Reckless Endangerment(65)

We left, just as an estate agent was erecting a ‘For Sale’ board in the front garden.

‘Good luck,’ said Dave. ‘They’ll have a job selling a house where a murder’s been committed.’

Dave and I had not long returned to ESB from West Drayton when Colin Wilberforce burst into my office. It is extremely rare for Colin to make a hurried entry without knocking, and I knew instinctively that he had something to say that was both important and urgent.

‘What is it, Colin?’

‘Two minutes ago I received a call from a traffic unit in Saint James’s Street off Pall Mall, sir. They’re in the process of arresting Julian Reed for driving under the influence.’

‘Interesting.’ It was just after two o’clock in the afternoon. ‘I thought it was only ladies-who-lunch who got caught. And they usually say, “But I’ve only had one glass of white wine, Officer.”’

‘It happens, sir. But I dare say Mr Reed had a few lunchtime bevvies at the Dizzy Club,’ said Wilberforce. ‘One of the PCs did a PNC check and found that we were interested.’

‘Are they still at the roadside?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Get back to them and ask them to do a fingerprint check on that magic machine they carry with them these days.’

‘I did that already, sir.’ Wilberforce gave a smile of satisfaction. ‘They’re a match for one of the prints found at the scene of Sharon Gregory’s murder at the Dickin Hotel.’

Give or take a few hours, it was now exactly a week since Sharon Gregory had been murdered. All we had found so far were an unidentified vaginal fluid, a few fingerprints and a few hairs on a pillow, one of which was a DNA match to whoever was the father of her unborn child. And in all probability it was he who was her killer. Maybe.

But now, it seemed, we’d had that stroke of luck that so often results in the apprehension of someone whom CID officers have spent hours trying to identify. And, as not infrequently happens, it was a uniformed constable, albeit in this case a specialist, who was almost accidentally responsible. This sort of extrinsic contribution to solving a murder, although not exactly commonplace, occurs more often than is realized.

When I did a senior investigators’ course at the Detective Training School, I remember being told of at least two examples of it happening in the past. In 1961 a man named Edwin Bush murdered a woman, Elsie Batten, in an antique shop in Cecil Court off Charing Cross Road, and an Identikit likeness was prepared from the descriptions of witnesses. Four days later a young uniformed PC was patrolling the Soho area of London and arrested the murderer whom he’d identified from that depiction.

And twenty-two years later, a drain-clearance operative had found human remains in the blocked drain of a house in North London, resulting in the arrest of Dennis Nilsen, a multiple murderer.

Now it was my turn. Perhaps.

‘Where are they taking him, Colin?’

‘Charing Cross nick, sir.’

‘Ask them to take Reed’s car there, too. I presume it was his Mercedes that he was driving?’

‘It was, sir, and they’re taking it in anyway.’

‘Tell them that they’re not to search it. We’ll do that when we arrive. And just to be on the safe side, ask Linda Mitchell to get a team down there.’

‘Right, sir.’

‘And advise the nick that we’ll be there as soon as possible.’

‘I’ll get a car, sir,’ said Dave. ‘Looks as though we might’ve cracked it.’

‘Maybe, Dave,’ I said cautiously. All too often in the past I’d believed myself to be on the point of solving a murder, only to find that I was wrong. ‘There’s one problem. The Simpsons, they of the swingers’ club in Dorking, were certain that Julian Reed was there with his wife at the time of Sharon’s murder.’

‘People have been known to make mistakes, guv.’

‘Yes, and I’m not usually one of them.’

‘No, sir,’ said Dave. ‘By the way, guv, I checked with Peter Gregory and he didn’t remove a laptop from the West Drayton house.’





SIXTEEN


By some method I didn’t wish to know about, Dave had laid hands on an unmarked police car that was fitted with a siren, and flashing blue lights positioned behind the radiator grille. He made good use of this equipment and we covered the five or so miles from Earls Court to Charing Cross police station in just over as many hair-raising minutes. It was one of the few occasions on which I would rather have been driven by a traffic unit officer.

I identified myself to the custody sergeant and enquired about Julian Reed.