Coming, Ready or Not

by Michael Fowler

  ‘There’s a couple of other things I’d like to go back over with you. Are you okay to do that? I fully understand if you don’t want to. I guess I’ve delivered something you hadn’t expected, so I can always come back if it’s too much to grasp?’

  ‘No it isn’t, Hunter. It’s good of you to come and give us the news. It can’t be easy for you as well, it being about Polly.’ Lynda gave her husband a sideways glance. ‘We want to help. We won’t settle until you’ve caught whoever did this to her. And this other poor woman, of course.’ She locked onto Hunter’s eyes. ‘We’ve never forgotten that day. People have told us that it gets easier.’ She shook her head. ‘Load of rubbish. There’s not a day goes by without me thinking about Polly.’

  Pursing his mouth Hunter replied, ‘Of course. I’ve not forgotten it either. Sometimes I wish I could turn back the clock.’

  ‘You can’t,’ Lynda said softly. ‘No one can. But it would be nice if you could catch her killer after all this time. We’ll all maybe be able to settle then.’

  Hunter nodded, ‘That’s what we’re hoping. Forensic techniques have moved on so much now that we’re hoping that whoever killed her slipped up.’

  ‘So what help do you want from us?’ asked Peter.

  ‘I just want to run through things with you again and check out one or two other things.’

  Peter exchanged glances with his wife and then returned his gaze to Hunter. ‘Fire away.’

  ‘Lynda, you said you last saw Polly at about half nine that morning.’

  ‘Yes. As you know she’d still got another week off before she went back to college. She’d taken to walking Mollie regularly for us, with us both out at work. It was a lovely morning and she said she fancied a long walk in the woods and was going to give you a ring.’

  Hunter tugged at the collar of his shirt. He responded, ‘She rang me just after ten, but unfortunately I’d agreed to meet up with a couple of mates, so I told her I’d see her that afternoon.’ He paused as he explored Peter and Lynda’s faces. There didn’t appear to be any blame in their looks. Continuing, he said, ‘Did she normally go out walking with anyone else?’

  ‘Varied. If she wasn’t with either of us two, or yourself, she’d sometimes go out with Lucy Stringer, or Amy Parker. Remember them?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’ An image flashed inside Hunter’s head. The four of them listening to cassette tapes in Polly’s bedroom. They’d take it in turns to record the top twenty pop charts every Sunday evening and then play them when they got together.

  Lynda disturbed his daydream. ‘But they were both on holiday that week.’

  ‘So she would have gone up to the woods alone.’ It was a rhetorical question. Hunter already knew from the police statements he had read that there were half a dozen sightings of her that morning during her journey up to Barnwell Woods. They even had a sighting of her in the woods itself. A female dog walker had stopped and exchanged pleasantries with Polly before going her separate way. The last time she was seen was at 11.15 a.m. ‘And she was found just after three p.m. the same day?’

  Grim-faced, Lynda Hayes nodded. ‘She was found the other side of the woods, lying in a ditch by the edge of a field. Two women out jogging heard Mollie barking. She’d stayed with her. Looking after her.’ Lynda’s eyes started to glass over.

  Hunter watched her wipe her eyes. He gave her a couple of seconds. ‘I’ve seen in your statement that you called the police at roughly two o’clock that Thursday.’

  ‘Yeah. Once she hadn’t come in by twelve thirty I started to panic. It wasn’t like her. I first rang Peter at work, to see if he’d heard from her, then I rang her gran. Then I rang you.’

  ‘Yes, I remember. I came straight round and we went out looking for her. We stopped a few people in the woods and asked them if they’d seen her. No one had. Then we came back here and you phoned the police.’

  Tight-lipped, Linda made a sharp sucking noise, as if holding back a sob.

  Hunter gave her some more time to gather her composure. ‘I know you’ll have been asked this already. And probably dozens of times. But I need to ask you again. That cloak. You said in your statement that you’d never seen it before?’

  Peter leaned forward, clasping his hands. ‘We hadn’t. As you know Lynda reported her missing and gave the police her description. They said they normally didn’t bother doing anything until someone of her age had been missing for twenty-four hours, but I insisted this was way out of character for her and so they promised to send an officer. Two detectives came round at tea time, and I thought it was to take my report, but it wasn’t. It was to break the news that they’d found Polly. They kept asking us about the clothing she’d gone out in. At first we couldn’t fathom out why and then a couple of days later they told us that when they’d found her she had this dark green cloak wrapped around her. They showed it to us and asked us if we’d seen it before. Neither of us had. We don’t know where it came from.’

  Lynda interposed, ‘The other thing was that it was far too big for Polly. Polly was only size ten.’

  ‘And you still have no thoughts of where it could have come from.’

  Lynda shook her head. ‘Polly wouldn’t have been seen dead in it.’ She pulled herself up and gulped. ‘That was a wrong turn of phrase wasn’t it, but you know what I mean. Polly was very fashion conscious, as you know, Hunter. It looked like the type of cloak a monk would wear.’

  Hunter interlaced his fingers. With a steadying voice he said, ‘I’m sure you might have been asked this before as well, but a long time has passed now, and I just wonder if you ever heard a whisper that she might have been seeing someone else?’ He paused and added, ‘Other than me.’

  Lynda shook her head vigorously. ‘Definitely not, Hunter. You could read our Polly like a book. She thought the world of you. You recall, we took her camping in Cornwall, with Lucy, in July that year. Well, halfway into the holiday they got chatting to a couple of lads, who took it the wrong way, and kept chatting them up at every opportune moment, but Polly sent them packing. Told them where to get off, in no uncertain terms. Me and Peter had a good laugh about it. No, you were the only one for her.’

  ‘Just one other question. I know it’s such a long time ago now but did anything unusual happen leading up to Polly’s death. It could be days, even weeks. Anything out of the ordinary?’

  Peter crooked his head to one side. Thought for a couple of seconds and then said, ‘Do you mean the nuisance phone calls?’

  ‘Phone calls?’ Hunter glanced at Grace. She shrugged her shoulders. He returned his gaze. ‘I don’t recall anything about nuisance phone calls in your statements.’

  Peter exchanged a look with his wife. ‘Well, we told the detectives about it. They said they’d look into them.’

  ‘Unless I’ve missed something when I’ve read through the file, I can’t recall any mention of nuisance phone calls. Tell me about them.’

  ‘Well, I suppose on the face of it they were nothing. There were only a couple. Maybe three or four at most.’

  ‘What was the nature of them?’

  ‘It was Polly who brought it to our attention. She told us she’d had a couple of crank calls one day. I asked her what she meant by that and she said, “just crank calls.” She joked about it and said she’d shouted perv down the phone and then hung up. She didn’t elaborate on the nature of them. Then one night I answered and I just got silence. I think I shouted down the phone. Told them, whoever it was to stop it, otherwise I was going to the police. Then Lynda got one.’ He shot a sideways look.

  Prompted by her husband’s glance Lynda said, ‘Mine was a silent one as well. I didn’t hang up straight away, I listened for a good couple of seconds. I tried to hear if there was anything I could recognise. I could hear whoever it was breathing. Not deeply or anything, just breathing. I eventually told them it wasn’t funny, and to grow up and then hung up.’

  Peter interjected, ‘And then Polly took one, one evening. She shouted to me that
it was him on the phone. I told her to give it to me, but by the time I’d got there, they’d hung up. Polly said he’d spoken to her.’

  ‘Did she recognise who it was?’

  Peter shook his head. ‘Well, when I say he’d spoken to her. It wasn’t exactly that. She said, and these were her words, the weirdo was whispering. It sounded like he was counting backwards.’

  ‘She said it was a “he?”’

  ‘Definitely. I asked her what she meant, when she said the weirdo was counting backwards. And she said, “you know, counting down Dad, like when we used to play hide and seek.” That was it.’

  ‘Counting down. That was all? No threats or anything?’

  ‘No threats. That was it. We got no more calls after that one.’

  ‘What time span was this before what happened to Polly?’

  Peter screwed up his face, thought for a few seconds and responded with, ‘Week, maybe ten days.’

  ‘And you told detectives about them.’

  Peter nodded, ‘Yes, they said they were going to check them up.’

  ‘Okay, that’s great. I’ll follow that up. We’ve got someone on the team who was involved in her case. I’ll have a word with him.’ Hunter met his partner’s gaze, gave her an enquiring look, as if to say, ‘is there anything you want to ask.’ She shook her head.

  He settled his eyes back upon Peter and Lynda and smiled. ‘Okay, that’s great. Except for the information about the phone calls I think that’s confirmed everything that was in your statement.’ He started to push himself up and then caught himself. ‘Oh, there is one thing. Again, I know it’s a long time ago, but did detectives search Polly’s room. Go through her things.’

  ‘Yes, they took a few of her belongings away. Some photos of her with her friends, a couple of letters. I think some were from you. And a diary and address book.’

  ‘Were those ever handed back?’

  ‘No. We never got them back. Why, haven’t you got them?’

  ‘To be honest I don’t know. I’ve only read Polly’s file. The statements etcetera. I’ll chase up where they are so that we can go through them again.’ Hunter straightened himself. ‘In the meantime if you bear in mind what I said earlier. We have opened up Polly’s case. If anything else springs to mind, no matter how small or inconsequential you think it might be, you know where I am.’

  Hunter reached out and offered Peter his hand. He caught sight of his eyes welling up.

  On a brittle note Peter said, ‘Catch the bastard, Hunter. For Polly. For us.’

  Unable to get hold of Barry Newstead, who was out on enquiries, Hunter spent the rest of the afternoon chasing up the exhibits from Polly’s case. He tracked down the cloak, she had been found wrapped in, to the Forensics Laboratory at Wetherby. It had been archived with other samples from the case. He made a request for them to be examined and spent an hour completing the paperwork. Then, he made further phone calls to determine the whereabouts of the personal things detectives had removed from Polly’s room. He had a breakthrough with those as well. He discovered that her diary, address book, photographs and letters had all been packed away in a storage box, and were held in a warehouse facility, amongst other exhibits from all unsolved cases investigated by South Yorkshire Police. He arranged for them to be delivered.

  At evening debrief Hunter fed in his and Grace’s visit to Polly’s parents and reported on his success at finding all the original exhibits from the investigation. He didn’t raise the matter of the nuisance telephone calls because he hadn’t been able to quiz Barry about them. He had a doctor’s appointment and had booked off duty without coming back to the station. Hunter had decided to speak with him first, and determine if the calls issue had been resolved during the original investigation, before introducing them.

  No one else brought anything new to the proceedings.

  That night, before going home, Hunter stopped off at the churchyard. He felt the need to visit Polly’s grave. It had been a long time since he’d done so. Negotiating the criss-cross of paths around the sides of the church he discovered, that aside from him, the graveyard was empty. Eerily silent. The light was starting to go; dusk had descended, throwing everything into shadow, confusing his bearings, and he found himself doubling-back on more than one occasion as he searched out her headstone. He eventually found it. The grave site was still pin-neat tidy; an obvious sign that it was being regularly visited and maintained. A rose bowl containing a bunch of fake flowers had been placed in front of the dark grey marble headstone. It gave colour to the drab backdrop. He stared at the carved inscription. It read, ‘Polly Ann Hayes, 16 years, 25th July 1972, 1st September 1988. Taken from us’. He dipped his head and a kaleidoscope of happy images tumbled inside his head; things they had done during the ten months they had been together. Kindred spirits. For a moment he wondered how it might be if she hadn’t died that day. His spine tingled and he shook himself. Beth and the boys were his life now. He said a silent goodbye, turned and made his way back down the path to where he had left his car.

  He didn’t drive immediately home, instead he stopped off at his parents’ house, and over a cup of tea, told them about the investigation. He also wanted to check out their garage, and see if the box, he had tucked away all those years ago, was still there.

  It was. He found it hidden away amongst cans of old paint, high up on a shelf. He picked it down and brushed away the years of dust. The lid was still Sellotaped. He knew he should have binned the box ages ago, but he’d never been able to bring himself to do it.

  He took it to his car, put it to the back of the boot and drove home.

  - ooOoo –

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Day Twelve: 29th March.

  Detective Superintendent Dawn Leggate added a quick signature to the last of her urgent paperwork, placed the cap back on her pen and checked her watch – briefing in ten minutes. Her timing was perfect. She would even have time to grab a quick coffee she told herself. As she pushed back her chair, her personal mobile rang. Not recognising the number, and thinking about having that coffee before briefing, she was in two minds whether to answer. She decided she had enough time and took the call.

  ‘Hi, Dawn.’

  As soon as she heard the voice she regretted her decision.

  Taking a deep breath she said, ‘What do you want, Jack?’

  ‘Just to talk.’

  ‘We’ve done talking.’

  ‘Just hear me out please.’

  Clenching her teeth together she said, ‘You’ve got two minutes.’

  ‘I just want to apologise. I know you’re angry with me, but I realise now what a stupid mistake I’ve made.’ There was a couple of seconds pause and then he said, ‘I realise just how much I miss you. I can’t live without you.’

  ‘Well you should have thought about that before you decided to shag that bimbo secretary of yours.’

  ‘We’ve finished. I’ve ended it. It’s you I really love.’

  ‘I don’t love you anymore.’

  ‘Please, Dawn.’

  ‘No. I’m happy now.’ She paused. She could feel her heart fluttering. She took a deep breath. ‘Jack, I want you to leave me alone. I’ve moved on.’

  ‘That’s not the Dawn I once knew talking. The job’s changed you.’

  Suddenly, the anger welled up. She bit down on her lip. ‘Don’t you dare blame the job, Jack. This is your fault.’ She took another deep breath. ‘This conversation is over. I don’t want you ever ringing me again.’

  ‘Please, Dawn, you don’t mean this.’

  ‘Yes I do, Jack. I’m hanging up.’

  ‘Don’t.’

  She ended the call and glanced at the screen. Suddenly, her chest tightened. She could hear the blood rushing between her ears. Gripping the edge of her desk she steadied herself. Then, saving the number, so she could ignore it the next time it rang, she switched off her mobile and slung it across her desk.

  For a few seconds she stared aimlessly around the
room, trying to pull herself together. She could feel the start of a panic attack. She caught herself and steadied her breathing.

  I’m not going to let that bastard ruin my day.

  She forced herself out of her chair, picked up her briefing notes and walked out of the office.

  ‘Heads up everyone, lot to get through this morning,’ she shouted, weaving between the desks, to the front of the room.

  Upon reaching DC Carol Ragen’s desk, she offered her a quick smile, moved aside some of her paperwork and deposited herself gracefully on a corner. Hitching up her dark blue pencil skirt she shuffled into a comfortable position. Dawn could feel her composure returning. ‘Okay, just a quick reminder.’ She did a quick recce around the room – checked that she had everyone’s attention. ‘We’re now linking the murder of Polly Hayes, in nineteen eighty-eight, to the murder of Elisabeth Bertolutti, four days ago, by the fact that Polly’s T-shirt has turned up on Elisabeth’s body. And we’re linking Elisabeth’s murder to that of Gemma Cooke, eleven days ago, by the fact that a masked man was identified as being responsible for killing Elisabeth, and a masked man, as we have seen on CCTV, was seen following Gemma only hours before her body was found. Our main suspects to date are, as you know, Adam Fields and DC Tom Hagan. Both have been interviewed and neither of them have solid alibis for the time period in which we believe she was killed. And, so to that end, although I’m not completely dismissing them yet...’ she swung out an arm, and aimed it at an A4 size still CCTV image of the grotesque masked head, Blu Tacked to Gemma Cooke’s incident board. ‘…my feelings are that whoever that masked man is, is the person we need to be focussed upon.’ Dawn glanced down at her lap, flicked away a piece of fluff, crossed one shapely leg over the other and raised her eyes. ‘As you know, for now, I’m running on the theory that what we have here is a serial killer, who is a trophy taker and who is then transferring his trophies between his victims. And with that in mind, I want us to focus on several things. Firstly, the green cloak, which Polly Hayes was found wrapped in. That is currently with Forensics and is being fast-tracked for DNA etcetera. I want it photographed and sent out to all Forces. See if any of them have any outstanding murders or attacks where the victim had a similar cloak taken. Remember we’re looking at a time-period during the nineteen eighties, maybe even earlier.’ She directed a pointed finger at Gemma Cooke’s board. ‘The second item of interest is the locket found on Gemma’s body. Again I want the same doing with that and see if anything comes back.’