As nobody seems to be able to help us very much on that score, perhaps we’d better concentrate our efforts elsewhere.”
“We’ve told you all we can,” said Grace. “You should find more information in her files.”
“Maybe.” Annie looked at Mel, who seemed to have pulled herself together and was nibbling on a digestive biscuit. “We’ll need a description of this Mary as soon as possible. Someone might have seen her locally. Mel, do you think you could work with a police artist on this? I don’t know how quickly we can get someone here at such short notice, but we’ll do our best.”
“I think so,” said Mel. “I mean, I’ve never done it before, but I’ll have a try. But like I said, I never got a good look at her face.”
Annie gave her a reassuring smile. “The artist’s very good,” she said.
“Just do your best. He’ll help steer you in the right direction.” Annie stood up and said to Grace, “We’ll be sending some officers over to take statements from as many staff members and patients as possible.
DS Naylor will be picking up the files before we leave. I hope you’ll be cooperative.”
“Of course,” said Grace.
Annie remained in the conference room and ate a potted meat sandwich, washed down with a glass of water, until Tommy Naylor came in with the files, then they left together. “What do you think?”
she asked Naylor when they got outside.
“I think we’ve got our work cut out,” he said, waving a file folder about half an inch thick. “I’ve had a quick glance, and there’s not a lot here except medical mumbo jumbo, and we don’t even have a next of kin to go on.”
Annie sighed. “These things are sent to try us. See if you can get the artist orga nized, not that it’ll do much good, by the sound of things, and I’ll find out if DS McCullough and the SOCOs have anything for us.”
3
WINSOME WONDERED IF SHE WAS DOING THE RIGHT
thing as she parked outside the Faversham Hotel that afternoon. She had told Donna McCarthy that Geoff was at a meeting and unavailable over the telephone. Rather than try to reach him later, leave a message, or wait for him to come back to Swainshead, she said she would go to find him and break the news herself. Donna had been grateful and relieved that someone else was going to tell Geoff about his daughter. Winsome had tried his mobile and the hotel switchboard a couple more times on her way to Skipton, but with no luck.
The hotel lay just outside the town, not far from where the wild millstone grit of the Brontë moorland metamorphosed into the limestone hills and valleys of the Dales National Park. Winsome knew the area reasonably well, as she had been potholing with the club in the Malham area on several occasions, but she didn’t know the Faversham.
It resembled a big old manor house with a few additions tacked on. A stream ran by the back, and Winsome could hear it burbling over the rocks as she went in the front door. Very rustic and romantic, she thought, and not at all the sort of place for a convention of used- car salesmen.
She showed her warrant card at the front desk and explained that she needed to talk to Mr. Daniels. The receptionist rang the room, but got no answer. “He must be out,” she said.
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“What’s his room number?”
“I can’t—”
“This is police business,” Winsome said. “He forgot to bring his medicine, and without it he could die. Bad heart.” It was a quick improvisation, but the word “die” did the trick. You didn’t have to see Fawlty Towers to know what problems a dead body in a hotel room could cause.
“Oh my God,” said the receptionist. “He hasn’t been answering his phone all morning.” She called someone in from the back room to take over from her, then asked Winsome to follow her. They made their way in silence on the lift to the second f loor and along the corridor where trays of empty plates and cups sat outside doors.
Outside number 212 was a tray with an empty champagne bottle in a cooler—Veuve Clicquot, Winsome noticed, the ice long melted to water—and a couple of plates bearing the discarded translucent pink shells of several prawns. A “Do Not Disturb” sign hung on the door handle.
Winsome was immediately transported back to the time when she worked at the Holiday Inn outside Montego Bay, cleaning up after the American and European tourists. She had hardly been able to believe the state of some of the rooms, the things people left there, shamelessly, for a young impressionable girl, who went to church in her best frock and hat every Sunday, to clean up or throw away. Winsome remembered how Beryl had laughed the first time she held up a used condom and asked what it was. Winsome was only twelve. How could she be expected to know? And sometimes people had been in the rooms, doing things, though they hadn’t posted a sign. Two men once, one black and one white. Winsome shuddered at the memory. She had nothing against gays, but back then she had been young and ignorant and hadn’t even known that such things happened.
Winsome looked at the receptionist, who held the pass card, and nodded. Reluctantly, the receptionist stuck the card in the door, and when the light turned green, she pushed it open.
At first Winsome found it hard to make out what was what. The curtains were drawn, even though it was past midday; the air was stale and filled with the kind of smells only a long night’s intimacy imparts 5 4 P E T E R
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to an enclosed space. The receptionist took a step back in the doorway and Winsome turned on the light.
A man lay spread-eagled on the bed, tied to the frame by his ankles and hands with black silk scarves, wearing a thick gold chain around his neck, and nothing else. A woman in the throes of ecstasy squatted on his midparts, wearing a garter belt and black stockings, and when the light came on, she screamed and wrapped a blanket around herself.
“What the fuck’s going on?” the man yelled. “Who the fuck are you?”
The receptionist headed off down the corridor muttering, “I’ll leave this to you, then, shall I?”
“Police.” Winsome showed her warrant card. She didn’t think of herself as a prude, but the scene shocked her so much that she didn’t even want to look at Daniels lying there with his drooping manhood exposed. It also made her angry. Maybe Geoff Daniels couldn’t have known that his daughter was going to die a terrible death while he was playing sex games with his mistress, but she was damn well going to make him feel the guilt of it. She asked the woman her name.
“Martina,” she said. “Martina Redfern.” She was a thin pouty redhead, who looked about the same age as Hayley Daniels, but was probably closer to Donna McCarthy.
“Okay, Martina,” Winsome said. “Sit down. Let’s have a little chat.”
“What about me?” said Daniels from the bed. “Will someone fucking untie me and let me go?”
Martina looked toward him anxiously, but Winsome ignored him and took her aside. She knew she should break the bad news to Daniels, but how do you tell a naked man tied to a bed by his mistress that his daughter has been murdered? She needed time to take in the situation, and it wouldn’t do any harm to put a few dents in his dignity along the way. “Care to tell me about your eve ning?” she said to Martina.
“Why?” Martina asked. “What is it?”
“Tell me about your eve ning first.”
Martina sat in the armchair by the window. “We had dinner at The Swan, near Settle, then we went to a club in Keighley. After that we came back to the hotel, and we’ve been here ever since.”
“What club?”
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“The Governor’s.”
“Would they remember you? We can check, you know.”
“Probably the barman would,” she said. “Then there’s the taxi driver who brought us back here. And they’d remember us at The Swan, too.
They weren’t very busy. But what are we supposed to have done?”
Winsome was more interested in the time aft
er midnight, but any sort of an alibi for last night would be a help for Martina and Daniels.
It would take at least an hour to drive from Skipton to Eastvale. “What time did you get back here?” she asked.
“About three o’clock.”
“No wonder you needed a lie-in,” said Winsome. “Long past bed-time. And you were together all that time?”
Daniels cursed and thrashed around on the bed. “That was the whole point of the exercise,” he said. “And this is police brutality. Untie me right now, you fucking black bitch.”
Winsome felt herself f lush with anger and shame as she always did when someone insulted her that way. Then she calmed herself down, the way her mother had taught her.
“Can I get dressed now?” Martina asked, gesturing toward the bathroom.
Winsome nodded and looked at the naked man on the bed, the man who had just called her a black bitch. His daughter had been raped and murdered last night, and she had to tell him now. She couldn’t just leave him there and keep putting it off, much as she would like to.
Courses taught you only so much about dealing with unusual situations, and simulations even less. When it came right down to it, Winsome thought, there was no book to go by, only instinct. She wanted to hurt him, but she didn’t want to hurt him in the way she knew she was going to do. The image of Hayley Daniels lying there on the pile of leather like a fallen runner caused her breath to catch in her throat.
Winsome took a deep breath. “I’m very sorry I have to tell you this, Mr.
Daniels,” she said, “but I’m afraid it’s about your daughter.”
Daniels stopped struggling. “Hayley? What about her? What’s happened to her? Has there been an accident?”
“Sort of,” said Winsome. “I’m afraid she’s dead. It looks very much as if she was murdered.” There, it was said, the dreaded word that 5 6 P E T E R
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would change everything, and its weight filled the room and seemed to suck out all the air.
“Murdered?” Daniels shook his head. “But . . . she can’t be. It must be someone else.”
“I’m sorry, sir. There’s no mistake. She was carrying her driving license and an address book with her name in it.”
“Was she? . . . I mean, did he . . . ?”
“I’d rather not say anything else until we get back to Eastvale,”
Winsome said. “Your wife’s waiting for you there.”
Martina came out of the bathroom in time to hear this. She looked at Winsome. “Can I untie him now?” she asked.
Winsome nodded. Since she had told Daniels the news about Hayley, she had forgotten that he was still naked and tied to the bed. He seemed to have forgotten it, too. And somehow, humiliating Daniels didn’t matter anymore. She wasn’t a cruel person; she had simply wanted to quash his arrogance and hear an alibi from Martina before the two of them had time or reason to make anything up. In both these matters, she thought she had succeeded, but now she felt a little ashamed of herself.
Martina got to work on the scarves as Daniels just lay there, staring at the ceiling. Finally freed, he sat up and wrapped the bedsheet around himself and cried. Martina sat beside him, glum and f lushed. She tried to touch him, but he f linched. He had curly dark hair, a Kirk Douglas cleft in his chin and sideburns reaching the line of his jaw. Perhaps he was the kind of man some white women liked to mother, Winsome thought, but he did less than nothing for her. He looked up at her through his tears like a penitent schoolboy. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That remark I made earlier . . . it was uncalled for. I . . .”
“I’m sorry, too,” said Winsome, “but untying you wasn’t my first priority. I needed to know why you were lying to your wife and where you were last night.” She pulled up a chair and sat down. “I’ve been trying to reach you all morning.”
Daniels got to his feet and pulled on his underpants and trousers.
Then he put on a shirt and started tossing socks and underwear from the drawers into an overnight bag. “I must go,” he said. “I must get back to Donna.”
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“Donna?” said Martina. “What about me? You told me you were going to leave her and get a divorce. We were going to get married.”
“Don’t be stupid. Didn’t you hear? I’ve got to get back to her.”
“But Geoff . . . What about us?”
“I’ll ring you,” Daniels said. “Go home. I’ll ring you.”
“When?”
“When? When I’ve buried my bloody daughter! Now bugger off, won’t you, you stupid cow. I don’t think I can stand the sight of you anymore.”
Sobbing, Martina picked up her bag, not bothering to go and pick up her toiletries from the bathroom, or anything she may have put in the wardrobe, and headed for the door. Winsome headed her off. “I need your name, address and phone number,” she said.
Martina glared over at Daniels. “Ask him, why don’t you?” She edged forward.
Winsome stood her ground. “I want you to tell me.”
Martina paused, then gave Winsome the information. Next she opened the wardrobe and took out a three- quarter-length suede jacket.
“Mustn’t forget my birthday present,” she said to Daniels, then she was out of the door and off down the corridor.
Daniels stood with his grip in his hand. “All right,” he said. “What are we waiting for? Let’s go.”
Winsome looked at him, shook her head slowly and led the way out.
K A R E N D R E W ’ S body had been removed according to the coroner’s instructions, but the SOCOs were still clustered around the wheelchair at the cliff edge when Annie and Tommy Naylor got back after their visit to Mapston Hall.
The wind had died down a little, leaving a light tepid drizzle. The SOCOs had tented the area to protect it from the elements while they worked, collecting samples and bagging them for evidence. The surrounding area had been thoroughly searched in a grid pattern, yielding nothing of immediate interest, and no weapon had been found at the bottom of the cliff, or anywhere else. It could have drifted out to sea, or Mary, if she was the killer, could have taken it away with her.
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Somehow or other, Annie thought, the mysterious Mary had slipped away into the morning and disappeared. She could be anywhere by now: anonymous in the London crowds, on a train to Edinburgh or Bristol. Had the murder been premeditated? If so, the odds were that she had worked out an escape route. If not, then she was working off her wits. But a stranger doesn’t just walk into a care home, ask to take out a specific patient and then slit her throat. She had said she was a friend, and whether that was true or not, there had to be some connection between this Mary and Karen Drew. To have any hope of finding Mary, they first had to discover as much as they could about Karen and the people she had known before her accident. It was best not to assume too much yet. While there were no signs of a struggle, it was also possible that Mary wasn’t the killer but had been another victim.
What if Karen had been killed and Mary abducted, or killed and dumped in the sea, or somewhere else?
Annie cursed the lax security at the care home, but to be realistic about it, Grace Chaplin had been right. What, or whom, did their patients need protecting from? They were harmless, incapable of moving and, some of them, even of speaking. Why on earth would anyone want to kill one of them? That was what Annie and her team had to find out.
Annie noticed DS Liam McCullough, the crime scene coordinator, detach himself from the group of white-suited figures, and she called him over. They had met on several occasions before they started working together, as Liam was a close friend of the Western Area CSC, Stefan Nowak, which made for a less strained relationship, Annie found. SOCOs could be annoyingly possessive of their crime scenes, and tight-arsed about any information they gave out, but with Liam in charge, Annie’s job was just that little bit easier.
“Nearly fi
nished,” McCullough said, walking over to her, that lopsided grin on his face showing a mouthful of ill-fitting teeth.
“Find anything useful?”
“We won’t know what’s useful until later,” McCullough said.
“We think the killer might be a woman,” Annie told him. “At least it was a woman who took the victim out of Mapston Hall, so that’s the theory we’re working on at the moment.”
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“Thanks for letting me know. It doesn’t make much difference now, but it’s good to bear in mind.”
“I don’t suppose you found any footprints?”
Liam pulled a face. “In this grass?”
“Thought not. Fingerprints?”
“Plenty on the wheelchair. Don’t worry, we’ll be every bit as thorough as Western Area.”
“I have no doubt,” Annie said. “Any traces of a car parked in the vicinity?”
“None that we could find.”
“Okay,” said Annie. “I didn’t expect anything. We’ll have to send out a house-to-house team.” She looked around the bleak, windswept stretch of coast. “Not that there’s really anywhere for them to go.”
“We did find several hairs on the victim’s blanket,” McCullough said. “No doubt some belong to the staff at the care home, and perhaps some to other patients, but you never know, the killer’s might be among them.”
“The person who dealt with our suspect at Mapston said the woman’s hair was hidden under a hat.”
McCullough smiled. “Haven’t you ever noticed how hair gets just everywhere?”
“I expect you’re right,” said Annie, who had noticed a short black hair on her sleeve on her way there, as if she needed reminding about last night. “What about the marks on her ears and neck?”
McCullough pulled a face. “Seagulls,” he said. “Postmortem, thank God. That’s why there’s no blood.”
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