by John Harvey
Even then she’d had to make the first move. Smoky brightness in her eyes, taste of cherries on her tongue. ‘Wine, Frank?’ she said now. ‘There’s red if you’d prefer.’
‘Later, maybe.’
‘As you wish.’
There were new paintings on the walls, abstracts of a kind, yellows and greens. Blurry and vague.
Joanne set aside her glass to light a cigarette. ‘There isn’t any news?’
Elder shook his head. ‘Of Keach? Not so far. A couple of sightings, but nothing definite. Nothing that’s checked out.’
‘You think he’ll be found?’
‘Sooner or later, yes.’
‘And that’s why you’re here? To help with the search?’
He shrugged. ‘Not a great deal I can do. Man in charge, Sherbourne, seems to have it all pretty much in hand.’
‘And it was what? Just through some accident that he escaped? That’s what it said.’
‘Seems that way, yes.’
They sat at either end of a low settee, facing out towards a window that ran practically the whole width of the room; silvered lanterns on the stone patio outside, the garden beyond.
‘So,’ Elder said, ‘you’re living here all on your own?’
‘Usually. Not always.’
‘And now?’
A slow shake of the head. No make-up, no matter how expertly applied, could conceal the darkness hollowed beneath her eyes.
‘Kate knows?’ she asked. ‘About Keach?’
‘Yes. I spoke to one of her flatmates earlier. She’s taken it pretty badly. You can imagine. Coming on top of everything else. Couldn’t be at a worse time.’
‘But she’s not in any kind of danger?’
‘From Keach? No, I don’t think so. I don’t see how. What he’ll be doing, concentrating on keeping out of sight, making sure he doesn’t get caught.’
Joanne drained her glass, got to her feet. ‘Sure you won’t join me?’
‘Okay, then. Maybe just one.’
She came back with a bottle of Côtes-du-Rhône and an empty glass. Lit another cigarette.
‘I told you they had Kate in for questioning,’ Elder said. ‘About Winter’s murder.’
‘I still don’t really understand what for.’
‘Nothing much, as far as I could tell. Clutching at straws.’
‘They don’t have a … what do you call it? That television programme … a prime suspect?’
‘If they do, they’re keeping it to themselves. But I told them, if they want to question Kate again I want to be there.’
‘Can you do that? Insist, I mean?’
‘Her state of mind, yes. Now especially.’
‘Poor girl.’ Joanne lowered her head. ‘It’s the last thing she needs. Now especially. Just when she seems to be getting over what happened. Injuring herself the way she did.’
Elder went to the window. The garden was slowly fading into shadow, lights coming on at windows circling down the hill: other people’s lives. How many families did he know who were truly happy and for how long? How many children? What was it the poet had said? They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
He turned back into the room. ‘That business with Winter. Kate getting involved with him the way she did. Did you know about that? When it was happening, I mean?’
‘Not really, no. Not at first, anyway.’
‘Then you did know something?’
‘I knew they were in some kind of relationship, yes.’
‘And you didn’t say anything?’
‘Say anything, what d’you mean? She’s not a child, Frank. She’s twenty-three, almost twenty-four.’
‘And he was what? Fifty-something? Jesus! That’s almost as old as me.’
‘Yes, Frank. Exactly.’
‘Exactly? What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘It means you don’t have to be a psychiatrist to see that’s part of the problem, right there.’
Elder laughed, bitter and loud, a bark. ‘All of a sudden you’re Sigmund bloody Freud?’
‘It’s not funny, Frank.’
‘I know it’s not funny. Fucking ridiculous, that’s what it is.’
‘Not so ridiculous, either.’
‘You’re not serious?’
‘Think about it, Frank … How old was she when you disappeared?’
‘I didn’t disappear.’
‘As good as.’
‘There wasn’t a lot of point in my sticking around here, you’d made that plain enough.’
‘You could have stayed for her.’
‘What? And slept downstairs on the sofa while lover boy was shtupping you upstairs in our bed?’
‘If you’d really wanted to, if you’d thought it was important enough, you could have found a way. Instead of which, what? You go slinking off to bloody Cornwall feeling sorry for yourself. Licking your so-called wounds.’
‘You didn’t leave me a lot of choice.’
‘That’s bollocks, Frank, and you know it. You’d been looking for a reason to get away ever since we got here. The minute we arrived.’
‘The place, maybe. But not away from you. Not away from Kate.’
‘Well, weren’t you lucky? I gave you the perfect excuse.’
‘Fuck this!’ Elder said and hurled his glass to the floor. ‘Fuck this and fuck you!’
He grabbed his coat and strode away, slammed the door behind him. When he looked back up at the house from the street he could see her outline, silhouetted against the picture window. The next time he looked she was no longer there.
As he turned left on to Castle Boulevard, the phone buzzed in his pocket.
‘One confirmed sighting,’ Sherbourne said, ‘Blyth services late this afternoon. Threatened some young bloke in the Gents with a knife …’
‘A knife? Where did he get …?’
‘Like I say, threatened him with a knife. Forced him to go to the ATM and take out a couple of hundred quid. Made off with his credit card and pin number and the keys to his car. Honda Civic, metallic blue. Alert’s gone out, registration, full description. Likely find it dumped, swapped for something else.’
‘You don’t know which direction he went off in?’
‘What I’ve told you aside, we know fuck all. But I’ll keep in touch.’
‘Okay, Colin. Thanks.’
Elder hunched his shoulders and, hands in pockets, headed back to his hotel. He’d phone Katherine from his room, hope that she was up to talking.
32
Elder had slept badly: the same obscene, obdurate dreams. He’d spoken to Katherine last thing and done his best to reassure her that, though he understood her being upset, disturbed, she had nothing to worry about where Keach was concerned; he was the subject of a full-scale manhunt and would soon be back in captivity where he belonged.
The truth, he knew after attending that morning’s briefing, was a little different.
There had been several other reported sightings – Sheffield, Doncaster, Leeds – one malicious, two well-meaning, all false. The young man, a trainee supermarket manager, whose car and credit card Keach had stolen at Blyth services, had recouped some of his losses by selling his story – Terror at Knifepoint – to the Sun. The card itself had been used twice more before the account had been closed.
The surviving passenger from the Ford Mondeo that had caused the accident had turned out to be a seventeen-year-old apprentice welder with an appetite for LSD and cans of Special Brew. The driver had been his cousin. Neither of them had as much as heard of Adam Keach; there was no connection. Accidental meant accidental. One of the prison officers involved had been patched up and released home, the other was still in hospital awaiting the results of an MRI.
When, on Monday morning, two uniformed officers and a detective called at the small terraced house in Kirkby where Keach’s parents lived, the father refused to open the door and would only answer questions through the letter box. Upstairs and down, curtains were pulled tightly across.
‘I’d like to believe you,’ the detective said, ‘but we’re going to have to check for ourselves just the same.’
From somewhere inside, they could hear the yapping of a small dog.
Only when they threatened to take the door off its hinges was it reluctantly opened. Keach’s father, close on seventy, seemed to be shrinking early into the shell of his own body, white-haired and bent at the waist, with trembling hands. Old before his time. His wife sat in a wheelchair behind him, head to one side. The interior smelt of stale cigarette smoke, damp clothes and slow decay. There were neat piles of dog faeces, hard and round like rabbit droppings, on the kitchen floor and here and there on the stairs.
When the animal, a brown-and-white terrier with yellow teeth, jumped up at the detective, he batted it away with back of his hand and then, with a well-placed kick, sent it whimpering into the corner.
Pigeons were roosting in the loft space above the head of the stairs.
Of Adam Keach there was no sign.
‘If you do hear from him,’ the detective said, handing Keach senior his card, ‘you’d do well to get in touch.’
The old man didn’t wait till the detective was out of sight before tearing the card into pieces with his shaking fingers and letting them fall to the floor.
Adam Keach’s brother, Mark, lived with his wife and family in a terraced house in St Ann’s, close to Victoria Park. One of their sons had left home some few years back and now lived across the city between Radford and Hyson Green with a young family of his own. The other son, Lee, still lived at home. Their daughter, Sophie, had been born with learning difficulties and lived nearby in supervised accommodation.
Now in his early forties, the longest Mark had held a steady job was the two years he had spent behind the counter at a newsagent’s in the city centre; that aside, he had drawn benefit when he could and taken on whatever casual work, most often cash in hand, came his way. Petty theiving when still in his twenties had first brought him to the notice of the police and when, later, some mates from the pub had roped him into joining them in a spate of house burglaries in Mapperley Park, he’d got caught literally holding the ladder. For this he’d served six months of a twelve-month sentence and, when released, done a further six months’ community service.
His wife, Amy, who worked five days a week at Argos and had done for the past fifteen years, told him if he was caught as much as taking the tram without a ticket, she’d have his things out on the street by suppertime and the locks changed.
He didn’t doubt she meant it.
When DS Simone Clarke and DC Billy Lavery called at the house that morning, it was Amy who answered the door. Her day off.
She was short, stocky, round face, mousy hair, wearing a sweatshirt and trackie bottoms.
‘Thought you lot’d be here crack o’ dawn wavin’ bloody guns an’ that. How you do it these days, i’n’ it?’
‘Been watching too much telly,’ Billy Lavery said.
‘Fuck off.’
‘Look round first, like?’
‘Wipe your feet and mind your manners, then. But he’s never here, you know that, don’t you? Likes of what he did, them poor girls, not give him house room for a minute.’
‘How about your husband?’ Simone Clarke asked. ‘He feel the same?’
‘He feels whatever way I fuckin’ tell him and don’t you doubt it.’
Simone didn’t doubt it for a moment.
Amy Keach stood back and nodded them in. Lee was seated at the kitchen table with a mug of tea.
‘Not set eyes on your uncle lately?’ Billy Lavery said.
‘Which one?’
‘You tell me.’
‘Me Uncle Dean, saw him Sat’day afore last. Skyped us from Australia, didn’t he? Brisbane somewhere. Mind you, picture were terrible. Breaking up all bloody time. Bufferin’. Broadband round here, bloody bollocks.’
‘How about Uncle Adam?’
‘He’ll not come round here.’ Said with a vigorous shake of the head.
‘How come? Him and your dad, they not that close?’
‘Never mind me dad. Me mum’d set about him wi’ a pan or two. Part his hair for him proper, no mistake.’
Simone had left them to it, started up the stairs. Halfway she hesitated, hearing a noise, a movement in one of the upstairs rooms, but it was only a cat, a large tabby, big eyes, tail bushed out, looking at her disdainfully before darting past.
The rooms were empty and the beds were made. Air freshener in the bathroom, the toilet.
‘You keep it nice,’ Simone said.
‘And if I thought you were patronising me …’
‘I’m not. Just with men around it’s not always easy. My feller stays over more than a night or two and it’s bedlam.’
Amy winked. ‘Dare say he’s got his compensations.’
Simone grinned back. ‘Mark not around?’
‘Working. Pal of his, got this white van. Man and van, you know. Removals, the like. No job too small. Brendan, that’s his name. Time to time, Mark lends him a hand. Makes me laugh, though, Brendan, white-van man. Black as the ace of spades. Make you look like one of them lattes, no offence intended.’
‘None taken. You’ve no idea when he might be back, I suppose?’
‘Hour or so, maybe. Difficult to say.’
‘Nor where they’re working?’
‘Wollaton way I think I heard him say. But, look, phone him, why don’t you? On his mobile.’
Simone put the number into her phone.
She spoke to him when they were outside, gave the address to Lavery. ‘You go see him, why don’t you? I’ll get back to the station. Anything doesn’t sound right, you can invite him in. Call for backup if need be.’
‘Why don’t you come with me?’
Simone lowered her voice. ‘This Brendan, if he’s who I think he is, I went out with him once. A few times, actually. Might be a little awkward.’
‘That’s always supposing he remembers who you are,’ Lavery said and laughed.
Simone feinted to hit him below the belt and when he flinched, clipped him round the side of the head instead, not hard but hard enough.
‘Less cheek from you, mister. Unless you want me to pull rank on you.’
‘Pull what?’
‘Rank.’
‘I thought …’
‘Wollaton. Now. Go.’
‘Yes, Sarge.’
‘And take that smirk off your face.’
‘Yes, Sarge.’
For the life of her she couldn’t remember much about Brendan aside from his name and the way the bedside light had shone off his skin.
They were carrying boxes, box after box of books out to the van; a professor of history at the university retiring to a cottage on the Dorset coast and resigning his life’s work into storage. Just a few first editions travelling with him, not history, but his other passion, the golden age of detective fiction. Margery Allingham. Michael Innes. Freeman Wills Crofts.
Billy Lavery took Mark Keach aside.
Asked the same few questions again and again.
‘How many more times have I got to tell you,’ Keach told him. ‘I’ve not clapped eyes on Adam since I visited him in Gartree when he was on remand. Now is it okay if I get on with the job?’
Lavery arrived back just as a report was coming in that Shane Donald had been tracked down to a house in Worksop, the north of the county. Close both to where the accident had occured allowing Adam Keach to escape, and to the last location he’d been definitely seen.
33
‘How far off’s Letchworth Garden City?’ Hadley asked that morning, pulling on her coat, ready to leave.
Rachel glanced up from where she sat reading the paper. ‘Forty, fifty years.’
Alice drove.
After threatening the usual rain, the sky ligh
tened the closer they came. Their route took them off the A1 and past the Spirella Building, a former state-of-the-art corset factory, recently restored to its former glory. Friends of Rachel’s had chosen to celebrate their tenth anniversary there, taking advantage of the ballroom’s sprung maple floor to demonstrate their best Fred-and-Ginger.
They parked and walked past a row of neat Arts and Crafts cottages with generous, well-tended front gardens.
‘It wouldn’t be so bad, living out here,’ Alice remarked.
‘You could be dead for six months before you noticed you’d stopped breathing.’
‘You might think differently, ma’am,’ Alice said, ‘if you were living in a flat share behind Finsbury Park bus station.’
‘Cheeky.’
Alice blushed.
There were roses, literally, around the door of number 17.
Hadley pressed the bell. Knocked. Pressed again.
After several minutes the door was opened by a woman in her late forties wearing a purple tunic over black leggings, a dark headband holding back a spring of reddish hair. A streak of vermilion on her right cheek.
‘Susannah Fielding?’
‘Guilty.’
The officers showed their identification. ‘I’m Detective Chief Inspector Alex Hadley and this is Detective Constable Alice Atkins.’
Susannah Fielding smiled. ‘The distaff side of the force, is it? Sensitivity a speciality.’
‘Alice here tackles like a front-row forward and swears like a drunken soldier.’
Alice blushed again.
‘You’d better come in. And please accept my apologies for keeping you waiting. When I’m working at the back of the house I don’t always hear the bell.’
They followed her along a short corridor, one side of the wall busy with small framed paintings, into a compact kitchen-diner and from there into the rear garden.
‘I thought we could sit out here. It’s just about warm enough, I think. If you take a pew I’ll hustle up some tea. Unless you’d prefer coffee, that is?’
They sat on wrought-iron chairs in a kind of arbour midway down the garden. At the far end the doors were open to the double-width shed that served as a studio.
‘There are muffins as well,’ Susannah said, reappearing with a laden tray. ‘Apple and pecan. Fresh this morning. When the work’s not going well I run off to the kitchen and bake by way of compensation. It’s a wonder I’m not twice the size I am.’