The Dark Room

by Minette Walters

  Chapter Seven

  AT THE OUTSET Bobby Franklyn had been careful with the four stolen credit cards, all of which carried the flamboyant signature that was so easy to copy. He had started in a modest way with purchases under thirty pounds to avoid incurring the inevitable telephoned checks, but after two days he was seduced by a leather jacket at one hundred and fifty pounds and caution gave way to greed. He sweated under the beady eye of the shop manager while the call for authorization was made, only to hit an adrenalin high when the jacket was handed to him and he knew that the cards had still not been reported missing. In the next five days, using each in turn, he bought goods to the value of six thousand pounds without, apparently, ever reaching any of the credit ceilings. He had yet to touch the woman’s cards.

  Of course, he grew careless. It was the nature of the beast to proclaim his cleverness and flaunt his new-found wealth, for there was no forward-thinking in Bobby’s intellectual make-up, merely a childlike need to gratify immediate appetites and demonstrate that he was a cut above his peers. He strutted his stuff with increasing arrogance, provoking jealousy and resentment, and was grassed up by an old school-friend, turned police informant, for a smoke and the price of a beer.

  Friday, 24 June, Romsey Road Police Station, Winchester, Hampshire – 12.15 p.m.

  At about the same time that Jinx was considering absconding, DS Sean Fraser tapped on the open door of DI Maddocks’s office. ‘You remember what the Super said about a third party nicking our couple’s IDs and money? Well, I took a look at the charge sheets for the last week and came up with a cracker. It’s too bloody neat to be coincidence, Guv’nor. A lad by the name of Bobby Franklyn was brought in this morning by the uniformed boys. He lives on the Hawtree Estate, single-parent family, five kids all running wild. He’s the eldest. Seems he’s been using stolen credit cards to buy electrical goods and clothes to the tune of six thousand quid in five days. When they prised up the floorboards in his bedroom they found four cards in the name of Mr Leo Wallader and two in the name of Miss M. S. Harris. He claims he found them in a carrier bag in the High Street, but when Ted Garrety phoned through to find out when they’d been reported missing he was told that, as far as the companies who issued them are concerned, they’re still kosher. Ted’s been trying to contact the two cardholders. Wallader’s registered address is 12 Glenavon Gardens, Richmond, and Harris’s is 43a Shoebury Terrace, Hammersmith. Two London numbers with no answer at either end. What do you reckon?’

  The permanent scowl on Maddocks’s heavy face smoothed into alert interest. ‘Is Franklyn still here?’

  Fraser nodded. ‘He’s a nasty piece of work. Seventeen years old, and knows his rights. We’ve hauled him in before but this is the first time he’s been old enough and bad enough to charge. According to Garrety, he had five televisions, half a dozen stereo systems still in their boxes beside his bed, and a quantity of brand new flashy clothing in his cupboard.’

  ‘Does he have a brief with him?’

  ‘A young woman from Hicks and Hicks. She’s advised him to keep his mouth shut.’

  The scowl returned. ‘Miranda Jones, I suppose. If women stuck to what they’re good at instead of muscling in on the male preserves, the world would be a better place.’ He flicked a lazy glance at the young sergeant’s prudish face. ‘You’d agree with that, wouldn’t you, Sean?’ he goaded him, knowing that Fraser hadn’t got the balls to contradict a superior officer.

  Fraser stared at a spot on the wall above the Inspector’s head and toyed briefly with the idea of thumping the bastard. He really hated Maddocks. He suspected the man’s misogyny was pathological and put it down to the fact that Maddocks was in the middle of his third divorce. But it was no excuse, any more than it was an excuse for his apparent willingness to abandon the six children he had had along the way. ‘She’s better than some of the men they send, Guv.’

  ‘OK, let’s take a look at him,’ said Maddocks, abandoning his sport to push his chair back and stand up. ‘No chance he’s our murderer, I suppose?’

  Fraser stood aside to let him pass. ‘I wouldn’t think so, Guv. According to Ted Garrety, he has a reputation for liking little girls. A thirteen-year-old accused him of rape a couple of years back but no charges were ever brought because her mother removed her very speedily when it emerged how many other boys her daughter had slept with. The view is that Franklyn has all the makings of a paedophile, and give it another two to three years and we’ll be banging the little sod up on a regular basis for child molestation. A type like that is deeply inadequate, so he’d probably rob two mature dead adults without a qualm, but I doubt very much he’d have the bottle to abduct them while they were alive.’

  Which was a fair summary, thought Maddocks, as he examined the depressingly low-grade young man in the interview room who couldn’t open his mouth without uttering obscenities and who fingered his crotch from beginning to end of the interview, apparently unaware he was doing it. He appeared unhealthy and unwashed with pinched, sharp features, eyes that looked anywhere but at the person to whom he was talking, and a sullen cast to his mouth. At times like this, the Fascist in Gareth Maddocks wondered why society tolerated such weasels within its midst.

  ‘We have something of a problem here,’ he murmured after Franklyn had replied ‘no fucking comment’ to the first three questions. ‘I’m going to deal this one straight, Bobby, so that you know where I’m coming from. I think, then, you might decide to give me some answers. I’m not interested in your credit card fraud. As far as I’m concerned that’s a separate issue. What I am interested in are the two people named on the cards, Mr Leo Wallader and Miss M. S. Harris, and the reason I’m interested is because I have two corpses I can’t identify who were found in Ardingly Woods yesterday afternoon. Now, guesswork tells DS Fraser and myself that our couple could very well be Mr Wallader and Miss Harris and it would save us a great deal of time and effort if you could confirm that for us, Bobby. We think the chances are you stumbled on the bodies a week or so ago and did what any normal red-blooded male would do, and removed their wallets.’ He smiled amiably. ‘What the hell, eh? They were dead, not by your hand, no question about that, but they weren’t going to need their credit cards any more, were they? How about giving us a break on this one? It really would help us to know who they are.’

  ‘Sod off,’ said Bobby. ‘No fucking comment.’

  Maddocks glanced towards the young solicitor. ‘What say the Sergeant and I leave the room for five minutes and you discuss options with your client? It’s worth pointing out, I think, that we might very well decide to bring additional charges against Mr Franklyn if and when we identify our dead couple as Wallader and Harris, and I should add that perverting the course of justice will be the least of them.’

  Fraser watched Bobby’s involuntary masturbation with marked distaste. ‘If we’re forced to go house to house on the Hawtree Estate, I wonder if we’ll turn up someone else, a young girl perhaps, who was in the woods with Bobby.’

  ‘There weren’t no one wiv me,’ said Franklyn in a rush, ignoring his solicitor’s warning hand on his arm. Shit, if they ever found out he’d screwed a twelve-year-old.

  ‘OK, OK, so I did find them two bodies and, Jesus, they were sodding ’orrible. Smashed bloody faces and bluebottles everywhere, but I was on me own. D’you fink I’d ’ave been able to lift them cards if I’d ’ad someone wiv me? Use yer fucking brains. They’d ’ave wanted an in on the goods, wouldn’t they? But it was like you said, them two was dead and they wasn’t gonna use their sodding cards again. Couldn’t see no ’arm in taking them and doin’ a bit of business.’

  ‘You had a duty to report it, Bobby,’ said Maddocks mildly, his habitual aggression cloaked in an encouraging smile which said: Don’t worry about it, lad, we’re men of the world, you and I, and we both know rules are made to be broken.

  ‘Fuck that! It weren’t none of my business. If I were a bit keener on you lot, then maybe, but you’ve never done me no favour
s so why should I do one for you? They was so bloody dead, you wouldn’t believe. Couldn’t see what difference it’d make to them if they was found a week ago or if they was found today. They’d still be dead, wouldn’t they?’

  Maddocks couldn’t argue with that. ‘Are you sure you were on your own, Bobby? If you had a girl with you we need to know now. It is important.’ He was thinking of the skid marks on the bank, made by a woman’s heel.

  ‘Yeah, I’m sure.’ He pondered for a moment. ‘I’ll tell you this for free. If a girl ’ad seen what I saw, she’d still be puking all over the sodding shop. I’m not thinking about it too much meself.’ His skin grew even more unhealthy-looking. ‘I ’ad to ’old me breath to search them. It was that bloody disgusting. Reckon there was a million bluebottles in that ditch. You gonna charge me? It weren’t me what did them in. I don’t do that kind of stuff.’

  Maddocks glanced at Fraser, who shrugged. The lad’s story certainly had the ring of truth. ‘No,’ said the DI, standing up. ‘At the moment I don’t intend to add any charges to those you’re already facing, but we will want to talk to you again, Bobby, so I advise you very strongly to make yourself available. Neither DS Fraser nor I want the trouble of having to look for you.’ He paused at the door. ‘Just one last thing. Had there been any attempt made to bury the bodies?’

  ‘You mean in a grave?’

  ‘No, I mean had they been covered over with anything?’

  ‘Only wiv leaves.’

  ‘Well covered?’

  ‘Yeah. Pretty well.’

  ‘Then how did you know they were there?’

  Franklyn’s sharp little eyes shifted nervously. ‘Because some think ’ad been at the guy,’ he said. ‘A fox, maybe. The ’ead and top ’alf of ’is body ’ad been dug out, least that’s what it looked like. I didn’t know the woman was there till I started taking the leaves off ’im and found ’er ’ead beside ’is sodding legs. To tell you the truth,’ he said, ‘I wish I’d never seen them now.’ He wiped his hands on his trousers. ‘It’s got me in bother and I’m not sure I cleaned myself properly afterwards. I’ve been worrying about that.’

  Nightingale Clinic, Salisbury – 6.30 p.m.

  Alan Protheroe looked in on Jinx later that afternoon and found her walking with gritty determination about her room. ‘I’m not going out in a wheelchair again,’ she told him angrily. ‘I hadn’t realized quite how sensitive I am to being stared at. It was a deeply humiliating experience.’ She jabbed a finger at her bandages. ‘When’s this idiotic thing coming off my eye?’

  ‘Probably tomorrow morning,’ he said, wondering if it was only humiliation that had sparked her anger. It would be a while, he thought, before she felt confident enough to admit she remembered anything. ‘You’ve an appointment at Odstock Hospital for nine-thirty. All being well, it’ll be removed then.’

  She came to a halt beside her dressing table. ‘Thank God for that. I feel like Frankenstein’s monster at the moment.’

  His amiable face creased into a smile. ‘You don’t look like him.’

  There was a short silence.

  ‘Are you married, Dr Protheroe?’

  ‘I was. My wife died of breast cancer four years ago.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Why did you want to know?’ he asked her.

  Straightforward curiosity. You’re too nice to be running around free and most of your shirts have buttons missing. ‘Because it’s six-thirty on a Friday evening in June and I was wondering why you were still here. Do you live in?’

  He nodded. ‘In a flat upstairs.’

  ‘Children?’

  ‘One daughter at university, who’s nineteen and very strong-minded.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. You’ve probably been using her as a guinea pig for your theories on individual responsibility since she was knee-high to a grasshopper.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  She eyed him curiously. ‘As a matter of interest, what happens when one of your patients chooses a wrong set of values? Acts in bad faith, in other words. I can’t believe they all toe the existentialist Protheroe line. It’s a statistical impossibility.’

  He lowered himself into one of the chairs, stretched his long legs in front of him and clasped his hands behind his head. ‘That’s an extraordinarily loaded question but I’ll have a stab at an answer. By “wrong” you presumably mean that they leave the clinic with the same problems they came in with? In other words, their time here hasn’t persuaded them that another modus vivendi might be worth considering?’

  ‘That’s a very simplistic way of putting it, but it’ll do, I suppose.’

  He lifted an amused eyebrow. ‘Then the simplistic answer is that my methods haven’t worked for them, and they either remain as they are or seek alternative therapy. But they’re usually the ones who discharge themselves within forty-eight hours because they didn’t want to be here in the first place.’

  Like me, she thought. ‘You must have your share of back-sliders, though. I can’t see Matthew sticking to the straight and narrow once he’s away from here.’

  ‘I think you’re underestimating him. He’s only been here two weeks, you know. Give him another month and then tell me he won’t make it.’

  She looked appalled. ‘A month? How long am I supposed to stay here then?’

  ‘As long or as short as you like.’

  ‘That’s not an answer. How long does my father expect you to keep me?’

  ‘This isn’t a prison, Jinx. I don’t keep anyone.’

  ‘Then I can leave tomorrow after the bandages have been removed?’

  ‘Of course you can, subject to what I told you on Wednesday. You’re still not physically fit, so I’d feel duty bound to inform your father that you’d discharged yourself.’

  She smiled faintly. ‘Does that mean I’m mentally fit?’

  He shrugged. ‘My impression, for what it’s worth, is that you’re as tough as old boots.’ He leaned forward and studied her face closely. ‘I’m having some difficulty squaring this rugged self-reliance of yours with the picture the police gave me of a heartbroken, vulnerable woman who drove her car at a wall.’

  She pressed a fingertip to her eyelid to hide the awful rush of tears. ‘So am I,’ she said after a moment, ‘but I’ve read the piece in the newspaper over and over again and I can’t come up with another explanation.’ She lowered her hand to look at him. ‘I phoned Meg’s answer-machine today. I thought if I could only talk to her and Leo, they could at least tell everyone that I wasn’t upset about him going.’

  ‘Is that something you can remember?’

  ‘You mean, not being upset?’ He nodded and she shook her head. ‘No, I’m just so certain that it wouldn’t have worried me.’

  ‘Why?’

  Because it didn’t worry me last time. ‘Because,’ she said out loud, ‘I didn’t want Leo myself.’ She looked away from him, fearful perhaps of seeing his disbelief. ‘I know it sounds like sour grapes but I’m relieved I don’t have to marry him. I can remember hanging around the studio till all hours just to avoid going home and spending cosy evenings with him, and I don’t think it was cold feet about the wedding. I was beginning to actively dislike him.’ She gave a hollow laugh. ‘So much for rugged self-reliance. Why was I marrying someone I didn’t like? It doesn’t make sense.’ She lapsed into a brief silence. ‘It wouldn’t be so bad,’ she said suddenly, ‘if I didn’t have to keep shoring up my defences.’

  ‘Against what?’

  She pressed her fingertips to her good eye again to shut him out. ‘Fear,’ she said.

  He waited a moment. ‘What is there to fear?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she murmured. ‘I can’t remember.’

  Romsey Road Police Station, Winchester, Hampshire – 7.00 p.m.

  Events moved extraordinarily quickly once the bodies were given tentative names and addresses. A telephone call to the Richmond police uncovered the interesting information that 12 Glenavon Gardens h
ad attracted the attention of another branch of the Hampshire police some ten days previously, following a road traffic accident involving Miss Jane Kingsley, the owner/occupier.

  ‘You want to speak to a Sergeant Halliwell at Fordingbridge,’ said the voice at the other end to Fraser. ‘He asked us to make some enquiries about Kingsley because it looked to them like the RTA was a deliberate attempt to kill herself. The gist is, she was engaged to Leo Wallader, who lived with her in Glenavon Gardens for about two months before buggering off on the night of Friday, the tenth of June, three weeks before the wedding, to shack up with Kingsley’s best friend. We talked to Kingsley’s neighbours who mentioned another suicide attempt on the Sunday, the twelfth, and also to Wallader’s parents by phone. The information we were given is that Wallader and his new girlfriend have scarpered to the continent until the fuss over the cancelled wedding has died down.’

  ‘Any idea what the name of the girlfriend is?’ Fraser held his breath.

  ‘Harris. Meg Harris.’

  Bull’s-eye! ‘Do you have an address for Wallader’s parents?’

  ‘Let’s see, now. The father’s Sir Anthony Wallader. Address: Downton Court, Ashwell, near Guildford.’

  ‘What about Meg Harris’s parents?’

  ‘Sorry. She only came into it as the new girlfriend. We’ve nothing on her at all except her name.’

  ‘OK, can you fax me everything you’ve got on this?’ He read out the number. ‘Within the next five minutes, if possible.’

  ‘Will do. What’s the story then?’

  ‘Not sure yet, but we’ve got two bodies here that we think are Wallader and Harris. You’d better warn your chaps to expect us some time tomorrow. Cheers.’

  He cut the line, flipped through a police directory and dialled Fordingbridge. ‘Is Sergeant Halliwell still there?’ he asked. ‘Yes, I know it’s late.’ He drummed his fingers on the desk. ‘OK, well this is urgent. Can you find him and ask him to call either DI Maddocks or DS Fraser in the Ardingly Woods incident room.’ He rattled off the number. ‘And make that a priority please.’