by David Hodges
Kate pursed her lips. ‘I’d assumed they met in a village hall somewhere.’
‘They used to but it got too expensive for them so they started using the library about a year ago.’
‘How often do they meet?’
‘Once a month. ’
‘When did they last meet?’
The assistant consulted a handwritten card taped to the desk in front of the computer keyboard. ‘Let me see, they were here at the beginning of the month – I believe that unfortunate Moorcroft woman gave them a talk then – and they’re due to meet here again Friday week.’
‘Do they have their own key to the library?’
Pink Glasses snorted again. ‘Of course not. One of the library assistants remains on duty on a rota basis each evening to supervise their visits. We are very particular about security at the library.’
‘And can you tell me which member of staff supervised that last visit?’
Her face twitched again as she turned back to her computer and rattled the keys for a few moments. Then she shook her head sadly. ‘It would have been that poor Schofield girl.’
For a moment Kate simply stared at her. ‘Melanie Schofield?’ she exclaimed. ‘You’re saying Melanie Schofield worked here?’
The assistant nodded. ‘She was a trainee. Chirpy little thing. Dreadful thing that happened to her.’
‘Why wasn’t I told this before?’
Another shrug. ‘You didn’t ask – and I don’t see how it is relevant to the poor girl’s death anyway.’
Kate controlled her rising anger with difficulty. ‘That is for us to decide, Miss Rundle, not you.’ Then she added, ‘Did anyone form any sort of relationship with Melanie?’
Another snort. ‘And how would I know that? She was just a nice friendly girl and very good at her job. Everyone liked her. Mr Fallow was particularly fond of her. Said she was like a breath of spring.’ She treated Kate to a frosty smile. ‘Such a nice man, Mr Fallow.’
Kate frowned, thinking that after these startling new revelations, she would have to reserve her judgement about the inoffensive little historian.
Will Fallow was cringing in his study when Kate knocked on his front door shortly after a hasty burger lunch and his dour unsmiling wife had no hesitation in showing her through, treating her husband to a hard glance as she discreetly withdrew.
‘So why didn’t you tell me you knew Melanie Schofield?’ Kate demanded without preamble.
The little man swung his swivel chair round to face her and raised both hands in a deprecating gesture. ‘I’m so sorry, Sergeant,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t think it was relevant.’
Kate nodded but not in agreement, thinking how many times she had heard that excuse. ‘So you didn’t think that knowing a victim in a murder inquiry was relevant?’ she echoed.
Fallow made a face. ‘I didn’t want you to get the wrong idea,’ he replied.
‘And what idea was that?’
He sighed. ‘I hardly knew the gal. She was just a very helpful young lady who sometimes sat at the desk in the library while we had our meetings upstairs. I was horrified when I heard about her murder but I was concerned that you might think there was a connection between her death and the society, which wouldn’t have been very good at all.’
‘Why would I think that?’
He hesitated. ‘Well, you seemed very keen on finding out all about the society and its members when we first met and I gather you have already interviewed several of them – Mr Copely was particularly upset about your visit.’
Even more upset now he has been arrested, Kate thought grimly. ‘So you decided to withhold the information?’ she said.
‘I didn’t withhold anything – you didn’t ask me if I knew her anyway.’
Kate snorted. ‘Let’s not split hairs, Mr Fallow. You were fully aware of the fact that we were making inquiries into Melanie’s background, yet you chose not to reveal your connection with her through the library and the historical society?’
‘There was no connection as such – she was just the person we liaised with on a couple of occasions.’
‘Yet you apparently went so far as to tell Miss Rundle you thought she was like a breath of spring?’
He wrung his hands, the sweat standing out on his forehead. ‘All right, all right, I should have told you but I didn’t and I’m sorry – what else can I say?’
She resorted to one last bluff. ‘You can start by telling me about the Sellotape.’
He looked blank. ‘Sellotape? I don’t understand.’
‘I believe someone from the historical society borrowed a roll of it from the library during one of the meetings and that Melanie Schofield may have been the one who gave it to them.’
She studied his face narrowly but there were no giveaway signs in his expression. He simply shook his head slowly, as if considering the possibility. ‘I don’t know anything about any Sellotape.’
‘Are you sure? Maybe that is why she was killed.’
His eyes widened. ‘Why would anyone kill someone over a roll of Sellotape?’
‘I can’t tell you that but there is a definite link between the tape and the murders of all three women.’
Fallow’s jaw dropped. ‘All three women?’ he echoed. ‘You’re saying there has been another one?’
‘You mean you don’t know? Don’t you listen to local radio or read the newspapers?’
‘Usually, yes but I’ve – I’ve been busy working on my new book in the last few days and I’ve sort of shut myself away. I had no idea there had been a third murder.’
Kate nodded soberly. ‘And there are likely to be a lot more unless we catch this man soon. If you are hiding anything from us, you will have their deaths on your conscience.’
‘But – but I don’t know anything else.’
Kate stared at him intently. ‘Are you sure? Was there any member of your society who showed particular interest in either Melanie Schofield or Tamsyn Moorcroft?’
Fallow stared about him wildly, as if seeking inspiration from the walls. ‘No – no, there wasn’t anyone. They’re all history buffs, middle-aged men and women. Melanie was just – just the library assistant.’
Kate was not convinced. ‘I believe you know a lot more than you are saying, Mr Fallow,’ she accused, ‘and I want you to think very carefully about that.’
She turned towards the door. ‘You know my telephone number. I’ll wait to hear from you.’
Then she was gone, leaving behind her a very worried little man who had every reason to fear that his comfortable ordered world of books and archives was on the verge of disintegrating. But if Kate felt at all guilty about the effect her hard-line tactics might have had on him, she was given no time to think about it or about Fallow’s shock revelations, for her mobile chose to activate even as she was climbing into her car.
The caller was Roscoe. ‘Get your arse back to the nick,’ he rapped. ‘Copely’s back on the agenda!’
CHAPTER 18
Janice Young was sitting at the table in the interview room, clutching a cup of coffee in both hands, when Kate joined Roscoe there twenty minutes later. The thriller writer was plainly very nervous and there was no disguising the glint of triumph in the DI’s eyes as Kate sat down in the chair beside him, frowning her puzzlement.
‘Miss Young has something very important to tell us,’ Roscoe said.
He raised an enquiring eyebrow in Young’s direction and she nodded quickly, taking a brief sip of her coffee. ‘Well, it’s like this, Sergeant,’ she began. ‘I’m afraid I was not entirely honest with you when you saw me yesterday about the bird-watching evening.’
‘Oh?’
Young glanced at Roscoe, then blurted. ‘Yes, I – er – didn’t stay all night in that hide, you see. I decided to call time on our little adventure just after Neville left.’ She hesitated, then made a face. ‘Maurice is not the easiest person to get along with, you understand, and, well, he thinks I chatter too much. He was most rude about i
t. Told me to “dry up”, so I left him to it.’
‘What time was this?’
‘Oh, about half eleven – maybe a few minutes later. Not long after Neville had left anyway.’
Kate looked even more puzzled. ‘But why say you stayed all night when you didn’t? Surely you can’t have wanted to give him an alibi if he was so rude to you?’
Young shook her head, spilling some of her coffee over her skirt. ‘I didn’t realize when you came to see me that that is what I’d be doing. I had no idea he was a suspect in these dreadful crimes – you never said.’
‘But why the fib in the first place?’
Young made a face. ‘Pride, I suppose. I didn’t want the rest of our little birdie group to know that I had given up so early. I would have looked like a silly old maid who was afraid of the dark – not good for my reputation as a thriller writer, you see.’
‘Which means,’ Roscoe cut in, his excitement showing, ‘our friend Copely now has no alibi at all.’
‘Oh dear!’ Young exclaimed. ‘I do hope I’m not getting him into more trouble.’
Roscoe worked at his most benign smile. ‘Course not, Miss Young,’ he soothed. ‘Now, if you’ll give us that statement, the nice sergeant and myself will pop around to see Mr Copely and have a little word in his shell-like.’
As it turned out, Roscoe was denied that opportunity. When he and Kate hammered on Copely’s front door an hour and a half later, they were met by a tearful Mrs Copely, who told them she and her husband had had a monumental row over his constant nocturnal absences. As a result, he had stormed out of the house and she had no idea if he would ever be back.
‘I – I’m sure he’s got another woman and he’s with her,’ she stammered. ‘It’s happened before, you know but he promised me it was the last time.’
‘Any idea where he might have gone?’ Roscoe queried.
Mrs Copely shook her head. ‘Some tart out on the Levels, I expect,’ she said with sudden venom. ‘He likes them young and cheap.’
‘Reckon he got wind of us coming, Guv?’ Kate said as she followed her boss back to the CID car.
The DI nodded. ‘Could be,’ he replied grimly, ‘but if the little turd is off on his toes, you can bet your arse I’ll find him – wherever he’s gone to ground.’
Detective Superintendent Ansell received the news of Janice Young’s admission and Copely’s subsequent disappearance with a characteristic lack of emotion, seemingly more interested in the information Kate had obtained from the library assistant than Roscoe’s apparent ‘score’.
‘Still doesn’t really add up, though, does it, Ted?’ he drawled. ‘I gather we’re looking for a man with only three fingers on his left hand and, as I understand it, Maurice Copely has a full score of ten?’
Roscoe scowled. ‘The pathologist could have made a mistake, Guv,’ he said lamely, ‘or Copely could still be an accessory.’
Ansell treated him to his most indulgent smile. ‘You mean there could be two killers instead of just the one? Now that would be an interesting idea.’
His dark eyes switched their gaze from the DI to Kate. ‘In any event, as you’ve suggested before, Sergeant, it appears that the library and the historical society are both key elements in this case,’ he continued, ‘and I think this Mr Fallow has a lot more questions to answer.’
Kate nodded. ‘I will be seeing him again tomorrow, sir,’ she said.
Ansell held up both hands, palms upwards in a deprecating gesture. ‘Why wait?’ he said. ‘Why not bring him in now? Let’s make our little author shit his breeches.’
In fact, Fallow did nothing of the sort. Like Copely, the writer was not at home when Kate called. ‘Out researching some bloody site or other,’ his wife snapped. ‘Damned fool’s obsessed with the past. Pity he wasn’t more interested in the present.’
Then she simply closed the door and returned to whatever it was she had been watching on a television which was churning out some strident signature tune from somewhere at the back of the cottage.
Kate sighed. ‘Tomorrow then,’ she muttered to herself and went back down the path to where she had left her Mazda, intending to return to the police station to break the news to the charming Mr Ansell. She never actually got there, however. The bright yellow Volkswagen Beetle saw to that.
She had got as far as Mark village and was heading along Mark Causeway when the VW rattled past her, heading in the opposite direction. Ordinarily she would not have given the car a second glance but its bright yellow colour and the plume of smoke it was leaving in its wake, obscuring part of her road ahead, made it difficult to ignore. Then, as it passed her, she glimpsed the male driver, huddled over the wheel with his eyes glued to the windscreen, as if terrified that the road would suddenly come to an end right in front of the bonnet. Even without seeing the driver’s face, Kate would have known who it was, for she had already recognized the car. She had seen it only a few days before, parked outside Will Fallow’s cottage.
Slamming on her brakes and swinging round in an entranceway, she left a nice black mark in the road as she raced off in pursuit. She had no idea where Fallow had been – the library in Highbridge probably – and she had no idea whether he was heading for home and his ‘darling’ wife or somewhere a lot more exciting but what she did know was that he had an appointment with Detective Superintendent Ansell at Highbridge nick and she was determined that he was going to keep it!
Kate was intrigued. Fallow was obviously not going home, for he had turned off the main road at Mark Church and was cutting across the Levels in the opposite direction. She had originally intended trying to pull him over but the narrowness of the road made such a tactic far too dangerous, so she decided to reduce her speed to match his, hanging back and following him at a safe ‘tailing’ distance. After all, he would have to stop eventually, coupled with which she was now very keen to find out exactly where it was he was heading anyway.
That remained a mystery for several miles, however, and it would have stayed that way had not the brief flash of yellow through the hedgerows at the junction with the main Westhay road alerted her to the fact that he had turned right towards Westhay village itself. But if she had expected his journey to end in Westhay she was disappointed and a mile or so further on, well before the village, he swung sharp left into the mouth of a narrow drove, heading deeper into the marshland countryside towards Godney Moor.
Where the devil was Fallow going? This was really desolate countryside, with few habitations except for the occasional farm or isolated cottage, and if this was not a planned visit to some historical site, what else could the little man have in mind for the afternoon? Maybe he had been bitten by the bug and was out for a spot of bird-watching – or perhaps he was heading for a clandestine rendezvous with some hot-blooded local vamp? She winced at the unsavoury image her last thought conjured up and tried instead to concentrate on the road ahead, still keeping well back to avoid detection and following the trail left by the clouds of black exhaust smoke as they slowly shrank to the pot-holed surface.
It was a sensible tactic but one that had its drawbacks, as she found out when, just thirty to forty yards beyond a particularly dense cloud, it suddenly dawned on her that the VW was nowhere to be seen – Fallow had turned off somewhere. She had lost him.
Slamming to a stop for the second time, Kate jerked round in her seat and studied the flat semi-wooded countryside behind her. At first all she saw was a green-brown patchwork of fields, bordered by stunted trees and hedgerows and criss-crossed by streams. But then she glimpsed the puffs of smoke again, rising above a long low wall which struck off from the drove towards a collection of dilapidated-looking buildings about half a mile over to her left.
Reversing into a passing place partially blocked by a heap of loose chippings and wincing as her rear bumper tore into the gravel, she churned her way out on to the road again and headed back the way she had come, spotting the un-gated entrance to a driveway on her right almost immediately and
pulling over to her nearside verge to take a closer look.
There was no sign of the yellow VW now, just a single puff of smoke hanging in the air close to the buildings. What on earth was a respectable local historian doing out here in this desolate spot? Visiting someone? The vamp maybe? Unlikely. Even from this distance, the buildings looked pretty lifeless.
She waited a few minutes to be on the safe side. She didn’t want to be spotted before she’d had a chance of finding out what the little historian was up to. Then, turning into the driveway, she bumped slowly along the grassy surface, keeping her engine revs down and her eyes peeled for any sign of movement ahead. But there was none and she got to within a few yards of the cluster of buildings when she saw a gap in the stone wall on her left. It accessed an overgrown rear garden with a couple of derelict barns on the far side and, to her right, the ruins of what had once been a stone two-storey cottage with a tiled roof and tall brick chimney, which had seen much better days.
It was obvious that no one had lived here for a very long time and most people would have been more than a little nervous about visiting such an isolated spot, even in broad daylight. Yet timid little Will Fallow had driven right in without the slightest hesitation and it seemed more than likely that he had been here before. So what was he up to? It was hardly the sort of place for a lover’s tryst, was it? There was only one way to find out.
Grabbing a small pocket torch from the car, she made her way round the side of the cottage via a narrow stony path to the front garden. The VW was parked a few yards away, just inside a gateway flanked by crumbling stone pillars but there was no sign of Fallow.
The empty windows of the cottage stared at her from scabby cracked brickwork sprouting a weave of parasitic climbers as she picked her way through weeds and low-level scrub to the open front door, and a strengthening breeze set a chain-like something clinking inside. She started involuntarily at the sound but then dismissed it when her gaze homed in on a small brass plaque attached to the wall beside the door. It looked to have been screwed into the stonework fairly recently and the inscription seemed to leap out at her.