by Jill McGown
“You sound very bitter about it,” Lloyd said.
“Of course I’m bitter about it! I’ve got to notify the police of every address I use. Even if I go for two weeks to Blackpool! And what happens? You tell me. What happens if some kid goes missing in Blackpool while I’m there?”
“You would be routinely brought in for questioning.”
“That’s right. And I’ll be routinely spit at when I leave. And routinely hounded out of my own home if it gets out that I’m on the register. You’d better believe I’m bitter, but because that’s not how it was!”
“You can’t have it both ways,” said Sandwell. “You want us to believe that she told a pack of lies to send you to prison, and yet you also want us to believe that you came running when she called.”
“It wasn’t her fault—I told you, I think she got screwed up somewhere along the way, and that’s why she told me all these lies about herself. And I added to her problems, even if I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. She probably resented that. Resented me, for making her pregnant. So if coming here meant I could make things better . . .” He shrugged.
“Oh, spare me,” said Sandwell.
“It wasn’t how it looked! We had a real relationship.” Fletcher looked down, his face reddening slightly. “It sounds strange now I know how old she is, but I loved her.” He looked up defiantly. “I still do. That’s why I did what she asked. Because I once told her I’d do anything for her, and I meant it.”
Did he now, thought Lloyd. Did that include covering up for her when she dispatched her mother with the doorstop? Or, perhaps, covering up for her when she tried to murder Waring in revenge for what he had done to her mother? Kayleigh could have found her mother, as he had suggested to Judy, but rather than running into the woods had run to the safety of the car, locked herself in, leaving Dean to fight off Waring. Dean joined her in the car, drove out . . . and perhaps Kayleigh, seeing Waring, had grabbed the wheel, driven the car into him. Perhaps that was why he kept denying that she was there at all.
“How did you get the swollen mouth?” Lloyd asked. “The cracked ribs and the cuts? Were you in a fight with someone?”
“No. I got the cuts when I ran through a load of greenery in the woods. And I told you how I cracked my ribs. I fell over a low branch at the base of a tree. That’s how I got the smack in the mouth, too.”
“You can take me to this aggressive tree, can you?”
“Of course I can’t! I don’t know where the hell I was.”
At ten forty-five, Lloyd terminated the interview and was summoned to Case’s office as soon as he had got back into his own.
“Roddam finally rang Sandwell—he’s on a train to Stansfield.”
At least now they would get a positive identification of the body. “I’ll meet him at the station,” said Lloyd. “Take him to Barton General myself—I want his help with Kayleigh, so we can go to the children’s home afterward.”
He turned to go, wondering why Case couldn’t have vouchsafed this information on the phone instead of dragging him all the way upstairs—why, indeed, he hadn’t left it to Sandwell to tell him. But he didn’t have to wonder long.
“Why didn’t you arrest Fletcher for Mrs. Newton’s murder? Why just the attempted murder?”
Lloyd turned back and looked at his boss, knowing that his face held the slightly mutinous expression that would cause Judy to give him the Look. “Mainly because I don’t think he did murder Mrs. Newton,” he said.
Case reached for his cigarettes, a sure sign that this was a complication he could do without. “I know better than to dismiss your theories out of hand, so I won’t.” He lit up. “But everyone else thinks he murdered her. Why don’t you?”
Lloyd sat down. “I can’t work him out.”
Case released cigarette smoke. “What’s to work out? He’s a violent offender who abuses little girls.”
That was certainly how it looked on paper, and Lloyd was having a problem with it. “Does that strike you as someone who would give a damn what happened to Alexandra?” he asked.
“Ownership. It wouldn’t matter if it was Alexandra or a microwave oven. If he owns it, he claims it.”
Lloyd shook his head. “And murders for it?”
“Like I said, he’s violent.” Case shrugged. “She said he wasn’t the father, so he picked something up, hit her—realized he’d better finish the job.”
“So you think that the row the postman heard was between Fletcher and Lesley Newton?”
“Yes, Lloyd, oddly enough, I do.” Case took a long drag of his cigarette, expelled the smoke, and looked at Lloyd through the haze. “Since she’s the one who’s been murdered.”
That was what Judy had said, but Lloyd thought they were both wrong about that. “I think that Kayleigh said it to get rid of him. And I can’t see it being something that her mother would say even for that reason.”
“I expect he was rowing with both of them.” Case ground out his cigarette, only half-smoked. “When it turned nasty, Kayleigh took Alexandra away from it, like you said all along.”
Lloyd smiled to himself. Case was hoping that admission that he had been right in the first place would appease him, but it wouldn’t. There was something all wrong about this.
Case sat back and looked at him. “You,” he said, after long moments, “think that Waring did it. Without a scrap of evidence. And why? All right, so Lesley Newton has money—so what? He only went to live with her January—they haven’t married. Her money probably goes to this Roddam bloke and Kayleigh.”
“Very probably. I’d be happy to entertain either of them as suspects. Fletcher says he saw Roddam leaving the cottage just before he got there.”
“And you believe him?” Case’s voice was incredulous.
“Not necessarily—he obviously thought Roddam still lived with Lesley Newton, and he was possibly just trying to shift suspicion onto someone else.” He gave Case the bare bones of Dean’s statement. “But I’ll certainly ask Roddam where he was yesterday morning, because regardless of her money, Lesley Newton had taken up with Waring, so he had a motive, as you yourself pointed out.”
“So had Fletcher, and he’s got a record of violence going way back.”
Lloyd frowned. “What motive?”
“Anger is a motive, Lloyd. All right, you believe him that Kayleigh brought him here—fair enough. The way I see it is that Kayleigh wanted him to see the baby, and her mother found out. She was waiting for him at the cottage, and she told him he wasn’t the father in the hope that he would go away. He lost his rag, picked up the first heavy object he could find, and battered her with it. Kayleigh grabbed the baby and ran away when it got violent.”
Lloyd considered that. It sounded plausible. It was more or less what Bob Sandwell thought. But he didn’t think that Fletcher had tried to cure Kayleigh’s problems by murdering her mother.
“And there’s the little matter of evidence,” Case said. “He’s the one who deliberately ran down Ian Waring. He’s the one who abandoned the car and ran away, who has Mrs. Newton’s blood all over his clothes—”
“He says he ran Waring down accidentally.” Lloyd told Case what Fletcher had said about the car. “And if the baby’s things were in it, that could be true, too. But he keeps insisting that Kayleigh and the baby weren’t there at all and we know that they were, so he could be covering up for her. She could have caused what happened to Waring in revenge for what he had done to her mother. Or she could have murdered her mother herself.”
Case sat back and looked at him, his mouth slightly open. “You’re happy to—how did you put it?—ah, yes, you’re ‘happy to entertain’ Waring and Kayleigh and Phil Roddam as suspects, but not Fletcher? Am I missing something here?”
“I haven’t crossed anyone off. But Waring’s my favorite, and Kayleigh’s my second favorite. Roddam’s odds could shorten or lengthen—it depends. And as far as I’m concerned, Fletcher is the rank outsider.”
Case grou
nd out his cigarette and swiveled his chair round to look out of the window for a moment before turning back. “You know what I feel like around you? I feel as though I’m playing one of those namby-pamby parlor games, where everyone’s in on the joke but me. ‘Mrs. Newton loves butter, but she doesn’t like cream.’ “ He employed a high-pitched, camp middle-class voice for his example; then it dropped back to its usual gruffness. “I never could get the hang of them, and I never can get the hang of you.”
Lloyd smiled.
“Am I supposed to guess why he’s the odd one out? You only suspect people whose first names have an i in them?”
Case wasn’t that unfamiliar with namby-pamby parlor games, thought Lloyd, still smiling. “Not quite that off-the-wall. But it wouldn’t stand up in court.”
Case shook his head. “To hell with court. You don’t think it would stand up in this office!”
True. And he hadn’t felt sure of it enough to tell Judy, so nothing would induce him to tell Case what it was. But it was more than that; he believed that Fletcher had fallen over a dead body and that he hadn’t deliberately attempted to kill Waring.
And, despite having advanced the notion to Case, Lloyd felt that covering up for Kayleigh seemed unlikely, because he even believed Fletcher when he said that he hadn’t seen her, hadn’t had an argument with her or her mother. And Lloyd believed him not because he had Waring down for the murder, but because he liked to think that he knew when someone was speaking the truth. Kayleigh—even though she hadn’t spoken—was not, in his estimation, being entirely truthful, and if Fletcher had not been having the argument with her, then perhaps there was someone else who was claiming to be the father of her baby.
“Tell me,” said Case. “I know Theresa Black’s alibi checked out, but if it hadn’t . . . would she have been on your A-list?”
“That’s an impossible question to answer.” Lloyd smiled again, knowing just how much he was about to irritate his superintendent. “It’s because she’s not a suspect that I’ve got an A-list at all.”
Tom Finch wasn’t looking forward to his interview with Andrea, because she was still living with the Crawfords. He would have preferred the station, but McArthur was very big on interviewing people at home unless and until it was necessary to take them in for questioning.
A tear-stained, tight-lipped Nina Crawford opened the door to him. She had known to expect him and he immediately told her that he had no news, but he hadn’t been able to stop the hope rising and dying in her eyes. He introduced Sarah, the WPC—not that he called her that, of course, not being in any way sexist—who had come to chaperon the visit, since it would take place in Andrea’s bedroom, and was invited in.
“No news,” said Mrs. Crawford when her husband jumped up from where he sat, and he sat down again, his face tortured.
“I was surprised to discover that Andrea was still with you,” said Tom. “In the circumstances.”
“She’s under notice,” said Mrs. Crawford. “But I won’t throw a seventeen-year-old girl out on the street. I have to give her time to find somewhere to live.”
Tom nodded. Why did things like this happen to good people?
“What do you want with her?” asked Roger Crawford.
“Oh, just details,” said Tom. “Sometimes people remember things afterward—she may have seen something that she didn’t recollect in the shock of finding Emma gone.”
“Is anything happening?” Crawford’s question sounded like a plea. “Have you been told anything at all that you can go on?”
“I’m sure Mr. McArthur would have let you know if we had anything concrete,” said Tom. “But it is a fact that babies taken in this way are almost always found, and returned unharmed.”
“Almost always,” repeated Mrs. Crawford, her voice flat.
“I’d be lying if I said always, Mrs. Crawford. But believe me, every lead is being checked. Everything that can be done is being done.” It was cold comfort; he knew that. But it was all he had to offer.
Upstairs, they found Andrea sitting on her bed, looking, if anything, even more devastated than the Crawfords. Once again, Tom had to say that there was no news, and once again, he had to try to reassure someone who was in near despair.
“She’s not coming back, is she?” Andrea said, rocking slightly on the edge of the bed. “She’s not coming back.”
“I’ve just told Mrs. Crawford,” said Tom, “that stolen babies are almost always found. And they’ve usually been very well looked after.”
“No. No—she’s gone. Something’s happened to her. Something must have happened to her, or why hasn’t anyone brought her back?”
Andrea had had direct responsibility for Emma, Tom thought. That was why she was feeling even more wretched than the baby’s parents and wasn’t allowing herself the luxury of hope, as she dissolved into tears of desperation.
It seemed impossible that the distress was manufactured, but he had to question her again, just in case. As soon as Sarah managed to calm her down.
Phil Roddam nodded. “Yes. That’s Lesley.”
That morning he had taken a long walk along the promenade, blown away some of the demons that had haunted him in the night, and then had come in to the heartiest breakfast he’d had in years, courtesy of Aunt Jean, who might never have needed a man but knew how to look after one.
She wanted to see his mobile phone, she said. If he explained to her how they worked, she might get one. Not in case she broke her hip, but in case she broke down. It would be handy, being able to ring from the car.
The phone had informed him, as he was showing her how it worked, that he had seven messages. He couldn’t remember the last time seven people had wanted to get in touch with him, so he presumed that it was one person who wanted to get in touch with him very badly.
He tried to ignore the messages, but in the end, she made him listen to them. The first was from Acting Detective Inspector Sandwell of Stansfield CID, and Phil groaned quietly. Sandwell wanted him to ring him; he left his direct line number and his mobile number. The others were all from Theresa, wanting him to ring her.
He hadn’t rung Theresa, because he had rung Sandwell first and had caught the next train out of Worthing. Now he was with Detective Chief Inspector Lloyd in the hospital mortuary, looking down at Lesley’s dead body.
Lloyd took him out into the fresh air; he suddenly felt very light-headed. They sat on the low wall that bounded the car park.
“When did you last see Mrs. Newton?” asked Lloyd.
Phil wiped the cold beads of perspiration from his forehead. “Last January,” he said. “I went to see her in the hope of a reconciliation, but she had found someone else.”
“Ian Waring?”
“Yes.”
“He was very badly hurt during the incident. Someone drove a car into him.”
Phil stared at him, trying to make sense of that. “What was it all about? Who did it?”
“We know who was driving the car, but we don’t know that he was responsible for what happened to Mrs. Newton. We’re hoping Kayleigh can tell us.”
Phil was immediately alarmed. “Was Kayleigh there when it happened? Did she see something?”
“Quite possibly. She has been very badly shaken up, and she won’t speak to us. Literally. She might nod or shake her head, but that’s it. She indicated that she would speak to you, and we’d be very grateful if you could try to get her to tell us what happened.”
Poor little Kayleigh, thought Phil. More upheaval, and more and more.
“I believe you haven’t seen her for a while?”
“I saw her in January, too. Not under the best of circumstances.”
“At Dean Fletcher’s trial?”
“Oh, you know about that, do you? Yes. But I haven’t seen her properly since last June.”
“In that case,” said Lloyd, clearly preparing him for something he wasn’t going to want to hear, “I think perhaps you won’t know that she’s had a baby.”
&nbs
p; Oh, Lesley, Lesley. Phil closed his eyes, shook his head slightly. “I thought I’d won that one, at least.”
“What’s that?” asked Lloyd sharply.
“I said she should have a termination, and Kayleigh was quite happy about that. Lesley didn’t believe in abortion, but I thought I’d persuaded her that it was the right thing to do.”
He supposed that had been a naive thing to think. And Lesley had seen how she could solve two problems at once; if she threw him out, she could go her own sweet way about Kayleigh’s pregnancy and clear a space for Waring while she was at it. Sensible, organized Lesley, who simply wouldn’t face facts. And, of course, the baby would be due mid- to late December. That was why Kayleigh was mysteriously on holiday at Christmas.
“It’s a girl. Alexandra.”
Phil wished he could feel happy about it, but he didn’t suppose Lloyd expected him to be popping champagne corks, so it probably didn’t seem strange to him that the news simply made him anxious. He took out cigarettes. “Do you mind? I’d given up, but what with one thing and another . . .”
He’d bought them that morning, at the station, and he had only four left now. He had needed something to make him able to face identifying Lesley’s body. As a crutch, it was better than booze, he supposed. Perhaps not much better for the consumer, but a lot better for those who had dealings with him. But then, no one wrote wistfully soulful songs about chain-smokers. They wrote them about drunks and winos and drug addicts, but chain-smokers were unromantic. He thought he’d better resign himself to the fact that he was not the stuff of story and song.
“Did you speak to Kayleigh during the trial?”
“Oh, yes—she and Lesley and I had meals together, that sort of thing.”
“And neither of them told you about the baby?”
“If I’d seen Kayleigh on her own, she’d have told me, but Lesley was always there.” He flicked the ash from his cigarette onto the ground. “Kayleigh’s not . . . not mature enough to look after a baby,” he said. “That was why a termination seemed the sensible solution. What happens about this sort of thing?”