desk nursing a steaming mug of coffee.

Most of the team had fresh hot drinks and some had even made themselves a slice of toast. It was such a familiar sight, she thought to herself as she gazed around. In spite of the faces being different and the Police Forces being hundreds of miles apart, this briefing scene could have mirrored the many that she had conducted with her old team back in her native Scotland.

“Mr Robshaw has had to start at Headquarters today, to sort out the budget for the investigation, so he’s asked me to take briefing. We have quite a lot to go through this morning especially the revelation yesterday so we’ll run this from the top.”

She tapped the incident board with her pen.

“We all know that sixty-three year old retired detective Jeffery Howson was found murdered at his home on Monday and the likelihood is that he was killed late Saturday night. We also know that before his death he made a phone call to Barry here, stating he wanted to meet and tell him about the murder of Lucy Blake-Hall in nineteen-eighty-three. That the wrong person had been convicted of it and that he knew who had done it. Have I got that right?” She turned to the Civilian Investigator she’d heard so much about but had not had time to get to know yet. In fact,  such had been her baptism, thrown immediately into this murder enquiry, that with the exception of Hunter she hadn’t had the time to get to know any of her new team.

Barry nodded back.

 “I can also see from the notes on the board that we now have the background to the Lucy Blake-Hall murder. Hunter, you and Grace had that enquiry. Can you expand on the information on the board?”

Dawn watched Hunter pick up his loose notes from his desk. She shot him a delicate smile.

“Yes Boss. We picked up the investigation in its entirety from the Cold Case Unit yesterday. We’ve haven’t had time to go through everything, as you will appreciate, but I have read the prosecution file and the report on his appeal, and Grace is currently trying to organise the old card index system for inputting into HOLMES. She has also spoken with the Forensics lab at Wetherby. It would appear they still have the exhibit slides from the original investigation and they have their own set of comprehensive notes, which is a real plus.”

The team listened as Hunter outlined the Lucy Blake-Hall case. He gave a brief resume of her family circumstances -married with a five year-old daughter, back in 1983, and then focused in detail on the last sightings of her on Friday 26
th
August when witnesses saw her with her lover, Daniel Weaver, firstly in the Coach and Horses pub, and then later that same evening arguing in the market place in Barnwell.

“Jeffery Howson and a Detective Sergeant Alan Darbyshire, whom, I’ve been informed by Barry, retired as a DCI in nineteen-ninety-two, arrested Daniel the day after she had been reported missing after visiting him at his home. He had scratches to his face and refused to say how he had got them. Weaver was known to the police. He has previous for a chemist break-in and also possession of a controlled drug with intent to supply. He did eighteen months in a young offenders’ institution in nineteen-seventy-seven.”

He outlined the interrogation of Daniel Weaver at the police station, in which, after initial denials, he admitted to his affair with Lucy and confessed that she had scratched him during an argument on the evening of her disappearance. Hunter revealed how Jeffery Howson and DS Alan Darbyshire had also discovered Lucy’s handbag hidden under sacking during a search of Weaver’s garden shed and that after making another initial denial he had gone on to give a full and frank admission as to how he had strangled Lucy and then buried her body up on Langsett Moor.

“A team of police officers spent a fortnight up on the moors searching for signs of her burial site, but at that stage Weaver had been appointed a solicitor and refused to cooperate with the investigation further, so her body was never found. The trial of Daniel Weaver took place in April nineteen-eighty-four. He did go in the box and give evidence. And I’ve got the next bits from the newspaper articles covering the trial.” He paused before continuing. “He admitted to the affair and to the argument with Lucy in which she had scratched his face. He said they were caused while trying to reason with her and she had pulled away from him. He admitted making a number of statements during his interviews but he flatly denied making the one where he admitted to strangling her and burying her body up on Langsett Moor. And he accused the police of planting the handbag. After a three week trial, he was found guilty of Lucy’s murder and given life. His defence submitted an appeal but it was turned down on the grounds that the trial was conducted fairly, and that without fresh evidence the conviction was deemed to be safe.”

Hunter glanced up from his jottings. “To be honest, on my first reading of the file I thought everything was cut and dried. That was until we found that statement in Jeffery Howson’s safe. Last night I re-examined the case file. All the interviews in it were written and recorded on the appropriate forms and witnessed by the defendant, Weaver. With the exception of the last set of notes in which he made his confession. On those, where he should have signed, the words ‘refused to sign’ have been penned.”

“Sorry to steal your thunder Hunter,” said Dawn, “If I can come in there now?” She again tapped her Biro against the sides of the incident board, where reduced digital images of the paperwork recovered from Jeffery Howson’s safe were affixed in the top right hand corner.

“This find could change everything about the trial and conviction of Daniel Weaver. The originals of these are currently on their way to Forensics for chemical dating analysis and for fingerprint identification, but at the moment everything about them screams they are the genuine article. What we have here, team, is a set of recorded interview notes conducted with Weaver during the time he was in police custody on twenty-ninth August, nineteen-eighty-three. As we have heard, the interviewers were Jeffery Howson and Alan Darbyshire, and going by the handwriting, which matches that on the envelope they were found in, looks as though they have been completed by our murder victim Jeffery Howson. Prior to the introduction of PACE and taped recorded interviewing all interviews conducted in a police station had to be handwritten. The notes take the form of a question and answer session between the police officers and the defendant, known as contemporaneous notes, and had to be read and witnessed by the defendant. The paperwork found in the envelope, for the attention of Barry, has been witnessed by Daniel Weaver and bears no resemblance to any of the interviews on the original prosecution file. In fact they are a clear denial in the involvement of Lucy’s disappearance and there is certainly no admission to her murder, in fact, quite the opposite. Daniel Weaver states that he last saw Lucy after their argument in the market place at about nine-thirty pm on the Friday evening. He says she told him she was going home; that her husband had found out about their relationship and was holding onto their daughter Jessica, threatening Lucy that she would never see her again. She told Daniel that she couldn’t leave her daughter behind, so was calling it off. He did his best to make her change her mind and at one stage grabbed hold of her. And that’s how he got his face scratched when she pulled away. He goes on to say that he went straight home to his flat, drank a few whiskies and watched some TV, and then went to bed where he remained until the next day when he went to his parents’ house about eleven am, where his Mother made him some breakfast. When he was asked about the handbag being found hidden under sacking in his shed he stated and I quote ‘someone must have planted it.’