by Faith Martin
‘We’re getting closer, Mr Davies,’ she said, and meant it. She was sure, now, that the blackmail angle was the course to follow. And it could only be a matter of time before she found whoever it was who’d rather kill than pay up. Perhaps something of her confidence sounded in her voice, because the anger was gone from his voice when he next said, ‘So what brings you back here?’
Hillary sighed. ‘In the course of a murder investigation, Mr Davies, the police uncover all sorts of things. Things not necessarily related to the crime, but things that come to light anyway. Family secrets, things best left undisturbed. But things that we have to follow through with, just to make sure that they’re not relevant after all. Do you understand what I mean?’
‘Not sure I do,’ George said, and Hillary saw his wife also frown and shake her head.
Hillary sighed and decided simply to take the bull by the horns. ‘We’ve had reports that you sometimes used to discipline your son, Mr Davies. Physically, I mean. Is that true?’
Shockingly, Celia Davies, who’d been standing unnoticed in the doorway, giggled loudly. When Hillary looked at her, she clamped a hand over her mouth, but her eyes danced wickedly. ‘Daddy used to smack his bum,’ she said, then clamped her hand back over her mouth again.
‘Oh, that weren’t nothing,’ Marilyn Davies said at once. ‘George never hit him around the head, or nothing dangerous. He never would, would you George?’
‘No, nor never took my belt off,’ George agreed, sitting down heavily opposite her. ‘My dad used to take his belt off to me, regular like, when I was a nipper. Suppose it never did me no harm, but I never forget it. It hurt like blazes, and I swore that when I grew up I’d never hit my kid like that. And I never did,’ he added, staring at Hillary defiantly. ‘You gonna do me for it then?’
Hillary shook her head. ‘No, Mr Davies,’ she said softly. ‘I can’t see that the Crown Prosecution Services would think that charging you would serve any useful purpose. You’re hardly a danger to the public are you?’
George shrugged, but his big shoulders slowly relaxed.
‘I do, however, want to know why you smacked him. Surely he was getting a bit too old and big for that?’
George sighed wearily. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I caught him once pinching a tenner from his mum’s purse.’
‘Then he threw a stone at Mr Cooper’s cat,’ Celia chanted and hung her head as her mother shot her a furious look. It made Hillary wonder, uneasily, how often Celia had snitched on her brother and earned him a smacking. And how Billy Davies would have retaliated in kind. Once again, Hillary found herself wondering if Celia Davies could have swung those garden shears after all. Perhaps in a fit of childish rage and managing a very lucky – or unlucky – strike that had slipped between her brother’s ribs without too much force being necessary.
Quickly she shook the image away. It was useless to speculate like that. She had to stick to facts. And the fact that Billy was blackmailing someone was looking more and more likely.
‘Mr Davies, Mrs Davies, did Billy ever say anything about photographing his neighbours?’ she asked casually. ‘You know, for the photo competitions, or simply for fun? Maybe he thought he might be able to sell them on, if they were really good? Some people like candid photographs of themselves, after all.’ It was weak, but there was no point in asking outright if they knew that their son was a blackmailer. They’d only deny it, even if they knew.
Marilyn looked a little puzzled, but clearly thought about it for a moment or two, then shook her head. ‘No, I don’t think so. George?’
George Davies also shook his head. Hillary turned and looked at Celia, but the little girl was staring vacantly out of the window, looking bored.
Back at HQ, Hillary deposited her bag on her desk, sat down wearily and reached into her drawer for her lunch. The apple was a little wrinkled Cox’s Orange Pippin, the yoghurt was blueberry. She was just scraping the very last dregs from the bottom of the carton, when Janine came back. She went straight to Hillary’s desk and threw herself into the chair opposite.
‘You were right about Warrender’s staff. Or his one co-worker, to be exact. Sylvia Dodd was only too happy to chat. Warrender sent her out on her lunch break as soon as he got back, and I hung around and treated her to a currant bun at the café by the canal. That reminds me – I need to clock it off to expenses.’ She fiddled in her notebook and Hillary sighed, waiting patiently for her to get on with it.
‘Anyway, she’s worked there forever, since long before Marty Warrender first showed up,’ Janine carried on, ‘and after saying what an OK boss he was, and all the usual, she dived right in. She’d met the wife a couple of times and thought she was a bit of a mean-fisted dowdy old so and so, and wasn’t at all surprised to see her boss one Friday night holding hands with a woman who definitely wasn’t Mrs W. At some pub or other in Cropredy, it was. I thought I’d drive over there and see if the barmaid knew who the girlfriend was. She might do, if they made a regular habit of meeting up there. Or if the other woman lives in Cropredy itself.’
Hillary nodded. ‘You think Billy might have taken a picture of Marty and his bit of skirt on the side and tried it on?’
‘Might have,’ Janine agreed. ‘The Warrenders are in on this property developing deal together – the payments and signatures are equally divided between the two of them. Marty might be in the soup financially if the wife learns he’s playing away, so he wouldn’t want to risk getting taken to the cleaners in a divorce.’
Hillary sighed. ‘But Marty denied paying up. Perhaps Billy approached the wife. Frank did the initial interview with June Warrender didn’t he?’ she asked glumly.
‘Yup. And you know what that means,’ Janine said, rolling her eyes and then spotting the empty yoghurt pot. ‘Got another one of those?’
‘No and, believe me, you’re not missing anything,’ Hillary said shortly. ‘OK, go out to Cropredy, but check on Mrs Warrender first. Test the waters, see if you think she knows about hubby and his lady friend. And if you get anything interesting, ask her outright if Billy tried anything on with her, vis-à-vis touching her up for a bit of blackmail money.’
‘Right boss. Where are you going?’ she asked casually. She always wanted to know what her boss was up to. Not only did DI Greene have an envious clear-up rate for her cases, and Janine learned lots by studying her methods, she also liked to make sure that Tommy didn’t get better assignments than she did.
Hillary, not fooled for a moment, smiled grimly. ‘I’m off to explore some derelict wasteground full of thistles and ticks. Wanna come with me instead?’
But Janine was already on her feet and heading for the door.
The allotments were deserted when she parked there at a quarter to three that blazingly hot Friday afternoon. The police tape still hung limply from the Davies’s shed, and Hillary glanced at it in passing. Behind the shed the mock-orange blossom was now blooming, and the heady, wonderful fragrance enveloped her as she pushed her way through it. It was surprisingly easy to do, confirming the reports she’d had that Billy Davies used to come this way regularly. She certainly didn’t have too much difficulty pushing through the shrubbery and emerging on to the other side.
The overgrown paddock was small, and surrounded on all four sides by hedgerow. Nesting birds flew in all directions at the first sign of the human interloper, and Hillary gazed around her curiously. Elder grew thickly all around, but there was a distinct and obvious pathway through it, where the grass and dock had been flattened.
She followed this trail cautiously, careful to keep her ankles well away from the worst of the nettles whilst admiring the beautiful colours of the thistle flowers, and the even more beautiful colours of the butterflies that were feeding off them. Orange-tips, yellow brimstones, and early commas, along with all kinds of bees and flies, found the flowers irresistible.
A chaffinch sang from the hedgerow, and was echoed by a yellow hammer, and Hillary was so busy nature-watching, she almost missed th
e dark, oblong outline of a building. It was low to the ground, covered in moss, lichen and bindweed and for a moment, she couldn’t think what it could be. And then she remembered the old-timer from the allotments telling her about the pigsty.
She moved forward and crouched down, finding the warped wooden door with ease, for here the low-growing elder branches had been hacked back. By Billy Davies?
She reached for the door, intending to go inside and hoping that any resident rats or spiders were out foraging, and was brought up short. For there, gleaming and relatively new-looking, was a big brass padlock.
So Billy Davies had managed to find a hiding place that not even his dad had rumbled, Hillary mused. She picked the padlock up in her hand and gave it an experimental tug, but it held fast. She sighed, and reached into her bag for her mobile.
‘Tommy? You back from talking to Mrs Cleaver? No, you can fill me in later. I’m in the paddock behind the Davies’s shed. I need you to get yourself over here as quick as you can with someone from SOCO and a good pair of bolt-cutters. We may have hit the jackpot.’
chapter twelve
Hillary watched as Tommy bent down in front of the padlock and positioned it in his palm. Although he had a pair of bolt-cutters with him, he reached into his shirt pocket for a small, leather case with a zip around three of its edges. It reminded Hillary of one of those portable little sewing kits that Victorian ladies used to carry with them when embarking on the Grand Tour.
But what Tommy extracted were a pair of long, thin, stainless steel instruments with hooks on the end. He inserted one all the way inside, and with the other, began to probe delicately. Hillary let out a long, slow, impressed whistle. ‘You’ve been taking lessons from Mick the Pick,’ she accused. Michael Pritchard, a now retired sergeant from burglary, was still something of a legend at Thames Valley. He was, she knew, very fussy about those he chose to be his ‘apprentices’.
Tommy, from his crouching position in a patch of dock, grinned. ‘He offered, and how could I say no? I bet he’d have this done by now though … ahh, got it.’
The padlock fell sweetly open into his hand, and he stood up and slipped it into a plastic evidence bag he kept in his other pocket. Throughout the procedure he’d been wearing ultra-thin latex gloves to protect fingerprint evidence.
‘Well done, Tommy,’ Hillary said, slapping him on the back. ‘Headington don’t know what an asset they’re getting. But now you’ve got it open, we don’t even know that our vic was ever here. For all I know, this pigsty could belong to a neighbouring farmer.’
Tommy paled slightly. ‘We have got a warrant, haven’t we, guv?’ he gulped.
Hillary grinned. ‘Never fear. I phoned Danvers after I phoned you. It should be being signed even as we speak.’
Tommy paled even further. ‘What if the judge turned it down? Aren’t we being a bit previous, guv?’
Hillary laughed. ‘Worried about being nabbed for illegal entry, Detective Constable?’ Then she shrugged. ‘Yes, we’ll have to be careful,’ she agreed more soberly. ‘No one sets foot inside until we get the go-ahead,’ she added, mostly for the benefit of the two forensics experts Tommy had brought with him. She recognized one as a fingerprints man, the other she didn’t know. Both of them, at her words, started looking around for a place to sit and make themselves comfortable. Eventually they flattened an area of grass underneath a flowering elder and stretched out. Gnats immediately began to gather around them, making them flap their hands above their heads as they began to talk about football. Neither were yet wearing their white boiler-suit outfits, so presumably they weren’t worried about tracking any ‘trace’ into the pigsty.
Hillary, not wanting to get down on to the ground, leaned against the smooth bark of an ash tree instead and wondered how much longer the heatwave was going to continue. If it was like this in May, what was July going to be like? Perhaps she’d go to Greenland for her holidays this year. Or to that place in Canada where you were supposed to be able to feed polar bears or whatever.
It was twenty minutes before Paul Danvers called back to say that the warrant had been signed. Hillary nodded over to the two SOCO officers, and watched them suit up and go in. They had to leave the door open to let in light, and from their muttered comments, Hillary knew they’d found something. Which came as something of a relief. Her biggest fear had been that the place was empty and that she’d wasted everybody’s time.
It was nearly an hour before she and Tommy were able to root about inside themselves. The pigsty was, of course, tiny, being barely six feet square, and was lined, incongruously, with old wooden filing cabinets. Grimacing at the ubiquitous black powder the fingerprint man had left everywhere, Hillary chose a cabinet and pulled out the first file. It was a cheap beige paper folder (probably pinched from the school stationary cupboard), and had the name ‘Gordon the Wanker’ written on it in big black felt-tip pen.
Hillary’s eyebrows shot up as she opened it, and was presented with large colour prints of a man urinating against a wall. He was stood with one hand out in front of him and braced against a brick wall, and his other hand was holding his flaccid member, which was clearly visible. It looked as if it had been taken in a town – Bicester, Banbury, maybe Witney, somewhere like that – for the man was obviously in an alley, and in the top right hand corner there looked to be some kind of lettering. The sign from a pub or club? Probably some boozed-up customer had left after one too many and instead of going back inside to relieve himself in the Gents, had simply chosen to do so in the alley. It was dark, but there were streetlights either end of the alley, and from the building he was leaning against, light shone from an open window.
The photograph had obviously been taken by someone who knew what they were doing for the focus was sharp, and the lighting superb. The man was heavy-set, grey-haired, and was wearing what looked to be a good quality suit. She moved the photograph a little closer to her face, and squinted. Yes, she was sure she could make out a gold watch on the wrist of the hand that was leaning against the wall. A man of some prosperity then. The face was in profile, but she had no doubt that he would be perfectly recognizable to anyone who knew him.
She turned the top photograph over and found several more of the same man, one with him almost full-on to the camera and in the process of stuffing himself back into his trousers. That photograph, more than any of the others, could have been misconstrued if taken out of context. She could almost see Billy Davies approaching him with a copy of it. Maybe at his place of work, or even at his home, piling on the pressure. Had he threatened to say that the man had propositioned him, flashed him, threatened him if he didn’t have sex with him? And would a no doubt perfectly respectable man, probably married and maybe with a business reputation to protect, then pay up to keep the boy quiet and happy?
Of course he would. In today’s climate, where paedophiles were hated and rightfully prosecuted as often as possible, no man would want to run the risk of being classified as such.
Hillary sighed, and passed the folder on to Tommy. ‘We’re going to have to find out who this is. Get Larry to get a head shot from that, and pass it around the troops. Someone might know him. If we don’t get any joy, we might have to ask the local papers to run it with the usual “Do you know this man” angle.’
‘Right, guv,’ Tommy said.
Hillary went to the next folder in the drawer and withdrew another set of photographs.
These were snaps that had been taken in broad daylight. A naked woman, lying on a towel in what was evidently her own back garden. In the background Hillary could see one of those round, revolving clotheslines, with a few children’s clothes hanging limply from it. The house looked small – a one-time council house maybe – and now probably privately owned. It could have been in any suburban cul-de-sac in any town. The woman was blonde, but not a natural, as some of the more revealing pictures only too clearly showed. Attractive in a plump kind of way. Stretchmarks clearly showed in one or two close-up shots. The l
ittle sod must have used a zoom lens to get such detail.
Would the woman have paid up, if only to prevent strangers and neighbours from seeing her physical defects? On the other hand, if she was extrovert enough to sunbathe naked in her back garden, maybe she’d told the little sod to sling his hook. Hillary rather hoped she had.
‘Tommy, another one we need to track down.’ She looked around at the filing cabinets, wondering how many more victims were in here. ‘This is going to take some time.’ She looked at the front of the folder she was holding and grimaced as she read ‘Big Tits Linda’ in the same bold black lettering. Well at least they had first names to go on. ‘With a bit of luck we’ll find a notebook or diary or something with their proper names and contact details on,’ she muttered.
‘Guv, I think you should see this,’ Tommy said, handing over another file he’d taken from the bottom drawer.
These photographs were different from all the rest, in that they were indoor shots, and carefully posed. Whereas all the others had been clandestine shots taken of people unaware of the lens, these were taken with the full consent of the model.
The girl was very young, beautiful and ash-blonde. Heather Soames’s face stared at her, full of health and youth, obviously taken before pregnancy and loss had put dark shadows under her eyes. She was lying on a black leather sofa, the contrast with her smooth white skin and fair hair almost painful. She was totally naked.
Sighing, Hillary flipped through them. There was nothing ugly about them. Nothing deliberately provocative or crude. She wondered if the girl thought of them as art; if her boyfriend had promised they were for his eyes only. And maybe they had been. And maybe not.
‘See if you can find any more like these, but of different girls,’ Hillary said. ‘If so, he might have been trying to sell them to the dirty mag trade. Heather is obviously underage, so some might have been willing to shell out a few readies.’