She nodded – acknowledgement rather than agreement. She saw he was shaken – perhaps ashamed. This was a crisis in his life. She had been with him through aftermaths before, seen him depressed because, although he had caught the villain, it didn’t make any difference to the victim. They were still dead. He didn’t really have the robust temperament his job demanded, she thought. Pointless death troubled him too much. He should have been a farmer, and helped things grow. But he needed her now, and she had to come up with something, though she had no idea what. She opened her mouth and hoped something appropriate would pop out.
‘I don’t know if you did wrong or not,’ she said. ‘But if you did, the important thing is that you know it. That’s how we grow – learning from our mistakes.’ Too much? she wondered. He was looking at her, she thought, a trifle blankly. She couldn’t tell if he was warmed by her words, or incredulous that she’d said them. ‘Now you have to forgive yourself and move on,’ she concluded. ‘Otherwise, it’s all a waste.’ Say something! she urged him silently. I don’t know what I’m doing here!
Finally, he nodded. ‘You’re right,’ he said, and she almost sagged with relief. ‘The Job is still the Job.’
She didn’t know they were Connie Bindman’s words. ‘I was going to say that,’ she objected, to lighten the mood.
‘I got it out of a cracker in the canteen,’ he said.
‘They have crackers in the canteen?’
‘What else do you have your cheese on?’
Joking, she thought, put a layer of essential padding between the raw nerves and the world. He’d be all right now. ‘Don’t make me your straight man,’ she said, standing up.
He stood too, and put his arms round her. ‘Oh, you’re anything but straight, I’m glad to say. Bed?’
‘Are you all better now?’ she asked suspiciously.
He pressed against her. ‘Try me, and see.’
Hart was not there on Wednesday morning, but she rang in as soon as Slider was at his desk – how did she manage that? Some kind of second sight – and said, ‘You don’t need me for anything in particular, do you, boss?’
‘I can manage. Why?’
‘I rather not say.’
Slider frowned. ‘Is this something to do with the matter we weren’t going to talk about any more?’
‘Maybe, maybe not. Depends how much you want to know.’
‘I don’t want to know,’ Slider said. ‘Also it’s over. We gave it our best shot, and that’s the end of it.’
‘Well, maybe it is and—’
‘Sergeant!’ Slider said sharply. ‘And remember, promotions are reversible.’
She weakened. ‘I had an idea, that’s all,’ she said, without the sass. ‘I’d like to follow it up.’
Slider sighed. ‘You’d better tell me.’
‘It’s the other girls. I know they won’t testify about the sex parties and the drugs and that, but if I could just get them to say that Kaylee was there that night, that throws this new forensic gig out the window, dunt it?’
‘I’m afraid not. She could still have gone out to Harefield afterwards.’
‘But if the big boys all say she wasn’t there, and we can prove she was, they must be covering something up, mustn’t they?’
‘And who do you think would be believed, if it came to a straight contradiction. You’ve got nothing there, Hart. I’m sorry. Let it go.’
There was a silence. ‘If you say so, boss.’
‘I do.’
‘Can I take a personal day, then? If you don’t need me in.’
‘What for?’ Slider asked suspiciously.
‘Oh, just girl things,’ Hart said, chirpy again. ‘You don’t want me to spell ’em out, do you?’
‘Certainly not. I’ll mark you on holiday, then.’
‘Ta, boss.’
‘Just don’t go poking sticks down holes,’ Slider warned.
‘Never!’ said Hart, and rang off.
LaSalle came gangling in rather shyly, still uncertain as to how his new boss reacted to individual thought. Carver had liked things done his way. To him, initiative was the sound you made when you sneezed.
‘I’ve been doing a bit of research, sir,’ he said modestly. ‘In the BD&M.’
Register of Births, Deaths and Marriages. Like many public records, it now had an online presence. Slider remembered long, peaceful hours at Katharine House when he was a detective constable, poring through the giant leather-bound ledgers in the hushed, library-smelling fastness. It was a wonderful way to keep out of your guv’nor’s line of sight for a day. Alas, no more. Oh the times, oh the customs!
‘Into?’ he prompted.
‘Vickery, sir. Knowing they were local made it easier. I got our Mr Vickery’s date of birth from the records, then looked him up, got his parents, and went through with them to see if they had any other children. And there was a brother called David.’ He lifted his eyes, hopeful for praise. Good orang-utan!
‘Well done,’ Slider said.
LaSalle relaxed and became expansive. ‘Born 1952, sir, which made him 30 in 1982 when Mrs Clavering said the Vickerys moved into Colville Avenue – she said late twenties, so it’s a fit all right. Our Mr Vickery, Edgar, was five years older, just right for idolising a brilliant younger brother. And …’ He hesitated.
‘Go on,’ said Slider.
‘Well, sir, maybe feeling he had to protect him. If he’d been set to look after his kid brother all the time when he was a boy, the habit might stick.’
‘Hmm,’ said Slider. ‘Well, we won’t speculate about that. The only connection we’ve got between David Vickery and this case is that his daughter was friends with the victim. Doesn’t make him guilty of anything.’
‘No, sir.’
‘But it’s good to have that point cleared up, anyway. Now we just have to find Melissa Vickery.’
‘Yes, sir. She’d be 39 now. So she could be anywhere,’ LaSalle said with a slight lowering of the tail. ‘Or anyone – if she married she won’t even have the same name.’
‘If it was easy being a detective, everyone would do it,’ Slider comforted him, and he went away.
It was a day for wonders. Not long afterwards, McLaren came bursting in, for once with no food in his mouth or his hand, though the piece of paper he was holding did have a greasy thumb-mark on it, and he bore about him the faint aroma of gravy and onions. Ginster’s individual steak pie, Slider concluded.
‘I’ve got it, guv,’ McLaren said.
‘Well don’t scratch, or it’ll never get better,’ said Slider.
McLaren was used to him after all these years. He ignored that bit. ‘I had this idea, y’see, about how to find David Vickery. If he was an inventor, if he had patents, he’d have to register them at the Patents’ Office, or he wouldn’t get his royalties. And if he’d invented something really important, like Mrs Clavering said, for the space programme – or even for the motor industry – he’d have wanted the royalties all right. They’d be worth a fortune.’
‘She said he was well-off,’ said Slider. ‘But that was a long time ago – no likelihood he’d be at the same address.’
‘No, guv – you have to re-register a patent every year,’ McLaren said proudly. ‘Otherwise it lapses.’
Another good dog. ‘I didn’t know that. Well, go to it. Find him. Sic, boy!’
‘Already done it,’ McLaren said, beaming.
‘Well?’
‘Patents only last twenty years,’ said McLaren.
This was like one of those ‘I’ve got some good news and some bad news’ routines. ‘Don’t toy with me, McLaren,’ Slider warned.
‘Yeah, but he didn’t stop inventing right away,’ McLaren went on hastily. ‘He done other stuff after he left Shepherd’s Bush. So there’s patents still active.’
‘So you’ve got an address for him?’
‘Not for him. He’s dead.’
Mentally, Slider reached for a rolled-up newspaper. ‘Dead, is he?’ he said
patiently. Too patiently.
‘Died four years ago, apparently.’
‘Well, well. How unfortunate.’
McLaren spotted the signs in time, and hastened to make good. ‘No, guv, the point is, patents are like property, you can leave the royalties to someone, like in a will. So if the person they’re left to wants the dosh, they got to keep in touch. Vickery left ’em to his daughter. I got an address for Melissa.’
Good dog! ‘Have a biscuit,’ Slider said.
‘Biscuit?’ McLaren said suspiciously.
‘Where is she?’ Slider translated.
‘In the same area. The old dame in Tetbury was right,’ McLaren said. ‘They moved to a farm between there and Cirencester. Oathill Farmhouse, Oathill Lane, Rodmarton, that’s the address.’
‘And she’s still there?’ Slider was taking nothing for granted by now.
‘I rung up the local boys just to make sure,’ McLaren said, with an eager nod. ‘They say she’s still there, lives there alone. The farmland’s all rented out, it’s just the farmhouse and a couple of outbuildings. Never been any trouble, so they don’t know much about her. Bit eccentric, they say – but they’d say that about any woman living alone, my opinion.’
‘You could be right,’ said Slider. ‘Or they could. Well, this is good news. At last we can talk to someone who was around at the time.’
‘Yeah, but she was only a kid then. Who remembers stuff properly from when they were fourteen?’ McLaren said.
‘Thank you, I can do my own pessimistic adjustments,’ said Slider.
EIGHTEEN
Armed and Dangerous
The house in Wornington Road with its scabby rendering and flaking paintwork was the sort to look all the better for the morning fog, wrapping it in a benign lack of definition. It was gloomy enough to need lights indoors, but there were none showing upstairs. There was a glow behind the drawn curtains of the basement, however, where the caretaker, Anita, lived. Hart descended and rang the doorbell.
As the door opened a cloud of cigarette smoke rushed out, like baby fog wanting to join its mamma, and there was the sound far back in the flat of the television blurting the witless shouts and laughter of some confessions show. Anita filled the space, a very large West Indian woman in a beige velour tracksuit, a mauve scarf tied over her rollers, a cigarette burning between her fingers. Her eyes narrowed when she saw who it was.
‘You’ve got some nerve, comin’ round here again! What you pushin’ your ugly face in ma house again for?’
‘Gimme a break, ma,’ Hart said. ‘I’m looking for Jessica.’
‘I ain’t your ma. You show me some respec’, copper. I pay your wages.’
Hart sensed that this was not just jousting – that she was really annoyed. She spread her hands apologetically. ‘I didn’t mean no disrespect. I need to talk to Jessica. I fought I should clear it with you first, seeing as you look after her so good.’ She thought the flattery might calm her, but Anita’s face was as hard as her eyes.
‘She ain’t here.’
‘Is she at work? At the restaurant?’
‘No, she ain’t. She lost that good job, an’ it’s all your fault – putting the filth on her. Coppers goin’ round there all hours, pokin’ about, askin’ questions. Course they give her the shove! They don’t want no trouble. Nobody wants no trouble, and these girls, they get the fuzzy end o’ the stick. She lost her job, and now she gone. I hope you satisfied!’
Hart didn’t entirely believe her. ‘Can I look in her room?’
Anita bristled. ‘You can look all you want, you won’t find nothing. She ain’t here, an’ I don’t know where she gone. I wouldn’t tell you if I did. We was gettin’ on all right before you showed up.’
She tried to shut the door but Hart had her foot in the way. ‘Look, love,’ she said, ‘I’m not the villain here. I want to help these girls, same as you do.’
‘You got a funny way o’ showing it, stickin’ the filth onto ’em.’
‘That’s not how it was. They were being exploited by some very bad people, and we needed their help to stop them.’
‘Well, stop ’em, then!’ Anita snapped. ‘Do your job, copper! Just keep your nose out of my life.’
The door was hurting Hart’s foot now, but she wasn’t going to give it up. ‘Just tell me where Jess is, and I’ll go. I just want to know she’s OK.’
A voice from inside the flat said wearily, ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ And Jessica Bale appeared behind Anita. ‘If I tell you I’m all right, will you leave us alone?’
She looked older than when Hart had seen her last, the rounded parts of her face mutated into adult planes, the shadows of late nights under her eyes. But she didn’t have the spiky, unstable look of being on drugs, for which Hart was grateful.
‘Oh, there you are, girl,’ Hart said cheerfully. ‘You livin’ with Anita now?’
‘She’s just visiting, all right?’ Anita snapped. ‘She got her own place, nice flat, sharing with some other girls.’
‘Give it up, ’Nita,’ Jessica said. ‘I’m in my old room. I’m clean. And I got a job in a food packing factory. I’m doing all right.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ Hart said. ‘But why did you withdraw your testimony? I know why Shannon did, but we can’t take the case forward without somebody helping us.’
Jessica sighed. ‘It’s all over, all that. Can’t you just let it go? There’s not going to be a case.’
‘It doesn’t have to be over. Listen—’ Hart began.
But Jessica interrupted her. ‘No. You listen. You’ve got your career and you want someone to be banged up for it, so’s you can feel good about yourself. I get that. But I’m out now, and I ain’t going back in for anybody.’
‘Babe, you was all under age,’ Hart urged. ‘You was exploited. These people broke the law—’
‘Oh, stuff the law. It’s against the sodding law to have a fag in a pub.’
‘You told me you left because you got scared, because you didn’t want to end up like Tyler,’ Hart reminded her.
‘Yeah, well I didn’t, did I? I got out, Anita got me straight, I got a job, I’m all right now. That stuff, that’s like a nightmare, all I want to do is forget it, but you want to start stirring it all up again. Well, I ain’t gonna do it. So just go away and leave me alone, willya. I ain’t testifying about anything to anybody, and that’s that.’
‘So she never married,’ Atherton said as they headed down the M4.
‘Or married and kept her name. Or got divorced and changed back. Don’t jump to conclusions,’ Slider admonished.
‘It’s all the exercise I get,’ said Atherton. ‘I wonder why she didn’t come forward. It was in the national papers.’
‘Very small, inside page, only once,’ said Slider. It hadn’t struck the fourth estate as very gripping, the skeleton in the garden. Too many other juicy stories breaking at the same time. ‘She could well have missed it. And not everybody reads newspapers. And even if she had seen it, she might not have thought there was any reason to come forward. She might not have anything to tell us.’
‘You’re determined to spoil my pleasure, aren’t you?’
‘I should have brought something for you to play with. You’re hell on car journeys.’
‘Let me drive, then.’
‘Just sit still and look at the scenery.’
Rodmarton was just off the main road from Cirencester to Tetbury. They drove through the village – it had pleasant cottages around a small green, and a pretty stone church with a spire atop a square tower – and on northwards, past rather scrubby fields in which sheep busily cropped, building up body weight against the winter to come.
There was no sign for Oathill Farmhouse, and they missed the lane at the first pass. They had a brief argument with each other and with Sat Nav, who insisted she was right, returned and paused doubtfully at the entrance to a narrow, muddy lane, only one car wide and leading between high, overgrown hedges. ‘This must be it,’
Slider said.
‘It doesn’t look like a road, more like a farm track.’
‘We want a farm track,’ Slider pointed out.
‘People ought to put up signs,’ Atherton complained.
‘Not if they don’t want visitors,’ said Slider.
‘Oho. You think …?’
‘I don’t think anything.’ He turned into the lane and bumped carefully through the ruts. ‘We didn’t have a sign at the end of our lane when I was a kid,’ he said. He’d been born in a farm labourer’s cottage. ‘Everybody knew what was down there, so there was no need.’
‘What if a stranger wanted to find you? There was no Sat Nav then.’
‘Why on earth would a stranger have wanted to find us?’ Slider countered with irrefutable logic. ‘Get out and open the gate, will you?’
‘What if there’s a dog?’ Atherton objected.
‘There is a dog. Can’t you hear it barking? Just do the gate. It’ll be chained up.’
‘You hope.’
‘They always are.’
Slider observed from Atherton’s struggle that the gate was old, heavy, and ill-balanced on its hinges. Beyond lay a large, muddy yard, decorated with puddles that looked to be of long standing. At the far side stood the farmhouse, Cotswold stone with a slate roof, flat-faced and plain, the sort of square with four windows and a door that a child might draw, and managing to be unusually, for a Cotswold farmhouse, unattractive.
To either side of the yard were outbuildings, on the right an open-fronted shelter in which stood a very muddy Landrover plus various pieces of rusty machinery, pallets and packing cases. On the left was a wooden barn with a tiled roof which seemed to be gently collapsing into its component parts. Parked by the house was an elderly Volvo estate car, even muddier; and the corners of the yard were colonized by an enormous roller, seized with rust, a Morris Minor lacking wheels or doors, several wheelbarrows, a decrepit bicycle, a pram circa 1958, and various nameless and abandoned implements, rolls of wire, buckets, and general junk. Long grass and weeds were growing between and rampantly through them. It was, Slider thought, a typical farmyard.
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