‘You mean they moved house?’
‘David took Melissa on holiday – it was August, you know. He came one morning to let us know. We used to keep an eye on their house when they went away and vice versa. We had each other’s keys, in case of emergency.’
‘Did he say where they were going?’
‘I have an impression it was Devon or Dorset or something like that. For three weeks, to give Melissa a change of scene before she went back to school. But in fact they never came back. The next thing we knew, there was a “for sale” notice outside.’
‘Had he mentioned to you that he was thinking of moving?’
‘No, not at all. I suppose it was a sudden decision.’
‘So you were surprised?’
‘We were a little hurt that he didn’t bother to say goodbye – not so much as a note through the post. But of course they were only neighbours, not really friends. Perhaps once he got away from it, he realized the house held only sad memories for him.’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Did you ever see him again, or Melissa?’
‘No. I don’t know if he came back in the time before the house was sold, but if he did, I didn’t see him.’ She looked at him, waiting for enlightenment. ‘Are you going to tell me what all this is about?’
‘It’s about the little girl who went missing, Amanda Knight. We’d like to talk to Melissa, but we don’t know where she is. We hoped you might have some more information about the Vickerys that would help us find her.’
‘I’m sorry. I don’t know where they went,’ Mrs Clavering said. ‘I could have told you that from the beginning,’ she added, a trifle impatiently.
‘Anything you can tell us about them may be helpful.’
‘I can’t imagine how.’
Atherton ducked that one. ‘Do you know if they had any relatives – the Vickerys? Brothers or sisters, uncles or aunts?’ She shook her head. ‘David, for instance – did he ever talk about a brother? Please think for a moment. It might be important.’
‘You hope to trace Melissa that way?’ She thought, evidently quite thoroughly. ‘They had visitors,’ she said musingly, ‘just like any other couple, but whether they were friends or relatives I couldn’t say. I’m trying to think – did Caroline ever mention …? I talked to her more than him.’ She frowned with effort. ‘Yes, we did once have a conversation about how brilliant David was – that was a frequent topic with her – and she said that he came from a high-flying family. She said, “They’ve both done terribly well for themselves, him and his brother.” Something like that.’
‘Did she mention the brother’s name?’
‘I don’t remember. I don’t think so. Perhaps if I’d been more interested I’d have asked, but her conversation was not very stimulating. She was such a pallid creature. One tended to smile and nod and think of other things.’
‘She didn’t mention what the brother did?’
‘Not that I remember. You must understand, it was a long time ago, and I didn’t pay that much attention.’
‘Well, if you do remember anything else, however trivial it may seem to you, please let me know,’ Atherton said, producing his card. ‘It isn’t always apparent at the time, but it could mean something in the whole pattern of things.’
‘Like a piece of a jigsaw,’ she said with a smile. ‘You can’t tell it’s a nose until you put it into place.’
He smiled back. ‘Exactly. So please, anything at all.’
She rose to see him out, and gave a gracious bow of the head. ‘You may be sure I will.’
‘What do you want?’ Shannon demanded, with more irritation than fear, though there was certainly a wariness at the back of it.
Hart was taking care to keep between her and the door. Shannon was home, and didn’t look like scarpering, but it didn’t hurt to be vigilant. It was a tiny place, typical rental, a bed-sitting- room-kitchen with a door to one side presumably leading to the bathroom – or more likely shower-room. It had cheap beige carpet and was meagrely furnished from IKEA, but it was clean and warm, and Hart could guess how much it meant to Shannon as a place of her own.
‘Like I said, I just wanted to find out if you’re all right,’ Hart said.
‘Will be, if you’ll just leave me alone,’ Shannon said crossly. ‘New start, remember? Make a fresh start, you said, forget about all that other stuff. Well, I’m trying to, all right?’
‘I know. The Nefertiti Beauty School,’ said Hart.
‘Academy,’ Shannon corrected.
‘And this flat. Very nice. Who was it said that, about making a fresh start? It wasn’t me.’
Shannon rolled her eyes. ‘You lot,’ she said, as though it was not worth correcting.
Hart smiled kindly. ‘Ah, well, you see, there’s lots and then there’s lots. There’s us, at Shepherd’s Bush, who got you out of the hands of the bad men and did our best to get them put away. And then there’s other lots, high-ups, who don’t necessarily talk to us, or tell us what’s going on.’
‘I dunno what you’re talking about.’
‘I didn’t tell you to make a fresh start. Not without clearing up old business first. But now I hear you’ve withdrawn your testimony. Is that right, babe? You not gonna help us take them bastards down?’
Shannon didn’t answer at once. She studied Hart with some apprehension. ‘Who sent you?’ she asked at last.
‘Nobody sent me. I sent meself.’
‘Bollocks!’
‘S’trufe. I told you, this is not official.’
‘How did you find me?’
‘Intuition. And a little help from your friends. Why? Are you in hiding?’
‘No, but they said …’ She stopped herself, warily.
‘What? Said what?’
‘Not to talk about it to anyone.’
‘You can talk to me. I’m on your side.’ She glanced around. ‘Nice place you’ve got here. Small, but nice. I know what places cost, even gaffs this small. And that course you’re doing – got to pay for that, haven’t you?’
‘Once I’m qualified, I’ll make a really good living.’
‘Yeah, maybe, but you got to pay first. Earn later. Where’d you get the dosh from, Shannon?’
‘My sister,’ she said, not quite quickly enough.
Hart shook her head. ‘No, you didn’t. Try again. Your auntie, maybe? Auntie Hallie?’
‘Yeah, that’s what I meant. Auntie give it me.’
‘No, she didn’t. She don’t even know where you went. I talked to both of ’em. Don’t lie to me, babe, cos I’m one step ahead of you all the way.’
‘Oh, leave me alone!’ Shannon cried, half angry, half alarmed. ‘I’m doing all right now, and you’re gonna spoil it all!’
‘Just talk to me. Why did you withdraw your testimony?’
‘I wasn’t sure any more. I dunno what I saw.’
‘You saw Kaylee being thrown off the roof,’ Hart said brutally.
‘I never!’
‘You told me you did. And I believed you.’
Shannon looked down, twisting her hands together miserably. ‘You don’t know what it’s like. They keep asking the same thing over and over. They keep talking at you and talking at you till you can’t remember what you saw and what you didn’t. They tell you that’s not what you said last time, and you can’t remember what you did say, and in the end you just – don’t – know – any more.’
‘But you do know, really,’ Hart said gently.
‘I don’t!’ Shannon looked up in desperation. ‘Look, I’d been drinking. I’d been doing charlie. I’d had a couple of E’s. I was out of my fucking head, if you want to know. I didn’t know if it was Christmas or last week. I prob’ly couldn’t’ve told you my own name. I was out of it. And Kaylee was never even there that night.’
‘Is that what they told you?’
‘They proved it. She was out some place in the country with a boyfriend. She got run over. She was never there!’
; Hart felt a deep sadness come over her for this girl, caught in the middle of things. And for the first time, a tremor of doubt. ‘When you told us about Kaylee being chucked over the roof, you were pretty sure about it,’ she said quietly.
‘I made it up,’ Shannon said. She withstood Hart’s steady gaze remarkably well.
‘Where’d you get the money for all this?’ Hart asked next.
The gaze wavered. ‘They were really nice to me. Nobody’s ever been nice to me like that before, not, like, you know, proper people. They said they didn’t blame me. They could’ve sent me to prison for false witness or something, but they said it wasn’t my fault, I’d got caught up in the drugs and everything, and they was gonna give me a second chance. To go away and make a fresh start. So I went to Auntie’s, but I knew I didn’t want to be a waitress. I knew what I wanted to do. And when the money come, I done it.’
‘Become a beautician,’ said Hart. ‘It was you and Kaylee’s dream.’
‘Yeah.’
‘But Kaylee’s dead.’
‘I know.’ A tear squeezed out, and Shannon’s lip trembled. ‘I can’t help her. But if you make trouble, they’ll take the money back and I’ll be fucked,’ she said miserably. ‘I don’t wanna go back to the way I was. I wanna have a good life.’
‘Babe,’ said Hart with infinite gentleness, ‘I don’t wanna make trouble. I want you to have your fresh start. Good for you, girl! All I ever wanted was justice for Kaylee. I swear on my mother’s grave you won’t get in trouble, but just tell me the truth, so I know. Just so I know, all right? Did you see Kaylee thrown off the roof?’
‘I don’t know!’ Shannon wailed. ‘I was out of my head that night, I don’t remember. It’s all just a big blur.’
‘Think about it, girl. Just think.’
‘I can’t think any more,’ Shannon said wearily. ‘I done thinking. I don’t remember nothing about that night, and that’s the truth.’
‘D’you swear to me? Mother’s grave?’
‘I never saw nothing. Mother’s grave. I made it up.’
SIXTEEN
How do you Solve a Problem Like Diarrhoea?
The merry-go-round of English weather delivered a mild wet day on Tuesday, with a sky like damp towels. Atherton had brought in a whole box of Krispy Kremes, to prime the morning motor. ‘Including two plain ones for you, guv,’ he told Slider as he came out to join the throng. Slider didn’t like things on or in them. He thought pink icing and sprinkles was a terrible thing to do to a self-respecting doughnut, like putting clothes on a dog. A doughnut, he said, had a natural dignity which should never be violated.
Coffee and tea went round with the reports from the previous day.
‘Don’t you find that provocative?’ Atherton prompted, when he’d finished with Mrs Clavering’s evidence. ‘Vickery selling the house so suddenly, like that?’
‘What, are you thinking he had something to do with it, now?’ Swilley objected. ‘Why him? Why not the Pope or President Obama?’
‘The Pope’s name’s not Vickery,’ McLaren growled through custard filling, but Swilley silenced him with a look.
‘It’s not just the coincidence of the name,’ Atherton said. ‘Look, if he went away for three weeks, and school usually starts around the seventh of September, that brings it back to around the 18th of August, doesn’t it? The date Amanda went missing.’
‘That’s the latest they could go. But Mrs Clavering didn’t know the date. You don’t know they didn’t go earlier than that,’ said Gascoyne, reasonably.
‘And you don’t know he was even meaning for her to go back to school the first day,’ said McLaren, swallowing valiantly. ‘Parents are always keeping kids off school for holidays.’
‘We know she did go back to school,’ Connolly said. ‘Just not the same school.’
‘Look,’ said Swilley patiently, ‘even if the date is significant, isn’t it more likely Melissa was upset about her friend going missing, and he took her away to take her mind off it?’
There was a brief silence in acknowledgement of the argument.
Atherton rallied first. ‘But then why did he suddenly sell the house?’
‘Like Mrs Clavering said, probably it just had sad memories for them, which they realized once they got away,’ said Swilley. ‘I’d buy that.’
‘It doesn’t seem a bit sudden to you?’
‘We don’t know he hadn’t been thinking about it for ages,’ said Connolly. ‘Only that he didn’t discuss it with Mrs Clavering. And why should he? D’you tell your neighbours all your biz?’
‘True,’ said Atherton reluctantly. ‘That’s the trouble with this case, everything’s so long ago, you can’ be sure of anything. So where does that leave us?’
‘We have to find Melissa,’ said Connolly. ‘She was there, she’ll be the one that knows.’
‘So we’re no better off than we were yesterday.’
‘We’ve got an area to look in,’ said Connolly.
‘What about this brother?’ said LaSalle. ‘Could that be our Mr Vickery?’
‘Even if it is,’ said Atherton, ‘I don’t see that it gets us any closer to Melissa. We don’t know where he is, either. That’s just displacing the search by one person.’
‘For me,’ said Swilley, ‘it’s the father that did it, no mystery about that.’ There were murmurs of agreement. ‘What we don’t know is the why and the how.’
‘I can’t see how we’re ever going to know,’ said Gascoyne. ‘He’s dead, and he’s not likely to have told anybody else. Finding Melissa might tell us more about Amanda’s state of mind, but is that going to get us any closer to the why and how?’
Slider could see his troops were getting discouraged. He caught Hart’s eye – she had been sitting quietly at the back. She had reported to him privately already, and he reckoned there was nothing like a toothache for taking your mind off a stomach ache. ‘Hart,’ he said, ‘tell us about your day.’
She stood up, and related her interview with Shannon. It was received in silence.
Then: ‘She’s been nobbled,’ said Fathom.
‘Let’s not say anything we wouldn’t want to be heard outside this room,’ Slider warned. ‘Hart, what did you think about her?’
‘I dunno,’ she said. ‘I started off thinking she’d been nobbled, what with the money and everything—’
‘Bought off,’ said Fathom.
‘Shut up,’ Swilley told him sharply.
‘But the more I listened to her, the more I thought, she really doesn’t know any more. And it’s probably true what she said – she’d been on the vodka and snorting charlie, so she could easily’ve been imagining things. Or maybe not even that – just dreamed it up afterwards, then forgot she’d dreamed it. You know what they’re like.’
They did. In a state of terminal confusion – and very, very suggestible. Slider felt a pang of doubt. Had they pushed her into remembering what they wanted her to remember?
‘In any case,’ Hart concluded, looking at Slider, ‘she ain’t a witness any more, that’s for sure. I wouldn’t find it easy to believe her now.’
‘Well, that’s the point, innit,’ said McLaren, disgruntled. ‘They’ve done her like a kipper. Done us an’ all. They didn’t like us putting the finger on Mr—’
‘McLaren!’ Slider said sharply, and his mouth snapped shut. ‘Let’s not give the conspiracy theories an outing. We did our job, to the best of our ability. Things didn’t work out as we expected. We move on.’
‘Yeah, but—’
‘Maybe,’ he went on firmly, ‘we were wrong. Has that ever occurred to you?’ They all looked at him. Porson’s words rankled in the back of his mind. You’re too quick to think the worst of the higher echelongs. Had he been trying to be too clever? Was vanity his sin? These were people’s lives they played with every day. It could induce a god complex without one realizing. I just have a feeling. They developed a copper’s instinct over the years, a little voice, and mostly it turned o
ut to be right, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be wrong. ‘Maybe we were wrong,’ he said again, looking around them, meeting gaze after gaze.
But we weren’t wrong, said the expressions looking back at him. ‘There’s such a thing as being in the game too long,’ he said. He hadn’t known he was going to say it, but he went with it to see where it took him. ‘You can start to jump at shadows. See things that aren’t there. This Amanda Knight business might be just what we need. Something we can examine without pressure, without haste. No careers rest on it. But that can be a good thing. I want a result on this, and I know it’s going to be difficult. But she deserves justice like anyone else. Just because she’s been dead twenty-five years doesn’t mean it matters any less. So let’s do this. Be thorough, be forensic – be right.’
He didn’t often make speeches, but hearing it come back to him he was rather impressed. So were they. Connolly applauded, and they all joined in for a beat or two.
Atherton lounged over to him as the group broke up. ‘Where did that come from?’ he asked ironically, but Slider could see he was impressed too.
‘Deep inside,’ he replied in like manner, thumping the manly chest. ‘This is the start of a new era. We’re going to kick bottom. We’re going to take this case by the seat of its pants and look it in the face.’
‘We’re going to a contortionists’ convention?’
‘I’m in charge here,’ Slider said grittily, ‘and as soon as I know what the questions are, I’m going to want some answers.’
‘That’s fighting talk.’
‘You’d better believe it.’
‘Bravo. Show me a man who laughs at defeat, and I’ll show you a chiropodist with a twisted sense of humour.’
Refreshed by this interlude, Slider gave him a stern look. ‘What are you going to do now?’
‘Look for Melissa Vickery,’ Atherton said meekly. ‘In a forensic and thorough manner. Are you going out?’ he added as Slider headed for the door.
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