The Split - Sharon Bolton Page 0,93
on the island of South Georgia, is our prime suspect in the murders of Dora Hardwick and Bella Barnes last summer. Our initial suspect was a person known as Shane. DI Jones, can you remind us why Shane was wanted in connection with the murders?’
Delilah taps her pen on the notebook in front of her, a sure sign that she is nervous.
‘Bella Barnes was sleeping alone in the Grand Arcade car park on the night she was killed,’ she says. ‘Round about the estimated time of death, we have CCTV footage of a person leaving the car park, wearing a black hooded sweatshirt with a distinctive logo. Other homeless people identified this individual as a man they knew as Shane. No one knew much about him, and efforts to track him down came to nothing, but he remained someone we very much wanted to speak to.’
‘If I remember correctly, your experts confirmed that Shane was male,’ Joe interrupts. ‘He walked like a man, stood like a man, carried himself like a man.’
‘He was believed at that time to be male, yes,’ Delilah confirms. ‘You yourself, Joe said the other rough sleepers were afraid of him. They thought him creepy, that he watched them while they were asleep. They believed him to have murdered Bella.’
Joe can remember saying exactly this to his mum.
‘Time went by, and we couldn’t find him,’ Delilah goes on. ‘Then, on the thirtieth of June, someone broke into my son’s flat. Fingerprints on and around the fire escape suggested an intruder, but they didn’t match any we had on the system. His identity remained a mystery. Joe installed extra security and nothing else happened.
‘On the eleventh of July, a patrol car spotted someone answering Shane’s description on New Park Street. They gave chase, but he got away. He had, though, left behind a knife. Fingerprints on the knife matched fingerprints found in Joe’s flat. We knew beyond any doubt that Shane was the intruder.’
Around the table, people look at Joe as though expecting him to argue. He doesn’t.
‘The case went cold,’ Delilah says. ‘Then, a week ago, we found the body of Dora Hardwick, another homeless person, in a drain near Silver Street. From the last sighting of her alive, the finding of her belongings in the river, and from an appointment that she didn’t keep, we assumed her most likely date of death was Friday the twenty-sixth of July. That same evening, Felicity Lloyd not only crashed her car and fled the scene of the accident, but was seen running around the streets of Cambridge, in some distress, and wearing a dress that appeared to be severely bloodstained.’
‘You haven’t actually found the dress, have you?’ asks Torquil.
‘She had plenty of time to get rid of it,’ someone says.
‘This coincidence enabled us to run fingerprints we had on file following an alleged break-in at Dr Lloyd’s house,’ Delilah continues. ‘From that we were able to confirm that Felicity Lloyd’s fingerprints and Shane’s fingerprints are the same. She broke into Joe’s flat. She is Shane.’
‘I’d like the meeting to acknowledge that she is extremely convincing as a man,’ Joe says.
Several puzzled faces turn his way.
‘Duly acknowledged,’ says Downey.
‘This next bit is circumstantial,’ Delilah says, ‘but significant. Felicity Lloyd was admitted to hospital with minor injuries and claiming amnesia on the same night that Bella Barnes was found stabbed to death.’
She stops to take a breath, then hurries on.
‘We had enough to apply for a warrant to search Felicity Lloyd’s house.’ Delilah has the air of someone wanting to get a difficult task over with. ‘She’d cleaned it well, but there was enough DNA left to give us a further match to Shane. And significantly, we found the distinctive hoody that Shane was seen wearing.’
She holds up a photograph of the sweatshirt. ‘That’s it, sir,’ she says. ‘I’m done.’
‘The isolated location of South Georgia presents us with some difficulties.’ Downey takes over again. ‘The nearest police force is on the Falkland Islands, some three to four days distant by boat, and even they aren’t well resourced for apprehending and extraditing violent criminals. My plan is to put in a request to the RAF and the governor of the Falkland Islands for a joint police–RAF operation that arrests Lloyd on South Georgia and flies her home under military escort.’
‘That would be the very worst thing you could do,’ Joe says.
He feels the people around him knuckling down. They are ready for him. They have expected him to argue.
‘The floor’s yours,