Was it enough? Banks was beginning to think they had a possible suspect in Mark Vincent and needed to find out as much about him as possible. They also needed to find him. They had Ray’s sketch, which was a start, but a real photograph would be even better.
Chapter 14
AC Gervaise had offered Gerry only DC Doug Wilson and PC Neil Stamford to help trace Mark Vincent, and while Stamford worked the phones from the incident room downstairs, and Doug Wilson questioned Edgeworth’s friends at the White Rose and the shooting club, Gerry cracked her knuckles and tilted the screen to suit her angle of vision. Where to begin? That was the question. She needed to find out as much as she could about Mark Vincent as quickly as possible, so they could make an assessment as to whether they were dealing with the killer or a red herring. Detective Superintendent Banks had phoned from Leeds and told her that Mark seemed to resemble Ray’s sketch, and why he might have had a motive for the shooting.
In the first place, no matter what tricks PC Stamford tried, he couldn’t come up with a current address for a Mark Vincent. Gerry had half-expected that and assumed he was operating under an alias. Gord, perhaps? It would be Wilson’s and Stamford’s job to see if that were the case and they could get past that little problem and find out what name he was using.
Banks had already told her the basic details of what happened to him after Wendy’s murder. Digging a little deeper, she found that he had been born on 24 April 1953 and in 1964, after failing his eleven plus, he had attended Armley Park Secondary Modern School. Not long after his sister’s murder, his parents split up and he was sent to live with an aunt and uncle near Castleford, where he attended a local secondary modern.
In the army, after basic training at Catterick, where he was apparently discovered to be an excellent marksman, Mark assumed active duty as a private in the 1st Battalion. Shortly after his eighteenth birthday, he was posted to Northern Ireland. His history there was sketchy. Gerry also discovered that the emblem of the regiment was a pair of wings with a parachute at their centre, and that many soldiers had this tattooed on their upper arms or chests, sometimes with the words PARACHUTE REGIMENT tattooed in a semi-circle above or below the emblem. Banks had told her that Michael Charlton, one of the old gang members, had seen this tattoo less than a year ago.
As Gerry went through the main points, she made notes. Later she would make some phone calls. The forces could be very cagey about giving out information, but she knew a major in the army equivalent of Human Resources at Catterick who had helped her in the past. Aunt Jane would be able to fill a few gaps, she was certain. It might cost Gerry a posh meal, as Aunt Jane loved her gourmet food, but it would be worth it. She was also good company.
Mark Vincent later turned up as a corporal in the Falklands War at the age of twenty-nine then disappeared again until he was promoted to sergeant in 1988. That didn’t last long, and he remained a corporal from then on. He would have been forty-seven by the time he turned up in Kosovo in 2000, Gerry reckoned. It didn’t seem like a very distinguished career, and the details of his discharge were vague to the point of being useless. Reading between the lines, Gerry guessed at best dishonourable, and at worst something to do with a massacre of innocent women and children, but again, perhaps Aunt Jane would be able to help.
Vincent had been in Iraq for just a few months, in Basra, when he finally parted company with the army in 2003 at the age of fifty. The silences were beginning to tell her a lot more than skimpy details at this point. In the early noughties, it seemed that Vincent turned to a life of crime. He spent a short term in prison between 2008 and 2010 for burglary, then another, longer sentence for arson in 2012. Apparently, he had set fire to a failing business on the owner’s instructions for a share of the insurance money. He had also been suspected of involvement in people-trafficking young girls from the Balkans for sex, but the police had insufficient evidence to charge him. He didn’t come out of jail until February 2016, shortly after Frank Dowson had been convicted of Wendy Vincent’s murder.
Jenny Fuller might be able to fill in some of the psychological insights once Gerry had managed to flesh out Vincent’s biography, but the skeleton of it was already in place. With any luck, Aunt Jane would be able to provide some illumination on the army’s role. And there would certainly be more details of his criminal activities in the West Yorkshire police files. She had called Banks to ask if he would get DCI Blackstone to dig around in the records a bit. Banks said he would. Gerry was beginning to think that the super was as convinced as she was that Mark Vincent was their man, and that he was still somewhere within their reach.
Perhaps the most important thing Gerry had learned was that Vincent had a criminal record, which meant there would be a photograph of him in the online archive.
All in all, she thought, turning away from the screen and scribbling more notes on her pad, it hadn’t been a bad afternoon’s work.
Ken Blackstone remained a staunch curry fan, though Banks found that spicy food was giving his digestion more gyp the older he became. He made sure to take an acid reducer before they settled down in the Indian restaurant on Burley Road that evening, on the southern fringe of the University of Leeds student area, and ordered a couple of pints of lager, samosas to start, then vindaloo for Blackstone and a lamb korma for Banks, with aloo gobi, rice and plenty of naans. Streetlights reflected in the wet dark streets through the plate-glass window. Passing cars sent up sheets of water from the gutters. Inside, the mingled smells of the cumin, cardamom and coriander overcame all Banks’s initial reservations, but he tapped his pocket to make sure he had more antacid tablets with him, just in case. Blackstone smiled.
‘It’s all very well for you to smirk,’ said Banks. ‘We don’t all have cast-iron stomachs.’
‘Obviously not.’
‘Anyway, cheers.’ They clinked glasses.
‘What brings you down to our fair city?’ Blackstone asked.
Banks explained about Martin Edgeworth and how an old murder had turned up in the background of the mother of the bride.
‘So you didn’t get the right man?’
‘I don’t think so. I think he was set up, poor sod.’
‘And this old murder is the answer?’
‘Could be. It might help provide us with one, at any rate. I was sceptical at first. Gerry’s apt to go running after any new idea that comes her way. But she’s sharp, and she has good instincts.’
‘So what can I do?’
‘It was on your patch, quite a bit before your time, but you might have heard of Frank Dowson.’
‘Of course. One of our big cold-case successes. He raped and stabbed a teenage girl in 1964.’
‘Right.’
‘But he’s dead,’ said Blackstone. ‘Died in prison last March.’
‘I know that. It’s not him I’m after. It’s the victim’s brother.’
‘Wendy Vincent’s brother?’
‘Yes. Mark. He was eleven at the time.’
Blackstone bit into a samosa and washed it down with lager. ‘Why now, after so long?’