Darkness, Darkness (24 page)

Search as she might, Catherine could find nothing that suggested those threats, those raised fists had become blows, nothing that testified to any actual violence being meted out. Perhaps, if it had happened at all, it had remained unseen?

What was that corny old song her uncle used to sing at parties? Her uncle, the only known Kenyan country-and-western singer in captivity. There was even a clip of him on YouTube, stetson hat, waistcoat with silver buttons, bootlace tie, black face shining.

‘Behind Closed Doors’, that was the song.

She reached for her phone and speed-dialled Resnick’s number. ‘Charlie, probably the last thing you want at this moment is company . . .’

He had bought a jar of marinated herrings with onions and dill from the Polish deli, a large jar of pickled gherkins and a loaf of black rye bread. As a treat, a bottle of Cornelius unfiltered wheat beer.

He’d thought he might sit and read a little, listen to some music – a toss-up between Monk with Sonny Rollins or Cannonball Adderley’s
Somethin’ Else!
– watch the
News at Ten
and then have an early night.

‘I’m sure I’m disturbing you,’ Catherine said, as she followed him into the house.

‘Not at all.’

Evidence suggested otherwise. There was a plate still balanced on the side of his favourite chair, half a slice of bread, herring, a piece of half-eaten gherkin; a glass of beer on the table next to an old copy of
The Jazz Scene
he’d found in a charity shop; Cannonball, slinky and sensuous, playing ‘Dancing in the Dark’.

‘You’ve eaten?’ Resnick asked.

‘Yes. Sort of.’

‘You like herring?’

‘I suppose so. I’m really not sure.’

In the kitchen, he buttered bread, forked pieces of herring from the jar.

‘Gherkin?’

‘Pass.’

‘I’m afraid I’ve almost finished the beer . . .’

‘I should have brought some wine . . .’

‘There’s whisky. Springbank. Only ten years old . . .’

‘Only?’

He grinned. ‘Someone gave me a bottle of eighteen years once.’

‘Good?’

‘Worth every penny of the sixty-odd pounds it would have cost. Likely more than that now.’

‘You should treat yourself.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Anyway, I’m sure this will be fine.’

‘Water?’

‘Just a little.’

‘You can brag to McBride you’ve been enjoying a good single malt.’

Catherine looked at him questioningly. ‘Have you said anything to him lately?’

‘Said?’

‘About me?’

‘No, why?’

‘He’s been close to what probably passes for McBride as charming.’

Resnick nodded, pleased. ‘Let’s take these next door.’

The CD had come to an end.

‘More music?’

‘I don’t really mind.’

‘What would you do at home? If you were sitting around on your own. Would you play music then?’

‘Yes, probably.’

Resnick went across to the stereo. ‘This okay?’

‘I liked it. What I heard.’

He pressed play. ‘Autumn Leaves’. Sat down, careful not to dislodge his plate from its precarious position. ‘Could be, when you phoned, you were bored and desperate for company, but somehow I doubt it.’

Catherine smiled. ‘There is something. It’s been bugging me. Since I saw Nicky Parker – Mary Connor’s friend – this afternoon.’

‘All ears.’

She told him about Linda, the missing neighbour, and, what had been preying on her mind most, the incident Nicky had so vividly described.

‘Aside from anything else, it’s difficult to match it with the man we talked to in Chesterfield. Happily pedalling back from his allotment; helping out the old lady next door.’

‘People change. Mellow. And besides, she could be exaggerating. Nicky. Not meaning to. But things can get magnified with time. Something like this especially. Something that made that much of an impression on her when she was just a kid . . .’

‘Which it clearly did.’

‘That could account for it looming so large now.’

Catherine took a sip of whisky, decided she liked it, had another. The herring was another matter.

‘You think we should pay it no heed then, no special attention, log it and let it be?’

‘Not at all. And I certainly don’t think another chat with Barry Hardwick would be a waste of time. But let’s see first if we can’t track this Linda down, the neighbour, see what she has to say. If she was in and about as much as Nicky says, she should be able to tell us something.’

‘Let’s hope so.’

Resnick polished off the last of the contents of his plate, took a last swallow of beer.

‘The way I see it, all this Michael Swann business, we allowed ourselves to get sidetracked. It happens. Fight against tunnel vision and sometimes, without noticing, you go too far the other way. Everything becomes possible. And with a team the size of ours – yours – that’s got its own problems.’

‘I know. I just wish we had something more definite, something to hone in on. Instead of just Nicky’s story and whatever it is that’s nagging away at my insides.’

‘You don’t suppose that could be the herring?’

Catherine laughed. It was a good sound, easy and free.

Resnick relaxed back into his chair. This was the first time, he realised, that another woman had been in the house – let alone sitting there in the living room, a glass in her hand – since Lynn had been killed.

It felt strange; strange, yet strangely good.

The cat wandered in, sniffed around Catherine’s ankles, and wandered back out. The music slipped, almost without a pause, from one tune to another.

‘The other day,’ Resnick said, ‘when I asked you about the bruise on your forehead . . .’

‘I said I’d slipped.’

‘And if I asked you again now . . .’

‘The same answer. I slipped on some oil.’

‘That man in Worksop . . .’

‘Abbas.’

‘Abbas. It was nothing to do with him?’

‘No, nothing at all.’

The mood broken, it wasn’t so very much longer before Catherine decided it was time to be on her way.

‘See you tomorrow, Charlie. And thanks for letting me disturb your evening,’ she said at the door.

‘Any time.’

He watched her go, the tail lights of her car. Looked out across the garden, the low wall separating it from the pavement, the road. Remembered. Fought against remembering. Went back inside. Another whisky, warm against the back of his throat. It helped, but not a great deal.

All the way home, driving across the city, Catherine worried at it like a cat with an injured bird. Couldn’t leave it alone. Something she had read in the statements taken after the funeral: something about Jenny sporting a black eye, an injury, she’d claimed, sustained on the picket line.

The truth or a lie?

Perhaps, like Catherine herself, Jenny had thought it was nobody’s business but her own.

On the stairs going up to the flat, the thought of Abbas flooded her mind, the fear he might be there, waiting to spring out of the dark.

Monsters?

No.

Abbas would never be hanging around, she knew that, not after what had happened. Too proud by half.

She turned the key in the lock, stepped inside and locked and bolted the door behind her. Not too late for a bath before bed.

THE FOLLOWING MORNING,
as she was just stepping out on to the Ropewalk, Catherine’s phone rang: the cold case team looking again at Donna Crowder’s murder. Could she possibly spare them an hour or so? The sooner the better, all things considered. Catherine tried Resnick’s number, caught him just as he was leaving. Michael Swann, that’s what they were going to want to talk about, Fleetwood also.

‘Best drive up together, Charlie. Sheffield. Meet me here. We’ll go in mine.’

An hour or so became two. The cold case team comprised a detective inspector nearing retirement and two former detective sergeants brought back into service. By the time Catherine and Resnick arrived at the Worksop office, further delayed by a four-car pile-up on the motorway, it was well into the afternoon and things had changed.

Conscious of the coming extra workload – by the end of the day, names from the Donna Crowder inquiry would, doubtless, be added to the load – John McBride had smuggled in a couple of extra computers, two extra desks, and, more importantly, had called in sufficient favours to have acquired the temporary services of two of the station’s civilian staff.

Vanessa and Gloria. Mother and daughter.

Identical outfits, identical hairstyles, save that Gloria’s was darker at the roots. One was busy inputting, the other checking employment records, chasing addresses.

Without wanting to disturb them unduly, Catherine made herself known, thanked them for their help.

‘Not a problem,’ Vanessa said. ‘Is it, Gloria?’

Gloria shook her head. ‘Makes a nice change.’

‘This Linda you’re after,’ Vanessa said. ‘Gets around.’

‘You’ve got a name, then?’

‘Several. Beckett, that’s the name she had when she was living in Bledwell Vale.’

‘Her husband’s name,’ Gloria explained.

‘Got divorced in eighty-nine, went back to using Stoneman, that’s her maiden name. Then, when she remarried in ninety-three, she became Price, Linda Price. Moved to Taunton.’

‘A nightmare,’ Gloria said, ‘keeping track.’

‘Matthew Price, died from a brain tumour in two thousand and five. Linda went off the rails a bit, by the look of things. Reading, you know, between the lines. Quite a bit of time in hospital.’

‘Medical records,’ Gloria explained. ‘Difficult to get hold of. Details, at least. Confidentiality.’

‘From her credit records,’ Vanessa said, ‘it looks as though she started using her maiden name again round about two thousand and nine. Stoneman. There’s an address in Melton Mowbray. She’s got family there, or she did. Worked for a short time at Dickinson and Morris. You know, the pies.’

‘She’s still there now, the same address?’ Catherine asked.

Vanessa shook her head.

‘I spoke to an aunt,’ Gloria said, ‘as close to gaga as makes no difference. Difficult to get much sense out of her at all. But from what I did gather, Linda’s not lived there now, Melton, for a good couple of years.’

‘We’ll keep at it,’ Vanessa said.

‘Well,’ Catherine said, ‘it seems to me you’ve done brilliantly so far.’

Both women beamed.

Seeing Resnick in conversation with McBride and Cresswell, Catherine went over. Four names in eighteen-point on the screen of McBride’s computer: Eric Somerset, Derek Harmer, James Laing, Joe Willis. All now in their fifties. Each had been interviewed more than once in connection with the crimes for which Michael Swann had later been convicted; each had recently been checked against the Police National Computer, their files requested from General Registry.

‘Might want to take a closer look at these two,’ McBride said. ‘Willis and Harmer.’

Catherine read through the files.

A long-distance lorry driver for most of his working life, Derek Harmer had been the subject of a restraining order after his then wife made a complaint to the police that he had assaulted her just four days after she’d returned home from hospital with their third child. After that, a succession of relatively minor misdemeanours, mixed with more serious incidents of indecent exposure, gross indecency and indecent assault; short prison terms and periods on probation. His work frequently took him north and south between Carlisle and London, west and east along the M62, Merseyside to Yorkshire, Liverpool to Hull, with detours to Sheffield, Derby, Nottingham, Leeds.

According to their information, Harmer’s current address was in Kingston upon Hull.

‘I’ve got a pal,’ McBride said. ‘DS. Humberside Police Headquarters on Priory Road. Could always ask him to call round, check dates and places, rattle Harmer’s cage.’

‘Do that. Get him to report back to us.’

Joe Willis’s file, augmented by some basic Googling, was, as McBride explained, a sight more complicated. Something of a soccer player, he had been on the books of Mansfield Town, his local club, for a time; a young full-back showing promise, one or two of the bigger clubs sniffing round. After a couple of seasons, a poor disciplinary record led to a transfer to non-league Altrincham. Willis remained with them for three seasons, before drifting out of the game. It was while working as a bouncer in Manchester that he first came to the notice of the police, a number of incidents involving violence, warnings as to his future behaviour, charges that never made it into court. An eighteen-month sentence, suspended, after a complaint for assault was brought against him by his then partner; two years later, on a visit home to Mansfield, he was arrested on a charge of rape by a woman who claimed he’d attacked her in a pub car park after closing, a charge that was later dropped when the woman declined to give evidence in court. Then, just a year before Jenny Hardwick was murdered, he picked up a woman at a slip road leading off the M1 at junction 32 and heading towards Doncaster. According to the testimony she gave later, Willis assaulted her in a lay-by, insisting she perform oral sex on him by way of payment for the lift and striking her when she refused. He was arrested, charged and a short while before the case came to court, the CPS withdrew the charge and he walked free.

A nasty but charmed life.

He was currently living back near Mansfield, Kirkby-in-Ashfield, unemployed and claiming benefit.

‘Sandford and Cresswell?’ McBride suggested.

‘You think they’re up to it? You know them better than me.’

McBride’s face slanted into a grin. ‘Gotta get bloodied some time.’

‘All right. But not without back-up. Make a call to Mansfield, will you, John? Don’t want them walking into something nasty.’

‘Right, boss.’

‘But before you do that, more names, I’m afraid. Suspects questioned back in eighty-seven over Donna Crowder’s murder.’

She set the printout before him.

‘I’ve marked the ones Charlie and I consider most likely, but you’ll want to check them yourself. Sheffield are sending the files over today.’

Any further conversation was halted by a triumphant shout from Vanessa at the other side of the room.