by Faith Martin
Tommy took a hasty swallow of his tea.
They were in Deirdre’s kitchen, waiting for her daughter to come home. Apparently she had just got a new job nearby and came home for lunch. Janine wondered if that was because the trauma of the rape was still with her, making her “run home to mother” on a regular basis, or whether it was just cheaper to eat at home.
From the looks of the place, the Warrenders didn’t exactly have money to burn.
Janine and Tommy had taken it in turns to read DI Greene’s report of her first interview on the way over, swapping driving duties halfway.
Now she nodded sympathetically. ‘Yes, Dave Pitman had a bit of an MO for that,’ she said.
Which was true. All three rape victims had come in for severe battering about the breast and genital area. Stitches. Scars. At least flesh healed, eventually. But at nearly thirty, here was Sylvia Warrender still living at home with her mother, coming back for lunch like a little girl needing to be looked after.
As if responding to some telepathic call, the kitchen door opened. Janine noticed Deirdre Warrender glance anxiously at the door. She was obviously wishing that Janine and Tommy were a million miles away. Still, that meant nothing. They were cops, and that alone made them the enemy as far as people like the Warrenders were concerned. And to make matters worse, they were there to question her daughter about something they must both want to forget about.
The two things that immediately struck Janine about Sylvia Warrender were that she was pale and thin. She looked washed out, faded, drooping. Like a wildflower after a long drought-ridden summer. The pale eyes — impossible to tell what colour — focused on them and became, if possible, even more dull.
She looked ready to bolt. Tommy didn’t dare move.
‘Cops, love,’ Deirdre said at once. ‘Remember, I told you I had a visit from one of them the other day? These two work for her. Come on in and I’ll get you some toast. Beans? Egg?’
Sylvia Warrender slithered into a chair like some kind of deep-water sea creature. She was wearing a plain black pair of trousers and a white, satin-look blouse. She was wearing make-up, but somehow it didn’t seem to work. The only thing that stood out on her, to Tommy’s mind anyway, was her necklace.
His girlfriend Jean was, on the whole, what people would describe as a “down-to-earth” kind of girl. Not the sort to waste her money on expensive holidays. The kind who had a building society account, steadily growing. The sort who bought next year’s Christmas presents in the January sales. The sort his mother loved. But she had one extravagance — jewellery. Not that she bought a lot, or that she was silly over it. It was just that what she bought was always good, always gold, and always expensive.
Jean would definitely salivate over the necklace Sylvia Warrender was wearing.
Except that she was not a Gemini.
The necklace was gold, with a plain but very nice box-cut chain. It was the pendant, however, dropping neatly into the milk-coloured ‘V’ underneath Sylvia’s almost non-existent chin, that immediately caught his attention. For a start, Tommy could have sworn it was not mass-produced. Jean had dragged him to enough craft fairs by now for him to know. This pendant, two back-to-back outlines of pretty young girls — the Gemini twins — smacked of handcrafted, customised individuality. Cameos in gold wire. Very fine.
And surely very expensive?
If she had a boyfriend, he obviously rated her highly. Or was it a present from her mother? Like Janine, he knew some rape victims never recovered. They never dated, but instead retreated into a safe world, peopled only with close relatives like parents, or not peopled at all.
Tommy watched Deirdre, while Janine gently questioned Sylvia about Dave Pitman.
Could she have afforded to buy such a gift for her daughter? He wouldn’t have thought so. Perhaps she hooked, now and then, purely as an amateur. Even so, she didn’t look the sort who’d go for handcrafted jewellery. A bottle of Chanel would probably be Deirdre Warrender’s definition of class.
He sighed, listening to Janine who, with genuine finesse, went through the paces.
Both Sylvia and Deirdre Warrender had an alibi for the night Dave Pitman was killed. So that was another dead end.
As Hillary had already ascertained, the father was a shadowy figure at best, and Sylvia seemed to know next to nothing about him.
Another dead end.
They were wasting their time.
When, some twenty minutes later, they were back outside, Janine put her notebook away and sighed heavily. ‘I’m glad Pitman is dead.’
For a second, Tommy felt a little frisson of shock, then nodded in understanding.
Sylvia Warrender was probably just as dead as Pitman. The only difference was that she breathed. She’d been too terrified to even look at Tommy, and had answered all of Janine’s questions, even the more knuckle-biting ones about the rape itself, in a kind of monotone that would have made any psychiatrist anxious.
He could almost imagine her life. Get up, force down some breakfast, go to work, come home for lunch, go back to work, come home, eat her mother’s cooking, then spend the evening in front of the telly. No men. No friends. No social life. All those things were dangerous. They must have led to her meeting Pitman in the first place. Led to her being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Yeah, he could understand why Janine, or any other woman, would be glad Pitman was dead. Hell, he only had to think of Dave Pitman with Jean or his mother or Hillary and he was glad Pitman was dead.
Back in the car, the radio was squawking.
Janine reached for it eagerly. Something must be happening back at the Big House.
CHAPTER 14
‘What’s up, boss?’ Janine asked, the moment she walked into the office. There was a definite buzz, but she couldn’t quite pin it down.
Hillary glanced up from the path lab report on Dave Pitman she was re-reading. Something about it was still bothering her.
‘Huh? Oh.’ Her eyes focused, and she leaned back in her chair, running a hand through her lush, still faintly beer-scented brown hair. ‘Oh, an appeal went out on the lunchtime news for anyone driving by Sturdy’s Castle late last night to get in touch. We got the usual, but one’s come up trumps. A woman driver, returning from a visit up at the Radcliffe. Sister in a bad way, apparently. She’d been hanging around, waiting to see if the worst was gonna happen. Then around one, quarter past, in the morning, they told her it was safe to go home. According to the wit, a hairdresser at a salon in Deddington, she was driving past the layby at going on one-forty, one-fifty, and saw a car parked up.’
Tommy sat down in his chair and used his feet to wheel it from his desk back to Hillary. Janine took off her lightweight coat and tossed it towards her desk chair. It hit the floor but she didn’t even look at it.
From his office, Mel saw her, and in a determined waft of lust, the image of her doing a striptease flitted into his mind. The blouse next, then the skirt. She’d be wearing stockings, of course, and . . .
He cursed, and answered the phone.
Oblivious to her superior’s discomfort, Hillary continued to bring her team up to speed. ‘She saw a single male, white, between thirty and thirty-five, well built, probably dark haired, lugging something from the boot of the car.
‘As you know, the streetlamps over there aren’t brilliant, but she recognised the make of car because her husband used to own one. A Vauxhall Carlton, dark in colour, black, dark blue, maybe dark grey. At the time, she assumed it was just somebody doing a spot of illegal dumping. When asked to describe the object, she stalls a bit, saying it was dark, she was going by at fifty miles an hour plus, but it was big and bulky, sort of like a rolled-up carpet. That’s what she thought he was dumping. Old carpet.’
‘Yeah, well, it’s usually that, or old mattresses, ain’t it?’ Janine said laconically. But everyone was thinking the same. A dead body, rolled up in something, looked a lot like a rolled-up carpet.
‘Regis is still tal
king to her now, going over it a second time. Mel took the original interview. So, tell me about the Warrenders,’ she finished.
Janine went over her notes.
Then Tommy told her about the necklace.
‘Thing is, guv,’ he ended, ‘it looked like good-quality gear to me.’
Hillary frowned thoughtfully. She could understand why Tommy had noticed it. From her own memory of Deirdre Warrender and her household, it wasn’t the kind of place you expected to find gold. Real gold, that is.
‘Right. Well, let’s leave it for now.’ She couldn’t really justify Tommy taking time checking it out because she couldn’t see any connection between a gold necklace and Dave Pitman’s death.
And no matter how much she wanted to turn over every stone, just to show Mellow Mallow and Donleavy that she could still function like a good police officer, even when being shafted and given the shitty end of the stick, she wasn’t about to go overboard on it.
‘OK. I’ll be going to interview the mother tomorrow. Janine, see if Mel wants you for anything.’
She didn’t notice her sergeant go white, then flush. ‘Right, boss.’
‘Tommy, you’d better start trying to trace any stolen Carltons, dark in colour. Go back two days. If nothing, go back a week.’
Tommy groaned inwardly. ‘Right, guv.’
* * *
Mel glanced up as Janine walked in the door. Feeling wrong-footed by the mental striptease image, he tried to smile like a benign uncle.
‘Sergeant,’ he said, foregoing her name.
Janine scowled. ‘Sir. DI Greene wants to know if you have an assignment for me.’
Mel didn’t. ‘Look, about the other night. The cinema. And . . . everything. I wanted to say I’m sorry it didn’t work out.’
Janine shifted uneasily from foot to foot. He was looking good today. All the late nights and tension had given him a bit of a rough edge. He wasn’t quite so polished and smooth. She liked it.
‘Yeah, well, it just felt a bit awkward, sir, didn’t it?’ she said miserably.
Mel nodded. Then looked up. ‘Want to try again?’
Janine smiled instantly. ‘Sure. Why not?’
* * *
It wasn’t until gone five, when Hillary and everyone but the next shift were thinking of going home, that the call came in.
A car, just off the Woodeaton turn, which was part of the local rat-run to Headington, had been found burnt out. It had been run off the road, through a hedge and into a field beyond a dip, so it was invisible from the road. The farmer who had come across it, thoroughly pissed off, had only just reported it. Tommy caught the call just as he was putting on his jacket, and then relayed it to Hillary, who rolled her eyes but nodded.
‘Better tell Mel,’ she said, because after the rollicking he’d given her about the second boat, she was punishing him by reporting every little move she made.
Mel merely waved her off with his blessing, and Janine, catching sight of them in the car park getting into Tommy’s car, jogged over.
Hillary wound down the window and, mindful of her sergeant’s still stiff and aching back, said, ‘No need for you to come if you’d rather get off. We’ve found a possible burned-out that matches the description of our Sturdy’s Castle layby wit. Might be nothing.’
Janine, thinking about going home, soaking in the tub before changing into something sexy, then waiting for Mel to show up with a bottle of wine and a packet of condoms, shrugged.
Sod that.
She wasn’t so sad that she had to have nearly four hours to get ready and wait for a man. She’d be back in plenty of time.
‘I’ll follow you down, boss. Where is it?’
Hillary told her then nodded to Tommy, who drove out and headed up the main road to the roundabout.
Hillary sat in the passenger seat, her elbow on top of the wound-down window, saying nothing. The fierce breeze felt good on her face. Her eyes felt gritty, as they always did when she wasn’t getting enough sleep, but the thought of going back to the cramped, empty boat depressed her.
She wondered what sort of place Mike Regis had. A conventional semi? A smart bungalow? How about a flat, one of those nice Victorian conversions in north Oxford? Up near Keble College maybe, by the park.
Then her mind supplied a wife and a couple of kids, and she grimaced. She was blowed if she was going to ask around about his marital status — in six seconds flat it would be doing the rounds of the canteen. And she was still wincing about the unfounded rumours that she and Mel were doing (or had in the past) the old horizontal tango. Taking another trip on the same bloody carousel didn’t appeal at all.
Tommy heard her huge sigh, and his hands tightened on the wheel.
He negotiated the usual traffic hazards at Islip, and a few minutes later was indicating to turn off to the small, historic village of Woodeaton. Didn’t people from all over the globe come to the church here because it had something rare in it? A tapestry — or a goblet, or manuscript or something. He couldn’t remember what it was. His mum could probably have told him, though.
‘Here it is, guv,’ he said unnecessarily, since a marked police car and an unhappy-looking man in a tractor were parked off the road.
Janine pulled in behind them, and together they walked up to the man sitting glumly in the tractor. The uniforms on the scene began to look vaguely interested now that the “brass” had shown up.
Hillary eyed the grass, the hedge and the dip beyond and heaved yet another sigh. Great. Join the police force and get your clothes and hair messed up with hawthorn, your legs stung by nettles, and your shoes ruined by cowshit and dirty ditchwater.
Some uncomfortable and curse-filled moments later, they were all clustered round the burnt-out car. By now the light was starting to go, and the setting sun was generously casting a pleasant golden light on the field, already green with barley. Except for a blackened area surrounding the car where the fire had fizzled out.
‘It’s a Vauxhall Carlton all right,’ Tommy said and, being a gentleman, got on his hands and knees and peered underneath it in search of unsinged paint. ‘And it used to be a dark grey,’ he added, standing up and wiping mud and grass and ashes off his hands and the knees of his trousers.
Hillary nodded. ‘OK. Let’s work on the assumption that it’s too much of a coincidence that our wit sees a man dumping an old carpet at Sturdy’s last night and us finding the same sort of car burnt out today. Tommy, take the village, see if anybody noticed anything. Since it was the middle of the night, don’t hold your breath.’
Tommy grinned. As if he would. He set off uncomplainingly.
Janine, meanwhile, stared morosely at the car and wished she’d gone home and taken that bath. She had some nice gardenia-scented salts left over from a birthday present.
Girl power was all very good when it didn’t cost you anything to practise it.
‘Janine, have a talk with Farmer Jones up yonder,’ Hillary said, in the dead, flat tone most coppers used when they knew something was a complete waste of time but had to be done anyway.
Janine sighed and trotted off, back up across the ditch, and through the hedge.
‘Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “dragged through a hedge backwards,”’ she muttered to herself.
But it was Janine who made the breakthrough, some half an hour later. Not through talking to the farmer, who, as expected, only complained about the amount of joyriders who wrecked cars in this part of the county, but through walking along the side of the road and casting about for “clues,” those things so beloved of readers of mystery novels, and which were so scarce in real life.
True, what she found wasn’t a cigarette end of a rare and wonderful quality that could only be ordered through the internet from Panama, nor was it a footprint or even a dropped hankie/key/piece of paper or any other type of Christie-like clue. It wasn’t even on the same side of the road as the car, but just opposite. This side of the road didn’t have a ditch, but it did have a
hawthorn hedge with a slight dip, and, more importantly, lots of tall, trampled-down grass. Below the line of sight of the road, out of the wind and well sheltered, it was as perfect an example of a tramp’s hotel as you’d find anywhere.
Hillary, when called over by her sergeant to take a look, nodded knowingly.
‘Well spotted,’ she said, which, much to Janine’s chagrin, made her feel good. ‘If our pal was curled up there last night, he’d have had a perfect view of the fun and games.’ She looked across to the gap in the hedge where the car had gone through.
Janine nodded. ‘And tramps are curious, aren’t they? If he’d seen a car either being carefully driven, or maybe pushed, into a hedge, he’d want to take a decko. Maybe even warm himself by the fire afterwards?’
Hillary pursed her lips. ‘Possibly.’ But tramps tended to come in two varieties. The mentally retarded, too uneducated not to poke their noses in where they weren’t wanted, and the very canny, who knew enough about survival to keep their heads well and truly down.
Tommy, looking disillusioned, came back and stood alongside them. The tramp’s nest was virtually indistinguishable in this light.
‘What you looking at?’ he asked, not even bothering to report to Hillary that the village had been a bust.
Janine told him.
‘Now you get the fun of trying to find our sleeping beauty,’ Hillary added.
Janine groaned. ‘Not me, guv. I’ve got a date.’
‘Right, get off then.’ Hillary thought, and then grinned evilly. She reached for her mobile and dialled the Big House. As she thought, Frank had come on for his later shift.
She gave him the good news.
* * *
Frank, furious, hung up, grumbling under his breath. No way was he going to check out the sewers and dives of scum-life Oxford looking for a tramp who liked to kip out at Woodeaton.
Senior officer or not, screw her.
If only he knew where that cunning bastard Ronnie Greene had stashed all his dough, he’d use it just to make his old lady’s life a living misery.
* * *
