by L M Krier
‘You’re very welcome. I do hope I can help you. I was Lucy Robson’s form teacher in her last year with us. We could go and talk in the form room. It’s not being used at the moment and it might be more private than the staff room.’
She turned and led the way along a corridor and up some stairs, opening a door onto a classroom on a mezzanine level. Large windows must have made it bright and sunny on a day when the sky was not as leaden as it currently was. She pulled out two chairs and invited Jezza to sit down as she did the same.
Jezza studied her before she began speaking. Firm but fair was the phrase which sprang to mind.
‘I wanted to find out a bit more about Lucy in connection with a case we’re working on.’
‘She’s surfaced then, has she?’
Jezza added ‘astute’ to her first impression.
‘I’m sure you will have found out by now that she left here quite abruptly,’ the teacher continued. As soon as she turned sixteen. You also probably know she should have started recognised training or carried on with part-time training whilst working, until she was eighteen.
‘When she didn’t come back to school after the summer break, we contacted the home where she lived, to ask about her. They said she’d left them and moved away. They’d heard from her, saying she was working and studying part-time, so there was no immediate concern for her welfare.
‘I’m afraid Lucy became yet another young person who slipped through the system. The unfortunate truth is that neither the education system nor the care system has the resources to keep tabs on everyone, and to follow up on people like Lucy. Especially when there didn’t seem to be any grounds to do so.’
‘What sort of a person was Lucy, in her time with you?’ Jezza phrased the question carefully so it didn’t imply anything.
‘A funny little thing,’ Mrs Hughes told her. ‘As you can imagine, I see a lot of children, so it tends to be the ones who are a bit different who stand out in my mind. The ones I remember. Lucy didn’t have an easy life, of course, but you’ll know that already, I’m sure.
‘She was always very immature for her age. Way behind her classmates in social development. A below average student who struggled a bit but tried hard. She was very easy to influence, too. Some girls would get her to do things for them which got her into trouble, not them. She lacked any form of judgement of people’s behaviour or motives. She only ever saw the good in people. Very child-like.
‘I took her for English for part of her time here. Her creative writing efforts really were what I would expect to see from someone much younger. More the sort of thing I’d associate with someone at primary school, Year Six, than a teenager. And the theme was always the same. Fanciful romance. The stuff of fairy tales. Damsel in distress is rescued by kindly older man who then sweeps her off her feet and marries her. Always the same theme, recycled to fit whatever the actual subject was. And always the happy ever after. Wishful thinking, no doubt.’
‘What about other subjects? How did she do with those?’
‘Struggled, basically. Generally low marks, but she scraped along somehow.’
‘Special needs?’
‘She was never statemented. Nor put in any particular pigeon-hole. She could read, write and do very basic maths. But she did struggle, especially socially. Very few friends her own age. She always tried to befriend older people. She’d hang round teachers, trying to chat to them. That sort of thing.’
‘What was she like physically?’ Jezza asked, thinking of Ted and Amelie’s description of Cyane Lee’s extreme thinness.
‘Always a skinny little thing. Looked as if a strong puff of wind would blow her away. She hadn’t had the best of starts in life, of course. Because of her mother, we were told.’
‘Eating disorder?’
‘Not as far as I know. It wasn’t flagged up to me, as her form teacher. I suspect she’d just got used to going without when she was little and it had become her norm.’
‘Were there any subjects she was better at that others?’
‘She liked to draw and paint. Her style was certainly naive, like she was, but it was pleasing enough. In fact, I put one of her pictures on the wall in here, just to encourage her, when she so seldom did anything worthy of much attention. I’ll show you.’
She stood up and went to get a small painting from the wall, but Jezza stopped her.
‘May I please borrow it, just for a short time?’ She was putting on gloves and reaching for an evidence bag as she spoke.
The teacher eyed her shrewdly. ‘So you’re hoping to find her fingerprints on the painting, then? Is Lucy in some sort of trouble?’
Jezza didn’t reply immediately. She was carefully lifting the small, framed picture off the wall. It was a simple landscape, mostly in shades of blue. A lake, sky, and a line of green grass, with tall trees. Jezza’s eyes were on the bottom left corner where the artist had signed their work.
A simple two-letter signature, in black paint.
Cy.
‘Thanks for arranging this for us,’ Martha McGuire told the prison police liaison officer, who was showing her and the man she’d gone there to meet into a room with facilities to watch security camera footage.
He had introduced himself as Todd Rosser, a lip reader, there to see if he could make out anything of the recording of William Warren’s last visit from Duncan Dooley. There was also a prison officer there to manipulate the equipment for them.
‘I’ll leave you to it for now,’ Katie Pilling told them. ‘The officer will let me know when you’ve finished and I can arrange for you to be escorted out. Oh, and Martha, I’ve been asked to pass on a message to your DCI. Please could you tell him that Martin Wellman would like to speak to him as soon as he can arrange to visit.’
‘What I’d like to do first, please,’ Rosser told Martha, ‘is just to watch the tape through, perhaps a couple of times, before I give you any feedback of what I think is being said. It’s a bit like listening to someone speaking with a broad regional accent, where it takes you a while to tune in and understand what they’re saying.’
‘The other problem you’re likely to have is that the cameras aren’t trained on Warren and Dooley the whole time,’ the officer warned them. ‘Depending on who else was visiting at the time and needed an eye keeping on them, the camera might have moved about a bit. You may be lucky, though, as Security had been told there was police interest in Warren and his visitors.’
Martha was glad she had an expert with her. She couldn’t make out anything from watching Warren and Dooley, no matter how hard she concentrated on the way their lips moved. The lip-reader was busy making rapid notes, so he was clearly picking up something from it.
After the third run-through of the relevant sections of the tape, the officer fast-forwarding through any parts which didn’t feature Warren and his visitor, Rosser turned to Martha.
‘Right, not the easiest to work with, I’m afraid. Both of them seem highly aware of the likelihood that there are cameras trained on them and they’re tending to keep their heads down more than would normally be the case on a visit, I imagine.
‘Also the younger man has a habit of swallowing the end of his words so the interpretation of them is likely to be ambiguous. One phrase he uses several times, though, is something like “welly row”. The same word shape as row a boat. And one word he also says a few times, which is sadly harder to read, is either “tosser” or “dosser”.
‘Is the older man the boss, in some way? Does he have a hold over the younger one?’
‘I’m afraid I can’t go into any details about our investigation, Todd.’
‘Let me put it another way, then. The older man is the boss of the younger one, as he’s clearly giving out the orders. They are firm, clear, repeated and unequivocal. He tells him several times, “you’ll have to go back to see him again and tell him what he needs to do”. He also says, more than once, “just remind him what’s at stake if he doesn’t”.
‘
I’ll transcribe all of my squiggles into something resembling English as soon as I get back to my office. Then I can email them straight to you. Does that help you at all?’
‘Enormously, thank you. More than I imagined it would. I have to confess it looked an impossible task to me. I’m not sure how you managed to get anything out of watching that. I could never have made anything of it in a month of Sundays.’
Todd stood up, packing away his notebook, and smiled at her.
‘I’m sure there would be very many aspects of your job I wouldn’t be able to do without years of training, either.’
Warren was taking out his frustrations on his mop and pail once more. He wouldn’t get to see the chaplain until later that evening and then it would be hard to find any time to talk to him one-to-one. Archer’s role at the prison was not full-time but was divided between there and his other duties as curate in his own parish. He deputised there for the parish priest, filling in during his absence, taking services and confessions as needed.
There was another Listeners’ meeting that evening, for the existing ones, with some of the new volunteers coming along to hear more of what was involved. But a prison officer would be present at all times and would soon jump on Warren trying to get any individual attention from the chaplain.
And he didn’t dare risk staging another of his seizure episodes. He kept those for special occasions. He knew some of the screws already had their suspicions about their authenticity. He had to make himself reserve them for times of dire need, or when he wanted to make a point.
His humming was as angry as the stabbing of his mop as he finished his cleaning of the corridor.
He had to find a way to get some time alone with the padre, and soon.
He had to.
Chapter Thirty
‘Welly row has to be Wellington Road, surely, near where the car showroom fire was?’ Mike Hallam said, once Martha had finished presenting her findings at the end of the day.
‘Logically, yes,’ Ted replied. ‘Especially as the last one so far, the one with the fatality, was also not far from there.’
‘The other reason I thought they might mention it, boss, was with an eyewitness account from near to the showroom. Whoever the man with the clerical shirt was, he’d know he’d been seen by someone.
‘We’re fairly certain the arsonist for the first ones can’t have been Duncan Dooley, because his work alibi seems tight. Although of course he doesn’t have an alibi for the fatal blaze. But it does seem, on the face of it, that that’s what Warren and Dooley were discussing. And as we’ve said before, the third part of the triangle with those two is the prison chaplain. He knew Dooley inside prison and he has regular contact with Warren.’
‘He’s still in touch with Dooley,’ Rob O’Connell told them. ‘Archer was at his home today. He doesn’t work at the prison every day. He does stuff in his parish. And not long ago, just before me and Virgil handed over the relay of obs on him, he had a visit from Dooley, who was with him for nearly an hour.’
‘Time to pull the chaplain in for further questioning, boss?’ Mike asked. ‘Check out his alibis in detail and get a sample of his DNA. See if it’s a match for the cigarette stub.’
‘I still think, from having spoken to him, that if he is setting these fires, he must be under some considerable pressure to do it. Blackmail, for sure. And it is just possible that he’s simply being told the locations to set fire to, without having any idea whether or not the places are occupied,’ Jo put in.
‘Warren certainly can’t be doing a recce of anywhere from his prison cell,’ Rob continued. ‘But Dooley could be picking the sites and acting as the go-between.’
‘That would fit with Warren telling him to go and see someone and remind him of what’s at stake.’
‘And tosser is surely dosser,’ Jezza put in. ‘That might have been how they described the homeless man who was the casualty.’
‘Speaking of him, we now have a confirmed ID on him, through military records,’ Jo told them. ‘Leonard Baines. Ex-Parachute Regiment, seriously wounded on active service and invalided out after a prolonged stay in hospital which involved putting a titanium plate in what was left of his skull. He got a medal for his pains, but he also finished up out on the streets, a broken man.
‘I’ve been talking to the Super and the Press Office. There’s a press release gone out today, naming the victim. Next of kin have been informed. An ex-wife who’s not seen him for years. With luck it should make the early evening news, with an appeal for witnesses. People might be more likely to want to help with the death of what we can now confirm is an Army veteran.’
‘So do we haul the chaplain in, boss?’ Rob asked him.
Ted thought for a moment. ‘I’d like to give it another day. If we’ve got him under surveillance, he’s unlikely to go far. I’d consider it to be a calculated risk that’s worth taking in the circumstances.
‘There are two things I’d like to wait for first, to see how they pan out. One is that there’s a strong likelihood that the news of the ID on the fatality might rattle our arsonist more than somewhat. Bad enough if they weren’t expecting anyone to be in the building at all. Far worse if they now discover they’ve killed a military hero.
‘The second point is my friend Martin. As you know, he’s been trying to get closer to both Warren and the chaplain, to see if he can pick up on anything going on between them which may give grounds for blackmail. It’s possible, for instance, that Warren’s got him to start smuggling stuff in to prison for him. Nothing too serious, but enough to make sure the chaplain would be in big trouble if it ever came out. Martin’s asked to see me, so I’m hoping he has some news for me. I’m going tomorrow morning, first thing.
‘As long as we’re happy the chaplain can’t disappear overnight, I’d sooner wait and see what that visit brings me.
‘So, what else?’
He could see that Jezza was itching for a chance to say something.
‘Boss, a productive visit to the school, I think. I picked up a small painting which Lucy Robson did while she was there. She signed it Cy. So, Amelie, you were on to something there. I’ve sent it off for fingerprinting. If we ever get the chance to get prints from Cyane Lee, we can get them checked to see if she and Lucy are the same person.
‘Another thing about Cyane. Again, sorry if I’m spouting stuff you already know, but art isn’t really my thing, other than finding out stuff for Tommy, so this was newish to me. Lucy’s painting uses a lot of blue. I took a photo on my phone before I sent it off, if anyone wants to look. It’s the greeny-blue colour sometimes called aqua. It’s also called cyan, without the E. Amelie, you’ve written it as with an E ...’
Amelie was on the defensive immediately. ‘I got her to spell it for me; that’s how she spelled it.’
‘It wasn’t a criticism. Adding an E is a way of making a name feminine, of course. It’s also the name of a water nymph in Greek mythology. Lucy’s form teacher said she was always very immature in what she wrote. Maybe not a reader of Greek myths, but she might have chosen cyan, after the colour, and just added the E because that’s how she thought it was written.
‘So, boss, can we bring her in and question her? Can we ask to take her fingerprints, so we can rule her in or out as Lucy? Because that would give us the link we need to Byrne, if she is Lucy Robson. A word of caution, though. Her teacher said she was always emotionally very immature. Easily led. She was never given a statement of special needs but she could be classed as vulnerable, so how do you want to handle her, if at all?’
‘Boss, if it helps, I did recent update training in interviewing vulnerable persons, as part of my return to work package. I’d be happy to interview her, unless anyone else is more qualified?’ Martha suggested.
‘If we do bring her in, I think it would be a good idea to keep her well away from Tam Lee. When me and Virgil talked to Tam, it’s clear she’s a strong character. Controlling, perhaps? When you were telling us about your
visit to see Cyane, boss, some of the things you reported her saying sounded very like Tam’s way of speaking.
‘We’ve checked Tam Lee out and she has form, though not recent, for getting a bit physical. It never came to much because there was always sufficient doubt over whether she was just defending herself, or whether she liked starting trouble.’
‘Lucy’s teacher said she was always very easily influenced,’ Jezza confirmed. ‘And it certainly sounds like it, with her relationship with Byrne. Surely, these days, most girls, even as young as eleven or twelve, know it’s not normal behaviour to be sharing a bed with a much older man. Even if he never touched them, which I find hard to believe.’
‘Yes, I think the way forward now is to bring Cyane in, hopefully without alerting Tam Lee, and to ask her some questions about Lucy Robson. Show her the picture on your phone, and the signature, and see what she says about it. Martha, yes please, can you take that. And Maurice, can you go with her? We’ve no reason to believe she’ll be bothered about the presence of a male officer, have we?’
‘I’d say the reverse, boss,’ Jezza responded. ‘If she really is Lucy Robson, she seems to relate well to older men. Daddy Hen could be just what’s needed to get her to talk.’
‘Make sure you get her written consent to give fingerprints, and the three of us will have a talk at some point, to see what needs covering. If at all possible, we need to get hold of one of these cards painted by Cyane Lee, to compare with the one from school. Particularly the signature.’
Eric Morgan gave an exaggerated sigh and unfolded his arms to pick up an evidence bag from the desk he was sitting at.
‘Guv, you should know by now, if you want a job doing properly, you give it to Uniform. Me and Amelie have already got one of the cards, on our rounds. So even if she doesn’t consent to fingerprints, with any luck, there should be something on this. It’s in one of those little cellophane pockets and we picked the one from the back of the display, so hopefully it’s not been pawed already by every man and his dog.’
