Daughters of Darkness

by Sally Spencer

  Directly in front of the manor – and serving as a very upmarket turnaround – was a fountain. It was circular, and at its centre were three metallic dolphins – caught by the sculptor in the very act of leaping – from whose mouths a gentle stream of water cascaded into the pond below.

  ‘Five years’ overtime that would cost me – maybe even ten,’ he muttered.

  He realized that anyone sitting beside him would have taken it as a grumpy remark, but it was more ruminative than bitter. He liked the fountain, and though he could never have afforded it himself, he was glad that someone else was affluent enough to have called it into existence.

  Hobson drove around the dolphin fountain, and pulled up at the front door. The door opened, and a man stepped out. He was late middle-aged, with hair that was beginning to make the graceful transition from black to silver. His jaw was square, his shoulders were broad, and his hands were massive.

  Could this be Dr Stockton? he wondered.

  If so, he did not fit Hobson’s idea of him, because when he had been told that Stockton was a doctor of comparative religion, he had pictured someone mild and unassuming – a sort of gentle Jesus without the sandals.

  ‘Are you the police?’ the man demanded, not even giving him time to finish climbing out of his car.

  ‘Yes, sir, DS Hobson,’ George said.

  ‘And have you found her?’ the other man roared. ‘Have you found my Grace?’

  Yep, there was absolutely nothing of the New Testament pacifist about this man, Hobson thought. He looked as if he would be very much out of place delivering a sermon on the mount, but completely at home in a rumble, as a sidekick of one of the more violent of the Old Testament prophets.

  ‘Well, have you found her?’ Stockton asked again.

  And deciding it wouldn’t exactly be tactful to admit they hadn’t even started looking yet, Hobson said, ‘No, sir, we haven’t. We were rather hoping you could give us some idea of where to look.’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course, that would be a very positive step,’ Stockton said. ‘Please come inside, sergeant.’

  He seemed suddenly much calmer, George Hobson thought. Perhaps that was because he’d given the doctor something to do – had, as it were, drawn him into the process.

  The kitchen was such a massive room that the Aga cooker – which would have dominated most kitchens – fitted comfortably in one corner. The room had oak beams, from which hung curing hams and bunches of herbs. The air smelled pleasantly of generations of roasts and stews.

  Hobson and Stockton sat facing each other across a large scrubbed wooden table.

  ‘Have you any idea of when your wife might have left, Dr Stockton?’ Hobson asked.

  ‘She didn’t leave,’ Stockton replied, angrily. Then he took a deep breath, as if he was making a real effort to calm down. ‘She didn’t leave,’ he repeated. ‘She was taken.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’ Hobson asked.

  ‘If she’d left, she would have written me a note to explain where she’d gone. Besides, she’d have packed a bag.’

  ‘And how do you know she didn’t?’

  ‘None of her clothes were gone.’

  ‘Again, how do you know?’

  Stockton sighed. ‘I know it because I checked her wardrobe and her drawers, and nothing was missing.’

  ‘Do you know all your wife’s clothes?’

  ‘There may be some of her underwear I am unaware of, but other than that, yes, I do.’

  Hobson thought about it. He’d never been married himself, but he had had a couple of long-term girlfriends, and he didn’t think he’d ever come anywhere close to being able to describe their entire wardrobes.

  ‘Are you absolutely sure about what you’ve just claimed, sir?’ he said.

  ‘Of course I’m absolutely sure,’ Derek Stockton said, the irritation evident in his voice. ‘It’s no great trick – I just have that kind of mind.’

  ‘What kind of mind?’

  ‘A near-photographic mind.’ Stockton studied Hobson’s face for a second, then added, ‘I can see you’re still not convinced.’

  Hobson shrugged. ‘I’ve no wish to offend you, sir, but, as a rule, people always think they’ve seen more than they really have.’

  ‘I am not one of those people,’ Stockton said firmly.

  If they’d been having this discussion in the pub, Hobson would have told him that he didn’t know what he was talking about – that if it was once put to a real test, his cocky self-confidence would soon crumble away.

  And perhaps he might yet have to do that with Stockton, but for the moment – taking into account the pressure the man was under – he resolved to move more gently.

  ‘I’ve questioned any number of witnesses who were convinced they’d seen one thing, only to find, when all the facts were uncovered, that they’d seen something quite different.’

  Stockton sighed again, and swivelled round so he had his back to the sergeant.

  ‘Would you mind closing your eyes,’ he said.

  ‘Listen, sir …’ Hobson began.

  ‘Please,’ Stockton said. ‘This won’t take a moment.’

  Hobson did as he’d been told.

  ‘You’re a trained detective, Mr Hobson,’ Stockton said. ‘Would you mind telling me what I’m wearing, please?’

  ‘You’re wearing a red-and-brown check shirt with a yellow pullover which has an image of a polo player at the top right. You’re also wearing brown corduroy trousers.’

  ‘What about my shoes?’

  ‘They’re brown.’

  ‘Lace-up or slip-ons?’

  Hobson thought about it. ‘Slip-ons,’ he said, finally.

  ‘You can open your eyes now,’ Stockton said. ‘That was quite good, but the shirt is brown-and-yellow check, you failed to mention the fact I’m wearing a green tie, and my shoes are actually moccasins.’

  ‘Well, there you are,’ Hobson said. ‘I am, as you pointed out, a trained detective, and yet even I—’

  ‘You are wearing a blue pin-striped suit and a white shirt,’ Stockton interrupted him, still turned away. ‘Your tie is blue, but has a red rugby club insignia on it. Your shoes are black lace-ups which are reaching the end of their serviceable life, and your socks are blue – though the left one is of a darker blue than the other one.’

  Hobson glanced down, and saw that Stockton was right: he had slipped on odd socks that morning without even noticing it.

  ‘If you look at the cupboard behind your head, you will find a number of tins of food that I stacked there just before I went to America,’ Stockton continued. ‘There are tins of baked beans, green beans, sweetcorn, artichokes and button mushrooms. I did not deliberately memorize the number of tins, or the exact order in which I stacked them, but I can describe the inside of the cupboard perfectly. Would you care to open it and test me?’

  ‘No, sir, you’ve made your point and that won’t be necessary,’ George conceded.

  ‘So when I say I am familiar with my wife’s entire wardrobe you are willing to accept that?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘The only item missing is a sapphire blue casual dress which she wears mainly around the house,’ Stockton said. ‘That’s what she was wearing when she was snatched.’

  ‘I’m afraid we still can’t overlook the possibility that she left in a hurry and simply forgot to leave you a note,’ Hobson said.

  ‘However flustered or hurried she’d been, she would never have forgotten to do that, because she knows how much I would worry about her.’

  ‘Is there any particular reason that you would worry about her?’ George wondered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Is there any particular reason you worry about her?’

  ‘She’s my wife – my raison d’être,’ Stockton said. ‘Don’t you worry about your wife?’

  ‘I’m not married,’ Hobson said, adding mentally, but if Jennie Redhead wasn’t so terrified of commitment, I could have been.

&nbs
p; ‘In that case, you couldn’t possibly appreciate how I feel,’ Stockton said, somewhat dismissively.

  ‘So it’s your belief, is it, that if she’s not here, it’s because someone is holding her?’ Hobson asked, getting the interview back on track.

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘But you haven’t found any signs of a struggle inside the house?’

  ‘None. And before you ask, yes, I am sure of that, because Grace is as organized and orderly as I am, and if anything had been out of place, I would have noticed it.’

  If that was true, there were three possibilities, George thought.

  The first was that, despite what her husband seemed to think, she’d left home voluntarily.

  The second was that she had been physically abducted, but her kidnappers had taken the time to clear up the mess.

  If either of those scenarios was the correct one, then she could be almost anywhere, and launching a search without further, more specific information would be a complete waste of time.

  But there was a third possibility, which was that she’d been attacked while she’d been outside the house.

  ‘Did your wife – I’m sorry, does your wife – like going for walks in the countryside?’

  ‘Yes, she does. She’s very keen on fresh air. It helps her to think, and she goes for a wander most days.’

  ‘And where do these wanders of hers usually take her?’

  ‘Why do you want to know that?’ Stockton asked, looking worried.

  ‘Just answer the question, sir, if you don’t mind,’ Hobson said.

  ‘Well, it depends. Sometimes she goes across the fields towards the river, sometimes down the lane that leads to the village. But the woods are her favourite place, by far.’

  ‘Which woods are they? The nearest ones?’

  ‘That’s right. I don’t know if they have an actual official name, but we call them the bluebell woods, because at this time of year, there’s a thick carpet of bluebells.’

  FIVE

  ‘First we searched the house and grounds,’ George tells me.

  I nod. I wouldn’t have expected anything else, because that’s the approved procedure.

  ‘You didn’t find anything?’ I say, and though it sounds like a question, it isn’t really.

  ‘Not a dickie bird,’ George replies. ‘It was a thorough search – I supervised it myself – but there wasn’t a hint of a struggle, and there was nothing that could have been bloodstains.’ He pauses. ‘So we widened the search to take in the area around the manor. I had a gut feeling that if we found anything at all, we’d find it in the bluebell woods – and my gut was right.’

  ‘It often is,’ I say.

  ‘Yes,’ he agrees, with perhaps a hint of complacency, ‘it hasn’t served me badly. Anyway, every available inch of the woods was covered with flowers, except for one small strip where there was just bare earth. We dug it up, and there she was.’

  ‘Who identified her?’ I ask.

  ‘Dr Stockton himself.’

  ‘That must have been hard.’

  ‘It was – and not just on him.’

  SIX

  18th April, 1972

  George Hobson had never consciously counted up how many times he had taken a close relative of a murder victim to the mortuary, but as he and Stockton walked through the main entrance, he reckoned this was probably the tenth or eleventh gruesome visit on which he had acted as unwilling shepherd.

  Reactions generally fell into two different camps. There had been one man and one woman who had immediately identified the corpse, and once that shocking admission had escaped their lips, they had gone slack, as if the bones in their legs had suddenly turned to rubber. The man had grasped the trolley on which the body lay for some support, but the woman had needed Hobson himself to grab her, or she would undoubtedly have collapsed.

  That had been bad enough, but the other reaction – the majority reaction – was generally, if anything, much worse. Here, he would notice the relative’s body stiffen, and would then know exactly what to expect next.

  ‘It’s not him,’ they would say, in a tight, strained voice. And then, to reassure themselves, they would repeat it. ‘It’s not him.’

  But that was only a part of their brains speaking – the part which refused to accept that the cold slab of meat they were seeing had once been someone they loved. And now that small part of the brain was doing its best to suppress the larger part, which recognized the truth.

  ‘I want to go now,’ they’d say, knowing that the longer they were there, the harder it would be to deny reality.

  He was always gentle but firm with them.

  ‘Please take another look. It’s very important.’

  And eventually they would break down – would admit that yes, it was Tom or Lucy.

  Thus, for obvious reasons, Hobson had always regarded this particular duty as one of the worst jobs in policing. But this was going to be even worse than usual, because, unlike most identification procedures, where the body would be covered by a pristine white sheet and only the head visible, in this case the body would be on display, because there was no bloody head.

  One of the mortuary assistants, white-coated and looking suitably grave, greeted them in the lobby and then said to Dr Stockton, ‘Would you excuse us for a second?’

  He led Hobson to the other side of the lobby, then whispered, ‘Don’t let the poor devil get too near to the stiff.’

  Hobson bristled at the word ‘stiff’, but recognizing that now was not the time to get into a debate about showing the proper respect, he simply whispered back, ‘Is there any particular reason for that?’

  ‘We’ve done our best to make it look like she still has a head, but it won’t bear close inspection,’ the assistant told him.

  Hobson understood exactly what he’d meant the moment they entered the viewing room. A sheet had been placed over the space where Grace’s head should have been, and the bulge in it indicated that there was something there.

  ‘You said the woman you dug up in the woods had been decapitated, but this body seems to have—’ Stockton began.

  ‘Don’t worry about that, sir,’ Hobson interrupted him. ‘You just concentrate on the rest of her.’

  The ‘rest of her’ was wearing a blue housedress with short sleeves and a hem which reached just below the knees. Hobson noticed that a swatch of material had been cut out of the hem. He wondered whether that had been done by Grace Stockton herself, or by her killer – and then he wondered why either of them would have done it.

  Beside him, he felt Dr Stockton stiffen.

  Oh God, he thought, this is going to be bad.

  ‘It’s not her,’ Stockton said, looking away. ‘It’s clearly not her.’

  ‘She’s wearing a dress just like the one you said Grace was wearing,’ Hobson pointed out.

  ‘Maybe I was wrong about that,’ Stockton said, with an edge of hysteria to his voice.

  But he was never wrong about things like that, as he had convincingly demonstrated to Hobson only hours earlier.

  ‘She’s wearing a bracelet on her wrist,’ Hobson said gently. ‘It could be made of hair. Did Grace have a bracelet like that?’

  ‘It’s her!’ Stockton moaned.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Hobson asked.

  ‘Of course I’m sure!’ Stockton said angrily. ‘Do you think I can’t recognize the legs of the woman who I’ve been married to for over thirty years?’ Stockton demanded angrily. ‘Do you think I don’t know those arms, which have hugged me to her every single day we’ve been together?’

  Hobson put his hand on the other man’s shoulder.

  ‘It’s time for us to leave, sir,’ he said.

  But Stockton was having none of it. He lurched forward, took hold of the dead woman by the shoulders, and lifted her trunk clear of the trolley, with the obvious intention of hugging her to him.

  The movement was enough to dislodge the semi-inflated football which had been serving as a head. I
t fell to the floor with a squelch, and rolled wobblingly away, in the direction of the door.

  Stockton, seeing this, relinquished his hold on the corpse, bent over almost double – and vomited.

  And who could blame him, Hobson thought.

  SEVEN

  ‘How long had she been dead?’ I ask.

  ‘The police surgeon reckoned it was between two and four days,’ George replies. ‘He said the decapitation created circumstances that made it more difficult to calculate accurately the time of death – which is another way of saying that he was covering his own back. But his vagueness didn’t really bother us, because we were certain she’d been dead for three days.’

  ‘What made you fix on that?’

  ‘It was three days earlier that our prime suspect suddenly appeared in Oxford – and then she quickly left again.’

  I remember reading something about her, but after three years it was all a bit vague.

  ‘Tell me about her,’ I say.

  George reaches into his bag, and takes out an A4-size photocopy. ‘This is her.’

  The woman is standing in Oxford railway station. Just beyond her, I can see other passengers. A couple of them are carrying coats, indicating they probably consider it too warm for heavy clothing, but the suspect has her duffle coat fastened up to the neck.

  It is hard to say how old she is. She could be a well-preserved eighty-five or a totally wrecked thirty-five, but whichever she is, her hair is as unruly as Medusa’s and her eyes are as wild as a mad woman’s.

  ‘We lifted that from the station CCTV camera,’ George says. ‘We also made several copies of the tape. There’s one in the bag for you. You’ve got a VCR player, haven’t you?’

  ‘Of course,’ I agree.

  I don’t know why I lie to George about that. With other people, I might play free and easy with the truth because I want to maintain my professional image – which is to say, I don’t want them to suspect that my only assets are a tatty one-roomed office and a flat that even the cockroaches complain about. But George knows all that. So maybe it’s simply pride – one of the many sins which I skilfully manage to be guilty of on a daily basis!