The Kate Fletcher Series

by Heleyne Hammersley

‘She was great,’ Julie said with a huge grin. She sat back in her chair, relaxing into her memories. ‘She was my best friend from our first day at Thorpe Comp. Got me into all sorts of trouble but I didn’t mind. She thought she was a rebel but there wasn’t really that much for us to rebel against. She was into music, clothes, make-up. She was one of those people who made you feel special if they paid any attention to you, like a light shining on you. Everything was better when Jeanette was around.’

  ‘Better in what way?’ Hollis prompted.

  Julie thought for a few seconds. ‘She always had the best ideas about what to do, where to go. We used to go to Donny on Saturdays and hang about in the Arndale Centre. Most of the lasses would be in and out of the shops but Jeanette liked to go up on the balcony and watch people. She said they were like ants, busy living their pointless little lives. After school, we used to go and sit in the middle of the playing field and smoke and talk about what our lives would be like in the future. I always said that I wanted to marry a rich bloke and have a dozen kids but not Jeanette. She wanted to leave Thorpe and go to London or Manchester. She wanted to sing in a band or be discovered by a casting agency and get on the telly. Kids’ stuff really, but she believed that she could do it.’

  Kate could see that the woman was lost in the past, her eyes unfocussed as she remembered her friend. Nothing Julie said helped the enquiry but it was interesting to find out what sort of person Jeanette had been. Could she have been lured away by somebody promising her bright lights and fame? She asked the question and Julie laughed.

  ‘No chance. Jeanette was really savvy. She knew that talent scouts didn’t hang about in Thorpe or the Arndale Centre in Doncaster. She knew she’d have to move away at some point. She wanted to do her A Levels first, though. She was going to go to college in Donny and study for a couple of years. She could probably have gone to university, she was bright enough. All our teachers said so.’

  ‘So you don’t think she ran away?’ Hollis asked.

  Julie shook her head firmly. ‘Not a chance. She’d have told me if she was planning anything like that. She told me everything.’

  ‘Did she talk about her family?’

  Julie tilted her head to one side and regarded Hollis quizzically. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘As I said. Just trying to get an impression. We’ve looked at your original statement and there’s nothing there to indicate that there were family issues but, with Caroline disappearing, we wondered if there might be a link.’

  ‘What? You think Caroline was involved? She was only nine when Jeanette went missing.’

  ‘What about her parents?’ Kate prompted. ‘Did Jeannette ever talk about how well she got on with her mum and dad?’

  ‘I’ve thought about that a lot over the years,’ Julie said, nodding slowly. ‘She always talked like she could wrap her mum round her little finger and she said her dad would do anything to please her mum.’

  ‘But you’re not convinced?’ Hollis asked.

  ‘At the time, I just took everything she said at face value but there were a few little things that have made me wonder ever since. She sometimes had odd bruises, mostly on her legs. I saw them in PE a few times. She always said that she’d had a fall or she’d been fighting with Caroline and I believed her. She was off school for a week as well with a broken arm. Said she’d tripped up the steps and fallen on it. Nowadays her mum and dad would probably have social services breathing down their necks but she might have been telling the truth. Apart from one thing.’

  She paused and Kate could see that she was working out how to phrase whatever it was that she had to say.

  Julie leaned forward again as though sharing a secret or some especially juicy gossip. ‘She was at my house one night; I think it was in the Easter holidays. We’d been sitting out the back listening to the Top 40 and hadn’t really been paying attention to the time. My mum came out and said that Jeanette’s dad was at the door asking for her. When Jeanette got up to go and see him she was really pale and I noticed that her hand was shaking as she turned the doorknob. I didn’t hear what her dad said to her but she didn’t come back to say goodbye, she just left with him. I didn’t see her for a while after that and when I did she said the family had been away for a couple of days to stay with her auntie in York. Thing is, I could have sworn I saw their Caroline in the Co-op two days before the day that she said they came back. I forgot all about it at the time. Just put it down to a misunderstanding but, with hindsight, I wonder if her dad had given her a good hiding for not getting home on time.’

  ‘You didn’t mention this to the police? It sounds a lot like the night she went missing. Out with friends. Home late.’ Kate tried to keep the accusation out of her voice. If a friend of Jeanette’s had spoken against Lambert then the investigation might have taken a different, more productive line.

  ‘I was just a kid,’ Julie explained. ‘I was terrified of the police. And, like I said, a lot of this didn’t really occur to me until much later.’

  ‘You could have come forward at any time,’ Kate told her. ‘We get new information about old cases on a fairly regular basis.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Julie sighed. ‘But it was supposition. What if it was all in my head and I’d made things even worse for the family?’

  ‘Did you meet Dennis Lambert?’ Hollis tried to change the subject. Julie was getting defensive and that wasn’t going to help them get any more information. Kate leaned back in her seat, giving him a chance to correct her mistake.

  Julie shook her head. ‘Not properly. He was always at work on the rare occasions when we went to her house. If he was due back we went out. There was that time he came looking for her but I only saw him briefly at the door.’

  ‘You were friends for four years and you never met her dad?’ Hollis was clearly surprised. ‘Did you get the impression that she didn’t want you to meet him?’

  ‘To be honest, I never thought about it. I’m not sure she would have seen much of my dad. It was a different time. Both our mums stayed at home and our dads worked. When my dad came home everything changed. There was tea to get ready while he got a wash and then he’d eat and watch telly. We weren’t supposed to bother him, and having friends over was bother, I suppose. If I did have anybody round we always sat in my bedroom, or the garden if it was summer.’

  It made sense based on Kate’s own experience. Her mum didn’t like her having her friends round if her dad was at home because he worked hard and she didn’t want him to be pestered. After her mum died Kate and Karen tried to look after him, but they were too young to run the house so he’d ended up doing a lot of the housework and cooking. She knew that he wouldn’t want other kids getting under his feet; his own two were enough.

  They were interrupted by a thud from upstairs.

  ‘Somebody else here?’ Kate asked.

  Julie smiled and shook her head. ‘Cat. Sounds like he’s got in the front bedroom and he’s not allowed up there. Hang on a sec.’

  She disappeared for a minute, closing the living room door behind her, and came back holding a large black cat who looked anything but contrite.

  ‘This is Marlon,’ she said. ‘I’ll just chuck him up the garden. If I don’t watch him he leaves mice under my bed.’

  She disappeared again and Kate felt a cold draught as the back door opened and closed. She raised her eyebrows at Hollis who was shaking his head in amusement. He knew that Kate didn’t like cats. The sound of a tap running came from the kitchen and then Julie Wilkinson reappeared, drying her hands on a tea towel.

  ‘Sorry about that. Where were we?’ She dropped the tea towel on the table and sat back down.

  ‘Did you ever hear of Dennis Lambert having a temper or being violent?’ Hollis asked. ‘Thorpe’s a small place, people talk. Did he get into fights? Have a drink problem? Anything like that?’

  Julie shrugged. ‘Not that I remember. It wasn’t the sort of thing that my parents would have talked about though – not in front
of me. If you reopen the case, are you going to interview him again?’

  ‘We can’t,’ Kate said. ‘He’s dead.’

  Julie’s eyes widened with shock. ‘Wasn’t expecting that. What happened?’

  ‘He had cancer,’ Hollis said. ‘Caroline had come home to look after him.’

  ‘Really?’ Julie’s tone was sceptical. ‘I thought she’d moved away after her mum killed herself. She always said that she was going to move as far away as possible when she was old enough.’

  Kate leaned forward again. ‘You knew Caroline?’

  ‘A bit. She was younger than me and Jeanette but I kept in touch with her after their Jeanette went missing. I bought Caroline her first legal drink when she was eighteen. I’m really surprised that she came back to look after her dad.’

  ‘Why?’ Kate asked.

  ‘Because she hated him. Loathed him with a passion. I bumped into her in the Cross Keys one night, I think she was celebrating her A Level results. She was pretty pi – drunk. Kept going on about how she was going to finally get away from that bastard and how he could rot in hell for all she cared. She said that she was never coming back and I really believed her.’

  ‘She hated her dad?’ Kate said. ‘So why would she come back and look after him? It doesn’t make much sense to me.’

  Julie sighed and shook her head. ‘I really have no idea. From what she said about him I’d’ve thought that she’d have stayed away. I don’t know why she felt like that but she was pretty wound up about him.’

  ‘Do you think he was violent towards her after her sister went missing? Might that have been why she hated him?’ Kate was thinking about the different reasons that Cooper had suggested for murder and she kept coming back to one in particular. Revenge.

  ‘I honestly have no idea,’ Julie said. ‘I suppose it would make sense but I’m not a hundred per cent sure that he knocked their Jeanette about, either.’

  Kate’s phone rang just as they were concluding the interview. She looked at the screen. Barratt. She let it ring while they thanked Julie Wilkinson for her time, headed back to the car and then rang him back.

  ‘Got anything?’ Kate asked as soon as Barratt answered his phone.

  ‘Maybe,’ Barratt said. ‘I’ve been talking to one of the neighbours opposite Lambert. A Peter Moody. He went to school with Dennis, had known him pretty much all his life.’

  ‘And?’ Kate prompted, trying not to be too irritated by Barratt’s need to give as much background detail as possible.

  ‘He says, when they were kids, that Dennis was cock of the school. Everybody was scared of him. He’d fight any lad who so much as looked at him wrong and he’d carry on fighting until his opponent was a bloody mess. Apparently he had a right reputation up until his marriage to Irene.’

  Kate thanked him and hung up. It tied in with Jeanette’s bruises and her fear of her father. What if his violent streak had been contained within the home after he married? It was possible that he’d lost his temper with Jeanette and gone too far. Is that what Caroline meant when she left the note? Was Jeanette somewhere where she could be found? Or her remains at least? She thought about the cross that had been marked in the book that she’d found on the shelf in Caroline’s study. What if it marked more than just the house where she’d spent her childhood? What if it marked a grave?

  ‘What now?’ Hollis asked.

  Kate sighed heavily, dreading what she had to do next. ‘I’m going back to base to ask Raymond for the time and resources to dig up Dennis Lambert’s back garden. If I were you I’d stay well away because you know how he gets about spending money. It won’t be pretty.’

  Chapter 30

  The next morning’s briefing was untypically subdued. Kate had spent half an hour in Raymond’s office trying to persuade him to commit time and resources to searching Dennis Lambert’s house and garden but he had been granite-hard in his opposition. He was unhappy that Caroline’s disappearance had left so many loose ends and had implied that Kate was to blame. She was frustrated and disheartened when she met with her team at 8.30am but she didn’t want to pass on this deflated feeling to them. She needn’t have worried; it was their own lack of progress that seemed to have brought each of them down and made them tense and uncommunicative.

  Kate called on O’Connor first. He gave her a rueful half-smile, clearly not wanting to admit defeat.

  ‘I tried everybody I could find,’ he began. ‘There’s only a handful of guys out there dealing in fake IDs. I did the rounds but nobody remembered a woman fitting Caroline Lambert’s description. Only one of them remembered a woman at all. Most of their business is regulars wanting fake IDs to pass on to illegal immigrants and people who need to hide from us.’

  Kate was uncomfortable with O’Connor’s methods but she knew that he was exceptionally good at gaining the trust of some of the most useful small-time crooks and criminals in the area. She didn’t want to know what he offered in return because his information often led to some high-profile arrests.

  ‘You said there was one woman,’ she prompted.

  O’Connor grinned, obviously pleased to have the opportunity to show off his list of contacts.

  ‘Ollie Skillen, who does a bit of running for Lee Weaver, said they’d had a woman round looking to buy a birth certificate and an NI number.’

  Kate supressed a smile at O’Connor’s casual name-dropping of one of Doncaster’s most prolific offenders. Lee Weaver was well known to her team. She wanted to ask O’Connor what he meant by ‘running’ but couldn’t face his smug smile as he explained.

  ‘This woman turned up about three months ago. Skillen remembers it was a good few weeks before Christmas because he knew he’d get a cut if he organised the business and he planned to use it to buy his boy a dirt bike. It wasn’t Caroline Lambert, though. The description was nothing like her – mid-to-late-thirties, dark hair, not very tall. She could have worn a wig but she couldn’t have made herself shorter.’

  ‘Sounds like Maddie Cox, though,’ Barratt observed. Three faces turned to look at him as though he’d suddenly grown an extra head.

  ‘It does,’ he continued.

  Kate had to agree with him, but it didn’t make much sense. She looked over her shoulder at the rough timeline on the whiteboard. A photograph of Maddie smiled down at her with different coloured lines radiating out to key pieces of information. One line ended at an image of Caroline Lambert with a list of dates of their known encounters underneath. The first was November twenty-second.

  ‘The date could just about fit,’ she conceded. ‘But why would she help Caroline? If they’d first met when Dennis was in hospital they wouldn’t have had time to form any sort of relationship.’

  ‘Maybe that’s why Caroline gave her money,’ Hollis suggested, his expression showing that he wasn’t convinced by his own theory.

  ‘I just can’t see Maddie Cox knowing somebody like that,’ Cooper added quietly. ‘And, if Caroline convinced Maddie to help her, she must have had some serious leverage considering they’d just met. Brenda Powley allegedly made the call on November twenty- first. The timing doesn’t fit. Didn’t we think that the money from Caroline helped Maddie pay off her gambling debts?’

  ‘So, it wasn’t Maddie Cox?’

  Four almost identical shrugs. They really were struggling with this one. O’Connor’s moustache returned to its usual inverted horseshoe shape as his grin faded and Kate wondered if their luck was running out.

  She was about to address the issue of Caroline Lambert’s possible suicide when her phone rang. It was Morrison from East Yorkshire.

  ‘We’ve done a search of the clifftop,’ he announced after introducing himself. Kate seriously doubted that Morrison had been involved in the physical search and assumed that the ‘we’ referred to a team of uniformed officers on their hands and knees in the frosty grass.

  ‘And?’ Kate prompted as she sensed that he was waiting for some sort of response.

  ‘I’ve emailed y
ou some photographs of the product of the search. There’s not much but there is one item that you might find interesting.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Have a look at the images,’ he said, hanging up.

  Kate explained the call to the others as she logged on to the laptop connected to the projector and downloaded the images from Morrison’s email. She flashed them up on the screen as a slideshow so that they could look at each in turn. At first glance they looked like the useless detritus that could be found on any stretch of grass or wasteland in the country. A squashed cigarette packet, a condom wrapper, a black sock.

  ‘What’s that?’ Barratt asked when an odd-looking object appeared. Kate clicked off the slideshow and zoomed in on the photograph.

  ‘It’s a SIM tray from an iPhone,’ Cooper said. ‘You can tell by the shape. Looks like it’s from a rose gold model judging by the edge.’ She typed something on her keyboard. ‘And Caroline Lambert’s possessions when she was arrested included a rose gold iPhone 7.

  Kate tried to picture the scene. Somebody changing the SIM card in their phone, hands shaking with the cold, or fear; dropping the tray and being unable to find it. ‘Why would anybody change their SIM card on a clifftop though? Unless they wanted to give the impression that the phone had gone out of service at that spot.’

  ‘Wouldn’t make any difference,’ Cooper said. ‘It’s the IMEI not the SIM that’s used to track phones. I’m sure a quick Google would show that information. Although, if I was going to destroy my phone I’d break the SIM as well, just in case it was found. It’s really hard to get information from a broken SIM.’

  Kate’s thoughts were spinning. ‘So, if this belonged to Caroline Lambert, and we’re assuming that she didn’t jump, she removed the SIM card, destroyed it and then threw the phone over the cliff? Why not just throw the phone into the sea?’

  ‘Maybe she couldn’t be sure that it would reach the sea? Or she might have been worried that something could still be recovered if it were found,’ Hollis said. ‘If she really wanted us to believe that she killed herself then she’d also have to consider that we’d try to track her phone – which we will. If it went out of service in the vicinity of Flamborough Head then she’s right to think we’d probably look for it so she destroyed the SIM separately just to be sure.’