He dabbed his eyes again, took several deep breaths and turned his focus back to work, pretty much the only thing, along with Cleo’s support, that had got him through these past days. They were expecting their second child together in December, which was at least something to focus on. And at work, fortunately, he had a cold case that deeply interested him.
The murder clear-up rate in the UK averaged around 90 per cent year-on-year – among the highest in the world. But that still left one in ten murders unsolved and he was acutely aware that for each of these there was a victim for whom justice had not been served, and bereft loved ones left without answers. Murders made sensational news headlines, but as the saying went, today’s news wraps tomorrow’s fish and chips. While the rest of the nation moved on to the next day’s stories, for those loved ones of the victim the pain would never cease. But at least a successful conclusion, in the form of a conviction, would bring some closure and enable them to carry on with their lives.
And as the Detective Superintendent also well knew, most experienced homicide detectives had at least one unsolved case they’d handled that bugged them for years after. For some, that case continued to haunt them even beyond the end of their careers. The one that got away, leaving them forever thinking, what have I missed – what vital clue? Some retired detectives went to their graves with that question still unanswered.
Police files on unsolved murders in the UK never closed. And all the time, when there was the likelihood that the offender was still alive, or there were family members who would benefit from closure, these cases were kept under periodic review.
Relationships changed, and with them, sometimes, loyalties. A partner or spouse who had once provided an alibi might, after the relationship had ended – especially if badly and they were angry enough – come forward to the police. In addition, as technology advanced, improved techniques for recovering vital evidence such as fingerprints and DNA could put someone who had long thought they’d got away scot-free behind bars.
Every piece of evidence recovered from a crime scene was carefully tagged and filed in a locked storeroom. Ready to yield its secrets years, maybe even decades, after the crime had been committed.
As Head of Major Crime for Surrey and Sussex Police, Roy Grace had overall responsibility for both current homicide investigations and the regular review of cold cases. He’d recently had a drink with a newly retired colleague, Nick Sloan, a brilliant Detective Superintendent he’d greatly respected and had learned a lot from. Sloan had confessed, over a pint, that he had one regret in his career, a murder case that still haunted him, which he’d been unable to nail. He’d missed something, he was certain, but what?
A wealthy London art dealer, Charlie Porteous, had been bludgeoned to death in his Bentley in the entrance to the driveway of his house. The murder had happened late at night in a public street, in an exclusive residential area in the city of Brighton and Hove.
Sloan’s team had established that Porteous had some cash-flow problems and, shortly before his murder, had been touting a painting he’d acquired from a dubious source. He’d paid cash – something apparently completely out of character, as ordinarily he would have paid by cheque or bank transfer, to leave a trail, as was the customary procedure for art dealers in case of any come-back.
On the night of Porteous’s death, Sloan’s team had established that the dealer had been out to dinner with his god-daughter, Carrie Hepworth. She worked part-time at the gallery and they had a close relationship. The investigation was satisfied that this was purely platonic, a totally avuncular relationship rather than anything untoward. They’d also established his wife, Susan, a pillar of Brighton and Hove society, was very fond of Carrie too, and she had stayed at the couple’s house on many occasions. They’d taken her under their wing after some troubled teenage years.
But the massive and extensive investigation, given the name Operation Canvas, had drawn a blank. The long list of potential suspects had included Porteous’s employees, a dealer they’d identified to whom he had touted this painting – seemingly a long-lost work by the eighteenth-century French artist Fragonard – and the wealthy collector in Sussex who had expressed interest in seeing the painting.
At the time of his investigation, Nick Sloan had been under pressure, due to a spate of murders in Sussex higher than the normal average for the county of twelve a year, and the then impatient Head of Crime had wanted him to move on as he’d exhausted all his lines of enquiry. Sloan asked Grace, when he next reviewed the county’s cold cases, to take a close look at the Porteous murder.
Grace assured him he would. He now had the principal case files in his office.
He briefly turned his attention away from work to his best man duties at his friend and colleague Glenn Branson’s wedding to Argus reporter Siobhan Sheldrake sometime later this year. It had been set for October but because of Bruno’s death they had decided to postpone it and had yet to fix a date. So there were quite a few things to rearrange.
The current fashion seemed to be a three-day stag-do bender in some European capital, or even somewhere far away like Las Vegas, but Glenn just wanted something local and low-key – to Grace’s relief. Even so, Glenn was a popular man both in and out of the force, so it was going to be more a question of who they didn’t invite. At least that was a high-class problem, he thought, but he had a reputational responsibility. A bunch of drunk men, including a number of detectives, cavorting through the city of Brighton and Hove was never going to be a good plan. And he had made one solemn promise to Glenn, that, unlike one of their much earlier cases, burial in a coffin in remote woodlands was not going to be on the list of options at his disposal.
Fortunately, after successfully wrapping up his last case of an apparently missing wife, these past weeks had been a rare quiet time at work. And he’d been grateful of that quiet after the death of Bruno. His team’s previous case – in which he’d had a relatively minor role – involved a bent legal aid solicitor running a county lines drug-dealing network. It had ended in a result, of sorts, but one which had tied him up in a major internal as well as an IOPC enquiry, which would be ongoing for some while. But he and his team had done everything by the book, and he wasn’t worried about the eventual outcome.
Right now, his main focus during this period of downtime was on his cold cases so he could get his brain thinking about other things. And while looking through the list of some thirty unsolved murders in the counties of Surrey and Sussex that merited assessment for possible review, he found himself drawn to the one his old friend and mentor Nick Sloan had talked about a couple of months ago.
The thick master file, labelled Operation Canvas, sat on his desk in front of him, and fourteen boxes containing evidence, including witness statements, crime scene photographs, forensic reports, CCTV footage printouts, ANPR analysis, phone records and association charts, were stacked on the floor around his desk. There were another twelve boxes still to go through in the locked evidence store. Additionally, he’d requested the HOLMES team to load their entire file on his system.
His purpose in carrying out this assessment was to see if anything had been missed, as Nick Sloan felt there had been. Was it worth putting more money and resources into it or not?
He resumed the laborious task of reading through Sloan’s policy book on Operation Canvas, in which the former Detective Superintendent had diligently noted all the decisions he’d made during the investigation, and his reasons, at the end of which were his conclusions before the unsolved murder had been filed.