She tipped her head on one side and gave a little tight-lipped smile. “Would I do, Mr Priest?” she asked.
“You’ll do just fine, Miss Brown,” I replied.
I decided to splash out, demonstrate that I know how to treat a girl. Annette protested, said it was her turn, offered to at least split the bill, but I asked her to indulge me. I laid it on a bit thick, said I felt like a treat, something more special than our usual curry or Chinese. I drove us into Lancashire, to a place near Oldfield that Jeff Caton had discovered, run by a French-Persian couple and attracting rave reviews.
We started with kebabs and I followed them with lamb done in goat’s milk and smothered in a spicy sauce. Annette had chicken in a fruity sauce with lots of chutneys, which I helped her with. We washed it down with a full-bodied Bordeaux. The proper stuff, all the way from France. The reviews, we agreed, were well deserved.
“Phew!” Annette exclaimed, dabbing her lips with her napkin. “That was good.”
I finished my coffee. It came in tiny cups and was strong enough to drive a nuclear reactor. They didn’t throw the grounds into the waste bin; they sent them to Sellafield for re-processing. A waiter appeared with the coffee jug but I held my hand over the cup and shook my head. “Any more of that and I’ll be awake all night,” I said.
“And you’ve an early start in the morning,” Annette reminded me.
“Six o’clock,” I groaned. “As much as I’d like to take you for a night on the town, it had better be some other time.” I paid the bill, which went a long way towards compensating the proprietor for the oil wells he lost when the Shah was deposed, and we left.
It was raining and dark, but I decided to take the scenic route back, over the tops rather than the motorway. I pushed the heater control over to maximum and pressed the Classic FM button on the radio. Rodrigues, excellent. I’d thought about pre-loading the cassette with a romantic tape, but it had felt corny, even for me. And what could be more romantic than Rodrigues? Annette wriggled in the passenger seat, making herself comfortable, and hummed along with Narciso Yepes.
A sudden flurry of sleet had me switching the wipers to maximum, but it only lasted a few seconds. “Where does Grandma live?” I asked.
“Scarborough,” she replied.
“And does she know about you?”
“Yes. I think so.”
“So why aren’t you going with them?”
“Because they’re staying overnight, and there isn’t room for me.”
“I see.”
More sleet splotched on to the windscreen, blobs of shadow that slithered upwards until the wipers swept them to the sides, where they clung to each other for security. “Brrr!” Annette exclaimed. “It looks a bit bleak out there.”
“Ah, but…” I argued, raising a finger to emphasise the point I was about to make, “we’re not out there.”
“Do you think…” she began, then stopped herself.
“Do I think what?”
“Do you think he is, out there?”
“Who?”
“Chilcott. Chiller.”
I hadn’t forgotten him, just pretended to myself that he’d gone away. “Somewhere, I suppose,” I replied. “Probably where it’s a little warmer than this, if he’s any sense.”
“Have you heard anything about him, since he escaped?”
“No, not a word since the Calais sighting. When we interviewed Silkstone we made it clear that they’d conned him out of his money. That’s probably what happened. Shooting me was never on the agenda.”
“I don’t believe you,” she stated.
“Well I’ll be off it now, that’s for sure. All he’ll want to do is survive. If the look on Silkstone’s face was anything to go by he’d been paid in full, and there’s no honour among thieves. None at all.” Apart from the odd fool like Vince Halliwell, I thought, doing ten years for someone whose name he “couldn’t remember.” Except that a hit man who ran off with the money without delivering the goods would very soon be an ex-hit man, but I kept that to myself.
I changed gear for the hairpin bend at the end of the reservoir and let the car drift over to the wrong side of the road. We were the only people up there, and it was easy to imagine, after just a few minutes, that we were completely alone in the world, snug in our private cocoon of warmth and music. Now it was Samuel Barber, Adagio for Strings. Someone was making it easy for me.
I slowed and turned off the road. A length of it, right on the top, has been straightened, but the old road is still there, used as a picnic place for day trippers from both counties, risking ambush by the old enemy.
“Don’t panic,” I said as we came to a halt. “I bring all my female friends here to admire the view.” Usually it’s the sky, ragingly beautiful as the sun sinks somewhere beyond the Irish Sea; or the lights of the conurbation, spread out below in a glowing blanket. Tonight it was a streak of paler sky marking the horizon, with indigo clouds bleeding down into it. Ah well, I thought, at least I got the music right. As I killed the lights I noticed the time. Twenty-two hours earlier I’d parked up with young Sophie sitting next to me. This was beginning to be a habit.
“I’m not panicking,” Annette said, turning towards me.
“I just thought we should talk more,” I began. “It would have been really nice to have had you along, tomorrow.”
“We could have had a cream tea in the Cotswolds,” Annette suggested.
“Or Bath buns in Bath,” I added. The music paused, hanging there like an eagle over the edge of a precipice, held by the wind. It’s moment, near the end of the adagio, when the silence grips you, forbidding even your breath to move. We sat quietly until the end of the piece, when I pressed the off button. Nothing could follow that.
“What will you do?” I asked, breaking the silence.
After a moment she said: “He wants to marry me.”
The rain on the windows had completely obscured the view and a gust of wind rocked the car. Who’d believe we were just into October? “Do you want to marry him?” I asked.
“Yes, I think so.”
“Will you leave the police?”
“Yes. If I go back to teaching we’d all have the same holidays. It would be an ideal situation.”
“You tried teaching, once.”
“I was twenty-two. I’ve learned a lot since then.”
“Like karate,” I said. “How to disarm an attacker, or use a firearm.”
She didn’t reply. I said: “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be trying to dissuade you.”
“What would you do, Charlie,” she asked, steering me away from the private stuff, “if you weren’t a policeman?”
“Same as you, I suppose,” I replied. “I was heading for a career in teaching. Physical education and art. Non-academic, looked down upon by all the others in the staff room, with their degrees in geography and…home economics. The police saved me from that.”
“What would you really like to do? If you could do anything in the world, what would it be?”
“Cor, I dunno,” I protested, my brain galloping through all the fantasies, searching for a respectable one.
“There must be something.”
“Yeah, I think there is.”
“What? Go on, tell me.”
“Swimming pool maintenance,” I announced.
“Swimming pool maintenance!” she laughed.
“That’s right. In Hollywood. I’d have a van – a big macho pickup – with Charlie’s Pool Maintenance painted on the side, and I’d fix all the stars’ pools.” I liked the sound of this and decided to embroider it. “When I’d finished checking the chlorine levels, cleaning the filters or whatever,” I continued, “the lady of the house would come out with iced lemonades on a tray, and she’d say: ‘Have you fixed it, Charlie?’ and I’d reply: ‘No problem, Ma’am.’ ‘What was the trouble?’ she’d ask, and I’d say: ‘Oh, nothing much, only your HRT patch stuck in the filter again.’”
Annette collapsed in a fit of
giggling. When she’d nearly stopped she said: “Oh, Charlie, I do…” Then she did stop.
“You do what?” I asked, but she shook her head. I reached out, putting my arm across her shoulders and pulling her towards me, meeting no resistance. I buried my face in her mass of hair, smelling it that close for the first time. “You do what?” I insisted. “Tell me.”
“I…I…I do enjoy being with you,” I heard her muffled voice say.
“That counts for a lot,” I told her, and felt her nod in agreement. I tilted her chin upwards and kissed the lips I’d longed to kiss for a long time. A grown-up kiss, tonight, with no holding back. She broke off before I wanted to.
As I held her I said: “I’ve dreamed of that ever since I first saw you.”
She replied with a little “Uh” sound.
“It’s true. I’m not looking for a one-night stand, Annette,
or a bit on the side. You know that, don’t you?”
“Aren’t you?” she replied.
“No. I want you to believe that.”
“Take me home, please.”
I started the engine and pulled my seatbelt back on. We drove most of the way to Heckley in silence. As we entered the town I said: “If luck’s on our side we’ll find something tomorrow to link Silkstone with other attacks in Somerset.”
“Do you think you will?” Annette asked.
“Depends whether he did them,” I replied. “And even then, it’s a long shot.” As we turned into her street I said: “I don’t know what to think. About anything. Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth bothering.” We came to a standstill outside the building which contains her flat. “Here we are,” I said. “Thank you for a pleasant evening, Annette. Sorry if I stepped out of line. It won’t happen again.”
She shook her head, the light from the street lamps giving her a copper halo that swayed and shimmered like one of van Gogh’s wind-blown cypress trees. “You didn’t step out of line, Charlie,” she told me.
“Honest?”
“Mmm. Honest.”
“Good. I’m glad about that.”
She reached for the door handle, like Sophie had done, then hesitated and turned to me in exactly the same way. “What do you have against one-night stands and a bit on the side?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I replied. “Nothing at all.”
I held her gaze until she said: “Would you like to come in?”
“Yes,” I told her. “I’d like that very much.”
Chapter Fourteen
I blamed the traffic for being late. Bob asked if I’d come down the Fosse Way or Akeman Street, but I said: “Oh, I don’t know,” rather brusquely and asked him what he had for me. I realised later that it was an office joke, probably imitating one of the traffic officers who always swore that the quickest way from A to B was via Q, M and Z.
Plenty was the answer. I wanted to see the basic stuff first and then move on to the specific. I asked myself, as I looked at the ten-by-eights of poor Caroline’s body, if this was necessary. Couldn’t I have gleaned the information I wanted from someone’s report? No doubt, but this way was quicker. Caroline had been strangled and raped, from the front and not necessarily in that order. Also, the deed was done outdoors. Serial rapists develop a style, like any other craftsman. Some, who often have a record for burglary, prefer to work indoors. Others, quicker on their feet, strike in parks and lonely lanes. If Silkstone was our man he’d changed his style. Caroline’s body was left in a shallow stream and not discovered for two days, hence the lack of forensic evidence.
Bob had extracted a list of statistics from the pile of information, to show how extensive the enquiry had been: fifteen thousand statements; twenty thousand tyre prints; eighteen thousand cars. He fetched me a sandwich and percolated some decent coffee while I read the statements made by the officers who had interviewed the Famous Four: Silkstone, Latham, Margaret, and Michelle Webster. What could they have said to differentiate themselves from all those thousands of others, short of: “I did it, guv, it’s a fair cop?”
But they didn’t, and were lost in the pile of names just like others before them and a few since.
“Cor, that’s good,” I said, taking a sip of the coffee. “Just what I need.”
“Late night?” Bob asked.
“Yeah,” I replied.
“Working?”
“No, er, no, not really. It was, um, a promotion bash. Went on a bit late.” I liked that. A promotion bash. He was a detective, so he could probably tell that I was smiling, inside.
There were twenty-one reported attacks on women in the previous ten years that may have been linked to Caroline’s death. Seventeen of them were unlikely, two looked highly suspicious. I started at the bottom of the pile, working towards the likeliest ones. Had I done it the other way round I might have become bogged down on numbers one and two. Some had descriptions, some didn’t. He was tall, average height – this was most common – or short. Take your pick. He wore a balaclava, was clean shaven and had a beard. There were three of them, two of them, he was alone. He spoke with a local accent, a strange accent, never said a word. He had a knife, a gun, just used brute force. He was on foot, rode a bike, in a car.
Which would the good people of Frome prefer, I wondered? A serial rapist in their midst or twenty-one men who’d tried it once, for a bit of fun? Most of the attacks occurred on the way home from a night out, after both parties had imbibed too much alcohol. Some of the reports appeared frivolous, some hid tragedies behind the stilted phrases of the police officers. This was fifteen plus years ago, when the courts believed that a too-short skirt and eye contact across a crowded room meant: take me, I’m begging for it.
I’d placed the four favourites to one side. I untied the tape around the top one and started reading. She was a barmaid, walking home like she did every night. Someone struck her from behind, fracturing her skull, and dragged her into a field. She survived, after a December night in the open and three in intensive care, but never saw a thing of her attacker. One year, almost to the day, before Caroline.
Bob was busy at another desk. I raised an arm to attract his attention and he came over. “He had full penetrative sex with this one,” I said. “Do we know if she became pregnant?”
Bob lifted the cover of the file to look at the name. “The barmaid,” he said. “On the Bristol Road. She nearly died. Of these four she was the last and the only one where he managed it. We’ve thought of that so she can’t have been.”
I didn’t curse. I felt like it, but I didn’t. It was good news for her. All the same, if he’d made her pregnant and she’d gone full term we could have done a DNA test, introduced someone to his or her daddy, perhaps.
The next one I looked at happened eighteen months earlier, in the summer of 1981, and he drove a Jaguar. “Bob!” I shouted across the office.
“What is it?” he asked, coming over.
“This one,” I told him, closing the folder to show the name on the front. “Eileen Kelly. In her statement she says that the car she accepted a lift in was a Jaguar. On the wall of Silkstone’s bedroom is a photograph of him posing alongside a Mk II Jag. You can read the number and it’s in the file somewhere.”
“I’ll get on to the DVLC,” Bob said. “When are we talking about?”
“She was attacked in August, ’81.”
He went back to his telephone and I read the Eileen Kelly story. She was sixteen, and had just started work at the local egg-packing factory. At the end of her second week the other girls invited her out with them to a disco. They met in a pub and Eileen was disappointed to discover that they stayed there, drinking, until closing time. As soon as they entered the disco the other girls split up, each appearing to have a regular boyfriend, and Eileen was left on her own. The last bus had gone and she didn’t have enough money for a taxi. The thought of rousing her parents from their bed to pay the fare didn’t appeal to her.
An apparent knight in shining armour appeared on the scene and after a few dan
ces offered her a lift home, which she gratefully accepted. Except he didn’t take her home. He drove almost thirty miles to a deserted place called Black Heath, on Salisbury plain, and dragged her from the car.
Eileen put up a fight and escaped. He chased her, but some headlights appeared and her attacker changed his mind and fled, leaving her to walk two miles down a dirt track in her stocking feet. She survived, and he graduated to the next level of his apprenticeship. He was on a learning curve.
The description she gave was fairly noncommittal. It’s broad terms certainly included Silkstone, who would have been twenty-five at the time, but it could equally have been anyone that you see at a football match or leaning on a bar. She was certain about the car, though: it was Jaguar.
“Bad news,” Bob said, placing a sheet of paper in front of me. “Anthony Silkstone owned a Mk II Jag from September ’76 to December ’78, which is over two years too early for us.”
“Bugger!” I exclaimed.
“Steady,” Bob protested, “I’m a Methodist.”
“Well sod and damn, too.”
“Maybe…” Bob began.
“Go on.”
“He’d be what, in his early twenties?”
“When Eileen was attacked? Twenty-five, maybe twenty-six.”
“But he’d only be…what, twenty-one…when he bought the Jag?”
“That’s right.”
“A bit young, I’d say, for a car like that, expensive to run. Maybe he couldn’t afford it, and sold it to a friend, Latham perhaps, but still had access to it. And if you were up to mischief it would make sense to use somebody else’s car, wouldn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “I’m just a simple Yorkshire lad. Find out what happened to it, Bob, please. He may even have traded it in for another Jag. We need a rundown of every car he and Latham have owned, and a full history of the Jag after he sold it. Let’s see if we can get some justice for Eileen, we owe her that much.”
I carried on with the file. Poor Eileen had been taken and seated in the passenger seat of every model that Jaguar, formerly Swallow Sidecars, had made. They changed their name at the outbreak of World War II, because SS, the abbreviated form, wasn’t good PR in 1939. Eileen couldn’t identify the actual model, but was adamant it was a Jag because it had the famous mascot on the bonnet and when she was little she’d seen a Walt Disney film about the animal.
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