Chapter Forty-One
‘So, that’s the state of things,’ Gina said as she added Samuel Avery to the board under Francesca Carter’s photo. Everyone in the room now knew of her daughter’s involvement with this man. Wyre had almost offered her deepest condolences. She grabbed a pain au chocolat from the packet that Jacob had brought in and she took a bite. Briggs brushed past O’Connor and PCs Smith and Kapoor, before catching Gina’s gaze for a second.
He sat at the head of the table. ‘Bernard, can you kick off? I know you have something to say.’
Bernard flicked through the many pages of his report. ‘All findings so far have been emailed to you all. As you all know, we are still working through evidence gathered at Cleevesford Manor and the clearing. We are trying to compare as much as possible to evidence collected at Francesca Carter’s house and we now have a link. The size nine shoe impression that was discovered just outside Francesca Carter’s back fence is a direct match to a partial print we found in the clearing in the woodland at the back of Cleevesford Manor. The Cleevesford Manor print was the hardest to distinguish. As it was only a partial print, we had to scrutinise it closer but a person’s gait is quite unique, there is a slight wearing at one side of the shoe. The print at the Carter household was deep and a cast was taken, giving us all dimensions.’ He reached into his folder and pulled out a photo of the cast with measurements and dimensions overlaid. ‘See that wear on the sole? It is an exact match of one of the partial prints found at the clearing. Same make, same size.
‘There’s something else. We recovered a couple of visible prints on the slabs by the gate of the Carter’s garden. It looks like the perpetrator had stepped on the grass, leaving prints leading from the garden. The visible prints show us a splayed softer version of this person’s footprint with the impression just coming through lightly. When magnified there is pattern to the print, such as that of the material used on boot covers. The covers are again a common brand, the same as those used by estate agents and tradespeople when they work in our homes.’
‘So our perpetrator went well prepared?’
‘Definitely.’
‘Anything else for the time being other than what we’ve received in your initial findings report?’
He shook his head. ‘We’ll keep ploughing on and I’ll keep feeding you any new information. I know budgets are tight but we’ve been working around the clock. One of my colleagues messaged me with this news in the early hours. I’m back onto it as soon as I’ve finished here.’
‘Thank you. Smith, any news on Samuel Avery, Phillip Brighton or Edward Powell? All three were not where they should have been at the time of Francesca’s murder.’
‘Uniform have reported that Edward Powell arrived home in the early hours.’
‘I want to speak to our groom. We’ll head back to the Powell household after we’ve finished here. Wyre, O’Connor, can you keep trying to find out the whereabouts of Samuel Avery and Phillip Brighton? As we know, Avery turned up at the Cleevesford Cleaver to see my daughter, Hannah, at ten in the evening last night. I want to know what he was doing before that.’
‘Yes, guv,’ Wyre replied.
O’Connor took his second pain au chocolat and bit into it.
‘Do we know when Francesca Carter’s post-mortem is scheduled?’
Bernard glanced at his notes. ‘Sixteen hundred hours, today.’
‘Thank you. Wyre, O’Connor, can you two attend and feed straight back to me when it’s over. I want to know if they find something in her throat.’
Placing his pain au chocolat down, O’Connor clapped his hands to dislodge the greasy crumbs. ‘I think I’ll save this for later, much later.’
Gina glanced at the receipt from Piccolo’s. ‘This receipt from around a month ago which Charlie Carter found in his wife’s bag shows her to have ordered a couple of sharing platters. The vegetable and the meat. Then we have the couple of bottles of wine. We need to find out who she was with. It is odd that she’d go there when this was her and Mr Carter’s special place. She never mentioned it to him at all. Who was she with? Why had she hidden it from him?’
She put the receipt down on the table.
‘Jacob, you said you have something to share.’
He nodded as he scraped his chair bringing himself closer to the central table. ‘This is where it gets interesting. One of the other people at the party has a juvenile record for sexually assaulting one of his classmates at Cleevesford High School ten years ago. Robin Dawkins, also known as Elvis. He was serving that night.’
‘We need to put him at the top of our list.’
‘Do we know anything about the case?’
‘It was at an end of year school disco. The girl called Jill Snaith said she’d fallen asleep by the lockers after being given a few shots of vodka that some of the other kids had brought with them. They were both fifteen at the time. She’d gone to her own locker to retrieve a bag of crisps she’d left there at lunchtime and had felt a little tipsy, so she sat on the floor in the dark. She awoke to him trying to pull her underwear off. He had his trousers pulled down and lay on top of her. Eventually, she managed to push him off. There had been another witness at this point who verified that it looked like Jill had been asleep. Anyway, he pleaded guilty to sexual assault and did a year before coming back out. No record since.’
‘That certainly puts him in the spotlight. Bring him in. I think we have reasonable grounds there.’ Gina closed her notepad. ‘There’s also our other bridesmaid, Lilly Hill. Given what happened to Holly and Francesca, we need to look out for her. Right, I’ll be out for a while. First stop, Edward Powell.’
Chapter Forty-Two
Gina tapped on the door and listened out for footsteps. Edward Powell’s black SUV was parked up on the drive. It hadn’t been there when they’d spoken to Kerry the night before.
‘Aha, I can see him coming down the stairs,’ Jacob said as the young man opened the door.
With a towel in one hand, Edward began to dry his dark hair. He glanced at his reflection in the door glass. His baby blue shirt hung over his trousers and he’d left his green striped tie looped around his neck. ‘Are you here to talk to Kerry? She isn’t in at the moment.’
‘We’re here to talk to you actually. DI Harte and DS Driscoll. May we come in?’
‘I’m just getting ready to go to work. I’m already late.’
‘This won’t take long.’
He glanced at the clock over his shoulder. ‘I really have to get going. I don’t know anything about what happened to Holly, she was Kerry’s friend.’
‘Have you spoken to Kerry since last night?’
He finished towel drying his hair and ran his fingers through the tangles. ‘We haven’t spoken since last night. When I got home, I found a message on the answering machine saying that her mother had collected her. She’d taken her to the family home and she wanted me to call when I got back. It was a bit late so I haven’t managed to phone yet. Wait.’ He frowned. ‘Is everything okay? Nothing’s happened to Kerry, has it?’