by John Eider
‘Your friend’s already down there,’ said the Senior Librarian, grumpily opening the door to the archive floor. Sergeant Smith went downstairs to see Sarah already at the desks turning to greet her.
‘Hi Cori,’ – as Sarah called her; for while Boss suited fine for the Inspector, Cori thought Ma’am sounded ridiculously formal for herself.
‘Hi Sarah. What is up with her?’
‘I think I upset her by mentioning Stella.’
‘She sure could rub people up the wrong way.’
‘Oh, and I’ve a message for you.’ (This was from the phone call transferred from the Inspector’s office earlier.) ‘You had a call from a Mrs Foreshore of the Southney School, she had some names for you which I promised to pass on.’
‘Oh, excellent, let me grab a pen… go on.’
Sarah related eagerly (as Cori transferred the details to her notebook),
‘She said that Stella Dunbar had been tutoring a lad last year, got him into an interview with an Oxford college apparently, but that obviously he’d since left town; but this year there are only two girls who the teachers there knew about, and that they do match the initials you gave her: a Stacie Kehoe and an Esther Night; both fourteen, in the same class, friends so their teachers believe; and that the long-dark-haired one is definitely Esther Night.’
It was moments like this that make a detective’s job worthwhile.
‘And they had contact numbers at the school office?’
Cori’s enthusiasm was to be short lived however: the number for the Kehoes bringing the news that their daughter was at school, only for the school to then say she’d not been in that day; meanwhile the Nights’ phone gave only a standard answerphone announcement, to which Cori told her story and asked for an urgent reply.
‘Sir?’
At the Inspector’s door was a mixed pair of Constables fresh from the mess room.
‘You asked for background checks?’ the young man reminded him. Grey knew he had requested checks recently, but couldn’t immediately remember of whom.
‘I looked up Rachel Sowton for you, sir,’ began his partner, who Grey had seen around the office with her counterpart and had wondered if they weren’t an item out of uniform. ‘She was cautioned for drugs eight years ago, and has been noted at various libertarian rallies in London.’
‘Do we keep a note of things like that?’
‘We have to these days, sir.’
‘Go on.’
‘The electoral role has her at the Cedars for sixteen years, before then at various flats around town.’
‘Okay.’
‘That’s it really. I’m afraid there’s even less for Derek Waldron: no police record, no wrong doing; though he is listed on the Internet as a member of various recognised professional bodies.’
‘What field?’
‘Architecture, sir. Civil engineering.’
‘I never did ask him what he’d done for a living.’
‘He’s been at the Cedars even longer, previously had his own house in town.’
‘Hardly Bonnie and Clyde are they.’
‘Not really, sir,’ she laughed.
But like minnows in the wake of a shark they disappeared as the footsteps of the Superintendent sounded behind them in the corridor,
‘Grey, my office?’
‘Eunice Prove, Eunice Prove,’ Superintendent Rose began once he and his Senior Investigative Officer were in his office, door closed. ‘You didn’t work on it, did you Grey?’
‘I think I was on another division at the time.’
‘The things they have us investigate, the animals they have us round up and try to keep penned.’
‘Sir?’
‘Your girl Sarah had found the file out of archive for you, but I took it from her as you weren’t here – it all came back to me reading it last night. I’ve just come back from the Assistant Chief Constable’s Office, by the way. You know I’ll be back there every day to give updates until these murders are sorted out?’
Grey took the hint. The Super continued,
‘A girl found bludgeoned – there’s no other word for it – bludgeoned in her own home, probably in broad daylight.’
‘Found by her father, I’ve been told,’ asked Grey as Rose passed him the file.
‘Indeed, though there was nothing like a coherent statement ever taken from him at the time – and you say it’s Stella Dunbar who’s been looking after him ever since?’
‘Seems like it, sir.’
‘This was as uncultured an attack as that on her father.’
‘Yet messier, more frenzied it sounds,’ mused Grey.
‘But the Eunice case doesn’t help us.’
‘No?’
‘This Oscar Skellet. Well, he turned up again, up to something like his old tricks.’
‘The boyfriend who fled back over the border?’
‘Well, it was presumed so, though the local police up there never found him. Anyway, he has since turned up: in Shotts Prison, jailed three years ago for three counts of aggravated assault.’
‘Of women?’
‘No, during a burglary of a warehouse at night. An amateur affair it reads like,’ the Super was now scanning a different set of printouts. ‘Apparently his colleagues testified against him, admitting to robbery and just trying to get off the assault charges. It looks as though that was never a part of the plan – easy in and easy out – but when they were disturbed this fellow Skellet went haywire, left a security guard and two others who answered the alarm in hospital, one of whom hasn’t worked since. Apparently his mates had known Oscar for years, didn’t know he had it in him.’
‘Which makes you wonder at what occurred during those last minutes with Eunice. But…’ Grey’s mind was working through the logistics. ‘But why weren’t we informed of his capture? Even before these two new murders, we had the Eunice Prove file open and unsolved with him listed as a key witness, if not as a suspect.’
‘An administrative oversight.’ The Super shook his head, ‘The fact had gotten lost in the system that we wanted him too. It happens, Grey. The Assistant Chief Constable has spoken to his counterpart up there and our paperwork is being sent to them now; and at least he’s inside in the meantime.’
‘But no help to us.’
‘Not in this case, no. Any other suspects?’
‘None obvious; but honestly, her life is like an onion and we’ve barely started peeling.’
‘Stella Dunbar’s?’
‘I’ve never known one so repressed. And as for Charlie, I’m not sure he’s belonged to the world since Eunice died.’
‘I’m told the Cedars Manager has form?’
‘Rachel Sowton? Minor stuff, and years ago. She loves the residents, would die for them I’d say.’
‘We’ve seen people kill family when they think it’s best.’
‘I don’t get any feeling about her at all.’
‘No, no, it doesn’t fly for me either.’
Grey shook his head, ‘That place is based on insulation. A member of staff described it to me last night as being somewhere with “less shocks than the world”, no noise, no bumps, no jolts. Neither victim seem to have been up to much once there, bar a bit of tutoring in Stella’s case – and we’ll have spoken to both of her current pupils by the end of the day, I hope.’
‘So it’s all over something that happened years before?’
‘But how far are back we going? Charlie’d been their fifteen years, Stella twenty-four.’
‘They knew each other before though?’
‘Yes, it seems so; but from what we’ve heard they were enemies during their time on the Council, fiercely opposed.’
‘Which only makes it more confusing. You’re confident it’s the same killer?’
‘There’s no reason why they couldn’t be, from what little we can deduce: tall, strong, cautious getting there and getting away.’
‘And absolutely no witnesses?’
‘They picked a busy building to en
ter to attack Stella, but struck either while everyone else was watching a TV programme or had gone to bed; and then an equally busy estate to strike Charlie, but after midnight when even the most rebellious kids would have gone home.’
Rose pondered, ‘You say chose, but they didn’t choose the time for the second attack exactly, did they.’
The Inspector could sometimes forget that the Superintendent had himself been an officer: working through the uniformed and traffic divisions, as opposed to the investigative branch he himself had chosen, yet getting on to his elevated role through sheer effort and earned respect. No number of meetings with the Assistant Chief Constable could diminish that or take from the man’s experience. And here, despite all that was going on, he had found a chink of light in areas Grey could not fathom.
‘You mean, of course,’ the Inspector clarified for himself, ‘that though the killer picked the best moment to take on Charlie, they couldn’t have known when the disturbance with the ill resident on the ground floor would break out, when Charlie would be off down the road unguarded to follow. That is interesting.
‘You know, this follows on from something we were saying with Rachel Sowton last night: that if no one could have been expecting him at the Hills then he must have been followed from the Cedars; only I hadn’t thought it through, as if the killer couldn’t have known Charlie would be outside and vulnerable at that time then that means – what? – that they were stalking the place, awaiting an opportunity?’
Rose concurred, ‘It might not have been too difficult to have hung around outside there unnoticed, what with everything going on there lately, and watching out for comings and goings, lights turning on and off. I don’t know.’
The conversation hung on this point awhile, Grey’s mind working through the possibilities; but the Super’s logic held, he further suggesting,
‘Perhaps they intended to play the same trick they had the night before with Stella… before seeing the Constable watching the backdoor.’
‘Maybe,’ answered Grey distractedly.
‘There’s no internal suspects, you’re sure?’ his boss asked. ‘As it would suit them to attack him away from the Cedars, to draw attention away from themselves.’
‘Apart from the Duty manager, the only other non-resident in the building last night was the orderly, Ellie – who lives nearby and was there in ten minutes – who were both at Mr Carstairs’ side the whole time.’
‘Well, I’ll still have someone check down the staff list. It’s no use getting sentimental: they may be caring for old folk, but someone’s killing those old folk one by one, and no one’s better placed to do so than the staff.’
Rose shuffled the papers back into order, ‘You’ll call me the moment you’ve spoken to the girls Stella was tutoring?’
‘Will do.’ Grey got up and left.
A mysterious outsider… was that the best they could come up with, asked Grey to himself as he walked back to his office… and one presumably concluding some sixteen-years-delayed vendetta? It might as well have been Jack the Ripper back from the dead. Meanwhile every one of them left in that building was terrified.
Back at the library, Sarah waited till she had the certificate in her hands before quietly calling Cori over. She had found reference to the birth on the system almost as soon as she’d begun looking, choosing in the end to start not at the green filing cabinet but at the nearby computer terminals (as she could have from the station), favouring this method to ploughing through the drawers of date-ordered papers. Had she more to go on than, ‘A boy, mid-Sixties’ then she may well have started with the physical records, but a product of the computer age, information flowed easiest for her through a screen.
‘“Patrick Mars”,’ read Sarah from the document as she handed it to the Sergeant, ‘“Father: Samuel Mars, Mother: Stella Mars”, and born in Sixty-seven, so forty-five now.’
Cori was impressed, ‘Call the boss and let him know, won’t you. Oh, and can you give him the names we’ve found for the schoolgirls.’
Going out through the fire escape to make her call, Sarah passed on the information to the Inspector, who responded,
‘Good work, then get back here and put him through our computer and the DVLA. Oh, and did Cori have any luck tracing the two girls?’
Reading from the details scratched down in her notebook, Grey listened then noted,
‘The Kehoes live on Coalville Lane, you say? That’s the Hills estates. I wonder… I’ll see you back here.’
‘Catch up then, sir,’ she said, before returning to the quiet building to pick up her things.
Cori, since arriving at the library had moved to another area in the basement, one she and colleagues had less call to visit in their police researches. Given the lack of assistance from the now rather rubbed-up Senior Librarian, she had been left to her own resources to locate what she was looking for.
‘Can I help you?’ asked a man already sat in that neglected corner. Apart from the brightly lit desks it was hard to see anything in a room where the thin, pavement-level windows that ran along the seam of the ceiling were of little use on even such a bright morning.
‘Do you work here?’ she asked.
‘No, though it can feel like it sometimes. What are you looking for?’
‘Sergeant Smith,’ she produced her badge, ‘I need the records of two past Town Councillors.’
‘Tim Hart, historian.’ His stuck his hand out and they shook. ‘Engaged in purely academic researches.’
A kind of panic at learning a person was a police officer was a common reaction amongst people who’d never have dreamt of committing a crime, and always left Cori reassured.
‘I have accreditation from the University of East Anglia here somewhere,’ he continued.
‘Oh, don’t worry, I’m sure you’ve every right to be here. Now, you were going to help me find these Councillors?’
‘Well, you’ve two options,’ he said getting up from his desk to demonstrate. ‘These cabinets here are the records of debates and decisions, so useful if you know the dates of when your Councillors spoke; but if it’s an overview you’re looking for then you could do worse than finding the Councillors’ Directory for the year you think they left and reading what will either be a resignation, final speech, hagiography or eulogy.’
‘One left in Seventy-four, the other Ninety-six or -seven maybe, both in ast…’
‘In absentia, eh? They didn’t die or resign, just never came back?’
‘That’s right: one was having a tough time at home; the other you’d call ill health I suppose.’
‘What a pair. Well, here’s your first book; and here’s the second. Happy reading.’
Thanking him, and taking her books to a desk she thought a polite distance away, Cori lost herself in images of coiffured men in gowns and tweeded ladies from the pages of Country Life. The Councillors’ Directory was a kind of yearbook, issued after each election and offering little more than a photo beside a thumbnail portrait of each current Councillor – important for anyone at the Council or elsewhere involved, when there were local elections each year and all would need to bid for re-election every three years. Most importantly for her purposes though was a section in tribute to those Councillors who’d that year died or left or were otherwise of note… and sure enough in the Directory of Nineteen Ninety-seven was a piece, written by his ‘dear friend’, as he described himself, ‘Councillor Campbell Leigh (Coleville Lane Ward)’ on the recently withdrawn from public service ‘Councillor Charles Prove (retired) MBE’.
Looking from the window of a nearby vacant office, his own looking out only onto neighbouring buildings, Grey was taking these last moments to think as he watched eagerly for the return of his Administrative Assistant across the town square. They would then begin their search for Stella’s son, this new and unknown player, or potential player, in their drama. At he watched from his office eyrie overlooking the civic gardens, he saw Sarah emerge from her expected corner of the
square to walk diagonally across the green toward the police station; as from the opposite side another figure approached in a direction that made it seem likely he would enter the Station reception area just ahead of her.
In the moments before he went down to meet Sarah Grey watched this man, something about him commanding his attention: perhaps the fact that he didn’t know him, yet in his determined walking he clearly had important business to conduct here today.
Grey left the office and went down the stairs to enter the mess room, as they called it, where their back-office staff mingled with officers fresh off the beat and writing their reports. By the key-coded doors that led to reception Grey waited for Sarah; yet she didn’t come through, he instead seeing her through the doors’ inset strengthened glass panels waiting at the other side, as if observing something going on in there. Eventually she appeared to greet him,
‘Patrick Mars,’ she said.
‘Yes, you found his birth certificate. Thank you.’
‘No, I mean he’s already here.’
Chapter 12 – Patrick Mars
