***
Simon Smythe had been telling the truth after all and they would have to cross him off their list of suspects. Although the pub landlord had been unable to confirm what he had been wearing, forensic had discovered a few tiny splatters of Linda Wilks' blood on the bottom of his trousers, presumably picked up from the grass around the body which indicated that he had merely fallen over her body rather than killed her. There were signs that he'd tried to remove the stains, but minute traces had still clung to the fibres.
Simon Smythe might be many things, but he wasn't a murderer. The only things he was guilty of being was a coward and a bit of a dummy, and they carried with them a punishment far longer and more severe than most courts would give out; a real life sentence in fact. Allward's clothes, too, were free of suspicious stains, though in his case, that proved nothing, merely that he was smarter than the younger doctor and not nearly so likely to incriminate himself.
So Rafferty was back to square one. Some questions had been answered only to find another crop springing up in their place. For instance, why had the killer gone to the trouble, not only of removing all Linda Wilks' clothes, but also of taking them away with him? 'Maybe the clothes the victim was wearing were an important clue,' he suggested to Llewellyn. Perhaps, Rafferty pondered, in some desperation, they were dealing with a necrophiliac—a tidy necrophiliac, who also collected the clothes of his victims. Perhaps he had gone out to his car for something before he began his vile practices, had seen Smythe coming up the road, recognised him, knew his "fun" was cancelled and drove off?
Rafferty sighed. Perhaps he was being fanciful again. It couldn't have been easy to strip the body. He'd have expected bruises from rough handling, but there had been none. Had the murderer cut the clothes off the girl? If so, it pointed to premeditation and that indicated that whoever had phoned her had also killed her. If there had been a phone call at all.
Rafferty scowled. Why hadn't they checked with Mrs. Wilks? By now, if her husband had been lying about that call, he'd have had ample time to browbeat his wife into supporting his story. Still, it was worth a try. Perhaps, he thought, if they could ask the question when her husband was at work, they'd be able to winkle the truth out of her.
He got Llewellyn to organise the checking of the Wilks’s phone records and when he’d set that in motion, asked, 'Did the murderer fear the victim would be more easily traced through her clothes?' He couldn't imagine why. From what the parents had said, they'd been pretty nondescript, the sort lots of young girls wore. 'What other reason could he have had for taking them?' he asked Llewellyn, that fount of all knowledge.
'Perhaps he reads crime fiction or watches crime dramas on the television and was worried about the possibility that he'd left DNA evidence on them.'
Rafferty drummed his fingers on the table. 'Maybe. If only we could be sure what the girl was doing there; who she'd come to see. I still fancy Allward.'
'We haven't seen Dr. Whittaker at The Holbrook Clinic, yet, Sir,' Llewellyn reminded him. 'Unless we want to upset Dr. Melville-Briggs—'
‘God forbid.’ Images of the Chief Constable and his doctor buddy merged uncomfortably in Rafferty’s mind. 'We'll see him this afternoon. I want to speak to his lady friend first, though, Gwendoline Parry. Let's have her in.'