Why Guy had not cleared up the mess after Jensen’s death was a bit of a puzzle; perhaps it had genuinely been because he was too squeamish. Whether or not Oliver Sparham had been directly involved in Dame Claudia’s disappearance was impossible to say. Tim persisted in his original reading of Oliver as an essentially honest and honourable man. He therefore chose to continue to believe Oliver’s account of his last meeting with Claudia. Juliet was inclined to agree with him, but for the less visceral reason that what Oliver had said fitted in with the forensic evidence. The wall had been spattered with Jensen’s blood much later than 4.30 p.m. in the afternoon before Claudia’s disappearance. Oliver had had a watertight alibi from the time of his arrival at the conference at 5 p.m. until the early hours of the following morning, by which time Jensen had almost certainly been murdered.
Superintendent Thornton was reasonably happy with the progress made by Tim and his team, even though there had been a certain number of deaths that he would have liked to be able to transform into arrests. He was still exercised by police failure to locate either Edmund Baker or Jane Halliwell, and persisted in his fanciful notion that they had eloped to Scotland together. Although Alex Tarrant’s statement included details of the conversation with Oliver in which he had said that he believed that Jane might have been the mystery woman with whom Edmund had first committed adultery, Tim could not see why a woman like Jane would impede her flight and run a greater risk of capture by yoking herself to a man for whom she probably had little regard. He did not dissuade Thornton from enlisting the help of the Scottish police, but at the same time he was pursuing a different line of enquiry. Police officers who had been randomly stopping vehicles on the night of the Herrick Old House incident had seen a car approach at speed, then suddenly slow down and reverse. It had turned precipitately and roared back into the darkness towards Star Fen, which was not far from Sleaford. Two of them had seen the car quite clearly. Although they could not say what colour it had been, they had both agreed that it was an elderly Saab.
If the car had indeed been Edmund’s, it was possible that when he saw that he might be stopped, he decided instead to join Maichment and Grigoryen’s men at Herrick Old House. Tim thought that this was unlikely, however. All the other evidence suggested that Edmund would be running away from the Albanians. He probably didn’t know of their plans to fire the children’s home, in any case. He had always been an outsider and now became a fugitive from everyone, even his own family. His sons had showed little but contempt for him. After their mother’s funeral, they had each returned to their jobs in distant places, seemingly careless of whether Edmund was found or not.
Tim was intrigued by the sighting, though, and convinced that it held the key to Edmund’s whereabouts. A few days after the fire he drove to the place where the officers had been, turned round, as had the driver of the Saab, and took the road to Star Fen. It was a tiny hamlet. He remembered vaguely that he had visited it once before, searching for someone accused of embezzling money who had been seen at a rented cottage there.
Star Fen consisted of a single street with half a dozen houses and a few farm buildings. Three vehicles were parked in the street. None of them was a dark red Saab. Tim got out of the BMW and walked along the road for some distance beyond the houses, and back again. It was a place of familiar fenland scenery: neatly-tilled fields bounded by deep dykes, no trees, few shrubs or bushes. Not promising territory for concealing a strange vehicle.
He sauntered back to his car again. At first he had thought that the hamlet was deserted. Then he saw a man standing at the side of one of the houses, watching him intently. He was a well-built man in his twenties, with a lot of untidy dark hair and a swarthy face. He was wearing navy-blue overalls and gigantic green gumboots. He carried a grease-gun in one hand. As Tim drew closer, he saw that he had evidently been tinkering with the engine of an aged tractor that was jammed up against the side of the house wall. Tim decided that he would speak to him. As he crossed the road, the man came walking towards him with rapid steps.
“Have you come about the bike?” he said.
“No,” said Tim. “What made you think I had?”
The man snorted. “Got copper written all over you. No-one’s come about it yet. I thought that they might have sent you.”
“No,” said Tim. “But you’re right, I am a copper.” He produced the photograph of Edmund Baker that Gary Cooper had acquired from one of Baker’s sons. “Have you seen this man hanging around here at all?”
The man held the photograph gingerly between greasy thumb and forefinger.
“Can’t say I have. People don’t hang around here, in any case. That’s what’s so odd about the bike. Thought that bastard next door might have taken it.” He jerked his head back in the direction of the tractor. “But I’d have seen him with it by now. It’s too close to home for him, anyway. Wouldn’t be able to use it here, would he?”
“Are you telling me that you’ve had a bicycle stolen and you’ve reported it?”
“Not a ‘bicycle’.” The man pronounced the word mincingly. “A motorbike. A Triumph. My pride and joy, it was. And the only way I had of spending a bit of time away from here. It’s all right, like. But it gets lonely.”
Tim was suddenly very alert.
“When was your motorbike stolen, Mr . . . I’m sorry, I didn’t ask your name . . .”
“It’s Sentance. Richard Sentance. Four days ago.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Of course I’m sure. Cops all over the place that night, weren’t there? Even come here once. I didn’t know it had gone then, mind. Otherwise I’d have put them on to it.”
“You’re definitely talking about four days ago?”
“That’s the one. When will someone come about it, do you think?”
Tim dredged up one of the many details of Alex Tarrant’s statement. She’d said that Edmund had been keen on motorbikes; that he’d told her that he’d had one in his youth and intended to buy another. He certainly knew how to ride one.
“I’ll make sure that someone comes to take a statement today. In the meantime, would you mind describing it to me as accurately as you possibly can?”
“I don’t need to do that. I’ve got photos of it: dozens of them. You can take your pick.”
Chapter Sixty-Four
Armed with the photographs, Tim returned to the police station. He put out a search request for sightings of the motorbike to all the police forces within a fifty-mile radius. He decided that it would be better to search intensively in a small area at first and extend the radius further if this didn’t work. He also asked local radio stations to broadcast descriptions of it. Edmund’s photograph had already appeared on regional news programmes and their websites. Tim asked them to re-run, adding photographs of the motorbike as well. Then he contacted the police at Sleaford and asked them to search the dykes around Star Fen.
The last of these initiatives was the first to bear fruit. Towards the end of the afternoon, he received a call to say that a dark red Saab had been found almost submerged in a deep dyke about half a mile from the hamlet. Checks with the DVLA showed that Edmund Baker was the owner. It was not possible to say whether the vehicle had been pushed into the dyke deliberately or whether it had crashed as the result of an accident, though the force with which the front of the car had hit the bottom, the crumpled state of the driver’s door and the fact that it had been left open suggested the latter. There was a sharp bend in the road at the same place which a driver not familiar with the area would have found difficult to negotiate if going at speed.
“But there’s no body?” said Tim.
“No, we don’t think so. We’ve walked along the bank for several yards with nets and poles and we’ve not found one. We’d have to have the dyke properly dredged to make sure.”
“Do that, will you?”
Tim was also perturbed by Ale
x Tarrant’s kidnapping. Unless Alex was withholding key information – which he doubted, after she’d come clean about Edmund – he couldn’t understand why she’d been taken. Alex herself said that she’d been told that if she co-operated she’d be held prisoner only for twenty-four hours, but that afterwards something had seemed to go wrong and she’d been convinced that her captors would kill her. How could holding her – or killing her – possibly have made any difference to what he knew of their plans?
He decided to ask Alex if they could meet again. He knew from Juliet that she was still staying with her friends at Holbeach, although the blood splatter – which analysis had shown was from a pig – had been cleaned from her kitchen wall and she’d been told that she could return to the flat if she liked. He wasn’t surprised that she was reluctant to do so, especially while Tom was still a patient at the Pilgrim Hospital. He called her mobile and, when she agreed to the meeting, offered to send a police car to fetch her.
“It’s all right – I’ll come on the bus. I want to call in at the Archaeological Society, anyway. I’ve got the doctor to sign me off today – I’ll start back to work next week – and I’d like to pick up my mail.”
Chapter Sixty-Five
They agreed that she would come to his office at about 3 p.m. Shortly after 2 p.m., she called his mobile. He recognised her number and answered it immediately. As soon as he pressed the green button, she mumbled: “DI Yates?” The rest of her words were engulfed by a burst of sobs.
“Mrs Tarrant? Alex? Are you in danger?”
He could hear her swallowing air, as if trying with great effort to compose herself enough to speak.
“Not in danger – no – but the Society . . .”
“Are you there now?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll be there in five minutes. I’ll bring DC Armstrong with me.”
When Tim and Juliet arrived at the Archaeological Society, the door to the street was gaping open. They rushed in and saw immediately why Alex Tarrant was so upset. The whole place had been ransacked. There were papers scattered everywhere: in the hallway, on the stairs, in Alex’s office. Alex’s desk had been upturned. It looked as if the contents of all the shelves on the wall behind it had been swept to the floor in an act of fury.
They found Alex in the library, where the scene of devastation was even worse. Several of the glass doors on the bookcases had been smashed and the books that they contained tossed in all directions. Shards of glass were everywhere. Only one of the sightless marble busts remained in place. Tim noted with grim humour that it represented Cicero. He doubted that he had been spared for his eloquence.
Alex was sitting at the massive table on the only upright chair. She was clasping her forehead, almost pinching it, with the fingers of her right hand. At first, Tim thought that she was merely surveying the many acts of vandalism with which she was surrounded. As he moved nearer, he saw that she was looking at something in particular. At her feet lay a massive, twisted heap of green metal that he recognised. A thick slew of papers spilled like a crude sunburst from beneath it. Various trinkets lay half in, half out of a sizeable cardboard box, some of them smashed.
She looked up as Tim and Juliet approached.
“Mrs Tarrant? Are you all right?” said Juliet.
“Yes, I’m all right.” Her voice was immensely weary. “I guess I don’t have to wonder what my life’s work will be now. It will take years to restore all of this.”
Alex rose to her feet and gestured at the mound of metal, papers and nineteenth-century gewgaws.
“It’s like a curse,” she said. “The curse of Jacob Sparham. That was the box that Edmund had borrowed. Someone was desperate to get into it. They must have thought that it contained that diamond swastika that Oliver told me about. I wonder if they found it.”
“I very much doubt it,” said Tim. “I imagine that whoever it was wrecked the place in a fury when they found that it wasn’t there.”
“Oliver always thought that it was an invention.”
“Perhaps it was – or perhaps it wasn’t . . . and Edmund Baker got to it first.”
Chapter Sixty-Six
Alex contacted Francis Codd, now the most senior of the trustees, to tell him about the ransacking. Tim had wanted to send in the SOCOs straight away, but Alex persuaded him that they would have to be accompanied by an expert in antiquarian books as they carried out their work, to make sure that the Society’s library was not damaged further. He agreed to wait until the next day if she could find a suitable person by then. She made other calls, to the museum at Peterborough and to the Heritage Society. Eventually he persuaded her to return to the police station with himself and Juliet. She had just accepted his offer of tea when she suddenly caught sight of his clock.
“It’s almost four-thirty! I need to catch the 16.45 bus to get to the hospital for visiting time.”
“Don’t worry,” said Tim. “Someone will take you. We’ll make sure that you get there. It will give us a few more minutes to talk.”
Alex nodded her thanks and clasped her tea-cup in both hands.
“As I’m sure you know, we haven’t managed to locate Edmund Baker yet. Do you have any idea where he might be?”
Alex frowned.
“No,” she said. “And I don’t think that I can help you. For a brief period, I thought that I . . . understood Edmund, but clearly I was wrong.”
“He didn’t confide in you? Tell you perhaps of favourite places that he liked to visit, or to which he might plan to retire?”
“No . . .” Alex stopped suddenly.
“You’ve thought of something?” asked Juliet, gently.
“Yes . . . although it seems too far-fetched for words. And it isn’t a place where he would be able to hide for days at a time. He might choose it to hide possessions in, though. We were together one evening in Peterborough a few weeks ago – we’d both been to a meeting at the Museum and decided to go for a drink afterwards. Then we picked up some fast food from somewhere, and instead of eating it in the car, Edmund wanted to take me to a secret place that he’d known about since he was a boy . . .”
Because it was getting dark and Alex had to leave for the hospital, Tim decided not to follow up on the information that she had provided about Edmund’s ‘secret place’ until the following day. Although she knew that it was part of a bridge that crossed the River Nene at Peterborough, her memory of its precise location was vague. They would probably have to drive around quite a bit before they located it. Alex had agreed to accompany them the next day, but she stressed that she didn’t want to enter the secret room itself. Tim wondered whether this was because it would provoke unpleasant memories, or perhaps because she had some premonition about what they might find there now.
After her departure, he asked the Peterborough police if they would search the river bank for abandoned motorbikes. Their response was that they would prefer to do this in daylight, so he had no option but to contain his impatience and go home. It was the earliest he would have arrived home for weeks. Although he was not keen to embrace the opportunity, he knew that the time had come to talk to Katrin.
The fragrant smell of Pichelsteiner hit him as soon as he let himself into their small hall. The stew was one of Katrin’s specialities. He found her in the dining-room, in the act of placing a small bunch of flowers on a table laid with white damask and their best cutlery. She was wearing a black silky top and dangling silver earrings. She appeared to be serene and was looking very pretty. She turned to kiss him.
“You look lovely,” he said. “What’s the occasion?”
“You said you’d be home on time tonight. That’s worth celebrating in itself.”
Tim tried not to look guilty. The conversation they had had that morning had completely slipped his memory. He had had a narrow squeak: if Alex Tarrant had not been visiting her husband in hospital, he might h
ave been pacing the towpaths of the Nene with her now.
“Would you like a drink?”
“Yes please! I’ve just opened a bottle of Pinot Noir. It’s in the kitchen.”
He went to fetch the bottle and poured wine into the two delicately-wrought crystal glasses that she’d put on the table.
“Cheers! And thank you for all your help with the McRae case. We’d never have got to the bottom of it without you.”
She chinked her glass very lightly against his own.
“It was Juliet as well as me. Joint effort.”
“Katrin, I’ve been so worried about you. You seem your old self now, but I need to know why . . .”
“Don’t, Tim. It’s too painful. Don’t spoil a nice evening.”
“OK, but what if it happens again? What if I ..?”
“Don’t,” she said again, in a tone that brooked no contradiction. “It was nothing to do with you. Not your fault in any way. Can we just leave it at that?”
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Almost Love Page 45
