The Last Straw (45 page)

Cautious nods.

“Could this be her?” Warren slid his mobile phone across the counter, a clear headshot on the device’s large screen.

Kel and her father looked first, both nodding tentatively. “Could be, hard to tell,” Stribling, admitted. His daughter was similarly unsure.

“What about you, Dazza?” Warren held his breath as the grubby teenager reached over to look at the image. He paused for a long moment. “Yeah, definitely. She was well fit.”

“Any distinguishing marks or features that you can remember?” Warren continued, holding his breath, now in anticipation.

The youth continued to stare at the photo before clicking his fingers loudly. “Oh, yeah, I remember now. She was well fit, like I said, and she had a tattoo on her tit, a flower I think.”

Warren resisted the urge to punch the air at the confirmation. A tattoo of a rose on her left breast; the same tattoo visible on the photos taken by the security camera in Mr G’s nightclub; the same tattoo that he and Tony Sutton had seen in the interview suite on Saturday. Clara Hemmingway.

* * *

Back outside in the warm, hazy air, Warren called Sutton.

“Yeah, it was definitely her. Have you any ideas how Severino could have failed to recognise her?”

“Assuming that Severino was telling the truth about not knowing her, I’m stumped. Supposedly, the whole lab met her and they went for lunch together. I find it hard to imagine that a warm-blooded Italian like Severino could have forgotten a looker like her.”

“I agree, it doesn’t make any sense. Keep on checking.”

“Will do, guv. Karen has some ideas that she’s looking at for the moment, but she hasn’t found anything yet.”

“OK, I have an idea I’d like to follow up on. I’ll see you back at the station later.” Warren acknowledged the message and then hung-up.

Climbing into his car, he headed back onto the main road. In a few minutes he had arrived at his destination.

Recognising him before he even offered his ID, the middle-aged security guard opened the double doors to the campus Security lodge and admitted him into the small control room.

“Hello again, DCI Jones. Anything we can help you with?”

Jones pulled out his mobile phone and brought up the headshot of Clara Hemmingway he’d just shown to the Striblings.

“Have any of you seen this young woman around the Biological Sciences building in the past few weeks, particularly last Friday night?”

The guard who’d let him in fished a pair of reading glasses out of a top pocket and squinted at the image. “Can’t say that she looks familiar. I’ll see if any of the lads recognise her.” Walking towards the back of the room, he poked his head around an open door marked ‘Staff Only’.

“Jim, Imran, come have a look at this picture.”

A few seconds later a white, shaven-headed man who looked to be in his late thirties and a younger, Asian man emerged from the room, coffee cups in hand.

The first man looked carefully at the picture.

“She looks familiar… Oh, yeah, I remember her, Claire or something her name was.” He passed the phone over to his younger colleague. “You remember her? Lost her handbag in a nightclub a few weeks ago.”

“Oh, yeah, I remember her. Yeah, Claire or Clara or something. She turned up in tears about one a.m. one Friday night. She’d had a bust-up with her boyfriend or something. She stormed out of the club and left her handbag behind. Keys, wallet, phone, the lot. Bouncers wouldn’t let her back in. She turned up here a bit pissed and really upset because she didn’t know if her flatmate was in and didn’t know where to go.”

“So she came here?” Warren voiced his surprise.

“Oh aye,” said the first man, the slightest twinge of a Scottish accent colouring his voice, “we get all sorts. Female students in particular are encouraged to call campus Security if they are worried about their safety. Just last week, me and Imran persuaded a couple of local lover boys to leave some young ladies alone.” He smiled evilly, revealing a set of suspiciously straight teeth that didn’t seem to match his squashed nose.

“Yeah, they got the message,” confirmed Imran with a certain amount of relish. Jones decided not to ask for details.

“So what did you do when she turned up?”

Jim shrugged. “What we usually do. We stuck her in the office with a cuppa and a box of tissues and phoned her flat to see if anybody was in. Luckily there was, so we let her finish her tea then drove her home.”

“I see. Did she say anything whilst she was here?”

“Well, young Imran here would be the one to ask about that. I left, didn’t want to cramp his style.” He smirked.

For his part, Imran flushed slightly. “She didn’t say much. She calmed down when we contacted her flatmate and then she just asked the usual questions: how much crime do we get? How long have I been doing the job?”

“It’s the uniform — you know what it’s like”, interrupted Jim with a leer.

“I wouldn’t know, I haven’t worn one for years.” Jones was getting a bit tired of this boorish fool. “Go on, Imran.”

“Well, as I said, she was interested in what we do here and how we keep an eye on so many cameras. She asked if I could see where she worked, so I zoomed in on the Biology building.”

Jones perked up slightly.

“Did she ask about the camera’s coverage at all?”

Imran frowned. “No. She just wanted to see if we could peek inside the windows of the tea room. She joked that if we could she’d have to find somewhere else to skive off when she should be working, otherwise the boss might catch her on camera. I reassured her that we couldn’t see around there, because the camera is at the wrong angle…” The young man suddenly stopped, paling slightly.

“Oh, shit…”

Warren smiled grimly. So Clara Hemmingway knew all about the blind spot by the side of the building.

Chapter 51

Back at the station, Warren filled in the rest of the team on what he had found out about Clara Hemmingway.

“She’s definitely the mysterious woman who seduced Severino. Which means that if that’s the case, she’s in this right up to her neck. The question is, why didn’t Severino recognise her?”

Karen Hardwick spoke up. “I have an idea. When was Hemmingway introduced to the lab? When did her affair with Tunbridge start?”

Warren answered immediately. “She started her project in November and presumably the affair started some time after that; she mentioned something about getting an extension on her essay.”

“In which case, it’s possible Severino never met her.” Karen placed a file down that Warren recognised as Severino’s personnel file. She leafed through it quickly, before stopping at a page to which she had attached a Post-it-note.

“According to this, Severino retained links with his previous research group at the University of Trieste in Italy. He popped over a couple of times a year to visit his old lab to share information on a long-standing collaboration, after which he usually delayed his flight home whilst he visited his family.” She smiled. “I wonder what the odds are that one of those sabbaticals coincided with the time when Clara Hemmingway was being introduced to the lab. He might never have clapped eyes on her.”

* * *

The telephone on Jones’ desk rang. Picking it up, he was surprised to hear the voice of Gary Hastings on the other end.

“Sir, it’s DC Hastings. Remember I interviewed the Tesco employee that claimed to have seen Clara Hemmingway on the night of Professor Tunbridge’s murder?”

“Go ahead, Gary, I remember the report.”

“The manager of Tesco has just called. Apparently another member of staff believes that he also saw Clara Hemmingway that night. I think you’d better hear what he has to say, sir. He’s on his way in now.”

“Good work, Gary. I’ll be down in a moment.”

There was silence at the other end of the line.

“Is there anything else?”

“Umm, yes, sir.” Hastings took a deep breath.

“I think I might have screwed up, sir.”

Chapter 52

Jones made it downstairs to the main reception in record time. Standing in Reception was a rather morose-looking Gary Hastings. He looked even younger than normal, if that were possible, thought Warren.

“The witness is on his way in now, sir. The store manager is driving him down.” A ghost of a smile flickered across the youngster’s face. “Apparently police cars in the car park are bad for business.”

“OK, then, let’s have a quick chat. Bring me up to speed on what to expect and what it is you think you’ve screwed up.” Jones said this last piece in an inviting tone. In his experience, those honest enough to admit their mistakes were usually wrong about the severity of the mistake, particularly younger and less experienced colleagues. And at least the kid —
detective
— had the guts to own up. Of course, if it turned out that he really had screwed up — enough, say, to cost them a prosecution — Jones would personally tear him a new arsehole…

By the time the desk sergeant let them know that the witnesses had arrived, Tony Sutton had also appeared. He too had listened as Hastings had admitted that he had forgotten to go back and pick up the breakdown of the till receipt or request the full CCTV footage of the night in question. Fortunately, when the manager had phoned beforehand, he had remembered to ask for both and the manager was bringing them with him. How significant was the mistake? wondered Jones. Depending on what this witness said and what was on the receipt and CCTV footage, it could have been either very significant or entirely trivial. And what about DC Hastings? He wouldn’t lose his job over it — cock-ups happened — but the size of the blot on his record could potentially determine the course of his career for the next few years. Jones hoped for all of their sakes that the mistake was trivial. The heavy feeling in his gut predicted otherwise.

Hastings introduced Sutton and Jones to Mr Patel the store manager, who in turn introduced Aaron Jenkins. Another seventeen-year-old checkout assistant, he at least looked the right age, noted Hastings. He was short and spotty, his hair was greasy and untidy, and his dark blue Tesco T-shirt seemed to hang off his skinny frame.

Once they were settled in the interview room, Jones indicated that he should begin.

“Well, I were talking to me mate, Kevin, who does the tills. Anyhow, he said that the police had been in asking about this bird that he served on Friday night. He said that he remembered her, like, ’cause she was well fit. Anyway, I asked him what she were in trouble for and he said he didn’t know, but it must have been serious, ’cause the police was after her.”

He paused and glanced at both Hastings and Jones, clearly hoping for some more information that he could take back to the staff canteen. None was forthcoming.

“Anyway, he says he was unlikely to forget her, because she was wearing a dead skimpy top and he could see right down it when she bent over. Said she had a picture of a rose tattooed on her tit. Well, I served her earlier on, like, but it was really weird because I was on the customer service desk. She come up to me with this massive trolley of shopping, all embarrassed, like, ’cause she’d forgotten her purse. She asked if I could look after her shopping whilst she nipped home to get her wallet. I said, yeah, sure thing. It’s dead quiet at that time of night and she didn’t have any frozen food in the trolley, so I stuck a label on it and wrote a note for whoever came in next to put it all back in an hour if she didn’t return.”

“And did she return?”

“Dunno. I went home about five or ten minutes later. I ain’t been back in until today.”

“What time did you leave?” Jones mouth was dry.

“Ten o’clock.”

Ten p.m
.… It started to come together in Jones’ mind. He turned to Patel.

“I believe that you have kindly brought in some information for us, Mr Patel.”

“Yes — not sure how important it is, seeing as it’s been lying around the store for the past few days.” He looked pointedly at Hastings, who blushed slightly. Jones, who regarded it as
his
job to bollock sloppy officers, simply smiled politely.

“As I am sure you can imagine, Mr Patel, an investigation of this magnitude has many different threads running in parallel. Thank you for your assistance.”

Patel grunted and handed over a DVD in a jewel case. Whilst Hastings went out to rustle up a TV and DVD player, Sutton, who was a surprisingly fast typist for a man with fingers like sausages, used a laptop to write up Aaron’s witness statement. He also put out a call for Kevin Peterfield to be brought down to the station to sign a formal witness statement.

Eventually, Hastings arrived with a wheeled TV/DVD combo unit.

“OK, Mr Patel, so what have we got here?”

“I had one of the boys in Security retrace the young lady’s steps from the moment she entered the store to when she finished shopping and left. Obviously, I have all of the raw footage as well.”

No wonder he was pissed that nobody had come to pick up the footage. He’d clearly put a lot of effort into this, Jones thought. Sometimes it was easy to forget that for the most part the general public supported the police and would usually go out of their way to assist officers. He made a mental note to publicly thank Mr Patel and Tesco, at some point. Always good to foster relations with the second biggest employer in the town.

The footage started outside the store, showing Clara Hemmingway walking briskly across the car park. Pausing briefly to grab a trolley, she walked through the double doors into the store. The time stamp at the bottom of the screen clearly read 21:41h. What followed was a masterclass in speed shopping. Hemmingway raced up and down the aisles at a remarkable pace grabbing items as she went. For a cash-strapped student, she paid surprisingly little attention to the prices as she tossed food into the basket, Jones noted. As she flitted around the store, the view jumped from camera to camera. Keeping an eye on the clock at the bottom, Jones saw that it never missed a beat. Every second of Hemmingway’s whereabouts in the store was accounted for. He wondered idly if Tesco used that smart CCTV that could follow individuals around the store to help track their buying habits. He decided that he’d rather not know; the whole idea was a bit creepy and Big Brother in his opinion.