by Anita Waller
Dunbar had smiled and complied with the request before completing their journey up the drive.
‘Sarah!’ Grace squealed her name out loud and they all laughed. ‘Come and look at my room!’
Sarah looked to Dunbar for permission and he nodded.
‘I’ll give you a call when I’m ready to go.’
Jess gathered up the other two children and they all went upstairs. Dunbar looked around.
‘Are Ken and Brenda free?’
‘They’ll be reading. Grace is educating them,’ said Pilot.
‘You want them here?’ Lauren looked puzzled.
‘Yes, if they’re not napping or anything. Don’t wake them, if they are. I just want to try some thoughts out with you, a bit like our brainstorming session we had at work. It didn’t produce anything very much there, but you’re closer to the action.’
‘I’ll get them.’ Dawn stood and walked over to their rooms. She knocked and walked in. They were both reading, and Brenda looked up with a smile.
‘Hello Dawn. You want something?’
‘Jake Dunbar’s here and if you’re up to it he wants you to join the rest of us. If you don’t want to, I can tell him you’re asleep.’
‘Don’t be silly! Of course, we’ll come through. I’ll just put my broomstick away. I’ve been playing Quidditch.’ She put her bookmark in and stood slowly. ‘Could do with borrowing his wand though to magic these aches and pains away.’
They followed Dawn through to the main lounge and all six sat around in a semi circle facing Dunbar.
‘Okay, these are my thoughts. As you all know, I’ve re-interviewed all of you and I don’t mind telling you I concentrated specifically on Jess. She’s the newcomer to the family. I also paid particular attention to Dawn and Josh because they were, initially, part-time members of the family.’
Dawn looked angry so he hurried on.
‘Stop glaring at me, Dawn. I’m only doing my job and this evil man has to be caught before he kills anyone else. And I can tell you that you all passed with flying colours. Please tell Jess, won’t you?’
‘Passed what?’ It was Pilot’s turn to look puzzled and angry.
The detective looked around at them all. They had suffered so much loss they deserved some answers.
‘’You all passed, so my theory of an accomplice doesn’t fit any of you.’
There was temporary pandemonium. Eventually the noise subsided and Pilot said,
‘Accomplice?’
‘Before I go into details I must tell you I have absolutely no proof that he isn’t working alone. I may be barking up the wrong tree, clutching at straws or any other cliché you can think of. However, I didn’t come to this conclusion on my own. Somebody else did which made me look at it more carefully.’ He nodded towards the stairs and the sound of the children’s laughter. ‘Sarah suggested it one afternoon in my office.’
Pilot had now stopped looking angry but the puzzled expression was still there.
‘But there’s never been any suggestion he could be involved with anyone else. Surely something would have surfaced by now?’
‘And nothing has except for one thing. He seems to know exactly what you’re doing, what we’re doing... he’s getting information from somewhere. I’m not saying this accomplice had anything to do with the awful acts committed on your daughter, Pilot, but I am saying he may have linked up with someone connected to this case.’
‘And do you have any idea at all who it could be?’
‘None. My whole team has been going through report after report after report; nothing has shown up. We have checked and double-checked everyone on the police team, everyone on the Carter Security team and everyone here. In about an hour, there will be a team of experts here to do a sweep for listening devices around your home. But if they’re here, I have no idea how he managed to place them. This brings us back to the accomplice theory. However, gut instinct tells me that it isn’t bugs and that’s because this house is never empty, there’s always someone here.’
He turned to Pat. ‘We’re going to do the same at Moorgate, Pat, so I’ll need your keys. I’ll return them as soon as we’re finished. We know he managed to get into your house, so if anywhere is bugged, that would be the better option.’
She nodded.
‘Of course, Jake, I’ll never forgive myself if you find anything at Moorgate. It means our home is the reason David died. That’s unthinkable.’
‘Pat, I don’t think we’ll find anything. It really is just ruling it out so we can move on to the next possibility. I believe somebody close to you is passing information on to him. I don’t know why. I don’t know how. We’ve checked everybody’s bank accounts and there are absolutely no strange payments – in fact, after I’d checked the accounts for the constables on our team, I wanted to have a whip round for them! This doesn’t rule out that Treverick might be paying somebody because as we all know he’s one smart cookie and could be paying them in cash but openly there are no payments.’
He was finishing speaking when he took his mobile phone from his inner pocket. He glanced at the caller.
‘Excuse me, I have to take this.’ He moved across to the patio doors and outside on to the paved area. Instantly Martyn Pearson moved towards him and stood with his back to him, surveying the surrounding area.
He listened for some time without speaking and then said,
‘I’ll go straight to the Cathedral. Inform DI Garside that I’m on my way.’
He went back inside and asked Lauren if she would mind calling Sarah down as they had to go.
‘Everything all right?’ Pilot asked. Dunbar looked angry.
‘I can’t say at the moment but we have to go now. Sorry Pilot, can I leave you to accommodate my de-bugging team, please? And hand Pat’s keys to them. I hope I don’t have to tell you that you don’t go with them...’
‘Don’t worry,’ Pilot laughed. ‘That message is well and truly engrained in our brains.’
Sarah came downstairs and looked at her boss. He nodded and said,
‘We have to go.’
Once in the car, he began to speak. ‘We’re off to Truro Cathedral so if there’s anybody you need to tell that you’re going to be late home tonight, do it now.’
‘No, sir, there isn’t. People have stopped expecting me home full stop. Why are we going to the Cathedral?’
‘We have a body. Fortunately the DI on the scene has linked this body to our investigation and has contacted us.’
‘So we know who it is, sir?
‘Kenny Raines, the journalist who wrote the article about Treverick’s son. This is going to be a bad one, Sarah; he’d been tortured before he died. All we can hope for is that he didn’t have the information Treverick wanted which is the whereabouts of Marcia Shaw. Because I don’t doubt for one minute that this is the work of Ronald Treverick, not for one minute.’
He drove in silence for most of the way and Sarah allowed herself to relax and relive a most enjoyable afternoon with Grace. The little girl had blossomed and while there were still big gaps in her education, she had clearly made huge strides in catching up. It was all down to Jess and her infinite patience and Sarah felt so much better for spending an hour at Hillside.
She had no idea what faced her at the Cathedral; she just hoped the journalist hadn’t suffered too much. Torture was obviously another sideline of Treverick’s that they hadn’t come across before – she hoped Marcia and Matthew Shaw were safely out of the country but more importantly she prayed they hadn’t disclosed their destination to Kenny Raines.
Chapter 39
Truro Cathedral is an imposing grey edifice of a building. Stunningly beautiful, it dominates the landscape and every day it attracts visitors from near and far. Today, it boasted crime scene tape.
Dunbar and Sarah entered by a side door and were met at once by DI Pete Garside. Pete and Jake had risen through the ranks together and had been friends for a considerable number of years. Dunbar had never s
een him look so ill at ease.
‘That bad, is it?’ he asked.
Garside nodded.
‘Oh, it’s bad. Both ears gone, all fingernails gone, several teeth missing and both eyes. He either was a brilliant bloke who wouldn’t give up the information or he simply didn’t have the information. Either way, he’s paid for it with his life. He’s been left round the back of the restaurant and we do have CCTV of him being dumped in the doorway there. The chef found him. He’s still throwing up.’
‘So, Treverick doesn’t care if he’s seen now.’
‘Apparently not. He’s sending you a message, mate. He’s going after his son. Does anybody actually know where they are?’
‘I don’t think so. I can’t imagine Marcia would have told this journalist; she just went. I’m the only one she contacted to say she was going and she definitely didn’t tell me where she was going.’
‘Right. Come and see the body. As you can imagine, it’s a mess. He brought it in a white van, stolen yesterday from Indian Queens. We’re doing the forensics on it as we speak.’
‘He left it?’
‘Uh huh. Dumped the body through the back doorway of the restaurant, closed the van door and simply walked away. There’s a brief case in the van, good quality, empty. He looked like a smart city gent so I’m assuming the briefcase was just for effect; that was obviously how he persuaded Raines to talk to him. The CCTV is pretty clear but it doesn’t show us much. The action took approximately thirty seconds and he’d gone, out of range of the camera. Raines’ eyes are in his left coat pocket. His ears, fingernails and teeth are in his right coat pocket in a plastic bag. Our forensics chap seems to think the eyes were removed after death but he’ll know more after the post mortem. Lovely chap, your Treverick.’
Closely followed by Sarah, Dunbar walked through to the area that was busy with police personnel. Sarah already felt sick and she hadn’t seen anything other than Garside’s face; that had shown her enough.
The body was slumped in the doorway, carelessly cast aside for anyone walking down the side road to see. The head was in an unnatural position, forced into staring up into the sky with eyes that couldn’t see. His hands were bloodied along with the whole of his head where the ears had been sliced off and the teeth removed. At this point they didn’t know if the teeth had been knocked out or forcibly removed.
If Kenny Raines had known the information Treverick wanted, he had put up a fight to maintain his integrity. He had probably realised from the beginning that he wasn’t going to come out of the situation alive but he had been a brave man to tolerate the intense pain that had been inflicted on him. Dunbar hoped he had been unconscious for most of it but he doubted it. There would have been no point carrying on with the torture if he hadn’t been able to feel it.
Sarah just stared. She had never seen anything like this. Six years of being on the Force hadn’t come close to preparing her for this abomination. She said a small prayer to God. It helped her.
Dunbar moved her away from the body and led her towards a seat.
‘Sit there,’ he said. ‘I don’t need you yet. You don’t have to look at this. They have taken photographs already, so they should be moving him soon.’
He was as white as Garside had been when they arrived.
‘Thank you, sir,’ she said and sat down. She took a packet of mints out of her pocket and offered one to Dunbar. ‘It helps combat nausea, sir,’ she said and he took two.
Dunbar went to speak to Garside and asked him if Raines’ family had been informed. Garside nodded.
‘Yes. We sent someone round as soon as we knew who he was. His wallet had been left in his inside pocket.’
‘Where does he live?’
‘Wadebridge. According to his wife, he knew Marcia Shaw from their teenage years. He hadn’t seen her for a long time and she had rung him out of the blue and offered him the story. We haven’t spoken to Mrs Raines properly because I figured you might want to do that, but I didn’t want her hearing anything on the news. I had to let her know he’s dead. He had a helluva scoop that all the big papers wanted after he broke the news, but my God, he’s paid for it. The poor wife is absolutely distraught. I don’t think they’ve been married very long. They haven’t any kids, according to my man.’
There was a flurry of activity and the body was zipped inside a body bag and removed from the premises. Immediately, the forensic team went to work taking samples, more photographs with the body not present and generally working to provide Dunbar and Garside with anything they might want.
Two hours later, they were on their way home. Sarah didn’t speak - couldn’t speak. She didn’t think she would be able to sleep that night either. Dunbar asked her if she wanted to get some food but she just shook her head. Did he want her to throw up in the front of the car?
He dropped her off at home and told her not to come in till lunchtime. She just nodded and said,
‘Goodnight, sir.’
He drove home and tried to eat the meal Fran placed in front of him but was unsuccessful. He moved various bits around the plate until she removed it from the table.
‘It was a bad one, then?’
‘The worst.’
The last time she had seen him like this was when he had attended a hit and run in which two young children had been mown down. His face had been the same then.
She handed him a whisky and placed the bottle in front of him. ‘Let’s watch a movie,’ she said. ‘We’re not going to sleep much tonight, are we?’
Chapter 40
Dunbar walked into the station just before eight o’clock next morning and met Sarah coming down the stairs.
‘Lunchtime already is it?’ he asked with a smile.
‘Couldn’t sleep,’ she mumbled. ‘Could you?’
‘No. Couldn’t eat, either.’
‘So now what?’
‘We find him. Amy Thornton, Alan Shimwell, David Farmer, Freda Andrews, Sam Marks, Kenny Raines – we have to find him. And let’s never forget what he did to Grace. She’ll have to live with that for the rest of her life. There’s no escape from him for that poor little girl.’
‘Did they find any listening devices at Hillside and Moorgate?’
‘Nothing. So, this takes us right back to the accomplice theory. And let’s face it, Sarah, there’s only the two of us that’s really buying into that.’ He sighed. ‘It’s so bloody frustrating. What price gut instinct? It’s proof we need.’
Dunbar left Sarah to carry on down the stairs and he headed up to his own office. He pulled out the reports once more and started to read through them. There had to be something somewhere that didn’t sit right and his plan for the day was to find it. The vision of a man who had been brutally tortured had haunted him all night; sleep hadn’t come until the early hours and then he was awake at six o’clock. No sudden inspiration was going to appear; this had to be down to plodding police work not just from him but the entire team as well.
The tired detective pulled out the report on Grace that captured so much of what she had said from the second she staggered into the Wainwright’s home to the day she left hospital for the Farmers. He pulled his yellow notepad towards him and began to make notes, forming a kind of timeline of everything listed.
An hour later, he did it again but this time he used Sarah’s report of her daily visits with the little girl.
And then he repeated it with Karen Eaves’ psychiatric report, noting dates and times.
It was fast approaching lunchtime and Dunbar decided to go to the pub and get a sandwich before building any more links. He was tired and emotionally exhausted. Grace’s own words were harrowing and for that alone he wanted to kill Treverick.
Descending the stairs to ground level, Dunbar didn’t hear the phone on his desk ring and the answering machine pick it up.
He sat alone in the pub, repeatedly pushing his dark hair back from his forehead. He was battling a headache that threatened to become migraine level. His cheese and
pickle sandwich and the half pint of shandy that followed it went down without him tasting them.
Having walked down towards the harbour, Dunbar now sat on the harbour wall and stared out to sea. Although he didn’t know it, he was in the same place that Amy Andrews and John Thornton had sat so many years ago when they had talked about walking straight across the oceans to America. He remained there for some time, letting his thoughts drift in the lukewarm March sunshine. No heat to it yet but it wasn’t unpleasant for all that.
His headache began to subside and he briefly closed his eyes. Fran had tried to talk him into taking a couple of days off, to have a break, but he knew that wasn’t going to happen. Time enough to rest when Treverick was dead.
He jerked himself awake. The object of the exercise was to catch Treverick, not to kill him. He had to stop thinking about him dying. The man had to be punished, had to do the actual dying in a prison cell.
He stood, stretched out his arms and fastened his coat. The sun had disappeared behind a cloud and it had become suddenly chilly. He walked back to his office and climbed the stairs up to his office. He saw the red light flashing, noted there were two messages and sat down at his desk. He pulled a pad towards him and pressed play.
Hello Dunbar. I saw you yesterday at the Cathedral. Just thought I’d check in with you today because I didn’t think it was a good idea to get too close to you as you were busy. I did a good job on him, didn’t I? It’s a pity really that he didn’t know anything. So now I’m thinking maybe you do. Or have you told your wife? Fran, is it? Maybe I’ll ask her. Anyway, I’ll call some other time. I just want to see my son.
Dunbar left his office at a run. He jumped into his car and fumbled to get the key in the ignition. His hands were trembling, his heart pounding; she had to be safe. He switched on the lights and siren and sped through the town centre until he reached St.Merryn.
Fran had been working voluntarily at the church three days a week for a number of years and was an expert on the church history. He knew she wouldn’t answer her mobile phone, she said it was rude to have a phone ring when she was telling a visitor something of interest about the church.