by Ann Cleeves
She’d added a picture of Dennis Salter, as a wild card. She couldn’t see how Christine hadn’t recognized her uncle, but if he’d disguised himself in some way, perhaps she might be tricked. Then there was Edward Craven, the picture taken from the North Devon Journal, looking rather grand in full dog collar and cassock, celebrating the day he’d moved to the parish. Jen couldn’t think that there was another man involved in the case, and Christine had been clear that a man had picked her up. If Matthew was right and the abductions were all to do with Simon Walden, one of these people must be holding Lucy. It occurred to her that perhaps she should have thrown a bigger picture of Jonathan Church into the mix, but surely if he’d been the abductor, Christine would have known him, and besides, it would have felt like a betrayal to Matthew.
Jen wished the light was better, less shadowy, but it seemed that Susan was thrifty when it came to the strength of the bulbs she bought. Jen held up each photo in turn for Christine to look at, tilting it to catch the best of the light. Watching Christine looking at the pictures, Jen thought she seemed focussed and concentrated. She’d lost the panic of the previous day.
‘Can you help me, Christine? Do you recognize any of these men?’
‘That’s my uncle Dennis.’
‘Yes, it is. Well done.’
Christine beamed at the praise.
Susan shot a look towards Jen. ‘What’s he doing there?’
Jen smiled. ‘I just wanted to see what your daughter’s memory for faces was like.’
‘She’s always been good at pictures.’ Susan was appeased.
‘Is there anyone here you recognize?’
Susan pointed to Preece. ‘He’s a big cheese at the Woodyard. Loads of money and on the board. A generous man. Without him, the place wouldn’t have been set up.’ Her fat finger moved across the table. ‘And the vicar came and helped out in the day centre a few times when he first moved down here.’ She sniffed. ‘I haven’t seen him recently, though. You get a lot of that. Do-gooders, thinking they’re going to change the lives of our people, then getting bored and moving on to other things.’ She looked up. ‘Nothing happens quickly with people like Christine and Lucy. You need to be patient to work with them.’
‘Anyone else?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘What about you, Christine? Can you see the man who drove the car that picked you up outside the Woodyard and took you to the flat? The man who asked you all the questions.’
Christine looked again at the pictures and then she shook her head. She seemed upset that she hadn’t been able to help. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘No need to be sorry, my love. You’re doing just great.’ Jen paused to choose her words carefully. ‘You’re a good friend of Lucy’s. Did she ever talk to you about another friend? A man called Simon Walden. She met him on the bus some nights on her way home.’
There was silence. Complete silence. The main road was too far away for there to be traffic noise.
‘Lucy said she was going to help him,’ Christine said. ‘In something important.’
‘What was that, my love? How was Lucy going to help him?’
Christine shook her head. ‘She didn’t tell me. She said it was a secret.’
‘Lucy didn’t give you any idea at all? It might help us to find her.’
Christine looked up. ‘She said she was going to help him to save the Woodyard.’ She shivered, although the room was very warm.
Susan came up and put her arm around her. ‘She’s been shivering all day. It must be the shock after all she’s been through. Here you are, my lover, let me get you a cardie. We’ll keep you cosy.’ She pulled a knitted jacket from the back of her chair and wrapped it around her daughter as if it was a blanket.
Jen looked at the cardigan. It was purple. Maurice had said Lucy had been wearing a purple cardigan when she’d gone missing. ‘Doesn’t Lucy Braddick have a cardigan a bit like this?’
‘Yes,’ Susan said. ‘Exactly the same! We all went on an outing to Plymouth with the Woodyard just before Christmas to do a bit of shopping, and they both got one.’
‘Did Christine have it on when she was snatched from the centre?’ Jen tried to remember what the woman had been wearing when they’d found her at Lovacott pond. Her clothes had been wet then, patched with mud, almost unrecognizable, but surely she’d been wearing this.
‘Yes. I was going to bin it, but Chrissie loves it so much. They said they were like twins, her and Lucy. So, in the end I put it straight in the machine and it came out like new. It’s not real wool, see, so no damage in a hottish wash.’
Jen left them sitting together, warm and snug, and went to sit in her car to phone Matthew.
* * *
‘I think it could have been a case of mistaken identity. The car driver had been told to pick up a woman with Down’s syndrome wearing a purple cardigan from the centre and got Christine, not Lucy. He said to Christine that he’d been told to give her a lift back to Lovacott. Both women would have been going there.’
‘But Christine doesn’t look much like Lucy. Lucy’s hair is longer.’
‘From behind, though, wrapped up in the purple cardigan, it might not be possible to tell them apart. Then Christine was sitting in the back of the car and the driver would just have glimpsed her in the mirror. And once he’d got her to the flat, what could he do? Just say it had been a dreadful mistake and drop her back at the Woodyard where anyone could see him? Perhaps he thought she’d have the same information as Lucy, and he asked his questions anyway.’ It was quite dark outside now. No moon. No street lights.
‘Then he got frustrated, took her to Lovacott where she was heading originally and dumped her by the pond,’ said Matthew. ‘I suppose it makes a kind of sense. But that implies that more than one person is involved in this. Someone giving the orders and someone carrying them out.’
‘I asked Christine about Lucy’s friendship with Walden. Lucy told her that together they were going to save the Woodyard.’
Matthew didn’t answer immediately. ‘I’m going to withdraw from the case. I should have done that from the beginning. There was always a conflict of interest and the Woodyard is obviously at the heart of it. I’ll contact management in the morning. From tomorrow you’ll be in charge. Temporarily at least, until they decide what to do next.’
Jen didn’t know what to say. She had mixed feelings. She’d never headed up such an important case and it had been her ambition since she’d joined the service. But this was Matthew. A good man and a good detective. ‘We’d better crack it tonight then, hadn’t we, boss. I’m coming in to the station and I’ll see you there.’
Chapter Thirty-Six
ROSS AND JEN ARRIVED BACK AT the station at about the same time. The day had been so full of events that it felt late to Matthew, as if it could be nearly midnight. In fact, Saturday night had just started in Barnstaple and from the police station, he heard music and voices, revellers on their way to the restaurants and bars.
Jonathan phoned. ‘We’ve searched every inch of the Woodyard. No sign of Lucy.’
Matthew wanted to talk to him about what Lucy had said regarding Walden’s secret plan to save the centre. Do you know what this is about? Why does the Woodyard need saving? But he thought he’d already involved Jonathan too much in the case. Matthew had always seen the point of rules, the need for order. That was why he’d joined the police. The decision had been his own small attempt to save the world from the chaos that he’d felt was about to engulf them all when he lost his faith. Life without the laws of the Brethren had seemed random and without meaning. He couldn’t see how every individual following their own path, selfish, weak, could form any kind of decent society. The law provided structure, its own morality. A safety net.
Now, he couldn’t pass on information about an ongoing inquiry to someone who might be involved and who was certainly close to people who were.
‘It’s going to be a late night.’
‘Don’t worry
,’ Jonathan said. ‘Just find her. I’ll be waiting for you.’
Ross burst in, swinging the door almost off its hinges. Like a bored teenager, he could never keep his frustration to himself. ‘The Salters weren’t bloody there. No sign of them. What a waste of a trip.’
‘No sign of Lucy either?’
‘We went all the way round the house, but there were no lights on. I looked through the downstairs windows, but it was almost dark by then. Impossible to tell if she’d been there.’ Ross paused. He knew what Matthew thought about rules too and wasn’t sure what the inspector would make of an attempted forced entry, but he continued anyway. ‘I couldn’t find any way of breaking in. I did check all the doors and windows just in case, but it was impossible. The Salters are very heavy on security. Verging on the paranoid.’
Matthew nodded and on impulse phoned his mother’s landline. He still remembered the number from when he’d lived in the house. He was only half surprised when she answered.
‘Ah, you’re there,’ he said. ‘I thought there might be a Brethren meeting tonight. Or some sort of get-together. I’ve been trying to get hold of the Salters, but nobody’s home.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing like that as far as I know.’ Her voice wasn’t as sharp as it had been in the past, but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of asking why he wanted to know. Matthew was grateful for that. He replaced the receiver. His thoughts were wheeling and dipping like the gulls over the estuary, groping for an explanation, feeling that at last he was making sense of what might lie behind Walden’s death. He’d never considered pride as one of his sins, but now it occurred to him that Jen might be right. He might crack the case overnight. The thought gave him an unexpected thrill of achievement. Then it occurred to him that Lucy was still missing and that he had little of which to be proud.
Jen arrived just as he replaced the receiver. ‘I’ve told the kids it’ll be an overnighter, but that’s no excuse for them to have a party. I don’t want to go back in the morning to vomit and a bunch of comatose teens in sleeping bags, looking like giant slugs on my front room floor.’
He grinned, grateful for the lift in mood. Her ability to raise his spirits alone made her an invaluable member of the team. He’d brewed coffee in the filter machine and they sat around one of the tables in the big room. Ross joined them.
‘I think we’re looking at a conspiracy,’ Matthew said. ‘If Jen’s right and Christine was snatched by mistake, at least two people are involved.’ He turned to Jen. ‘She couldn’t identify any of the men in your photos?’
Jen shook her head. ‘But the pictures I managed to print off aren’t brilliant quality. I don’t think Colin Marston’s mother would pick him out from the only shot I could find.’
‘I’ve been trying to phone Marston all evening,’ Matthew said. ‘No reply.’
‘I can’t see how Marston can be important,’ Ross said. ‘He doesn’t have the same strong link to the Woodyard as the others. He only teaches a weekly course there. Besides, if he’d kidnapped Lucy, I’d have thought he would reply to appear less suspicious.’
‘He told me he’d offered the board a couple of pieces of informal legal advice.’ Matthew remembered the conversation on the shore. He’d thought Marston was being pompous, inflating his own importance, but perhaps he was more caught up in the affairs of the Woodyard than they’d realized. Again, a few strands of the investigation came together in his mind and he thought he could glimpse a motive at least. ‘We need to track down Colin and Hilary Marston, and the Salters who seem to have mysteriously and conveniently disappeared too. Can you get the word out? I want them brought in to the station as soon as we find them. We’ve got their car registrations.’
‘As suspects?’ Jen sounded shocked.
‘Not yet.’ Matthew grinned. ‘They’ll be helping us with our enquiries. Respectable people like them, they’ll be glad to help the police.’
Ross got to his feet and stretched. He’d been still for long enough. They were both looking at Matthew for an answer, but his thoughts were too tentative at this stage. If he put them into words, they might disappear altogether.
‘Could it be about money?’ Jen said. ‘We know that Walden had plans for his two hundred grand, but then he sent it to his solicitor for safe keeping instead. We know he’d been planning a big donation to the Woodyard, then thought better of it. Perhaps he’d discovered something dodgy had been going on. The organization at the Woodyard seems a bit chaotic so fraud could have been relatively easy. Preece and Salter are both trustees and they both have a background in finance. Could they be filtering off donated cash or charitable funding for their own use? It does happen with charities. There have been a few cases recently in the press. One guy got away with hundreds of thousands. And it can take years for any crime to come to light. That would fit in with the conspiracy theory.’ She looked at Matthew. ‘Jonathan wouldn’t be aware of that. He manages the place but I guess he has nothing to do with the financial administration.’
Matthew didn’t know what to say in reply. He appreciated Jen’s kindness. He wanted to tell her that Jonathan was the most honest man he’d ever met, that his husband would work at the Woodyard for nothing to keep it running, that he fretted if he’d thought he’d undertipped a waiter in a mediocre hotel, but until they found Walden’s killer, Jonathan would still be an object of suspicion.
‘It would be interesting to look at Preece’s and Salter’s bank accounts. They seem prosperous enough, but they might have had problems with money.’
He was thinking that Preece had provided the deposit for the house in Hope Street. Matthew had gained the impression that the man was trying to buy his daughter’s affection. He was probably still subsidizing her lifestyle. Perhaps that, and the guilt-ridden donation to begin the development of the Woodyard, had depleted his savings.
‘Let’s bring Preece in too. If he hasn’t disappeared like the others. We’ll interview them separately, see if we can find some inconsistencies in their stories.’
He couldn’t imagine what Salter’s guilty financial secret might be. It could be related to the Devonshire Building Society, perhaps. Could he have been stealing from them too?
Ross gave an embarrassed little cough. Matthew could see now that he’d been building up to this throughout the conversation, gathering his courage. ‘Perhaps we should look at Jonathan’s bank account too. Just to put you both in the clear in case the press gets hold of the connection.’
Jen jumped in, fighting. ‘Is this your idea or Oldham’s? Been brown-nosing again, Ross? More cosy chats over a few beers? Hoping for another speedy step up the ladder?’
Matthew raised his hands, a gesture of agreement and peacemaking. ‘You’re quite right, Ross. I’ll give the forensic accountants all the details. For Jonathan’s accounts and mine. We have to be transparent here. And as all our victims and witnesses seem to be connected to the Woodyard, I’ve already discussed the conflict of interest with Jen. She’ll be taking over the case tomorrow. You’ll be reporting to her from first thing in the morning.’
He sent them away then and sat for a moment in his office. Matthew felt no resentment about the request to disclose his financial affairs, but he wished it had been done differently. The decision had obviously come from Oldham, but filtered through Ross. The DCI had been too idle or too cowardly to ask himself, and that wasn’t fair either to Ross or to him. He suspected that Jonathan would find the idea of being a suspect faintly amusing, especially if the motive was supposed to be greed. Money had never mattered much to either of them.
Matthew tried to set office tensions aside and replayed the conversations he’d had with Salter and Preece. Suddenly his perspective shifted. There was something that mattered more to both these men than money too. He wound back the timeline since the opening of the Woodyard to look for a trigger, something that might have led to one murder and two abductions. Then he stood up and made for the door.
‘Where are you goi
ng, boss?’ That was Ross, at his desk. A little subdued, but resentful because he was still here, in the police station, waiting.
‘I need to speak to a witness.’ He still thought it was too soon to tell the team about his suspicion. There was someone who had far too much to lose.
* * *
The Rosebank Care Home was two storeys high, purpose-built with a narrow strip of garden in the front. Parking for staff and visitors was at the back, most of the spaces empty now. All but a few rooms were in darkness. It was only nine o’clock but it seemed that most of the residents were already in bed.
The door was locked and he rang the bell. A buzz and a crackly voice through the intercom. ‘Who is it?’
‘Inspector Venn for Mrs Janet Holsworthy.’
A brief silence. ‘You’ll find me in the office at the end of the corridor.’ The door clicked open and he went in.
Through open bedroom doors, he saw carers in pink tunics helping the last remaining residents still up to prepare for bed. Matthew imagined his father in a place like this – because surely his hospital ward hadn’t been very different – and he thought there were worse things than death. One woman was sitting on a commode. He turned away and hurried on before she saw him. Rosa’s mother sat in a small office, a plate on the desk in front of her, with a half-eaten sandwich and a banana skin. A mug of coffee in her hand.
‘I haven’t got long,’ she said. ‘I’m just on a break.’ But it seemed that there was no fight left in her. She waited while he took the chair on the other side of the desk.
‘I need to know about Rosa,’ he said. ‘One man’s dead and her friend, Lucy Braddick, is missing.’
She nodded. He thought she was very tired. She must scarcely sleep, working all night and looking after her husband and daughter during the day.