“Did she accept that offer?”
“Sometimes. But Sabine and Victor would always look after her. I knew that, so I never worried too much, and she always texted me when she got home.”
He loved her. I could hear it in his voice. He still loved her.
“Do you think the new man she was seeing might have been one of them?” I asked carefully.
He shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know, though. It’s a nice place, and you get a mix of people. Any one of them might have caught her eye.”
“Someone with an interest in nature?” I asked. “We know she was interested in conservation.”
Another smile touched his face, and he nodded. “Oh, yeah. Built a little hedgehog home in the back of the garden and everything. I thought she’d maybe go into it for a career, but she seemed to want to. Liked having it as a passion, I suppose, rather than a job.”
“Makes sense,” I said. “It’s something you two had in common?”
“It’s how we met,” he said. “Same conservation society at university.”
I blinked. “You were in the club?”
He nodded, sipping his water. He was relaxing the more we spoke.
“Did you ever meet a man named Haspel?” Mills asked. “Or hear that name at all?”
“Haspel?” Eljas made a thoughtful face. “Don’t think so. There weren’t many of us at the time,” he added. “The name doesn’t ring a bell, sorry.”
“No worries,” I said, splaying my hands. “Bit of a long shot, anyway.”
“But you think Julia went for a guy with that interest?” Eljas asked. When I nodded, he continued. “I’d say so.”
“She kept a notebook at the restaurant,” Mills told him, pulling out some photocopied pages. “And one day, she mentions this man and that he has a pin like hers.”
“The badger pin.” He nodded immediately. “She’d move it from coat to coat,” he recalled fondly. “She cared more about that pin than her phone.” He shook his head.
It was odd then that we did not have the pin. That either she had not worn it that day, or somebody had taken it before we got there. A prize. There had been no prizes or tokens taken from the first four. This was different, and I still couldn’t wrap my head around it.
“Do you think Julia might have been curious as to what the party did?” Mills asked. “The ones at the corner table?”
“She was,” Eljas said. “She wondered a few times, said she caught snippets of their conversations sometimes, but she couldn’t make heads nor tails of them.”
But she overheard.
I looked at Mills, and we shared a brief look. “Can I ask where you were last night, Mr Pentti?”
“Last night? I finished work at five, then went and had dinner with my parents. Ended up staying overnight and drove home this morning.”
I smiled, then rose from the table. “Thank you, Mr Pentti,” I said, giving him a nod to rise as well.
“I can go?” He stood up fast enough that his knee knocked against the desk, rattling the cup. “Sorry,” he muttered, grabbing it before it could spill.
“You can go. We appreciate your cooperation.”
He shrugged. “For Julia,” he said.
“I’ll show you out,” Mills said, extending an arm towards the door. Eljas gave me a nod and followed Mills from the room. I drifted out behind them and watched as they vanished around the corner, leaning against the wall.
“He still loves her, doesn’t he?” Fry asked, appearing from the adjoining room. She’d removed Mills’s jumper and now held it, folded up, in her arms. Her hair was still down, framing her face.
“He does,” I answered, looking back at the corridor. “And an alibi for the time Hana Miyara was killed.”
Fry hummed softly, tucking her hair behind her ear. “Julia left her coat so that he’d come by,” she said. “She didn’t like being there with them.”
“Eljas was safe for her, even after they broke up,” I replied.
“But she kept working there,” Fry mused. “She must have really liked it, apart from then.”
“Must have done,” I replied, confused by the whole thing.
“So, what now, sir?” she asked, looking up at me.
“We find out who this mystery man was,” I said, sighing and pushing my hair back from my face. The movement hurt, and I grimaced, leaning back against the wall. Fry didn’t miss it, and she looked me over.
“Maybe you should head home, sir,” she said.
I was fully ready to argue with her on that, but on this occasion, I think she was right. My body hurt from head to toe, and I was so exhausted that if I sat down again, I doubted that I would be able to get back up. So I nodded wearily and gave her a smile.
“You call me with any updates,” I ordered.
“Course, sir.” We walked along the hall to the stairs as Mills bounded back up, fresh excitement on his face. He looked at Fry first, at the jumper in her arms, then at me.
“Alright, sir?” he asked, studying my face with a slight frown.
“I think I’ve overworked myself,” I said. “I’ll call it a day here.”
Mills nodded. “Want me to drive you?”
“I can grab a taxi,” I started, but he was already shaking his head and jogging back to the office, returning a second later with his coat and his keys in his hands.
“I’ll drive. Fry,” he said, touching her arm lightly. “Start taking a look through some of the photos we have from the restaurant, see if any of the faces match up to the bookings or to Harris’s notes. I’ll be back in a bit.”
Fry smiled and nodded. “See you, sir.”
“See you, Fry,” I replied, walking to the stairs. Mills walked down beside me, slowed to my pace.
“You’ve got your energy back,” I observed.
“We might have something.”
“No facts,” I pointed out.
“No, but we’re learning more about Julia. About what she might have heard there. And I think we can rule out Eljas.”
“I’d say so,” I agreed. “That man would have walked over hot coals for her if she’d asked him to.”
Normally there was a thin line between passion and violence, but Eljas was the steady, patient sort of love that let his ex-girlfriend show up at work, bring her coat to her and not harbour a bad thought about her even after being dumped. I didn’t think he could harm her if he wanted to, and certainly not to the extent of killing Hana Miyara as an extension.
This was something else, someone else. And all roads led to the restaurant, and the man inside with his badger pin who someone joined it all up.
Twenty-Three
Mills
I dropped Thatcher off at home, sitting in the car and watching to make sure he got up the stairs and into the house in one piece. He waved over his shoulder as he walked in, the door swinging shut behind him. I relaxed, knowing that he wasn’t about to make his injuries any worse, and pulled away from the kerb. I stopped by a coffee place on my way back, figuring that if Fry and I were to spend the next few hours pouring over paperwork, we at least deserved something better than the watery instant stuff we kept in the station. We should have a pot, at least, the kind they always seem to have in American films.
I ended up going to the café, where I knew both the coffee was good, and the service. It put me out a few minutes, but I doubted that those minutes would change much in the grand scheme of the case. It was a tricky one, though, flitting between the past and the present, somehow connected though for the life of me I couldn’t grasp why. At least Thatcher got the chance to rest. I knew that this case stirred up some unhappy memories for him, though if something came up, I wouldn’t hesitate to give him a call and get his opinion.
I parked on the street outside the café, a space thankfully there, as it always seemed to be. I wondered if Billie had something to do with that.
She was there when I walked in, wiping down tables after the lunch rush, and she smiled as I walked over.
<
br /> “Alright, Billie,” I greeted her.
“Hiya, Isaac.” She looked over my shoulder then up at my face. “How is he?”
“Sore and stubborn,” I answered. “I’ve just dropped him home, but I’m in need of coffee before I get back to this case.”
Billie nodded and walked over to the counter. “Tough one, is it? Must be if it landed him in hospital,” she added.
“It’s not the easiest,” I told her. Not logically for me, not emotionally or physically for him.
“You’ll get there,” she offered supportively. “Just the one coffee, is it?”
“Two, thanks, Billie. Figured I owed constable Fry something decent to drink since we’ll be at our desks all afternoon.”
Billie smiled, running it through the till. “Coming right up.”
I handed her the cash, dropped a few extra coins in her tip jar, and looked around the café as she made the coffees. It had changed little since the first time we’d been here, so had Billie, for that matter. The place was starting to resemble her more, with fresh paint on the walls and art from local artists hung up on display. Thatcher had mentioned once that Agnes, the owner, was likely to leave the place to Billie. But neither he nor she was sure if that was what would happen. The girl was young, and she still had time to choose. I was only a few years older than her, fresh out of university with a politics degree, when I decided that being a policeman was what I wanted.
“You going straight home after work?” I asked her as she brought the cups over, forcing the lids down. I was thinking about Hana Miyara walking home, and I didn’t like the thought.
Billie nodded. “I thought about going to see Max, but I’ll wait till he’s rested some more. Straight home for me. Why?”
She slid the cups over the counter. Her bright green eyes narrowed with suspicion.
“Just want you to be careful,” I answered.
She held my gaze for a second and nodded. “Fair enough. See you around, Isaac.”
“See you, Billie. Stay out of trouble,” I called, walking over to the door.
She gave me a jaunty salute as I walked out, holding the door open with my shoulder for the woman behind me, and headed to the car.
When I got back to the station, Fry had done some rearranging. She’d found another board and wheeled it into the room, so now we had three all lined together. On one board, she’d put all the information we had from Thatcher’s cases twenty years ago, Julia Brook and Hana Miyara squeezed close to the side. On the far side, she put everything we had on Harris’s case, including a few photographs she had sent through already. The middle board was empty, ready for every and any overlap we managed to find.
Fry herself stood in the middle of the room, flipping a whiteboard pen in her hand. Her hair was still down, the long black strands framing her copper skin, her shirt sleeves pushed up to her elbows. My jumper was on my desk, neatly folded, and it had been interesting to see her wear it.
“Coffee,” I said as I walked in, holding out a cup.
“Oh, thank God,” she breathed, taking the one I offered. “Thanks, sir.”
“No problem. Figured we’d need some half-decent coffee to get through this.”
Fry smiled and took a tentative sip. “Hope you don’t mind,” she said, waving a hand towards the boards.
“Not at all, should work well. So,” I sighed and perched on the edge of Thatcher’s desk, “where shall we start?”
“I started looking into some of the names that Harris has given us,” she said, putting her cup down. “There’s not much on them, of course, but I’m just looking for anything that might connect them to either Julia or any of the previous women.”
“Any luck?”
“Not so far, sir. They’re tricky people to pin down, I suppose. Harris knows the most about them, but they’ve managed to stay off her radar for quite some time.”
I nodded. That was true.
“We know that the restaurant links them to both Julia and Hana,” I said and watched as she wrote the name of the restaurant on the middle board in big, curling letters. “And that there was a man there, who somehow connected Julia Brook to the first four victims.” It was a loose connection, but he had known details about the previous killings that we couldn’t overlook.
“But not Dominic Haspel, since he’s dead,” Fry said.
I nodded, and she sighed slightly and sat beside me, picking up her coffee again. We sat and looked at the three boards, hoping something would jump out at us.
“Do you think the past is connected more than it seems?” Fry asked. “If we think that Dominic Haspel worked for the county lines gang back then in some capacity, maybe there was somebody who did as well. Someone who was back there then and has come back now. Like the gang itself.”
“History repeating itself?”
“To us, yes, but maybe not to them. Maybe this is just their next thing, the next act of the play if you like.”
I hummed. “What’s past is prologue,” I recited quietly.
Leila turned to look at me. “The Tempest?”
“You a Shakespeare fan?” I asked, slipping from the desk.
“My dad is,” she said. “Teaches A-Level Literature.”
“Brave man,” I commented.
She smiled. “We all think our dad is brave, though, don’t we?”
A thought hit me, and I turned to her questionably. “Even if we’re estranged from them? Even if, for some reason, we grew apart, changed our name… or had it changed? You know Oscar Wilde?” I asked, not knowing how else to explain my train of thought.
Fry blinked at my sudden change of speed but nodded. “Everyone does, sir.”
“After he was convicted, his wife,”
“Constance Lloyd,” she said.
“That’s her. After he was convicted, she took their sons to Switzerland and changed their last name.”
“To Holland.” Fry nodded, standing up. “And she made Wilde give up his parental rights.”
“We didn’t look into Dominic Haspel having any children because we found no relatives with that name.”
“But if the child had their mother’s name,” Fry grinned. “Of course. So many children have their mother’s names these days.”
I caught onto her tone. “You’d rather have your mother’s?”
“My mother’s maiden name was Vaidya. A little prettier than Fry.”
I chuckled. “Fair point.”
“I think you might have something there, sir,” she said. “I’ll start looking into Dominic Haspel again, see if I can find any record of anything.”
I nodded and looked back at the boards. I was still missing something, something right on the nose, and it was driving me mad. I walked round to my desk and sat down, waking up the computer. It was always odd to look over at Thatcher’s desk and not see him there, but Fry, perched at the end, was, of course, welcome company.
If a parent was forced to give up custody, there would be records. There had to be. Going through welfare was often the easiest, but I wondered if they even kept onto records that old. Once a child was eighteen, there was little involvement for them to even have. Nonetheless, I got looking, scouring through pages after page, looking for any mention of Dominic Haspel. It seemed he’d lived fairly under the radar, which, if he was murdering women in his spare time, made sense.
It also made sense that his child might know the details, which was grim to think about. That the child might want to echo their father and know exactly how to do it.
My eyes scanned down the next page, my hand freezing on the mouse.
“I might have something,” I called to her. “No mention of the child’s name, but I have a custodial court case from twenty-one years ago between Dominic Haspel and a woman named Susan Rosewall.”
“Rosewall,” Fry repeated with a nod, typing away furiously. I leant closer to the screen, skimming the details of the case. She had won full custody of the child. I wonder if she had known if she had pieced it
together, or perhaps she had seen who he’d been hanging out with, and that was enough for her. Either way, she’d made the right call.
“I’ve got a death certificate,” Fry said. “Susan Rosewall died five years ago. And a hospital record. Birth certificate with her name on it as the mother.”
“Child’s name?”
Fry squinted and leant closer to the screen. “Keith. Keith Rosewall.”
“No marriage license,” I muttered. “Probably why he has her name. Made it easier for her to get custody.”
“She must have known something wasn’t quite right,” Leila said.
I nodded and put a search in for Keith Rosewall.
“He must have decided to start going by his dad’s name at some point,” she said. “At least, when he booked a table in the restaurant, he did.”
Could it just be a coincidence then? The connection to the gang that Harris was now following. That Keith had simply wanted to bring back his father’s work, and Julia had been there, a pretty waitress in a café with a love of nature. His father donated money to the society. Maybe he found her through there. But that didn’t explain Hana Miyara, unless he lost his edge for it, just killed for the sake of killing. But coincidences like that didn’t happen often, and Julia Brook had noted something off about the people in the restaurant long before Keith ever arrived. Had called Eljas in from time to time to put her at ease.
I focused on the screen, sipping my coffee as the results loaded.
“What’s the date on the birth certificate, Leila?” I asked.
“The second of March 1989.” That made him thirty-two, so twenty years ago when his father was killing, he’d have only been twelve. Perhaps they reconnected over the years once Dominic disentangled himself from the gang, and the murders stopped.
Thirty-two, older than Julia, which we knew he was a little and old enough to have been there twenty years ago, however much of it he might remember.
The results loaded onto my screen, and I began sifting through them. There were a few. The man wasn’t hiding. The first result that came up was from a local paper, out towards the north of the moors, up towards Stokesley. An article about some conservation work done out on the moors with a team of local volunteers and some members of staff from the North York Moors National Park Authority. Keith Rosewall features in it briefly, one of the members of staff.
Vicious Cycle (A DCI Thatcher Yorkshire Crimes Book 9) Page 19