Free The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes by Roger Wilkes

It takes a while to complete but it is the cleanest and quietest way of entering a house. A burglar, not wishing to give himself any more trouble than is necessary, will choose a small window and avoid anything that is double-glazed.
    Mrs Brown’s killer ignored all the small windows at the back of Hall Farm, and entered a high-walled courtyard at the side where there are three double-glazed glass patio doors to the main room. He scored around the entire circumference of the middle door and covered the scoring with an all-weather Sellotape. If he had properly completed the task he would have had to repeat it with the double-glazing panel. Instead he then smashed and shattered the whole pane.
    When the case was featured on Crimewatch the item produced no useful leads but among the callers was a professional burglar who gave his name and his record and said that no burglar who knew what he was doing would ever break in to a house like that.
    The police cannot be sure but they believe Mrs Brown was upstairs in bed when this happened. Her clothes were neatly piled by the bed in her tidy way and she usually slept undressed. If the police accept that the incident began before the ten o’clock period when the alarm was set off, it is hard for them to understand why she apparently did not respond to the loud noise of the shattering glass by immediately triggering the nearby panic button or putting on the dressing gown which she kept by the bed. They speculate that she may not have heard the noise—perhaps because she was asleep or the television in the bedroom was on, or both—or may have frozen in fear, but Detective Superintendent Short concedes that these are half-hearted explanations. Though she was killed downstairs a small piece of the packing tape was found in the bedroom, indicating that she was gagged there.
    Michael Short has many years’ experience as a detective investigating major crimes. It was apparent that the death of Janet Brown was confusing and strange to him in ways he had not previously encountered. It was also apparent that he would not readily be defeated by it. There was no big talk or bluster about this. While police officers can sometimes seem hard and cynical his manner was calm and unruffled. There had, of course, been method and wisdom in his approach to the case. But this alone could not put all the pieces together in a way that made sense. There was almost a challenge here. You try and make sense of it because I’m damned if I can. He was protective of Mrs Brown and her family and had a police officer’s caution and scepticism about the media that was all too familiar to me; caught up in an ongoing conflict about using or being used by journalists, wondering whether he could trust and not be betrayed.
    Short did say that there are one or two details of the case he is keeping back “for the usual operational reasons”. He said they would not radically alter my understanding of the case if he disclosed them. He did reveal that traces of diluted blood were found around some of the light switches in the upstairs rooms of the house. The traces were too small to be identified but the police assume they are particles of Mrs Brown’s blood from the hands of her killer after he had attempted to wash and clean himself following her death. They support the theory that he stayed on in the house for an unknown amount of time and there are additional signs of a cursory, exploratory search of the house. Nothing was stolen however and the only clue that burglary may even have been intended was that both the television and video recorder downstairs had been unplugged from the mains, as if being readied for removal. Janet Brown’s daughters noticed this when they went through the house for the police a couple of days after the killing, looking for things missing or out of place.
    The police think it possible that the killer may have triggered the alarm himself, deliberately, for whatever reason, before finally