Hilary Bonner

by Braven

  Not even when the police were digging up the garden next door. Not even when you had a fair idea what they might be looking for—not even when you were battling with thoughts and images too crazy and terrible even to think about.

  Chapter Two

  The young man in the green suit, of which he was somewhat misguidedly extremely proud, had watched idly as the tall gangly schoolgirl disappeared inside Laurel House. With one hand he brushed his hair from his eyes. It was 1976, and he sported a thick head of dark hair which, in accordance with the fashion of the time, hung over his collar at the back and flopped over his forehead at the front. He was also misguidedly proud of his hairdo.

  The young man’s name was John Kelly. He was a reporter in the last year of his indenture with the local weekly paper, the Torquay Times, and as he surveyed the scene, he reflected that maybe he should be talking to more of the neighbours, but he somehow didn’t want to yet. Charles Peabody, whom Kelly knew because the older man compiled crossword puzzles for his newspaper, had already given him the benefit of his view on the goings-on of the day which had been predictably opinionated and based on little more than pure speculation.

  John Kelly preferred to focus all of his energy on Parkview, going over and over in his head what may have happened there.

  He removed a cigarette packet from the pocket of his jacket, which he carefully smoothed down as he did so, lit up and then passed the packet to the photographer accompanying him. It looked as though he might be on the biggest story Torquay had ever known, and thanks to a tip from a police contact Kelly was on the scene first, before the national boys or the local evening and morning papers.

  Kelly knew the story behind all this police activity better than most. He had written it enough times for the TT, but most of it had ended up on the spike as he supposed he’d known it must. For legal reasons. Now the police had finally taken action all that would change, and what had merely been a ferocious chain of gossip throughout Torquay could, he hoped, finally be printed.

  Richard Marshall and his wife Clara had run the Parkview Hotel for several years. They had two small daughters, Lorraine, aged six, and five-year-old Janine. Marshall was a big, handsome, personable man with a quick wit and an easy way with people. He had been well enough liked until a year previously.

  Then, suddenly, Clara Marshall and her daughters had disappeared. Their absence caused little comment at first. Marriages broke up all the time, even in the seventies. Most mothers leaving the marital home would want to take their children with them, and Richard Marshall had always had a plausible explanation for everything, as was his wont. The gossip had grown only gradually, gaining momentum, of course, when Marshall had moved another woman into his hotel home with what his neighbours considered to be quite indecent haste. By the time the police finally began to investigate, the level of gossip was such that there could be nobody in Torquay who did not at least suspect some kind of mystery concerning the disappearance of Clara Marshall and her children. And for many suspicion had grown into a horrible sense of certainty about their fate.

  Kelly, whose mother was the head teacher of the primary school the Marshall children had attended, was one of those who had come to believe that murder had been committed. Kelly’s own enquiries over the past few months had revealed no sign of Clara or the girls. He was a local paper reporter whose resources and time were both very limited. But he knew that the police had now checked bank, social security and national health records to no avail. Clara Marshall and her daughters appeared to have vanished off the face of the earth. The finger of suspicion pointed firmly at Clara’s husband, Richard. But gossip, conjecture and assumption were not evidence. They did not solve a crime, nor indeed did they even prove that one had been committed.

  And one way and another it had been a whole long year before the police had made their move. Now Kelly had been told that the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary was about to launch the biggest missing-persons enquiry the West of England had ever known. Now. A year later, when the trail was surely cold. Kelly took several short fast puffs on his cigarette. He feared that it may already be too late. Too late not only for Clara Marshall and her girls, but too late to prove anything against anybody.

  Kelly didn’t like that. The whole thing was a mess. And his mother, whom he adored, was deeply upset by it. She had reasons for feeling that she could have saved the Marshall girls from whatever had happened to them. Kelly thought she was wrong to blame herself in any way. Nonetheless this story was personal to him. If Clara Marshall and her daughters had indeed been murdered, then he wanted their killer brought to justice every bit as much as the police did.

  Impatiently he threw his half-smoked cigarette to the ground, and extinguished it with the toe of one shoe.

  “C’mon, Micky,” he said to his photographer companion. “I don’t see any more mileage here. We know they’ve taken the bastard to the nick. Let’s take a trip down there, shall we?”

  Meanwhile, at Torquay Police Station, Detective Chief Inspector Bill Talbot strode into the interview room wearing a confident expression, which did not reflect his inner feelings at all. This case was already the most frustrating he had experienced in his career.

  Squeezed behind the little wooden table in the centre of the small bare room sat Richard Marshall, totally impassive, features in repose, his disconcertingly clear pale-blue eyes alert but giving nothing away. This was far from Talbot’s first confrontation with Marshall. Nonetheless he was once again struck by the man’s immense physical presence. It wasn’t just his size, although Marshall—six foot three or four, and seventeen or eighteen stone, Talbot reckoned—was indeed an extremely big man which was evident even when he was sitting down. His shoulders were huge, stretching the fine fabric of his well-tailored navy-blue blazer. Even his head, with its shock of thick dark-brown curly hair, was big. And his face, although Talbot had to reluctantly accept that Marshall was a good-looking man, was broad and fleshy. He had a big nose, a bulky forehead, and lips so full that although there was nothing remotely effeminate about him, his mouth would almost have been better suited to a woman were it not quite so wide. But it was more than all of that. Marshall had a way of filling a room and dominating those in it. He returned Talbot’s gaze steadily, unflinching, confident. Even if that wasn’t how he felt it was the way he came across. He looked every bit as if he might be about to conduct an interview with the policeman rather than the other way round. The muscles at the back of Talbot’s neck had tightened quite painfully. Indeed, he was aware of every fibre in his body tensing up in anticipation of the task ahead.

  Marshall was good, very good. He also had experience of police investigations. He had a criminal record. He had served six months in jail for his part in a time-share scam concerning property in Spain. Marshall had been the front man, and Talbot had no doubt he would have been very good at it too. He was so smooth. A number of people, mostly elderly folk, had lost a lot of money, in some cases their life’s savings, because of that unpleasant little operation. Marshall had also been suspected over the years of being involved in other cons and always seemed to be somehow or other skimming along on the edge of the law. Talbot considered him an unsavoury character in every way. It was, however, a quantum leap from anything the Detective Chief Inspector knew about Richard Marshall to murder. Nonetheless, Talbot firmly believed that Marshall was capable of such a deed and that he also had both the gall and the ability to stand up to the most ferocious of police investigations.

  Marshall had been arrested in connection with the disappearance of his wife and children, but he had yet to be charged. There was not enough evidence for that. In fact there was no evidence at all worth mentioning. Talbot was hoping to God that either Marshall would break, which as it happened the man gave no indication at all of doing, or that some hard evidence would turn up—like a body. And fast, too. Clara Marshall and the girls had been missing for just a week less than a year exactly, and Talbot knew that there was going to be criticism
of the police for not acting sooner. In fact there would still have been no operation in place had not Clara Marshall’s partially estranged father finally arrived in the town two weeks earlier in search of his daughter.

  The Detective Chief Inspector’s big fear was that even now there was little or nothing to act on and that he was going to have to let Marshall go. Talbot’s divisional commander, Chief Superintendent Raymond Parish, was notoriously cautious when it came to detaining suspects without their having been charged, allegedly because he had been involved in an incident as a young officer when a man had died in custody during what was later ruled by the court to have been an illegal period of detention. In 1976 there was no statutory protocol governing the length of time for which you could lock people up while still trying to finalize a case against them, but there were rules of thumb consistent with the ancient laws of habeas corpus. And DCI Talbot was well aware that Parish would not want to let him keep Marshall without charge for very much more than twenty-four hours. Talbot, who was pretty good at working the system, might be able to stretch that a bit, but he certainly would not be able to detain the man for more than one night without formalizing his arrest.

  Doing his best to cast aside all doubts, Talbot sat down next to Detective Sergeant Mike Malone and Detective Constable Janet Parkin. Marshall was alone on the opposite side of the table. He had not even asked for a solicitor.

  “Right, switch on then, Mike,” said the DCI briskly, gesturing to the big double tape recorder, with its giant spools, which sat on the table before him. Malone did so and then announced the interview for the record, listing the officers who were present in the small brightly lit room.

  “I want to go over it all again, Mr. Marshall, every detail, from the beginning,” said Talbot.

  “What, again?” The big man’s response was weary, but it was the weariness of someone dealing with a tiresome irritation rather than that of an anxious suspect.

  “Yes, again.”

  “I’ve told you everything.”

  “Do so again, please.”

  Marshall sighed. He raised his eyes so that he was looking at the ceiling rather than at the three police officers before he began to speak. His voice was calm, with that hint of weariness still about it, and his manner patiently tolerant as if he were addressing a rather dim child of whom he was nonetheless quite fond.

  “On the last Sunday in June last year my wife told me that she was leaving me. It was not unexpected. We had not been getting on well for some time. I also suspected that she was having an affair.”

  “She quite suddenly confirmed my suspicions and said that she was leaving me for another man. He was an Australian over here on an extended visit. He was little more than a backpacker, it seemed. There was no way they could look after the children, she told me. She planned to start another life with her new boyfriend.”

  Marshall paused, and stretched out his long arms, hands palm-upwards as if begging for understanding. “There was nothing I could have done even if I’d wanted to. Clara was always a very determined woman.”

  There was a pause. “Go on,” prompted Talbot.

  “I persuaded a neighbour, Mrs. Meadows next door, to look after the girls. It was June, one of our busiest months. We were full at Parkview. Clara did all the cooking. She abandoned us to total chaos. I didn’t have the time or energy to think about anything except somehow keeping things going, keeping all the balls up in the air. All I did was concentrate on the practicalities. I set about finding somebody to stand in for Clara, while at first trying to provide meals myself. And I didn’t do a very good job of it. I’m no cook. The guests were not very forgiving, either.”

  “Then two days later Clara turned up again. She said she couldn’t live without the girls. She begged me to let her take them. With all that was going on I didn’t see how I could look after them, so I agreed that she could have them. You can’t know how much I’ve regretted that since, but I wasn’t thinking straight. I was just taking it all a minute at a time. And she is their mother after all. Fathers aren’t the same, are they?”

  Again outstretched arms and this time a sideways inclination of the head asked for understanding. None of the police officers responded. Marshall continued without prompting.

  “I have not seen my wife and children since that day. Neither have I heard from them. And that’s all I know.”

  “Is it, Mr. Marshall?”

  “I’ve told you again and again that it is.”

  “Yes. But are you telling the truth?”

  Marshall shrugged. “I’m sick of this,” he said. “I’m trying to cooperate. I want this cleared up as much as you do. But you lot don’t seem prepared to listen. You’re as bad as all the local gossips. You’ve made up your own minds about what happened to Clara and the kids and nothing I have to say makes any difference, does it?”

  Talbot ignored the question.

  “You were having an affair at the time of your wife’s disappearance, Mr. Marshall,” he continued quietly.

  “Yes, I was. But only out of a kind of retaliation, really. I loved my wife. I didn’t want to do anything to harm our marriage.”

  “Mr. Marshall, you have a reputation as a womanizer. You have been married three times—or very nearly…”

  Marshall half-smiled. He actually looked almost pleased with himself. When only in his twenties he had married his second “wife” while still wed to his first. He actually had a conviction for bigamy as well as for fraud. But at his trial he had escaped with only a suspended jail sentence after a doctor had given evidence about the state of stress he was allegedly in and, rather more remarkably, both women had spoken in his defence. Talbot looked the other man up and down appraisingly. Women, in particular, always seemed totally taken in by Richard Marshall, he reflected, for reasons which baffled DCI Talbot.

  “We have no cause at all, except your version of things,” Talbot continued, “to believe that your wife was ever involved with anyone else. But you had a string of affairs during your marriage, didn’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t call them affairs exactly.”

  “All right. You moved Mrs. Esther Hunter into your home just one month after Clara disappeared, did you not?”

  “After Clara left.”

  “Don’t play word games with me, Marshall. Answer the question.”

  “You know I did. You also know why. Her husband found out she’d been seeing me and chucked her out. She just turned up on my doorstep. What was I supposed to do? Send her away? Anyway, I needed help in the hotel. I just couldn’t manage and I couldn’t afford the wages I was paying out.”

  “Very gracious, Mr. Marshall.”

  The big man smiled again and reached up with one hand to straighten the knot of his tie. It didn’t need straightening. Talbot found his gaze drawn to it. He was pretty sure the striped green-and-red tie was from a rather prestigious guards regiment and that Marshall, although he had been called up for National Service as a younger man, had no right to wear it. Which was typical, of course. Marshall dropped his hand onto the table again and leaned forward until his face was just inches away from Talbot’s. He was almost conspiratorial.

  “The truth, Detective Chief Inspector,” he said. “Just the truth.”

  Instinctively Talbot pulled away, then mentally kicked himself. “Two days after your children were last seen you were spotted taking your boat out of Torquay Harbour,” he continued resolutely. “You motored around the bay towards Berry Head, then out to deep water, where you seemed to hover for some time.”

  “I was fishing. I used to go fishing most evenings when I could get away, and take the children with me whenever I could. They loved it…”

  Suddenly there was a catch in Richard Marshall’s voice. It was the first time he had shown any emotion at all.

  Talbot did his best to grasp the moment.

  “I put it to you that you murdered your wife and children and that you went out in your boat that night in order to dump their bodies
at sea.”

  Talbot could see Marshall’s body tensing at last. Just as his had done earlier. The other man’s hands, once more clasped before him, were trembling. For a moment Talbot hoped he might be about to break through his composure after all. But no. Marshall was a tough cookie.

  You could almost see him physically and mentally taking a hold of himself.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said.

  They came to Laurel House at ten o’clock the following morning, a Saturday, arriving in the middle of a summer thunderstorm, so that they stood in the hallway dripping water from their sodden raincoats all over the threadbare carpet. Karen’s mother was sober, thank God, and no longer in a state of near-hysterics, but she was still in bed, of course, recovering from her excesses of the previous day. Her father was playing golf. It was what he did when he wasn’t working. “At least it gets me out of this damned house,” he would shamelessly announce.

  So it was Karen who answered the front door to Detective Sergeant Malone and Detective Constable Parkin, took their wet coats from them and escorted them into the big shabby sitting room. She ran upstairs to get her mother, and once she was sure that a protesting Margaret Meadows was safely installed in the bathroom in order to apply her obligatory layers of make-up, Karen ran downstairs again to make DS Malone and DC Parkin tea while they waited.