‘No, he won’t,’ said Mariner. It wasn’t a prison sentence but they both knew it was the next best thing. ‘Thanks for everything you did.’
‘My pleasure, Tom. There is something else. McCrae’s written you a letter of apology expressing remorse for what he’s done. I need your permission to forward it.’
Mariner’s gut lurched. ‘Sure, why not?’
Next up Mariner got back to Stuart Croghan. ‘You’ve got some results on the paint flecks?’ he said.
‘No. Something else I thought might interest you though. The baby remains from the Lickeys. When we ran tests on them the DNA profile jogged something in my memory. I checked back over recent cases and found a match.’
‘You can identify the baby?’
‘We’re a step nearer,’ said Croghan. ‘Its mother was the woman you found in the sewer last Christmas.’
‘Madeleine? Christ, you’re sure?’
‘As sure as I can be.’
‘Wow. We knew at the time that she’d recently given birth.’
‘And now you’ve found her baby, although sadly, it still doesn’t tell us who she was.’
Still astonished. Mariner took the news over to where Charlie Glover was ploughing through the paperwork on his desk. He seized upon it. ‘This gives us a new lead,’ he said, eagerly. ‘The baby had a cleft palate. Somebody would surely remember that?’
‘But we don’t know if she had the baby here or in Albania,’ Mariner cautioned him. ‘If she had him over there we haven’t any idea of the extent of the medical care available. It wouldn’t necessarily be recorded anywhere, so you’d be relying on someone to remember it, and where the hell would we start with that?’ Glover was crestfallen. ‘It might be worth checking round local health centres and hospitals here though. It’s possible she had the baby here, though it will also of course depend on whether she was here legally.’
‘How old was the baby?’ Glover asked.
‘Around four to six weeks according to Croghan, and he died at about the same time as Madeleine, so you’re looking at him being born sometime in October or November of last year.’
‘What I don’t understand is, if Madeleine and her baby were killed at the same time, why not dispose of them both in the same way and put them both down the sewer?’ queried Glover. ‘Why go to the trouble of burying the baby in a different spot?’
‘Perhaps whoever did it was squeamish about doing that with a baby.’
‘Can I follow this up, boss?’ Glover was already starting to stack papers, tidying his desk to leave it for a while. ‘I could do a house-to-house in the row opposite the woodland, too. Someone may have seen whoever it was dumping the baby’s body.’
Mariner hated to dampen his enthusiasm. ‘Nine or ten months ago? It’s asking a lot for anyone to remember that far back. And I can’t imagine it was done in broad daylight either.’
‘I know but . . .’ Charlie hated loose ends too.
‘All right then. It won’t do any harm, I suppose.’
Croghan had given Mariner the number for the paint lab, and the technician there had come up with a positive result. Mariner couldn’t think what would possess anyone to opt for a career that involved spending all day in a lab, examining bits of paint, but he was bloody grateful that someone had.
‘The flecks of paint found in Christie Walker’s clothing are without a doubt from a car, not a train,’ said the technician at the end of the phone. ‘I’ve compared it with the manufacturer’s database and it’s a DuPont Cayman green, a paint used on Ford Escorts up at Halewood from the early 1990s.’
‘That’s a long time span,’ said Mariner.
‘The last car rolled off the production line up there in July 2000, so you’re looking for a car more than six years old. That should narrow it down for you. Also the top layer of paint was more loosely bound on some of the samples, so you’re looking for a car that’s had a partial re-spray.’
‘But basically we’re looking for a green, six-year-old Ford Escort.’
‘That’s about it.’
‘Thanks.’ It was a starting point. At last something tangible to look for.
Mariner contacted the DVLA for a list of Ford Escorts registered in the Birmingham area, though it was only going to help them if the driver believed in tax and insurance, and there were plenty who didn’t. And the CCTV cameras in the car park of the Golden Cross were no help at all as they were out of commission.
‘It would help if we could pinpoint exactly where Christie was struck,’ Mariner said to Tony Knox. ‘To have killed her it must have been quite an impact. There must have been damage to the car so there must be some evidence of it. At least if we could establish what route she might have taken—’
‘And how do you propose we do that?’
‘By taking Croghan’s advice and looking for anything connected with Christie.’
‘Like—?’ The penny dropped and Knox screwed up his face in distaste. ‘You mean the vomit.’
‘It’s all we’ve got.’
Assembling a small team, they began working outwards from the pub, but in a short time it became clear that it was going to take a long time. Even aiming for the direction that Christie would have taken to get to Jimmy Bond’s house, they were very quickly presented with numerous alternative routes and each pavement was dappled with possible stains. The enormity of the task was just hitting home when Mariner’s mobile rang. It was CID. ‘We’ve had a call from a man who’s seen Christie Walker’s shoe.’
‘Seen it? What does that mean?’ It seemed an odd way of phrasing it.
‘So he says, and it’s kind of in the area you’re looking at, between the Golden Cross and Jimmy Bond’s house. I said you’d go and talk to him.’
Knox and Mariner went immediately down to Grange Road where Andrew Sawyer lived. Bordering on the university campus and once the home of manufacturing industries, in recent years the old factories had been torn down and student halls of residence erected in their place. Sawyer, it transpired, was a mature student, an academic renting a flat in the university’s post-graduate accommodation. Even though his face said early thirties, he dressed like a middle-aged man in dark trousers, collar and tie, with a sleeveless pullover on top. Nor was his flat anything like any student accommodation Mariner had ever been into before, everything tidy and spotlessly clean. ‘Would you like a cup of tea? I was just making one.’
It was hours since they’d had a drink and Mariner’s throat was parched. ‘Thanks.’ Knox declined the offer. Sawyer disappeared into the kitchen.
As they’d driven up, the street outside had been deserted, Sawyer seemingly the only resident in the block, a point that Mariner remarked on now.
‘Yes, most of the other students aren’t back yet after the summer break,’ Sawyer explained, disappearing into the kitchen area. ‘Give it a couple of weeks and it’ll be quite different.’
‘You must feel quite isolated here,’ Mariner called after him.
‘Not really, I quite like the peace. I’m working on my doctorate,’ came the disembodied voice in reply. ‘It demands a high level of concentration.’
‘What’s your subject?’
‘The impact of electro-magnetic fields on planetary orbits.’
‘Oh.’ It was a real conversation killer.
Sawyer reappeared moments later carrying a tray with two mugs and a plate of chocolate digestives.
‘So, the shoe?’ Mariner asked, thanking him and taking one of the mugs.
‘I saw it lying on the pavement when I went to the library. I remembered thinking “how strange,” because it was a nice shoe and quite new. It’s quite amazing, isn’t it? The number of times you see just an odd shoe lying in the road, but they’re usually old and worn through. During term time I’d have simply assumed that one of the undergraduates had lost it on the way home after a drunken night out. Then I saw the appeal on TV and recognised it; a blue and white striped canvas ballet shoe, with a buckle trim.’
&nb
sp; Mariner was impressed with the level of detail. ‘And where is it now?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. When I realised it was the same shoe, I went out to fetch it, but it was gone.’
‘When was this?’
‘First thing this morning. I caught it on the breakfast news.’
But the first appeal had gone out yesterday evening, meaning that someone else could have seen it then, and returned to the scene to retrieve the shoe. Either that or they were dealing not with a genuine witness, but an attention-seeker, with a possible shoe fetish.
‘Can you take us to where you saw it?’ Mariner asked.
‘Of course.’ On their way out Sawyer lifted an anorak off the hook in the hall. Mariner wouldn’t have expected anything else.
Sawyer took them back out onto the road, still eerily quiet, walking back towards the Bristol Road until they were about equidistant between a sharp right-hand bend at one end and the main road at the other. He looked in both directions to judge the distances, then concluded: ‘It was around here.’
‘You’re certain?’
‘I have a photographic memory. That was how I recognised the shoe when I saw it on TV.’
Debris crunched underfoot. It was glass, the thick glass that shields car headlights. It might be just enough to make Sawyer a credible witness. Mariner scooped some of it up into an evidence bag and he and Knox scoured the road for any traces of paint. SOCO would need to come and make a more thorough search.
‘And you saw only the shoe here? There was nothing else?’
‘Like what?’
Mariner shrugged. ‘Any other personal belongings?’ He didn’t want to make any suggestions.
‘No, there was nothing like that.’
‘Have you been aware of any disturbances out here during the past few days?’ Mariner was careful not to lead Sawyer.
‘A couple of nights ago I must have dozed off in the chair, because I woke suddenly in the early hours. I thought I’d heard a noise but then realised it was just a car door slamming.’
‘A door or a boot?’ asked Mariner.
‘Hm, I thought door, but I suppose it could have been the boot. It’s hard to tell the difference, isn’t it? It was pretty late, after midnight, so I did get up and have a look, but the car was just pulling off as I got to the window. It would have been about here, I suppose.’
‘Did you see what make the car was, or what colour?’
‘I’m not very good with cars, but it was quite a smallish one and a dark colour. I think it might have been a hatchback.’
‘You didn’t happen to see the number plate?’
‘I’m afraid not, I expect it was shadowed.’
So much for the photographic memory. ‘Any idea which night this was?’
Sawyer thought hard. ‘It must have been Saturday, well, early Sunday morning really.’
‘Have you seen the same car back here since then, say, yesterday evening?’
‘No, but then I wasn’t really looking.’
‘Do you drive, Mr Sawyer?’
‘No. I ride a bicycle.’ No big surprise there either.
Before leaving Grange Road, Mariner walked again to the spot where Sawyer claimed the shoe had been.
‘The timing would be about right,’ Knox said. ‘The barmaid at the Golden Cross said Christie left at about midnight. The accident woke Sawyer up first, driver jumps out of the car slams the door and/or the boot. By the time Sawyer gets to the window the car’s pulling away.’
‘I have a problem with the hit and run accident scenario though,’ Mariner was frowning.
‘Which is?’
‘Look at the width of this pavement. There’s no need for Christie to even have been in the road.’
‘Unless she’d chosen to walk there. She was drunk, remember.’
‘But approaching this spot from either end a driver would have had to slow down, either to turn the corner into the street, or to round a sharp bend, and he wouldn’t by this point have picked up much speed. The street lights are new and there are plenty of them. It’s so well lit, he must clearly have seen any pedestrian and would have had the time and space to swerve and avoid them.’
‘Unless he’d been drinking too, or worse,’ said Knox.
‘But who would need to drive along here at night anyway? Sawyer seems to be the only person living here. For Christie on foot it was an obvious shortcut through from the university campus to get up to Jimmy Bond’s house, but it’s not a through road for drivers. It doesn’t go anywhere.’
‘Joyriders?’
‘That’s a possibility,’ agreed Mariner. ‘Or if someone wanted to hurt Christie deliberately, it’d be a good place to do it.’
‘You think someone was following her?’ said Knox.
‘The route between the pub and the university is all public roads and would have been fairly busy late on a Saturday night, so too risky. But if the driver knew where Christie was going, he could have watched her walk onto the campus then driven round and waited for her to emerge on this side. With the students away, this area’s like a ghost town. He could have reasonably expected no witnesses at all.’
‘He?’
‘Okay,’ conceded Mariner, ‘it could have been “she,” but whoever it was would need to be strong enough to lift Christie’s body and heave it over the bridge parapet.’
‘So why bother to move the body?’
‘Because eventually it would be found, along with the broken glass from his headlights and any other forensic evidence that might lead us to the killer. Having knocked her down, the first thing he’d want to do is dump the body away from the scene of the accident. It’s what, about a mile from here to the railway bridge? The only thing he failed to notice was that her shoe had come off. Fortunately for him, we tipped him off with last night’s TV appeal, giving him time to come back and retrieve it.’
‘So what’s the motive?’ asked Knox, as they got back in the car.
‘Where do we start? We come back to Jimmy Bond for a start off. Did he believe that Christie had shopped him, or is he just pissed off because she left him?’
‘He’s got a pretty firm alibi.’
‘I’ll bet he’s got some interesting contacts too, though; said Mariner. ‘And what about this TV documentary Christie was going to do? I bet Trudy Barratt wouldn’t have been very happy about that. She wasn’t going to admit it to us, but the nursery has clearly suffered as a result of the abduction. A documentary rehashing and sensationalising Jessica’s abduction would have opened up old wounds and brought back all the adverse publicity for the nursery, especially if Marcella Turner’s involved. She’d make sure of it.’
‘How would Trudy Barratt have found out?’
‘She already knew a documentary had been proposed, and Christie could have been using it to force a pay rise. Trudy Barratt told us that the heated meeting with Christie was about trying to keep her, and involved offering her more money. Perhaps she was being economical with the truth. Was Christie trying to blackmail the manager? It would explain why she was smiling when she came out of the office, and why she thought she would be able to afford a flat on the Bristol Road development.’
‘Yeah, but people like Trudy Barratt don’t go around killing, do they?’
‘She might if she’s desperate enough. We both know it happens. Jack and the Beanstalk is Trudy Barratt’s livelihood, and she’s already taken a battering. Then there’s this “other story” that Christie told the TV producer she had. We don’t know what that was. Maybe it’s something else going on in the nursery.’
‘—if it was anything at all. As the producer said, it could have been just a cynical ploy to screw more money out of the TV company.’
‘Christie didn’t call Jez Barclay about it until very late on Saturday night, after you stood her up,’ said Mariner.
‘Thanks for the reminder.’
‘What I mean is, perhaps Christie had uncovered something illegal, something she thought you’d wa
nt to know about. When she couldn’t tell you about it she decided to go public instead.’
‘Or maybe this has nothing to do with me,’ Knox said. He preferred it that way.
‘We could do with talking to her friends again and finding out if anyone else knew about her discussions with the TV company.’
* * *
Back at Granville Lane they were greeted by Charlie Glover who was almost beside himself.
‘You won’t believe this, boss. I went back to finish the house-to-house last night, and I’ve found a guy who remembers seeing a man going into the woods late one night last year. He says it was definitely around November 5 because it was the fireworks that had kept him awake. He thought the bloke had gone into the woods for a slash but he went right into the woods and was gone for ages. He’s sure he was carrying a bag of some sort too.’
‘That’s great,’ said Mariner, wondering how soon it would be before Charlie realised how thin that was.
‘Yeah, only thing is, the description doesn’t match Alecsander Lucca. Lucca was short and stocky. According to this witness, the man going into the woods was tall and slim.’
‘But it’s something.’
‘Yeah, something . . .’
Mariner and Knox returned to his office to look again through Christie’s meagre belongings. ‘Shame she didn’t keep a diary,’ he said, taking out the bank statements. Something fell out, a bright orange flyer that fluttered to the floor by Knox’s feet.
Knox picked it up. ‘What about this?’ he held up the flyer for Mariner to see. Fertility. New hope for childless couples. Telephone confidentially . . .’
‘What do you make of that?’ he asked.
Mariner read it. ‘Bond talked about wanting to settle down and start a family, but according to him, Christie wasn’t interested.’
‘And yet she came off the pill eight months ago,’ said Knox, taking back the leaflet. He scanned it again. ‘Perhaps Bond was lying. If they’d been trying unsuccessfully for a baby it’s not something he’d want to own up to. It’d put a nice big dent in his macho image, wouldn’t it?’
‘But Christie was how old, twenty-four? Isn’t that young for fertility treatment?’
Baby Lies (Reissue) Page 21
