‘I want to get to Jack Taylor’s before Gordon gets there,’ he explained.
‘You think he’s going there?’ Jill didn’t. She thought Gordon would be licking his wounds alone. They were extremely deep wounds that would take a long time to heal.
‘I don’t know.’ Max fired the engine. ‘But I’m damned if I’m giving them time to get their stories straight.’
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Jill was exhausted by Hannah’s story. Saddened, too. She sometimes wished she’d chosen any career in the world other than one that brought her into contact with murderers and their victims. She heard stories that were too terrible, saw things that time could never erase. It must be bliss, she thought, to arrive at Asda at eight o’clock, and sit on the check-out all day talking of nothing deeper than the weather and the price of milk.
Max said nothing as he drove them to Jack Taylor’s house. Perhaps he, too, was wishing he had a job sweeping the streets or cutting grass.
He stopped the car at the T-junction and turned briefly to look at her. ‘I’ll treat you to dinner after this, kiddo.’
‘On one condition,’ she told him, ‘that we don’t discuss this case. In fact, I refuse to talk about anything depressing.’
‘It’s a deal,’ he said as he swung the car into Jack’s road. ‘Blimey, for a minute there, I thought you were going to insist on paying.’
‘With the nags I’ve backed lately? You’ve got to be kidding.’
Jill considered herself a fairly optimistic character. She’d seen it all, little surprised her, and it took a lot to get her down. Yet, as they got out of the car and walked up the path to Jack Taylor’s house, she was thoroughly depressed.
It seemed unlikely, but she wondered if Max guessed at her feelings because he gave her shoulder a squeeze and said, ‘Take it from me, Jack makes the best cup of tea in Kelton.’
She must pull herself together as, sadly, she didn’t have the luxury of sitting on a check-out all day.
Jack answered the door and ushered them inside. He was alone, except for the collie, and he was in the middle of washing up at the old, ceramic sink.
His dog licked Jill’s hand with a gentleness that touched her. Animals were far superior to humans, she thought. They were above all this.
‘Have you seen your son-in-law?’ Max asked him.
‘Gordon?’ Jack had been about to carry on washing up, but that stopped him. ‘No. Should I have?’
‘We’ve just come from Hannah and Gordon’s house,’ Max explained. ‘Gordon left. He was a bit upset by what he heard and we wondered if he might have come here.’
‘Ah.’ In that short word was a wealth of understanding. ‘No, I haven’t seen him.’
‘I expect he’s gone for a walk to calm himself down.’ Jill didn’t want Jack worrying unnecessarily.
‘Probably,’ he agreed. ‘How’s Hannah?’
‘She’s OK,’ Jill promised.
Jack, for once, was lost for words.
‘I think we all need one of your special cups of tea, Jack,’ Max said.
‘I think you’re right, lad.’
Jill watched, eyes widening, as Jack reached for a bottle of whisky.
‘Do women drink whisky?’ he asked Max doubtfully.
‘This one does,’ Jill told him.
‘Really? My, how things change.’ Shaking his head at the state of the world, Jack poured generous measures of whisky into large mugs. ‘Let’s see if this helps, shall we?’
He put the tea on the kitchen table and sat down.
Jill, very gingerly, took a sip from her mug. Surprisingly, it tasted good.
‘Hannah’s told you everything then?’ Jack guessed.
‘She has,’ Max said, ‘but I’d like to hear your version.’
‘My version? That’ll be the same as Hannah’s. She might not tell me things for years, twelve years in this case, but when she finally spills the beans, you get the lot. She wouldn’t lie to me,’ he added hastily.
‘So tell us your version of events,’ Max suggested, taking a swig of his drink.
‘If you like,’ Jack agreed. ‘My Hannah went off to university, with proud parents looking on, and found herself like a fish out of water. She’d lived a simple, decent life in the village till then. She met that bugger Johnson and—’ His knuckles were white as he gripped his mug more tightly than ever. ‘She were putty in his hands. Next thing, he’s buggered off back to America and she’s in the family way. So she gets rid of the baby.’
He broke off and stroked his collie.
‘That were her decision,’ he said at last. ‘It wouldn’t have been mine, and I don’t know what her gran would have thought of it, but the world’s different now. Right or wrong, that’s what she did.’
He fell silent.
‘Go on, Jack,’ Jill urged him.
‘She hears nothing from him until he realizes she’s standing as the Tory candidate. Then the evil bugger—pardon my French, Jill, but that’s what he were—follows her here and tries to blackmail her. He phones her and sends her notes.’
‘Did you see the notes?’ Max asked.
‘Yes. Saw ’em and burnt ’em!’
Jill suddenly recalled seeing a spiral of smoke rising from Jack’s incinerator when she called here with Ella.
‘Memories and truth remain,’ she quoted softly, and he looked straight at her.
‘You were here,’ he remembered. ‘You and Ella were here the day I burnt them.’
‘That’s destroying evidence,’ Max told him.
‘I’d have burned that bugger along with ’em if he hadn’t been dead already,’ Jack assured him. ‘And before you ask, Sherlock, no, I didn’t kill him. Nothing would have pleased me more, but I didn’t do it.’
‘I know.’
‘Oh? How’s that?’
‘We’ve been checking a lot of CCTV footage and your smiling face was caught on camera in Rochdale,’ Max told him.
‘Was it? Well, I’m buggered. You lot aren’t as daft as you look.’
But not clever enough, Jill thought, as Max began asking him about McQueen, Khalil and Tessa Bailey. Max was convinced there was a connection; Jill wasn’t.
All the same, it was coincidental that, three weeks after Bradley Johnson’s body was found, Thomas McQueen was filled full of bullets. And Bradley Johnson, they knew, enjoyed a spot of blackmail. If he’d found out who had killed Khalil, and if he knew McQueen had been mixed up in it—
Round and round they went in ever-decreasing circles. She was tired, hungry and thoroughly depressed, and she wasn’t sorry when they left Jack’s house.
‘Dinner,’ Max said, taking her arm and guiding her to his car.
‘And not a word about any of it,’ she warned him.
‘Scouts’ honour.’
‘Oh, yeah, like you were ever in the Scouts.’
‘I was! I’ll have you know that my sheepshank had to be seen to be believed. As for my Hunter’s Bend and Buntline Hitch, remarkable. King of the knots, I was.’
She smiled at that and slowly began to relax.
It was cold in the car and the heater blew out icy air before Max switched off the fan.
‘Where to?’ he asked her.
‘The Red Chilli in Bacup. And don’t spare the horses.’
The Chinese restaurant was always Jill’s choice when she was famished. It was impossible to leave the place hungry. Added to that, the food was exquisite and the service first-rate.
An hour later, with her appetite sated and with copious amounts of wine consumed, she felt much better. True to his word, Max hadn’t mentioned the case.
And then he took a phone call.
When it was over, he snapped his phone shut and returned it to his pocket. ‘Well, well, well. Who’d have thought it?’ He put up his hand. ‘Sorry, I forgot we weren’t talking work.’
‘Now what’s happened?’ she asked, wary. ‘We haven’t got another corpse, have we?’
But he didn’t look concerned. �
��It’ll keep till tomorrow. We’re not talking work, remember?’
Damn him, he knew she wouldn’t rest.
‘Come on. Tell me.’
‘Peter Lawrence was arrested in the early hours of this morning,’ he said.
She sagged with relief. Peter Lawrence was arrested on a regular basis.
‘Drunk and disorderly?’
‘Nope. Breaking and entering.’
‘Blimey.’ She had to smile. ‘That’s a new one. Into a pub or an off-licence?’
‘Neither. West Mercia Constabulary caught him trying to gain access to a narrowboat in Worcestershire.’
‘What? You’re kidding me.’ She couldn’t believe it. ‘But I didn’t mention anything about boats. All I did was try and get him to come up with names of Claire’s friends.’
She simply couldn’t believe it.
‘The owners returned to it to find him,’ Max explained.
‘Really? Who are they?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Who the hell might Claire know who owns a narrowboat?’
Of course, it could be nothing more than Peter Lawrence finding himself in Worcestershire without a bed for the night and trying his luck on the river. No, that was too much of a coincidence.
‘I need to get down there to see him,’ she said.
And she had no intention of leaving until she had a name from him. He must know something.
Chapter Thirty
Jill often arrived at HMP Styal with time to spare, but today she was in a rush. All the same, as she’d skipped breakfast, she ate a Cadbury’s Flake and had a quick look at the day’s runners and riders. If she didn’t have a winner today, she may as well admit defeat. Gambling was a mug’s game anyway.
Not that a mug would have backed Manor Boy and netted themselves three hundred quid, she reminded herself. However, that had been her last decent win.
None of the horses leapt off the page at her. Her dad had told her to back Swansong but, despite his claims that it was a dead cert, she wasn’t convinced. Her dad’s luck was no better than hers right now. But if she didn’t back it, the animal was sure to romp home leaving the rest of the field furlongs behind. She may as well squander a tenner on it. Maybe twenty, just in case.
Minutes were ticking by and, without much hope, she phoned through her bets. Six fine racehorses or six wornout nags? Time would tell.
Ten minutes later, she was with Claire Lawrence.
‘Your husband was arrested yesterday.’ Jill came straight to the point.
‘Again?’ Claire wasn’t interested.
‘Yes, breaking and entering. In Worcestershire of all places.’ She brushed an imaginary speck from her shirt before saying casually, ‘Apparently, he was trying to get inside a narrowboat on the river down there.’
Claire was interested now. She didn’t say anything, but her fingers were wrapping themselves around a strand of hair in an extremely agitated fashion.
‘I wonder what he was looking for,’ Jill said carelessly.
‘A drink, I expect.’
‘It’s a long way to go for a drink. Even for Peter. Anyway, he was arrested before he had a chance to find anything and he wouldn’t say what he was looking for.’
Those fingers slowed slightly.
‘I’ve had a chat with the police, though,’ Jill continued, ‘and now they’re curious. Very curious. They’re talking to owners of every boat in the area.’
Claire said nothing. For a full twenty minutes. When Jill spoke, she merely hummed tunelessly.
‘I can’t waste time here,’ Jill said pleasantly. ‘I’m on my way to Worcestershire to have a chat with your husband.’
Claire merely shrugged.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll let you know as soon as the police find anything.’
There was no response from Claire so Jill left her to her worries and headed down the M6 to Worcestershire.
Traffic was backed up where the M5 joined the M6 but, other than that, Jill’s journey went smoothly and she was soon sharing a room with a sullen Peter Lawrence. A young constable sat alongside Jill as they tried to get him to talk.
She wasn’t hopeful. Jill had assumed he’d been found trying to break into a specific narrowboat. He hadn’t. He’d been walking along the River Avon checking on half a dozen that were moored there. All six had been unoccupied but the owners of the last one had returned from an evening at the pub and called the police.
‘So what made you think of boats, Peter?’ she asked him.
‘Nothing really.’
‘It’s funny that. Something made me think along the same lines.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes. And do you know what, we both thought of boats for exactly the same reason. Because of something Claire said.’
He scuffed his feet back and forth on the floor.
‘She told me she’d like to live on one,’ Jill went on. ‘Something in the way she said it made me think that maybe, just maybe, she had experience of boats, that perhaps she knew someone who lived on one.’
He shrugged.
Unlike the interview suite at Harrington, this one was hot and stuffy. Peter Lawrence was sweating.
‘So we assume you were breaking into the narrowboat with the intention of stealing whatever you could find,’ the constable said. ‘That’s a serious matter, as you know. When we heard from Lancashire that you might be looking for someone, we thought maybe you had a valid reason to be there. It seems we were wrong.’
Lawrence thought about that.
‘Something has made you think of boats,’ Jill said. ‘As unlikely as it seems, Claire must have a friend who had access to one. Why don’t you save us all, you especially, a lot of time and tell us that friend’s name.’
‘I don’t know her name,’ he snapped.
Great.
‘But Claire mentioned someone?’
He nodded.
‘What did she say?’
‘I found a phone number scribbled on a fag packet in her coat,’ he said on a long sigh. ‘Ages ago it was. I thought it was some bloke. Anyway, according to her, the number belonged to her best mate.’
‘And she didn’t tell you a name?’
‘Not that I remember. She was sad, she said, because this mate was going off with some bloke she’d met.’
‘And he owned a boat?’
‘Yeah.’ He thought for a moment. ‘She won’t still be with him, though. This mate of Claire’s, I mean. She was a prostitute, same as Claire, but the bloke knew nothing about that.’
Even if the relationship had lasted, the couple could be living in Australia by now.
‘All I know,’ Lawrence went on, ‘was that he lived on a boat in Evesham. And Claire’s mate—she said she was the sort you could trust with your life.’
And with her daughter’s life.
This girl, whoever she was, must have been a rare find for a woman like Claire who didn’t trust enough to make friends easily …
The drive back to Lancashire took three and a half hours, and Jill went straight to headquarters where she was just in time for the evening briefing. The first person she saw was Grace, who was trying to get a coffee from the machine.
‘Anything?’ Jill asked her.
‘Damn thing. It’s taken me half an hour to get a cup.’
‘I meant anything from Worcestershire?’
‘Nothing. And don’t raise your hopes, Jill. It would be virtually impossible to hide a kid like Daisy for so long. We launched a massive search at the time. No, someone would have seen her long before now.’
Jill knew she had a point.
‘How confident are you that Daisy’s still alive?’ Grace asked.
She wouldn’t bet her cottage on it. ‘Seventy-five per cent,’ she answered and Grace whistled through her teeth.
‘If you’re wrong, you’re going to be in deep—’
‘I know,’ Jill cut her off, not wanting to consider the possibility of being wrong and the consequence
s for all concerned.
But she wasn’t alone. Peter Lawrence had been convinced enough to go to Worcestershire …
After the briefing, she went to her office, pushed aside all thoughts of rivers in Worcestershire, and checked her emails. She fired off quick answers to half a dozen and then picked up the sheet of paper on which she’d scribbled all suspects for the murder of Bradley Johnson. What bothered her most was that she knew every one of them. They were her neighbours.
Phoebe had a motive. Her husband had been sleeping around and might have been on the verge of leaving her for all they knew. She’d had opportunity, too. Yet why would she go to the trouble of killing him in Black’s Wood? It would be too risky. Why not do the deed at the manor and trot out the well-worn story of him disturbing a burglar?
But she didn’t think this was a family matter. The Johnsons were one of those close-knit families who, although they had a wide circle of acquaintances, were short on close friends. Phoebe kept to herself and the boys stuck together. They were a family who always thought they had to be on show. They wanted to stay private, to keep their petty arguments to themselves.
Damn it, it was always the same. Every case she worked on, the doubts plagued her. She’d got it wrong before, big style, and that mistake had been partly responsible for costing a man his life.
Was she wrong to dismiss Phoebe?
What about Hannah Brooks? She had a motive. Johnson was threatening to end her career and, with it, in all probability, her marriage. She had even admitted to seeing him on that fateful afternoon. Why the admission? Because someone had spotted her? Either way, it would have been easy enough for her to wait until Ella had continued walking, then follow him into the wood. Her grandfather had owned dogs all his life so Hannah would have walked through Black’s Wood countless times. Just like her grandfather, she would know every tree.
Gordon Brooks had an alibi. But so what? Just because work colleagues said he was at the office all day didn’t necessarily mean that he was. If he’d got wind of Hannah and Bradley’s relationship, he might have been driven to murder. But was he such an accomplished actor? Yesterday evening, he’d been genuinely shocked, angered, hurt and every other damn thing one might expect. Hadn’t he?
‘Yay!’ Grace burst into the room, completely abolishing Jill’s train of thought. ‘We’ve got John Barry!’
Kennedy 04 - The Broken Circle Page 23