The only one who remained not totally convinced had been Kate. ‘We don’t actually know those letters she received were from Armstrong. She seems to have thought they were from some weirdo.’
‘And what’s Armstrong but a weirdo? It’s the same method the bastard used before to frighten her — writing to her, ringing her up, following her everywhere.’
‘I know the probabilities are stacked against them being from anyone else, but I’d feel happier if we’d seen them.’
‘So would I, Kate, so would I. But it’s the only lead we have, so far. And if he is innocent, I’d be more inclined to believe him so if he hadn’t chosen this moment to do a runner.’
‘That does seem funny.’
Yet she was basically right. Amidst all the euphoria following the discovery of Armstrong’s existence, Crouch realized that he had brushed aside the difficulties of apprehending him and now, though he wouldn’t have cared to admit it, the good feeling that it was all over bar the shouting had evaporated like water in the Sahara after hearing that he had broken his parole and disappeared. Dammit, he might have known. Given his luck lately, things weren’t likely to be that easy — though he was still convinced they were steering a straight course in the right direction. However …
If Armstrong had any sense, it went without saying that he and the child would be out of the country by now. And then, even supposing he were found, getting him, or the boy, back could be a long-drawn-out affair. These tug-of-love cases, as the press delighted in dubbing them, and which was essentially how this had started out, were a bugger.
The child’s disappearance was already generating too much interest for his liking in the media, blast them. But these were sentiments he couldn’t afford: their co-operation was needed.
Usually, by now, two days after the opening of an investigation, information would be trickling in, however slowly. But not on this one. The facts surrounding Bibi Morgan’s stabbing remained stubbornly obscure. As for Jasie, there had been the usual false sightings by people who claimed to have seen him, from Edinburgh to Clacton on Sea, but none of it could be given credence.
Crouch had been pinning his hopes on the local police up in Yorkshire, feeling sure that they would have gone some way towards tracing Armstrong by now, but so far those guardians of the outposts of the Empire hadn’t come up with anything — probably knocked off for the weekend, he thought irritably. Armstrong had been living in Morley, a suburb of Leeds, since his release, in the house his lately deceased father had left to him, but he’d failed to report to his probation officer two weeks ago and had simply vanished, without a word to anyone. The house was reported to be as locked up and silent as it had been during the interim between Armstrong senior’s death and the release of his son from prison.
Crouch wasn’t actually sanguine enough to believe that the man they were looking for was certain to be found at all, though he would never have admitted this to anyone. If he had disappeared into the maw of one or other of the big cities, that might be the end of it. He had, after all, lately been living in the company of those used to existing outside the law, and if he hadn’t known all the tricks and dodges by which it was possible to disappear before he went inside, he would now. Outside, there was always someone ready to employ casual labour and no questions asked, if he was without means of support, which he might well be, since how much ready cash he had was debatable. Though he now owned the house, its contents and an old car left to him by his father, they were assets which would need to be realized and, with the possible exception of the car, that wasn’t easy to do without discovery. He might soon be living hand to mouth, but even in this bureaucratic age, it was possible to exist without papers. Doing so with a small boy in tow might be more difficult.
‘Let’s try to work things out, how it happened,’ Crouch had said to his assembled team that morning, the thirty or so men and women brought together on this assignment, ‘working from what facts we have.’ First, he’d outlined the case as he saw it, simple on the face of it: after his release, Graham Armstrong had started threatening Bianca Morgan with the letters and the threat to ‘get’ her. She had gone for a walk in the grounds of Membery, he had been waiting for her, had killed her and tipped her body into the water, then snatched his son and made off with him. Either by force or by persuasion.
This last would explain, argued Crouch, why the boy had made no fuss.
‘With respect, sir, I don’t think that’ll wash,’ Kate had objected. ‘According to Chip Calvert, Armstrong had terrified the child by letting him see how he upset his mother. He wouldn’t have gone willingly with him — certainly not without his mother’s say-so.’
Crouch thought for a moment. ‘All right, by force, then.’
There was a moment’s silence, at the thought of this man who had lost his hold on reality having the boy in his grasp. Not one person who didn’t remember reading in their briefing notes what he’d said at his trial — that if he couldn’t have Jasie, no one else would.
And yet, a judge had freed this man on the understanding that he had shown remorse and was no longer a risk, basing his judgement on the reports of psychiatrists and psychologists, care workers and prison authorities and his own assessment of the prisoner at a Parole Board hearing.
‘Forgive my cynicism,’ Crouch had remarked on hearing that, an understandable reservation, given that within weeks of being released Armstrong had restarted his campaign of intimidation against his ex-wife and their son. Now, it seemed as though that might have been justified, that Armstrong had snatched the child. There had been no one to hear but the two old women. The big old house had thick walls, which would have deadened any sounds from outside. Even the shrill screams of a terrified small boy might not have penetrated as far as the small sitting room where the two old women had been watching the Channel 4 news, relaxing and sipping aperitifs, waiting for Jonathan Calvert and his girlfriend Jilly Norman to arrive for supper.
Crouch very soon closed the meeting and went to telephone Yorkshire yet again, to waken the dozy buggers up there in the sticks. He had never been very good at waiting.
After Kate left her, Fran had showered and dressed, washed her hair, and now feels more sense of being in control before ringing the number Mark has given her. The speed with which he answers tells her he’s been waiting for it to ring and that makes her feel good, but his short, sharp, ‘Yes?’ diminishes the feeling somewhat.
Fran has always hated the telephone for conversations like this, or for those requiring any degree of intimacy for that matter, when you can’t see the face of the person you’re speaking to, or their body language. All the same, as she and Mark talk, she does sense that during the time that has passed since their last conversation, he’s absorbed the shock of what she’d had to tell him, has got himself together and thought it through. This time he comes over strong and supportive — the old Mark — and she feels a surge of relief. Everything’s going to be all right. It had all been her imagination, thinking he was holding back.
‘Right. Now, here’s what we’ll do,’ he begins decisively. ‘Just hang on there, I’m arranging to come home, just as soon as I can sort things out and get a flight.’
‘But —’
‘No buts.’
‘No, listen, don’t do that, Mark, there’s really no need.’ She puts a smile into her voice. ‘Anyone would think I can’t see a thing like this through without a man beside me.’
‘You’ve been talking to Claire again.’
She laughs. ‘We had a meal together, Wednesday evening.’ Actually, Claire’s bright decisiveness, her clear-sighted certainty when faced with any problem, is just what she needs now — only Claire’s in Spain for the weekend, meeting her future parents-in-law for the first time, out of circulation until Monday. ‘But this has nothing to do with Claire.’
‘Makes no difference, you shouldn’t be on your own.’
‘You call being five minutes away from Membery on my own?’
&nb
sp; ‘No, but if I know you, you won’t be creeping up there into the bosom of the family for protection, and yes,’ he adds positively, ‘I am coming home, no arguing. You’re far too vulnerable down there at The Watersplash with a homicidal maniac at large.’
Fran likes, and at the same time despises, the warm, protected feeling this gives her, but she says, ‘What makes you think he’d be after me? Anyway, listen — the police think they know who killed Bibi now, and he’s not a homicidal maniac — at least not that sort. They think it was Jasie’s father, a man called Graham Armstrong. And that Jasie’s with him now.’
She rather belatedly realizes that Mark, with his quick intuition, and in view of those letters in his desk, must have made that connection already, but he gives no indication of it. ‘Do they? Well, let’s hope they’re right,’ he says non-committally. ‘They’re on the track of this guy, you say - this Armstrong?’
‘Yes.’ She proceeds to tell him all that she’s learned from Kate Colville, though it really hurts, knowing that most of what she now knows about Bibi, if not more, can’t be news to him. She can’t imagine what sort of game he and Bibi were playing, but she can’t see she has any alternative at the moment but to carry on as though she isn’t aware there was anything between them. A quarrel about something as important as this at long distance isn’t something she’s prepared to initiate. She takes a deep breath and says, ‘So you see, there’s no need for you to mess everything up over there. Don’t let it interfere with what you’re doing. Armstrong isn’t interested in anyone else.’
She hopes she sounds convincing, because she isn’t convincing herself. Truly, she doesn’t feel she’s in the least danger from Armstrong, or anyone else, but she can’t rid herself of that spooky sense of impending disaster that’s been with her ever since she saw Bibi floating in the pool. Actually, it had started even before that. Looking back, she can date everything from the moment when she had that telephone call from Bibi, and then came home and saw the impression of the white owl on the mirror. Or even before that, with that creepy sensation that she and Mark were being watched. Tell herself as much as she will that it’s all rubbish, she can’t rid herself of the nagging feeling that something else is flowing along there, like a subterranean current beneath the surface of the murder.
‘How can the police be so cocksure?’ Mark is saying. ‘Seems to me like an unwarranted leaping to conclusions.’
‘Mark, he’s got Jasie, and that’s all he wants. We have to leave it to the police, it’s in their hands. There’s nothing we can do,’ she adds mournfully, ‘but watch the clock and wait for something to happen.’
‘God, yes, that’s what it amounts to, doesn’t it,’ he says soberly after a moment, adding, as he had before, ‘What a bloody mess it all is.’ Then, ‘How’s Ma taking this? And Chip, of course?’ he asks, with a sort of delayed reaction.
‘You should ring them, your mother would love to talk to you.’
‘I already have, but the line’s forever engaged.’
‘I expect that’s Chip on to his office in London. He’s frantic about some unfinished business he has on the go. The police have a direct line they’ve set up — Mark, they have an incident room in the library!’
‘The holy of holies? Did they get Jane’s permission?’
‘With difficulty.’ She laughs shakily. How liberating only a little laughter is. How it unravels the knots of tension inside. A minute before, she’d felt Mark was beginning to waver and now she seizes the advantage, pressing home all the arguments she can muster. She can be pretty persuasive, when she wants to be. In the end, he says, ‘Tell you what — we’ll leave it until tomorrow and see what gives, OK? Surely they’ll have found Armstrong by then.’
‘I’d feel much more comfortable if we did that, rather than you come charging over here to no purpose.’
‘Well, I still don’t feel good about it at all, but as things are here …’
With a sigh, she replaces the receiver when they’ve finished talking. She hadn’t, in the end, said anything to him about finding the letters and it has left her with a guilty feeling that perhaps she had in fact never had any intention of doing so.
Her stomach rumbles. Perhaps this downbeat feeling might be due, at least in part, to the fact that she’s had no breakfast, nothing much at all, in fact, over the last two days. Shopping is clearly indicated when she examines the distinctly unappetizing contents of the fridge, consisting mostly of the leftovers from the meal she and Jonathan had eaten together. They look more depressed than she is, and are in any case more than a little suspect by now. Some bendy-looking celery and lettuce so wilted it’s going slimy, smoked salmon that has dried and curled up, all ready to die, and several slices of avocado that are evidently in the final stages of the Black Death. The last morsel of the Brie that had been just ripe when Jonathan brought it has run and spread all over the plate on which it’s been standing. It’s still edible, however, and she scrapes it off and eats it, but she makes a clean sweep of the rest of the once-tempting offerings, which leaves only some scaly-looking Cheddar, a couple of rashers of bacon, half a pint of milk and two cartons of tomato juice. Oh, and the oranges, filling up half the crisper drawer. She takes two of them out, frowning. Again, that uneasy moment as she remembers coming into the house and seeing them on the table in the black dish. Determinedly, she shakes off the shivers the thought inexplicably induces and juices the oranges to drink while she makes herself a bacon sandwich and be blowed to the fat content.
She feels ready to face the Saturday shopping in Felsborough after she’s eaten. Finding somewhere to park there will be a pain, but still, there are things she needs apart from food and it’s a pleasant place to shop, a small country town with pretty buildings and some interesting shops off the High Street. Everything she wants can be found there, dispensing with the hassle of a safari to the big Tesco’s on the edge of the town. Things like cheese from the specialist shop, fruit and salad from the Saturday market that lines the High Street. An hour should see it finished.
Chapter Thirteen
Papers, papers, papers! Chip, sorting, putting aside for the shredder. Being suddenly decisive, ruthless in clearing out the debris, the questionable, being very efficient about it, too. Making sure there could be no comeback, nothing that would connect, if ever it came to the crunch … not that it would, he’d hadn’t actually done anything strictly illegal, yet. Not committed himself, thank God, either here or at his London office. He’d spent hours on the telephone and his affairs there were now as much in order as they ever would be, as were these here. Not a whiff of anything unsavoury left. He was clean as the day he was born.
‘What are you doing?’ asked his mother, from the doorway.
‘Sorting out my life,’ said Chip. Her face told him there was still no news.
‘Chip.’ She came into the room. ‘My darling boy.’ She sat down on one of the big, shabby chairs and waited, while her handsome son sat at his desk, amid the chaos of papers. She turned her head so as not to be caught watching him, and gazed out of the open windows. Not a cloud in the sky, a burning bright blue. Where, under that sky, was Jasie?
Chip swiped the drops of sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, looked at the bottle on the sideboard, then at his mother, and decided not. At any rate, not before he’d told her what he’d told the police. He was sick of explanations, he absolutely didn’t want to go through the whole bloody rigmarole again, but he couldn’t dodge it. She’d hear the story from Crouch, anyway, if not from him, and he owed her that much. She’d accepted Bibi, and Jasie, no questions asked. Which, for Alyssa, was a great deal, and now she had a right to know why she’d been asked to do it.
‘All right, Ma,’ he said. ‘There’s something you should know.’
He began to tell her the bits of the story she hadn’t already heard — which was most of it, he realized, and at the same moment, wondered for the first time why there had been the need for all this secrecy. Bibi had
been paranoic, that was why, unsure of herself. Even using the bloody stars to counteract her insecurity.
Alyssa knew, she always had known, when it was time to listen, when any of her boys had something to confess. Even before he began to speak, she felt instinctively that this wasn’t going to be a small graze that could be made to feel immediately better by the application of an important-looking bandage. But when he’d finished, she wondered, with a flash of insight, how deep the hurt was — and how far Chip’s commitment to Bibi’s son would go. Even Alyssa could not envisage her son, on good terms as he was with Jasie, taking on the permanent responsibility of another man’s child — always supposing the monster who called himself the father could be persuaded to release him.
Although Crouch believed it was all sewn up, now that Graham Armstrong was in the frame, and though Kate for the most part agreed, she thought there was an element of wishful thinking involved in his certainty. To her mind, there were still gaps to be filled and inconsistencies which were not going to clear themselves up as easily as Crouch imagined. She knew she would have to go on doggedly, as her police training had taught her and her nature compelled, with the business of talking to people, again and again if necessary, for as long as it took to get a clear picture of what had happened on the day Bibi Morgan met her death.
The decision as to who should come first on her list was made when she saw Humphrey Oliver working in the small front garden of his house as she made her way through Middleton Thorpe, driving yet once more between Felsborough and Membery. She drew her car up on the road outside and went towards the gate.
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