Unlikely Graves (Detective Inspector Paul Amos Mystery series)

by Rodney Hobson

  The boyfriend, Bradley Irwin, had set off with her for the station at about 8.40am on the Monday morning. Rita, who was an undergraduate student in her second year at Cambridge, caught a train leaving just after 9am, changing at Peterborough. Irwin had seen her onto the train and had then crossed the road and walked into the lower end of the pedestrianized upper half of the High Street heading towards Steep Hill. Just where the street begins to rise, at the humped bridge over the Brayford canal, he had walked into Stokes’s Café on the bridge and met a friend for coffee and a late breakfast.

  This had been planned during the weekend. Irwin was out of work and living on benefits but economic necessity was encouraging him to make not very strenuous efforts to find some means of employment, preferably without having to lose his state-given entitlements. Reading between the lines, Amos could see that Winchester strongly disapproved but he was definitely satisfied with the assurances of the friend, who took a less relaxed attitude to sponging than Irwin did and who grudgingly picked up the bill as Irwin was ‘a bit short’.

  The friend was even more peeved when he offered some casual labouring work that Irwin turned down. Irwin was in good spirits, if a little preoccupied, according to the friend, and had said that the weekend had gone well and he hoped that when Rita finished her studies they could get married.

  Several Lincoln residents who had caught the train had been tracked down or had come forward after a reconstruction of the walk to the station. Most had travelled to London and one or two had been visiting Peterborough but none had switched trains to travel on to Cambridge. Rita had ten minutes to make the connection and the train from Lincoln had arrived in Peterborough three or four minutes late, which meant that she would have had no difficulty in catching the Cambridge train but would not have been waiting on the platform for long. Three people had seen a young woman on the train who could have been Rita but when they were shown a photograph of the missing woman were unable to make a definite identification. None of these three witnesses had seen the young woman leave the train at Peterborough and no young woman even vaguely fitting Rita’s description had been traced as being on the Lincoln to Peterborough train, nor had one been seen standing on the platform for the Cambridge connection. One name did stand out, though: another student at Cambridge called Martine Brown who shared a flat with Rita Randall at Cambridge and who had reported Rita’s disappearance.

  Amos dialed the phone number given on the witness statement. It was not the Cambridge code, Amos knew, though he did not recognize where it was for. It rang. That was a good start. Better still, it turned out to be Martine Brown’s parents’ phone number and they were still there. Their daughter had stayed on at Cambridge University and the mother supplied Amos with her office number. The university students would mostly have returned home for the long vacation but many of the staff, including Martine, were still around. Amos thanked them profusely and tried the number he had been given. The receptionist tracked her down. Martine Brown agreed instantly to see Amos the following day. Had there been a development? Had Rita turned up at last? Was it bad news?

  ‘I’m afraid there is still nothing definite,’ Amos told her vaguely. ‘However, we are taking a fresh look at the file.’

  Brown gave Amos directions on how to find her and also the route from the station to the lodgings that she and Rita had shared 15 years ago.

  Amos arranged to meet Brown at lunchtime, which suited the young woman. He understood that few people want a police officer turning up at their place of work to interview them.

  This appointment would allow him to take a train as near as possible to the one Rita Randall took, allowing for undoubted changes in the timetable over the years, and to walk the route she would, or should, have taken to her digs.

  Amos gave Yates instructions to find train times for the morning. It would not be a Monday but that hardly mattered so long after the event. Then he dumped the Rita Randall file onto his deputy.

  ‘Sorry, Juliet,’ he said. Can you and the team go through this to see if there are any clues as to why her brother might end up on a rubbish tip, or who else it might have been, or if there is any connection with Randall’s murder.

  ‘I’m going to see the retired Detective Inspector Winchester who handled this case.’

  Chapter 23

  Barry Winchester had been retired for about five years and Amos knew him by reputation only, having never actually met him. Nonetheless, it was a name that Amos knew well, for it was Winchester’s retirement that created the opening for his own promotion from detective sergeant to detective inspector and a move from Skegness to headquarters on the outskirts of Lincoln.

  Winchester’s reputation was that of a conscientious plodder. He was renowned for his tenacity and hard work rather than brilliant insight or flashes of genius. A good, honest hardworking cop you could rely on.

  He lived in retirement in a modest, semidetached house in a village to the east of Lincoln no more than 15 minutes’ drive from HQ. Amos pulled into a short driveway, spotting the retired detective looking out through a bay window as he slammed the car door shut.

  Winchester was at his front door, having moved with some alacrity from the window to open up, as Amos strode up a couple of steps to the entrance. Winchester held out his hand.

  ‘So you’re the great Paul Amos,’ he greeted his replacement with a little too much gushing. ‘Come on in. I’ve heard a lot about you.’

  ‘Not too good, I hope,’ Amos added a little icily. Was it his imagination or was there a hint of jealousy in Winchester’s voice? Amos was determined to hold his own in this conversation.

  Winchester showed Amos into his comfortable front room, the one with the bay window where Winchester had been waiting ready to pounce, and indicated an arm chair.

  ‘Take a seat, old chap,’ he remarked affably, selecting the matching armchair as Amos sank into deep pile.

  A moment later a 50-year-old woman walked in smoothly with tea and biscuits on a tray which she laid down on a table between the two occupied chairs.

  ‘You like chocolate digestives, I believe,’ the woman said. ‘With plain chocolate. I’ll leave you two in peace,’ she added, withdrawing as graciously as she had arrived.

  Winchester has been checking up on me, Amos said to himself. He wants the upper hand in this conversation.

  ‘I married late in life,’ Winchester said as if he wished to keep no secrets, however personal. ‘CID work, as you know, is not particularly conducive to a settled home life. My wife, as you see, is quite a bit younger than me. Still, you didn’t come here to discuss my marital arrangements.’

  ‘Rita Randall. So she’s turned up again to haunt me.’

  Amos decided it was time to take control while he had the chance.

  ‘You were in charge of the inquiry into her disappearance. She was never seen again. I’ve read the files on the case, of course, but I’d like to hear events as you saw them as the investigating officer.’

  Winchester leaned forward and poured two cups of tea. After offering Amos milk and sugar, he sank back again gathering his thoughts.

  ‘It was the one blemish on my career,’ he said finally. ‘The one major case I never cracked. Everything was stacked against me. Looking back even now, I don’t know what else I or any other officer could have done.’

  ‘It wasn’t for want of trying, believe me. I left no stone unturned. I went over the evidence time and time again. I worked the staff hard to the point of driving them crackers.’

  Then leaning forward in a conspiratorial manner, the nearest he had come to a genuine rapprochement with Amos, he admitted: ‘I kept that case open until the day before I retired. Not the day I actually retired, mind. I didn’t want that case to overshadow my departure. It was not until I had only 24 hours to go that I finally conceded defeat and classified it as a cold case. Cold? It was freezing.’

  ‘Tell me about how the case started. Who reported her missing?’

  ‘It was Irwin,
about a week after she vanished. He came into HQ and he was very persistent, I can tell you. The station sergeant tried to treat it as a missing person report but Irwin was adamant that something had happened to Rita.’

  ‘She was a student at Cambridge, very bright. Great things were expected of her. She was way out of Irwin’s league, I can tell you.’

  ‘He wasn’t very bright, didn’t have a job and he could hardly string a sentence together. Not what you’d call stimulating. Heaven knows what Rita saw in him but they had been friends since childhood – he’d lived near Skegness as a youngster and he’d kept in touch with the Randall family when his parents moved to Lincoln. He was a decent enough sort of bloke, I suppose. All right as a friend, but not as a boyfriend.’

  Amos nodded to show that he understood.

  Winchester continued his narrative: ‘Irwin said that Rita had been to see him that weekend. She usually came up once or twice a term.’

  ‘Did he ever go down to Cambridge to see her?’ Amos interposed.

  Winchester looked a bit narked at being interrupted by a man who had, after all, asked him to hold forth.

  ‘No. It seemed that Rita discouraged him to the point of forbidding him to go. She told him he would distract her from her studies.’

  ‘Anyway, on the Monday morning Irwin said he walked Rita to the railway station as usual. She had a return ticket so there was no need to buy one. They just walked to the station and he went onto the platform with her as there was no-one on the barrier. She got on the train and he waved her off, watched the train until it turned the bend in the tracks then he went back to his flat.

  ‘Neither of them had mobile phones in those days. The first that anyone knew she had gone missing was when the college rang her father to ask if she was ill. One of her flatmates was on the same course and when there was no sign of her on the Tuesday, a day after she should have returned, she alerted the college authorities.

  ‘They took their time about it but when Rita’s tutor confirmed that she had missed lectures and a tutorial they finally attempted to contact her father. They had a contact phone number but it was for a neighbour, because Harry Randall wasn’t on the phone. The university simply asked for Randall to contact them.

  ‘The neighbour didn’t rush round to Randall as he didn’t realize it was serious. However, when he did find him he did allow Randall to use his phone to contact Cambridge University. Randall was surprised to hear that Rita had not appeared since the previous weekend but he wasn’t initially too concerned. He just assumed she was poorly.

  ‘He told the university to contact Rita’s brother, John, who was also at Cambridge and had just taken his finals. John had gone off on a job interview so nothing happened until he showed up. He had a phone number for Irwin’s sister, Gemma, so he contacted her. Gemma went round to her brother’s flat but he wasn’t in. Finally she got hold of a mutual friend who got word to Irwin on the Monday morning after Rita disappeared. He came straight to us.

  ‘As far as anyone knew, Rita had never arrived in Cambridge.

  ‘I took over the case and launched a full scale inquiry. House to house inquiries, the lot, but by now the trail had gone cold.’

  ‘What was the attitude of the father and boyfriend?’

  ‘At first it was rather strange, at least as far as the father was concerned. He was quite uncooperative. He refused to take part in any appeal and just seemed to be in complete denial about his daughter’s disappearance. He was convinced that his daughter would turn up any day and that there was a perfectly innocent explanation for the whole thing. It was only when we reached the following weekend and there was still no sign of her that he started to face reality. It was like he was shell shocked.

  ‘The boyfriend, on the other hand, was frantic with worry and was begging us to do more, not that we were leaving any stone unturned. He walked round the streets from dawn to dusk, and then on into the evening, handing out leaflets with her face on them and putting up posters. He became a bit of a nuisance, quite frankly, but I think most people he pestered understood his anguish.

  ‘He even borrowed money for his train fare to Cambridge and he hung around outside the railway station quizzing passengers and dishing out leaflets. His efforts, however, were no more successful than ours. There was not a trace of the missing girl. She had vanished into thin air.

  ‘You’d obviously be certain which train she caught,’ Amos said.

  ‘Of course. It was the 9.07am. We were able to be extremely accurate with timings. Irwin said initially that they left the flat at about a quarter to nine, although he was naturally not sure of the exact time as he didn’t look at his watch. He didn’t know then that he would be accounting for his precise movements a few days later.

  ‘However, we know that he and Rita must have left before 8.40am because they had disappeared from view by the time a young couple in another house in the street left their home at 8.43. They were quite sure because they did check the time. They had two children to drop off at school before going on to work and they were running very tight for time that morning.

  ‘The walk from flat to station is about 17 minutes at a brisk pace – we timed it several times – which is the speed that Irwin says they walked at. Thus they got to the station at about 8.57am, give or take a minute after a two minute delay at the level crossing gates.’

  Allow for a couple of minutes to check that the train was running and on time, which according to the board it was, and they were on the platform seconds after 9am.

  ‘The train in fact arrived a couple of minutes early and Rita got on right away to be sure of a seat as it was a London-bound train, so they were on the platform together for no more than five minutes. Irwin said when we first interviewed him that he didn’t particularly notice what time the train arrived, only that they were not on the platform all that long. We got the train timings from British Rail.

  ‘So unfortunately he and the girl would be seen together for only a few minutes, which is probably why no-one noticed them.’

  ‘Odd though,’ Amos remarked thoughtfully. ‘You’d have thought that someone would have done.’

  ‘Too bad,’ Winchester said testily. ‘The fact is that they were just an ordinary couple

  doing nothing out of the ordinary. Why should anyone bother, especially as it was a full two weeks later when they were being asked. We naturally targeted the same train on the following Monday after Irwin alerted us. Two officers rode all the way to Cambridge, working their way right down all the carriages, but it was no use.’

  ‘I saw from the file that you held a reconstruction. What happened?’ Amos asked.

  ‘That was a great non-event. A lot of time, effort and expense wasted. Yes, we reconstructed the walk the Monday after the officers went on the train, except now it was three weeks after the event. The couple who were neighbours agreed to act exactly as they had done the morning Rita disappeared.

  ‘We were going to have two police officers play Bradley Irwin and Rita Randall but Irwin insisted on doing it himself. He was absolutely adamant that he wanted to do everything within his power to help us find his girlfriend.

  ‘It was actually a stroke of luck from my point of view as he was quite a short guy and we didn’t have a police officer short enough to play him realistically. In addition, he knew what he had done on the fateful morning better than we did.

  ‘Anyway, the charade went off according to plan. We got loads of coverage locally and within Lincolnshire, though not elsewhere as far as I know. And then, the great silence. Not one person came forward to say they had seen either Irwin or Rita, let alone both together.

  ‘People go around with their eyes closed or they just don’t want to be involved. It shook my faith in human nature, I can tell you. We slog our guts out for the public and what do we get in return. Zilch.’

  Winchester shook his head sadly. Although he did not greatly take to the man he had replaced, Amos felt rather sorry for him and did not know what to
say, so an awkward silence held sway for a few moments. It was Winchester who broke it.

  ‘I have to say that it was, in so many respects, the most disheartening case I was ever involved in right through my 35 years in the force. The fact that we got nowhere, that we got so little assistance – apart from Irwin, and even he soon faded out of the picture.

  ‘I didn’t find out until later that he had handed in his notice to his landlord a week after Rita vanished. He only had to give one month and since the landlord was holding one month’s rent to cover damage Irwin simply failed to pay up for the final month.

  ‘When the agent went round to sort it out, Irwin had already packed everything and gone with ten days still on the tenancy. The people in the upstairs flat told him that Irwin’s father and brother had cleared his stuff.’

  ‘Are you sure it was his father and brother?’ Amos asked.

  Again, Winchester was tetchy about the implication that he was not thorough in his investigation.

  ‘Of course I was satisfied it was them,’ he replied hotly. ‘The neighbour actually mistook the brother for Irwin from the back and he heard the younger man call the older man Dad.’

  ‘None of them - father, brother, sister - bothered to let me know where he was going. I gathered that it wasn’t the first time Irwin had piked off. Last time he went abroad.

  ‘I never thought to hear his name again. It was all so long ago.’

  Chapter 24

  Amos reported the details of the conversation to Swift back at HQ to test her reaction.

  ‘I’m still not convinced that the cases are linked after all,’ she said.

  ‘No, no,’ she added hastily. ‘I’m not suggesting for one minute that we should give up on the body on the tip or abandon that investigation to another team. But I think we must keep open the very real possibility that there are two different murderers.’