by Iain Cameron
‘Not well as I only glanced round before one of them grabbed me and bundled me outside. The one who grabbed Cindy and slapped her was a big guy with a crew-cut and acned face, and the other, smaller and skinny, weaselly as my mother would say.’
‘Did you notice the car they drove?’
‘It was black, a big 4x4, maybe a BMW or Mercedes, I don’t know. I didn’t look too closely.’
‘What made you come back?’ Walters asked.
‘Initially, I thought it was none of my business. She’s very capable is Cindy and I thought she could handle it. Later on, after I’d thought about it and remembered the angry faces of the two guys, I came back. Maybe it’s got something to do with the finance to build this place.’
‘Doesn’t she own it?’
‘I don’t know if she does or she doesn’t, but if you saw her old place in Portslade, it was a shoe-box compared to this. To leap from there to a place like this takes a shed load of money, don’t you think?’
‘So, you came back,’ Henderson said, ‘expecting to find what? Cindy distressed or maybe beaten up?’
‘Yeah.’
‘When you didn’t find her, you called us?’
‘You got it.’
‘Have you tried calling her?’
She nodded. ‘Numerous times. It rings but she doesn’t answer.’
‘What do you think has happened to her?’
‘I really don’t know. I can’t think of any reason why someone would try and hurt her, she’s such a sweet person. Gave me a shoulder to cry on when my husband buggered off, and helped a lot to publicise Maggie’s Farm.’ She dabbed her eyes again.
‘You’ve obviously known Cindy for many years, do you know what she does when she isn’t working?’
‘Now there’s a story,’ she said. ‘She’s very righteous is our Cindy, campaigning against anything and everything. It could be fracking at Balcombe, the council’s treatment of Afghan refugees, building on the green belt. Any protest and Cindy is out there supporting it. I might be doing her a disservice as she must see some logic in the things she protests about, but I can’t.’
‘Is she married, does she have children?’
‘Christ, children! Who’s picking up Molly?’
‘Who’s Molly?’
‘Cindy’s daughter. When she divorced from that useless specimen of a husband, Greg Jackson, the boy went with him and she kept the girl. She’s a pupil at Hurstpierpoint College and Cindy told me she’s appearing in a play there tonight.’
Henderson turned to Walters.
‘I’m on it, gov,’ she said, getting up to leave.
‘We’ll send someone over to the school to pick her up,’ Henderson said.
‘Good,’ Maggie replied. ‘Make sure she goes to her father, useless as he is. I don’t think Cindy would be happy with her going into social services.’
‘Do you have her ex-husband’s address?’
‘Cindy has a black book of all her main contacts and stores it in the top drawer, right-hand side of her desk. He’ll be in there.’
‘Thanks. Is there anyone to look after the studio in Cindy’s absence?’
‘She’s got an assistant, Annie Heath. She works four days a week. She should be here in the morning.’
‘If not, I assume her name is in the address book?’
She smiled, the first. ‘You got it.’
Henderson said goodbye to Maggie Hyatt a few minutes later and headed back into Cindy’s office at the far end of the building. He edged around the room, careful not to disturb anything as he hadn’t yet decided to call in a forensics team. It was then he noticed the blood on the desk. He wouldn’t have spotted it on the wood of the desk, but some had marked nearby papers.
Using tweezers, he carefully lifted some items out of the way and his curiosity was rewarded when he spotted a button, small and opaque, from a shirt or a blouse.
He heard Walters come in.
‘I’ve sent Sally Graham to pick up Molly from her school,’ she said, ‘and I told Phil Bentley to talk to our other witness, Lidia Rathbone. He’s good with the old ladies, he’s been out with enough of them.’
‘You leave Phil alone.’
‘He deserves it.’
‘Look at this,’ Henderson said, pointing at the blood and button.
‘Do we know what Cindy was wearing?’
‘No. Give Maggie a call and find out.’
‘What do you think? She got thumped and fell back on the desk, spilling the blood?’
‘Maybe a tussle with someone grabbing the front of her blouse followed by a smack.’
‘Do you think she’s been raped?’
‘It’s a messy desk, but there’s no evidence to suggest it. I’ve been debating whether I should get forensics in here, but seeing this, I’ve decided I will. With luck, it’ll also clear up the ‘R’ question.’
‘Fair enough.’
‘If Lidia corroborates Maggie’s story, it establishes that Cindy is a kidnap victim. By whom and for what reason we don’t yet know. My hope is when the forensics boys come in here, they will find something to help us, otherwise there’s a busy private and professional life we need to trawl through.’
‘I’m up for it.’
‘Even with a new man on the scene?’
‘I won’t miss a beat.’
THREE
Greg Jackson took off his jacket and hung it with care on a peg in the hall. It wasn’t as if he was trying to look after an expensive item of climbing gear made by the likes of North Face or Rab. It was a thin, crappy thing, bought from a department store, but he couldn’t afford to buy another.
His son, Jamie, seventeen and heading for the same aimless lifestyle he lived if the boy’s recent academic results were anything to go by, was out at a party tonight. It wouldn’t be with a girl as these modern teenagers, or at least Jamie and his friends, didn’t go in for this sort of thing. He’d seen some of Jamie’s female classmates when he used to drop him off at school, and he couldn’t help but be mystified by his voluntary abstinence. The poor boy had to be gay or stupid.
It was good job his son was away this evening as otherwise Greg would only take out his bad mood on him. His boss at Harris Manufacturing where he worked in Burgess Hill, Gary Richardson, had been on his case all day. If it wasn’t about the price of raw materials, not his fault, the cost of temps in their Hassocks warehouse, partly his fault, it was about the high levels of scrap. He worked in Accounts not Manufacturing, the stupid prat.
He took a beer from the fridge, noting he needed to buy some more, popped the ring pull and took a seat in the lounge, contemplating another Friday night alone. Time was when he would be upstairs taking a shower, getting dressed in his best togs and dashing out the door with whatever food he could eat while walking. The evening would then be spent with his mates in a pub in the centre of Brighton followed by a late-night session in a noisy night club.
His youth hadn’t quite passed him by, but he didn’t feel he’d experienced enough of it. He’d had his share of one-night stands, but as soon as some attraction developed, he’d fall into a long-term relationship with all the enthusiasm of an American evangelist preacher. Before he knew it, a couple of years had passed with nothing much to show for them.
Following a few relationships like this, he met and married Cindy. They were happy together for ten years and, looking back, had lived a good life. He’d been at the early stages of his accountancy career, studying for exams and looking forward to qualifying in the not too distant future. Cindy opened a small studio in Portslade and it was steadily growing in popularity. What went wrong, he couldn’t put his finger on, but when they split, she was making plans to move to a bigger place and he was facing a future as a dogsbody having flunked his exams and been sacked from a good job for incompetence.
He often felt like this on Fridays. A day that promised so much with the end of the working week and an opportunity at night to unwind and leave all the problems of life behi
nd. Now, all he had to look forward to was Saturday supermarket shopping in Tesco and a weekend in front of the telly, as Jamie spent most of his time in his room.
He put the beer can to his lips but found it empty. He crushed it, annoyed for drinking so quickly as he had only one left. It took an effort to get up from the settee and walk back into the kitchen. He dumped the can in the bin and opened the fridge, not to remove the remaining beer, but to see what he could cook for tea.
Despite being badly paid and not able to afford to put his son into the same school as his daughter, Molly, he would not economise on food. He had learned to cook while married to Cindy as she frequently went out to meetings or discussion groups where the zealots would plan their next day of protest. He was happy to support Cindy on marches, but he refused to sit and listen to a load of old windbags moaning about the government, big business, capitalists, the Americans or any number of protagonists responsible for screwing up the lives they wanted to lead.
If he ever did attend such a gathering, he would tell them it wasn’t anyone else’s fault they hated everyone, it was their own. If they hadn’t messed around at school, smoking in bike sheds, staring out of the window and haranguing teachers with their stupid questions, they might have made something of themselves. Then, they would have something more important to worry about than fracking or somebody else’s refuse collections. How did he know this? He’d made the same mistakes himself.
He took out a paring knife from the drawer and sharpened it. He pulled over the vegetable rack where he removed a carrot, cabbage, peppers and an onion, and over the next ten minutes, shredded the lot. He put the wok on the cooker, lit the gas and turned it up high. While waiting for the oil to heat, he took out a thigh of uncooked chicken from the fridge and cut it into pieces. When the wok reached a suitable working temperature, he scooped up the chicken pieces and placed them inside, the sizzling drowning out the radio in the background. When the chicken was cooked, he tipped in the vegetables.
A few minutes later, he carried a tray into the lounge with a delicious-smelling meal and his last can of beer. He put the tray down and switched on the television. He refused to pay the exorbitant charges for Sky or cable and made do with Freeview, but being so indiscriminate in his tastes, he could usually find something to while away a few hours.
He started watching a crime drama. It was fine for the first hour, by which time he’d finished the stir-fry, the last drops of beer and a plate of ice-cream and fruit. However, when the plot alighted upon a fraud taking place at the office where one of the main characters worked, he lost all concentration as it brought it all back.
He’d been sacked from his previous job at Mathieson Transport, not because he’d done anything wrong, but he’d failed to spot the thieving activities of two men working there. Their job was to empty the huge forty-tonne articulated lorries that brought goods into the UK from all over Europe, but in doing so, they were helping themselves to some of the merchandise. During the rancour and recrimination that followed, it didn’t help his case when he accused, with some justification, the owner of Mathieson Transport, Ted Mathieson, of having an affair with his wife.
For a while afterwards, he couldn’t get another job, driving a further wedge into his relationship with Cindy. After months of trying he ended up at his current place, Harris Manufacturing, a small producer of bespoke items for the aerospace industry, and there he would stay. It wasn’t a bad place to be if he could ignore the huge amounts of money being made by his boss and his two direct reports.
The negative thoughts were making him feel agitated and he couldn’t remember what had happened in the crime drama over the previous half hour. He walked into the box room at the back of the house, euphemistically called a study, lifted his laptop and headed back into the lounge. He switched it on, put it to one side to allow it to boot-up and carried on watching television.
Five minutes later it was ready. He turned down the sound on the television and picked up the laptop. Loading his web browser, he selected a website from his list of ‘favourites’, an adult dating site. If a woman had expressed an interest in his profile, he would have already received an email, a text and probably a ‘Halleluiah! Someone’s Interested!’ alert on his phone, so that wasn’t his reason for logging on. He wanted to see if any new women were on the site.
While browsing, he searched for a woman in his office, Debbie Payne, as he’d overheard her telling someone she’d recently joined the same dating site. He found her after a time but the reason it took so long was the photograph on the screen didn’t look a bit like her. She was a reasonably attractive woman, mid-forties, a bit overweight with thick dark hair, but the woman on the website was a cracker; young, early thirties and blonde. The bio read like the woman he knew, even if she was gilding the lily a touch when she claimed to spend her free time hill-walking and dancing, as he knew she preferred watching television and going to the cinema.
He stopped to consider if this was something he needed to do, post a flattering younger picture of himself. Not that he owned many pictures of himself unless he went back at least seven years to the studio shots taken by Cindy. He opened the ‘Photos’ app on the laptop and scanned some of his old pictures. He spent the next couple of hours looking at photographs, some memories making him smile and others leaving him melancholy. In the end, he found one he liked and loaded it up on the website.
He looked at the clock and decided to shut the laptop down. He went into the hall, grabbed his jacket and headed out to the car. He felt happier than he often did on a Friday night and wondered why he hadn’t thought about doing something like this before. He’d dated a couple of women from the site and noticed they never looked the same as their pictures. He assumed at the time they’d used an old one as they didn’t have anything more recent, or they’d been members of the site for a while and hadn’t updated their picture, but he knew Debbie in the office hadn’t been doing it for long.
It was approaching midnight by the time he parked outside the house of Jamie’s friend, Alex. He was under strict instructions not to come to the door. He wouldn’t dream of it, as the sight of a seventeen-year-old with pecs bursting through a tight t-shirt, a nubile young thing on one arm and a bottle of beer on the other would age him faster than Mother Nature could.
He was on the point of phoning, an activity designed to give him something to do as Jamie would never pick up, when the front door opened and the boy himself strolled out, walking like a gangsta rapper. His son never ‘strolled’ anywhere, as he was introverted and had self-confidence issues, so Jackson knew he’d been drinking or taking drugs. His behaviour had been a problem ever since the divorce, but now combined with teenage angst and anxiety, it had mushroomed.
He missed the car’s door handle at the first attempt and after succeeding, fell inside the car and made it into the passenger seat more by accident than design.
‘Hey,’ he slurred. His usual complexion was white with an array of angry red spots, but in the sodium light of a Burgess Hill street it looked pasty-grey. People were hospitalised for less.
‘Drive on, driver,’ he said, a stupid grin splitting his face.
‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’
‘Eh?’
‘Seat belt.’
‘Ah.’
He watched as Jamie, with one eye closed, tried to spear the tongue into the buckle without success. After a few further attempts, Jackson got fed up waiting and plugged it in himself.
‘Ah was gettin’ there,’ Jamie said, his alcohol-laden breath a little too close.
‘When?’ he asked as he drove off. ‘Next Wednesday?’
‘Ha, ha you made a joke.’
Jamie laughed, not the sarcastic laugh of the boss when he heard a delivery would be late, but the hearty chortle of the inebriated.
There was no point in asking him how the party went, he would have to wait until morning and hear the more comprehensible version. They drove in a sort of silence, the radio
playing low and Jamie talking to himself. It was the gibberish of the plastered, not the coherent conversations he used to have with his imaginary friend, Eric, aged twelve or thirteen.
‘Can you go slower, Dad?’ Jamie said, ‘I feel a bit sick.’
‘I’m going no faster than the speed limit. Don’t you dare throw up in my bloody car, or you’ll get the job of cleaning it.’
‘Yeah, I can see me…’
He’d lost the thread and rested his head against the window with his eyes closed. They made it back to the house without incident. Jackson was so busy trying to get his son out of the car without him falling face-first on the pavement, he failed to notice the police car parked across the street or the copper walking towards him.
‘Good evening, sir.’
He looked up. A woman stood there, conservatively dressed in dark trousers and zip-up jacket, pretty face, her blonde hair tied back in a ponytail. Wicked thoughts of his dating website sending women out for personal visits stopped when he noticed the police ID she was holding up for him to see.
‘Detective Constable Graham, Sussex Police.’
Shit, he’d only drunk two cans of beer and didn’t remember doing anything wrong, except maybe not indicating as he turned into his street as there wasn’t anyone around.
‘Are you Greg Jackson?’
‘Ye…yes. Why do you want to know?’
‘Are you the former husband of Cindy Longhurst?’
‘Yes, I am. Why?’
Jamie seemed to lose interest and wandered off, walking unsteadily towards the front door of the house. If he had trouble opening the car door handle, he would need some luck finding his key and trying to fit it into the little keyhole.
‘Can we step inside for a moment?’
‘What’s this about?’
‘Can we just move inside, sir?’
He racked his brains. He was the law-abiding sort, but the huge money made by bosses at the place where he worked did rankle. They drove big saloon cars and took holidays at the MD’s villa in Barbados. Those on the shop floor could barely afford two weeks in Mallorca.
