Cold Revenge (Willis/Carter #6)(46)
Davidson thanked the waiter for the arrival of his starter of mackerel with wild berries, smoked over newborn lamb’s hay.
‘No disrespect meant, sir,’ said Carter. ‘I’m just talking about hindsight, that’s all – we all wish we were blessed with it. Who do you think should have been investigated but wasn’t?’
‘The family,’ Davidson said with his knife poised in the air like a baton. Then he scraped the Melba toast with soft butter, piled it high with mackerel and paused to examine it as he raised his eyes to Carter. ‘The father was a difficult man, he decided early on that we were not going to find his daughter; I don’t think he wanted us to. He was a bully and they’d had Heather late in life, I guessed it wasn’t what he’d wanted to be doing at sixty, keeping tabs on a teenager. Got his computer off him.’
‘Okay, thanks, anyone else that you would take another look at?’
‘There were so many. He had every odd bod for miles coming to the parties. We managed to get a couple of people to talk about something that had happened to them at the bungalow – sex, rape, violence – but none of them could back up their stories. Look at these people, the ones who made statements against Douglas, see where they have been for the last sixteen years.’
‘What about the uncle, Trevor Truscott, or her brother, Ollie?’
‘Her brother was at university and nearly finished – there was a nine-year age gap. We didn’t see anything in him. He obviously left home as fast as he could and never went back. Truscott had alibis for everything. He is the wife’s brother. He said as little as he could get away with. He was up to no good, we knew he was having affairs. Truscott was probably shagging everything that moved on that farm, but it didn’t add up to murder.
‘He was one of the last people to see Heather, and he was very friendly with Douglas.’
‘But Heather liked going to the farm, would she have gone there if the uncle was a threat?’
‘Don’t forget he made money from Douglas and his raves, they scratched one another’s backs. He screwed Nicola Stone for the rent. It was an arrangement that worked.’
‘What about other possible victims?’ asked Carter.
‘We plotted all those missing who fitted the same profile as Heather and the rape victim, what was she called, I forget?’
‘Rachel McKinney.’
‘That’s it. If we could have got her to open up to us, we might have understood more about Douglas, but she was in no fit state. She was just before Heather was abducted, different part of the country, and nothing to connect the two things, until her DNA was found in his van as well as Heather’s. By the time it came to court six months later she was a wreck. She might have given us a second site for Douglas. We know he held on to her for five days. He didn’t keep her in his van that whole time. Mentally she was jelly, no matter how hard we tried to help her. She wanted to drop the charges, she was so scared when she came to face him in court. Rachel McKinney was cross-examined for days and she just fell apart. He said it was consensual sex and the injuries were nothing to do with him, that he didn’t know anything about the grave. There was nothing of his in the grave, no footprint, nothing; it was waterlogged. We think it was dug weeks before he took her there that night. The jury listened to three pages of doctors’ reports detailing the injuries on her body – mutilation which included partial flaying of her skin, for God’s sake – and they found him guilty of rape, only because of his semen inside her anus, but not guilty of attempted murder and not guilty of grievous bodily harm. There was no proof, no evidence, and she couldn’t speak, she couldn’t even look at him in court. The prosecution argued that the mutilation was self-inflicted, it was the beginning of a spiral downhill, they said, despite the fact she had been a perfectly bright and healthy girl at university before it happened. The judge handed down a life sentence. I shook his hand. It was sixteen years and no parole. It was the best we could hope for.’
‘So that grave could have been meant for someone else, you think?’ said Carter.
‘Exactly. We made a shortlist of thirty people, both sexes, aged from children up to thirty. Taking the profile from the rape victim and Heather we decided he probably thought that Rachel was younger than she was. She was a slight nineteen-year-old at Bristol uni. The profile we came up with was between twelve and eighteen, slight build. But then we found out that Douglas was bisexual and had had encounters with a few of the farmhands at places he got to know. Have you seen the notes from the investigation?’
‘I have, but I wanted to talk to you as soon as I could,’ answered Carter.
‘Well, you’ll find the list of the missing in there. Some may have turned up now. Plus, we didn’t have the luxury of the modern forensics, the geo profilers you have now. You could do a lot with this now. You have tools at your disposal that we didn’t have then.’
‘What happened to Douglas’s van, do you know?’ asked Carter.
‘When we’d done with it, it went to a public auction. At the end of the day, the disciples were sucked in with the drugs and the sex, the non-stop parties. It must have been every teenager’s dream, even when it turned into a nightmare. They got away with it, didn’t they? None of the disciples, except Nicola, went to prison. All of them have a lot to thank her and Douglas for, they could have landed all these kids in it. I was in no doubt they saw a lot of things going on in that bungalow that they knew weren’t right but they never said. So you’re looking for someone who wants vengeance on Douglas and his disciples?’