To Die Alone (6 page)

Jasmine Riley sat on the bed in her toom at the Roxham guest-house and stared down at the mobile phone in her hand. Why did Trevor not ring? He had said he would ring. Promised he would ring. Promised that they would arrange where to meet up again once they were both safely out of the valley. Said he would give her the name of the pub in Newcastle. Trevor had impressed upon her the importance of not ringing him: if anything happened to him, he had said, the last thing he wanted was his phone falling into the wrong hands. GPS, he had said for the umpteenth time, these people could do wonders with GPS. You had to be careful when dealing with these people, he had said, had to keep one step ahead of the game, make sure you gave them no way of tracking you down. She had often wondered how he knew these things, where he had learned to speak in such a way. Don’t worry, he had said, with a reassuring smile just before leaving the cottage that morning, he would ring.

But he hadn’t.

Jasmine Riley looked down at the phone for a few more moments then up at the clock. 10 p.m. it said. She sighed.

‘Sorry, love,’ she said and dialled Trevor Meredith’s number.

High up in the dark northern hills, lying among bracken in a valley swept with rain, Trevor Meredith’s mobile phone rang and rang and rang.

Ten miles north of Levton Bridge, a battered old red pick-up drove slowly along the road as it wound its way like a ribbon through the bottom of the valley. The vehicle’s headlights, one much dimmer than the other, were the only illumination in the darkness and showed up flecks of driving rain. The vehicle slowed next to the entrance to one of the small fields that patchworked the hillside and the passenger, a man with a flat cap jammed over his shock of white hair, got out and walked, bow-legged and stooped, to open the gate. The job done, Harry Galbraith walked back to the vehicle where the driver, Dennis Soames, a stocky tousled-haired farmer in his thirties, wound down the window.

‘Well?’ he asked.

‘Should be alreet,’ said Galbraith.

The pick-up reversed slowly into the entrance and drew to a halt, its nose hardly noticeable from the road. Soames cut the lights then waited for Galbraith to rejoin him. Sitting there with their windows down, the two men listened to the sounds of the night – the patter of rain on the vehicle’s windscreen, the whining of the wind across the rock escarpment far above them and, occasionally, the plaintive sound of a sheep bleating as it sheltered from the storm behind one of the drystone walls.

‘Old man Jenner all right with us parking here?’ asked Soames.

‘Aye, as long as he don’t have to do no work, he’ll be fine.’

Both men laughed and Harry Galbraith rooted around in his canvas bag before producing two tin-foil packages and handing one of them to Soames.

‘Ham,’ he said.

‘Grand.’

Galbraith rummaged around a bit more and produced a flask and two plastic cups.

‘Tea,’ he announced.

‘E’en better.’

Galbraith reached into the bag again and produced a small Tupperware box.

‘Cake,’ he said. ‘Home-made.’

‘Your Elsie knows how to look after us, Harry.’

For a few moments, the only sound in the vehicle was the munching of sandwiches then Soames looked at his friend.

‘Are you going to try the police again, Harry?’

‘No need.’

‘I’m not so sure.’ Soames looked anxious. ‘I mean, we’re out here on our own. Jack Harris did say that we should only do it with the police around and we’ve heard nowt from them since you talked to that Gallagher chap.’

‘Relax,’ said Galbraith, reaching into a glove compartment and producing a radio. ‘We’ve got this if we need them. Which reminds me, we better have a codename for tonight. How about something—?’

‘I’d still feel better if—’

‘Don’t fret,’ said Galbraith, noticing his friend’s increasingly anxious expression. He unscrewed the lid from the flask. ‘Tea?’

Three miles further down the road, back towards Levton Bridge, the lights of a black saloon car cut through the darkness.

‘Nothing!’ exclaimed Matty Gallagher, glancing across the living room from the bureau he had been searching. ‘We’ve been through this place with a fine-tooth comb and there is absolutely nothing to suggest why anyone would want to kill Trevor Meredith.’

Jack Harris, crouching by a bookcase in the corner of the room, did not reply. It was shortly before 10 p.m. and the detectives were in the small cottage on the edge of Levton Bridge which had been Meredith’s home for a decade. The house was like the man, tidy and unremarkable, and the officers had been searching it for the best part of an hour, speaking little as they went through drawers and files, seeking something which would cast light on Trevor Meredith’s death. As their labours continued to prove fruitless, the sergeant had grown increasingly frustrated.

‘I mean,’ he said, holding up a sheet of paper in disgust, ‘he’s not even behind with his gas bill. It’d be easier to see why someone would want to murder Mother Teresa.’

‘She local then?’ asked Harris, not looking up.

‘You know the new Indian on the corner of Wesley Street? She works in the kitchens. Cooks a mean rogan josh, I can tell you.’

Gallagher grinned with delight at his quip then sighed as Jack Harris gave no sign that he had heard.

‘Wasted,’ said the sergeant gloomily, ‘that’s what I am.’

Harris said nothing but, looking down so that Gallagher could not see his face in the shadows behind the sofa, he allowed himself a smile.

‘Talking of the Indian,’ said the sergeant, looking up at the clock above the fireplace. ‘if we get finished here in time, I quite fancy a curry and they open late on a Monday night. You on for that?’

Again Harris did not reply. Gallagher sighed – he knew the answer anyway. The sergeant returned to his inspection of the bureau but could not concentrate: kept thinking about his favourite curry house back in London. A little back street job. Nothing to look at from the outside but chapatis to die for. Matty Gallagher sighed: God, he’d tried, he thought, he really had tried to settle in the North, but in recent weeks he had found himself thinking more and more about the old places. With an effort, he dragged his mind back to the task in hand.

‘I tell you something weird,’ he said, looking round the room. ‘It’s been bugging me ever since we got here. There is nothing of the man.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, think of a normal house. There’d be pictures for a start – parents’ golden wedding anniversary, grandkids, being presented with the golf trophy, that sort of thing. I bet even you’ve got pictures around your gaff, the day you and Scoot got married, that kind of thing.’

The inspector chuckled and glanced across at Scoot, who was sitting in a corner watching the two men work. Then the inspector looked at the pictures on the wall: two nondescript prints of landscapes which could hang in any house in the country. He wondered why he had not noticed the absence of the personal touch himself and looked approvingly at his sergeant.

‘What’s more,’ said Gallagher, flicking through some papers on the bureau. ‘There’s nothing here either. We’ve got a little desk like this at home and it’s crammed with personal things, but this guy? It’s like he’s a non-person.’

Both officers looked up as a forensics officer clumped down the stairs and entered the living room.

‘Anything?’ asked Gallagher hopefully.

‘Not really.’

Gallagher nodded gloomily and the forensics officer walked out into the hallway and left the cottage.

‘Maybe this is a waste of time,’ said the sergeant. ‘Maybe we’re looking for a connection that doesn’t exist. Maybe it’s a good old fashioned loony out to kill the first person he sees. Wrong time, wrong place.’

‘You’re the second person to have said that today.’

‘There you are then.’

‘And you’re both wrong.’

‘Ah.’

‘This feels deliberate,’ said the inspector, replacing the book on the shelf and walking over to stare out of the window. ‘Someone was out to get Trevor Meredith.’

‘I don’t suppose that you have any evidence to support the theory, by any chance?’

‘Don’t complicate things.’

Gallagher surveyed the back of the inspector’s head for a moment: in the year since he had reluctantly forsaken his beloved London to set up home with his fiancée in Levton Bridge, the sergeant had struggled to come to terms with much about his existence in the northern hills. At times, the silence of the hills themselves threatened to stifle the life out of Matty Gallagher after the bustle of the Capital – he sometimes thought that he would kill to hear a car horn in the middle of the night – but the thing which most exercised his mind was the difficulty he experienced in reading Jack Harris. Wondering now if the inspector was joking – everyone knew that Harris was perfectly capable of cutting corners – the sergeant eyed the DCI uncertainly.

The inspector walked over to sit on the settee. Feeling strangely weary, he remembered that he had not eaten anything for hours apart from a chocolate bar up on the moors. Maybe, he thought, looking over at the sergeant, who had now returned his attention to the bureau, a curry might not be a bad idea after all. It was time the inspector bought a pint for the sergeant.

‘So where do we go now then?’ asked Gallagher, lifting up some of the papers before letting them drop haphazardly: several floated on to the carpet. ‘We’ve got nothing here.’

‘Let’s go through what we do have then.’

‘That shouldn’t take long,’ said the sergeant, settling down in one of the armchairs and flicking through his notebook. ‘Trevor Meredith, forty-two, forty-three next month. Manager, and also a director, of Levton Bridge Dog Sanctuary, a not-for-profit company largely dependent on grants and donations.’

‘I gave them fifty quid when I got Scoot there,’ nodded Harris, gesturing to his dog, whose ears pricked when he heard his name.

‘Then you will know that it’s hardly the kind of place where murderous tensions run high. And nothing we hear about Meredith makes me think anything else. If he did have a secret life, he sure as hell kept it well hidden.’

‘I imagine that’s why it was a secret life.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘What else do we know about Meredith?’

‘Precious little. He came to Levton Bridge ten years ago – looks like he moved here when he got the manager’s job,’ said the sergeant, flicking over a page of his notebook. ‘Here it is – he started work on October the ninth, 1999. He was made a director three years ago. A reward for loyal service – they’d had four managers in three years before that because the pay was so poor and they were delighted that he had stayed.’

‘Where had been before he came here?’

‘The staff reckon he’d been travelling for a few years.’

‘Travelling where?’

Gallagher looked up as Butterfield walked into the room.

‘Ask the lady yourself,’ he said.

‘They didn’t know,’ said the constable, sitting down in the only vacant armchair and stretching out her legs. ‘One of them reckoned it might have been Europe.’

‘It’s a big place,’ said Harris. ‘Couldn’t they be any more specific?’

‘Not sure anyone was interested, guv.’

‘Doesn’t that strike you as odd?’ said Harris.

‘You know what this place does to people.’

‘Yeah,’ said Gallagher with a sly smile. ‘Half of them get nose bleeds going to Roxham. I pass them sprawled out on the roadside when I drive home. It’s a truly pitiful sight. I stop to help them but what can you do?’

Harris looked as if he was about to remonstrate with his sergeant: Gallagher’s disparaging comments about life in the hills had often been known to irritate people. Harris knew this only too well, having fielded several complaints from irate townsfolk and eventually, following acerbic comments from Supt Curtis, the inspector had found himself warning his sergeant to be more sensitive – but only half-heartedly. Jack Harris appreciated from personal experience how claustrophobic life could be in the division’s hill communities.

Escaping such realities was the reason that, as a young man, Harris had joined the army, to leave behind bad influences and to explore the world beyond the dark horizon of the North Pennines. Even when he left the army after more than a decade’s service, Harris had opted to start his police career to the south, in Manchester, rather than return to Levton Bridge. Eventually, however, the pull of the hills had proved too strong, as he had always known it would, and he had applied for a transfer to his home town. For all his powerful desire to return, Jack Harris had not done so without reservations: he knew that a place where everyone knew everyone’s business could be wearing. Which was why he did not challenge Gallagher’s comment now.

‘Surely,’ said Harris, suddenly aware that the others were looking at him for some kind of response, ‘we must be able to find something. What about his CV, there must be something in there?’

‘What CV?’ asked Butterfield. ‘I went through every file at the dog sanctuary and there isn’t any sign of a CV. His personnel docket in the filing cabinet was empty. No letters, no reports, no nothing. It’s like Trevor Meredith did not exist before he came to Levton Bridge.’

‘Yeah,’ said Gallagher, holding up a sheet of paper. ‘We know how much he paid the gas board but we know virtually nothing about Trevor Meredith the man.’

‘What do we know about the girlfriend? She pop out of thin air as well?’

‘No, there’s plenty on Jasmine Riley,’ said Gallagher, glancing down at his notes. ‘She lived with her mum in Chester while she trained as a legal clerk. Left home when she got a job in Levton Bridge, working at the solicitors in the market-place. Arrived a couple of months after Meredith turfed up.’

‘Now there’s a coincidence. She knew Meredith before she came here?’

‘Seems not,’ said Butterfield. ‘The staff at the sanctuary reckon that they met at a party. They had been together ever since.’

‘Yeah,’ nodded Gallagher, glancing round the room. ‘Her mum said they were going to get married next Spring. Jasmine moved in here not long ago.’

Harris walked over to the window again.

‘So,’ he said, ‘if they were making all those plans, why on earth were they getting out this morning in such a hurry? And why were they travelling separately?’

‘Your guess,’ shrugged Gallagher.

Harris walked back over to the bookcase and reached out for the volume he had been studying earlier: a history of blood sports.

‘I keep coming back to the dog fighting,’ he said. ‘I’ve got this idea that Trevor Meredith decided to do a bit of freelance investigation.’

‘Well, he was damned foolhardy if he was,’ said Gallagher. ‘Those guys can be pretty mean. They’d kill you as easy as….’

The sergeant’s voice tailed off.

‘Indeed,’ said Harris.

Idly, the inspector flicked through the book, giving an exclamation when a piece of paper fluttered on to the floor. Reaching down, he turned it over and read the mobile phone number written on it in what he assumed to be Meredith’s hand, neat and tidy like the man. After showing them the piece of paper, and receiving blank looks, Harris started to dial the number.

‘Are you sure that’s wise?’ said Gallagher dubiously. ‘I mean, what if it’s—?’

Harris waved the protest away and listened for only a fleeting moment then hurriedly hit the cancel button. He looked at the piece of paper in bemusement.

‘Now why,’ he asked softly, ‘would a man who wasn’t even late with his gas bill, have the phone number of Gerry Radford?’

‘Who he?’ asked Gallagher.

‘One of Manchester gangland’s finest. He and I go way back.’

‘Brilliant,’ breathed Butterfield, eyes gleaming as they always did when Jack Harris talked about his experiences with major league criminals: it was, the young detective had always thought, what you joined the police for.

‘So,’ asked Harris thoughtfully, ‘on whose side was Trevor Meredith, do we reckon?’