“Come on, Mum. Pick it up. Please
pick it up. It’s just ringing out. That’s the second day.
Something’s wrong. I’ll have to go round there.”
“Try not to worry, Jess. There’s
bound to be a simple explanation.” Harry tried to reassure his
wife.
“She always answers at this time
of day. Something’s definitely wrong. Her friend Jenny
hasn’t heard from her, and they were supposed to meet last
Thursday. I must go round there now.
Can you watch the kids for a while?” Harry would reluctantly
hold the fort, hoping that his Saturday
lunchtime tee-off would still be available.
When Jessica’s knock at her
mother’s door went unanswered, she tried to look through the
living room curtains, which were drawn, ominously. Out of
the corner of her eye Jessica spotted the
next door neighbour heading for his garage. “Excuse me. Have
you seen my mother? She’s not
answering the door.”
The neighbour hesitated. “Come to
think of it. I haven’t seen her for a few days. Sorry, I have
to dash.” Jessica’s fears were reaching a crescendo. She
hoped the Police wouldn’t give her a telling
off, but this was serious.
Luckily for Jessica, the young
constable was understanding and very helpful. He went as far
as apologising for forcing the front door the following
Monday morning, although Jessica had made
the request. They found no trace of Jessica’s mother and
were about to leave, when something
about the living room carpet caught Jessica’s attention. She
bent down. “What’s that?”
The constable’s reply had a
shocking effect. “Looks like blood, I’m afraid, and the coffee table’s
been moved.” Jessica saw the exposed impression in the
carpet where one of the legs had been. “I
must treat the area as a crime scene now. Can I just check
your details, so we can keep in touch?”
Jessica’s world became darker as
the Police investigation progressed. Jessica’s mother’s bank
account hadn’t been touched. Her car hadn’t left the garage.
And still her family and friends hadn’t
heard anything. The preliminary forensic findings at the
house were alarming. A small area of blood
had been found near the coffee table in the living room and
there were tiny spots of blood on one of
the coffee table legs. The police had taken Jessica’s
mother’s toothbrush and hairbrush. Jessica had
not given up hope.
Then Jessica received the call
she had been dreading. When the Police Family Liaison Officer
told Jessica, as sympathetically as she could, that there
was no good news, and asked her to come to
the police station with her husband Harry, Jessica burst
into tears. The blood found in the living
room was Jessica’s mother’s blood. The blood pattern ruled
out accident. Jessica’s mother had been
attacked. There had been no ransom note to indicate mere abduction.
The police were now
conducting a murder investigation.
“It’s always the worst part of
the job, telling the family.”
“Yeah”, sighed DS Mark Miller. He
and DI Larry Jenkins had worked side by side in the
Norfolk Homicide Squad based in Norwich for more than five years.
Despite their experience it was
always heart-rending to witness the grief of loved ones at first
hand. By way of consolation, it drove
them to work harder to catch the culprit. There was always the
possibility that Jessica’s mother would
suddenly reappear, but the police knew the chances were
fanciful in the extreme.
The detectives understood that
with no body and no murder weapon, only the strongest
circumstantial evidence would suffice, assuming even then
that the Crown Prosecution Service was
satisfied there was enough to proceed.
Some reasonable deductions could
be made though. Without additional traces of blood,
and no ballistics indicators, the most likely cause of death
was strangulation. The pathologist
thought it reasonable to suppose that the deceased woman
collided with the coffee table on her
way down. On the plus side, entry had not been forced. Jessica’s
mother knew her killer.
Significantly, the killer must have had access to the back
door key, because Jessica knew that her
mother, who lived alone, was always careful to keep her back
door locked. Forensics established
that the deceased had been wrapped in bed-clothing missing
from a bedroom, before being carried
and dragged through the back door to the gate at the rear of
the garden. The back door was then
locked from the outside and the key thrown into a flowerbed.
The killer had worn gloves. Not a
single fingerprint could be found. Obviously, the body must
have been loaded into a vehicle and
driven off.
The time of death could be
narrowed to a span of a few days, from the time Jessica’s mother
was last seen alive, to the time she failed to answer Jessica’s
first phone call. However, the most
thorough door knocking and CCTV retrieval produced only
disappointment. If only a vehicle had
been noticed near to the rear of the property! Realistically, there were only two persons of
interest
– the deceased’s estranged husband and her boyfriend, Andrew
Birmingham. Police soon learned
that one suspect had no motive and the other had every
motive.
The boyfriend seemed to have
adored Jessica’s mother. He had no motive and was quickly
ruled out. By contrast, Jessica’s mother had had a very
unhappy marriage by all accounts. Even after
the separation, her husband bitterly resented any claim she
made to share in his considerable
wealth. In short, he hated her. When a tearful Jessica had
been asked if she knew of anyone who
might wish her mother harm, Jessica nominated her stepfather without hesitation.
Digging further, Inspector Jenkins established
that the prolonged and acrimonious divorce
process had reached the point where, had Jessica’s mother
not been murdered, her husband would
have been forced to sell his large house to settle with Jessica’s
mother. The interior of the husband’s
Range Rover had plainly not been cleaned for a very long time.
Would the killer not have taken every
precaution and cleaned his vehicle meticulously? In any
event, the vehicle was subjected to the most
rigorous forensic testing. Every inch was examined and re-examined.
Results were double checked,
and, in some cases, even triple checked. There was simply no
trace.
The Police kept watching and
waiting but after another four months the case had gone cold.
The two detectives shared the pain over a beer. “We’ve done
our best. I’m sure we haven’t
missed anything, Mark, but it’s always a grind when one gets
away.”
“Yeah, Larry. I hate it, letting the
family down, but we must move on. Can’t afford to dwell on
it. I’ll get the next round.”
It was nearly a year after her
mother’s disappearance. Jessica began in her usual self-effacing
way. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I thought you should have
this. Just in case it might mean
something.” With that, she handed over a few sheets of
paper. “That’s my mother’s handwriting. I
found this when I was going through her things the other
day. The figures and the notes about ‘he
this’ and ‘he that’ don’t make sense to me.”
“I’ve seen that figure at the top,
£63,000, somewhere before”, pondered DS Miller, as Jessica
left the office. “And those £5,000 entries, I’ll check if
they match her bank records.”
Things were beginning to fall
into place. The boyfriend had indeed been generous, making
four deposits of £5,000 into his lover’s bank account in the
month before she disappeared. Unusual,
perhaps, but nothing untoward, thought the sergeant. But that
figure of £63,000 was bothering him
And it kept bothering him. A few days later the eureka moment
happened.
“Remember that inside job at
Baker’s? How much went missing?”
DS Paul Butcher of the Fraud
Squad was on the other end of the line. “Hang on, Mark. I’ll just
be a minute. “Are you still there, Mark? Yeah, here it is.
£63,104.”
“Thanks, Paul. Just one more
question. An Andrew Birmingham worked there. Did you look
at him?”
“You bet. He was the main guy,
the in-house accountant. He was the closest we got, but we
couldn’t make it stick, and the company wrote it off.”
It was just enough to get
a warrant. Why is it that guilty souls always keep some kind of
trophy? Inspector
Jenkins was reminded of the notion when the search of the boyfriend’s home
uncovered a photo of Jessica’s mother in a bedside drawer.
Hardly an ordinary photo. A telling
feature stood out. Pound signs had been scrawled all over
her face. This was encouraging but far
short of the sort of evidence acceptable to the Crown
Prosecution Service, of course.
The boyfriend had told police
earlier that his car had been under repair in a local garage
around the time of Jessica’s mother’s disappearance. That
had checked out. The boyfriend had also
explained earlier that, without his car, he had walked to his
work at Baker’s, although it was quite a
distance, as part of a fitness drive. Further enquiries
would now be made at Baker’s.
“That’s it, he’s lied to us!
According to the office manager, Birmingham used his father’s mini
traveller at Baker’s, when his own car was being repaired.
It’ll be delicate approaching his father but
that’s the next step.” Encouraged, Inspector Jenkins felt
they were closing in.
“I thought you people had
finished with him at Baker’s.” Birmingham’s dad sounded
irritated, but he went on to confirm that he had indeed lent
his car to his son from the Wednesday
night before the disappearance. “Won’t forget that in a
hurry. He promised he would only need it for
a few short trips but he used more than half a bloody tank!”
Mr Birmingham senior was less than
pleased again, when, armed with the necessary warrant,
police removed his beloved car for forensic
examination.
Thankfully, the boyfriend had
been unable to remove all traces from the inside of his father’s
car. Faced with all the evidence, and some skilful questioning,
the boyfriend eventually came clean.
He was remorseful enough to lead police to the place of
burial.
Jessica had trouble coming to
terms with it all. The boyfriend had trusted her mother with his
stealing secret, but in return she had chosen to blackmail
him - and paid the highest price.
About the author
Dave Dempster is a retired lawyer, who practised in Scotland and Western Australia. He has been published in JONAH magazine and has had two of his detective crime short stories accepted for print anthologies.
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