‘That’s right. I remember her. Pretty young thing in a flower-patterned frock. Nervous as hell. And clearly very upset. She was at the wedding?’
‘Mother of the bride.’
‘Dead?’
‘Unharmed.’
‘Then why make the connection?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Banks. ‘All I know is that I suspect there might be one, and I’m not a hundred per cent convinced that Martin Edgeworth was responsible for the shooting.’
‘You’re not trying to say that someone shot Maureen Grainger’s daughter because of what happened to Wendy Vincent over fifty years ago, are you?’
‘I’m not sure what I’m saying. Why don’t you tell me about it?’
‘We worked on the assumption that it was a crime of opportunity.’
‘Most likely it was,’ said Banks. ‘But why did Frank Dowson kill Wendy Vincent after raping her?’
‘You know as well as I do, Alan,’ said Jenny, ‘that rapists often kill their victims.’
‘Not always,’ Banks said. ‘Unless they’re sexual psychopaths. And usually, if they do, it’s a matter of identification.’
‘Which is exactly what it was in this case,’ said Gristhorpe. ‘Wendy Vincent did know Frank Dowson. Not well, but certainly well enough to recognise him, to know who he was. He lived on the same estate. He was the older brother of someone she knew. When they finally caught up with Dowson a couple of years ago, he confessed to a number of other rapes, but denied any more murders.’
‘The others were strangers?’ Jenny said.
‘Aye.’
‘Was there any gossip about Wendy Vincent?’ Banks asked. ‘Did she have any sort of a reputation to make Dowson think she’d be easy, or asking for it? Anything that might make him believe she was sexually available?’
‘Good lord, no,’ said Gristhorpe. ‘Quite the opposite. Young Wendy was an angel, by all accounts. Sunday school, Brownies, the whole kit and caboodle. Did well at school, good at sports. Pretty much held a dysfunctional household together by herself. There’d been problems, social services involved, that sort of thing. The parents were alcoholics. But Wendy was a nice kid. Everyone said so.’
‘Is it possible that he might not have intended to kill Wendy Vincent, but that she surprised him by struggling?’
‘He was certainly a strong lad, and one of those who didn’t know his own strength. But he raped her then stabbed her five times, Alan. There wasn’t much of a struggle. I’d hardly say he didn’t know exactly what he was doing. You were right first time. He knew she’d be able to identify him. And that’s what the court believed as well, fifty years later, despite the sneaky defence barrister trying to claim diminished responsibility.’
‘Frank Dowson was mentally challenged?’ Jenny asked.
‘He had a very low IQ. But he knew what rape and murder were. At least he knew how to commit them.’
‘Can you remember what happened that day?’ Banks asked.
‘As if it were yesterday. Happens when you get older, you know, Alan. Yesterday becomes a blur, but the distant past comes sharp into focus. I remember all my cases, and Wendy Vincent was one of the first, like I said. I was a callow DC working in West Yorkshire.’
‘Do you remember anyone called Chadwick, a DI? Was he involved in this case at all?’
‘I knew Chadwick, but he wasn’t on the Wendy Vincent case. I never worked with him, but I heard things. I don’t even think he was around at the time. Always thought he was a bit iffy. Detective Superintendent Lindsay was running the investigation, and I was working mostly with DI Rattigan and DS Saunders. Decent coppers, all of them. Of course, there were plenty of others involved, plainclothes and uniformed. There was a huge search for the girl, then a manhunt for her killer, but by then Dowson was back at sea, and as far as we knew he’d always been there.’
‘How did it begin?’
‘We got a phone call from Wendy’s parents. Her father, if I remember rightly. They didn’t have a phone in their house, so he had to walk to the nearest telephone box. That’s before they all got vandalised.’
‘When was this?’
‘About seven in the evening. They’d been expecting her home to make their tea. She was playing hockey for the school in the morning, then there was a lunch afterwards at school for the team. Teatime at home was half past five. Regular as clockwork. They assumed she’d be knocking about with her mates in the afternoon, but when she wasn’t home by then, they got worried. By seven they were even more worried. It wasn’t like her. Wendy was a good girl. They got in touch with Maureen’s parents, who said that Maureen hadn’t seen Wendy that day. Maureen wasn’t a hockey player, by the way, so she’d been visiting her gran in Thornhill, near Bradford, and not at the game. Then they got really worried. Being December, it was dark by late afternoon, of course, and it had started raining.’
‘Then what?’
‘The usual. Naturally, as the family was known to us through social services, we searched the house and questioned the parents pretty thoroughly. You know as well as I do, Alan, that as often as not it’s the best place to start, however callous it might seem. But they were convincing, even though it was obvious to anyone they were drunk. Pretty much everyone who talked to us believed that Wendy would never run away from home or do anything like that. She was a good kid, despite her tough home life. You could tell. You can almost always tell. Next we checked with all her school friends and teammates. Nobody had seen her after she left the school canteen to go home. We mapped out the route, and instead of taking the main roads and residential streets, she took the short cut through the woods. This involved walking down a narrow treelined lane with houses on one side set well back and high up, hidden by the trees. We did a house to house there, of course, but nobody saw her. On the other side there was a small church, empty that afternoon. The lane petered out at the woods. There’s a stream runs through it, quite wide in parts and there’s an old stone bridge, been there since Dick’s day as far as anyone remembered.’
‘What did you do next?’
‘There wasn’t much more we could do that night except search the streets, knock on doors. It was dark and rainy, turning to mist. It wasn’t much better by morning, but by then we thought we’d found a witness. A local dog-walker from one of the houses on the lane had seen a man going into the woods shortly before we think Wendy would have been there. That’s why we thought it was a matter of bad timing and opportunity, not premeditation. Nobody could have known she would take that route, as far as we could discover. Not that it made much difference to the outcome. Trouble is, we didn’t get a good enough description to put out an identikit. It was a gloomy afternoon, and he was in shadow. It got us nowhere. Someone else saw a lad on a bicycle passing the edge of the woods, maybe a delivery boy of some sort. Same negative result.’
‘And Wendy?’
‘We began a search of the woods. It covered a fairly extensive area so it took a while. Her parents had told us it wasn’t unusual for her to take that route, depending on whether she was with friends who lived close to the main road or not. This time she wasn’t. The woods didn’t have a bad reputation. Nothing terrible had ever happened there, and there was no reason to think anything would. The conditions weren’t much better for the search as far as the rain was concerned, which made it pointless to bring in the canine unit, but at least it was daylight. It took about three hours, but by the early afternoon, one of our uniformed lads found the body under the old stone bridge, covered by a makeshift pile of leaves, twigs and bracken, on the narrow path beside the stream. She was only about a hundred yards from home, poor thing.’
‘But you said Frank Dowson was thick. It sounds a bit sophisticated for someone like him, hiding the body like that.’