Detective Mike Croft Series Box Set

by Jane Adams

  Whatever, he thought, he would have to take action soon, the child was definitely sick and he wasn’t sure how much longer she would last.

  * * *

  Jake could not have anticipated Alastair’s body being found so soon, but he had taken no account of the strong current that whipped around the headland and struck the foot of the cliffs, only to be turned back out to sea. The body, its shattered face battered by the ocean currents, fetched up on a stony beach only miles from where it had entered the water. Mike was sent to identify it.

  ‘It isn’t pretty,’ the pathologist told him. ‘I’ll try and fit the post-mortem in some time today, but I can’t promise anything.’

  ‘Cause of death was gunshot wounds?’ Mike asked.

  ‘To that, a provisional yes,’ the pathologist told him. ‘Unless the shotgun was used to hide something else, of course. But whether or not he was dead at the precise moment he hit the water, well, I think that’s pretty academic, don’t you, considering half his face was blown away?’

  Mike didn’t feel qualified to comment. He had a sudden vision of Jake Bowen standing in a courtroom arguing it out with the prosecution, but he let it be.

  ‘We’ve had dental records sent for,’ he said. ‘Will they be of any use?’

  ‘Oh, yes. There are still plenty of teeth left. Most of the injury is to the upper portion of the head.’

  They entered the small room at the side of the mortuary that was usually set aside for relatives identifying their dead.

  ‘I put him in here,’ the pathologist said. ‘We’re a bit full right now. Car crash last night on the M5. Maybe you heard about it?’

  Mike nodded. ‘Seven dead.’

  ‘Yes, nasty. Anyway, here’s your man.’

  Mike had seen bodies pulled out of the water before, some of them so bloated and discoloured they looked scarcely human. Alastair had not been immersed that long, but the rocks and tide had done their own damage and the shotgun wounds had been further scraped and beaten by the tides, turning Alastair’s face into a bloody pulp.

  ‘I’d like to see his hands,’ Mike said.

  ‘Certainly. There’s a ring still on the left, looks as if it’s been there for a long time. A wedding band probably. They always get tight as we get older and the body gets, well, that little bit bigger.’

  Mike looked closely at the dead man’s hands and at the ring that he’d seen so many times, a broad band of light yellow gold.

  ‘Until we’ve got the dental records nothing’s positive,’ he said, ‘but I believe that this is Alastair Bowen.’

  ‘Well, if I meet up with another six-foot middle-aged male I’ll let you know,’ the pathologist announced with satisfaction. ‘Until then we’ll assume this is your man. I’ll get the reports to you as soon as I can.’

  Mike phoned Peterson from the mobile in his car. ‘I’m pretty certain,’ he told him. ‘Gunshot wounds to the face, but I’m in little doubt.’

  ‘Right,’ Peterson said quietly. ‘Well, that’s that then. Another one chalked up.’

  ‘Anything on the house-hunting?’

  ‘I’ve people doing the rounds, and we’ve contacted the other agencies. You remember, there were a couple from up north and others from further along the south coast, but it’s going to be pure luck if we come up with anything. Agents vary in how long they keep their records, so we’re pulling the property guides from the local papers for that period as well.’

  ‘Sounds like a long shot.’

  ‘The man’s got to live somewhere, Mike.’

  * * *

  Jake had taken a break for lunch. He was sitting in a roadside cafe finishing his tea and reading the paper when he saw Charlie’s advert in the Lonely Hearts section.

  He read it twice, just to be sure, then a slow smile spread across his face. So, Charlie Morrow had a sense of humour.

  He tried the number from the pay phone in the cafe, only to have Charlie’s direct line intercepted by the reception switchboard.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the woman told him, ‘he’s not in his room right now, he’s having his physio.’

  Jake declined to leave a message. He felt somewhat put out by the delay. A call to the Dorchester Herald came next. ‘Sorry,’ he was told, ‘but it’s too late to place an advert for tomorrow. We usually need at least two days.’

  He put the receiver down, thinking quickly. Then called the Herald again and asked to be put through to Ed Macey.

  Macey was not at his desk and it was Liz who took the call.

  ‘Hello, Ed Macey’s desk.’

  ‘My but your voice has changed. Are you taking anything for it?’

  Liz giggled. ‘Macey’s not here right now,’ she said. ‘He’ll be about ten minutes. Can I get him to call you back?’

  ‘No, thank you, love. I won’t be here by then. I’m calling to leave a message for a man called Charlie Morrow. He’s got a small ad in your Lonely Hearts.’

  He felt the change in Liz’s attitude even before he next heard her voice and was amused as she began to stall.

  ‘A message, you say, for Charlie Morrow. OK. Right. If you’ll tell me what it is, I’ll pass it on. Of course, I will.’

  Jake leaned back against the wall, looking out across the cafe. He heard a couple of clicks on the line and guessed Liz would now be recording the call. The slight echo when he next spoke made him wonder if she’d switched to speaker phone.

  ‘I take it you’re recording this for posterity. Well, that’s all right. No doubt your experts will have a lot of fun pinpointing the accent and getting it all wrong.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ Liz told him. ‘I mean, I don’t know much about those things.’

  ‘No? Well, never mind, give yourself another year or two and I’m sure you’ll be the expert Macey is. Now listen close and tell this to Charlie Morrow. I’ll meet him where Marion O’Donnel died. He’ll know the place I mean. And tell him if he comes alone, I’ll consider giving him the child.’

  ‘When?’ Liz asked him. ‘I’ve got to tell him when.’

  ‘It’s a sacred place, love. He’ll know what time.’

  ‘No! Wait!’ Liz shouted. ‘Wait, don’t hang up yet. Charlie can’t drive. His hands—’

  ‘Of course. I hadn’t thought of that. Well, tell . . . Ah, yes, tell Maria Lucas that she has to drive him. She’ll do that for the sake of the child, I’m sure.’

  He paused, enjoying the panic in Liz’s voice, but also the fact that her nerve had held enough to remind him about Charlie.

  ‘We should get together some time,’ he said. ‘Have a little chat, maybe take in a film, or have dinner. My place maybe? Or should it be yours?’

  * * *

  Macey was mortified that he’d not been the one to take the call, but listening to the tape he had to admit that Liz had done well.

  ‘You OK?’ he asked her. She was smoking again, he noted. Probably not a good sign.

  ‘Sure I am. Sure. I just got off the phone from talking to a murderer. He invited me to dinner. How the hell am I supposed to feel?’

  ‘Make him take you somewhere special,’ Macey advised, realizing even as he said it that he’d gone too far. He patted Liz’s shoulder in his usual parody of comfort and dug a packet of cigarettes from the bottom of his drawer. ‘Here, love, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘And there aren’t many people hear me say that in one lifetime.’

  * * *

  Charlie was as excited as Macey, but worried too.

  ‘He won’t keep the appointment,’ he said. ‘It’s all just one big joke to him, seeing us running round in circles. I’ve got to get on to Mike. He’ll never agree to Maria driving me.’

  ‘Don’t see he’ll have much choice,’ Macey said. ‘She’s a lady with a mind of her own and she’d do anything to get that little girl back. Charlie, what’s this place he’s talking about?’

  ‘It’s a place called West Kennet. Other side of Devizes.’

  ‘And presumably he means midnight as the meeting time.
Do we have to bring them in on this . . . Sorry, stupid question. OK, you get on to Peterson. But, Charlie, you cut me out of this and I’ll never let you rest, you know that, don’t you?’

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  It was something like a two-hour drive from Honiton to Devizes they had estimated and West Kennet was just a little further on. There was no village there, only a cottage, a gate leading to a path between ploughed fields and, at the top of a steep hill, the long barrow itself silhouetted against the skyline.

  ‘I’ve not seen the place since last winter,’ Charlie told Maria as they drove. ‘It’s a bleak spot at the best of times and I won’t forget that night in a hurry. Tipping it down with rain, visibility a few feet and this red-hot shell of a burnt-out car that just wouldn’t cool, no matter what Mother Nature chucked at it.’

  ‘He won’t be there, will he?’ Maria said. ‘And what he said about letting Essie go, that’s not true either, is it?’

  Charlie looked at her. She was staring straight ahead, trying to concentrate on the road, but her hands gripped the wheel so tightly he could see the bones of her knuckles through the skin.

  ‘He knew what he was about when he said you had to drive, didn’t he? I wish I didn’t have to put you through this, love.’

  ‘I know, Charlie. It’s just we’re none of us fooled by this, we know it’s just another Jake Bowen line, and yet—’

  ‘We can’t afford not to go, just in case he plays it straight with us this time.’

  Charlie shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He didn’t find it easy to be anywhere for long. There was so much of him that rubbed and chafed where the new skin was growing or the scarring pulled at the surrounding skin. He took pills at night and hated doing it, but the few hours of oblivion were precious and it was the only way that he could sleep.

  It had been chaos since Peterson had been told about Jake’s call. He’d been furious with Macey and with Charlie himself, but his rant had been cut short by the need to act on the information. And Macey would have to wait for his exclusive.

  ‘When we’re done with this, you can write the bloody book,’ Peterson had told the journalist. ‘I’ll give you rights to my frigging memoirs, but you’ve got to hold off on this one. If the public knows he’s making fools of us yet again then all the cooperation we’re beginning to get will come to nothing. And we’ll still be no nearer finding that child.’

  Macey had agreed to back off, albeit reluctantly. ‘But anyone else gets so much as a whiff of this,’ he promised, ‘and I’ll publish the whole damn thing, with or without your cooperation. You mark my words on that.’

  Kennet was way outside Peterson’s jurisdiction. Charlie had been a serving officer on the local force when he’d been injured and the help they had received had been unstinting. An ARV had been in place since before Maria had collected Charlie. There were officers in the cottage beside the gate that led to the barrow and still others at the monument itself. An unmarked car with a young couple in plain clothes sat in the lay-by fifty yards up the road and officers equipped with night sights were stationed at vantage points all around the area.

  Peterson and his opposite number from Devizes had taken up position in the shadows of Silbury Hill, the giant earthworks that faced the West Kennet long barrow across the Devizes road.

  Mike was following Maria’s car with two armed officers.

  It was a massive operation. Charlie wondered how much it was costing and what must be going through Jake’s mind when he set it up. He wondered too what Maria was thinking just then, but he found he couldn’t ask. Probably the same hopeless thoughts that were going through his own mind.

  ‘We’re almost there,’ he commented as they reached the traffic island a little over a mile from their destination. The Wagon and Horses pub was in darkness and the unlit road curved ahead and out of sight. ‘Just take it slow,’ he said, ‘or you’ll miss the pull-in. It’s not well marked.’

  Maria dropped her speed. In the mirror she could see Mike’s car a good way behind. He had orders to go past her when she parked up, then stop further along the road. She saw Silbury looming out of nowhere on the left, just before Charlie told her they’d arrived and pointed to the lay-by on the right-hand side.

  ‘Well, now we’re here,’ she said, her voice unsteady for all that she tried to remain in control, ‘what do we do?’

  ‘It’s ten to twelve,’ Charlie said. ‘We get out and walk to the place where Marion O’Donnel died and then we wait.’ And when it’s plain the bastard isn’t here, he thought, I suppose we turn ourselves around and go back the way we came.

  Miles away, Jake had the windows open and if he listened hard he could hear the sea. He’d been watching the late film, an old B-movie horror flick, the sort he’d grown up with and still loved, where the heroines scream so prettily and threaten to fall out of their clothes and evil can be destroyed by a cross and a sharp stick.

  He sipped his beer and thought about Charlie Morrow and all his entourage waiting for him in the dark in the middle of nowhere.

  ‘Next time, Charlie,’ he whispered to himself, highly amused by his little escapade. Anyway, he thought, it wouldn’t be so bad. At least this time the rain had stayed away.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  5 July

  It was eight o’clock on the Friday morning. Mike figured he’d had less than an hour’s sleep, but somehow rest would not come. His mind was running in all directions, refusing to either make sense or be still. He felt more deeply depressed than he could ever remember, except perhaps when Stevie had died. Nothing had as yet quite matched that, but the way he felt now came very close.

  Beside him Maria slept. She’d cried herself to sleep, having kept a hold on her emotions until they’d been alone. She had driven back with Peterson in stony silence, then finally broken down. It was a revelation to him. Maria never cried, was always in control, always the one to give comfort. It was the final confirmation of just how hopeless their situation seemed.

  The only compensation he could find was gratitude, that she trusted him enough to let him see how utterly bereft she felt.

  ‘I dreamed of calling Jo,’ she’d told him, ‘and telling her that Essie was safe and it was all over. I knew I was just kidding myself, Mike, but it was something to hang on to, you know.’

  ‘You’ll still get to do that,’ he told her. ‘It will be all right.’

  And she’d been kind enough not to tell him to his face that he was a liar.

  It was almost two weeks since Essie had disappeared from her school and they were no further on.

  He must have dozed again despite himself, because the next time he looked at the clock it was almost nine. The bedroom window was open and sounds from the street filtered in: traffic noise and people’s voices as they went about their day. He lay still, nagging at the random thoughts still plaguing him, then he turned over and woke Maria.

  ‘We’re going to talk to Max,’ he told her. ‘You’re going to talk to Max. We have to know where Jake bought his house.’

  * * *

  It was early afternoon by the time they got to the prison and Max was in flirtatious mood. Maria was a beautiful woman and Max liked attractive females, though he was fickle when it came to type. His last preference had been for blondes, but he was quite prepared to change his mind.

  ‘Nice of you to brighten my day, Inspector Croft,’ he said. ‘But you’ll excuse me if I ask what the lady sees in you. She could take her choice, if you ask me.’

  Maria raised an eyebrow at Mike but she returned Max’s smile. ‘I suppose I don’t always like the obvious,’ she said.

  ‘Nice answer, yes, nice answer. It’s good to look at the unusual. Jake always said you should try and view the familiar from an unfamiliar angle. That way you learn to see things as they really are.’

  ‘And does that work for you, Mr Harriman?’

  ‘Oh, call me Max. It’s not often that I get the choice. But to answer your question, yes, I find
it works for me. People are so hidebound, don’t you think?’

  Maria nodded. ‘Probably,’ she said. ‘Sometimes people have big ambitions, big ideas, but reality gets in the way of achieving them. I think, for most of us, our families and the need to earn a living end up taking priority over the rest.’

  Max shook his head. ‘I never wanted that,’ he said. ‘Family, it just ties you down. It’s better to be free of all of that.’

  Maria nodded slowly. ‘I used to think that way,’ she said, ‘but it can get lonely sometimes. You never wanted someone special in your life, Max? Someone who thought you were the most important thing in the world?’ Max grinned at her. ‘He thinks that way about you, does he? I’m not surprised. You’re quite a catch for a humble copper.’

  Maria laughed. ‘I’ll keep reminding him of that. But did you never want that for yourself?’

  Max narrowed his eyes and contemplated the question. ‘Just what is it you want from me?’ he asked Maria. ‘I mean, this is very nice and I’m quite happy to waltz around the question all the day, but I’m curious just the same.’

  ‘What do you think I’ve come for?’

  ‘The same thing all of them ask for. Tell me about Jake, they say. What did Jake do? What did Jake say? And I understand the fascination, I really do. My whole life has been spent looking at what Jake has done with his and trying to get close, even within touching distance, of half that he’s achieved.’

  ‘But sometimes you’d like to be valued for yourself,’ Maria stated. ‘I think that’s natural, Max. Everyone would want that.’

  Max scratched his head, then got up and began to pace around the room. From the corner Mike observed, content to let things take their course for a while. He watched Maria shifting into her professional role, the change in her almost physical as she moved back mentally into her working clothes, and she said nothing as Max paced the room, gathering his thoughts. It seemed like a long time before he sat down and began to talk again.

  ‘Has he got rid of that father of his yet?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ Maria lied smoothly. Confirmation of Alastair’s death had not yet hit the news. ‘Do you think he might?’