by Diane Janes
‘She doesn’t actually hear him drive away, but she guesses that he must have gone to withdraw money on her cards …’
‘Which is exactly what he did do, as confirmed by her bank statements. Maximum cash withdrawals of three hundred pounds from each account, just before midnight at the cashpoint in front of Endersley Village Stores – no witnesses and no CCTV.’
‘She also assumes – rightly – that he has taken her keys and gone to the house at Colchester, to try out the combination of the safe, and of course she’s out of her mind with terror, wondering what he’s liable to do to her, when he finds out that she’s given him the wrong numbers.’
‘Not a nice situation to be in. Locked in that cupboard, in the dark, just waiting for him to come back.’
NINETEEN
‘Matty, my boy, how’s tricks?’
Matt Blakemore didn’t even bother to twist his features into the semblance of a smile. ‘What do you want, Chaz? I’ve told you before not to call me out of work like this. I’ve done your latest “little errand” – now what do you want?’
Although he knew it was never a good idea to antagonize Chaz, Matt found it increasingly difficult to disguise his loathing of the man. He hated those peculiar greetings, halfway between the public schoolboy which Chaz undoubtedly was, and the East End gangster, for whom he presumably provided a front. Although Chaz gave the impression of being very much a part of the ‘Big Man’s’ organization, Matt assumed the reality to be that Chaz was as much a captive to debts as he was himself. Or maybe Chaz had always been the type to team up with the bullies, the sort who got a buzz out of kicking the other chap, when he was down. Most of all, of course, Matt, hated the hold Chaz – or his shadowy employer – had over him. A bad run at blackjack was all it had taken. That and the reckless notion that a short-term loan from a dubious source would see him out of trouble.
The suggestion that he approach Chaz had come from Dominic Phillips-Warde, whose reputation for being more than a bit wild had never encompassed being downright crooked, though probably poor old Dom had been working to Chaz’s instructions too. He could imagine Chaz telling him to: ‘Find me another mug, and I’ll knock a few thou off what you owe.’ Well, he doubted that Chaz and his boss had ever recouped much from Dom Phillips-Warde, who had been dead within six months of embroiling Matt in Chaz’s various schemes. A drug overdose had always been on the cards with Dom. The inquest resulted in an open verdict – could have been an accident, might have been suicide. Matt shuddered to think of a third possibility, though he knew that such a thing was a possibility, and made all the more likely, given Chaz’s comments that Dominic was ‘a loose cannon, with a big mouth’ and ‘a bloody great liability’.
Whatever the truth of the matter, it was hard not to associate Chaz with Dom’s death, and seeing Chaz, awaiting him at the bar, dressed in the typical gentleman about town tailored suit, striped shirt, and silk tie, looking as pleased with himself as ever, was like a red rag.
‘It’s that very thing I wanted to talk to you about,’ Chaz said. ‘I was passing the end of your street and I thought I’d just check in with you and see how it went.’
‘It went the way you wanted it to.’ Matt glared at the other man. ‘I met this bloke, as you asked, the one who’d been asking me questions about Mark Medlicott at Windsor. I walked up to him at the bar, and said, “Haven’t we met before?” also as you asked me to. He said he didn’t think so, then I said, “Wasn’t it at the races, about a week ago”, and didn’t we have a mutual acquaintance in Mark Medlicott? He remembered me then and seemed quite keen to talk, so we had a drink together.’
‘And,’ Chaz prompted.
‘I did what you told me to. I bigged up Medders’s supposed fortune. I don’t know why you wanted me to and I suspect that it’s actually quite the opposite; that Mark’s in trouble with the guy you work for, and that’s why you’re involved with him in some way. You’d better not be using me to stitch him up. I didn’t like the look of that bloke. There was something about him that didn’t seem quite kosher to me. Are you setting Mark up?’
‘Really, old chap. As if I would.’
Matt glared openly at his tormentor, provoked still further by the Burlington Bertie expression. ‘I don’t want to be involved with anything criminal,’ he said.
Chaz laughed. ‘Are you suggesting that I would be involved in anything criminal? Dear Boy, I’m cut to the quick.’
‘If that’s all you wanted, you could have phoned me, preferably out of office hours.’ Matt turned to leave. ‘I’ve told you before not to bother me when I’m at work.’
‘Never know who might be listening in at your end,’ Chaz said. ‘I won’t offer to buy you a drink as I know you’re bursting to get back to the office.’
TWENTY
‘You know what? It doesn’t matter how long I do this job, I will never get used to seeing photographs like these.’
Peter noticed that Hannah sounded extremely weary. They had agreed at the beginning of the week that while it would be impossible to cover every detail of the Thackeray case, in order to get through as much material as possible, they would work an extra hour or two each evening. This had made for very long days, shut up together in the stuffy little office, with its quartet of Blu-tack spots on the door and its carpet repaired with a line of Do Not Cross tape (at least someone still had a sense of humour).
She was leafing through the pictures as she spoke. Images which showed in detail the welts and bruises which had decorated Jude Thackeray’s body, when she initially arrived at the hospital. ‘Imagine how humiliating it must be, having to strip off for the camera and show your battle scars. Horrible.’
‘Don’t look at them, then. Concentrate on the verbal descriptions. Unless you’ve had enough and want to call it a day?’
‘No.’ Hannah sighed audibly. ‘Let’s get through this part of it.’
‘OK. So Jude Thackeray is locked in the cupboard, knowing that she’s given this thug the wrong combination to the safe and therefore that before too long, he’s going to come back, asking her for the right one.’
‘Right.’ Hannah resumed the role of narrator. ‘She’s absolutely hysterical with fear, but then she manages to calm herself down enough to think about the combination. She knows it’s based on birthdays and anniversaries and she reckons that it’s her parents’ birthdays, thirteen and twenty three, coupled with the year they got married, which she thinks is seventy-four, but then she also recalls where the slip of paper with the combination can be found.’
‘I wonder why she or her brother never changed the combination to something easier, after both parents had died.’
‘I suppose they never saw any need to. Anyway, the next thing she remembers is him flinging open the cupboard door, and attacking her. She remembers him grabbing her by the hair, slapping her head and face, and landing a couple of kicks as well. Obviously he’s furious, because he assumes that she gave him the wrong combination on purpose.’ Hannah swallowed hard.
You weren’t supposed to let this sort of stuff get to you, Peter thought. The Thackeray case was by no means the worst violence either of them had seen inflicted on a fellow human being, yet for some reason McMahon seemed to be finding the bald facts particularly difficult to handle. He had never known her go soft on them before.
‘We should stop and take a break,’ he said.
‘No.’ Hannah spoke fiercely, almost angrily. ‘We have to get through this part before we go home tonight.’
He raised his hands in a gesture of surrender and she began again, recounting Jude Thackeray’s story, while he tried not to let her see that he had noticed her unmistakable efforts to stave off distress.
‘She tried to tell him about the combination and where he could find the piece of paper so that he could check it, but he carried on hitting her – slapping her, she says here – and even when she’d told him the combination at least three or four times, he then says that he’s going to test her and see
if she’s telling him the truth and that’s when he heats up the sharpening steel and places it against her bare skin, a few times.’
‘Where does that sit with your ideas about him not being particularly sadistic?’
He had spoken quietly, not challenging her so much as prompting debate, and she answered in an equally measured way, ‘I still think it isn’t violence for violence sake. Some of these scumbags – remember the Butcher robbery – go mad, give half a chance to lay into someone. Teeth knocked out, broken bones … This guy isn’t into that. It’s all incredibly controlled. He puts on disposable gloves before rifling around in the kitchen to find something suitable for his purpose, chooses the steel, which he calmly heats up, using the gas ring. He intends to hurt her enough to make her tell him what he needs to know, but he doesn’t go absolutely over the top, even though he ultimately intends to kill her.’
‘Mmm …’ It was his turn to be thoughtful again. He did remember the Butcher case only too well: a hapless, middle-aged couple, subjected to a hideous amount of violence, by a couple of armed thugs – now happily detained at HM’s pleasure – all for a relatively small amount of cash and a couple of mediocre antique figurines. ‘I don’t think we should mistake this for kindness,’ he said at last. ‘The plan entails walking her out to the van and then probably walking her some way into the woods at the other end of the van ride. He doesn’t want to have to carry her, so there’s nothing to be gained from any excessive violence, above and beyond what he sees as absolutely necessary.’
‘Fair point. And of course he may be saving himself up for the last act of the play, when they get into the woods.’
‘Right. Is there anything in the way he uses things that are to hand in the kitchen, rather than coming equipped?’
Hannah considered for a moment, before answering. ‘He may not have anticipated the need to do anything to her in the kitchen. Presumably his original idea was that she would give him all the information he needed, when he first gave her a going over in the bedroom, for which he had come equipped, with a hefty leather belt that she had provided for him.’
‘Which has never been found.’
‘Probably still hanging in his wardrobe … wherever that is.’
‘Could be useful when we track him down.’
‘If.’
‘When,’ he responded firmly.
‘So, after threatening that if she sends him off on another wild goose chase, he will come back and kill her, he eventually accepts that she’s told him the truth about the combination, and he shuts her back in the cupboard. She tries to get her hands free, but she can’t and only succeeds in chafing her wrists against the cable ties. In the meantime we know that he was quite busy that day. He gives everywhere a thorough clean and does the laundry, if you please.’ She gave a laugh, but it was a bitter, half-formed thing, which hung uncomfortably in the air.
‘Neat touch that. You can’t fault a man who strips the bed and puts everything through the washer-drier after he sleeps with you. That’s got to be a step up from promising to call but never bothering.’ Peter hadn’t intended to get anywhere near topics like that, but Hannah suddenly seemed so low that he badly wanted to make her laugh properly, which she did.
‘So far as we know, the only person to call at the house that day is the postman,’ she continued. ‘He drops a couple of circulars through the door, sees no one, doesn’t remember anything unusual and can’t remember what vehicles, if any, were parked on the drive.’
‘Another in a long line of helpful, productive witness statements, in fact.’
‘There are no visitors, no telephone calls. Local people passing the end of the drive don’t notice anything either. There are absolutely no sightings of the white van, though we know it must have arrived at some point during the twenty-four to forty-eight hours prior to him using it to drive her to the lay-by.’
‘My gut feeling is that our man exchanges his own car for the white van during the trip back to the house at Colchester, when he helps himself to the contents of the safe and pays his second visit to the village cashpoint, in order to withdraw another £900 from the three accounts that he’s now got access to.’
‘Another late-night operation, when he manages to avoid being seen by anyone. It’s like chasing the Invisible Man. Even the jewellery is pretty much impossible to follow up since the Thackeray family have never bothered to get it valued, photographed, or individually listed on their insurance policy, so all we have to go on are their verbal descriptions, plus one or two photos from the family album, showing Jude dressed up in a necklace, plus her grandmother sporting what appears to be a diamond brooch against her fur coat, circa 1950.’
‘Again, he’s very disciplined,’ Peter noted. ‘He enters the house, letting himself in with a key. He goes for the safe, doesn’t appear to touch anything else or do any damage. The other thing that has struck me time and again, is that he put in a lot of work for relatively little return in the end. We don’t know the exact worth of the family jewellery, but having to fence it will reduce its value considerably, and he settled for the £1800 he was able to withdraw from the cashpoints across the time period while he held Jude Thackeray captive. That’s not a hell of a lot, for what amounts to several weeks work – all that time spent gaining her confidence.’
‘Perhaps he’s not all that clever, after all,’ Hannah said. ‘He could probably have done just as well by forcing his way into the house one night, wearing a Mickey Mouse mask, so that she never got to see his face. He could still have forced her to give up the pin numbers and the combination to the safe, and as she’d never got any sort of look at him, he would have saved himself the trouble of having to murder her – or trying to.’
‘It’s not a lot for such a carefully constructed plan. And we know that he didn’t come up with the idea once he’d got to know her, because he was laying a false trail from the very start. There’s definitely something that we’re missing here. Maybe he didn’t get as much as he’d hoped for? Maybe there was another part of the scheme which went wrong? Perhaps he’d over-estimated the amount of assets that she would have readily available?’
‘All possibilities, but presently unknowable.’
‘I bet he didn’t get anything like as much as he’d hoped for. It’s hardly enough to retire on, is it? Some antique jewellery and a couple of grand? Maybe this was some kind of trial run. I think he’ll wait awhile, then try it again, targeting some other wealthy woman.’
‘Which he may be doing right now – he’s a dangerous guy.’ Hannah waited to see if her colleague had anything more to say, but when he remained silent, she continued, ‘At some point, either before or after the initial attack, he changes vehicles, because when he takes Jude from the house, she is absolutely clear that the only cars on the drive are hers and the white van, whereas his car had been there the day before.’
‘We also know that he wasn’t picked up by the CCTV on the main road, so he must have driven to both the cashpoint and the house at Colchester via the back lanes – but then our man’s such a careful planner that I wouldn’t have expected anything less of him. No doubt he had all his routes sussed out, weeks before.’
Hannah nodded. ‘We don’t know which way he went, or have any times except for the cash withdrawals, but at some stage he arrives back at Laurel Cottage in the van. That van must have been garaged somewhere reasonably close to his route between Elmley Green and Colchester. He gets back to the house, lets himself in again with her door key, and eventually he opens up the cupboard, orders her out, then marches her straight through the kitchen, out of the back door and round the side of the house. This activates the security lights, so she sees the van standing there, with the back doors open, and he makes her get inside.’
‘And she was sure that there was no one else around.’
‘Right. No question of an accomplice at the scene, unless there was someone else in the cab of the van, but there’s nothing to indicate that. Jude has absolutely no
idea of the time by this stage, only that she’s been locked up for what feels like an age – but we have the timings of the withdrawals from the cashpoints, so we know that it must have been well after midnight by the time he went back to collect her. She gets into the van and before he shuts the door, she sees a loop of wire or string, which she has described as a garrotte, lying on the floor of the van. When he shuts the door, the back of the van is in darkness – she thinks it was screened off from the front seats somehow.’
‘This garrotte, or whatever it was, has evidently been brought in from the outside. No clues as to what happened to it and no sign of it in what was left of the van, though it may have been completely destroyed by the fire. Wasn’t Joel in charge of pursuing possible leads on the van?’
‘Yeah. No definite sightings from when it was pinched from outside the flats, until it was found burned out. Hundreds of lock-ups identified without establishing any definite links. Miles of CCTV footage checked, but it’s another complete non-event, evidentially, except for the one sighting when Mr X and Jude Thackeray were on their way between Laurel Cottage and Foxden Woods, when he stops to top up with a tenner’s worth of diesel, at the all-night garage.’
‘That’s the part I really don’t get,’ Peter interrupted. ‘He’s been so incredibly careful, then he rocks up at a garage and gets captured on CCTV. You said “on their way”, but actually the garage isn’t on their way. He had to go out of his way to visit it.’
‘That’s probably because it’s the only twenty-four-hour garage for miles around. Someone’s noted here, “shows local knowledge”.’
‘For me this is the part that really doesn’t fit. You don’t plan everything so meticulously, then notice that you need to stop for petrol.’
‘Except that everyone makes at least one mistake.’
‘Which for him, turns out not to be a mistake, since we can’t see his face at all on the footage, and get nothing concrete from it, except that he has the height and build of Mr Average, which is no more than we knew already. It’s as if he’s bloody taunting us – “look, look, here I am, captured on camera and you’re still no wiser”.’