by Faith Martin
‘No, ma’am.’
Hillary met Knighton’s bland hazel eyes, and nodded grimly. ‘He’s a brave man, DI Gregg. And obviously trying to do right by Mel.’ She didn’t say it lightly. She knew her words would be passed along the grapevine via Knighton, and she knew how people would take it.
Hillary and Philip Mallow had been well known to be great friends, and if Hillary had officially put her seal of approval — and forgiveness — on DI Gregg, then it would go a long way towards helping Gregg get back in the good graces of the rank and file at HQ. Not that anyone openly blamed Gregg for what happened to Mel, but Hillary knew a lot of people were secretly thinking — and wishing — that it had been Gregg who’d taken the bullet. It was Gregg, after all, who’d been in operational charge of the Myers rape case.
Hillary also had felt a knee-jerk reaction of resentment at the mention of the man, but she was too honest not to admit to herself that Gregg had merely been unlucky. Or to acknowledge that Mel himself hadn’t blamed Gregg for the foul-up. Still, to know that she would probably be bumping into Gregg sometime in the future filled her with unease.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ Knighton said quietly. ‘DI Gregg wants Myers badly.’
Hillary grunted vaguely, then forced herself to eat the fruit she no longer had any appetite for, nodded pleasantly to Knighton and left the canteen.
For some reason her throat seemed to ache, and she realised she was on the verge of tears. She made a quick detour to the ladies’ loo to splash cold water on her face and swallow back the tightness in her throat, then went to her desk.
She was surprised to see Frank Ross at his desk. He shot her a blank look as she took her seat, and she braced herself for some nastiness that never came. Perhaps he’d been on a bender and was now sober enough to face reality.
‘Did you find those old case files I wanted, Frank?’ she asked, as Gemma Fordham looked at him curiously. Briefly, she told her sergeant about the Linda Quirke case, and how the missing girl had been Rachel Warner’s best friend. Gemma shrugged and went back to her keyboard, obviously finding it of little interest.
Wordlessly, Frank Ross searched his messy desk top, and came up with a somewhat dirty beige file. She wondered if the admin people who beavered away putting old cases on to the computer database had reached as far as the Quirke years yet, and decided, from a brief scan of the ancient-looking forms and typewritten reports within the folder, that they hadn’t.
Quickly, she scanned the evidence, acquainting herself with the basics.
Linda Quirke, a thirteen-year-old with long brown pigtails and big eyes, had gone missing from her home in Duns Tew one Saturday morning in August 1981. She’d set out on her bike to pedal the three-quarters of a mile or so to her friend’s house in the nearby hamlet of Steeple Knott, and had simply vanished.
Her bicycle had never been found. There’d been very little traffic on the roads, and none of the motorists who had been in the area on the isolated country roads had reported seeing the little girl.
An extensive search had come up with nothing of any use — no trace of the girl, her bike, car or lorry tyre marks that might have been parked on the side of the road, or Linda’s clothing.
Linda Quirke had simply vanished.
Hillary frowned. No doubt the friend she’d been going to see that morning had been Rachel. Had the little girl she’d been then been puzzled by the no-show of her friend? Had she hung around the house, watching from the windows, wondering what had kept Linda? And how had she felt when the news started to circulate that her friend had gone?
Something in the file niggled at her, and she couldn’t think what it was. All this had happened over twenty-five years ago. None of the names of the useless witnesses were familiar to her. The Quirke family themselves certainly didn’t feature in the Philpott case, all those years later. So what was bugging her?
‘Guv, I’ve got something!’ Barrington’s excited voice as he barrelled over towards her had her head snapping up. She tossed the file into her pending-tray, determined to go through it with a fine-tooth comb later and figure out what was teasing at her brain stem.
‘Can you be more specific, Constable,’ Hillary asked wryly, and Barrington smiled back just as wryly.
‘Sorry, guv. Tom Cleaves. The man’s life has been as boring as anything, and I thought I’d never find anything interesting about him. He was the manager of a carpet warehouse company for nearly forty years, and had an exemplary work record. He and his wife Margaret have been married for nearly as long, and his three sons are all as respectable and boring as himself. All have left home now, of course, and there’s not a sniff of naughtiness anywhere in the whole damned lot of them. No extra-marital affairs on either side as far as I can tell, and no run-ins with us either — not even a traffic ticket, guv. Then, when I got back into his childhood, I finally struck gold.’
He sat down in his chair and shuffled back the leaves in his notebook. ‘He was an only child, and his mother, Cecily Cleaves, née Cairn, committed suicide when he was seven. There was something of a scandal about it,’ Barrington said, aware that he had everyone’s full attention now. Even Frank Ross was listening.
‘Apparently, Cecily worked as a parliamentary secretary to the local Conservative MP. Well, it’s the usual story. They had a fling and the press found out. The MP’s wife “stood by her man” and the press had a field day painting Cecily Cleaves as the “scarlet woman.” Anyway, the coverage and the hounding of the press got so bad that Cecily’s husband, Tom’s father, George Cleaves, filed for divorce. Before the case could get to court, however, Cecily was found drowned in the local river.
‘It turns out that somebody had been blackmailing her for months before the press got hold of the story, and had bled her dry. The copper assigned to the case found letters demanding more money in her wardrobe. Another secretary in the same office came under suspicion, but nothing could ever be proved.
‘A sympathetic local coroner’s court brought in a verdict of misadventure. But everyone at the time believed she’d committed suicide. There was even a bit of fuss over the local vicar having her buried in consecrated ground.’
He took a large breath, then looked across at Hillary.
Hillary thought it over. It was dramatic, yes, but did it really add anything to their case? ‘Well, something like that will certainly scar a child for life,’ she agreed pensively. ‘And I dare say Tom Cleaves came away from it with several hang-ups.’
‘The poor sod probably never goes fishing in the river,’ Frank Ross said, and laughed.
Everyone ignored him.
‘Well, he certainly never blamed his mother,’ Gemma pointed out, with rather more relevance. ‘Boys who turn against their mothers don’t tend to have long happy marriages with another woman, twenty years down the line.’
‘Right. But I imagine he has a knee-jerk reaction to blackmail of any kind,’ Hillary said. And she could well understand why. Like most people, she found blackmailers to be particularly offensive.
‘Guv,’ Gemma said sharply. ‘You remember at the beginning of the case, we kept running across examples of how Tom Cleaves and our victim came to loggerheads over the local flower show?’
Hillary nodded.
‘I’m pretty sure one of the green-fingered brigade I spoke to said something about Eddie saying that Tom Cleaves and a certain judge were too pally for his liking.’
Hillary cocked her head to one side. ‘Go on.’
‘Well, guv, I think he said that Eddie mentioned something in passing about how he had proof that Tom had won his prize dishonestly. I was just wondering . . .’
She let her voice trail off, and Hillary took up the thought obligingly. ‘. . . whether he spoke to Tom about it. And if he did, and was particularly clumsy about it, it might have sounded as if he was trying to blackmail Tom?’
‘Well, it’s possible, isn’t it?’ Gemma asked.
‘Yes, it’s possible,’ Hillary agreed. It was even possible that Eddie Philpott had
in fact used a little bit of blackmail to get his rival to back off in next year’s show. From what they’d learned of Eddie, he might well have simply seen it as a bit of teasing fun, never knowing how devastating such a ploy might have seemed to the sensitive Tom Cleaves.
‘And if Tom Cleaves does have a particular sensitivity about blackmail, it could have unbalanced him enough to make him act out of character,’ she mused. All along she’d thought that the act of hitting a man over the head with a spade was an act of either rage, desperation, or some other extreme mental or emotional pressure.
‘OK, reinterview your green-fingered friend. Try and pin him or her down on what Eddie Philpott actually said,’ Hillary ordered Gemma.
‘Guv. Should we bring in Cleaves?’
‘No. Not yet. So far all we’ve got is speculation.’
‘Guv.’
Hillary nodded across to Barrington. ‘Good work. Still no luck at placing either Cleaves or Hepton at the cottage on Monday morning?’
‘No, guv. And I can’t see it happening either. I think in such a small place, if anyone had seen anything, we’d know about it by now.’
Hillary agreed, but didn’t say so. Instead she nodded at him to continue, whilst Gemma grabbed her coat and walked quickly across the office. It amused Hillary to see several of her male colleagues follow her progress with their eyes.
She reached for her telephone and dialled Janine’s number. There was no answer.
‘Frank, go out and get a copy of the local papers, would you?’ Hillary said.
Frank grunted, got up and left without a word. Nervously, Barrington watched him go.
Like Hillary, he was expecting fireworks at any minute. Frank Ross compliant and quiet was far more worrying than Frank Ross as his usual belligerent self.
* * *
The two constables watching the front of Clive Myers’s house perked up when an extremely dirty red truck with an open flatbed trailer pulled up just past the house and began to reverse up the short drive.
PC Patrick Mulligan, a six-foot-six, almost bald youth, began furiously taking pictures with his digital camera, whilst his colleague, PC Ian Davis, reached for the radio to report in.
Both of the men watched as Clive Myers walked from the house and opened up his garage obligingly.
‘I don’t like this,’ Mulligan said grimly, as the rear end of the small, dirty truck began to disappear into the back of the garage. When only the nose of the truck was visible, the engine was turned off, and the driver’s door opened.
A man dressed in dirty white painter’s overalls, splotched with many colours, climbed out. He was wearing distinctive hobnailed boots, and had a large dark blue baseball cap on his head. He also wore dark glasses. ‘I really don’t like this,’ Mulligan repeated under his breath.
‘Shit, they’re going inside,’ Ian Davis said, his voice rising in a squeak. Unlike his friend, he’d barely met the police height requirements and, again unlike his friend, had a mop of unruly brown curly hair. The two men had become firm friends, however, since being assigned to the same panda car. And when they’d both been seconded to DCI Evans’s team, they still tended to work together.
Grimly, Davis relayed the news back to HQ, asking for further instructions.
* * *
Hillary Greene thanked Ross as he tossed copies of the Oxford Times and the Oxford Mail on to her desk.
As expected, the Oxford Mail had a story on page two about the return of DI Peter Gregg.
Hillary grunted. So they had their goat well and truly staked out now.
She only hoped, for Gregg’s sake, that they didn’t botch it. She might never be able to warm to the man, but she didn’t want any more dead coppers on her patch.
She tried dialling Janine Mallow again. Again, the telephone wasn’t answered.
She hoped that it meant that Janine was having a long lie-in. But she rather doubted it.
* * *
‘Sir, he’s coming out again now,’ Davis hissed into the car radio.
‘Can you see his face?’ DCI Evans’s voice, tight with tension, crackled back over the line.
‘Hold on,’ Davis said. ‘Pat, use the telephoto zoom. Can you see his face?’
Mulligan got the man emerging from the Myers house in the frame and swore. ‘No, the crafty bugger’s looking down at the ground.’
‘Sir, all we can see are his clothes. He’s wearing the same painter’s overalls, boots, cap and sunglasses.’
‘Shit!’ Evans swore sibilantly. ‘What’s he doing?’
‘Going to the truck, sir. Climbing in. Yes, the engine’s turned over. Sir, what do we do?’ the youngster asked anxiously.
‘Follow him. Tell the other two in the car at the back to split up. One is to remain in the vehicle, the other is to walk around to the front and get a good view of the house. I wouldn’t put it past Myers for this to be a double bluff. Lure us into following an obvious decoy, and then slip out of the house later.’
‘Guv,’ Davis said, and quickly contacted his colleagues to relay the message.
Mulligan started the car — an unremarkable Renault — and pulled out behind the truck.
‘Sir, how long do we follow him?’ Davis asked into the radio.
‘Until I tell you otherwise,’ Evans said curtly.
* * *
Janine Mallow pulled her car into a gap in the line of cars which were parked somewhat illegally on the road, and switched off the engine.
Compulsively, she reached a hand under the driving seat of her car, and felt the touch of cold metal and the slightly warmer plastic bottle, and gave a little sigh of relief. Not that she’d expected the gun to have magically disappeared or anything.
She glanced around the quiet, residential road, and settled back in her seat more comfortably. Her bloated stomach felt tight and slightly alien. She’d always been a slender, pretty blonde, and her distending stomach made her feel vaguely uneasy. She glanced down at the open copy of the Oxford Mail beside her and read the story again.
She reached into her bag, withdrew a small bottle of tonic water and took her pills. Her doctors had been nagging her about her hypertension for weeks now.
Duty done, Janine Mallow leaned her head back against her seat’s headrest, and waited.
She’d wait all day if she had to. And all night. And all the next day, if it came to that.
After all, she had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do.
* * *
‘Where the hell’s he going?’ Ian Davis muttered to his pal fifteen minutes later, and then, into the radio, ‘We’re still going vaguely north, guv. He’s taking the country roads, and isn’t in any particular hurry.’
‘You ask me, he knows we’re following him and is just playing silly sods,’ Patrick muttered darkly.
‘Have you heard from the boys back at the house, sir?’ Davis asked curiously.
‘Yes. No sign of Myers, and the garage door is still standing open,’ Evans told them. ‘So either he’s really not there, or he just wants us to think that he’s not.’
‘Well, we’re not falling for that,’ Mulligan muttered. ‘Hold on, he’s turning off here. Hey, Ian, doesn’t this road lead back to that same village we passed about five minutes ago?’
Ian Davis wasn’t sure, and quickly consulted the map. ‘Yeah, it can do. Or it loops back on to the main road again.’
‘That confirms it,’ Mulligan said grimly. ‘Tell the guv this bloke’s just leading us around in circles.’
Ian passed the message on to his superior officer. For a long while the radio was silent, then Evans said grimly, ‘OK, pull him over. Make it a routine check. Have you got anything minor you can use as an excuse?’
‘Not sure, guv. His tail lights are working OK.’
‘He’s got a muddy number plate,’ Mulligan pointed out with glee.
‘I heard that,’ Evans said. ‘Use that.’
‘Guv. What do we do if it is Myers?’
‘Bring him in
,’ Evans said decisively. ‘He’d expect us to, so let’s not disappoint him.’
‘And what do we do if it’s not him, guv?’
‘Let him go with a warning,’ Evans replied. ‘But make sure you get his name and details. If nothing else, this bastard must know he’s helping Myers to give us a hard time. He might not be so obliging once he learns what it means to make our shit list.’
‘Guv,’ Davis said, with a grin.
Patrick accelerated to get right behind the truck, then flicked his lights and beeped his horn. They were not in a panda car, and both coppers were aware that, legally, the man in the truck had no reason to stop. If asked why he hadn’t, he could all too reasonably respond by asking how he was to know that it had been police in the car behind him. For all he knew, they could have been bandits out to rob him or steal his car.
But the truck in front slowed down immediately at their frantic signalling, and Mulligan carefully pulled up in front of the truck, blocking any quick exit he might make.
‘Here we go,’ he muttered nervously under his breath to his partner. Both men were well aware that this was almost certainly the man who’d killed Superintendent Philip Mallow. And as they approached the truck, both were unarmed, but knew that Clive Myers almost certainly had access to a high-velocity sniper rifle.
As an ex-army man, Clive Myers had probably had more hand-to-hand combat experience than both of them put together. So it was not surprising that Ian Davis felt his palms sweating as they approached the truck, and he rubbed them nervously on the outside thighs of his trousers. Beside him, he could hear Patrick Mulligan breathing heavily.
Without a word, they split up as they got to the nose of the truck — Patrick to go to the driver’s side, Ian to the passenger side. It was how they always did it when approaching any stopped motor vehicle, and it simply never occurred to them to change their routine this time.
So Patrick Mulligan was the first to see the driver’s face as he turned to wind down the window and look out, and Ian plainly saw his partner’s shoulders droop with the release of tension.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ Patrick said, in his well-rehearsed policeman’s voice. ‘Were you aware that your rear number plate is all but unreadable?’