In Bitter Chill
Page 17
It wasn’t a dead end. Experience told Connie that those two local history meetings were important. She checked her watch. It was coming up to two o’clock. She should really eat something but food at lunchtime always left her feeling tired and sluggish.
She drove to the college situated on the main Bampton Road. It was known as Bampton Tech in 1978, teaching mainly vocational subjects. Peter Jenkins, Sophie’s father, had lectured there in actuarial studies. Connie had looked up what an actuary did that morning. A specialist in statistical risk. Was that significant? There had been an element of considered risk – in snatching two young girls off the street in broad daylight and it made him, in Connie’s eyes, a person of interest.
He still lectured at the college one day a week. She’d telephoned the college from her office that morning and was told that Peter Jenkins now worked as an actuary from home and came in once a week to lecture two classes, at eleven and three. He’d be there that afternoon.
It was two thirty by the time she’d found a parking space and then a newsagent’s to change her five-pound note. She rushed back and found a traffic warden beginning to write her a ticket.
‘Hey, I went to get some change,’ she shook a fist full of coins at him which he ignored and carried on writing on his pad.
‘Look! I’m going to pay. I just need to go to the machine.’
He looked up at her now. ‘You’re too late. I’ve started writing.’
‘Bollocks!’ she exploded. ‘Don’t give me that bullshit.’
She dropped the coins in her pocket and pulled out her police ID. ‘I know for a fact you can tear that up.’
He glanced at the ID and then carried on writing. ‘Then you also know that the police don’t get any preferential treatment from us. Hard luck.’
Connie swallowed the fury rising in her chest and walked off.
‘Oi! That doesn’t mean you don’t still need to buy a ticket.’
She ignored him and walked towards the building’s entrance. Sadler would sign off the payment for the parking ticket. He had done it once before. He wasn’t bothered about that type of thing. He might have his ratty side, but minor petty infringements he seemed perfectly willing to ignore.
The college was pretty much what Connie had been expecting. The Victorian facade hid a utilitarian interior, designed to withstand the daily trampling of hundreds of young students. The woman at the reception desk seemed impressed by Connie’s badge and directed her towards a room at the far end of the building. When she got there, it was empty and Connie sat for a few minutes, catching up with the news on her iPhone. Penny Lander’s murder wasn’t headline material any longer on the Internet sites. Fortunately a popular politician had been spotted having an intimate dinner with a woman who wasn’t his wife and the papers were having a field day with the story.
Eventually, she heard footsteps coming down the corridor and a small man entered, wearing what she considered to be a ‘flasher’s’ mac, a flared raincoat, slightly too large for him in an indeterminate sludgy brown colour. It was belted tightly around his waist. He looked surprised to see her but as soon as she reached into her handbag for her card he spotted her profession.
‘I wondered if you lot would be paying me a visit.’ He put his leather case onto the desk and flicked up the clasps.
‘You know why I’m here, then, Mr Jenkins?’ Connie stood up and walked over to the desk.
‘I saw the news about Yvonne’s death. I wondered if you’d be getting in touch.’
Yvonne Jenkins’s next of kin had proved to be a distant cousin who was organising the funeral arrangements. And yet her death would still have impacted on her ex-husband’s life. You gave up some responsibilities on divorce, but not all, and Connie wondered whether this neat little man had any regrets over his failed marriage.
‘I’ve not come to see you about your former wife’s death. We’re treating it as suicide, but we are alarmed by its proximity to the later murder of Penny Lander. I’d just like to ask you a few questions about that.’
The man stopped shuffling his papers. ‘The teacher who worked at St Paul’s? What would I know about that? It was over thirty years ago. I never knew the woman.’
‘You didn’t see her at parents evenings?’
‘I never went. Yvonne used to do all that. I was too busy with work.’
Too busy carrying on with your soon-to-be new wife, thought Connie. ‘You never kept in touch with Sophie after your divorce? It must have been hard to leave your child behind.’
He looked at her now. Willing her to judge him. ‘You have no idea what it was like then. I’ve never felt so much abject misery as I did in those early years of my marriage. Every day, when I came home from the college, I’d put my key in the lock of that door and feel sick to the bottom of my stomach. I couldn’t stand it. I was looking for any way out and then I met Margaret and it didn’t take me long to see where happiness lay.’
‘You’re still together?’
He looked angry now. ‘We’ve been married for over thirty years. Longer than most. That first marriage seems like a nightmare. Sometimes I dream about those days, the claustrophobia and the misery, and I have to force myself to wake up. Can you imagine that? I deliberately wake myself up so I don’t have to keep dreaming about the misery.’
‘And Sophie? Was she part of the misery too?’
Peter Jenkins sat down at his desk. Connie reckoned she had about five minutes maximum until students would start to trickle in but it looked like he still had something to tell her. He appeared even smaller sitting at his desk and she wondered how he dealt with rowdy students, but then perhaps the disruptive ones didn’t take actuarial courses. He seemed struggling to form a sentence, his small mouth working.
‘I met Yvonne at school. It was the early sixties and we were in the same class. We started going out when I was in the sixth form and Yvonne had left school to go to secretarial college. Our families knew each other and it was natural that we get engaged and then married.’
‘And marriage wasn’t all it was cracked up to be?’ suggested Connie. ‘It’s a common problem.’ She thought of Palmer and his white face that week. He was about to find this out the hard way. But Peter Jenkins was shaking his head.
‘It wasn’t that. I think we were happy those first few years. We were both working, we had some money coming in and we both enjoyed our jobs.’
‘So what changed? Did you meet someone else?’
His head shot up and Peter Jenkins glared at her angrily. Connie saw with a start that his eyes were red and bloodshot.
‘Despite what you and everyone else might think of me, I was for a long time a loving husband and father. What changed was Yvonne when Sophie was born. She suffered from postnatal depression. That’s all you read about these days in the papers. This person’s depressed after she’s had a baby. You have no idea, no idea whatsoever, how utterly destructive it can be.’
‘She was severely depressed?’
‘It was a nightmare. Yvonne couldn’t sleep. She would roam around the house with Sophie in her arms. I was absolutely terrified that she would drop her. She didn’t cook, she didn’t wash. She went through a stage where she would just knit. I can see her now, her elbows out at right angles, as those needles clackety-clacked. God I feel sick even thinking about it.’
‘Didn’t she get any help? I mean, I know we’re talking about over forty years ago, but a doctor would have been able to see she was depressed.’
‘I took her to a doctor. I had to force her into a car and he took a look at her. He wanted her to take Valium but she wouldn’t because she was still breastfeeding. She adored that baby. Whatever problems she might have had, she never took it out on Sophie.’
Yvonne Jenkins had died from an overdose of diazepam – unbranded Valium. Perhaps Yvonne had been sending a message to her ex-husband when she had taken that final overdose.
‘Was she ever suicidal?’ asked Connie, aware that time was ticking away.
‘And in the end it all got too much for you?’ Connie tried to imagine this self-effacing man reaching the end of the line in his marriage and bailing to leave his daughter with a depressed mother. But there had been nothing on file about this. Perhaps in the unenlightened seventies depression had been the illness that could not be spoken about. But once more he was shaking his head.
‘I didn’t leave until Sophie was six. After about nine months, maybe a year after Sophie was born, Yvonne gradually began to improve. She lost the weight she had put on and started to go out, meet other mothers and so on. And our marriage began to improve. It had never been our intention that Yvonne go back to work and she began to make a life for herself as a wife and mother. I genuinely thought that our marriage would survive all of the problems.’
‘So what happened?’
They both turned as a student walked into the room and, ignoring them both, slung a bag on one of the tables while texting on his iPhone.
Peter Jenkins dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘What happened was that Yvonne got pregnant again.’
Chapter 30
Sadler walked over to Connie’s desk, looking at the jumble of papers, pens, pencils and reports. He had a problem with the latter. He didn’t like official files left scattered around the office. It smacked of inefficiency and haste, neither of which was a characteristic he would apply to Connie’s determined approach to her job. He picked up one of the papers. Inside were certificates pinned together, in the name of Paul Saxton, Rachel Jones’s father. Sadler scanned the details. Paul Saxton had been clearly dead by the time the girls were kidnapped and Sadler wasn’t so fanciful to think that the certificates were faked.
Palmer was tidying his desk in readiness for his annual leave. He was completing each movement in slow time, as if his limbs ached with the heaviness of his actions. He noticed Sadler frowning at him and, shutting a drawer, came over to Connie’s desk.
‘What’ve you got there?’
‘It looks like Connie did some digging into Rachel Jones’s past before we were pulled from the case. She’s lined up Rachel’s father’s BMD certificates.’
Sadler switched on a desk light and examined them. ‘The marriage and death certificates have the same address as the birth certificate, which suggests that Paul Saxton remained in the family home after his marriage. A bit unusual, I suppose, but hardly earth shattering.’
‘What’s the piece of paper pinned to the back?’
‘It looks like a copy of a page from an electoral register.’
Sadler skimmed over the details. Registered at the address in 1969 were Paul Saxton, aged twenty-four, Roger Saxton, aged twenty-one, and Tom and Shirley Saxton, aged fifty-six and fifty-four respectively. Mary Jones had presumably moved into her new husband’s house after their marriage, possibly while they saved up for a home of their own. Connie had also photocopied a recent copy of the electoral register. Roger Saxton was still living there.
Sadler looked at the clock. The house was a fifteen-minute walk away. Would Connie be angry at him pinching her work?
‘I’m going to pay Roger Saxton a visit. If Connie calls, tell her that’s where I’m headed.’ Sadler glanced over at his sergeant’s desk. ‘When does your leave start?’
Palmer looked down. ‘Tomorrow.’
*
Connie pushed open the door to Cafe Aroma and ordered a large coffee. The place had quietened down now that lessons had started at the college and the few students left were trying to do some work. She took her coffee to one of the far tables and sat down facing the window looking on to the high street. Shoppers were walking past with far fewer plastic carrier bags than she would have expected a couple of years ago. Three years of recession had taken its toll on the shops. The place she had often bought clothes in had shut down and the unit still lay empty, its blank windows giving it a desolate air.
When she was twenty-three, Connie had got pregnant by her then boyfriend Stuart and had an abortion. She was two years into her police career, he was studying for his sergeant’s exams and a baby figured in neither of their plans. It had never been discussed. She simply told him that she was pregnant and he’d taken it as read that she would know what to do about it. The operation had passed by in a blur and two days later she had been back at work. She never thought about that time. Her life had experienced other traumas, other more pressing worries, and she’d filed the incident to the back of her mind. Stuart remained a figure of her past. He was apparently married and probably had his own children by now.
In 1972, she supposed it had not been so easy to procure an abortion. She wondered when the procedure had been legalised. She took out her phone and looked it up: 1967. So five years later, Yvonne Jenkins had taken advantage of the relaxation of the rules and had an abortion when she had become pregnant with her second child. Connie wondered what she had felt about that. Whatever the devastation of postnatal depression, surely the fact that she had doted on Sophie had counted for something? The thought of going through that period again must have been too awful for Yvonne Jenkins to contemplate. Peter Jenkins was adamant that he’d been the father of the new baby.
The dynamics of that long-finished relationship fascinated Connie. From Peter Jenkins’s reddened eyes, she guessed that the termination had affected him deeply, but something in the manner he had told the story suggested to Connie that part of the impetus had come from him. She replayed his words and tried to grasp at what had given her that impression. His tone? The challenge in his eyes, perhaps?
So there had been no new child but the marriage had failed nevertheless. This didn’t surprise Connie. Her relationship hadn’t survived the termination either. It was women who carried around the vestiges of their decision, however buried the consequences might be. What a life for Yvonne Jenkins. Two dead children, depression and a husband who started a new life elsewhere. And yet Llewellyn remembered her as a smart, well-dressed woman. She had tried. But life had just ground her down.
The cafe had now cleared and Connie was left as a lone customer. The woman at the till had the machine’s lid up and was poking around inside. She saw Connie looking around and said without smiling, ‘Give us an hour and we’ll be full again.’
Connie took a sip of her coffee. ‘It looks like you do a roaring trade most days.’
The woman started to insert a new receipt roll into the till. ‘Can’t complain. You a friend of Francis?’
‘Sadler? Yeah, though not sure “friend” really covers it. He’s my boss.’
‘Your boss? You a copper, then?’ The woman had stopped what she was doing and stared openly at Connie.
‘That’s right. Don’t I look like one?’
The woman shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t have had you down as a copper, I have to say. I had you pegged as Francis’s new squeeze.’
Connie felt the colour creep up her neck. ‘I think the boss has a girlfriend already.’
The woman bent her head back to the task and mumbled, ‘Try telling that to Christina.’
*
The house that had been the Saxton family home for four decades was on a 1930s former council estate. Few of the homes were now under the control of the local authority and most owners had attempted to rid their property of the utilitarian look so common to houses built on an estate. The most obvious giveaway was the sludge brown pebble-dashing that some, like the Saxtons, had neither the means nor inclination to paint. Sadler looked for a bell, then a knocker, and finding neither, rapped loudly on the door.
Roger Saxton was massive. Grotesquely overweight, he had to push his body back against the wall to open the door. He wheezed with the exertion of moving around his massive bulk as Sadler stood on the doorstep and tried to explain himself.
‘Paul’s been dead over forty years. What you after him for now?’
>
‘It’s not a case of being after anybody. I just want to confirm the details of his life. Could I come in for a moment?’
Reluctantly, Roger Saxton let Sadler into the hall and led the way towards the living room. It was sparsely furnished but immaculately tidy, a surprise to Sadler, who had assumed that a man who was possibly disabled would have been put at a severe physical disadvantage by his bulk. Sadler handed over Connie’s papers and sat in an armchair. Roger Saxton remained standing as he scrutinised the papers.
‘What’s all this, then? Checking up on us?’
‘I just wanted to confirm that the information contained within the papers is correct. In relation to your brother Paul Saxton in particular.’
Roger levered himself into an armchair, his fat spilling over each side.
‘It’s been years since anyone asked me about Paul. He died when I was a young man.’
‘Of pneumonia?’
Roger shrugged, sending a ripple of fat across his body. ‘So they said. He was never that strong. He had bad asthma that was difficult to control.’
‘But he did die?’
A wheezy laugh came from the huge flesh. ‘He definitely died. I saw the body myself. What’s this all about?’
‘I’m trying to pull some loose ends together. Were you questioned by the investigation team looking into the kidnapping of Rachel Jones and Sophie Jenkins?’
‘Them? They came round here asking questions. I was away working in Dundee. They interviewed my mum, but she couldn’t tell them anything. We hadn’t seen sight nor sound of Mary Jones since the day our Paul died.’
‘They didn’t travel to Dundee to interview you?’
‘Eh? What would they want to interview me for? I was nowhere near the place they were kidnapped.’
‘You were the uncle of one of the kidnapped children.’
‘Uncle? I had nothing to do with the child. I never set eyes on her. Paul died while Mary was pregnant and that was the last I saw of her. Never set eyes on the baby.’