“No.”
I looked at Pete, who shook his head, and we left. “More lies,” he said as he started the engine.
“He’s certainly covering something up,” I agreed. “Would you take him for a killer?”
“As much as anybody else. You get the impression there’s something going off deep down inside him, and what sort of a grown man drives a vehicle like that?”
“Oh!” I exclaimed. “I was rather fancying one like it for myself.”
Trevor and Michelle live in Skipton, which, to my eternal surprise, is not all that far away from these Lancastrian towns. Our A to Z didn’t cover it, so we called in at the police station for directions and a quick consultation with the electoral roll told us that their surname was Young.
As soon as we turned into their cul-de-sac I knew where Janet Towse’s aspirations lay. It was what the agents call an executive development, with four individual houses on large plots and not a wishing well in sight. Brookmere was second on the left, complete with integral sun lounge and double garage. There wasn’t a car to be seen. Everyone must have either been elsewhere, in the reserved space outside the office, or safely tucked up in its heated garage. Pete tried to park his so that it didn’t look abandoned, but found it impossible, and we walked up the block-paved drive to the front door. I searched for an oil stain from the pickup, but imagined that any such blemish would have been cleaned up within hours.
A white haired gentleman with a pink face and Shetland cardigan opened the door. “Sorry to trouble you, Sir,” Pete said, “but are you Mr Young?”
Chapter Five
“Detectives, eh,” he said, a few minutes later when we were seated in easy chairs which I would describe as chintz covered, although I don’t know what chintz is. There were watercolours of Dales scenes on the walls, a rare burst of sun streaming in through the French windows, and if I’d had a pot of Earl Grey at my elbow I’d have been as content as a little green caterpillar in a peapod. “Always enjoy a good mystery myself,” he went on. “Envy you chaps. Now, what’s it all about?”
“I’m admiring the paintings, Mr Young,” I said. “Do you have any problems with them fading in all this sun?”
“No,” he replied. “Not so you’d notice, but Michelle does them, and what she doesn’t sell ends up on the wall. She knocks them off like breeding rabbits.”
“Don’t belittle her talent,” I chided. “They’re very good.” I meant it. Watercolours require something called painterliness, and these had it. Every stroke of the brush was done with confidence and there’d been no going back. And she’d caught the Dales in all their moods. “Where is Mrs Young?” I asked.
She was out walking the dogs. Funny, I thought, how “walking the dogs” carries connotations about class that “walking the dog” doesn’t.
“We understand,” Pete began, “that you held some sort of a dinner party here just over a week ago, on the evening of the twenty-first. Is that so, Mr Young?”
“Er, yes, as a matter of fact we did,” he replied.
“Do you have a guest list, Sir?”
“No, I’m afraid not. We don’t bother with anything like that; it’s all rather informal. Not a dinner party, as such. We put on a buffet and just stand around and chat.”
“How many attended?”
“Twenty-two couples. Forty-four including ourselves.”
“So how do you draw up the invitations?”
“We don’t. We’re just a group of like-minded friends, and if you want to bring someone else along, that’s fine. Could you tell me what this is all about, please? Is someone in trouble?”
I said: “And you hold one of these parties on the third Wednesday of the month?”
“Yes,” he replied, “but not here. We don’t hold them all here. We rotate, somewhere different each time.”
“I see.”
“Were a couple called Jason and Janet Towse at the party, do you remember, Sir?” Pete asked.
He looked thoughtful. “Jason and Janet?” he repeated. “No, I don’t think I met them. You’ll appreciate, of course, that one can’t remember everybody’s name, and there were one or two new faces present last Wednesday. Jason and Janet? No, I don’t think so. We tend not to bother with surnames.” A car door slammed and the sound of barking dogs interrupted our conversation until it receded to the back of the house. “That’s Michelle,” he said. “She might remember them.”
“But you can’t?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
A door closed and a voice shouted: “Hide behind the sofa, Trev, I think the bloody Mormons are in the street again,” immediately followed by Michelle Young making her entrance.
I fell for her instantly. She was a big woman, wearing a long full coat and flowing silk scarf, with bleached hair and tinted spectacles. We stood up and I said: “Actually, we’re the bloody CID.”
She gave a hearty laugh and shook my hand, then Pete’s, as we introduced ourselves. She’d have looked good in a trilby hat, tilted over one eye, drawing on a cheroot.
“So, what’s the bloody CID want?” she asked, after telling us to sit down again.
“We came to ask a few questions about your Wednesday night party,” I told her.
“Has Trevor offered you a coffee?”
“No, we’re fine.”
“Trevor! Where’s your manners?” She turned back to me, saying: “Tch! I’ve tried to train him but most of it fell on deaf ears.”
“No coffee,” I protested. “We’d just like to clear up something about one of your guests, if you don’t mind.”
“Oh, if you insist. Which one?”
“Right, thank you. Now, can you tell us if a couple called Jason and Janet were at the party?”
“Yes,” she stated, emphatically.
“You sound quite certain,” I said.
“I am. They were here.”
“Well I don’t remember them,” Mr Young admitted.
“Of course you do, darling. You spent most of the evening talking to him.”
“I don’t remember anyone called Jason. Damned stupid name. I’d have remembered that.”
“Not Jason!” she declared. “Rowena! Surely you remember Rowena. Rowena and Janet.”
“Ah, Rowena!” he exclaimed. “Now I remember. Does something in wood, I believe.”
“Rowena?” I echoed.
“Rowena?” Pete added, determined not to be left out.
“That’s right, Rowena,” Mrs Young confirmed. “He was wearing a fetchingly simple fuschia button-through with white accessories. He couldn’t get the handbag right, but it was the poor darling’s first appearance in public, so to speak. He is all right, isn’t he?”
I looked at Pete and he looked at her and I looked at Mr Young and she looked at me. “Um, yes, he’s, er, all right,” I mumbled. “He’s, er, very…all right. But…I think I could manage that coffee, now, if that’s, um, all right.”
We didn’t speak much on the drive back. Once a month forty-odd like-minded people of both genders met for canapés and dressed in their partners’ clothes. They stood around and talked, mainly about fashions, had a few drinks and went home. It was a brief island of relief, a safety valve, before they immersed themselves once more in the daily grime of living a lie and being normal, whatever that meant.
“Reckon he’s in the clear, Chas?” Pete asked as we swung into the station yard.
“Forty-three witnesses say he is,” I replied.
“They weren’t sure what time he arrived.”
“True.”
“And a pickup was seen.”
“I know. Keep on it Pete – that only leaves four thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine others to check out.”
“Thanks.”
“Monday’ll do.”
Everybody had gone home, so we followed them. There was a note from Geordie on my desk telling me to bring my gear in the morning. He’d organised a jog round the park, followed by a swim at the sports centre, followed
by a well-earned pint, so I abandoned my plan to go on a solo run and had a pizza from the freezer.
I was disappointed, no point in denying it. The pickup was the first red-hot lead we’d had, but now we were back to square one. Worse than that, square none. We had a database of possible offenders and could check the ones who owned motor vehicles, but Adrian Foulkes had told me that our man probably didn’t have a criminal record.
I put a week’s washing in the machine and gave it the delicates cycle. A lady a couple of doors away irons my shirts for me, and I’d take them round tomorrow. Ironing is one domestic task that I haven’t mastered. I found a can of lager in the fridge and wandered into the front room to get a decent glass from the cabinet, but by the time I got there I’d forgotten what I wanted. Back in the kitchen I saw the can on the work surface and remembered that I needed a glass. I made it at the second attempt.
Dave rang to say that they were back from their trip south. Everybody had been helpful and they’d collected a load of paperwork. I told him to bring his kit in the morning and declined his offer of a swift half or two in a nearby hostelry. I emptied the swing bin and did all the washing-up and rounded off an evening at home with some laddish television. All in all, not a memorable Friday night, but better than someone’s. Much better than someone’s.
Gina Milner loved animals. She loved all animals, but not equally. At the first stutter of her alarm clock she was wide awake and swinging her legs out of bed, and a quick peek through the curtains confirmed that the sun was shining, for once. She loved animals with shells or scales or feathers or fur, it was all the same to her, but most of all she loved horses.
She’d never owned one but had taken riding lessons from an early age. Her dad had ferried her there and back, and even investigated the possibility of buying a horse and stabling it at the riding school, but the cost was prohibitive and there are too many horse traders in the horse trading business.
Mrs Milner was already downstairs, making toast, as Gina breezed into the sunlit kitchen. “Morning, love, want some toast?” Mum asked.
“Haven’t time, thanks,” Gina replied. “Is it all right if I take the car?”
“It’s not good for you, you know, dashing about without any breakfast. Of course you can.”
“I’ll have some when I get back. Thanks, Mum.”
She grabbed her anorak from behind the door, unhooked the car keys and was gone. Her mother shook her head and smiled, proud of the daughter she’d thought she would never have. She placed six rashers of bacon under the grill and shouted up to her husband that breakfast was ready.
Gina was in her A-levels year at Heckley High School, and was on course for a straight flush of grade A passes. Then it would be off to Glasgow, studying veterinary medicine. After that, who could tell? Set up in practise in Halifax, go into research or work for a while on some project in Africa? The world would be at her feet. Meanwhile, the horses had to be fed and then it was off to her Saturday job, earning money for a trip to see the famous Lipizzaner horses at the Spanish Riding School in Vienna.
None of her friends knew about her Saturday job, although they had all seen her at work. Her parents were in on the secret, but if one of them mentioned it she would collapse in a fit of giggling and change the subject.
Gina filled a plastic bag with carrots from the sack in the garage and transferred them to the boot of her mother’s Fiesta. She drove to the greengrocer’s shop at the end of the road and the proprietor gave her another bag filled with cabbage leaves and other waste items.
“There’s some apples in there,” he told her. “’Osses likes apples.”
“Thanks Mr Moss,” she replied. “You’re a treasure. I’ll tell them they’re from you.”
He smiled and shook his head as she drove off. “She’ll go far, that lass,” he said to his next customer. “She will, she’ll go far.”
Gina made an expert three-point turn and drove past her home, over the little bridge that crossed the canal and turned on to a minor road that led over the fells. The ponies were in a little triangular field just down from the tops, where a farmer had brought some of his sheep to have their lambs. They were all stranded there now, because of the foot-and-mouth restrictions, and the field was a quagmire. Gina had seen their plight a fortnight earlier, when out for a walk with her father, and had unofficially adopted them.
There was room to park but not enough to turn round. Usually she would feed the horses first, and after a long chat with them, and much rubbing of their ears, would drive another quarter of a mile to where an old drovers’ road crossed the lane. She would turn round there and go home. This morning for some reason she decided to turn round first. The horses were waiting for her, their heads hanging over the wall like a pair of stuffed moose. Gina waved to them as she sped by, shouting: “Don’t worry, I’m coming back.”
A four-by-four came over a brow in the road, travelling in the opposite direction. Gina pulled into the side to give it room to pass and raised her hand to wave to the driver until she realised it wasn’t the one she normally saw. She smiled at her mistake and saw the vehicle’s brake lights come on through her rear-view mirror.
Gina stopped on the left-hand side of the lane, just beyond the drovers’ road, and reversed into it. The ground was rough and stony, and the entrance narrow, so she concentrated hard on what she was doing. Mrs Milner would not be pleased if her car was returned minus its silencer. When she was far enough back she pulled the handbrake on and instinctively glanced in her right-hand wing mirror before moving forward.
Chapter Six
The same weak sun that had brightened Mrs Milner’s kitchen was shining through the gap in the curtains of a Victorian terrace house on the outskirts of Heckley. The young woman lying in bed screwed up her eyes as the patch of light it cast on the duvet moved across her face. She turned away from it and put her arm around the man lying next to her.
“Are you awake?” he whispered.
“Mmm, are you?”
“Mmm.”
“Did you sleep well?”
“Yes. I always do, after…you know.”
“So do I.” He moved her arm from across his chest and sat up, turning to plump up his pillows. “Put some music on,” he said.
She reached out and pressed the Play button on the cassette player that sat on the bedside cabinet, then rearranged her pillows so she could sit up next to him.
This is the eye of the storm, came out of the speakers in a high-pitched voice, almost falsetto. Watch out for that needle, Son, ’cos this is the eye of the storm.
“Fast forward past this,” he ordered her. “It’s too slow.”
She did as she was told and a few seconds later the tempo stepped up to a rap. “This is better.” He put his arm across her shoulders and slapped out the rhythm with the palm of his hand against her skin as he sang along with the tape:
Teachers are liars, singing in choirs,
Too much bread, I’d give ’em lead.
Professors an’ lawyers an’ all their employers,
Corruption is rife, I’d give ’em the knife.
Man on the video, thinks he’s a Romeo,
He’ll lose his aplomb if you send him a bomb.
The congressman’s niece is the chief of police,
Don’t choke on the smell, just send ’em to hell.
“Ah, that’s a good one,” he declared. “Tim didn’t fuck about when he wanted to say something. Now, listen to this next one and tell me all about it.”
It was the song that Tim Roper wrote for his pal Zeke’s new-born son, Theo. The collected voices of The LHO sang the lyric:
One two, buckle my shoe,
Uncle Joe is stuck in the glue…
“Now,” the man began, “who are we talking about when we say Uncle Joe?”
“Joe Kennedy!” the girl answered, triumphantly.
“Very good!” he replied. “Dirty Joe Kennedy, who spawned the whole fuckin’ Kennedy tribe. But who put an end t
o it?”
“Lee Harvey Oswald!” she replied.
“That’s right. You’re learning, my girl, you’re learning. And who are The LHO named after and in tribute to?”
“Lee Harvey Oswald!”
“Off course they are. Probably the greatest American who ever lived. And who’s Sister Mary?”
“Mary Warner!”
“That’s right, marijuana. Now listen to this one. This one’s poetry.”
The property developer can see the possibilities,
The hogan of the Navaho is now a tower of ’luminum,
A pyramid of glass and steel
Stands where the tents of Kedar leaned,
And shareholders play endless golf,
Where once the elk and pronghorn dreamed.
Mojave and San Gabriel
Will soon be distant memories
The property developer has seen the possibilities.
He reached across her and pressed the Stop button. “That’s where Tim spent his last night,” he told her, “in the San Gabriel mountains, composing himself, collecting his thoughts, before the CIA assassinated him. Maybe we should go there.”
“What, to America?”
“That’s right. I think they’d appreciate us there. Wouldn’t you like to see the Mojave Desert just once, with the sun coming up behind the mountains, before they make it one big car park?”
Her face was alive at the thought of it. “Could we?” she asked.
“I don’t see why not, when we’ve finished here. Did you enjoy last night?”
“Oh yes! It was the best so far.” She snuggled against him, her face glowing at the memory of the previous night’s activities. “When can we do it again?”
“Soon. I should be finished downstairs today or tomorrow. All it needs is some paint. And then we’ll do something really special, I promise you.”
“Have you found anyone?”
“I think so. And you’ll like her. One I remember from the old days, back down home. It might be a good idea to go further afield, next time.”
“Oh Timothy, you’re so good to me.”
“What!” he exclaimed. “What did you call me?”
Laughing Boy Page 12
