Primal Cut (20 page)

‘Section C states that to “cause, procure or assist at the fighting or baiting of any animal…or act or assist in the management of any premises for the purpose of fighting or baiting any animal” is an offence punishable by a maximum of six months’ imprisonment and a level 5 fine.’

‘We have explained to you that Mr Woollard has never arranged or participated in dog fighting,’ Dearing replied.

‘I am aware of that, yes.’ Bevan continued. ‘We will also be charging Mr Woollard with contraventions of the 1991 Dangerous Dogs Act. Section 1 of this act identifies species of dog including the pit bull terrier and the Japanese Tosa and states that to “breed, sell, exchange or make a gift” of such dogs is an offence. Both types of animal were found on Mr Woollard’s premises. This offence is also punishable with a maximum six-month prison sentence and a level 5 fine.’

‘Those dogs never leave Mr Woollard’s farm and
are always muzzled around people,’ Dearing said.

‘Irrelevant.’ Bevan turned the page. ‘The 1973 Breeding of Dogs Act specifies that “no person shall keep a breeding establishment for dogs except under the authority of a licence.” Mr Woollard has no such licence. That is an offence punishable by a maximum three-month prison term or a level 4 fine. Furthermore the 1991 Breeding of Dogs Act makes it an offence “to obstruct or delay any person in exercise of powers of entry or inspection”. Mr Woollard did precisely that when we visited his premises.’

Dearing said nothing as his pen scratched furiously onto his file paper.

‘Finally,’ Bevan continued, ‘the 1999 Breeding and Sale of Dogs Act places a number of restrictions on the commercial sale of dogs. We believe that Mr Woollard has breached at least two provisions of this Act. The maximum sentence is either three months’ imprisonment or a level 4 fine. That’s it.’ Bevan sat back in his chair.

Dearing finished writing. ‘You have been busy Inspector Bevan. We will of course challenge these charges.’

‘That’s your prerogative.’

‘On the other matter,’ Dearing continued, ‘the death of Mr Shaw. I understand that charges have not yet been levelled.’

‘Not yet,’ Dexter replied, ‘but we are investigating charges of conspiracy and obstruction of justice.’

‘My client has already given you information relating to that matter – without my presence, I might add.’ Dearing had encountered Dexter before. He disliked her commonplace accent and her acidic manner. ‘He claims that Inspector Bevan made him some kind of unsolicited offer of leniency in return for information.’

‘No official offer has been made,’ Dexter said sharply, ‘and if your client is in possession of information regarding the death of Leonard Shaw that he is withholding, that, in itself, is an offence.’

Woollard was beginning to see the impossibility of his position and decided that desperate times required desperate measures. ‘Look, when I met this Norlington guy or Garrod – whatever his fucking name is – he said that he’d won his dog in a fight in Clacton.’

‘You told me that already,’ Bevan responded.

‘You’ll have to do better,’ Dexter added.

‘I asked him if he knew a bloke called Jack Whiteside. He’s a dog man – well known in Essex and Cambridgeshire. Or he was anyway. Jack was killed a couple of years ago. He was from Maldon.’

‘How was he killed?’ Dexter asked.

‘His throat was cut. It was in the papers. Look it
up. When I said that Jack had been murdered the guy insisted he didn’t know him. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. It seems a bit weird now because he must have heard of Jack if he’s fought dogs in that part of the world.’

Dexter thought of Underwood. She wondered if the link he had made between Garrod and Essex was as tenuous as she had originally thought.

She became aware of Woollard staring at her.

‘So?’ he asked, ‘can we talk about a deal?’

She looked at him. ‘No deal on the dog charges. They stand. The Essex business is a separate matter. I’ll discuss it after we have checked out this Whiteside story.’

She left Bevan to formally charge Woollard on the cruelty charges he had previously outlined.

Driving in the rain through some of the less visually stimulating parts of Essex gave Underwood’s mind an opportunity to wander.

Six months earlier he had begun a missing person’s hunt for Alison Dexter’s father. She had not seen Gary Dexter since she was a child. Underwood placed that loss at the centre of her intellectual spider’s web.

Initially
he had drawn a blank. He had authorised Police National Computer checks on Gary Dexter and found nothing. Underwood knew that Alison had grown up in Leyton and Walthamstow. He knew that she had lived with her mother. He also knew from conversations with her that her father had disappeared some time in 1978.

Underwood knew that Alison Dexter had tried half-heartedly to locate her father a couple of years previously. One night, in the deserted CID office he had rifled through her desk drawers. He found a blank PNC check and a photograph of a baby that he presumed was Alison with a man that he presumed to be Gary Dexter. The man was sitting on the bonnet of a car with the baby in his arms. On the back of the photograph was a comment and a date – ‘Gary and Alison on Daddy’s new Car September 1969’.

Then, sitting alone in the glass office that smelt faintly of her, as the station clock had crawled around past three in the morning, Underwood had experienced a minor revelation. On the photograph of Alison and Gary Dexter was a partial car licence plate. Gary Dexter was perched on the front of his car; his leg obscured some but not all of the registration plate:

‘J__16__’

Underwood remembered that the old licence
plates
had two letters then a number in those blocked spaces followed by a year suffix letter. He also remembered that the two missing letters were the code of the local registration office. So ‘NB’, for example, denoted a registration issued by the New Bolden registration office.

If he had a complete registration, he might be able to locate the original dealership. DVLA records – if they went back that far – might also give an address that the car was registered to. Certainly they would give the original owner’s details. Underwood wondered if Gary Dexter had been the original owner of that car. It did say ‘Daddy’s new car’ on the photograph after all. He had written out the licence plate again:

‘J__16__’

If, he reasoned, the car was new in September 1969, he would be able to identify the last letter. He had searched carefully on the Internet and eventually discovered that the year suffix for new cars registered between August 1969 and July 1970 had been ‘H’.

‘J__16_H’

The next step would be to identify the two missing letters. An hour of research produced good news and bad news. The second and third letters on the suffix-style plates denoted the original registration office. That was the good news. The
bad
news was that Underwood had no idea where the original registration office was. If he did, he would have had an almost complete registration number. He had called DVLA in Swansea early the following morning and had them fax over a list of registration office identity codes from the 1960s.

He then remembered that the car was a Ford Cortina. In the 1960s, the Ford production plant in Dagenham was at the peak of its output. That increased the likelihood that the car was originally registered in London.

To his dismay, he discovered that there were eight codes listed for the North London registration office near Stanmore. It seemed hopeless. Or did it? A single double letter combination was obscured on the plate as was a single number. If the combination was one of the London prefix codes, then there could only be a limited number of possibilities.

He had tried an example. Say Gary Dexter’s car had originally been registered in London with the identity prefix ‘LK’. That would give Dexter’s plate as:

‘JLK 16_H’

That would mean that the final plate could only be one of nine possible combinations. If there were eight North London prefix codes and nine numerical suffixes that meant that there were only seventy-two potential registrations for Gary
Dexter’s
car. Underwood had written them all out painstakingly on a piece of A4 paper then sent his finding by fax to a contact at the DVLA offices in Swansea. A fax came back the following afternoon. The key section was the second paragraph:

‘A Ford Cortina was registered on 16
^th
September 1969 to Gary Dexter of 44a Churchill Terrace, Dagenham, London. Records show that Mr Dexter sold this car to a Mr Niraj Patel of Flat 19, Twyford House, Seven Sisters Road, Tottenham on 3
^rd
January 1974. Subsequent to this, there is no evidence of any cars registered to Mr G Dexter of 44a Churchill Terrace, Dagenham. It should be noted that registration was computerised in the 1980s and many earlier records were either not transposed or lost.’

He had made a start. He had found an address to work with in addition to a name.

His next move had been to contact the Public Records Office and the Inland Revenue. If Gary Dexter had died, a death certificate would have been filed at the PRO. Alternatively, if he was still alive, he was almost certainly either paying taxes or receiving a pension. Underwood was confident that Inland Revenue records might provide him with a new opening.

He had been half-correct. After an irritating
week
of silence, the Inland Revenue Service had contacted Underwood and informed him that they did have a record of a Gary Dexter at the said address, then at two subsequent London addresses. They also provided information on two companies that Gary Dexter worked for: Ford Motors at Dagenham and then at a garage called ‘Jowseys’ in Wanstead, London. Unfortunately for Underwood, they had no record of Gary Dexter since November 1994 when he had left Jowseys and a rented address in Wanstead. Since then, there had been no tax or National Insurance payments in his name. Gary Dexter had either vanished or died. However, there was no death certificate filed at the PRO.

Underwood now had an address in Wanstead to look into: 9 Grove Gardens, Gosling Road. However, the last record of Gary Dexter at that address was eight years out of date. On a Tuesday, using up a day of his annual leave, Underwood had driven down to Wanstead himself.

Grove Gardens was a small cul-de-sac. The houses were tiny bungalows. Some had football-related graffiti on the walls. Underwood knocked on the door of number nine to find that the house was now occupied by an old lady called Maud. She had never heard of Gary Dexter. Disappointed, Underwood tried a similar approach with the other
houses
in Grove Gardens. Those people who answered their doors were similarly unhelpful. Returning to his car, Underwood had felt a terrible sense of frustration.

He sat behind the wheel of his car and stared out into the grey skies above East London. He was over eight years behind Gary Dexter. For some reason, the man had disappeared off the face of the earth in 1994. How could that have happened? Underwood wondered. If he were dead then a certificate would have been filed somewhere. If he had been imprisoned, then Gary Dexter would have appeared on the Police National Computer check that he had authorised.

Irritated and on the verge of giving up hope, Underwood had eventually headed to the London Borough of Redbridge Library in Sprat Hall Road, Wanstead.

Underwood flashed his police identification card on arrival and requested back copies of the local newspapers: the
Ilford Leader
and the
Wanstead and Woodford Guardian
. The librarian, Elizabeth, had shown him to an archive room where back copies of the paper were kept on microfilm.

‘The
Wanstead Guardian
has its own website,’ she had told him. ‘But they don’t keep papers from before 2001 online.’

And so, Underwood settled himself down for an
afternoon’s
research. He found the microfilm viewer a cumbersome, annoying piece of equipment. He started with a September 1994 edition of the
Ilford Leader
and began to wind his way through local history. Hours slid away.

The silence of the library began to chew at his conscience. What would Alison think if she knew what he was doing? Underwood could not imagine that she would be pleased. The reality was that his motives were muddled and contradictory. He was becoming an increasingly peripheral shape in the crystalline lattice of logic that was Alison Dexter’s mind. She was a conundrum to him: a seemingly straightforward person whose abilities constantly surprised and humbled him. Was this the riddle at the heart of Alison Dexter – the memory of a man who had deserted her?

The complete quiet of the room was terrifying. Underwood knew that silence was dangerous to him. Stripping away the white noise in his mind left him only with the sound of his own emptiness. Underwood was trying to fill that emptiness now.

He wondered desperately at his madness.

Time was passing. Underwood found himself staring at a microfilm copy of the
Ilford Leader
from November 1994. A headline looked back at him through the viewer.

Underwood wiped his eyes and tried to concentrate. His breakdown a couple of years previously had left his ability to focus in tatters.

Concentrate.

A man from Walthamstow died in a tragic car accident on Lea Bridge road. Another local man was seriously injured. Oliver Donovan’s Vauxhall Nova hit a lamppost on Lea Bridge Road at about 10.30 p.m. on Friday night.

His passenger, Mr Gary Dexter, 58, of Grove Gardens, Wanstead, had to be cut from the wreckage by the rescue services. He was taken to Whipps Cross Hospital and is said to be in a stable but critical condition.