‘They’d barely taken her poor body away,’ Eric said sourly, ‘and some toerag smashes in her back window, ransacks the place. Honestly. No respect, nowadays.’
‘Drugs or, or, or something, I expect,’ Barbara sniffed. ‘Or just somebody else wanting something for nothing.’
Cox tried to keep them on track.
‘But you think Verity might have had an idea that it was going to happen? Do you think it was this man who’d been following her that broke into her house?’
‘Who knows?’ Barbara shook her head miserably. ‘People get confused, don’t they. Older people. Perhaps she wasn’t well. But I know this, Kerry.’ She lifted her chin, gave a sharp nod. ‘She was scared. Rightly or wrongly, I don’t know. But Verity was scared out of her wits.’
They’d reached the Hopsons’ car, a well-kept old green Ford, parked just outside the church gate. They were among the last to leave. As Eric helped Barbara into the passenger seat, he offered Cox a lift to the church hall; ‘Tea urn, sausage-rolls, the usual,’ he said with a sad smile, and the air of a man who’d spent too much time at funerals. She accepted gratefully. She’d already learned a lot from the Hopsons – but she had the feeling there was still a lot she didn’t know.
It was a church hall much like any other: clean bare floorboards, posters and notices pinned to the walls, a cross-shaped east window. A table was laden with, as Eric had said, ‘the usual’: open sandwiches, cold quiche, hard-boiled eggs, sausage-rolls. As far as Cox could tell, everyone who’d been at the church had come along.
She couldn’t drink another cup of tea, so helped herself to a glass of water, and wandered over to take a look at a flower display set out on a trestle table under the window. It was a nice arrangement, lilies and freesias and some green fern framing a set of photographs of a smiling, silver-haired lady with rounded cheeks and pale blue eyes – Verity Halcombe.
Or rather, Cox noted, bending to read a handwritten notice beneath the photographs, Verity Halcombe, OBE. There was a picture, in fact, of her proudly holding her OBE medal in the grounds of Buckingham Palace. It was the only one of the photographs in which Verity was by herself; in all of the others she was surrounded by kids, playing, laughing, pulling faces and showing off for the camera – or shy, and clinging to Verity’s pleated skirt.
In one, Verity and the kids were joined by a group of smiling women in polo-shirts with logos. The caption read: On Verity’s retirement from Cromby House, Whitby. It was dated a year earlier.
As Cox turned away, she noticed the lilies sent by William Radley. From your dear friend Bill x.
How had one of the most senior figures in London policing come to befriend a nursery worker from Whitby? Where was the connection?
She noticed another woman, smartly dressed in a black trouser-suit and around Verity’s age, peering at the photographs.
‘Lovely display, isn’t it?’ Cox said, moving alongside. ‘I’m Kerry. An old friend of Verity’s.’
The woman smiled, shook her hand.
‘Helen. So you knew Verity back when she was in the Midlands, then?’
Think fast.
‘Ah – no. Just since she moved up here.’
‘Oh.’ Helen looked disappointed. ‘So not that old, then.’
‘No.’ She forced an embarrassed laugh. ‘No, I suppose not, really, if you look at it like that.’ Tried not to show that she was flustered; wondered how long ago Verity had lived in the Midlands – how long did you have to know someone to qualify as an ‘old friend’? People Helen’s age probably had different ideas about that sort of thing. Maybe you weren’t really an old friend unless you’d swapped ration coupons or been through the Blitz together.
They made small-talk stiffly for a while, and then Cox made her excuses and headed outside.
The weather hadn’t let up. If anything, the temperature had dropped, and the sea wind was gusting more strongly. It took her the best part of forty-five minutes to find the greasy-spoon café and her car parked outside; another half-hour – including a twenty-minute wait at the swing-bridge – to drive across town to Whitby police station.
‘DCI Kerry Cox, Metropolitan Police.’
The constable on the front desk looked at her with a gormless mix of amusement and fear.
‘From – from London, ma’am?’
‘Yes, from London. You must have heard of it.’ Cox’s reserves of patience were at a low ebb. ‘I’d like to speak with someone about the death of Verity Halcombe.’
The constable nodded awkwardly, as though his head were being jerked on a string.
‘Y-yes, ma’am. I’ll – I’ll fetch the sergeant.’
He hurried away.
The sergeant, at least, seemed to be a man she could do business with. He was a thick-set, doughy-faced man with a receding hairline and a badger-grey moustache. He greeted her briskly, ushered her through the security door into an empty office suite.
‘Now, how can I help, ma’am?’
Cox rubbed her face.
‘A good cup of coffee would be a start,’ she said. ‘But I don’t suppose there’s any chance of that?’
The sergeant – Carrick, he’d said his name was – smiled bleakly.
‘This is a police station, ma’am. It’s brown stuff from the machine, or nowt.’
‘Never mind, then.’ She pushed her hair behind her ears, rolled her stiff shoulders – the after-effects of yesterday’s long drive were starting to kick in. ‘I’m investigating a suspicious death in London, sergeant. Trying to track the final movements of the victim. I’m here in Whitby because we think the victim might have some connection with Verity Halcombe. Miss Halcombe died recently.’
‘That’s right, ma’am.’ The sergeant nodded. ‘Although it’d be more accurate to say that we found her recently. Unfortunately, by that time, Miss Halcombe had been dead quite some time.’ He grimaced; they both knew what that meant.
Sergeant Carrick went through the story in step-by-step police-ese. A postman had noticed a foul smell of decomposition wafting through the letterbox one morning, just before Christmas. He’d dialled 999, the police had attended the scene – and the body of Verity Halcombe, six weeks dead or thereabouts, had been found in bed.
No, he said, there were no suspicious circumstances; no, Miss Halcombe hadn’t reported anything about a man following her.
He paused, then added: ‘There was one funny thing, though, ma’am. Probably nothing, but –’
‘Go on.’
‘Her front door, ma’am. When we arrived, it was unlocked.’
‘It’d been open all that time?’
‘Hard to be sure, ma’am. We were told that Miss Halcombe was a very security-conscious lady – but would she have gone to bed without locking the door?’ He twitched his moustache sceptically. ‘That’s why it struck me as funny, ma’am.’
Cox nodded.
‘Thanks, sergeant.’
I wouldn’t go to bed without locking the door, she thought. All right, Whitby’s a far cry from Shepherd’s Bush, but still. Verity, by the sound of it, was borderline paranoid. Why would she leave the door open?
There are three options, she thought: someone else opened the door; Verity just forgot to lock the door before bed; or Verity knew someone was after her – and wanted them to find her.
7
The garden had been well looked after, once. Someone had cared for it. Now it was a rank strip of straggly off-yellow grasses, dead flowerheads, ragged hedges and leggy herbs. A hanging basket by the door held nothing but lankly drooping plant stems.
‘She just lost interest, apparently, towards the end,’ Sergeant Carrick said as he unlocked the front door. ‘Never went out. Let the garden go to pot.’ He cast a dull eye over the derelict lawn. ‘Shame.’
He hadn’t taken much persuading to let Cox see the place. Coppers were a cynical lot, but some words still worked a certain magic in any nick. ‘Scotland Yard’, for instance.
It was a small place, Verity’s
house, a 1920s redbrick on the end of a terrace of five; from the doorstep, you could see across a stretch of neat allotments to the far side of the bay and the dark, brooding ruin of the Abbey.
Something to do with Dracula, was it, the Abbey? It was written there, or set there, or something.
Well, we can probably rule out vampire attack in this case, Cox thought grimly as she entered the poky hallway. But beyond that, who knows? The coroner, she knew, had recorded a verdict of ‘natural causes’ – which seemed pretty vague, for a late-sixties woman in decent health. The state of decomposition had made things hard to determine with much certainty.
On the drive over from the station she’d asked Carrick about the burglary. He hadn’t thought much of it. It was pretty common, he’d said, an opportunistic thing; word gets out that someone’s passed on, and that means an empty house – it was a bloody shame, yes, but there you are.
Cox closed the door behind her, turned – and stopped.
‘Jesus Christ.’
‘Yep.’ Carrick, hands in pockets, nodded. ‘They really did a number on the place.’
‘Did a number’? They’d practically taken it apart.
Cox moved carefully through the house, taking in the extent of the damage. In the sitting room, the sofa cushions had been slashed and the stuffing torn out; a roll-top bureau had been emptied of its contents, the bottoms of the drawers kicked through, stationery and bric-a-brac strewn across the carpet. In some places the skirting-boards had been levered away; in others, they’d rolled back the carpeting and jemmied up the floorboards.
It was the same in every room. The toilet cistern smashed. The stained mattress in the bedroom ripped open. Pictures pulled off the walls. Cupboards emptied, doors hanging off their hinges. Rags of torn loft insulation hung from the opening to the roofspace.
Whoever did this had been looking for something. There weren’t many hiding places in a house this small – whatever they were after, surely to God they’d found it.
She headed back downstairs, to where Carrick was waiting. Cox felt like clicking her fingers in front of his face just to see if anyone was home. Did they seriously think this was just an opportunistic burglary? But it wouldn’t do any good to antagonize the local force.
‘Any idea what was taken?’
‘Hard to tell, what with no family to say if there’s owt missing. Telly’s still here. Clock on the mantel, few bits of jewellery upstairs. She might’ve had an iPad, but I doubt it.’
‘There’s no one at all? Who inherits the house?’
‘She didn’t leave a will. Council’ll sort all this when they come to auction it off. House-clearance company, I expect.’
His weariness was beginning to grate, so she picked her words carefully. ‘Bit odd, isn’t it?’ She shoed cautiously through a heap of old bills on the floor. ‘All this mess? Nothing apparently taken? Funny sort of burglary, if you ask me.’
Carrick shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot.
‘Now you mention it, ma’am, it does seem a bit odd, as you say,’ he conceded. ‘But I thought – I mean, we thought – you know, old lady, natural causes, empty house, and, as I say, it does happen a lot, ma’am, and sometimes they’re just junkies looking for cash …’
He tailed off. Cleared his throat.
‘I understand, sergeant,’ Cox said. Smiled thinly.
She knew the type. Anything for a quiet life. Didn’t make him a bad copper – but didn’t make him a good one, either.
Her eye was caught by a broken pane of glass on the floor by the window. It was the glass from a picture-frame, broken in three. Beneath it was a black-and-white photograph, creased but not otherwise damaged. She stooped, picked it up, shook away a few fragments of glass. It was of a young woman – looked a lot like Verity, at maybe twenty, twenty-five. She was grinning on the arm of a dapper-looking young man: high forehead, stiff collar, crooked half-smile.
She turned to Carrick.
‘Verity never married, did she?’
‘No, ma’am. She was never anything but Miss Halcombe, far as I know.’
Cox held up the picture.
‘Any idea who this man is? Brother?’
‘There’s no brother anyone’s heard of. Old boyfriend, p’raps?’
‘Mm. Maybe.’ She took out her phone, snapped a photograph of the old print. Behind her, she heard Carrick’s radio crackle; he stepped out into the hallway to speak.
She moved around, pretending to be focused on taking snaps of the ransacked room. Carrick’s voice was low, a strained mutter; she stood quite still, camera pointed at random, listening hard – couldn’t make out the words.
When she glanced across she could see a section of Carrick’s face through the gap between the door and the frame. The sergeant’s brow was furrowed; something had cracked his unflappable, seen-it-all front.
When he stepped back into the shattered sitting room he had a hangdog, just-doing-my-job look.
‘I’m sorry, ma’am. But we’re going to have to go.’
‘Go? Go where?’
‘That was my CO. He’s had a call from London, ma’am.’
Oh, here we go …
‘And?’
‘Word from – from your chief super.’ He nodded to emphasize the significance. ‘He says – and this is just the message I was given, ma’am – that the Miss Halcombe business is to remain in the hands of North Yorkshire Police.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘This is just what I was told, ma’am. There’s no connection between Miss Halcombe’s death and your investigation in London.’
‘Says who?’
‘I don’t know, ma’am. This is just what I’ve been told. He said I’ve to drive you back to your car, and that’s that.’ He spread his hands. ‘So – shall we go, ma’am?’
Cox fixed him with a bitter look. Had to remind herself that it wasn’t his fault; orders from on high, what was he supposed to do? He’d done her a favour bringing her here, anyway.
She thanked him – said she’d prefer to walk. Carrick did a bad job of hiding his relief.
Out in the street, she waited for the patrol car to pull away before she took her phone and – feeling a day’s worth of frustration uncoil inside her – dialled Naysmith’s number.
The phone rang for what seemed like for ever.
Don’t you dare, she thought, pacing the pavement. Don’t you dare duck out of this.
He answered on the seventh ring.
‘Cox.’
She exploded: ‘Guv, what the bloody hell is going on?’
‘Now, Cox, I’ve been more than accommodating –’
‘This is a serious lead, guv, a serious, valid lead on a major case. I’m not here for the good of my bloody health. Verity Halcombe –’
‘Spare me the details of your wild goose chase, Cox. I said I’d give you twenty-four hours on this –’
‘I don’t remember that at all,’ she said.
‘– and your time’s up. I’ve had enough.’
‘You? Or the chief super?’
There was the slightest pause – that was answer enough.
‘This has nothing to do with the chief super,’ Naysmith said unconvincingly. ‘This is my call.’
‘Sure it is, guv.’
‘Careful now, Cox.’ An edge in his voice. ‘You’re this close to the line.’
‘Guv, this is not a waste of time, this is not speculation, this is a lead –’
‘Back here. Now. I want you on the road within the hour, and when you get to London the first thing you do is report directly to me. Do I make myself clear?’
Talking tough doesn’t make you a leader, Cox thought. And treating me like I’m a wayward teenager doesn’t prove you’re right.
‘This is a live investigation. The Halcombe death is –’
‘It’s an irrelevance, and a distraction, and you’re going to walk away from it right now, Cox, because I’m ordering you to.’ He paused, drew a breath. Then, in a w
earier tone, he added: ‘If you don’t get your act together, we’ll both have all the time in the world to relax at the seaside after this bloody inquiry rips us to pieces.’
‘Guv, I’m not relaxing, I’m –’
There was a noise, a door opening, a man’s urgent voice. ‘Hang on,’ Naysmith said to her sharply; muffled the phone with his hand.
When he came back on the line the brisk authority had returned to his voice.
‘Stabbing in Battersea Park,’ he said. ‘Some proper bloody policework for you. Go there direct.’
You needn’t sound so pleased about it, Cox thought.
‘On my way, guv,’ she said. She rang off.
When she got back to her car she changed out of her smart black funeral shoes into a pair of comfy trainers and climbed wearily into the driver’s seat. Her back and shoulders were knotted with tension, her knees stiff, her eyes dry from sleeplessness. Six hours of driving and nothing to look forward to at the end of it but an inner-city stabbing. Still, it beat a face-to-face with Peter fucking Naysmith.
She turned the car deftly, drove uphill out of town on to a snaking moorland road. The ruined Abbey, a stark black outline against piled blue clouds, snagged in her peripheral vision as she drove; gave her the creeps, even from this distance. She let her gaze drift westwards along the horizon. The clouds grew darker, more forbidding, towards the south – high, bruised and full of storms. She shifted gear, pulled on to the A-road. She was heading into heavy weather.
The Fourth Day of Christmas, 1986
There’s a copper here.
We’re all on edge, really wound up – we’ve all of us here, except maybe our Stan, had our run-ins with the cops, out in the real world. All come off worse. They’re a bunch of old bastards, and that’s all there is to it.
This one’s here because he’s bringing in a new lad, a proper hardknock by the sounds of it. The bastard’s got his arm in a sling. Hope it hurt, whatever he done.
The kid’s called Col.
‘He was in here before,’ Stevie told me. ‘Got fostered. Dunno what he done to get brung back but he’s a right nutcase, could’ve been anything.’
Twelve Deaths of Christmas Page 7