Innocent Blood (20 page)

‘No, stop it. Now we’re trying to outdo each other in contrition!’ She laughed but it sounded sad. ‘What?’ he asked.

‘I was just thinking that it’s ironic. Last year you decided that an affair would be too risky for both our careers and now…now, well, we’re the victims of rumour anyway. It wouldn’t be so bad if there were some substance behind the speculation.’

‘Wouldn’t it?’

‘No,’ she replied softly.

There was silence. A fly decided that their sandwiches looked appetising and settled on a crust. Neither of them flicked it away. Eventually Fenwick reached out and took a sip of his drink, pulling a face at the taste.

‘Yuck! That’s disgusting. Can I get you something else?’

‘Why not,’ she said with a one-sided smile. ‘A glass of white wine and a water; st—’

‘Still, no ice or lemon, I know.’ He swung his legs over the bench and stood up. As he walked behind her he squeezed her shoulder, letting his hand stay there long enough that she put her own on top of it. Then he was gone and she was on her own.

Her mobile rang a minute later. It was Blite.

‘Just thought you’d want to know that Quinlan is looking for you. I said I’d track you down. He wants to see us in half an hour to discuss whether he should combine the Eagleton and Hill investigations under one SIO. I told him I thought it was a good idea but for some reason he wants your opinion before he makes up his mind.’

Nightingale’s heart sank. She’d made a lot of progress on the Hill/Maidment investigation in a short space of time and she didn’t want to see all her effort subsumed into an inquiry with Blite as SIO. But her tone gave nothing away.

‘I’m on my way back from interviewing Maidment again.’

‘So when will you be here? I suppose you’ve stopped for lunch.’

Nightingale realised the full implication of his words and made an instinctive decision.

‘A quick sandwich. Look, Rodney,’ she said and carried on quickly before she could change her mind, ‘I know there are rumours going round about me and Andrew Fenwick.’

She heard his intake of breath.

‘Well, I want you to know that they’re not true. If they were, I’d tell you but there’s nothing between us other than a casual friendship.’ She knew she sounded sincere and hoped he would realise the truth when he heard it.

‘Right, course,’ was all he said. ‘So when are you likely to be back?’

‘In time for the meeting. I’ll see you in Quinlan’s office, shall I?’

‘Yeah, see you then.’

She broke the connection as Fenwick returned with a tray bearing wine, water and fresh food.

‘That was the station,’ she explained. ‘I need to get back.’

She wrapped the sandwich and put it in her handbag.

‘Developments?’ he asked hopefully.

‘No, just Quinlan, he needs an update.’ Nightingale drank the glass of water but left the wine untouched. ‘I must go. If anything interesting happens, do you want me to call you?’

‘Of course.’

She was gone before he had a chance to find the right words of goodbye. The memory of their previous conversation hung about the table as he sipped his fresh tomato juice and finished his sandwich. There was a sense of an opportunity missed, of his life taking a tiny, fraction of a degree shift that would take him in a direction that he didn’t want it to go. But the shift had happened and he had done nothing to prevent it. After a few minutes’ introspection he gathered their empty plates, her untouched glass of wine and took the debris of their meal back into the pub.

Back at the station, Blite called Dave McPherson and changed his bet. He put £20 on against the affair but declined to say why. He reckoned he was on to a winner.

‘I’m buggered!’ Cooper leant back against the hot vinyl of his car seat and addressed the empty air. ‘Bloody background. This poor sod’s got more background than a sodding Turner.’

He was quite pleased with himself for the artistic analogy. On his way back to the station he stopped for lunch at the Saucy Sailor, a fish and chip restaurant that, in his opinion, did the best batter in Harlden. He ordered a large piece of hake but compromised with only a small portion of chips because Doris was becoming very insistent about this low-fat diet idea of hers.

Writing up his reports took hours. Cooper belonged to a police generation that had mastered a clumsy two-fingered typing technique. It was accurate but rarely exceeded fifteen words a minute. He was relieved to receive a call from Nightingale explaining that the team meeting she’d originally scheduled for five had been brought forward to three-fifteen because Superintendent Quinlan wanted to sit in on it. Oh, and Andrew Fenwick might be there as well, she added, with nonchalance Cooper was certain was studied.

Cooper cast his eye around the meeting room and calculated that his presence had just lowered the average rank of attendees by at least one level. As well as Nightingale there was Fenwick, looking bemused and Quinlan. Nightingale hadn’t asked for a large team to investigate Paul Hill’s murder but she had hand-picked them. In addition to himself, there was another detective sergeant and two young detective constables, one a fast-track graduate who reminded Cooper of Nightingale when he’d first met her.

His task of digging into Maidment’s background was demanding, solitary grunt-work of the sort that was often given short shrift. That’s why it had been dumped on him, he knew. Nightingale already had a reputation as a stickler for detail…rather like her old boss, Cooper realised and the thought made him smile.

The DS – Ken – and graduate trainee, whose name Cooper was always forgetting, were searching for Bryan Taylor. Nightingale and the other constable had been reviewing the original Paul Hill case and re-interviewing the witnesses they could find. As he looked at Quinlan and Fenwick, Cooper tried to work out why the case was attracting so much attention from the higher-ups.

‘Bob, good. Now we can start.’ Nightingale sounded in remarkably good humour. ‘Chief Inspector Fenwick is here because of a potential link to a case MCS are working on and the superintendent has asked to participate in the meeting because this case has the particular attention of the ACC.

‘The chief inspector’s investigation is a highly sensitive investigation and his interest in our activities must remain confidential.’ Her tone made it clear that no details of this case were about to be shared and he saw a slight relaxation in Fenwick’s shoulders.

‘So, Bob, could you tell us where you’ve got to, please?’

Cooper paused, trying to collect his thoughts. He’d spent the past week trudging around Maidment’s friends and acquaintances, past and present. The major’s worst crime so far, in the words of one churchgoer, was that he was ‘too good to be true’. Only one person had voiced real suspicions; a neighbour who lived close to Castleview Terrace whose son had sometimes been given a lift by the major. Cooper had spoken to the son about it, a strapping lad of ten, who’d told him not to be daft. Still, Cooper would have to organise a follow-up with a specially trained police interviewer. He relayed all this quickly, playing down its significance, and to Nightingale’s credit she didn’t try to make it sound more relevant than it was.

‘What do they say about him at the golf club?’

‘More of the same: decent bloke; efficient secretary; not a bad golfer; good reputation in the army. One curious thing maybe.’ He paused and scratched his paunch without being aware he was doing so. ‘He was popular and a good mixer but no one I’ve spoken to claims to be a really good friend. Mind you, I’ve a couple of his army mates to talk to yet and I’m told that they were closer to him than anybody. I suppose combat does that.’

Fenwick and Nightingale glanced at each other then quickly looked away.

‘OK, keep digging. Ken, what progress have you and Teresa made?’

Teresa, that’s her name,
Cooper thought.
Typical of Nightingale to refer to them both rather than just the DS.

‘We’ve spent most of our time looking for the original case files and evidence as well as reconstructing as much background on Bryan Taylor as we can. There’s still no trace of the files and it’s looking more and more likely that they’re lost or destroyed. Teresa is going through every piece we have from the period anyway in case something was misplaced.

‘So far, what we know about Taylor is that he drifted into Harlden around 1977 from Essex. People recall an unmarried, shaven-headed man with a goatee and earring; back in those days he was automatically considered gay. He had a snake tattoo and no interest in women or football, but nobody remembers seeing him with other men.

‘No surprise when his name was linked to the disappearance of Paul Hill; he’s the sort of loner the public prefers for its villains. This is all we have on him.’

Ken circulated a copy of Taylor’s driving licence (an old one without a photograph), and a rough e-fit based on people’s recollections of what he’d looked like, for what it was worth. He’d also tracked down the registration number of Taylor’s red estate car though there was no trace of its whereabouts; the vehicle had never been sold, nor been involved in any traffic offence.

Cooper watched Nightingale digest the scant information and the implications for their investigation, which were not good. Taylor looked like a man for whom it was second nature to disappear. He could be living anywhere in the UK under an assumed name, earning his living without throwing up a whisper of a national insurance record. They didn’t even know the colour of his eyes. It was enough to make anyone want to abandon the search, but not Nightingale. She squared her shoulders.

‘You’ve made more progress than I thought was possible in the absence of the original evidence but you’ll have to go further. It’s obviously key that we find Taylor and either eliminate him from the case or link him to Maidment. If we don’t, no matter how strong our forensic evidence against Maidment is, we will have a gaping hole in our case. Taylor was the prime suspect in Paul’s abduction.’

Ken nodded.

‘There’s still more we can do. We’re still tracing anyone who might have known him, starting at the golf club, where we’ve discovered he did some casual work.’
Not helpful,
Cooper thought,
he could have dumped the clothes.
‘Taylor was universally disliked but he was a cheap worker so people kept using him. He did odd jobs for local schools and social clubs – in retrospect it looks like he gave heavily discounted terms whenever he could work around children.’

‘It’s disgusting that he was allowed to get near them.’ Cooper was outraged.

‘He wasn’t on a register and it was all casual work; he didn’t even bother with a contract most of the time. Taylor could turn his hand to most things: carpentry, tree clearance, decorating, maintenance, even helping out at harvest time. His dealings were usually in cash and only a small portion of it found its way into his bank account.’

‘When his house was searched did they find any money? If he’d planned to abduct or kill Paul it stands to reason he’d have taken it.’ Fenwick had kept silent far longer than Cooper had expected.

Nightingale answered.

‘All we have to go on is a summary record of the case that was kept in a master file here in Harlden. As you heard from Ken the original files and evidence are still missing. But based on the record we have there was no cash recovered from his house.’

Quinlan shifted at her words and Cooper looked at him, expecting him to speak, but he remained silent.

‘I know this isn’t a popular question to raise but what if we don’t find Taylor?’ Cooper asked, not wishing to undermine Nightingale but anxious that they didn’t build their hopes on completing what he thought could be an impossible task.

Nightingale didn’t answer straight away but looked at Superintendent Quinlan. After an increasingly pregnant pause he took a deep breath and said, ‘It’s absolutely vital that we find Taylor. You see, there’s been a new development. Since Maidment’s arrest a week ago we’ve received a number of letters from people claiming that he’s innocent.’

‘Well, that’s standard enough.’ Cooper didn’t see the significance.

‘Two of these letters turn out to be important. They arrived on consecutive days and the first must have been posted immediately after the news broke.’

Nightingale handed out copies of a word-processed letter.

‘The letter was posted in London and sent first class. Unfortunately it took six days to arrive. Here’s the second one.’

Cooper was still only part-way through reading it when he heard Teresa gasp. He read on quickly and even forewarned couldn’t suppress his own ‘
Bloody hell!
’

Attached to the letter were photographs of a paperback – Salinger’s
Catcher in the Rye
– complete with school library stamp of ownership. On the reverse was a copy of the title page with the usual list of student borrowers. The last name belonged to Paul Hill, the date stamp alongside it 7
^th
September, 1982.

‘Paul borrowed the book from the school library on the day he disappeared.’ Quinlan stood up and started to pace. ‘It’s already been sent for analysis and, as the Well-Wisher claims, Paul’s fingerprints are on it.’

‘So who sent it?’ Cooper raised the obvious question. ‘Bryan Taylor?’

‘Why would he implicate himself?’ Fenwick was dismissive. ‘Isn’t it more likely to be from an ex-lover of Taylor’s, perhaps even another boy seeking revenge for their own abuse? Maybe Taylor bragged to them about Paul. Sending us an anonymous letter is an easy way for someone to get their own back without becoming involved, particularly if they don’t know where Taylor is.’

‘So, what are we going to do? Should I stop the background work on Maidment?’ Cooper asked hopefully. ‘Because there’s no way he could have sent the book.’

‘No,’ Nightingale was insistent, ‘the investigation continues unchanged except that we now have another line of inquiry. I’m going to follow up on this letter to try and trace the writer.’

‘To have the book, someone must have seen Paul
after
he’d been to school on the day he disappeared. Can we be sure it was Taylor? Does the other set of prints match any on our records?’ Fenwick looked at Nightingale expectantly.

‘No, though we haven’t finished checking. The letter had no prints on it at all and the envelope and stamp are self-adhesive so there’s no chance of DNA.’

There was silence in the room. Cooper’s thoughts were going in circles and he imagined everyone else’s were too. Still, he had his reports to finish and time was passing.

‘Well, that’s all for now,’ Nightingale said as if reading his mind. ‘I know I don’t have to remind you how sensitive this new information is so please keep it to yourselves.’

Everybody started to gather their papers but as they did so Superintendent Quinlan cleared his throat and stood up. Despite his unassuming demeanour such was the respect in which he was held that the room fell quiet almost instantly.

‘There is one further announcement I would like to make,’ he said and looked briefly at Nightingale. ‘I’ve decided that it makes sense to combine the investigations into the murders of Malcolm Eagleton and Paul Hill. So, with effect from today, Inspector Nightingale will assume SIO responsibility for both. I have significant expectations, Inspector, as you know.’

‘Yes, sir.’ The inspector gave him a brief smile, which was reciprocated before he left.

There was a hush of significance in the room. Everybody recognised what had just happened; Quinlan had taken a case away from an experienced inspector and given it to the upstart. The action suggested that Nightingale’s career really was in the ascendant and Cooper wasn’t the only one grinning as he left the conference room.

Fenwick handed out freshly brewed takeaway coffee and pastries to the members of the MCS surveillance team. They were installed in a warehouse opposite the main entrance to the storage depot where Alec Ball was known to keep his legitimate goods for sale. It was the end of the afternoon on the sixth day since he’d authorised the operation and this was the first time they had called him with anything remotely interesting.

On the wall behind them were photographs of people they were watching out for with a brief résumé of their involvement. Fenwick studied the list as he waited for the team to sort out sugars and debate who would have which doughnut.