Superintendent Martin pushed the door open, dressed in an immaculate dinner jacket instead of uniform. ‘Not disturbing you, am I?’ he asked.
‘You’re a very welcome interruption, sir,’ George said, meaning it.
Martin settled himself in the chair opposite George and slipped a silver hip flask from his back pocket. ‘Anything to drink out of?’ he asked.
George shook his head. ‘Not even a dirty cup. Sorry.’
‘No matter. We’ll just adopt battlefield manners,’ Martin said, taking a swig from the flask before wiping the top and handing it to George. ‘Go on. I bet you need it.’
Gratefully, George took a mouthful of brandy. He closed his eyes and savoured the burn as it coursed down his throat and warmed his chest. ‘I didn’t realize you had medical qualifications, sir. That was just what the doctor ordered.’
‘I was at a Masonic dinner. So was DCI Carver. He told me what you’ve been up to.’ Martin gave George a level stare. ‘I’d rather have heard it from you.’
‘Things…moved at a bit of a lick today. I was very uneasy about that business of the newspaper photograph last week. I thought it needed further investigation. But I wasn’t planning on anything more than questioning Hawkin to see if I could unsettle him and perhaps make him slip up. Then when his wife phoned…I did think about coming to you before we searched the manor, but if I had, I would have missed the JPs at court, and you know how difficult some of them can be about signing warrants in what they see as their own time. So…I just forged ahead.’
‘So where exactly are we up to?’
‘I’ve charged him with rape. He’ll be up before the justices in the morning for a remand in custody. I’m just doing the paperwork now. I should tell you that he’s got Alfie Naden defending him and he’s already preparing the defence that we faked the photographs to make it look as if we hadn’t completely failed in the Alison Carter case.’
Martin snorted. ‘That’ll never fly. I doubt we’ve got either a photographer or the equipment to concoct something so elaborate. Still, it’ll stir up a lot of mud and he might just slide through it and out the other side. You can never tell with juries, and he’s a good-looking beggar.’ He fished a cigar case out of his inside jacket pocket. He loosened his bow tie and undid the top collar stud in his dress shirt. ‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘Cigar?’
‘I’ll stick with my cigarettes, thanks.’ Both men lit up.
Martin exhaled a plume of blue smoke. ‘What have we got for murder? Take me through it.’
George leaned back in his seat. ‘One, we now know he was interfering with his stepdaughter and taking pornographic photographs of her. Two, on the afternoon she disappeared, he claims he was alone in his darkroom. But we have two witnesses who saw him crossing the field between the wood where Alison’s dog was found and the copse where there were signs of a struggle involving her.’
‘Suggestive,’ Martin commented.
‘Three, the dog lived in his household. If anyone could have taped its muzzle shut without being bitten, it was someone that familiar with the dog. We’ll have to do a trawl of the local chemists to see if anyone remembers selling him a roll of elastoplast. Four, nobody in the village apart from Ma Lomas admits to ever having heard of the disused lead mine workings. But a book detailing the exact location of the entrance to the mine was found on the shelf in Hawkin’s study.’
‘Suggestive but circumstantial.’
George nodded. ‘It’s all circumstantial. But then, how often do we get a corroborated witness account of a murder?’
‘True. Let’s hear the rest of it.’
George paused for a moment to collect his thoughts. ’OK. Five, Hawkin shared the blood group of the person who deposited semen on Alison’s underwear. There was also blood on that clothing that is the same group as Alison’s and the blood found on the tree in the copse. We know from the presence of Barr bodies that this blood was female in origin. So it’s reasonable to assume that Alison was at least injured if not killed at the hands of a sexual predator. And we know from the photographs that Hawkin fits that category. Six, the supposed identification of Alison from a newspaper photograph of a football crowd. It mirrors exactly a newspaper story about the missing Manchester girl, Pauline Reade. I believe he used this as a means of making himself look like a worried and caring father. Something he’d completely failed to do up to that point, I have to say.
’Seven, two bullets were found in the lead mine. One was sufficiently unmarked to be identified as having been fired from a Webley .38 revolver. A similar gun was stolen from a house where Hawkin was a regular visitor a couple of years ago. A similar gun was found hidden in his darkroom, with the serial number filed off. We don’t know yet if the man whose gun was stolen can identify this as the same weapon. And we don’t know yet if this is the gun that fired the bullets we found in the mine. But we will.
‘And finally, we have the bloodstained shirt. It’s identical to the ones he has made to measure in London, right down to the tailor’s label on the collar. It’s been soaked with blood. If that blood corresponds to the other blood we’ve circumstantially identified with Alison, it ties Hawkin into an attack on her.’ George raised his eyebrows. ‘What do you think?’
‘If we had a body, I’d say charge him. But we haven’t got a body. We’ve got no direct evidence that Alison Carter isn’t alive and well. The DPP will never wear a murder charge without a body.’
‘There’s precedent,’ George protested. ‘Haigh, the acid-bath murderer. There was no corpse there.’
‘There was evidence that someone’s body had been disposed of and forensic traces that pointed to his victim, if I remember rightly,’ Martin said.
‘There’s another precedent with even less evidence. In 1955. A Polish ex-serviceman who was convicted of the murder of his business partner. The prosecution claimed he’d fed the body to the pigs on their farm. All the prosecution had to go on was that friends and neighbours said the two men had been quarrelling. There were some bloodstains in the farmhouse kitchen and the business partner had vanished without trace, leaving behind his Post Office savings account. We’ve got a lot more than that. There’s been no confirmed sighting of Alison Carter since she disappeared. We’ve got evidence that she was sexually assaulted and that she lost a considerable amount of blood. It’s not likely that she’s still alive, is it?’
Martin leaned back and let his cigar smoke dribble towards the ceiling. ‘There’s a lot of difference between “not likely” and “beyond reasonable doubt”. Even with the gun. If he killed her close up, why are there two bullets in the wall?’
‘Maybe she got away from him initially and he shot at her to scare her. Maybe she was struggling and he threatened her with the other two shots. To subdue her?’
Martin considered. ‘Possible. But the defence will use those two bullets to spread confusion with the jury. And if he killed the girl in the mine workings, why move the body?’
George pushed his hair back from his forehead. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps he knew an even better place to hide the body. He must have done, mustn’t he? Or else we’d have found it by now.’
‘So if he knew a better place to dispose of the body, why leave evidence of the sexual assault in the mine?’
George sighed. Frustrated as he was by Martin’s questions, he knew the defence lawyers would be a hundred times worse. ‘I don’t know. Maybe he just didn’t have the chance. He had to put in an appearance at the dinner table. He couldn’t afford to be late that night of all nights. And by the time he’d had his dinner, the word had gone out about Alison and he couldn’t chance going back?’
‘It’s