Shades of Evil

by Shirley Wells

  Jill knew her neighbour would love that. She already saw herself as Miss Marple.

  ‘Right,’ she said again. ‘But I bet I could still—’

  ‘Flatten him? Maybe. Maybe not. I’d rather not take any chances just in case he’s an expert in Thai boxing, too. OK?’

  She nodded. It was one thing being brave in Max’s office, but she knew from experience that it was a completely different matter when you wanted a shower and couldn’t banish that confounded scene from Psycho from your head.

  ‘He must phone first,’ she mused, ‘to see if I’m there.’

  ‘Maybe. He certainly doesn’t hang around on the phone for more than a second or two. Anyway, don’t worry, we’ll soon have him. Tell you what,’ he went on, ‘I need to call on Adam and Vivienne Smith but, when I’m done there, we’ll all go out for a meal. Me, you and the boys. I’ll even pay.’

  ‘Sounds good to me.’

  ‘Oh, and one other thing,’ Max added. ‘You don’t tell a living, breathing soul, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I mean it, Jill. We’re dealing with someone who knows you. Someone who knows we’re a couple.’

  She was fully aware of that, and it wasn’t a comforting feeling.

  Max had hoped that, as was usually the case, Adam Smith would be pounding the streets looking for his daughter. His wife, Vivienne, was far easier to deal with.

  His luck was out, however. Adam Smith opened the door to him.

  Max watched as Smith swayed in front of him. Not alcohol this time, Max suspected, but nerves. Smith might try to convince himself, as well as everyone else, that his daughter was lost on the streets, but even he must realize that, after so long, there was a very strong possibility that she was dead.

  ‘Nothing’s happened,’ Max assured him, ‘but I’d like a word if that’s all right. May I come in?’

  Smith pulled the door open fully to allow him access.

  ‘What do you mean, nothing’s happened?’ he demanded.

  ‘I mean I don’t have anything to tell you other than that we may, and I stress the may, have had a positive sighting of your daughter in Blackpool.’

  ‘Blackpool?’

  That threw him. It made a mockery of the hours he’d spent walking the streets of Harrington.

  Vivienne Smith had been sitting in the lounge, but she rose to her feet, panic etched in every facial muscle.

  No TV or radio had been on and Max guessed they had either been talking about their daughter or, more likely, simply staring into space, too terrified to voice their personal nightmares.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Smith,’ Max said, giving her what he hoped was a positive, upbeat sort of smile.

  ‘Did you say Blackpool?’ she asked, and Max nodded.

  This room was like any other in the row of semidetached houses on West Street, but it had a sadness to it that seeped into your bones. He wondered what it had been like when Yasmin was living there. Filled with noise? Echoing with laughter? It was difficult to imagine.

  The plasma TV screen was huge and to the side of that was an impressive audio system. There was a pebble-effect gas fire, a tan-coloured leather suite and cream carpets.

  Max handed Adam Smith the photograph they’d pulled from the CCTV footage.

  ‘It’s the best we can do, I’m afraid,’ Max told them. ‘Would you say this is Yasmin?’

  Max saw the way Smith’s chin quivered, and the way his jaw tightened as he strove for a tight grip on his emotions.

  At first, Max thought the pain was from seeing his little girl in the photo. Then he realized it was because Smith couldn’t say for sure if it was Yasmin or not.

  Wordlessly, he handed it to his wife.

  ‘That’s Yasmin,’ she said. ‘That’s our daughter, Chief Inspector.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Positive.’

  ‘When was this taken?’ Smith asked.

  ‘Two nights ago.’ Max knew the couple expected him to go to Blackpool, collect Yasmin and bring her home. He only wished it was that simple. ‘The car she’s getting into is a white Mercedes,’ he went on, ‘but we can’t see anything to give us a clue as to its owner. No registration, no identifying marks, nothing. We’re scanning all other CCTV in Blackpool to see if we can get another sighting of either Yasmin or the car.’

  Smith took the photo and stared at it for a few moments. Once again, emotion threatened to take over. Max was wrong; the emotion wasn’t due to not being able to recognize his own daughter, it was due to not daring to believe it could be her.

  ‘I wondered if you have more photos of Yasmin,’ Max said. ‘Or, even better, videos of her. We’d like to see the way she moves and talks, any gestures unique to her—’

  ‘We’ve given you photos,’ Smith muttered.

  They’d given them two photos. In both, Yasmin had been smiling for the camera. The stance was too posed.

  ‘I know, and I’m asking for more. We have a lot of highly trained officers working on this, and it will be a great help if they can study Yasmin in more detail. If you have pictures where she’s been caught unawares, where she’s doing something other than looking at a camera, we’d be grateful.’

  ‘I’ll get them,’ Vivienne said.

  She left the room briefly and returned clutching a large cake tin to her chest.

  ‘We’ll return them to you as soon as possible,’ Max promised.

  When she lifted the lid, Max saw hundreds of photographs. They must have sorted them out over the last few months.

  ‘There are lots taken when she was a baby or a toddler,’ Vivienne warned.

  ‘They won’t be any use, will they?’ Smith snapped at his wife.

  ‘Let’s have a look, shall we?’ Preparing himself for the long haul, Max sat beside Mrs Smith and looked through them with her. Picture after picture.

  One in particular caught his eye. It would have caught anyone’s eye. Fairly recent, it showed Yasmin dressed as Madonna. Instead of an innocent fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, she looked seductive and experienced. In short, she looked like every red-blooded man’s fantasy.

  ‘This one …’ Vivienne shot her husband an anxious look and spoke softly. ‘It was for a party at her friend’s house. They all dressed up like this. Yasmin thought it was a bit of fun, but then Beth, her friend, put pictures of everyone on the internet. Yasmin didn’t like that. She’s quite shy, you see, and she hates other people seeing her photo.’

  Max longed to grab them both by their throats and shake them. Did they seriously imagine that finding a lost teenager was simply a case of having a couple of patrol cars on the streets ready to bring her home? Why in hell’s name hadn’t they mentioned this before?

  ‘Which internet site was it?’ Max asked, and Vivienne shook her head.

  ‘I don’t know about the internet,’ she apologized.

  ‘I need Beth’s address.’

  ‘Beth?’ Smith snapped. ‘You’ve got Beth’s address. You were given all her friends’ names and addresses.’

  Yes, and they’d spoken to every last one of those friends. But while they’d checked everything on Yasmin’s computer, they hadn’t checked Beth’s.

  Vivienne didn’t argue. She simply went to the address book by the phone, tore a page from the back, and carefully, stopping to double check, wrote down Beth’s address and phone number.

  ‘Thank you,’ Max said. ‘I need to take this photo, but I will let you have it back.’

  They looked at every photo in that tin and, while there were several pictures of Yasmin that interested him, the Madonna lookalike was at the top of his list.

  All the time, Adam Smith paced the room. Max guessed he was mentally packing a bag. Without doubt, he would be on his way to Blackpool first thing in the morning.

  Max knew better than to argue with him.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Jill was striving for normality, but having breakfast with Max and his sons was a disturbing experience. It was a painful remind
er of how good and how bad things had once been between them. She was trying hard not to remember any of it.

  She had a slice of toast, something she never bothered with at home. Usually coffee was her first meal of the day. Perhaps she was trying to set an example to Harry and Ben by showing them she knew all about the most important meal of the day. Or, more likely, she was too greedy to refuse.

  ‘Bus,’ Max mumbled through a mouthful of food, nodding up at the clock.

  ‘It’s always late,’ Harry said, but he picked up his schoolbag.

  ‘Yay! Last day of school,’ Ben said happily.

  ‘Trousers, Ben,’ Max pointed out.

  Ben looked down at his legs and seemed surprised to see the old jeans he’d worn in the garden while playing with the dogs.

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ he said, and he ran upstairs to change, leaving Max to roll his eyes in despair.

  Five minutes later, in full school uniform and with bags slung over their shoulders, the boys headed off for the school bus.

  ‘It’s lucky Ben doesn’t want to be a rocket scientist,’ Max said, shaking his head. ‘Do you want another coffee?’

  ‘Please.’

  The caffeine would help to keep her awake. She’d been too conscious of Max in the adjoining room to sleep well. The offer had been there, so she could have shared his bed. They’d had some wonderful times when they’d lived here together, but it had ended in disaster, and she didn’t want his sons thinking she was a permanent feature.

  ‘I’m a bit stuck without a car,’ she said, pushing the memories aside. ‘I wanted to go over to Kelton this morning and have a chat with Steve.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘I won’t know until I get there.’

  ‘You can come in with me and then take a pool car.’

  He was ready to leave but first Jill needed to sort out her cats. Apart from Fly, who always looked as if he was contemplating a tasty snack of cat, Max’s dogs were polite around the felines. There was a reasonable harmony between them all, and Jill marvelled that animals, unlike humans, could exist fairly happily side by side. All the same, she locked her cats in the conservatory, well away from the dogs.

  ‘Are you ready to go?’ Max asked.

  ‘Yes, and thanks for letting me stay last night. I’m sure I was perfectly safe back at my cottage, but, well, until we have some idea who’s out there—’

  ‘Quite. Good to see you showing a bit of sense for a change.’

  ‘Although, my stalker isn’t planning to harm me,’ she added confidently. ‘He’s a complete coward.’

  ‘We’re safer not testing that theory.’

  Most of the snow had thawed, but Max had the radio tuned to the local station as he drove and more heavy falls for the north-west were expected overnight.

  Once they reached headquarters, Jill went to her office to check emails. Finding nothing urgent, she dashed off a couple of replies and then went to sort out a car. It wasn’t quite as simple as Max had suggested but half an hour later she was driving an ancient Vauxhall Astra in the direction of Kelton Bridge.

  She wasn’t surprised the car had been available and was merely glad she wasn’t in a hurry. The interior smelt of stale fish and chips and something that she couldn’t identify. She didn’t try too hard.

  When she reached the village, she drove straight to Steve Carlisle’s house.

  She wasn’t sure what she wanted to talk to him about. She believed though that, whether he knew it or not, he held some of the answers to this.

  She knocked on his door, but no one answered. It was after nine o’clock, so he would have listened to the news headlines and taken Cally for her morning walk. Jill decided to wait. Her copy of the Racing Post was in her bag, so she passed the time by looking at the runners and riders.

  She couldn’t concentrate, though. Her mind went round in circles as she thought of Lauren Cole and her father. Father and daughter murdered. Why?

  She was trying to mentally gather all she knew about Lauren and Vincent Cole when Steve walked up his drive, the dog ambling by his side.

  She jumped out of her car.

  ‘Morning, Steve. I was passing so I thought I’d call in and see how you are.’

  ‘Hello, Jill. Come on in. You haven’t been waiting, have you?’

  ‘No, I’ve only just pulled up.’ She’d been sitting there for half an hour.

  Steve shrugged off his coat, scarf and hat, and kicked off his walking boots, then they went into the sitting room where Cally immediately jumped on to her chair and settled down to sleep.

  The stove hadn’t been lit, but the room was a lot warmer than the pool car had been.

  ‘So how are you doing, Steve?’

  ‘Fine, thanks,’ he replied. ‘The reporters seem to have given up on me for the time being. Fingers crossed they stay away.’

  Jill knew what he meant. Journalists would try any ploy to get a story and having them camped out on your doorstep was a daunting experience.

  ‘How’s Alison?’ she asked.

  ‘She’s good, thanks. Working, of course. There’s an exhibition in Liverpool so she’s there at the moment. She’ll be back tomorrow morning.’

  It was difficult to tell what he thought of that, but she guessed he was glad that life was carrying on as normal. He wasn’t the type to want a wife at home fussing around.

  ‘Steve, I know you’ve been asked more than enough questions,’ she began, ‘but can you tell me exactly what Lauren Cole knew about you?’

  He frowned at that. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Did she know the route you walked? The time you’d be out walking? That you sometimes carried an axe or a saw with you?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ he said after a moment. ‘She knew all that. One day when we met up, she asked what was in the sack. I had an axe and half a dozen logs in it. She laughed, I remember. Said she would have thought twice about speaking to me if she’d known I had an axe.’ He sighed loudly. ‘Given what’s happened, it’s not very funny, is it?’

  ‘And she knew that you walked the same route at the same time every day?’

  ‘She knew where I liked to walk with Cally, yes. But sometimes that route took me an hour and sometimes two. Why do you ask, Jill?’

  ‘I’m just trying to piece things together,’ she answered, deliberately vague. ‘What about Charlie? Was he the sort of dog to go off with strangers?’

  ‘No, he was utterly devoted to Lauren. Although if someone had food …’ He smiled, a sad sort of smile. ‘She told me that when she found him, or rather he found her, he was starving. A stray, he was. She didn’t think he’d ever got over that and was always hungry. He had a good nose on him, too. Once, he ran off quite a distance. When we caught up with him, he’d found a sandwich that someone had dropped. He must have been able to smell that from a hundred yards away.’

  If Steve, who only saw the girl now and again, knew all this about Charlie, it stood to reason that any acquaintance of Lauren’s would, too.

  ‘What are you getting at, Jill?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she admitted. ‘I’m trying to understand what happened that morning. Is it possible that someone could have enticed Charlie away from Lauren, knowing that you would split up? Is it possible that someone set you up?’

  The question clearly shocked him.

  ‘But why would anyone – I mean, why me?’

  ‘Why not?’ Jill responded.

  To escape blame, the killer wouldn’t care who he put in the frame.

  ‘Do you think it’s possible?’ she asked again.

  ‘Not really, no. It was my suggestion we split up to look for Charlie. No one could have known I’d say that. I dropped my sack and no one could have known I’d do that. In fact, no one could have known that I’d even have it with me.’

  He was right, of course. The killer couldn’t have known those things.

  But if Jill’s theory was correct, this had been a spur of the moment attack. Their man was an opportunist. H
e was an amateur, albeit one who, so far, was clever enough to get away with murder. Perhaps he’d followed Lauren that morning. Perhaps he’d seen her meet up with Steve, enticed the dog away with a Mars bar or anything else he happened to have in his pocket.

  It sounded far-fetched, and she certainly couldn’t see Max falling for it.

  ‘I think someone wanted Lauren out of the way, Steve, and I think you were an easy target for the blame.’

  ‘I can’t see why. Or how.’ He looked so weary of it all. ‘Thanks, though. For believing I’m innocent, I mean.’

  ‘I never doubted it,’ she replied.

  ‘Chief Inspector Trentham did. Still does, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  ‘He’s keeping an open mind,’ she said lightly.

  To give credit to Max, he always kept an open mind. He would never send an innocent man to a cell.

  ‘If you remember anything else about that morning,’ she said, ‘let me know, will you?’

  ‘I will, yes. Of course.’

  He showed her to the door and she took the unfamiliar car keys from her pocket.

  ‘You seem to be coping well,’ she couldn’t help saying. He looked desperately tired, but he appeared more confident than she’d ever seen him. He looked as if he could take on the world and win.

  ‘I’ve had a lot of time to think about things,’ he said. ‘I’ve realized that the small stuff doesn’t matter.’

  ‘You’re right there. Be seeing you, Steve.’

  Instead of driving straight to headquarters, she drove to Todmorden Moor and parked there. The wind strength was increasing and it buffeted the car.

  Deciding the planet would have to take care of itself, she kept the engine running for warmth. She leaned back in her seat, closed her eyes and tried to picture what had happened the morning Lauren Cole met her end.

  ‘Right,’ she murmured to herself, ‘tell me what you did. You followed Lauren to her dad’s house, didn’t you? You saw her leave and you knew she was in a temper. Her dad said she drove off in such a state that she knocked the wheelie bin flying. So you wondered where she was going, didn’t you? You followed her. So you must have a car.’

  Jill smiled to herself as she thanked God her mother couldn’t see her talking to imaginary nutters. Except this particular nutter wasn’t imaginary. He was out there somewhere. All they had to do was find him.