“No, that’s not normal procedure. Agents, especially if they’re female, always go in pairs.”
“I think she was taking her boyfriends to an empty house,” I said patiently.
“That would be highly unprofessional,” said Craig. “If head office were to hear about it —”
“She was having sex with them there, wasn’t she?” Susan’s cheeks were as pink as her nails.
“Probably. Was it always the same key?”
“I’m not sure, but the last time, I checked which key was missing after she’d gone. It was number 47. I remember the number because that’s how old —” She stopped abruptly.
“47 what? Where is this house?” I asked.
“It’s not a house number, it’s a code,” said Craig. “We keep the keys and the addresses of properties separate, just in case of a break-in.” He returned to his computer. “We number the keys and match them to their addresses on here. I can’t remember offhand which property number 47 is but…” He clicked his mouse a couple of times.
I watched Craig’s face as he stared at the screen. “Chapel House,” he said without a trace of surprise. I had the impression he knew already.
“I should have guessed,” said Susan. “It’s been on the market so long, the For Sale sign has blown down three times.”
“Why hasn’t it sold?”
“If you saw it you’d know why. It’s not exactly your standard semi.”
“It’s overpriced,” said Craig. “That’s why it hasn’t found a buyer.” He turned to his colleague. “I asked her to go out there a few times, Susan, to keep an eye on the place. So that business about the keys was perfectly above board, nothing for you to worry about.”
Susan’s mouth fell open. It was clear she didn’t believe a word of it. Nor did I.
“I’d like to take a look at Chapel House,” I said.
“Are you interested in purchasing it?”
“No. I’ve told you why I’m here.”
“Then I’m sorry. We have strict rules. No time-wasters. Head office insists that we follow procedure.”
“If you’re busy just give me the key. I’ll have it back to you within an hour.”
“Certainly not.”
“I’m not going to smash the place up!”
A little weary smile passed across Craig’s face.
“If you don’t trust me, come with me and pretend I’m a client.”
His gaze skimmed over my worn leather jacket, my frayed jeans. “It’s out of the question, I’m afraid.”
“At least tell me where it is.”
“No can do.”
I clenched my teeth. If I had time when I got back to Photographic I was going to restore the mug shot of the branch manager to its former mottled glory.
“OK.” I grabbed the Property News from a dump bin by the door. “I’ll find it myself.”
*
My mobile rang before I reached my car.
“Where the hell are you?” Tony’s gravelly voice blasted in my ear. “Get your arse back here, Jude. The shit’s hit the fan.”
“Can’t you manage without me for an hour or so? There’s something really important I need to do.”
“This is important. What the hell do you think you’re playing at? And don’t tell me you’re visiting your sick son in hospital. According to Matt, he’s well on the mend.”
“I’m on a job.”
“Which job? Give me the ticket reference.”
“It’s a private job.”
“You’re doing freelance work on company time?”
“It’s nothing to do with photography. I’m following up a hunch I had —”
“A hunch? Who do you think you are? A bloody journalist? I don’t believe this. Show your face back here in thirty minutes or else.”
“Or else what?”
“You’re the investigative reporter now. You work it out.”
“Good to know the real Tony is back,” I said, but the line was dead.
*
Tony stood with his hands on his hips, staring at the wall in Photographic.
“What are these doing here?” He jabbed at the enlargements Harrison had mounted. “These aren’t news pix. I don’t remember any of them.” He peered closer. “River for sale? What’s that all about? Is this your own arty-farty stuff? Are you using this place as your personal art gallery?”
“I took them in my own time, yes, and now they’re logged in the computer. They could be useful. And it wasn’t me that put them up.”
“Who was it?”
I looked around. Raymond was working at his computer, surreptitiously stuffing his face with chocolate muffin. Buzz, whose leopard-skin trousers had been exchanged for a pair of bright red jeans, was going through the job tickets and entering them in the diary. There was no sign of Harrison. I was about to dump him in it, but I held back. I’d done him a disservice over the Craig Gilmore picture, and to be honest, I was just a little bit flattered that he’d put the prints on display. They stood out against the dreary pictures of cheque presentations and cricket teams, not just in subject matter and composition, but in sheer quality. I had my old Nikon F and the painstaking work I put in in the darkroom to thank for that.
I floundered, wondering what to say, but Tony had already moved on.
“Never mind. I’ll deal with that another time. I want to know exactly where you’ve been this morning.”
“It was about Lara Ramsey. It was something I had to do. When this is all over —”
“You think I’m going to wait that long to get some work out of you? And talking of the Ramsey story, I’ve had a complaint.”
“Who from?”
“Mrs Ramsey, that’s who!”
He picked up a copy of yesterday’s Post. The Ramsey family smiled in a tight-lipped way from their sun-baked terrace.
“How did you get hold of this photo?”
“I can explain about that.”
Two pairs of eyes swivelled in my direction. Raymond stopped chewing, his cheeks as full as a hamster’s, while Buzz’s sleek dark eyebrows rose nearly to his hairline. Tony glared at them as if to say mind your own damn business.
“Come to my office. Now.”
*
Tony snapped shut his venetian blinds and sat in the leather chair behind his desk.
“Mrs Ramsey says you stole this picture.” He stabbed the image of Lara in the chest with a thick finger.
“But it wasn’t me who —” I stopped. I was reluctant to split on Matt and tell Tony that this theft was my colleague’s fault. Wasn’t I just as much to blame? After all, I had processed the damn thing. “Mrs Ramsey was being difficult. Understandable, of course, but we needed a picture. It seemed the right thing to do at the time.” I shrugged. “I shouldn’t have taken it without permission. It won’t happen again.”
“What a pathetic explanation.”
Someone came into the room. I turned round. It was Matt.
“If this is about Lara’s picture…” he began.
I warned him with my eyes. “It’s all sorted, Matt. I’ve apologised. Old hands like me shouldn’t lead clean-living young reporters into bad ways.” I turned to Tony. “I’ll take the picture back to Mrs Ramsey and grovel.”
“Good. Just as long as I bloody well don’t have to do it.”
The phone on his desk rang shrilly. “Editor. What? Right. What time?” He banged the phone down. “The police have called a press conference.”
“They did the post-mortem last night,” I said. “Perhaps there’s more information.” They both looked at me with something like respect. “Contacts,” I explained.
“When is it?” asked Matt.
“Eleven o’clock. You need to get down there straight away.”
“Me too,” I said, turning to go.
“Just hold on a cotton-picking minute!” Tony exploded. “You’re going nowhere, sunshine. There’s a pile of stuff waiting to be processed, pix I need for tomorrow’s paper.”
“Get someone else to do it.”
“I’m telling you, Jude. You are not going.”
“That’s where you’re wrong.” I leaned across the desk and patted his cheek
“I’ll even take some pictures for you.”
Eleven
“Did you see his face?” smiled Matt. He drove fast through the town centre, or as fast as the heavy traffic and an unbroken chain of red lights would allow. “By the way, some guy’s been ringing you. Someone called Norman Foley? He says he met you in the park.”
“Oh, him. He’s a complete fraud. Calls himself a psychic detective. He says he can pick up vibes from the place where Lara was found. Can you believe that?”
“Sounds like an interesting angle.”
“Forget it, Matt. He just wants his fifteen minutes of fame. He’s a con artist, I’m sure of it. Well, fairly sure. But I have got some reliable information.” I told him what Susan at the estate agents had said about Lara taking certain favoured clients to properties on her own.
“She was no angel, was she? Downright promiscuous, in fact.”
“Only until she met Daniel.” I glanced at my watch. “The conference starts in two minutes.”
“No problem.”
He swerved into a narrow side street, ribbed on both sides with double yellow lines. He slapped a card stating PRESS on the dashboard. “It usually works.”
“You’re wasted in Ravenbridge, Matt Dryden. It’ll be the bright lights of the metropolis for you.”
“One day. But right now this place is just fine.” He squeezed my hand. I winced. “Sorry. How is it?”
“A lot better, though my bottom’s still throbbing.”
“That ferret bit you on the arse as well?”
“Tetanus injection.”
“That explains why you were walking like a cowboy at the hospital.”
He laughed. I grimaced. We both pulled up our collars against the bitter weather. “Come on, Matt, we’ve got work to do.”
The press room at the central police station was packed with reporters and photographers. I recognised local TV and radio staff, and a few stringers for the nationwide titles, but there were several unfamiliar faces too. I knew from last night’s TV news that this was now a national story and it wasn’t hard to understand why. The brutal murder of a beautiful young girl was the perfect recipe to get the media salivating. Apart from the sensational appeal, this point in the calendar, just after Christmas and New Year, was infamous for its lack of news. It was as if the killer had done the hacks a favour.
Matt and I pushed our way to the standing room only at the front where a conference table bristled with microphones. On the wall behind, a large whiteboard displayed a massive enlarged photo of Lara. Matt and I stared at it wordlessly, immediately sobered up.
“Listen, I want to thank you for what you did back there,” said Matt, breaking the silence. “You could have landed me in it with Tony over that stolen photo, but you took the rap. Why did you do that?”
“Guilt.”
“It was my fault.”
“I colluded with you. I’m equally to blame.”
“But Tony thinks it was all down to you.”
“You’re young, Matt.”
“You’re not exactly a pensioner.”
“No. But I don’t have your driving ambition to be big in the media. It would be bad timing if you got into trouble now. This story could be the making of you.”
“I can’t deny that. That’s why I really appreciate what you did.” He squeezed my other hand this time. I didn’t wince. In fact I felt a rush of electrical energy that was far from painful.
“Where is the photo now?”
He tapped the pocket of his coat. Just then, there was a small commotion at the inner door and all heads swivelled in that direction. Laverack came into the room, followed by a uniformed officer, her shoulder tabs heavy with silver. Mrs Ramsey, walking with a ramrod-straight back, and a man I presumed was her husband, brought up the rear. They all sat behind the desk, dwarfed by the giant picture of Lara.
“I see they’ve wheeled out the big cheese,” whispered Matt.
I nodded. Chief Superintendent Rollins was the chief commanding officer of this division, an area that covered Ravenbridge, a number of smaller towns and all the spaces in between.
Laverack raised a well-manicured hand. “Ladies and gentlemen.” The babble of voices ceased at once. The whirr and click of cameras was all that could be heard for several seconds while the detective gathered his thoughts.
“As you know, a young woman, Lara Ramsey, aged twenty, was murdered here in Ravenbridge last Monday night.”
A local stringer for the Sun immediately piped up, “Is it true she was a nude model?”
Laverack’s hand went up again, a more defensive gesture this time. “Can we leave questions till the end? I have a statement…” He rustled a sheet of paper. “Lara Ramsey was a highly respected member of the community.”
I looked at Matt and our eyebrows rose fractionally.
“She left the house of her aunt and uncle, Stanislaus and Carol Roguski, around nine on the evening of January 1st. Our last sighting of Lara is on the bus into the town centre. A few hours later she was murdered in cold blood, almost certainly in her own flat.”
“Why did she take a bus?” I whispered. “Why didn’t she take her car?” Matt shrugged and put two fingers to his lips to shut me up. He was recording Laverack’s words in furious shorthand.
“We believe her body was then left in the park. It was discovered by a man taking an early morning run. I think we can all agree this was a cruel and undignified end to a young person’s life.” Laverack turned the sheet over. “The police pathologist has now completed the post-mortem and we can confirm that the cause of death was asphyxia caused by strangulation.”
A murmur passed like a wave through the room.
“I thought she was stabbed?” Matt said.
“No — didn’t I tell you? Sorry, so much to think about. Listen up and keep writing.”
“We can also confirm that some, in fact most, of the blood found on the victim’s clothing did not belong to her. Nor did the traces of blood found in her flat. DNA testing is underway as we speak. I should point out that the killer made a good job of cleaning up the flat and that very little forensic evidence has been found. This blood sample is vital to our investigation. Therefore we appeal to anyone who might have seen someone, a friend, relative or workmate, with a bad cut or wound that they can’t properly account for, to contact us immediately. We need names, if only to eliminate them from our enquiry.”
Patricia Ramsey maintained her iron control, but her husband was openly weeping, head down, shoulders heaving.
Laverack ploughed on. “We can’t be sure of the exact time of death — it was an extremely cold night and we don’t know how long Lara’s body had been left out in the open, but our best estimate is that death occurred around midnight on January 1st.”
“Was there evidence of rape?” someone shouted from the back.
“Questions later,” he answered sharply. “Lara’s parents have agreed to our request to attend this conference and Mrs Ramsey would like to make this statement.”
Patricia Ramsey leaned towards her microphone. I could barely watch as she made an appeal for witnesses, or anyone who could help in any way to find the person who had robbed her and her husband of their beloved daughter. Her voice wavered, and everyone in the room held their breath expecting her to break down and pour out her pent-up grief, but she made it to the end, still in control. Mr Ramsey’s chin sank even lower on his chest. Remembering my promise to Tony, I raised my camera, but was roughly shouldered aside by a photographer I didn’t recognise just as I was taking my shot. There was no alternative but to lift my camera over his head for the next one and, for all I knew, get a fine picture of the ceiling.
Job done, the Ramseys were ushered out, then Laverack and the Chief Superintendent resumed their seat
s.
“You will all appreciate that we don’t want to cause the grieving parents any more distress than absolutely necessary,” said Rollins. “There will be a memorial service for Lara Ramsey at St Bridget’s Church at seven this evening. But we would ask that the press respect the family’s wishes for privacy and keep away.” She paused, looking around the room. “So now they’ve gone, if there are any questions…?” She sounded hopeful that there would be none, but she had underestimated the hunger that was palpable in the room. The restrained appeal from Mrs Ramsey, dramatic in its controlled intensity, had only whetted the reporters’ appetite.
“So was Lara raped or not?”
“There was no evidence of sexual assault,” said DI Laverack.
“The murderer could have been a woman, then?”
“We can’t rule anything out at this stage.”
A surge of excitement raised the emotional temperature in the room. Mini tape-recorders were thrust forward, pens flew over notebooks, Matt’s included.
“What about the teacher who killed himself? Did he have anything to do with it?”
“We’ve eliminated Mr Keele from our enquiries.”
“How come? Did his alibi check out?”
“Of course,” said Laverack testily.
I glanced at Matt. “I knew it,” I whispered. “There’s no way Adam could have done this.”
“Have you liaised with other police forces? Has this killer struck before?”
“There’s no evidence of that.”
“Are you saying you haven’t liaised? What’s the point of having a police database if —”
“We are still at a very early stage in the investigation.”
“Do you have any suspects at all?”
“We are following up several possible lines of enquiry.”
“Such as?”
“Lara’s friends and colleagues have been questioned. She was an estate agent, and we are looking at her client contacts going back six months. We have conducted house-to-house interviews in the Stonebeck area, plus a fingertip search of the park and other sites. As I explained earlier, we’re examining DNA evidence. We’ve appealed for witnesses — anyone who saw anything suspicious in the early hours of the morning, especially in the vicinity of Jubilee Park.”
If It Bleeds Page 9