She would have to ring up everyone who had been at the trade fair, and ask them when they last saw William Danbury, Meadows thought gloomily. Then she would have to cross-reference their responses, and maybe interview several of them. And even then, she wouldn’t know when Danbury actually left the hotel – only when he’d last been seen there.
Julie returned with the list, and Meadows pocketed it.
‘Thanks for your help, Julie, I really appreciate it,’ she said, turning and heading for the door.
‘Wait a minute,’ Julie said.
‘Yes?’
‘I couldn’t help notice that you’re dressed in leathers …’
Meadows grinned. ‘Yes, I suppose they are kind of hard to miss.’
‘… so I guess you must have come here by motorbike.’
Meadows’ grin widened. ‘Very well deduced, Julie. You should have been a detective.’
‘What sort of bike is it?’
‘A Yamaha XS-1.’
A dreamy look came into the receptionist’s eyes. ‘Could you do me a favour, sergeant?’ she asked.
‘What kind of favour?’
‘I get off duty in five minutes. Could you possibly wait around and show me your bike?’
‘Of course. After you’ve been so helpful to me, I’d be more than glad to.’
Julie looked at the Yamaha with a yearning which would have been funny if it hadn’t been so earnest, and when she reached out her hand and stroked the leather seat, it was if she were caressing her lover.
‘I take it you’re a bit of a bike fanatic,’ Meadows said.
‘Oh yes, I most certainly am,’ Julie agreed enthusiastically. ‘And so is my fiancé, Charlie. But he’s a vicar, you see, and most of his parishioners are really rather conservative. They’d be shocked if he roared up on a bike.’ She grimaced. ‘They’re much happier to see him pootling round in a boring family saloon.’
‘Well, all you have to do is wait until he’s been made a bishop, and then you can both do what the hell you like.’
‘I’ll be too old to enjoy it by then,’ Julie said. She sighed. ‘Why couldn’t I have fallen in love with a lorry driver?’
Meadows risked a grin. ‘Speaking personally, I’d rather have a good man than a good bike any day of the week,’ she lied.
Julie smiled. ‘You’re right, of course,’ she said. ‘Isn’t life funny, though? You never know what’s going to happen next.’
‘No, you don’t.’
‘Take you turning up, for example. I’ve worked in the Ambassador for three years, and in all that time, I’ve never seen a woman in leathers in the place. And then, suddenly, there are two.’
‘Two?’
‘Yes, you today, and the woman – or rather the girl – yesterday.’
Meadows felt a tingle run down her spine.
‘A girl?’ she said neutrally. ‘What was she like?’
‘She was rather good-looking. She had blonde hair and she couldn’t have been older than nineteen or twenty. How she could have afforded a bike like that, at her age, is beyond me. Maybe she’d only borrowed it – but if I had one, I wouldn’t lend it to anybody.’
‘This bike,’ Meadows said tentatively, ‘you don’t happen to remember what make it was, do you?’
Julie laughed. ‘Well, of course I do. It’s burned into my soul.’ She grimaced again. ‘Oh dear, I really shouldn’t have said that – not with Charlie being a vicar and everything.’
‘What make was it?’ Meadows asked patiently.
‘It was a BMW R 75/6.’
Driven nearly all the way to Dundee! Meadows thought. What a load of bollocks! The truth was that Gretchen Müller had never got further than Newcastle upon Tyne.
As the day had progressed, Tony Hayes had grown less and less enthusiastic about the search he’d so willingly signed up for that morning, and by three o’clock in the afternoon, as he and Alfie Clayton were checking their assigned section of Lower Mill Woods, he could almost have been described as grumpy.
‘If you ask my opinion on the matter,’ he said to the man who had once been his best mate and was now – tentatively, at least – his best mate again, ‘this whole thing’s been a complete waste of time.’
It was certainly a boring job, Alfie Clayton agreed. Before the volunteers had been allowed into the woods, the police had marked out long, thin strips of it with lengths of cord, and each two-man team had been given its own strip. The first task each team had was to sift through the fallen leaves for any small object which might be hidden there. Once it was established that there was nothing, the leaves which had been sifted had to be bagged, so that the ground that they had been covering could be properly examined.
Sift, bag, examine … sift, bag, examine. Christ, it was tedious.
But then, they weren’t there for the excitement, were they? Alfie asked himself. They were there because some helpless little girl had gone missing.
‘If the lass is dead, she’s probably buried out somewhere on the moors,’ Tony said. ‘That’s where they usually end up.’
As a matter of fact, they didn’t usually end up there at all, Alfie thought. From the cases he’d read about in the newspapers, most of the poor little mites were eventually found close to home.
But he said nothing, because he was carefully rebuilding his friendship with Tony, and he didn’t want to spoil everything now, by arguing just for the sake of arguing.
Once the light began to fade – and it was certain that the search would soon be called off – Tony’s spirits began to rise again.
‘I’ve really missed the George and Dragon these last ten years, old mate,’ he said.
‘So have I,’ Alfie agreed.
‘Can you imagine the look on everybody’s face in the public bar when we walk in side by side?’ Tony chuckled.
‘They’ll not be able to believe their eyes,’ Alfie said, joining in with his old friend’s amusement. ‘They’ll think they’re dreaming.’
The sergeant in charge blew his whistle.
‘That’s it,’ Tony said happily, ‘everybody back to the bus.’
The men turned round, and, as they’d been instructed earlier, walked back towards the road, being careful to tread only on the strip of land that they personally had been assigned to search.
They’d almost reached the edge of the woods when Alfie came to a halt at the base of an oak tree and stared down at the ground.
‘What’s the matter?’ Tony asked.
‘I never noticed this before,’ Alfie said.
‘Noticed what?’
‘This,’ Alfie said, pointing down to a patch of ground just beyond the roots which looked as if it had been disturbed.
He wondered how he’d managed to miss it during the search. Possibly, it was because it was at the base of the tree. Possibly, he and Tony had been talking about old times at that moment, and got distracted. But it didn’t really matter why he had missed it, did it? The point was, he had seen it now.
‘That’s nothing,’ Tony said dismissively, looking towards the other men, who were almost clear of the woods.
‘You must admit, the soil does look as if it’s been dug up,’ Alfie said dubiously.
The sound of the minibus engine firing up bounced noisily from tree to tree.
‘It’s not been dug up at all,’ Tony argued. ‘The topsoil’s been scratched a bit – that’s all. It was probably a bloody badger or something. Look, you can see the claw marks.’
Yes, there were claw marks, Alfie agreed, but they did not seem, to him, to extend across the entire patch of disturbed earth.
‘That chief inspector feller did say that the big danger with this kind of search lay in us getting careless,’ Alfie pointed out.
Tony sighed exasperatedly. ‘Even if somebody had dug a hole there – and I’m not saying, for a minute, that anybody has – it would have been too small to put a body in.’
‘It’s a little girl that we’re looking for,’ Alfie reminded him.<
br />
‘I see you’ve not lost your stubborn streak over the years,’ Tony said – and now there was a definite edge to his voice which said that he wouldn’t be holding in his temper for much longer.
Alfie gave in. It seemed the only thing to do.
‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘it was probably a badger.’
‘It was definitely a badger,’ Tony told him. ‘And now that you’ve come to your senses, let’s get on that bus and ask them to drop us off at the George.’
He had really been looking forward to their evening in the George and Dragon, Alfie thought, but somehow it didn’t seem quite so appealing any more.
SIX
It was twenty-five past eleven in the evening, and Whitebridge – unlike New York, the city that never sleeps – was getting ready for bed.
In the pubs, the last few customers, having been reluctantly shepherded to the door, paused on the threshold to say what a pity it was about that little girl and to wish the landlords a final goodnight.
In the bus station, the conductors, having completed their last run, were bagging up the day’s takings – one bag for pennies, one for five pence pieces, one for ten pence pieces …
The larger shops still had their window displays illuminated, but at the stroke of midnight these would be extinguished, plunging into darkness travel posters for places where there appeared to be a marked absence of moorland scrub but an abundance of golden sand and palm trees, and condemning stylish overcoats draped on stylish mannequins into overnight obscurity.
The town had had enough for one day, and was looking forward to embracing that sleep which would knit up the ravelled sleeve of care.
There was no thought of sleep in DCI Paniatowski’s office, where the team had been discussing the case – first from this angle and then from that – for well over an hour.
Here, the ashtrays were overflowing, and the air was as thick with tension as it was with tobacco smoke.
Jane Danbury had been dead for less than thirty hours, yet all the team felt as though they had been working on the investigation into her murder for their entire lives.
‘So, to sum it all up, what do we know?’ Paniatowski asked.
‘We know that William Danbury beat up his wife – sometimes quite badly – and that he was so disapproving of her friendships that she ended up without any friends at all,’ Crane said.
‘That was partly her own doing,’ Colin Beresford pointed out. ‘Gillian Blake tried her very best to hold their friendship together, but Jane simply wasn’t having any of it.’
‘Her own doing, but not her fault,’ Meadows said. ‘It’s classic battered wife syndrome. In her eyes, it wasn’t her husband who was responsible for the violence – it came about because of something she was doing wrong. And given that, the worst possible thing that Gillian could have done was to criticise William.’
‘What can we say about William?’ Paniatowski asked.
‘His father’s a bloody brute, and he’s grown up to be just like him,’ Beresford said.
‘He’s having an affair with Gretchen,’ Meadows added.
‘How difficult will it be to prove that?’
‘It won’t be difficult at all. In fact, it will be a piece of cake. If I’d had a picture of Gretchen with me at the time, I could have proved it then and there. But I didn’t, so I did the next best thing, which was to talk to all the staff who might have come into contact with her.’
‘And what did they say?’ Paniatowski asked.
‘Several of them remembered the striking girl in leathers very clearly, and I’ve no doubt that when the Newcastle police show them the photograph I’ve sent up there, they’ll make positive identifications.’
‘Another thing we know about William Danbury is that, for all his swagger, he’s really nothing but a hired hand,’ Jack Crane said. ‘He may run the mill, but he doesn’t own it. Jane’s father – Joseph Bradshaw – made sure of that when he drew up his will.’
‘Go through the details of that will again,’ Paniatowski said.
‘The mill is in a trust, and Jane was the only beneficiary of that trust. She was entitled to all the profits, but under the terms of the trust, she couldn’t sell the mill – or even give it away.’
‘So how does William fit into all this?’
‘William, as the managing director, has considerable freedom of action. For instance, shortly after Joseph Bradshaw’s death, he fired over half the workforce – most of those sacked were, you’ll not be surprised to learn, women – and began importing cheap cotton from India. All the imported cotton passes through the mill, and while it’s there, they do just enough to it to get away with the claim that it’s made in England.’
‘With each new thing that I learn about him, my admiration increases,’ Meadows said, in a hiss which would have had the boldest rattlesnake slithering for cover.
‘The thing is, he can’t take any money out of the company, and all expenditure has to be scrutinised by a board of trustees that old Joseph set up,’ Crane continued. ‘My guess is Joseph Bradshaw decided, on the one hand, that William was absolutely the best person around to run the mill, and, on the other, that you couldn’t trust him as far as you can throw him.’
‘Can the board of trustees fire him, if they don’t like the way he’s running things?’ Paniatowski asked.
‘No,’ Crane said, ‘the only person who could have given him the boot was Jane.’
‘Jane had both the means and opportunity to leave William, but she didn’t,’ Dr Lucas had told Paniatowski.
And it was starting to seem as if the doctor was right, because, on paper at least, Jane held all the power.
‘I’ve got two possible scenarios in my head,’ she said. ‘I want you to listen to them, and then tear them apart. The first is that Jane learns that her husband is having an affair with Gretchen. Now she’s put up with a lot over the years, but that’s the straw that finally breaks the camel’s back. She decides to fire him, and then divorce him. If she does that, he’ll be broke and – even more significantly from his point of view – he’ll probably lose the custody of his boys.’
‘It would destroy him to lose the boys,’ Meadows said.
‘Either she tells him what she’s going to do, or he guesses that’s what she’s going to do,’ Paniatowski said. ‘And once he knows about it, he doesn’t see he has any choice but to kill her.’ She paused. ‘So what do you think?’
‘It’s plausible,’ Beresford said. ‘It’s more than plausible.’
‘Second scenario: Jane doesn’t know anything at all about the affair, but Gretchen and William decide they want to make their relationship more permanent, and if they’re to achieve that without pain – if they don’t want to lose either the lifestyle or the kids – then Jane has to go.’
‘If one of them is correct, it doesn’t really matter which one it is,’ Crane said. ‘In both scenarios, the children inherit the mill, and William, as their sole guardian, gets his hands on the money.’
‘William books his hotel room for an extra day, and goes out of his way to point out to the receptionist that he’ll be there until seven,’ Paniatowski continued. ‘But what he actually does is leave Newcastle upon Tyne at five. Now, most people planning to kill their wives would try to sneak back into their home, but he knows – given the neighbourhood – that there’s little chance of him being spotted, so he drives straight up to the front gate. And it was him driving up that Mrs Colonel heard when she was out in the garden, conducting her war on snails.’
‘If he did that, he was running a risk, even allowing for the high walls and indifference of the neighbours,’ Crane said.
‘Murder is always a risk, but in this case it wasn’t a big one,’ Paniatowski countered. ‘And anyway, he’s arrogant. He’s got away with beating his wife up for years – why shouldn’t he get away with killing her?’
‘Good point,’ Crane agreed.
‘He batters Jane to death with a statuette, which is
a nice touch, because it makes it look like whoever killed Jane wasn’t planning to, and simply grabs the most readily available blunt instrument.’
‘Yes, that was a nice touch,’ Beresford said grudgingly.
‘The next bit is rather tenuous, but given what we now know about William Danbury, I think it’s more than possible,’ Paniatowski continued. ‘He deliberately dips his hand in his wife’s blood, goes upstairs and wipes the blood off on Melanie’s pillow.’
‘And the reason he does that is because the whole purpose of the kidnapping is to distract from the murder, and the more dramatic it is, the more distracting it becomes,’ Crane said.
‘Exactly,’ Paniatowski agreed. ‘He lifts Melanie from her bed – she doesn’t make a fuss, because, after all, he is her father – and drives away with her.’
‘And half an hour later – as arranged – Gretchen Müller turns up and “discovers” Jane’s body,’ Crane added.
‘And the first thing Gretchen does after that is to rush outside and spew up,’ Meadows said.
‘Do you think that her throwing up suggests she’s innocent?’ Paniatowski asked.
Meadows shook her head. ‘Far from it! What I’m suggesting is that she and Danbury had worked out that throwing up would make her look innocent – so she took something to make bloody sure that she did.’
Alfie Clayton is in the woods. He knows they are the same woods he was in that very afternoon, yet in some ways they look quite different now. For a start, the trees don’t seem quite as substantial as they had earlier. It is almost, he thinks, as if rather than taking hundreds of years to mature, they have been hurriedly drawn by a second-rate artist.
He wonders what he is doing in the woods, and yet at the same time, there is a part of him which knows exactly why he is there.
He has come back to complete a task he didn’t finish earlier.
That much, he is sure of now.
The problem is, he has no idea what that task might be.
A figure emerges from between the badly drawn trees. It is a little blonde-haired girl. She has an angelic face, except for her eyes, which are huge and red and burning.
‘Look at your hands, Alfie,’ she says in a voice which seems to echo through the trees. ‘Look at your hands … look at your hands …’
Thicker Than Water Page 12
