Hunter returned to his seat.
“Okay,” said the Detective Superintendent rubbing his hands together. “Well done Hunter, you’ve convinced me with that explanation, unless anyone has another interpretation.”
The detectives around the tables all looked at one another. A few shrugged.
The SIO looked along the sea of faces. “So what’s the significance of the playing card? The seven of hearts found on Rebecca Morris’s body, yet none found with Carol Siddons.”
Blank stares faced him back.
“We don’t actually know there was no card with Carol’s body,” returned Hunter. “Quite a lot of earth had been removed around her before the digger uncovered her remains. It could still be amongst the waste we’re sorting through.”
The team nodded in acceptance of Hunter’s response.
There was further silence for a good thirty seconds then Detective Superintendent Robshaw said, “Right, the playing card issue is one we need to think about for future briefings.” He leaned forward, clasping his hands together into a ball “And I don’t need to remind you all that what we discuss here doesn’t get to the press. The playing card and the markings on the body we keep to ourselves, okay?”
There was a nod of acknowledgment from the team.
The SIO unclasped his hands. “Right let’s move on. Isobel give us a rundown of what we have so far.”
Isobel dropped her paperwork onto the desk and lifted a pair of reading glasses, hanging from a cord around her neck, onto the bridge of her nose.
As Hunter listened and watched Isobel he couldn’t help but notice that over the years, at every new investigation, she seemed to have put on extra pounds, and he couldn’t help but think that her pudgy features made her appearance look older than her forty years. He guessed it was down to all the constant deskwork and long hours, only able to grab fast food and in-between snacks, to fuel her working day.
She cleared her throat and began to read slowly through the pages of summary, occasionally pausing to cross reference with the two timelines to confirm sightings and evidence. She began with Carol Siddons affirming that her mother Susan had last seen the fourteen-year-old schoolgirl, on the twelfth of October 1993, after making an unofficial visit from school to her mother’s house, instead of going back to the residential care home where she had been placed by the courts.
“Carol spilled tomato sauce on her school clothes and so her Mum loaned her a pair of jeans and a cardigan and saw her to the bus stop at half past nine. She left her at the bus stop and that is our last sighting until her body is discovered on the old Manvers Coking plant site ten days ago. Now this is where we have had a real breakthrough. A PC Paul Goodright, who used to work here in Barnwell CID back in nineteen-ninety-three, has come forward following the Crimewatch appeal. It appears that on that night he had his CID car nicked whilst he was out on enquiries and that was found by a passing dog walker on fire on the dirt track behind the Coking Plant. The Fire brigade put out the fire and PC Goodright recovered a cardigan from the back seat of the CID car.”
“I remember that.” interjected Hunter feigning amazement, as though this was all fresh news to him. “I was working that night. I went out with Paul after the Fire Brigade called in with the news. Scenes of Crime were called but the car was badly smoke damaged and they didn’t manage to lift prints or anything unfortunately. The car had also got some front-end damage and there had been a fatal hit and run that same night. We’re certain it hit a car being driven by the boyfriend of Paul Goodright’s sister. The boyfriend was killed and she was badly injured in that crash. In fact it confined her to a wheelchair. He was trapped inside when it burst into flames. The gaffer at that time, DI Jameson, encouraged the Traffic Officers, who were investigating the accident, not to make the link with the CID car. I think he was going for promotion at the time and he thought it might affect his chances. Back then having the embarrassment of one of his department’s cars being nicked and linked with a fatal was not a sign of good leadership.”
“Well,” continued Isobel, “It seems PC Goodright recovered a cardigan from the back of that car and booked it in as evidence. He’s taken the trouble to search through old property at Headquarters and found the cardigan. It’s still sealed in its original bag and labelled and it’s been identified by Susan Siddons as the same cardigan she loaned her daughter Carol on the night she went missing. That’s on its way to Forensics as we speak.”
“That is good news” said the Superintendent elatedly. “This could be the breakthrough we’ve been looking for.”
Hunter lowered his head and smiled. Paul and Barry Newstead had come good.
“Now to Rebecca Morris,” continued Isobel. “As we know she was last seen walking towards a bus stop five hundred yards from her home, in school uniform. That sighting was at five to eight on the morning of the sixth of July — three weeks ago. Her body was discovered the next day in the barn of a derelict farm near to Harlington, four miles from her home. There are no sightings during this time and we are as happy as we can be that the man who discovered Rebecca’s mutilated body was not involved in her murder. The man who found her states he thought he heard someone running from the back of the farm and then a van or car driving away. We have no description of a person or vehicle.”
Isobel followed the line of her finger down the summary, glancing up from time to time as she spoke to see if the others were following. “When Rebecca’s body was discovered she had on jeans and a T-shirt. We have not found her school uniform, or the school bag she was seen with, or her mobile phone. A close friend of Rebecca’s, Kirsty Evans, states that Rebecca hinted that someone older had been chatting her up, phoning her, and asking if he could photograph her. Kirsty says the impression she got from Rebecca was that this guy was older, more than likely a young man as opposed to a teenager.”
She paused again and looked over her glasses at everyone studying her paperwork “And finally our only suspect at this time, Steve Paynton. Steve was the partner of Carol’s Mother, Susan, and we know from what she has said that Steve was physically abusing the pair of them and when he was arrested he had in his possession indecent images of Carol when she was very young. He also had almost a hundred other indecent photographs of children, none of which were of Rebecca. So although we can link him to Carol, we cannot link him to Rebecca at this time. As we know both Carol and Rebecca were killed by the same weapon and the moulding taken from the wounds, which has come back from the Forensic team is pointing us to a Bowie type knife. Extensive searches have now been carried out at all the locations where we know Steve Paynton has lived over the past thirteen years and we have not found anything similar, or anything relating to Rebecca.” Isobel paused again removed her spectacles and sat back. “That brings us up to the present,” she said picking up her paperwork and tapping it neatly together on the tabletop.
The Detective Superintendent looked up from his copies of the documents and leaned forward. “Okay, thanks for that Isobel,” he began. “Next steps.” He raised his eyes to the ceiling for a second and then returned his gaze. “The matter playing on my mind is the time gap between the killings. So whilst we have teams going over the background stuff of the two girls, we now need to concentrate on some of our old cold casework. Are there any other unsolved murders out there, which could be connected to ours? We also need to focus on the killer or killers. What have they been doing or where have they been during the past fourteen years. We need to make enquiries with prisons and the probation service, to see if we can come up with any likely candidates. We have a lot of tasks to be getting on with and with limited resources so Headquarters have approved me taking on more staff to help.”