by Anita Waller
Luke warned both Kat and Mouse of an imminent meeting, and fifteen minutes later they each had a coffee and a cupcake. Kat had spent the morning putting finishing touches to a difficult sermon she needed to deliver the following Sunday, so she listened to what the other two had to say, having nothing of her own to contribute.
Doris began. ‘The first thing I need to say is that Ethan King needs to up his security on his personal home set-up. That’s where I began to look for his properties, half expecting them to be part of KingPress, but they’re not. They’re definitely on his home system, which is pretty sophisticated, I must admit, but I got in.’
‘Easily?’ Mouse asked.
Doris shrugged. ‘So-so. Once I was in, it was simple to navigate. He actually has twenty-six properties, although only twenty-five are listed on the website. Of those, twenty are holiday lets. You can click on any of these for the details and ways to book. The other five are permanent lets. Four are tenanted, one is available as a long-term let. They’re scattered around one small area.’
‘And the twenty-sixth?’ Kat asked.
‘Exactly. The twenty-sixth. At the moment I can’t find it. It’s listed, but without a location attached to it, and it says it’s tenanted. It seems Ethan King complies with the law regarding his taxes, but has to hide something with this one. Let’s hope the thing he’s hiding is Adam Armstrong.’
‘We need to go and talk to him?’ Mouse asked, a frown etched into her brow.
‘No.’ Doris was quick to answer. ‘That’s the last thing we need to do. One thing said out of place and Adam will disappear, if he is the one in the mystery house or flat.’
‘So what do you propose?’ Kat was intrigued.
‘Give me time. As long as we don’t alert Adam and Ethan to any activity, we’re okay. I can go deeper to find this, but I have to be careful where I’m going. It may take a couple of days, but if we get what we want, and I’m still stressing the if bit, we’ll put surveillance on the house, see who comes and goes. If we’re on the right track with this, and the tingles in my fingers tell me we are, we may have to talk to Tessa. No, we will have to talk to Tessa. I imagine when Adam and Daniel went missing, the police removed items from the house that had their DNA on them. If we can get something of Adam’s, we can pass it on for testing. His physical appearance could have changed dramatically, but he can’t change his DNA. We can’t approach anyone before we have proof and the police have been called in, because he will run. I’m sure of it. He’s kept Danny safe for all these years, he’s not going to put him in harm’s way again.’
‘Get any sleep last night, Nan?’ Mouse asked quietly.
Doris grinned at her granddaughter. ‘I put something on to run for half an hour, then closed it down. I read, watched the news and went to bed. Now stop nagging. Oh, and I had the other half of that box of Ferrero Rochers. I’ve run out now,’ she added, lowering her glasses and staring over the top of them at Kat and Mouse.
‘Now you’re a partner they no longer form part of your consultant fee.’ Kat tried to keep her face straight as she answered Doris.
For possibly the first time in her life, Doris didn’t have a response.
It was a busy day for everyone in the cases connected to Nicola Armstrong. Olivia Fletcher’s Mini had been seen on CCTV travelling both ways between Bakewell and Baslow with the precious half bottle of whisky on the return journey. The statement by the shop owner at the convenience store had been signed, and results were coming back from extended tests on the two bodies.
Neither woman had been sexually assaulted, although Tessa had guessed that. Undisturbed clothing was a pretty big clue. This case had never been about sex, it was all about Nicola Armstrong. What nobody could get a handle on was the reason for Nicola’s death.
Her anger issues were well documented, but who would be so pissed off with her brutality that they would follow her steps towards Chatsworth, then kill her? Paula Ireland, the cheated wife? She hadn’t even known her husband was seeing Nicola; that much had been clear when Tessa and Hannah had dropped the bombshell. She hadn’t liked Nicola, that had been obvious, but that had been more about the enforced tramping over the hills of Derbyshire looking for two people that everyone knew would have left the area on the day they went missing.
Tessa pulled the printout of the autopsy results towards her. No perpetrator DNA apparent on either body, same rope, line, used for the ligature, with cut ends that matched with precision, and the rope could have been bought at any hardware store in the county, so generic was it. Both women had been hit over the head primarily, although this wasn’t what had killed them. The rope had done that. The blow to Nicola’s head hadn’t been as severe as the one to Olivia’s, but with the amount of alcohol inside Nicola, the effect would have been the same.
Tessa pushed back her hair, and felt the fringe flop back on to her forehead. She reached into her bag and took out the paracetamol, popped two out and swallowed them with the dregs of the now-cold tea. Although feeling much better in stretches of four hours, her body told her to take medication to get her through the next four. And she desperately hoped the tablets would eventually give her a voice that people could hear and understand.
‘Hannah!’
‘Boss?’
‘Let’s go to the Armstrong house. I know it’s been gone over by forensics, but we haven’t been back. Let’s go and see how Nicola lived, see if there’s anything at all that’s been missed. We might get more of a feel for her, and her lifestyle.’
Hannah was putting on her jacket while Tessa was speaking. ‘Come on, I’m driving.’
It briefly occurred to Tessa that they could have walked; Nicola did on that last night of her life.
They parked the car outside the house and walked up the path. There were brave signs of spring in the daffodil leaves pushing through the soil, and little blue plants that Tessa thought were rather pretty, despite her having no idea what they were.
Entering the house this time was different. Last time the heating had been on, thanks to Nicola having left it on before venturing out for that last walk that she fully expected to return from, frozen and needing warmth. Now it felt bitterly cold.
‘Where do we start?’ Hannah murmured, almost to herself. She ventured into the kitchen and Tessa entered the lounge.
Fifteen minutes had passed before they met up in the dining room. They looked at the books.
‘Wow.’ Tessa’s poorly voice managed to deliver the one word that spoke volumes.
‘Look at these,’ Hannah said, awe evident in her voice. ‘She has complete series of crime authors – all the Sue Graftons, the Patricia Cornwells, the Ian Rankin novels, the Henning Mankells, dozens of J D Robbs – this woman was a serious crime reader. And that side of the room is taken up with real crime. She would have been, in her own way, an expert criminologist. So… did her husband and Daniel leave her voluntarily, or was it something more sinister that everybody discounted? Tessa, we need to look at this differently, don’t we?’
‘We certainly do. Ring for SOCOs to come back. I want comprehensive photos of every shelf, every book in this room. Particularly the true crime ones. Let’s see how her heroes disposed of the dead bodies they were left with.’
21
Doris pulled the map of Norfolk towards her and picked up the thick black marker pen. Sometimes, she reflected, you just needed pen and paper.
The list of properties was also printed on to paper; she wanted to be able to rule them in or out, again with the thick black marker pen. She had the printout on her left, the map on her right, and her brain somewhere in between. She had twenty-five addresses that she wanted to dot onto the map, and she didn’t really know why. The twenty-sixth address was proving elusive, and she wanted to see if any areas had more homes owned by Ethan King than any others did.
You’re struggling, old woman, she said to herself. The first address took a couple of minutes to locate on the large-scale map, and she put a dot on the exact spo
t. By the time she had located ten of the properties, it was clear that all of them were in one specific area, and all within five hundred metres of the sea. She continued until each home had been dotted, and then sat back and stared at the massed black marks. A very small area contained all the homes.
She sat for quite some time wondering what she had gained from the exercise, and decided it was nothing. Picking up a red pen, she put a circle around the dots that represented the long-term rental properties. A pencil followed the red pen, and she connected the same properties, the line forming an almost-perfect pentangle amidst a sea of plain black dots.
Doris’s top right-hand drawer revealed a pack of Blu-Tack, and she attached the large map to the wall. She studied it intently, wondering what had been in Ethan King’s mind when he had designated these five properties to be the long-term lets, and not holiday lets. Surely it wasn’t just a protective ring of trusted people around a man who had been threatened by his wife. It seemed a bit extreme, to say the least.
Or was the protection for Danny? As the adult, Adam had been the focus for her, but standing looking at the map of the coastal region of Norfolk, she knew it was truly about Danny, not Adam.
Doris pressed her buzzer for Luke, and he knocked and opened her door.
‘Look at this,’ she said, and waved her hand towards the map.
He stood for a moment; his eyes took in Cromer. ‘These are the homes he owns? He either has a bit of a thing about Cromer, or he’s set up an escape route for his best mate.’
Doris stared at the map. Could it be as simple as that? ‘Let’s get our brainstormer troops in. Are they both here?’
‘Yes, Kat went out but she’s back. I think she went for morning prayer. I’ll get them.’
None of them sat down. They stood around, clutching on to the cups of coffee they’d brought with them, and simply looked.
‘Luke, tell the others what you said, first of all.’
‘I guessed – no proof at all, obviously – that Ethan King has set up an escape route for Adam and Danny. And I bet that when we find Adam, his house will have so much CCTV on it, it will be like a documentary being filmed for television. He will be able to see anyone approaching the house, any cars going past… do we know what he did for a living before he went missing?’
‘No, we don’t. I’ll ring Debbie and find out.’ Kat stepped closer. ‘Did you think the pentangle was significant, Nan?’ She laughed.
Doris smiled at her. ‘He could have set up a magic thing, where he’s protected from all evil by salt and garlic. No, it was actually to see where the centre of that five-house set was. Even then it seemed like a protection system.’
‘Luke, can you give Debbie a ring and find out what job Adam did, and who he worked for, please.’ Kat spoke almost absently, still engrossed in the map.
He disappeared, feeling inordinately pleased that Kat had asked him. He returned two minutes later with the news that Adam had worked for a company called Secure, and he worked from home, but travelled all over the country setting up security systems. When the police contacted Secure, trying to track him down, they said he’d not checked in for work since the day he disappeared.
‘Then the only person he can see is me,’ Doris said. ‘If ever we track him down he’ll disappear as fast as an express train, unless it’s me standing at his door, a little old lady carrying a dog lead, looking for her dog who’s slipped his lead. I can cry on demand, you know.’
‘So our only problem is finding where his house is. Let’s jump straight to the middle of that pentangle and start there.’ Kat gave a short bark of laughter. ‘Easy.’
‘Or we could apply to rent this untenanted property,’ Doris said. ‘I could be the little old granny whose grandson lives with her, and we’d like to move to the coast. It’s a Cromer Estate Agency who manages the properties, so we could approach them. We’ll put that on the back burner though. I’ve got something running… if things go well, we’ll have this last address, if not I’ll buy a dog lead. Out of petty cash now I’m a partner.’
Mouse was still staring at the map. ‘This is quite a little empire he has. I’m impressed.’
‘He inherited twelve of them from his grandfather. He’s bought at least one a year since then. Most of them are holiday lets, he just seems to keep this group of five as proper homes for people. You know, this is still all assumption that he is helping Adam, we’ve no proof at all. In the end, we may just be putting this theory to rest, and have to start over again. We may even have to consider that Adam and Danny are dead.’
The final home wasn’t in the centre of the pentangle; garlic and salt didn’t come into it. It was a house between two other tenanted properties. The tenant was James Owen.
Kat, Mouse and Luke trooped back into Doris’s office, keen to see what her delvings into the grey shadows of the Internet had thrown up.
She had used a luminous green marker for the final house, and she pointed it out on the map. Then she handed out detailed printouts of the road. Using the same luminous green, she had highlighted the house, and back and front gardens. The alleyway down the side of the house was highlighted in luminous orange. A second, wider path running all the length of the houses, was highlighted in luminous blue.
‘Nan, we could frame this and have it as modern art.’ Kat held it against a wall, and Doris threw a paperclip at her.
‘Any more sarcasm, young lady, and you’ll be on the naughty step. So, if this is Adam Armstrong, the pathway running along the back of all the houses, at the end of their gardens, is his escape route. That’s the blue on your maps. There’s a lot of Victorian houses in this country that have a path at the end of their gardens, not sure why but I guess there was a good reason when they were made. And I bet these tenants either side are there for a reason – to protect him. They’re both very long term, one’s been there eleven years, the other one nine. The first one was already in situ, the second one’s tenancy started after Adam disappeared. It seems Ethan King can make things happen.’
Doris paused and stared at the map. ‘Or am I being stupid? This is all supposition. What frightened this man so much that he hid away for ten years? And he must know by now that his wife is dead. It’s been all over the news and I’m damn sure Ethan King will have been in constant touch.’
‘Maybe he doesn’t want anything to do with that old life. If he has a good one now, he’ll not want to go back to the bad memories. And Danny probably won’t remember much about it, so there’s nothing to take him back.’ Mouse too was staring at the map, as if it would give her enlightenment.
‘But there is something to take him back,’ Kat joined in. ‘The house in Baslow now legally belongs to him. Unless he murdered her, of course, and then it doesn’t. But why now? If he’s the murderer, why has it taken so long for him to do it? He’s quite successfully disappeared so doesn’t need to come back into the limelight by killing Nicola. He’s not on my radar for having done it. What do you think?’
‘I don’t understand it at all.’ Doris frowned, continuing to look at the multi-coloured map as if seeking inspiration. ‘We need confirmation that James Owen is Adam Armstrong before we pass this to Tessa, because if he turns out to be just a bloke called James Owen and nothing to do with the investigation, we’ll look complete plonkers. We can always blame Luke, of course.’
Luke grinned. ‘Hey, keep me out of it. This is fascinating, watching the way you three work. You just bounce the ball around between you. No wonder our police ladies call in here to sort out their heads. Are we going to check him out then? I’ll volunteer to ride shotgun with Mrs Lester.’
‘You think she needs protecting?’ Mouse laughed and swung Doris’s laptop around to face Luke. She opened the file containing a video from their CCTV. ‘Come here, Luke, it’s time you saw this. The man is an arsehole called Ewan Barker, who Nan had a couple of dates with, and then we found out what sort of a scumbag he really was. You need to see this so that you know just who your Mrs Les
ter is, and why you need never think about protecting her.’
Mouse held out the chair for Luke to sit down, and clicked for the file to open. ‘Enjoy the movie,’ she said.
Luke’s mouth fell open as he watched the events unfolding on the screen, and when it finished with Barker prostrate on the floor clutching his groin, Luke clicked for a replay. Finally he sat back. ‘If I go with you, Mrs Lester, will you promise to look after me and protect me?’
‘Certainly, Luke,’ Doris said with a smile. ‘I don’t act like that every day though. Only twice a week.’
Luke stood. ‘I promise never to upset you. And you still train?’
‘Of course. And never forget that Mouse is even more advanced than I am, so between us we can take on the world, and Kat will make everything better.’
Kat was still staring at the map, but her smile widened. And then her brain woke up.
‘Hang on a minute,’ she said, and left Doris’s office, returning a few seconds later with her mobile phone.
She scrolled, then dialled. ‘Simon?’ They went through the formalities of saying they were fine. ‘Simon,’ Kat finally got around to the point of the call, ‘did Adam support a football team?’
There was a short bark of laughter. ‘We both went to every home match for a number of years. Manchester’s not so far from here when you’re a fan.’
‘Which one?’ she said, knowing she was right. ‘Which team? Blue or red?’
‘Red all the way, Kat. We lived for Man U, when they were probably the greatest team ever.’
Kat thanked him and disconnected. She turned to the others. ‘That name had been bugging me. James Owen. And suddenly it clicked. Michael Owen, one of the biggest stars at Man U.’
‘A bit tenuous,’ Mouse said.
‘Not when you know his name is Michael James Owen, it isn’t. I’ll wager next month’s child benefit that Adam Armstrong took his new name from his beloved Man U.’