The World's End by Tom Wood

Author:Tom Wood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Birlinn

b)

Frances Barker had been murdered by Sinclair acting together with the man already convicted of the crime;

c)

Sinclair had been schooled in murder by the man convicted of Frances Barker’s death;

d)

the man convicted of Frances Barker’s murder happened to use the same MO as Sinclair.

It was clear from the very first time the case came to the attention of senior officers that, no matter which of these four possibilities had occurred, the case of Frances Barker was going to be problematic for our inquiry. In those early days of our knowing of this murder, I think we all rather hoped option b) or c) would present itself as the eventual outcome. It would be some time before a conclusion could be reached though and a very thorough, painstaking investigation was undertaken.

The date of Frances Barker’s death, 11 June 1977, would have made her the first victim of the six months of murder. She was thirty-seven and lived alone in a flat in the Maryhill district of Glasgow, having moved out of the family home in the city centre. Frances had worked for a baker in Glasgow for more than four years prior to her death and the company was, in fact, the landlord of her new flat.

The night she met her death she had, like all the other victims, been out socialising and had had a fair amount to drink. I think it would be fair to say that, by the time her sister and other family members she had been with that night helped her into a taxi to go home, she was a little worse for wear.

The taxi driver who dropped her off that night remembered clearly watching his fare as she made a somewhat precarious way towards the door of her close, in Glasgow’s Maryhill Road. The cabbie did not actually see Frances go into the close because it was a busy Glasgow Friday night and another fare climbed aboard the taxi as soon as Frances got out and the taxi was off.

After her murder the police discovered that it was unlikely she would have been able to gain entry to the close that night. She had mistakenly taken the wrong coat from the pub where they had been earlier that night and her house keys had been left in her own coat in that pub.

Her colleagues at the bakery were no doubt concerned when Frances didn’t appear for work the following Monday and, indeed, for the rest of that week but their concern did not cause them to take any action until the Friday – a full week since they had last seen her. They contacted Frances’s parents and, later that day, bakery workers and Frances’s brother Tom went to the flat in Maryhill Road and forced their way in. There was no trace of her and no sign of a disturbance or of anything being out of place.

A full sixteen days later, a man working on his family’s farm near Glenboig in Lanarkshire found the badly decomposed remains of a woman lying in a copse next to a farm road.

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