a lovely person and he’s married, so be nice.’
‘I’m always nice.’
‘Not in a way that’s noticeable to the casual observer.’
Derwent moved away from me, grinning to himself. As if to prove me wrong, he went across to the queue to help Kit with the drinks. I followed Godley and Whitlock to the table, not without some misgivings. Derwent would take the opportunity to talk to Kit about me, unsupervised, and I liked Kit but he wasn’t the most discreet person I’d ever encountered. I couldn’t think of anything I needed to hide, specifically, but then again I couldn’t think of anything I’d like Derwent to find out about me. He knew too much already.
Without his wig and gown, Harry Hollingwood looked different too. His grey hair was swept back from a high square forehead and brushed against his collar at the back. He was compact, fit, fiftyish and he looked good-humoured, despite the loss in court. His small brown eyes were shrewd and full of life.
‘Sit down, sit down. I thought we should have a little post-mortem before we all went home.’
‘It was the result we expected,’ Whitlock said, which was his way of reassuring the lawyer that he didn’t blame him.
‘Couldn’t have gone any other way. The point is that we’ve got to prepare ourselves for a retrial.’
‘How soon can we expect the retrial?’
‘Soon,’ Hollingwood said. ‘He’ll be in the Crown Court tomorrow to be formally released from prison. How long do you want him out?’
‘Not long.’
‘Well, then. We’ll seek an early trial date. In the circumstances, we should get it. But that obviously means you have less time to conduct your reinvestigation. A month or two.’
‘We’ll manage,’ Godley said, with a confidence that I didn’t feel. ‘Have you met Maeve Kerrigan? She’s one of my best detectives.’
Hollingwood nodded to me. ‘Kit speaks very highly of you.’
‘I’ve always enjoyed working with him.’ I hoped I sounded like a tough and experienced detective sergeant, even if I was flustered to the point of blushing by what Godley had said.
‘I should say that the previous investigation was excellent.’ Hollingwood turned to Whitlock. ‘We were very happy with the evidence as it was gathered and presented to us. I am simply conscious of the fact that time has passed and the defence has had an opportunity to revisit the case they ran. We want to be prepared for them to take issue with anything that was awkward for them in the previous hearing. We’ll be disclosing anything new that you find out, of course, but with any luck it will be unanswerable.’
There was a brief hiatus while Derwent and Kit returned with the coffee. Kit had the expression of a man who had gone through a car wash in a convertible with the roof down. Derwent was at his most bland. He smiled at me as he sat down: never a good sign.
‘What was the defence?’ I asked quickly. ‘I read the files the other day and it seemed there wasn’t much room for doubt.’
‘There’s always room for doubt in a defence case,’ Hollingwood said. ‘They don’t have to prove he didn’t do it. They only need to confuse the jury. The idea is to reinterpret the evidence so the Crown’s account of what happened seems open to debate.’
‘He had a really good brief,’ Kit contributed. ‘One of those guys who does a closing argument that makes the jury fall in love with him a little bit. Make ’em laugh, make ’em cry.’
‘I don’t see where the doubt comes in,’ I said. ‘Stone was sitting in the house when they went there to ask him about the van. There was forensic evidence of Willa Howard having been in the room behind him.’
‘No,’ Kit said, grinning. ‘That was the mistake we’d made, according to his brief. There was forensic evidence in the cupboard in the room behind him. The defence alleged he’d found it dumped on a street corner and thought it would be useful. The defence said that someone else had used it to imprison Willa Howard before or after her death, and that Stone had unwittingly brought it into his home.’
‘And locked it in a room? And hid the key so we never found it?’
‘They said that Stone was worried about being burgled. He was obsessed with security.’
‘Yeah, funny how serial killers like their privacy.’ Derwent shook his head. ‘Surely there’s no way the jury would have fallen for it.’
‘You don’t need to convince all twelve of them. You can get a mistrial if you confuse three of them beyond the point where they know black from white.’ Hollingwood leaned back in his chair, amused rather than upset by it. ‘The prosecution has to play it dead straight – no showboating, no dramatics, just concentrate on the facts. The defence can do what they like.’
‘And as for being convincing, they won over more people than you’d think. Journalists, campaigners … and Sara Grey’s family.’ Whitlock’s voice dropped at the end of the sentence, and I realised with a mild sense of shock that he was angry. ‘I need to warn you about that. You’re going to have to handle them with care. They turned against the police during the initial investigation into Sara’s disappearance. My understanding is that the local CID didn’t impress them and stepped on a few toes. The fiancé was out of the country when it happened, but the detectives had their concerns about him. That bothered the family, who felt they were wasting time instead of locating her. Then they took offence at some of the questions that we had to ask. Sara’s body was well away from where we found Willa Howard. It was the cadaver dog that found her, not us. And there were differences in how the bodies were positioned. We didn’t want to assume they were both left there by the same killer. Dr Hanshaw was confident that both women had died in the same way, but by the time we found them, they had been left to nature for some time. The remains were skeletonised. He wasn’t able to specify a definite cause of death for either of them. Now, of course, the question is whether he missed something.’
Beside me, Godley was absolutely still. He wouldn’t give away how much he minded Glen Hanshaw’s reputation being questioned, but his very silence was loaded with emotion, I thought.
‘The Greys believe that we’ve never found Sara’s killer – that she wasn’t killed by the same person who killed Willa Howard, and that person was definitely not Leo Stone. They’ve bought into a conspiracy theory that we’re deliberately trying to mislead them. They don’t trust us, but they trust Stone and his son. Kelly Lambert made friends with them – can you believe that?’
‘Is that why they don’t want to believe Stone was Sara’s killer?’ I asked.
‘That and the lack of forensic evidence. They don’t think she would have stopped to talk to him that night. She was quiet – a bit shy. Timid. She wouldn’t have argued with a guy like Stone. She’d have crossed the street to avoid him.’
‘If he let her do that.’
‘Then there’s the fact that there was no trace of her in Stone’s house or his van.’ Whitlock sighed. ‘I wish we’d connected the two cases earlier, but we didn’t. I wish I’d been able to investigate Sara Grey’s disappearance. It bothered me that they hadn’t taken it seriously enough. They could have put more resources
