Breaking Point (5 page)

A door banged at the rear of the house, and a shrill voice, shouted, ‘I'm home. God, it's been a shitty day! Hope you've got the kettle on, Emma.'

‘Sylvia has arrived,' Emma said with a grin. ‘She'll be in as soon as she peels off her working clothes.' She plugged the electric kettle in again.

Sylvia Tyler literally burst through the door. ‘Pigs!' she said ‘I don't think I ever want to see another bloody pig aga . . . Oooh, sorry, Emma,' she said apologetically, ‘I didn't know you had company.' She turned to leave.

Emma said, ‘No, don't go, Syl. This is Detective Chief Inspector Paget, and Sergeant Tregalles, and they'd like a word with you.'

‘Coppers? Oh, shit! And here am I going on about pigs!' She made a face and giggled. ‘Not what you'd call best first impressions, is it, Emma?' She eyed the two detectives warily. ‘Not something
I've
done, is it?' she enquired nervously. ‘I mean, you're all standing there looking at me as if . . .'

‘Oh, do shut up, Syl,' Emma said. ‘It's about Mark. He's still missing, and we've been looking at his room. Have you had any occasion to go in there lately?'

‘I should be so lucky,' the girl sighed. ‘But he's never so much as suggested it, and it's not because I haven't given him enough hints.' She rolled her eyes at Paget. ‘He's gorgeous,' she breathed, ‘but he's never – you know . . .'

Paget repeated the question he had put to Foxworthy, concluding with, ‘So, if you have any idea who might have taken them, we'd like you to tell us.'

The girl shook her head. ‘As I said, I've never been in Mark's room.' Frowning, she looked at Emma and said, ‘Why would anyone want stuff like that, anyway? Except the laptop. Not that they'd get much for it; it's pretty old.'

‘I've no idea, Syl. But if none of us know anything about it, and Mark hasn't been back since Friday morning, then someone must have broken in while we were out.'

‘Oh!' Sylvia Tyler's eyes grew round, and she seemed to shrink away from them as she sucked in her breath and grimaced guiltily. ‘I forgot,' she said in a tiny voice. ‘Sorry, Emma, but it completely slipped my mind. The lock's broken on the back door. I wondered how it had happened at the time, and I meant to ask the other day.'

‘Oh, Syl . . .' Emma simply shook her head.

‘When did you first notice it was broken, Miss Tyler?' asked Paget.

Sylvia thought. ‘Friday. Friday afternoon when I came back from class. I was late getting in, and I had a date, so I was in a bit of a hurry.' She made a helpless gesture. ‘To tell you the truth, I didn't think much of it. It had been sticking a bit, and I thought maybe Mark was working on it. He does that sort of thing around here,' she explained. ‘I really did mean to mention it, Emma, and I'm truly sorry.' She was struck by a sudden thought. ‘Maybe they're the ones who took your camera, and it wasn't Mark at all?'

Emma shook her head. ‘No. It was gone when I came home on Thursday afternoon,' she said.

‘Mind if I go, now?' Sylvia asked Paget. ‘I need a bath. I left my overalls in the back entrance, but I know I stink a bit.'

‘Of course, and thank you, Miss Tyler.' Paget turned to Emma as the girl left the room. ‘Could we take a look at the back door?'

‘Straight down the hall to your left,' she told him, ‘but I won't come with you if you don't mind, because if I don't get dinner started now, I'm going to be late for work.'

‘T
regalles and Molly Forsythe are on their way to Whitcott Lacey, and Charlie is sending a man along as well,' Paget said, referring to SOCO's Inspector Charlie Dobbs. It was eight twenty and he was in Alcott's office. ‘Tregalles will try to track down this fellow, Doyle, while Molly talks to the neighbours. She'll be asking if they've seen anything suspicious going on around Wisteria Cottage in the last few days, and to pick up any gossip about the people who live there. Charlie's man will cover the cottage itself.

‘Emma Baker volunteered to stay home today in case we need her. She is convinced that Newman's disappearance has something to do with what Doyle told him in the pub, but that was more than a week ago, and she could be completely wrong. However, whether she's right or wrong, it looks as if someone did break in through the back door and removed every scrap of paper from Newman's room. The way I see it, they were looking for some sort of written record, but didn't want to spend much time there, so they took everything, including the laptop.'

‘Record of what?'

‘I'm afraid your guess is as good as mine,' Paget told him.

Alcott snorted. ‘How the hell can you
not
notice that someone's broken into your house?' he said. ‘I find that hard to believe.'

‘It
was
noticed by Sylvia Tyler,' Paget reminded him. ‘But she's the only one who uses the back door on a regular basis. Her boots are often muddy after she's been mucking about with the animals, so she takes them off there. The trouble is, she forgot to mention it to anyone on Friday. She says it was because she had a date for dinner, and she was in a hurry to wash and change. No one went in or out that way during the weekend, and you would have to be using the door to notice the damage. Tyler admits she noticed it again when she was on her way out yesterday morning, but says she wasn't particularly worried about it because she still thought it was something Mark had been working on before he disappeared. She was running late, which is a habit of hers, I gather, and everyone else had gone, so she pulled the door to and left it. She said she didn't think it would do any harm to leave it, because, as she put it, there was nothing in the house worth stealing anyway.

‘Unfortunately, she was wrong,' Paget continued, ‘but Newman's room was the only one targeted. There's no evidence they were in anyone else's room, and that worries me. Because, if Newman didn't clear the place out himself – which I think is highly unlikely – then someone else did, and they knew exactly where to go and what to take.

‘I'm having a picture of Newman and a description of his van circulated. The picture only shows part of the side of the van, but Foxworthy was able to tell us it's a D reg Toyota, with a ladder rack and ladders on top, which shouldn't be too hard to spot if it's on the road at all.

‘As for Emma Baker's camera, she feels pretty sure that Newman took it before he left on Thursday. She spoke to her sister to get the make, model and serial number, and a description is being circulated in case someone tries to flog it over the counter, but I doubt if we'll ever see Newman's laptop again.'

Alcott leaned back in his chair, rocking gently. ‘So the chief constable's niece was right to be concerned,' he said softly, as much to himself as to Paget. ‘What do
you
think has happened to Newman?'

‘I have no idea. All we know so far is what we've been told, which is that he was excited about something. Emma told us that, and the others confirmed it, but whatever it was he kept it to himself. It's an assumption on Emma's part that he was after a story, and that Doyle knows something about it, but we won't know if that is true or false until we find Doyle.

‘Having said that, my gut feeling is that Newman could be in serious trouble. It looks to me as if someone searched his room to find out if he had left anything there that would point to where he's gone and why. And if that's the case, he may have stumbled on to something he couldn't handle.'

Alcott nodded. ‘Right,' he said with a dismissive wave of the hand. ‘Make sure that Tregalles keeps us both informed of any developments, and make sure he understands that the chief constable is taking a personal interest in the case.'

The church clock was striking nine as they crossed the bridge and entered the village of Whitcott Lacey. Detective Constable Molly Forsythe glanced at her watch, then peered up at the church tower.

‘That clock is
still
ten minutes slow,' she told Tregalles, who was driving. ‘The hands show the right time; they say ten past; it's the chimes that are out of sync. I used to come here fishing with my dad when I was just a kid, and the chimes were ten minutes behind the hands then,' she explained. ‘You'd think they'd have corrected it by now, wouldn't you? It's funny, but I'd almost forgotten about this place until you mentioned it this morning. We used to come here quite often in the summer.'

‘They're probably so used to it by now that it would throw the whole village out of whack if they changed it,' Tregalles told her. ‘Besides, it's the sort of thing that makes the village different. Gives the Cotswold tourists something to talk about when they get home.' He slowed to make his way past an awkwardly parked car in the narrow street. ‘I didn't know you fished,' he said.

‘I don't,' she told him, ‘and I didn't then, not really. I used to sit on the bank and dangle a dead worm on a hook in the water while Dad waded out into mid-stream to fly-fish. I never caught anything, of course, except the odd tiddler or stickleback with a net, but neither did he most of the time. I don't think he really cared whether he caught anything or not; he just liked to be out here, and so did I. And the best part was we always had egg salad sandwiches for lunch.'

There was a wistful quality to the words, and Molly's dark eyes were sombre as she surveyed the street ahead.

Tregalles refrained from comment, remembering just in time that Molly's father had died quite recently. Apparently a healthy man in his middle fifties, he'd collapsed in the street one Saturday afternoon while out shopping, and died in the ambulance on the way to hospital. Aneurysm, they'd said, the sergeant recalled.

Wisteria Cottage was at the far end of the village, and a small white van was parked in front of it. ‘Looks like SOCO's here ahead of us,' Tregalles said as he pulled in beside it and they both got out. He led the way up the flagstone path to the house. ‘I'll introduce you to Emma Baker, and then I'm off to see if I can find this bloke, Doyle. Have a chat with Emma before you see what the neighbours have to say. See if she's remembered anything that might help since we talked to her yesterday. And find out, if you can, if she and Newman had something going. She might be a bit more forthcoming with you than she would be with us.'

‘Is there any reason to believe there was anything going on between them?'

Tregalles shrugged. ‘Not really, but you never know, do you?' he said. ‘A young lad like Newman, a bit wet behind the ears, and an older woman. Could be she fancied him.'

‘Older woman?' Molly stared at him. ‘What does that make me, then? I thought you said she was in her late twenties?'

Tregalles shrugged. ‘Well, it's all relative, isn't it?' he said. ‘I mean, he'd hardly been gone any time at all before she reported him missing. Maybe she came on too strong; he got scared and took off, and she's using us to find him. Like I said, you never know, do you?'

Before Molly could reply, he lifted the heavy door-knocker and let it drop against the iron striker plate.

Cutter's Caravan Court had been there a long time, as had many of the caravans by the look of them. It was located at the base of what had once been a gravel pit sliced out of the hillside about a quarter of a mile from the village. It was hot in the summer and cold in the winter, but it had water and electricity, and compared to the escalating price of houses in the area, it was a cheap place to live.

There were fourteen caravans in all, some big, some small, and all of them looked as if they were there for the long term. It was a clean site, the space between caravans was generous, and some even had raised garden beds beside them. The soil must have been brought in, Tregalles decided, because even dandelions would be hard pressed to push their way through the natural base of hard-packed gravel.

It wasn't exactly gardening weather, but one man was out there digging in his small plot. Tregalles stopped the car and rolled the window down. ‘You're pushing it a bit, aren't you?' he said. ‘I'd have thought it would be too early for planting around here.'

The man stuck the fork in the ground and came over to the car. He was tall and lean, with barely an ounce of spare flesh on him, and well into his seventies by the look of him. ‘Facing south,' he said laconically. He flicked his head toward the hill behind him. ‘All gravel, that is,' he went on. ‘Holds the heat. I'll have my peas in by the end of the week.' He took a flat tin from his pocket, opened it and extracted a hand-rolled cigarette. ‘So, take the wrong turn down the road, did you?' he asked as he flicked open a lighter.

Tregalles shook his head. ‘I'm looking for someone,' he said. ‘Fellow by the name of Mickey Doyle. I understand he lives here.'

The old man eyed him narrowly through a curl of smoke. ‘In trouble, is he?' he asked.

‘Not as far as I know. Why? Is he often in trouble?'

The man pushed out his lower lip and appeared to be giving the question some thought before answering. ‘Not often, no,' he said at last. ‘Just the odd time when he's had a bit too much to drink.' He paused to pull a piece of loose tobacco from his lip. ‘But then, you probably know that better than me, you being a copper. What's he done this time?'

Tregalles chuckled. ‘Is it that obvious?' he asked wryly.

‘Afraid so.' The man grinned. ‘But then, it takes one to know one. I used to be one myself. Thames Valley. Long time ago. Been retired for more than twenty years.' He stuck out his hand. ‘Goodale's the name; Frank Goodale.'

Tregalles grasped the outstretched hand as he introduced himself. Goodale's grip was firm. ‘So what do you want with Doyle?' the old man asked. ‘Not that you'll find him at home. He's probably off on a job somewhere. Come to think of it, I haven't seen him around for a week or more. But you could ask Mary Turnbull – she's Mickey's next-door neighbour, and she looks after his cat whenever he's away. Number eleven over there.' He pointed. ‘Doyle's is number twelve.'