by Penny Grubb
A voice at his shoulder. ‘Call from the Chief Super’s office, Guv.’
He turned to head for his own office, hearing a shout of laughter from Sam. It was lucky he’d decided to return here; hadn’t realised Farrar would be back this afternoon. He wouldn’t approve of Sam’s presence.
‘Ah, Superintendent Webber. I’m glad I chased one of you down.’
The call had been bounced on from Farrar’s office but it wasn’t Farrar. It took a second to click into place. It was the voice that had spelled out a plan to use Tom Jenkinson’s death as collateral to snare a drugs dealer. He pictured the florid features. His first thought; they’d made a mistake, it would turn out that Streetwise had given them the slip, that he was responsible for Jenkinson’s death after all.
‘Hello, what can I do for you?’ What can you do for me?
‘I have not rung to hand you Streetwise, I’m afraid. No last minute gap in our surveillance to report.’
Webber pursed his lips; didn’t like having his mind read like this. ‘But I assume it’s on a related matter,’ he said tartly.
A gentle laugh. ‘Yes, indeed. We like to keep an eye on the people he recruits to his little organisation. As to the ones he lets go … Jenkinson, Stevenson, there have been others … they’re of no interest to us, but I thought it might prove useful to you if one of my colleagues were to push Streetwise for information on his trip to York, and if I were to let you know what he said. It was an interesting exchange.’
‘Are you saying you’ve arrested him?’ Webber hadn’t realised they were that close to a decisive move.
Again that laugh as though he’d said something naïve. ‘No, no. It’s all part of the game. We have him under very close surveillance.’
Webber felt his eyebrows rise. They had someone under cover – deep cover by the sound of it – not a job for which he would want to hold responsibility. He said as much, adding, ‘Streetwise and Boots Boy, they’re out-and-out psychopaths.’
This time the laugh sounded like genuine amusement. ‘Exactly so. They dropped Mr Jenkinson because they didn’t deem him reliable, but they didn’t follow up with Miss Stevenson for quite another reason. The exact quotation is a colloquialism, but roughly translates that the post of psychopathic killer within their group is taken; they would not risk recruiting another. So yes, you can say we have a tiger by the tail, but it seems that you have one on your patch from whom ours prefers to keep a distance. I cannot offer you anything tangible, no statements, no evidence, but I don’t think you need look further for the killer of Tom Jenkinson and I advise you to tread with care.’
Webber looked across the corridor to the crowd around Sam. He could barely see him, just a small fist waving something, hilarity all round that became suddenly muted as though they sensed his scrutiny. ‘We have Edith Stevenson in custody.’ He listened to his own words as though hearing them from far away. Mel had met the woman.
‘Then be sure that you keep her.’
‘We will,’ said Webber, hearing a hollow note to his voice. He’d yet to hear of a single piece of concrete evidence against Edith Stevenson for anything.
When he ended the call, he stood up determined to go and extract Sam, to get the station back to work. Then he hesitated. If he had Sam on his knee he couldn’t be chasing up anyone for details of what had happened down by the Humber. He got as far as the doorway. Sam sat on the floor between two officers, fists at his mouth as he gnawed on a bread roll. Webber wondered whose it was, what was in it.
‘DI Davis’s car has just arrived, Guv. You said to let you know.’
He veered off his intended path and headed for the window, reaching it in time to see Davis hurry round the corner, collar turned up against the weather. As he watched, Davis stopped and looked back, said something. Another man, tall but bent, came into view. Was that Drake? He’d only ever seen a photograph from decades ago. He took in the slow hobbling gait, the walking stick. Ahmed had said the man wasn’t well … at his last gasp more like. Clearly Davis had done as told and not allowed a change of clothes. Drake’s topcoat was smart enough but his trouser legs were tattered and frayed. If he’d realised it was that bad, he would have relented. Their progress was painfully slow.
After a few minutes, Davis came in shaking rainwater off his jacket. He glanced at Webber. ‘I’ve put him in the interview room.’
‘I didn’t realise he was that bad on his feet.’
‘He was fine till we came round the corner. Apparently it comes on suddenly, whatever it is. The weather doesn’t help.’
An hour later, with no sign of Melinda, Webber’s fingers itched to pick up the phone and call her, but he didn’t want to have the conversation with Ahmed or anyone else listening. They’d be stuck in rush hour traffic now. Webber didn’t want Melinda out on York’s streets, not with Jenkinson’s mystery man bent on sabotaging traffic lights, but he’d had someone contact Ahmed. They’d be on their guard.
He’d talked to Davis before sending him back to Drake, wanting the DI up to speed on the phone call he’d had about Streetwise’s views on Edith Stevenson. It had been planned as a brief update. He hadn’t expected Davis to retaliate with his own mini bombshell.
‘Hard to know what to make of it,’ he’d told Davis. ‘Why would we take note of hearsay from someone like Streetwise? On the other hand, we know we’ve had a killer on the loose. That bloody gravel pit. I just hope they’ve plumbed the depths of that site now and it’s not going to spring any more …’ He’d stopped, seeing Davis’s gaze drop. ‘What?’
‘Yeah … um … you were busy … I meant to tell you. I’ve asked for the DNA profiles on that third body, the deepest one … I’ve asked for them to be fast-tracked. They came through with some more stuff … artefacts they’d found with the corpse, all that, I got someone to do a comparison with the old missing person files. It’s looking like it’s going to be the schoolgirl from Dorset. Everything else matches. We just need the DNA.’
Webber blew out a sigh. ‘Christ! What in hell does that mean?’
He ran his hand through his hair. Links they weren’t close to seeing; it was all tied in together, somehow. It had to be. Tilly Brown 45 years ago, someone else here and now.
‘Edith Stevenson,’ he said. ‘We’ve nothing on her. Some of the school friends were interviewed at the time to see if they’d heard from Tilly Brown, but that was it. I’ve gone back to the Morgan files too. They were all interviewed. They looked at them briefly for possible conspiracy but found nothing. Their alibis held up. There was even some CCTV from outside a pub to corroborate their stories. The teacher Meyer told me they always stood out in a group, the way they dressed, the way they walked. They were lucky, that footage took the heat off them. and the real focus of the investigation was to get all the ammo they could find to throw at the animal rights group. Yeatman, Stevenson and Pamela Morgan had arranged to see Michael Drake because it was the tenth anniversary of his first wife’s death. More to the point, they alibied each other up here in York. Morgan was killed in Dorset.’
‘And Dorset’s where Tilly Brown went missing.’
Webber reran the conversation in his head as he struggled to pull some meaning out of it all.
Davis was in the interview room now talking to Drake, recording him for Webber to listen to later. From what he could gather, Davis was walking a thin line close to holding the man against his will, but Ahmed had been right. Drake was susceptible to bullying. And Webber would let them both off the hook soon.
He looked at the screen in front of him. Four recordings were open; Kowalski, Tippet, Yeatman and Jenkinson. He’d been hopping from one to the other, listening to short stretches from different places, closing his eyes as he absorbed them, voice only, no body language to distract him. Deceit and fabrication had a way of shining through raw words in a way that was often smothered by the distractions of facial expression and movement.
The headphones hung round his neck as he sat back and took a break. He’d
homed in on Kowalski first, remembering her many hesitations, wanting to discover the root of her dishonesty, but he’d heard nothing untoward. Exhaustion, confusion, pain at old wounds reopened but nothing to suggest she wasn’t being straight with him, except maybe when he’d mentioned Tilly Brown’s rocking horse.
That’s got nothing to do with Pamela … Why are you wasting time …
Of course, she was sleep-deprived. It might have been down to tiredness.
Tippet’s voice dripped deceit and alarm all around the theft. He’d known the car had gone hours before he reported it. Was it really as simple as him having thought it was Drake and wanting to get him into trouble? How paranoid was Tippet that even after all these years he’d overlooked the fact that it wasn’t the car to which Drake had keys? If he’d known all this when Tippet had been sitting in front of him he could have explored it further. It hardly seemed worth the bother of chasing now. And if revenge on Drake was the aim, how did failure to report the theft achieve it? Unless … Webber sat back resting his hands behind his head … unless Tippet knew what it had been stolen for. And that raised another question; had it been stolen to do the post office raid or to dump Morgan’s body?
He’d told Davis to quiz Drake on the whole Tippet feud. They might be talking about it right now. It was a frustration that he couldn’t go and listen as they talked, but for all that Sam was happy playing, he’d already made clear with an indignant wail that his father wasn’t to move out of sight. Webber looked across the corridor and felt his lips tighten in annoyance. The game with the toy cars had grown into an elaborate affair involving file boxes and makeshift track. Sam had become a spectator chewing on an apple whilst what looked like the entire staff threw themselves into fierce competition with the tiny vehicles.
He made himself look away. Sam shouldn’t be here at all so either he put up with this impromptu tournament or he would have Sam to himself. He was glad Suzie hadn’t come back before the end of her shift, didn’t want her thinking in terms of precedents.
He pulled on the headphones and switched to the recording marked Yeatman. After what he’d had from Melinda, he homed in on the stretch where Ahmed quizzed her on Pamela Morgan’s suicide note. He’d skimmed through it yesterday, curious about how the woman reacted to Ahmed’s questions, but beyond a few hesitations he hadn’t seen much of note. Now the contrast was stark. Once he cut out her face, there was no air of middle-aged, middle-class respectability to colour his interpretation. Every mention of Pamela Morgan’s suicide was spoken through a layer of ground glass especially the anomaly of the unsigned note. He caught hints of anger, confusion, fear … then pulled himself up in case he was manufacturing anomalies in his head. She hadn’t had to cooperate with Melinda, so why had she done it? He felt that her account to Ahmed was intended to give a simple gloss to something she didn’t understand. Was it something she wanted to understand or not? Why hadn’t she been open about it? Was she scared of uncovering something nasty?
Again he stopped the recording and took off the headphones … felt he was marking time … waiting … and not just for Melinda.
It was a relief to see Davis framed in his doorway. The DI allowed his glance to slip briefly to the mayhem in the big office, before meeting Webber’s eye. ‘Mr Drake badly wants to go home. I’m sure I could keep making up excuses to keep him here all night, but I really don’t want to. I’ve the best part of an hour’s chat with him on record now. I’ve squeezed him dry of everything I can think of.’
‘Anything new?’
‘Not really. If he’s guilty of anything it’s loyalty to a friend somewhere along the line, maybe Stevenson but maybe it goes back to Pamela Morgan. Whatever it is, I can’t get a handle to prise it out of him. There were a couple of bits … The finance … You know Ayaan and Suzie were speculating that he’d had money from Pamela Morgan and that’s when he’d broken ties with the Tippets. They were right.’
Webber nodded. ‘Anything odd in it?’
‘Not that I can see. He was open about it when I asked him. The Morgans had had that big pools win. They were loaded. He told me he asked her for a loan, but she wouldn’t entertain it. It had to be a gift. She didn’t want him with the debt on his shoulders.’
‘I wouldn’t mind some friends like that,’ Webber commented.
Davis gave half a smile. ‘She did similar for Stevenson according to Drake. Stevenson’s loan was earlier than his. He hadn’t known about it at the time but said he wasn’t surprised, or rather wasn’t surprised that Pamela had helped her out, but quite surprised to know Stevenson had been in trouble. He says he doesn’t know what it was about. I’m not sure if I believe him and I’m not sure if it’s important after all this time.’
‘You said a couple of things.’
‘Yes, I asked him what Suzie had read in his wife’s emails. He shilly-shallied, said he hadn’t wanted to know, but clearly she’d questioned him about something she’d found. Anyway, apparently she asked him about someone who signed their emails JB, which was J Brown according to the email address. He said he didn’t know, but he got the idea she’d found something that made her think his wife was with this J Brown.’
‘I thought he said she was going to find Stevenson.’
‘Stevenson first, was what he thought.’
‘And this J Brown isn’t one of the friends she sent Ayaan after?’
‘No, she gave Ayaan the two addresses before she looked at the emails. I’m sure it’s nothing but while he was telling me, he remembered a J Brown from years ago, a John Brown who always signed his name JB. Tilly Brown’s brother. The missing schoolgirl, the one who’s probably …’ Davis nodded his head in the general direction of the evidence boards that held the photographs from up behind the gravel pits. Then he shrugged. ‘I mean, chances are it’s not even J for John and if it is, then it won’t be the same one. Tiffany Drake never knew the Browns. She wasn’t born when Tilly disappeared. It was just odd, the name cropping up like that. It’s all on record. Do you want me to load it?’ He indicated Webber’s screen.
Webber nodded.
‘Any sign or Ayaan or Suzie?’ Davis said as he pulled Webber’s keyboard towards him.
‘No. Ayaan’ll be stuck in traffic and Suzie went off duty an hour ago.’ Webber wondered if Suzie had been in the equation that had led Melinda to chase Edith Stevenson to Hull. ‘She and Ayaan talked before he picked up Melinda,’ he added, ‘so she’s no excuse for trying to collar Stevenson if that’s what she did. But maybe she was after the mystery JB. Anyway …’ He waved the issue aside.
‘I need to let Drake go home,’ said Davis.
‘OK, but I’m going to have a look at the CCTV of him arriving. Call me paranoid but aren’t we looking for someone with a funny walk?’
‘You’re paranoid.’ Davis gave him a withering look. ‘I’ll go and call the guy a cab.’
Webber walked through into the big office. No one spared him a glance. Tension was palpable as all eyes focussed on the makeshift racing track. Sam’s attention was on his apple, juice dribbling down his chin. The woman beside Sam leant over to mop his face with a tissue.
The screen in front of Webber flickered to life. He studied the images of the scene he’d watched live an hour ago. Davis stopping to see where Drake had got to … Drake emerging from round the side of the building, hobbling, leaning heavily on his stick. He clicked over to the car-park’s camera, pushing time backwards to watch them drive in. They marched smartly across the tarmac, shoulders hunched against the cold drizzle, the breeze flapping Drake’s ragged trousers to invisibility against the grey tarmac, making him look like a man with no legs in the failing light. Webber wanted to see the transition – Drake’s upright stride to his bent hobble. It was nothing dramatic. Drake simply stopped as they reached the corner, his head and neck curved forward, and then he set off again slowly, face screwed up against the wind or the pain as he inched the last few paces to the doorway. It was nothing like the indistinct image on the foo
tage with Jenkinson. He hadn’t expected it to be. Paranoia, just like he’d said.
Somewhere behind him a buzz of encouragement grew for one of the car racers. Sam’s voice rose shrill above the crowd. Webber could interpret the babble as Sam’s attempt at ‘Faster, damn it!’ and kept his face turned away to hide a smile as he returned to his office, picking up the headphones and clicking on the new window that Davis had opened. He used the mouse to pull the slider about halfway along the 48-minute extract.
It was a near perfect guess. He landed in the middle of Davis’s interrogation about the emails.
‘I didn’t want Sergeant Harmer to tell me,’ Drake’s voice said. ‘It’s a matter of trust, but like she said I had to balance things against Tiff’s safety, but I’m afraid the name meant nothing.’
He listened to the story of JB unfold just as Davis had told him. Drake’s voice remained even and bland. He sounded relaxed if a little tired. Davis moved on to the money and Drake cutting all ties with the Tippets.
‘You must have needed money to move on,’ Davis said. ‘Did you get it from Pamela Morgan?’
When the question was met with silence Webber glanced up at the picture on the screen. Drake had nodded.
‘Quite a lot of money …’ Davis prompted.
Webber looked away again and concentrated on the sound track.
‘Pammy was one in a million.’ Michael Drake’s words were wrapped in velvet, a sudden warmth animating the bland tones.
Pammy not Quinny, Webber thought. Then Sam’s voice cut across everything. Even muted by the earpieces it was a clear, delighted cry. ‘Mummy!’
And there was Melinda bustling in to scoop Sam from the chaos of the game that was hastily dismantled as people dispersed, entertainment over, back to their tasks for the remainder of the shift. Ahmed was there too, shaking the rain from his coat, talking to Davis who would be filling him in on Michael Drake.
Webber walked over, caught Melinda’s eye and gave her a smile that she returned with a hint of wariness. What on earth had she been up to? The question was secondary. He had no intention of wavering from his plan to get her and Sam back home. Right now.