by Iain Cameron
Making her way to the scene, she made three calls. The first to the DVLA, confirming the car did indeed belong to Mrs Langton, as she couldn’t trust the plods around here to do it. Next, she called Brian Langton who was now on his way to meet her with the spare keys. Her third call was to DC Khalid Agha, the young detective she was supposed to be mentoring, who wasn’t best pleased to be called out after loading the car with all his kids’ things, all set for a day out in Watford to visit his brother.
She tried to see inside Kelly Langton’s car but with tinted windows, dull and dirty with road muck, a couple of dead bodies might have been in there for all she could see. Due to the high profile nature of the case, she was in two minds what to do with it, either to send it off for forensic testing or let Mr Langton drive it away.
She pulled out her phone. With her memory of last night a tad hazy, she was convinced someone had been making calls on it while she was in the loo or playing some games when she wasn’t looking, as there wasn’t much oomph left in the battery. She called Henderson.
‘Hello sir, how are you this cold morning? I hope I didn’t disturb your beauty sleep.’
‘Sleep? I should be so lucky. When I finish work, I spend the next hour fielding phone calls and questions from journalists. The only place they haven’t tracked me to is here at the Marina.’
A vision came into her mind of him cowering deep in the bowels of his little boat, waiting until it got dark before he emerged, but no, that wasn’t his style.
‘We’ve found Kelly Langton’s car.’
‘She’s not in it?’
‘Not as far as I can see.’
‘That would make it too easy, wouldn’t it? Where is it?’
‘Pound Hill shopping parade in Crawley.’
‘Pound Hill?’ Henderson went quiet for a moment. ‘Yeah, I know where it is, up the road from Three Bridges Station, a place with good connections to the south coast and London.’
‘Right first time.’
‘The hallmark of a fleeing woman, perhaps?’
‘Could be, or to throw us off the scent.’
‘Maybe. Did you find anything of interest when you looked inside?’
‘I haven’t done it yet. I’m waiting for Brian Langton to turn up with the keys. What should I do with it?’
‘What, after you’ve searched it?’
‘Yes.’
He paused. ‘Nothing. Let him take it away.’
‘Don’t you think–’
‘We should send it for forensic analysis?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What for? She’s been missing less than a week and what will we find? The dabs of two dozen kids, mums she ferried to coffee mornings, some of her business associates? It’ll take two officers a fortnight to eliminate them all. No, give it back to Mr Langton.’
She wandered over to the pool car, refusing Agha’s offer of a cigarette as she stopped six months ago and only succumbed to temptation when drunk. Her face reddened when she remembered last night. Wasn’t it Oscar Wilde who said giving up was easy, he’d done it hundreds of times? Join the club.
‘So what do you think, Sherlock?’
‘I’m thinking about what a nice afternoon I’m missing with my brother and here I am freezing my bollocks off in a dump like this.’
Four years on the beat in South Wales and another three as a trainee detective in Portsmouth before becoming a sergeant at Sussex, her colleagues would say she ‘had served her time.’ This know-nothing rookie, fast-tracked on the promotion ladder to the top, spent no time buckling down and learning his trade and wasted more time and energy acting the belligerent and moody bastard with a permanent chip on his shoulder. If the chip was about his colour as his family came from Pakistan, or because he used to live in a scruffy part of South London, she could understand and deal with it, but it seemed to be about anything and everything and his constant whinging was starting to piss many people off.
‘Listen mate,’ she said, turning to face him. ‘If you want to make it as a detective, and speaking from my own experience it’s a good place to be, but you’ve got to accept that shitty things happen and when they do, they have a nasty habit of buggering up what you’re doing. It doesn’t matter if you’re at work, sleeping or heading off to Watford to see your brother as murders, suicides and burglaries don’t magically occur between the hours of nine and five to suit Mr Khalid Agha.’
‘Yeah, but–’
‘Yeah but nothing, mate. If you shut the hell up, pack in your whinging and knuckle down, you’ll get along fine but if you don’t, I guarantee you won’t last six months, fast-track or not.’
He thought about it for a moment or two before shrugging. ‘I suppose so,’ he said.
She was about to head into one of the nearby shops for some heat when she spotted Brian Langton, waiting to turn into the car park. At least she thought it was him, it was a big bloke driving a look-at-me light-blue Mercedes CLS, equipped with low-profile boots, Xeon LED headlights, and a booming sound system playing Sheryl Crow and ‘All I Wanna Do’.
When the car stopped, she waited until the engine was turned off and walked over, rubbing her hands together to keep warm.
‘Good morning, Mr Langton,’ she said, when he opened the car door. ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Carol Walters from Sussex CID.’
‘What’s good about it?’
‘I called you earlier. I’ve checked the car with the DVLA, it’s definitely Mrs Langton’s.’
‘Good, I wouldn’t thank you to be dragged over here on a false alarm.’
They shook hands and her dainty digits were enveloped in giant shovels, reminding her of school bully Alice Rounds who liked to stick the hands of fellow pupils in a vice during woodwork.
‘You were lucky to catch me. I was about to take the boys to football. Who spotted it?’
‘A woman in one of the houses nearby,’ she said, jerking a thumb behind her. ‘She read about Kelly’s disappearance and the missing car in the paper and when this one didn’t move for a while, she called us.’
‘Good job she did. What the hell is it doing here?’
‘How do you mean, sir?’
‘Why would she leave the car here, in Crawley? Kelly never comes here.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I mean there’s nothing in Crawley she couldn’t get in Brighton and we live a lot closer to Brighton than here.’
‘Maybe she came here to meet someone.’
‘I doubt it. Where is it?’
‘Over there,’ she said, pointing towards Mr Acne Fizzer who was picking his face. Every mother knew that touching an acned face was the worst thing to do, as it only caused the infection to spread, but one piece of lifestyle advice was enough for one day.
Without so much as a ‘thank you officer, you’ve been so helpful and I’ll mention this good work to your superior officer,’ he brushed past and strode off towards his wife’s car. When he got closer, he stopped and examined the rear before walking around it slowly, like a prospective purchaser looking for scratches.
He fished the keys out and pressed a button, making the doors unlock and the lights flash. He opened the driver’s door and climbed in and sat motionless for several seconds, an impassive expression on his big, rough face. It was either a good act or he was trying hard to maintain control of his emotions, but from where she stood, it seemed genuine enough.
The outside of the car looked grubby but the inside was clean and inviting with sumptuous leather seats, a complicated dashboard and elaborate steering wheel full of buttons, requiring the driver to digest the handbook before it could be operated.
‘Mind if I take a look in the boot?’ she asked.
‘Be my guest.’
The boot unlocked with a click and she stood there for a moment and took a deep breath. A woman went missing in Portsmouth, the place where she started her ill-fated married life, and she was discovered dead two weeks later in the boot of her car. She didn’t work on the case as s
he had moved to Sussex by this point but knew the officers involved and could imagine the look on their faces when they opened the boot and found her, as they were probably expecting to see no more than a toolkit and an old can of de-icer.
Up went the tailgate on a pair of sturdy hydraulic arms to the accompaniment of a deep swishing noise, and to her relief it lay empty, save for a window scraper and a litre bottle of oil, tucked away in a handy little side pocket.
‘How does it look to you, sir?’ she said, as she closed the tailgate. ‘There’s nothing here.’
He didn’t say anything and so she walked around to the driver’s door and tried again.
‘Do you notice if anything’s missing? I didn’t spot anything unusual when I looked in through the windows.’ In fact, she couldn’t see anything much at all through the windows but it sounded a reassuring thing to say.
He shook his head. ‘No, nothing yet.’
She turned and scanned the neighbouring shops: an ironmonger, Co-Op mini-supermarket and hairdresser; and the houses close by, but didn’t see any CCTV cameras. There were also no sanctimonious signs proclaiming, ‘Residents Only,’ ‘Stay Restricted to One Hour,’ or her pet hate, ‘Clampers Operate Here,’ as appeared all over her adopted home town of Brighton and Hove and spreading to outlying areas faster than the Ebola virus.
He opened the glove compartment and dipped hands into door pockets before checking behind the sun blinds. He sat there, no doubt wondering where else to look but his bulky frame sagged and his face seemed deflated somehow. If he or one of his mates drove the car there, he did well to hide it, as he seemed disappointed not to find anything. Or perhaps he was annoyed because Old Mother Hubbard in a house nearby spotted it so soon.
‘Did you find anything, sir?’
‘No, there’s nothing here.’
‘No sign of her handbag, credit cards or something else of a personal nature?’
‘No, nothing much at all, a couple of CDs, AA book, sunglasses and de-icer. No more. Nothing added and nothing taken away.’
‘Do you mind if I take a look?’
‘Carry on,’ he said. A moment or two later, he climbed out and she got in.
There was little point in doing another search but she did so as he watched her. Her interest was in the condition of the interior and whether any scratches were visible on the leather seats to indicate a struggle, or clumps of hair or blood spots on the seats, doors, or carpets, the presence of which would give reason to go back to Henderson and force him to put it through forensics.
She bent down and peered under the driver’s seat, feeling for anything that someone might have dropped, an earring or a ring, maybe, before shifting seats and doing the same on the other side. The carpets were clean and free from hairs and dust, with no obvious finger marks on the facia or dashboard, suggesting the car had recently been cleaned and wiped of fingerprints or Mrs Langton was a fastidious person, as this car often carried the two main culprits of a messy interior, dogs and children.
‘Do you have your cars washed regularly, Mr Langton?’
‘A mobile service comes to our house every couple of weeks.’
She stepped down from the car and turned to face him.
‘Everything’s fine sir, you can take it away.’
‘What the hell d’ya mean?’ he said, his face changing from pale and cold to red, hot and bloody indignant. ‘Aren’t you going to comb it for fingerprints and DNA and all that stuff? What if she’s been abducted by some psycho or something?’
‘No. Until we find evidence to make us think different, this is still a missing person enquiry and to undertake a forensic examination of the car at this stage would be pointless and a complete waste of public resources.’
FIVE
Ed Hardacre lived in Plumpton Green, a village a few miles southeast of Burgess Hill. It was a small place with a shop, pub, garage, railway station and little else. With so few amenities to choose from, it amused Henderson to find Hardacre’s house directly opposite the only shop.
His was a red, sandstone terraced house set back from the road and shielded in part from a range of garish signs declaring ‘Open ‘Til Late,’ and ‘National Lottery Sold Here,’ by a tall Leylandi hedge. The garden was small and tidy and even Henderson could stretch to mowing a tiny patch of lawn and weeding a narrow flower bed, but ‘tidy’ was not a word he could use to describe the house, as a rancid smell greeted him and DC Sally Graham on opening the door, and magazines, cups, glasses, and empty plates were strewn around the lounge.
‘You wanna cup of coffee or tea?’
Henderson hesitated but being early, the lack of a caffeine kick in his veins overrode any queasy feeling he had about kitchen cleanliness.
‘Coffee for me, sir.’
‘Nothing for me,’ Graham said.
When Hardacre disappeared, she leaned closer.
‘A couple of friends of mine are students and live in this big, old place off the Lewes Road with five others. I used to think their place wasn’t fit for human habitation and threatened to report it to Environmental Services, but this place takes it to a whole new level. Pest Control should be involved.’
Henderson laughed. ‘I know what you mean but I’ve seen way worse than this and I’m not referring to my own place.’
A few minutes later Hardacre returned bearing two mugs, which appeared to be clean but if they weren’t, he was sure the piping hot liquid would do a job on any harmful bacteria.
‘What do you wanna see me about?’ Hardacre said as he cleared some rubbish from a chair and dumped it on the floor before sitting down.
‘Do you live alone?’ Henderson asked.
‘Yeah. My missus left about six months ago and as you can see, I’m finding it easy to live on my tod.’
The personnel file at Kelly Kreations gave his age as forty-two, but the careworn corduroy trousers, wrinkled denim shirt, unshaven face and untidy hair put ten years on the poor sod.
‘Was it a mutual separation?’ Graham asked.
He lifted his chin and scratched his beard. ‘I suppose so, she wanted to go and I didn’t do anything to stop her.’
‘We’re here in connection with the disappearance of Kelly Langton,’ Henderson said, ‘and interviewing everyone in her social and business circle, trying to build up a picture of what she is like.’
‘Well, I can tell ya she was a fucking bitch to me. Had it in for me right from day one. Couldn’t hack it in business, could she? But what d’ya expect from a fucking model, they’re all a bunch of air-heads.’
Henderson noted down ‘air-head’ in his notebook. It was stereotypical bullshit from an aggrieved and wounded ex-employee but it would lighten the mood of the next team meeting.
‘Why were you dismissed from your job?’ he asked.
‘How the fuck do I know? She said something about some dodgy invoices but they were nothing to do with me.’
‘C’mon sir, it must have been a bit more than you’re making out.’
‘She said I was nicking from the company, aw right, but did she bother to check who else might be responsible? Nah, she blamed it all on me.’
‘From what I understand from Mr Fournier, a number of invoices were paid to a business owned by you.’
‘Do I look rich? Eh? I’m down to my last.’
‘We’re not here to discuss the rights and wrongs of a fraud, although we will investigate further if Mr Fournier decides to press charges, but I would like to talk about the threats you made to Mrs Langton.’
‘Yeah, well I’m not proud of what I said but how the fuck would you feel to be chucked out of a job a couple of months after your missus upped sticks and fucked off? Eh?’
‘You’re telling me what, you made the threats in the heat of the moment?’
‘Yeah. I went out to the pub at lunchtime for one or two beers and lost a few hundred at the bookies so I didn’t feel best pleased when she called me into her office.’
Henderson shifted in the lumpy
seat as a spring or something else seemed to be sticking into his bottom. ‘Have you been back to Kelly Kreations or been in contact with anyone from there?’
‘Nope and I don’t intend to, but her disappearing is the best news I’ve had all week.’
‘How so?’
‘Well, I always wanted her out of my face so whether some bloke’s run away with her or her husband’s done her in, either way, it gets her out of my hair and I didn’t need to lift a finger.’
They left the Hardacre pigsty a few minutes later, and with Sally Graham bending his ear, insisting she needed to go home and take a shower and wash her hair, they got into the car and he pointed it in the direction of Brighton.
‘What did you think of him, Sally?’
‘Not a lot. Scruffy, rude, more bad habits than a wake of buzzards.’
‘However, while he doesn’t have the property or much intelligence to kidnap and incarcerate our missing woman, he does posses a volatile temper and who knows, maybe he confronted her on the day she disappeared and lost the rag.’
‘Could be, but I think he’s all talk and no trousers.’
‘You could be right.’
‘Where are we going now?’
‘Back to Brighton, to see Jack Monaghan.’
‘He’s the guy who didn’t tell us much when we interviewed him the first time but Ricky Wood’s girlfriend, Celia told us Ricky saw him kissing Kelly.’
‘Yes, but it’s not the sort of thing I think many men would blurt out in a police interview, so I might let him off.’
DC Sally Graham was twenty-three, a natural blonde with a pretty face and shapely figure, but ditzy blonde she wasn’t, despite having every Essex blonde joke thrown at her in the two years she worked in CID. She didn’t join the police straight from school but started off in a bank and brought some of that experience with her, as she dealt with witnesses, suspects and victims calmly and impartially and with a good eye for small details.
JM Data, a systems development business owned by Jack Monaghan, was housed on the third floor of a modern, brick-built office block in Trafalgar Place, Brighton, an area adjacent to the main railway station ‘regenerated’ a few years before Henderson came to Brighton.
