In The Presence Of The Enemy (53 page)

She’d tackle Stanley first. No reason to hunt down Mrs. Harvie and get her knickers in a twist before concerted knicker-twisting was actually called for.

Outside, she discovered that the silence of the geese was due to the position of the car.

She’d parked it in such a way that the sun reflecting off its rusting wings had created a patch of warmth on the earth, and upon this warmth the birds were basking contentedly among the remains of Barbara’s offering of salt and vinegar crisps.

She tiptoed to the Mini, alternating her eyes from the birds to the barn, from the barn to the fields beyond it, from the fields to the house. Still, not a soul was in sight. A cow lowed in the distance and a plane fl ew overhead, but otherwise nothing and no one stirred.

She slipped into the car as noiselessly as possible. She said, “Sorry, old chaps,” to the geese and started the engine. The birds leapt to life, honking, hissing, and fl apping their wings like a visitation from the Furies. They pursued Barbara’s car from the farmyard onto the lane. There, she thudded her foot onto the accelerator, shot through the hamlet of Ford, and headed in the direction of Amesford and Sergeant Stanley’s waiting embrace.

The sergeant was enthroned in the incidents room, receiving homage in the form of reports from two teams of constables who had been at work probing the countryside for the past thirty-two hours in their respective sec-tions of Sergeant Stanley’s grid. The men from Section Number 13, the Devizes-to-Melksham patch, had nothing to report save an unexpected run-in with a caravan owner who apparently operated a thriving business in everything from ganja to bombers to blow.

“Dealing from the car park in Melksham,”

one of the constables said incredulously.

“Right behind the high street, if you can believe. He’s in the nick now.” The team from Section Number 5, the Chippenham-to-Calne patch, had little more. But they were giving a detailed explanation of their every movement to Sergeant Stanley anyway. Barbara was about to wrest them from their chairs and drop kick them back out into the street to get on with things so that she could arrange for the crime scene team to be sent to the Harvie farm, when one of the constables from Section Number 14 burst through the swinging doors of the incidents room, announcing,

“We’ve got it.”

H is decla rat ion mobilised ever yone, including Barbara. She’d been practising patience by attempting to return a phone call from Robin Payne—which had apparently been placed from the call box inside a tea room in Marlborough, from what she was able to gather from the somewhat mentally deficient waitress who answered Barbara’s return call upon the twenty-f ifth ring—and by directing a young female constable to do some digging through Alistair Harvie’s schooldays at Winchester. But now Sergeant Stanley’s gridwork looked as if it was about to pay off.

Stanley waved the remaining talkers in the room to silence. He’d been seated at a round table, arranging a collection of wooden toothpicks into the crisscrossing walls of a log cabin as he listened to the reports, but now he stood.

He said, “Give, Frank.”

Frank said, “Right.” He didn’t bother with preliminaries. He just said with some excitement, “We’ve got him, Sarge. He’s in interview room number three.”

Barbara had a horrified vision of Alistair Harvie in leg irons without benefi t of either caution or counsel. She said, “Got who?”

“The bugger that snatched the kid,” Frank replied with a dismissive look in her direction.

“He’s a mechanic from Coate, works on tractors out of a garage near Spaniel’s Bridge. One mile exactly from the canal.”

The room erupted. Barbara was among those who stormed the ordnance survey map.

Frank pointed to the location with an index finger whose nail had an arch of mustard imbedded beneath it.

“Right here.” The constable indicated a dogleg in the lane that led from the hamlet of Coate north towards the village of Bishop’s Canning. Along the canal, it was three and a half miles from Spaniel’s Bridge to the spot where Charlotte’s body had been dumped, one and a half miles to that same spot if one used lanes, tracks, and footpaths to reach it instead of relying upon the meandering motorway. “The sod’s claiming he doesn’t know a thing, but we’ve got the goods on him and he’s ready to be grilled.”

“Right.” Sergeant Stanley rubbed his hands together as if ready to do the honours. “Interview which did you say?”

“Three.” Frank added scornfully, “Bugger’s doing a real fine job of leaf-shaking, Sarge.

You give him a good taste of muscle, and he’s going to crack. I swear.”

Sergeant Stanley settled his shoulders, preparing to take on the task. Barbara said,

“What goods?” Her question went ignored.

Stanley set off towards the door. Barbara felt her insides heat up. This wasn’t the way they were going to play it. She said sharply,

“Hang on, Reg,” to Stanley, and when the sergeant did a deliberately slow pirouette in her direction, “Frank, you said you have the goods on this bloke…what’s his name anyway?”

“Short. Howard.”

“Fine. So what are the goods you’ve got on Howard Short?”

Frank looked to Sergeant Stanley for direction. Stanley gave a fractional lift of his chin as a response. The fact that Frank would need to get permission from Stanley infuriated Barbara, but she chose to ignore it and waited for his answer.

“School uniform,” the constable said. “This bloke Short, he had it in his garage. Planning to use it for a rag, he claimed. But the Bowen kid’s nametag is sewn into it, big as can be.”

Sergeant Stanley dispatched the crime scene team to Howard Short’s garage outside of Coate. He set off towards interview room number 3 with Barbara hard upon his heels.

She caught him up and said, “I want another team in Ford. There’s a dovecote with—”

“A dovecote?” Stanley stopped in his tracks.

“A bleeding
dovecote
, did you say?”

“We have an audiotape of the girl,” she told him, “made a day or two before she died. She’s talking about where she’s being held. The dovecote fi ts her description. I want a team of evidence officers out there. Now.”

Stanley leaned towards her. She realised for the first time that he was a truly unattractive man. At this proximity she could see the ingrown whiskers on his neck and the pockmarks round his mouth. He said, “You clear that with our guv. I’m not sending evidence officers round the countryside because you get an itch that you want scratched.”

“You’ll do what I tell you,” Barbara said.

“And if you don’t—”

“What? You going to sick up on my shoes?”

She grasped his tie. “Your shoes’ll be fi ne,”

she told him. “But I can’t promise much about the state of your balls. Now, are we clear on who’s going to do what?”

He blew a puff of stale tobacco breath in her face. “Cool down,” he said softly.

“Bugger you and enjoy it,” she replied. She released his tie with a shove against his chest.

“Take some advice, Reg. This is a battle you can’t hope to win. Have some sense and know it before I have you pulled from the case.”

He lit a cigarette with his lady’s arse lighter.

“I’ve an interview to conduct.” He spoke with the assurance of a man who’d had tenure on the force for too many years. “You want to sit in on it?” He walked down the corridor, saying, “Get us some coffee, room three,” to a clerk who was hurrying by with a clipboard in her hand.

Barbara told her anger to recede. She wanted to jump on Stanley’s pitted face, but there was no point to going eyeball to eyeball with him. It was clear that he was determined not to blink so long as his adversary was a woman.

She’d have to use other means to neutralise the little bastard.

She followed him along the corridor and turned right to the interview room. There, Howard Short was seated on the edge of a plastic chair. A twentyish boy with the eyes of a frog, he was wearing the grease-splotched overalls of his profession and a baseball cap that had the word
Braves
scrolled across the front. He was clutching his stomach.

He spoke before either Stanley or Barbara had a chance to make a comment. He said,

“This’s about that little girl, isn’t it? I know it is. I could tell when that bloke went through my rag bag and found it.”

“What?” Stanley asked. He straddled a chair and offered his packet of cigarettes to Short.

Howard shook his head. He clutched his stomach more tightly. “Ulcer.”

“What?”

“My stomach.”

“Bury it. What’d they find in the rag bag, Howard?”

The boy looked to Barbara as if seeking reassurance that someone was going to be on his side. She said, “What was in the bag, Mr.

Short?”

“That,” he said. “What they found. The uniform.” He rocked on his chair and moaned.

“I don’t know nothing about this little kid. I just buy—”

“Why’d you snatch her?” Stanley said.

“I didn’t.”

“Where’d you keep her? In the garage?”

“I didn’t keep no one…no little girl…I saw it on the telly like everyone else. But I swear I never seen her. I never seen her once.”

“You liked stripping her though. You have a nice pop when you got her naked?”

“I never! I never did it!”

“You a virgin, then, Howard? Or a poufter?

What is it? Don’t like the girls?”

“I like girls fine. I’m only saying—”

“Little ones? You like them little as well?”

“I didn’t snatch this kid.”

“But you know she was snatched? How’s that?”

“The news. The papers. Everybody knows.

But I didn’t have nothing to do with it. I only got her uniform—”

“So you knew it was hers,” Stanley interrupted. “Right from the start. Is that it?”

“No!”

“Come out with it. It’ll go easier if you tell us the truth.”

“I’m trying. I’m telling you that the rag—”

“You mean the uniform. A little girl’s school uniform. A dead little girl’s uniform, Howard.

You’re just a mile away from the canal, aren’t you?”

“I never did it,” Howard said. He rolled forward on his arms, increasing the pressure against his stomach. “Hurts bloody awful,” he grunted.

“Don’t play games with us,” Stanley said.

“Please, c’n I have some water for my pills?”

Howard inched his arm away from his stomach, reached in his overalls, and pulled out a plastic pill box that was shaped like a spanner.

“Talk first, pills later,” Stanley said.

Barbara jerked open the door of the interview room to call for some water. The clerk from whom Stanley had ordered the coffee stood there with two plastic cups of it. Barbara smiled, said, “Thanks awfully,” with much sincerity, and handed her cup over to the mechanic.

She said, “Here. Use this for your pills, Mr.

Short,” and she pulled a chair out from the table and placed it next to the quaking young man. She said firmly, “Can you tell us where you got the uniform?”

Howard popped two pills into his mouth and drank them down. The position of Barbara’s chair forced the boy to turn in his own, offering only his profile to Stanley. Barbara gave herself a mental pat on the back for shifting the power so adroitly. Howard said, “From the jumble stall.”

“What jumble stall?”

“At the church fête. We have a church fête every spring and this year’s was Sunday. I took my gran because she had to work in the tea booth for an hour. It wasn’t worth taking her to the fête, going home, and coming back, so I hung about. That’s when I got the rags. They were selling them in the jumble stall. Plastic bags of rags. One pound fifty each. I bought three because I use them at work. It was for a good cause.” He added this earnestly. “They’re raising money to restore one of the windows in the chancel.”

“Where?” Barbara asked. “Which church, Mr. Short?”

“In Stanton St. Bernard. That’s where my gran lives.” He looked from Barbara to Sergeant Stanley. He said, “I’m telling the truth.

I didn’t know nothing about that uniform. I didn’t even know it was in the bag till the cops dumped it out on the f loor. I hadn’t even opened the bag yet. I swear it.”

“Who was working the stall?” Stanley interjected.

Howard licked his lips, looked Stanley’s way, then back to Barbara. “Some girl. A blonde.”

“Girlfriend of yours?”

“I didn’t know her.”

“Didn’t chat her up? Didn’t catch her name?”

“I only bought the rags off her.”

“Didn’t make a play? Didn’t think about what it would be like to roger her?”

“No.”

“Why? Too old for you? D’you like them young?”

“I didn’t know her, okay? I just bought those rags like I said, at the jumble stall. I don’t know how they got there. I don’t know the name of the bird ’at sold them to me. Even if I did, she pro’ly doesn’t know how they got there either. She was just working the stall, collecting money and handing over the bags.

If you need to know more, you should pro’ly ask—”

“Defending her?” Stanley said. “Why’s that, Howard?”

“I’m trying to help you lot!” Short shouted.

“I bet you are. Just like I bet you took that little girl’s uniform and stowed it with the rags once you bought them at the fête.”

“I never!”

“Just like I bet you snatched her, drugged her, and drowned her.”

“No!”

“Just like—”

Barbara stood. She touched Short’s shoulder. “Thanks for your help,” she said fi rmly.

“We’ll look into everything you’ve said, Mr.

Short. Sergeant Stanley?” She canted her head towards the door and left the interview room.

Stanley followed her into the corridor. She heard him say, “Balls. If that little sod thinks—

”

She swung round to face him. “That little sod nothing.
You
start thinking. Bully a witness like that and we end up with sod all, which is what we nearly got from that kid.”

“You believe that rubbish about tea booths and blondes?” Stanley snorted. “He’s dirty as used-up engine oil.”

“If he’s dirty, we’ll nail him. But we’ll do it legitimately or not at all. Got it?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “So send that school uniform to forensics, Reg. Check every inch of it.