by Diane Janes
‘Didn’t Mrs Andrews also say that the car was being driven rather fast?’
‘She did. That all comes into her impression that Jude wasn’t in too good a temper.’
‘Hmm. Mrs Andrews constructing a little story for herself do you think?’
‘Couple have a row and he beats her up and locks her in a cupboard? I see where you’re going. I can’t remember – what did Jude Thackeray have to say about meeting the Andrews in the lane?’
‘Nothing much,’ he responded promptly. ‘Initially she said she thought the Andrews might have got the day wrong, because she didn’t think that she and Mr X had been out in the car that day at all, but later on, she remembered that she’d popped out to buy some milk around midday, because they were running out, and she thought that Lover Boy had probably come in the car with her, though she couldn’t be sure. She said she didn’t recall meeting the Andrews in the lane, but that she was so used to seeing them out walking their dogs, it could easily have happened as they said, but she’d simply forgotten. It was such a commonplace thing that she wouldn’t have taken any notice … Here it is …’ He had been scrolling through a statement as he spoke. ‘She said that she usually slowed down for people walking, but maybe she hadn’t seen them until the last minute. She doesn’t remember being annoyed or upset, but agreed that maybe she had been a bit irritated about forgetting to get any milk, when she’d only ordered a delivery of shopping, the day before.’
‘I reckon the Andrews were probably right about him being in the car,’ Hannah said, thoughtfully. ‘He had everything planned by then. He wouldn’t have wanted to let her out of his sight that last day before he took her captive.’
‘Maybe. But the guy in the village shop is pretty sure that Lover Boy didn’t come in with her for the milk – though of course he wouldn’t, because he took care not to be seen by anyone, if he could avoid it.’
‘Did the man in the shop actually confirm the trip for the milk?’
‘He wasn’t positive about it. It’s another one of those routine things that he wouldn’t have particularly noticed, because it happened all the time … and it would have been a cash transaction, so nothing specific to help us in the till records.’
‘The Andrews ought to be really useful,’ Hannah mused. ‘They only live just along the lane but although they saw him in the car and they saw various cars parked on her drive a few times, there’s never anything concrete. He’s “ordinary looking” with short, light-brown hair, and “an angry face” according to Mrs Andrews. One of the cars is “a dark-blue one”. It hardly narrows the field.’
‘The drive is pretty much completely hidden from the road by that whacking great hedge. You can’t see anything of the house until you look directly in through the gateway. If you’re passing by on foot that takes no more than a couple of seconds – even less when you drive by in your car. He couldn’t have been any luckier with that either. Talk about retaining your privacy.’
‘Nil desperandum,’ Hannah said, affecting a cheerfulness which neither of them felt. ‘At least we’ve got two comprehensive descriptions of the guy – from Jude Thackeray and her brother Robin.’
ELEVEN
It was immediately obvious to Rob that Jude had been drinking. Quite aside from the fact that she had a half-empty wine glass in her hand when she admitted him to the flat (he had a key but she had double locked the door from inside), she also had a particular look on her face which only arrived there after the consumption of at least half a bottle of wine.
He didn’t bother with a preamble. ‘I’ve found out a bit more about the engineering firm. He’s definitely not a director. It’s run by his two older brothers.’
‘Oh please, Rob. Not now. We already know that his grandfather left him shares in the business, and that his mother inherited a pile from her father. We’ve even read the probate of his father’s will and know that he left assets of well over ten million.’ She simulated a huge yawn. ‘Will you please let it rest?’
‘I managed to have another chat with that chap I saw him with at the races. Bloke called Matt Blake or something like that. I knew I would manage to bump into him again.’
‘Is that really wise? I mean it sounds awfully like you’re stalking his friends.’ She had slumped full length on the sofa, but now she raised herself sufficiently to reach for her glass and take another gulp of her drink.
‘It’s wiser than leaving things to chance – and a hell of a lot wiser than lying around, getting pissed.’
‘I have to deal with things in my own way,’ she snapped. ‘And I have a lot to deal with.’
‘Sure you do. But burying your head in the sand isn’t clever. Suppose he rings and you’re drunk. Do you want to end up losing him, by saying something silly?’
She made a clicking noise with her tongue, before responding. ‘Sometimes I don’t know where you’re coming from. On the one hand you don’t want me to commit myself, in case this guy turns out to be not what he seems, on the other you’re worried that I might lose him.’
‘Oh well, I’m sure you wouldn’t want to do that.’
The sarcasm in his voice sobered her somewhat. She turned to see the look on his face. ‘Why Rob,’ she cooed. ‘I believe you’re jealous.’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘Attention everyone—’ she waved her glass to encompass an imaginary crowd – ‘the green-eyed monster is in the building.’
‘Sometimes you just go too far.’ He stalked across to the kitchen door, pausing when he reached it to ask, ‘Is there anything for dinner?’
‘Not unless you brought sandwiches. Ring for a takeaway, if you’re starving.’
‘Have you had anything?’
‘A packet of crisps. Didn’t want to drink on an empty stomach.’
He tried not to be irritated by the flippant tone. ‘I’m ordering pizza. For both of us. Sometimes I don’t know what to do with you – ’specially when you’re in this half-crazy mood.’
‘I’ll be OK in the morning.’
‘If you carry on drinking, you’ll have a stinking hangover in the morning.’
‘I never get hangovers.’
‘Oh really? Since when?’
He went into the kitchen to find the phone number of the pizza place. In spite of her repeated assurances to the contrary, he was afraid that she had become so enamoured of Mark Medlicott as to be no longer entirely rational about him.
He, on the other hand, retained a healthy scepticism. Surely Jude of all people hadn’t lost sight of the fact that it wasn’t hard to affect fictional wealth for a short period, in order to snare an unsuspecting partner. Medlicott appeared to have the right kind of background, but there was always the possibility that he was putting on a front. Jude’s kidnap had made all the papers. In the aftermath of the publicity, she had received numerous letters from would-be suitors, some professing undying love to this rich young woman whom they had never met, all of them promising to look after her. (There had been some vile letters too, saying that she was a tart, a trollop, and worse, who had got what she deserved for sleeping with a man outside of matrimony, while others went into graphic descriptions of what they would like to do to her, in the event that they ever happened to have her tied up in an isolated property for two or three days. All of these communications had been passed on to the police.)
Mark Medlicott did not, of course, belong to this lunatic fringe and she had met him in a public place, in a seemingly ordinary way, without his apparently being aware of who she was. In the initial stages of the relationship with Medlicott, Jude herself had been as careful and wary as Rob, but lately he had sensed a growing recklessness in her. Medlicott’s apparent enthusiasm and now his hurry to cement their relationship, made Rob’s suspicious hackles rise. Medlicott’s friend at the races had been worryingly non-committal in the face of his gentle probing. There had definitely been something in his manner which had made Rob feel uneasy. Of course, it might just be a bloke protecting the priv
acy of his mate – refusing to share gossip with an unknown stranger.
If only we could be sure, he thought. But you never could be – not one hundred per cent, because it was so easy to construct a false front, if you were absolutely intent on deception.
TWELVE
‘So …’ Hannah paused to stretch out her arms to their fullest extent, flexing her long slim fingers, then bringing her hands back onto the table in front of her, before continuing. ‘The brother reckoned that our Mr X was a wrong ’un from the start.’
‘Benefit of hindsight,’ Peter Betts said.
‘That’s a bit dismissive.’
‘And also wrong,’ Peter conceded a few seconds later, ‘because it says here that he and his sister had a bit of a row about her seeing so much of the bloke. Robin Thackeray thought it was all going a bit fast, whereas his sister could see no wrong in the guy.’
‘He’s a bit possessive, isn’t he – the brother?’ Hannah said. ‘Do you think that came about because of what happened with Mr X, or do you reckon he’s always been like that? Their father’s dead, right? That might have encouraged the brother to think that he had to take on the head of the family role. If the brother was forever stepping in – interfering – that could have made things worse.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘She’s a grown woman and big brother tries to come the heavy and suggests she sees less of the new bloke? I mean, that’s just calculated to have her saying, “You’re not the boss of me”, and going all out to defy him.’
‘Quite likely. There’s no real indication of why the brother didn’t like him.’
Hannah referred to her pile of notes: ‘The exact phrase appears to be, “there was just something about him that I didn’t take to”.’
‘Well, it’s always helpful – when a witness can be so specific.’
‘So … the slightly possessive brother – who maybe doesn’t take to anyone who dates his sister – notices something which may or may not be discernible to anyone else, and which he is unable to explain. Apart from that his description is very much like the victim’s. He thinks the guy is about the same height, or slightly taller than he is himself, whereas his sister definitely puts the guy a fraction taller. He never clocked the eye colour; Jude says the guy’s eyes were brown. Both agree on short, light-brown hair, medium build, no particular accent. Jude says he has a small, dark mole on one buttock; brother is understandably never in a position to notice it. They can’t provide an address, but understood him to be staying at the hotel in Ipswich, paid for by his company. He evidently drives a series of different cars, allegedly hire cars, which are also supposedly provided by his company. The company is called Odec, or Adec, or Amec, or something similar and supposedly specializes in some kind of revolutionary heating system for offices and showrooms – though all efforts have so far failed to trace any such company, or anyone attempting to sell or install this marvellous system – whatever it may have been – in the immediate area.’
‘I think we can be fairly confident that it doesn’t actually exist. The point is that it sounds plausible.’
‘He told the victim that he had worked abroad, including spells in Holland and Belgium and demonstrated his ability to speak the language when she asked him to say something in Dutch for her.’
‘Which is also inconclusive,’ said Peter. ‘Given that she doesn’t speak Dutch, and he presumably knew that, so he could have been speaking any language and she would have been none the wiser.’
‘He’s one hell of a blagger, isn’t he?’
‘It just seems to have been an incredibly detailed set-up, for relatively little reward …’
‘Right. He’s apparently planned and executed everything to perfection, right up to the moment when he lets her get away. Let’s have another look at that, shall we …’
Peter frowned, waiting while Hannah turned up the relevant passages from among Jude Thackeray’s screeds and screeds of witness statements.
‘OK – here we are. “He stopped the van and came round to the back. When he opened the door, a light came on in the back of the van, so I could see him and see that the door was open. I would have known anyway, because I heard the door and felt a rush of colder air. He was standing outside the back of the van, wearing the same clothes that he’d worn earlier in the house, except that he’d put a ski mask over his face and he was wearing a hood. It looked like he was all in black. I remember wondering why he’d done that, because I knew who he was – or anyway, who I thought he was – and also what he looked like. After he opened the door, he sort of hesitated. I’m not sure if he actually said any proper words. I think he might have said something to himself that I didn’t catch, or maybe he just sort of grunted, and then he moved out of sight – it sounded as if he was going round to the front of the van and I guessed that he’d forgotten something. I knew it was my only chance, so I sort of rolled – I’m not exactly sure how I did it – I was on my knees at one point … Anyway, I sort of fell out of the back of the van, scrambled up and ran.” Not so easy, with her hands tied behind her back,’ Hannah interrupted herself to say.
‘It’s amazing what you can do when you’re desperate,’ Peter said. ‘Go on.’
‘“It was really dark,”’ Hannah resumed reading. ‘“I couldn’t see anything, but I just ran. I didn’t know where I was, or what direction to go in, but I thought that if I ran in a straight line, away from the back of the van, I’d be on a road, and someone might be driving along, who would stop and help me.”’
‘Sounds reasonable enough.’
‘“But I realized that I wasn’t on the road, because the ground was bumpy and I could hear my feet on leaves and twigs and things. I realized that the noise was going to help him follow me, so I stopped. I think it was as soon as I stopped that I heard a banging noise behind me. It might have been one of the van doors. I seemed to be surrounded by bushes and little trees and I’d been running through all these scratchy branches. After the big bang, I tiptoed really quietly for a few feet, then I crouched down, by the side of some sort of bush and I listened. It was pretty quiet and I knew he would be hunting for me. I heard him come quite close, but he didn’t see me. Then after a few minutes had gone by, he must have gone back to the van for a torch, because I saw this light flashing around among the trees. I could feel myself starting to cry, because I thought he would find me for sure, but then I realized that he was going the wrong way. I thought about trying to run again, but I decided that the worst possible thing would be to make a noise, because that would lead him straight to me, so I tried to keep absolutely still. He turned back and the light came nearer and nearer …”’
Though Hannah was doing the reading, Peter could almost hear Jude Thackeray’s voice. He remembered the mounting tension in it, when she had reached this part of the story, and the tears which had spontaneously appeared in her eyes.
‘“… although I knew that I mustn’t make a sound, I swear that having the gag in my mouth saved me just then, because it reminded me not to scream. I thought for sure that he was going to get me, but when he was within about six or eight feet, he turned away again. He kept on searching for ages – well it seemed like ages to me – and I kept thinking that any minute, he would turn back and shine his light on me and that would be it, and all the time, I was freezing cold, and the scratches on my bare arms were stinging, and I knew that I was shaking … It all seemed to go on forever … He’d get further away and then come nearer again, and I kept thinking that it was only a matter of time until he found me. And then … well, I realized that he was gone. One minute he was searching and the next I couldn’t see the light of the torch anymore. I heard the engine of the van start up, its lights came on, and then I heard him driving away.”’
Peter took up the tale from memory. ‘And she stayed there until it got light, then made her way out onto the road, where she was seen by the AA man, who was heading back to base after attending an early-morning breakdown. I wonder why h
e gave up?’
‘The AA man?’
‘The attacker. He must have known that she could identify him.’
‘Except that as it turns out, she couldn’t.’
Peter shook his head. ‘He was clearly motivated to murder her, when they originally left the house. Why give up, when he had her in the woods? Surely he realized that she couldn’t have got very far, with her hands tied behind her – and he’d got a torch?’
‘Perhaps the battery gave out.’ Hannah sounded almost bored. ‘Don’t forget that he probably didn’t see her actually getting out of the van. From the way she remembers it, he was busy doing something in the front when she got out of the back, so he wouldn’t have seen which direction she’d initially gone in. On the face of it, it sounds as if he had the upper hand, but there are woods on either side of the road just there. It wouldn’t be easy to track her in the dark, providing she stayed still and didn’t make a noise.’
There was a brief silence while they considered this. A muffled burst of laughter bounced along the corridor outside, the faint precursor of voices which grew momentarily louder and then fainter again, as they passed by on the other side of the door. Hannah picked up a pen and flicked it against the edge of her desk two or three times, before musing, ‘It’s almost as if he let her go on purpose.’
‘What?’