A Narrow Trajectory

by Faith Martin

  So why had Medcalfe’s thug been so confident about the outcome of the meeting? Because it was clear from his tone of voice that he was one very happy bunny. And yet, he could hardly kidnap Jake from such a public place and drive off with him, could he? Nor could he threaten him to transfer the money by wielding his favourite weapon – a knife – on a concourse full of people. All Jake would have to do is yell or make a run for it.

  So just how did Chivnor plan to keep up his end of the bargain, and get his money, all within sight of hundreds of commuters? That’s what they had been trying to figure out when Hillary had interrupted them.

  But when she’d been told about it, she hadn’t so much as turned a hair. Which meant … For a moment longer, Rollo Sale thought it over. Then he nodded.

  ‘She’s not surprised because she already has a fair idea of what Chivnor’s up to, right? She’s one step ahead of us, isn’t she?’

  Steven slowly smiled. Now he was getting it. ‘You’ll find that she usually is,’ he warned him simply.

  ‘But how? Does she know something we don’t?’ Rollo demanded sharply.

  But already Steven was shaking his head. ‘No. She doesn’t work that way. As I’ve already said, she doesn’t make grand plays or hold stuff back in order to pull the rabbit out of the hat and play the superstar. We’ve all seen and heard the same things that she has. All the information she has, is in her reports. We can read them any time we like.’

  ‘But she’s put the facts together and we haven’t?’

  Steven Crayle slowly grinned. ‘Welcome to CRT,’ he said mildly.

  Lucy Lockett was simply beautiful. The moment Hillary saw her, she wanted to stroke her velvet-like ears and coo into her deep brown eyes. And her handler, an eighteen-stone ex-miner with a totally bald head and tattoos ranging up his arms and neck that clearly showed his allegiance to Sheffield United Football Club, clearly felt the same way. For when she met them outside in the car park, the liver-and-white spaniel was sitting on his lap in the canine unit’s mobile van, and looking up at him adoringly.

  ‘Hello – you must be Barry?’ Hillary said, opening the other side of the van and climbing up into the passenger seat.

  ‘Yes, guv. You DI Greene?’

  Hillary grimaced. ‘As was. Just a civilian now … sergeant?’

  ‘Dawes, ma’am.’

  ‘Guv’s fine.’

  The dog handler grinned. Like everyone who’d worked at Kidlington for some time, he knew all about DI Greene. ‘My guv said you needed a favour. Off the books, like?’ He sounded vaguely curious, but not inclined to push it.

  ‘Yeah. Well, for now. It might get official later, depending on how things work out,’ she felt obliged to warn him. ‘Although it’s equally possible that I just might be adding up two and two and getting four, when all I should be getting is twenty-two.’

  ‘Don’t you just hate it when that happens?’ Dawes said deadpan.

  ‘So, who’s your companion? And can I take her home with me?’

  And that’s when she learned Lucy Lockett’s name, and fell under the spell of the canine’s big brown eyes.

  Dawes started the van and Lucy immediately jumped down into the space between the seats on the floor. Hillary was almost sure that the proper protocol was for her to be in the back, in a cage, in case of traffic accidents. But what the brass didn’t see, the brass couldn’t grieve over.

  ‘Where we going, guv?’

  ‘Just head for Cumnor Hill and I’ll give you directions from there,’ she directed.

  ‘Right.’

  As they set off, Hillary checked her notebook. The directions that Mike McIntyre had given her had sounded clear enough over the telephone line, but she was very much aware that she was looking for a semi-secret location nestled in the hill and woodland near a small village. And well off the beaten path. And not being a natural Davy Crockett type (she’d even been chucked out of the girl guides before she could do the orientation course) she could only hope that she’d find the place without looking like too much of a prat. Getting Barry, Lucy and herself lost could also probably be described as wasting police time. The desk sergeants alone would wet themselves laughing if that ever came out – the bastards – and would make her life a misery.

  As it happened, though, they found the spot with relative ease.

  It was a typically cold, wet, grey December day. Barry Dawes pulled the van discreetly off the road and a short distance down a farm track, where he could park it under the cover of some dripping ash trees. Looking out of the window, Hillary was glad that she’d chosen to don her warmest and most waterproof raincoat that morning.

  ‘There’s a selection of wellies in the back, guv,’ Barry informed her cheerfully, further improving her sense of wellbeing. ‘My guv’nor said that we were just going for a walk, that right? Just you and me, two private citizens, like. And I just happen to be exercising Lucy Lockett at the same time, yeah?’

  Hillary smiled. ‘That’s it.’ With budget cuts being what they were, Hillary knew that if she’d made this request official, forms would have had to be filled in and invoices paid out, and Steven would have had to OK it, and then deduct the cost of it from who knew where. And it would probably take forever to arrange. And after all that, it might well turn out to be for nothing.

  Which was why Hillary preferred to do it this way.

  Barry Dawes looked out at the grey lowering sky, the muddy ploughed fields, the dank, dripping trees and chill wind and grinned. ‘And why not? It’s a lovely day for a stroll in the park.’

  Hillary grunted. Wasn’t it just?

  As she slipped on a pair of wellies that were only just slightly too big for her, she re-read the directions in her notebook. With the van locked up, she made sure that the locally famous hill was to the north of her, then checked to see that the spinney Mike McIntyre insisted should now be in sight, was in fact on her right – as per the ecologist’s directions. As it was, she confidently pointed the way forward and they started walking towards the trees.

  Beside her, Barry strode along in an easy, amiable silence, whilst Lucy Lockett, tail wagging in ecstasy, darted about sniffing rabbit trails and other such delights. At the moment, the dog was clearly in her non-working mode, and if anybody had happened to be about, they might indeed have mistaken them for a man-and-wife couple, out walking the family pet.

  Only Hillary knew how far from the truth that was.

  ‘We going far, guv?’ Barry finally asked. ‘Not that I mind, but Lucy and me have to be back by four for a training session. We’re showing a Lab/Collie cross the ropes.’

  ‘No, not far. And luckily, it’s not a big area that needs covering, either. As a matter of fact, the site is of special scientific interest. In the summer, it’ll have Oxford zoology and ecology students crawling all over it. Otherwise, it should have been left pretty much undisturbed by the general public.’

  ‘Oh? Rare orchids?’

  ‘No. Bats,’ Hillary corrected.

  ‘Bats, huh?’ Barry said. And gave a quick look skywards.

  Hillary hid a grin. ‘Don’t worry. They hibernate in the winter.’

  Barry grinned back. ‘Did I look worried?’

  ‘Not much. It should be just up ahead, in this stand of trees. Apparently there’s an old ruined folly in there somewhere, where the bat colony is.’ Idly, she wondered what species Mike McIntyre had been studying. But he hadn’t said, and she had neglected to ask. Pipistrelles maybe?

  Learning the ins and outs about Michael McIntyre’s project hadn’t been a high priority for her. Instead, she’d asked him if he’d been one of the many students to study Wytham Woods, and he’d confirmed that he had been. Oxford University students were known for their research in that area. Then she’d asked him if he’d ever taken Kyle Karastrides there. But he hadn’t. And from what he’d said, the woods were so well studied, nobody would go there who sought privacy anyway.

  He had, however, taken Kyle with him one night on one of
his other projects, to study the bats. And when he’d gone into more detail, it had been all that Hillary had needed to know.

  Now as they paused on the outskirts of the small, slightly boggy stand of trees in the middle of a vast ploughed field, Hillary watched the rooks and crows circling around, cawing morosely, and shivered slightly.

  It was a desolate, bleak spot.

  ‘In here, is it?’ Barry asked prosaically.

  ‘Yes.’

  She watched, fascinated, as Barry whistled his spaniel over, and gave the cadaver dog her instructions. The spaniel instantly became both alert and excited, and watched Barry intensely. When he gave the signal, the dog entered the woods and they quickly followed.

  ‘So, how’s Sheffield doing this season?’ Hillary asked, as they stepped into the darker, danker gloom of the stand of trees.

  ‘Oh, don’t get me started,’ Barry snorted, watching Lucy carefully as she began ranging around the ground competently. She seemed to be quartering the area in a haphazard, but thorough way. ‘I went up last weekend and should have stayed at home.’

  Hillary commiserated. And, following Lucy’s lead, they moved on to the next area of trees. Hillary, glad of the wellies in the oozing mud underfoot, listened to a blow-by-blow of the football match, and let her thoughts wander.

  Was she wasting her time here? Had she read Kyle Karastrides all wrong? It wasn’t exactly common, in a murder case, to meet a witness, peg him as your prime suspect right away, and then discover the missing victim’s body all on the same day. But stranger things had happened.

  And you had to follow your gut instinct.

  But there was still Lydia’s stepfather hovering around on the fringes of the case to consider. And in many ways, he was also a classic suspect, and she might well end up with …

  ‘Guv?’

  Hillary snapped her attention back to Barry. ‘Sorry?’

  For answer Barry merely nodded his head in the direction of his dog. Lucy Lockett was sitting down near a large fallen beech tree, her tongue lolling happily. She was watching her handler with the same adoring look as before.

  And for a second or two, Hillary didn’t understand what she was supposed to be looking at.

  And then she did.

  Most members of the public, if asked, would say that they thought a dog trained to sniff out drugs or – in Lucy’s case, a dead body – would find what they were looking for and then bark to attract their handler’s attention. Or maybe, if it was a pointer, to do that nose-straight-back-to-tail pointing manoeuvre so indicative of the species.

  But Hillary knew that a lot of dogs, when they’d found what they’d been sent to look for, simply sat down on the spot and waited quietly.

  Like Lucy now sat and waited.

  And for a moment, Hillary felt a totally human sense of triumph. Yes! She’d been right all along. It paid to be brave and take chances now and then. And to be vindicated was a definite relief.

  And then, the next second her heart fell, as she realized the full import of what she was seeing. And she said quietly, ‘Oh, hell.’

  Beside her, Barry reached into his overcoat and drew out a squeaky toy. ‘Do you know who it is?’ he asked quietly.

  Hillary nodded bleakly.

  Of course, Lucy could have found somebody else’s buried body. And until the forensics people and pathologists were able to confirm it, she wouldn’t know for sure. But given the circumstances, it had to be Lydia.

  ‘And soon I’m going to have to tell a very nice lady just why her daughter didn’t come home for Christmas dinner all those years ago,’ she said flatly.

  Barry Dawes sighed, then called his dog over and began to play with her with the squeaky toy. Hillary didn’t object to this seemingly irreverent activity. She knew that playing with the toy was Lucy’s reward for doing her job and a vital part of her training.

  So as the man and his adoring canine cavorted under the dripping trees, Hillary moved away and pulled out her mobile phone.

  It was time to make this official.

  Over the line, she heard Steven’s voice and smiled. ‘Hey, it’s me,’ she began somewhat wearily, then began to fill him in on where she was and what she needed.

  Soon, she knew, the place would be swarming with white-suited men and women whose job it was to attend the dead and catalogue the evidence, and a large tent would be erected over the spot where Lydia Clare Allen had lain all these years. There would be forms to fill in (and in the case of the cadaver dog, judiciously backdated), forensic teams to direct, and uniforms to organize in a – by now – almost certainly pointless fingertip search.

  And tomorrow was an early start.

  And to cap it all, it started to rain in earnest – a cold, steady, persistent dripping of water that inevitably found its way down the back of her neck.

  As Hillary Greene waited patiently for the others to arrive, she watched the big man play with his happy, lovely and loving dog. The squeaks of the rubber toy sounded incongruous in the dark woods as Hillary took a stick and put it in the ground, marking the spot where a young, murdered girl now lay. And as she did so, it suddenly flashed through her head that, somewhere within this scenario, there must surely be a deep and very significant philosophical truth to be learned about the state of the human condition.

  It was just such a pity that she was too damned dim to figure out what it was.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Wendy was the first person Hillary saw when she finally got back to HQ. It was now fully dark, and when she’d left the woods, the forensics team had erected lights to help them continue digging. They had found human remains before the light had faded, but the pathologist on site was being slow and thorough, and he had made no predictions about when they might expect to start getting solid answers.

  But he had deigned to make a preliminary report, and the bones were probably that of a female in her mid to late twenties and with nearly all her teeth in place, getting a DNA match would be possible.

  Which was enough for Hillary to be going on with.

  She was on her way to Steven’s office to update him and Rollo, when Wendy met her in the car park. ‘Is it true? You found a body?’ Her first words were rushed and excited.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it Rebecca Tyde-Harris?’

  Under the orange glow of a street light, Hillary sighed wearily. ‘Sorry, Wendy, but I don’t think it is. I think it’s Lydia Allen.’

  The young goth’s shoulders slumped. ‘Of course. She’s one of your cases, isn’t she? If Rebecca had been assigned to you, instead of me and Jimmy, you’d have found her by now.’

  Hillary put a gentle hand on the girl’s shoulders. ‘First of all, don’t be so sure. Not every case gets solved, you know, no matter how hard you work on it. And there’s not a copper around who isn’t haunted by a sense of failure over some poor victim who never got justice.’

  Wendy grimaced.

  ‘Second of all, don’t do yourself and Jimmy down – you’re doing your best. And thirdly, Jimmy told me how tough the interview was with Rebecca’s family. And it’s only human that you should want to help Rebecca’s mother to get closure. But you can’t take the responsibility for the whole world on your shoulders. Nobody can. And believe me, it won’t do anyone any good to try. Not you, not Rebecca – wherever she is, nor Mrs Tyde-Harris, either.’

  Wendy nodded glumly. ‘I know. I just wish we could tell Rebecca’s mum and dad that we’d found her. You know?’

  ‘I do,’ Hillary said, withdrawing her hand.

  ‘So how do you cope, guv?’ Wendy asked disconsolately. ‘About the ones that got away?’

  Hillary smiled grimly. ‘Who says you do?’ she asked, then shrugged. ‘You never give up, basically,’ she said softly. ‘I’ve known old coppers, retired for years, who still investigate, off and on, the ones that nag at them. And sometimes, you just have to pass the baton on to your colleagues,’ she added. ‘And trust that, somewhere down the line, someone else might stumb
le onto something that you missed.’

  And then, thinking about Sasha Yoo’s reaction when she’d mentioned Rebecca’s name, she gave a small, grim smile. ‘But don’t give up on finding Rebecca just yet,’ she advised her. It wasn’t over yet, not by a long shot. Now that Sasha Yoo was on their radar, she wouldn’t be at all surprised if Steven’s new team, at some point in the not too distant future, succeeded where the CRT had so far failed.

  ‘But me and Jimmy haven’t a clue, literally,’ Wendy said bitterly. ‘Nobody’s talking. It’s so sad, guv. These girls get caught up in stuff, and get sucked down, and there’s often nobody to help them climb out. If they’ve been in care, they have no family, and their friends either don’t understand the life, or are in it themselves, or are too scared of the likes of Medcalfe to do anything to help them,’ she carried on heatedly.

  Hillary nodded. ‘Sounds to me like they could all do with a good social worker,’ she said casually. ‘Look, I’ve got to report in to Steven. See you tomorrow, OK? It’ll probably be late in the day, though,’ she added, mindful of their appointment in Bristol.

  ‘OK, guv,’ Wendy said absently.

  As Hillary walked away, she tossed the young girl a quick glance, pleased to see that she was looking thoughtful. Good. Perhaps that comment about the need for good social workers would sink in.

  It must have been her night for accidental meetings, because as she pushed her way through the lobby and headed down the steps into the basement of the building, she met Jimmy Jessop coming up. He was holding on to the railing with a strong hand, and wincing with every step he took.