‘There’s a big confidence issue here, in more ways than one,’ Branagh was saying. ‘You all know that we face upheavals, and the possibility of some restructuring. So we have to demonstrate that Derbyshire Constabulary are up to the job of dealing with a major inquiry. In particular, we have to prove that we here in E Division are as capable as anyone of policing our own area. I don’t have to spell that out for you any further. I’m sure you all understand what’s at stake. It could be your entire future. All of our futures. I’m relying on you all to show exactly what you can do.’
‘No pressure, then,’ whispered Murfin to Cooper. ‘Should be a doddle.’
‘Shush, Gavin.’
‘Oh, sorry, boss.’
Cooper wondered how many of the other officers in the room were feeling the same excitement that he was. The older hands, like Gavin Murfin, put on an air of world-weary resignation, as if to suggest they’d seen it all before. Been there, done that. Nothing new in the world for those who were approaching their thirty. But he bet they still had that feeling deep inside, that guilty thrill of a high-profile murder case.
‘I don’t care how secluded the houses on Curbar Lane are,’ said Branagh. ‘The neighbours in the village must have seen something. It’s just not conceivable that our suspects could have reconnoitred their target in advance, then come in and gone out again – all without anyone seeing them or noticing any suspicious activity, even a strange vehicle. We need to canvass all the neighbours. And I mean all of them. It’s not a big village. We have the manpower available, and we’re going to get round every household, however long it takes. They’re not getting away from this one without leaving some traces. A sighting. Something.’
‘What about the neighbours we’ve already talked to, ma’am?’ asked Luke Irvine.
‘We visit them again. Make them account for where they were, and who they saw. We can piece this together bit by bit. Even negative information could be useful.’
‘Right.’
‘And bear this in mind,’ said Branagh grimly. ‘The pattern of events suggests that they’ll be back. Unless we bring this inquiry to a swift conclusion, we can expect the perpetrators to strike again. Where, we can’t predict. When, it’s impossible to say. One thing I’m sure of, though – time isn’t on our side. So get your teams up to speed, pick up your tasks from the incident room, and let’s get out there finding some leads.’
DI Hitchens took over and outlined the facts known so far. Zoe Barron had apparently been attacked by an intruder or intruders who had entered the house from the back door shortly after ten o’clock, when it had only been dark for an hour so. The door had been locked, but the deadbolts had not been closed, and none of the security alarms were active. The lock alone had not been strong enough to resist a determined assault.
‘Mrs Barron was in the kitchen, so she encountered the suspects first. She was attacked with a heavy metal object, something like an iron pipe,’ said Hitchens. ‘She was struck with some force and suffered a fracture to the skull. So far as we can tell, there was no resistance from her, no scuffle or physical contact. Just the one blow, inflicted before she had time to react or escape. Preliminary post-mortem report shows that she died of head trauma from a blunt object.’
‘So if they didn’t make contact with her, there would be no traces for forensics,’ said someone.
‘Only one kind,’ said Hitchens grimly. ‘The suspect who struck the blow would almost certainly have Mrs Barron’s blood on him. Or at least on his clothes.’
‘How do we know there was more than one suspect?’
‘We’re making a reasonable assumption, based on the fate of the husband, Jake Barron.’
Photographs of both the Barrons were stuck on the whiteboard behind the DI.
‘At the time of the attack, Mr Barron was in the sitting room, watching TV. He must have heard the noise made by the intruders entering the house. We assume that his wife screamed or called out. Yet he seems to have been struck down before he could move more than a few paces towards the kitchen. He hadn’t even reached the door of the sitting room when he suffered a similar blow, again with a metal object.’
Cooper tried to imagine the scene inside Valley View, and the speed with which events must have happened. There was always that moment of shock, when the body and brain were frozen, and refused to respond. Fear drove all logical thought from the mind and paralysed the muscles.
A determined and ruthless assailant knew to take advantage of that. They would aim to get in quick and close down the resistance. It was only if you hesitated that things began to go wrong. Amateurs often messed things up at that point. They were reluctant to use violence except as a last resort, and tried to control the situation without it.
But these weren’t amateurs. They had hit hard and fast, shown no mercy and no hesitation. They had given their victims no time to react or raise the alarm, no chance of offering the slightest resistance.
‘The children,’ said Hitchens. ‘Obviously, once we were on the scene, one of our main concerns was for the children. The Barrons have a son and two daughters. The oldest, Melissa, is aged thirteen. At the time of the attack, they were all in their separate bedrooms upstairs. Valley View is a large property, and the bedrooms are in another part of the house, well away from the kitchen and sitting room where the assaults on their parents took place. One of the children told Social Services that it was quite normal for them to call their parents on their mobile phones rather than go downstairs to speak to them.’
A small, restless mutter went through the gathered officers, many of them parents themselves. They were constantly bombarded with advice on talking to their children, monitoring their activities, spending quality time together. Here was a family that seemed to spend its time in separate parts of the house, children isolated from their parents. There was a danger of losing sympathy for these victims.
The DI tried to override the wave of mutterings.
‘In any case,’ he said, ‘the youngest child, Fay, was already asleep, while the two oldest, Melissa and Joshua, were engaged in activities that would have drowned out any extraneous noise. An iPod and a computer game respectively. It seems the boy also had the TV on. As a result, they weren’t even aware of what had happened to their parents until the FOAs and paramedics arrived.’
This was taking insulation from the real world to extremes, Cooper thought. Your mother was killed and your father seriously injured in a violent assault right there in your own house, and you were unaware of it. At least one of the children might have been in some fantasy world they preferred to the real one. When the emergency services arrived at the house, it would have seemed like an extension of the fantasy, a TV drama brought right into the home. Cooper wondered how the children had reacted when they discovered what had happened to their parents. It was a shocking way for reality to intrude. The worst possible way. How long would it take for it to sink in for these kids?
‘Because the children didn’t hear much,’ said Hitchens, ‘we can’t be sure how long the offenders spent inside the house. The only thing we can be fairly confident about is that they didn’t go upstairs. In the downstairs rooms we can find no fingerprints that don’t belong to family members. It’s almost certain they wore gloves. If not, they were incredibly careful. And this was never planned as a slow, careful operation. They went in fast, and we can assume that they wanted to get out fast, too. So they wouldn’t have wanted to be worrying about leaving prints or DNA traces.’
‘What is missing?’
‘Mrs Barron’s purse, which was in her bag, and her mobile phone – which might have been left on a table, either in the kitchen or the sitting room, we’re not sure.’
‘It’s not much of a haul for such a risky enterprise.’