by Diane Janes
Jude was safely in Spain again for a couple of days and anyway she had already told him that she never came here since the failed kidnap attempt, so he swung the car straight in between the wooden gateposts which marked either side of the entrance, confident in the knowledge that the place would be empty. The house and garden were completely invisible until he turned into the drive, where he was astonished to see that the lawn was littered with kids’ toys. A little girl with her hair in bunches was bouncing on a circular trampoline, while a woman – presumably her mother – lay on a sun lounger nearby. The woman had been reading a magazine, but the arrival of Mark’s car caused her to look up, curious, maybe even a little startled by the presence of an unexpected visitor.
His tyres skidded to a halt on the gravel. Shit. This wasn’t in the script. For a second he considered reversing the car straight back into the lane and speeding away, but that wasn’t a good idea at all. Far better to improvise something which would allay her suspicions.
He silenced the engine and climbed out of the driver’s seat, attempting a reassuring smile. The woman stood up, as if in readiness to meet him and the child stopped bouncing to stare at him, falling forward onto her knees, as the trampoline continued to vibrate beneath her. Though she endeavoured to hide it, the woman’s anxiety was plainly written on her face. Laurel Cottage, Elmley Green, was an infamous address, after all. A woman had been held captive here for several days, and the man who had clearly intended to murder her was still at large.
‘Sorry to bother you.’ He called out to her across the grass, making no attempt to approach. He knew how important it was not to arouse the slightest curiosity and above all to appear unthreatening. It would be all too easy for her to memorize his number plate and make a call to the police, after he had gone. ‘I’m trying to find Green Hedges.’ (Green Hedges? Where the heck had that come from? Wasn’t it the name of the house where Enid Blyton used to live?) ‘My Sat Nav’s got me this far, but I can’t find the house. I saw your big hedge and I thought this might be it.’ (Clever touch. Green Hedges was coming in handy after all.)
‘I’m afraid I don’t know it. We haven’t lived here very long. This is Laurel Cottage.’ The woman had relaxed somewhat, apparently willing to accept the innocent nature of his errand and seemed further reassured by his immediately preparing to resume his position in the car. ‘You could maybe try asking at White Gates – it’s only a little way on down the lane. They’ve lived here forever, and know everything about everybody. You’ll see it easily enough, because of the big white gates … obviously.’ She gave a short, slightly nervous laugh.
It was precisely the opening he needed. ‘Not much sign of the laurels now,’ he said, cocking his head in the direction of the impenetrable wall of leylandii which stood between the large expanse of lawn and the lane. ‘Will you change the name of your house to something more appropriate, do you think?’
‘It’s not ours to change. We’re only renting, while my husband does some contract work locally.’
‘Well, it looks like a lovely spot to spend the summer. Specially now the weather’s perked up. I’ll leave you to enjoy it while you can.’
He gave a cheery wave as he climbed back into the car, taking a final glance around which encompassed the woman, her little girl and the entirety of the ‘lovely spot’ as he did so. A sense of relief filtered back as he reversed carefully into the lane. Jude had put some temporary tenants in. Fine. No problem. He hadn’t managed to get as much of a look at it as he would have liked, but it was a nice place, in a desirable location, and he was confident that the purchase price would more than meet his obligations to Chaz’s invisible friend. It surely wouldn’t take much to persuade Jude that she would be better off selling a house which could bring back nothing but unhappy memories. She needed to make a clean break from the past and if he became her husband, he could help her to do it, volunteering to look after the whole transaction, leaving her nothing to do but sign the papers. That way she wouldn’t even have to approve any estate agents’ pictures, see its name printed anywhere, or so much as give the place a second thought. All she had to do was trust him – and she was beginning to do that more and more with every day that passed.
EIGHT
‘I’m going for coffee, do you want your usual?’ Joel stood poised above Peter Betts’s desk. For such a big man he moved remarkably quietly, often appearing as if from nowhere and startling his colleagues with the sound of the voice: a bass rumble which had terrified the wits out of many a miscreant when PC McPartland was still a beat officer and had arrived unexpectedly on the scene and found them up to no good.
‘Cheers, mate, but I’ve only just finished one.’
‘I’m good too.’ Hannah McMahon had not been so deeply engaged with the papers on her desk that she had failed to spot Joel’s arrival, and was scarcely able to control her mirth at Bettsy’s startled reaction and swift recovery.
‘They ought to make him wear a bell or something,’ Peter grumbled, when his colleague had moved on. ‘He’ll end up giving some poor bugger a heart attack – and not necessarily someone on the wrong side.’
‘He’s probably doing it on purpose. I reckon he’d rather be reviewing the Thackeray case, than mucking about with the CPS over the Rashid brothers. The Rashid case is a mess.’
‘We’ve all had our share of crap to deal with,’ Peter said cheerfully. ‘Guess it’s just Joel’s turn.’
‘Nah – this isn’t about taking turns. The boss gave you this because he knows how much you care about Jude Thackeray.’
He couldn’t help but notice her faintly provocative tone. ‘The Old Man doesn’t allocate work on that basis,’ he said. ‘You know and I know that if he thought there was the slightest possibility of emotional involvement between an officer and a victim, he’d pull them off the case faster than you can say, “It’s my round”.’
‘Yeah, yeah, no need to bite.’
‘Sorry – didn’t realize that I was.’
‘Is something up with you? I’m not getting personal or anything, but you seem a bit out there today.’ Hannah’s voice had lost its teasing note.
‘I’m OK. I just got an email from a mate that’s set me back a bit.’
‘Bad news?’
Typical woman, he thought. The other guys in the team would have left it alone, but McMahon, though her normal persona was one of trying to out-bloke the blokes – insisting on being addressed by her surname, toughing everything out, expecting and receiving no concessions – had suddenly chosen the worst possible moment to reinvent herself as the concerned, motherly colleague, to whom you could take your problems. Well, no … that was not entirely fair. McMahon was capable of displaying as much kindness and compassion as the next person. Joel, or Jerry, or any one of the team might have asked as much. He knew that behind the sometimes abrasive exterior, there was a generous colleague, who any one of them would be happy to have covering their back, whatever the situation.
‘Not at all. Just the opposite.’ He could see that she was curious, but he didn’t want to say more – not yet. Apart from anything else he knew that she wouldn’t get it. McMahon might be sympathetic, but when it came to the job, she thought in straight lines. Like all of them, she had probably already made sacrifices to her career. Being a copper was an all or nothing proposition, and he knew without even discussing it, that to someone like her, the notion of giving it all up – just like that – for a life as an itinerant musician, would be the height of madness. A series of chords sounded somewhere in the far recesses of his mind. Hannah McMahon probably didn’t even know ‘Johnny Be Good’.
‘So,’ he said, as if the pause while she waited, presumably hoping that he was going to say something more about his mysterious email, had actually been him taking a moment to gather his thoughts about the Thackeray case. ‘Ready to walk through what we know about Mr X?’
She nodded and began: ‘He called himself Rod Stanley, but so far as we’ve been able to ascertain, there’s no such person
. He didn’t go to much trouble over creating a false ID. Never had a driver’s licence, never tried to open a bank account. Now there’s something you might have thought would trigger suspicions straight away – someone who always pays for everything with cash. Why didn’t Jude Thackeray pick up on that?’
‘I don’t suppose she particularly noticed. They went on a couple of dates together. He takes her to a classy restaurant and settles the bill in cash, leaving a generous tip. She’s enjoying her night out, loves the way this guy is making her feel – I’m sure she said that once, in a statement – “I loved the way he made me feel.” By the end of the evening she’s had a few drinks and is anticipating a nice romantic interlude back at her place. She isn’t putting together an evidential trail for kidnap and attempted murder, so why should she particularly notice, or care, whether the guy uses cash or plastic to pay the bill?’
‘That’s another thing. They always go back to her place.’
‘Because he says his place is in Leeds.’
‘Which of course it isn’t.’
‘Actually it could be,’ Peter demurred. ‘Given that we don’t know who he is, or where he lives.’
‘Well, I bet it jolly old well isn’t in Leeds, because every single thing he told her seems to have been a complete lie – and I’m pretty sure she describes him as having no noticeable accent.’
‘Not everyone from Yorkshire is an eee-by-gummer. And he may have really believed that only saddos followed Twitter.’ Peter kept all but a tiny edge of mischief out of his voice. He suspected that McMahon was a closet social media addict.
‘So …’ She failed to rise to the bait. ‘He must have been living somewhere within reasonable proximity to Elmley Green in the early stages of the relationship, but we never managed to find out where. He told Jude Thackeray that his firm was putting him up at the George and Dragon Hotel in Ipswich, but the hotel had never heard of him and she couldn’t pick him out from any of the guests on their CCTV.’
‘Hardly surprising, since this guy generally avoided anywhere with CCTV cameras like the plague.’
‘Except for the camera at the garage on the night when he had her in the back of the van,’ Hannah put in.
‘Except for that one time, yeah.’ Peter shook his head, as if attempting to reorder the thoughts inside it. He was thinking of the hours and hours that had been spent, trailing around every hotel and guest house within a thirty-mile radius, trying to find an establishment which had played host to Mr Rod Stanley. ‘So,’ he continued, ‘various possible men who matched the description identified at hotels and guest houses in the area, all of them eventually eliminated. No record of anyone renting a room, flat or house in the general vicinity to a Rod Stanley, or anyone who even resembled him. Or at least, there are plenty of blokes who look a bit like him, but none of them are him.’
‘Then there’s the car …’
Peter managed to suppress a groan at the mention of the car. Or rather cars – in the plural – which Graham Ling and his team had vainly attempted to track down.
‘Or rather cars,’ said Hannah, echoing his thoughts. ‘Jude Thackeray reckons she saw him driving at least three different cars. He explains that by telling her that the firm is fixing him up with a series of hire cars. She can’t even describe the first one.’
‘She’s not into cars.’
‘I know. Basically this woman is a rubbish witness.’
Hannah’s exasperated tone set him jumping to the victim’s defence. ‘Oh, come off it, McMahon, she did her best.’
‘I always said you had a soft spot for her.’
‘Look, she managed to give us a colour and make for the other two vehicles and the digits in the registration plate of one of them.’
‘Yeah.’ Hannah’s sarcasm was blatant. ‘That really narrowed the field.’
‘So – no joy with hire companies or stolen vehicles. There’s always the possibility that one of them was his own car.’
‘If it was, then you can bet it was the first one – the one that she couldn’t remember at all,’ said Hannah grimly.
‘Then there’s the white van. A Vauxhall Movano, stolen seven weeks before Mr X first encounters Jude Thackeray, which proves that he’d planned the whole thing very carefully, well in advance. The van was taken from outside a small block of flats, where a self-employed electrician had turned his back for a few minutes, leaving his vehicle unlocked. Van then completely disappears until the night of the attempted murder, when the next definite sighting is on the drive of Laurel Cottage, when he frogmarches Jude Thackeray outside, bound and gagged, and she’s confronted with the van, which he forces her to climb into the back of. He then drives the van to a garage to pick up fuel—’
‘For which he of course pays in cash,’ put in Hannah.
‘One CCTV camera picks him up on the forecourt and another one captures him entering the shop to pay, but he’s wearing a hoodie and never raises his head, so we don’t get a proper look at him. He drives on to Foxden Woods, where he muffs what should have been the final act in the drama. The victim manages to get away and when he can’t find her in the dark, he eventually gives up searching and drives to a secluded lay-by off the Little Fordesley to Benton Heath road, where he sets fire to the van, thereby buggering our chances of any helpful forensics from the one vehicle we can tie him to.’
‘So – we then get to the only helpful witnesses in the entire case,’ Hannah prompted.
‘Right. Mr Smethurst and Mrs Adderley – old-fashioned adulterers, meeting at a normally deserted beauty spot, after dark, for a dose of extramarital passion.’
‘I can’t imagine doing it in a car, can you?’
‘I think that would qualify as an unprofessional enquiry, Miss McMahon,’ he said with a grin. ‘Anyway … these two lovebirds arrive and they’re surprised to find that there’s a car already parked there. Adderley gets there first – she’s obviously keen.’
‘Just a better timekeeper, being a woman.’
‘She thinks the strange car is empty, but it’s dark and she isn’t sure. It puts the wind up her and she decides to drive on to a lay-by further down the road, where she tries to ring Lover Boy, but he hasn’t got a hands free – and being a generally good egg, in spite of cheating on his wife, he doesn’t pick up until he reaches their usual place of assignation, where he stops to check who’s just called him, sees that it’s Adderley and returns her call. He has obviously seen the strange car too and like her, he assumes that there’s no one inside, but he agrees with her that they need to find an alternative venue for their little tryst. It’s too dark to be sure what colour the car is, but he is pretty sure that it’s a dark-coloured BMW.’
‘For me,’ said Hannah, ‘this car has always been the best thing we’ve got. Mr X clearly left it there, in readiness to make his getaway after he had set fire to the van. Either that or someone else left it there for him. It’s an isolated place, a lonely spot, a long way from anywhere. Adderley and Smethurst had been using it for their extramarital get-togethers for at least six months and it was the first time they had ever seen another vehicle parked there. Both of them were pretty sure that the car was empty. Whoever drove that car there, must have had a second vehicle to take them away – unless someone actually sat there in the dark, waiting to pick up Mr X, once he’d set fire to the van. Whichever scenario you pick, there’s a second person involved in placing that getaway vehicle at the lay-by.’
‘It would have been a long time for someone to sit and wait. Smethurst and Adderley saw the car several hours before the white van was picked up on the CCTV at the garage. That’s assuming they actually saw the car on the right night. Remember that it took them three weeks to come forward. It was a regular meeting place for them, and they’d got no particular reason to recall the date.’
‘I think you’re wrong,’ Hannah said firmly. ‘They would remember, because they had to change their routine that night and they would have read about the Thackeray case within a cou
ple of days. They would have known right away that the burned-out van had been found in their favourite lay-by, because it was reported in the press. It wasn’t a case of them taking a long time to come forward because they’re people who’ve half remembered something, then written themselves into the story, several weeks later. The reason they didn’t come forward right away was because they’re reluctant witnesses, with something to hide.’ She paused for a moment, then continued: ‘Besides which it’s too much of a coincidence – Mr X had to get away from there somehow. Don’t tell me that he’d planned everything else down to the last detail, but not worked out how and where he was going to get rid of the van and get back to wherever he was based. Let’s face it – he covered the rest of his tracks so successfully, that we’ve never managed to link him to any other vehicle, or any other address.’
‘Smethurst and Adderley were the only people he’d reckoned without,’ Peter Betts said thoughtfully.
‘Well, you can see why. The only people likely to find their way up there on a dark winter evening would self-evidently be up to no good. It was just his hard luck that more than one person had chosen that particular parking area for their not-so-good deeds that night – and he could hardly have anticipated that there were still people who were gagging to have sex in the back of a Volkswagen Passat. I thought that had gone out forty years ago.’
‘I don’t think they had Volkswagen Passats, forty years ago.’
‘You know perfectly well what I mean.’
‘And you’ve been in this job long enough to know perfectly well that some people have tastes which the majority of the population would find somewhat outlandish. Including a lot of stuff that’s a good deal weirder than making out in a Volkswagen Passat.’
‘Talking of outlandish, did you know that Joel sometimes puts sachets of strawberry jam onto his hamburgers?’
‘Is this a thinly veiled reference to your desire for a lunch break?’
‘I wouldn’t say “no” to a sandwich.’