Through a Narrow Door

by Faith Martin

  Tommy nodded and began to pull out drawers.

  Hillary reached for the phone and reluctantly called in Frank Ross to come and help out. Then she took a few of the Heather Soames pictures and slipped them into a plastic evidence bag. ‘Tommy, I’m going to have a word with Francis Soames. See if he knew about these,’ she waved her hand in the air. For a protective papa, they had motive written all over them. ‘Better get a catalogue going of all these folders. Pull in some uniforms to help, every piece needs to be properly noted and logged into evidence. It’s going to be a long night.’

  Tommy nodded and watched her go. Before leaving the station, he’d signed the last of the forms accepting his promotion to sergeant, and agreeing to the move to Headington. Next Wednesday was going to be his last day. He wondered where they’d take him for a drink and how he’d feel knowing that his life was about to change irrevocably. Now that the time had come, he felt almost sick.

  He shuddered, then went back to trawling a pigsty for evidence of blackmail.

  In the car, Hillary speed-dialled Janine’s phone.

  ‘DS Tyler.’

  ‘Janine, it’s me. You checked out Francis Soames’s alibi right?’

  ‘Yeah, boss. You wanted to know if he was out on a call cleaning carpets. He wasn’t. He was in the office all that day. Secretary confirms it. The office has only one door in and out, but it’s on the ground floor. He could have slipped out the window. I checked, it has windows that open, it’s not sealed or anything. Looks out over the car park, so if he picked his moment right he might have been able to nip out without being seen, but he’d have to be lucky. I couldn’t pin the secretary down, though, on just how long he might have been in the office on his own. She thinks she was in and out with letters to sign, cups of coffee, queries, etc. all day long. She reckoned he couldn’t have been on his own for more than twenty minutes at a time, if that. It seemed unlikely to me that he’d have been able to get out, kill Billy, and get back again without her knowing.’

  Hillary sighed heavily. ‘Pick up any vibes from her?’ she asked hopefully. If she and the boss were sleeping together, she might have been prepared to give him a false alibi.

  ‘Not a one.’

  ‘OK, thanks. Ring Tommy, we’ve had developments this end,’ she added abruptly and rung off.

  Francis Soames didn’t look particularly surprised to see her again so soon. When she came in, he was already on his feet, and he nodded to his secretary, a fifty-something with good bones and large waves of striking grey hair. ‘Yvonne, some coffee perhaps?’

  Hillary watched the woman leave, then took a seat in front of his desk. She waited until Soames had sat back down before reluctantly pulling out the photographs, still encased in their plastic covering, from her briefcase. ‘Mr Soames, you’re probably going to find these upsetting, but I need to know if you knew about them.’ She pushed the photographs across the desk towards him and saw his jaw drop.

  He stared at them for a moment, and then slowly reached out and drew them closer. He swallowed hard once or twice, then croaked deliberately, ‘It’s Heather.’

  He looked back up at Hillary, then down at the pictures of his naked daughter and abruptly flushed bright red and pushed them away from him. Hillary hastily scooped them up and put them back in her case. Unless the man was a better actor than Hoffman, he’d never seen them before in his life.

  ‘Her mother would have been horrified,’ Francis Soames said at last, and still unable to meet her eyes. He himself looked mortified. ‘I suppose that boy took them,’ he added bitterly.

  ‘We think so, yes,’ Hillary said, very calmly and matter-of-fact, trying to lower the embarrassment factor a bit. ‘I take it Heather never said anything about posing for art shots?’

  ‘Art?’ Francis opened his mouth to rail bitterly, then changed his mind, and closed it again. After a few deep breaths he shook his head and said instead, ‘I never thought Heather would do something like that.’ He sat with his elbows on the table, his hands covering his face, then he took them away and stared at her. ‘Who else has seen them?’ he demanded, his voice rising in pitch. ‘Were they in his locker at school? Did he show them around to his friends? To that freakish-looking Miller boy? Have they been laughing at her behind her back? Tell me!’ his voice had risen to an almost hysterical shout by now, and suddenly the door opened.

  His secretary came in with a tray of coffee, pretending not to have heard him. Francis watched her put the tray down on his desk and made a visible effort to get himself under control. His face was now bright red, with white blotches. He swallowed hard and mumbled, ‘Thank you, Yvonne. Would you hold all my calls for now. Oh, and cancel my meeting with the reps at four?’

  ‘Of course, Mr Soames.’

  Hillary waited until the door closed behind her before continuing. ‘I have no reason to suppose that anyone other than Billy and Heather herself have seen the pictures, Mr Soames,’ she said quietly. ‘The photographs weren’t found at his school, or even at his residence, but in a well-concealed and secure hiding place. Is Heather still at home?’ Hillary asked. ‘We’ll need to talk to her about these at some point.’

  ‘What? Oh, no, she said she’d go back to school this afternoon.’ Francis Soames slowly leaned back in his chair, visibly growing calmer now. ‘She wants to get back to normal, catch up on the schoolwork she’s missed and be with her friends. You know how teenage girls are. She’s sleeping over at her friend’s house tonight. Mary-Beth’s. Perhaps it’s just as well. I need some time alone to come to grips with this.’

  Hillary nodded. ‘Probably the best thing for you both. Well, we’ll leave it ’til tomorrow then,’ she said, getting to her feet. Francis Soames nodded, but didn’t rise himself, and she doubted he even heard the door closing behind her. The secretary glanced up at her curiously as she walked by her desk, but didn’t speak.

  Hillary stood in the parking lot for a moment, thinking. Francis Soames was an emotional man, clearly still upset at losing his wife and maybe on the verge of a breakdown himself. It wasn’t hard to imagine him, in a moment of unthinking crisis, reaching out for the nearest weapon and striking the boy who’d stolen his daughter’s innocence. The trouble was, Hillary didn’t think he knew anything about it. And why would Billy agree to meet Francis Soames at the allotment shed? As far as she’d been able to make out, Billy had been afraid of his girlfriend’s father.

  No, she just didn’t see it, somehow.

  Hillary glanced at her watch. Nearly ten minutes past four. She could go back to Tommy and the others, but there was little point now. She supposed she should head back to headquarters and update her new boss on the latest developments.

  Or she could tackle Lester Miller again.

  This time she called Mr Miller senior first, and he was waiting for her as she pulled up outside his mock Tudor residence, leaning against a silver/blue Daimler Sovereign with his arms folded across his chest, and one foot tapping impatiently away on the tarmac. The epitome of a busy man with better things to do than talk to the likes of herself.

  Hillary smiled at him widely as she got out of her car. Her cream-coloured jacket was creased and probably smelly from the heat, her matching slacks green-smeared and covered with grass seeds from her trip through the paddock. She hoped her shoes were dirty enough to leave marks on his carpet.

  ‘Mr Miller, hello again. I take it Lester’s home from school?’

  ‘He is. And I do hope this is the last time you’ll need to see him, Detective Inspector Greene.’

  Hillary grinned. ‘So do I, Mr Miller. So do I. Shall we go in?’

  Lester was sitting in the same leather chair as before, but this time his feet were bare and he was drinking from a can of lager. His father noticed, but said nothing, and Hillary wondered if he’d get a bollocking after she left, or if Gareth Miller was the sort of man who’d approve of his teenage son showing what he was made of in front of the hoi polloi.

  ‘Hello again Lester,’ Hillary sai
d brightly, taking a seat on the sofa opposite without waiting to be asked. She pulled out her notebook, smiled at the ginger-haired boy, waited until he’d taken a significant swig of Fosters, then said brightly, ‘So why didn’t you tell me about your mate Billy’s blackmail scams?’

  Lester didn’t spout the lager from his nostrils, or choke, or do anything so entertaining, but he did swallow hard and have to clear his throat. From a lounging position against the unlit fireplace, Gareth Miller suddenly shot upright. ‘What?’

  ‘Please, Mr Miller, don’t interrupt,’ Hillary said flatly. ‘If you insist on making things difficult, we can always carry on this conversation at the station. With solicitors and all that that entails.’ The look she shot him made him slowly lean back against the mantelpiece, but his eyes narrowed on his son.

  Lester Miller shrugged, then laughed. It wasn’t a very convincing laugh. ‘Nothing to tell.’

  ‘That won’t do,’ Hillary said, slowly shaking her head from side to side. ‘We found his hidden stash, Lester. Don’t tell me that you weren’t in on it. A bright lad like yourself.’

  ‘Don’t say a word, Lester,’ Gareth Miller growled, and to Hillary snapped, ‘Look, I’m not having this. Are you accusing my boy of something? Because if so, I want to know what.’

  Hillary sighed. ‘Mr Miller, let me make things clear. I’m not interested in making trouble for you or your boy. But I need to know the facts. Why don’t we just let Lester speak, hmm?’

  ‘It’s OK, Dad, I think I know what she’s talking about, and it’s no big deal, yeah? Billy took photos see, of people. There was this woman who used to sunbathe in the nude, right, and it drove her husband spare. He was always telling her off about it. Well, Billy took pictures, see, and said he was going to see if she’d pay him off, otherwise he would show them to her husband. I don’t suppose he went through with it though. Billy just did it as a joke.’

  Yeah, right, Hillary thought sourly.

  ‘It doesn’t sound funny to me,’ Gareth Miller growled.

  ‘Me either,’ Hillary put in tartly. ‘Tell me, Lester, how did Billy know about this woman sunbathing nude?’ she asked curiously.

  ‘Huh? Oh, somebody at school told him. This kid in the third form was bragging about it. She lives just down from him, apparently, and he was telling everyone how, when he goes home from school, he gets his old man’s bird-watching binoculars and does some real bird-watching. Get it? Anyway, when Billy heard him he decided to follow the kid home and see if it was all just bullshit, or on the up-and-up. And when it turned out to be true, he goes over there on the next sunny day and – wham. Pictures.’

  Hillary sighed heavily. ‘I’ll need this boy’s name. The woman’s neighbour, I mean,’ she clarified, and wrote it down when Lester told her. At least that was one victim they’d be able to trace with ease. ‘And what about the other pictures, Lester?’

  Lester Miller shrugged one bony shoulder and took a sip of lager. ‘Don’t know about them,’ he lied.

  ‘You don’t, huh?’ Hillary said sceptically and saw the boy’s father frown. ‘But isn’t that where Billy got all his money from, Lester? You know, to buy the mountain bike, and the fancy zoom lenses for his camera. The gold jewellery for his girlfriend?’

  Lester shrugged, but his eyes refused to meet hers. He looked less cocky now and more angry. And suddenly, Hillary twigged.

  ‘He was holding out on you, wasn’t he, Lester?’ Hillary said softly and with mock sympathy. ‘What was it? At first he kept you in touch with what he was doing. The nude sunbather, the man waving his willy about.’ Out of the corner of her eyes, she saw Gareth Miller jerk against the wall, and carried on quickly before he could break her momentum. ‘And it was fun, wasn’t it? Watching Billy con or bully or threaten all these men and women, these so called adults and grown-ups, out of their hard-earned cash. But things changed, right? He began to keep secrets. Not tell you stuff. Maybe even deliberately kept you out of the loop. Is that how it was?’

  Lester Miller stared down at his lager can. ‘He thought he was so clever. He used to take me along, when he confronted them, like, letting them know that he wasn’t the only one who knew. And in case they got stroppy, like, I was to call the cops straight away. But the last few months or so … I could tell he’d got on to something good. Really good. But he wouldn’t tell me what. He kept denying it, but I knew.’

  Hillary leaned forward on the chair, unable to mask her sudden tension. ‘You think he arranged to meet someone that afternoon, don’t you? The day he was killed. You think one of his victims turned ugly, don’t you, Lester? And you know what? So do I. So if you have any idea, any idea at all who it was, you have to tell me.’

  ‘Lester, tell her,’ Gareth Miller urged. ‘Have some sense for once in your life.’

  ‘But I don’t know, do I?’ Lester Miller suddenly shouted, leaping to his feet and throwing the can of lager to the floor in a fit of childish temper. His eyes, though, were full of genuine tears. ‘You think I don’t know that if I’d been there, like before, I could have stopped it happening? If only he’d told me, I’d have gone with him and he’d be alive today. If I knew who killed him, I’d tell you. But I don’t. I don’t.’

  By now the lad was sobbing, and his father, nonplussed, went across and patted him awkwardly on the back. But the boy pushed him away and angrily wiped the tears from his face with the back of his hand. Mucus from his running nose hung in strings from his hand and he wiped them vaguely on the side of his jeans.

  Hillary got up slowly. ‘All right, Lester,’ she said softly. ‘All right.’ She nodded across his carrot-coloured head to his father, and let herself silently out of the house.

  She felt tired all of a sudden. Perhaps she’d head back to HQ after all, have a drink in the canteen, catch up on some of her other cases while she waited to hear from Tommy. Do something normal, something that didn’t have human misery and sin stamped all over it.

  It was nearly six when Tommy came back from the pigsty. Frank had driven off on the dot of five, of course, leaving him and two uniforms to bag up the proceeds.

  Janine had also been and gone, citing a hot date for not hanging around. Something about the way she’d said it had caused alarm bells to go off in Hillary’s head, but she’d been too tired to pursue it. Besides, Janine put in so much unpaid overtime, there was no way she was going to comment about her getting away on time for once.

  Tommy wasn’t surprised to find only Hillary at her desk, but as he went by the DCI’s cubbyhole, the door opened and Danvers came out.

  ‘Guv,’ Tommy said in passing, but didn’t stop, since he had an arm full of evidence that looked ready to totter over and spill across the floor. He made it to Hillary’s desk just in time and dumped the lot in the middle of the table, catching some of it before it spilled over. It was only then that he was aware that Danvers had followed him across the room.

  ‘This the lot?’ Danvers asked. ‘Hillary’s informed me of your find out at Aston Lea. Good going.’

  ‘Yeah. Er, right, thanks guv. No, it’s not the lot. I’ve logged most of it into Evidence downstairs. But I thought the guv should see these. They’re a bit odd. We can’t figure out, me and the lads, what they’re doing in with all the rest,’ Tommy said. ‘We found more naked women shots, by the way; some of older women too, who the hell knows why they posed for him. And some other shots of a couple making out in the back of a Volvo, plus two men in a Gents out at Woodstock park. We reckon Billy took them through an open window. One face is clear, the other,’ Tommy coughed, ‘isn’t.’

  Hillary nodded. More blackmail victims.

  ‘But like I said, guv, these don’t seem to fit the pattern.’

  Intrigued, both Hillary and Paul Danvers took a beige folder each and opened them out.

  In Hillary’s pile, the now familiar style of Billy Davies’s camera lens showed photograph after photograph of the same man and woman. The man was of medium height and build, rather effeminate-looking,
with carefully styled brown hair and a perfect complexion. Sometimes he was wearing a suit, sometimes something casual. In one or two he had on sunglasses. In all of them he had the look of a man who had regular face massages at a club where they also manicured his nails and clipped his nose and ear hair. Hillary guessed he’d have cabinets full of those products for men that ranged from fancy shower gels to moisturizing shaving lotion. The woman with him had a similar, pampered look. She was about his height, with long dark hair and big eyes bristling with mascara. Like her partner, she was always expensively dressed, be it a plain white tennis dress that must have cost more than a month’s worth of Hillary’s salary, or plain, extremely tailored trouser suits designed to look like a man’s outfit from Brooks Brothers.

  They were pictured getting in and out of cars, always together, always going to, or coming from, different, respectable-looking and well-maintained houses. There was nothing in them that could possibly be material for a blackmailer.

  She frowned at Paul Danvers, who was looking equally puzzled at his own folder, and, catching his eye, wordlessly swapped with him.

  His couple were a little older, a little plumper, but the photographs were the same. In fact, all five folders were filled with men and women going to and coming from houses. Nothing more, or less.

  ‘What the hell?’ Danvers said.

  ‘Exactly guv,’ Tommy said. ‘We can’t figure it out. The nude sunbather, or the bloke peeing up a wall, OK. I can see how it could be embarrassing for them, and why they might pay out the odd fifty quid just to save them the hassle of explaining them away. And maybe the gays in the bog might want to avoid the hassle of being outed. But these? What’s the big deal?’