I turned to Silkstone. “Are there any large sums of money in the house?” I asked, and he shook his head before Prendergast had time to advise him otherwise. “My men, as you call them,” I continued, “are accompanied by several civilian scenes of crime specialists and one of Her Majesty’s scientists. I am confident that they will conduct themselves with their normal integrity and impartiality. As I have said before, their findings may corroborate your story and you will have full access to them. If you are concerned about your property you may go along and watch, but you will not be allowed in the house.”
“So what am I supposed to do?” Silkstone demanded. “Stand in the garden in the rain?”
“I suggest you go about whatever you intended to do. Now, if you’ll follow me to the front desk I’ll sign a copy of the tape and photocopies of these diagrams over to you. Don’t forget your umbrellas.”
Prendergast complained all the way there and was still berating the custody sergeant as I danced up the stairs, three at a time, towards my little kingdom and a well-earned pot of Earl Grey. All we needed now was some evidence.
Jason Lee Gelder said that the food at the remand centre was really good. It was next door to Bentley prison, catering expressly for under-twenty-ones, and still came under Gwen Rhodes’ authority. They had sausages and beans for breakfast and something different every day for dinner. He shared a room with another youth and they got on well together. The duty solicitor joined us, complaining about his beaker of tea, and I said: “Right, Jason. Let’s talk about this girlfriend of yours. Have you remembered her name?”
“No,” he replied.
“Have you tried to?”
“A bit, but I can’t.”
“I’ve checked the families of every police officer at Heckley,” I told him, “and nobody has a daughter of that age who goes in the Aspidistra Lounge. Your girlfriend definitely wasn’t a cop’s daughter, so you have nothing to fear there. You are wrong about that, Jason, so who is she? Either you are lying to me or she was lying to you. Which is it?”
“Actually,” he could have said, “it’s you who are lying to me,” but he wasn’t to know that. Instead he coloured up and shrank into himself, like a child scolded by a grown-up.
I eventually broke the silence by saying: “Come on, Jason, start telling me about her. It can only help your case.”
“Tell the inspector what you know,” the solicitor urged.
“Let’s start with a description,” I suggested, rising to my feet. “How tall was she. You danced with her, so where did she come up to?” I took hold of his arm and helped him stand up. “Up to here?” I said. “Or here?”
“’Bout ’ere,” he told me, holding his hand, palm down, level with his Adam’s apple.
“About five feet four,” I said. “Well done, that’s a start. And what about her build? Was she slim, overweight, or in between?”
“She was a little bit fat.”
“Good. What colour was her hair?”
Simple questions that he could answer, that would have saved me a sleepless night if I’d asked them earlier. Sometimes even the toppest cops get the basics wrong. After they’d had sex he took her home, which was somewhere in the Sylvan Fields estate. Not right to the door, because she was afraid that her dad would see her coming home in a car and cause some grief. And he was glad to oblige because dad was a cop, wasn’t he?
We went through the whole sordid scene, and little flashes came back to him. She had a tattoo on her shoulder. He couldn’t see it properly in the dark, but she said it was a spider. Her favourite group was Boyzone and her previous boyfriend drove a Mazda, but it was stolen and he lost it. She didn’t go in pubs but went to the football, sometimes. Her mam and dad were always fighting and kept breaking up. She didn’t think he’d stay much longer. They did it twice, and she helped him the second time. He only had one condom with him, but it was OK because she had one. Everything but a name. I could have asked him what I wanted to know, what I really wanted to know, but it would sound better coming from someone else.
“So you sat and talked for a few minutes before she got out?” I repeated for the third time.
“Yeah, a bit.”
“What about?”
“Dunno. This and that. What I just told you, I s’pose.”
“Did you arrange to meet again?”
“I told you, yeah.”
“Tell me again.”
“At the club, I think.”
“You just left it loose. You had brilliant sex with this girl and then you said: ‘OK, perhaps I’ll see you again sometime.’ I don’t believe you Jason. I don’t believe that you are getting it so often that you can afford to be choosy. I think you desperately wanted to see her again, as soon as possible, and you arranged to do so. Maybe you promised to phone her. Was that it? Did she give you her phone number?”
Jason slowly straightened in the chair, his brow furrowed and his lips pursed. He had the looks of a film star, but he’d have needed a stuntman to do his dialogue. “Yeah,” he said, the light of remembrance lighting his countenance with all the illumination of a male glow-worm. (It’s the females that glow, wouldn’t you just know it.) “Yeah, that’s what she did, she gave me her phone number.”
“Great,” I said. “That’s great.” Now all I had to do was prise it from him. Given the choice, I’d have preferred trying to take a banana from a rabid baboon. “So did she write it down for you, or did you try to remember it?”
“We didn’t ’ave a pen,” he told me.
“Well you wouldn’t have, would you?” I replied with uncharacteristic understanding. With a combined IQ that was lower than the number of left legs at an amputees ball, it was unlikely that either of them would want to scribble down a sonnet, or even a haiku or two, after a moonlit shag in a Ford Fiesta. I waited for someone else to speak and wondered what to have for lunch.
“It wasn’t then…” Jason began.
“Wasn’t when?” I interrupted.
“Then. When I dropped her off. It was before that, at the brickyard, just after, you know…”
“Just after you’d had it?” My mind kept returning to the two of them bonking like a pair of ferrets in the front seat of his car. It was worrying.
“Yeah, then,” he confirmed. “She told me ’er number and I asked ’er to write it down, on a parking ticket. Not a parking ticket, one from a machine, you know.”
“A pay and display ticket,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s right. Pay an’ display. But she didn’t ’ave a pen.”
“And you didn’t, either.”
“No. So she wrote it on the win’screen, with ’er finger. Up at the top. It was steamed up, y’know. Then she pulled the sun flap down, ‘To protect it,’ she said. I’d forgotten all about it.”
“Alle-flippin’-luia,” I sighed, burying my head in my hand.
Chapter Twelve
Jason’s car was still in our garage at Halifax, emblazoned with stickers saying that it was evidence and not to be touched. Fingerprints had found the last three digits of the number on the windscreen when they gave it a good going-over, hoping to find evidence that Marie-Claire had been in there. The numbers were meaningless, so no action was taken on them. “It’s a phone number for someone who lives in the Sylvan Fields,” I told Les Isles, over a coffee in his office.
“So it probably starts with eight-three, followed by an unknown number,” he stated.
“Which narrows it down to ten possibilities.”
An hour later BT had furnished me with five names and addresses, and after fifteen minutes with the electoral roll I found myself drawing a big circle around 53, Bunyan Avenue; home of Edward and Vera Jackson, and their daughter Dionne.
I rang the number, but it was engaged. Les had left me to have a meeting with somebody, so I wrote him a note and headed for the exit. They have a visitors’ signing in and out book at HQ and a young man in a Gore-Tex waterproof was bent over it. He looked at his watch and entered his l
eaving time in the appropriate column.
“Could Mr Isles help you, Mr Hollingbrook?” the desk sergeant asked him.
“Not really,” he replied. “he was very kind, as always, but said that all he could do was have a word with the coroner. He has to make the decision.”
He slid the book towards me and I put ditto marks under the time he’d written.
“I’m afraid that’s always the case,” the desk sergeant stated. “But the coroner’s a reasonable man, and I’m sure he’ll do what he can. I’d have liked to organise a lift back for you, but everybody’s out at the moment.”
The visitor was Marie-Claire’s husband, I gathered, come in to ask about the release of his young wife’s body for burial. He only looked about twenty. I caught the sergeant’s eye and said: “I’ll give Mr Hollingbrook a lift, Arthur. No problem.”
“There you are, then,” he said, and introduced me to the visitor. We shook hands without smiling and I opened the door for him.
His first name was Angus. He was twenty-four years old and a student of civil engineering at Huddersfield University, sponsored by one of the large groups that specialise in motorways and bridges. Marie-Claire had died on the Saturday or Sunday of the holiday weekend, while he was seconded to Sunderland to help in the replacement of an old stone bridge over a railway line by a modern pre-stressed concrete structure. He’d come home on Wednesday and found her body. I told him that I wasn’t on the case, but I was interested because the assault was similar to the one on Margaret Silkstone at Heckley, back in June. I explained that we had somebody else for that murder, but there was a possibility that Marie-Claire’s was a copycat killing. That was the official line, so I stayed with it. No point in stirring up the gravel with my own private paddle just yet. There’d be plenty of time for that: there’s no statute of limitations on murder.
“Lousy weather,” I said as the windscreen wipers slapped from side to side.
“Mmm,” he replied, not caring about it, his thoughts with the beautiful girl he’d loved, wondering if he’d ever forget her or find her like again.
“It’s next left, please,” he said.
I slowed for the turn, then stopped to allow a bus out. It said Heckley on its destination board. The driver waved his thanks to me and when he was out of the way I turned into Angus’s street.
“It’s the last house on the left,” he told me.
They were Victorian monoliths in freshly sand-blasted Yorkshire stone, with bay windows and stained-glass doors, built for the middle-management of the day but now converted into flats or lived-in by extended families. The street was lined both sides with parked cars, because, like the pocket calculator, nobody predicted the advent of the automobile.
“This is rather grand,” I said, parking in the middle of the road.
“It is, isn’t it. We just have the top floor. Marie loved it. Great big rooms and high ceilings. Lots of room for her hangings — she was in textile design — but a devil to heat. We…” He let it hang there, realising that there was no we anymore.
“Will you stay?” I asked.
He shook his head. “No, no way. Our lease runs out at Christmas but I don’t think I could stay that long. We’d wondered about buying it, but it didn’t come off. Fortunately, now, I suppose.”
A car tried to turn into the street, but couldn’t because I had it blocked. Angus opened the door and thanked me for the lift. “No problem,” I replied, and drove round the corner, out of everybody’s way.
John Bunyan would have loved the avenue they named after him on the Sylvan Fields estate, although the satellite dishes would have had him guessing. He’d have called it the Valley of Despondency, or some such, and had Giant Despair knocking seven bells out of Christian and Hope all along the length of it. I trickled along in second gear, weaving between the broken bricks, sleeping dogs and abandoned babybuggies until I found number 53. At least the rain had stopped.
The front garden looked as if it had hosted a ploughing match lately, but the car that evidently parked there was not to be seen. I took the path to the side door and knocked. The woman who answered it almost instantly had an expectant look on her face and a Kookai carrier bag in her hand. She wore a tight leather jacket with leggings, and her halo of hair faded from platinum blonde through radioactive red to dish-water grey.
“Mrs Jackson?” I asked, holding my ID at arms length, more for the benefit of the neighbours and my reputation than the woman in front of me. I had a strong suspicion that male visitors were quite common at this house.
“Er, yes,” she replied, adding, as she recovered from her initial disappointment: “’Ave you come about the fine?”
“No,” I replied, “I haven’t come about a fine. I believe you have a daughter called Dionne.”
“Yes,” she said. “What’s she done?”
“Nothing,” I told her, “but we believe she may have recently witnessed something that will help us with certain enquiries. When will it be possible for me to speak to her?”
“You say she ’asn’t done nowt? She’s just a witness?”
“That’s right. She may be able to clear something up for us. When will she be in?”
Mrs Jackson turned, shouting: “Dionne! Somebody to see you,” into the gloom of the house, and stepped out on to the path. “She’ll be up in a minute,” she told me. “I ’ave to go to work.”
“Well,” I began, “I would like to talk to your daughter on her own, but because of her age she is entitled to have a parent with her.”
“But I don’t ’ave to be, do I?”
“No, not really.”
“Right, I’ll leave you to it, then. Bye.” She staggered off down the path, her litter-spike heels clicking and scraping on the concrete.
When daughter Dionne appeared she was wearing a tank top whose shoulder straps didn’t quite line up with those of her bra and the ubiquitous black leggings. She was whey-faced, her hair hastily pulled together and held by a rubber band so it sprouted from the side of her head like a bunch of carrot tops. Hardly the sex bomb I’d expected. Her expression changed from expectancy to nervousness as I introduced myself.
“May I come in?” I asked, and she moved aside to let me through. I took a gulp of the chip-fat laden atmosphere and explained that she was entitled to have a parent present but as my questions were of a personal nature she might prefer to be alone. The carpet clung to my feet as I walked into the front room and looked for a safe place to sit. The gas fire was churning out more heat than an F14 Tomcat on afterburner and in the corner a grizzly bear was laying about a moose with a chainsaw, courtesy of the 24-hour cartoon channel. Dionne curled up on the settee as I gritted my teeth and settled for an easy chair. There was a plate on the table, with a kipper bone and skin laid across it.
“Kipper for breakfast,” I said, brightly. “Smells good.”
“No,” she replied, her attention half on me, half on the moose who was now minus his antlers, “that was me mam’s tea, last night.”
I decided to axe the preliminaries. “Right. Your mother said she was off to work. Where’s that?” I asked.
“Friday she cleans for someone,” Dionne replied. The moose was fighting back, holding his severed antlers in his front feet.
“What else does she do?”
Dionne wrenched her attention from the screen and faced me. “I don’t know what they get up to, do I?” she protested.
“I meant on other days,” I explained. “Does she have a job for the rest of the week?”
“Yeah, ’course she ’as. She cleans for a few people. Well, that’s what she calls it. Posh people. A doctor an’ a s’licitor, an’ some others.”
I looked around the room, taking in the beer rings on every horizontal surface and the window that barely transmitted light, and tried to recall the proverb about the cobbler’s children being the worst-shod in the village. “And what about your dad, Dionne?” I asked. “Where’s he?”
“’E left us, ’bout t
wo weeks ago.”
“Oh, I am sorry.”
“Don’t be. ’E’ll be back, soon as ’is new woman finds out what ’e’s like.” The moose had gained the initiative and the bear was in full flight.
“Can we have the telly off, please,” I said, and she found the remote control somewhere in the sticky recesses of the settee and killed the picture.
“Thank you. Four weeks ago,” I said, “On the Friday night of the holiday weekend, you were out with a boy. He says you can give him an alibi for that night. Can you?”
“Dunno,” she replied. “What was ’e called?”
“I was hoping you would tell me. You met him at the Aspidistra Lounge, and he brought you home.” She looked vacant, so I added: “You called at the brickyard on the way,” not sure if that would narrow the field.
“Friday? Of the ’oliday weekend?”
“That’s right.”
“Does ’e look a bit like Ronan in Boyzone?” she asked. “Y’know, dead dishy?”
“He’s a good looking lad,” I admitted.
“Yeah, I remember ’im. ’E’s called Jason. I can give ’im a nalibi for Friday night, if that’s what you mean.”
“Good, thank you. Did you arrange to see him again?”
“Yeah, but ’e ’asn’t rung me.”
“You gave him your phone number?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you write it down for him?”
“No, well, yeah. We didn’t ’ave a pen, so I writ it on the front window of ’is car, in the steam. Mebbe it got rubbed off.”
“Perhaps it did. When you were talking to Jason did you mention your father at all?”
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