The Night Stalker (Detective Jane Bennett and Mike Lockyer series Book 4)

by Clare Donoghue

  He looked up at the snow-covered trees above their heads. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘but this is just between us.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said, forgetting her cold face and freezing feet.

  ‘Roger wasn’t meant to tell me . . . though how that would’ve worked, God only knows, but anyway . . . he wasn’t meant to tell me, and I would definitely be in the shit if he knew I’d told you, so keep schtum.’ She nodded. ‘You know Atkinson called Rog asking for Met assistance.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Because Pippa Jones lived in London.’

  Lockyer tipped his head to the side. ‘That was the official line, yes, but Atkinson told Roger he wanted support for Townsend because he’d struggled with his last case.’ He looked at her, his gaze heavy with hidden meaning.

  ‘Right?’ she said, feeling none the wiser.

  ‘It was a murder case. Townsend was brought down from Bristol when the DI in charge had to go off on medical leave or something,’ he said. ‘He mentioned it in the car on the way down, and . . .’

  ‘And you think it was the Chloe Evans murder?’ she asked as the penny dropped.

  ‘I’d say it’s a fair assumption, yes,’ he said.

  She frowned. ‘So we’re here to hold Townsend’s hand.’ Her thoughts were jumping like a needle on a scratched record. ‘That still doesn’t explain why you’re so antsy.’ He grimaced. ‘Seriously, what is it?’

  ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Roger had two phone calls. One from Atkinson and one from someone else, someone . . . higher up.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘He wouldn’t tell me,’ he said.

  Jane folded her arms, shoving her hands under her armpits. If she was searching for warmth, she failed to find it. ‘Interesting.’

  He shrugged. ‘Anyway, the higher-up . . . whoever they are, told Roger that Townsend was incompetent and I was to essentially come down here and take over the case but that I couldn’t let on to Townsend or Atkinson.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘How on earth are you meant to accomplish that? And . . . since when is Townsend incompetent? Is that instead of or in addition to his issues with his last case?’ Her mind was racing. She was having a job keeping up with her own thoughts as they skittered across her mind like pebbles on a pond. ‘From what I’ve seen he seems capable, notwithstanding your obvious issues with how he’s run the Jones case to date . . .’ She was about to go on when something occurred to her. ‘But, having said that . . .’ She saw Lockyer’s mouth twitch. ‘If he was the DI on the Evans case . . .’

  ‘Exactly,’ Lockyer said. He looked relieved. ‘If the Evans case was his, then he should be cross-referencing it with the Jones case on location alone.’

  ‘Like I said, maybe he already has and he dismissed it,’ she said.

  ‘Then it would be on file. We would know about it.’ Jane couldn’t help noticing Lockyer’s conversion from ‘I’ to ‘we’. She felt a little rush of warm satisfaction. ‘Which means he hasn’t cross-referenced them – because either it hasn’t even occurred to him, or it has, but he doesn’t think two young women dying six months apart in suspicious circumstances on the same hill range merits further investigation.’

  ‘Or three, if you count Walford’s wife,’ she said, as the pieces slid into place. ‘Goes some way to explaining the incompetence accusation.’

  ‘Exactly,’ he said again, stamping his feet and puffing out a breath. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here. It’s fecking freezing.’ He turned and started walking again.

  ‘Why don’t they just get shot of Townsend, if they’re that concerned about his abilities?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ he said. ‘We have to go up and around to the right to get back to the car, I think.’ He stepped off what must have been an animal track they had been following, and headed deeper into the woods. His uncertainty didn’t fill her with confidence, but now wasn’t the time to question his map-reading skills.

  ‘Maybe it’s not Townsend that’s the issue, as such? Maybe it’s the case?’ she said, sniffing, her mind manipulating the new information like playdough, her icy toes forgotten.

  ‘I thought the same,’ he said, pausing and looking off to his left. ‘Although what’s so special about the Jones girl, I have no idea. As you said, other than proximity there’s nothing similar about the deaths.’

  ‘Could be a PR issue,’ she said, following him as he went off-piste. The snow was deeper here, the boughs above them thinner. ‘Tourism must be a massive part of the economy down this way. One murder’s bad, but two? Could be someone’s trying to avoid a media storm in their little rural teacup?’

  ‘That occurred to me as well,’ he said. ‘That’s why we need to look at the Evans file – find out what the press had to say at the time.’ They had started to climb, the incline hidden in the snow, although Jane could feel it in her ankles and thighs. ‘Townsend aside, I’m surprised it took even this long to find out about it. You’d think the gruesome murder of a heavily pregnant, single mother of two would have made a bigger splash.’

  ‘Chloe Evans was pregnant?’

  ‘Yes, seven months,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Did Barney not say?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘He didn’t.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  12th December – Saturday

  Lockyer pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. His head was thumping, his temples seeming to pulse with each heartbeat. He leaned his head back and rocked it from side to side, easing the tension in his neck. The pain had started during his and Jane’s excursion into Shervage Wood this morning. He hadn’t realized until they got back to the car just how cold it was. His extremities were yet to thaw.

  He took a slurp of his tepid coffee and looked at his watch. He was waiting to speak to John Mills, the landlord of the Farmer’s Arms and Pippa Jones’s boss. The guy had been at the door of the pub to greet him when he arrived, but then excused himself for ‘a moment’. The moment had stretched into ten minutes. Lockyer had been debating whether to go in search of the wayward publican for most of that time but had decided to stay put. He had positioned himself as close to the log burner as possible, and now that it was kicking out some real heat he was reluctant to move. Every time he took a breath his nostrils were filled with a heady smell of beer, charcoal, smoke and cooking fat. It was a proper old pub with real draft ales with great names like Will’s Neck, Hound Dog and Tangle Foot. Lockyer would have no trouble drinking his way along the pumps. It used to be a challenge to find good beers in London. Not now. Not now the trend of unusual beers and bushy beards had come into fashion. But it wasn’t the same. A place like this, a real pub, was as old as the brewers themselves and there wasn’t a copper bar or any Feng Shui-ed furniture in sight.

  He looked at his watch again, and then his phone. No new messages. No reply. Where was Townsend? He had emailed the guy before he and Jane left Shervage this morning. He opened his own message to read it again:

  Bill, on my way into office now eta 30 mins. DS Bennett is meeting with Fyne Court catering manager Derek Cooper in an hour. She’s got Abbott and Pimbley with her. Spoken to Joneses. Bennett has meeting with them at three – I’ll meet her there. Be good to catch up with you. I’ve got paint guys due in at midday. Seeing Mills, Farmer’s Arms landlord, at two thirty. Wanted to talk to you about a case. Chloe Evans. Summer of this year – body found in Shervage Wood. If you can get your hands on the file before I get in, that’d be great. I’m on my mobile, Mike

  That was almost five hours ago. He shook his head. Granted it was the weekend and Townsend had said he might not be in but Lockyer had assumed he was joking. What kind of DI stayed home when he had a five-day-old murder inquiry on his desk?

  He had spent half the drive back to Express Park devising inventive ways to take charge without making it obvious, but it was clear now he needn’t have bothered. Townsend didn’t seem to care if he was sidelined – his team, even less so. Why was anyone’s guess, on bo
th counts.

  Lockyer leaned back and looked out the pub’s old leaded windows at the snow-covered beer garden and woods beyond. The trees were close together, their branches intertwined, their trunks slim, the bark peeling and flaking off. They looked a damn sight healthier than some of their deformed and stunted cousins up on the hills. Jane had pointed out the ‘petrified forest’ that grew in line with Dead Woman’s Ditch. No wonder the locals were agitated, with places like that on their doorstep. He uncrossed and re-crossed his legs to warm the other foot. The A-frame tables had a good inch of snow on them, the table-tops resembling the marshmallow-covered biscuits he had loved as a kid – the fallen leaves sticking up through the snow like the desiccated coconut sprinkled on top. His stomach rumbled in response to the memory. He had a sudden desire for all his old favourites: Garibaldis, fig rolls and the milk biscuits with the cow and calf on them. His stomach grumbled again. No breakfast and half a sandwich at lunch hadn’t done him any favours. He had been about to bite into his second tuna and mayo when the front desk had buzzed him to say the paint specialists were waiting for him in reception. He had dumped his sandwich and headed down to meet them, his hunger a dim second to mining their expertise.

  His phone beeped, vibrating across the smooth oak table. It was a text from Jane:

  Cooper interview done. Not much to go on. Jones quiet, kept herself to herself. Somewhat agitated previous week but no indication why. No close associations. Apparently she’d pissed off some of the other staff; thought the job was beneath her – so Cooper says. I’ve been up and down the motorway to Clevedon twice so far! Another story. Don’t ask. Arrived at the Joneses’ early. I’ve managed to pick up another chuckle brother. Neither’s said much. Feel like a leper at a picnic. J.

  He smiled as he typed out a reply.

  Despite his frustration with Townsend, it felt good to have Jane ‘in the know’ when it came to his orders from above. If anyone could help him with his clandestine agenda, it was her. It had been her idea to call the Joneses and set up this afternoon’s meeting-cum-interview. Townsend had booked it in for Monday, to give the family time to grieve, he said, but as Jane had pointed out, Pippa’s parents would be keener than anyone that the investigation be dealt with in an expeditious manner. Aaron too, given he was a copper and knew how these things should run. Lockyer pushed the pad of his thumb into his right temple, his fingers tangling in the tight curls at his temple. He kept forgetting the connection with Aaron – or he suspected his subconscious was at work, compartmentalizing so he could focus on the case itself without thinking about his daughter and her connection. He had tried to get hold of her to let her know he would be seeing the Joneses today and not Monday, but so far she was as unreachable as Townsend. He pushed harder into his temple, feeling a not unpleasant crunch.

  He had let Jane speak to Pimbley, Abbott and a few others on Townsend’s team, enlisting their help before she made the call to the Joneses. Where he knew he was heavy-handed, she was subtle and diplomatic. She could get people on side and doing things her way without them even knowing they were being stage-managed. She had been doing it to him for years.

  Jane reversed into a space outside the Rose and Crown pub in Nether Stowey and turned off the engine. She twisted in her seat and looked back at the white cottage next to the pub. The front door was painted a glossy black with a rusting number 10 screwed on at a jaunty angle above a large round brass knocker.

  ‘We’re fifteen minutes early,’ she said. There was no answer. Not that she was surprised. The drive over from Express Park had been no different.

  She took out her phone and typed a message to Lockyer. He was meeting her here after he was done at the Farmer’s Arms, where Pippa had been working in the kitchen and behind the bar. Combe Florey, the village the pub was in, was on the other side of the Quantocks off the A358 out of Taunton. She was glad he had offered to interview the landlord; at least it meant Jane was spared another trip up and over the hills. Yesterday and this morning had been enough to put her off for life.

  When she had left Fyne Court after meeting Derek Cooper this morning, she had ended up coming off the hills on the opposite side to Bridgwater and heading into Taunton, a market town ten miles or so south of the Quantocks. It had been more of a mercy mission than a jolly, after her mother had called to say Peter was running a fever. Jane had wondered if he was sickening for something at breakfast, but Lockyer had dragged her out of the house before she could check. She had left DC Pimbley in her car, the engine running, as she ran down the high street and into Boots to get some Calpol. Peter loved Christmas, but the excitement made him fractious and he was often ill as a result – a physical manifestation of the stress. She had known, without needing to be told, that her mother’s call had been a cry for help. Jane had as good as tipped Pimbley out of the car at Express Park and headed back up the M5 to Clevedon.

  By the time she arrived, Peter and her mother were beside themselves. She had left her mother in the kitchen, muttering to herself about the evils of sugar, and gone to rescue her son from himself. He was bent over an Ordnance Survey map of Somerset, tears fat in his eyes. It seemed he had quizzed his grandmother on the county only to discover that Bridgwater and nearby towns, Taunton being one of them, were surrounded by four hill ranges: the Quantocks, the Mendips, the Blackdowns and the Brendons. This information, to anyone else, would have been noteworthy at best, but Peter was different. Her mother had put him in front of a film while she prepared lunch. It was the second in the Ice Age franchise. The storyline revolved around the main characters finding their way out of a valley before the ice melted, the valley was flooded and they were, in turn, drowned. Peter had somehow merged fiction with fact and decided Jane was in danger. He imagined the snow that had been falling on and off since their arrival from London would thaw and flood the bowl in which his mother was working, and she would drown.

  As bizarre and incomprehensible as this idea might be to most people, to Peter it was real, as was his distress. It had taken Jane an hour to calm him down. She had left him watching an episode of Friends and given her mother strict instructions not to be drawn into any more discussions about where Jane was working. It was ironic that something so abstract had been the cause of his upset, given that his grandmother had been filling his head with talk of dragons and blood-soaked earth since their arrival.

  She had been almost back to the station when her phone had started to ring. Her mind had been elsewhere as she pulled off the motorway, her eyes drawn to the Willow Man – Somerset’s equivalent to the Angel of the North. The huge sculpture was striding across the fields between a supermarket depot and a new housing estate. She was too busy questioning the placement of the piece of artwork and admiring the ample curve of its arse to anticipate the reason for her mother’s call. It seemed Peter had found a coffee-table book about Somerset. His grandmother had thought nothing of it, until he came to the section on the levels and how they flooded each year.

  Jane hadn’t even attempted to pacify her distraught son over the phone; she had just turned around and headed back up to Clevedon. Before she left again, Peter had extracted promises that she would take him to Alton Towers and make him up a bed on the floor in her room.

  Her phone beeped. She looked down at the screen. It was Lockyer:

  You’ve got the chuckle brothers. My guy’s MIA. Be with you as soon as. M.

  She smiled at his sign-off and then looked at her passengers. Neither of them was looking at the other. Neither was looking at her.

  DS Abbott was in the passenger seat, staring out of the window, and DC Pimbley was sitting in the back seat to Jane’s left. Pimbley was one of the Daniels, but she couldn’t remember if he was the one or the other one. She would have asked, but her attempts at conversation both this morning and during the drive had been met with monosyllabic answers. She had hoped the addition of DS Abbott to their troupe might improve the situation, but it seemed he was as taciturn as his colleague. She cleared her throat
and went back to staring out the window.

  The rain had melted the majority of the snow on the motorway and the main road into Bridgwater, but not here in Nether Stowey. The cobbled pavements that ran the length of the village were still covered in snow. She ran her hand through her hair, catching her finger on a knot she must have missed. She hadn’t slept well. She pulled the tangle loose as she rested her elbows on the steering wheel. Lewisham didn’t look like this in winter. The plethora of concrete, brick and asphalt all took on the same dull appearance whatever the weather. Somerset was like another world. Even though the trees were bare, there was a sparse beauty to the place.

  Abbott had mumbled directions out of Bridgwater, leading her onto the A39, the road she had seen the night before when she was out with Barney. It cut right through the landscape, rolling farmland to her left, the Bristol Channel – now dark blue rather than black – to her right. As she had turned off at the signpost for Nether Stowey, she had been able to see the Quantocks off to her left. From a distance, the naked woodland looked almost purple. She shivered. Even thinking about the place gave her the willies. She rubbed her hands together as the temperature dropped in the car now the engine was off. She looked again at her silent passengers. She had tried to engage them by talking about the area, asking for recommendations when it came to pubs or places to eat, but to no avail. She looked at the clock on the dashboard. It was ten minutes to three. ‘I reckon we should give it another five minutes, guys,’ she said. ‘What do you think?’

  From the back seat, Pimbley said, ‘I guess that’s up to you.’

  She decided to let the dig pass, given the utterance was at least progress in the conversational standoff. ‘Given they weren’t expecting us ’til Monday, I think arriving early is poor form,’ she said, more for her benefit than theirs. ‘Besides, it’ll give me a chance to get to know you two better.’ She hid her smile with the back of her hand.