Shaping the Ripples (31 page)

“Surely the police could supply you with statistics of the quantity and nature of crimes they’ve dealt with?” he queried with a frown.

I was beginning to wish that I’d thought through my cover story a little more carefully. “Yes, they’ve been very helpful in supplying me with that information,” I lied. “But my paper is about the public perception of the police, rather than just the official figures. Your paper should give me a good way of exploring that.”

This bit of thinking on the spot seemed at last to satisfy him. “Very well then,” he said. “If you’d like to follow me, I’ll show you to the archives.”

He lead me through reception and into a long corridor. On our right was a lift door, and he pushed the button to summon the lift. “Of course the recent murders in the city are extremely unusual,” he observed as we waited. “York is usually such a peaceful city, especially in comparison with most others.”

We rode the lift down to the basement together. A door directly in front of us as we came out was labelled “Archives”. Behind the door was a small working area. There were a couple of medium sized tables with four chairs around them, two desks bearing computers, and a table all along one wall with a number of machines on it which looked a little like very old computers. Nigel headed to the opposite side of the room from them, and ducked under a wooden desk, before emerging on the other side.

Behind him was another room ,which looked like a large warehouse. Metal shelves stretched all the way back into the room, each one seemingly covered with old newspapers. I could imagine people going in there and never emerging.

“This is where we store all the hard copy,” he said, waving a hand behind him. “The room temperature and humidity have to be carefully monitored, to protect the paper. I am in the process of scanning the papers into our computer data base, so in the end all the information will be electronic. So far, it only goes back about three years, but we aim to have it all done in five years.”

“It’s amazing,” I said with sincerity. “I wouldn’t have a clue where to start.”

“Those computers at the side are linked to the data base,” he said. “You can use those to search through our files. Unfortunately as I said, that will only help you for the last two or three years.”

“And if I need to look before then?” I asked.

“Then you’re going to have to wade through microfiches and pull up the data yourself.”

“Micro whats?” I asked, already feeling that this was going to be an impossible task.

“When you get to that bit I’ll show you,” he promised.

So I went over to one of the desks and turned on the computer. As I explored the system, I wished that Nigel had been a bit quicker in getting data on to the computer. It was easy to search through the stuff he had got on, it was just that it didn’t seem to go far enough back for what I was looking for.

Actually that isn’t completely true. Although the search for the phrase “Michael Palmer” mostly produced the records of his impressive achievements over the last few years – including a rumour that he was soon to be invited to set up a serious crimes task force for the North of England, there was one hint of what I was looking for. The very last entry, dated May 31st 1998, had the headline “Accused policeman returns to work”. It read;

Michael Palmer, the policeman who has been suspended for three months while investigations continued into the killing of Ray Miller, is to be allowed to return to work a police spokesman confirmed last night. “The enquiry concluded that there was no basis on which to charge DI Palmer, and he has therefore been reinstated” the official statement read. Mystery continues to surround the brutal death of Mr. Miller, of Bootham Terrace, Leeds which DI Palmer has continually claimed was a case of self defence.

Now at least I knew what I was looking for. The only problem was that this had been the last result of my search because it was as far back as the computerised information went. Three months back from the end of May would presumably mean that the main story had broken in February.

I switched off the computer terminal, and walked back across to the desk. Nigel Benson seemed to have disappeared into the vast storage world on the other side. I waited for a moment and listened intently. There was a faint rustling sound coming from somewhere.

“Hello!” I called. After a moment, Nigel appeared from the darkness.

“Are you finding what you need?” he called as he approached.

“It’s all been very helpful so far,” I answered. “But now I need to look back a bit earlier. I’m looking for February 1998 and then probably the six months before that.”

“Just a moment,” he said, and disappeared again. He came back holding about half a dozen thin brown folders, and came out from behind the desk.

“I’m afraid that means searching manually through the microfiche system,” he explained. “I’ll show you how to use it.”

He led the way across to the table supporting the machines I had thought of as very old computers. It turned out that they were actually microfiche readers. Nigel opened one of the brown folders, to reveal five rectangles of black plastic, looking rather like they were made of camera film. He took one of the rectangles carefully by the edge, and switched on the machine.

The screen just displayed a blurred yellow light. At the front of the machine was a glass rectangle. Nigel lifted the top of the glass, and placed the black film in the middle. Once he closed the glass again, some indistinct writing appeared on the screen. He twiddled a knob at the side of the machine, and a newspaper article came into focus.

“There you go,” he said. “Each folder has about five fiches in it, which make up a month’s newspapers. To scan through each fiche, you just turn these knobs to move the glass around, and to change fiche just lift up the glass and swap them. Be very careful how you handle them, though. You’ve got six months worth of fiches there, which should easily last you the rest of the day.”

Once he’d gone and left me to it, I began to realise what he meant. Although each film contained stacks of information, only a very small amount of it was displayed on the screen at any one time. With there being no search facility, it basically meant that I was going to have to read every headline in the hope of spotting the relevant ones.

It was nearly an hour later when I struck gold. If there was an article at the end of February reporting Michael’s suspension, I must have missed it in the deluge of information. But in the pages for February 13th, I found the key to the story.

HENDERSON AND MICHAELS: “CASE CLOSED” SAY POLICE

Police last night confirmed that they“were not looking” for anyone else in connection with the recent sex murders of Susie Henderson and Dawn Michaels.

This follows the death earlier this week of Ray Miller. It is understood that Mr.Miller, 58, of Bootham Terrace, Leeds had been questioned several times by police in connection with the murder of the two schoolgirls. He had a number of previous convictions for indecent assault against young girls.

“In the light of Mr. Miller’s death, we are closing the investigation into the two earlier murders,” a police spokesman confirmed.

Mystery still surrounds the death of Mr. Miller, who was allegedly killed in a struggle with the officer in charge of the murder enquiry, DI Michael Palmer.

“The death of Mr. Miller is being thoroughly investigated,” the spokesman insisted, refuting claims of a whitewash over the matter.

DI Palmer was unavailable for comment.

It took me another couple of hours of searching back, but eventually I had pretty much been able to piece the whole story together.

It had begun in September of 1997. In Leeds a nine year old girl named Susie Henderson had been sent out to the local shops, to get some beans for her tea. It was a walk of about half a mile which she’d made quite often, but this time she never returned. The next day, her naked body was found on in bushes on a patch of waste ground less than two hundred yards from her home. She had been raped and strangled.

Suspicion apparently fell fairly quickly on a man whose house she would have passed on her way. His name was Ray Miller. He was a known paedophile and had already spent several brief spells in prison for indecent assault on young girls. The police case seemed to have two problems; the complete lack of any evidence actually connecting Ray Miller to the crime, and the fact that he had never before given any sign of being capable of killing his victims.

Nonetheless, he was arrested and questioned several times, but always released without charge. Then in January, a second girl went missing in the neighbourhood. She was ten year old Dawn Michaels and had apparently snuck out of the house to try out the new bicycle she had been given for Christmas. Her parents had been keeping a strict curfew since Susie’s murder.

The bicycle turned up near the same waste ground which had been home to Susie’s body. But Dawn’s body didn’t. It was well over a week before she was found, buried in a shallow grave in some parkland about three miles from where she went missing. She too had been stripped and raped, but as an added twist the coroner believed that she had been knocked unconscious and then buried alive.

This time the police effort was ferocious, and again it seemed to centre on Ray Miller. Once again, there was not enough evidence to make an arrest. Because it was a York newspaper that I was reading, there was a certain emotional distance in the reporting, but it was clear that Leeds itself had descended into uproar about these crimes. There was enormous pressure on the young policeman who had responsibility for the case to make an arrest as soon as possible.

That policeman was Michael Palmer. The case came to an official end on February 10th. The exact sequence of events on that day were unclear, but you could get a broad outline from the report. It seemed that DI Palmer had gone to Ray Miller’s house alone, to question him once again about the murders. Whatever had happened in the house, it had resulted in Ray Miller’s death.

Michael Palmer’s story was that in response to some hard questioning, Ray Miller had attacked him repeatedly. In trying to restrain Mr. Miller, he had knocked him down. Ray Miller had died from a bang on the head as he fell. This story was contradicted by a couple of neighbours who had been drawn by the sound of shouting and fighting. They claimed that Michael Palmer hardly had a mark on him, while Ray Miller looked as if he had been battered almost beyond recognition.

On the basis of this, the police had suspended him while Ray Miller’s death was investigated. Obviously no-one said it in any of the reports, but I got the impression that no-one was too concerned about his demise, since it enabled them to close the file on the two dead girls. After a period of three months, they announced that there wasn’t enough evidence to bring charges against Michael, and he returned to duty. Within a couple of months he had been transferred to the York police force. I had an idea that the transfer was probably part of the deal which had seen him return to work.

But there was one report that I found myself drawn back to, again and again. There was something about it that felt important, even though I wasn’t sure what. It was a fairly short report, dated early January before the second girl had gone missing, quoting an appeal from Michael Palmer for witnesses to the first crime. Along with the brief article was a photograph of Michael Palmer, caught on camera as he was getting out of his car, which looked to be the same Mercedes that he still has. I had the strongest sense of déjà vu I looked at the article and the photograph again and again.

Suddenly the thought that had been lurking in the shadows of my mind since the first time I’d met Michael Palmer finally came into focus. I’d thought then that he looked familiar, even though I was sure we’d never met before. Now a moment became crystal clear, shocking in its implications.

A cold November morning; I was just leaving Jennifer Carter’s house after what would turn out to be our last ever meeting. My mind was full with the emotions that the session had evoked, and I’d turned to go down the path. Pulling up outside the house, the car which I assumed contained her next client. A big silver car, and a tall man with dark hair getting out, and hurrying towards Jennifer’s front door. It had been Michael Palmer – he was one of Jennifer’s patients, or at the very least, knew her.

I sat back in the chair, almost stunned. Not only had I found out that Michael Palmer had a history that included extreme violence, but I’d connected him to the first murder victim. Was it possible that he was the killer? Certainly he seemed to have a violent dislike for me which until now I’d assumed was because of his belief that I was the murderer. But suppose that wasn’t the reason. All of a sudden Laura Smith’s warning seemed to have a more deadly weight.

Another, even wilder thought occurred to me. Suppose Ray Miller hadn’t been the person responsible for the rape and death of the two girls. His death, especially after supposedly attacking a policeman for investigating him, created a convenient excuse to close the case. I had a feeling that the same would have happened with the murders in York if I had really killed myself last night or were to die “resisting arrest”.

I told myself that I was letting my imagination run away from me. Now I had Michael Palmer as a possible multiple killer, both here and in Leeds. I reminded myself that the only basis for this was the fact that he had visited Jennifer. It could have been a perfectly normal visit, which his colleagues at the police knew all about. But what if they didn’t? Could he really be Guignol or was I just clutching at straws?

I picked the card which Laura Smith had given me out of my pocket, and was about to use my mobile phone to ring her when I spotted Nigel Benson glowering at me. I put the phone away and took all the brown folders back to him.

“Did you manage to find all the data you needed?” he asked. He sounded rather cooler than he had before, but I might have been just imagining it. Maybe he just wanted to go home.

“Yes, thank you,” I replied. “I shouldn’t need to come and disturb you again.”