In Bitter Chill

by Sarah Ward

  ‘If anyone asks, just say that I came to you offering to give you some information regarding Penny Lander’s murder and I insisted that the cinema was the only confidential place to go.’

  It wouldn’t stop her getting the sack if anyone found out about it though, thought Connie. They were sitting towards the back, near a noisy group of teenagers who were more interested in groping and hitting each other than paying attention to the adults behind them.

  ‘We’re linking the three cases. The 1978 abduction, the suicide of Yvonne Jenkins and the murder of Penny Lander. Whether or not Sadler tells you that formally in the press conference I don’t know, but I’m telling you anyway. Firstly, it’s nothing you couldn’t pick up if you listened to the uniforms chatting in the pub on Friday night and, secondly, you need to know because the help I need is on 1978, not the murder last week. But it’s all connected.’

  She sensed him nod in the dark. He leaned over and said in her ear. ‘I’ve looked at everything I could find on that case. There’s not much in the public domain that hasn’t already been sifted over.’

  ‘No, but we’ve got a few discrepancies that no one can explain. First of all, Rachel Jones’s father, who died before she was born. There’s something strange there.’

  ‘Strange? What do you mean strange? You think he’s not really dead?’

  ‘He’s definitely dead, but I think someone should have a good look at the dates and so on. Just check up on that angle.’ Connie debated whether to tell him about Sadler’s interview with Roger Saxton but decided to leave it. Better he discover it himself. It shouldn’t take long for him to work out all was not right.

  ‘You know something, though?’

  ‘You need to be careful,’ she said, sidestepping the question. ‘I think Rachel doesn’t know anything about it. But something’s not right about the whole set-up. You might want to look into it.’

  ‘OK, I’ve got it. Go on.’

  Connie paused as she watched a fight scene between the hated cat brandishing a sword and an enemy of indeterminate species. Dog? Mouse?

  ‘We’ve also got a problem with what happened between the time of the abduction and when Rachel was found up by Truscott Woods. Where did they go and what happened in between?’

  ‘But that’s impossible. If I find that out, I in effect solve the case. Where am I supposed to look?’

  ‘I didn’t say it was going to be easy. But you must be able to find something. Look around other events; find out what was going on at the time. Where could you have taken two girls for about three hours without anyone noticing?’

  He grunted besides her. ‘Anything else?’

  Connie thought, as she leaned towards him and caught the smell from his body. Citrus soap and the tang of his own scent. ‘Tell anyone that you’ve met me and I’ll sort you out myself.’

  Chapter 33

  20 January 1978

  Rachel was sitting in a room. The heat was so great that she could feel trickles of sweat running down her back. It reminded her of something, a cloying smell and moisture on skin that her brain was telling her that she must forget. She was wearing a dressing gown that was too long for her, a pale lemony colour with buttons down the front. It looked a bit like her one at home, except hers was purple and was getting too small for her. All of her clothes had disappeared. A lady took her into a room and asked her to undress and put them all in a bag. She could hear them whispering outside while she took off her sock. She heard the words ‘wait’ and ‘Mum’. She was glad to get the damp clothes off her, but she could still feel water and cold in this stuffy room.

  The door opened and her mum came in. She sat and waited as her mother rushed towards her and she was engulfed by even more warmth and a sickly smell, Je Reviens perfume from the round glass bottle on the dressing-room table. Behind her mum’s back, a tall policeman stood watching them. He had bright red hair brushed to one side but with a bit sticking up at the back. Rachel noticed his large hands, all knuckle and bone, and she looked away quickly. Behind that large policeman there was someone else hovering. A woman policeman and this thought turned her stomach. She looked to her mother for reassurance and something in her face gave her that at least.

  Her mum turned around to the tall policeman and Rachel heard him cough.

  ‘Rachel, do you know where Sophie is?’

  She looked down at her feet, her pale toes a sickly pinky-brown colour, and she clenched them tightly.

  ‘No,’ she replied. But it seemed that this wasn’t enough. The silence in the room grew and grew. But she couldn’t say anything else. The man coughed again.

  ‘Can you remember what happened to her?’ Rachel had an image of sweat trickling down her back and looking at her pale brown toes she turned her head to one side and threw up on the bench.

  Chapter 34

  Rachel drove towards her house, her movements made clumsy by the agitation she could feel rising within her. Sadler was following her in his car, a watchful presence keeping a respectful distance behind her. She used her mobile phone to cancel her five o’clock appointment, telling her client that something urgent had come up, which in one sense was true. It had been an exhausting day and her dissipating weariness was fighting with that familiar instinct for survival.

  She found a parking spot near her house and watched as Sadler sped up the hill to look for a free space. There was a single journalist still stationed outside her home. The sharp-faced woman in the cherry red trench coat, talking to someone on her phone.

  Rachel crossed to her house and opened the front door, flicking on the heating as she crossed the living room. She automatically checked her organised desk, looking for signs of disorder and, satisfied that everything was as it should be, opened her large notebook. The one with its pages still wrinkled from the damp churchyard visit. The time before everything had started again. She flicked to the section that held her father’s information. The weaker strain, in her eyes, since that family had dumped her mother the minute her father had died. For completeness, Rachel had compiled the tree but her heart hadn’t been in it then, and even now her lassitude made concentrating on the names difficult.

  She pulled open her filing cabinet and pulled out the folder containing her father’s certificates. Birth, marriage and death. She crossed to her dining-room table and laid them out side by side.

  Sadler knocked on the door a couple of minutes later and she let him in. She pulled him over to the table and pointed at the documents.

  ‘See: nothing strange here.’

  He pulled out a chair and sat down. Rachel was once again struck by how attractive he was. His blond hair showed no signs of the baldness that usually characterised a man of his age. She wondered if he had a girlfriend.

  ‘You’re a professional like me, Rachel. Tell me, do you come across cases where what is told within a family is completely incorrect. A family story, for example, that isn’t right?’

  Rachel pulled out a chair, sat down opposite him and jammed her hands underneath her legs. ‘Of course. There are always stories within families that prove not to be true.’

  ‘And it’s just like policing. We hear stories: sometimes they’re correct and often they’re not. But there’s also something else I noticed when I first joined the police. Some people have an excessive love of something that’s written down. I meet policemen who, for example, see something official and decide it must be true. Do you see what I mean?’

  Rachel pulled her father’s birth certificate towards her. ‘I suppose so, but it’s something I try to avoid. I have to take an open approach when I’m looking through records. People’s names can be spelt incorrectly; dates are wrong and so on. Is that what you mean?’

  ‘I suppose what I’m trying to say is something can be talked about within a family and you can have the paperwork to back it up, and it still might not be true.’

  She looked at him now. ‘Are you talking about me?’

  ‘How much do you know about your father?’r />
  ‘Not much. I told you, Mum didn’t really talk about him.’

  ‘Doesn’t this strike you as strange? Weren’t you entitled to have information about your father?’

  Rachel found she couldn’t meet his eyes. ‘But lots of things weren’t talked about then. What are you trying to say? I’ve just looked at that death certificate again. There’s nothing wrong with it and, believe me, I would know.’

  ‘It’s not the death certificate I’m worried about.’

  ‘Then what?’ Rachel pulled all the certificates towards her and scanned her eyes across them. ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘We don’t believe that Paul Saxton was your natural father.’

  She started to laugh. ‘I can categorically tell you that Paul Saxton was my father.’

  ‘How? How can you categorically tell me that?’

  She picked up the hard-backed notebook and waved it at him. ‘My whole life is in here. This notebook. Research that I’ve done over the years. And my mother helped me. Where do you think I got those certificates from? Not from the Family Records although, believe me, they’re there on the registers. My mother gave them to me. She wouldn’t have lied to me about something that was my life and my job. This was important to me and Mum always put me first.’

  Sadler let the silence open out in the room. ‘I’m sorry, Rachel. But I believe Paul Saxton wasn’t your father.’

  She was angry now. ‘Why? Why do you think that?’

  He was looking at her with calm eyes and Rachel couldn’t drag her gaze away.

  ‘Paul Saxton’s brother, Roger, confirmed to us that the dates don’t fit. He believes that your mother was already pregnant when Paul married her.’

  ‘I know she was already pregnant. I told you that. So they had sex before they were married. So what?’

  ‘According to Roger Saxton, the dates don’t fit at all. Your mother was already pregnant when she got together with Paul.’

  The bile rose in her throat. ‘I don’t believe you. Why would my mother tell me that a dead man was my father? Why would she make it up?’

  ‘Why do you think? You knew your mother better than anyone.’

  She looked at the floor and let the silence open out into the room. ‘Because you think that my natural father was still alive.’

  ‘It has got to be a possibility, hasn’t it? The original investigation team missed it. They took your mother’s word that she had nothing to do with Paul Saxton’s family and they were never investigated.’

  ‘And you think my natural father had something to do with our kidnapping?’ She thought about her web page and its skewed number of hits.

  ‘Look,’ she continued, ‘there’s something you need to know. Someone’s been looking at the family tree on my website. I don’t know who. I can’t tell from the stats counter that I use. But I’ve had an unusual amount of hits. About a month ago. Before all this started.’

  Sadler stood up and walked over to the front window, his hands in his pockets, and looked out. She could hear his phone buzzing but he ignored it.

  ‘Is there anything about your father on the site?’

  ‘That’s the thing. It’s my maternal line that I’ve put on my website. Nothing to do with my father at all. It starts with me, then Mary Jones, my mother. Then Nancy, my grandmother, and her mother, Mair Price. And so on.’

  ‘My colleague, Connie Childs, has a theory that there’s someone missing from this case. A nomen nescio. Sorry, that means—’

  ‘I know what it means.’ He turned his head sharply and she could see that she’d surprised him. ‘We use the term in genealogy. When we don’t know the name of someone we put in, for example, NN Jones.’

  ‘I don’t think we’re looking for an NN Jones. In the background is an NN who was your natural father.’

  ‘And you believe my mother colluded in this deceit?’ She stood up now, challenging him to speak to her directly. He turned round fully to face her.

  ‘I think she was the architect of it.’

  Chapter 35

  Connie tried Sadler’s phone but it went to voicemail and she decided against leaving a message. What was she supposed to tell him? That she’d just had an illicit meeting with a journalist from a tabloid paper and, without permission, had asked him to help with the investigation? Sadler was unpredictable at the best of times. She wondered where he was. What had that woman in the cafe said – ask Christina?

  She headed back to the station, where most of the team were beginning to drift off home. Only Palmer sat at his desk, idly flicking through Internet sites.

  ‘Anything interesting?’

  ‘What? Sorry, I’m now officially on annual leave. As of five this evening. I was just having a look at the sports pages before heading home.’

  ‘You need to get off. It’s the big day next Saturday.’

  He winced. ‘Don’t remind me.’

  She looked at him, shocked. ‘Jesus, Palmer. You’re always telling me how great Joanne is. What’s the matter?’

  He ran his hand over the top of his head. His prematurely grey hair had been clipped short, ready for the wedding. ‘I’m not sure I go can through with it.’

  ‘You’re joking. I’ve bought my dress!’

  ‘Yes, go on, laugh. I’m the one being led down the altar with my hands tied behind my back.’

  ‘You’re mixing your metaphors there, Palmer. Go and get your coat.’

  *

  They walked out of the back entrance of the police station, through the car park and stopped as a hubcap from one of the patrol cars freewheeled past them.

  ‘If it’s not the snow it’s the bloody wind,’ said Palmer. ‘Maybe we should go after it in case it causes any damage.’

  But Connie was transfixed by the movement of the police transportation carriers being buffeted by the large gusts of wind. Their high sides were rocking in a syncopated rhythm of their own.

  ‘I think we need to get out of here.’

  Hustle is an old-fashioned word but it best described the action with which Connie virtually shoved Palmer into the Bakers Arms pub at five thirty in the afternoon. He was compliant enough, far too docile in Connie’s eyes. She’d never seen him like this. She wasn’t sure she liked this new Damian Palmer as much, fearful of his coming nuptials. As a colleague, she’d come to rely on his competence and resolve in dealing with investigations. Palmer’s new uncertainty was stirring up that most unwelcome of feelings: pity. But mingled in with the pity was also a sense of protective concern. Something which, given that he was about to get married, wasn’t her place to feel. He had his fiancée for that. But now she wondered if there weren’t more ill tidings in the distant future. Joanne had him at her beck and call. Connie had seen him scurry off home on nights out after his mobile phone rang. But there was a difference between being under the thumb and sick to the pit of your stomach at the thought of getting married.

  He asked for a beer, which went to show how stupid men were. She ordered two double shots of brandy with ice and took them over to the corner table where he was sitting looking at his phone. He showed it to her.

  ‘Look. Ten missed calls, and I spoke to her at lunchtime. Does she think I have nothing better to do all day than take her phone calls?’

  ‘Maybe she’s stressed too,’ said Connie, taking a sip of her drink and allowing the warmth to trickle down her throat and settle in her stomach.

  ‘We’re both stressed, I appreciate that. But what does it say about what the rest of our marriage will be like, if she’s like this now?’

  Connie shrugged and crunched an ice cube. Palmer’s fiancée was behaving in exactly the same way she’d always done. What was different was Palmer’s response to it. It was a typical male reaction to blame the woman. He could do worse than look at his own behaviour. But Connie instinctively liked Palmer, mainly because on a professional level she enjoyed his competitive banter, and his uncertainty was revealing an unexpected side to his nature. But if he confided in
her, how would he feel about her as a colleague when it had all settled down? Perhaps he would regret his confidences to her.

  ‘It’s not too late to call it off . . .’ She left the sentence hanging between them.

  He was shaking his head. ‘You wouldn’t believe how many people we’ve got coming to the wedding. My cousin’s even come over from Australia. He’s here already. Calling it off is not an option.’

  Connie grimaced into her empty glass. ‘Then you’d better make the best of it and hope it’s just nerves.’

  *

  Sadler looked at his watch and wondered whether to go back into the office but decided against it. He was nearer his Pedlar Street house and he could work from there. The sun was attempting to break through the February day and Bampton suddenly looked cheerier than it had that morning. As he passed the Bakers Arms the swing doors closed behind someone who reminded him of Connie. He looked at his watch again. Just gone half five. It surely couldn’t have been her – hadn’t she told him she was off the booze? He considered ringing her mobile but there was something prurient about his interest in her. Even if she had decided to go to the pub after work it was hardly his business.

  He parked his car in the small parking area shared by the row of four cottages. He really should call Christina and try and make it up to her, but perhaps now was the time to make a clean break of it. Unbidden, his thoughts turned to Justine Lander and her solid beauty, so different from Christina’s glamour. And different again from Rachel Jones’s dark attractiveness.

  He opened the door and picked up the post while his neighbour’s cat made a half-hearted attempt to sneak into the house. He could hear it meowing outside the door as he shut it behind him. Rachel Jones had been genuinely shocked by the discovery of her mother’s duplicity and he believed her when she said she knew nothing about the deception. If he was right, and she had inherited her mother’s strength, she would start to do some digging herself. The key was for him to get to the solution before Rachel did. Because at the heart of the case was a murderer.