One Last Lesson (6 page)

The i
nterviews conducted with Ferris’s neighbours mentioned the moody builder in Kingfisher Cottage and frequent rows that could be heard between him and his wife, Rosalyn and gradually they were piecing together a picture of the man before them.

Once the owner of a successful building firm
and involved in everything from house building to roof repairs, the last building recession struck hard and he only managed to stave off bankruptcy by selling his five-bedroom, two-million pound house in Itchingfield, complete with horse stables, home cinema and swimming pool.

‘Me wife took the downturn worse than I did,’ he said. ‘What made it worse was
she blamed me for dusting meself down and just getting on with it. She couldn’t understand how I didn’t miss the bloody horses, the swimming pool or having a nice Polish bird to clean the house. I did, of course I did, but I didn’t let it get me down. No way. I needed cash so I just took any job going.’

‘I mean I wasn’t poor, down to my last penny like, but you’ve got to keep going, right? You see, I started with bugger all, so when the business went belly up and we moved in here, there was still a bit of money in the bank, a roof over our heads and food in the larder so it was enough for me to start again. I wa
s ok wi’ my lot, but she wasn’t, she couldn’t handle it.’

‘We are still trying to locate your wife,’ Wallop said.

‘Aye but not on my account, mate, I’m fine on me own. See when she left…’

‘What was the final straw?’ Walters said, trying to head off another
long sermon.

‘What d’ya mean, the final straw?’

‘You know, the thing that made Rosalyn up-sticks and leave. Was it something sudden like a big argument or the slow drip-drip of problem after problem.’

He shifted his large bulk uncomfortably in the chair. ‘I suppose she got fed up with me drinking
, coming home late, you know, spending good money, hanging about with a bunch of losers, all of that stuff.’

‘So, she’s gone off to Scarborough?’

Several of his neighbours half-heartily suggested that their time would be better served trawling the pond at the bottom of the garden before heading off to Yorkshire on a wild goose chase, but for the moment Walters was giving Ferris the benefit of the doubt.

‘Aye,’ he said scratching a face that hadn’t seen a razor for a few days. ‘She’s staying with that fucking bitch of a sister of hers, Hilary. She could turn a man’s pint to piss just by glaring at it, that one
, got a face like a bashed up Ford Transit she has.’

He launched into another diatribe about his wife
’s odious family. Losing interest, Walters looked around. In her opinion, the house was lacking a woman’s touch as there were piles of unwashed dishes in the sink, the work-tops were cluttered with rubbish, and bags of cement and boxes of electrical components were cluttering passageways. To the more discerning eye, there was also a large pile of dirty clothes beside an overflowing laundry basket, a thick layer of dust on most flat surfaces and marks on the wall where pictures and ornaments were removed but never replaced.

His account
of finding the body was retold again, but in even greater detail this time and corroborated with many of the statements given to them by neighbours who often saw him walking his dog on his way to the golf course or to fields nearby.

‘So where are you working now Mr Ferris?’

‘An outfit called Corey Building & Repair who’ve got a contract with Crawley Council to rip out the old kitchens and bathrooms in five hundred houses in Broadfield before they get rewired, re-plumbed and fitted-out to modern standards.’

‘It must have been a big step to come from owning your own firm to working for a contractor,’ Wallop said. ‘Was
that a difficult adjustment?’

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Shit happens. I’m sure my time will come again.’

Due to the nature of his work, ‘always covered in shit,’ and its location, ‘always in Crawley’ his social life revolved around a couple of pubs not far from his cottage, a dwindling number that still allowed the quarrelsome man to drink there.

Walters was
gradually coming to the conclusion that it was unlikely that Mike Ferris would ever came into contact with Sarah Robson who, according to her flatmates, only socialised in Brighton town centre and rarely ventured farther afield, except when returning home at the end of term. Not only was he much older than she was, but in her experience, students tended to socialise with other students.

‘
Mr Ferris, do you know a girl called Sarah Robson?’

He
rubbed his nose with the back of his hand and shook his head. ‘Nah, never heard of her.’

‘Do you do any other jobs, Mr Ferris,’ Wallop asked. ‘For example,
do you do any homers for friends or neighbours?’

‘No time for that see, I also work
a couple of days a week as a bouncer. Ha, if the lads in Crawley could see me all decked up in my dinner suit and dickey bow, I’d never hear the end of it.’

‘Where do you do that?’

‘At The Havana Bay nightclub in Brighton.’

‘So in summary,
what we’ve got is bugger-all.’

It was the end of the first week of the investigation into the death of Sarah Robson
, and DI Henderson was chairing his fifth early morning meeting. It was the first of two formal meetings he would attend that day; this one, the early one to establish the tasks for the day ahead and another at six-thirty in the evening, to hear and respond to, whatever had or had not been achieved.

One-by-one they reported their exhaustive enquiries and to his disappointment, all they could come up with were a handful of sightings of
a girl who almost fitted Sarah’s description, making him feel even more melancholy. Of course, he knew it was unrealistic to expect someone to suddenly announce at this meeting a key piece of information when it was their turn to speak, as in reality it would be zapped across the bush-wire just as soon as it was discovered, but that didn’t stop him wanting more.

‘He’s been a clever bastard and no mistake,’
DS Harry Wallop said. ‘He’s abducted a fit and healthy young woman, albeit whose judgements were probably impaired by too much booze, somewhere along the busiest roads coming in and out of Brighton. He’s then takes her on a forty-minute journey to Mannings Heath and rapes and murders her without leaving any trace of hair, sperm or DNA.’

‘That’s the bit I don’t bloody get,’ Henderson said
. ‘He must have left something. I mean all the principles of criminal investigations such as Locard, suggest he must have left something.’

‘What’s ‘Locard’ sir?’ Seb Young
asked.

‘Locard’s Exchange Principle states that
when any crime takes place, the perpetrator takes something away from the scene with him and leaves some trace of himself behind, no matter how trivial or miniscule that trace might be. So where the hell is it?’

‘I can only agree with you,’ Pat Davidson, the Crime Scene Manager and boss of the SOCO team searching the area around the golf course said, ‘but the problem is not in trying to identify a suitable place to park a vehicle with easy access to the dump site, it’s trying to find the actual
one where the killer stopped. There must be at least a dozen little parking places dotted all around the golf course and we found debris of some sort in every one.’

‘I know what you mean
,’ Harry Wallop said. ‘I drove round the other day when me and Carol, Sergeant Walters went to see Mike Ferris at his cottage in Mannings Heath and the site is massive, two hundred acres according to their web site and there are loads of places where people park their cars and head off into the woods for a hike, walk their dogs or get up to something more physical.’

‘
Happy memories there, Harry?’ DC Graham Roberts asked. ‘Enjoying a little bit of reminiscing, were we?’

‘
At least my memory, and everything else still works.’

Henderson s
ighed. ‘Get serious lads, this is a murder investigation. What you’re saying Pat is there’s no way of knowing if a fag butt or a beer can that you pick up in any of these sites belongs to our killer or not.’

‘Not unless we get a
good sighting from a witness and then we can narrow the site down.’

‘Gerry, give me a sighting for God’s sake.’

Hobbs shook his head. ‘Sorry boss but the residents in Mannings Heath are either heavy sleepers or deaf as bloody posts because nobody living close to the golf course saw or heard anything usual.’

‘I take
it you’re including all those people you went back to see because you missed them the first time round, and those you thought might remember something if you left them a few days?’

‘
That’s right but it’s the same story, I’m afraid.’

‘Damn. Seb, any advance on nothing?’

‘There are no CCTV cameras close to the golf course, the nearest is at the clubhouse and overlooking the car park and there’s one at a petrol station about half a mile away, but that’s it and without an ID on the vehicle, there’s not much point looking at cameras further afield.’

‘
Ok Seb, thanks,’ Henderson said, although it sounded more like another sigh. ‘Yesterday, DC Graham and I met Sarah’s parents. They’re still trying to come to terms with the news, as you would expect, but they can’t think of anyone in their circle of friends or relatives that would have harmed her. Quite the opposite in fact as it seems she was a very popular girl.’

‘Popularity can breed resentment and jealousy,’
DC Graham said, ‘especially among young girls.’

‘True and we should all bear that in mind as we work out
way through this investigation, particularly as we’re referring to the killer as ‘he,’ that it could also be a ‘she,’ a friend or a fellow student.’ He looked down at a depressingly short list. ‘How are the interviews with the clubbers at Havana Bay coming along?’

‘We’ve traced the group of Business Studies students that Sarah met in Havana Bay on Thursday night,’ DC Joanna Clark said, ‘and their stories corroborate. The boy she fancied and subsequently fell out with, Josh Haveland did indeed get drunk and
crashed out on a sofa. He’s so cut up about his role in all this that he’s been given leave by the university and is now at home with his parents in London.’

‘Is
Haveland a suspect?’ Henderson asked. ‘He is after all, one of the last people to talk to Sarah and see her alive.’

‘No, I don’t think so sir. His alibi checked out with other members of the Business Studies party and one of the bouncers remembered him too. He effectively slept through the whole thing and was chucked out at closing time, three in the morning.’

‘What about her laptop? Any joy there?’

‘There’s nothing unusual t
o report,’ DC Phil Bentley said. ‘It contains mostly coursework, essays, correspondence with tutors and emails between her and her friends. They also looked on social media as she used Facebook, Twitter and Instagram but found nothing suspicious.’

‘No emails
or posts from strange men or women?’

‘No sir, that’s why
I think it would be so much better if we could locate her phone, kids of that age usually text rather than email.’

‘Don’t try
and make me feel older than I do Phil, but I agree. Is that analysis complete?’

‘Yes, it is sir. The IT unit has already returned it to us.’

‘Don’t you think boss,’ DS Hobbs said, ‘this bloke seems to understand our forensic methods and DNA techniques too bloody much? I mean, he’s stripped her and left nothing at the dumpsite and even picked a place to stop that was just one of many. I think maybe we got ourselves an extremely savvy bastard.’

‘Yeah, I was thinking that,’ DC Bentley said.
‘Could he be one of us?’

‘What do you mean Phil, one of the team?’ Henderson said.

‘Well, not exactly sir,’ Bentley said, his face reddening now he realised the implications of his comment. ‘I was thinking it might be a copper or maybe even a detective.’

‘I understand your logic but I think it’s too early to say that and limit the focus of our investigation. After all, much of this sort of
forensic information is readily available on television programmes like CSI, the web and libraries so almost anyone could become fairly competent in these techniques if they really wanted to.’

‘Fair point boss,’ Hobbs said, ‘and let’s not forget
a case from my neck of the woods, the Yorkshire Ripper. For the younger members of the squad, that investigation was seriously undermined when South Yorkshire Police received a tape from a guy with a Sunderland accent who claimed to be the killer. They believed it was genuine and changed the focus of the investigation from Yorkshire to Wearside and setting back the capture of the real villain by several months.’

‘
Thanks, Gerry.’ Henderson turned to face Carol Walters, sitting beside him. ‘So, Sergeant Walters, you’ve been fairly quiet this morning. Bring us up to date with the details of your meeting with the irrepressible Mike Ferris.’