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A Bad Bad Thing. Elena Forbes
Читать онлайн.Название A Bad Bad Thing
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781786898692
Автор произведения Elena Forbes
Жанр Ужасы и Мистика
Издательство Ingram
She said nothing. He made it sound so easy and reasonable but she knew how her superiors wouldn’t view it that way, if they found out. But what choice did she have? She would just have to be careful.
‘As far as Mr Cooper goes,’ Peters continued, ‘I’ll make it very clear you’re acting in an unofficial, voluntary capacity. The charity’s short of funds and we’ve made a small financial donation to help oil the wheels temporarily. Cooper will be told to cooperate and to be discreet. To be honest, the way things are going, he should be grateful for any help he can get. But any problems, you just let me know and I’ll have a word with him. You can then go back to Bellevue tomorrow afternoon to meet Sean Farrell.’
The files from Peters arrived by courier just after eight that evening. The sealed box contained a large, thick, black ring binder, labelled Jane McNeil Murder, as well as a bulky brown envelope, shaped like a small brick. Even without feeling through the paper, she guessed what was inside. She held it in her hand for a moment, loath to open it, then tore open the flap and pulled out a block of new fifty-pound notes, with a yellow sticky note attached, in Peters’ handwriting: £10,000. For expenses. AP. It was way more than what was reasonable for a couple of weeks’ work, plus expenses, and it stank of a bribe. She took a photograph of it with her phone, as well as the note, in case she ever had to explain. She wouldn’t take a penny of Duran’s money, over and above what was needed for expenses. There was also an old-style Nokia phone, still in its box. The yellow sticky note attached to it said: Use this if you want to call me or Mr Duran. Numbers are pre-loaded. It’s untraceable.
She made a pot of mint tea, sat down on the sofa and picked up the file. The first page was a large, A4-sized colour photograph of a young woman, slotted into a plastic sleeve. In spite of a pair of unattractive, heavy-framed spectacles, Jane McNeil had been nice-looking in an unremarkable way, with small, neat features and shoulder-length, wavy, dark-brown hair. She was slim, dressed in jeans and a fitted denim shirt, but her body language was awkward, arms folded tightly over her chest, her smile shy and forced, as though she was unused to posing for the camera. A photocopied press cutting had been tucked behind the photograph.
The semi-naked body of Jane McNeil, 27, was discovered in the West Woods, near Marlborough, on Friday evening, thirteen days after she was last seen at a party on the nearby Westerby estate. She was found in a densely-wooded area, half a mile from the main car park. Someone, presumably her killer, had attempted to burn Miss McNeil’s body. Although thirty officers from Wiltshire Constabulary have been involved in the inquiry, questioning locals and Miss McNeil’s former boyfriend, nobody has yet been able to shed any light on how her body came to be there, according to a police spokesperson. ‘One theory we are looking into is that she may have been out jogging, as she liked to keep fit. But it’s early days and we are keeping an open mind.’ Det Supt John Hamill, who is heading the inquiry, yesterday renewed an appeal for anyone to come forward who may have seen Miss McNeil between the evening of Saturday 6th December and Friday 19 th December, the day her body was found. ‘We are talking to her family, friends and colleagues and anyone else who may have relevant information, in an effort to find out more about her,’ he said. ‘It’s an ongoing process and will take many days. It is far too early to comment on a possible motive. We would like to hear from anyone who has information relating to this investigation and we hope that by releasing a photograph of Jane, it will jog the memories of anyone who may have seen her prior to her death.’ The surrounding area was sealed off by police yesterday. Further tests are still being carried out to determine the cause of Miss McNeil’s death.
She skimmed through the first few pages, which were enough to give her the gist of what had happened. Jane had worked as an administrative assistant in the office of Westerby Racing and had lived in a cottage on the Westerby estate. The timeline was clear and straightforward. On Saturday, 6th December, shortly after nine a.m., she had visited a gym, just outside Marlborough. According to the security system, which required an electronic log-in and log-out, she was there for just over an hour and a half. Her ex-boyfriend, Sean Farrell, belonged to the same gym and he arrived there around ten thirty. Several witnesses at the gym described overhearing an argument between the two. Between one p.m. and six p.m., Jane was at the Westerby Racing client Christmas party, serving drinks and canapés to their clients, as well as helping to clear up afterwards. According to several people who were there, she left before the end, claiming she had a headache and was going home, although nobody saw her leave. The last recorded call from her mobile phone was made from the Marlborough area to her mother, at 7.16 p.m. that evening.
A work colleague of Jane’s, Annie Shepherd, drove past the cottage where Jane lived just before seven p.m. that evening and noticed a couple of lights on inside. When another woman, Susan Wright, went past half an hour later, the lights were all off. She also said that she saw a man hanging around Jane’s cottage, peering in through the windows and hammering on the door. It was dark, but she thought he was Jane’s ex-boyfriend, Sean Farrell. When Jane failed to arrive for work on Monday morning, Melissa Michaels, the daughter of the owner of the Westerby estate, went over to the cottage to see if she was alright. One of the ground floor windows at the back of the cottage had been forced open and a pane of glass broken. There was no sign of Jane, or her car, and she called the police. Just over two weeks later, a couple of women out hacking in the West Woods with their dogs discovered the partially burnt and decomposed remains of a woman’s body. It was tucked away in a gulley behind a fallen tree trunk, covered by a pile of dead leaves. The body was later identified as belonging to Jane McNeil. Her car was eventually found in a pub car park next to the Kennet and Avon canal, about two miles south of the cottage where she lived. The only recent prints in the car were Jane’s, although a partial fingerprint belonging to Sean Farrell had been found on the inside of the passenger door-frame. There was no means of saying when the fingerprint had got there, but the absence of any other prints was odd.
Further down the page, Eve found a handwritten note to say that Jane had taken the car to be professionally cleaned a few days before she disappeared. The police assumption was that either Jane had driven herself to the pub to meet somebody, presumably Farrell, or that whoever had driven it had either wiped it clean afterwards or had worn gloves. Farrell’s defence was that he had been in Jane’s car countless times when they were still seeing each other and that the print had been missed by whoever had cleaned the car earlier that week. Nobody at the pub recalled seeing the car arrive, or either Jane or Farrell there that night.
Judging from the press clippings, Farrell had been a suspect right from the start, but there was nothing unusual in that. Stranger-killings were very rare, and in all crimes of violence against women, particularly those with a sexual motive, the obvious place to start was with men known to the victim. The autopsy summary gave the cause of death as undetermined, but of particular interest was a note relating to the presence of seminal fluid on the victim’s thigh, although there hadn’t been sufficient biological material to develop a full DNA profile. Ten years on, there had been a huge advance in the sensitivity and scope of DNA profiling techniques. Had this been a cold case review, re-testing the exhibits would have been a priority. But with Farrell convicted, the case was closed. Somebody – it looked like Alan Peters’ writing – had also made a handwritten note on the page saying: ‘See biologist’s evidence’. Attached to the back of the pages was a passage from the transcript of the trial. The biologist who had analysed the samples taken from the body had given evidence to the effect that the few sperm that had been recovered were all ‘deformed’. ‘A couple of the spermatozoa have two tails, some have bent heads, or twin heads,’ she had noted. Again, written by hand and outlined with a highlighter were the words: ‘Sean Farrell had a vasectomy. No sperm should have been found, deformed or otherwise’.
Eve turned to a short section labelled ‘Prosecution Case’, which contained a summary of the evidence against Sean Farrell. It also contained what looked like copies of documents taken from his official police file, which were not in the public domain and she wondered who Duran or Peters had bribed in order to obtain them. She also found annotated transcripts from the trial, both from the defence