No Smoke Without Fire (A DCI Warren Jones Novel - Book 2) Read Online Free Page A

CCTV operators in the area. Let’s see if we can find any useful images from around the time that she went missing. I doubt that there will be much in the way of CCTV footage up near Beaconsfield Woods, but you never know, we might get lucky and pick up something on the speed cameras on the main road.
    “In the meantime, I’m going to speak to her family again and see what her boyfriend has to say for himself.”
    * * *
    Warren chose Detective Constable Karen Hardwick to accompany him to interview Sally Evans’ family. The young woman was relatively new to CID, but had shown a lot of promise. Warren firmly believed that a small unit such as Middlesbury should be careful to ensure that more junior colleagues received the full range of learning experiences, and so he regularly took detective constables and sergeants out with him to interview witnesses or suspects.
    It was almost a cliché that whenever a murder occurred, the first place the police headed for was the victim’s home. However, as Warren’s first mentor, Bob Windermere, would often remind him, clichés and stereotypes only become such because there was more than a grain of truth to them. The vast majority of murders were committed by someone known to the victim and so when a young woman was killed the first people the police investigated were her husband, partner or any exes that might still be on the scene. Consequently, the first person that they questioned was Darren Blackheath, Sally Evans’ boyfriend.
    The two had been together for almost three years and had been renting a small third-floor flat for the past eleven months, the young man explained as the two police officers sat on the small sofa opposite him.
    Darren Blackheath was a twenty-four-year-old tyre fitter with no previous convictions. A Middlesbury resident all of his life, he’d lived with his parents until moving in with Sally Evans. Similarly, Sally was also in her first serious relationship, although she had shared flats with housemates and lived in student accommodation when studying for a degree in tourism management.
    The couple had met in a bar one night, exchanged phone numbers and started dating ‘officially’, as he put it, a month later. A bit of delicate probing revealed that the relationship had been going well, according to Blackheath. So well in fact that he had been planning on proposing to her on Christmas morning. With reddened eyes, he had shown the two police officers the diamond ring with which he had hoped to seal the deal.
    The night that Sally had disappeared had been unremarkable. He’d left work at his usual time, sending her a text message to let her know that he was on his way. Crossing town had taken no longer than normal and he’d pulled up outside the rear entrance to her workplace at a few minutes past six. As usual the street was deserted, but unusually his girlfriend was not waiting for him.
    “She usually comes out on the dot of six and has a fag whilst she’s waiting for me to pick her up. I don’t mind her smoking in the flat, but I draw the line at me car.” His eyes grew moist again. “She promised she were going to quit in the new year. It’s one of the reasons I decided to propose. She always said she’d quit before she got married, ’cos she wanted a white wedding and she said there were nothing worse than a bride with a fag in ’er mouth. Nearly as bad as tattoos.” He looked embarrassed for a moment. “No offence if you have tattoos. But I figured it would give her an extra incentive, you know?”
    “So what happened then, Darren?”
    “Well, I checked me mobile, but there was no message. Normally she’s out the door on the dot, so she doesn’t bother replying. But if she’s going to be late she always texts me so I don’t worry.
    “I waited for about five minutes before I rang her mobile but it rang out and went to voicemail. So I locked the car and tried the back door to her place, but it’s a fire door and it was locked