She held up her hand in apology, dropped her bag on the floor next to her desk and pulled up a chair.
‘As I was saying before DS Hunter decided to grace us with her presence, if anyone hears from Gavin this morning let me know immediately. Right, today’s focus will be following up on the information we’ve received from Peter Bailey in relation to the cause of Alison Campbell’s death. We also need to speak to her fiancé as soon as possible, so keep trying his phone. I want to gauge his reaction to the outcome of the coroner’s inquest. Carys, work with Dave Walker and Robert Moss from BTP to obtain copies of their reports following Alison’s death. Cross check the witness statements against Peter Bailey’s statement yesterday. Make a list of anyone else from those reports you think we need to speak to.’
‘The inquest was held six months ago,’ said Barnes. ‘Alison died six months before that. I’m wondering why our killer only began after the inquest. If he felt that Alison’s colleagues should have done something to prevent her death, why wait?’
‘Maybe he was expecting justice for Alison from the outcome of the inquest,’ said Kay. ‘Perhaps the outcome was a shock to him – after all, everyone involved was exonerated. No one was held accountable, whereas he thinks they should be.’
Sharp tapped the photograph of Kevin McIntyre that had been pinned to the whiteboard. ‘At the present time, until we speak to Kevin McIntyre and he provides us with some answers, he remains our main suspect. In the meantime, Kay – you and Barnes go and speak to the parents. It’ll be interesting to see what they have to say about McIntyre. We’ll reconvene at four o’clock as usual.’
Kay’s desk phone began to ring as she wheeled her chair back into place.
‘Hello?’
‘Kay, it’s Teresa in admin. About your swipe card?’
‘Hi – thanks for calling me so quickly. I couldn’t get into the car park this morning, and Hughes said something about the electromagnetic strip being damaged.’
‘Yes, I don’t know what happened there. We’ve checked it again, and it’s not showing up in the system. It’s like you don’t exist.’
Goose bumps broke out on Kay’s arms. ‘Isn’t that a bit unusual?’
‘Absolutely. Normally that would only happen if we manually deactivated the card, for instance if someone leaves. I’ve spoken to my manager down here, and we’ve got no idea why this happened. I can only apologise for the inconvenience.’
Her mouth dry, Kay’s thoughts turned to the previous evening. Had she somehow set off an alert while using Gavin’s computer?
How else could she explain why her security card no longer worked? Was somebody trying to send her a message?
‘Hughes said he’s giving you a temporary card,’ said Teresa. ‘I’ll sort out a permanent replacement one for you within the hour. If you want to pop up to collect it and I’m not here, I’ll leave it with someone for you.’
‘That’s great, Teresa. Thanks.’
Kay ended the call and dropped the receiver into its cradle.
‘What’s the story with Gavin, Ian?’
‘Didn’t show up this morning,’ said Barnes, glancing up from his computer. ‘Sharp was pretty pissed off, I can tell you – especially when you were a no-show for the briefing as well.’
‘Has anyone tried to phone him?’
‘Yes. It goes straight to voicemail. I think all of us have left a message at some point for him this morning. Funny, I always thought he was a bit more responsible than this.’
Kay murmured a response and wiggled her mouse to wake up her computer. She entered her password, and tried to concentrate on the emails that had accumulated.
She tried to convince herself that Gavin was okay, that he was simply being an idiot and had ended up having a late night with the friends he said he was catching up with after work.
Except it was totally out of character for him.
A sickness began to churn her stomach and all sorts of scenarios began to go through her head.
She tried to push her thoughts to the back of her mind, but as she stared at the computer screen and the words began to blur, she realised she’d soon have to stop thinking about her own investigation or else she’d be in danger of missing something. She had to prove to Sharp that she was capable of leading this enquiry. The incident of her swipe card had shaken her. Evidently, someone was trying to make her look bad. She couldn’t let that happen. She glanced up, suddenly aware that someone was standing over her.
‘Hey.’ Barnes stood next to her chair and jangled the car keys in his hand. ‘I said, come on, let’s go.’
‘Sure.’ Kay locked her computer screen, picked up her bag before grabbing her jacket from the back of her chair, and began to follow Barnes towards the door.
‘Hunter, a word please,’ said Sharp. He waved Barnes on, and turned to Kay.
‘Guv?’
‘What happened this morning? You’re not usually the last one through the door.’
‘Sorry. My swipe card wouldn’t work. I couldn’t get into the car park, or the building. I had to wait until someone could let me in. I’ve asked admin to look into it, and they’ve given me a temporary one.’ She held up the white piece of plastic.
‘All right. I’ll see you at this afternoon’s briefing. Don’t be late again.’
Thirty-Seven
Kay changed gear, indicated right and swung the car into a rabbit warren of a housing estate, and tried to keep track of the different cul-de-sacs disappearing off to her left and right.
‘It’s the second one on the right down here,’ said Barnes, and pointed through the windscreen.
After concluding their interview with Peter Bailey the previous day, Kay had decided that she wasn’t prepared to wait for Kevin McIntyre, Alison’s fiancé, to return her calls.
Now, she pulled up outside McIntyre’s house, and took a moment to take in the manicured front garden and tidy paintwork. A low privet hedge marked the boundary between the property and the pavement.
‘What’s the story with this guy?’
‘Thirty-two. Currently unemployed,’ said Kay. ‘Hasn’t returned to work since Alison died. Bailey said he didn’t have to – both of them had life insurance, and so Kevin paid off the mortgage.’
‘Nice one.’
‘Except for the circumstances.’ She unclipped her seatbelt and removed the keys from the ignition. ‘Okay, let’s go.’
She cast her eyes over the houses opposite as she locked the car, but it didn’t appear that anyone was in. She checked her watch. It would be another hour before the schools emptied and the cul-de-sac turned into an unofficial playground within moments of the kids returning home.
She followed Barnes up the garden path, and waited while he rang the front doorbell.
‘I don’t think he’s in.’
She spun around at the voice to her left, and saw a woman in her late sixties peering over the fence at her.
‘Do you know when he might be back?’
The woman shook her head. ‘Sorry, no. He doesn’t go out that much; I only know that he’s out at the moment because I saw his car leave.’
Kay beckoned to Barnes, and led the way over to the neighbour’s house.
The woman stabbed a garden fork into the flower border as they approached. ‘Is this about the deaths on the railway I heard about?’ She didn’t wait for a response. ‘Did you know his girlfriend was killed on the same stretch of track a while ago?’
‘I did,’ said Kay. ‘It’s what we wanted to talk to him about.’
‘It was awful. They were such a lovely couple. Alison always used to wave to me on her way to work, like she didn’t have a care in the world. And they were due to get married in September. She had showed me photographs of the wedding dress she had chosen. They were going to go to the Dominican Republic for their honeymoon.’
Kay looked across the fence to McIntyre’s garden. ‘The house is looking tidy. How is he coping?’
The woman shrugged. ‘He keeps to himself mo
re these days,’ she said. ‘We don’t see him as much as we used to. When Alison was alive we used to maybe go around there every couple of months for dinner, or they would come to ours. We used to have a cat, and Kevin would feed it if we went away. I think the last time I had a proper conversation with him was about three months ago, when he came around to help my husband cut some branches off a large tree we have in the back garden. It was terrible. He completely went to pieces after Alison died. We could hear him crying at night – the walls here are quite thin. We didn’t know what to do. We offered to help him in the house and garden where we could, so that he had some contact with someone at least, but he simply wanted to be left alone to grieve. He really struggled after the accident, and then had to relive it all for the inquest. The investigation took ages. It seemed to drag out, when all he wanted was some answers. It was a terrible time for him. We were really worried about him for a while.’
Kay fished out one of her business cards from her bag and handed it to the woman. ‘We’d best be going. Thanks for your time. Perhaps you could pass that on to Kevin for me, and ask him to give me a call?’
‘Of course,’ said the woman.
‘What next?’ said Barnes as they drove away.
Kay tilted her wrist and checked her watch. ‘We’ve still got a bit of time before we’re due at Alison’s parents. The stretch of track where Lawrence was killed isn’t too far from here – I want to go and take another look.’
It took her twenty minutes to navigate the car around the outskirts of the town centre and out towards the suburb where Elsa Flanagan lived. She drove past their eyewitness’s house, and braked when she saw the gap in the fence and the start of the footpath Elsa said she had used to reach the field.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s go for a walk.’
They made their way along the footpath, watching where they stepped amongst the muddy furrows in the long grass. They reached the end of the footpath after a couple of minutes, and it widened out at the top of the field. The railway line ran across the end of it from right to left, and to Kay’s right she could see the steel gate in the hedgerow through which she and Carys had walked only a few nights before.
The field looked peaceful now, a small flock of starlings swooping over the far end before heading off across the railway tracks.
Barnes looked over his shoulder then back towards the railway tracks as an express train tore through the countryside. ‘Whiting’s killer must have waited until the other dog walker had turned her back to go home. I had a look at her witness statement – she didn’t see anyone around at the time. She certainly didn’t see Whiting on the rails.’
‘In that case, he must have drugged Lawrence with the antidepressants. There’s no other way to do it. He must have put him in the boot of his car or something, because Harriet said they definitely found dragging marks in the mud. They didn’t get any footprints of the killer, so he must have covered the soles of his shoes.’
Barnes watched the last carriage recede into the distance. ‘He got lucky, didn’t he? There’s only about twenty minutes in between these trains.’
Kay let her eyes fall to the twin tracks that cut through the landscape. ‘He didn’t get lucky, Ian. He knows this place. He knows the train times, including all the recent changes to timetables for the spring. He’s been here before, even if Elsa Flanagan and the other dog walker never saw him. He’s been planning this for a while, I would imagine.’ She jutted her chin at the entrance to the field. ‘It’s what I couldn’t understand the other night when we were attending the scene. Our killer isn’t using this line to dispose of bodies.’
‘What do you mean?’ Barnes shielded his eyes as he stared at the railway.
‘This is personal. He’s making a point. I think that’s why he made sure he only gave Whiting enough of the drugs to get him here. He wanted him to suffer.’ She frowned. ‘The question is – why? Why is this particular train route so important to him? And why kill Lawrence Whiting like that?’
Another train horn sounded from the direction of Maidstone, and a couple of minutes later a smaller three-carriage train sped past.
Barnes grimaced. ‘Dave Walker said the trains only slowed by about forty miles an hour when they have people working on the track,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe Alison walked out in front of one without hesitation.’
‘Me neither,’ said Kay. ‘Which begs the question, why did she do it?’
‘She certainly appeared to have everything to live for.’
‘Exactly. So, what changed between the last time the neighbours saw her, and that morning?’
‘Do you think she and her fiancé had an argument?’
‘The neighbour said the walls in those houses are thin. I would have thought she would have said something to us if she’d heard an argument. But we’ll ask McIntyre when we speak with him. It still seems pretty drastic though, doesn’t it?’
Barnes kicked at a loose stone. ‘All these deaths—’
‘And not a single suspect,’ said Kay. ‘I know. I don’t like it either, Ian. But, we keep digging.’
‘I think we’re going to need a bigger shovel,’ he muttered, and trudged back towards the car.
Thirty-Eight
Kay took a deep breath and closed her eyes for a moment, savouring the sun’s warmth as she stood on the doorstep.
‘Make the most of it,’ said Barnes. ‘They’re predicting thick fog over the next couple of days.’
‘That should make things interesting for our friends in Traffic.’
‘Here we go.’
Kay opened her eyes and turned as the front door opened and a man peered out, his grey bushy eyebrows furrowing as he took in the two strangers.
‘Martin Campbell?’
‘Yes?’
‘DS Kay Hunter. This is my colleague, DC Ian Barnes. We were wondering if we could talk to you about your daughter, Alison?’
He frowned, then stepped aside. ‘Um, I suppose so. Come on in.’
Kay followed him into a bright living room, the fake cheeriness of the space tempered by the framed photographs that filled the length of an ornate mantelpiece halfway along the wall on the far side.
A gas fire sat in the grate where logs would have once burned, but despite this, a small collection of brass pokers hung from a rack to the left of the set piece.
Kay’s eyes travelled around the room, and she nearly leapt back with a start when she noticed a woman sitting in one of the armchairs at the far end, her dark eyes peering out from under a mop of prematurely greying hair.
‘Please,’ said Martin Campbell, and gestured to the other armchairs. ‘Have a seat.’
‘Thanks.’
‘DS Hunter is here to talk to us about Alison,’ he said to the woman, before turning back to Kay. ‘This is my wife, Karen.’
‘Thanks for seeing me at short notice,’ said Kay, and pulled her notebook out of her bag, aware of the couple’s intense stares boring into her. ‘I realise this will bring up some dreadful memories for you, and I apologise, but I’m interested in hearing from you what happened when Alison was killed. Where were you at the time?’
‘I was at work,’ said Martin. ‘I had a job as a forklift operator at one of the big warehouses on Aylesford industrial estate.’ He dropped his gaze to his hands clenched together in his lap. ‘The warehouse supervisor came out of his office waving his arms at me to switch off the engine. His face was pale – I’d never seen him like that. I thought I’d done something wrong with the forklift for moment, until he told me the police wanted to speak with me. They were waiting outside with the car – I could feel everyone staring at me as I walked across the forecourt towards it.’ He swallowed.
‘Mrs Campbell?’
‘I was at work, too. I used to have a job then – at the garden centre near the motorway.’ She wiped tears away. ‘I haven’t been back since.’
‘Karen took Alison’s death particularly hard,’ said Martin, and reached across to tak
e his wife’s hand. ‘I couldn’t bear the thought of her returning to work until she was ready.’
‘What was Alison like? I understand she was a very good engineer,’ said Barnes.
‘And to this day, I’ve got no idea where she got that from,’ said Martin, a note of pride in his voice. ‘Neither of us was any good at things like that. When we realised during her third year at secondary school how good she was at maths, we paid for her to attend additional lessons twice a week – she loved it. Soaked it all up.’
‘Where did she go to university?’
‘Plymouth,’ said Karen. ‘I didn’t want her so far away from home, but she made friends easily, and we used to drive down a couple of times a year to see her, to save her coming all the way back here, and have a bit of a holiday together.’
‘Is that where she met Kevin McIntyre?’
‘No, she and Kevin met at a postgrad engineering conference in Croydon a couple of years ago,’ said Martin. ‘It was a sort of careers convention – a lot of engineering companies had displays there so people like Alison could meet with them and talk about potential careers. After that, Alison was offered a job by the railway engineering company – their head office is at Dartford – and Kevin landed a job with a company working on the gas facility at the Isle of Sheppey. After that contract ended, he ended up working in their head offices in Ashford.’
‘How long had they been engaged?’ said Kay.
Karen pulled out a cotton handkerchief from her sleeve and gently blew her nose.
‘About four months,’ she said.
‘Did she give you any indication that she was experiencing problems at home or at work?’
Kay caught the look that passed between the couple, and held her breath.
‘You should tell her,’ Martin said, and patted the back of his wife’s hand.
Karen took a shuddering breath before speaking.
‘I was in a rush to get out the door for work that morning,’ she said. ‘We used to have an old cat that we shut in the kitchen at night. When we came downstairs that morning, it had made a mess, so by the time I cleared that up, I was already running late. My mobile rang as I was closing the front door – the bus stop is a ten-minute walk from here. I saw it was Alison’s number, so I answered it.’
Will to Live Page 14
