In Bitter Chill

by Sarah Ward

  ‘Why did she retire?’ asked Connie.

  ‘She’d reached sixty, which was the age she’d decided to leave teaching. I was surprised. Her husband had died earlier in the year and the plans they’d made, travel and so on, were suddenly redundant. She gave me the impression of being at a loose end. But, to be honest, teaching is hard at any age. Running round after kids when your over sixty isn’t fun at all.’

  Sally Arden looked at Sadler expectantly. She had a chirpy personality that he didn’t like. He noticed Connie was frowning too. He suspected that Sally Arden wouldn’t be to Connie’s taste either.

  ‘We’re here,’ Sadler told her, ‘because a body has been found near Truscott Woods that we have reason to believe is Penny Lander.’

  He watched the woman’s face fall and a flush spread up her neck. For a moment he felt sorry for her, although Connie’s expression implied satisfaction.

  ‘Did she kill herself?’ she asked.

  ‘We’re awaiting the results of the post-mortem so at the moment we’re treating the death as suspicious.’

  ‘Are you aware of anything or anyone who may have wished Mrs Lander harm,’ asked Connie, watching Sally Arden closely.

  ‘No. Nothing at all.’

  Some of the woman’s chirpiness had disappeared but the smile remained.

  ‘What about another teacher? Who’s the longest serving member of staff you have here?’

  ‘Jane Thomson. Miss. She insists on the “miss”. Unfortunately, she is of the old-fashioned school. She’ll be retiring next year and it’s probably about time. I’ll get her for you.’

  And she rose quickly and left the room.

  Sadler had got to know the minor tics in Connie’s personality. He didn’t look at her now, not least because he knew at present she wouldn’t be forthcoming. She would store it up later and then give it all guns blazing. He preferred her like that. It was her reticence that always caused him pangs of anxiety. With Connie, her silence was usually a sign of deep thinking. She would only share when she had reached her conclusions, and that was never good in a team, especially one working on a murder investigation.

  The door of the room reopened and Sally Arden re-entered, followed by a much older woman whom she introduced as Jane Thomson. The head teacher had obviously revealed the news of Penny Lander’s death to her colleague, a tactical mistake, and Sadler had to quell the spurt of irritation that was his first impulse. Imparting the news of a victim’s death was the first line in a murder enquiry. He cursed himself for not insisting that she keep the news quiet; it was a beginner’s mistake and he wasn’t an amateur. He saw Connie shoot him a sideways look.

  Jane Thomson was tall and thin, her grey hair cut into an old-fashioned bob with a severe fringe. This was a woman who carried an air of competency but was a textbook example of how authority wasn’t enough in the teaching profession any longer. To the students who attended this admittedly middle-class school, she would look like a mix of Mary Poppins and Nanny McPhee. Without invitation she dropped onto the sofa against the side wall.

  ‘I can’t believe it. Penny, dead. I never would have thought it.’ She seemed visibly shocked by the news.

  Sadler looked up at Sally Arden and, taking the hint, she left. Jane Thomson sat on the sofa, dry-eyed but with a tissue in her hands.

  Connie leaned forward in her chair. ‘Miss Thomson. Were you teaching here when Rachel Jones and Sophie Jenkins went missing?’

  Whatever the woman had been expecting, it wasn’t this. Her head jerked up and she looked from one to the other.

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything? Just because Yvonne Jenkins committed suicide last week doesn’t mean Penny would have followed suit. That was years ago. We’ve all lived with the guilt since then.’

  ‘Guilt?’ asked Sadler.

  Jane Thomson looked out of the window. ‘I was Rachel and Sophie’s form teacher. It wasn’t like now where there is in effect a procedure for every eventuality. It wears you down. But then things were a bit freer. If a child didn’t turn up for school, the parents were supposed to ring up and tell us. But not all remembered and although we were then supposed to chase, we didn’t always remember to do that either, and we certainly wouldn’t have had time before the lunch break. It was the same that day. I took the register. Both girls were absent and I marked them as so. And I never thought of them again until the school secretary came into my classroom that afternoon and called me out. I couldn’t believe it when I heard what had happened.’

  ‘Had you cautioned your pupils about the dangers of getting into a car with strangers?’ asked Connie.

  Jane Thomson looked angry. ‘Of course we did. We even had a policewoman come into the school to talk to the children.’

  ‘So you were surprised that Sophie and Rachel would have got into the car.’

  ‘Yes, I was. Especially Sophie, who was a very sensible child. Very obedient.’

  Perhaps it was Sophie’s obedience that got her into trouble, thought Sadler.

  ‘And Rachel?’ asked Connie.

  ‘She too would have known not to get into a car,’ admitted Jane Thomson, pursing her lips.

  ‘Although the fact it was a woman might have confused them,’ said Sadler.

  ‘A stranger is a stranger.’

  Sadler could see the dogmatic personality that would make this woman so hard to manage. He changed tack. ‘Can you remember at all Penny Lander’s reaction to the kidnapping? Any comments she might have made at the time, for example.’

  Jane Thomson looked at the tissue in her hands. ‘She didn’t say anything at school. I remember there was a discussion about whether to send all the pupils home, but it would have been a logistical nightmare, not least because not everyone had a phone in those days. We were asked to keep the classes going, which was very hard, particularly for me, as I couldn’t help looking at the empty desks.’

  ‘Can you remember exactly how and what you were told?’

  Jane Thomson frowned. ‘We were all – all the teachers, I mean – called individually from the classroom by Miss Coles, who was the head teacher then. The class was left on its own for the few minutes that it took to give us the news – that Rachel Jones had been found at Truscott Woods claiming she had been kidnapped.’

  ‘Claiming?’ asked Connie. ‘Who said that?’

  ‘Perhaps they didn’t use the word claim.’ Jane Thomson looked down at the handkerchief in her hands.

  Sadler could see Connie assessing the teacher. ‘Back to Penny Lander. So you had no time during the afternoon to discuss the kidnapping with her? What about after the children had left?’

  ‘Not then either. Some of the parents had already got wind of what had happened so we spent the time after lessons reassuring them and making sure the children got off safely. Some of them picked up on what was happening and were frightened to walk home, so we did have to call parents then.’

  ‘So you didn’t speak at all about the incident, until when?’

  ‘Penny rang me that evening. We rarely called each other outside school hours, but we did have each other’s numbers in case something came up. We just talked about what had happened. We hadn’t been told much by the police then.’

  ‘But you spoke of guilt,’ Connie persisted. ‘You’ve explained why you might have felt guilty because you didn’t follow up on their absence. But why would Penny Lander feel responsible? She wasn’t their teacher.’

  Jane Thomson looked again out of the window. ‘I don’t know why but she did feel responsible. We all did. It was different in those days. As a school we felt we were a whole unit. We felt collective responsibility towards what happened to those girls.’

  Sadler willed himself not to look at Connie but she was shifting slightly in her seat, always a clue to her repressed excitement. And it was justified too. Collective responsibility wouldn’t account for Penny Lander’s guilt and her death so close to Yvonne Jenkins’s suicide was a coincidence too far. But Jane Thomson looked like
a woman who would hold on to her secrets. He only had one more chance.

  ‘Miss Thomson. We are treating the death of Penny Lander as both unexplained and suspicious. Is there anyone that you can think of who might have wished Penny Lander harm?’

  The look of shock and astonishment told him that, for the moment, Jane Thomson would be of no further help to them.

  Chapter 20

  Sadler and Connie sat in the Aroma cafe on Bampton High Street sipping the strong coffee that made it famous amongst the locals. If you walked off the street into the cafe, you would never expect the riches that the place provided, but it held its own against the designer franchise across the road. There were booths with hard red plastic benches, the type made to be easily wiped down. It was clean, but garish, and for different reasons both Sadler and Connie looked out of place. It was popular with students and Connie guessed that Sadler was one of the oldest people there, with the exception of the woman behind the till. Connie stood out because of her well-cut clothes and carefully applied make-up. The cafe was run by Greek Cypriots who had ended up in Bampton after the crisis of 1974. The coffee was strong, rich and cheap. Eleni, who ran the till, watched over proceedings with a practised eye and payment was upfront for a large cup of black coffee, with a free top-up if you wanted it. Just the once, though. Milk and sugar were the optional extras.

  Connie knew that Sadler liked his coffee black and strong. She’d hesitated to suggest the cafe. She imagined he would want something more upmarket, but the readiness with which he agreed suggested he knew the place already. Intriguingly, he also seemed to know Eleni behind the till.

  ‘It’s been quite a week, hasn’t it? We started off with a suicide. And now we have a murder, or at least one that looks that way.’

  For a moment, remembering the body in the field, Connie felt the coffee in her mouth turn sour. ‘Will we get more resources now? We both think there’s a link between Yvonne Jenkins’s death and Penny Lander’s. Will you be able to make a case to Llewellyn?’

  Sadler looked across at the woman at the counter. ‘Of course we’ll get more resources; this is a current murder case. The problem is that if the two deaths are connected, then the answer will still lie in the past. And we don’t have enough to go on. I feel like I’m scrabbling around in the dark.’

  ‘If Penny Lander was murdered two days ago, that was still after Yvonne Jenkins killed herself. Which means that whatever a connection might be, Mrs Jenkins was already dead and can’t have been the person directly responsible.’

  Sadler took a sip of his coffee. ‘It would certainly have been neat if Yvonne Jenkins had committed the crime, although I doubt that we would be finished with the case. Llewellyn would want to know why Yvonne killed a teacher in her daughter’s old school. And, to be honest, so would I.’

  ‘So we’re looking for the murderer of Penny Lander, given Bill’s preliminary assessment of cause of death. And what about Yvonne Jenkins? Do you think something prompted her act of suicide?’

  Sadler looked at her with his pale blue eyes, which never failed to put a dart of fear through her.

  ‘Suicide is always a difficult act to quantify. Things are rarely clear-cut. But there’s a lot to think about. We have a girl who is kidnapped and then released, apparently unharmed. We have another girl, kidnapped and presumably killed.’

  ‘Why are you talking about them separately? They were kidnapped together.’

  ‘Because I’m starting to think, Connie, that the mistake in the investigation may have been the fact that the case was never separated. We have two different types of victim here. Rachel Jones was the victim of an unexplained kidnapping. Sophie Jenkins was kidnapped and either killed or permanently removed from her home. I suspect the reason for that is the key to the whole case.’

  ‘But it could have been an accident. Sophie accidentally killed, for example, and then the abductors panicked and released Rachel Jones.’

  Sadler shook his head. ‘It doesn’t sound right. Why not kill Rachel and then there are no witnesses at all. Something else went on in that woods and that’s where we are going to start.’

  ‘So who was the intended victim, Sophie or Rachel?’

  Sadler made a face and Connie leaned back against the hard bench in frustration. They would be splitting the 1978 case into two investigations and now they had Penny Lander to add to the mix.

  ‘What about Rachel Jones?’ asked Connie. ‘Are you sure she remembers nothing at all.’

  ‘She sounded pretty convincing and I believe her, to a certain extent.’

  Connie looked up at the qualification. ‘You think she’s holding something back though?’

  Sadler smiled at her. ‘I’m certain of it.’

  ‘Will it be important?’

  ‘It’s difficult to say. But she’s not telling us everything. The interesting question is whether she’s deliberately holding out on us or whether she knows something but is currently unable to tell us anything.’

  ‘I could go back and have a look at the police interviews with her at the time, if you think it’d help.’

  ‘I don’t think so. I don’t think interviewing children amounted to much then. Everything was taken at face value.’

  ‘Do you think it’s significant that neither of them had their fathers living with them? A link that might explain why the two of them were taken together?’

  Sadler picked up a spoon and began to stir his coffee. ‘Go on.’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s just an idea. It’s just that it was quite unusual for those days – one-parent families. They weren’t the norm they are now. I mean, I had two parents; didn’t you?’

  He looked at her and she suspected that she had pushed him too far. He gave little information about his background. She had heard he had a girlfriend and that he’d grown up in Bampton. But that was it. Finally, he answered.

  ‘I did have two parents and you’re right, very few of my friends came from one-parent families, although I think that did change later.’ The spoon that he had been using to stir the coffee clanked onto the table. ‘I’ve been thinking a lot about family recently. Something about this case, I suppose. My father, who was a presence throughout my childhood but who I never really knew.’

  ‘Me too.’ He was staring at her as she spoke. That was the problem with Sadler. He always looked right into your eyes. Hadn’t she read somewhere that it was a form of aggression? ‘I mean, I’ve been thinking about my family too. My mother. It’s funny you’ve been thinking of the fathers but it’s bought my mother back to me. Not that she’s dead or anything.’ Connie stopped. It wasn’t really the time for confidences.

  ‘Go on.’

  She could feel a colour rising in her cheeks. ‘My mother was an alcoholic when I was growing up. One of these educated ones that you read about in the papers now. She was a pharmacist, had her own little shop in Matlock. She ran it until she retired. But every day, the minute the shop shut at five, she started drinking. Wine and gin were her tipples.’

  ‘Did no one notice?’

  ‘Notice? Everyone knew. That’s the funny thing about it. Everyone knew and did nothing. That’s what you and I need to remember about the past. That secrets could be everywhere and no one would mention a thing.’

  ‘I’m closing up!’ Both Sadler and Connie started at the loud voice and Sadler looked at his watch.

  ‘We’d better go.’

  As they left the cafe, Connie was intrigued by the cheery goodbye the woman behind the till shouted after them. It appeared to be directed at Sadler. He smiled back but ignored Connie’s enquiring look. He seemed keen to get back to the office, where the investigation team into Penny Lander’s death needing assembling and tasks had to be assigned. The promised more important case that Llewellyn had warned them of when they had picked up the 1978 kidnapping had now materialised but, to Connie’s relief, Sadler wanted her for the moment to keep digging into 1978. She would join the team in the incident room later that evening for an
update. Palmer, she presumed, would be given the initial choice tasks but, given the obvious connection between the cases, she wasn’t exactly wasted pursuing the old investigation.

  Connie’s problem was that most of the people who might have been in a position to help her were dead: Rachel’s mother Mary, Yvonne Jenkins and now Penny Lander. Jane Thomson had told them everything that she was planning to. So, as far as Connie could see, the women in the old case, dead or alive, were not going to give up their secrets easily. That just left the men. Sophie’s father, Peter Jenkins, and Rachel’s, a Paul Saxton. Saxton had apparently died before Rachel was born, which should be easy enough to check. Peter Jenkins might be more difficult to track down, but he’d been interviewed in the original investigation so at least there was a starting point.

  But now that she was temporarily removed from Sadler’s watchful presence, she intended to have a quick peek at the files from the initial investigation. Even if it was a quick size-up of the mountainous pile of paperwork, she would at least feel connected to that initial investigation. Which meant a trip to the constabulary’s records centre.

  It took about fifteen minutes to reach the small industrial estate on the outskirts of Bampton where the files were housed. Once inside the vast warehouse, the place seemed deserted. If the building hadn’t been so modern, Connie would have been tempted to look out for ghosts, such was the feeling of complete isolation with only the hum of the air-conditioning unit, set to high even in this cold weather. Connie counted three people in total as she walked to the relevant rack, two of whom were wearing headphones.

  The rack holding the records for the 1978 case was about half full of stuff, somewhere between thirty and forty boxes, she estimated. She opened the lid of the first few cardboard cartons, most of which contained files full of case notes. The different colours suggested a system of some sorts, but without any explanation of the colour coding, the files seemed random to Connie. One carton was labelled ‘Interviews’ and Connie heaved this box on to the trolley she had been provided with. A cursory look through the other cartons revealed more files until to her surprise a lid she lifted revealed a void inside. Empty? Connie lifted off the lid fully, tipped the box towards her and peered inside. There was a plastic evidence bag lying across the bottom, slightly cloudy with age. Inside was something white with a slight ribbed pattern. Connie touched the item through the plastic and saw with surprise that it was a girl’s sock.