A Game of Proof Read Online Free PDF Page A

expectantly.
    ‘Any luck?’
    ‘No, sorry, I just set them all against me. Come on, let’s go and see Valentino.’
    The two women made for the staircase to the police cells, where Gary Harker would be held until the Group 4 van took him back to Hull prison for the night. As they went through the door they left the imposing pomp of the courtroom with its ancient oak panelling, stucco pillars and exotic domed ceiling, and entered a grey, comfortless world of bare stone corridors and clanging cell doors. At the foot of the stairs they met a detective on his way out.
    ‘Aha, the devil’s advocate! Hello, Sarah. And Lucy Sampson, isn’t it?’
    ‘That’s right. My solicitor.’ Sarah smiled coolly at DI Terry Bateson, one of the few CID men she actually liked. Bateson, as usual, was managing to make his double-breasted suit hang crumpled around him like a tracksuit. Perhaps it was something to do with the tie, strung several inches below the top button; or the loose-limbed, broad-shouldered frame that supported the clothes, but every time Sarah saw the man he looked more like an athletic teenager than the senior criminal detective that he actually was. And despite her cool smile, conversations with Terry seldom failed to flutter her. He was a widower, too, which made him all the more attractive.
    It was Terry who had charged Gary with rape; and as the officer investigating the murder of Maria Clayton and the attempted rape of Karen Whitaker,  he suspected that Gary was guilty of these crimes too. Maria Clayton, an up-market prostitute, had been found strangled on Strensall Common a year ago. Her hands had been bound behind her with the belt of her own raincoat, and the belt looped through its buckle round her neck, so that the harder she struggled the tighter the noose became. It seemed she had been half-strangled like this and then throttled with her attacker’s hands. She had been sexually assaulted and there was a small cut in her neck. Her dog, a Yorkshire terrier, was found with its throat cut in a ditch.
    Karen Whitaker, a university student, had been posing nude in the woods for her boyfriend to photograph when the couple were attacked by a hooded assailant with a knife, who snatched their camera, handcuffed the boy to the steering wheel of his car, bound Karen’s hands with tape, and was attempting to rape her when the boyfriend managed to set off the car alarm and attract some walkers, who chased the attacker away.
    This attack, which happened less than three weeks after the Clayton murder, led to the Hooded Knifeman articles in the Evening Press ; and when Sharon Gilbert was raped a month  after that, the pressure on the police to make an arrest was enormous. But although Gary was Terry’s prime suspect for all three attacks, the evidence he had to link him to the first two was very thin. Gary had been one of a small team of builders who had built an extension to Maria Clayton’s kitchen six months before her death, and had boasted of having sex with her once. He had also been one of a gang of builders repairing Karen Whitaker’s hall of residence, and had seen the naked pictures in her rooms. But scores of men had visited Maria Clayton’s house, and dozens of students and building workers had known about Karen Whitaker’s exhibitionist hobby. A smudged footprint from a size 9 Nike trainer had been found near the scene of both crimes, and a battered pair of size 9 Nike trainers had been found in Gary’s flat; but this, as Lucy had pointed out scornfully when the police presented it, would put about two million other men in the dock alongside Gary. Although she had been sexually assaulted, no semen or body hairs were found on Maria Clayton’s body, but Terry’s team had been triumphant when they had found a male hair stuck to the tape used to bind Karen Whitaker’s hands. But their triumph turned to ashes when DNA analysis of the hair turned out not to match Gary, effectively acquitting him of the