Stick or Twist

by Diane Janes

  To his surprise she didn’t appear to mind. ‘Then it doesn’t matter how loudly I say it in the canteen. Anyway, I say we carry on in the evenings – when we’re off duty.’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t about to throw you across a desk and ravish you in the middle of a briefing.’

  ‘I’m referring to the Thackeray case. Lingo can’t stop us thinking about it, on our own time.’

  Instead of pursuing the conversation any further, he had given his full attention to removing the paper case from a double chocolate chip muffin. He didn’t want to say anything more on the subject to Hannah, because he was uncertain about how things really stood between them, and didn’t want to give himself away. There were a lot of competing, confusing factors. He had always thought that the ideal home life was one where you could get away from the job. It was all-consuming at the best of times and he had tended to the opinion that the best girlfriend to have was the kind who didn’t ask questions about what you were working on, or what you had done that day. His music had always ensured that he didn’t completely eat, sleep and live the job, but now here was Hannah, suggesting that they look into the Thackeray case in their spare time.

  That was another thing – what spare time? Outside work, most of her time was spent offering her family support, while a great deal of what was left over was spent in bed, and while he had no problem with that at all, he drew the line at any suggestion of post-coital discussions regarding Jude Thackeray, or indeed any other investigation. He had always feared that a relationship with a fellow detective would make it even harder to leave the job at the door and this conversation represented the living proof of it.

  Of course, he thought, Hannah would argue that we aren’t actually having a relationship. According to her, he was no more than being a good mate, but for him it was becoming a bigger and bigger lie. Inch by inch he was getting drawn further into her life, bringing in groceries, driving her to visit her dying sister in hospital. He had even grown accustomed to the lime green bed linen … and as for the softness of her body, the smell of her hair, the way her eyes lit up when she smiled. Her sister only had a matter of weeks now, the doctors said. Soon there would be no dying sister and no reason for him to stay.

  THIRTY-ONE

  ‘This is it … see where there’s a parking place on the left-hand side?’

  Initially Mark could not see anything other than the single track lane itself, but then he spotted the place she was indicating: a level rectangle of gravel at the side of the tarmac, with just enough space for two cars side by side. The hedge which had hemmed the lane up to this point gave way to a rustic wooden fence, which separated the parking spaces from an uncut field of swaying grass. A board had been nailed to the fence, which read PRIVATE PARKING FOR PENMENDHU COTTAGE ONLY.

  ‘We have to walk from here,’ Jude announced, as he executed the turn, bringing the bonnet up to the fence in order to clear the lane. ‘You’ll need to pull back out and get in closer on this side.’

  ‘Why?’ He was feeling tired and bolshie. The journey had taken hours longer than he had anticipated, the sky had turned overcast, and now it seemed that you couldn’t park anywhere near the cottage itself, so before you could have a much needed drink, you would have to hump the luggage through a bloody field, heaven only knew how far, to a house which wasn’t even in sight.

  ‘Because if you leave the car like this, right across the centre of the parking area, you can only get one car in. We always leave room for a second vehicle.’

  ‘Why? We’re not expecting anyone, are we?’

  ‘Of course not … It’s just that we always do.’

  ‘We?’ Though he remembered just in time how important it was to keep her sweet, he felt obstinate. I’m not being told how to park the blasted car, he decided. Adopting a lighter tone he said, ‘It’s you and I, now darling. We’re the “we” – and we don’t want any interruptions, or any visitors, so if I leave the car here, we won’t need to rely on that notice to prevent people from parking here, when they’re not wanted.’

  He turned off the engine with a decisive gesture. ‘Right then. How far do we have to walk?’

  ‘Oh – it’s not very far.’

  She sounded a bit vague and he sensed that for some reason she was still preoccupied by his refusal to shift the car. Maybe she was just unaccustomed to his not instantly giving way. Up until now he had tolerated every trivial whim and fancy, and on reflection, perhaps he should have gone along with her about this too – it was such a little thing after all – but it was too late now. In fact it would make more of a thing of it, if he re-started and manoeuvred the car. He decided that she would soon realize that it wasn’t important and forget all about it.

  As he got out of the car, he glanced around hopefully, but there was no sign of any habitation nearby: not so much as a chimney pot or a rooftop in sight. He took the case and the largest bag, while Jude carried a Kool box containing their champagne and smoked salmon supper, together with a much smaller bag, which still left a rucksack and a box of groceries for a second journey.

  ‘What on earth made you choose a place this far off the beaten track?’ Struggling slightly under the load, he tried not to allow his breathing to get in the way of the question.

  ‘I didn’t choose it. I inherited it. Me and Robin, equally, from our parents. We used to come for family holidays.’

  The mention of Robin unnerved him. It hadn’t occurred to him that any of the properties – the London flat, the Essex cottage, the Cornish retreat, or the place in Spain – might be jointly owned with the knuckle-dragging brother. Had she wanted to leave that free parking space …? No. Stupid thought. The guy knew they were on their honeymoon. Surely it was only mere force of habit that had made her comment about the second space being normally left open.

  She led the way as he panted the length of one field and then embarked across another. The path was beaten earth, and ran between the massed stems of tall, unidentified grasses on one side, and a weedy margin which ran alongside a waist-high, barbed-wire fence to the other.

  ‘Did your parents never think of putting in a proper drive?’

  ‘They don’t own this land.’

  ‘Couldn’t they have bought it?’

  There was a brief silence. Shit, he thought. I’ve hit a wrong note there, but when Jude spoke again, she sounded perfectly unruffled. ‘The farmer wouldn’t sell. You know what farmers are like. We’ve got right of way across the field, providing we stick to the path. There … you can see the cottage from here.’

  She paused to point ahead. He looked beyond where she was standing and saw that they were now within sight of the upper storey of a small cottage, its walls unpainted grey pebble dash, its roof slate. Expectations of a grand summer retreat, the sort of house with diamond pattern windows, topped with sun-faded awnings which could be lowered to protect the furniture from harmful rays; a patio with furniture for lounging away the long summer days, maybe a loggia, or a wrought-iron balcony accessed by French windows from the master bedroom, overlooking a swimming pool, all instantly evaporated in the face of this small, mean-looking building.

  ‘I know it doesn’t look much from here.’ Jude must have sensed his disappointment. ‘But it’s got one massive advantage that you’re going to love.’

  With the suitcase and the large bag trying to drag his arms out of their sockets, he couldn’t summon up the protestations of enthusiasm which she was no doubt anticipating, so he said nothing and continued to trudge towards their objective, stealing another glance ahead every so often. The building’s appearance did not improve on closer proximity. If anything it appeared to squat in the landscape like a malevolent toad, filling him with an unaccountable sense of foreboding.

  When they reached the front door, Jude initially had trouble with the keys, and once they got inside, he realized that the place was even smaller than he had first thought. There was just one living room downstairs, furnished with a trio of two-seater sofas which formed
three sides of a square around a wood burning stove at one end of the room, and a table with six dining chairs at the opposite end of the room, next to a hatch into the kitchen. She didn’t give him the opportunity to take more than a cursory glance around, insisting that he walk straight across to the ugly modern patio doors which had been installed at the rear of the property. These looked out onto a paved area which was nothing like the glamorously appointed recreational space of his optimistic imaginings, comprising as it did of just a rectangle of cheap, concrete slabs, in alternate off-white and dirty pink, which had a few tubs of neglected pansies in one corner, and a wooden picnic table in the centre. It was the kind of picnic table found in public parks, where the table and benches were fixed into a single, uncomfortable element, with a hole at the table’s centre, ready for a sun umbrella.

  Jude seemed unaware of his disappointment. ‘Look,’ she said, pointing out of the window. He followed the gesture with his eyes, taking in the wide scrubby area of gorse and grass beyond the garden fence, which eventually met the sky without offering an intervening view of the sea. ‘You see where the grass stops?’ she continued. ‘That’s the cliff edge – and over the top is our own private beach. It’s a bit of a climb down, but no one ever comes there except us. I told you the place had something pretty special going for it. We’ll get the rest of the luggage across and then maybe later on, when we’ve had a drink and some supper … or probably tomorrow morning, after breakfast, I’ll show you the beach.’

  ‘Hey, yeah, great.’ He made the words come out without thinking about them, then turned back to the spartan living room. ‘Can’t we have a cup of tea, before we fetch the rest of the stuff from the car?’

  It wasn’t just his disappointment that the place was so much less nice than he had expected. True, it was not a bit like the houses in Colchester and at Elmley Green, but that wasn’t the whole story. There was something wrong with the whole set-up, he thought. Something which made him feel vaguely queasy.

  THIRTY-TWO

  ‘I had another quick look at the Thackeray stuff this afternoon,’ Hannah said. ‘Joel had to go to that meeting with Lingo, and I figured that even if the Old Man found out what I was up to, he wouldn’t go ballistic over a half-hour excursion off piste.’

  She had already called in at the hospital en-route home from work, and now they were sitting side by side on her sofa, enjoying a ‘cheeky one’, as she referred to a pre-dinner gin and tonic. Between the crazy workload in CID and Hannah’s commitments to her family, her suggestion that they attempt to pursue the Thackeray investigation ‘on their own time’, had so far gone no further.

  ‘And …?’ Peter prompted.

  ‘It’s a bit irregular – a bit odd.’ She paused for another sip of her drink. ‘Normally we’d have checked out antecedents, associates, contacts – because obviously a kidnapper may have found out stuff from a friend or a relative, even though the victim doesn’t realize that there’s a connection – but in this case we’ve got very little on file about the victim’s antecedents or background.’

  ‘Someone’s messed up?’

  ‘Not exactly. I mean … well no, not really. The Thackeray parents are both dead. According to Jude and Robin, their mother was an only child, whose parents are also dead. Father has two half-sisters in Liverpool, from whom he’d been estranged for years. Jude Thackeray reckoned she wouldn’t know these people if they walked up to her in the street. She gave us the names, we made contact with colleagues in Liverpool and the story checked out. Usual thing – first wife dies, so Granddad Thackeray marries again, first family never got along with second family, all meaningful contact lost years ago – they don’t even do Christmas cards.’

  ‘Might have a motive there, if the Liverpool lot thought they’d been done out of their share of the family loot.’

  ‘True enough, but no indication of it – and anyway it was the brother who stood to gain, if anything happened to Jude. The Liverpool rellys got nuttin,’ Hannah concluded in her best impersonation of Scouse.

  ‘The brother was always a person of interest, though we never managed to get anything on him.’

  ‘Right. Brother Robin certainly has a motive, because for all that devoted brother and sister thing they’ve got going, if someone had succeeded in putting Jude Thackeray permanently out of the picture, little brother inherits the lot – according to Jude anyway, and it’s safe to assume that she knows the terms of her own will. So setting him aside, the family angle is a complete non-starter. Which brings me to friends and associates.’

  ‘Previous boyfriend before the nutter was some bloke who plays the flute in an orchestra, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Right first time. He was easily traced and easily eliminated. He’d only been out with her on a couple of dates. Relationship started when they met in a London pub and got into conversation. He was off on tour a lot of the time, and anyway they quickly decided that they hadn’t got a lot in common. He seemed unaware that there was money in the background – and he didn’t come across as remotely likely to be involved in anything dodgy.’

  ‘Brother Robin also had a short-lived romance around the same time, if I recall.’

  ‘You recall correctly. Girl called Letitia. Twenty-one, very pretty, but never going to get onto University Challenge. Quite volatile and quickly fell out with Robin Thackeray, though neither of them could remember exactly why. She apparently had no idea about the Thackeray wealth either and on learning that her ex-boyfriend had been a millionaire, referred to him as a “tight bastard”.’

  ‘Sounds like a charming example of womanhood.’

  ‘Absolutely. But hardly the criminal mastermind. Same deal with the girlfriends that Jude sometimes hung out with. There were only two of them: both had only known her a short time and seem to have been little more than casual acquaintances. She met one of them when she joined an art class, and got to know the other woman because she’s a mate of the first one. They were out having a drink with Jude when she met the flute player in the pub – but not when she met the kidnapper. They were aware of him though, because Jude once blew them off to go out on a date with him. Of course, they never actually met him.’

  ‘It’s pretty odd, when you come to consider it. If I remember rightly, there were no really old friends, or old flames in the UK.’

  ‘No. But we accepted that because they hadn’t long returned to the UK after living abroad.’

  ‘So we’ve got nothing on record to confirm which school Jude and her brother actually attended?’

  ‘No. We focussed on their adult life, which has been mostly spent overseas. They both provided plenty of names of people living in the States and the Caribbean, with whom they’d had friendships and relationships of one sort or another.’

  ‘All of whom checked out?’ It was more of a statement than a question. The list of previous contacts was not an area they had focussed on in their previous trawl through the files.

  ‘Actually, none of them checked out.’

  ‘Come again?’ Peter was so surprised that he jerked forward, almost spilling his gin.

  ‘When we reviewed the case, we skimmed through it on the assumption that there was nothing useful in their past history. Unfortunately it appears to have been – ahem – overlooked first time around as well.’

  ‘But surely …’ Peter shifted again in his seat. ‘Surely someone was assigned to go through past contacts.’

  ‘Jerry Wilkins and his sub-team were – and they did – up to a point.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘It was complicated. Virtually nothing was local. The only way to check out all these overseas people was to ask for co-operation with other police forces. They then had to follow up the various names and addresses, which of course all took time. You know how it is. The information came in dribs and drabs, and it was always negative. On the face of it, none of the people the Thackerays had mentioned as friends, ex-employees, business contacts, or anything else you care to mention, had any kin
d of criminal record, or any suspected criminal contacts, or any known UK connections.’

  ‘On the face of it?’

  ‘What I mean is that nothing obviously suspicious turned up. But get this. One ex-boyfriend of Jude’s had died in a car accident, a couple of others couldn’t be traced at all. One of the women Robin Thackeray named as an ex-girlfriend had married and moved to Australia – the last note on the file suggests trying to find out her married name, but that didn’t go any further. Basically someone who has lost touch with the Thackerays and moved to Australia several years ago doesn’t flag up as especially likely to be worth pursuing. Some of the long-term neighbours they mentioned in Florida had gone into an old folks’ home and it was decided not to pursue that any further either. Some other long-time friend was last heard of travelling in Thailand, and so it goes on. On the face of it, all these enquiries produced nothing of interest or relevance to the case, but …’

  She left the word hanging long enough for Peter to interject. ‘Are you saying what I think you’re saying? Did Jerry and co. actually manage to make contact with anyone who is supposed to have known Jude or Robin Thackeray while they were living abroad?’

  ‘The short answer is “no”. The trouble is that this really only emerges when you look at the whole picture. Jerry’s annual leave fell part way into all this and his second in command was Nina, who was heading for her maternity leave, and his other team member was Jack Drysdale, and he went off sick a couple of months into the enquiry – got some sort of virus. For some of the time it seems like Jerry only had the services of brand new PC Bostock, who was logging the information as it came back in, but of course it was a very slow process, with Jerry working on other things and only wanting to be alerted if anything significant cropped up.’

  ‘And whenever anything new came in, it was always a negative?’