Darkness, Darkness (16 page)

‘See you tomorrow, then, Charlie,’ Catherine said.

‘Tomorrow.’

When Catherine got back to the police station in Potter Street, McBride had already gone, a red-and-yellow scarf – a football scarf, she supposed – dangling from the back of his chair.

A manila folder lay on the desk, the name Michael Swann printed in biro on the top right corner. Inside, a printout summarising the investigations into the murders for which he had been convicted. Catherine had been right – at various stages three forces had been involved: Cumbria, Lancashire and Cheshire. Once it had become clear the three murders were linked, overall control of the investigation had passed to Detective Chief Superintendent Arthur Hodgson from the Lancashire force, with a detective superintendent, Steven Walcott, from Cumbria as his deputy.

In total, some twelve thousand statements were taken over the entire period, from Kim Bucknall’s murder in 1989 to Swann’s arrest in January of 1997, a significant proportion of those owners of silver Ford Sierras, that make of vehicle having been identified in the proximity of two of the attacks.

Semen samples taken from the scene of the second murder were, at the time, too small to allow the extraction of a DNA profile that could be used in court.

Possible suspects – close to three hundred at one stage – were checked for criminal records, questioned and statemented, alibis verified, each item of information cross-indexed. There were still as many as forty people under serious consideration when Swann carried out an attack on a young woman in a lay-by on the A56, south of Altrincham. The woman fought back, injuring Swann quite badly in his left eye, and ran out to the road, signalling for help. Several vehicles stopped, in one of which was an off-duty policeman. When Swann attempted to drive away he was blocked in and held until being put under arrest.

After which, it all fell into place. As in so many instances, Catherine thought, a mixture of diligence and good fortune. And a young woman with the wit and courage to make use of the tweezers in her handbag.

Catherine put Arthur Hodgson’s name into the computer.

He had retired, with his wife, to Portugal at the turn of the century and suffered a fatal heart attack on the golf course just a few days shy of his seventieth birthday.

Steven Walcott had also retired, comparatively recently, from the post of Deputy Chief Constable for Lincolnshire, and was living in a village in the Wolds, between Louth and Market Rasen.

Catherine switched off the computer, put the folder in her bag and switched off the overhead light. She’d call Resnick later, pass on the news, arrange to meet.

RESNICK HAD MADE
this journey before, in part anyway, the slow drift through the Wolds, eastwards towards the sea. A young girl had disappeared from the swings in the small park in Lenton, no more than a stone’s throw from her home. Gloria Summers, six years old. She had lived, much of the time, with her grandmother, and it was to visit the grandmother that Resnick had been driving, a little over two months later, to tell her that Gloria had at last been found. A disused warehouse, close by the canal. The child’s body, partly decomposed, wrapped in bin bags in the wasted dark.

The grandmother had crumpled in front of him when told, the air sucked out of her, blood running cold.

Resnick had offered the usual platitudes, the patted hand, the cup of sweet tea. Had stayed too long, forcing himself, anxious to be away. He could have sent somebody else, should have, perhaps, the coward’s way.

‘Thank you for coming. Telling me yourself . . .’

All the way back he had tried to erase it from his mind, the feeling of blame haunting her eyes.

‘What happened,’ Resnick had told her, ‘it wasn’t your fault.’

She would never believe him. Five minutes, she had looked away. A child in a busy park, the middle of the day.

‘Charlie . . .’ Catherine’s voice jolted him back into the present. ‘What is it?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Something’s worrying you.’

‘No, nothing. I’m fine.’

‘You’re such a liar.’

Embarrassed, even though the air conditioning was on he wound down his window far enough to feel the wind on his face. Trees either side of the narrow road. The land gently undulating. A patchwork of fields. Several miles since they’d seen another person, passed another car. Birds overhead, the only other things moving. Even the few beasts in the fields were still: recumbent, replete.

‘You ever think about it, Charlie?’

‘What’s that?’

‘The country. Retiring.’

‘Not really.’

‘Seems as if everyone else has. Sell up, move out. Certainly the thing to do where police are concerned. Keith Haines and now this. Walcott. I shall begin to feel like that woman if we do much more of this.’

‘Woman?’

‘You know, always on afternoon TV. Not that I ever watch afternoon TV, of course. Beeny? Sarah Beeny?’

‘What I remember, you don’t look much like Sarah Beeny.’

‘Very funny. But you know what I mean. Senior police officer, good pension, wants to swap house in the city for quiet retirement property in the country. That sort of thing.’

‘Maybe you’ve missed your calling?’

‘Television?’

‘Real estate.’

‘God, Charlie, I hope not.’

So did Resnick, no great admirer of estate agents since his former wife had run off with one. A line from a book he’d started reading and never managed to finish came back to him. Something about it being the only job that gave you the licence to spend the afternoons making love in other people’s beds.

‘How much further?’ he asked.

‘According to satnav not far at all.’

The house was not that attractive, truth be told; but a charming little cottage, that’s what it would doubtless have been called, the usual estate agent’s tendency to see the best in everything. Brick built and square looking, red-tiled roof, small windows, green door; solid enough, but with a distinct lean to one side.

Its saving grace was the location: the edge of the village, some way back off the road, garden on three sides, two of them set to lawn. Generous shrubs, towards the rear a small stand of fruit trees, apple and pear. A state-of-the-art water butt decanting into a small pond.

The dog had started barking when they were still out of sight, back around the curve in the road.

Grace Walcott was up a ladder, renewing the creosote on the fence at the garden’s edge. Beyond it, a ploughed field rose up towards a coppice of beach. Attractive enough, at that moment, to make Resnick think settling in the countryside might not be so bad after all. If the weather held, he might be able to stick it out for as much as a month, maybe even six weeks.

Seeing them arrive, Grace Walcott was nimbly down the ladder, a tall woman, trimly built, greying hair tied with a ribbon, dungarees, what looked like a man’s collarless shirt, bare feet.

‘You must be Catherine. Or should I say Detective Inspector Njoroge? Did I say that correctly?’

‘Perfectly. And Catherine’s fine.’

‘Grace.’ They shook hands.

‘And it’s Inspector Resnick?’

‘Charlie.’

‘Well, Charlie, you’re welcome. My husband’s out back, pursuing his new career. Or so he’d have us think. Come on, I’ll take you round, then put some coffee on. You’d both like coffee, I suppose? And Frido, if you don’t stop that stupid barking I’ll take you off to the kennels and leave you there.’

Steven Walcott was sitting behind a small easel, a selection of watercolours on the stool alongside, painting the view above the hedge and along the sloping field to the trees at the top. Layers, overlapping, varying shades of brown overlaid with a tinge of lavender, a few lines of paler green higher up and then the brighter blue of the sky. Yesterday’s, perhaps, not today’s. Artist’s licence. To Resnick it seemed competent, that at least.

‘Not bad, eh?’ Walcott grinned. ‘From DCC down to Constable in no time at all.’

Quick to the reference, Catherine smiled.

‘Not that this is anything like the real Constable, of course.
The Hay Wain
and all that.
Flatford Mill
. Can’t do figures at all, not yet. End up looking like bloody Lowry. Stick men in bowler hats. Still, considering I’d never as much as picked up a brush till six months back, it’s passable. Just about.’

Resnick was thinking of Keith Haines’ wife, begged not to enter the local art show on account of being of too good for the rest of the competition. Compared to that, Walcott had a way to go.

‘Coffee out here, or d’you want to come inside?’ his wife called.

‘I think out here would be fine. Okay with you two?’

It was. A couple of extra chairs were found. Coffee in a cafetière, warm milk in a jug; almond biscuits, crisp at the edges; brown sugar.

‘When we spoke on the phone,’ Walcott said, addressing Catherine, ‘you said – implied anyway – there might be a connection between Michael Swann and your current investigation. Jenny Hardwick, have I got that right? Presumed murdered as far back as nineteen eighty-four, the body only recently surfaced.’

‘That’s correct.’

‘You think there’s some chance Swann might have been responsible?’

‘At this moment, we’re just exploring the possibility . . .’

‘Similarities?’

‘Physical, certainly. The victim conforms to his preferred type. Plus the manner in which she was killed, the body disposed of.’

‘Swann’s other victims, they were all picked up on the road, taken somewhere quiet, sexually assaulted.’

‘In this case, because of the length of time before the body was discovered, we’ve no way of knowing if sexual assault took place. Nor do we know very much, if anything, about the circumstances. She could have been picked up like the others and then taken to the house, either before or after she was killed. We know it was unoccupied at the time.’

‘You don’t mind me saying, that’s one hell of a stretch. Awful lot of supposition. And that’s without your crime scene being a good hundred miles at least from where Swann’s known to have operated.’

‘There is another possible connection,’ Resnick said. ‘Donna Crowder. Found murdered outside Rotherham three years later, eighty-seven. Link that to Jenny Hardwick and you’ve got two victims in the same area, same time span.’

At the mention of Donna Crowder, Walcott’s expression had changed. ‘This is that moron Fleetwood, isn’t it?’

‘Moron?’

‘All right, too much of a pain in the behind to be that, too clever by half in fact, but that’s who this is, right? Peddling his sorry-arsed stories for all he’s worth.’

‘You know him, then?’

‘Know him? Drove me half bloody crazy once upon a time. Pestering me with letters, phone calls. Calling round where we used to live, unannounced. Did I think Swann had any other victims, prior to those he’d been convicted of killing? Surely Kim Bucknall couldn’t have been the first? Practically stalking me at one time, couldn’t go to the bloody supermarket without him turning up in the car park, just wanting to ask a few more questions, would I take the time to read this, that or the other.’

Walcott drew breath; broke a biscuit in half and dunked it in his coffee.

‘This was all a while ago, mind. Thought he’d given up, found another poor dead bastard to carve a living from. But then, I suppose when your Jenny turned up, that was enough to get him excited all over again. Couldn’t believe his luck. Not one but two unsolved murders. Attach those to a serial killer already behind bars and some publisher’s got to be interested, slap another thousand or two on the advance.’

‘And the first time he came to you,’ Catherine asked, ‘that was when?’

‘At the trial.’

‘You didn’t think there was anything to it, the possibility that Swann had killed before?’

‘Possibility, of course. But we already had Swann stone cold for three murders. The evidence of the Altrincham woman. Forensics – a blood sample with Lisa Plackett’s DNA found in the silver Sierra he’d sold on. A confession of sorts, even though he tried to claw it back. Why muddy the waters? That would have been the CPS’s verdict, you can be certain. Less wriggle room you give his brief the better.’

‘According to Fleetwood,’ Resnick said, ‘Swann was based in Sheffield when the Crowder murder took place. Driving a minicab. Jenny Hardwick, too.’

‘He tried that one on us, I remember. Went so far as to try checking it out. But by then, ninety-seven, we were a good ten years on. Short memories, insufficient records. Sometimes none. Nothing we found told us Swann was in Sheffield at all, let alone driving a cab.’

‘Figment of Fleetwood’s imagination, then?’

‘He’s a writer – why not?’

‘Fact, not fiction.’

‘So he’d have us believe.’

‘You really think he pulled it out of clean air, just to help his story?’

‘He might. Might well. I’d not put it past him. But if there was any provenance, it’d be Swann himself, I imagine.’

‘They were in touch?’ Catherine said. ‘Fleetwood and Swann?’

‘For a spell, yes, I believe so. I think Swan thought Fleetwood was going to write him up as some kind of folk hero, Jack the Ripper with a heart of gold. Either that or help him with his parole. When it turned out to be neither, he lost interest. As far as I know, refused to see Fleetwood again.’

The dog started barking. A car passing along the road.

‘Anyone for a top-up?’ Grace Walcott said, indicating the cafetière.

‘Just a little,’ Resnick said. ‘Half a cup? Then we should probably get going.’

Catherine rested her hand, palm down, across the top of her cup and shook her head. ‘No, thank you. Charlie’s right, we’ve taken enough of your time.’

‘Not exactly pressed,’ Grace Walcott said with a smile. ‘Neither of us. That’s the beauty of it. Your own little bubble.’

‘You don’t miss the bright lights?’ Catherine said. ‘Shops? Restaurants? All the bustle?’

‘If we do, there’s always Louth.’

She laughed and Catherine joined in, without knowing exactly why.

Resnick kept silent. He’d been to Louth more than a few times and couldn’t think of anything about it that was remotely funny.