by Ann Cleeves
He smiled. ‘I’m just going,’ he said. ‘But if you see anything unusual – a car you don’t recognize, people hanging around the cottage – you will give us a ring?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course.’
She was walking to the door with him when the phone went. Her mobile, still in her bag in the kitchen. She knew it would be Samuel, and was preoccupied with the thought, so she didn’t take in the implication of the detective’s next words.
‘Will you be in this evening? In case we have any more questions?’ He seemed not to have noticed the trilling of the phone. Or perhaps he didn’t care if she was inconvenienced.
‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘Oh yes. We don’t often go out.’ She just wanted him to leave.
He smiled again as if that was the reply he’d wanted, as if that was why he’d come in the first place. ‘Excellent. That’s fine, then. I’ll see myself out.’
By the time she returned to the kitchen the phone had stopped. There was no message. Call register brought up the number of Samuel’s mobile. She tried to ring it but it had already been switched off. She left another message, but although she tried his home phone again, she couldn’t get through to him. She kept trying until James came home from school, then she gave up.
Peter arrived home from the university a little earlier than usual. It was only half past five. From the kitchen window Felicity saw him get out of his car and stand for a moment looking over to the cottage.
He’s thinking about the girl. He misses her. A lump of jealousy, solid, like food stuck in the throat, making her want to gag.
James must have seen him too from where he was playing in the garden. He ran round the house to greet him. She couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he started talking as soon as he saw his father. Some news about school. Peter smiled and picked the boy up and swung him over his head.
Felicity watched, thought how fit he was despite his age, how strong. Peter put his arm round his son’s shoulder and they walked together towards the house. The land line rang. Felicity went into Peter’s office to answer it, glad of a chance to compose herself before she greeted them.
It was Samuel.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I’ve been trying to call you.’ She had tried several times while she was in Morpeth that morning. There’d been no reply from his home phone or his mobile. She’d plucked up courage to go to the library, but the woman behind the desk had said he’d taken a day’s leave. Then she’d gone to his house and knocked at the door. There’d been no reply.
‘Why? What’s happened?’ His voice sounded strange, a little blurred. She wondered if he’d been drinking.
‘I can’t really discuss it now. Peter’s just come home, if you’d like to talk to him.’ She kept her voice light and easy as she always did when there was a possibility of being overheard.
‘No. It’s you I wanted.’
‘Are you all right?’ she asked. ‘Where have you been all day?’
He didn’t answer immediately. She heard Peter calling her from the kitchen, put her hand over the receiver and shouted back, ‘I’m just on the phone. Won’t be a minute. Stick the kettle on, will you?’
Still there was no response from Samuel.
‘Where have you been?’ she asked again.
‘I thought you might have worked it out.’ It was the sort of thing he might have said when they were alone together. Teasing. Implying a shared understanding. But now he just sounded bitter.
‘Are you all right?’ she said. ‘Is something wrong?’
‘I need to see you.’
‘I don’t think that’ll be possible,’ she said. ‘Not this evening.’ She’d forgotten all about her plans to accuse him of keeping the secret about Peter’s affair with Lily Marsh. Forgotten the bubbles of lust which had sustained her since they’d got together, made her smile to herself when nobody was looking. Now she wanted to extricate herself from the relationship as soon as possible and with as much dignity as she could manage. With this phone call, she was starting to consider Samuel as a liability.
‘It’s the twentieth anniversary of Claire’s death,’ he said.
Of course, she thought, that had been mid-summer too. She remembered the funeral. A still, humid day. Swarms of insects under the trees as they waited outside the church. The awkwardness, because suicide was such an embarrassing form of bereavement. She’d felt almost that they should be commiserating with Samuel for being dumped. Later they’d brought him home with them and he’d described finding his wife. ‘She looked more peaceful than I’d seen her for months. Her hair floating around her face.’
She had a sudden shock, as she realized he could be talking about the recent victims, then she pushed away the picture of Samuel as a murderer. Samuel was a gentle man. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I should have remembered.’ She knew he was waiting for her to agree to meet him, and for a moment she hesitated. Perhaps she should go to him. Just as a concerned friend. James had switched on the television in the living room. She heard the signature tune of an early evening soap. Peter yelled from the kitchen that tea was ready. This was the important stuff, she thought. The everyday trivia of family life. This was worth fighting for. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘I’m really sorry but I can’t. Things are difficult here. The police took Peter in for questioning last night. Are you sure you don’t want to talk to him?’
Samuel didn’t answer.
‘Everything’s such a mess,’ he said at last.
‘Where are you?’ she asked.
‘Forget it.’ More bitter than she’d ever heard him. He switched off his phone.
Peter had made her Earl Grey, with a splash of milk, just as she liked it. ‘Who was that?’
She hesitated for only a moment. ‘Samuel. He sounded a bit upset. It’s the anniversary of Claire’s death. I tried to get him to speak to you.’
‘I’ll talk to him later.’
‘That young detective was here this afternoon. Another young woman has gone missing.’
Peter carefully set down his cup, but she could tell the news had upset him. Perhaps it reminded him of Lily.
‘Do they think that has anything to do with the murders?’
‘That was what Ashworth suggested. He wanted to know where I’d been this morning.’
‘They’ve been trying to track me down all day.’ Peter leaned back in his chair, stretched, implying that he’d been so busy that he was exhausted.
‘Where were you?’
‘A meeting. Extremely tedious and abysmally chaired, which is why it went on so long.’
‘Really?’
‘You can’t think I had anything to do with this abduction?’
‘No,’ she said quickly. ‘Of course not. Not that. I went into Morpeth this morning. I tried to phone you. But I couldn’t get hold of you either.’
‘You suspected I was with another woman?’
‘I’m sorry. It did cross my mind.’
‘Never again,’ he said. ‘I promise I’ll never do that again.’ He moved his head to take in the house, James in the next room, the view of the garden. ‘This is all too important.’ She realized he was echoing the thought she’d had earlier, when she was talking to Samuel.
After dinner, she and Peter watched television with James. Later, they went together to put the boy to bed, then they took their drinks onto the veranda and watched the huge orange sun floating low over the hills to the west. Peter seemed anxious, preoccupied. He returned several times to the subject of the abducted young woman. What else had Ashworth told her?
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Really. But if they find her and catch the person who took her, you’ll be in the clear, won’t you? It’ll all be over.’
But that thought seemed to give him no comfort. He couldn’t settle. At one point he went into the house to make a phone call. She assumed it was to Samuel.
‘How was he?’ she asked when he returned.
‘I don’t know.’ Peter was frown
ing. ‘He wasn’t answering.’
The police officers arrived just as it was getting dark. She’d never met them before. She’d locked the front door and they walked round the side of the house, a man and a woman. They seemed impossibly young to her, gauche, inarticulate, though they made every effort to be polite.
‘Sergeant Ashworth said we could watch the mill race from here. You told him it would be OK?’
‘Did I?’ She couldn’t really remember what she’d agreed to.
‘Perhaps there’s a front room upstairs? We could watch from there.’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Anything we can do to help.’
They were still in the spare bedroom when Peter and Felicity went to bed. She saw them sitting in the dark, peering out over the meadow towards the cottage. There was a moon now. It didn’t give enough light to see detail, but would be enough to make out somebody moving as a shadow. But what will they do, if someone does turn up? Felicity wondered. They’re hardly more than children.
She made them a flask of coffee and some sandwiches. They thanked her, keeping their eyes on the window.
She must have fallen asleep before Peter. She was aware of him lying next to her, very still, trying not to disturb her.
Chapter Forty
It was mid-afternoon when the search team found Laura’s shoe. It was in a ditch by the side of the road, not very far from the bus stop. They’d started close to Julie’s house in Seaton and followed the line of the footpath, spreading out across the field which was all stubble now. The residents of Laurel Avenue watched them from the upstairs windows, saw them as black figures against the bright sunlight and the gold of the cut field. The officers moved in sequence like dancers in a slow, elaborate ballet, their shadows shifting as the day wore on.
It must have occurred to some of the team, after being at it for so long, that they’d find nothing. Vera thought that in this situation she might find it hard to keep up her concentration; she’d start thinking of home and a shower, a cold beer. But when they hit the road the team didn’t stop. They moved along the hawthorn hedge and down the ditch, which was almost dry now. They were still focused. They just stood up occasionally to stretch or rub an aching back. They worked almost in complete silence. Even after the discovery of the shoe they continued all the way along the verge to the big roundabout on the outskirts of Whitley Bay.
It was clear that the shoe had been dropped by accident. It was a mistake. Whoever had taken Laura hadn’t realized she’d lost it. There was no sign that it had been placed in the ditch to hide it and it wasn’t there to make a point. The water was so low that it was clearly visible sticking out of the mud. Vera was sure this had nothing to do with the placing of the bodies. There were no flowers. It was just a shoe. A flat, black shoe with no heel and no back, simple, the fashion of the summer. The kidnapper would know now that it had been left. Would it be preying on his mind? Would he think the forensic team would be able to work some magic with it, that they would deduce immediately who and where he was?
Julie recognized the shoe at once and began to cry. Until then it had been possible to convince herself that Laura had bunked off school. To pay her back for being such a crap mother. For not being there that morning when she set off for Whitley High. She looked at the shoe in its plastic evidence bag and she howled. Vera couldn’t bear to see her in such a state. She persuaded Julie to take one of the tranquillizers prescribed for her by the doctor. This was more for her sake than for Julie’s. The sound of the crying woman got under her skin and stopped her concentrating. Even when she’d gone outside to speak to the supervisor of the search team the noise remained with her.
Of course the shoe told them nothing. It could have told them about Laura. About how tall she was likely to be, about the way she threw her weight forward when she moved, about where she’d been walking. It didn’t tell them anything about the man who’d taken her. But close to the spot where it had been found there were tyre tracks on the verge. The grass was very dry there. The tyres had only crushed the grass and left no real imprint. However, just where the grass sloped down to the tarmac was a small patch of reddish builder’s sand. Perhaps it had been left during road repairs or spilled from a lorry. And there a perfectly formed tyre mark remained. Only a fragment, half the width of the tyre and about ten centimetres long, but enough to excite CSI Billy Wainwright, who crouched over it, like a toddler concentrating on making a perfect mud pie.
‘Well?’ Vera knew she shouldn’t really be there. She should be back in her office, pulling in all the information, keeping on top of things. Only she didn’t feel on top of things.
‘I’m not sure we’ll be able to identify the make of tyre from this.’ Billy stood up. She thought he looked knackered and a bit stressed. He was too old to be playing away with his new young lover. Too decent to do it lightly. Again she wanted to tell him to be glad of what he had. A wife he could talk to at the end of the day. Not to throw it all away for some mid-life fantasy, however young and however bonny. ‘But if you find me a suspect vehicle, I’ll be able to tell you if there’s a match. Look, there are very specific marks of wear, chips and nicks in the rubber.’
‘So we’re not looking for a new tyre?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘The treads are very faint. This is hardly legal.’
It was a perfect late afternoon in mid-summer Less humid than it had been earlier in the day, when everyone had been muttering about thunderstorms. Vera stood for a moment watching the search team inch their way towards the horizon and the swallows swooping and dipping to pick up insects over the stubble field.
‘If you can get an ID on that tyre, you’ll get in touch?’
He nodded briefly and, looking at him, she thought he knew already how mad he was to take up with the pretty pathology assistant. He hated himself but he couldn’t help it. He didn’t want to admit he was making a fool of himself, or he was too old, or that the woman was using him. He’d persuaded himself that he loved her.
In Kimmerston, the incident room was unusually quiet. A strained expectant quiet, so every ringing phone or unexpected raised voice set nerves jangling. She’d just settled into her office when her phone did ring. Not an internal call. This had come through on her direct line. She gave her name and there was a pause. In the background the sound of echoes in an enclosed space, a metal gate slammed shut and locked, rowdy men’s voices. Then a different, quieter voice. ‘This is David Sharp.’ Davy Sharp in Acklington Prison. It would be teatime. She pictured him on the wing. He’d have had to queue to get to the phone and there’d be a line of men behind him. All listening in.
‘Yes, Davy. How can I help?’ Keeping it easy. Her voice low too so only he could hear.
‘More the other way round,’ he said. ‘More what I can do for you.’
‘What can you tell me, Davy?’
‘Nothing on the phone. You’ll need to visit. And it could be nothing at all.’
‘Run out of tabs, Davy?’ She couldn’t leave the investigation and rush off to Acklington just because he wanted a cigarette. Not without news of Laura. ‘It’s impossible today. Can I send someone else?’
‘No,’ he said, his voice still even. ‘It’s you or nobody.’ There was a moment of silence and she thought the phone had been cut off before he continued. ‘It’s complicated. A bit odd. I don’t understand it. But no rush. Tomorrow will do.’
‘There’s a girl missing, Davy,’ she said. ‘I need anything you have now.’ But this time the phone was dead and she wasn’t sure he’d heard what she’d told him. She replaced the receiver, angry with herself. She should have handled it differently.
Despite what she’d said to him, she was tempted to go. At least it would be action of a sort, the drive to Acklington, the banter with the prison officer on the gate. An escape from the waiting. But Sharp hadn’t sounded urgent. There was no way she could justify it.
The collection of Parr’s stories on her desk caught her eye and she was distracted by thoughts
of the writer. She had a sudden picture of him, sitting with the rest of the group in the garden at Fox Mill, the night they’d found Lily’s body. The four men and the one woman on the veranda. It occurred to her now that all those men were a little bit in love with Felicity Calvert. It wasn’t the birding which glued them together. It was the woman. The ideal housewife with her flowery skirts and her perfect baking. The men were all lonely, screwed up, frustrated. Like me, she thought. Just like me. Then she was taken back to the story she’d been reading when Julie had phoned, the abduction of the young person at the height of the summer, the loving description of the capture.
Vera opened her door and yelled for Ashworth. He came immediately and she saw the people in the rest of the room look up from their desks to watch. She realized they were thinking there’d been a development. A body. It might even come as a relief for them, a break from the tension, if the girl was found dead. At least then they would know what they were working with.
‘There’s no news,’ she said, speaking to the room in general. ‘Soon as there is, I’ll tell you.’
Ashworth shut the door behind him and leaned against it. She thought he looked tired, then remembered his wife, the baby due any day. Things got uncomfortable the last few weeks of pregnancy. Especially in this weather. So she’d heard. Perhaps neither of them was getting much sleep.
‘Read this,’ Vera said. She nodded to the book on the table. ‘There’s this story, written by Parr. It’s not exactly like the abduction of the girl, but near enough.’
Joe looked at her as if she’d completely lost it, but he picked up the book and began to read.
‘I started it last night,’ Vera went on. ‘Now I can’t get it out of my head.’
Joe looked up from the book. ‘You think it’s a sort of fantasy. Parr’s written about it and now he’s playing it out.’
‘Crazy, isn’t it? Ignore me.’ And really she couldn’t believe it. It was too theatrical to be true.
‘There’s no evidence he ever met the Armstrongs,’ Joe said slowly. ‘Certainly no motive.’