by J P Lomas
With an image of Kev fresh in her mind, she decided to return to bed. If she was taking the day off and the children were taken care of, then she and Tim would have the time to make last night’s guilt sex more than a one off. It was then that she heard Max waking up in his cot. Reflecting that they’d been very lucky the previous night, she went to rescue her youngest from whatever had troubled his innocent dreams.
****
Debbie couldn’t decide if Exmouth was more or less beautiful in the winter? There was certainly something very atmospheric about the near deserted caravan park perched high on the cliffs. When she’d been living down here, she’d hated the closed down feel that the town had acquired once the holiday season came to an end; however her metropolitan exile had given her a new taste for the charms of rural living and the wild seascape helped her reconnect to her Devonian roots.
Having walked the coastal path which led from the end of Exmouth beach, over the high land of Orcombe and across the crumbling, red cliffs to Littleham she’d felt rejuvenated, not that a girl in her early twenties should ever have a pressing need to feel young. Although scrambling up the ladder which connected Rodney Cove to the cliffs above had reminded her that it had seem an easier ascent as a child, even when the tide was closing in and eating up the rapidly disappearing sand. Perhaps it was time to take out one of those gym memberships everyone seemed to be taking up in London? Nevertheless, she now felt she had deserved tonight’s glass of wine, as she could have hired a scooter, or even borrowed her mum’s car, for transporting her round East Devon as she researched into the lives of those caught up on the peripheries of these murders. Yet she’d missed the sea and this was the best way to experience its timeless grandeur. Even the stunning photographs of the swelling sea crashing against the shore, she’d taken to accompany her piece, could never truly capture this first-hand experience.
It was on the perimeter of the holiday camp where she found her quarry. Passing row upon row of empty mobile homes, not that many of them appeared to be mobile given the ways they appeared anchored to their berths, she’d finally found the origins of the park. Well she presumed they were the origins, they may well have been the dumping ground, as on the far side of it and away from the breath taking views of the sea, were three vehicles which were certainly caravans and which must have been dumped there in the 1960s.
Unlike the mobile homes, you could imagine these being towed behind an Austen Allegro, or Ford Granada. They were no more than a third of the size of their sleeker cousins and at least looked as if they’d been lived in, even if at least two of them were deserted. She presumed that the far caravan, at the end of a deeply rutted path, which had AC/DC’s ‘Highway to Hell’ blaring out of its one visible and begrimed window was where the subject of her latest interview was now living.
At least there were more signs of life about this address than there had been when she’d gone round to interview Catherine Sullivan. With that woman it would have been easier to do what a few of her less scrupulous colleagues did and make up the details. Sullivan had appeared either drunk, stoned or both. Her journalistic skills had uncovered the prescription strength tranquilisers in the bathroom cupboard and the empty vodka bottles in the kitchen when her interviewee had passed out on the sofa, but her heart had not been up to including these details in her background article on the ‘Rub-a-dub Killings’; some slices of life were better left on the shelf.
The interior of Nigel Byrne’s caravan was even less welcoming than the battered outside, though at least she had persuaded him to turn off the music and surprisingly he had been gracious enough to offer her tea and biscuits. She just hoped she wasn’t going to regret accepting his offer given her previous experience of Exmothian home comforts; Catherine Sullivan’s kettle seemed to have collected all the fur her cat had lost. Well at least his offer would give her a chance for a quick nose around whilst her host collected water from the stand pipe outside. This caravan came with just one cramped room and she just hoped it wasn’t Byrne’s bed that she was perched on. If the more modern ranges outside came with exotic names like Arizona, Nebraska and Wyoming, she presumed this range would be called Rhode Island.
Byrne looked a lot better than the last time she had seen him, in the sense that he now fitted his natural environment. He was still a slob, but at least he was slob in a pig sty. He was not a slob in an ill-fitting collar and tie giving perjured evidence in court. He might have made a more credible witness wearing the stained ‘Hawkwind’ T-shirt and torn jeans he was modelling today than pretending in court to be an upright member of the community. And prison food had clearly agreed with him; he had put on weight if anything during the 12 months of the sentence he’d served for perjury. It probably made him impervious to the bitter cold inside the caravan, as the heat from the small camping stove certainly did nothing to provide her with any warmth.
She picked up a photo frame perched precariously on top of a stack of records. It displayed two boys, who appeared to be around five and six years old. The picture had been cut crudely at one end; a woman’s hand was still visible around the shoulder of the older boy.
‘They’re Rob and Mikey. Mikey’s the one on the left.’
‘They’re very good looking,’ Debbie lied.
‘Take after Dad then,’ grinned Byrne handing her a surprisingly good cup of tea.
‘You must miss them.’
Byrne’s pasty face darkened noticeably.
‘Haven’t seen ‘em since being sent down.’
‘That must have been hard,’ Debbie replied in a voice she hoped conveyed sympathy.
‘Mandy took the kids to her missus and now she’s started seeing someone else. Moved the boys over to Dawlish.’
Byrne made the town located just across the Exe, sound like it was as distant as Yorkshire, or Scotland.
‘Well, as I said earlier, our readers are going to be very interested in hearing about the other victims of these killings.’
‘Is there any money in this then?’ asked Byrne, more in desperation than in hope.
‘Not so much money, more a chance for you to put the record straight.’
She waited as her host squeezed his portly bulk on to the bunk opposite her. Given one or two of the emanations coming off him, she felt sorry for his former cellmate.
‘I could have been someone you know?’
‘Really?’ asked Debbie trying her hardest to sound sincere.
‘See these guys?’
She looked at the picture on the stained T-shirt he was wearing.
‘I use to roadie for them when they rehearsed down here!’
Debbie tried her hardest to express her admiration at this, though her more cynical self, assumed that he might at most have helped unload a van when in presumably a younger and healthier incarnation.
‘Wrote songs too! They told me I had talent. Want to hear one?’
What Debbie really wanted to get to the bottom of was how and why this man had identified Connie Baker as the passenger he’d picked up on the night of Calum Baker’s murder and yet her experience had taught her that you had to get through a lot of the chaff, before you got through to the wheat in her line of work.
Before she could answer, Nigel Byrne was already loading a cassette into the stereo next to the sink. The stereo appeared to be the most valuable thing in the caravan and was probably worth more than the vehicle too. And yet to the former cabbie and erstwhile factory worker, the most valuable thing aside from the photo of his kids appeared to be the mix of guitar, drums and screaming vocals coming from the hi-fi. Despite the lanky hair he was banging along to the track and the rather childish ‘Satan is Lord’ salute he was making with his chubby fingers, there was still something about the man’s passion that the mother of his children must once have fallen in love with.
‘Let’s all run amok, journey to the Jabberwock!’ blasted out from the stereo.
‘Let’s get ready to rock, journey to the Jabberwock!’ was the only other lyri
c Debbie could make out.
An eternity and two guitar solos later, a beaming Byrne announced -
‘That’s ‘Journey to the Jabberwock’. Loads of people have said that it should have been huge!’
Debbie nodded in tacit agreement; she hadn’t had the heart to point out that it should have been journey to the Jabberwocky.
‘But then all this electronic rubbish came along. It’s all drum machines and synthesisers nowadays. All Cock, Aitken and Bloody Waterman. No-one’s interested in real music anymore!‘
‘It’s a pity, but I suppose with your musical background it wasn’t hard for the police to make a case against you?’ asked Debbie taking her chance to move matters on.
‘Them drugs weren’t mine.’
‘Are you suggesting the police planted them on you?’
‘No.’
‘Then how do you explain the story you told in court about picking up Connie Baker on the night of 11th June, 1987?’
Byrne bit into a biscuit; Debbie noticed he hadn’t offered her one, despite his earlier promise.
‘I won’t get in no more trouble about this, will I?’
‘You won’t get into trouble for telling the truth, Nigel.’
‘I got 18 months for telling the truth!’
Debbie forced herself to look more closely into Byrne’s blotchy face. Whatever the judge had thought, this looked like a man who at least believed he was telling the truth; or at least his version of the truth.
‘So, you picked up Connie Baker outside the Royal Standard Hotel and drove her to Brixington?’
‘I picked a woman up on the front, yes.’
This was where the prosecution’s case had begun to unravel. Byrne’s previous positive identification of Connie had been unpicked by the defence team and he had then become increasingly shaky about the precise details of his journey.
‘Where exactly on the front?’
‘Down by the docks.’
So a good mile from where he said he’d picked up Connie.
‘And where did you drop her?’
‘Brixington.’
‘Allingham Avenue as you said in court?’
Byrne sighed.
‘The police suggested it might be clearer for the jury if I said Allingham Avenue.’
Now things were becoming interesting, thought Debbie. The Exmouth One didn’t quite have the same ring as the Guildford Four, but a miscarriage of justice was a miscarriage of justice whichever way you looked at it.
‘And so where did you really drop your passenger?’
‘At the local school – she said she had to get there before ten in order to get her vote in for Maggie.’
‘And why didn’t you say that at the time?’
‘I got confused. It’s near Allingham Avenue anyway and they wanted me to keep it crystal clear for the jury.’
‘And what time did you really drop her off?’
‘Just before ten.’
So the polling station would still have been open and the timing sounded less suspicious than the around eleven ‘o’ clock to which he had sworn to in court. A respectable citizen might have cause for a last minute vote, whilst a drop off around the time of last orders could put a different spin on events.
Given that the school was at least a good 5 minutes further from the Bakers’ house than Allingham Avenue and that the time of ten o’clock was at least an hour or more before the fire was set, Debbie could appreciate why the police might have wanted to paint a clearer picture for the jury.
‘And for this they made the drugs charges disappear?’
‘I still served a year for perjury and lost my family into the bargain!’
‘And so you made this deal to save your family?’ prompted Debbie.
‘Of course I did. I knew Mandy would chuck me if I let her down again.’
‘And why did you think this woman was Connie Baker?’
‘The booking was made in the name of a Mrs Baker and she looked like her, especially when they showed me her picture in the papers down at the station. It was dead easy to pick her out of the line up.’
‘They showed you a newspaper?’ Debbie was incredulous. They might just as well have stuck Connie Baker in a line-up with a post-it note over her head saying ‘Pick Me!’
‘The Custody Sergeant said it would be okay.’
‘And you thought the woman in the dock was your passenger?’
‘Well it was going to be five years in gaol if it weren’t! And it could have been her!’
A hunch had formed itself in Debbie’s mind. She was still certain that Nigel Byrne had perjured himself through the Machiavellian deal he’d made with the police and yet there was no smoke without fire, as her grandmother liked to say. Certain parts of his story could well have been true.
‘Did the woman you picked up look like this?’
She slid a photograph across the small table wedged between the two bunks.
‘Let me get my specs.’
Debbie waited as Byrne rifled through an overhead locker crammed with junk. He emerged looking self-conscious in a pair of NHS spectacles; the very ones he should have been wearing on the night in question according to Connie’s barrister.
Byrne at least did the justice of studying the face this time.
‘Well apart from the hair, it could have been her.’
‘What about the hair?’
‘Hers was blonde, not brown.’
Debbie smiled to herself and retrieved the photograph of Maggie Mallowan.
It was only when she was looking for a call box to telephone Jane that she wondered about the usefulness of her discovery. She knew the stuff about how Byrne had been leaned on and led by the police wouldn’t affect Jane. A lot of that was out in the open already given the verdict in the trial and she’d just been crossing the‘t’s and dotting the ‘i’s. If it helped get rid of any of the rogue officers, well that would not only be a good story, but the decent officers would also benefit.
Most of the cops she had met in her line of work had been decent people trying to do a difficult job; this was a good story, but it was no more than ‘one bad apple’ syndrome. It was like the less than scrupulous journalists she’d met who certainly didn’t represent the heart and soul of journalism. For every paparazzo trying to find out where Connie Baker was now living, there were two or three like her who were just trying to get the story right.
And yet it was one thing to have got Nigel Byrne to identify Mrs Mallowan as the likely killer, it was going to be quite another thing for it to be of any material use to Jane. Just as it would be impossible to try Connie Baker for the same crime again, it was also going to be just as impossible to find twelve jurors prepared to believe the testimony of a proven perjurer!
Opening the door to the telephone kiosk she’d found in the deserted shopping precinct of the camp, she realised that whilst it was one thing to have come up with a solution to these murders, it was going to be quite another proving it. And unless Jane came up with a brilliant way around this dilemma, she wouldn’t even be able to get this part of the story into print. Unlike Connie Baker, Maggie Mallowan would not only escape the courts, she’d also keep her reputation intact.
It was only then that she realised someone had vandalised the phone.
****
Osborne’s office was smaller than Dent’s palatial suite and not designed to show off his giant’s robes. The awards and certificates which Osborne was sure to have picked up on the way to achieving his current seniority were not displayed in gilt frames on the wall. Instead of framed photographs of him hob-nobbing with the great and the good, there was one of Simon and his parents on holiday in France. Jane’s chair was not visibly inferior to his and the desk seemed to be a genuine workspace, rather than a badge of authority.
Yet it didn’t mean the DCS was going to be a pushover. Despite his apparent friendliness, she knew he was under enormous pressure to crack the case. She didn’t usually think people on his pay scale de
served the silly money they were being paid, yet in cases like this she knew it was the top brass who became the burnt offerings when sacrifices were needed to appease the politicians and media.
Jane’s new found confidence in Sobers’ solution had drained a little by the time she found herself sitting opposite him. She would have been more comfortable if she could have removed her jacket, yet in preparing for the interview she’d noted that her new deodorant had left little white patches on her black top which the washing machine hadn’t removed. Osborne probably wouldn’t even notice or care about this; however the fact that she knew still made her feel ill at ease with her presentation.
Osborne looked sceptical – ‘You think Mrs Mallowan is our killer based on her taste in literature? Well I love John Le Carré and Ian Fleming, but I’ve never made a dead letter drop in East Berlin, or played the tables at Monte Carlo with an alluring KGB honeytrap glued to my arm!’
‘Well, we’ve had copycats before and if some people think video nasties are to blame for Society’s ills, why not be inspired by the best?’ answered Jane.
The DCS sat back at his desk trying to come to terms with the bizarre theory Jane was putting to him.
‘What about the Maggie angle?’
‘I think she just struck lucky, it was another way of linking the killings, but not a method as sure as using the nursery rhyme. She couldn’t be sure in 1983 that Thatcher would win the next election, let alone the one after that.’
Osborne drummed his fingers on the desk.
‘Why Mrs Mallowan then?’
‘She benefits big style from her husband’s death. None of the other relatives do. Kellow left virtually nothing and Connie already had all the money in the Bakers’ marriage.’