Walk a Narrow Mile

by Faith Martin

  And she wasn’t. She moved off towards one of the converted barns, and came back a scant five minutes later, toting a heavy-looking backpack, and a curious, pony-tailed friend.

  Hillary glanced at her watch. It was nearly three. Say an hour to get back, if they didn’t run into too much traffic. Yeah, there’d be time for a good debriefing.

  She nodded to Gilly and her friend and followed them part way to another large barn where a row of various vehicles, some of them in an even worse state than Puff, were lined up. Gilly made her way to a sporty little Mini, that had to be twenty years old, but still looked good.

  ‘Jimbo’s our resident mechanic and car buff. He loves waxing the old girl and treating her,’ Gilly said, patting the hood of the car affectionately. ‘He says he gonna give her a racing stripe one day.’

  Hillary nodded, marvelling yet again at how the Gillians of the world seemed to get all the luck and watched her and her friend climb in. She called curtly, ‘Follow me closely all the way back, yeah? I’ll fix a parking space for you at HQ if need be.’

  Gilly nodded dutifully, and her friend, though clearly puzzled, grinned good-naturedly in response.

  Hillary walked back to the Volkswagen, and sighed at it in passing. ‘Don’t suppose you fancy a racing stripe, do you?’ she asked sardonically.

  The car started at the very first attempt, as if wanting to court her favour. Perhaps it really did fancy a racing stripe at that.

  Dream on, rustbucket, Hillary thought, but was wise enough not to say it out loud.

  On the way back, she was careful to wait until she was stuck in a line of traffic before using her mobile. The last thing she needed was to get done by a conscientious traffic cop.

  She called Steven’s office direct. ‘Hello, look it’s me,’ she said, the moment he answered. ‘I need you to find and round up Geoff wherever he is and get him into the office. I’ve just caught a massive break in the case, and I’m bringing in a crucial witness,’ she said, her eyes on the car ahead, which luckily still showed no sign of moving. ‘And you’re never going to guess who it is,’ she couldn’t resist crowing, just a little bit.

  There was a moment of ominous silence on the other end of the line, and then Superintendent Steven Crayle said coldly, ‘You managed to break the case and find a witness, huh? Many of them about, are there, in your sickbed, back on the boat?’

  Ah, Hillary thought.

  Oh yeah.

  Shit.

  ‘Uh, I suddenly felt better?’ she offered.

  She braced herself as she knocked on Steven’s door and walked in at his curt summons. Seated opposite his desk was DI Geoff Rhumer and in a corner, trying to look invisible, Jimmy Jessop, who shot her a boy-are-you-for-it look in warning.

  Hillary smiled brightly, stepped to one side, and ushered in Gilly. Out in the car-park, whilst her pony-tailed friend settled down to wait patiently, Hillary had asked her if she had a hat or a cap that she could wear. Though clearly puzzled by the request, Gilly had obligingly rummaged about in her backpack and found a bright green golfing cap and put it on. This she now took off as she walked past Hillary and glanced around.

  Hillary could tell at a glance that none of the men in the room had recognized her. ‘Gilly, this is Superintendent Crayle, DI Rhumer, and former Sergeant Jessop. Gentlemen, meet Gillian Tinkerton.’

  There was a moment of profound silence.

  ‘Hello,’ Gilly said nervously, sensing the odd atmosphere. ‘Gosh, are all you important people really here because of me?’ she asked, again with a decidedly nervous laugh.

  Jimmy Jessop, suddenly aware that he was doing a stunned mullet impersonation of great breadth and scope, abruptly snapped shut his gaping jaw. Geoff Rhumer half rose, then subsided again. Steven Crayle studied Hillary with those dark, damned sexy eyes of his. They promised retribution later, and the thought made her shiver.

  She held his gaze with a bland smile of her own. ‘I found Gilly living at one of the artists’ communities that Sammy and Vivienne found for me, sir. We just need to get her statement about where she’s been which shouldn’t take us long. Perhaps we can get a WPC in to take it?’

  Steven, still keeping his smouldering eyes on Hillary, reached for his intercom and summoned a WPC, who took a slightly bewildered Gilly away, after Hillary had fully briefed her on what was needed. ‘And don’t enter her name just yet into the system,’ Hillary told the WPC as she was leaving. ‘For the moment this is strictly hush hush. When you’ve done the paperwork, don’t file it anywhere, but bring everything back down here to me. Oh, and, Constable, you don’t talk about this to anyone. Not even your guv’nor. Got it?’

  The WPC nodded, obviously impressed by the seriousness of Hillary’s voice, and left. When the door closed behind her, Geoff Rhumer said, helplessly, ‘I don’t get it.’ And that, he thought, as far as understatements went, was up there with the best.

  ‘What the hell’s going on, guv?’ Jimmy agreed.

  Hillary slowly took the seat next to Geoff, and looked across at Steven. ‘First of all, sorry about going off on my own. I just had an off-the-wall hunch that probably wouldn’t pan out, and if it hadn’t, I didn’t want any witnesses to it, that’s all.’

  Steven nodded slowly. ‘We’ll discuss that later,’ he said, with a slight twist to his lips that had Hillary’s eyes briefly flaring in response. ‘Right now, let’s just have it. From the beginning.’

  Hillary nodded.

  ‘OK. Here goes. Right from the start, when I began looking in to these three girls’ disappearances, things didn’t seem to fit quite right. Little things didn’t make sense or add up. I couldn’t seem to get a purchase, a grip on anything solid. And I finally realized that it was because I already had the solution – or thought I did – and that I was just trying to find the facts to fit the theory, namely, that a stalker had killed all three girls, when, normally what I would have been doing at the start of a case is trying to find the facts first, and then see what theory fitted them.

  ‘So I decided to put aside everything we thought we knew, and approach it as I would any other cold case – or any other potential murder case, come to that – and the more I investigated, the odder it became.’ She paused and tried to marshal her sometimes chaotic thoughts into a coherent whole.

  ‘Let’s take Gilly first. She didn’t fit in with the other two girls, because (a) she’d told her family she was going, and (b) she’d packed some things. So, taking Lol out of the picture, what would I normally have thought would be the most likely thing to have happened to her?’ Hillary turned to Jimmy here and raised an eyebrow. ‘The obvious, right? That she’d simply gone off somewhere, like her family all thought.’

  Jimmy nodded. ‘Right, guv.’ If those were the only facts that they’d had, that would have been just what was assumed.

  ‘OK. Now let’s move on to Meg Vickary,’ Hillary said. ‘She was a totally different kettle of fish from Gilly. She was vain about her looks, and was known to use men to get what she wanted from life. She liked money, and the good life, and she had an affair with her married boss that went sour. When I began to look into her case, lo and behold, we come across a costa con. A man loaded with money, who’d been known to be interested in Meg. Now, what would you think, Jimmy, if Meg suddenly up and left?’

  ‘That’s she’d run off and shacked up with the con, and was living la dolce vita somewhere warm, guv,’ Jimmy said at once, nodding.

  ‘Wait a minute though,’ Geoff Rhumer put in. ‘She didn’t just give her married lover the heave-ho and go though, did she? She disappeared. She didn’t pack any clothes, didn’t clear out her bank accounts, nor did she work out her notice or tell anyone where she was going.’

  ‘Quite right,’ Hillary agreed promptly. ‘No, for Meg, everything seemed to point to her being the victim of foul play,’ Hillary agreed, making both Geoff and Jimmy frown.

  This time it was Jimmy who said simply, ‘I don’t get it, guv.’

  ‘No, neither did
I, Jimmy,’ Hillary said. ‘Not at first. At least, not until I began to think about Meg Vickary’s personality. Right from the start, do you remember, Georgia Biggs seemed sure that Marcus Kane had had something to do with her disappearance?’

  ‘Yes, she did,’ Jimmy agreed.

  ‘But why? Unlike Ruth Coombs, she had no interest in Kane. She hadn’t even met the man. And she wasn’t an obsessive personality type like Ruth either. She might have been friendly with her flatmate, sure, but I never got the feeling that they were bosom buddies. So where was the only place that Georgia could have got that impression from?’

  It was Steven who answered of course. Of all the men in the room, Hillary knew that he was the brightest and quickest. ‘From Meg herself,’ he said, and when Hillary turned to nod at him, he smiled. ‘I get it. You think that Meg wanted people to worry about her, to report her missing, to…’ He nodded slowly. ‘Of course. In order to give Marcus Kane a hard time.’

  ‘Yes,’ Hillary said. ‘Remember, Meg Vickary was used to twisting men around her little finger. She married her first husband for money and, when his business crashed, got rid of him quickly enough. And she soon found Marcus to be husband number two.’

  ‘Only he wasn’t playing ball,’ Jimmy put in.

  ‘No. He was too comfortably married to a rich woman of his own. Moreover, one with a powerful daddy. When Meg finally realized that he wasn’t going to divorce her, she looked around for another meal ticket. And found him. But Meg is vain and spiteful, and she wanted to stir up trouble for her ex-lover. She definitely wasn’t the forgive-and-forget kind. So when she left, she made damned sure that she was leaving a giant headache for him behind her – and she succeeded. I bet, right now, Kane is ruing the day he ever hired her! Anyway, she carefully planted seeds of doubt in Georgia Biggs’s mind about her relationship with Kane, so that when she vanished, Georgia would report her missing. She carefully packed no clothes, and told no one that she was going. It probably irked her to have to leave her money behind, but then again, she didn’t really have that much in her accounts, and besides, Hardwicke was loaded. He’d be taking care of all the bills from now on and showering her with baubles and the best champagne anyway. All she needed was to get abroad without the use of her passport. She’d guess that the police would run a routine check to make sure that it wasn’t used. But then to a man like Hardwicke, setting her up with a fake passport would be a cinch. I’ve got a friend over in Spain now who’s taking some photos of Hardwicke and his household. Until they come in, we can’t be one hundred per cent sure, but’ – she shrugged graphically – ‘I’m willing to bet a year’s wages that when they do, we’ll have some good snapshots of Meg Vickary alive and well and sunning herself by the pool.’

  Geoff Rhumer shifted in his seat, shaking his head. ‘Bloody hell. If I hadn’t seen Gillian Tinkerton with my own eyes—’

  ‘You’d be thinking I was going off my rocker,’ Hillary finished for him without rancour. ‘Yes, and I wouldn’t blame you. I’ve been wondering the same thing myself lately. When I first thought all this out, I kept thinking I must have got it wrong somehow. It just seemed so unbelievable. So you can see why I couldn’t bring any of you in on what I was after, until I had some solid proof.’

  Jimmy’s lips twisted. ‘They don’t come more solid than Gillian, guv.’

  Hillary laughed. ‘No.’

  ‘She is a big lass,’ Geoff Rhumer said, with a chortle of his own.

  ‘And Judy Yelland,’ Steven said, breaking in to the slightly hysterical atmosphere with a sharp question.

  Instantly, Hillary’s smile fled. ‘Yes,’ she said quietly. And met Steven’s eyes levelly. ‘Judy.’

  ‘You think she’s dead, don’t you?’ Steven said, instantly catching her mood.

  Hillary sighed. ‘Yes, I do. Right from the start, the atmosphere around Judy felt different from the others. She had no reason to disappear. No reason to lie to her family, who didn’t care about her anyway, or just drop out of life without a word to anyone.’

  ‘What? You think the stalker killed her?’ Geoff Rhumer asked sharply.

  ‘No,’ Hillary said at once. ‘There are only two candidates for who might have killed Judy. Jimmy?’ She turned to the old ex-sergeant who nodded slowly.

  ‘Ruth Coombs and Christopher Deakin,’ he agreed.

  ‘And of those, who’s the obvious suspect?’ Hillary pressed. ‘If we take out all the distractions, and bearing in mind Occam’s Razor?’

  ‘Occam’s what?’ Rhumer asked, puzzled.

  ‘Sorry,’ Hillary said. ‘It’s a theory that says the most obvious solution is usually the right one. In cases of murdered women, who is most usually the culprit?’

  ‘The man in her life,’ Jimmy said flatly.

  ‘Right. Christopher Deakin,’ Hillary agreed. And looked at Steven. ‘Starting tomorrow, sir, we need to work on Deakin properly, with a search warrant for his premises for a start.’

  Steven nodded. ‘I can get that ball rolling now.’

  ‘Hang on just a minute, what about the man who attacked you?’ Geoff Rhumer demanded. ‘The man me and my team have been working our arses off the last few days trying to track down? Are you really saying that he’s had nothing to do with any of this?’

  Hillary smiled grimly. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that. He’s one sick puppy. He definitely stalked all three women, and he tried to slit my throat, don’t forget. Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about Lol,’ she said grimly.

  She took a long, deep breath. ‘But this is where things are really twisted around. It’s why it was so complicated and so messed up. Why I couldn’t see my way clearly for quite some time.’

  ‘Guv, I’m with DI Rhumer here,’ Jimmy felt compelled to interrupt her. After Hillary had produced a rabbit such Gillian Tinkerton out of her hat, he’d been following her reasoning and logic closely, and was perfectly willing to place his bets on her being right. When the recon photos from Spain came through for instance, he’d be more surprised than not, if Meg Vickary wasn’t in them. And he’d always felt something was off about the way Deakin had been acting whenever they’d talked to him. Squirrelly, was the word that had sprung to his mind, and he didn’t really doubt at all that Hillary Greene would bring the murder of Judy Yelland home to him. And yet…. What about the bloody stalker? Where did he fit in? It still made no sense.

  ‘He was the one who stalked the girls, right?’ Jimmy asked, trying to grapple his way through carefully.

  ‘Yes,’ Hillary confirmed

  ‘And sent you all the messages, the gifts, the cards, the crosses, for Pete’s sake?’ Jimmy pressed.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And he attacked you?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘But still, he had nothing to do with any of the girls going missing?’ His voice rose incredulously. ‘I just don’t see how that can be, guv.’

  ‘No. I know how you feel,’ Hillary said, with genuine sympathy. ‘It shouldn’t have happened that way, but it did. It must have.’ Hillary looked from the scowling, somewhat sceptical Rhumer to Steven’s thoughtful face.

  ‘Just lay it all out for us, Hillary,’ he advised quietly. ‘How do you think it played out?’

  Hillary nodded. ‘OK. Let’s try and get into Lol’s sick little mind for a while,’ she said, with genuine distaste. ‘We know from the vague descriptions we have of him that he’s youngish, well built and probably good-looking. We think he’s in the job, too, so he’s in uniform – which I’m reliably informed some people find sexy and irresistible.’

  All the men smiled but wisely made no comment.

  ‘So, women should be a doddle for him – attracting them, sleeping with them, forming some sort of bond. But we know that it isn’t. According to the shrink, he’s almost certainly a loner, and women probably instinctively avoid him or mistrust him. So he starts watching them, stalking them, getting more and more enraged and alienated.’

  ‘I’m with you so far,’ Steven agreed.r />
  Hillary nodded. ‘He fantasises about women. Starts following them, sending them presents and making a, generally, mild nuisance of himself. And if that was all, then it wouldn’t much matter, not in the grand scheme of things, but fate, or bad luck, or the Devil or whatever you want to call it, plays a hand, and something drastically alters for our Lol.’ Hillary sighed heavily. ‘Judy Yelland, the first of them, disappears. Worse still, a while later, so does Meg, and then, lo and behold, so does Gilly.’

  ‘That’s just too much of a coincidence to swallow,’ Geoff said agitatedly. ‘Sorry, Hillary, but I just can’t see that. The three women he chooses to stalk, all disappear? No way.’ He shook his head vehemently.

  Hillary sighed patiently and said quietly, ‘Who says there were only three, Geoff?’

  Steven slowly leaned forward in his chair. ‘You’re right. There must have been more. Maybe a lot more. Look at his MO: text messages, cards, flowers, gifts. Worshipping from afar. He could have been fixated on any number of women – dozens of them over the years. And probably more than one at a time.’

  ‘I think there were. Gillian said of him that he was all bark and no trousers,’ Hillary agreed. ‘Up to a point, she was right. I think Lol probably fantasized and stalked lots of women without any major incident, before Judy Yelland came on the scene. But when Judy went missing, I think everything changed for him,’ Hillary said, her voice becoming grim now.

  ‘Just think about it for a while. Reason it out. Here we have an inadequate man, obsessed with body-building and women. Women who rejected him. Women who were making his life miserable. And then, Judy Yelland, his latest infatuation, is reported as a Missing Person. What does he think?’

  ‘That she’s scarpered to avoid him,’ Jimmy said flatly.

  ‘Yes. Maybe at first, that’s all it was,’ Hillary agreed. ‘And it would have made him feel good, right? Here she was, a woman at last showing him the proper respect, giving him the kudos he deserved, by being afraid enough of him to run away. It would have given his ego a tremendous boost. But then, less than two years later, another of the many woman he’d singled out for his special attention also goes missing. Meg Vickary. Now what does he think?’