room is prickling as if a ghost has just passed. Raider whimpers.
“One of the ‘loose ends’ has a hyperlink under it,” I say, hearing the tremble in my voice. “It’s invisible until you wave the cursor over it.” I open another article and search for ‘loose ends’. “There’s another one in the next article. It looks like she’s hidden something behind some of them. A file of secrets. About each case? It explains the password protection on the flash drive.”
“Don’t click on them, Tiggy. Let’s set up incognito mode. But before we do, read out the first cold case so we know what the ‘loose ends’ refer to.”
I take a sip of wine. Then another. The subterfuge behind first the password, then the note and now the hidden link has rattled me. I hope Piper Halliday is taking notes while I wobble. This is just the kind of tension I want to create in my books.
Clearing my throat, I begin reading.
“At 3pm on the afternoon of 22 August 1998, Pippa Pemberton (3) disappeared from her front garden while her grandmother dozed in a chair. She was wearing a mauve tulle fairy-dress over pink tights. A large-scale search of local streets, parks and lakes failed to locate her. Police now think she did not wander off and get lost, but was taken.
“‘One pink sandal was found in a neighbour’s front garden,’ a police spokesperson said. ‘This suggested Pippa was not on foot but was being carried.’
“After a member of the public reported seeing a child of her description in a white van, the search moved to an area about 15 miles from where Pippa was last seen.”
I read out Helena’s description of how she cracked the case.
“‘Several vans were impounded for analysis but no evidence was found. Hoovering the vehicles produced a large number of bags of microscopic material and I was called in to examine them. Faced with weeks of painstaking work, I asked myself if we could shorten the process. Had we missed any loose ends? This led me to look at Pippa’s sandal.
‘It was plastic and I lifted a very clear foot print. Since the child had been seen in the back seat of the van, I reasoned that her one bare foot would leave a print of matching size in several places including the seat and the foot bay. Her abductor might think to wipe down everything to remove fingerprints but even if he hoovered the foot bay, this would not remove a footprint.
‘We started with the vans that had rubber mats and I found a child’s single foot-print. Since toe-prints from each foot are not the same, this did not prove the child was Pippa. But there was a line cutting across one toe-print and Pippa’s distraught mother confirmed that her daughter had a scar on that toe from some broken glass. We then turned to the bag of hoovered material from that van and found two tiny purple sequins from a child’s fairy-dress. When confronted with the evidence, the driver of a dry-cleaning van led police to a shallow grave in Tuppence Wood.’
Rupert says, “It looks like it’s the thinking behind what she chooses to focus on that separates her from other forensic scientists. She could have spent months sifting through those bags of fluff until she found the sequins.”
He sits beside me on the couch and sets up incognito mode. I return to Helena’s question: Had we missed any loose ends? I copy the URL hidden behind ‘loose ends’ and paste it in.
I don’t know what either of us was expecting but what comes up is a shock. It’s a photograph of a crime scene. The front yard of a house. Crime scene tape is marking off an area of brick paving. There is thankfully no corpse, but seeing a child’s abandoned animal mask on the ground causes a pang.
“This must be a police photograph,” Rupert says. “Not for public viewing. If she’s digging into what’s been missed, Dr Loxton must have access to the files for each case. But where’s the red arrow pointing us to the loose end?”
Raider has left his armchair and wedged himself between us. Three pairs of eyes are scanning the enlargement on the screen.
“This isn’t where Pippa Pemberton was abducted,” I say. “Her grandmother’s house was in a more rural area with grass and gardens. Nothing is jumping out at me. What am I supposed to do with it?”
“I doubt Dr Loxton gets to keep copies of police evidence, like this. After her forensic investigation, her access to the secure database would be withdrawn. This looks like an illegal copy. And if not illegal, then improper. They wouldn’t want pictures of crime scenes floating around.”
“Then why keep them?” I ask. “Let’s look at the other ‘loose ends’ to see if we can pick up a connection between them, even though the crimes they’re hidden under look unrelated.”
I read out the next story.
“The human remains found in a shallow grave in Haldon Forest on Monday have been identified as missing school girl, Fiona Winters (14), who hasn’t been seen since she left to walk to school in Exeter on the morning of October 25. Deep tyre tracks nearby suggest a truck visited the area in late October before the recent drought hardened the ground. Police are seeking sightings of anything suspicious, possibly by Halloween revellers, including information that might be considered trivial.”
Helena explains how the cold case was solved by her forensic analysis.
“‘This one was solved more easily than anyone expected, given the length of time and the lack of useful evidence. I started by going through the remnants of clothing and other personal items found on the deceased, looking for anything that might still hold a clue. Fiona’s watch was there, with a soft plastic band. The face was cracked, but the band was intact and undamaged by months in the ground. When I looked at the band under the microscope I found markings. She’d had the presence of mind to remember the number plate of the abductor’s vehicle and she’d used her watch buckle to scratch the beginnings of the letters and numbers into the inside of the band. I was able to photograph these under the microscope. The police then created a shortlist of possible vehicles, singled out those with truck tyres and compared the tread to a cast from the gravesite.’”
Fiona didn’t make it but she made sure her killer didn’t either.
The ‘loose ends’ link clicks through to another photo. It’s the display window of a charity shop. Someone creative has put together items of regular clothing with masks and hoods to create Halloween costumes. A jack-o-lantern face mask with a painted zig-zag mouth reminds me of the fish mask Barracuda was wearing.
“There’s also an animal mask in the crime-scene photo,” I say. “Something to do with Halloween? Or disguising one’s identity?”
We could use Baxter’s attention to detail and lateral thinking.
The third article isn’t an interview with Helena but she’s quoted several times. The ‘loose ends’ link is under a story about a man wrongly arrested for murder.
“After items of evidence collected from the kitchen of murdered school teacher Pia Patel (26) were found to have the fingerprints, saliva and boot prints of local plumber Helmut Storch, he was arrested and charged with her murder. But Storch had an alibi for the night of her death. He was at a chess tournament at the German Club in Exeter, witnessed by a room full of people.
“Forensic scientist extraordinaire Dr Helena Loxton was brought in to examine all the evidence again. ‘I never criticise the work of my colleagues. We are all working under the constraints of budget, time, available samples, and contamination of evidence. This is not an exact science and mistakes are made, loose ends are overlooked. In this case, Helmut Storch had been to the house on the day of Pia’s death to fix a leak under the kitchen sink. He was leaving fingerprints and footprints, drinking some juice he found in the fridge and leaving his saliva on the lip of the glass. Finding his DNA was easy but if he wasn’t the murderer, who else had been there? There was no sign of forced entry. Had she known her killer? I wondered if he took advantage of Helmut’s visit to mask his own.’”
Helena goes on to describe the painstaking analysis she did of Pia’s underwear under the microscope, until she found what shouldn’t be there. A hair from someone else. Not Pia herself, not her cat and not Helmut.
“‘We can all pick up hairs on our clothing when we’re mixing with people in public but this hair was glued to her underwear with a speck of blood, hard to see without a microscope because her camisole had a colourful pattern. Her blood, but not her hair. The DNA from the tissue on the hair root was probably our murderer’s but we had to find a match. He wasn’t on the police database so I suggested they start with Helmut’s contacts because the timing seemed convenient.’”
There are details about how they took DNA samples from Helmut’s friends. None of them matched the DNA from the hair root but then Helena noticed something odd. Two of the samples matched each other.
‘They were either from identical twins,’ Helena said, ‘or the sampling had been flawed or contaminated.’
One of Helmut’s plumbing mates had heard about the job he was doing at Pia’s house while she was at school and where she kept her spare key. When DNA samples were being collected, he asked a naive apprentice to pretend to be him, not knowing the boy had already given his sample. This ruse eventually came to light and the reluctant sampler proved to be the killer.
The photograph under ‘loose ends’ is a close-up of labelled sample bottles.
“Something about DNA,” I say. “Or mistaken identity?”
“She seems to be compiling clues in a puzzle for you to solve,” Rupert says.
“She mentioned she likes the codes in Piper’s books.”
His phone buzzes. The pizzas are ready. We’ve got to go and pick them up.
Rupert says, “The Italian café at the top of Punt Lane now has a guy doing wood-fired pizzas from a van in the carpark. On Friday and Saturday nights.”
“Just after I moved out,” I say.
“Timed exactly. It’s his first weekend. But they’re not delivering yet. And … don’t look at me like that, Raider. I bought a special treat for you.”