The Unquiet Grave (27 page)

Noble sighed, his shoulders slumping. ‘Nothing good. News about McCleary’s stash of kiddie porn was all over the papers and local telly again.’

‘Do you even know it was his yet?’

‘The opposite,’ said Noble. ‘We can’t find a single print of McCleary’s on any of it. And I doubt we’re going to be able to ask him anytime soon.’

‘He might still pop up, John,’ said Brook. ‘Criminals don’t always behave logically. He must be short of funds and nothing motivates ex-cons like money.’

‘I know,’ said Noble. ‘We’re maintaining surveillance on the flat and the post office but he won’t show if he’s got any sense.’

Brook nodded in sympathy, glancing at the newly promoted Gadd surrounded by well-wishers, enjoying her last day as one of the gang. ‘How are you coping?’ he said to Noble, tight-lipped in commiseration.

‘Jane? Yeah, well. Who needs it?’ said Noble. ‘Let her take the strain. I’m happy as I am. I’ve seen what the pressure can do to people.’ He stared down into his lager.

‘You’re not wrong,’ agreed Brook. ‘And CID could certainly do with less testosterone sluicing around.’ He eyed Noble. ‘And I meant what I said last night. If I ever stop chasing ghosts, I want you to know how much I value your work.’

‘Well!’ replied Noble, to draw a line under the matter. ‘What are you drinking,
guv
?’ he added in a Dickensian cockney accent.

Brook laughed and grimaced simultaneously. ‘Don’t. It’s on me.’

Noble looked theatrically at his watch. ‘Better remember the date – the first drink from my DI.’

‘Excuse me,’ protested Brook. ‘According to my accounts, I’ve bought you at least three cups of tea over the years.’

‘As many as that?’ replied Noble. ‘I stand corrected. I’ll have another lager, thanks. Now you have been to a bar before. . .’

‘Ye-es,’ said Brook, setting off towards the counter.

Eighteen

Saturday, 15 December 2012

The next morning, Brook woke later than usual and instead of dragging himself down to his small kitchen, his eyes barely open, he lay in bed for a few minutes, wondering whether he was expected to work weekends. He’d become so detached from the rest of his colleagues that following any kind of shift pattern had begun to seem irrelevant.

Recalling with dismay the exchange with DI Ford the previous evening, Brook decided to go to the station. If nothing else, he was determined to keep his nose to the grindstone, no matter how futile the work. No one would be able to criticise him on that score.

Before setting off, he sat down with a tea and scoured the anthologies on his bookshelves. ‘The Unquiet Grave,’ he muttered when he found what he was looking for. ‘Anonymous.’ He read the seven-stanza poem, giving voice to one of the verses.

‘The twelvemonth and a day being up

The dead began to speak:

“Oh who sits weeping on my grave,

And will not let me sleep?”’

An hour later, Brook parked at St Mary’s Wharf. To avoid any chance of meeting Hendrickson, he decided to walk all the way round the building to the service entrance, which took him directly to the basement and, with a little effort, his new office in the depths of the building.

Finally, slumped in his chair, he poured himself a tea and glanced at the file on his blotter. It wasn’t the Stanforth folder. He found it back on the trolley with the others. Brook flipped it open. Copeland had left the fake Pied Piper note, written by Brook, in the file. But carelessly he’d put the folder back in the wrong place. Even sloppier, Copeland had left a different file on Brook’s desk.

‘You’re getting old, Clive,’ said Brook, absent-mindedly picking up the new folder in front of him. His mood darkened when he saw the date: 1965.

‘This is getting ridic—’ Brook halted, mid-rant, when he saw the name at the top of the file. Matilda Copeland.
Clive Copeland’s sister?
He took a quick peek at the first page to confirm it then looked at the cold case sheet which was nearly full and contained the names of several high-ranking detectives over the years.

Ex-DI Walter Laird had indeed been a good friend to Copeland, signing his name to reviews of Matilda’s murder in 1969, 1973, 1977 and 1981.

Copeland was too young to be in the force in 1969 and, in 1973, would have been a callow 21 year old, so the first two case reviews were probably genuinely carried out by Laird. Brook suspected Clive Copeland would have first re-opened his sister’s murder in 1977, when he would have been a Detective Sergeant.

And if DS Morton was correct, Copeland had performed every subsequent review until his retirement, persuading close colleagues to sign off on his work despite minimal involvement – first Walter Laird in 1977 and 1981 then a long list of other CID names, only some of which Brook knew. All were complicit in bending the rules for their obsessed colleague. Since Copeland’s retirement, the case had been revisited only once, by Brook’s former colleague Detective Inspector Robert Greatorix.

‘This stinks,’ murmured Brook, and if he hadn’t been under a disciplinary cloud, he might have marched into Clive Copeland’s office and told him so. All those reviews, taking place over decades, under the aegis of CID officers who didn’t have a clue what had been actioned in their names.

Brook closed the file, unsure what to do. Was this a mistake? Had Copeland accidentally shuffled his sister’s file into Brook’s caseload? It seemed unlikely.

‘No harm in having a look,’ he reasoned, opening the file. He could take it back later as though he’d just discovered it. He could even pretend he hadn’t made the connection between brother and sister, if this was a genuine mistake.

Matilda Copeland had been dead for over forty-seven years and her younger brother had lived with her unsolved murder all that time. According to Morton, Clive Copeland had joined the force as a direct result of her killing and the eleven separate occasions the case had been revisited were testimony to Copeland’s dedication to his sister’s cause. But despite all his efforts, her killer had escaped justice.

‘You were too close to it, Clive. Too close to see, too close to think. That’s why we have a rule.’ Maybe Copeland knows that. Maybe he knows it’s time for an impartial review.

Brook read on, skimming the wealth of material in the report before turning back to the beginning for a more methodical read-through. He had to admit, Copeland had been meticulous in compiling background on the case, over the years. Details rarely found in a murder book filled the page and, at times, Brook felt as though he was intruding on a private dialogue between Copeland and his sister.

To his credit, Copeland had forced himself to maintain a level tone throughout the written reports, even when touching on what must have been painful memories. It was as though he knew the day would come when he wouldn’t be around to search for his sister’s killer and that, to colour the facts in any way, might hinder a future investigation.

The late DCI Bannon had again been the original SIO, as in the Billy Stanforth case in 1963. Clearly, Bannon was – to use one of Charlton’s irritating phrases – the ‘
go-to guy
’ when it came to homicide. Walter Laird had accompanied Bannon again but this time as a detective sergeant.

In 1965 Clive Copeland and his family had lived on Radbourne Lane at the edge of the Mackworth Estate, overlooking fields to the north of Derby, and, even to this day, the lane was the dividing line between Derby’s north-western suburbs and open countryside. At that time, according to Copeland’s notes, Mackworth was a modern development of desirable homes, giving easy access to the countryside and providing a suitable location for a solid, well-to-do family.

George Copeland, Clive and Matilda’s father, had worked in engineering for Rolls-Royce, one of Derby’s main employers. During the Second World War, George had remained in Derby, maintaining Tiger Moths and Miles Magisters for the flying school at nearby RAF Burnaston. Later, when the Air Ministry needed a site to train glider pilots to deliver British Airborne Forces into combat, Burnaston was chosen and Copeland’s father had worked on them too.

Copeland’s mother, Mary, had met George working as a secretary for Rolls-Royce and had given up her career to be a housewife when the first of her two children had been born: Matilda, in 1949, and Clive two years later.

The Copelands were just another average family until Matilda Copeland’s disappearance in the late summer of 1965. The story had been big news in Derby, and the local paper, then the
Evening Telegraph
, had led with it on several consecutive nights.

Brook skimmed through the chronological newspaper reports. Local journalists wouldn’t have known more than CID officers so Brook restricted himself to looking at pictures of the Copeland home, maps of the area and a portrait of young Matilda taken the year before her murder, when she was fifteen.

According to family and friends, Matilda had been a normal, happy-go-lucky sixteen-year-old girl, fresh out of school with a good report and impressive exam results. She had recently started work in a local shop, Barney’s General Store, on Prince Charles Avenue, just three streets away from the Copeland family home.

On 31 August, a warm Tuesday night, Matilda Copeland had taken the family dog, Ebony, for its evening walk around the estate. She had set off just after 8.00p.m. but never returned and the family never saw her alive again. At ten o’clock, the dog Ebony returned unaccompanied. Two hours of searching and shouting along all the usual walking routes had produced nothing and the police had been called in.

For four nights and three days, the search continued until, on Saturday, 4 September 1965, Matilda’s naked body was spotted floating in Osmaston Park Lake by a couple of hikers. Osmaston Park was a local beauty spot, part of a large private park a few miles north-west of Mackworth, along the A52 past Kirk Langley towards Ashbourne.

Brook knew the lake well. It was on his way home and sometimes, when he was unable to get back to his cottage before dark, he would park his car outside the Saracen’s Head in the village of Shirley and take the circular walk around the wooded grounds. In summer, the circuit would only take about ninety minutes but in winter, the ground around the lake became boggy and walking was difficult.

Brook checked the distance between Mackworth and Osmaston Park on his laptop. It was just over nine miles. ‘Transport required,’ he mumbled, flipping to a new page of his notebook and writing ‘Van or car’ under the heading ‘Matilda Copeland’. Brook poured more tea from his flask and ploughed on.

The body of Copeland’s sister was recovered and taken for autopsy, where she was found to have been strangled with a cord, before being dumped in the lake. Forensic scientists determined that she’d been in the water for around four days before her bloating remains were spotted on the surface amongst reeds. They further concluded from the lack of rigor mortis and discolouration of her neck that Matilda had died shortly after her abduction and must have gone into the water no more than a few hours later.

Unfortunately the long immersion in the lake had destroyed any evidence adhering to her corpse. Her fingernails were scraped but no evidence of the murderer’s tissue was found beneath. No semen or foreign pubic hair could be detected in and around the vagina and no other clues were found on her body. Her clothes were never recovered.

With a naked corpse, determining whether Matilda had been raped before death was an important line of inquiry and here the case took a twist. It proved impossible to establish whether Matilda had engaged in sexual intercourse before her death. Apart from the lack of semen and pubic hair, the pathologist could find little in the way of bruising or other injuries around the sexual organs. However, this couldn’t rule out the possibility that Matilda Copeland had submitted to sexual intercourse before death to try and save her life because, importantly, she had not been a virgin at time of death. Moreover, from the wording in the forensic report, it was made absolutely clear that Clive’s sister had not lost her virginity on the night of her death. Matilda Copeland had been sexually active well before the night of her abduction.

As the father of an abused daughter, Brook closed his eyes to empathise. How painful it must be to Copeland every time he read the details of Matilda’s death, especially as suspicion about her sexual partners would have been rife and, given her age, might have been stretched to include male members of the Copeland family.

After finding Matilda’s body, search teams hunted for evidence in the surrounding woodland where Matilda might have met her end. However, the police were never able to identify any viable location where the killing had taken place, despite calling on extensive manpower, canine power and conducting a fingertip search of the dense woods.

According to Laird and Bannon’s contemporary reports, the ground that summer was dry and firm, making it impossible to track the killer’s movements around the heavily wooded park, even with dogs. No tyre tracks were found. No items of clothing were recovered. No scraps of torn material, no stray handkerchief, no detached buttons.

The absence of wounds on Matilda’s body presented a similar problem, though that didn’t prevent Bannon and Laird calling in the bloodhounds in the hope that, in her struggle to live, she might have drawn blood from her attacker. But again nothing was found. No blood, no fluids, sexual or otherwise were located by the dogs. There was no trace of human urine or faeces so often expelled during the death throes, making it impossible to determine the route taken by the killer to the lake’s edge, despite having to carry a body. Indeed, there was no evidence to indicate that the murder had taken place in the woods at all.

Bannon and Laird were forced to conclude that the murder and any possible intercourse had happened elsewhere, before her naked body had been carefully packed then transported through the woods, possibly in some kind of body bag to contain fluids, before being dumped in the estate’s lake. Somebody had been very careful to cover their tracks.

At the lake, attention focused on the estate’s gamekeeper, John Briggs, and his seventeen-year-old assistant, Colin Ealy, who were both interviewed at length about their whereabouts on the night of Matilda’s abduction. Both men had flimsy alibis, claiming to have been alone that night, Briggs at home and Ealy working on the estate until late. Neither could provide corroboration.