‘Absolutely.’ And the detective gave a sly grin.
‘What?’ Helen didn’t understand what was so amusing.
‘I know what he’s going to say.’
‘What is he going to say?’ She looked at Bradshaw and then at Tom.
‘He’s going to say,’ Bradshaw began, ‘that an alibi that perfect …’ and he let Tom finish.
‘… Can’t possibly be real.’
‘Exactly.’ And the policeman’s grin grew broader.
They walked in silence for a while until Tom said, ‘This is it.’
‘Is this the exact place?’ Helen asked.
‘The case files mention a spot between the river and the woods with a gap in the barbed-wire fence and two felled trees close by,’ he said, and pointed out each of those landmarks in turn. ‘This cut is where Rebecca Holt used to meet Richard Bell. It’s also the spot where she died.’
Helen found it hard to imagine. The location was so peaceful. She realised it was foolish but somehow she expected Lonely Lane to show signs that a brutal murder had occurred at this solitary spot; not ghosts exactly, more of an atmosphere of some kind, but it was as if nothing bad had ever happened here.
‘I wanted to see it,’ said Tom eventually, ‘even though I knew it was probably a waste of time.’ But neither Helen nor Ian questioned the wisdom of that idea.
By the time they dropped Bradshaw the rain was coming down hard. Traffic slowed so much Tom wondered if everyone just forgot how to drive once the roads were wet.
‘It’s time we checked out that alibi on the ground,’ Tom said, ‘and you could buy a few things in town.’
‘Thanks.’ Though the prospect of spending money Helen did not have to replace her lost items was galling.
‘Darren’s letting the plumber in today,’ he added, ‘so by the time we get home you’ll have hot water.’
‘Great,’ she said, though his use of the words we and home in the same sentence panicked her a little.
He must have read her mind. ‘I’ll clear the junk out of the spare room tomorrow and get a bed put in it.’
‘Oh, please don’t go to all that trouble.’
‘I have to do it anyway. I was planning on getting a lodger to help with the mortgage. I figured you probably wouldn’t want to carry on sharing my bed for too long.’ Tom could also think of someone else who wouldn’t be keen on that idea.
‘I meant I shouldn’t impose on you by staying any longer.’ Perhaps she was also thinking of her boyfriend now.
‘Where else are you going to go?’
He was right. There was nowhere else. Staying in a hotel for even a few days was prohibitively expensive on a local journalist’s salary and Helen didn’t know anyone else well enough to stay with them.
Tom seemed to think that was the end of the discussion. ‘I am going to park where Annie parked, then I’ll walk every yard she walked to see if her alibi really stacks up.’
‘According to Ian’s colleagues it does.’ Annie Bell’s alibi was a little too good to be true, but if she really had proof she was elsewhere when Rebecca Holt was murdered, then how could she be in two places at once?
‘There are some good detectives working this patch,’ Tom admitted, ‘but they’re not all as diligent as Ian, and you have to remember they weren’t looking too closely.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The assumption has always been this killing was the work of a man,’ he reminded her. ‘From day one it was Richard Bell or Freddie Holt, even a psychopathic stranger – but never a woman.’
‘That’s because most violence against women is committed by men,’ she reminded him.
‘True, but that initial assumption was backed up early on by an expert’s report, which said the attack could not have been carried out by a woman – and we now know that had no basis in fact.’
‘But if virtually every moment of Annie’s day is accounted for, what are you actually looking for?’
‘A window,’ he told her.
The social worker looked weary, harassed and overworked, but she was at least helpful. Ian Bradshaw told her he was concerned about residents of some of the care homes in the area being targeted and used by a gang of professional shoplifters and she seemed to take this at face value. He didn’t mention Meadowlands at first because he didn’t want anyone to know he was particularly interested in the home. Instead they had a general conversation about the types of young people who end up in care and the merits or defects of the various places that housed them all.
‘I’m afraid the stories are often pretty harrowing.’ And she proceeded to tell some of them, leaving out names in the interests of confidentiality. She painted a bleak picture of neglect and abuse, and her sympathies very clearly lay with the children she was tasked to protect, no matter what they had done.
Her tone altered slightly when he asked her, ‘And what about the Meadowlands home?’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘that place? A bit of a last-chance saloon if I’m honest. Meadowlands houses quite damaged young girls who have already been in a lot of trouble. I’m not saying we’ve given up on them exactly …’ But it sounded to Bradshaw as if she and her colleagues probably had.
‘What exactly is the problem with the Meadowlands girls?’
‘They are too difficult to manage elsewhere, so they’ve been corralled together in one place to prevent them from influencing girls who might still have a chance of avoiding trouble. Unfortunately they tend to egg each other on, so the reoffending rates are highest there. Meadowlands houses teenagers who run away a lot, girls who are violent and are frequently picked up by the local police.’
‘What for?’ he asked though he obviously had an inkling from the night he watched the place.
‘Well, a number of things, but prostitution basically,’ she said, ‘though I would be loath to call it that.’
‘They are selling sex?’
‘Sort of,’ she said.
‘How can you “sort of” sell sex?’
She answered his question with another. ‘What kind of women turn to prostitution, in your experience?’
‘They tend to fall into a couple of categories,’ said Bradshaw, ‘the ones who sell sex for cash either because they want to or are forced to, but either way, money changes hands. They work from their homes or rented accommodation. Then there are streetwalkers at the lower end of the scale, who climb into strangers’ cars. It’s risky and most of the money goes to the pimps who supply them with a fix because they are often dependent on drugs.’
She nodded. ‘The girls at Meadowlands are in a different category. They hang around older guys and become friendly with them. Those guys give them cigarettes, booze, weed, small sums of money, a pizza maybe … but they expect something in return, not always right away but eventually. The girls get confused and sometimes think of these older guys as boyfriends or at least friends, and the boundaries become blurred, so when one of the men forces himself on a girl they often view it as normal, like it’s the price they have to pay for the stuff they’ve been given.’
‘Christ. How old are these girls?’
‘The age range is thirteen to sixteen.’ And Bradshaw realised the girl who propositioned him outside Meadowlands may have been even younger than he thought.
‘That is unbelievable, and you know for sure that this is going on?’
‘It’s pretty common knowledge.’
‘Then why is nothing being done?’
‘I could ask you that,’ she said, ‘since you’re a police officer.’
‘I’m assuming there have been no arrests because no one knows where the girls are being taken.’
‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘everyone knows. I told you; it’s common knowledge. The men involved run a series of businesses in a street just a few hundred yards from Meadowlands. There’s a taxi rank, a burger bar and an off-licence.’
‘And the men there openly prey on these underage girls?’ She nodded. ‘But nobody has been puni
shed, why the hell not?’
‘You might want to ask some of your colleagues about that.’
Chapter Thirty-Six
Tom arranged to meet Helen later and started to retrace Annie Bell’s steps, leaving the car park and mentally totting up the time it would take to do all of her errands as he progressed along the high street: past the dry cleaners, the department store and travel agents then Oscar’s café. There was no need to check her story about the row in the café – enough people had witnessed that. Instead he looked through the window and noticed how cramped it was. Causing an argument in a place this size wasn’t a very English thing to do, he reasoned … unless you wanted everyone to remember you.
When Tom Carney told the young manager of the local cinema he was a journalist, the guy couldn’t do enough for him. As he led him into the foyer, Tom realised why he was being so cooperative. The cinema was old, dark and musty. There were even cobwebs in less accessible corners and the place smelt vaguely unpleasant. The manager must have been hoping a journalist might give the cinema a boost, though Tom wasn’t sure how linking it to a murder was going to do it any good.
‘I’m looking for information on a specific film shown two years ago.’ He gave the manager the relevant date, the name of the film and an explanation: he was researching the Rebecca Holt case.
‘The police asked us about that,’ said the manager. ‘I was here then.’ He sounded a little despondent as he said that, perhaps realising the amount of time that had elapsed while he was still in the same dead-end job. ‘It was to do with an alibi.’
‘That’s right.’
‘That should be easy enough to check. It’s all in the logbook.’
Tom watched as he lifted something the thickness of two telephone books from a shelf behind the counter. There was no place for computers here. The manager began to leaf through the logbook, looking for the relevant date. It took him some time but eventually he glanced up at Tom.
‘Yes,’ said the man with some pride at actually finding what he was looking for. He pointed at the date Rebecca Holt was murdered. ‘Screen 2, Schindler’s List, three screenings: one thirty, five thirty and seven thirty.’ He closed the book.
‘Do you get many for the early-afternoon showing?’
‘It varies. It’s never as popular as the evenings but we get a few.’ He contemplated this for a moment. ‘Or we used to, before the multiplex opened up outside town.’
‘What kind of people go to the cinema at that time?’
The manager shrugged. ‘Students skiving off lectures, shift workers, people who work weekends so their days off don’t match their mates’ free time, the unemployed; they get a discount.’
‘Bored housewives?’
The cinema manager grinned. ‘Sounds like a porn mag.’ Tom greeted his feeble gag with a half-hearted smile. ‘Some,’ he agreed, ‘like that Bell woman the police were asking about?’
‘You remember her then?’
‘It was all over the papers. I don’t recall seeing her that day but I’m not always out front. The police asked the lass who sold the tickets but she didn’t remember.’ Then he added, ‘Mind, you’re lucky if she remembers to turn up. There were a few in that day though. It was a popular film.’
‘Mrs Bell did have a ticket stub with the date on.’
‘She must have been here then.’
‘She couldn’t have got hold of it any other way?’
‘Not unless she asked someone for one on the way out.’
‘Which would have been a bit suspicious,’ observed Tom. ‘I think you would remember if somebody asked you for the used stub from your cinema visit.’
‘People drop them in the foyer sometimes,’ said the manager. ‘She could have picked one off the ground.’
‘Not without drawing attention to herself, so we can discount that possibility. So she bought it here? It’s the only place you sell them?’
The manager nodded and Tom scanned the room. Once you bought your ticket at the booth by the entrance, you had no choice but to progress into the auditorium. ‘Could she have bought her ticket days before?’
‘Er no,’ the manager sounded sheepish, ‘we don’t do that here.’ He meant they didn’t have the technology to allow you to buy a ticket in advance. Tom surveyed the ticket booth. It had a single glass window with a space for one person to distribute tickets from a small semi-circular gap at the bottom of the window, and there was a flat brass counter top that had three slots in it, one for each screen, which spat the tickets out at you. The manager explained that tickets could be distributed on the day of the performance only, because the machine that issued them had to be set at a certain date and it was way too much hassle to change it for one ticket. The whole set-up was like something from the ark and Tom knew the new multiplex would soon see this cinema off.
‘What time do you open?’ asked Tom.
‘Half an hour before the first performance.’
‘So she could have bought a ticket thirty minutes before it started and then just turned around and gone out again without seeing the film?’
‘She could have,’ said the manager doubtfully, but Tom knew Annie Bell couldn’t be sure the girl who sold her a ticket wouldn’t have noticed her leave, which would blow her alibi right out of the water.
‘No, she definitely went in.’ Tom said this as much to himself as the cinema manager and his eyes trailed the walls with its posters of the latest releases, the most prominent of which was, appropriately, The Usual Suspects. There was a manned sweets kiosk that would have provided another witness to Annie’s arrival. At that point the auditorium broadened and there was a wide, sweeping staircase leading to another level. Tom pointed to a dark alcove to one side of the staircase with a faint number three above the curtain. ‘So you’ve got screen three on the ground floor?’
‘That’s the smallest screen, for the movies that have already been on for a while or the art house stuff nobody really watches,’ explained the manager.
‘And the stairs take you up to screens one and two?’ Tom asked.
‘The bigger screens,’ agreed the manager needlessly.
‘What’s through there?’ Tom pointed to the dark alcove at the other side of the staircase.
‘Toilets,’ answered the manager. ‘There’s an electric sign above the door but it’s not switched on just now.’
Tom walked towards it and the manager followed, all the while keeping up general chit-chat about how good the cinema was and all it really needed was a bit of money spent on it: a lick of paint here, some modern lighting there, to lift the gloom. Tom wasn’t really listening. He swept back the red curtain that blocked the entrance to the corridor leading to the toilets.
Tom walked a few feet into the dark corridor then the manager flicked a switch and there was the plinking sound of an ancient strip light trying to fire itself into action. The lights blinked on and off, then one became fully illuminated while the other continued to flash intermittently. ‘Bloody thing,’ said the manager, ‘only changed that the other day,’ but his guilty tone betrayed the lie.
Tom could now make out two doors at the far end of the corridor. One had a stick man on it and the other a stick woman. It was the dark shape beyond them that caught his attention.
‘What’s that?’ He pointed.
‘Just a door,’ said the manager, ‘an emergency exit.’
Tom walked down the corridor and approached a large exterior door with a thick metal bar across it.
‘This locked?’ he asked.
‘Never,’ said the manager, ‘it’s a fire escape.’
‘Alarmed?’ Tom checked, though like everything else in the cinema it didn’t look modern enough.
‘No.’
Tom pressed down on the metal bar with both hands and it gave way easily, forcing the door to swing open into an alleyway. If you turned to your left you could make your way back to the shops on the high street but the door was shielded from view by two enormous metal wh
eelie bins. If you turned to the right instead you could follow a narrow litter-strewn alley nobody would usually venture down. A strong smell betrayed its use as a toilet at pub kicking-out time. Tom realised this lane took you towards the quiet back streets used by delivery vans behind the main stores. Go beyond them and you’d be able to creep quietly out of town.
He smiled to himself.
‘Like I said,’ the puzzled manager reminded him, ‘it’s only a door.’
‘No,’ said Tom. ‘This, my friend, is a window.’
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Ian Bradshaw and Helen Norton stood outside the cinema, staring at the locked fire exit door. Tom Carney was not facing the door. Instead, he was looking at them.
‘How could Annie Bell have known the plot of the movie,’ asked Helen, ‘if she skipped out of the cinema as soon as she bought a ticket?’
‘It had been on for ten days by then,’ explained Tom, ‘she could have seen it already.’
‘A different performance on an earlier day?’ asked Bradshaw and the question sounded rhetorical but Tom answered anyway.
‘Exactly.’
‘So she buys her ticket, heads for the toilets but walks past them, opens the fire exit and slips through it, closing the door behind her, then …?’ asked Helen.
‘I’m guessing she does a right turn, taking her away from the main drag.’ Tom started to walk down the alley. Bradshaw and Helen followed him.
‘If she did skip out of the film,’ asked Bradshaw, ‘how long does that give her for this window you keep talking about?’
‘She chose the right film,’ Tom said. ‘The running time of Schindler’s List is three hours and fifteen minutes plus trailers and adverts. The average length of a film trailer in this country is two and a half minutes.’ He could see they were both looking at him quizzically. ‘I’ve done my homework,’ he explained. ‘Add in a bunch of adverts for training shoes or the local tandoori and you have around fifteen minutes of extras, so that’s three and a half hours.’
‘Which gives her enough time to get back to her car and away, except we know the car didn’t move so …’ Helen shrugged.
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