Wendy messaged for Isaac to bring the mother back; if Rose was going to get emotional, hysterical even, the result of the realisation, delayed shock, then it was for Maeve Winston to console her daughter.
‘Can you remember any more than that?’
‘Nothing more, only that he moved away and onto the path. It was just the way he walked, as though he had hurt one of his legs.’
‘We never found any indication of a limp,’ the CSI said.
‘A kick to the shin?’ Larry said.
‘The woman fought back, is that what you’re saying?’
‘It’s possible. Any sign on the woman’s sandal or on her feet to indicate that she did?’
‘Pathology might be able to tell you, but as for the sandal, it wasn’t the best quality, new as has been recorded, but one wear and there would be scuffing. Nigh on impossible to be certain, but she could have reacted.’
Maeve Winston arrived, took one look at her daughter and put her arm around her.
‘I saw the woman die,’ Rose said to her mother. She was tearful but bearing up.
‘No more tonight,’ the mother said.
‘No more,’ Wendy agreed.
‘We’ll give Brad a lift,’ Maeve Winston said.
‘Thanks, Mrs Winston, but I don’t live far. I can walk.’
Brad Robinson walked away in the direction of Compton Road and his mother, almost certainly the worse for wear after an encounter with alcohol. He was sad, but he didn’t know why.
***
Isaac would have said that the day was over and that the team would meet at Challis Street in the morning at six, except that as the activity at the cemetery was winding up, Bridget phoned from the office.
Larry was too hungry to continue without sustenance, and Wendy was too tired, but both issues were resolved by Larry buying a McDonald’s cheeseburger, and Wendy joining him, taking the opportunity to rest, closing her eyes for five minutes. Isaac, younger and definitely fitter than the other two, drove straight back to the office, grabbed himself a coffee, a biscuit out of the tin that Bridget always kept filled. Bridget would want an audience for what she had discovered. He didn’t intend to steal her thunder.
Twenty-five minutes later, Larry and Wendy walked into the office.
Bridget handed folders to the three police officers once they were all in Isaac’s office. ‘Of the credit cards that were used, I’ve eliminated virtually all of them.’
‘How?’ Isaac asked.
‘It’s not conclusive, and we may have to go back over some of them if what I’m giving you isn’t sufficient, but if I have a name, then there is Facebook, as well as the purchases made with cards issued overseas, Chinese, Japanese names, others I can’t pronounce.’
‘Those remaining?’
‘One lives in Hammersmith, probably too far if you hold to the local angle. Another lives south of London, twenty miles.’
‘The others?’
‘Two in Notting Hill, one in Bayswater, another in Paddington, and two close enough to the cemetery to walk to, to even walk through.’
‘Have you tried phoning?’ Larry asked.
‘Not yet. I phoned you as soon as I had something tangible.’
Bridget was right, Isaac knew. She had done her work; now it was over to him and the other two.
‘Tonight?’ Isaac said.
‘The two close to the cemetery,’ Wendy said, not that she wanted to as she was ready to go home, but she had known her DCI for a long time, from when he had been a constable in uniform. She knew he’d not agree to leave it till tomorrow.
‘Larry, you take one; Wendy, you take the other. Keep me updated.’
Isaac opened up his email and read those that needed answering, deleted those that were either unimportant or spurious. Jenny was waiting for him, wanting to tell him about her visit to the gynaecologist, although she would understand, she always did.
He wouldn’t leave the office until Larry and Wendy had phoned in.
Bridget shut her laptop, stood up, said goodbye to Isaac and left the office. She was going home, her work for that day complete.
***
Larry knocked on the door of a house very similar to Brad Robinson’s, only two streets away and built at the same time, monuments to the working class and to successive governments attempting to make society encompassing, not shuffling those less fortunate out to suburbs so far from their places of work that some of them would spend two to three hours a day travelling.
The door was opened by a child of five or six, dressed in pyjamas and with bare feet. ‘No one’s here,’ the boy said.
Larry, not easily deterred, was aware that the child delegated at such a tender age to lying for a parent had been sent to deal with unwelcome visitors.
‘I saw them in the upstairs window,’ Larry said. ‘Tell your mother to come down here now. Tell her it’s the police.’
The child walked away and up the stairs. On the top landing, he shouted out, ‘It’s the police.’
It was a house of crime, although what sort of crime Larry didn’t know. The address and the name on the card weren’t known to him.
‘Tell him to come back with a warrant,’ a woman’s voice said from the front bedroom. ‘We’ve done nothing wrong.’
Larry wasn’t concerned whether they had or not, not that night. Back at the station the next day, he’d ask someone to check out the address where a child was forced to lie, and a mother locked herself in her bedroom. He walked into the house, shouted up the stairwell.
‘Pearl Harris, Detective Inspector Larry Hill, Challis Street Police Station. I’m not here about a crime. One question, that’s all.’
The door upstairs opened, and a woman of African or Caribbean background descended the stairs. ‘I’m Pearl Harris,’ the not unattractive woman said. Larry thought her to be in her late twenties or early thirties. She was dressed in a pair of old jeans and a shirt too large for her, clearly belonging to the man upstairs, put on in a hurry.
‘The child?’ Larry said.
‘Nothing to do with me. He belongs to him upstairs.’
‘Who’s he? Someone special?’
‘Ben, Ben Swinson. He’s my de facto.’
‘Where’s the child’s mother?’
‘She took off, left Ben with him. I do the best I can with him, not a bad kid, not really. Why are you here?’
Apart from finding out that social services would need to visit, which he did not say. ‘Did you purchase a pair of sandals at a store in Knightsbridge?’
‘They weren’t much good, the strap broke after two days, and they won’t give you your money back. There should be a law about it,’ the woman said. ‘Good money for rubbish.’
Larry could have said buyer beware, caveat emptor, as Wendy had said the no return policy was clearly stated in the shop’s window, but did not. ‘Do you have the sandals? Can I see them?’
‘What’s so important, disturbing people at night?’
‘The sandals first.’
Pearl Harris opened a cupboard under the stairs, showed them to Larry. Upstairs a husky voice: ‘Haven’t you got rid of that copper yet? A man’s got needs.’
‘Horny,’ Larry said, judging that crudity wouldn’t be amiss.
‘Always, not that he’s much good.’
‘You’ve had better?’
‘Much better, but I better get back up there. You never know…’
‘He hits you?’
‘Not Ben. He’s a decent man, looks after me, looks after the kid. Do you want me anymore?’
‘Not as long as you’re alive, I don’t.’
‘What’s this about?’
‘Another woman who purchased the same shoe as you was murdered. One door we’ll knock on, and the woman won’t be there. I’m glad it’s not you.’
‘You’re not bad for a policeman,’ Pearl said.
‘All heart, that’s me,’ Larry said.
She was a pleasant woman, he decided, trying her best, alt
hough Ben upstairs was probably skirting on the edge of illegal, and Pearl’s history could well be suspect. He’d let others deal with it, although the child was well looked after, clean and well-fed, but where was his mother?’
‘Best of luck with your search. Sorry about the woman, too much of that these days,’ the woman said as she closed the door.
As Larry walked away, he could hear Pearl talking to the child, asking if he wanted a glass of milk, a visit to the bathroom. The child may not have been hers, but she still cared in her own way.
***
Wendy’s address, even though it was walking distance to the cemetery, was further away than Larry’s, almost five hundred yards.
The house appeared empty, no light on inside, not even a sound when she placed her ear against the front door. To her, it looked more promising than Larry’s address.
A white-painted house with a bay window, it was in good condition, and the street was well maintained, although there were roadworks at one end of it, a house being renovated two doors away.
Wendy knocked on the front door four times, each time harder than the previous one. Eventually, a stirring, a light at the rear of the house. The door opened, a woman dressed in black stood in front of Wendy. Whatever it was that she had disturbed, she didn’t like the look of it.
‘What is it?’ the woman, in her fifties, jet-black hair combed straight and down to her waist, said.
‘Sergeant Wendy Gladstone, Challis Street Police Station. I need to speak to Flora Soubry.’
‘Don’t know why. I thought it was someone from down the street complaining, no idea why, but people can be difficult when they don’t understand.’
‘If you have problems with them, it’s nothing to do with me. It’s Flora Soubry that I need to see; one question.’
‘Come in. We’re odd, that’s what you’ll think.’
A house in total darkness, heavy curtains closed, a woman in her fifties, her hair jet-black and down her back. Yes, Wendy thought, it was odd, but no different than some other houses she had been in over the years: devil-worshippers, mad all of them, and then those who were dressed as characters out of nursery rhymes, not forgetting the house with swingers, the couples pairing off with whoever. She had been younger then, following up on a complaint, the swingers not only inviting her in but asking her to join them. She had beaten a hasty retreat, arranged for a couple of policemen in uniform to sort it out. They had returned to the station after a couple of hours to a rousing cheer from the others; Wendy had updated her colleagues on what she had seen there, and whereas there was no proof that the two had succumbed, one of them a lay preacher at his local church, it hadn’t stopped the ribbing.
In the back room where the light had first appeared, five women sat around a table, a Ouija board in the middle.
‘A séance?’ Wendy said.
‘We communicate with the dead,’ one of the women said.
It seemed more benign than some other situations she had seen over the years, although Wendy didn’t like it. Summoning spirits, attempting to communicate with the dead, didn’t sit well with her. She’d do what she had come for and then leave.
‘I’m looking for a Flora Soubry,’ Wendy said.
‘That’s me,’ a woman with a high-pitched voice said, her hand on the board. Wendy found it hard to imagine that this woman, clothed in black, the same as the woman who had answered the door, could wear colourful clothing and footwear, although out of the house all of them would have been indistinguishable from the majority, and London was awash with the eccentric, the mad, the weird, and now, one murderer.
‘You bought a pair of sandals from a shop in Knightsbridge?’
‘A week ago, a good price.’
‘Do you have them with you?’
‘I do. In the other room.’
‘Can you show me?’
The woman got up from the chair, taking her hand away from the board, and opened the door to her right. In the other room, the women’s everyday clothes on hangers. She knelt down, picked up the sandals.
Wendy took a photo as proof and went back to the other room. ‘Do you believe in this?’ she said, looking down at the Ouija board.
‘We do,’ one of the other ladies said.
‘Why are you here?’ Flora Soubry asked.
‘A woman who bought the same sandals as you, the same size, was murdered. The sandals are the only clue we have.’
‘How tragic. Can we help?’
‘Communicating with the dead, hardly investigative, not sure it’s even admissible as evidence,’ Wendy said.
‘Everyone is sceptical until they have proof.’
Wendy left the house. The five women had a new focus for that night; finding out the identity of the dead woman. They couldn’t fail any more miserably than Homicide.
Chapter 6
An impasse. That was how Isaac saw it. As the senior investigating officer, it was his responsibility to deal with the murder investigation, the reason that Jenny was mildly annoyed that night.
She had been excited to tell him about her day and how they were going to decorate the baby’s room, or whether they should buy a house instead of staying in the two-bedroom flat in Willesden.
He was distant, although he had tried to be interested, a woman’s death troubling him. Eventually Jenny, tiring of the stilted conversation, left him and went to bed.
He went and sat in the living room, picked up a book, scanned the first few pages, tried to read it but couldn’t. From the other room, the sounds of Jenny asleep. It was where he should be, where he went. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Rough day, not getting any better either.’
Jenny rolled over, looked at him through semi-closed eyes and gave him a kiss. ‘It’s what I signed up for,’ she said.
And it was, they both knew that when she had first moved in with him. The long hours, the weekends away cancelled at the last minute, the romantic candlelit dinners in the flat, just the two of them, disturbed on more than one occasion. The lot of a police officer’s wife was difficult, and Isaac had had more than one broken romance when a lover had said she could deal with the long hours on her own, the uncommunicative nature of her man at the end of a long day, his indifference to violence and world events, but then couldn’t.
It had only been Jenny who could; he knew that, and for that he was grateful.
‘A house,’ he said. ‘It’ll be better for the baby.’
Another kiss, this time more passionate than the previous one. Isaac looked over at the clock on the bedside cabinet. It was after one in the morning, but sleep eluded him. He got up and went into the other room, opened the fridge, put on the kettle.
A cup of coffee in his hand, a problem to ponder. He phoned Larry.
‘Sorry about the late hour,’ Isaac said. ‘I couldn’t sleep.’
‘That’s alright,’ Larry replied, even if it wasn’t. After a couple of months of tension between the two men on account of Larry’s drinking and slovenliness, he was pleased that his chief inspector was looking to him for help, rather than telling him what to do. The disciplinary still hurt, and if Larry had been more ambitious, he knew it would have had some bearing on his promotion opportunities, but he wasn’t.
Sure, he had tried to knuckle down and study for the requisite qualifications, but his brain wouldn’t kick in, not only because of the demands of Homicide but because he had been no more than a moderate student at school, invariably receiving a could-do-better end of term report. He had come up through the ranks from uniformed constable to sergeant to inspector, the same progression as his DCI, but Isaac was a smart man, intellectually gifted, and he was going places, whereas Larry knew his race was over, and he’d see the rank of inspector alongside his name until the day of retirement.
Larry went and made himself a cup of coffee too.
‘We’re clueless,’ Isaac said.
‘I know. Apart from a Buddhist chant and a man who may or may not have limped, we’ve got nothing.’
‘The limp?’
‘The CSIs will go over the place again, but don’t expect too much. They’re only watching their backs, worried that the young woman might be right.’
‘Discount it for now. What can we do?’
‘A name for the woman, otherwise the case is dead and buried, unsolvable.’
An ignominious outcome, Isaac knew, and not something he’d want to explain to Chief Superintendent Goddard. How would he go about it if he had to? A dead woman, a knife, two witnesses, one who had possibly seen the murder, and we’re stumped, he thought. It made him shudder: the first murder case in his career where he had failed. And he knew how it worked, the same as in life. A multitude of successes, one failure. Which of the two would they remember? He knew the answer.
‘Tomorrow,’ Isaac said. ‘Forget the early-morning meeting, focus on the other names you have.’
‘I was going to phone you early tomorrow and suggest it. I’ve already spoken to Wendy about it,’ Larry said.
‘Great, go with it. Do you need assistance?’
‘Leave it to Wendy and me. If we need someone, we have a name.’
‘Kate Baxter?’
‘She’s competent.’
‘Tomorrow, a result,’ Isaac said. He hung up the phone and went back to bed, Jenny briefly acknowledging his presence. He was asleep within five minutes; Larry wasn’t. The coffee had woken him up; it wouldn’t let him go to sleep, not for some time.
***
Janice Robinson sat on the bed in her squalid bedsit. The darkened street corner where once she had sold herself now replaced by the mobile phone at her side. And besides, soliciting on the street was illegal, selling herself from her phone was not, nor was bringing the client to where she lived.
If she were cognisant, she would have said that her life was on a downward spiral with only one end, but she was not, having just injected herself with heroin, a momentary calm settling over her.
It had been almost a year since she had seen her mother, three months since Brad and she had met. She missed him, cheerful and cheeky, able to make her laugh; her mother she did not miss.
Grave Passion Page 5