Evil Impulse

by Leigh Russell

  ‘Please tell your client that if he continues to refuse to answer any questions we will hold him here overnight, and perhaps that will persuade him to talk to us,’ Ian added with grim satisfaction.

  Geraldine glanced at Ian, but he did not look at her.

  ‘Very well,’ the lawyer said. ‘I need to talk to my client.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ Geraldine blurted out when Greg had been led away and she was alone with Ian.

  ‘We have to put pressure on him,’ Ian replied. ‘If he confesses he killed her, we’ll be putting him behind bars where he belongs.’

  ‘What if he’s innocent?’

  ‘Then he won’t confess. But if he did it, I think he’ll crumble.’

  ‘I don’t think he did it,’ Geraldine replied.

  In the meantime, a team had been studying CCTV footage from the area closest to the river where Angie’s body had been found. There was no camera in the immediate vicinity, but officers were searching for sight of her on the bridges leading down to the river path, and passing by the boat club that had security cameras in place to film anyone who approached the building. Another team was investigating Angie’s contacts on social media, trying to find out where she had gone on the night she died. So far, no new information was forthcoming, but the work continued. Someone had killed Angie, and it could have been her husband. As the dead woman’s spouse, there was a weighty balance of probabilities against Greg being innocent. All Geraldine had to persuade her of his innocence was a gut feeling that he hadn’t killed his wife.

  10

  ‘She went missing yesterday?’ Eileen repeated, red-faced with outrage. ‘Why the hell didn’t her parents report it at once? Why did they wait? What sort of parents are we looking at? A teenage girl was out all night? Should we be looking at her parents?’

  ‘They probably thought she’d come back today,’ Ariadne said. ‘We don’t know that she hasn’t run off before. She might just have gone to visit a friend and forgotten to tell them. Teenagers can be thoughtless like that.’

  A few middle-aged officers with teenage children muttered darkly.

  The constable who had taken the call shook her head. ‘Apparently they were under the impression they couldn’t report a missing person for twenty-four hours.’

  ‘She’s thirteen, for Christ’s sake!’ Eileen protested. ‘If they had any sense, they would have called us straightaway. Perhaps we shouldn’t have waited to let the media loose on the recent murder.’ She sighed. ‘It’s time to issue a press release about Angie Robinson.’

  The decision had been made to keep Angie’s death quiet for forty-eight hours, in hopes of concluding the investigation before the media caught on to it. Now it was going to be exploited as a sensational item of news, and no doubt used as an opportunity to attack the police for failing to apprehend a dangerous murderer promptly enough, as though an efficient police force should be able to track down an elusive killer within hours of the victim being discovered. In addition, a sensational item of news about a murder inevitably resulted in a host of false accusations, which wasted many hours of police time, and even raised the spectre of a copycat killing. The decision to keep the situation under wraps had not been taken lightly.

  Geraldine understood why Eileen was incensed about the parents’ delay in reporting their thirteen-year-old daughter missing. Had the police known about it at once, they could have initiated a search straightaway, instead of twenty-four hours later. The fact was, the missing girl could be at greater risk than her parents had realised, because Eileen had chosen not to share news of Angie Robinson’s murder immediately with the public. It was a tough decision, and Geraldine was glad she had not been called on to make it. On balance, she would probably have done the same as Eileen, governed by her reluctance to spark a media frenzy as soon as Angie Robinson had been pulled from the river. They were not to know that only a day later another young woman would disappear.

  ‘There is absolutely no reason to suppose this missing girl has anything to do with Angie Robinson’s murder,’ she said. ‘The chances are the girl will turn up, safe and well, oblivious to her parents’ concern. It’s true, teenagers are often thoughtless. And she might have deliberately decided to pull a vanishing stunt just to worry her parents. There’s nothing to suggest her disappearance has anything to do with our investigation.’

  Eileen grunted.

  In general, a report of a missing girl might not be acted on immediately, but in this instance Eileen was keen to investigate the disappearance without delay. In the unlikely event that the two cases were linked, the second victim might help them to track down the killer they were already looking for.

  The couple who had reported their daughter missing lived only a couple of miles from the station.

  ‘Where they live isn’t far from the river,’ Ariadne said.

  ‘Nowhere’s far from the river in York,’ Eileen replied brusquely.

  ‘And we don’t know that Angie Robinson was killed anywhere near the river,’ Geraldine added, ‘only that her body was dumped in the water some time after she was killed.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Eileen chimed in. ‘The body could have drifted quite a long way before it was spotted. She might have been killed somewhere further up, outside the city.’

  Geraldine was sent to question the parents of the missing girl. She did not need Eileen to remind her not to mention that a woman had been murdered only two days earlier, the body having been discovered close to where they lived. As yet there was nothing at all to connect the murder to the missing girl, who in all likelihood would turn up, unharmed.

  ‘In this job we have to be optimistic,’ Geraldine agreed.

  Glancing up, she happened to look at Ian, whose face relaxed in a grin. Geraldine looked away quickly, but not before their eyes met fleetingly.

  ‘Well, I for one am going to take that advice to heart,’ he said.

  Geraldine suppressed a smile, pleased that he seemed to have recovered his good spirits.

  Bella and John Watts lived in a small brick-built terraced house in Milner Street, along Acomb Road. Geraldine had to drive past to find a parking space. Walking back along the road to the house she was looking for, she thought about the missing girl. A woman opened the door as soon as Geraldine knocked. With her pale face and light blue eyes, she looked almost spectral in the dim light.

  ‘Have you found her?’ she asked, without even waiting to hear that Geraldine was a police officer.

  A dark-haired man joined them and Geraldine followed them into a small living room furnished with a settee and three chairs upholstered in maroon, and a low coffee table in the centre of the room. Since all the pieces were too large for the room, it seemed to be crammed with furniture. Geraldine wondered if they had moved to their house from somewhere larger. The man, who looked about forty, had blue eyes that contrasted strikingly with his dark hair, and seemed to gaze at her with a disconcerting kind of rapture that was quite seductive. She noticed he looked at his wife with the same attentive expression. Clearly he was an accomplished charmer. With his dazzling good looks and beguiling voice, she guessed he was a salesman of some kind. His wife was equally attractive, in a fragile way. She had wispy blonde hair, matched by eyebrows and eyelashes that looked white above her pale blue eyes. Her arms and legs were long and slender and she had a remarkably narrow waist. Geraldine was slim, but compared to Bella she was robust, even bulky.

  Geraldine listened as John and Bella went through their account of the last evening their daughter had been at home. After checking Zoe’s age and confirming that it was out of character for her to stay out all night without telling her parents where she was going, she enquired about the circumstances under which the girl had left home.

  ‘Circumstances?’ Bella echoed with a puzzled frown. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Had you had an argument with her?’

 
; ‘We didn’t even know she’d gone out,’ Bella said, reaching for a tissue and wiping her eyes. ‘She took her dinner upstairs and that’s the last we saw of her.’ She let out a sob.

  ‘She didn’t eat with you?’ Geraldine asked.

  ‘She preferred to eat in her room,’ John explained, with a faint moue of regret. ‘She’s a teenager. We tried to give her as much freedom as we could, in the house, where she was safe.’

  ‘Did you feel she wasn’t safe outside the house?’

  ‘Well, yes, of course, hopefully she was, but these days you hear all sorts of terrible stories, don’t you? We weren’t keeping her here against her will or anything like that,’ he went on, with a smile that contrived to be both concerned and endearing. ‘She was happy here. We liked her to stay in on school nights, to do her homework, but she was free to go out with her friends at weekends, and she never complained about her situation. Well,’ he added with a regretful smile, ‘not more than any teenager might. But we negotiated with her, the time she had to be home, and so on, and we never laid down the law. There was nothing like that, no conflict. She was very amenable. If we were at fault it was in being too lenient, so it was easy for her to co-operate. Teenagers these days don’t like to be told what to do.’

  Geraldine suspected Zoe’s father of putting a positive spin on the operation of the household, but she made no comment, instead taking down the names of the missing girl’s friends, before asking to see her bedroom.

  ‘Is that necessary?’ Bella asked. ‘I mean, she didn’t even like us going in there.’

  ‘Let the police officer do her job,’ John said. ‘We want Zoe found, don’t we?’

  Zoe’s room yielded little of interest, other than that she had left her phone on the bed, presumably to prevent anyone from tracking her location. Her parents had already said that she had taken her school bag packed with clothes and a wash bag, including her toothbrush. Geraldine explained that an officer would come round to look at Zoe’s phone and computer, in case she had left any clues as to where she had gone.

  ‘If she’s still not returned tomorrow, we’ll ramp up the search,’ she said.

  ‘Ramp it up how?’ Zoe’s father asked. ‘Shouldn’t you be doing everything you can right away?’

  ‘We’ll begin at once with questioning your neighbours in case they saw anything, and speak to her friends, and do everything we can to discover where she might have gone,’ she said with what she hoped was a reassuring smile. ‘In the meantime, if you can think of anything at all that might help us to find her, please do get in touch straightaway.’

  As Geraldine was speaking, Zoe’s mother glanced almost fearfully at her husband, who kept his eyes fixed on Geraldine and paid no attention to his wife.

  11

  First thing the following morning, Geraldine and Ian drove to the café where Angie had worked. Ian went to speak to the shopkeepers on either side of the café: a betting shop and a hairdresser. There was a slim chance one of them might have seen or heard something suspicious happening in the café, or outside on the street. Geraldine questioned the manager of the café, who was only able to tell her that Angie had been punctual, hardworking, and polite with customers.

  ‘She will be a great loss,’ he added gravely.

  ‘How well did you know her?’

  The manager shook his head. ‘Not at all, I’m afraid. She turned up for work and did a good job, but our conversation never strayed beyond the customers’ orders. We’re generally too busy here to stop and chat. If there was ever a slack period, she would chat to the other waitress. I think she might be able to tell you more about Angie than I can.’

  Geraldine sat at a table in the corner, waiting for the manager to send a skinny dark-haired girl over to speak to her. The odd mustard colour of the tables should have complemented the brown chairs and pale yellow walls, yet somehow the décor and furniture all seemed to clash. Geraldine stared at the plastic table top, and tried not to think about Ian.

  The waitress came out from behind the counter, looking like a child, with a flat chest and virtually no hips. She claimed to be twenty-four, although she looked half that age. She spoke English fluently with a marked foreign accent, and seemed happy to chat about herself. Geraldine learned that Klara had left Poland when she was eighteen, coming to England as an au pair. She had met her partner and moved in with him six months later, after quitting the family she was living with.

  ‘I am happy to leave house,’ she said. ‘They are not nice people. Not kind. They treat me like servant. I am slave to horrible children.’ She pulled a face. ‘Now I work here. Is good job for me.’ She grinned. ‘No more slave to horrible children.’

  Klara had been working at the café for five months. She didn’t know how long Angie had been employed there, but she had the impression her colleague had been working at the café for quite a while. Geraldine nodded, aware that Angie had been a waitress there for nearly three years.

  ‘What was Angie like?’ Geraldine asked.

  Klara shrugged, and answered with a question of her own. ‘Why she not here? Please to tell me what is going on.’

  When Geraldine explained gently that Angie was dead, Klara looked startled. Her lower jaw dropped so that her mouth hung open for a second.

  ‘She dead?’ she repeated in a shocked whisper. ‘How that is possible? She not sick. Is she killed by car? Oh my God!’

  Geraldine explained that Angie’s body had been discovered in the river.

  ‘So she drowns and not… not…’ Klara said, struggling for the word she wanted. ‘How very sad is this. My poor friend.’

  Geraldine questioned the girl gently, but Klara knew very little about her dead colleague. They had never socialised, and most of their time together had been spent working. All that Klara could say was that on the rare occasions they had time to chat, Angie had seemed very nice, and very happy.

  ‘You called her your friend just now,’ Geraldine reminded her. ‘How well did you know her?’

  ‘Yes, she nice to me. I think we can be friend. But I think she have husband,’ she told Geraldine. ‘He now very sad. I sorry.’

  Klara had never met Greg, and was unable to pass on anything specific that Angie had said about him.

  ‘She say she have husband. She say her man clever, very good looker, this what she say. And she happy with her man.’

  There was no reason to doubt the girl’s sincerity, and Geraldine left soon after. Ian’s questioning had proved similarly fruitless.

  ‘None of the staff in the shops on either side knew anything about the waitresses here. They seemed to know the manager by sight, but that’s about the extent of it. One of the hairdressers claims she regularly saw two girls coming in and out of the café, but that’s about all I could gather, and her description was extremely vague.’

  ‘Yes, I had the impression she was just trying to be obliging,’ Ian said.

  ‘Angie’s colleague was no more helpful,’ Geraldine replied and proceeded to tell him the little she had managed to elicit from Klara. ‘This whole trip has been a complete waste of time,’ she added.

  ‘It would be good to feel we were actually getting somewhere,’ Ian replied. ‘The DCI seems a bit down in the dumps.’

  ‘She’s like a bear with a sore head, but as long as she gets the job done, who cares?’ Geraldine answered testily.

  She had no wish to gossip about her colleagues. All she wanted to do was find out who had killed Angie.

  They drove back to the police station in silence. Actually, Geraldine reflected, the DCI’s personality did matter. An effective team leader encouraged her officers, and commanded respect and loyalty. Undermining other people’s efforts, while intending to spur them on to work harder, could be counterproductive. She suspected that beneath her gruff façade, Eileen lacked faith in her own ability to lead the team. But it was easy to judge o
thers, and Geraldine had never been called on to lead a team herself.

  ‘We each have to do our best,’ she said aloud, and Ian grunted.

  She glanced at him but he was staring straight ahead. She hoped she had not been curt in dismissing his attempt to air his concerns about Eileen. Geraldine had insisted she and Ian keep their relationship quiet, but now she wondered what other officers might say to him about her, not knowing about their relationship. She already had a reputation for being cold and detached. Such personal qualities were not necessarily inappropriate in an officer working on murder investigations, but they did make it more difficult for her to form friendships. Ariadne was the only close friend she had on the local force, apart from Ian.

  With a sigh, she turned her attention to the case. It was easier to focus on the death of a stranger than to brood over her own shortcomings. She was mulling over everything Angie’s boss had told them, and his reaction on hearing about her death, when they arrived back at the police station. Ian smiled at her before he jumped out of the car, and she wondered if she had misinterpreted his apparent chagrin. Probably he too was preoccupied with the case. Having checked in at the police station and written up her report, Geraldine’s next visit was to Angie’s neighbours. She wanted to find out as much as she could about the dead woman’s relationship with her husband. It was ironic that she should be reluctant to listen to tittle-tattle in general, when her work necessitated prying into the circumstances of strangers.

  12

  As she drew into the kerb, Geraldine wondered whether it was a coincidence that Greg lived only a few blocks away from Zoe’s house. His home was in the middle of a row of terraced York stone cottages, most of which would have benefited from some renovation. A few had new UPVC windows, but most, like the property where Greg lived, had old-fashioned sash windows with rotting wooden frames which must have been draughty in the winter. In the absence of a bell, she knocked and waited. When Greg finally opened the door, she noticed his hangdog expression and bloodshot eyes straightaway. Either he had been crying, or else he had rubbed his eyes to give that impression. Geraldine felt a stab of pity for him, and wished she did not have to approach the bereaved with such relentless suspicion. He had been allowed home, but as Angie’s widower, he remained first in the line of potential suspects.