He sat back with his eyes closed, the radio switched off, his thoughts grim. Like Uttley, he promised himself no rest until they’d found the killer. The burden was heavy, but it was his responsibility. The third day after the murder, and the bastard still free. Yet he knew that the search could go on for months, years even. If you didn’t find them fast, often you didn’t find them at all.
As the tree-crowned Kennet Edge flashed by on their left, and they entered the outskirts of Lavenstock, children were coming home from school, humping the oversize bags they all seemed to find necessary to carry their school kit around in. There’d been nothing in Patti’s school bag to excite attention – her school books, plus gym kit, towel, a hairbrush, deodorant and a small leather purse containing less than a pound. The newsagent she’d worked for, Surinder Patel, had been worried that she hadn’t returned to leave the empty delivery bag and to pick up her school bag and hat, which she always left with him before cycling off to school for half past eight. He blamed himself for not raising the alarm earlier, but his corner shop, as well as being a newsagent’s, was also a sub-post office and general grocery store, and that was his busiest time of day, when people were coming in for papers and cigarettes, and bread and groceries were being delivered. Long before he’d had the chance to do something about it, Patti was dead.
Just why had Gemma been pulling the wool over their eyes? Farrar had been detailed to canvass all the local taxi firms, and, knowing Farrar, it would be done thoroughly, but Mayo was damn sure none of them would have received any call on Saturday evening for a taxi to take a young schoolgirl home. Narrowing his eyes, he visualized the town map which occupied most of one wall in his office.
‘Turn off and drive round the ring road,’ he said suddenly to Abigail as the Kublai Khan glass domes of the new shopping centre at the top of the town came into view.
She obeyed without so much as raising an eyebrow. They followed the road as it skirted the main thoroughfares and swung round into Colley Street. At the stop by the Punch Bowl they had to wait until a number 12 bus pulled out, which lumbered in front of them all the way to Milford Road, where Mayo instructed Abigail to abandon the ring road and drive into the police-station car park.
Back in his office, he traced the same bus route on the map with the arm of his spectacles. It went along the ring road, then made a detour into the town centre. Past the Saracen’s Head and across to join Albert Road and thus into Colley Street. Past the police station, and eventually round to the end of Mailer Street, where Patti lived.
‘But – have a look at this – from the bus stop in Colley Street –’
‘The quickest way to Mailer Street is the path across the back of the allotments.’ It hadn’t taken Abigail long to pick up his reasoning. Her eyes took on a gleam of realization. ‘And you think –?’
‘It’s a possible hypothesis,’ Mayo said slowly.
‘More than that, surely? It was the same Saturday night Ensor was killed there, wasn’t it? So it’s not out of the way to think that she might have seen something!’ The idea had re-energized her. ‘I think I should go and see Gemma again. And this time get the truth out of her. I’ll go carefully,’ she promised, pre-empting any warning he might see fit to give. ‘After what happened to Patti, no wonder she didn’t want to talk, poor kid.’
Abigail would have preferred to speak to Gemma on her own, but since Gemma was in the eyes of the law still a juvenile, it was necessary to go by the book and have an appropriate person present. In this case, Gemma’s mother, not the grandmother. The evasions didn’t trip quite so easily from Gemma’s tongue in her presence.
Amanda Townsend was several inches shorter than her daughter, a pretty, dark, energetic-looking woman in her mid-forties, but one whose every gesture indicated that she wasn’t one to stand any nonsense. She sat next to Gemma on the sofa, looking expectantly at Abigail, wearing a beige cotton skirt and a plain white shirt, no make-up. Too busy, perhaps too self-fulfilled in her career to feel the need to bother about her appearance. Maybe it was the grandmother who’d chosen Gemma’s clothes.
‘I just want to go over what you said again. Gemma,’ Abigail began. ‘About the taxi on Saturday night. We haven’t been able to trace a taxi firm that came here to pick anyone up.’
Gemma, this time dressed in jeans, albeit carefully pressed ones, and worn with a neat print blouse, gave a choked sort of gasp and then burst into tears.
Her mother let an arm rest across her daughter’s shoulders for a few seconds, gave a squeeze, then announced briskly, ‘That’s enough of that, Gemma. Dry your eyes and tell Inspector Moon what she wants to know. She’s not going to bite.’
It seemed as though that might be the least of what Gemma feared. In a rush, scrubbing at her eyes at the same time with a tissue, she gulped, ‘She didn’t take a taxi home.’
‘Well!’ Her mother eyed her speculatively. ‘How is it you were able to give me the correct change, three pounds fifty?’
‘We just guessed that’s what it might have come to, about six fifty. Patti put that, apart from her bus fare, into the RSPCA box, so it wasn’t really dishonest. It wasn’t her fault about the taxi, anyway – it was me! She only did it because I asked her to. Mum!’
‘Did she, indeed?’ The tone was not encouraging, but Gemma knew now there was no going back.
There was, as Abigail had known there would be all along, a boyfriend in the picture. Not Patti’s, however, but Gemma’s. ‘What boyfriend’s this?’ Dr Townsend interrupted sharply.
‘His name’s Nige.’ Gemma’s chin went up, a small act of defiance, but she skated on hurriedly with the rest of the story, twisting the little brass ring with the skull and cross-bones on it around on her finger. Gemma had known, she said, that if she went down to the amusement arcade by the market he’d be there, it was where he spent his evenings -
‘Hm,’ was her mother’s only comment.
Hearing the tone of it, and as familiar as Gemma’s mother evidently was with the arcade and the sort who hung around there, Abigail saw immediately why this Nige hadn’t been introduced into the Townsend family. She wondered briefly where Gemma’s father was. Divorced, as Patti’s had been? One could see that drawing the two girls together. Orphans of the marital storm, perhaps.
They’d all had a coffee together, Gemma was saying, when Patti had caught the bus and – Abigail listened impassively – Nige had brought Gemma home on the back of his motorbike. Her grandmother was still in bed and hadn’t known a thing. Not even that Gemma had been out.
In view of all this, looking at Amanda Townsend’s determinedly noncommittal face, Abigail had it in her heart to feel sorry for Gemma. Threats of wasting police time, which had been in her mind when she arrived, she pushed away as unnecessary.
‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ Gemma apologized tearfully, swallowing hard, and turning to Abigail. ‘I suppose I should’ve told you before, but I – There’s something else.’
‘More?’ repeated her mother ominously.
‘Patti got off the bus at Colley Street and took a short cut across the allotments. She could’ve stayed on and ridden round to the end of Mailer Street but it would’ve taken ages and she was already a bit late.’
Bingo! Even the fact that the idea had been Mayo’s, and not hers, couldn’t lessen Abigail’s small surge of triumph. ‘And?’
‘She was halfway along the path at the back of the allotments when she saw two people struggling. One of them seemed to knock the other flat to the ground. She wondered if she ought to have gone to fetch help or something, but it would have made her even later, and, well – you don’t interfere in anything like that if you’ve any sense, do you?’
‘That’s right, Gemma, you don’t.’
Abigail visualized the allotment site, the small green huts amid the neat rows of vegetables, here and there a vivid patch of flowers for cutting, beans climbing up their supports. The colour would have been leached out by the moonlight, but the same moonlight and residual
light from the sodium streetlamps in Colley Street would have cast enough light for Patti to see clearly as she took the path towards the Leasowes, giving her a good view of the central road, the place where Ensor had been found, and possibly even a good view of their faces.
‘But then,’ Gemma said, licking her lips, ‘there was that piece on Radio Lavenstock about that man who’d been found dead there. And she began to be worried that she ought to tell someone.’
‘She didn’t know who they were? Didn’t describe them, or anything?’
‘No – but I think she might’ve known, really, after she’d thought about it. She kept saying she didn’t know what to do. I think she was just too scared to say.’
15
Speculation ran like a buzz of adrenaline through the incident room where the team waited for the Superintendent. The ending of another frustrating day. Largely unproductive routine: legwork, telephoning, questioning, with sources beginning to run dry, a feeling that the inquiry was reaching stalemate. And now, with tidings of this new development filtering through, it was kiss goodbye to any thoughts of taking it easy. They revved up with cigarettes and coffee, in the circumstances not a man or a woman there begrudging the extra effort that would be needed.
Kite alone was bouncing around as if it were first thing in the morning. Keeping up with his high energy levels was other people’s problem. He began opening more windows before Mayo had the chance to do it himself. It hardly made a dent in the atmosphere, since Inspector George Atkins had his pipe well away. He came back to the front desk and reread the information Gemma had given them, propping himself against a desk, arms folded, crossed legs stretched across the gangway. ‘Silly kids. If they’d simply come straight out with it –’
‘It’s obvious why they didn’t.’ Abigail pressed the last drawing pin into the visual-aid board and laid down the black marker pen. ‘Patti thought at first that it was nothing more than a fight she’d seen. According to Gemma, it was only after she heard on the news on Sunday night that a man had been found dead down there on Sunday morning that she began to worry. She dithered about coming forward because she knew both she and Gemma would be in dead shtuck over her not taking a taxi home, not to mention compounding it by short-cutting through the allotments, that time of night.’
‘What devious lives adolescents lead!’
‘And the ones you’d least expect to. Gemma Townsend, of all people, and this Nige.’
‘Nigel Worsfield, a name not unknown to us down here.’
‘OK, I know, bunking off school, petty shoplifting when he was younger – but fair’s fair, he’s had a job down at Everett’s garage since he left school and not been in trouble since. Hardly someone her mother’s likely to approve of, though.’
‘Excuse me, Sarge.’ A WPC, looking pointedly busy, with a file under her arm and balancing two styrofoam cups of coffee, was endeavouring to get past.
Kite amiably angled his long legs to one side. ‘Any mates Patti might have been pairing off with?’ he asked.
‘Apparently not. Patti had been covering up for Gemma – you know, saying she was with her when Gemma was really with Nige and so on, but she doesn’t seem to have had any particular boyfriend of her own. Don’t think we shall get anywhere pursuing that line – the odds are that she saw Philip Ensor being murdered – and that makes it an entirely different ball game.’
Mayo evidently thought so as well. When he showed his face in the incident room, the buzz of talk died down in the expectation of what was to come, the cigarettes of the circumspect were put out as officers grouped themselves in front of him to hear what he had to say.
‘Firstly, thanks for staying on. You should all have made yourselves familiar with the new developments by now, but just to make sure everything’s crystal clear ...’
He drew their attention to the diagrams Abigail had drawn on the board: the names of Philip Ensor and Patti Ryman, side by side, with details of the assaults on each circled and radiating from them. Lines from each circle were now joined together at the bottom.
‘None of you need me to spell out what this means. We now have a possible motive for Patti’s murder – I say possible, we must keep an open mind, but at least it gives us something to work on, in both cases. It’s beginning to look something like this: she takes a short cut home, via the path that runs along the back of the allotments, and sees this struggle going on between the two men. They’re milling around on the road which runs through the centre of the allotments, but they’re not so far away that she couldn’t have recognized their faces – or the face of one of them, at least. There was a full moon that night and in any case, she must have passed fairly close. One of the men dies. Leaving aside the question of whether it was accidental or not, the other man panics, fearing this girl will tell what she saw.’
And that, Mayo was convinced, was why she’d died. He made a positive effort to sound unemotional about it, to control his own anger that Patti’s life should have been forfeit – not to satisfy the urges of a random child killer, something quite outside the boundaries of comprehensible human behaviour – but worse, in a way, simply because the poor unfortunate child had stumbled upon an act of mindless violence against another person. And had been deemed expendable because of it.
‘Understood so far?’
The queries which followed were mostly routine, until Farrar asked keenly, ‘If it was the same perpetrator in both cases, why did he wait so long to kill her – more than a week later?’
‘Good question. Patti at first told Gemma Townsend she didn’t know who the two men were, but it seems she might have had second thoughts about that. Presumably the killer didn’t realize who she was, either. Not then. I believe it must have come to him later that she was the girl who’d passed them when they were fighting. And had reason to think she’d realized this, too.’
‘Wouldn’t that rule out anybody who lives on her paper round? They’d have recognized her on the spot, wouldn’t they?’
‘That may be so, Keith, but I still want every resident in the vicinity retargeting. I recognize how tedious this going over old ground is becoming, and I’m sorry. But we need to find out if there were any links at all, however tenuous they might seem, between any of them and Philip Ensor, and – it goes without saying – especially where they were on the Saturday night that Ensor died. And I particularly want to know what the hell he was doing in Lavenstock that night, OK? Try the hotels again, bed and breakfasts, see if someone’s memory can be jogged. It’s just possible he was staying under an assumed name.’
Though if he’d been staying overnight, why had his car been left out of sight behind Rodney Shepherd’s premises, rather than in a hotel car park? Mayo frowned, studying his methodical notes for a moment. Ensor was where it all began, he was convinced, everything else was the after game. Find out what he’d been doing here and ...
‘As to why he chose the time and place he did to kill Patti, when he could so easily have been seen ...’ Mayo paused. ‘It was a risk I don’t think he did choose – in that particular sense.’ This, he reminded them, was no psychopath they were looking for, but someone out to protect himself from the consequences of the original killing. Whatever the outcome, the intention had simply been to shut Patti up. It looked as if Ensor’s murder fell into the same category, an impulse, or possibly accidental killing after a fight. ‘We seem to have come up with a profile of a spur-of-the-moment killer, someone who lands out unthinkingly when he’s upset, but sharp enough to seize the opportunity when it offers – remember, in neither case did he go equipped, simply picked up what was lying around for a weapon.’
‘What about the cat, sir?’ It was Farrar, once again.
‘I think we have to look on the cat as only incidental – important only in so far as it was the cause of Patti going into the wood. We know that Loates killed poor old Nero, but he’s not, for my money, a credible suspect in Patti’s murder – and it’s even less likely that he could fight and overcome a m
an like Ensor, so much younger and fitter – just supposing he had cause. Unless whoever killed her was conveniently lurking inside the wood at the same time, which doesn’t make much sense, we might line it up something like this: Patti hears the cries of the cat – not on his usual perch – and goes to investigate. The murderer – probably watching out for her – seizes his opportunity and follows her into the wood. He speaks to her, still not entirely sure whether she’s recognized him as one of the men she saw fighting, but what they say to each other convinces him that she does. She turns away, perhaps having told him that she must tell the police – and he picks up the iron bar and kills her.’
There was a silence.
‘You want to say something else, Keith?’
‘Could’ve been someone who had legitimate business around the Close, like the postman or the milkman, somebody not likely to be regarded as a stranger.’
Mayo followed a rule that at these briefings no one was to feel they couldn’t put forward a theory or a suggestion – but why was it always Farrar? It was a perfectly legitimate observation he’d put forward, but Farrar got up his nose, in the way he got up most people’s noses. Maybe because he was always so damn right, but – There was always a but where Farrar was concerned. Mayo had had a hint from Kite that the DC was having domestic troubles. Not exactly unusual in the police service, as Mayo knew to his cost. Before Lynne had died, things had not gone smoothly in his own household, so he was even more inclined to make excuses for Keith Farrar, who was in any case a damned good police officer, and would have gone further, had it not been for his attitudes.
‘Oh, come on, Keith! Milkmen and postmen have already been accounted for, as you should know,’ Abigail reminded him sharply. Too busy doing The Times crossword, were we?’
Somebody sniggered and Farrar looked at the inspector sourly, smarting at the quip about the crossword, which everyone who hadn’t been at the South Pole lately must know he could do in under half an hour, but aware that he’d uncharacteristically slipped up. The first woman Chief Constable in Britain had recently been appointed. Moon was obviously hopeful of being on her way to becoming the second. And he was still a bloody DC, he couldn’t think why. Life was a bugger, sometimes.
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