by Faith Martin
‘Boss,’ Janine said flatly. She’d have liked to be in on the interview with the grandson. Chances were, the toerag had done it, and once upon a time, she’d have made her feelings clear. But what with the wedding coming up in just a few days, and with everything else on her mind, it hardly seemed worth the effort somehow. Besides, she’d be in Witney soon.
A new start.
It seemed, suddenly, more of a blessing than a set-back.
She gathered her stuff together and walked out to the car park, cursing as the high winds caught at her long black coat and whipped her long blonde hair around her eyes. She was just pulling the strands back from her face when she reached her car, which was perhaps why she didn’t realize the problem sooner. As it was, she opened the door and got in, then cursed, as the car felt distinctly spongy and oddly low-slung beneath her.
She struggled out, again battling with her hair and the wind, and stared at her front left tyre. It was as flat as a pancake. Great. She turned, about to walk to the boot for her spare, and instead stared in dismay at her left rear tyre. It too was flat.
Numbly, she walked around to the other side of the gleaming red mini, her pride and joy. All four tyres had been slashed.
With a yell of rage, she turned and glared around the car park. But the high winds weren’t encouraging anybody to linger, and it was deserted. No roaming gangs of uniforms, entering or leaving, no fag-addicted DCs grouped around the horse chestnut trees having a crafty one. No doubt that was why the stalker had chosen this morning to get out his flick knife. She’d even helped the bastard out by parking about as far away from the nearest CCTV camera in the bloody car park as she could get.
‘Shit, shit, shit!’ she yelled, and leaning against the top of the mini, felt hard, hot tears clog her throat. Damn it! She wanted to stomp inside and harangue the desk sergeant, set a fire under Traffic’s arse, wail and rant and rage to Mel. Demand to know where somebody’s car was safe, if it wasn’t effing safe in the effing Thames Valley effing Police Force’s HQ car park.
She did none of those things of course. Instead she forced herself to calm down and call a local tyre and exhaust company. She shamelessly used her status as a police officer to get someone down there right away and watched, impotently, as an acne-beleaguered youth, trying hard to hide the grin on his face, changed her tyres. He eyed her up as he handed over the bill for what she considered to be an outrageous, three-figure amount, and two minutes later, she roared off far too fast up Kidlington’s main road.
All it needed now was for her to get a speeding ticket. She tried to laugh at the thought, to get back some sense of equilibrium. But all the way to Bicester, Janine was aware of fighting off scalding tears of humiliation, pain and exhaustion.
As Keith Barrington followed his boss down the stairs, he felt the familiar tingle that always came whenever he was about to confront a suspect. And, in this case, maybe even their prime suspect.
He was glad, and a little surprised, that Hillary Greene had asked him to sit in on it. He knew Janine Tyler was the logical choice. Perhaps Hillary was already gradually sidelining her, since she was about to leave. It made sense – the Jenkins case might still be ongoing by the end of next week, when Janine left for her new posting, and she’d need to have one member of her team up to speed on everything. And it was beginning to look more and more as if Frank Ross, although technically holding the rank of sergeant, wasn’t a serious player. For the first time, Barrington began to feel a real sense of optimism about this new posting.
When Hillary pushed open the door to interview room six, a uniformed PC nodded, then stared stoically ahead again. Seated in front of a plain wooden table, nervously shifting about on his chair, was a young man.
From his record, Keith knew he was twenty-four years of age, but his body was so stick-like, his face so gaunt and with the skin stretched taut over his skull, he could equally have been a teenager or an old man. He looked, Barrington thought uneasily, like one of those survivors of a concentration camp he’d seen in history books at school.
He was dressed in filthy jeans and a T-shirt so big and loose it threatened to literally drop off his skinny shoulders. It bore an old Def Leopard montage, so worn away it resembled an abstract painting – the sort a seriously mentally disturbed David Hockney might have painted.
Hillary drew out a chair and sat down, waiting until Keith had done the same, then nodded at the tape recorder. Keith obligingly went through the ritual, stating the time and date, the names of those present, and that Mr Dylan Hodge had voluntarily stated that he did not request the presence of a solicitor. Hillary knew that the junkie couldn’t afford one, and was probably either too high, or too far gone on withdrawal systems to realize he probably needed one.
His thin arms bore scabs on both wrists, and no doubt, would bear similar scabs on both the insides of his elbows and the tops of his shoulders. He probably had old needle tracks in his groin and between his toes as well.
She opened her case and pulled out his file. She read it in silence for a moment, whilst the young man opposite her watched, his eyes constantly shifting about the room. He seemed to be most worried about the silent, uniformed police officer standing by the door.
‘Says here you trained to be a television repair man, Dylan,’ Hillary began gently. ‘You even held down a job for nearly ten months. Then you were caught stealing from a customer.’
Dylan Hodge shrugged his shoulders. ‘It was a mistake. Didn’t get sent down for it, did I?’ he added triumphantly, casting a belligerent look at the uniformed constable who was staring blankly at the wall about a foot above his head.
Hodge had greasy brown hair that lay flat against his skull, and the pupils of his eyes were so dilated it was hard to tell what colour they were.
Hillary turned a page on the dossier, and said, her voice totally without emotion, ‘I see a few months later you were back before the same judge for car theft. You got eighteen months for that.’
Hodge shrugged. ‘A mistake again,’ he muttered. ‘Thought it was the girlfriend’s dad’s car, didn’t I?’
Hillary sighed and pushed the dossier away. ‘Let’s face it, Mr Hodge. You’re a drug addict. Your girlfriend is a drug addict. You live in a squat. You scrounge off your only relative, you thieve and you con and you’d do anything for your next fix. How long has it been since you had a hit?’ she asked curiously.
Hodge sneered at her. ‘On the methadone, ain’t I? Can’t get me on nothing like that.’
Hillary smiled. ‘I’m not trying to get you on nothing like that, Mr Hodge,’ she said, very softly.
Dylan Hodge suddenly went very still in his seat. For the first time he glanced at Keith. Then he frowned. ‘Here, you’re not Vice,’ he said. His tone of voice made it an accusation.
Hillary smiled. ‘I never said I was, Mr Hodge. We want to talk about your grandmother.’
Dylan Hodge blinked. Something – a look that could have meant anything – crossed his face. Part of it seemed to be the recall of a memory. What might have been fear or apprehension made up another part. But his fried, junkie brain didn’t seem able to unscramble it, and after a second, it was gone, leaving behind his habitual sneer. ‘Gran. Yeah, what about her?’
‘She’s dead, Mr Hodge,’ Hillary said matter-of-factly.
Dylan Hodge began to scratch at the scabs on his wrist. Hillary watched the top of his bent head, and thought she saw the sly, darting movement of lice.
‘Mrs Florence Jenkins is your grandmother, Mr Hodge?’ she prompted.
‘Yeah.’
‘She lived at 18 Holburn Crescent, in Bicester?’
‘Yeah.’
‘When was the last time you saw her?’
‘Dunno. I’m not much good with time.’
This Hillary could well believe. To the likes of Hodge, ten minutes could feel like ten months, or last year could seem like a minute ago. ‘You didn’t come near her place yesterday,’ Hillary began patiently. ‘What about the
night before?’
Hodge could certainly fit the very vague description the witnesses had given for the man who’d called at the victim’s house on the night of her murder. A not-bulky figure in a cap.
‘Do you own a cap, Mr Hodge?’ she asked and Dylan, having picked one scab until it began to ooze, turned to another. Hillary let him get on with it, fighting the urge to lean across and rest her fingers on top of his, stopping the frantic scrabbling. But she knew better than to give him any excuse to start screaming police brutality. She wasn’t about to lay so much as a finger on him.
‘Dunno. Might do. There’s clothes at the squat. We share. Donny’s got a bloody good donkey jacket.’
‘I’m surprised someone hasn’t stolen it,’ Hillary said drily. ‘Must be worth the cost of a few good fixes.’
Dylan grinned. ‘Oh yeah. I forgot. Donny’s gone. Took his jacket with him. Or is he inside? Not sure.’ His eyes, already vague, almost crossed. How long before he simply passed out?
‘The night before last, Mr Hodge, did you visit your grandmother?’ Hillary said loudly, allowing an edge of impatience to lance her voice now.
Instantly the sneer was back. ‘No I didn’t, see. And you can’t prove I did.’
And neither could they, Hillary conceded glumly. Yet … ‘You don’t seem very upset that your grandmother is dead, Mr Hodge,’ she said.
‘Yeah. Well, she was old, wasn’t she. Really old. And she was always complaining about being ill. I suppose she was. The old die, don’t they?’
Hillary stared at him without speaking.
‘I mean, she had these pains and all,’ Hodge said, not liking the silence.
Hillary continued to stare silently at him, hoping to get more.
‘Look, I’m off,’ Hodge said, standing up so suddenly that the chair crashed to the floor behind him. The uniformed officer, startled, took an instinctive step forward, and Hodge reared back.
Hillary quickly held out a hand. ‘It’s all right, Mr Hodge. You’re free to go. For the moment.’
It was pointless, Hillary knew from experience, to talk to them when they’d got to this stage. A mixture of bravado and repetition was all she’d get from him now. Better to try another time – catch him on a high if she was lucky. Besides, with no evidence to link him to the crime, she had no cause to hold him.
Hodge charged for the door clumsily. Hillary watched him go, then turned to Keith. ‘Get out to that squat before he does. I dare say they’ll all be suffering from severe amnesia, but see what you can find out about his movements the day of the murder. Then take his mug shot to your witnesses – but I doubt you’ll get a positive ID.’
‘Guv.’
Hillary glanced at her watch, saw that it was gone twelve, and collected her bag.
She had a lunch date with a legend.
chapter six
* * *
In spite of the no-smoking signs and laws, the room was hazy when Hillary walked into the public bar, enough to make her gag, since she was somewhat allergic to cigarette smoke. She coughed into her hand and looked around the crowded bar room, eyes watering slightly, and saw a hand go up in the far corner.
When she made her way over, one toothless octogenarian playing dominoes with someone even older, gave her a wolf whistle from the far corner. She was still grinning when she sat down opposite Mitch Titchmarsh, and shrugged off her coat.
‘What you having?’
‘Just orange juice, thanks,’ Hillary said, ignoring Mitch’s grimace of sympathy. He made no attempt to talk her into something stronger, however, but nodded and wandered over to the bar. The fact that he recognized her need to keep a clear head whilst heading up an investigation, made her feel a little bit better about the favour she was going to ask him. Mitch might have been retired for over five years now, but he was still a copper through and through. Once a professional, always a professional.
She thanked him again as he placed her drink in front of her, and glanced at the blackboard menu. ‘The ploughman’s any good here?’
‘Hell no.’
‘I’ll give it a miss then. Cheers.’ She took a sip of her drink, and glanced surreptitiously at her watch. Mitch caught it, and smiled.
‘Case hotting up?’
Hillary sighed. ‘Not really. We’re still in the collating phrase. You know how it is.’
Mitch did. ‘No obvious suspect then?’ He knew, as did most people who took up law enforcement, that nine times out of ten, the culprit in any case was fairly obvious – unlike television dramas would have you believe. The husband who’d battered his wife just a bit too hard this time. The long-feuding neighbours where one of them had taken hostilities a shade too far. The hit-and-run driver with a series of convictions for drink driving behind him.
It was when things weren’t obvious that the need for painstaking detail came into its own.
Hillary thought fleetingly of Dylan Hodge and shrugged. Did he count as an obvious suspect? Her gut wasn’t yet convinced. ‘I’m not sure.’
Mitch grunted. ‘An old lady you said?’ He shook his big, shaggy head sadly. His own mother had lived until she’d reached her nineties.
Mitch Titchmarsh had joined the police force on his eighteenth birthday. Big, burly, tough as old boots even then, he’d quickly become known as the man you wanted to have guarding your back in a tight spot. He’d served his time on the football fields, fending off hooligans, and on front lines during violent pickets. He’d married young, to a woman who produced a baby boy once a year. By the time he was forty, he had nine sons, and, during the course of the next twenty or so years, all but one had joined the force. Some had climbed the ladder, the brightest and most ambitious now being a DCI out Banbury way. The vast majority, however, had opted, like their father, to stick at the rank of sergeant.
But Mitch had always had brains as well as brawn, and his arrest rate during his stint at HQ had been second to none, earning him kudos and respect from all ranks. He was helped, no doubt, by the fact that he was the son of a car factory worker out of Cowley, who’d been born and raised in a hard, working-class neighbourhood, and retained many friends and snitches, who kept him well informed. Even when university graduates started joining the force, and computers, profiling, forensics and PR began to take the place of foot-soldiering, Mitch’s arrest and conviction rate continued to rise.
He was also a larger than life character, a known womanizer, with just a slightly dodgy reputation for scaring villains that had turned him into an object of hero worship for generations of uniforms. His gang of sons still kept him well up to date about goings on in his old patch, and Hillary wouldn’t be at all surprised if he knew almost as much about what went on as she did.
‘Your Roger did well the other week. Ram-raiders, wasn’t it?’ she said, taking a long drink of her nearly warm orange juice.
Mitch’s big, florid red face flushed even more roseate with pride. ‘He’s a born thief-taker that one,’ he admitted gruffly.
‘And how’re Maurice’s scars doing?’
Mitch guffawed. ‘He always did have an ugly mug. A bit of a white line down the side of the jaw ain’t going to make no difference. His wife still loves him.’ Maurice, one of his younger sons, had got on the wrong end of a drug dealer’s flick knife last year.
Mitch quaffed nearly half a pint from his pint glass of Hook Norton ale, and then slowly put it down. ‘Right, that’s the pleasantries out the way. What can I do for you, gal?’
Hillary grinned. Mitch had been one of the first of the old guard to accept her as a player, all those many moons ago. He’d first noticed her when she’d still been in uniform, of course. That thick nut-brown hair and attractive figure had instantly caught his attention. Naturally, he’d tried it on and been firmly rebuffed, but hadn’t taken it personally. And when she’d finally made it into CID, he’d been as proud as a peacock, almost as if he’d had something to do with it. When others had grumbled and moaned about her promotion, he’d cut them off at the kn
ees, and had crowed every time she’d had a success. Even her disastrous marriage to Ronnie Greene hadn’t lessened his respect for her.
For her part, she knew that having Mitch in her corner had gained her acceptance far sooner than it might have done, and she’d always had a soft spot for him, steering him a few good leads whenever they came her way when she thought he could make better use of them. Those days now seemed long ago and far away.
Now she shrugged. ‘I need a favour.’
Mitch grinned. ‘It didn’t take an Einstein to figure that out.’ He leaned back in his chair, a big bear of a man with the makings of a beer gut, dressed in old grey slacks and a lumberjack’s red and black check jacket. ‘Didn’t ever think the day would come when you’d need one, mind,’ he mused, his somewhat watery grey eyes watching her closely. ‘You always were able to look after yourself.’ The way he said it made it sound like more of a question.
Hillary nodded. ‘It’s not me who’s in trouble, but my sergeant.’
Mitch snorted. ‘You can’t mean Frank Ross? If that git’s in deep shit, let him drown.’
Hillary smiled. ‘Janine Tyler,’ she corrected. ‘Heard of her?’
Mitch had, of course. It was inconceivable that he hadn’t. ‘Pretty blonde bit, getting married to Mellow Mallow, your old pal?’
‘That’s her. She’s attracted an admirer. The kind who leaves nasty notes and nasty gifts.’
The smile was gone instantly from Mitch’s face. A deep frown wrinkled his brow, for, quick as ever, he’d already figured out the sub-text. ‘One of our own, you mean?’ he said grimly.
As pater familias to all the young and not so young lads in blue, she could tell the thought disturbed him. ‘It’s not one hundred per cent certain,’ Hillary said. ‘But I can’t see it being a civilian. I think her up-coming marriage to Mel sparked it off.’
Mitch nodded. ‘Someone thinks she’s slept her way to the top and doesn’t like it.’ He took a swig of beer, then asked, curious, ‘Did she?’