Apart from his need for strenuous exertion after a week cooped up in the office or in various claustrophobic meetings with experts and potential witnesses, he wanted to think about the case. There was something about what they had found out so far which didn’t quite hang together, but he couldn’t put his finger on exactly what it was. He sensed that if he could only spot the anomaly in all the evidence that they had gathered, it would lead him to Kathryn Sheppard’s murderer. Of course, he did not have, and would probably never have, conclusive evidence that she had been murdered, but murder enquiries had been based on much slenderer evidence. There could have been no innocent explanation for the dumping of her body by the roadside, for a start. He was confident that he was now conducting a murder enquiry and, as he thought it probable that Kathryn had known her killer, he also knew that it was likely to have been someone whom his predecessors or he himself had already questioned. So what had they all overlooked?
He had nearly reached the Common now. He stood on the pedals to get a bit more speed up. A couple of teenage girls standing on the pavement by Townend Manor wolf-whistled. He felt a childish surge of pride in the bike and his own appearance. Cycling didn’t just help him to burn off energy: it also allowed him to indulge his taste for flamboyant clothes. He was wearing a shocking pink and green cycling shirt and skin-tight lycra shorts. His silver cycling helmet was set slightly back on his head. He grinned at the girls and pushed himself a little harder, rebuking himself inwardly for his display of juvenile exhibitionism as he did so.
Pondering the case, he felt a sudden pang of shame at his brusqueness over Juliet’s methodical attempt to marshal facts, followed by a creeping intuition that she might have been on to something after all. As well as deflating her never very robust ego by implying that she had been wasting her time, he may have missed something of importance by being too sceptical. He made a mental note to apologise to her next time he saw her and again picked over the little pile of nuggets of information that she had assembled.
Juliet had established that the fragments of dress had been composed of a denim look-alike material widely imported in the nineteen seventies by several manufacturers who supplied chain stores. The metals rings that had once held together the straps of a bra had likewise been widely used at the time, and indeed were still used by some lingerie companies. He sighed. He may have been – he certainly had been – morally culpable to have belittled Juliet’s efforts, but what of intelligence could be deduced from any of this, particularly when the DNA testing had proved without a shadow of a doubt that the remains were those of Kathryn Sheppard?
A rough idea of the date of her death would have been useful, of course: from the information that Mrs. Sheppard had given Juliet, and from the police reports that were filed at the time, he knew that she had disappeared in the late autumn of 1975, though it was possible – if unlikely – that she had not died until some time later. But knowing that at the time of her death she had been wearing a dress and a bra that could have been manufactured at any point between 1970 and 1980 was not going to yield a useful date; nor was the identification of a plastic Red Indian as having belonged to one of several batches supplied from a company operating from Hong Kong to a breakfast cereals manufacturer; nor that the friendship ring had been distributed by an East-End wholesaler to boutiques and ethnic shops just about everywhere in the country.
And then there was the whole Dorothy Atkins business. Aside from Juliet, who seemed to have no view, the other members of his team seemed to be convinced that Kathryn Sheppard had been murdered by Dorothy. But though this hypothesis, if proved correct, would offer a neat solution, and was obviously one that had occurred to him as well, was there any evidence to support it save that otherwise they would have been presented with the unlikely coincidence of two murderers operating in the same small town and moving in the same circles at roughly the same time? And would Dorothy even have had the opportunity to kill Kathryn? He knew by now that he would almost certainly have to obtain permission to question Dorothy Atkins in her nursing-home, and that this would need to be sooner rather than later; indeed he relished the prospect of such a meeting after all that he had read or been told about her. But he suspected that the whole Dorothy Atkins thing would prove to be a red herring as far as Kathryn Sheppard was concerned; and in any case, he needed more evidence before he could hope to extract anything of value from her.
What could help him to make some kind of progress? He was finding it unusually difficult to think outside the box in this case. He tried a different tack. If he had been writing a case study and presented these findings to junior colleagues as a textbook crime to solve, what else might he have added that would enable them to identify the culprit?
Timing. It all hung on timing. He did not realise this in a sudden burst of inspiration; rather it dawned on him slowly that it was the key factor, and that he should have thought of this earlier. The more he considered it, the more obvious it became: it caused him to switch from scepticism to a fervent hope that more evidence could be teased out of those modest scraps of artefact that had been dumped with Kathryn’s corpse.
He had examined the plastic Red Indian carefully when it had first been found. Viewed objectively, it was a crude and simple toy, moulded in one piece from terra-cotta coloured plastic. It was a model of a Red Indian chief who had a feathered head-dress that stood out from his head. He was in the act of drawing his bow. Each individual feather had been scored into the plastic, as were his features and the folds of his loin-cloth. His feet, caught in mid-stride, were anchored to a small plastic rectangle which made it possible to stand him up on a flat surface. The words ‘Hong Kong’ and two or three Chinese characters appeared in tiny script on the underside of the rectangle. From the moment that it had been found Tim had been intrigued by it, though he knew that this was not because it had been found with Kathryn Sheppard’s remains. There could be no proof that it had any connection with her, either in life or after death, unless some subsequent clue were to link the dead woman and the toy. It was because, as a boy, he had always loved promotional free gifts. There was something magical, almost talismanic, about them: the not knowing which particular model it would be, what colour, or when it would drop out of the packet. He remembered treasuring such toys, carrying them around in his pocket and scrutinising every detail of their features. That they were ‘free’ made them more special. Was it conceivable that the murderer had felt the same way? That the toy had been used as a kind of trophy in reverse? A gift to the dead of a treasured possession?
He remembered that Juliet had said that Nubisk, the cereals manufacturer that had imported the toys, had been quite helpful when she had contacted them. He hadn’t listened properly to the details, but he did recollect that – somewhat amazingly – they seemed to have records of all their promotional initiatives, and had given Juliet the range of dates during which the Red Indians had been distributed, and with which products.
Dates! Could the discrepancy in this case that he couldn’t quite fathom, the problem at the back of his mind which could not quite formulate itself into words, be associated in some way with dates and more particularly with the sequence of events leading up to and following the deaths of both Doris Atkins and Kathryn Sheppard? They – he – had certainly made some assumptions about both of these deaths. It was the lynchpin of the case that he and his team were constructing that both women had been murdered and that it was likely that they had been murdered by the same person; and therefore that Dorothy Atkins was the murderer. But did these hypotheses bear scrutiny?
That Doris Atkins had been murdered was certain. That Kathryn Sheppard had also been murdered was likely, even though no cause of death could be discovered because of the subsequent deterioration of the remains. If her death had been accidental, there would have been no reason for someone to have gone to such lengths to conceal her body, or indeed to have hidden the fact that she had died – unless they had a guilty se
cret which making it public would have exposed. Let us therefore assume, thought Tim, that Kathryn was indeed murdered. What leap of logic was required to suspect ‘Tirzah’ of the murder? None, if you were Claudia Hemingway, the prison psychiatrist, who was convinced that ‘Tirzah’ was capable of multiple killings and probably a psychopath; but Dr. Bertolasso would certainly have doubted her capacity to commit the second crime. If he was telling the truth and not just trying to bolster his reputation, he did not even believe that she had killed Doris.
As a policeman, Tim did not feel disposed to question that she had been guilty of the crime of which she had been convicted. He had read the many reports relating to the case, and he believed that she had been given a fair trial. The weight of evidence against her, although it was indeed circumstantial, had been overwhelming; and although it was not unheard of for innocent people to stay silent when charged with a serious crime, this was an expedient much more commonly used by the guilty.
That did not make her guilty of Kathryn Sheppard’s murder, though. Her links to Kathryn were slender – the main one being that Kathryn was the former girlfriend of Dorothy’s son Hedley – and if no-one had ever come up with a motive to inspire Dorothy to kill Doris, there could be even less reason for her to have killed Kathryn. Psychopaths did not need reasons, of course.
It was unlikely that he would be able to understand the workings of Dorothy’s brain, either as it had functioned thirty years ago or as it was performing now. What he could try to do was to piece together accurately the timing of Kathryn’s death.
He noticed that he had slowed his pace on the bike so much that it was wobbling into the centre of the road. He pulled it back towards the verge, and realised in the act of doing so that he had already reached the Common. He dismounted and took a swig of water from his CamelBack, feeling comforted by the familiar and not unpleasant, slightly astringent plastic aftertaste left by its nozzle.
He hesitated briefly and then drew his cellphone from the CamelBack’s mesh pocket and pressed Juliet’s number on the speed dial. She responded with disconcerting speed.
“Good morning, sir,” she trilled, as if she had been waiting for his call for hours.
“Juliet? I’m sorry to bother you on a Saturday, but this shouldn’t take long.”
“It’s OK, sir. I’m working this morning. Officially, I mean.”
“What? Oh, good. I’ve been thinking about the Kathryn Sheppard case. You know all that information that you collected about the stuff that was found with the bones?”
“I understand why you were annoyed with me for spending so much time on it. I did get rather carried away . . .”
“No, no – on the contrary, I shouldn’t have criticised you. It was obtuse of me not to see at the time how useful your work might prove to be – will prove to be, I am sure. It’s the plastic Indian that I’m interested in at the moment. Can you cast your mind back to what Nubisk said about it? If I remember correctly, you said that they were very helpful.”
“Yes – they were.” She sounded surprised and almost elated.
“Can you remember what they told you about the consignment of the Red Indian toys? It’s the date that I’m interested in. Not the date that they started putting them into cereals packets, but the date on which they actually received the shipment?”
“I’m not sure offhand whether they did tell me that, but I can look in the file. It won’t take me more than a few minutes. I’ll call you back.”
He had propped his bike against a five-barred gate while he was talking. He decided that it would be best to wait there for Juliet’s call, because the mobile signal had been a good one. He hoped she wouldn’t be too long about it: he had worked up a sweat while he was pedalling and now he felt shivery as it cooled on his skin. It was a mild day for February, but still too raw to stand around for too long dressed in lycra cycling clothes. He took another swig from the CamelBack and contemplated the view. The sweeping flatness of the Fens held a certain beauty in the early spring, even if, as a cyclist, he found them less than challenging. They had challenged men in other ways in the past. He thought of Hereward the Wake, creeping through the treacherous marshland, in danger of being ambushed at any moment. It must have concentrated the mind, knowing that a wrong move could cost you your life.
His cellphone rang.
“Hello, Juliet.”
“Hi.” She sounded confident, even excited. “I’ve found the schedule that Nubisk sent me. The plastic Indians were imported towards the end of September 1975. Although as a foodstuffs manufacturer Nubisk did not specifically target the Christmas market, the models were intended as a kind of Christmas gift – a loyalty reward, you might say – for kids.”
“Great – thanks. I don’t suppose the schedule also gives the date at which they were first put into the cereal packets, does it?”
There was a brief pause. He envisaged Juliet earnestly working her way through the schedule as rapidly as she could, as always anxious to please.
“Yes and no,” she said eventually.
“What does that mean?”
“They weren’t actually put into the cereal packets. That had been the original intention, but there was a court case involving another food manufacturer earlier that year. Apparently a company that made powdered milk drinks had put toy plastic battleships directly into the product, and a child had almost choked when one stuck in its throat – or so the mother claimed. She also claimed not to have known that the packet contained the toy, and not to have noticed it floating in the glass.”
“My God,” Tim marvelled at her mastery of such detail. “How do you know all of this?”
Juliet laughed. “I didn’t need to dig very deep. There’s a whole sheet of information and instructions attached to the schedule; presumably it’s a document that was circulated at the time.”
“What did they do with the plastic Indians, then? I assume that since we’ve found one, they weren’t just disposed of.”
“You’re right: they didn’t waste them. The Indians were packed in individual cellophane wrappers and supplied to retailers by the bagful, instead of being put directly into the cartons.”
“And this process didn’t hold them up too much? The retailers still had them to give away with packets of cereal before Christmas 1975?”
“Yes, according to the schedule. There are some more notes to retailers about only giving away the Indians with packets marked ‘free gift inside’, dated the 6th of November. I suppose that this was to stop them using up old stock for the promotion. But what I don’t understand is . . .”
“Go on,” said Tim impatiently. His mind was already leaping ahead to other dates.
“But all this information about the plastic toy actually makes it a red herring, doesn’t it, sir? We know that Dorothy Atkins was being held in custody by the middle of September 1975, and that the plastic Indians did not arrive in the UK until at least two weeks later. What we’ve just proved, therefore, is that the plastic Indian has no connection with Kathryn Sheppard’s death – or with her killer.”
“Maybe,” said Tim. “But only if Dorothy Atkins was indeed Kathryn Sheppard’s killer. If, on the other hand, the plastic Indian was dumped with Kathryn’s body – which I admit we still can’t prove – then we know that the killer couldn’t have been Dorothy Atkins – unless she found time to dump Kathryn’s body on one of the occasions when she had temporary bail. Unlikely, since she couldn’t drive. Unfortunately, all the work that you have done doesn’t lead to a clear-cut conclusion; but it casts a considerable amount of doubt on the notion that Dorothy was the killer. Which is why I’m grateful to you for doing such a meticulous job, and somewhat ashamed of myself for not having seen the value of it before.”
There was a long silence. He imagined that Juliet was deeply embarrassed by this apology. After he felt that the pause had gone on for long enough, he said:
“Was there anything else you found when you were making these enquiries? I seem to remember that the scraps of garment failed to yield anything specific?”
In the Family Page 13
