by Neil White
‘What’s wrong?’ Hunter replied. ‘No more sports cars, no second homes in France?’ He scoffed. ‘I’ll hold back the tears. And anyway, even all the money Gilbert had wasn’t good enough for him.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Because he tried to get more by throwing it away in casinos,’ Hunter said. ‘His old school friends had gone to work in the City. This was the eighties, and they were making big money. Claude was stuck on the northern circuit, but he couldn’t say no to the high life when it was there to be had. Claude was richer than most of us, but he was the pauper in his crowd. Even when he started doing television, you know, one of those awful debate programmes, it didn’t change things. It just took him away from home more often, gave him another chat-up line, and he had some big debts by the time he disappeared.’
‘Didn’t everyone live the high life back then?’ I asked. ‘It was the boom before the bust.’
Hunter smiled ruefully. ‘My life didn’t change much. The only change I saw around here was the mills closing down. And maybe that’s what sucked him in: that all around him he saw people losing their jobs, but he had the house and the sports car, and so he thought he was still the high-roller, the big man. There were rumours around court that Claude had talked about giving up the law to become a professional gambler, that he thought he had the knack of the skill games, had even tried counting cards at the blackjack tables, but he didn’t have the brain for it and started to lose money.’
‘Maybe he owed money to the wrong people,’ I said. ‘Lawyers find out things that they shouldn’t know, and gambling debts made him liable to be blackmailed. Maybe he had to pass on information that he was supposed to keep secret.’
‘What, are you saying that Nancy was killed by gangsters?’ Hunter said.
‘Maybe him too,’ I suggested.
Hunter shook his head. ‘I’ve thought about that, but why get rid of the bodies separately? Why be so cruel to Nancy?’
‘If Nancy was buried alive, Gilbert knew he was on a timer,’ I said. ‘Perhaps he had to say what he knew before she died.’
‘I’ve heard that theory, but I don’t believe it,’ Hunter said. ‘They found his car at Newhaven, abandoned. That’s the other end of the country. What gangster would dump the car so far away, as some kind of red herring?’
‘So why do you think the car was there?’ I asked.
‘Because he jumped on a ferry,’ he replied.
I smiled. ‘Maybe that’s why a gangster would dump the car all the way down there, to make you think that.’
‘That would be good in a detective novel, but real criminals don’t work like that,’ Hunter said. ‘Why go all the way down there? Why not the airport?’ He shook his head. ‘Gangsters wouldn’t set up a false trail. They would get rid of the body and leave no trail.’
‘So what about all the sightings?’ I said. ‘Do you think any might be true?’
Hunter leant in. ‘They’ve either been unconfirmed or proved to be false. Any tall, suave stranger in a foreign land was thought to be Claude Gilbert. There was a sighting a couple of years ago, some hobo in New Zealand living out of his car. Someone hawked a photograph around the papers and the media went crazy. But all the locals knew him; he had been there all his life. And there was a man in Goa. A book was even written about him, naming him as Gilbert, but people from England knew him. He was just some busker from Birmingham who had moved out to Goa to get spiritual.’
‘I was told that you never really let go of the case,’ I said.
He looked sheepish for a moment. ‘He’s guilty of a cruel murder, but he was able to just walk away from it,’ he said. ‘I suppose it got to me.’
‘So what do you think happened to him?’ I asked.
Hunter smiled, and I could tell that he was enjoying the audience, that his theory was one he had gone over in his head countless times.
‘I don’t know for sure,’ he said. ‘He got on the ferry, but he had a head start on us by a few days, and life was different then. You paid by cash and so were harder to track. You didn’t have to give up an email address or do it on a computer. All he would have needed was his passport, or any passport, and he would be in Europe straight away. What happened after that is something we’ll never know. Perhaps he had friends who helped him out.’
‘His old school friends? The head-boy clique?’
‘I don’t know, and you would be a brave man to print it; those people have got the money to ruin you,’ Hunter said. ‘But if you want my theory, I’ll tell you: Claude Gilbert is dead.’
I raised my eyebrows. ‘You sound pretty certain,’ I said, and hoped that he wasn’t, because that would be the end of my story, apart from some human interest piece on a female hoaxer.
‘He boarded a ferry, I’m certain of it, and that’s why his car was left behind,’ Hunter said. ‘Remember that he wouldn’t know his wife’s body would be found. It’s a long voyage from Newhaven to France, plenty of time to think about things. Where was he going? How would he live? How much had he left behind?’ Hunter shrugged. ‘So he jumped.’
‘Killed himself?’ I queried.
Hunter nodded. ‘Gilbert was a cowardly man. He hid behind his father, and then behind his wig and gown. He buried his wife because he couldn’t cope with the killing part, and so he let Mother Nature do the job. But when it came to it, to the thought of life on his own, maybe even some guilt, he couldn’t cope.’ He raised his cup in salute. ‘I think he ended up in the English Channel somewhere, drowned by his own misery.’
But if that was true, I thought to myself, who was in London trying to get me to broker a newspaper exclusive?
Chapter Nine
Frankie Cass was looking out of his window, as always. In winter, the hills that overlooked Blackley glistened like sugar when it was cold, the parallel strips of stone terraces like slashes in the ice, but he preferred it like this, in the summer, when it was warm enough to open his window and let the sounds from outside waft into his room. Birds sometimes rested in the sycamore and horse chestnut trees outside his window, and in spring he watched the gardens around come alive with flowers.
He checked his watch. It would be change of shift soon at the rest home across the road. There had been some new staff members, pretty young girls. Polish, he thought, or Romanian, judging from their accents as they walked past his house, laughing and talking, their speech fast and clipped. Sometimes they didn’t bother to close the curtains when they got changed in or out of their white uniforms. If it was hot, they showered.
His tongue flicked to his lips as his binocular lenses crawled along the wall, looking for a glimpse, a flash of skin.
He heard the car before he saw it. It was the way the engine strained that caught his attention as it battled to climb the steep hill. He swung the binoculars to the road and smiled. A convertible, bright red, a seventies relic, the number plate showing white on black. He scribbled down the number and made a note of the time, before watching as the driver climbed out. He saw the camera and notebook and made another note: reporter.
He raised the binoculars to his eyes again. He would keep watch. It’s what he did.
Claude Gilbert’s house wasn’t what I expected.
I had always known of the story—most people did around Blackley and Turners Fold—but I’d never had cause to visit the house. It was on a road that climbed a steep crescent away from the town centre, the houses large and imposing, shielded by trees and bushes, just the high slate roofs visible and the occasional bay window.
The Stag didn’t enjoy the climb though; I could hear every rattle with the roof down, every scream of the engine. But it made it, and once I’d switched it off, the only thing I could hear was the ticking of the engine as it cooled down. There was no one else around, and as I looked over my shoulder, I realised that Blackley had disappeared behind the high walls and the trees.
I looked over at Claude Gilbert’s house. The walls were taller than me, with ivy creeping along
the top and only the tips of conifers visible from where I had parked. I took a few pictures and then I walked towards the gates, but I was surprised when I got there. I had expected some closed-off shell of a house, the centre of national notoriety, but from the sign on the gate I saw that time had moved on and the house had a new life: Blackley View Residential Care. I looked around again, and I noticed signs on other gates or fixed between trees. Accountants. Surveyors. A housing association. It seemed like no one lived on the street any more, all the grand old houses of Blackley given up for business use. The good money must have moved out of town, to the rolling fields and old stone hamlets of the Ribble Valley.
I gave the gate a push and it swung open slowly, screeching on its hinges and coming to a halt as it brushed against the gravel on the drive. The Gilbert house was different to the others on the street. Rather than blackened millstone, it was painted in a sandstone colour, the corners picked out in white, just like in the photographs I had seen whenever the story had been reported. The paint looked jaded though, the windows flaky and worn out.
As I got closer to the house, I saw the alterations. There was a ramp to the modern front doors, which swished open as I approached them. As I stepped inside, I saw that a grand old hallway had been transformed into an entrance lobby, laid out with plain chairs and low tables on a thick flower-patterned carpet. Stairs swept imposingly up to the next floor, the balustrade thick and strong with twisted spines, but the elegance was undermined by the stair-lift that ran along the wall and disappeared around the bend at the top.
I heard movement, and when I looked, I saw a woman walking briskly towards me, middle aged, her hair dyed dark brown and her figure trim in a tight white tunic. She smiled and asked if she could help. I checked out her name badge, and I saw that she was the assistant manager.
‘Hello, Mrs Kydd. My name is Jack Garrett. I’m a reporter.’
Her smile faded. ‘What can I do for you, Mr Garrett?’
‘I’m doing a piece on Claude Gilbert,’ I said, and gave her an apologetic smile. ‘I know you’ll get this a lot, but the story starts here.’
‘We do get this a lot,’ she said, her tone brusque. ‘We can’t just keep on giving up our time to show reporters around.’
‘I know that,’ I replied, trying to be conciliatory, ‘but I promise I’ll include a picture of the sign. Call it free advertising.’
‘They all say that too,’ she said, and then she shook her head in resignation. ‘C’mon on then. I’m on a break, so let’s get rid of you.’ She set off towards a room just off the hallway. As I followed her in, I saw that the edges were crowded with high-backed chairs, all centred around a large television against one wall. There were a few old people in them, wrapped up in cardigans despite the stifling heat generated by large radiators. A couple of them watched the television, the volume almost deafening, but the others just looked down at their laps.
I smiled a greeting, and one old lady glanced at me, a twinkle in her eyes, but no one else seemed to notice I was there. Or perhaps they didn’t care.
Mrs Kydd led me to a corner of the room that overlooked the garden, visible through a large conservatory that ran the full width of the house. I could see two long lawns outside, a wide path between, and a glass and steel summer house in the corner of the garden.
‘This is where Mrs Gilbert was attacked,’ Mrs Kydd said, pointing to a spot by an old cast-iron radiator.
‘How did they know?’
‘There was blood on the skirting boards and walls. There wasn’t much, as if he had tried to cover his tracks, but there were a few small spots and streaks that he missed.’
‘It sounds like you know the story,’ I said.
‘I work here, and so I’ve read about it,’ she replied. ‘And writers turn up. They all like to talk about it, all of them thinking they’ve got a new theory.’
I raised my eyebrows at the dig, and she smiled at me, pleased that I’d spotted it. I took some pictures, trying to get the garden in the background, to show the route to her death.
‘Does it bother the residents, you know, what happened here?’ I asked.
Mrs Kydd shook her head. ‘Our residents get well looked after, and it’s a nice home. They know about it, but to most of them it is just another news story. They were all middle aged and older when it happened, so maybe it doesn’t hold the attention like it does with the younger ones.’ She smiled. ‘And it’s only the fact that he got away that makes the story interesting.’
I didn’t disagree, because that was the interest that would sell the story.
I looked back towards the garden. ‘Is that where the body was found?’
Mrs Kydd looked over her shoulder. ‘You might as well see that as well,’ she said.
I followed her outside, through the conservatory and then down another ramp, relieved to be in the natural warmth of summer rather than the suffocating artificial heat inside.
As we walked along the garden path, I looked around, tried to imagine how it must have been back then. Although I could see the chimneys and roofs of the nearby buildings, I saw that the height of the boundary wall just about stopped anyone from seeing into the garden. The road ran along one side, and on the other the land dropped away to a park, so that the house stood proudly on a hill. Claude Gilbert would have been able to drag his wife all the way down here without being spotted.
‘What happened to the house after Gilbert disappeared?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know much about that,’ she replied, turning towards me. ‘Only what I’ve read in the papers.’
‘Like what?’
‘That it was repossessed by the bank when the mortgage didn’t get paid.’
‘Do you get many people coming round to take a look?’
‘We did a couple of years ago, for the twentieth anniversary, but it’s been quiet since then.’
‘What about his family? Are they ever in touch?’
‘There was somebody once,’ she said. ‘He said he was Claude Gilbert’s father.’
‘The judge?’ I said, surprised.
‘That’s what he said. He was a nice old man, seemed sad about it all, and not just for Claude. He just wanted to pay his respects.’
‘How long ago was this?’
Mrs Kydd thought for a few seconds, and then she said, ‘Springtime last year. And he brought that.’ She pointed to a single rose bush, kept trimmed and neat. ‘He asked us if we could plant it there, where Nancy was found, as a tribute.’
I looked at her, and then back at the flower bed. ‘It’s just a patch of dirt,’ I said, and then looked at Mrs Kydd. ‘It seems strange that it looks so ordinary.’
‘I’ve thought the same thing a few times, when I’ve been able to snatch a quiet moment in the garden,’ she replied. ‘That’s why he wanted the rose bush there, as a marker, so we don’t forget what happened here.’
I thanked her for her time and strolled through the garden to make my way back to my car. I stopped a few times to take pictures, trying to show how ordinary it looked, but when I got back onto the street, I looked back towards the house, gripped by the sensation that I was being watched. I couldn’t see anyone, but I sensed it, from the gentle shiver at the back of my neck to the way the hairs stood up on my arms.
I climbed into my car, wary now.
Chapter Ten
Thomas and Laura walked through the town centre in a slow, rolling police stroll, past the old wooden shop fronts and then the glass windows of the chain stores on the precinct, fast-food wrappers overflowing from rubbish bins. Laura felt self-conscious in her uniform, still getting used to the feel of it again after the years spent in plainclothes. Both of them were in short sleeves, but they were warm in their stab vests, their belts heavy with equipment, the radio squawking constantly on their chests. She could feel her backside straining against her black trousers, the cut doing little to flatter her figure.
Thomas seemed quiet, and his body language defensive, as if he was wa
ry of the first spot of action.
‘You okay?’ Laura asked.
‘Just looking around, observing,’ Thomas said, his voice quiet, and then he gave a laugh, the first time Laura had heard it. ‘It’s easier at the training centre, because you’re expected to get it wrong, just so you can be told how to get it right, but this is it, right now,’ and he pointed at the floor. ‘I’m not here to get it wrong though.’
Laura smiled. ‘Don’t be hard on yourself before you start. We all make mistakes. Just be courteous to people, be firm with those who deserve it, and don’t tell lies. It’s better to say sorry than tell a lie. And for the rest of it? Just use common sense and follow your instincts. That’s all the job is about.’
Thomas nodded and looked down.
They walked for a few minutes in silence, until Laura asked, ‘Are you enjoying the job so far?’
Thomas looked up. ‘What, do you mean today?’
‘Just generally,’ Laura said. ‘When you walked into the briefing room, how did you feel?’
Thomas blushed, his cheeks pink behind only a hint of stubble. ‘Honestly?’ he said, and then he laughed again. ‘Scared rigid. Maybe tomorrow will feel different.’
‘It will,’ Laura said. ‘Every day feels different. That’s what’s great about the job.’
Before either of them could say anything else, they heard a shout. Laura looked up and saw a young man twenty yards away in a green polo shirt, the uniform of one of the music chain stores, trying to hold on to a gaunt man in a scruffy blue puffa coat, his eyes encircled by black shadows, his cheeks pale and sweaty, a games console under one arm.
Laura started running, Thomas a step behind. Then the man pulled away, the sight of the sprinting uniforms giving him the push to make a break. The games console fell to the floor as he ran.
Laura’s equipment jangled against her hips, her breaths loud in her ear, the adrenalin of the pursuit pushing her on. She could hear a couple of cheers from some college kids, and then she was panting: her detective years hadn’t involved many foot-chases, and motherhood had made her heavier than when she had last worn the uniform. As the thief went around a corner and into one of the open car parks, Laura guessed that it would turn out to be his day. Her chest began to ache, her throat dry, sweat across her forehead, and her legs slowed. She stopped running and reached for her radio, sucking in air as she tried to make her voice fit for broadcast.
