Silent Crimes Read online

  Chapter 2: Background

  Saturday Morning

  Benny Goodall, Dorset’s senior pathologist, was speaking to a woman standing opposite him. She was tall, blonde and smartly dressed. ‘I’d say about a week, judging from the state of skin deterioration and the insect activity. Maybe we’d be able to pin it down a bit more precisely if we could get one of these forensic entomologists in to have a look. Can you afford that?’ He raised his eyebrows.

  Detective Superintendent Sophie Allen made a face. ‘Of course not, Benny. This is the age of austerity, as you well know. I have to beg, borrow or steal to get anything I need. In this case, I’ll beg. I have a couple of contacts at the local universities who owe me some favours. If the worst comes to the worst, I’ll offer to do some kind of talk at their graduates’ careers convention.’

  Benny smirked. ‘How could they refuse you after an offer like that? Here, how about making it a double act? The Detective and the Pathologist — Solving Crimes Together! What a title for a lecture. Maybe we could charge for entry. Maybe we could hit the road and go on tour.’

  Sophie Allen rolled her eyes. ‘This is all because you failed to make it as a rock star twenty-five years ago, isn’t it? I don’t think your idea quite matches up to the reality, Benny. You wouldn’t get flowers and underwear thrown on stage at a lecture with that title. Or any lecture, come to that. You’ve got to move on in life and put these adolescent disappointments behind you. Let’s get back to business. How did he die?’

  ‘It looks as though he was hit from behind with a log or something wooden, judging from the splinters embedded in the wound.’

  ‘Nothing of that description was found nearby, nothing complete anyway,’ she said.

  ‘Doesn’t that tell you something? You’re the detective.’

  ‘Did he die quickly, or could he have crawled to where he was found, maybe trying to get back to his shelter?’

  ‘No, not with a head wound that serious,’ Benny said. ‘Chances are he was dead within a minute or so of being hit. The injuries are pretty severe. Is it true that Jade found him?’

  ‘Yes. Apparently, she befriended him without telling anyone. She used to take him food. She hadn’t seen him around town for a while and decided to check up on him. I’m quite proud of her, actually.’

  ‘Well, it’s good to know that my goddaughter has grown up the right way, despite the somewhat slapdash parenting she’s had.’

  Sophie gave an exaggerated scowl. ‘I’ll rise above that comment. Anything else I ought to know?’

  ‘He was ill, though he probably wasn’t aware of what was lying in wait for him. Cirrhosis of the liver, lung damage and he had a small tumour behind his left eye. All treatable in someone with a more orthodox lifestyle, but living the way he did, it probably wouldn’t have been picked up in time. Everything else was pretty much as I’d have expected. He’d chosen a hard life and had the bruises and scars to show for it. So Jade never told you about him?’

  Sophie shook her head, frowning. ‘No, and it makes me feel a bit inadequate. As a mother, I mean. Why didn’t she ever mention him? Does she think I’d have been so lacking in understanding? It shakes me up a bit that she didn’t feel able to talk about what she was doing.’

  ‘You’re taking it the wrong way, Sophie. Don’t you think we all need to keep some part of our lives private? Particularly from our parents. Why do you think you should know everything about Jade’s life? Did you, do you, tell your own mother everything? Of course not. Well, Jade’s her own person. She’s making her own way in life, and jolly good for her. Anyway, she told me about him. Not much, mind you, and it was only once. Just that she was keeping her eye on a tramp.’ Sophie stared at him, her mouth open to speak. ‘Listen, just leave it. Don’t mention it to her, it would only cause friction. Who’s been interviewing her? Barry?’

  ‘Yes, up to now.’

  ‘Let him get on with it and don’t interfere. Just be Mum, not the police bigwig. I’ll be meeting her for lunch in a few days’ time, so I’ll do a bit of gentle probing and maybe let her know your feelings.’

  Sophie sighed. ‘Okay, bossy-boots. But what’s this lunch about?’

  ‘Just me performing my godfatherly duties like the responsible person I am. It’s all very informal. She sometimes brings along a friend or two, particularly if they’re gay. She introduces me as her gay uncle figure, and they use me as a sounding board. I’ve even visited her school for an official session on LGBT and personal relationships.’

  Sophie raised her eyebrows.

  ‘No need to look so surprised, Sophie. I am a doctor, you know. Jade is a brilliant organiser and very socially aware. You should be proud of her. I know I am.’

  *

  By the time Sophie returned to Wareham police station, Barry and Rae were already setting up an incident room. Computers had been trucked down from county headquarters and Ameera Khan was directing her team of technicians who were networking the machines together. She was gone within an hour, leaving one resident technician behind. Sophie scanned the information board. The word “sparse” hardly did it justice. She’d never seen one with so little information on it. Her two junior detectives stood beside her, all three staring at it despondently.

  ‘Sorry, ma’am, but that’s all we have,’ Rae said. ‘It’s a pig of a business trying to find out anything about him. I never realised how easily people can disappear off the record when they go walkabout like this man. It’s as if he never existed. He didn’t work in any organised way. He didn’t pay tax. He wasn’t on the voters’ roll. He doesn’t seem to have been registered with any doctor in the area. As far as I can tell, he didn’t even claim any state benefits. He must have lived a real hand-to-mouth existence, which ties in with what Jade’s told us.’ She glanced at Barry.

  ‘What it means, ma’am,’ he said, ‘is that Jade seems to have known him better than anyone else around. She’ll have to be questioned again, until we’ve made more progress. It’s not what we want but that’s the reality. Which one of us would you like it to be?’

  Sophie passed a hand across her forehead, unconsciously brushing away the headache that had been threatening for a while. ‘Rae, I think. Jade knows you too well, Barry. I’ll stay well clear, so that there’s some chance of the mother-daughter relationship surviving this lot.’ She shook her head slowly. ‘Bloody hell. And I’ve just had to endure a lecture from Benny Goodall about Jade’s laudable sense of social responsibility. What a day.’ She turned and trudged from the room.

  ‘How carefully do I have to tread?’ Rae said.

  Barry shrugged. ‘It’s your baby, Rae. You rarely get these things wrong.’

  Rae rolled her eyes. ‘Gee, thanks for your help, boss.’

  *

  Rae was at the Allen house, sitting on a couch with a mug of coffee. Jade sat facing her in an armchair, legs tucked underneath her. A cleaned-up Algy lay with his head on her lap, a small splint strapped to one of his back legs.

  ‘Tell me how and when you first met Paul Prentice,’ Rae said, notebook at the ready.

  ‘About three years ago? It was spring, and I was on my way home from school with some friends. Paul was in the doorway of an empty shop in West Street looking cold, wet, hungry and ill. Even Algy here looked a bit pathetic.’ She tickled the small dog’s neck and it whined contentedly. ‘Some louts from the year below me at school were giving him a hard time so I told them to get lost. They’d have probably gone for me if I’d been on my own, but I was with a bunch of my friends, so they thought better of it and wandered off. There was a café nearby, so I went in and bought him a coffee and a ham roll, plus a pork pie for the dog. I don’t normally do things like that, but he looked so vulnerable. He didn’t look as though he was in a fit state to be living rough like that. Anyway, I came here to drop my stuff off, then I went back on my bike to see if he was still okay. But he’d gone.’

  ‘Did you try to find him?’ Rae asked.

  Jade shrugged. ‘I cycled
around the town centre for a bit but didn’t spot him. The next time I saw him was a couple of days later, on the Saturday morning. He was back in the same doorway, wrapped in an old sleeping bag just like before. I couldn’t stop to check up on him ’cause I was on my way to hockey practice. He was gone when I came back, but this time I found him. He’d shifted around the corner to North Street, to get out of the wind. I got him a carton of hot soup from the café, along with another pork pie for the dog. The thing is, even in April it can get really cold if someone’s stuck outdoors all the time. He had to spend time in the town centre because he wouldn’t pick up any begging money otherwise. He told me that he was spending his nights in the old wooden stand at the cricket club, but the groundsman kept chucking him out.’

  ‘When did you tell him about the place in the woods?’ Rae asked.

  ‘It must have been a few months later, in the summer. Dad and I stumbled across it by accident when we were out birdwatching one day. It was ramshackle even then, and it smelled disgusting. Paul cleaned it out a bit, so it wasn’t so bad. I never told Dad what I’d done.’

  ‘I suppose I can understand that, but I’d have thought your dad, of all people, would have been sympathetic. And your mum, come to that. Aren’t I right? Maybe I shouldn’t ask you that. She is my boss, after all.’

  ‘It’s not that. Once you tell someone who’s in an official position like they are, they feel duty bound to do something about it. Which means calling in some authority or other. Paul just wanted to be left alone. So I decided to just keep an eye on him myself. He turned out to be a really nice man. He was intelligent, and he had a wicked sense of humour once you got to know him.’

  Rae thought back ten years to when she’d been eighteen. Of course, she’d been a young man at that age, some six years before she transitioned, and bound up in her own mental anguish. But even taking that into account, would she have had the same degree of social awareness Jade had shown? Hardly. That younger Ray, and all his friends, would have seen some old tramp sleeping rough in a shop doorway and begging, and he’d have been just about invisible to them. They might well have made fun of him. It had taken Rae until she was twenty-eight — thirteen years older than Jade when she’d first encountered Prentice — to get to the same level of human understanding. It made her feel inadequate.

  ‘What else can you tell me about him?’ she said, moving on quickly. ‘You must have picked up something if you’ve been seeing him for a couple of years. Anything would help, Jade. He dropped off the official radar years ago and we can’t find a thing about him.’

  ‘All I know is that something happened to him way back. Someone close to him walked out or vanished, and it totally shook him up. He decided to become invisible and that’s why he ended up here. There’s no point in looking for him in any local records ’cause he originally came from somewhere in Somerset. You see, Rae, he wasn’t stupid. I got the feeling that he’d had some fairly high-powered job but left when the bad thing happened. And he was worried or scared about something, as if he still felt threatened. He asked me once to let him know if there was anyone asking around after him. He wouldn’t explain why, he just clammed up when I asked.’

  ‘Did you ever pick up any clues as to what this high-powered job might have been?’

  Jade shook her head. ‘It must have been a long way back. After all, I’ve only known him for the past couple of years. I got the impression he’d been tramping around this area for a lot longer than that. He used to spend the worst of the winter in a hostel in Poole. Maybe they can help?’

  ‘I’ve found three that he might have used,’ Rae said, ‘but the most likely one closed down at Easter when the parent charity folded. I’m trying to trace the warden who was there most recently, but it isn’t easy. Apparently, he moved to one of the big cities, but no one seems to be sure which. It’s a pig, to be honest.’

  ‘He seemed to know about the law, and not just his own legal rights. And he was well-spoken, articulate. We once had a chat about local bylaws, and he really seemed to know his stuff. He explained it really well. He knew a lot about the land. I don’t mean as a farmer or anything, he seemed to know about the way boundaries and roads originally followed the landscape. You know, contours and stuff.’

  Rae nodded slowly. ‘Could he have been a surveyor? That would explain both of the things you mentioned.’

  Jade shrugged. ‘Could be, but he never said. We mostly talked about more general things — wildlife, the night sky, human behaviour, that kind of stuff.’

  ‘Sort of philosophical? Is that what you mean?’ Rae said.

  ‘Partly. He seemed to have thought a lot about why people behave the way they do. Maybe that was connected to whatever happened to him. I did wonder a couple of times whether he’d been badly let down by someone. You know, got into some kind of trouble because of someone else. But that’s just me speculating. I never asked him about it.’

  ‘Is there anything else you can think of that might help us?’

  Jade tickled Algy’s neck again and shook her head. ‘Not about Paul, no. But there is something about Algy. Ever since I’ve known him, he’s always had a collar on. It had a little silver canister attached to it. You know, the type that unscrews and has the owner’s address on a bit of paper inside. It’s gone missing. The thing is, Algy doesn’t let strangers get near him, not willingly. Whoever took it either knew Algy or got hold of the collar by force. And I’ve puzzled over how he got his leg injury. I wonder if someone had to wrestle with him to get the collar off, and that’s how he got hurt. If Paul was lying badly injured or already dead, Algy would have fought like a wild thing.’

  ‘So whoever it was might have suffered bites and scratches? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘Could be. The vet thought that Algy’s leg injury was consistent with a blow from a stick. That’s what the X-ray showed. Maybe it was the same stick that was used to attack Paul.’

  ‘Do you think Paul Prentice was his real name?’ Rae said. ‘If he was on the run from someone or something, he might have adopted a false identity.’

  ‘He never gave me any reason to think that, but I guess it’s possible. If so, that would leave you with nothing to go on, wouldn’t it?’

  Rae nodded. ‘Dead right. And it’s a spot-on description of the state we’re in. But don’t worry, we’ll get there.’

  Chapter 3: Gossips

  Late Saturday Morning

  ‘Have forensics found anything useful, Barry? I don’t hold out much hope, but you never know.’

  Sophie had returned to Wareham police station in time to join her second-in-command for coffee in the incident room.

  ‘I was on the phone to Dave Nash just now, ma’am. They’ve completed the search of the immediate area, but nothing’s turned up yet. That bit of branch poking out of the embers didn’t produce any useful fingerprints but it’s being forensically wiped to see if it has any traces of DNA. It’ll be ages before we get the results and I don’t hold out much hope. It looks to me as if this was planned. Someone travelled down here specifically to kill Prentice, and they made sure not to leave any evidence. It backs up the idea that they knew what they were doing, doesn’t it?’

  Sophie shrugged. ‘It may look premeditated, but we can’t be sure at this stage. Let’s head off and join the group in town. I want to know if anyone’s been asking around after Prentice in the last couple of weeks. According to Jade, he was getting to be a well-known figure around the place. The locals are a nosey lot. I know because I’m one of them. Someone wandering around asking dubious questions is likely to have come to the attention of the local nosey-parker league, as we call them. Nothing escapes the attention of old Mrs Denhay and her friends in the pensioners’ coffee group. Maybe I’ll speak to them while you check on the official door-to-door squads. Apparently, they consider me an honorary member for some reason, particularly since I got my recent promotion. They’ve asked me to be a guest speaker at one of their official morning get-togeth
ers and give a talk about modern policing methods.’

  ‘Will you do it?’

  ‘I’ll have to. Turning them down would result in the whole family being sent to Coventry for a year. Their memories are long, and the old dears can be quite vindictive. Small-town life.’

  *

  Mrs Denhay and her friends weren’t able to offer any help, but a uniformed officer out on a house-to-house enquiry did discover from a local shopkeeper that a slightly suspicious-looking individual had been seen hanging around the town centre a week or so previously. The problem was, of course, that it was the start of the summer holiday season, and large numbers of dishevelled people could be seen hanging around Purbeck. It was a favourite area for camping, trekking and beach holidays, not to mention the regular jazz, folk and blues festivals. And the country’s favourite nudist beach on Studland certainly meant that, during the summer months at least, the area was crawling with keen disciples of alternative lifestyles.

  Barry went back to visit the shopkeeper in question, the manager of a hardware store conveniently situated on a corner of the High Street and an equally busy side road. The views out onto the main thoroughfares were particularly good.

  ‘This man you saw last week — what raised your suspicions?’ he asked.

  ‘He just didn’t seem right,’ said the manager, a middle-aged woman wearing blue shorts and a loose cotton top.

  Barry looked with fascination at her toenail varnish. It spanned the colours of the rainbow, starting with a deep red on the small toe on her left foot and ending with violet on her equivalent right toe. He looked up to find her watching him, her eyes sparkling with mischief.