“I need to speak to Aland … reassure him … if you’ll pick up the copies from the office and then see yourself out …?” said Mrs Coombes, turning off the alarm before opening the door for them and showing Gayther and Carrie through. “Oh, and one more thing, if I see you here again, I shall complain to your Chief Constable, for harassment.”
Gayther nodded as she moved away, back down the corridor.
He turned to Carrie, “Don’t say anything, Georgina, just don’t. I’m really … not in the mood.”
They walked in silence side by side, across the reception area towards the office.
“By the way, guv. It’s not.”
“Not what?
“Not Georgina.”
Carrie led the way into the office, smiling at the assistant sitting in the corner, and picking up a sheaf of photocopied papers.
“Georgie?”
“Friends and family, guv.”
“George, then? I’ve heard you called that.”
Carrie shook her head as they headed for the way out.
He looked at her with a long-suffering expression on his face. “Georgina … Georgie … George … I’ve called you all of those on and off for the past eighteen months. And you’re none of them? So, what are you then …?”
She laughed. “You’re the detective, guvnor, see if you can find out …”
* * *
“So, how would you rate that then, guv … on a scale … from a result to a complete balls-up?” said Carrie as DI Gayther drove the car around in the car park and headed for the exit.
He ignored her, pointing to the glove compartment by her knees. “Pass me the bag of mints in there please, Carrie … or at least one of them anyway.”
“Sugar-free?” she said, taking them out. “On a diet, are we?”
He took a mint from the bag and gestured for her to take one too. “Diabetes, Carrie. It’s caught up with me. My GP says I’m in the shallow waters, whatever that’s supposed to mean. I thought you either were or you weren’t. The cigarettes have gone. The alcohol too … I lived off those for years. And now I have to get rid of all the sugar I can. There’s not much pleasure left, I can tell you.”
She nodded and they drove along quietly for a few minutes, sucking mints and reflecting on the visit. She then reached for the file between the seats and started flicking through papers, as if searching for something. DI Gayther drove the car in silence along the twisting road that led back up to the A12, and down south to the police station. As they approached the A12, Gayther spoke.
“There are three options, Carrie, so far as I can see. Play devil’s advocate with me. One, Lodge simply decided, whether in the fog of his mind or a moment of clarity, that he was going to take his own life for whatever reason and going through the window was the quickest, and possibly the only, way to do that.”
“Okay,” Carrie replied, “so, um, I’ve lots of questions about that. On the one hand, he seemed happy, up until a day or two before. There’s no reason to suggest he would do that. He is … was … a religious man, so suicide would be against his principles, surely? On the other hand, everything – the undisturbed room, no sign of a struggle – suggests he went out of the window without a fight. If he believed he saw The Scribbler, whether he did or not, that could be enough to frighten him. And he was suffering from dementia, so we have no idea what was going on in his mind at the time. Could be anything.”
DI Gayther nodded. He looked across at her as he turned the car to the left and on to the A12. “Okay, so the second option is the one that the care home, the doctor and the coroner and everyone else seems to accept … to want to be true. The one that’s most convenient and tidy and easiest to sweep away under the carpet. He got up, decided he needed some fresh air, went over to the window, opened it and, oops, somehow managed to fall out. How likely is that?”
Carrie thought for a minute and then replied, “The thing is, we need to bear in mind that he was, as Mrs Coombes put it when we arrived, ‘befuddled’. So, a rational person is not going to go up to the window and fall out. Mr Lodge, it says in the file here, is, was, 1.80 metres. A fair bit taller than me but even so …”
He nodded, “And …?”
She paused, thinking, and carried on. “When you were talking to the assistants, I stood with my back to the window and I would have had to lift myself up with my hands to get my bum onto the ledge, let alone over the edge. You could not, accidentally, go out head-first. But if he sat on the ledge, I don’t know why, he would then fall backwards, landing on his back, and possibly surviving, rather than falling slap-bang on his head. He could not have fallen accidentally. He either lifted himself or was lifted.”
“They seem to be sticking to the line that he lifted himself up, as if to sit and look out … backwards? … and lost his balance … anyway, option three, Carrie. He really did see The Scribbler. The Scribbler knows it and came and silenced him as soon as he could. He visited when the home was at its busiest. Walked into the room … opened the window. Crossed to the bed, lifted up a dozing, medicated Lodge, dragged him to the window and threw him out. Then left, as if he were a visitor who was a little slow to leave … so, is that possible?”
Carrie shut her eyes in thought. “Yes … let’s suppose The Scribbler was at the fete … or was the singer, maybe … they saw and recognised each other after all these years? Is that possible? Maybe. The Scribbler … I don’t know … would he come back? How would he know there wasn’t CCTV everywhere? And the sketch and the scratches – does he hold Lodge down and keep him quiet while he cuts him with a knife … it’s possible I suppose, but it’s more likely, for me anyway … I don’t buy the accident line either … that Mr Lodge did it himself in torment and, although no one wants to say it, took his own life … there, case closed, done and dusted.”
Gayther thought before speaking. He then said, “That all makes sense, Carrie. All of it. Except for one thing … well, two actually …”
Carrie turned towards him, a sudden look of ‘here we go again’ on her face before she masked it with a smile.
“… two things that tell me it’s murder and it’s The Scribbler.”
“Oh yes?”
“One, Lodge might have known about the cartoon likeness from the papers, whatever, but he would not have known about the criss-cross scratching out. It’s far too much of a coincidence that he’d self-inflict the exact same wounds as The Scribbler. Millions and millions to one chance, that.”
“Okay, and the other thing?”
“The knife, Carrie, the knife.” Gayther laughed loudly. “If he’d done it to himself and then killed himself, where the bloody hell is the knife?”
4. MONDAY 12 NOVEMBER, AFTERNOON
Gayther sat in his Silver Ford Focus in a layby on the A12, undid his seat belt and turned to Carrie as she climbed back into the passenger seat.
“So…” she said, “I was wondering—”
“Chips first,” he interrupted, before she could go on. “I’m starving.”
She passed him his wrapped chips before sitting back and opening her own.
“That’s good,” she murmured. “You can’t beat cheesy chips.”
He looked at her, went to say something and then thought better of it; instead he pushed three fat chips into his mouth all in one go.
“Tartare sauce,” he said after a few minutes.
“What?”
“Tartare sauce … it’s what we used to have with chips when I was young.”
“What was that like then?”
Gayther laughed. “Horrible, actually. I can’t believe you’ve not had it, let alone not know what it is.” He looked at her but wasn’t sure whether she was winding him up or not. “It sort of looked like mayo with bits in it … green bits I think … it tasted of … I don’t know …”
“Snot?”
“Um well, I was going to say fish and vinegar actually.”
“I’ll stick to cheesy chips … or curry sauce … or ketchup …
I love a bit of ketchup, me – if it’s proper ketchup … Heinz.”
They sat there, comfortable together, eating the rest of their chips.
As they finished, and both screwed up their wrappers, Gayther sighed happily and passed his wrapper to Carrie.
“Tuck it down the side, Carrie, I’ll empty the car later. Did you get some water?”
She passed him one of the two bottles of water she had bought with the chips. Then waited as he took one, two and then three swigs of it.
“So …” said Carrie.
“So … oo …” echoed Gayther, mimicking her Suffolk accent.
“So, what next, what are we going to do this afternoon? Write up our notes, add them to the file?” asked Carrie, ignoring his impression.
“Okay, I want to spend some time on this case … the victim’s own words … the criss-cross scratches … the absence of a knife … it’s, well, let’s assume it’s murder and see where it takes us. It would be good to crack this, for a number of reasons.”
“What have we got so far then, guvnor? That’s useful.”
“Well, we have our timeline. We know exactly when Lodge died and that’s not something we’ve had with The Scribbler so far – rotted bodies, much later, for the most part. And where and how he died. So, when we have a suspect, we can narrow things down pretty quickly if he doesn’t have a solid alibi. DNA, of course. Is there CCTV footage from a camera where he stopped for petrol before or after the murder? Is there speed camera footage? Is there anything from the care home in his car? On the tyres? In the footwell? Remember Locard’s Principle, every contact leaves a trace.”
“Okay, yes, and …?”
“We need to follow all the leads we have. We’ll sort those this afternoon. You never know where they will take us. We know – we assume – that Lodge saw The Scribbler, possibly at the fete, and that he came back to silence him, to kill him. If we have a suspect, and can get a photo, it’s possible Mrs Coombes or Sally or Jen might look at it and say, ‘Ah yes, that’s the fellow who came in first, last or whenever that night. Asked directions, whatever’.”
“But Mr Coombes said …” Carrie queried.
“Don’t worry about that for now,” Gayther waved his hand in the air as if to say, ‘no matter’.
He went on, “We need to speak to this Karen, to talk about that visitor for … Miss Bright was it? Smith? … that’s a big flag to me … and this Elvis look-a-like singer; he’s less likely, someone would have recognised and remembered Elvis if he had turned up out of the blue swivelling his hips and thrusting his crotch in their faces … but I guess you never know.”
He then said, “And we have two other would-be victims who got away from before. Let’s track them down and have a word, see if we can turn up something new. And there are other leads from the original killings. The three suspects … where were they the night of this killing? We need to follow everything up, find the red herrings and the clues and decide which is which.”
“So,” asked Carrie, “what now?”
“For you? When we get back, I want you to find a quiet corner somewhere and start going over everything that’s in the files on The Scribbler, the notes, the witness statements, photos, everything. Just read it all through, nice and slowly, take it home if need be. See if you can find me the needle in the haystack … it’s there somewhere. You just have to spot it. There’s always a needle.”
Gayther paused and then added.
“My first case, years ago, when I was starting out like you, was a little boy … Christopher … he was eleven years old … he was killed. Strangled. We got the killer four months later, after he did the same again … another little boy, Alex, twelve. Thing is, when we went back through the files for the first boy, there was an interview with a neighbour who named various people she’d seen hanging about in the run-up to the murder. We interviewed them without success.”
He stopped for a moment, working through his thoughts.
“She also described but could not name another person who she had seen hanging about, who wore a distinctive hat. Like a Russian hat. What with one thing and another, he was never traced and interviewed … it slipped through the net … even though he lived just three streets away … and he turned out to be the killer. It was a throwaway remark, noted down properly, but not followed up correctly … well, not at all. If we had only … the line between success and failure is …”
He shrugged and then stopped again. Carrie could see that he was moved and was struggling to find the right words. A surprisingly emotional man.
“Fact is, Carrie, we now have, for The Scribbler, all of this information, lots of it from before and a little bit now and, well, when it’s murder, you can never have too much information. Not really. Thing is, we will almost certainly have the answer in there somewhere right in front of us. A clue. An overlooked lead. Once we see it for what it is, things will start to fall into place. We just haven’t seen it yet.”
He turned and smiled at her.
“And we have more on our side these days. The bits of evidence that we’ve kept all these years maybe will yield DNA that, if we can get forensics involved, might match DNA in Lodge’s room that has no right to be there. And relationships change. That Burgess fellow, his wife flip-flopped … did she cover for him because she became pregnant? Are they still married or divorced now? Will she sing the same tune these days if we go and talk to her again? My wife always said …” Gayther’s words tailed away.
“Your wife, guvnor?” Carrie asked, after a moment or two’s silence.
“Annie,” he sighed. “You remember her. I think you met once or twice?”
Carrie nodded, not sure what else to say.
“She worked for the taxman for much of her working life. Until, you know, things got too much. She always said that most of their most successful enquiries … investigations, whatever, came from ex-spouses or partners dishing the dirt … for revenge.”
“Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned,” Carrie said. “Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.”
“Shakespeare?”
“William Congreve, Restoration playwright.”
“Oh yes, slipped my mind. That English degree of yours … glad to see it’s come in useful for something after all.”
He smiled at her and she smiled back.
“Time to go, guv?”
He nodded and then said, “We need to get moving on this as fast as we can. In fact, look, we’ll go back to the station, spend the afternoon going through the papers between us. See if you can pull in one or two other new DCs who can give us an hour or two. Then we can get that big whiteboard out. Allocate tasks and start following through properly, get stuck in, in the morning.”
“We’ve a couple of new direct-entry detectives doing their training at the moment, guv. And they’d be well-suited to this cold case. They’re … you know.”
He looked at her. “Gay? Say so, Carrie; it’s not like you to go all coy. And we’re a modern police force these days, aren’t we? We even take 2.2 university graduates with degrees in Elizabethan poetry.”
“Ooh, low blow. I had glandular fever in my third year … and I think it was a William or a Mary, not Eli—”
“What worries me, Carrie, is this,” interrupted Gayther, as if struck by a sudden, urgent thought. “Is this a one-off murder to silence a witness, which is bad enough and we need to solve that anyway, or is it … quite possibly … the start of another killing spree? If it is, we’ve no time to lose.”
* * *
Gayther stood at one end of the portacabin, in front of a big whiteboard, black marker pen in hand. He wrote ‘Rev Lodge’ in the middle, circled it, and then turned to Carrie, sitting at the desk at the other end of the portacabin alongside two young men, early twenties, Thomas and Cotton.
Gayther was struck by how similar they looked, dark-haired, slim … ‘nerdy’, although he wasn’t sure that was a word used so much these days and knew he probably wasn’t supposed
to think it, let alone say it out loud. Someone, somewhere, would be offended. Or be offended for someone else who they thought should be offended.
“Direct-entry detectives, great things expected of them, guvnor,” Carrie had said to him, as they were waiting for the two young men to arrive. “I’ve known them both a while, they’re good lads. I gave them a quick summary along with copies of the papers and they’ve had a look over them, too. They’re sharp, up to speed already.”
“They’re all direct-entry these days, Carrie. No police experience whatsoever and, zoom, straight into being a detective. Took me bloody years. You were three or four years in uniform, weren’t you? They don’t even need that any more … just whizz straight in on the back of a cycling proficiency certificate. There’s no substitute for experience in my opinion.”
“A cycling what, guv?”
“It doesn’t matter, Carrie,” he said, shaking his head as the two young men came through the door. They both look about twelve, he thought, and so white and pasty that they must spend hours playing computer games in their bedrooms with the curtains drawn.
He half expected them to offer their hands to high-five, but they both shook his hand in turn, respectfully enough, and took their seats at the desk before turning towards him. Gayther thought they looked like eager children ready to take part in a spelling test. He resisted the urge to spell the letters ‘C U P B O A R D’ out loud very slowly. Instead, after smiling to himself, he turned back to the board.
“So, the three of you, from what you’ve seen, the connections to Lodge, who could have murdered him?”
“Sally and Jen,” replied Carrie with a straight face.
“Are you being serious?” asked Gayther looking at her.
“Well, we’re always told not to rule anyone in or out at this stage, sir. Just to list them all and then work through them one by one … in order of probability … but not discount anyone who could have done it.”
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