A Place Of Safety (29 page)

The patronising scorn with which he spoke was deeply disturbing. As was Lionel’s attitude. A dishevelled, shambolic figure covered in stains that looked appallingly like blood, he sat beaming at Jackson, nodding eagerly at everything he said.

‘Anyway,’ Barnaby made no effort to conceal his contempt, ‘it’s you I’m here to see, Jackson.’

‘Anything, Inspector. You’ve only got to ask.’

‘How are you on a bike?’

‘Never tried it. I went straight from skateboarding to TDA. Anything else?’

‘Yes,’ said Sergeant Troy. ‘We’re asking for your clothes. Top layer, underwear, socks, shoes. Contents of pockets. The lot.’

‘That’s fetishism, that is.’

‘Just get on with it.’ Barnaby seemed to have endless patience.

‘You mean . . .’ Jackson touched the edge of a beautiful leather jacket. ‘These clothes?’

‘If those are what you were wearing at three o’clock this afternoon,’ said Barnaby, ‘yes.’

‘I’ve told you earlier, I were gardening this afternoon. You don’t think I’d do a dirty job in clobber like this.’

‘So we’ll have the clobber you did do the job in,’ said Sergeant Troy. He was taking a leaf out of the chief’s book and speaking calmly and quietly. What he really wanted to do was run across the room, get his hands round the fucker’s throat and squeeze till moisture showered from his baby blues like rain.

‘It’s in the flat, Inspector.’

‘So get it,’ said Barnaby. ‘And stop calling me Inspector.’

‘No problem,’ said Jackson, strolling towards the door. ‘The cycle should be through by now.’

‘The what?’

‘The wash cycle. After I’d finished work I put everything in the machine. Like I say, it was a dirty job.’

 

Barnaby was twenty minutes late for his seven o’clock briefing and arrived flushed with annoyance after a wrangle with the money men on the top floor. The incident room was bristling with people lively and animated on two counts. First, the situation, which had appeared to be in grave danger of becoming totally moribund, had now taken a totally unexpected and dramatic turn. Secondly, the tape had arrived. Everyone had heard it except the chief and his bagman. Inspector Carter waited till they were seated, wound back and pressed Play.

The moment she spoke Barnaby knew who it was.

‘
. . . help . . . you must help . . . me . . . someone has fallen—no, no, into the water . . . the river . . . she disappeared so fast . . . just swept . . . I ran up and down . . . all the way to the weir . . . What? Oh, Ferne Basset . . . I don’t know, half an hour, maybe less . . . For God’s sake! Does it matter when? Just come, you must come now . . .
’

When asked for her name, the woman caught her breath. There was a moment of absolute silence then the receiver fell. They could all hear it, clattering and banging against the side of the box. Then she started to cry. Just over a minute later the phone was placed very gently back on the rest.

Barnaby sat very still, his eyes closed. There was no point in bemoaning the tragic twists and turns in the case that had kept Ann Lawrence from his grasp until it was too late. ‘If only’ were words outside his vocabulary. Even so, it was bloody hard.

The room was still. Someone switched the machine off. Sergeant Troy, struggling with a deep sense of unease, looked sideways at the brooding figure under the Anglepoise. He saw a profile that seemed to sag rather than relax, blue veins prominent in the wrists (why had he never noticed them before?) and a heavy droop of skin above each eyelid.

Of course the chief often looked knackered, that was nothing new. Sergeant Troy had seen him look tired and disappointed many times. Cheated. Betrayed even. But not beaten like this. And never old.

Barnaby lifted his head, heavily at first as if it was a ball of stone, then more freely. His burly shoulders, freed from tension, set themselves firmly back.

‘Well,’ he said and smiled, warming to life again before their very eyes. ‘Here’s a turn-up for the book.’

The whole room was reactivated as well then, like a film when the freeze frame is released. People started to move, gesture, talk. Someone even laughed. It was Sergeant Troy actually. Part nerves, part just bloody relief.

‘Ties her well in, doesn’t it, sir?’ said Audrey Brierley. ‘Mrs Lawrence.’

There were murmurs of agreement. Plain as the nose on your face, it seemed now. The missing girl had lived in the woman’s house, as did the prime suspect. Or as good as. The murdered man had worked for her. Everything was becoming satisfyingly intertwined.

‘Certainly,’ said Barnaby, ‘we now know she saw what happened when the girl went into the river. But that’s all we know at this stage, OK?’

There were a few murmurs of reluctant agreement.

‘Let’s not get overexcited,’ continued the chief inspector. ‘She may simply have been an observer.’

‘Presumably a secret observer,’ suggested DI Carter, ‘or someone would have shut her up long before this.’

‘But if that was not the case,’ Barnaby carried on smoothly, ‘and Mrs Lawrence was the only person involved, then Leathers must have been blackmailing
her
.’

This suggestion, which overturned all the beliefs and theories held so far in the murder inquiry, was presented with surprising equanimity. The room, taking their cue from the top, nodded.

‘First thing tomorrow we chase up her bank. And if she’s been drawing out large sums of money . . .’ Barnaby shrugged, letting the rest of the sentence tail eloquently away.

Troy liked this idea of open-ended dialogue, if only so that someone else could make a fool of themselves for a change by finishing it. He said, ‘So our assumption that the blackmail victim murdered Leathers . . .’ He shrugged, letting the rest of the sentence tail eloquently away.

‘Yes?’ said Barnaby.

‘Um.’ A pause.

‘Hurry up. We haven’t got all day.’

‘I think Gavin means,’ said Sergeant Brierley, ‘that it’s very hard to picture Mrs Lawrence garrotting someone.’

‘Very hard indeed,’ said the chief inspector. ‘Though not impossible.’

‘But she’s been attacked herself, sir,’ said Constable Phillips. ‘There aren’t two murderers involved in this case surely?’

Barnaby did not reply. Just sat looking round the room. Roughly ten minutes into the meeting and so far sympathy for Ann Lawrence was not particularly in evidence. The chief inspector was not surprised. As far as he knew, no one present, apart from Troy, had met her. They had certainly not witnessed her lying unconscious and hanging on to life, breath by fragile breath, in a lonely hospital bed.

‘So where does Jackson fit into this, chief?’ asked Troy. ‘D’you think he was involved in the assault on Mrs Lawrence?’

‘I don’t think, I know.’

‘But why?’

‘Presumably because we were going to meet her later this afternoon.’

‘But would he know that?’ asked Inspector Carter. ‘Given the total lack of communication between them.’

‘He could have listened in - there’s a connecting line from his flat to the house. Or got it from Lionel. He’s putty in Jackson’s hands.’

Troy snorted in disgust. Putty wasn’t the word he’d use. Something soft, yes. Flexible, yes. Something you could step in that would leave an impression on the sole of your shoe. But not putty. He snorted again just to emphasise his complete and utter disdain.

‘Whatever,’ said Barnaby. ‘But I’m convinced these two crimes are back to back and skin-tight. Solve one, you solve both.’

‘All due respect, sir—’

‘No genuflexions, please, Phillips. Anyone on my team is encouraged to speak their mind.’

And God help them, said his team silently to itself, if he’s running a moody.

‘It’s just that,’ continued Phillips with a quail in his voice, ‘as the girl’s body has never been found, how do we know we have a serious crime at all?’

‘Because whatever Leathers saw gave him a genuine lever for blackmail. And trying it on got him killed.’

‘Oh yes, sir.’ Constable Phillips, not a tall person at the best of times, folded himself down into his chair until he almost vanished. ‘Thank you.’

‘Any time,’ said Barnaby.

‘Could she have just swum to the other side, climbed out and run away?’ asked DS Griggs.

‘Hardly,’ said Inspector Carter. ‘You’ve read Jackson’s record. Can you see him being that incompetent?’

‘Not if the attack on Mrs Lawrence is anything to go by,’ agreed Sergeant Agnew. He turned to Barnaby. ‘How do you think he managed to work that, sir?’

‘Yes,’ said Audrey. ‘Like, how could he know in advance where she was going to park?’

‘He drove in with her,’ said Barnaby. ‘Though of course without her knowledge.’

‘That’s right,’ agreed Troy. ‘She’d never have got into a crowded double-decker bus with him, let alone a car.’

‘He wouldn’t risk hiding in the back, surely.’

‘No, no, he used the boot,’ explained Barnaby. ‘Climb in at the very last minute, pull the lid down, hold on to the latch. And bingo, he’s on the spot when she gets out.’

‘Unlucky for Mrs L there was no one around,’ pointed out Inspector Carter.

‘That would merely have delayed the attempt,’ said the chief inspector. ‘He’d have got her later - waiting at the traffic lights, walking too near the kerb. One hard push when a bus was coming would do it.’

‘Plus he might be carrying,’ added Troy. ‘He’s been done for using a blade.’

‘Lovely,’ murmured Audrey Brierley.

‘And all because she knew exactly what happened the night Carlotta disappeared?’

‘I’m sure of it,’ said Barnaby.

‘He must be desperate.’

‘Yes,’ said Barnaby. ‘Which makes him doubly dangerous.’

‘We should get a result this time, though, sir. Broad daylight? Someone must have seen him.’

‘Maybe,’ said Barnaby. ‘But I think it’ll be forensics who are going to nail this one.’

‘They’re working on the Humber,’ added Sergeant Troy. ‘And they’ve got his clothes. Though he’d already put them through the wash.’

‘That’s a giveaway if you like,’ said Constable Peggy Marlin, a stout, comfortable women in her late thirties with several sons. ‘I’ve never known a bloke that age wash his clothes at all, never mind the minute he takes them off. They’re all over the floor for the next three weeks.’

‘We might have more luck with the shoes,’ said Barnaby. ‘We’ve got all those that were in his flat plus the sneakers he was wearing.’

‘He’ll have cold feet.’ Policewoman Marlin laughed.

‘He’ll have more than cold feet before I’ve done with him.’

‘There’s an oily smear through which Mrs Lawrence was dragged,’ explained Sergeant Troy. ‘Just a pinpoint on one of his shoes and we’ve got him.’

‘Did you see any trace, sir?’ asked Sergeant Brierley.

Barnaby hesitated. ‘Not with the naked eye. But of course that doesn’t mean the lab won’t.’

There was a longish pause. Looking around, the chief inspector sensed their excitement seeping away. Saw them thinking that if the bloke had stepped in it the evidence would have been plain enough. Knew his words had provoked diminishing enthusiasm, disappointment even. Well, that was not his fault. He couldn’t offer what he didn’t have.

‘No doubt the slimy sod’s sorted himself an alibi,’ said DS Griggs.

‘According to him he spent the entire time weeding the Rectory back garden.’

‘Anyone see him?’ asked Inspector Carter.

‘Fortunately, no.’ A small cheer. Barnaby went on to explain how, having hung around for half an hour pouring black coffee into Lionel, they had finally got the information they wanted.

‘It seems Lionel was working in his study on a funeral address for Charlie Leathers. Being out of practice, he reckons it took him a good hour and a half. The study faces the front of the house.’

There were a few soft whistles, raised eyebrows and incredulous glances. Inspector Carter put the general feeling into words.

‘Jackson’s wire-walking this one. What if the old guy had come looking for him?’

‘Oh, there’d be some tale about him falling asleep or shopping in the village. Lawrence believes every word he says.’

‘Loosely wrapped, is he?’

‘To put it kindly.’

‘So when can we prove Jackson was there?’

‘For sure, just gone three thirty. He asked Valentine Fainlight to come over.’

There were jeering ‘ooohs’ at this, some crude and deeply unfunny gestures and one simple request to God that the ‘slimy pair of penile warts’ should disappear up each other’s bottoms.

Constable Phillips said, ‘I didn’t realise Jackson was gay.’

‘He’s not gay,’ said Sergeant Troy, in a voice so thick with contempt he sounded about to choke. ‘Just rents it out to the highest bidder.’

‘This puts Evadne Pleat’s romantic musings in a quite different light,’ said Barnaby. ‘D’you recall she saw Fainlight hanging round at night in the Lawrences’ garden?’

‘And thought he was after Carlotta,’ reminded Audrey Brierley. ‘He must be absolutely besotted.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Barnaby. ‘Let’s just hope he’s not so besotted he’s prepared to lie.’

‘You mean cover for Jackson?’

‘There’s already a discrepancy over time. Fainlight thought he got to the garage flat about half three. Jackson said it was nearer three o’clock.’

‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’ Constable Phillips, gradually unfolding from his chair, peeped out of his shell.

‘Does he know the score, Fainlight?’ said DS Griggs.

Barnaby shook his head.

‘That’ll make a difference,’ said WPC Marlin. ‘Wait till he discovers what he’s giving an alibi for.’

‘Which brings us to the most important question,’ said Barnaby. ‘On which everything,
everything
will depend.’

‘How he got back?’ said Sergeant Troy. And suddenly twigged the message on the mobile from the car park.