by David Hodges
‘So she has no other relatives?’ Kate went on, disappointed that the formal identification had to rest with de Marr.
He studied her for a moment. ‘No, love,’ he said finally. ‘Just good old jail-bird Lawrence. Is that a problem for you?’
She didn’t answer him but went off on another tack. ‘Was Ellie a fit sort of person?’
He drew heavily on his cigarette and blew smoke rings at the ceiling. ‘Fit enough,’ he said with another throaty chuckle. ‘Did me the world of good at the time. Quite the athlete actually – won the triathlon at uni twice, I hear.’
Kate started. ‘Triathlon? What did that involve?’
He made a face. ‘Running, swimming, cycling – that sort of thing.’
‘So she was a swimmer?’
‘You’d have to be to a swimmer if you were swimming in a triathlon, wouldn’t you, love?’
Kate’s heart began to beat faster but he was ahead of her already and added, ‘So how did she manage to drown, that’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?’
She made no reply again and his grin was back like a flash. ‘You reckon someone did her in, don’t you?’ he said, his gaze locked on to her face. He leaned towards her and out of the corner of her eye, Kate saw the coroner’s officer tense. ‘Well, I’ll tell you something for nothing, Detective Sergeant Lewis; you find the feller that did it and I’ll buy him a drink!’
‘Bloody hell,’ Roscoe erupted after she had updated him on developments. ‘You’re determined to make this a murder job, aren’t you?’
Kate shrugged. ‘I’m just telling you what de Marr told me,’ she said, ‘and the fact that Ellie Landy was apparently a strong swimmer only serves to support the pathologist’s view that she didn’t just fall into the river and drown as a result of an accident. What we still don’t know is precisely where she went in—’
‘Which we’re never likely to find out anyway unless we employ a flaming medium.’
Kate frowned at the interruption. ‘That’s not necessarily the case. There is Ellie’s car. The blue MG I told you about earlier? I’ve already circulated a description of the motor and if the plods find it, it should significantly reduce our search area.’
Roscoe nodded, looking noticeably underwhelmed. ‘Yeah, whatever. Thing is, I’ve seen the DCI and he’s instructed me to treat the whole thing as a straightforward drowning, nothing more, unless we turn up something more substantial.’ He made a grimace. ‘Which means that for the time being I get to run the bloody inquiry, with just a basic team to do the business.’
‘That could be a big mistake,’ Kate observed. ‘We need to hit this with everything we’ve got before the trail goes cold.’
He snorted. ‘Tell me about it but, according to the boss, there is no trail yet. He’s not convinced Landy’s injuries are necessarily due to an assault. He suspects they could be the result of river damage, which he says he’s seen several times before in his illustrious career. Also, because of the number of major incident inquiries currently running in the force, he reckons that resources are too stretched to justify the setting up of yet another one on the strength of what we’ve got so far.’
‘He didn’t know about the triathlon thing when you went to see him, though, did he?’
Roscoe cut her off with a wave of his hand. ‘Don’t even go there,’ he growled. ‘Decision’s been made and we’ll just have to get on with the job as best we can.’
‘And how the hell do we do that without the proper resources?’ she persisted. ‘There are miles of flooded fields out there. Maybe we should enlist the help of Ratty from The Wind In The Willows!’
Roscoe’s eyes hardened, but even as he made to snap back at her, his office telephone rang and, picking it up, he listened for a moment then replaced the receiver with a grim smile.
‘Front office,’ he said. ‘Seems you have a visitor downstairs – one Gabriel Lessing of Lessing’s Global News Agency. Maybe you should start with him?’
Hayden opened the door of the interview room for Kate and followed her inside. Kate knew Gabriel Lessing immediately – even though she had never met him before. He was exactly as she had pictured him: short, overweight and balding, with thick slack lips, tiny restless eyes and thick squat fingers adorned with several large gold rings. Maybe her penchant for reading her father’s collection of 1950s private eye novels had not been such a bad idea after all.
The little man affected an insipid smile as they entered the room, scrambling to his feet with one podgy hand outstretched. Off his own turf, he seemed less sure of himself than he had been on the phone – altogether more subdued. ‘Ah, you must be Detective Sergeant Lewis,’ he said, the loose bubbling cough loitering at the back of his throat.
Kate’s gaze took in the red bow tie, mauve shirt and shiny grey suit, noting the point of the red handkerchief visible above the line of the front pocket and smiled her distaste.
‘My colleague, Detective Constable Hayden Lewis,’ she said, nodding towards her other half.
Lessing raised both eyebrows. ‘Same name, eh?’ he commented.
‘You usually do have the same name when you’re married,’ Kate said drily as she and Hayden dropped into two chairs facing the little man across the interview room table. ‘Now, what can we do for you?’
Lessing followed their example and sat down again. ‘Well, I – er – decided to come down here to see if I could help your inquiries in any way,’ he replied.
Kate smirked again, reading him like a book. You mean, what’s the story and is there anything in it for me? she mused. ‘You could tell us a bit about Ellie Landy,’ she encouraged.
‘So it is her then?’ he queried. ‘She has been positively identified?’
‘By her stepfather,’ Kate replied.
‘Oh? Stepfather? I didn’t realize he wasn’t her real old man. Who – who is he?’
Kate shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t tell you that. He might not want his name divulged.’
Lessing visibly started. ‘Oh, why is that? Is he some sort of public figure?’
‘I can’t tell you that either,’ she replied, knowing that the first thing he would do when he left the police station would be to find out and when he did, the ‘whatnot’ would really hit the fan in publicity terms.
The journalist looked irritated by her reply, but he didn’t pursue the matter any further, instead launching into another question. ‘Whereabouts was she found?’
Hayden sighed heavily. ‘I thought you had come down here to help us with our inquiries, Mr Lessing?’ he said.
The agency man nodded quickly. ‘Of course – I’m just curious as to how this could have happened. She was a strong swimmer, you know.’
Kate nodded. ‘So we understand. But you said on the phone that she was covering the flooding problem on the Levels? What was her angle?’
‘Angle?’ Lessing seemed indignant at her use of the term. ‘My agency doesn’t have angles, Sergeant. We just report the facts.’
‘OK, so what “facts” was she specifically looking at?’
Lessing smirked, acknowledging that she was asking him exactly the same thing, but couched in a different way. ‘The flooding should never have happened, we all know that, and her job was to look beneath the surface and see if there was any reason why the flood defences had not been upgraded.’
‘So, dig up the dirt wherever she could?’
He hesitated, then sighed. ‘Look, I have a business to run and that business depends on—’
‘Scandal,’ Hayden cut in.
Lessing shrugged, unperturbed by the accusation. ‘If you like, yes. Good news doesn’t sell newspapers.’
He leaned forward across the table, his eyes gleaming with excitement.
‘You don’t think her death was accidental, do you, Sergeant? You think someone did her in? Have they done a PM? What was the result?’
Kate ignored the questions. ‘Do you know what she had found out?’ she asked quickly. ‘Anyone she was due t
o interview?’
Lessing shook his head. ‘But she did ring me about two days ago to say she had stumbled on something unconnected with the flooding,’ he said, ‘which could be a major story.’
‘What sort of thing?’
‘I haven’t the faintest. But it sounded big – that’s why I was so gutted when you rang me to say what had happened.’
‘And there was me thinking you were upset by her tragic death,’ Kate said sarcastically.
Lessing gaped. ‘Well, I was that as well but—’
‘Did she say she was going to meet someone?’ Hayden cut in.
The little man shook his head. ‘Only that it would push the flooding to the inside pages.’ He hesitated. ‘She did mention a name, but it didn’t make any sense to me.’
‘A name?’
‘Yeah, Sand something or other. Didn’t quite catch it on the phone – bad signal with her mobile.’
Kate glanced quickly at Hayden but just in time stopped herself from blurting out the name that was forming on her lips. ‘Sand, you say?’
‘Yeah, Sandley, Sanders, something like that. Then we got cut off.’
‘When was this?’
‘Friday last, I think. She never rang again.’
No, Kate thought, because by then she was dead! ‘I gather she had a blue MG sports car?’ she went on, abruptly changing tack.
He was taken aback for a moment. ‘Er – yeah, bought it at the end of last year. Why are you asking about the car?’
Kate shrugged. ‘If we can find it, it might help us to determine where she went into the water. Do you know the registration number?’
He shook his head. ‘No idea,’ he replied dismissively, then leaned forward towards her, his eyes gleaming – obviously sensing a possible ‘in’ with the inquiry. ‘Listen, Sergeant,’ he said quickly, ‘we could help each other, you know. Sort of pool information, if you’ll pardon the pun. You can trust me not to release what you tell me until you give me the go-ahead. And I could be very useful to you out on the ground. Digging up information is my stock in trade.’
Kate stood up abruptly. ‘I’ll bear that in mind, Mr Lessing,’ she said, ‘but for the present there really isn’t anything I can tell you. Best if you went back to London. Nothing you can do here.’
Lessing also stood up but stared her out. ‘I’ll be staying on for a while,’ he replied defiantly. ‘I’ll probably see you around.’
Not if I can help it, Kate thought, but smiled and said, ‘Thank you for your help, Mr Lessing,’ and she nodded at Hayden to show him out.
Kate didn’t make any move to leave the interview room but settled her bottom on the corner of the table and waited with her arms folded across her chest. Just minutes later Hayden practically bounded back into the interview room, as she’d known he would, his eyes alight with excitement. ‘See, old girl? What did I tell you?’ he exclaimed. ‘Sandman! That note in the book did mean something.’
She nodded. ‘Bravo, Hayd, but what?’
‘Well, as I thought, Ellie Landy had obviously arranged to meet this feller somewhere.’
‘Or woman,’ she replied. ‘Why should it have been a man necessarily?’
‘Let’s leave the pedantry out of it,’ he retorted irritably. ‘The important thing is that we now have a name—’
She smiled faintly. ‘Which, according to you, belongs in a fairytale.’
He ran the fingers of one hand through his mop of untidy hair and began pacing the room. ‘So what do we do now?’ he said. ‘We seem to have hit a brick wall.’
She shook her head. ‘Not entirely,’ she corrected. ‘There is one avenue we could try first.’
‘Which is?’
‘Her mobile.’
‘But there’s no sign of it. It’s probably at the bottom of the Parrett.’
‘So, let’s ring it,’ she said, waving one of Ellie Landy’s business cards in front of his nose. ‘You never know, someone might answer it.’
So they did and it was with a sense of shock that they heard the answer phone respond, ‘You’ve reached the mobile of Ellie Landy. Sorry I’m not available just now. Please leave a message and I’ll get back to you.’ It was the soft husky voice of a dead woman, which filled the room with a ghostly presence that chilled right through to the bone.
‘Want to leave a message?’ Hayden asked with a twisted grin. ‘Maybe some entity from the spirit world will come back to us with a reply.’
Kate studied him for a moment. ‘Not funny, Hayden,’ she said, ‘not funny at all.’
CHAPTER 6
He stood in the curtained room with his back to the roaring log fire, watching the inky shadows climb the walls in front of him, the mobile phone in his hand and a thoughtful look on his face.
So, someone had called, had they? But no message had been left and the caller’s number had been withheld. It had been a good idea to keep hold of the interfering bitch’s phone. After all, he had no idea whom she might have spoken to before he’d got to her, but discovering a missed call to her number made several days after her death was unsettling. It could have been just a friend, catching up on any news, or a worried parent or boyfriend, wondering why she had not been in contact for a while. But on the other hand, it could have been someone she had confided in about the things she had discovered and if that were the case, he might soon have a serious problem on his hands.
Crossing the room to the drinks cabinet in the corner, he poured himself a single malt, holding the spirit in his mouth for several seconds as he pondered the issue. He had heard on the local television news that the woman’s body had been found, but from the details released it seemed that the death was being treated as a tragic accidental drowning. The fact that the police had not come knocking on his door suggested that no one had alleged anything different, which meant that the person who had made the call to the mobile was either unaware of the circumstances or was intending to use information they had been given for personal gain.
He smiled grimly. If the former, there was nothing to fear and if the latter, then he would wait for the approach that would inevitably be made and take the action required to remove any threat that might present itself. And he allowed the whisky in his mouth to slip slowly down his throat before draining his glass.
Kate was filling her chipped mug from the coffee machine in the CID office when the telephone on her desk bleated urgently. Sipping from her mug, she returned to her desk and lifted the receiver. The control-room operator was brief. ‘DS Lewis? Call for CID, skip.’ Seconds later a sharp click preceded the rasp of someone breathing heavily.
‘Detective Sergeant Lewis,’ Kate said. ‘Can I help you?’
‘The drowning of that reporter,’ a woman’s voice blurted after a few moments’ strained silence. ‘I want to speak to the officer in the case.’
Kate set her coffee mug down on the desk with a frown. ‘Who is this?’ she queried.
‘Never mind that,’ the caller replied. ‘Is it you or not?’
Kate beckoned to Hayden as he entered the office and switched the telephone on to speaker. ‘I am one of the investigating officers, yes,’ she said. ‘What can I do for you?’
There was further hesitation before the woman answered. ‘It wasn’t an accident,’ she said eventually.
Kate threw a swift glance at Hayden who was leaning over her shoulder, now with his head on one side as he listened intently. ‘What makes you say that?’ she went on.
‘She was on to things,’ the woman said.
Kate felt her heart start to race. ‘What things?’
‘He couldn’t allow that.’
‘Who is “he”?’
A harsh unamused chuckle. ‘Your worst nightmare.’
Kate sighed, irritated by the clichéd phrase and suspecting she was dealing with a hoax call. ‘Listen, love,’ she said heavily, ‘I am not here to play silly games with you. Exactly who are you and what have you got to tell me?’
Hayden tutted at Kate’s impa
tience and squeezed her arm in warning, but he was too late. ‘Sod you then,’ the woman retorted and hung up.
‘Well, that was nicely done, old girl,’ Hayden commented drily. ‘You really handled that like a pro.’
Kate glared at him. ‘I can do without your sarcasm, thank you,’ she snapped. ‘It was obviously a rubbish call.’
He shrugged. ‘Then how did she know the dead woman was a reporter? As far as I know, that info hasn’t been released to the press yet.’
Kate snorted. ‘OK, clever clogs, so make yourself useful and see if you can get the caller’s number traced.’
‘Is that before or after lunch?’
‘What do you think?’
He stood to attention with a mocking grin. ‘Right away, Sergeant.’ And, turning sharply on his heel, he marched out of the room like a soldier on parade.
Kate glanced over her shoulder at his retreating figure and shook her head wearily. Sometimes Hayden could be such a child. But, though she hated to admit it, she knew his criticisms had been more than justified; she had been far too impatient with the woman caller and consequently might have lost a valuable witness. ‘Damn, damn, damn!’ she muttered to herself.
Retrieving her coffee mug, she took another sip, then pushed it to one side with a grimace. It was only lukewarm. So what now? Hope that the woman’s number could be traced or simply wait in the hope that she would ring again? Somehow she felt that the latter option was pretty unlikely, but she was wrong. In fact, it was just ten minutes later that her desk phone rang and control put the same caller through.
‘DS Lewis?’ the familiar voice queried and before she could reply, the caller added, ‘Meet me.’
Kate froze in her seat. ‘Where?’
‘Do you know the old derelict Toliver factory on the outskirts of Street?’
Again Kate was given no opportunity to respond one way or the other, for the next instant, the caller snapped, ‘One-thirty. Be there or you’ll never hear from me again – and just you, none of your buddies.’
Then the phone went dead.
Kate glanced at her watch. 12.55. She looked around the office. The place was deserted – even Roscoe was not at his desk behind the glass partition that served as his private space – and, if she knew Hayden, he would be down in the canteen, stuffing his face before following up the inquiry she had given him. No time to arrange backup; there would be too many questions to answer first. She knew the risks, but she had no choice save to go it alone or chance making yet another faux pas which could lose her the mysterious witness altogether. Grabbing her coat and her all-singing, all-dancing TETRA police radio, she headed for the door.