Girls on Film: (DI Angus Henderson 7)

by Iain Cameron

  At the base of the hollow, a pile of broken bricks, wall render, smashed glass and bent pipes, into which a couple of coppers were carefully sifting.

  A few minutes later one of the officers looked up and saw Henderson. ‘There’s nothing under it, sir. Some bastard has littered this fine park where I take my kids every Sunday with all the crap from a demolished conservatory.’

  EIGHT

  Henderson parked his dirty Audi estate beside a sparkling clean and beautiful red Ferrari 488 GTB. Ignoring the protests by DS Walters about the cold and biting wind, he stood for a moment to admire the gleaming paintwork, the stunning lines of the body styling, the alloy wheels and its sumptuous interior.

  He wondered if all the accessories he could see, the satnav, digital radio, leather seats and all the rest were included in the one hundred thousand pounds plus list price. With every car he’d ever looked at, the enticing quoted price was thousands of pounds less than the final price paid after installing a range of ‘optional accessories’ that many owners considered essential.

  ‘Can we go inside now?’ Walters said, exasperation evident in her voice. ‘I’m freezing my socks off out here.’

  ‘It’s a good job the car doors aren’t open,’ he said as they walked towards the entrance of Mathieson Transport, ‘then you’d never get me away.’

  ‘Praise be.’

  The receptionist had been expecting them and, without much delay, led them upstairs to Ted Mathieson’s office. On seeing the officers approaching, Mathieson put the phone down and came out to meet them.

  ‘Can I get you anything before we sit down,’ he said after introductions. ‘Tea, coffee, water?’

  ‘Coffee for me,’ Henderson said.

  ‘And for me,’ Walters said.

  ‘Three coffees, Andrea, and close the door behind you. Oh, and Andrea, hold my calls.’

  ‘This is a nice office, Mr Mathieson,’ Henderson said, taking a seat facing Mathieson’s desk. It was a bright and airy room with modern furniture, television on the wall, glass-fronted cabinets and not an unpleasant view over the tops of neighbouring businesses, the grey sea lurking in the distance.

  ‘It’s not bad. Most people think of offices in transport companies as being small, an in-tray full of grubby invoices, a bin overflowing with empty paper cups and girlie calendars on the wall. We’ve got one of those. It’s called the Dispatch Office, but it’s downstairs.’

  Mathieson was a sharp dresser, a chubby figure neatly attired in a well-trimmed blue striped suit, white shirt and a patterned tie, suitable attire Henderson imagined, to sit behind the wheel of the expensive vehicle outside. However, the stylish accoutrements couldn’t disguise the face: a hard expression, one not familiar with smiling. When added to the hawk-like eyes, it gave an overall look that wouldn’t seem out of place in a police mug-shot.

  ‘We’re here, Mr Mathieson because we are investigating the disappearance of photographer, Cindy Longhurst.’

  ‘Bloody odd it is. Cindy’s the last person someone could hold a grudge against. She’s kind, generous, would help anyone in trouble. You’ve probably heard about her protest activities, well it just sums her up. She can’t just sit on the sofa stuffing her face with biscuits and watching soaps like most people. When she sees something out there that she perceives as an example of injustice, or indifferent government, she’ll let people know she doesn’t agree with it. Ah, here’s the coffee.’

  Andrea’s timing was good as just then, the loud roar of a lorry gunning its massive engine filled the air and rattled the windows of Mathieson’s office, making conversation impossible. A few seconds later, the noise faded into the distance when the truck left the yard and made its way towards its destination.

  ‘What’s your relationship with Cindy, Mr Mathieson?’ Henderson asked after Andrea had left the room and closed the door.

  Mathieson sat back in his chair, comfortable to be asked an easy question.

  ‘I gave her a loan to help start her business.’

  ‘How did that come about?’

  ‘If we wind the clock back eight, nine years, her ex-husband Greg Jackson used to work for me.’

  ‘Yes, we know.’

  ‘You maybe didn’t know he doesn’t work here now because I sacked him.’

  He was right, Henderson didn’t know. ‘Why did you do that?’

  ‘Incompetence, pure and simple. A couple of people in the loading bay crew, I won’t mention their names, were on the fiddle. Anything and everything, it didn’t matter, they nicked goods from lorries, diesel from the store and personal stuff from the lockers of other drivers. Jackson, as my finance guy, should have spotted it earlier but he didn’t. At first, I suspected he was in collusion with the thieves and trying to cover it up, you know, but I realised he was too dumb and scared to be involved in something like that.’

  ‘So, you sacked him.’

  ‘Him and the two thieves, but not before the other members of the crew got a hold of them and handed out their own form of justice.’

  This was a story he no doubt told down the pub on a Friday night, the aggrieved drivers getting their own back on the guys with the temerity to steal their things. ‘You don’t expect me to condone the taking of the law into your own hands, do you, sir?’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘Was it through Greg that you met Cindy?’

  ‘Yeah, before the fiddling started, myself and my wife, the one before the current Mrs Mathieson, used to socialise with them. Cindy’s great fun and she and I get along like a house on fire. After a time, she realised her husband didn’t like going out in a foursome and neither did my wife. So, the two of us would meet for lunch or dinner whenever the notion took.’

  ‘How did the investment in her business come about?’

  ‘She bought a big house in Hurstpierpoint after she received a large inheritance from her grandmother…’ He looked over at Henderson who nodded.

  ‘The house came with a couple of acres of land and one day she came up with the idea for a studio. Not just a room to take photos, but a fully-equipped photographic suite where filmmakers can come and shoot videos and make adverts. I must admit, I was sceptical at first, but Cindy can be persuasive when she sets her mind on something, and right from the off, she made it work. It’s now one of the main studios in the south and profitable too.’

  ‘It’s a bit of a departure from this,’ Henderson said, casting an arm around the office, ‘to a photography studio.’

  For a moment, Mathieson looked shifty, as if a feeling of guilt had passed over. Maybe for not telling his new wife about the loan, although Henderson doubted she would notice. Mathieson didn’t look short of money.

  ‘Sure, it’s the first time I’ve spent big money on something outside the world that I know, transport and distribution. However, I invested not so much in the photography business, which I admit I know bugger-all about, but in her. I invested in Cindy. She told me she could make it work and I had faith in her.’ He tapped his forefinger on the desk. ‘She pays me on the nail every month.’

  ‘Where were you on the night she disappeared: Friday 26th January?’

  He picked up a fat desk dairy, and even at this early stage in the year, it looked to be well used.

  ‘Ah, I was there,’ he said smiling. He snapped the diary shut. ‘I don’t know if you remember, but there was a big outbreak of flu just before Christmas. Half the buses in Brighton weren’t running because of it.’

  Henderson nodded. ‘We were short-staffed too.’

  ‘I’ve got a nine-year-old. I’ve got two grown up kids as well by my first wife, so it’s second-time round for me doing all this school stuff again, but to tell you the truth, I love it. A load of teachers and pupils at my daughter’s school came down with flu a week before the Christmas break and couldn’t put on the big play they’d been rehearsing. The night Cindy went missing, I was watching Snow White do her rescheduled thing with her seven little men at Hurstpierpoint College.’
<
br />   This rang a bell in Henderson’s head. Cindy’s daughter, Molly, also went to Hurstpierpoint College.

  ‘Can anyone verify your attendance?’

  ‘Sure, I talked to a number of people that night. I’ll write down their names if you like.’

  When finished, he handed the paper to Henderson. The DI glanced at it before asking, ‘What do you think has happened to Cindy?’

  ‘Christ, I wish I knew. I’d tie them to the back of one of my lorries and drag them around Newhaven for an hour. Cindy’s a dear, dear friend of mine and I hope to God you find her soon, safe and well.’

  Five minutes later, the detectives left Mathieson’s office and walked back to the car.

  ‘I believe him,’ Henderson said.

  ‘Me too. I think the sincerity he showed back there is hard to fake.’

  ‘It is. However, I’m tempted to take a look into the financials of his company and find out how profitable this business really is. I’ve always believed transport companies ran on tight margins, especially if they’re working so closely with national supermarkets as Mathieson does.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘If so, how come,’ he said as he started the car and headed back to Lewes, ‘he’s got such a fantastic car, smart office and, no doubt, a very expensive house?’

  ‘You said you’re only tempted.’

  ‘I think it’s a distraction we can all do without.’

  ‘Maybe you could–’

  Henderson’s phone rang. He pressed ‘receive’ on the steering wheel and the voice of DS Harry Wallop boomed through the car’s speakers.

  ‘Morning, sir.’

  ‘Morning, Harry.’

  ‘I hate to say it, but we have another sighting.’

  ‘What is this,’ Henderson said, looking at Walters in amazement, ‘Groundhog Day?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Yesterday when you called about the Wild Park sighting we were on the point of leaving Harris Manufacturing after talking to Greg Jackson. Today you’ve called as we’re coming out of Mathieson Transport after seeing Ted Mathieson. What is it this time, a load of old cars?’

  ‘It’s another sighting I’m afraid, sir, but I guarantee it’s not another pile of rubble. There’s a body and I think it’s our missing woman.’

  **

  Henderson had driven through Saltdean numerous times but he couldn’t recall ever stopping there. This part of East Sussex from Rottingdean to Peacehaven was dotted with thousands of bungalows and hundreds of retirement homes. They were occupied in the main by the aged, living on the south coast to benefit from the sunshine, sea air and bracing walks along the tops of spectacular cliffs.

  The naked body of Cindy Longhurst lay at the bottom of one of those cliffs. He knew it was Cindy as soon as he saw her; he’d looked at her picture every day, every working hour, for the past week. He needed to look hard, mind you, as her face and body were bloody, bruised and battered, not from falling off the cliff tops some forty metres above his head, but from being beaten before receiving a bullet to the head. This wasn’t his theory, but the educated initial assessment of the pathologist, Grafton Rawlings, currently kneeling down on the pebbles beside the corpse.

  Henderson felt sick. Despite being aware of the low probability of finding her alive due to the violent nature of her abduction, he had harboured a measure of hope that they would. Call it blind optimism or something about the case that gave him hope, he couldn’t say, but the sight of her broken and battered body lying on the stones hit him hard.

  He could see Walters standing on the under-cliff walkway, talking to the person who found her, a dog walker with a lively pooch that couldn’t keep out of the water despite the cold temperatures. Once again, Henderson knelt down opposite the pathologist.

  He didn’t say anything for a few minutes before he looked at Henderson.

  ‘I would say she hasn’t been here long, perhaps dumped a few hours back when it was still dark. She has a number of injuries and maybe a few broken bones, but I can’t be sure until I get her back to the mortuary. What I can say with some degree of certainty is her injuries didn’t kill her. The bullet to the head certainly did.’

  ‘Has she been in the water?’

  ‘No. So, we can rule out being transported here by the tide. She was definitely dumped here.’

  He heard a crunching noise and looked up to see two people approaching.

  ‘Here come the stretcher bearers.’

  Henderson stood and stretched his tired muscles.

  Walters finished talking to her witness and walked over to join the DI.

  ‘There’s no vehicle access down here, according to our witness,’ Walters said. ‘Therefore, he or they must have dragged or carried the body all the way down here.’

  ‘It might be restricted access for the public, they don’t want cars driving up and down the under-cliff walkway and annoying pedestrians and running over dogs, but vehicles must be able to get down here. How else could they build and maintain the walkway?’

  ‘I didn’t think of that, but if they did come down here in a vehicle in the middle of the night, who would notice one car or a van? There wouldn’t be anyone around.’

  ‘Yeah, especially in winter. Call the office and get some more people down here. We need to know how they did it. Once we’ve established the where and the how, get a team moving door-to-door and see if there are any insomniacs in the houses nearby, or if anyone was woken by the noise of a vehicle at some ungodly hour.’

  ‘I’m on it.’

  ‘In many respects, it’s not a bad place to dump a body. In winter, only a few people walk along the beach, especially if the weather’s inclement. Come high tide, the sea will help to wash away clues and aid decomposition. Maybe by finding the body before that happened, we’ve bought ourselves a slice of luck for a change.’

  NINE

  Mike Harrison loved to paint. He could turn his hand to most things: plastering, woodwork, bricklaying, but painting was his passion. Not only did it give him time to do some daydreaming, as pushing the roller up and down didn’t require much concentration, but the results were instantaneous, ergo one happy customer.

  In his line of work, a self-employed handyman, he could be anywhere in Sussex, Surrey or Kent doing a job. The cost of fuel not only ate into his profits, but with each new piece of work he didn’t know what he’d find until he got there. It could be a flooded house, the limb of a tree embedded in a smashed roof, or rotting windows and rotting everything else.

  What he liked, and what every other self-employed tradesman he knew wanted to get their hands on was a steady job. He’d worked at Hillcrest House, near Shermanbury, for almost a year. The house was built in the 1800s but had been considerably remodelled since the businessman who owned it bought it ten years ago. Despite the extensive renovation, any old house required regular maintenance, and with a customer as fastidious as this one, all the little updates and changes he wanted created plenty of work for Harrison.

  He finished the first coat of Peachy Pink but didn’t step back to admire his handiwork. He knew how good it would be without looking, and in any case, he was desperate for a fag and a cup of tea. He tidied up his workspace in the event someone should walk in, not that anyone would, the owner was at work at his wine business in Brighton while his wife, Julia, would still be in bed. Julia was what his barbed-tongued elderly mother would call a ‘soak’. A woman who would spend the morning buying clothes, enjoying coffee with her friends before cracking open a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc while watching the afternoon soaps.

  He didn’t know for sure, he didn’t come to the house every day, but piecing together her morning-after face, the empty bottles and occasional pieces of broken furniture or a door he was required to fix, she would often be drunk by the time her husband came home. Harrison had been married and his ex-missus liked a drink, but he would’ve given her hell if he ever came home and found her drunk. She couldn’t drink in the afternoons anyway, t
radesmen like him weren’t paid as much as self-made businessmen, and she had to work for a living, teaching special-needs children how to read and write.

  Harrison wouldn’t put it past the husband to give her a good smack now and again. He’d never seen any evidence of this, but it didn’t stop him speculating. He liked to gossip as much as the next man.

  Julia Webster was a good-looking woman with wavy shoulder length blonde hair, a slight frame and the most piercing blue eyes he’d ever seen. Once or twice he’d found himself standing outside her bedroom door, his hand inching towards the handle. Her bedroom was down the hall from the spare room he was painting and it would be a simple thing to do, turn the handle and walk in. She liked him, he knew she did, and wouldn’t be fazed by his presence, but he was wary of her husband.

  Today, he walked past Julia’s bedroom without a sideways glance and headed downstairs. The housekeeper nodded a curt ‘hello’ as she dusted a mirror, but never did he receive a smile from the miserable cow. He opened the back door and took his familiar seat on the bench facing the fields. He never tired of the view: woods to one side, open and rolling hills in front and more woods on the other side. It changed from season to season and now in early February, the grass was covered in a silver sheen and the trees all huddled together in the breeze as if trying to keep warm.

  He filled a cup with tea from his flask and sparked up, sending out a large cloud of smoke and condensation into the air. In the early days of his apprenticeship as a painter, the old guys used to warn him about the danger of having open flames near oil-based paints and spirits. It was good advice as he’d once seen a couple of guys become engulfed in flames and he’d heard that fumes absorbed by clothes could become a fire hazard even when the painter returned home. It wasn’t a worry nowadays, most household paints were water-based and didn’t produce any fumes, inflammable or otherwise.