Unsolved Read online

  On his way home, Hunter decided to swing by the house that once belonged to the Bannister family to fix the sense of place before he began his enquiries. He knew the locality fairly well because he’d once lived only a few streets away as a child, and that was another reason why the event triggered a memory: having once resided in the same neighbourhood, the sudden disappearance of the Bannisters in 1991 had been something his parents had frequently asked him about on the weekends he had come home from police training school. All he’d been able to tell them back then was that it was something he wasn’t involved in and wouldn’t be involved in until he actually started on the beat. When he had finished his training and got his posting to Barnwell, the enquiry had been ‘closed pending further information — believed murdered by David Bannister, followed by his suicide’, and that was why his recollection of the event was so fleeting. Speaking with his mum and dad about their memory of the family’s disappearance was on his list of priorities over the next couple of days.

  Wath Road was made up of two rows of identical Victorian terracing, all in private hands. It was a street of houses with no driveways, and so the occupants’ cars lined the road either side, leaving only a narrow passing. Hunter eased off the accelerator but kept going, allowing himself enough time to read the house numbers that he passed. As he approached the junction, he saw that the old Bannister home was the end terrace on the right-hand side. It had an alleyway to the side giving easy access to the rear, making it different from the other properties, and as he stopped at the give-way markings he gave the house the once over, fixing an impression of it. As he turned left out of the street, he took a last glance in his rear-view mirror. He remembered these streets and some of the occupants well from when he was a child. Tomorrow, he would begin finding out who was still here from 1991 when David, Tina and their daughter Amy had gone missing.

  The moment Hunter entered his home, the wonderful smells of cooking greeted him. Setting down his briefcase, he shouted, ‘It’s me,’ slipped off his coat, draping it over the stair rail, and flipped off his shoes.

  Beth called back, ‘I’m through here,’ and he made his way to the kitchen.

  ‘Something smells good,’ said Hunter, eyeing several pans on the large stove.

  Beth wore an apron over a T-shirt and jeans and her hands were in oven-gloves. ‘There’s a beer in the fridge,’ she said, pulling open the oven door. A waft of steam poured through the gap, and Beth pulled back her face.

  ‘You’re home early,’ she said. ‘I can’t remember the last time you were home at a civilised time and we ate together as a family. If this is what your new job means, then you can stay in it until your retirement.’

  Hunter pulled two half-pint glasses out from a cupboard and split the bottle of beer. He handed one glass to Beth. ‘Cheeky mare,’ he returned and took the head off his Theakston’s. It hit the spot. He took another, longer drink, almost draining the glass.

  ‘I’ve put another in the fridge for you. I thought you might need it.’ Beth took a sip of her own beer, then asked, ‘How did your first day go?’

  Hunter finished his beer. ‘Okay. Not what I’m used to, but it looks as though it could be interesting.’ He told her about Maddie being his only supervision.

  ‘Is she nice?’

  ‘Seems it.’ He told Beth about her circumstances. Then before Beth could respond, he said, ‘Where are the boys?’

  ‘In their rooms. Jonathan said he has some homework, and I think Daniel’s on his X-Box.’

  ‘I’ll grab a shower, and then have ten minutes with them both before we eat.’

  While Hunter ate, he chatted with the boys about what they had done at school and discussed getting tickets for Sheffield United’s next home game with Jonathan, and suggested taking Daniel to rugby on Sunday — family things he hadn’t been able to do for the best part of a year. And whilst St. John-Stevens entered his thoughts during the odd moment, he couldn’t help but think it had been a long time since he had felt this chilled; work was constantly in his thoughts, especially when a big case was running.

  After the meal, he helped clear away the dishes, and while the boys disappeared back to their rooms he switched on the TV to grab the remainder of the local news. There was a piece on about Rasa Katiliene. They were showing a screenshot from CCTV footage of her in the company of a big-built overweight man, believed to be in his late forties, leaving The Junction pub. It wasn’t of good quality, and Hunter was of the opinion it had been captured by a camera a good distance from the pub and had been blown up. St. John-Stevens was telling the reporter that it was the last sighting of Rasa, and that if anyone knew who the man was, they should contact the Incident Room. The news-clip only lasted thirty seconds, and Hunter mumbled the word ‘wanker,’ as it switched to another news item. Operation Hydra had slipped from his thoughts, and he reminded himself to speak with Grace about the case purely out of curiosity.

  As the weather report started, Hunter turned off the TV and switched his thoughts to the Bannister family. He had brought the missing file home with him in his briefcase, and he decided that he would go through the remainder of it before Jonathan and Daniel’s shower and bedtime.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  What a difference a day makes, Hunter thought as he exited the lift on the first floor of the training complex and made his way to his new office. He had slept well, only waking when his alarm went off at 6.45 a.m., and he felt the most refreshed he had done for days. Although he was his own timekeeper now, he had already decided he was going to continue to aim for 8 a.m. starts, even though it was only himself and Maddie.

  The office was empty — Hunter wasn’t surprised given Maddie and her daughter’s circumstances — and dumping his briefcase on his desk he made his way across the room and switched on the kettle. As it boiled, he booted up his computer and took out the Bannister file. He had noted last night while flipping through it that among the witness statements there was also a set of crime scene photographs of the Bannister home, which had immediately pleased him — a photograph was better than any written evidence — and after giving them a cursory look through, he’d decided upon a more thorough scrutiny of them this morning. His aim was to read through the file and establish if there were any lines of enquiry.

  One of the things that already concerned him was knowing that St. John-Stevens had been the investigating officer in this case. Notwithstanding his issues with him, Hunter had doubts about his experience as a detective back in 1991. He had done his homework on him since their run-in and discovered that St. John-Stevens had joined the job in 1988 as a twenty-one-year-old graduate, with a degree in law. Three years later he was a Detective Constable at Barnwell, and while he undoubtedly had knowledge of the law and procedures, Hunter knew that it took more than that to be a detective. It takes years of honing skills from hard-earned experience, and the only experience St. John-Stevens would have had in 1991 was three years of policing, two of those as a probationer constable.

  A vision of Hunter’s mentor, Barry Newstead, suddenly leaped into his head. He remembered Barry telling him of several run-ins he’d had with a uniform chief inspector of similar character to St. John-Stevens. What had Barry said about him? ‘He couldn’t detect shit on his shoes.’ That thought made Hunter chuckle, and as he gazed again at St. John-Stevens’ name on the last page of the summary, he told himself, This case definitely warrants a thorough going-through before being filed away again.

  There were a dozen photographs of the Bannister home, the first three of which showed the outside of the house, front, side and rear. The only difference Hunter could see from his visit yesterday was that PVC doors and windows had replaced the wooden ones in the photos.

  In the fourth photograph, Hunter saw that the front door opened straight into the lounge. The room was very well furnished and decorated. The walls were covered in wallpaper of two different designs separated by white dado rail. The bottom section was green and white stripes and the top paper a ser
ies of green designs on a white background. It was furnished with a green Dralon three-seater sofa and matching chair, a wooden coffee table, and a glass cabinet that contained a mix of wood and pottery ornaments together with a brown glazed coffee service that Hunter recognised as Hornsea ware. A TV was on a stand in the right-hand alcove next to a tiled fireplace. He remembered that the summary mentioned a side table being overturned and a photograph smashed, and he could see in the photo that there was a small wooden table on its side next to the fireplace and a shattered picture frame beside it.

  The fifth and sixth photographs were closeup shots of the tiled hearth and fireplace, and Hunter could see a number of dried blood splashes. There were only half a dozen splodges, the biggest of which looked to be about the size of fifty-pence pieces. He remembered that it had been identified as belonging to Tina. While she had obviously been injured, looking at these two photographs, it couldn’t have been a bad injury, he told himself.

  The seventh photo was a wide shot of the daughter’s bedroom. It contained a cot, the bedding of which had been made, a cream coloured bedside cabinet and a double wardrobe that matched. By the absence of other photos of Amy’s room, Hunter guessed that nothing untoward had happened there.

  The remaining five photographs were all of the kitchen, three of them of the floor area which looked as if it was covered in light brown vinyl with a tile design. One of the photos had crime-scene markers set out over the floor, but it appeared clean. Two others of the kitchen had been shot from the same angle, but in these Hunter saw sizeable tracks of something smeared across it. He guessed he was seeing this because Luminol had been sprayed across the vinyl floor, which picks up blood and other stains when subjected to a certain type of ultra-violet light, and he recalled mention of significant amounts of bloodstaining being found in the kitchen that someone had attempted to clean with bleach. Hunter could clearly see the signs that someone had been badly injured in this room.

  The last shot was of the door jamb that led from the lounge into the kitchen. Low down, very close to the floor was a bloodstain smear. The first thought that jumped into Hunter’s head was that this was where Tina had made a last-gasp effort to stop herself being dragged into the kitchen after being assaulted in the lounge. He tried to remember if that had been accounted for in St. John-Stevens’ summary. He scribbled a note to check and then lingered over the last three photographs before setting them aside and reading the witness statements.

  The first he picked out was from David Bannister’s mum, Alice. It began with background information relating to when her son was born, when he met Tina, when they married and the date when Amy, her granddaughter, was born. All standard preamble for a statement of this type. It led on to when David moved into the house on Wath Road, his occupation — a warehouseman at a local building firm — and when he started work there. It was short and to the point.

  From there, it jumped to 3 p.m. on the 16th July 1991, the time and day when Alice visited her son and daughter-in-law’s house. The initial detail of her visit mirrored the summary — that she first found the front door unlocked — thereafter it was expanded, describing how she opened the door and shouted into the house, and after not getting a response as expected, she stepped inside and found the disturbance in the lounge and from there made a cursory search of the kitchen, and seeing the back door was also unlocked, and no one around, made her way upstairs expecting to find her daughter-in-law and granddaughter up there. Not finding them, she returned to the lounge and this time noticed the blood droplets on the hearth. She became immediately concerned that something had happened to either Tina or Amy and finding the house phone ripped from its socket, nipped next door to the neighbour and made a telephone call to her son’s workplace.

  She learned that David had left at lunchtime and hadn’t returned back to work, and at that point Hunter recalled that the summary had made mention of a work colleague tipping him off about a man he had seen drinking with Tina in the pub and leaving their address a week earlier, and that David had said he was going home to try and catch them. Hunter held on to the page while he skim-read back over the summary to find the details of the man tipping David off. He found him. George Evers. He made another note and returned to Alice’s statement, picking up where he had left off.

  He read that she then rang Barnwell General Hospital, asking if any of them were there. When she was told they weren’t, she rang the police and reported them missing. Finishing Alice’s statement, Hunter realised that with the exception of Alice’s more detailed account of her actions following her entrance into her son and daughter-in-law’s home, the phone calls to her son’s place of work and the hospital enquiry, he hadn’t learned anything different to what he’d read in the summary, and he put it to one side and picked up the next document.

  This witness statement was from thirty-two-year-old Denise Harris, who lived directly opposite the Bannisters. He read that was she was a married mother of two boys aged eight and six and worked part-time as a cashier at a local supermarket. On the day of the Bannister’s disappearance it was her day off, and after taking her sons to school, she walked into Barnwell town centre to do some shopping and then returned home, arriving back about 10.30 a.m. when she put on her washing machine and started to clean her house.

  At around noon of that day, Denise Harris was in her lounge, hoovering, when she noticed a man at the front door of the Bannister home. She described him as white, of medium height and medium build, with dark hair and wearing a dark-coloured long coat with the collar up so that she couldn’t see his face, and was therefore unable to give an estimate as to age. She stated that she only gave him a few seconds’ attention, because she continued hoovering. When she looked through her window again, about a minute later, he had gone.

  A little under an hour later, she was again in her lounge when she saw David Bannister let himself in by the front door. After she saw David go into the house, Denise then went into the backyard of her house to hang out the washing and saw no more activity at the Bannister home. The following evening, she became aware of police activity in the street, especially around the Bannister home and learned that they had all been reported missing.

  Hunter finished Denise Harris’s statements, tightening his grip on the pages. None of this was in the summary, and he knew that it should have been. The presence of a stranger at the front door of the Bannister house a day before their reported disappearance — albeit for a few seconds and with a poor description that wouldn’t enable identification — was still worthy of investigation. It also tied in with the information from David’s work colleague, George Evers, who had seen Tina drinking with a man in a pub and had seen the same man leaving the address one week prior to them all disappearing.

  Hunter set down Mrs Harris’s statement and searched through the paperwork for George’s statement. Whilst there were other statements in the folder, there wasn’t one from George. For a moment he was puzzled, until he remembered how the file had only been held together by a flimsy elastic band and guessed that it had fallen out at some stage over the years of handling and filing. He noted down George Evers’ name as someone to trace. There were clear lines of enquiry here that warranted following up. Putting his list to one side, Hunter was just thinking it was time for another cuppa when the office door opened and in stepped a flushed Maddie. He looked at his watch. 9.30 a.m.

  Maddie hurried past him, unbuttoning her coat. She dropped her bag onto her desk. ‘Nightmare of a morning! I’m so sorry, Sarge. Libbie was in loads of pain again last night, and I didn’t get her down until three this morning. We slept in.’ She shook herself out of her coat. ‘I’ll work later and make up for it.’

  Hunter could see she was flustered. He answered, ‘Okay, don’t worry about it, Maddie.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She let out a deep sigh. ‘And I’m sorry about this, but I also need to sort out something that’s urgent before I start.’

  Hunter eyed her anxious expression. ‘What’s that
, then?’

  She let out another heavy sigh. ‘I forgot to set my handbrake, and my car’s rolled back into another car in the car park.’

  ‘Oh, crikey, Maddie! Do you know whose it is?’

  Tightening her mouth, she shook her head. ‘I’m just going to do a check.’

  Her face gave away how overwhelmed she was feeling, and Hunter saw her eyes starting to well up. He said, ‘Don’t get upset, Maddie. There’ll not be much damage if you’ve only rolled into it. Take me down and show me the car you’ve hit before you do anything.’

  Maddie picked her bag back up and followed Hunter out of the office. They took the lift down to the car park and Hunter let Maddie show him where she had parked her VW Golf.

  As he approached Maddie’s VW, Hunter thought that it looked to be perfectly parked.

  As if reading his thoughts, she said, ‘I pulled it back after I’d hit it.’ She pointed to the shiny silver Mercedes parked behind her car.

  Hunter took a deep breath. It was a brand new E class model. Not cheap. Hunter couldn’t help but think this had ‘gaffer’s car’ written all over it, and sneaking a quick look around and seeing they were the only people in the car park he bent down to examine the Mercedes’ front bumper. Below the number plate was a foot-long black scuff mark from Maddie’s bumper. Without commenting on the damage, Hunter said, ‘Do you have a wipe?’

  Ferreting around in her handbag, Maddie produced a wet-wipe which she handed to Hunter.

  Scrubbing the mark, he managed to rub away most of the black, but beneath the scuff were several small scratches which he couldn’t remove. He gazed up, and seeing her face still wearing a troubled look, he said, ‘It’s nothing, Maddie. T-cut or one of those scratch-pens will easy get rid of those.’ He added, ‘Give me another wipe.’