Almost Love (10 page)

Chapter Thirteen

Tim was driving along the winding road to Helpston for the second day running. He was trying to concentrate on the traffic, which was not heavy, but he was aware that most of the other vehicles on the road were as idiosyncratically driven and therefore potentially lethal as was usual in this part of the world. The farmers naturally assumed that they had a supreme right to trundle along, gouging holes into the surfaces of the highways with their outlandish and often ill-maintained vehicles as they plied the modern version of their ancient occupation, an occupation made newly mysterious by their seeming hardly ever to take these vehicles into the fields. Essentially, their attitude was that all other road-users were there on sufferance and had to take their chance. Already Tim had almost collided with a harrow that was protruding far to the right of the ancient Land Rover that was towing it, unmarked with flag or lantern, as he tried to overtake. City of Peterborough police should do something about these farmers, he thought sourly. He knew that he was being unfair, however. The farmers in South Lincolnshire were just as ungovernable, if less visible offenders. This was partly because their land was more remote and often accessed via B roads that attracted little other traffic; partly because they were professionally adept at extracting money from the EU and so were able to maintain much newer, more roadworthy vehicles. He dropped behind the Land Rover, screwing up his eyes to try to see the road beyond it more clearly. There was no prospect of his being able to overtake: the road was too winding.

A glance to his left told him that he was passing the Herrick estate. Still dominated by a massive country house, with a park that stretched as many miles as when it had been bestowed by a grateful queen, and still bounded by the same neat sixteenth-century stone walls, it had been built by Giles Herrick, an Elizabethan courtier whose descendants had continued to serve country and monarch right up to the present. He wondered idly how they had managed to escape the death duties that had rudely ejected so many noble families from their ancestral seats in the twentieth century. Service and royal patronage still counted for something, he supposed. And the house was open to the public, of course – that post-war source of manna for the aristocracy. Curious that in the sixties and seventies the working classes, in the new-found affluence that had provided them with mass-produced cars and ‘disposable income’, had chosen to spend their Sunday afternoons gawping at the treasures amassed by descendants of the hierarchy that had oppressed their ancestors. He supposed that there was a certain triumph to be gained from tramping through rooms thus exposed to common scrutiny, especially if you knew that their owners were cowering in some other part of the house, disdainful of the sweaty crowds but needful of their precious cash. Yet he did not really believe that those early visitors had made their jaunts in this spirit. Their attitude had rather been one of respectful reverence. He remembered being taken to Witham Abbey by his mother in the early eighties, when he was still at primary school, and how thrilled she had been when the Duke of Botolph himself had deigned to spend some minutes talking to the bus-load of ladies who were making their day more memorable by spending their husbands’ hard-earned pounds in His Grace’s souvenir shop. He had signed the apron that she had purchased. When she reached home again, one of her first tasks had been to embroider the Duke’s signature in black silk so that it would not come out in the wash. As long as the pinny lasted, she could show her friends a perpetual record of the fact that His Grace had spoken to her. And what had he said? Nothing, as far as Tim could remember, except: ‘Would you like me to sign that?’ He had not asked her name. He had certainly not acknowledged the small boy standing at her side. Odd thing, the English reverence for titles. Even more remarkably, it rubbed off on foreigners. Katrin was a great royalty lover and never missed televised events that featured the royal family.

Katrin. She was the problem lurking at the back of Tim’s mind, the reason why he was obliged to force himself to concentrate on driving properly. Their relationship had become strained. To have said that she, normally the most sanguine and even-tempered of women, was experiencing ‘mood swings’ would have been an understatement. Her moods did change, but merely from sad resignation to downright unhappiness. There were no high points. She no longer had any enthusiasm for the small treats or pleasures that he might suggest and she often seemed close to tears. He had tried to talk to her, but she had just stone-walled him. She had variously said that there was nothing wrong, that he was imagining it, or that she was just suffering a touch of the winter blues and that he was making her feel much worse by constantly talking about it. He could not understand it; their courtship and the first two years of their marriage had been so blissfully happy. Aside from the fact that he adored her and that she had given him every reason to believe that she reciprocated as wholeheartedly, he had counted himself blessed in finding a wife who understood the demands and the savagely unsocial hours that working as a policeman entailed. That Katrin worked as a police researcher represented the perfect solution in Tim’s eyes. She could share in his experiences and enjoy confidences that he would not have been able to disclose to an ordinary civilian without herself taking on the irregular hours and the frayed nerves that went with the territory. Katrin was the homemaker, the warm, funny and beautiful woman to whom he had always looked forward to returning at the end of the day, however long it had been. That is, until a couple of months ago, when things had started to go wrong without warning.

Tim suddenly felt that he could not bear it. He knew that to lose Katrin, even to lose the wonderful intimacy that they had shared, would destroy him; yet he felt helpless. If she continued to keep him at arm’s length, what could he do to restore their happiness?

The events of the previous evening had made matters considerably worse. He had taken Katrin to the police station at Spalding to make a statement to Superintendent Thornton. Boston Police were contacted, and they immediately checked the Pilgrim Hospital for anyone answering to Claudia’s description. The hospital drew a blank – and its administrators could only grudgingly be persuaded to trawl through their records again, having already done so earlier in the week at Juliet’s request. An announcement about the sighting, with a further plea for witnesses to come forward, had been broadcast on local radio and on Look North. No-one responded.

Katrin was shown photographs of the only two men in the district known to be current associates of Claudia – Guy Maichment and Oliver Sparham – and could not make a positive identification of either of them as the man who had been accompanying Claudia. Nor was she able to help put together a convincing Identikit picture. Her lack of confidence was disconcerting.

Superintendent Thornton had been very tolerant – even tactful, by his standards – but it was clear that he thought that Katrin had been mistaken. He had tried not to indicate this.

“Don’t worry,” he had said, patting her arm, “it’s early days yet. We may very well get some responses tomorrow. And you’re obviously exhausted, my dear. You should go home and get some sleep.”

Under the circumstances, Tim saw that no useful purpose would be served by his going to Boston himself. By this time it was almost 11 p.m. As Thornton said, if anything came of the broadcasts, it would be better dealt with in the morning or, if it was urgent, by the Boston police on the ground. He drove Katrin home. Both were silent during the short journey.

“Drink?” asked Tim, when they were through the door.

“No, thanks. I think I’ll go straight to bed.”

“Are you OK?”

“I suppose so.”

She did not meet his eye. Instead, she fetched a glass of water from the kitchen tap and disappeared upstairs with it. Tim sat in the cold sitting-room for an hour, drinking whisky, before he joined her. She was already asleep. She was still sleeping at 7 a.m. the next day when he left for work.

Pondering all of this, Tim realised with a start that he had almost overshot the turn-off to the road to Guy Maichment’s house. He slowed down. The Land Rover towing the dangerous harrow was still immediately in front of him. It also began to slow down and, at the last minute, to indicate left. Although he had not visited it before, Tim knew that Guy’s house was the sole property standing beside a metalled road that gradually petered out into a dirt track. The track led to an area peppered with disused gravel pits. Its location, in light woodland, and isolated situation were not dissimilar to those of Claudia McRae’s house. It therefore occurred to Tim that Guy Maichment was probably the driver of the Land Rover.

Keeping a prudent distance, he followed the Land Rover down the road. As he did so, he passed a series of water-filled gravel-pits. They were enclosed by a barbed-wire fence with a gate set in it that faced the last of the pits. A narrow cinder path ran round the circumference of the entire enclosed area. On a sign beside the gate the words ‘Painton’s Fisheries: licence holders only’ had been inscribed in large block letters. A much older sign with an arrow pointing to the right announced more gravel pits. Tim remembered vaguely that when he was a child the bones of woolly mammoths and other prehistoric animals had been discovered in these pits. At that time the gravel works were still operational, but they had fallen into disuse quite soon afterwards. An enterprising person had evidently converted some of them into an organised fishing ground.

As the dirt track took over, the edge of the protruding harrow that the Land Rover was towing rose up on to the bank of the dyke that separated the fishing compound from the road, cutting down in its wake the small bushes that had been planted there. The driver of the Land Rover carried on without slowing down, though he must have been able to feel the drag on his tyres as the machinery battled its way through the long grass and scrub. When he reached the end of the track he turned a half-circle so that the Land Rover was standing parallel to the house, facing the woodland beyond. Tim parked the BMW half on the road, half on the bank of the left-hand dyke, so that if any other vehicle approached it would be able to get past.

The driver of the Land Rover jumped out smartly without looking across at Tim and walked quickly into the house, slamming both the gate and the door as he went. Tim was irritated by this. Unless Guy – or whoever it was – was a very poor driver indeed, he or she must have seen him in the wing mirrors as he followed the Land Rover down the track and must surely also have realised that Tim’s was the same car that had been tailing his for miles. He came to the conclusion that Guy was trying to make a point. Exactly what point was less clear; aside from being a manifestation of his sulky and rather arrogant nature, it was probably intended to convey how little time he had to waste on policemen. Such a gesture would be wasted unless Guy decided not to answer the door. He’d better not, thought Tim to himself, his anger rising.

He took a deep breath and told himself to keep calm. After a few seconds, he got out of the BMW slowly and shut and locked the car quietly. Crossing behind the Land Rover, he opened the low gate in the fence that bounded Guy’s garden and walked up the straight concrete path to the house. It struck him in passing how bleak this garden was, even allowing for the fact that winter was not kind to gardens. To call it austere would be generous; unadventurously conventional might be more accurate. The nondescript concrete path bisected two almost identical plots of land, in each of which was planted a grass patch and an arrangement of small box hedges shaped like noughts and crosses frameworks. If this garden contained flowers in the summer, they would have to be annuals or border plants so small that they died down completely in the winter. Tim considered what he knew of Guy’s choice of career. How many professional gardeners planted their own plots so drably?

The house was also a surprise: a squat building with terracotta-washed walls and a flat roof with an unattractive overhang fashioned of thick concrete, it looked as if it had been constructed from a post-war pre-fab to which a large-ish extension had been added afterwards. The windows were sliding panels of glass of the kind found in Victorian railway carriages; the door, of some type of wood shoddy such as hardboard or chipboard, looked as if it could have been broken open with a single well-judged kick. It was an extremely ugly, not to say scruffy and down-at-heel building, and not the type of residence that Tim would have expected the self-regarding Guy Maichment to occupy.

There was no doorbell. A lion’s head knocker, itself incongruous in such a setting, had been set high up on the door, but when Tim reached up to tap it he found that it had stuck to the blistering green paintwork. He was about to rap on the door with his knuckles when he heard footsteps approaching. He turned and saw Guy Maichment standing immediately behind him, almost too close for comfort. Guy was dressed in a voluminous waterproof of the kind that horse-riders wear on wet days and a pair of knee-length leather boots. He was carrying a tree-lopper.

“Good morning, Detective Inspector Yates. This is a surprise.”

“Mr Maichment,” said Tim, tipping his head forward slightly, since the tree-lopper made shaking hands awkward. “Not much of a surprise, surely – unless I’m mistaken, I’ve just followed you home.”

Guy Maichment looked puzzled.

“I’ve been here all morning,” he said. “I’ve been cutting branches off the trees at the back of the house to let in more light.” His brow cleared suddenly. “Oh, you mean that you were following the Land Rover. I heard Jared come back in it just now.”

“Who’s Jared?”

“Just a local man who works for me on occasions. In fact, I hope to have some pretty regular work for him shortly. He’s been into Peterborough to buy some supplies for a job that we’re doing.”

“What kind of job?”

Guy Maichment looked Tim levelly in the eye.

“A landscape gardening job. You do know that landscape gardening is my profession?”