by Joe McNally
I put the phone down feeling panicky. Lisa’s instincts had been a hundred percent sound so far. If she was right on this one too… ‘Is it OK to make a call?’ I asked.
‘Be my guest,’ said Sollis.
I phoned McCarthy, and he read the unease in my tone.
‘Eddie, what’s wrong?’ he asked.
‘You heard of a vet called Digby Craddock?’
He thought for a few seconds. ‘Name rings a bell but I can’t say I know him. Why?’
‘Lisa thinks he might be involved in all this. She says he had something to do with a dead horse in the National.’ My voice was tight, tense.
Mac murmured, ‘Craddock, Craddock, Craddock... no, can’t think.’
‘He lives somewhere in Bromyard. Find out exactly where and get the police there as fast as you can.’
‘Eddie-’
‘Listen, Mac, Lisa’s gone up there to see Craddock. The killer could be making the same trip, now do me a favour, will you? Humour me. You owe me one.’
‘Eddie, look-’
‘Do it, Mac!’ I gave him the car-phone number.
Sollis looked across at me. ‘Want me to head for Craddock’s place?’
I nodded, staring, bug-eyed, mind racing. He accelerated.
About fifty minutes later, I reckoned we were no more than a couple of miles from Craddock’s house when McCarthy rang.
‘Eddie...’
I could tell by his voice. ‘Lisa?’ I asked and held my breath.
‘Craddock...he’s dead.’
‘And Lisa?’
‘She’s not there.’
‘Thank God!’
‘Eddie, they found her handbag in Craddock’s house.’
48
There was still some heat in Craddock’s body, which lay on the cold tiles of the kitchen floor. The cops were waiting for their medical man, but a grey-haired sergeant reckoned the vet had been dead less than an hour. The corpse showed no obvious cuts or bruises or broken limbs. The note in the pocket of his pale blue shirt read: Jeremiah 17:9. No one had tried to find a Bible.
Lisa’s handbag had been discovered under the kitchen table. The worktop bore signs of a struggle: a pool of coffee spilled from a broken mug, a small bunker of sand which had burst from a shattered egg timer, jagged slivers of a shattered whiskey glass in the stainless steel sink.
I told the sergeant Lisa was my girlfriend. He said, ‘Tough break.’ He wouldn’t let us nose around. ‘Nobody touches anything until SOCO get here.’
‘Scene of Crime Officer,’ Sollis said.
Kavanagh and Miller were also on their way. The sergeant said I’d best wait until they got there. I didn’t think so.
I rang Mac from the car and updated him, then asked, ‘Have you got a Bible?’
‘Somewhere, hold on...’
I heard drawers being opened, stuff being shuffled around then he picked up the phone. I gave him the details and he mumbled quietly as he leafed through the pages. ‘Found it. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.”’
I said, ‘Mean anything to you?’
He pondered. ‘Something’s clicking with Craddock... can’t pin it down.’
‘The key word in the quote is heart. Lisa found out Craddock knew the horse had a dicky heart, but he passed it okay to run in the National. You can tell the pathologist to start the autopsy by looking at Craddock’s heart.’
Sitting in the darkness, I thought about Lisa and felt angry at her foolhardiness, then guilt at allowing her too much rope.
Worry followed, twisting maliciously in my gut, sending nasty little questions as to why he’d taken her, feeding images of brutal rape to my mind’s bulging eye, then murder. I couldn’t switch it off. The more I tried, the more vivid the show became.
Sollis tried to reassure me. ‘Maybe she escaped.’
I shook my head. ‘Her car’s still there. He’s got her all right.’
We sat in silence.
Sollis said, ‘What’s she like? Will she handle it?’
I sighed. ‘As long as she stays alive, she will.’
‘If it is Roe, he might be heading back to Hereford right now. Want to try to keep this appointment?’
I looked at him. ‘Be ten o’clock before we get there. Think this captain guy will see us?’
‘I’ll drive. You ring him.’
The captain said he’d be there. Sollis pushed the car up to eighty and made me feel better by offering the pistol to load.
Mac rang with confirmation of the rumour Lisa had heard about the dead vet.
‘No proof then?’ I asked.
‘None or he would have been struck off.’
‘How widespread was the rumour, Mac?’
‘From what I can find out, it seems not that many people had heard it. It was no big deal really, compared to some of the other stuff that goes on.’
‘Doesn’t it make you wonder how our man got hold of it, then? He’d have to be pretty heavily involved in racing to have heard it first-hand, wouldn’t he?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Unless he has a ready source of inside information.’
Mac paused then said, ‘You think somebody’s setting people up?’
‘A ready source, Mac. David Cooper. Under duress of course, but that must be why he’s holding him.’
‘You think he’s maybe torturing the boy to get it?’
‘Big possibility. Who was the vendor who knew that horse had a dicky heart?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well you’d better find out, because he might be next.’
Mac said, ‘With Mark Pelham off the hook, you maybe better face the fact that you could be next.’
‘Mac, the way I’m feeling, the sooner this bastard comes for me the better. I’m ready.’
‘Just stick close to Sollis,’ he said, then, ‘By the way, if it helps with your Victor Roe theory, the gun used to kill Gilmour and Donachy is among those on standard issue to the SAS.’
We sped on, headlights cutting through the rural dark, my anger and frustration bubbling as I tortured myself with the thought that we were probably driving in the tracks of the killer, following him, never knowing what turn-off would lead in a different direction.
At the SAS camp, two armed soldiers took away Sollis’s pistol and ammunition and escorted us to a sparsely furnished office in the basement of a darkened building. They left us alone there for about twenty minutes.
Quickly sussing we were either being watched, listened to or both, we stuck to talking about Roe and the killings.
The door opened and a soldier came in, introducing himself as Captain Gavin: early thirties, slim, quiet looking, nothing rugged or square-jawed about him. Not what I’d expected.
He listened carefully and almost silently to our story as we listed piece by piece why we suspected Roe was involved. When he’d heard us out, I asked, ‘Can you confirm that Victor Roe was part of the regiment here at one time?’
‘Yes, I can.’
‘And that he left when his wife was killed around four years ago?’
‘About six months prior to that actually.’
‘Do you know why he left?’
‘Religious grounds.’
‘Can you be more specific?’
‘He became one of those born-again people, renounced violence.’ The captain seemed contemptuous.
I said, ‘Did you know his son also died in an accident this time last year?’
‘Oh I know that,’ he said, ‘but what you gentlemen obviously don’t know is that Victor Roe killed himself three months later.’
49
Roe had been found dead in his living room, a shotgun on the floor nearby and half his head blown off. He’d left a note saying he couldn’t go on after the death of his son.
Having built up my expectations of raiding Roe’s place tonight and freeing Lisa, I felt angry and frustrated to the point of tears. After all the disappointments and wrong turning
s over the past three weeks, I was raging against fate. I couldn’t accept that we were back at the start with nothing.
I’d have bet Jack Cooper’s fifty grand reward money Roe was the killer.
We booked in at a pub offering accommodation, and ordered drinks. Sollis had beer. I sipped whiskey. I’d been ranting for a while and I was aware of Sollis watching me.
I said, ‘It could be an SAS cover-up, you know, to protect an ex-member. Maybe it wasn’t suicide. Maybe he is still running around.’
Sollis nodded, but I could see he just wanted to avoid an argument. He was happy to listen to me sounding off until all the steam had gone. He said, ‘We’ll go and see the local police in the morning, get full details. See if anything funny shows up.’
‘Thanks for humouring me, Kevin. I appreciate it.’
He looked mildly hurt. ‘I’m not! It’s worth a shot. We’re here anyway. It won’t do any harm.’
Next morning, we visited the local police station, more because we didn’t know where to turn than in any real expectation of finding something. Sollis charmed the desk sergeant into letting us see the file on Roe’s suicide. Sitting in the small interview room, we worked our way through it.
On 7th July last year, Roe had placed a shotgun under his chin and blown the front of his head off. The body hadn’t been discovered until almost a month after his death when a social worker visiting Roe to help him get over his son’s death had discovered his badly decomposed corpse in the living room. Reading the report of the officer in attendance, the first thing Sollis noted was that no swabs had been taken of Roe’s hands.
He explained: ‘In any shooting there’ll be some blow-back, some chemical discharge from the gun onto the hand holding it. It’s a simple way of proving a suicide. No trace of discharge, then somebody else pulled the trigger.’
‘Would it be standard procedure to take a swab?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘Not exactly standard, I suppose. Depends on the officer in charge.’
‘Would the swab still show something after a month?’
‘Oh yes. Would be faint, but it would be there.’
Flipping the report over, he picked up the next piece of paper, read it and passed it to me. ‘Suicide note,’ he said. ‘Probably the reason they didn’t take a swab.’
I looked at Roe’s blocky handwriting: ‘1472 days since Isobel’s death. 83 since Christopher’s. Along with my God they both await me in Heaven.’
The figures were a neat uniform height. Sollis flicked a picture across of Roe’s wasted, insect ridden, unrecognisable corpse. I gazed at it for a while then at the numbers again and I smiled.
Sollis frowned at me. I said, ‘He faked it.’
‘What?’
‘He’s still alive.’
Fifteen minutes later Sanders faxed a copy of the other notes Roe had left on his victims, as well as the one he’d sent me. We sat comparing the figures on the chapter and verse numbers with those on Roe’s ‘suicide’ note. To my eye, they matched exactly.
Sollis although not as convinced, agreed there was a very strong chance my theory was right.
To help build my case, I got the number of Roe’s social worker and rang her. She confirmed what I’d suspected, that Roe had known the exact date she was due to drop in. In the three weeks after his son’s death, she’d gone there once a week, then Roe had said that a monthly visit would be fine.
‘So what was his thinking there?’ Sollis asked.
‘To make doubly certain the body was unidentifiable...by sight anyway. First he makes sure the shotgun blows the face away, then to cover any discrepancies in build, he gives the corpse maximum time to rot, knowing it unlikely that anybody except the social worker will call at the farm for a month.’
Sollis nodded slowly, then said, ‘So who’s the dead man?’
I leaned back, comfortable with my thoughts, happy that I’d put everything together correctly. I said, ‘Who do you think? Who’d be most likely?’
Hands in pockets, Sollis shrugged. ‘A jockey? Trainer?’
‘How about Sampson, the box-driver?’
He frowned, puzzling. I said, ‘Roe’s a religious man. He has to find justification for killing. Who would he have felt justified in killing within twelve weeks of his son’s death under the wheels of a horsebox?’
The big man’s frown dissolved. He smiled.
I said, ‘The guy’s supposed to have conveniently disappeared and returned to the anonymous life of a vagrant a few days before Roe kills himself. He rings the stable in a very emotional state to say he won’t be back, which means, theoretically, nobody will be looking for him.’
‘I’m warming to it. Go on.’
I said, ‘How’d you like to bet Roe had a pistol at the poor bloke’s head as he spoke?’
The more we went over the whole thing, the more convinced I was that I was right. Sollis was on my side. Mac too, when I rang him. He decided to drive straight up.
By the time he arrived, we’d read the contents of Roe’s will. He’d asked that the animals be given free to good homes and that the farm be sold and all proceeds donated to the RSPCA. He’d added an interesting rider: ‘As a memorial to my wife and son, the farm should stand empty for a period of one year before being sold.’
I looked at my companions. ‘Guess where Mister Roe is based?’ I said.
50
The farm lay five miles north of the town. Sollis had persuaded me that we had to wait until nightfall before going in. We were on our own. Kavanagh and Miller, acting on information from Buck, were scouring the flatlands of East Anglia trying to find their new ‘chief suspect’.
Inspector Sanders was of the opinion that we hadn’t a shred of solid evidence to justify a raid on “a dead man’s house”.
British summer time had begun the previous night and I had to suffer the additional frustration of waiting an extra hour for darkness. If anything happened to Lisa between now and us going in, it would take a lot of living with.
As dusk fell, Sollis and I crouched on the crest of a small hill about five hundred yards from Roe’s farm. McCarthy had volunteered to stay with the car ‘in case we needed to make a quick getaway’.
One light showed in the farmhouse through a downstairs window. Sollis checked his gun for the tenth and final time, and darkness wasn’t quite on us when we started creeping down the hill.
Reaching the corner of the house, I peeped out across the yard. All was still and silent.
I turned to Sollis. ‘I’m going to work my way along that wall. If he’s inside the house, he won’t see me. If he’s outside, he can only be in the big barn to your left or by the gable end at the top. Can you try to cover those areas?’
‘I will. Be careful.’
‘I’m only going to take a look through the window, no heroics.’
‘Good luck.’
I slunk out, crouching, and scuttled toward the corner. Staying close to the rough sandstone wall, scrutinising doorways and the deep windows of the barn opposite, I felt my senses so keenly tuned I could have seen an atom or heard a feather land on snow.
I reached the lit window and peered in: an empty kitchen, bare ceiling bulb casting a harsh glow on the sink unit, table and chairs, dirty dishes, a toppled cereal box and various packets and tins. Glancing behind toward Sollis, I saw his silhouette against the last of the light of the evening sky. I moved on.
In the shadow of the doorway, as I reached for the handle, the door was opened from the inside. Sollis shouted, ‘Down, Eddie!’
But I stayed upright, and saved the life of David Cooper.
The boy said Roe had left two hours previously, then he led us to where Lisa lay in a bedroom. Hearing footsteps, she got to her feet looking defiant. When our eyes met she tried to smile, but her face crumpled and she slumped. I caught her before she fell.
He’d kept her tied up, using blue and yellow mountaineering ropes threaded through heavy metal rings fixed to wall-beams. Her wrists and ankles
were raw from rope-burns.
She clung to me, head on my shoulder, weeping quietly and I was perversely happy that her cool efficiency, her hundred per cent competence had finally broken down.
Sollis said, ‘Eddie, he might come home any time.’
Lisa jerked upright, her wet wide eyes staring at me. ‘You haven’t caught him?!’
Half-puzzled I shook my head. ‘No, he left two hours ago, according to David.’
Lisa looked horrified. She said, ‘He’s gone to kill Vanessa Compton!’
Vanessa Compton was an owner who lived in Richmond, Yorkshire. Roe had told Lisa that although Compton had been warned of her horse’s failing eyesight, she’d forced her trainer to run it in the National where it had fallen, breaking its neck.
When talking about it, Roe had kept quoting to Lisa, ‘If the blind lead the blind then both shall fall into the ditch.’
Sollis rang the Richmond police suggesting they might be able to trap Roe, and asked them to contact us at Hereford police station as soon as they knew anything. He and McCarthy took over control of operations, organising a welcome party of armed police at the farmhouse in case Roe aborted the Richmond attack.
Before leaving to take Lisa to the Lodge, I reminded young Cooper to call his mother and father. He nodded, looking a bit perplexed by everything. He told me he’d found Roe waiting in the back seat of his car the day he set off for London and his mother’s party.
Roe soon realized he had the wrong D. Cooper, but couldn’t let him go and kept him locked in the basement below a heavy trap door. The night we turned up was the first night the kid had tried to open the trapdoor, and succeeded only to narrowly avoid having his head blown off by Sollis.
51
Roe never appeared in Yorkshire, nor did he return to his farm. That worried Lisa enough to talk me into moving out of the Lodge again. Roe had told her how frustrated he was that he’d failed to trace me and keep to his strict chronological killing order.
He’d known too that I’d been trying to track him down, though Lisa couldn’t say how he’d got that information or how he’d learned about the rumours surrounding Digby Craddock and Vanessa Compton.