Detective Mike Croft Series Box Set

by Jane Adams

  It was ordinary, recognizable. Mike himself had grown up in similar surroundings, geographically about a hundred miles south but in look and spirit very little different.

  Police officers had converged on the little community over the past months, ostensibly mapping Max Harriman’s career, but really more intent on tracking Jake. Mike knew that it would be only a matter of time before Max’s connections with Jake Bowen came out, then the few details the police knew, but the press and public did not, would be splashed across every front page in the country. He could just visualize the headlines, the glaring spotlight trained on this small community when it finally became known that not one murderer but two had emerged from its quiet streets.

  It was a two-hour drive to the prison even using the motorway and another half-hour dealing with the bureaucracy of the visit. Mike sat behind the wooden table in the bare room where it and two chairs were the only furnishings and laid out the cassette recorder he used during these interviews and the photocopied cuttings books.

  The copies had been spiral-bound for ease of handling. Max Harriman’s original books had been sugarpaper scrapbooks, of the sort that could be bought in any stationer’s or post office. Stapled together and bound in stiff card. Harriman had made them more robust by covering the outside in sticky-back plastic.

  The originals had been stashed away as evidence, but Max had been given a copy of each one in the hope that it would prompt him to make further disclosures. In practice Max spent more time bemoaning the loss of his originals than he did adding to their information. He would complain from the moment Mike came through the door, as he did today.

  ‘You haven’t brought my books. I told you, I wanted my books.’

  ‘Good morning to you, Max. Sit down.’

  Harriman sat down and shoved Mike’s spiral-bound books away from him as though he found them distasteful.

  ‘I told you, I don’t say anything until I’ve got my books.’

  ‘They’re evidence, Max. You know that.’

  ‘You’ve got copies. Use those as evidence.’

  Mike didn’t bother to reply this time. Instead he opened one of the books at a page he had previously marked and turned it so that Max could see.

  ‘Last time I came to see you, we talked about Jake’s parents.’

  ‘No, Inspector, you talked about Jake’s parents, I just listened. I told you, I can’t do it without my books.’

  ‘What happened to them, Max? Where did Jake’s parents go to? We’ve got this one picture and nothing after that.’ He leaned forward to see better and read the caption. ‘ “New lay preacher, Mr Alastair Bowen, at St Bartolph’s Parish Church.’” He looked expectantly at Max, who said nothing.

  ‘It’s an odd thing for you to have saved, Max. A little clipping from a church magazine. Especially as neither you nor Jake could have been more than seven when it happened.’

  Max glanced at him, then at the picture. ‘It isn’t mine,’ he said.

  ‘It was in your book.’ Mike frowned. ‘It’s a funny thing, though, it was in one of the later books if I remember.’ He flipped the cover over to check. ‘Yes, I thought so. You must have added it later and not had room in the original book, so you put it in here. Five years ago, Max. What happened five years ago that you suddenly acquired this?’

  ‘It isn’t mine. I told you.’

  ‘Then whose is it, Max? Are you suggesting that I made it up? Stuck it in a book and copied it just to fool you?’

  Harriman gave Mike an almost pitying look. This was a routine they had repeated many times. Max sometimes even refused to acknowledge that the copies of the cuttings books bore any resemblance to the originals or had anything to do with him.

  ‘If it were in my book I could tell you about it,’ Max told him. ‘That thing, it isn’t mine.’

  Mike shook his head thoughtfully. ‘I can’t let you have the originals, Max, you know that.’

  ‘Why not? You’ve got copies. Lots of copies.’

  ‘So you agree this is a copy of your book? If it’s a copy and you recognize that it’s a copy, why can’t you tell me about this clipping?’

  Max sighed and leaned back in his chair; gazing up at the ceiling. Mike had learned over the course of many such sessions that the best thing he could do now was carry on, continue to talk, allow his conjectures to become wilder and wilder until Max was finally provoked enough to contradict him.

  He pressed on. ‘So what happened, Max? We know that the Bowens moved to York when Jake was twenty-one and that Jake went with them. We know that Jake was working in a printer’s, that he was a plate maker. Very good, from what I’m told. We’ve traced them on the voters’ register until 1982, when Jake would have been twenty-three, and then they drop out of sight. Now why was that?’

  He sat forward, turning the book towards him. ‘Where did the Bowens go to?’ He let the silence sit for a little, then, as though thinking out loud, he said, ‘It’s strange, though. Alastair Bowen was a keen churchgoer all his life. Avid, you might say. Sang in the choir as a boy, joined an evangelical chapel as a young man and was a lay preacher at St Bartolph’s right up until a month before they moved to York.’

  ‘So?’

  It was the first positive response of the morning, so Mike treated it with care. ‘Well, doesn’t it strike you as a little odd? I mean, we’ve absolutely no record even of church attendance in York. And I know, because I’ve talked to the minister who had the living at the time, that Alastair left the church quite suddenly. From being a mainstay of church activities to nothing, literally overnight, doesn’t that strike you as strange, Max? Even a little strange?’

  Max Harriman was sitting very still, his focus having switched from the ceiling to the wall behind Mike.

  ‘And there’s another thing. The minister from St Bartolph’s said it was as though Alastair Bowen was afraid of something. Ashamed and afraid. That suddenly he wouldn’t even speak to anyone from the church. Wouldn’t let them into his house or take their calls when they phoned. Odd behaviour, don’t you think? And I have to ask myself, Max, what was he afraid of? If the minister was right and he was ashamed of something, what do you suppose that could have been?’

  Max blinked rapidly, as though awakening to Mike’s presence again. ‘He was a stupid man,’ he said. ‘Never understood.’

  ‘Understood? Understood what?’

  ‘Why —’ Max laughed and looked at Mike disbelievingly — ‘Jake, of course. What Jake did, what he was, was beyond anything their small minds could understand.’

  ‘Jake was special, then?’ Mike pressed on, keeping his voice level and noncommittal, though he sensed they might be on the verge of something important.

  ‘You know Jake was special. He always was, always will be to those of us who understand. Who have the vision to see beyond the act and look to the purpose.’

  ‘And what purpose would that be?’

  Max smiled at him, two bright spots of colour burning in an otherwise pale face, and his hands moved excitedly as though turning invisible pages to search for the right entry in the book.

  ‘What happened to Jake’s parents, Max?’ Mike asked, hardly daring to raise his voice above the softest whisper. ‘And Jake, where did Jake go to? Where did he go to next?’

  Max’s hands stopped moving abruptly, as though he had suddenly realized that the pages he was turning were unreal. What he was searching for wasn’t there. ‘I can’t tell you without my books,’ he said. Then he got to his feet, pushing the chair back so that it scraped loudly across the floor. ‘I want to go now. I have nothing more to say. I want to go.’

  It would be useless to press him further. Max could sit in stubborn silence for hours at a time once he’d set his mind against speaking. Mike watched the guard escort Max away and sat quietly, trying to assimilate what had and had not been said. He had come here today quite convinced that Jake Bowen had murdered his parents and had hoped to get some kind of confirmation from Max. Now, unaccountably, h
e was not so sure. What he had said to Max about having spoken to the old incumbent of St Bartolph’s Church was a lie. The old minister had been dead and gone at least a dozen years. It had been guesswork on Mike’s part, built on the slight evidence that Alastair Bowen had resigned from his position as lay preacher, but it looked as though he’d hit a target not so far from the truth.

  Mike flipped open one of the other books. If the clippings held any clues, then Jake was already at least involved in the sex industry by then. Max’s clippings recorded raids, in 1983, on two sex shops in the Bradford area, and another one, curiously, in Cardiff, where a quantity of magazines had been seized.

  The evidence had long since been used to prosecute and would then have been destroyed, but from police records most were S&M mags of a particularly violent type. The report also stated that the pictures were very graphic, extremely realistic in their evocation of torture and of pain, and were taken by an obvious professional. It seemed that Jake Bowen knew his business even then.

  Mike gathered his paperwork together and removed the tape from the machine. He glanced up as one of the guards who had escorted Max back to his cell came in.

  ‘I hoped I’d catch you,’ he said. ‘Harriman got very excited when we were taking him back, wanted me to come and tell you something.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘Well, it’s a bit odd really. He said to tell you that Jake sent him the picture five years ago and that you were right, he didn’t have room for it in his proper book. Then he said I’d also got to tell you that his mother was a whore and the day she died was the only time he ever saw her smile.’

  * * *

  Mike got back into the car and turned on the radio. Peterson had held yet another press conference earlier that morning and details were given in brief on the lunchtime news, which Mike caught the tail-end of. Peterson was saying that he recognized the need for media exposure, that he realized public feelings were running high, and once again he appealed for help. Mike winced, knowing how Peterson really felt about all the media involvement, how much of a struggle it had been to keep anything under wraps.

  Mike flicked the radio off and dialled the incident room number on his mobile phone. ‘I’m on my way back,’ he said when Peterson came on the line. ‘I just heard you on the radio.’

  Peterson snorted. ‘Total farce,’ he said. ‘But you have to make the right noises. Anyway, we’ve got a development. I’m not going to say much over the air, but we know who she is. And she’s been missing close on twelve weeks.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Got lucky with a missing person’s report. We’re trying to locate kin. I’ll fill you in when you get back. But the big question is, where the hell’s she been all this time?’

  Chapter Six

  21 June

  Mike had arrived in Lyme Regis at ten o’clock on the Saturday morning to find that Maria had already left for the beach. Their hopes of a romantic weekend had been dashed the night before. Her mother had called her literally as she had been about to leave with the news that Jo had gone into labour. She had to go to her, as Jo’s husband, a sales rep, had been notified but would not be able to make it home for hours. Please could Maria help out?

  She had called Mike immediately but had been unable to reach him. Undecided, the best she could manage was to leave a message telling him that she would be coming down but bringing Essie.

  ‘They left about an hour ago,’ the woman at the boarding house told him. ‘The little girl was so keen to get to the beach.’

  Maria had left instructions as to where they were likely to be and Mike went to see if he could find them.

  He wasn’t dressed for the beach but for the interview with the bereaved relatives he knew he would be meeting at some point that day. The girl in the woods had been called Julia. Julia Norman. Her parents, after weeks of anxiety, had finally been persuaded to spend a few days away with friends somewhere in the Midlands and it had taken time to track them down.

  Julia had been a fine arts student. She had walked away from her course and the house she shared with four others without so much as a goodbye, taking only some clothes and the box containing most of her art equipment. That had been almost twelve weeks before and was the last anyone saw of her.

  Anyone except Jake Bowen.

  Mike loosened his tie and slung his jacket over his shoulder. He felt conspicuously overdressed among the shorts and T-shirts of the holidaymakers. He walked down the steep hill from the boarding house and cut through a shaded alleyway towards the beach. Maria had said they would be on the short stretch of sand close to the breakwater, looking out towards the Cobb. He strolled along the seafront, enjoying the bright sunlight and the blueness of the water, looking ahead and scanning the crowd for them.

  It was Essie who saw him first. He heard her shouting his name.

  ‘Uncle Mike, Uncle Mike! We’re over here, Uncle Mike!’

  Mike grinned and waved at the small figure in the red swimsuit. Her braided hair decorated with blue and yellow beads swung about her face as she leapt up and down trying to attract his attention. Water, sparkling like diamonds, splashed all around.

  Mike strode across the stretch of sandy beach, picking his way between the sandcastles and sunbathers. Essie ran to him, arms outstretched. He hoisted her up, almost losing his jacket in the process, and her wet arms and plump sandy legs locked around his body.

  ‘I love you, Uncle Mike.’

  Mike cuddled the child close, inhaling the warm sunshine scent of her skin. It was a long time since his son Stevie had been this age and he had held him like this.

  ‘I love you too, sweetheart,’ he told her, looking over her head at Maria, who was walking up the beach towards him. She looked spectacular, he thought. Blue denim cut-offs and a white shirt open at the neck and tied below her breasts.

  ‘Hi. I’d forgotten what you looked like.’ Smiling, she kissed him, then looked with mild disapproval at his suit and tie. ‘You’re not dressed for making sandcastles, Uncle Mike.’

  ‘I know, but I’m sure I’ll manage.’ He set Essie down and watched as she scampered back into the sea, aware of the damp patches on his shirt from wet, sandy limbs.

  ‘You’re likely to be called in?’

  ‘They’ve identified the murdered girl. We finally managed to contact her parents late last night and they’re expected back in Exeter this morning. Peterson’s going to give me a call when they’ve made the formal identification. I’m really sorry love, but I don’t know how long I’m going to be.’

  Maria slipped an arm through his and kissed him again. ‘I knew it would probably be like that,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll be just fine. Exeter, you say. She was a local girl then?’

  Mike nodded. ‘Born and brought up in Exeter. Studied at art college there, even lived in a shared house not two miles from her parents’ home. Quiet and rather shy, according to her teachers. Then suddenly she breaks the pattern and takes off without a word.’

  ‘Maybe no one knew her as well as they thought?’

  ‘Maybe.’ Mike sighed. He was dreading meeting the parents. ‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘I’ve got a while with you, and I can’t tell you how good it is to see you.’

  * * *

  Mike had a little over an hour with Maria and Essie before the inevitable call came through. As brief a time as it was, it helped get his mind back into gear and his life back into perspective. As he allowed himself to relax and play with Essie and chat with Maria, he realized just how much tension had built up over the previous weeks and how heavily Jake Bowen weighed upon his mind.

  Peterson’s call, when it came, was brief and to the point. The parents had identified Julia and were insisting on seeing where the body had been found. Mike was to meet them at the crime scene with Peterson.

  Mike frowned as he slipped the mobile phone into his pocket and told Maria he had to go.

  ‘Is that unusual?’ she asked. ‘For people to want to see the place?’
>
  ‘It happens, though usually later rather than immediately, but you can never tell what a bereaved family are going to do.’

  He hugged Essie goodbye, getting wet again. He slipped his jacket on over the sand stains on his shirt and kissed Maria, promising he’d see them later; then walked back to find his car.

  What had possessed a girl like Julia Norman to disappear as suddenly as she had and make no attempt to contact anyone? Or had she been unable to do so?

  Twelve weeks of captivity was an awesome thing to contemplate. Mike wondered just how soon into that time she had known that she was going to die.

  Mike was first to arrive back at the incident room in Colwell Barton. He spent the waiting time taking down the pin-board covered with the pictures of the dead girl and hiding it behind the hay bales in the corner, then tidying any other evidence out of sight. He heard the car pull up on the gravel outside only a few minutes later.

  The Normans were middle-aged, a little older than Mike would have anticipated. He stood stiffly, shoulders squared as though to attention, his gaze deliberately concentrated on whoever might be speaking, while Mrs Norman could hardly bear to meet anyone’s eyes.

  Peterson made the introductions.

  ‘I really am terribly sorry,’ Mike found himself saying, hating himself for the meaninglessness of such platitudes but at a loss as to what else he might do.

  Mr Norman nodded briefly and his wife murmured something that might have been thanks.

  ‘You’ll want to be getting on with this,’ Peterson said brusquely. He’d spent time with them already and realized that sympathy at this stage was more than either of them could take. ‘Mike, if you’d maybe lead the way. The going’s a bit rough, I’m afraid,’ he added, glancing down at Mrs Norman’s summer sandals.

  ‘If we could just go.’