‘You can’t get so involved,’ he said putting a tentative arm around her shoulder.
‘I wasn’t involved,’ she said. ‘I just felt sorry for Connie and the kids. What she wanted to do seemed sensible to me. They needed to get away for a bit.’ Barnard nodded, though she could see even in the dim light that he was no longer convinced what they had done was wise.
‘There’s more bad news from Southend,’ he said. ‘Some DS called Mason called me. Did you meet him?’ Kate nodded.
‘He was marginally better than the DCI,’ she said grudgingly. ‘So what’s happened now?’
‘They’ve found Luke’s coat out on the mudflats near where his father was found dead. And they are looking at his mother and his uncle very hard. They reckon they must be involved in some way. If they arrest them, they’ll take the other children into care for their own safety.’
‘Oh, no!’ Kate said. Barnard sighed.
‘Stay here tonight if that’s what you want to do. Take some time out. I’ll call you in the morning, if that’s OK.’ Kate gave him a half-hearted hug and turned away while Barnard got back into his car and watched her go up the steps and into the house.
‘Hell and damnation!’ he said to himself as he revved the engine and pulled away from the kerb, anxiety tearing his insides to shreds. ‘Don’t do this, Katie. Please.’
Kate did not wait for Barnard to call her the next morning. She rang him at eight o’clock, knowing he would not yet have set off for work. The phone rang for a long time before he picked up, and she guessed from his slurred voice that she had wakened him and that he had drowned his sorrows the night before.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked tentatively.
‘What do you think? Are you coming home?’
She hesitated for a moment before answering, not sure how much to tell him about what she planned to do.
‘I’ll have finished this Canvey Island assignment by the end of tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Then I’m going to ask Ken for a few days off. I’ll tell him I need to go home to Liverpool for a christening or something.’
‘And what are you really going to do?’ Barnard asked. Kate could hear the growing anxiety in his voice as he recognized a lie when he heard it.
‘I want to go back to Southend to check out that Connie Flanagan is all right and she’s got her children back.’
‘That’s crazy, Kate,’ Barnard said. ‘There’s nothing you can do down there, and if DCI Baker trips over you he’ll be even more furious. You really can’t interfere in a murder investigation. You’ll end up in a cell. It sounds as if you’ve already annoyed him big time.’
‘Well, I didn’t let him intimidate me, if that’s what you mean. But I feel responsible for Connie. She can’t possibly have killed her husband and dumped him in a bog, and if it wasn’t for your stupid driving they’d never have found her in Clacton. I don’t think she’s safe in Southend, I don’t want her to lose her children, and I don’t like that uncle of hers. I wouldn’t trust him an inch if push came to shove.’
‘You’re not being very rational, Kate,’ Barnard said and she could hear the weariness in his tone.
‘Did you hit the bottle last night?’ she asked.
‘What do you think?’ The silence between them lengthened.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But I really want to do this. And I don’t think you should be involved. I’ll stay here with Tess for a few days and then you’re in the clear. Let’s talk next Monday.’ The silence at the other end of the line deepened and Kate thought for a moment he had hung up.
‘I love you Kate,’ he said eventually. ‘I don’t think I can live without you.’ She took a deep breath at a declaration she never thought she would hear and sat down, her heart thumping.
‘I’ll think about that,’ she said eventually. ‘Let’s talk at the weekend.’ And feeling slightly dizzy, she hung up.
ELEVEN
Kate finished her assignment on autopilot and asked for three days off to go to Liverpool to see her family. That, she was sure, would give her enough time to find out what was happening to Connie and her children. She knew that Harry was right, what she was planning to do was not rational. The woman was a complete stranger and the police might be right to suspect she was involved in her husband’s murder. Or if not her directly, then her overbearing and slightly menacing uncle. But she did not believe Connie was a killer, and Luke was still missing. After seeing the Essex police at first hand, she did not believe that they were likely to be doing anything very energetic to find the boy even now. She guessed that if at first they had thought his father had taken him away, they would now think that the child had probably died with him in the mud of the estuary and his body would never be located. What disappeared into the sands, she thought, more often than not stayed disappeared and Connie must be distraught if she thought Luke had been swallowed up by the mud.
The next day dawned dark and dismal and Kate rolled over in her unaccustomed and too narrow bed, taking a moment to realize from the traffic noise outside that the bed was her own not Barnard’s. As she came round, her decisions of the day before crowded in on her and she became increasingly reluctant to move. She lay for a moment wondering if the course she had decided to take was remotely sensible, but convincing herself in the end that it was something she had to do. She got out of bed and made herself a cup of instant coffee in the tiny kitchen and concluded that it was a pale imitation of the intense Italian brew she had got used to with Barnard. She smiled slightly. Maybe she would miss Harry’s coffee more than she missed the man himself. Of Tess there was no sign and she assumed that her friend was sleeping in after a hard week at school.
An hour later she was back on a Southend train, heading through a misty morning to Essex. In the summer the train would no doubt be crowded with day-trippers, but on a bleak weekday the train carried few passengers as far as Southend and on a dank morning like this there was little to look at, with the temperature barely above freezing and banks of mist blotting out anything but brief glimpses of the docks, close to the stations where the train stopped briefly, and the ever present river winding its course to the sea. The occasional mournful wail of fog horns and sharp blasts of ships negotiating their way to and from the Port of London reminded her of home. Back home, a favourite – and free – outing had been a trip to the Pier Head to watch the ships on the Mersey, even if there had not been enough in the kitty to take the ferry across to the other side.
Benfleet station was at least recognizable through the murk, but Canvey Island itself, across the bridge, was barely visible through what had now turned into thickening fog. She gathered her belongings together and prepared to get off at Southend, still unsure of the best course to follow. As she came out of the station she took a deep breath, but instead of the salty tang of the sea all she could detect in the thick damp air was a slight whiff of fish and chips.
She slowly made her way through the ambling shoppers towards the pier, which looked deserted, visibility reducing it to little more than a short narrow track heading into a grey blanket where sea, sky and sands dissolved into each other. Below the trailing clouds of fog, it was difficult to see across the fairground and almost impossible to pick out the showmen’s caravans parked close to the pier. She took a deep breath to bolster her courage and set off to where Connie Flanagan’s uncle was supposed to be looking after her welfare. But she did not get as far as the caravans before a group of men loomed out of the semi-darkness and she recognized Jasper Dowd in the lead.
‘Who the hell—’ he began. ‘Oh, it’s you, is it? What are you doing here again?’
‘I was in Southend and wondered how Connie was getting on. Is she all right?’
‘If you call being harassed by the police all right. They wanted her back at the police station again this morning. She spent half the day there on Thursday, so I don’t know what the hell more they can ask her.’
‘Have they found Luke?’ Kate asked.
‘No, they
haven’t. I reckon they think he’s buried out in the sands like his father. They should be looking for his father’s dodgy friends, not making his mother’s life a misery.’
Dowd glanced at his companions and shrugged.
‘Anyway, we’ve got work to do. We were hoping to open up this afternoon, but in this weather I wonder if it’s worth the effort.’
Kate gazed at the tall showman and as he crowded in on her realized he was not giving her any option but to return the way she had come. She spun on her heel and was aware of the men following her off the fairground and watching as she headed back into the town centre. That, she thought, had been a fruitless call and although she did not entirely believe what Dowd had told her she could think of no way of penetrating the barrier that they seemed to have erected between her and Connie Flanagan.
Kate stopped for a coffee in a small café close to the station, hot and steamy and almost empty on a foggy morning, and considered her next move. It was obvious that Jasper Dowd was determined that she should not talk to Connie again if he could help it and she wondered why. She also wondered whether he was lying about Connie being at the police station. That was one place where she certainly would not be able to get hold of her, so it could be a very convenient lie. She drained the indeterminate brown liquid in her cup and decided to try to find out.
But when she got to the police station she hesitated on the opposite side of the road, reluctant to go inside the bleak building again in case she should bump into DCI Jack Baker or even the slightly less aggressive DS Mason for a second time. That, she thought, might be more than she could stand and she began to think that this excursion on her own was a lost cause. She should have listened to Harry. But as she hesitated, she noticed a woman in a formal suit and carrying a briefcase coming out of the main entrance. She could, Kate guessed, be a detective, although she knew that would be unusual. Barnard had more than once told her that very few women succeeded in joining CID. Alternatively she might be a lawyer, or even a social worker, who had some contact with Connie.
She crossed the road and waited for her to come down the steps then tried to catch her eye. The woman, who looked only slightly older than Kate herself, glanced at her curiously. She was as blonde as Kate was dark and smartly turned out in a blue suit over a red shirt.
‘Are you a cop?’ Kate asked tentatively, putting herself directly in the path of the woman so that she had no choice but to stop.
‘God no!’ the woman laughed. ‘I’m a solicitor. But they won’t eat you, you know, the cops,’ she offered with a sympathetic smile.
‘I’m not so sure about that,’ Kate said with feeling. The woman looked at her for a moment.
‘Do you need help?’ she asked. ‘I’m Janet Driscoll. I spend quite a lot of my time here at the nick for my sins. Or other people’s.’
‘It’s not for me,’ Kate said quickly. ‘I had a session in there a couple of days ago. And I’m not at all sure DCI Baker wouldn’t swallow me whole if he got the chance. But I’m looking for someone else this time.’
‘You didn’t get on?’ the solicitor asked. ‘He doesn’t react well to what he considers uppity girls and you look as if you’re that just as much as I am.’
But although she smiled, her smile did not reach her eyes. ‘So who are you looking for?’ she asked and looked even more concerned when Kate told her.
‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Now you’ve put me in a difficult position. I’ve just been talking to Connie Flanagan as it happens. I was the lawyer on call this weekend and she’s being questioned under caution about her husband’s death. But of course I’m not allowed to tell you anything more than that about a case I’m involved in.’ Kate’s face must have revealed her disappointment because Janet took her arm. ‘But that’s not to say that you can’t tell me about your connection to Connie and anything you know about what’s been going on in her life recently. Any – or all – of that I can listen to as it may help my client, and I’d certainly not be breaking any rules by admitting that she needs some help right now. Come on, let’s have a coffee and a chat.’
Janet led the way to a coffee bar in a side street, where Kate was relieved to see they made Italian-style coffee. Harry Barnard had certainly done a good job on her taste buds if nothing else, she thought as the lawyer ordered two espressos.
‘So,’ Janet said thoughtfully as they sipped their coffee and she pulled a notebook and pen out of her briefcase. ‘You don’t look as if you work at the funfair. How do you come to know Connie Flanagan? And even more important to her at the moment, have you any idea where her son Luke is?’ She listened carefully as Kate went through her contacts with Connie right up to the moment she and Barnard dropped her and the two younger children at her aunt’s in Clacton.
‘I shouldn’t think DCI Jack Baker appreciated that intervention,’ she said. ‘Especially as your boyfriend’s a cop with the Met.’
‘He didn’t appreciate it,’ Kate said feelingly. ‘Far from it. He dragged me all the way back to Southend to bully me into telling him essentially what I’ve just told you. And my boyfriend’s not very popular with his boss in London, either.’
‘There’s no love lost between different police forces,’ Janet said. ‘And the country cousins out here especially hate the Met. So why are you back in Southend today?’
‘I haven’t seen or heard from Connie since we left her in Clacton and I wondered if she and the children were OK. I had to come in person. There’s no way I can ring the nick here and ask about them, is there?’
‘You’d get short shrift, I think,’ Janet agreed.
‘Just like I did from her uncle when I went to the fairground to see if she was there. He practically ran me off the place.’
‘Well, that’s worth knowing. I was going to tackle Jasper Dowd myself. I wondered why he hadn’t been to the nick to see why they’re keeping Connie so long.’
‘I don’t believe Connie could have killed her husband. It’s nonsense,’ Kate said fiercely. ‘How could she have pushed him into the quicksands? She’s only a slip of a thing.’
‘I can’t comment on that. But there are different sorts of involvement in crime,’ Janet said, her expression neutral. ‘I can’t discuss what’s going on in there. But I promise you I’ll do the best I can for her. And what you’ve told me about the background will help. If the worst came to the worst, I might need you as a witness at a trial. But that’s a long way off and hopefully it won’t happen at all if I do my job properly. Now I have to go and talk to her family on the fairground, however unhelpful they are. If I were you, I’d go back to London. If you give me your phone number, I’ll call you tomorrow to let you know what’s happened. They’re not allowed to question her indefinitely. They have to either charge her with something or let her go, and I’ll do my best to make sure she’s out of there by then.’
Janet Driscoll hurried off and left Kate sitting savouring the dregs of her coffee, unsure what to do next. In the end she decided that, having come this far, there was at least one more avenue of inquiry she could follow. She went back to the station and took the train to Benfleet, determined to comb Canvey Island and try to find the former detective Les Greenwood. With all that had happened since she and Barnard met him in London he would surely be more ready to help find young Luke Flanagan, if not his father’s killer.
Tentatively Kate opened the door of the Red Cow and scanned the lunchtime crowd. In one corner of the lounge bar she spotted two of the regulars she had met before – Tom, who had given her a tour of the island, and Ken, who had lost his son in the flood. She wriggled her way through the busy lounge to their table and smiled at both of them.
‘You again?’ Tom said, looking slightly surprised. ‘You’ll be settling down here if you keep this up.’
‘I’m only passing through this time,’ Kate said. ‘I’m looking for someone in particular. Do you happen to know someone called Les Greenwood? He said he lived on Canvey but I can’t find him in the phone book.’ Neither o
f the men responded immediately, but they both glanced at each other and then round the bar.
‘It’s unusual for Les Greenwood not to be here by now,’ Tom said reluctantly.
‘Used to be a copper,’ Ken added. ‘Spends a lot of time in here now he’s retired.’
‘Sounds like the man I’m looking for,’ Kate said quietly. ‘He can certainly knock it back.’
‘Why do you want to talk to him? He didn’t move to the island until long after the flood. He was a detective in Southend, I think, though I’ve never heard him talk about that very much. In fact I’ve never heard him talk about anything very much. Keeps himself to himself does Les, even when he’s plastered.’ That sounded like the Les Greenwood she and Barnard had met in an obscure City of London pub and she wondered, as they had then, quite why an ex-cop should have been quite so reluctant to be open with Barnard.
‘Do either of you know where he lives?’ she asked, but neither of the men answered immediately until Tom nodded towards the open door, through which a familiar figure was entering the pub.
‘There he is, coming in,’ Tom whispered. ‘But for God’s sake don’t rile him. He’s a bad-tempered beggar at the best of times, and if you catch him when he’s seriously thirsty he’ll snap your head off.’
‘Why don’t you have a drink with us for a while and wait until Greenwood’s had a few and mellowed out a bit? That’s what I’d do. Safer that way.’ Ken winked at her. ‘What can I get you, sweetheart?’
Glancing cautiously at Greenwood, who was scowling heavily as he settled into a seat near the bar, Kate decided that following local advice was probably the safest course and accepted the offer of a shandy. But she parried all attempts the two men made to uncover why she was so keen to talk to Greenwood – that sort of gossip would do Connie Flanagan no good at all, she thought.
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