Detectives Merry & Neal Books 1-3

by JANICE FROST

  Chapter 16

  Living in an isolated county such as Stromford had its advantages, but getting out of it quickly wasn’t one of them, Neal thought. He was standing on the platform at Harmsborough station having driven forty minutes along the A15 just to get to a station with a direct link to London.

  There were only a couple of trains a day that did not involve multiple changes and these never seemed to be at convenient times of the day. Catching the seven o’clock to King’s Cross had necessitated a five o’clock rise, and Neal was not at his most alert. Glancing at Ava making her way down the platform towards him with her trademark Costa coffees, Neal was irritated to see that his sergeant was looking as radiant as ever. Of course, she was an early riser. Years of getting up to train at the pool had conditioned her to jumping out of bed first thing in the morning. She wouldn’t have had time for a swim or a run today, but Neal was ready to bet she had done at least a hundred sit-ups before breakfast.

  He wasn’t the only one to notice her radiant good looks. Male and female heads alike turned as she walked past, and eyes lingered. And she wasn’t even looking her best, Neal noted, seeing the shadows under her eyes even from this distance.

  Ava’s glorious hair, usually pulled back when she was on duty, tumbled over her shoulders, making her look like a cover girl for a glossy magazine, and she was wearing more make-up than usual, although it did look as though it had been applied the night before, Neal thought. She was wearing her trademark Levi’s with brown Ugg boots and a brown suede jacket layered over a red cashmere jumper. As she approached him, Neal felt embarrassed, aware that he too had been staring at her in a manner that was not exactly neutral.

  “Here you go, boss. I got them to stick an extra shot in — you look like you need a caffeine boost this morning.” Neal muttered his thanks; he’d told Ava before that strong coffee gave him the jitters but she seemed to keep forgetting. He did not mention that she looked more in need of a caffeine boost than he did.

  They stood sipping their coffees, watching the early morning travellers walk up and down the stairs from the bridge connecting the station’s two main platforms. A skeletal woman with limp straggly hair bumped a wheeled suitcase down the steps, her coat billowing open to reveal a stretch of white thigh tattooed with numbers and symbols; a middle-aged man with a gut bulging over his trousers, who leered at Ava as she took a step backwards to let him pass; a group of schoolgirls dressed in old-fashioned plaid skirts and blue woollen blazers, the uniform of the town’s expensive private school. A cross section of a typical early morning commuter crowd. Was it because he was a police officer trained to observe and catalogue that Neal found himself scrutinising his fellow travellers so closely, making judgements and sorting into categories that were probably more stereotype than reality? A glance at Ava confirmed that she was doing the same. People-watching with a purpose, looking for the unusual detail, the small anomalies that might signify something significant. On guard and alert. They had both done their share of surveillance duties, and old habits die hard.

  The train was running ten minutes late, and when it arrived most of the carriages were half full.

  “We have reservations,” Neal said, unnecessarily, as they had already checked their tickets and positioned themselves at the appropriate place on the platform.

  “I’ve had a couple of bad experiences with trains,” Ava said, mysteriously, as she stepped aboard. Neal had already observed that their reserved seats were occupied.

  “These are our seats,” Ava pleasantly but firmly informed the two young lads who had settled into their seats.

  “So? We were here first. Go find yourself somewhere else to sit.”

  “I think not,” Ava answered, discreetly showing them her badge. Immediately their swaggering attitude disappeared.

  “We didn’t know you was coppers,” one of them said sullenly.

  “What difference does our being coppers make?” Ava retorted, but the lads didn’t wait around to reply. Instead of shifting into the two facing seats, they moved to another carriage, to Neal’s relief; he didn’t relish sitting opposite their sullen faces for the next couple of hours.

  “Subtly handled,” he congratulated Ava.

  “My pleasure, sir.” They couldn’t talk about the case with a potential audience all around, so Neal took out his Kindle and Ava her smartphone. Whenever he glanced down at her screen, Neal saw his sergeant engaged in a strange game that seemed to involve a huge catapult launching a succession of colourful birds at a pig. Must be the game Archie and Maggie were enthusing about last week, he concluded, Angry Pig, Angry Bird? Something like that.

  Archie often accused him of being out of the technological loop, but that was not the case. He merely didn’t see the point of a lot of the uses people put it to.

  Digital books were something that he could relate to and enjoy, although he did find himself still buying hard copies of books he had read and admired on his e-Reader. The device was, he had concluded, a convenient means of storing and transporting his reading material, but he still preferred to run his fingers along the spines of the volumes on his bookcase, the sense of touch stirring memories of the pleasures within.

  “What kind of ‘bad experiences’ have you had with trains, then?” he asked Ava after a while, when the clickety-clacking of the wheels were beginning to make him feel drowsy.

  “Flashers, mostly. When I was a student, travelling late in the evening. I remember one kid plonking himself down opposite me in an empty carriage, unzipping his trousers and just staring at me, terrified.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I suggested politely that he put it away and go to the next carriage. Which he did. I think of the two of us, he was the more embarrassed. He couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen.”

  “And you were what? Eighteen, nineteen? That would have been unsettling for some young women.” Ava shook her head.

  “He was just a kid, and it wasn’t my first experience of that sort of thing. The first time I was fourteen and the bastard was at least forty. That was unsettling. I didn’t even report it, I was so shocked and ashamed.”

  At that moment an elderly woman settled into the seat opposite them and Neal felt it inappropriate to continue with the conversation. He had noticed that Ava’s expression had hardened as she recalled the earlier incident, and wondered if there were more to it than flashing. He also knew that he should not ask, even at an appropriate time.

  The journey passed quickly. Neal became engrossed in his book as soon as the train picked up speed and hardly noticed even when they stopped at stations on the way. Ava put on some headphones and was soon tapping out a beat with her fingers.

  “Must be a good book,” Ava commented as they pulled into King’s Cross. Neal knew that his sergeant’s literary tastes did not match his own, and he simply agreed and left it at that. Archie’s mother had not been much of a reader either, nor had any of the women he had dated in recent years. Anna Foster was a book lover; he thought of how pleasant it would be to spend an evening in her company discussing their favourite books and authors.

  At King’s Cross station, Neal and Ava headed for the tube station. Neal had been on trips to London, mostly with Archie to visit museums or other attractions, but he didn’t know it well and truth be told, he was always glad to leave it behind. To him, Stromford was a city on a human scale, and it was possible to be in the countryside within ten minutes of leaving its centre. He wasn’t sure that he could cope with the size and scale of a larger city.

  Heading west on the tube, Neal tried to be surreptitious as he surveyed his fellow passengers. In crowded places like this, he was always hyper alert and he knew that Ava was too, just as they had both been on the platform in Harmsborough. If someone had asked him later how many passengers had been in his carriage, whether any of them had stood out, how many were male or female, black or white, he would have been able to answer with near one hundred per cent accuracy. Being observant was
hard-wired into his brain, a skill that he had no desire to switch off.

  * * *

  “You coppers?” the cabbie asked as Neal and Ava climbed into the back seat of a taxi, after Neal had given their destination as Wormwood Scrubs.

  “Or relatives of an inmate?” None of your business, Neal thought, not wanting to answer for fear of being drawn into conversation with their driver. Ava answered, and there followed an exchange of views on the British criminal justice system during which Neal and Ava were left in no doubt about the cabbie’s opinion of what should happen to terrorists, murderers and repeat offenders.

  Neal refrained from making any comment and, after a few more moments of enduring the man’s Draconian views, he began speaking to Ava in a low voice. The cabbie must have got the message because he slid the partition shut and tuned his radio to some kind of discussion programme, the sound of which was mostly muffled by the glass between them.

  “The Scrubs is a category B prison, isn’t it, sir?” Ava asked, though Neal suspected she already knew the answer. He nodded.

  “Bolan’s serving a life sentence. Model prisoner by all accounts. He’s always denied harming his baby daughter, but he had a rough time of it in the early days because he was regarded as a child killer. His young son, Simon, told some weird tale about his sister being rescued by an angel, and it was probably this that prompted Bolan to claim that Emily must have been abducted. There was a huge search, but the conclusion was that he had killed her and disposed of the body.”

  “Bolan claimed that Debbie Clarke was alive when he left her, didn’t he?” Ava asked, “And wasn’t it proven that she didn’t die for some time after Bolan left her?”

  “A couple of hours. By then, she’d taken a truckload of painkillers. Bolan’s lawyer tried to argue that she would have lived but for that. The autopsy was inconclusive, but Bolan eventually went down on both counts. He’s always argued that he was wrongly convicted, of course.”

  “The Jury must have been convinced,” Ava mused.

  “There was no doubt that he beat Debbie severely and left her for dead,” Neal said, adding, “whatever else he was guilty of.” He stared out of the window for a few moments.

  Looking back on his cases, he could say with utter conviction that he had been convinced of the guilt of everyone he had been responsible for bringing to justice over the years, but even so, the very thought that some innocent man or woman had been deprived of their freedom as a result of shoddy or dishonest detective work, or any other fault in the legal process, filled him with horror. He had to believe that the system would get it right; otherwise he would not be able to do his job at all.

  “If Simon does turn out to be Amy’s killer, you could call it bad genes,” Ava said. “Like father, like son.”

  Neal made a face that he hoped told Ava exactly what he thought of that observation.

  “Don’t look so disapproving, I wasn’t being serious. Simon was an abused child, wasn’t he? Could have sustained damage to his pre-frontal lobes through injury, or his emotional development might have been impaired by neglect. He could have grown up having a lack of empathy leading to behaviour patterns consistent with a sociopathic personality.”

  “You’ve been doing some reading,” Neal commented. A couple of weeks ago he’d told Ava about a book he’d been reading that suggested sociopaths and psychopaths should be regarded as damaged rather than inherently evil. It had made him uncomfortably aware of how easy it was to dismiss violent offenders as inhuman monsters.

  He and Ava had argued about the moral consequences of accepting such a supposition, and both had concluded that the only sensible way to deal with such offenders was to lock them up and throw away the key for the protection of others in society.

  “Simon has a loving mother now. You have to hope her influence would balance out his earlier neglect,” he said.

  “’Ere we go,” the cabbie called cheerfully when they reached their destination. “That’ll be ten quid. I expect you’ll want a receipt for that?” Neal paid him, adding a generous tip. “Say ’allo to my mate, ’arry Saunders while you’re in there,” the cabbie said, as they stopped, “doin’ three years for GBH. Always ’ad a temper on ’im ’arry did.”

  “Come on, let’s get this over with,” Neal said.

  * * *

  They had both been in prisons before, and one is very much like another in terms of internal arrangement and décor. Still, Neal was struck by the starkness of this one, the sense of oppression and confinement that pervaded its walls. Ava summed it up,

  “I always feel like I should take a breath when I enter these places, and not let it go until I leave.”

  The interview room was cold, ill-lit and depressing. Wade Bolan sat opposite them, a middle-aged man in good shape; evidently he spent a lot of his time in prison working out. He was a tall man, and defiant; even sitting down, he owned the room. Neal had to remind himself that it was he and Ava who would be walking out of the room and into the outside world when the interview was over.

  From the moment they entered the room, Bolan’s eyes were riveted on Ava. Neal had no doubt that his DS was used to being appraised by men, but there was nothing subtle about Bolan’s look, and his gaze lingered a long time on her breasts. To her credit, Ava remained unruffled. It was Neal who was annoyed.

  “I know you’ve been told why we’re here,” he began, “so let’s get to the point. We’re looking for your son, Simon. Has he been in contact with you?”

  “I don’t have a son,” Bolan answered, finally looking from Ava to Neal, “He was adopted years ago. Haven’t you done your research?” His mocking tone grated on Neal, and he did his best to ignore it.

  “My letters are opened, my phone calls are monitored, and I’m not even allowed to receive emails directly. You know all that. Why waste your time coming ’ere to ask what you already know?”

  “You and I both know that there are ways of getting around the system.” Neal said, patiently.

  “What’s he done then, my boy? He in some kind of trouble? Chip off the old block is he, eh, Sergeant?” Bolan said, winking at Ava, who smiled at him good-humouredly.

  Neal continued, “He’s gone missing. We need to question him in relation to a case we’re investigating.”

  “Why would ’e contact me? ’E don’t know me from Adam.”

  “You have contacts on the outside. Is he staying with any of them?” Bolan seemed amused by the question, leading Neal to suspect that he was genuinely surprised they thought Simon might have been in touch with him.

  “I told you already. I don’t ’ave a son. ’Ad one once. Weird little sod, ’e was. Clever, like ’is old man, only more so. I had a little gel too; don’t know what became of ’er neither. Tell you what though, ’er disappearing, that had nothing to do with me. Least you can’t accuse me of killing this Simon. Got the perfect alibi this time, ain’t I? I mean it’s not as if I can just nip out any time I like and bump someone off, is it now?” No hint of amusement now, only anger, and defiance. It seemed almost as if Bolan were challenging them to contradict him.

  “Simon isn’t dead, Mr Bolan. Not that we’re aware of and, like I said before, there are ways of getting around the system.”

  Bolan shook his head in evident disbelief, but there was no mistaking that his anger was rising, “You lot are incredible, you are. Trying to pin something else on me when I’m already banged up inside. It’s a fuckin’ outrage.”

  “No one’s accusing you of anything,” Neal said.

  “Like I said, ’e ain’t been touch an’ whatever ’e’s got himself involved in it’s got nothing to do with me,” Bolan repeated.

  With Bolan’s tone changing from mocking to aggressive, there seemed no point in persisting with the interview. Clearly, he was not going to cooperate.

  Neal and Ava followed another guard back down the corridor to the exit. “He doesn’t get many visitors,” he told them, “but the ones who do come are mostly regulars. Most of
them have done time themselves. A bad lot. Did have one non-regular a few months back. Young lad, not the one you’re looking for, though, doesn’t fit the description.” Neal thanked him. All in all, they seemed to have gained nothing from the visit.

  Ava exhaled exaggeratedly as they cleared the prison gates. Neal smiled. “Letting go?” he asked.

  * * *

  The train was cancelled. There had been an incident outside one of the stations on the main line, and long delays were expected.

  “Isn’t it always the way?” moaned a woman in the crowd of passengers all looking up at the electronic notice board.

  “Bloody inconvenient. It’s parents’ evening at Archie’s school. I haven’t a hope in hell of making it now. Maggie’ll have to step in as usual,” Neal said, sounding bitter.

  “I’m sorry. I know you don’t like letting him down.”

  Neal’s fingers moved furiously over his mobile as he texted his sister. Almost as soon as he had finished, the phone buzzed, and his face lightened considerably as he read Maggie’s text, “It’s been cancelled,” he announced, “at least three of the teachers at the school have come down with food poisoning. Come on, let’s have a drink.”

  They made their way through the press of disgruntled early afternoon commuters, most of whom seemed to be either texting or speaking on mobiles. The real trouble would start as the rush hour approached and hordes more people found themselves stranded or forced to make alternative arrangements for their journey home. Neal found himself sympathising with the station staff; they would no doubt bear the brunt of the frustrated commuters’ short tempers.

  In a bar a couple of streets away from the station, Ava connected to the free Wi-Fi to check the news on her smartphone, and review their travel options.

  “There’s been a derailment. Just a goods train and no one injured, but all trains to the north and northeast are cancelled until further notice,” she informed Neal.

  “Fucking hell,” he muttered into his beer. He rarely swore. It was the thought of the wasted time that bothered him most.