A Deadly Thaw (6 page)

Kat set the alarm for 6.30 a.m. and reached for the phone after stumbling out of bed. Her eyes were gritty from the lack of sleep, and there was a heavy pressure behind them. It was a bad sign. If she started the day with a headache it was unlikely to clear until the next morning. She looked to see if there were any messages on her phone from Lena. Nothing. Charlie was curled up in the middle of the landing, and she stepped over him to check Lena’s room one final time. The space was devoid of her presence, and there was an unfriendly chill to the air.

Bampton that morning was covered in a shroud of mist waiting for the pale spring sun to rise. The first part of the drive was slow. She could see nothing further than a few feet in front of her, and, although she knew the roads well, the speed of other drivers hurtling towards her made her fearful. As she left Derbyshire behind, the promise of sunshine proved to be false. The day opened out into a bleak morning, clouds gathering and darkening in the grey sky.

She switched on the radio and let music soothe her frayed nerves. By the time she had reached North Yorkshire, the rain was pelting fat blobs onto the windscreen.

The sky reflected the black hues of the moor in the final miles to Whitby. As she drove down the narrow streets, she was suddenly aware of the futility of what she was trying to do. She knew that Lena came regularly to the town, but the only clue was an address she knew her sister had stayed at years ago.

Parking was clearly an issue in Whitby. When she finally found a space and hunted around for enough change to pay for a few hours, she retrieved the piece of paper she had from her pocket. The ink had faded only slightly, and Lena’s swirls were still legible on the yellowing paper. Crowther Terrace. Kat took out her phone and found the street on the map. She had parked on the wrong side of the river. She not only had to go down the steep incline, her ankles groaning in protest at the unfamiliar pull, but then puff up the hill on the other side. When she got to the street, she quickly found number 43. One look at the house, and she sighed. It was a holiday cottage now. Or perhaps it had been all those years ago. A card in the window was advertising Whitby Holiday Homes with a mobile number underneath.

Her call was answered by someone with a husky male voice, his Yorkshire accent immediately apparent. Kat plunged in. ‘I’m standing outside 43 Crowther Terrace, which I’m thinking of renting at some point in the future. I just want to know, has it been on your books for long? I’m looking for something with an up-to-date interior.’

There was a short silence. Then a cough. ‘Hold on. I can check.’ Silence, and then he came back on. ‘It’s been with us since 1995. Not that recent, I suppose. I’ve just called up the property on the computer. The rooms are traditionally furnished with—’

‘Fine, fine.’ Kat was making some mental calculations. Lena must have rented the house off this company when she stayed here. ‘Do you have a list of people who have used the cottage over the years?’

It was a long shot, and too much for the man at the other end of the phone. ‘Hang on, who are you?’

Kat cut the connection and stepped into the road to take a good look at the house. It was a traditional fisherman’s cottage, built in the days when houses and shops were jumbled together on the same street. Next door was its mirror image, the brick whitewashed less recently, though.

Kat went to the house and rang the bell. The door opened immediately. ‘I thought you were a potential burglar staring at my house like that.’ He was a tall man with a black beard, roughly trimmed. A thick-ribbed green jumper was half-tucked into his jeans and his feet were bare.

‘I wondered if you could tell me something about the cottage next door? My sister stayed there, I think. A few years ago.’

‘You’re Lena’s sister? It gave me a shock when I saw you outside. I thought you were her for a moment. You look like her, you know.’

Kat sighed. ‘I do know. I’m Kat Gray and I’m trying to find Lena. Have you seen her? This week, I mean?’

‘Lena?’ The man stared at her. ‘I haven’t seen her for years. That’s why I was surprised to see you standing there. It would’ve been nice if it
was
her. I miss her. You okay?’

Kat suddenly felt exhausted. The three-hour drive, conducted in nervous tension, had drained her of all energy. She wondered if he would invite her in, but he made no move to open the door any further. ‘Can you remember when you last saw her?’

‘Lena? Like I said, years ago. She used to come here all the time.’

‘Can you remember what years?’

The man looked at her in amusement. ‘You’re kidding, right? Of course I don’t know what years. She was always by herself. She used to come a lot. It’s how I got to know her.’

‘You were friendly?’ She wondered if he’d tell her his name, but, standing over the threshold of his home, he was revealing nothing about himself.

‘Fairly. It’s not a huge amount of fun living next to a holiday cottage. Some people can be noisy and, of course, people rarely come more than once. But Lena was different. She came back again and again. Until—’

‘Until?’

The man shrugged. ‘I don’t know. She just stopped coming. A long time ago. It was a shame, us not getting to say goodbye.’ He looked at her in consternation. ‘She’s all right, isn’t she?’

Was Lena all right? wondered Kat. It was difficult to say for sure. Her abrupt disappearance from Whitby must have been a result of her arrest and imprisonment. ‘I haven’t seen her for a while, that’s all. You know how it is with families sometimes, don’t you?’

The man looked like he did. ‘Sorry I can’t be any more help, Kat. When you track her down, tell her from me that it’d be nice to see her.’ And without saying goodbye to her, he shut the door gently.

Andrew Fisher had either hidden himself away since 2004 or had been hidden. This was the only indisputable fact that Sadler’s tired head was able to crystallise. He’d slept badly, waking at approximate half-hourly intervals and checking, pointlessly, his alarm clock. He’d never overslept in his life and yet the fear was always there – the possibility that one day he would miss the shriek of his bedside alarm.

And yet what if he did? As a detective inspector he had some flexibility with his hours. It wouldn’t be a complete disaster if he turned up late once in his professional career. The thought made his head ache even further.

The thing giving him the biggest headache was where Andrew Fisher could have been since 2004. Twelve years was a long time to hide yourself these days. Even overseas there were ways of tracing you. Although, Sadler suspected, if you weren’t being looked for, why would anyone find you? But until the identity of the dead man had been uncovered, and Lena Gray found, Andrew’s whereabouts would be an area of focus.

Connie walked through the door with her usual bustle of energy, remembering to knock only as she was three-quarters into the room. ‘There’s something I want to run past you, if that’s okay?’

Sadler gestured to the chair in front of his desk.

She flopped down and sat with one foot over her knee. ‘Palmer’s concentrating on the identity of our original dead man. There’s a distinguishing feature in the PM report that he wants to investigate. A possible surgical procedure on his arm. He’s looking at an ID that way and I’ve been giving him a hand by researching persons reported missing around the same time. But something else came up while I was going through the database.’

‘Go on.’ Sadler reached into his drawer and took two tablets from a blister pack, swallowing them with the remains of his cold coffee.

‘Well. In 2012, a report was made by a member of the public who claimed to have seen Andrew Fisher while she was on holiday in Whitby. She’s from Bampton and was visiting Whitby as part of a coach tour.’

‘A coach tour? How old was the witness?’

‘The report doesn’t say but I would guess over retirement age. Doesn’t mean she’s not reliable though, does it?’ Connie held out the report to him. ‘Would you like to see it?’

It was a few lines. A Jane Reynolds, resident of Curlew Road in Bampton, had called the station in the summer of 2012 to say that she had seen Andrew Fisher alive in Whitby while she was there on a weekend trip to the area. The officer, PC James Walker, had recorded the action but had done nothing to follow up the report.

Connie saw him looking at the name. ‘I rang him. Before coming to you. He remembers the call but only in vague terms. He thinks the woman began by being positive that it was Andrew Fisher she had spotted but by the end of the call had talked herself into believing it was a case of mistaken identity. So he made a note of the call and filed it away. I’m sure I’d have done exactly the same.’

Sadler smiled. ‘Me too.’ He handed her back the report. ‘Whitby? Interesting mix of Dracula, chip shops and early Christian religion. Don’t we have enough on our plate?’

‘It seems not. She’ll need checking out. Jane Reynolds lives on the other side of Bampton. It’s not far.’

‘Go and see her and get a proper statement from her. Then let me know how you get on. Whitby? What the hell would Andrew Fisher be doing in Whitby?’

Connie left the room, and, in the silence, Sadler thought back to his teenage years. He had shared many classes with Andrew Fisher while at Bampton High. They had been in the top set for most of the subjects and had progressed through school in the classrooms, thrown together by a shared capacity for doing well in exams. But they’d never been friends. Sadler had liked reading and cricket, and that was about it until he was fifteen. Then he had discovered music, and he and a group of friends would travel to Sheffield to see the latest bands.

Andrew Fisher had been sporty but was a rugby-playing drinker, even as a teenager. He would come into class hungover, smelling of stale beer and teenage sweat. Then they had gone their respective ways to university, and Sadler had seen him only very occasionally.

As Sadler had climbed the ranks of the police, the casual acquaintances of his childhood could basically be divided into two reactions. Those who were impressed by the status that the job of a police inspector afforded, and those who gave him a wide berth. Sadler had long learnt not to make any assumptions about the latter group, which had included Andrew. People steered clear of the police for a variety of reasons, not all of them criminal. Not all. But some.

Another knock on the door. This time it came in advance of the person entering. It was Llewellyn. Sadler stood up, but his boss waved him back to his seat. ‘Needed to stretch my legs. Get out of the office. You know how it is.’

‘I do. I’m about to go out myself. How did the visit to Mrs Fisher go?’

Llewellyn sat down in the chair opposite and clasped his large hands together behind his head. ‘She’d already had the news broken to her, of course. The family-liaison officer was still with her. She seemed to be taking it okay, though.’

‘She was surprised? His mother, I mean. About her son being alive all these years?’

‘I’d say she’d had the surprise of her life. I think she was still in shock when I left her. I mean, let’s face it, it’s a lot to digest, isn’t it? Your son’s alive, then he’s killed, then he’s alive because it was someone else who was killed, but actually you can’t see him because he’s now dead.’

It was almost comical, thought Sadler, and it was unsurprising that Llewellyn could see the humour in the situation. ‘So we can rule her out as an accomplice? That’s interesting in itself. Whatever made Andrew Fisher disappear, it was enough to make him determined not to speak to his mother.’

‘We’re missing something, Francis. I don’t want us pissing about just looking for Lena Gray, wherever she may have got to. Don’t look at me like that. Of course I want you to
look
for her. What I mean is there’s something gone on, that’s still continuing. We need to find out what it is.’

Sadler exhaled a deep breath. ‘You think this is part of something bigger? Connie’s investigating a possible sighting, and Palmer’s looking at the identity of the original victim. Do you have anything in mind?’

Llewellyn stood up to leave. ‘Take my advice. Start with the affair. That man was found in Lena Gray’s bed. What do you think he was doing there? Having a kip? This case revolves around sex. That’s where you need to start.’

The pale sunshine lifted Kat’s spirits as she drove to the small studio she rented for her therapy sessions. She opened the door and went to put some flowers in a glass vase in an attempt to brighten the place. When she’d first qualified, Lena had suggested Kat use one of the downstairs rooms of their house for her practice. Kat had swallowed the retort that had come to her lips and merely said that she wanted to split her professional and home life. Which, in a sense, was true. But the idea of meeting clients in one of the rooms with peeling wallpaper and shabby furniture was laughable. Anyway, it was Lena who had always identified with the house. At some point Kat would need to make her escape. Perhaps sooner rather than later. When she found Lena, she would have it out with her. It was nonsense holding on to the place.

Kat’s first client of the day was Miriam, who was invariably late. Kat kept rigidly to her slots. Miriam’s appointment was at 9.30. If she turned up at 9.40, the session would still finish at 10.30. In this regard, Miriam had run the gamut of emotions, from outrage at paying for a shortened session to pleading for a bit of tolerance. Now she faced the routine with a calm acceptance. At no point had she considered changing her behaviour.

Kat glanced at the clock. Ten past. She had at least twenty minutes to wait, almost certainly longer. She pulled out her iPad and looked at some of the online sites. News of a body at Hale’s End was being reported, but that was it. The coverage was sober and, to her mind, uninterested. Even the location of the body was failing to spark much interest from journalists looking for an angle for sensationalism. A middle-aged man wasn’t providing that for them. For the moment. She wondered how things would change when news of his identity was revealed.

She shut down the news page and opened up her diary. There was little point. She knew she would be seeing only three clients today. She could have recited the appointment times in her sleep. It was another reason for her childhood room in Providence Villa. She was barely keeping her head afloat. She had known counselling wasn’t lucrative from the first time around but she’d anticipated more clients than she had been able to muster.

The last person she would be seeing today was Mark. When she had written up her notes from the previous session, she had emphasised the unexpected email he had received from his mother. She had made no mention of his subsequent text.

She heard a rattle on the door and looked up in surprise. The clock said twenty past. Surely Miriam wasn’t early? Kat got up and opened the front door. Standing in front of her was a boy wearing a grey sweatshirt and jeans. His white Converse trainers were grubby. The hood of his top was pulled up and underneath Kat could only see the pair of brown eyes and pale skin. He looked young – mid-teens, she guessed.

‘You Kat?’ He was softly spoken, his voice barely above a whisper. He was holding out something in his hand. A small package wrapped in newspaper. She looked behind him at the cobbled courtyard. It was empty, although she could see one of the shops to the left had its lights on. It comforted her that there was help nearby. She took the parcel from him, and he turned and walked off. Not fast.

‘Hold on!’ She ran after him. ‘What’s this?’ She held out the package to him, afraid to open it. ‘Who are you?’

He tugged at his hood, pulling it further down over his eyes. ‘A friend of Lena’s.’

‘Lena’s?’ Kat couldn’t hide the incredulity from her voice. How would Lena know this boy?

He looked hurt at her tone and turned away. Over his shoulder, he shouted, ‘I know her better than you,’ then broke into a run. As he turned the corner, she saw Miriam pass him and come towards her. For once, she was on time. Kat swore silently to herself and waved a hand at her client. She assessed the package in her hand. It was heavy, about the weight of a bag of sugar and not dissimilar in dimensions.

Miriam came puffing up. ‘Broken a habit of a lifetime. I’m on time.’

Kat, sharper than she’d intended, said, ‘You’re early actually.’ Seeing Miriam’s face, she backtracked. ‘I’m sorry. You’re a few minutes early. I’ll let you into the room, and you can make yourself comfortable.’

Miriam relaxed. ‘Sure. Why not? I need a bit of time to catch my breath.’

Kat led the way into the room and watched distractedly as her client settled herself into the chair. ‘Will you excuse me for a minute?’

In the hall, she peeled the newspaper off the package. Underneath there was wadding, which looked like it had been pulled from a Jiffy bag, closely bound together with Sellotape. She tugged fruitlessly at the binding, then went into the small kitchen and pulled a knife from a drawer. She sliced away at the tape until one side was completely open. Gently she slid the contents onto the counter, and started in horror.