by Alex Walters
Wickham's eyes flicked from Murrain to Ashworth. 'To be honest, I've been screening her calls since you and your colleague came round to interview me. When I saw her number this morning, I just turned the phone off. I thought it was all getting too complicated.' He gestured towards Ashworth. 'In the circumstances.'
'Tell us about your relationship with Mrs Myers.'
'Look, I keep telling you, it was hardly a relationship. We only met a short while ago, part of a get-together in the local pub. Finlan Brody's so-called Business Forum.'
Murrain exchanged a glance with Milton, who nodded. 'But you got to know her?'
'Well, we got on, or I thought we were getting on. And now I imagine it's over. That's it. All there was to it.'
Ashworth looked up for the first time since Murrain had interrupted him. 'Did you know she had a child? When you took up with her, I mean.'
'For what it’s worth,' Wickham said, 'as I told Mr Murrain here, no, I didn’t. Not when I "took up" with her, as you put it. I met her in the pub. She was a pleasant woman of roughly my own age. I knew she was divorced but she never mentioned a child. We went out together a couple of times. That’s the whole story.'
'She didn’t mention she had a child?' Murrain this time, speaking softly. 'That seems a little odd.'
'You’d have to ask her,' Wickham said. 'I’m guessing she was holding it back until we’d got to know each other better. She never actually lied to me. I just didn’t ask.'
'But you found out when Luke supposedly went missing the first time?'
'I've told you all this.'
'Indeed.' For the first time, Murrain looked across at Milton, who opened a laptop bag he’d been holding on his knee and pulled out a plastic wallet. 'Some mix-up between Mrs Myers and her ex, wasn’t it? Youngster left kicking his heels in the rain.'
'Something like that,'
'There was some suggestion that, while he was waiting in the rain, young Luke got scared by someone watching him. Someone in a van.'
'So you told me,' Wickham said. 'That was what Finlan Brody said. He was one who found Luke. I wasn’t there. There's nothing more I can tell you.'
Murrain leaned forward on the sofa. 'Let's go back to Mrs Myers. You form a relationship with a divorcee who has a child of the same sex and age of the child you were convicted of killing—'
'Now wait a minute—'
'I’m simply stating the facts. You seem to have inveigled your way into her life in a very short time.'
'There was no "inveigling". We got to know one another. That's all.'
'A lonely woman with a son of a certain age.'
'That’s not how it was.' Wickham stopped. 'Look, I can understand why you’d want to talk to me. I can see this is the first place you’d look. But if Luke’s gone missing, it’s nothing to do with me.' He gestured expansively. 'Search the place. Search wherever you want.'
'Thank you, Mr Wickham. We'd like to do that. Just so we can all be reassured.'
'Search wherever you like. You’ve my full permission. You’ll find nothing here.'
'Thank you for your co-operation, Mr Wickham. I’m sure it’ll make it easier for all of us. We’ll need to search your car and the garden too. I presume that won’t be a problem?' Murrain knew they could obtain a warrant if need be, but Wickham's offer would make the process much quicker.
'Whatever you want,' Wickham said.
Murrain turned to Ashworth, as if he'd only just remembered his presence. 'You're happy with that, Colin?'
Ashcroft’s expression suggested that he was never likely to be happy again. 'Best we can do, I suppose,' he said. 'We need to protect Kevin’s identify as far as we possibly can. It won’t be in anyone’s interest for this to hit the press without good reason.'
'Quite so,' Murrain said. 'Well, let’s hope there is no good reason.' He turned to Wickham, who was still standing awkwardly by the window. 'And let’s hope you don’t have any nosy neighbours.'
***
Wickham sat hunched in a chair in a corner of the living room as they listened to the tramp of heavy shoes up and down the stairs and across the floors of the rooms above. Colin Ashworth was sitting on the sofa pretending to read a newspaper he’d pulled out of his briefcase. He clearly hadn’t known whether to stay or go and Murrain had shown no intention of enlightening him. Milton had already had a couple of officers standing by ready to conduct the search, knowing Murrain was likely to succeed in provoking Wickham to agree to it voluntarily.
Murrain himself was at the opposite end of the sofa, showing no signs of restlessness or boredom even though they’d been sitting there for the best part of ninety minutes. He’d been content to leave the supervision of the search to Milton, wanting to spend time in Wickham's company. The familiar nagging headache had been there since they'd entered the house, but had never intensified in the way he might have expected.
'Their instructions are to leave things as tidy as possible,' Murrain had commented. 'But it’ll be a thorough search.'
'The more thorough the better, as far as I’m concerned. I just want to prove to you that I’ve nothing to do with this.' He paused. 'Apart from anything else, I want you to stop wasting time with me and devote your energies to trying to find Luke.'
They’d sat in silence for a long period after that, hearing the irregular stamping of footsteps through the house. Eventually Milton stuck his head around the door. 'Kenny,' he said to Murrain. 'Can I have a word?'
Murrain looked across at Ashworth, tacitly instructing him to keep an eye on Wickham. He left the room and returned a few moments later, holding a small plastic bag delicately between his fingers.
'Mr Wickham,' he said, with a new formality in his tone. 'I wonder whether you can offer us any explanation for this?' He held out the plastic bag in front of Wickham’s face.
Wickham peered at the contents. A folded piece of cardboard, deep blue. 'What is it?'
'Part of the cover of a school exercise book,' Murrain said. 'Not in good condition. But enough to read the name of the front. Luke Myers. Any explanation, Mr Wickham?'
'Where the hell did that come from? I’ve never seen it before.'
'It’s a mystery, isn’t it, given that Luke’s never been in this house. That’s what you told us?'
'It’s true,' Wickham said. 'Where did you find that? Maybe Sue dropped it.'
'Anything’s possible.' Murrain took the evidence bag back, and then, with the air of a magician performing his climactic trick, he produced a second identical bag from behind his back. This bag contained a folded white sheet of paper, dog-eared at the corners. 'I won’t ask you to play guessing games with this one, Mr Wickham. It’s one of those letters that schools send out to their pupils. The kind that sit in their blazers or school-bags for months because they’ve forgotten to pass them on to their parents. This one was about a PTA meeting a couple of months ago.'
Wickham shook his head. 'I don’t know what you’re talking about.'
'The letter is addressed to Luke Myers. But I imagine you’d already guessed that. The real question is, once again, how it came to be in your possession.'
'I’ve never seen it before—'
'Both these items look to me as if they might have, say, fallen accidentally out of a school-bag, or perhaps a pocket.' He glanced at Ashworth, who was watching the exchange with an increasingly horrified expression.
'I think,' Murrain continued, 'that we need to continue this discussion in a more formal setting. We can do this the easy way or the hard way at this stage, Mr Wickham. I can invite you to be interviewed voluntarily under caution, or I can arrest you on suspicion of the abduction of Luke Myers.'
'I keep telling you that I’ve done nothing. I’ll co-operate with you every step of the way if it helps prove that.'
'That’s good, Mr Wickham. I’m sure it’ll make all our lives much easier.'
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Kate was preparing to leave the house for her meeting with Wickham when she heard the ins
istent buzzing of the mobile phone in her handbag. She fumbled for the handset but the call had already run to voicemail. As she’d half-expected, it was Wickham. 'Kate, really sorry but I’ll have to postpone our get-together. Something rather major’s come up. Will be in touch.' There was something odd about the tone of voice, she thought. As if he’d been trying to convey some meaning he couldn’t express openly.
Second thoughts? Well, it seemed likely. Maybe he’d just thought through the implications of their meeting and felt it wasn’t worth the risk. But she wanted to see him now. She pressed 'call back', but the phone went straight to voicemail. She cut the call without leaving a message, unsure what to say.
As she held the phone to her ear, she’d been half-watching the television screen as the lead news stories were summarised. Elizabeth had left one of the news channels running with the volume down, parading its images of the usual endless struggles in the Middle East, tensions between the US and Russia, some Government Minister pontificating about who knew what.
Suddenly she found herself staring at a landscape she recognised. The low sweep of the Pennines, a fast-flowing river under a stone bridge, the slow progress of a narrow boat over a canal. One of the nearby villages. The village where Wickham was living, she realised. The banner at the bottom of the screen read starkly: 'Breaking News: Missing Child.'
She fumbled for the remote control from the coffee table and thumbed up the volume, initially too loud so that Elizabeth and Jack, who were engaged in some board-game in the corner of the room, looked up startled. '…Now missing for over twenty-four hours. Police say that they are pursuing a number of leads but have no far released no further details. Local people have been organising their own searches of surrounding countryside, but a police spokesman today requested that any such activity should be conducted only under police direction.'
Kate felt a sinking in the pit of her stomach. The village where Kevin Wickham was living. 'Something rather major’s come up.' It might mean anything but whatever it meant was unlikely to be good.
She cut the sound on the TV again, but remained staring at the screen. The reporter was interviewing locals who no doubt had little of substance to offer but were keen for their moment of fame.
Then she froze. For the briefest of seconds, as the TV reporter was interviewing two earnest-looking women who’d been involved in a search of nearby woodland, she’d caught sight of another face in the background. Just the merest glimpse of a figure passing the camera, then turning away hurriedly as if perhaps concerned about being caught on television. She told herself there was no way she could be certain, not in that short instant.
But she was.
Graeme.
He was there, somehow, for some reason, in that village. A village close to where she was living.
A village in which a child was missing.
***
Murrain and Milton had played nice and nasty cop in various permutations for most of the afternoon but made little progress. Wickham hadn’t yet been arrested, but was being interviewed under caution as a potential suspect. He had, for the moment, declined legal representation. The police had agreed that Ashworth could sit in on the interview, assuming Wickham had no objection.
'You can’t offer any explanation as to how those items came to be in your house?'
'I’ve told you. I’ve never seen them before. If they were in my house, I’ve no idea how.'
'Luke Myers has never entered your house.'
'I’ve only met Luke briefly, and that was at his mother’s house. Nowhere else.'
'You can offer no explanation as to how that piece of his exercise book and that letter came to be in your house?'
'No.'
And so on, in endless circles. Murrain knew there'd come a point, probably fairly soon, when this became counter-productive. They'd have to make a decision about whether to arrest Wickham or to let him go. They probably had enough grounds to make an arrest, and in normal circumstances that would have been Murrain's preferred option. But Wickham's circumstances were anything but normal, and the consequences of placing him under arrest would be substantial. They needed something more than the flimsy circumstantial evidence currently in their possession.
They went backwards and forwards over his relationship with Sue Myers. They asked him about the night that Luke had first been reported missing. He repeated that he’d known nothing until Sue had called him. He’d stayed with her until Luke was found, and then, at her request, he’d joined her at the meeting with PC Wallace the next day. And, no, he hadn’t encountered Luke in the street that night. Whoever Luke had seen, if he’d been talking to anyone, it wasn’t him. He offered nothing.
Eventually, Murrain and Milton rose, and beckoned Ashworth to follow them out of the room. 'That’s fine for the moment, Mr Wickham. We’ll be back shortly.'
Outside, Murrain said: 'We're getting nowhere.'
'What's your feeling?' Milton said, glancing at Ashworth.
'I don't know. My instinct is that he's not our killer. But there's definitely something there.' Murrain was silent for a moment, trying to make sense of what felt almost like a host of distant voices howling almost out of earshot. Nothing. Nothing coherent, at any rate.
'What's the next step?' Ashworth intervened. 'Are you planning to arrest him?'
'That's the question, isn't it, Mr Ashworth? If he were anyone else, my inclination would be to do that. Turn the heat up a bit and see if we can get anything out of him. But if we do—'
'The proverbial will hit the fan.' Ashworth nodded grimly. 'I know.'
'And if we don't, and it turns out he is our man, we'll all be covered in the proverbial,' Murrain said. 'Welcome to our world, Mr Ashworth.' He turned to Milton. 'I may live to regret this. But I think we should let him go for the moment and keep an eye on him. If he has taken Luke, then we've got to hope that the boy's not been harmed so far. If Wickham's our man, he might lead us to him. If Luke is being held somewhere, keeping Wickham here won't help him. But get someone from our team to stick with him. Not just a uniform. Someone who knows what they're doing.'
That something was still buzzing away in the back of Murrain's head, like a fly incessantly hitting its head on a pane of glass. Some connection that wasn't quite being made. A dead and a missing child. Kevin Wickham. Another man lying crushed on a rail track. An attempted child snatching in Hazel Grove. A circuit that wasn't quite being completed.
Rubbing his temples, he picked up the phone and dialled Bert Wallace, who was working back in the MIR. She answered on the first ring.
'Bert,' he said. 'This thing with the Morrison woman in Hazel Grove. What the neighbour said. I'm not going to get free for a while, but I want you to go out there now. Talk to Mrs Morrison. Don't let her off the hook. Find out if there's anything in this gossip or not.'
'You really think it's relevant?'
'I think it might be. I don't know how or why, but I want it checked out.' He could sense the puzzlement at the other end of the line, and he allowed himself a faint smile. 'You know how it is, Bert. It's just a feeling.'
***
Kate had been clutching the phone in her hand and answered it on the first ring.
'It’s Kevin. Kevin Wickham.'
'Are you OK? I’ve just seen the news—'
'It’s a long story,' he said. 'I need to talk to you. Could you come over here? To my place, I mean.'
'Are you sure that’s all right? I thought you preferred to meet somewhere more anonymous.'
'Like I say, it’s a long story. I’d rather not leave the house. And I think our meeting up is the last thing the authorities will care about just at the moment.'
'What do you mean?'
'The police were here,' he said. 'In connection with Luke’s disappearance. I knew his mother. They took me in for questioning.'
'But surely they can’t think—'
'What would you expect them to think? Of course, they’re going to want to talk to me. They know the backgrou
nd now.' She could hear the bitterness in his voice. 'That’s one reason I need to talk to you.'
'I’ll come straight over,' she said. 'I need to talk to you too. I don’t understand it, but I’ve a feeling we might want to talk about the same things.'
She arrived twenty minutes later. As he let her into the house, she glanced down the street. It was already late afternoon, and the sun was setting behind the woodland opposite. Further down the road, a figure was standing in the shadows. Probably a plain-clothes cop keeping an eye on Wickham and his movements. She could imagine they’d be checking her registration number even as she entered the house. It was madness being here, but it was too late for her to think about that now. And maybe it no longer mattered.
'You’re OK?' she said. 'You’re looking well.'
'As well as can be expected,' he said. 'I’ll apologise in advance for the mess. The police aren’t very domesticated.'
'So what’s happened?' She’d been tempted to launch straight into her own story, but she recognised that Wickham needed to talk.
He ran through the whole story—meeting Sue, the first incident with Luke, and then today’s visit from the police.
'You’ve no idea how those items of Luke’s might have got into your house?'
'None at all. Depends where the police found them, of course. They were playing that close to their chest. But if Sue had dropped them I don’t see why I wouldn’t have found them earlier.' He hesitated, as if unsure how to frame his next words. 'Do you think it's possible that I could have put them there without knowing? That I could be doing things I don't remember—'