Devil's Game

by Patricia Hall

  ‘Do you think that’s likely?’ Laura asked.

  ‘I’d bet on it,’ O’Mara said. ‘It seems to be what he’s done everywhere else. She’s not exactly “born again”, isn’t our Debbie, and I doubt she’ll go down well at all with them that are.’ At that moment they heard a bell ring inside the school buildings and within minutes a flood of pupils burst out of the doors and through the gates, where a jostling crowd of them soon began to congregate, demanding to know what the demonstration was about. O’Mara did not hesitate to explain and, while some drifted off with many a teenage shrug, a significant number listened more carefully to what the gathered adults had to say, and decided to stay, some of them pulling sheets of paper out of their bags and improvising anti-academy posters which they attached to the school railings. Sir David Murgatroyd, Laura thought grimly, would not be best pleased at his reception.

  And so it turned out. The dark, chauffeur-driven Jaguar, which brought him to the school, closely followed by two other cars, stopped some distance from the now considerable crowd and they could see the chauffeur using a mobile phone. Almost immediately, a police car appeared and four uniformed officers approached the school gates, clearing a path for the visitors’ cars. This move was greeted with a few catcalls and whistles, which Steve O’Mara himself tried to silence.

  ‘We don’t want to get a reputation as hooligans,’ he said to Laura. ‘That won’t do us any good at all.’ As he spoke the three cars, led by the Jag, swept through the now open gates, which swung closed again immediately, and a police sergeant approached O’Mara with a notebook in his hand.

  ‘Are you responsible for this demonstration, sir?’ he asked.

  ‘Not really,’ O’Mara said. ‘A few of us wanted to speak to David Murgatroyd before he visited the school. The rest was just spontaneous when the students came out.’

  ‘And you are?’ the sergeant asked, before writing down O’Mara’s details in his notebook.

  ‘You should be aware that you need police permission for a demonstration, sir,’ the sergeant said.

  ‘I told you it wasn’t intended to be a demonstration, more a sort of lobby,’ O’Mara said. ‘I suppose you’ll be telling me that’s illegal next?’

  ‘No, sir,’ the sergeant said. ‘But I have to say that this looks very much like a demonstration to me.’

  ‘It wasn’t until the youngsters came out of school and decided to join in,’ Laura broke in. ‘Perhaps you’d better talk to them, if you can pin them down.’ She glanced at the milling crowd of teenagers and watched the sergeant’s eyes follow hers and come to a conclusion which he did not appear very happy with. He turned to one of the constables standing close behind him.

  ‘Get these kids on their way home,’ he said stonily before turning back to Laura, as all three PCs began chivvying the students away from the school entrance.

  ‘And you are?’ he asked. Laura told him, wondering if the name meant anything to him. Michael Thackeray would not be best pleased to discover that she had clashed with a uniformed officer, however over-officious she might claim he had been. Their incompatible professions had brought them into enough conflict over the years for her to be in no doubt about that.

  ‘And the photographer’s with you?’

  Laura nodded.

  ‘I’m sure you don’t think we need police permission to be here as well,’ she said with her most engaging smile. But she doubted that her charm had achieved anything as the sergeant turned on his heel and set about clearing the crowd with a singular lack of charm of his own. Laura shrugged and turned back to O’Mara.

  ‘Come and have a drink,’ she said, nodding towards the pub on the opposite side of the road. ‘Tell me all about your worries about the academy. I’ll have to catch up with David Murgatroyd some other time.’

  ‘Gotcha!’ Sergeant Kevin Mower said with satisfaction as he put the phone down on the technical examiner who had been trying to enhance the photographs from Karen Bastable’s phone. The good news was that the forensic team thought they had succeeded in deciphering two registration numbers from the blurred photographs of cars. The even better news he relayed to DCI Thackeray ten minutes later was that both cars had registered owners in Bradfield and that one lived just a stone’s throw from the Bastables’ home.

  ‘You reckon they must know each other?’ Thackeray asked mildly.

  ‘I’d put money on it, guv.’

  ‘Right, let’s go and see what they’ve got to say for themselves,’ Thackeray said, pushing the files on his desk to one side and stubbing out his cigarette. ‘I need some fresh air, and depending on what they say, we may need Bastable in here again. This could be the breakthrough we’ve been waiting for.’

  Their first call, in the leafy suburb of Southfield, led nowhere. The car with the registration number they had been given was an entirely different colour and model from the one in Karen Bastable’s photograph and with a vital digit’s difference in the licence plate. The perturbed owner assured the officers that he had just returned from a holiday in Scotland. Which left one possibility, and they soon had more than enough evidence to be knocking on Terry Bastable’s door. They had spent the previous half-hour with his self-professed best friend, Les Duckworth, who lived in the next street and admitted immediately that he owned the red Astra parked in front of his house and identified from Karen’s photographs. But Duckworth had denied all knowledge of even the rough location of Bently Forest, or ever taking part in even the mildest and most innocent of outdoor sexual adventures. And given his gross size, a beer belly of huge proportions hanging over his baggy tracksuit bottoms, which stretched almost to splitting point over enormous thighs and buttocks, Mower was inclined to believe him. No one even remotely like Les had appeared in Karen’s photograghs and he must have known himself, if he had taken part, that he would be extremely easy to identify, however many masks he had used to conceal his face.

  ‘Is that what they were at?’ he had said, in what appeared to be genuine astonishment. ‘Mucky beggars. Terry told me he wanted to borrow t’car because his was in dock and he needed to take Karen to work. She works late shift and there’s no buses back. But I thought it were a bit odd when I read in t’Gazette that her car were found right up there. I were going to ask Terry about it.’

  ‘I suppose it never entered your head to tell us that Terry Bastable had borrowed your car that night,’ Thackeray said angrily.

  ‘I were going to ask Terry about that an’all, as it goes,’ Duckworth said, immediately on the defensive. ‘But I’ve not been right well this week. I’ve had the flu. That’s why I weren’t bothered about giving him t’car t’other night. I went to bed early. I were wheezing like a bloody blocked drain.’ Mower glanced at the empty lager cans and the sports pages strewn around the living room and wondered whether either had acquired therapeutic properties he had not heard about.

  ‘And you’ve never been to Bently Forest any other time?’ Thackeray snapped.

  ‘I told you, I’ve never heard o’t’bloody place,’ Duckworth almost shouted, and immediately started a breathless coughing fit, as if to prove the veracity of his story. They left him to his flu and his lager, and walked round to Bastable’s house where Bastable eventually opened the door, looking grey and unshaven.

  ‘Have you found her?’ he asked and his shoulders slumped convincingly enough when Thackeray shook his head.

  ‘We need to ask you some more questions about your movements on the night Karen disappeared,’ Thackeray said. ‘You can either do it here or down at the station…’

  ‘What movements?’ Bastable came back quickly, still holding the door firmly half closed. ‘I told you, I were here all night, looking after t’kids.’

  ‘Can we come in, Mr Bastable,’ Thackeray asked, ‘or would you really prefer to come to the station?’ Scowling heavily, Bastable opened the door for them and pointed them in the direction of his untidy sitting room, where plates of half-eaten pizza were still left from the previous evening’s mea
l. The Bastables’ home was obviously seriously missing a woman’s touch, Thackeray thought. He chose an upright chair, leaving Bastable to flop onto the sofa while Mower took out a notebook and stationed himself near the door.

  ‘There seem to be some things you didn’t tell us about the night Karen went missing,’ Thackeray said, mildly enough to be disarming. But Bastable responded with aggression.

  ‘Like what?’ he snapped.

  ‘Like the fact that you had borrowed Les Duckworth’s car that afternoon.’ Bastable’s face, already an unhealthy colour, drained to a dirty white.

  ‘So what? I needed it to fetch some stuff from t’supermarket after Karen went out. I took kids wi’me. Nowt wrong wi’that, is there?’

  ‘So you took the car back after that?’

  Bastable hesitated.

  ‘He said I could keep it till morning,’ he said. ‘He weren’t well. He weren’t going out. Said leave it till t’morning.’

  ‘So you had the car all evening?’

  ‘I told you. I went to t’bloody supermarket.’

  ‘Your children will remember that then?’ Mower intervened, but Bastable just shrugged.

  ‘Happen,’ he said.

  ‘So how do you explain that the car was seen at Bently Forest after Karen got there?’ Thackeray asked.

  ‘It weren’t. That’s a lie,’ Bastable said. ‘I never went anywhere near t’bloody forest. I don’t even know the way.’

  ‘It’s easy to find if you followed her there,’ Thackeray asked. ‘So what happened? Did she recognise the car? Did she recognise you in the car?’

  ‘I weren’t there,’ Bastable said. ‘I bloody told you. I weren’t there.’

  ‘But we know the car was there. We’re certain of that,’ Thackeray said. Bastable’s eyes roamed uneasily around the room.

  ‘Must be a mistake,’ he muttered.

  ‘No mistake,’ Thackeray said. ‘We’ll be examining the car in detail, of course. There will be forensic evidence of who’s been in it – you, or the children – and quite possibly traces of where it’s been.’ He paused, leaving Bastable looking sick.

  ‘Traces of Karen,’ Thackeray spelt it out. ‘Or even Karen’s body. Everyone and everything leaves traces.’

  Bastable ran a hand over his stubbled head and face before nodding, his shoulders slumped, and Thackeray pressed home his advantage.

  ‘I think it’s time you were a bit more honest with us about what exactly happened that night,’ he said. Bastable groaned and sat in silence for a full minute, hands clasped, staring down at his dirty trainers.

  ‘I knew she were up to summat,’ he muttered eventually. ‘I’d reckoned for a while that she had a boyfriend. She suddenly started going out wi’that cow Charlene from her work. That were new. And her clothes. She started buying stuff that were more sexy, more revealing, you know? She said there were nowt going on but I didn’t believe her. So I borrowed Les’s car, left the kids here and followed her. I never reckoned she’d drive so far. I thought she’d be going to a pub or a club, local like. I couldn’t believe it when she drove right up there into t’hills. I were beginning to get panicky about leaving t’kids. Matty can be a little devil when he chooses…’

  ‘So she saw you?’ Thackeray said. ‘Down the track into the woods, she spotted the car and saw you driving it?’

  ‘No, no, she never,’ Bastable protested. ‘I stopped for five minutes, no more. Watched what were going on, saw Karen get out o’t’car and join in…wearing next to nowt…I were right choked. But there were so many people there, I couldn’t do owt, could I? I left her to it. Came back home in a right state but the kids were OK. No probs. Planned to have it out wi’Karen when she got back, but she never did, did she? She never did get back. One of them bastards…’ He broke off, too distraught to continue. Or else a very good actor, Thackeray thought.

  ‘Let’s get this completely clear, Mr Bastable,’ he said. ‘You’re telling us that you followed your wife in a borrowed car, a car which she was likely to recognise, but she didn’t see you and you didn’t make any attempt to speak to her when you realised what was going on?’

  ‘Right,’ Bastable said, his expression sullen now.

  ‘You simply turned around and came home?’

  ‘Right,’ Bastable said again. ‘I couldn’t deal with it wi’all them beggars there, could I? I’d have bloody dealt wi’it when she got back, though. I’d have given her a right thrashing.’

  ‘That’s your usual answer to problems, is it, Mr Bastable? Violence?’

  ‘If it’s called for,’ Bastable said, without hesitation. ‘Two-timing cow!’

  ‘You realise that we’ll check out your version of events with anyone else who may have been in Bently Forest at the same time you were there,’ Thackeray said. ‘We will undoubtedly want to question you again and take a full statement.’

  ‘Check away,’ Bastable said, defiant now. ‘That’s what happened.’

  But when the two officers went back to their car, Kevin Mower laughed.

  ‘Does he really expect us to believe all that?’ he said.

  ‘I want Duckworth’s car searched for DNA, hair, blood, anything at all,’ Thackeray said. ‘If Karen was ever in that car, dead or alive, I want to know about it. And we need to know who else was up there that night.’

  ‘And that’s going to be the hard part,’ Mower said as he slid the car into gear. ‘I can’t see any one of them rushing forward as a witness to anything that happened there. Judging by what Charlene said, they’ll be keeping their masks very firmly in place.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  When Laura got back to the office, she found the newsroom already half empty, though Ted Grant was still in his office, the door ajar, and as soon as she had taken off her coat and settled back at her computer, his half-expected roar of a summons reached her.

  ‘Did you get hold of Murgatroyd?’ he asked without preamble, and before she opened her mouth to reply he stormed on regardless.

  ‘I’ve had Peter Maxwell from the council bending my ear,’ he said. ‘He’s apparently had Murgatroyd’s PA on the phone complaining that we’re running some sort of anti-academy campaign. What the hell’s all that about?’

  Laura shrugged.

  ‘Considering I haven’t written a word yet, I don’t see how he can have jumped to that conclusion.’

  ‘Did you get an interview with Murgatroyd?’

  ‘No, I couldn’t get near him. There was a minor protest going on outside the school – governors and a few parents. They’d got wind of his visit somehow. And then when the kids started coming out they thought it was a good idea to join in. I don’t imagine any of the students have the foggiest notion what becoming an academy means, but they joined in the fun anyway. Then the police turned up and it all got a bit heavy.’

  ‘Aye, well you can write that up for tomorrow morning anyway,’ Grant said. ‘Did we get pictures?’

  ‘Yes, Tony was with me. They should be on your screen by now.’ Grant clicked into Photoshop and cast a cursory eye over the photographer’s offerings.

  ‘Owt and nowt there,’ he said. ‘Now, are you going to finish this piece for Friday or do I need to pencil summat else in instead?’

  ‘Murgatroyd promised me an appointment, but his sidekick, Sanderson, seems to be avoiding me. He’s the one who must have spoken to Maxwell. He seems to be the main obstruction, though I’ve no idea why. I don’t know whether it’s deliberate. Seems a bit odd, if it is. I’ll keep trying, but if I can’t pin him down tomorrow I think you’d better hold it until next week. We can’t really run without some sort of comment from Murgatroyd himself. I need to ask him why he’s ploughing all his money into inner-city schools, what he thinks he’ll get out of it, or whether it really is for some sort of higher religious cause. Perhaps he just likes kids, although I don’t think he’s got any of his own. I’ve not found any record that he’s even been married.’

  ‘Sounds to me you don’t have even the begin
ning of a profile of this beggar,’ Grant said dismissively. ‘Well, if you want more time, you’d better come up with something tasty. I’m not sure we shouldn’t ditch the whole thing. Just run news stories as and when they happen and let the protesters fight it out in the letters column.’

  ‘If he’s this elusive, he must have something to hide,’ Laura said, not entirely convincing herself. ‘There’s trouble brewing at the school in any case, so we’ll have a good story one way or another. The head seems convinced she’s going to lose her job and some of the governors are going to be furious about that. They’ll all lose their positions, too. Murgatroyd gets to appoint all the governors and make the policy, in exchange for what is actually a very small financial contribution.’

  ‘Peter Maxwell reckons it’s just the usual suspects at the school, troublemakers of one sort or another, trades unionists, lefties and liberals, looking a gold-plated gift horse in the mouth.’

  ‘He would think that, being a dyed-in-the-wool Tory himself,’ Laura said. ‘I get the impression that there’s more to it than that. Give me a couple more days.’

  Grant nodded reluctantly.

  ‘It had better be good,’ he said.

  Taking Grant at his word, Laura glanced at her watch and reckoned that she had time for one more assault on Sibden House before she went home. It was a long shot, she knew, but gave her another excuse to avoid the conversation she needed increasingly urgently with Michael Thackeray. She shivered slightly as she accelerated out of town along the valley of the Maze. There had been a time when she would have expected to be delighted at the prospect of becoming a mother, but she had been entangled in the aftermath of her partner’s tragedies for so long that she barely remembered what a straightforward emotional reaction was like. She had buried herself in her work, but now that was no longer an option for very long. Some sort of decision would have to be taken and very soon, and the prospect filled her with foreboding.

  To her surprise, when she parked outside Sibden House, the answerphone on the gates got an immediate response, and she recognised the voice of Winston Sanderson.