Hope to Die

Well that last one is in the winter, right? So we’d all have been in jumpers and coats and it wouldn’t have been so obvious. But yes, I know what you’re getting at. I think we were all a bit naïve at that age, but I can’t believe her mother or the teachers didn’t notice anything.

JOHN’S VOICE (off)

Did you know she had a boyfriend?

LEONORA STANIFORTH

No. And I think she’d have told us. Mel, anyway, even if not me. Those two were always really really tight, especially around then.

JOHN’S VOICE (off)

So you have no idea who the father was?

LEONORA STANIFORTH

(shakes her head)

None at all. I don’t think there was a single black family in Shiphampton back then. I guess she could have met him in Birmingham or something, but I’ve been racking my brains and I just can’t remember her ever going there without either me or Mel. It’s just a complete mystery.

Cut to: montage of shots of Camilla Rowan during the trial – leaving the court, head down, with her mother, with her legal team.

VOICEOVER – JOHN PENROSE

And it’s just one of the many mysteries that still haunt this case. One thing we do know is that – for whatever reason – the father of that baby has never come forward. His identity remains shrouded in secrecy, just like that of the man who fathered Rowan’s second child, scarcely a year later. But that second baby was not taken in by a loving family. He was last seen alive at only a few hours old, in his mother’s arms, in a hospital car park.

Another mystery, more deceit, more chameleon camouflage. Because as we all now know, when it came to telling lies, Camilla Rowan had barely even got started …

- freeze frame -

* * *

Adam Fawley

23 October

17.27

‘Holy fuck.’

Classic Quinn. But he has a point.

Gis is still looking at me blankly. ‘Camilla’s kid? What the –’

Quinn turns to me. ‘How old does Challow reckon the vic was?’

Good question.

‘Probably no more than twenty-one. And certainly no younger than fifteen. Something to do with the pubic bone.’

Quinn’s obviously doing the calculations. ‘So whoever the fuck he is, he had to have been born between 1997 and 2003?’

Gis glances across at him. ‘Well, Rowan was either under investigation, on trial or in the slammer from the summer of 2002 onwards, so that narrows it down a bit.’

Quinn looks at me. ‘Wasn’t there another kid – aside from the mixed-race one? Isn’t that how the police got involved in the first place?’

I nod. ‘I’m having the full case file sent over, but yes, there was another baby, but that was a girl. Born in 2002.’

Quinn grabs a bit of paper and starts doing the math. ‘So that leaves us about three and a half years between her killing that kid in 1997 and getting pregnant with the daughter in 2001.’ He looks up. ‘Could she really have had yet another brat in that time – yet another pregnancy no one noticed, and the original investigation never found?’

There’s a silence.

‘There is another possibility,’ says Gis quietly. He knows it, Quinn knows it, I know it.

Quinn lets out a low whistle and starts shaking his head. ‘Jesus.’

Gis nods. ‘Looks like that kid didn’t die in 1997, after all. He died last weekend, at Wytham. When his grandaddy shot him.’

* * *

Adam Fawley

24 October

08.27

‘Jesus, Adam, you’re only just back from paternity leave. You’re supposed to be taking it easy. Not having another run-up at the crime of the century. And another force’s crime, at that.’

I think he’s trying to be funny. ‘Trying’ being the word – in every sense.

‘I know, sir, but there’s not much I can do about that. We hardly went looking for it.’

Superintendent Harrison sits back and steeples his fingers. ‘How confident are you that this really is the child she was convicted of killing? I don’t want us digging all this up again on a hunch.’

‘I’m not one hundred per cent sure, sir, but it’s a very strong possibility. Mainly because I doubt there could have been another child of the right age that the original investigation didn’t find.’

‘So where does that leave us with the Swanns? Do you think they knew who he was?’

‘Well, he must have known who they were – what was he doing there otherwise? We don’t know how he found them – and clearly we don’t know where he’s been all these years either – but I find it hard to believe he didn’t tell them who he was when he arrived. Surely it’d be the first thing you’d say?’

Harrison is nodding slowly. ‘And yet he ends up dead.’

‘I know. I’m struggling to join the dots on that one too. All we do know is that for some reason the Swanns never called 999, and by the time we got there the body had been stripped of anything that could identify him.’

He eyes me for a moment. ‘Do you think he turned up unannounced? Or did they know he was coming?’

He’s asking me if this could have been premeditated.

And the answer is, ‘It has to be possible, sir.’