Dave Slater Mystery Novels Box Set Three

by P. F. Ford

  Once again, Slater found himself admiring Watson’s attitude. A lot of DSs would have accepted Norton’s excuses and kept on waiting, but she obviously wasn’t one for messing around, and she didn’t mind getting her hands dirty. There was no doubt she was going to keep him on his toes, and he actually liked that idea.

  He turned his attention to his email inbox. It hadn’t taken him long to discover that now he was a DI, the majority of his messages were basically circulars sent to all officers of his rank and above. These he now forwarded to ‘DI Garbage’, which wasn’t a person but a folder he had created specially for the purpose, where they remained, unloved, unopened, and unwanted. But among all this dross, he was pleased to see that at least there was one message that might be worth opening. It was from his boss, Detective Superintendent Bradshaw, and it concerned former DI Diana Randall.

  As he quickly read through the message, his mouth dropped open in surprise, then he smiled to himself and read it again. He got up from his desk, made a cup of tea in the tiny kitchen, returned to his desk, and read the message again. The message confirmed Diana Randall had been working as a DS at Ramlinstoke before she was promoted to DI and moved up to Flipton. So Diana had a connection to Ramlinstoke, where both bodies had been found, and she had chosen not to tell them. Slater figured this was definitely food for thought.

  According to Bradshaw, and this was the reason Slater had been surprised, the official reason for Diana Randall’s resignation from the force had been depression. Slater smiled to himself again. The way Bradshaw had worded the message told him there was more to this than met the eye, and the additional information that there had been ‘unconfirmed rumours about an affair with another officer’ suggested what he might look for.

  A small ‘ping’ from his laptop announced the arrival of another email. To his surprise, it was another from his boss. He clicked on the message and read it through. This new message suggested he should seek out a retired desk sergeant called Ted Rivers for further information.

  As he sipped his tea, he allowed himself a few moments of idle speculation, but his thoughts soon turned to feelings of guilt. He wondered if there was any way a possible affair could be relevant to their inquiry, or was it more the case that he wanted to find some dirt on Diana Randall simply because he didn’t much like her? And anyway, who was he to adopt this ‘holier than thou’ attitude, and judge her? Hadn’t he done the very same thing himself and had a brief, unwise fling with his previous boss?

  He tried to justify his position by telling himself that it was different because in his case they had both been single, and no one else had been hurt, but it didn’t really make him feel any less of a hypocrite. He was still struggling with his guilty conscience when Watson returned, carrying a dusty old archive box which she dumped unceremoniously in the middle of the floor, creating a small cloud of dust in the process. Her white latex gloves were a grubby grey colour.

  ‘Good grief,’ said Slater, looking down at the box. ‘No wonder you needed to go and get changed!’ A hand-shaped smudge through the dust on the lid showed where Watson had checked the index when she had found the box.

  ‘I had to sign for the whole box but, according to the index, Norton’s notebooks for December 2000 are in here.’

  Slater made to ask the next question, but she beat him to it. ‘And, before you ask, yes, I did look inside to make sure. I also checked the log to see if anyone else had been down in the archive looking for this box recently, but you can see from the state of it that no one’s been near it in years.’

  ‘So, if Norton’s made no attempt to find the notebook, what does that tell us?’ asked Slater, thinking out loud. ‘Does it suggest he’s just a lazy arse and hasn’t bothered, or does it suggest he thought I was bluffing?’

  ‘I would imagine he’s the sort who wouldn’t want to go down in that archive, especially if it meant getting filthy. I bet he was hoping we were going to go away before it came to that. Of course, it could be he’s got nothing to hide and he resents having to prove it.’

  Slater studied Watson’s face. ‘Yeah, right, but you don’t believe that any more than I do. Anyway, resent it or not, we all have to prove our intentions now and then. No one likes it, but it goes with the job.’

  ‘I’m not defending him,’ said Watson, ‘I’m just saying how he might be thinking. Don’t forget, if the chip on your shoulder’s big enough, it affects your view.’

  Slater smiled at that comment. ‘It did seem pretty big, didn’t it? More like a boulder than a chip.’

  ‘Maybe it’s a bluff on his part,’ Watson suggested. ‘Perhaps he thinks if he doesn’t go near it, we’ll think there’s nothing to find and we won’t bother looking.’

  Slater laughed as he snapped on a pair of latex gloves. ‘In that case, let’s call his bluff and see what we’ve got.’ He flexed his fingers theatrically as he stepped towards the box, then he lifted the lid and looked inside. To his surprise, everything inside was bundled and labelled, and it took just a few seconds to find Norton’s notebooks.

  ‘Right then, let’s see what we’ve got,’ he said, as he carefully lifted the bundle of notebooks from the box and placed them on his desk. There were just two notebooks that covered December, so they took one each and settled at their desks. It soon became apparent Norton used his own version of shorthand, which Slater thought wasn’t going to make things easy for them, but then he realised names and addresses were written in longhand. As he was basically looking for names, maybe it wouldn’t be so hard after all. In fact, it might even make things a little easier.

  Fittingly, as she was the one who had used her initiative to get hold of the notebooks, it was Watson who found the first entry relating to David Hudson. ‘Here we are,’ she said. ‘David Hudson, 15 December 2000.’

  Slater left his own desk and crossed to Watson’s desk, where he peered over her shoulder. ‘Can you read his shorthand?’ asked Slater. ‘I can barely make head nor tail of it.’

  ‘It’s not easy,’ she agreed, ‘and the scrawled handwriting definitely doesn’t help!’ She studied the page for a minute. ‘I think it says at 22.00 David Hudson reported his girlfriend and their baby missing. The address of the cottage is there too.’ She flipped a page and studied it for another minute or so. ‘Right, now it’s the next morning. He’s been out to the cottage, but the people there are called Higgs, and they’ve never heard of anyone called Hudson. There’s a date here, 20 November.’

  ‘That was the date the Higgs family moved in,’ said Slater. ‘But why does he say they’ve never heard of anyone called Hudson? Why isn’t he asking about Kylie Mason? That was her name.’

  Watson scanned the page again, flipped back to the previous page, and scanned again. ‘He hasn’t taken her name,’ she said in surprise. ‘There’s no mention of Kylie anywhere.’

  ‘How the hell are you going to find a missing person if you don’t have their name?’ asked Slater.

  ‘There doesn’t seem to be a description either,’ said Watson, ‘but there is a big doodle on the first page.’

  ‘I can picture that,’ said Slater. ‘There’s poor old Hudson telling Norton the love of his life is missing and Norton’s doodling instead of listening.’

  ‘Maybe he was working a long shift,’ said Watson.

  ‘Don’t make excuses for him,’ said Slater, testily.

  ‘Sorry,’ muttered Watson, ‘but I’m not making excuses, I’m just saying.’

  She turned another page and studied the crude shorthand. ‘David Hudson obviously wasn’t going to give up easily. Here’s another entry dated 17 December. This time he’s written the address again, and the name Howard Glossop.’

  ‘Is there any mention of a visit to Glossop?’ asked Slater. ‘Only he said no one from the police ever contacted him.’

  Watson was doing her best to read the unfamiliar shorthand as quick as she could. ‘It doesn’t look like it . . . Oh, hang on. Oh goodness, this is priceless,’ she said, sarcastically.
‘He’s made a note that he believes the girl has left taking the baby with her. There’s even another note underneath that, in longhand, that says “I don’t blame her”.’

  ‘I bloody knew it,’ said Slater, angrily. ‘He didn’t look for her at all, did he? Lazy bugger, he just didn’t bother.’ He turned and aimed an angry kick at the archive box, but it was a lot heavier than he had anticipated, and all he succeeded in doing was wrenching his ankle. ‘Ow! Bollocks!’ he said, sinking down into his own chair.

  Watson continued with her head down, studying the notebook, until Slater had finished mumbling curses to himself. He had a sneaking suspicion she was trying to suppress a smirk.

  ‘And let that be a lesson to you, Watson,’ he said at last, swinging his chair round to face her. ‘You should never kick an archive box, no matter how frustrated you might be feeling. They’re heavier than they look.’

  She swung her own chair round. ‘Right, boss,’ she said, acknowledging his rueful smile, ‘I’ll do my best to try to remember that. On a more serious note, what are we going to do about Norton?’

  ‘What do you think we should do about him?’

  ‘Well, I suppose we could point out to him how, if he had done his job properly, Kylie Mason might well have been found in 2000 and not nearly twenty years later.’

  ‘That won’t bring her back though, will it? Anyway, we’re pretty much certain she was dead two months before Norton had even heard of her, or David Hudson. You have to ask yourself – did his actions actually stop her killer from being caught?’

  ‘You’re not suggesting we just ignore what he did, or rather what he didn’t do, are you?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Slater, ‘but I think we need to keep things in perspective. Norton deserves to have his arse kicked all over the place for the way he treated David Hudson, but right now, I am more concerned with solving two murders.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ agreed Watson, ‘so, what? Do we put him on the back-burner for now?’

  Slater pursed his lips. ‘Before we do that, I think there’s something we need to consider. I think we’re both agreed Norton is pretty much a waste of space, right?’

  Watson nodded her head. ‘That’s certainly the impression he gave me.’

  ‘Okay then, bearing that in mind, should we just accept he didn’t visit Glossop because he couldn’t be bothered? Maybe, like you suggested, he was working long shifts in the run up to Christmas, and he was tired. Along comes David Hudson, claiming his girlfriend had gone missing with her baby. Norton goes to the cottage where Hudson claims they live, and when he gets there he finds someone else is living there who claims the place was empty when they moved in. There’s no sign of a girl, or a baby, so he doesn’t follow up with the landlord because he’s decided this guy, Hudson, is some sort of nutter, and even if the girlfriend does exist, it’s no wonder she’s left him. He hasn’t even written a report yet, and because he’s tired, and he thinks it’s all a waste of time, he doesn’t even bother. Who can blame him?’

  Watson looked at Slater in disbelief. ‘You sound as if you almost feel sorry for him, and you’re defending his behaviour!’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘That’s what it sounds like.’

  ‘I’m just telling you what he wants us to believe,’ said Slater. ‘The thing is, I’m not sure we can trust Norton, and I do believe David Hudson. Plus, I also have a suspicious mind.’

  ‘And what is your suspicious mind telling you?’

  ‘It’s telling me we should be asking this question: was Norton just too lazy to visit Howard Glossop and check Hudson’s story? Or was there a reason he didn’t check it? Glossop’s office is only on the other side of the village. It’s less than fifteen minutes from Ramlinstoke Police Station. It would have taken five minutes to check back through the previous tenants and confirm or deny Hudson’s story. It would have taken all of half an hour, and he would have known for sure.’

  ‘Gosh,’ said Watson. ‘Are you suggesting he already knew what had happened to Kylie? I can see him being lazy and incompetent, but suggesting he’s complicit in murder is a whole new ballgame.’

  ‘I’m not quite sure what I’m suggesting,’ said Slater, ‘but now the idea’s in my head, I don’t seem to be able to dismiss it.’

  Chapter 23

  ‘I still can’t figure out what might have happened to the baby,’ said Watson later.

  ‘You and me both,’ agreed Slater.

  ‘You don’t think Kylie was killed for the baby, do you?’

  ‘You mean someone wanted a baby that badly, they killed Kylie just to get their hands on hers?’ asked Slater. ‘So, if it was you, why would you pick on her?’

  ‘She was a young mum, all on her own, just moved to a new house,’ said Watson, who had clearly already given this some thought. ‘Who’s going to notice?’

  Slater thought for a moment. ‘Only her boyfriend,’ he said. ‘And we know that’s the case because he was the only one who did actually notice.’

  ‘That’s right,’ agreed Watson, ‘but what if I knew he was away and would be away for another two months? By the time he gets back, I’m going to be long gone.’

  Slater could see the logic, but he didn’t feel convinced. ‘So, you think someone picked Kylie out as being an easy target, knew David was away from home for a few weeks, and knew she was going to be moving to a new house where no one would know her? I think that would take a lot of planning, or one hell of a lot of luck, Sam. Maybe if it had happened in the last five years I might buy it, but that’s a lot of information to gather, and don’t forget you couldn’t access information as easily back then as you can these days.’

  ‘But the only alternative is someone coming across her at random, knocking her down, and taking the baby,’ argued Watson. ‘I don’t find that any more likely. Most people would panic in that situation and run like hell. Anyway, if I suddenly appeared with a three-month-old baby, I’d have a lot of explaining to do, wouldn’t I? It’s not as if you can hide it away!’

  Slater sighed. He shared her frustration. When you got down to it, they really were quite clueless about a lot of things in this case. ‘We’re missing something, somewhere,’ he said, ‘and my gut is telling me it’s here, right in front of us, we’re just not seeing it.’

  ‘Do you want to go back to the beginning and start again?’ she asked.

  ‘We started with Diana and Alan Randall and that Irish pendant,’ he said.

  ‘You still think it’s her son, don’t you?’ asked Watson. ‘But how can it be if Hudson’s the father? I thought we’d established there was no relationship between her and Hudson at the time Sonny was born.’

  Slater heaved a heavy sigh. ‘I know it doesn’t add up,’ he agreed, reluctantly. ‘I just keep seeing her face when we showed her the photo of that pendant. She recognised it, I know she did.’

  ‘Did you ever hear back from Mr Bradshaw about her?’ asked Watson.

  ‘Yes, I did,’ said Slater.

  ‘What about her resignation?’

  ‘Apparently she left the job because she was suffering from depression,’ said Slater.

  ‘Was that after her son disappeared? I suppose that’s fair enough. I should think that would be enough to depress anyone,’ said Watson, gloomily.

  Slater stopped. A little bell was ringing in his head. ‘Where’s your notebook?’ he asked.

  ‘Here on my desk, why?’

  ‘Can you look up the notes from the day we went to the Randalls?’

  She grabbed her notebook and began flipping through the pages until she found the right ones.

  ‘I’m sure she told us she left fourteen years ago,’ said Slater.

  ‘Yes, you’re right, she did,’ confirmed Watson a few seconds later.

  ‘But that was four years before her son went missing.’

  ‘So that’s not the reason she was depressed,’ said Watson. ‘Didn’t Mr Bradshaw offer a reason why?’

  ‘No,’ said Slate
r. ‘The only thing he had to offer was an unconfirmed rumour that she’d had an affair with another officer.’

  ‘Did he think there was anything to it?’ asked Watson.

  ‘He gave me the name of a retired sergeant.’ He checked the email again. ‘Here it is, Ted Rivers. Apparently he used to be a desk sergeant.’

  ‘He would probably know if there was any truth to the rumours,’ said Watson. ‘They tend to know everything.’

  ‘Exactly,’ agreed Slater. ‘And I don’t think Bradshaw would have given me his name just for the sake of it.’

  ‘Well, there you are,’ said Watson. ‘If that’s true, perhaps she was asked to leave or risk being exposed and face a scandal. They might have agreed she could use depression as an excuse.’

  ‘Or maybe her husband found out and gave her an ultimatum,’ Slater suggested. ‘What if he told her she had to choose between the police or her family? Maybe the realisation she had messed her whole life up really did cause her to sink into depression.’

  Slater dug around on his desk until he found their copy of the Flipton case file on Sonny Randall’s disappearance. ‘I’m going to take this back to the hotel tonight and have another look at the assessment of the parents. I’m sure it didn’t mention anything about her suffering from depression at any time, but maybe I missed it.’

  ‘I’m probably being dim,’ said Watson, ‘but even if she did have an affair, and she was, or wasn’t, suffering from depression, I’m afraid I can’t see how it’s relevant to Kylie Mason’s death, which was at least ten years earlier.’

  ‘Oh, it isn’t,’ said Slater, ‘but it might have something to do with her son’s disappearance.’

  ‘Right,’ said Watson, ‘I see.’ But she didn’t look or sound convinced.

  Slater just hoped it wasn’t going to be a monumental waste of his time.

  Chapter 24

  ‘So?’ asked Watson the next morning. ‘Did you learn anything from your homework last night?’