Cradle to Coffin (A DCI Thatcher Yorkshire Crimes Book 10)

by Oliver Davies

“But,” she shrugged, “it’s not happened since.”

  As Thatcher nodded along, I looked over to the church, where the music inside had faded.

  “Sounds like they’re finishing up in there,” I murmured, looking at Thatcher.

  “So, they are. Well, we can’t have them leaving such a nice service and seeing our faces lurking around,” he said, walking back to the hole and pulling the tarp back into place, securing it down. I grabbed the other corner to help, and Gillian watched us with faint interest.

  “It was a pleasure meeting you, Ms Warren,” Thatcher said, shaking her hand. She nodded back.

  “Mind you don’t go crawling around any more graves before your time, lad,” she said. “That’s bad luck if ever I heard it.”

  “I will not be wanting to repeat that again, I assure you,” he replied. Gillian chuckled and nodded smartly at me before walking back through the gate. She stopped at the headstone she’d pointed at earlier, kissing her hand than pressing it to the stone before shuffling back down through the yard.

  “Let’s go,” Thatcher said, nudging me. “I don’t particularly feel like going through this conversation with everyone in there.”

  I nodded, walking after him through the yard and onto the lane. We’d just gotten onto the road when the church doors opened, and the solemn-faced crowd wandered outside. Thatcher paused against the wall of someone’s garden, watching as the crowd emerged. In the midst of them was a woman, surrounded by well-wishers. Her blonde hair was pulled back from her tear-streaked face, her thin frame huddled in a large black jumper. She looked a little annoyed by the constant hovering around her and broke away to walk over to Gillian, who linked their arms together and smartly walked her down the road.

  “Must be hard enough having to deal with that every day of every year without the constant reminders from other people,” Thatcher murmured, still watching the crowds. I said nothing, and he turned to look at me, his grey eyes unusually solemn.

  “Come on, Isaac, I know you’ve got a poem or something rattling in that head of yours.”

  I chuckled quietly, casting my mind back through the scraps and snippets I had collected over time.

  “Better by far you should forget and smile,” I recalled, “Than that you should remember and be sad.”

  Thatcher nodded thoughtfully. “Rossetti?” he asked.

  I looked at him, surprised, and he grinned.

  “My mother liked her,” he told me, a rare insight into his memories. “Well, I doubt Elizabeth Wellins will be able to forget any time soon, but maybe by the end of all of this, we can make her smile.”

  “Perhaps Jeannie will have found her notes by now,” I suggested hopefully as we walked back to the car and peeled off our boots and coats.

  “Perhaps,” Thatcher answered, kicking his muddy boots off. There were bits of mud speckled over his skin from being down in the hole, and I passed him a bottle of water and a tissue. He bent down, using the wing mirror to clean himself up a bit. “But we’re not sitting around tapping our feet waiting for Jeannie.”

  He threw the tissue into a nearby bin. “And besides,” he said with another grin, climbing into the car, “I owe you lunch.”

  Seventeen

  Thatcher

  I was happy to have gotten an account of what had happened to Jack Wellins from a local. I was sure that Jeannie would have more facts, times, dates, first-hand accounts and reports, but to hear about what had happened from someone who had known the boy, who knew his mother, outside of an official police statement, was always a good thing to have. The village, if Gillian Warren was any indication, had been fond of the boy, and they all felt his loss. Slow, she had called him, perhaps easily led astray by someone who’d taken him or fell into something foul down by the river. It wouldn’t be the first time we’d heard of someone meeting their end in the hard currents out towards the moors.

  Thinking about it helped to take my mind off the fact that I had, for a while, stood inside a grave. There was something I definitely did want to repeat any time soon. When Mills had moved away, taking the torch with him, I’d been plunged into darkness, just the faintest glimmer of light from the sky when I craned my neck all the way back. Otherwise, it had just been dark, damp walls on all sides, nothing to even show for my time down there. But it confirmed a hunch that anything worth finding had been found and had been in the possession of Dr Schmidt and now, most likely, in the hands of whoever had killed him. The same person who bought that wine, I realised, though tracking down a single bottle of wine in this city would be a veritable needle in a haystack situation that I didn’t want to subject anyone to undertaking.

  I got hungry myself as we drove from the village and was rather happy that I’d promised Mills some lunch, my stomach gnawing at itself as we crossed into the city. I followed the familiar roads along towards the Minster and found a place to park, then we hopped out and walked the last few minutes to the café. I couldn’t remember if Billie was working today or not, but for her sake, I hoped not. The girl deserved a bit of rest, though I also knew she wasn’t a fan of rattling around her flat on her own, with just the cat and the memories of her sister for company.

  But when we walked into the café, there was no sign of her behind the counter, just Agnes, who stood there with a book in her hands. There was only one other table currently occupied. Over in the far corner, a young couple sat together with their hands interviewed over the table. Mills looked at them with a slight grimace to his face, and I knew he wasn’t the biggest fan of PDA at the best of times, let alone when he was still coming out of a nasty breakup.

  As we walked over to the counter, Agnes looked up with a smile.

  “Hello, Inspector. Sergeant Mills.”

  “Hello, Agnes,” I replied.

  “No Billie today?” Mills asked.

  Agnes shook her head. “Not today. She was supposed to be in this morning, but I gave her the day off after making her come in yesterday. What can I get for you?” She tapped the screen of the till. We ordered and made our way over to our usual table, settling down on the sofas by the large fish tank filled with fake plastic fish that bobbed around, blown by the little air current funnelling in.

  Mills shrugged his coat off and slumped back against the cushions. “Been an interesting day so far, sir,” he said, rubbing his face with his hands.

  “That it has,” I replied. “And I’m not sure what entirely we’ve got from it. Other than more bits and pieces to pull together about Schmidt’s work.”

  Mills tapped his fingers on the sofa arm with a thoughtful expression. “Still wondering how Jack Wellins fits into this,” he said. “According to everyone we’ve spoken to already, he came home on that bus.”

  I nodded. “But he went somewhere after, and it wasn’t home.”

  “The river?” Mills wondered, thinking back to when Gillian Warren had told us.

  “Quite possibly,” I replied. “I like to think that we would have searched the river,” I added. “Back when he went missing in the first place. Was there anything about it in the report Fry found?” I asked.

  “Not that I remember seeing,” Mills replied slowly. “But I need to give it another proper read through, anyway.”

  I was due to give it a read through myself, though I was sure that if there was anything truly useful in it, Fry would have brought it to my attention the moment she found it. I wanted to ask her what she thought, but today was her day off, and I knew better than to start messing with Sharp’s carefully structured rota. If I called anyone in on their day off for anything short of murder, mayhem or a plot to kill the Queen, then I was for it. Anyone would be, though it didn’t seem to stop them from calling me in.

  “Fry didn’t mention anything about it, did she?” I decided to ask Mills, knowing that if anyone had a staunch memory for the things said by our Detective Constable Leila Fry, it would be him. He thought for a moment, then shook his head.

  “Nothing that we can really build a case off of,�
�� he said. “Nor anything that might link the boy to Schmidt, that’s for sure.”

  I pursed my lips, thinking, and we went quiet as Agnes appeared with a laden tray in her arms. I jumped up to relieve her of it, and she patted my arm as I held it steady so that she could take the plates and mugs off and set them on the table.

  “Anything else for you boys?” she asked, taking the tray back and tucking it under her arm.

  “No, thank you, Agnes,” I said, sitting back down.

  “Looks as lovely as usual,” Mills added, already snatching a chip from his plate.

  Agnes winked. “I threw a few extra on there for you.”

  Mills grinned. “You’re a saint.”

  Agnes chuckled and made her way back over to the counter, leaving us to eat. We were both too hungry to really keep our talking going, only the passing comments between bites.

  My plate was half empty when the café door opened, the smell of rain wafting in, and someone crossed the café floor to dump themselves in the seat beside me. I jumped and turned to find Jeannie awkwardly wriggling out of her damp coat, her hair darkened by rain.

  “Just caught it,” she muttered, grabbing her purse from her bag.

  “Hello, Jeannie,” I said slowly.

  “Hiya, Thatch. Mills.” She nodded, then got back up and swanned over to the counter.

  Mills and I exchanged bewildered looks, and before long, she was back with a large mug of tea in her hands. She collapsed with a sigh.

  “How did you know we were here?” Mills asked.

  “You weren’t at the station, and the desk sergeant said you left a few hours ago. Figured you’d get hungry, took a shot.”

  “And this particular café?” Mills asked.

  Jeannie rolled her eyes and turned to me. “This is where that girl of yours works, right?”

  I nodded, surprised that she would remember that from her brief meeting with Billie. Jeannie nodded, satisfied, and leant down to pull a folder out of her bag, handing it over. Then she stole a chip from my plate and slumped down against the sofa.

  “Your notes?” I asked, wiping my hands on a napkin and picking up the file.

  “Told you I’d find them. You’re in luck, though, Thatch. One of my boxes got a little mouse nibbled, but this one was safe. Put it up with the other important ones.”

  “Important ones?” Mills repeated.

  Jeannie nodded, blowing on her tea. “Ones that might come back, mostly. Any joy on that, by the way?”

  “Not since yesterday,” I replied, opening the folder and looking inside. Most of her notes were handwritten, scraps on paper from her notebook all jostled together. Jeannie sighed and looked around.

  “Nice place. I can see why you like it.”

  “It had a certain charm,” I replied, taking out a handful of pages and passing them over to Mills.

  “Your girl not working today?” Jeannie asked, scanning the room.

  “Not today. And her name is Billie.”

  “Billie,” Jeannie repeated. “Like Billie Whitelaw?”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Actress, CBE. The Omen?” Jeannie prompted.

  “Hot Fuzz,” Mills added, not looking up from the page. Jeannie pointed at him triumphantly.

  “Anyway, it’s a good name. Suits her, from our brief interaction.”

  “I’d rather talk about Jack Wellins, to be honest, Jeannie,” I said before she could get too side-tracked by her current train of thought.

  She cleared her throat and sat up, crossing her legs and shoving her damp hair back from her shoulders. She took the file from me, her cold fingers grazing my hand and pulled out a timeline.

  “Through careful investigation,” she said smugly, “the day he vanished. I got everything, just in case.”

  “Seven am, woken up by Elizabeth Wellins. 8.15 on the bus to school. 8.40, sends a text to his mother to tell her he’s at school. 3.30, school ends, another text to say he’s on the bus.”

  Jeannie nodded, taking over. “4.10, the bus arrives in the village, and the driver swears that Jack gets off. Doesn’t get back on, according to him. But there is another bus that left about ten minutes after.”

  “What does this say?” Mills asked, pointing at a scribble by that note.

  “Something his mother said,” Jeannie replied. “Jack took the same bus with the same driver every day. She said he wouldn’t get on a different one with a different driver. He just wouldn’t. She said he was…” Jeannie struggled for the right word. “He liked his routine. If you ask me, from what I’ve heard about him, I’d say our boy Jack might have been autistic. He was never diagnosed, though. Either way, Elizabeth swears that he would not have missed his bus home and that he wouldn’t have gotten on another one.”

  “He had a routine,” I murmured, slowly chewing another bite of my sandwich. “You have it?” I asked.

  Jeannie nodded, fishing through for another sheet. “Elizabeth had no trouble getting this to me,” she said.

  “Seven am, wake up, wash. Seven-thirty, breakfast with mum. Eight fifteen, bus to school. School until half three. Half three, bus home. Four fifteen, home. Snack. Half four, mum home. Homework. Half five, play outside or telly. Six, dinner with mum. Seven, shower or bath. Telly until bed at nine.”

  I hummed as I scanned it over. “Quite the schedule.”

  Jeannie nodded. “See, the bobby on the case said that it was likely this strict routine that made him feel claustrophobic, want to run away. But Elizabeth says that Jack was the one who stuck to this. If she wasn’t home by her usual time, he’d call her on the house phone, see where she was. Sometimes,” she went on, “he’d go out. Help someone in the village, drop something off, pick something up, head down to the river or cow and see the sheep across the road or something.”

  “Any friends?”

  “Not really,” Jeannie replied, sipping her tea. “Liked hanging out with his elders, apparently. A cup of tea in a village kitchen and a natter. Elizabeth said he sometimes hung out with a few other of the local kids at some fetes or whatever, but otherwise, he was happy to come home and stay home. Not really many friends at school either, but she said she never heard a complaint from him.”

  “Any word of him being bullied?” Mills asked.

  Jeannie shook her head. “His teacher said that he was quiet, but he was never rude. If someone invited him to play, he’d play, but he’d never push in. The other kids thought he was a bit weird, but there was never any trouble. He was a nice boy.”

  I breathed in deeply, looking at Jack’s routine, wondering where it went wrong.

  “What happened?” I asked Jeannie. “If his routine got messed up, or if something moved?”

  “According to his mum, he could get quite emotional, need to calm down. But she said nothing was wrong that day. She was home by her usual time, expecting to find him in the kitchen as normal, but he wasn’t there. So, she calls round to the neighbours who he might have gone over to, said he did that sometimes, but no sign.”

  “And he was reported missing,” I said slowly. Something wasn’t adding up with that, and it made me quietly annoyed at the Inspector who had handled the case.

  “Everything still in his room?” Mills asked.

  Jeannie nodded. “All his toys, all his clothes, except what he was wearing.”

  “His uniform?” I asked.

  “And his hoodie. Apparently, he wore it all the time, took it off and kept it in his bag at school and then put it on again when he left. Never went anywhere without it.” She smiled slightly. “Elizabeth told me that she had to wash it when he was asleep so that he could have it the next day.”

  “He was wearing it,” I murmured. “And his uniform, but nothing else? No spare clothes, nothing?”

  Jeannie shook her head. “Didn’t even have his P.E. stuff with him or anything.”

  “And he was wearing school shoes,” Mills added. “Not exactly the sort of shoes you’d wear down to the river.”

 
; “Not in a place like that,” Jeannie said.

  I nodded in agreement. The first rule of growing up in a rural village was to wear appropriate shoes unless you were asking for a scold from whichever grown-up caught you first.

  “He just vanished into thin air?” I asked. “I highly doubt it.” I drummed my hands on the table as a theory began to shape in my mind. I thought about the case from a fresh perspective. If it had been me, called out to investigate his disappearance, compared it to every other case I had worked.

  A young-ish lad, close to his mother, sticking to his routine, sticking to his village, vanishes. No note, no belongings taken with him, nothing but the clothes on his back.

  “What about his school bag?” I asked, turning to Jeannie. “Did he have that?”

  “Elizabeth didn’t find it,” she answered. “So, yeah, I’d say he kept it.”

  What child doesn’t dump their school bag the moment they can? Jack Wellins hadn’t run away. Something had happened to him. And that something was in some way, shape or form tied to Dr Stefan Schmidt. Dr Stefan Schmidt, who had worked in that village.

  I stood up, grabbing my coat.

  “Where are we going?” Mills asked, scrambling after me.

  “To get Lena,” I said. “And to look at some bones.”

  Eighteen

  Thatcher

  The thought wound into my head and latched on so that I needed to leave the café, get to Lena and get to the lab now. Mills was quick, hopping up and pulling his coat on as Jeannie watched in mild surprise, lounging along the sofa, fitting in as she did everywhere.

  “Figured something out, did you?” she asked, grabbing a thermos from her bag and pouring her tea into it.

  “I think so,” I replied, fishing my keys from my pocket.

  Jeannie pulled her damp coat back on, stuck the lid on her thermos and grinned.

  “Always nice to actually see that brain of yours going, Thatch,” she remarked, walking with us to the doors. The rain, after its sudden downpour, had settled again, but Jeannie still stared outside with a grimace.