Wendy could always more or less tell the outcome of a morning briefing before a word had even been spoken. As she walked into the incident room that morning, she could sense an atmosphere of solemn frustration.
The surviving family of Lindsay Stott had been looked into, but other than an aunt in Somerset and a few cousins dotted around the country, Lindsay had no close family. She’d been born in London, her parents both being in their fifties when she was born and both now long dead of natural causes.
The door-to-door enquiries and chats with her neighbours had proved pretty fruitless, too. None of them seemed to have known Lindsay personally other than saying hello over the front wall occasionally, although a couple mentioned that she had a pretty solid routine of leaving her house around six-thirty each evening and coming back between eleven and midnight. It was assumed she had a local pub that she frequented, and Steve Wing had graciously volunteered to visit all of Mildenheath’s pubs in person to see if anyone recognised her.
The local newspapers had, predictably, already been tipped off and would no doubt be running their own stories on the discovery of Lindsay Stott’s body, but the debate now was on whether or not Mildenheath Police should hold a formal press conference.
‘It’d help us find people who might have known her,’ Wendy explained. ‘You don’t live in a town like Mildenheath for long without getting to know and recognise people. The six degrees of separation don’t come into play here. It’s more like two degrees in Mildenheath.’
‘Only problem with that is that we don’t tend to hold a formal press conference every time someone dies. It’ll raise eyebrows,’ Culverhouse replied.
‘We do when we can’t find out enough about the person ourselves. People will just assume we’re looking for more information.’
‘What, barely a week after another body was found? We’ve got nothing on that and we’ve got nothing on this. People’ll automatically assume we’re linking the two.’
‘But we are, aren’t we?’
‘That’s not the point, Knight. If there’s even so much as a sniff of a rumour that we’re looking for a serial killer, there’ll be pandemonium. I’m not risking it.’
‘You’d need three for it to be a serial killer, guv,’ Luke Baxter piped up from the back of the room. ‘This’d just be a double murder.’
Culverhouse stared at Baxter for a few moments. ‘Fuck off, Luke.’
Wendy couldn’t help but let out a snort and a laugh. Culverhouse pretended he hadn’t heard and carried on speaking. ‘The last thing we want to be doing is panicking people. We have enough trouble sorting the wheat from the chaff as it is. I’ll give it another twenty-four hours. See what Steve finds from the local pubs and get all of the records checked and double checked. If we’re really stuck, then perhaps I’ll consider it.’
The sensationalist local media had a nasty habit of blowing stories out of proportion in their clamour to flog exclusives up to the national papers. Culverhouse knew from experience that they could often do far more harm than good by creating their own theories and trying to find a scapegoat, whether that be their own theories as to a suspect or simply blaming the police for incompetence.
Wendy was well aware that handling the media was one of the biggest challenges facing modern policing, particularly now that the line between the media and the general public had blurred. With the advent of smartphones and everyone having a camera and potentially a direct link to worldwide social media in their pockets, a photo of a crime scene and an accompanying theory could be sent all over the world within seconds. The protection and control of sensitive information in the digital age was now a major priority.
Only a few months earlier, Mildenheath Police had been embroiled in a scandal in which a raid on a suspected paedophile’s home had been filmed by a passer-by on a smartphone, only with the added complication that the custody van had been parked a good hundred yards down the road, meaning that the handcuffed suspect had been paraded down the street in full view. By the time the case was later dropped due to insufficient evidence, the man had already seen his face plastered all over social media and had found his property vandalised and his life ruined. Six weeks later he took his own life and the police had come under intense scrutiny as a result.