by Tom Bradby
‘Payment of what or whom?’
‘I don’t know. That’s when we were interrupted.’
As Julia pulled into the car-park at the Rose and Crown, she remembered dimly that it was possible to rent rooms at the pub: some people had stayed there for Jessica de la Rue’s wedding seven or eight years ago.
A police car was parked in the entrance to Pascoe’s lane. The crowd had dispersed.
‘Wait here a minute,’ Professor Malcolm said.
‘Why?’
‘I’m trying to spare your reputation. I don’t want us to look as if we’re checking in together.’
‘We could tell Doberman what you’re doing.’
‘Who’s Doberman?’
‘The landlord.’
Professor Malcolm shook his head. ‘There’s no need to alert people. I don’t want to be stoned on my first day.’
As he got out, Julia looked at her watch. It was twelve o’clock. She wound down the window and closed her eyes against the bright sun.
After about five minutes, Professor Malcolm appeared at the top of the fire exit above where Julia had parked. He had put on a khaki jacket earlier and his forehead gleamed with sweat. ‘Not exactly the Ritz,’ he said.
Julia got out of the car, picked up the box carefully and followed him. The room was at the end of the corridor at the top and it was bigger than she had imagined, with a sloping roof, a narrow single bed and a table with a leather chair beside it. Ahead, a large desk was pushed into the alcove beneath a small window. She put down the box and looked out. From here, she could see up to the top of the ridge behind and down over the rear of the former council houses in the lane beside the pub. There were three in all: two neatly kept and then Pascoe’s at the end, with knee-high grass in the back garden. There were no lights on inside his house and Julia could see no sign of the protesters.
‘Just give me a moment,’ he said. ‘If Pascoe is still here, then we should talk to him now.’
Julia stayed where she was, assuming Professor Malcolm had gone to speak to the police. She eyed the box, but made no move to examine its contents.
Professor Malcolm returned within a few minutes, his expression troubled, as if suddenly less confident of something. ‘Pascoe demanded they take him out of the village and drop him in the centre of Cranbrooke. The police … they can’t hold him. I should think he will be back soon.’
Julia found the idea of Pascoe returning uncomfortable, recalling how he’d said she looked like Sarah. What did he mean by that?
Professor Malcolm slipped off his shoes and placed them on the floor beside the bed, with the socks tucked neatly into them. Julia caught a faint whiff.
‘Did you have to do that?’ she asked.
‘What?’
She shook her head dismissively.
He came over and took the box to the bed, pulling up the chair next to it. ‘You’ll need the desk, because you’ll be doing the phoning,’ he said.
Julia frowned at him, but he ignored her. She had given no serious thought to what helping him would entail.
Professor Malcolm removed the drawer from the box and Julia noticed that he was still sweating, so she went to open the window.
‘This is our incident room,’ he said, and from the end of the drawer he took a pile of what looked like photographs. For a moment, she braced herself for pictures of the crime scene, but as he turned them over, she saw that some, at least, were of a type much more familiar – surveillance prints.
He took a ball of Blu-tack from his jacket pocket. First, in the centre of the wall, he put up the picture of Alice. Julia experienced no emotional response and understood that it was because of the professional context in which Professor Malcolm had placed it. This was like her work: surveillance prints and the psychological study of people she had not yet met.
For now, Alice was a stranger.
It occurred to her that in fact this was what she had been seeking all along: the placement of everything that was personally important in a professional situation with which she felt at ease and over which she could exert control.
Above the little girl, he put a photograph of Sarah. Julia recognized it as one that had been used on posters printed at the time, calling for anyone who had seen this woman walking with her daughter in the minutes before the murders to come forward.
‘First, these two,’ he said. He looked at them for a few moments. ‘Sarah is very attractive. Provocative.’
Julia studied the knowing smile, the casual turn at the corner of the mouth and the way it emphasized the curve of her cheeks. With her long, jet-black hair, Sarah reminded her in this picture of Ali McGraw in Love Story.
‘I never met Sarah,’ he said, ‘but I can see she is sexy. Her smile is knowing, ironic, amused.’ He turned to her. ‘Was she fully aware of her beauty and the effect she had on men, or was there a naïvety and innocence that does not come across in this photograph?’
Julia shook her head. ‘No, your first analysis was correct. She knew exactly what effect she had on men and enjoyed it.’
He looked at the picture some more. ‘She has here, to me,’ he went on, ‘the kind of quality that Marilyn Monroe exudes in photographs. A you-can-fuck-me aura, except that with Sarah it seems more calculated and amused, less unconscious and innocent.’
‘I doubt Marilyn was as innocent as she appeared, but I never met her. With Sarah, you certainly did feel it was calculated.’
‘At least you did.’
He was looking at her. She did not comprehend the point he was trying to make.
Professor Malcolm lifted up a crudely drawn map of the common and the village and placed it next to the pictures of Sarah and Alice. Then he put the rest of the photographs in a circle. ‘People who knew Sarah well, or had the most to do with her,’ he explained.
Julia looked at the images, but said nothing.
Professor Malcolm took a pencil from his pocket and pointed to where a cross had been marked on the map of the common. ‘Scene of crime,’ he said. He traced his finger back. ‘At the time the crime was being committed, we know that three people were on the common. You …’ he marked another cross ‘… walking down from the village green. An old woman here …’ he marked a third cross at the far end, near where the disused well was located ‘… who said that, at about the time or shortly after the murder was committed, she saw a man in a black leather jacket with long hair hurrying past her. She claimed he looked agitated.’
Professor Malcolm turned to face her. ‘Locating this man took up most of the investigating team’s energy. We never did find him.’
‘I remember the photo-fit picture.’
‘You read the newspapers, of course.’
She hesitated. ‘Yes. Some of the time.’
‘We can rule him out. This was not,’ he said, ‘a crime committed by a violent stranger.’ He turned back to face the map, the pencil still in his hand. ‘Of course, the common could, in theory, be the kind of fantasy theatre a violent stranger might find attractive. Sarah could have been, in theory, the type of woman such a man would have chosen – beautiful, provocative, the kind he could never hope to snare for a consensual sexual act. However, too many things do not add up.
‘One, if this is the theatre you have chosen for the enaction of a violent fantasy, you do not pick this spot here.’ He pointed to the first cross. ‘It is too close to the entrance to the common. It is on the major path and it is a Sunday, which, he will know, is the most popular day for walking here. There are always people passing and this spot is too risky.’
‘Part of the appeal.’
‘He doesn’t want those sort of risks. Also, he stabs her only once. Once only.’
Professor Malcolm looked at her. The faint trace of his East European accent had come through again, but she knew exactly what he meant. ‘No sign at all of any kind of frenzy,’ he said. ‘No violent, sexually charged frenzy.’
‘Aren’t you relying too much on established patterns of cri
me? It could be that there is something unusual here we haven’t considered.’
‘No.’ He was ignoring her. ‘I don’t believe so. And third, if his fantasy is the woman and he is a stranger, then why bother about the little girl? She has run, but she’s too young to identify him convincingly. Chasing her magnifies the risks enormously.’
Julia thought about this. ‘So, someone who knew them both well?’ she asked. ‘That’s your point. That the murderer was not a stranger at all.’
‘Yes.’ He pointed again to the cross by the well. ‘Whatever the man in the leather jacket leaving the common was doing, it had nothing to do with the murders.’ He shrugged. ‘Perhaps the old woman felt threatened by his appearance and her description of his face merely reflected her own agitation. I’ve no idea. It certainly messed up the investigation.’
Julia looked at the other photographs. She knew enough about surveillance to see clearly that they had been taken from a distance, probably from the ridge above the Rose and Crown, on a long lens. Almost all the people pictured had been caught entering or leaving their homes.
‘Why these photographs?’ she asked, pointing to them.
‘Solely for my purposes,’ he said. ‘I asked for them. Wanted to keep them in the sight line.’
He had put up the pictures roughly in the shape of a clock. Alan Ford was at the top. He wore a raincoat and had been photographed getting into the blue Mercedes that had been his car at the time of the murders. Or mostly Sarah’s car. Julia noticed how little he had changed, though the angle of the lens here made his round face look fat and mean, which in her experience it never had been.
‘Surveillance pictures,’ she said, ‘make everyone look like a criminal.’
‘Not if you concentrate on their minds. The pictures are just to help me get my bearings.’
Professor Malcolm pointed to Alan’s photograph, then leant towards the map. ‘Alan is at home at the time the crime is committed. He did not accompany Sarah and Alice to church that morning and, once the service is finished, they go straight to the common, rather than coming home. We’ll come to the inexplicable aspects of that in a second. Your mother provides Alan’s alibi. She was the last to leave church and she saw him at home as she passed.’
He marked a cross over the Ford house to indicate Alan’s whereabouts, then pointed to the next picture in the circle, which was of her father, her mother and herself, all, again, leaving the house in long coats. Julia thought that these pictures had probably been taken on the day of Sarah’s funeral and Alice’s memorial service. ‘Your father leaves the church first with you,’ Professor Malcolm went on. ‘Your mother stays behind to talk to the vicar. You arrive home. You go upstairs to your room. You see your father go out into the garden. A few minutes later, you come down and cannot find him. Where is he? You walk down across the field to the entrance to the common, cutting around the back of the Ford property and emerging through a gap in the hedge just by the stile at the entrance to the common. You’re looking for your father and you say later you think he’s just taken Socrates for a walk.’ Professor Malcolm looked at her. ‘Why did you choose that moment to go looking for your father?’
Julia looked at her feet. ‘I don’t think it’s fair if this becomes about me,’ she said.
Professor Malcolm looked at the photographs on the wall. ‘All right. You think your father has taken Socrates for a walk and … you’re just trying to catch him up, perhaps, but you’re mistaken. In the meantime – and this is all in the matter of a few minutes – your mother has walked home from church down Woodpecker Lane, has seen Alan through the window and come into the drive of your house, where, she says, your father was working on the flower-bed by the hedge.’ He marked a cross over her home. ‘So your mother, your father are at home. You’ve gone to the common.’ He looked at her again to see if she wished to amend any of the details. ‘That’s all in the statements we have. Next, the de la Rues, the village landowners. She, uptight but generous. He, patrician, gentlemanly and frayed around the edges. Too fond of whisky and young girls. They go home after your parents and remain there. They are each other’s alibi. No corroboration.’ He turned to her. ‘No corroboration for any of you.’
‘You’ve a good memory,’ she said, but he ignored her.
‘Pascoe. At home all the time, never goes to church, has no alibi at all. His mother is away visiting his sister.’
Julia looked at the picture of Pascoe. He was wearing a dirty grey anorak and had been caught rapidly turning his head, as if aware he was being photographed. He was tall, but he slouched, his shoulders hunched and his hands in his pockets. He looked every inch a child-molester.
‘At the top of the hill, close to the neck of the valley, the Rouses. They come home from church with their two children. Adrian Rouse turns round inside the house and comes out again to walk his dog. He says that as he passes the pub he sees Pascoe entering his house in an agitated state. That is the crucial evidence, alongside the confession. And lastly Michael Haydoch, included because he was a known friend of Sarah. Lives in East Welham. No alibi.’
Julia looked at the picture of the thin, dark man with wavy hair and thick eyebrows. His picture was more tightly framed than the others and he walked with an arrogant swagger, his hands in his pockets. He was wearing a raincoat, jeans and a white T-shirt. This picture was of a better quality than the others and the image, but for the scruffiness of his clothes, would not have seemed out of place in a magazine.
He turned to her. ‘Anyone else you can think of?’
‘All the people you’ve chosen are from the regiment. Except de la Rue.’
‘Yes. But their density is no surprise, given the proximity of the base. And de la Rue was also once a soldier, as you know, albeit in a different regiment. The Grenadier Guards, I think.’
This was true and seemed a remarkable fact to recall. She would have thought him guilty of prior research if she had not seen him digging out this box in the attic.
Professor Malcolm pulled over the box. ‘All right, you begin at this end. We’ll pass in the middle, then we’ll talk when we’ve finished.’
She hesitated.
He made no move to coax her.
The first item at her end of the box was a brown envelope. She opened it and pulled out a bundle of A4-size black and white photographs.
They were all of the crime scene. One or two looked as if they might have been taken from a great height, but this was probably illusory. Some were from a distance, some close, so as to give, when taken together, the exact detail on the ground and a sense of context. The ones shot from above showed the victim at her most exposed, her right leg twisted awkwardly backwards and her hair trailing into the edge of the stream. The close-ups showed that Sarah’s mouth was open, her face pale. They were almost pornographic, as if a moment of intimacy had been captured without her approval.
Julia put them all down on the desk. Professor Malcolm was studying her face. ‘You must have seen the dead often,’ he said.
Julia shook her head. ‘I try not to make a habit of seeing it. Anyway, that’s not the point. That’s a different kind of crime.’
‘It’s remarkable you can look at them.’
Julia pulled out the next envelope. This was the pathologist’s report and was neatly typed. She began on the first page, but kept on reaching the end without any sense of what it was that she was reading.
‘It’s funny,’ he said. ‘A few paragraphs and everything comes back.’ He stood and she noticed how his shoulders hunched when he was thinking.
He leant back against the radiator next to the alcove. ‘Detectives I most respect work on what I would loosely call the concentric-circle model.’
She nodded for him to continue. He was clearly being careful not to patronize her; indeed, she could see that he was leading her, though to what end, she was less able to discern.
‘As you know, it means that in a crime such as this we start with the victim – victims in this case,
except that I think we’ve established it is the woman not the child we need to focus on. We go back to the woman’s life and find out as much as we possibly can about it. Whom did she like? Whom did she hate? Whom did she see? Was she in financial trouble, having an affair? More than one affair? This research is an area of work with which I should have thought you will be familiar and comfortable.’ He paused again. ‘What did you think when Pascoe confessed to the murders? After all, your father died saving his life.’
Julia failed again to discern what he was driving at. ‘My mother said real bravery was being able to concentrate on the fact that you were saving a life.’
He was still looking at her, as if expecting more. ‘Did you ever go to the trial?’ he asked. ‘Did you see anyone you knew there?’
She nodded again, slowly, sticking out her bottom lip in a gesture of concentration. ‘I saw Adrian Rouse. He was sitting close to the back. I saw Pascoe in the dock as well, but when I thought about it later, I mean now, recently, when I saw him this morning, I could see that I had never made the mental leap to regarding him as a criminal.’
All this time, Professor Malcolm had been holding a sheet of paper with the front page turned over and he now rearranged it and handed it to her. She lifted the top sheet and saw Robert Pascoe’s name and signature at the bottom. ‘This is the statement they altered?’ she asked.
‘It’s his confession,’ Professor Malcolm said. ‘Bullied out of him after his return from the war.’
He waited while she read. ‘Notice anything?’
Julia was trying to concentrate on Pascoe’s account of his ‘obsession’ with Sarah.
‘It’s hardly convincing, is it?’ he went on. ‘In fact, it’s pathetic when you bother to think about it. The detectives’ theory, once they’d shoved myself and Barnaby aside, was that he was after the little girl, but that is mentioned as an afterthought in the confession. The first part, to me, has the ring of truth. Perhaps Pascoe did have an obsession with Sarah, as he says, perhaps he had been following her, but when we get down to his admission that he killed them both and that he can no longer remember where he buried Alice’s body … I mean, if the police were able to get a confession out of him, then they were surely able to “persuade” him to reveal what he’d done with the little girl’s body.’