Tiger Blood (DS Webber Mystery Book 2)

by Penny Grubb

  She turned to face him, giving him a half smile from close quarters. ‘I know how to handle evidence, Ayaan.’

  He relaxed a little but didn’t move away. ‘Are you planning to make the move to CID?’

  ‘Hell no. It’s too slow for me. I’d get bored to tears doing it all the time. I like the front line stuff.’

  What did she mean by all the time? She’d always been in uniform.

  ‘Anyway, I really need to get going.’ He eased the bag out of her hands and laid it on the desk. She relinquished it without a struggle.

  ‘Will Jones and Gary Yeatman?’ She seemed to ask the question under her breath, her attention now on the list with their circled names. He thought she sounded shocked.

  ‘Well … um …’ He tried for a breezy tone as he grasped her arm and drew her away. ‘I need to be on my way. Are you waiting for Martyn?’

  He felt relief that she let him lead her towards the door. ‘My car’s in dock,’ she said absently.

  ‘Right, well …’ He glanced across towards the frosted partition the other side of the corridor. It showed Webber and Farrar still deep in conversation. Wrap it up, guys! He aimed the thought crossly, certain he’d be the one to catch the flack if Melinda’s meddling became an issue. ‘I’ll walk you through to reception. Can I get you a coffee while you’re waiting?’

  She seemed to snap back from wherever her thoughts had wandered and gave him a grin. ‘It’s all right, officer, I’ll go quietly.’

  He dropped her arm and followed her out of the office, clicking off the light plunging the space behind them into darkness. She paused at Webber’s door and pushed her face close to the glass, waving her hand in an extravagant gesture to attract his attention. Ahmed saw Webber glance up. Farrar had his back to them. Melinda flicked her hand in an unmistakeable get-a-move-on gesture and then headed for the exit.

  Ahmed blew out a sigh of relief to have her back in the public space. His intention to usher her to a chair stalled as he looked at the stained and broken furniture. Someone really should do something about that.

  As though reading his dilemma, she said, ‘I’ll be fine, Ayaan. I’ll wait here for Martyn. You get on. Sorry to have kept you.’

  As he scurried away he thought about her holding the evidence bag to the light, turning it this way and that. There was a temptation to go back and ask if she knew what it was. But no, she’d have said. Far better to get clear of the firing line.

  * * *

  Sam spluttered and squealed as a sheet of rain cut under Webber’s protective arm and hit him full in the face. He kicked and wriggled against the strap that held him in the chair. Webber had the carry-handle awkwardly over his arm as he wrestled with the key in the front door. He could hear the rustle of carrier bags as Melinda hauled the shopping from the boot and hurried up the path.

  ‘Come on, Martyn, get Sam under cover. He’ll get soaked.’

  Webber forced the key home and gave the door an irritable kick to open it. Replaying the trip home he could hear Melinda’s inconsequential chatter as she’d gone on about what he could now see were irrelevant details about the shopping she wanted to stop for. She’d filled the time until they arrived at Jess’s house and once Sam was in the car, she’d twisted in her seat to talk to him and side-tracked all Webber’s attempts to ask questions.

  He needed to know about her return to work. It affected him as well. And where did that leave their plans for a sibling for Sam? Did he have to assume now that they were going to wait a few years? Didn’t he have a say any more? But he couldn’t concentrate on the traffic as well as Melinda or his bad temper would have shown, so he had bitten his tongue.

  Now they were indoors. Melinda was clattering about in the kitchen putting things away. He carried Sam to the doorway as he eased the boy out of his damp coat. Maybe she’d already agreed a date to start again. Where would she be stationed? Would she go back full time? How would it work with play school?

  ‘Come on, Mel, tell me what’s going on.’

  Fleetingly her eyes met his then she looked at Sam. ‘When he’s in bed,’ she said turning back to stack tins of beans in the cupboard.

  ‘Why?’ he said. He wasn’t letting her off the hook on this one. ‘Why shouldn’t Sam hear about your plans … our plans?’ Sam strained in his arms, reaching for a high shelf. Webber plucked a packet of spaghetti down and gave it to him, leaning his head away to avoid a smack in the face as Sam rattled the packet vigorously. ‘It’ll affect him too, certainly if you end up on shifts.’

  He saw surprise in her expression, mingled with disapproval as she looked at Sam scrunching the crackly cellophane in his fists. ‘Uh … yeah. Yes, of course, but I don’t have a date yet. I’ve been on to HR but we haven’t talked dates. I just said that to John for something to say.’

  Webber realised that she’d been expecting an interrogation about something else, not her return to work. ‘So you’re definitely going back. I mean now rather than in a couple of years, say?’

  ‘Yes, Martyn, I am. I want to keep my career on track. And Sam’s great but I don’t want two children under three. I want to wait a couple of years.’

  He couldn’t hold back a smile. This was long-term planning. And in a couple of years he might be able to take some leave; there’d be no Suzie Harmer hovering in the background. Except that there would. There would be her child; he couldn’t think of it as his. Maybe it would have become nothing more than a standing order on his bank account. Fiona would be fine with that. He wasn’t sure about Suzie, and oddly he wasn’t sure about Mel either. Dangerous territory. He shook the thoughts out of his head.

  ‘Have you considered CID?’ He was pleased with the question. It flowed neatly, avoided dangerous ground and segued into the territory that she was trying to avoid.

  She gave a short laugh. ‘Ayaan Ahmed asked me that.’

  ‘Ayaan? When?’

  With a delighted shriek, Sam ripped apart the spaghetti packet tipping pasta needles down Webber’s shirt front and on to the floor where they bounced and skittered across the lino.

  Melinda let out a sigh. ‘I’ll get his tea on while you clear that lot up.’

  Webber reached for the dustpan and brush as he lowered himself and his son to the floor and began to gather up the brittle rods. She must have spoken to Ahmed after she’d left his office. Had Suzie been there too? He remembered Melinda’s backward glance. It hadn’t been Suzie she’d focussed on.

  ‘Mel?’ He looked up at her. ‘When Sam’s in bed, I want to know about it.’

  ‘Yeah, OK. But I want to make a call first. I want to be sure.’

  He nodded and returned to his task, surprised at how far the pasta pieces had spread. He didn’t know what it was or what she wanted to be sure about, but she assumed he’d guessed. Hearing the clicking of the keyboard, he stretched across to look through into the living room as the computer screen burst into a palette of colour then flicked to a single orange rectangle.

  ‘What’s that?’ He spoke more sharply than he’d meant to.

  ‘Dulux colour chart,’ she replied reaching for the phone.

  A chuckle from behind alerted him. Sam’s eyes were bright with mischief; his fist descending. Webber dived but wasn’t quick enough. The dustpan flipped, sending a shower of fractured spaghetti high in the air. Through Sam’s shrieks of laughter and the crackle of breaking pasta, he heard Melinda say that she’d emailed a link … she was asking someone to check something.

  He assumed she was calling Joyce Yeatman, but later while she was upstairs putting Sam to bed, he looked at the last number dialled. It wasn’t one he recognised.

  ‘Who did you phone, Mel?’ he asked as soon as she came back down.

  She sat down before she answered him. ‘A guy called Johan Meyer. He’s the one we went to see at the weekend, me and Joyce. I needed to check something with him. I wasn’t sure if I was making too much of it.’

  ‘Too much of what? Who is this Johan Meyer?’

&nbs
p; ‘Retired teacher. He knew the quintets, taught them … I’ve got it all written down for you. And no, I don’t think I was making too much of it.’ She had a look on her face that was almost sulky. Like a child who’s found a wonderful treasure but knows they have to give it back. Webber waited for her to go on. ‘There’s something you need to know. It’s about that plastic thing that Ayaan Ahmed had in the evidence bag.’ He noted in passing that she’d airbrushed Suzie out of the way. ‘He claimed not to know much about it,’ she went on. ‘But then he wouldn’t tell me, would he?’

  ‘No, of course not. You shouldn’t have asked.’ As he spoke he knew he should shoulder the blame; shouldn’t have given her the opportunity.

  ‘OK, Martyn, then you tell me. They know what it is, don’t they?’

  ‘No,’ he said, taken aback. ‘No, I don’t think so. I don’t think they know anything about it.’ He thought of her excursion on Saturday to the mystery Johan Meyer. He still didn’t know where she’d been. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Do you know what it is?’

  ‘Yeah. I think I do.’ She turned to the computer and knocked the mouse so the screen sprang to life. Leaning across she typed in a URL and the screen was filled with photographs of rocking horses. He stared but saw nothing that looked in the least like his memory of the gaudy orange plastic.

  ‘It was the colour,’ she said. ‘That’s what I wanted to check. I mean orange comes in all sorts of shades, doesn’t it?’

  Webber nodded. There was no trace of orange in the pictures on the monitor. ‘Where do the toy horses come in?’

  ‘Something like that one, I’m guessing.’ She homed in on an elaborate old-fashioned model and enlarged the image. ‘The saddles are plastic. Imagine ripping it so you get part of the pommel thing and a bit down the sides there and there.’

  He stepped across to scrutinise the picture rolling the mouse wheel to enlarge it further. ‘I suppose it could be.’ He could just about make a match, but he was sure he could find another dozen plastic toys where he could argue an equally good fit with the ragged artefact Ahmed and Suzie had collected. He voiced his doubts.

  ‘Like what?’ she said. ‘Where are you going to match the twist of that pommel? And you know whose it is, don’t you?’ Her eyes narrowed as she looked at him.

  Webber shook his head. ‘No, Mel. All we know is that it was dug up from a pit that might contain human remains, but there’s little trace of anything left down there.’

  ‘The land behind the fishing place!’ She looked startled. ‘I didn’t realise. I thought they’d dug up cattle bones.’

  ‘They did in two of the pits.’

  ‘Definitely human remains?’ she asked.

  ‘No, there’s nothing definite yet. Mel, why do you think that that thing was part of a bright orange plastic rocking horse saddle? And whose was it?’

  She looked troubled as though fighting to work something out, then stood, turning away from the computer screen and went to sit in an armchair.

  ‘The rocking horse was her big thing,’ she said. ‘She used to cart its bridle and stuff about with her. The saddle got broken in a fight. But it can’t be her. Not there. If she’s anywhere, she’s in Dorset.’

  ‘Dorset? Who are you talking about Mel?’ He strode across the room, crouching in front of her chair and taking both her hands in his. Her skin felt cold; he felt the ghost of a tremor. This had suddenly become real to her.

  ‘Shit, Martyn, what’s wrong with me? I’ve been treating this like a game, pleased I’d found her before you did. It’s Tilly Brown. Remember? Tilly Brown and the quintets.’

  Chapter 30

  Webber studied the screen that showed the soft interview room. The man sitting there craned his neck to survey his surroundings. It was the retired teacher, Johan Meyer. His face wore a half smile; he held himself upright but relaxed. On appearance alone, Webber would have judged him early to mid-60s, but he had to be ten years older. He’d been a teacher until his retirement a decade or so earlier. Meyer had claimed never to have visited a police station in his life before and no one had unearthed anything to contradict that. Webber had rarely seen anyone quite so at ease in an interview room. The man’s gaze darted about, taking in his surroundings; his head gave small nods of satisfaction as though approving what he saw. It had been his own choice to be here. He could have been interviewed at home.

  ‘Practically begged to be allowed to come in, Guv, said it would make a nice change.’ The PC who’d made the call had given a helpless shrug, adding, ‘And he asked if it was about “young Tilly Brown”.’

  ‘I suppose we shouldn’t rule out that he wants to keep us away from his house,’ Webber had murmured, but hadn’t seen it as a real possibility. Meyer would provide useful background, nothing more.

  The real problem was that they’d hit the wall he’d been dreading since this started. Melinda’s investigation had crashed into the middle of the real one. It should be Suzie or Ahmed here watching Meyer cast his gaze around the room whilst sipping pale tea. With no idea how or if to keep Melinda’s meddling out of the frame, Webber had muscled in on the cold cases, saying he would conduct Mr Meyer’s interview himself.

  He’d seen surprise and annoyance on both Ahmed and Suzie’s faces. She’d snapped that they’d been planning an interview strategy for Mrs Joyce Yeatman.

  ‘All in good time,’ he’d told her through gritted teeth. If Suzie had got her finger out and talked to Joyce Yeatman earlier, she might have got to Meyer before Joyce had given the name to Mel. ‘Go and find Edith Stevenson,’ he told them. ‘See what she can tell you about Tilly Brown.’

  That got rid of them from the premises and left him with Johan Meyer, the teacher Joyce Yeatman had dredged up from her husband’s old school papers and taken Melinda to see. Meyer had taught them all, Pamela Morgan, the diminutive China Kowalski, Brad Tippet, all three brothers from the post office raid, including the eldest who had been in Dorset the night Robert Morgan died.

  Webber remembered the emails he’d exchanged with Kowalski. He wanted someone to talk to her to find out just why she’d approached Farrar’s father last May, but she was thousands of miles beyond his jurisdiction, beyond even the reach of the internet. All he had was Johan Meyer. And Meyer, of course, had known Tilly Brown.

  Once the old Tilly Brown paperwork had been found, he knew where the sense of familiarity had come from. He’d been barely Sam’s age when Tilly Brown was all over the newspapers, but the case had kept popping up over the years as such cases did when unsolved. Peripheral memories floated around his head; his parents discussing the mystery, speculating on what might have happened. It must have been one of the things, along with Robert Morgan a decade and a half later that had lodged in his subconscious and influenced his career path.

  Mathilda, always known as Tilly, had left the area with her family when her father retired in 1971. They’d moved to the south coast. Tilly was 15. She’d stayed behind to complete the school year, lodging with her friend Edith Stevenson before heading for Dorset to join her family. A new school awaited her that autumn, but unbeknownst to anyone at the time, Tilly’s studies were over. One day in August, she went out for a walk and never came home. Police enquiries had been extensive. There were unconfirmed sightings; Tilly getting on a train … on a ferry … walking a path high on the cliffs. But she was never seen again. She’d taken nothing much with her, no passport, no money; the only oddity had been the disappearance of the bits and pieces from her rocking horse, its bridle, saddlebags, the broken section of its saddle and a multi-coloured shaffron, whatever that was.

  Webber gave the screen a final glance before pulling in a deep breath and marching to the door. He put on his friendly face as he entered and introduced himself, noting that unlike Brad Tippet a week and a half ago, his rank made no impression on Meyer who stood up with a beaming smile to return his handshake.

  ‘Good of you to come in, Mr Meyer … Johan.’

  Meyer laughed. ‘Jack, please. No one ever called
me Johan. I’ve been Jack forever, after the cricketer, you know.’

  Webber didn’t know but nodded anyway.

  ‘And you’re Martyn,’ Meyer went on. ‘I met your wife. A very determined young lady.’

  Webber acknowledged the point with a smile. ‘Back in the late 1960s, early 1970s …’ He sat down opposite Meyer and drew him into the past, to his days as a teacher. ‘You taught a group who called themselves Tilly and the quintets.’

  ‘Ah yes, Tilly. The little girl with the rocking horse.’

  ‘Yes, the rocking horse. Tell me about them, all of them, not just Tilly Brown.’

  * * *

  Ahmed steered the car through the morning traffic. The rain was a steady drizzle draping a grey blanket over the city. He glanced at Suzie. Her monologue of complaints against the Webbers had run down when he’d stopped responding, bored with it. Grievances notwithstanding, she looked more cheerful this week, brighter.

  ‘God, there’s another one,’ she snapped suddenly. Ahmed followed the line of her pointing finger to see a driver openly chatting into a phone. ‘Is there a dash-cam on this? Can you get her on it? I’ll report her.’

  ‘It doesn’t do sideways,’ said Ahmed. ‘If we get close enough, flash your warrant card. That’ll give her a nasty jolt. We’re not far off now. Edith Stevenson lives in one of the crescents down there.’

  ‘If she wouldn’t talk to you, why should she talk to both of us? I’ll try on my own. She might be funny about strange men on her doorstep.’

  ‘Martyn said to ask her about Tilly Brown. Maybe that’ll spark something.’

  ‘Why should it?’

  Ahmed shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe he knows something we don’t.’

  ‘Then he should have told us. Who does he think he is, barging in on our interview like that … you know why, don’t you? That sodding wife of his.’