Cherringham--Death on a Summer Night Read Online Free Page A

he knew why Tim Bell was such a figure of hatred in Cherringham.
    But he had no idea — on the evidence revealed in the papers — why a jury had convicted him.
    When he arrived, he hadn’t told the young librarian at the desk what he was looking for — just asked to see the newspapers for 1989 and 1990. She’d taken him to the microfilm reader at the back of the library, given him the key to the storage cabinet, and then instructed him on how to work the machine.
    He’d listened patiently — in truth this was one piece of old-school tech he could operate in his sleep, having spent thousands of hours at NYPD headquarters on identical machines.
    Then he’d found the fiches, loaded up the machine with files starting in August ’89, and got to work.
    The first “missing” reports appeared in the paper a day after Dinah Taylor hadn’t returned home from the fair.
    Dinah, the reports mentioned, was well-liked in the village. Sixteen years old, pretty and confident, she helped out at various charities, worked in one of the local stores, supported the church …
    But she was also apparently an amazing violinist, a school star pupil destined for a London conservatoire and a glittering future.
    There was speculation that maybe the pressure had got too much for her and she’d just taken off somewhere — “give it a few days, she’ll be back with her tail between her legs” as one of her teachers put it.
    But a week later … and notions that she’d done a teenage “runaway” were replaced with hints from the police that her disappearance was now being treated as suspicious.
    The army was brought in to search the village and scour the surrounding fields. A murder squad from Oxford took up residence at the police station. The river was dragged. Countless interviews were conducted. Heartfelt pleas to “whoever knows where she is” were made by Dinah’s distressed parents and friends.
    As Jack well knew, so very heart-breaking those must have been.
    But no body was found.
    Then — a fragment of clothing had turned up on a hill outside the village. Dinah’s mother identified it as coming from the dress she’d worn that night. And on the material … bloodstains. And the lab analysis revealed it was Dinah’s blood.
    But not just Dinah’s. There were also traces of someone else’s blood.
    And as tests showed, that blood was Tim Bell’s — a young lad with a bad reputation, seen by numerous witnesses driving her away from the fair on the last night she was seen.
    Bell’s house and car were searched. More blood traces were found — on his clothes too. Police labelled them as “signs of a struggle” in his car.
    Bell was brought in and interrogated over two days and nights. First, he denied everything. Then he finally admitted going off with her in his car.
    His defence, according to the paper, wasn’t convincing. She’d “led him on”, he’d “had a bit to drink”, they’d argued, she’d run off, he’d gone after her, he’d seen a car — but he couldn’t describe it properly, then he’d gone back to the fair but all his mates had gone home, so he’d packed it in too …
    He swore: she was alive last time he’d seen her — that just about summed up his defence.
    But his story didn’t stand up.
    Nobody remembered seeing him come back to the fair.
    Nobody saw Dinah again.
    Nobody else seemed to have a motive to kill her.
    Then there was the blood.
    And by now — two weeks after Dinah’s disappearance — even though there was no body, there seemed to be no doubt that the poor girl was dead.
    There was still only one name in the frame — Tim Bell. Who’d already served time in a youth detention centre for theft, assault, drunk and disorderly …
    Bell was charged with murder, bail was withheld, and he was imprisoned to await trial.
    Jack flipped forward a few months to the trial, and slowly read through the daily reports in the paper, winding on the microfilm page by page.
    The trial, in