by Penny Grubb
But he’d started and couldn’t stop. He found himself pleading with her. ‘We can’t throw it all away. It’s too precious.’
‘The trouble is, Martyn, I’m not the one doing the throwing. That was you. I have to work out whether or not I can live with it. And if I stay it won’t be for some sham of a marriage. If we’re to get through this, you’re going to have to buck your ideas up.’
His mouth felt dry. He didn’t know what she was asking. ‘I love you, Mel,’ he blurted out, semi-shocked by his own words; remembering the easy way that Davis had spoken with affection to his wife on the phone.
Melinda looked surprised. Her expression hardened. He kept a firm grip on her hands. ‘I’m not saying it, Martyn,’ she snapped. ‘You don’t deserve to hear it. And never mind what I have or haven’t decided. What about you? Have you written off this marriage?’
‘What?’ He stared, fought to find the words to say what should have been obvious. Of course he hadn’t given up on their marriage. He was the one begging her to stay. ‘No. No, of course not. Mel, if I could undo things …’
‘Don’t give me any garbage about changing things that can’t be changed. You’re going to have to do better than that.’
Sensing that she was about to back away, he held tight to her hands, trying to work out what she wanted, desperate not to hear himself come out with something truly pathetic like telling her he’d washed the knives by hand.
‘Mel … What do you want me to do?’
‘Let go of my sodding hands for starters,’ she snapped, jerking them from his grasp and standing upright. She stretched her head back and muttered that leaning over him was making her back ache. ‘And you can bloody well …’ She paused, glanced towards the stairs and lowered her voice. ‘Bloody well stop treading on eggshells round me. Have you any idea how irritating it is!’
‘Sorry.’
‘And stop bloody apologising.’
That seemed unfair as she’d spent the afternoon demanding that he apologised to all and sundry for his mistake over Sam. He supposed it was part of the penance that he be battered with inconsistent and contradictory demands. Opening his hands in a gesture of helplessness, he asked again, ‘What do you want me to do?’
‘How about you stop treating me like some favourite little sister who’s a bit simple and has to be humoured at every turn?’
‘I’m not, Mel … I …’
‘That little bitch gets pregnant …’ She spoke over him, her voice rising again, ‘and I have to live like a nun. What’s that about?’
‘What!’ His mouth dried. Was she saying …? If he hadn’t been sitting already, his legs would have given way. A seam of resentment came close to the surface. He saw himself creeping back into the house the evening after Harmer’s visit – only about ten days ago, though it felt like months – not knowing what to expect, finding her encased in an impenetrable shell, presenting a normal face to the world but cold as ice to him. Sam’s cot had been through in their bedroom, the spare bed made up. He’d said nothing, just waited until the small hours, until she was sound asleep then crept into bed. She’d been annoyed to wake beside him, but Sam had been right there standing up in his cot jabbering at them, so she hadn’t been able to make anything of it. He’d employed the same tactic the next night, and the following day Sam’s cot was back in its own room. But every time he touched her, contriving to hug her and Sam together, she’d tensed and turned away. He wasn’t the one keeping his distance.
But this wasn’t the time to overthink things. He hadn’t misheard her, nor misunderstood the look on her face. He was on his feet, reaching to pull her close. She pushed him off and shook her head. He caught a gleam of triumph in her eye. Was this just a ruse to wind him up? What was she playing at?
‘Come on, Martyn,’ she said. ‘Let’s have a bit of thought here. You reckon we’re going to rip all our clothes off and shag like rabbits, do you?’
With emotion boiling inside him, he fought to hold back the desire that would drive him mad if she was just toying with him. He didn’t know whether to shout or plead; hadn’t a clue where she was coming from. Years of training kicked in. Remove the passion, keep it practical. He heard himself say, ‘I was going to close the curtains first.’
She laughed. A real laugh. He stared at her, thought he must look like some kind of doleful puppy, but couldn’t do anything about it.
‘This is going to be on my terms,’ she said, ‘not yours. Sit down and cool off. We’ll give Sam time to settle.’
He swallowed against a dry throat as he let his legs give way and thumped down into the chair.
‘While we’re waiting …’ Her voice was cool, but the gleam still sparkled in her eye. He had to dig his fingernails into his palms to stop himself reaching out for her. He was under no illusions that she knew exactly what she was doing to him.
Her gaze ran over the lists on the board as though her whole attention was there and not on him at all. He sensed again the reckless streak in her that had kept him so on edge. She wasn’t just looking for the truth about Pamela Morgan anymore; she was after Robert Morgan’s killer. She was determined to beat Suzie Harmer to it. He wanted to tell her it didn’t matter; tell her to stop now before things became any more entangled. Because she couldn’t outpace Harmer’s team and their access to official records. The minute Mel found anything of value, he would have to feed it back into the enquiry, just like he had with what she’d found so far.
She turned to him, gave him a speculative stare as she ran her tongue around her lips. He felt frozen to the chair, unable to move. Her glance flicked towards the stairs. The gentle crooning had stopped a while ago. Webber had consciously to tell himself not to hold his breath.
Her gaze returned to him, a steady stare, then she looked at the clock. ‘We’ll give him a few more minutes,’ she said, not meeting his eye as she spoke. They both knew that Sam was fast asleep. ‘And while we’re waiting …’ She picked up a marker pen and twisted one of the boards towards her. ‘So Joyce’s name has cropped up in a murder enquiry, has it? Robert Morgan, I assume. Tell me all about it?’
Chapter 24
Webber sat at his desk, a set of aerial photographs spread out in front of him. He slid them one way then the other, completing the jigsaw of overlapping images. Nothing leapt out at him. He supposed he shouldn’t have expected it to, but he would get the shots pinned up in plain sight; let the collective subconscious loose on them.
Publicity surrounding Jenkinson’s death had been muted; both Jenkinson and his mother had records that auto-labelled them as dregs not worthy of real outrage. The news that Trent’s death had been reclassified as suspicious hadn’t made much of a dent either. Trent was too old and too ordinary to create a splash, although a note had arrived from a psychic offering his services to scan what he’d called the ‘vortex of evil that surrounds the death site’. Caught by the phraseology, Webber had checked the letter and seen it referred to the road where Trent died. He would have been more impressed if it had been the fishing lakes the guy had homed in on. ‘Vortex of evil’ would have been an apt tag. The grass and shrubs blurred as his eyes lost focus.
John Farrar had been on the phone earlier, harassed over myriad issues, but beneath a grumpy veneer had wanted to talk. Webber had been able to report a slow but inexorable chipping away at the edges of both Jenkinson’s and Trent’s last hours, and a gradual composing of a picture of Jenkinson himself and his activities since he’d come to York.
‘No suspect we can put a name to so far, but I’m confident he’s in the net. We just have to find him.’
‘Him?’ Farrar had queried. ‘You’re confident it’s a man?’
‘It’s still open,’ Webber told him, remembering the exchange with Ahmed in the interview room almost two weeks ago. … when we get near enough to see, there’s two of them, and it’s a woman driving …. ‘You know we’ve found a stack of data online. It’s not straightforward. We’re not shouting about it but it’s cl
ear now that Jenkinson was involved in far bigger things than petty car crime.’
‘You mean all the time he was being mentored through the “Kids with Potential” scheme.’
‘Yes, every step of the way. And I don’t want the wrong angle on that getting out into the press. It’ll just be more ammunition to have what funding’s left pulled.’
‘Not a great advertisement for the scheme,’ Farrar had said dryly.
‘That’s where you’re wrong.’ Webber’s teeth had clenched as he’d heard the words emerge. Farrar didn’t like being baldly contradicted. But he’d started so he ploughed on. ‘All the signs were that Ayaan Ahmed was turning him. No doubt he started on the scheme with very different ambitions, but by the end of that first year he had real respect for Ayaan. If we’d only known what size of fish we might have been reeling in.’
‘So you think his Mr Big found him out?’
‘We’ve found nothing either way on that yet. And nothing links the Mr Big, if he exists, to the mystery man of the traffic lights scam. Might be the same person, might be unrelated. But one of them was responsible for Jenkinson’s death. If this is an organised crime hit, we could be talking hired assassin.’
‘Do you think that’s likely?’
‘On balance, no. It was all too hurried, too panicked.’
He ended the call and let his mind drift over the angles, the fishing lakes, the gravel pits … he thought he might talk it over with Mel later. The thought suffused him with a warm glow.
‘What are you looking so content about?’
The voice made Webber jump and pulled him back to the present. Suzie Harmer leant in the doorway. He gave her a half smile. He knew he was a long way from being out of the woods, but was more relaxed than he had been since all this had blown up. She was right. Content was exactly what he felt.
‘No law against contentment as far as I know.’
‘I hear you have a possible crime scene for Jenkinson’s murder,’ she said.
‘It’s pretty clear he was killed where he was found up at the fishing lakes.’
Both Suzie and Ahmed were deliberately being kept out of the loop on the extent of Jenkinson’s underground network. He didn’t trust Ahmed not to do some unsanctioned digging if he discovered the extent of Jenkinson’s betrayal.
‘Ayaan’s pretty cut up about the whole thing. He’s forever hassling people for the latest on Jenkinson.’
‘You can’t blame him. He put a lot of work in with that family and it seemed to be leading somewhere. I mean Jenkinson wasn’t heading towards model citizenship, but without that scheme he might have dropped out of school and spent his life a typical brick-through-window merchant.’
‘Better educated criminals? That’s not going to persuade anyone to retain the grants.’ She pulled in a breath as though to say something more, but her gaze dropped.
Webber waited, curious to see what was to come. She shot a glance around as though checking the corridor, looked at him again. ‘So … uh … you’re OK, are you?’ Her tone made it sound almost like an apology.
‘Yes, I’m fine.’ Webber sat back in his chair, fingers laced. This woman carried his child, but there had been too much stress and hassle to confront the reality of it. Now it felt weird in a way it hadn’t before, but he wasn’t lying. He felt fine, relaxed even. After a moment it occurred to him he should return the query. ‘How are you?’
She pulled a face. ‘I’ve felt ropey this week.’ She pushed herself away from the door frame and came inside, sitting down to face him. He hadn’t meant his enquiry to be an invitation to come in.
‘Should you be here at all?’
‘It’s only hormones.’ She waved her hand in a dismissive gesture. ‘It’ll pass. There are plenty worse off. At least I’m not with a fleeing convoy of refugees trying to cross a border under fire or anything.’
She looked across at him, giving him a flash of the sunny smile that was her trademark. Stray memories of overheard comments replayed in his head … Sunny Suzie …everyone’s friend … just as long as she has things her own way …
Up to very recently he’d liked Suzie. Everyone did. She was hard not to like. And despite everything this was the same Suzie, efficient, bright and mostly straightforward, not trying to hide the discomforts of her pregnancy but not asking for sympathy. He smiled back at her. ‘How’s Ayaan doing?’
‘OK. He’s good at his job. Can I send him to Dorset?’
‘What? Why?’ The abrupt change of tack disconcerted him.
She told him how Ahmed had tracked down a man called Larry who had given a statement to the escaped tigers enquiry almost thirty years ago. ‘Tried to give a statement,’ she amended. ‘As far as we can unravel it, the guy was drunk. Can’t blame anyone. Whatever he was saying must have seemed way offbeam and the name wouldn’t have meant anything.’
‘Big brother post office,’ Webber murmured. ‘But the post office would have been hit by the time they were doing door to door down there.’
‘Sure, yeah, but it was hundreds of miles away and nothing to link it.’
‘The records have been digitized, haven’t they?’
She curled her lip. ‘Kind of. Crappy scanning for the most part. It’ll be a slog but this name cropping up … that’s promising. And we’re lucky the guy’s still around. Ahmed found the family. His daughter and grandkids still live in the same house, but the guy himself is in a home. Compos mentis but deaf. We can’t do anything over the phone.’
‘You could ask someone local to go and get a statement.’
She gave him a pleading setter look. ‘They’re busy. They won’t want to take it on. They’ll skimp it. It’ll need some work to get anything out of an ancient ex-drunk. Ayaan’ll get everything there is to get. This could be the key to whole thing. And … uh … we’ll get after that name you gave Ayaan. Tilly Brown. I’ll get them on to it today.’
He read the whole story into the slight pause. They’d pushed Brown aside as irrelevant, only kept her on the list at all because he’d fed them the name, and now Suzie was kicking herself that she had nothing positive on Brown to offer him. He might have used it against her yesterday, but he and Melinda between them had moved things on beyond that sort of pettiness. And if he was honest, old school friends did look like an irrelevance in amongst everything else. He wouldn’t have deployed his resources differently.
‘No, don’t stress over it,’ he told her. ‘The line you’re on looks more promising.’
She looked relieved, must have expected the reprimand. He felt a moment’s disappointment that she hadn’t thought better of him. He remembered Melinda comment as she’d run her gaze over the name.
They don’t think Tilly Brown’s important, do they?
He hadn’t contradicted her, hadn’t really been paying attention to anything except answering her questions, telling her way more than he should have about the case. But of course she was right. Tilly Brown wasn’t important to the official enquiry, not with a possible link between Robert Morgan and the eldest brother from the post office raid.
While he was on duty, his priority had to be Tom Jenkinson, but off duty, he could help Mel to tie all the loose ends around Pamela Morgan. They’d find Tilly Brown on their own without Harmer’s shadow sitting between them, and maybe this old school friend, number six of the group of five, would be the catalyst that persuaded the Yeatman woman to hand over Pamela’s suicide note.
Looking down at his desk, the aerial photographs focussed in front of him. The fishing lakes, the old gravel pits, the surrounding terrain unusable for being too boggy and unstable. The deep ruts of the vehicle were still visible despite the incessant rain. The tracks showed where Trent must have driven his lorry to tip concrete over a body that had still been breathing. They already had a record of all that. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected to see from this angle, but the traffic helicopter had been over-flying the site anyway and he’d asked them to photograph it.
‘OK,’ he sai
d to Suzie Harmer, ‘send Ayaan to Dorset, but don’t let him be all week over it.’
Chapter 25
Friday morning Ahmed arrived at work on the cusp of being late, lead running in his veins. He’d spent the whole of Thursday on a trip to Dorset to interview an old man called Larry Scott. The motorways had been busy, visibility poor. It had been close to midnight before he was back in York where he’d fallen into bed too tired to write up his notes. He tucked himself away at the edge of the room hoping to escape notice.
Larry Scott had not been an easy witness. Apart from having to conduct the interview at full volume to counter Larry’s bad hearing, he found the man had embroidered his memories of the tiger incident over the years, embellishing it into a tall tale with which to entertain strangers.
As he’d taken in the ravaged features, the outward signs of long dependency on alcohol, it had seemed wildly optimistic to ask Larry to recall detail from 30 years ago. ‘In 1986,’ he’d said, ‘you gave some information to a police enquiry.’
The old man’s face had lit up. ‘That’s right. The business with the tigers. I remember it like it was yesterday.’
It had been an encouraging start. Larry had been caught up in the extensive trawl for witnesses and information to bury the animal rights group. ‘I saw it all,’ Larry had told him. ‘I’d seen all the faces in the photos and more besides. I’d not only seen them, I’d heard them plotting. If they’d listened to me the whole tragedy might not have happened. The whole gang of them it was, round a table, voices low. I could hear in those days. Heard the lot.’
That had been the point Ahmed knew he was in for the long haul. Larry’s contemporary statement had been skeletal, no hint he’d seen or heard any of the people the police had actively been looking for. It was the mention of big brother post office by name that shone out like a beacon 30 years later, but all he’d said about it at the time was that he’d overheard the man on the phone talking about a car.