A Narrow Margin of Error Read Free Page A

murder case for you.’
    And so saying, he reached into the top of his in-tray, and pulled out a thick beige folder. ‘This is just the preliminary dossier.’
    Hillary gave a wry smile. ‘I know. Let me guess – there are boxes and boxes of more stuff waiting for me in the stationery cupboard.’
    The stationery cupboard was what she called her office – since that was what it had been before becoming her office.
    Steven Crayle’s smile utterly lacked sympathy. ‘They wouldn’t all fit in there. Most of them are in the main office,’ he admitted, without missing a beat.
     
    It was the main difference between taking on a fresh new case, and taking over a cold one, Hillary mused an hour later, as she contemplated the piled-high documents concerning the killing of Rowan Thompson. When you’re presented with a person whose dead body has only just been discovered, all the information to be gathered is stretched out ahead of you, and in the pursuance and gathering of it, if you were lucky, you would find the killer.
    But when you are handed a cold case, all of it has already been done for you. The autopsy has been performed and the results are in; the reams and reams of forensic information are neatly catalogued , the witnesses have all been seen and interviewed, insome cases many times over, and the deceased family and friends have all been contacted and questioned.
    And through the blizzard of paperwork, and many years later, you are supposed to go over someone else’s case, and follow in the footsteps of some other Chief Investigative Officer who has already tried and failed to solve the crime.
    Hillary sighed and poured herself another cup of coffee and reread the initial reports, trying to get her own take on what she was being told, and gazing at the scene-of-crime photographs whilst trying to imagine herself actually there.
    The facts were simple enough.
    Rowan Thompson had been just twenty years old when he was killed on December 21 in 2001. The photographs of him – both alive and dead – showed him to have been five feet nine-to-ten inches tall, with spiky fair hair and big brown eyes. A good-looking kid, Hillary acknowledged, he was originally from Birmingham, having been raised in a typical middle-class home in Solihull. He’d been bright too, which is why he’d won a place at one of Oxford’s many colleges, where he’d been reading PPE – Philosophy, Politics and Economics. According to his parents, he’d wanted to be either a banker or a stockbroker – and maybe go into politics later in life.
    Hillary gave a wry snort and sipped her coffee. With the way the economy was nowadays, if he had lived to make it in the banking world, he’d have probably been widely loathed and vilified by one and all by now. But he’d been spared any of that.
    Instead, someone had taken a large pair of sharp scissors and had buried them deep in his stomach.
    He had been rooming, along with several other students, in a Victorian property not far from Keble College, where the old house, like many others of its ilk, had long since been converted into bedsits. He was due to go home to Solihull the next day, for the start of the Christmas celebrations with his family.
    Instead, his parents had spent the seasonal holidays arranging his funeral.
    Hillary picked up a picture of the murder victim taken when he was still alive. It was a group shot, taken in his bedroom at the murder site and the four other people in the frame comprised the other students who shared the house.
    She began to make her own notes – part of the process of claiming the case as her own.
    Marcie Franks had been twenty-four years old at the time of the killing, and was thus a post graduate student, who was studying for a D.Phil. in biochemistry. In the photograph she was standing to Rowan’s right, and stood just fractionally taller than him. She had long brown hair and brown eyes, and regarded the camera with a steady, slightly bored look on her face.