The Moth Catcher (18 page)

Vera thought Susan would probably know. She imagined the cleaner going through desk drawers when she had the place to herself, picking up birth dates and stray personal details. She’d be one to hoard information, loving it for its own sake.
And isn’t that just what I do?

She looked across at Percy. ‘Did Susan pick up any useful facts about Patrick Randle, the house-sitter? She’d have been curious – a new man in the valley – but she might be a bit embarrassed to tell us, because she wasn’t supposed to go up into the flat. She wouldn’t want us to know she’d been prying. But she might have told you.’

For the first time Percy seemed uncomfortable. He shifted in his chair. ‘She means no harm.’

‘That’s not really an answer, is it, pet?’

The old man didn’t reply and Vera continued, ‘You know this place. Two men are dead. You’d tell me, wouldn’t you, if you had any idea what might have caused it? Even if you only suspected?’

‘I don’t know anything about the murders,’ Percy said. ‘Really. I hate all this. The police in the meadow and the roadblock at the end of the lane, so I get stopped every time I just want a quick pint in The Lamb. If I knew owt useful, I’d tell you. I want everything back to normal.’

Vera nodded, satisfied at last.

She expected to find the station quiet, but Holly was still there. With a touch of guilt Vera suspected the officer had been waiting for
her
. If it’d been Joe, Vera would have taken him home, fed him something her hippy neighbours had left in her freezer, opened a beer. But she’d learned that Holly disliked that sort of approach, saw it almost as corrupting. So Vera took her to the canteen, bought coffee from one of the machines. That was about as informal as Holly was comfortable with. Their words seemed to rattle around the empty space.

‘So, Hol? How did you get on with Randle’s girlfriend?

‘She’d seen about the murder in the press. Of course she was upset. Although Becky was the one to end the relationship, I don’t think she saw the separation as permanent. She always thought there’d be a happy-ever-after ending.’

Vera heard the sarcasm, but ignored it. Holly could do with a bit of romance in her life. It might make her a tad less brittle.

‘If she still cared for the lad, why did she dump him?’

‘Because she thought he was keeping secrets from her. Maybe she thought if she threatened to dump him, it would jolt him into confiding in her. It didn’t work, though.’

Vera became more alert at that. Until then she’d been going through the motions, letting Holly know that she was taking her seriously. But now this was starting to get interesting. ‘Come on, Hol. Tell me more. What sort of secrets. Another woman?’

‘Nothing like that. At least I don’t think so. Apparently Patrick’s personality changed at about the time his mother took up with her new man. He became interested in the family history and started researching the past, digging around in the archives of the local paper. He got a bit paranoid about his university research too, talked about people stealing his data. I’m not sure what it was all about. But he sent Becky a text last week.’ Holly looked down at her notes. ‘
Nearly fit to be your friend again. If you can forgive me.
Which Becky took to mean that he’d finished whatever project had been taking up all his time, and he hoped it might be possible for them to get back together. That he might be prepared to tell her what had been going on.’

‘Did she reply?’ Vera’s coffee had been left to go cold.

‘She didn’t phone him. I’m not sure whether she texted.’

Vera tried to get her head around this. Of course the emotional affairs of two young people might have no relevance at all to the case, but Patrick’s obsession with secrecy struck her as significant. What could a young man from his background possibly have to hide? And where could Martin Benton fit in? She realized that it was starting to get dark outside.

‘Get on home.’ She made a little shooing gesture with her hands. ‘We’ve got a full day tomorrow and I can’t have you off your game. You’ve done brilliantly, Hol. Thanks.’ Then she smiled at the young woman’s confusion. It never did any harm to wrong-foot the team by giving a bit of praise. It occurred to Vera, watching Holly walk away to spend the night alone in her flat, that they had more in common than she liked to admit.
She’d
been spiky and defensive when she’d been a young officer, and though there were more women in the service now, Holly didn’t have it easy. No family around to support her. And it probably wasn’t her fault that she looked like something out of a fashion magazine, with legs up to her waist and American teeth. Holly left the canteen and Vera watched with a stab of sympathy. Then she thought she must be getting soft in her old age.

On the way back to her car she called into her office. On her desk was the brown Manila file she’d seen in Randle’s car and a little note from Joe:
This is the file you were asking about. It was empty. No fingerprints except Randle’s
. She thought that just about summed up the progress they were making with the case.

The next morning she woke very early. There was the cold grey light of just after dawn, but it was the noise of her phone that had dragged her from sleep. The landline. Everyone knew that her house had crap mobile reception. ‘Yes!’ She could feel the adrenaline racing through her heart, jolting her, scattering weird ideas in her brain. She thought she must sound as Percy had, when she’d rung his doorbell the afternoon before.

It was a voice she didn’t recognize and it took her a while to take in the words. ‘We think we’ve found the locus for the young man’s death.’

‘Where?’ Now she was fully conscious and aware of what was going on. She was already out of bed, the phone tucked between her ear and her shoulder, scrabbling to find a scrap of paper.

‘The vegetable garden of the big house. We didn’t look there yesterday and it was our first search this morning. There’s blood on the wooden rim of one of the seedbeds. Easy enough to miss, but one of my boys picked it up. I’ll bet you anything we’ll find that the soil on the victim’s shoes has traces of compost. There’s salad stuff growing in there, and some of the plants have been crushed.’

‘Thanks.’ Her mind was still racing and that had nothing to do with being wakened suddenly from a deep sleep. If Randle had been killed in the garden, why bother moving him? He’d be just as much hidden there as he’d been in the ditch. Then the thought came, sudden and urgent:
It would help if we knew which of the victims died first.
She realized the officer in charge of the search team was still on the end of the line. ‘Tell your people it’s my shout next time I see them in the pub.’

‘We’ll carry on looking. But I thought you’d want to know.’

Friday morning and Annie Redhead was counting the hours until her daughter’s release from prison. They’d had a phone call from Lizzie and had been told she’d be let out of the gaol mid-morning on Sunday. Phone calls were always tricky. The background noise and the money running out, people in the queue shouting for her to be quick. Annie had offered to pick Lizzie up: ‘If that’s all right. If you haven’t made any other plans.’ She’d become used to being careful what she said to Lizzie; always felt it was important not to make assumptions. After all, Lizzie was an adult now. She had to be allowed to make her own decisions. Annie imagined standing in the gloomy prison hall where she waited when she went to visit and seeing the small figure of Lizzie being led along the corridor. Looking like a shadow. In her daydream Lizzie was always delighted to see her and, when she emerged into the hall, lit up through the Victorian stained-glass windows, her face seemed to be shining.

Annie wasn’t sure whether she was looking forward to Lizzie’s release or dreading it. She’d left behind the social embarrassment of Lizzie’s imprisonment months ago. That no longer worried her. The court case had been in the papers and everyone had known about it. The only time Sam ever said anything positive about selling the restaurant was that he was glad they weren’t living in Kimmerston when the news came out. ‘I couldn’t bear it. Customers talking about it and falling quiet every time we got close. The pity.’

Of course their friends in Valley Farm had known that Lizzie was inside, that she’d been charged with grievous bodily harm, but they’d never really mentioned it. Not in front of Sam. They understood that he was a private man. Jan and Lorraine had come to her separately, saying much the same thing: ‘I’m really sorry. It must be a dreadful time for you. If ever you want to talk . . .’ But the last thing Annie wanted to talk about was Lizzie’s behaviour. She was happy to have everyone there when she needed some company, people to share a bottle of wine with, a bit of a party on a Friday night. Even Sam had appreciated that. But she didn’t want a heavy conversation or advice. They’d been through all that since Lizzie was tiny – with teachers, psychologists and social workers. None of it had helped. She thought Lizzie was damaged in some way, had been since she was a baby, and nobody could help her.

Occasionally Annie saw a mother with a grown-up daughter walking through the town. They’d have linked arms or be sharing a joke. Then she experienced a moment of intense jealousy, just as she supposed women who couldn’t have children felt when they saw a newborn in a pram. The pain of wanting something that would probably always be denied to them.

The great thing about having Lizzie in prison had been that they could stop worrying about her for a while. The relief of that had been immense. Like the bliss of chronic pain suddenly disappearing. Annie knew about chronic pain because of the arthritis in her knees. In prison their daughter was the authorities’ responsibility. Annie could go to bed at night knowing that Lizzie was safe, that there would be no frantic phone calls in the early hours demanding action. No mad dashes to A&E. But soon Lizzie would be out, and Annie’s deepest fear was that the stress and anxiety would return and they wouldn’t be able to handle them this time. They were too old. They’d become used to contentment, a wonderful boredom, and a return to the old way of surviving might break them.

The phone rang again just after Sam had driven away on his routine trip to the village to collect his paper.

‘Hello.’ Annie hadn’t recognized the number and her voice was sharp. It would be someone trying to sell insurance, a new boiler, loft insulation.

‘Mrs Redhead? This is Shirley Hewarth. I work for a charity called Hope North-East. It’s about your daughter.’

For a moment Annie didn’t answer. ‘What do you want?’

‘Just a chat.’ The woman’s voice was warm and calm. She sounded like all the other professionals who’d thought they could make a difference. ‘About Lizzie’s future. I saw her yesterday. Just a short prerelease visit. I can come to you, if you like. Later this morning.’

‘No!’ Annie didn’t want another stranger in the house, and Sam saw any visitor as an intruder. ‘I’ll come to you. Where are you?’ When the woman started describing the office and the pit-village where it was based, Annie interrupted her. ‘Yes, I know where that is.’ Because it was where she came from. She’d lived with her parents not very far from the charity’s office.

Annie didn’t tell Sam about the phone call or the appointment. They were both thinking that Lizzie would soon be out, but they hadn’t discussed it. Perhaps they were hoping some miracle had happened in the Victorian monstrosity where their daughter had been living for the last few months. That she’d emerge from the big wrought-iron gates gentler and more considerate.

When he walked into the kitchen with his newspaper under his arm, she was already dressed to go out.

‘You don’t mind, love, do you? I really need to escape the valley for a while.’

‘Do you want me to come with you?’ He put down the newspaper.

‘Nah, I might meet up with Jill. Have coffee. Lunch even. Do a bit of shopping.’ He nodded and didn’t ask any more questions. It felt strange lying to him. She didn’t think she’d ever done that before.

It was weird going back to Bebington. Weird because nothing had really changed. It had been a kind of ghost town since the pits had closed, and she hadn’t known it as very much different; there were still rows of houses with peeling paint and occasional boarded-up windows, the bony men sitting on doorsteps, listless, seeming only to wait for their next fix. In other parts of the country, and the county, the economy had peaked and troughed, but here there’d been nothing but depression. She’d have understood Lizzie’s anger and frustration if her daughter had been brought up in this town, but she’d been born when they were living at the farm. Her playground had been the valley. And even when Sam had given up the tenancy and they’d moved to Kimmerston, Lizzie had been loved and given everything she could possibly need.

Annie stood for a moment outside the Hope North-East office and tried to remember what used to be in the building. Suddenly she remembered: a little cafe. An old-fashioned greasy spoon, serving bacon stotties and strong tea. Her grandfather had come here sometimes to meet his pals. She pushed open the door and climbed the stairs to the office.

Three people were sitting at one of the small desks, having some sort of meeting. They had mugs of coffee in front of them. There was a skinny woman who looked middle-aged, but was probably in her early thirties. Lank hair and troubled eyes. A big guy with huge hands and tattoos. And Shirley. From first glance, Annie had realized this must be Shirley. It was the way she dressed and the way she was speaking. She was clearly the person in charge. She stood up. Seeing her close up, Annie thought she was older than she’d first guessed. Late fifties, early sixties. The make-up was discreet, but skilfully applied.

‘You must be Annie.’ Shirley held out her hand. ‘Just give me a moment to finish up here and we’ll find somewhere private to talk.’

There was a brief conversation with her colleagues about diary dates and fund-raising. The big man wandered off downstairs and the little woman returned to her own desk.

‘There’s an interview room downstairs,’ Shirley said. ‘We won’t be disturbed there. I’ll make us some coffee, shall I?’ She switched on the kettle, which stood on a tray on the floor, and spooned ground coffee into a cafetière. Annie had been expecting horrible supermarket own-brand instant and was surprised.