Shades of Evil (16 page)

‘True, but not much.’ He kicked off his shoes and rested his feet beside Jill’s. ‘OK. Someone somehow manages, and God knows how, to get to the shelter without half of Kelton Bridge seeing him. He knows Steve walks that way each morning, and he knows that Lauren sometimes does, so he lies in wait with a lamb chop in his pocket.’

‘What?’ She spluttered with laughter.

‘He’ll have known that he can’t call Lauren’s dog,’ Max explained, ‘so he’ll try and entice the dog without being heard.’

‘Hey, that makes sense.’

‘Hm. So he produces his lamb chop and, according to plan, Lauren’s dog goes to investigate. He grabs the dog and ties it up. Oh, he gags it, too, so it can’t bark.’

Jill knew he wasn’t taking this very seriously, but she was determined to find something, somewhere, that was feasible.

‘So he lies in wait,’ Max continued, ‘with the dog bound and gagged until Lauren returns to the spot where she’s agreed to meet Carlisle. He then takes the axe from Steve’s sack. Did I mention he has X-ray vision? That’s how he knows the axe is there. He kills Lauren with one swift blow. He then unties the dog and scarpers without a single soul in Kelton Bridge seeing him.’

Put like that, it sounded absurd. Impossible.

‘There has to be an explanation,’ Jill insisted.

‘No one else was seen in the area,’ he reminded her.

‘But they wouldn’t be, would they? Everyone saw Lauren and Steve because they were walking their dogs as they often did. They had no reason to hide. The killer, on the other hand, would have made sure he wasn’t seen.’

‘How?’

‘There are plenty of stone walls to hide behind. And trees.’

All the same, it didn’t make any sense and she was too tired to think. Either that or the wine had turned her brain to mush. She closed her eyes and listened to the crackling of the logs.

Frank Carlisle lay in the bed he’d shared with his wife for more years than he cared to remember and longed for the first hint of daylight. At this time of year, it was slow to come.

For once, Ruth was sleeping soundly. Perhaps the glass of wine she’d had at Jill Kennedy’s had helped.

She needed sleep. They both did, but Frank’s mind refused to switch off. The last thing he wanted was to wake Ruth, but his body ached from holding it so still.

Not, he decided, that an aching body was anything new. At seventy-eight years of age, he was used to that. The slightest movement out of the ordinary always brought with it a painful reminder of his age.

It seemed no time at all since he’d been able to run up these hills and think nothing of it, or race the length and breadth of the football pitch for an hour and a half and barely be out of breath.

All that was a long time ago. Now, he often wondered how long it would be before even climbing the stairs was too much for his old body.

To hell with it. Coaxing his stiff limbs into an upright position, he sat on the side of the bed for a moment, waiting to see if the movement had woken Ruth. Pleased that it hadn’t, he stood up and padded barefoot to the door where his dressing gown hung from the hook.

He shrugged that on and tiptoed down the stairs and into the kitchen. Perhaps a hot mug of tea would settle him. At least it would give him something to do until the light finally ushered in another day.

With his tea made, he carried it into the sitting room and sat by the window in the upright wooden chair. The chair had belonged to his father and his grandfather and, what it lacked in looks, it made up for by easing his aching back.

On the sideboard, on the opposite side of the room, were several photographs, all showing members of the family on important days. There were birthdays and graduations. The one that held Frank’s gaze showed Steve and Alison smiling for the camera on their wedding day. He felt like flinging it across the room. What hurt most was the broad smile on Steve’s trusting face as he stood next to his young beautiful bride. Sometimes beauty was only skin deep, Frank thought as he tore his gaze away.

For years, ever since young Maisie had been snatched from them, Ruth had been worrying about the state of Steve and Alison’s marriage.

‘Don’t be daft, woman,’ Frank had scolded at first. ‘They’ve lost a baby so of course they’re unhappy. But they’ll have more. It’ll all come right in the end, you’ll see.’

No other children had come along though, and Frank had begun to wonder if perhaps Ruth was right. But Steve had seemed happy enough with his lot.

Frank had chosen to believe that all was well in his son’s marriage until, six weeks ago, he’d seen that it wasn’t. Although he could remember things that had happened sixty years ago, he often struggled to remember what he’d done yesterday, but he could remember everything about that day with a perfect clarity.

His friend, Bill, had been going into Burnley to get his car serviced and Frank had said he’d go along to keep Bill company while he waited. They planned to walk into town and have a look round.

As Bill drove them over Deerplay Moor, they spoke about Burnley’s football team and how their recent success had given the town a much needed boost.

It had been drizzling, and the windscreen wipers had screeched their way back and forth. While Bill was complaining about that, Frank spotted a car like Alison’s in front of them. He paid it no real attention. He was too busy talking.

It was when they were a couple of miles further on, where roadworks had narrowed the road near the lay-by, that he realized it
was
Alison’s car.

As Bill’s car was stationary at the temporary traffic lights, Frank watched, a sick feeling thudding in his stomach, as Alison parked her car, jumped out, and ran a couple of yards to another car. The owner of that car got out to meet her.

Bill was easing the car forward when Frank saw his daughter-in-law kiss the driver of that other car. It was a long kiss. The man had been sliding his hands over Alison’s buttocks …

Frank hadn’t said a word to Ruth about it. Nor Steve, nor Alison. He hadn’t mentioned it to a soul, but he couldn’t get it out of his head.

That Alison could cheat on Steve – and what other explanation could there be? – sickened him to the pit of his stomach.

More than anything, Frank hated liars and cheats, hated people running around behind their partners’ backs.

And now, Steve was alone. He was being held in a cell while the police quizzed him about the murder of a young girl. And it was tearing his mother apart.

It would be sorted out, Frank had no doubt about that, but what did Steve have to come home to? A cheat and a liar, that’s what.

For two pins, he’d go to their house and tell Alison exactly what he thought of her. He wished to God Steve had never set eyes on the blasted woman.

Jill opened her eyes, sat up with a jolt and felt a stab of pain in her neck. She’d fallen asleep on the sofa. Max had too but, as she moved, he woke up.

‘What time is it?’ he mumbled.

‘Early enough to go to bed, I hope.’

Max rubbed his eyes then checked his watch. ‘Hell’s teeth. It’s almost eight. Time for a quick shower and then I need to go.’

Jill liked to wake up slowly, preferably with coffee in bed. That was out of the question, but she had no intention of doing a single thing before she’d had a caffeine hit.

‘You have a shower,’ she said, ‘and I’ll sort the coffee.’

While it was brewing, she let the cats out, peering into the garden as she did so just in case any lunatics were out there. It was deserted, of course. All the same, she wouldn’t rest easy until the cats were on the right side of a locked cat-flap again.

She was sitting at the table, a large mug of coffee in front of her when Max came downstairs. Not only had he showered, he’d managed to find a clean shirt. He looked wide awake and smart; she looked as if she’d spent an uncomfortable night on a sofa.

She poured him a coffee and glanced out of the window again to see what her cats were up to. Sam was sitting on the shed’s roof surveying his world. Rabble and Tojo were having their usual morning fight.

Max’s phone rang and Jill wondered why they couldn’t even manage a coffee without interruption.

‘Oh, no,’ she heard Max say. ‘How? … Do we know when? … Yeah, OK.’

He ended the call and shook his head in despair.

‘What’s happened?’ She hardly dare ask.

‘Vincent Cole is dead. He killed himself.’

It took a moment for his words to sink in.

‘No,’ she said with absolute certainty. ‘I don’t know what happened, but no way did he kill himself.’

‘Believe me, he did. He’s hanging from the beam in his sitting room.’

‘No, Max. He didn’t.’

‘Jill,’ he said patiently, ‘the bloke never got over losing his wife. Now his daughter is dead. In his shoes, I’d probably top myself, too.’

‘Trust me, Max, this isn’t suicide. Yes, he might have been having thoughts about ending it all but there is no way he would do that before he’d buried Lauren.’

He was perfectly still, considering that.

‘We do all we can for our loved ones,’ she reminded him, ‘and the last thing we can do is lay to them rest with the dignity they deserve. Believe me, Vincent Cole wouldn’t have killed himself before Lauren was at rest beside her mother. When we visited, that’s all he cared about.’

‘Shit!’

Max was on the phone again.

‘Vincent Cole,’ he told the person at the other end. ‘I want everyone available out there. And nothing is to be touched. Nothing at all. I’m on my way. I’ll be there’ – he glanced at his watch – ‘half an hour at most.’

He ended the call and gave Jill a quick kiss. ‘I’ll have to dash. Catch you later.’

Jill stood at the door to watch him jump in his car, fire the engine and take off down the lane at a speed that was far from sensible given the icy state of the road. Then she went to see if she, too, could shower and find clothes smart enough for the interview she was doing later.

It was mayhem when Max arrived at Worcester House. Tape sealed off the property. A crowd of neighbours stood in the cold air to see what was going on.

Max changed into his protective suit in the hallway and then walked into the sitting room where SOCOs in similar suits were gathering evidence. The photographer was busy, bursts of flash lighting the room – and the body – every few seconds.

Hanging from the centre beam in the room, wearing blue striped pyjamas, was Vincent Cole.

Beneath Cole was a kitchen chair that had, possibly, been kicked away.

‘Who found him?’ Max asked.

‘A neighbour. She’s in the kitchen.’

Max went to the kitchen where an elderly woman was sitting at the table, an untouched cup of tea in front of her and a young WPC opposite her.

‘This is Mrs Hollingsworth,’ the WPC told Max. ‘She cleans for Mr Cole and has a key.’

Max sat opposite her and gave her an encouraging smile.

‘You’ve had a terrible shock,’ he said, and she nodded at the understatement.

‘What made you come here at this time?’ he asked. ‘It’s a bit early to start cleaning, isn’t it?’

‘The wheelie bin,’ she replied, her voice trembling. ‘Oh, I live in the bungalow across the road,’ she explained, ‘and I’ve been coming in to clean for Vince since – since his wife died. Not yesterday. I don’t do Tuesdays. Yesterday, I went into Manchester and didn’t get back till six.’

‘You said something about the wheelie bin?’

‘Yes. Knowing it would be dark when I got home, I put my bin out before I left. I always put mine out the night – or day – before because they come early to empty it. This morning, I was up early. Couldn’t sleep for some reason. Anyway, I saw that Vince hadn’t put his bin out. You can see it now. It’s still round the corner of the house.’

‘And that’s unusual?’ Max asked.

‘Oh, yes. He’s a stickler about it. He likes to get up very early and normally he’ll put it out about six o’clock. The bin men are always here by seven in the morning. Always.’

She looked at the tea in front of her and took a hesitant sip.

‘I spoke to him when I put mine out,’ she said. ‘He was getting his car out of the garage. He told me he’d probably put his out later because it’s so dark in the mornings.’

‘And that’s all he said.’

‘More or less, yes. I told him, yet again, that if there was anything I could do, he just had to say the word. I don’t suppose there is –
was
– but I did feel for him. That girl meant the world to him, poor man.’

Max nodded at that.

‘How did he seem?’ he asked her.

‘The same as usual,’ she replied. ‘He thanked me, said he was doing all right. Mind,’ she added, ‘he used to be in the army so I suppose he thinks it’s weak to show his feelings.’

‘Did he say anything else?’

‘No. But it was cold and we were both keen to get back inside.’

That was understandable.

‘I wouldn’t normally dream of going in the house,’ she went on, ‘using my key, I mean, unless it’s my day to clean. But, like I said, it felt wrong. In fact, it felt so wrong that I nipped over here and rang the bell a couple of times. There was no answer. I even shouted through the letterbox a couple of times. Nothing.’

‘So you came inside?’ Max asked.

‘Not then, no. I thought he must still be in bed or – to be honest, I didn’t know what to think.’ She took a long, shaky breath. ‘Then I thought he might have taken a fall, or had a heart attack. I just didn’t know. So I took his keys from the hook and came across here again. I rang the doorbell a couple of times, shouted through the letterbox, and then – and then I let myself in. I shouted up the stairs, but it felt horrible. So quiet. I pushed open the sitting room door, switched on the light, and that’s when I saw him.’

Tears welled in her eyes and she took a white lace handkerchief from the pocket of her coat.

‘I can’t believe he’d do such a thing,’ she said on a sob, mopping at her eyes. ‘I mean, I know losing his wife hit him hard. And now this. This is just the worst thing that can happen to anyone. Losing a child, it’s the worst thing imaginable. But even so…’

Max nodded his understanding.

‘Did you touch anything when you came in?’ he asked and she looked surprised by the question.

‘No. Why?’ Before Max could answer, she said, ‘Well, I used the phone to dial 999. But no, nothing else. The woman who answered the phone asked me to stay here. I sat on the stairs.’ She pointed in the direction of the staircase. ‘I couldn’t bear to see him like that so I sat on the stairs. It wasn’t many minutes before two policemen arrived.’

‘OK. Thank you.’

Max left her with the WPC and took a look around the rest of the house.

There was nothing at all to suggest that this was anything other than a suicide.

He stood in what had to be Cole’s bedroom and gazed around him. It was a large room, the ceiling lower than those downstairs, and was dominated by a double bed with a mahogany headboard. The bed was unmade, the pillows crumpled.

He pulled open the wardrobe doors. Trousers, shirts and jackets were hanging from the rail, some beneath dust covers. A poppy was pinned to a blue blazer, a reminder of Remembrance Day. Highly polished shoes were lined up neatly on a low shelf.

A comb sat on the mirrored dressing table, alongside a small trophy engraved with Harrington Amateur Dramatic Society, but, other than that, it was bare. Max pulled open drawers and frowned at what he saw. Here, unlike in the rest of the house, was the sort of mess that would have driven a man like Cole crazy. Underwear had been thrown in untidily. A couple of T-shirts would need ironing again before they could be worn. A belt, pushed in haphazardly, stopped the drawer opening smoothly.

Odd.

He walked down the stairs and into the sitting room where Cole’s body was finally being released.

Max walked over to the sideboard and opened the drawers. Here, the same mess existed. Perhaps Cole was only tidy where things were visible.

No, that didn’t make any sense. The man had been tidy to the point of obsession.

It seemed to Max that someone had rummaged through drawers looking for something. But what? An officer was examining the vacuum cleaner. ‘Looks like he used the cable from this, Max.’

So Cole had donned his pyjamas, gone to bed, decided to end it all, come downstairs, cut a length of cable and hanged himself? No way.

This wasn’t suicide. Vincent Cole had been murdered, Max was sure of it.

Max spent much of that day pacing his office, reading through paperwork and waiting for reports that didn’t come.

You could gather all the evidence in the world, he thought irritably, but until it had been analysed, it was worse than useless. And the waiting was driving him crazy.

Jill was doing a TV interview today so he couldn’t even moan to her.

Phil Meredith thought Max was going mad. As far as Max’s boss was concerned, the fact that Cole had decided to end it all should be obvious to anyone.

‘Even you, Max! Christ, there’s no need to go looking for trouble …’

Max stepped into the bustling incident room. He stared at a wall of photos and annoyed everyone who didn’t have a phone glued to their ear by demanding answers they couldn’t give him. The collective sigh of relief as he left the room was audible.

In Cole’s situation Max knew that he too would want to see his daughter buried. He wasn’t religious, he had no belief in any afterlife, but it was something you did. You did your best for your loved ones whether they were alive or dead. The only thing Cole could do for Lauren now was see her buried next to her mother. No way would he have killed himself before he’d performed that one last act for his daughter.

As he walked along the corridor, he peered through a glass door and saw Doug leaning back in a chair staring at CCTV footage. While doing that, he was chatting to Clive White.

Max pushed open the door.

‘Hello, Clive. You’re spending more time in the building since you’ve been suspended than you did when you were working.’

‘I’m still trying to get sponsorship, guv. Coppers are the most tight-fisted bastards imaginable.’

‘We’re all overworked and underpaid.’

‘True.’

‘So how’s it going?’

‘I’m bored rigid,’ Clive admitted.

Max could understand that. God alone knew what he’d do with his time if he ever found himself in the same situation.

‘I’ve had a clear out in the house,’ Clive went on, ‘and taken a load of junk to the tip. I thought I’d call in here on the way back and see if I could get more money out of anyone.’

‘I’ve had to cough up,’ Doug said, his eyes not leaving the screen.

‘What’s that?’ Max asked, nodding at the fuzzy town centre pictures. ‘And where is it?’ It wasn’t Harrington.

‘Blackpool,’ Doug said with little enthusiasm. ‘There was a robbery last night and guess who gets lumbered with this job.’

Max had heard about the robbery, but it didn’t interest him.

‘Hey, go back a bit,’ Clive said suddenly. ‘Back to where that white car was.’

‘If you see a couple of blokes wearing balaclavas, I’ll double my sponsorship,’ Doug promised as he rewound the tape. ‘I hate this job.’

‘There!’ Clive said.

Something in his voice had Max peering closely at the image.

‘What?’ Doug, like Max, was none the wiser.

‘That girl,’ Clive said, tapping a finger against the screen.

‘Good God!’ Now, Max knew exactly what Clive was thinking. ‘Go back a few seconds, Doug.’

The three of them watched as a young girl, her arm gripped by a tall man, was helped into a white car. The man was wearing what looked to be a leather coat with the collar hiding most of his face.

‘See what you can do with it, Doug, and let me know when you’ve got something clear. If you can’t get the car’s registration, see what else there is – scratches, dents, furry dice in the windscreen – anything.’ Realizing that Doug knew exactly what was needed, he nodded at Clive. ‘Good work.’

‘Thanks, guv.’

As far as Max could remember, none of the possible sightings of Yasmin Smith had been in Blackpool. But that meant nothing. She might, just might, be the girl on the screen.

He refused to get too hopeful. And he wasn’t letting Adam Smith know about this yet.

Instead, he rang Jackie Ingram to see when her postmortem report on Vincent Cole would be available. Needless to say, her greeting was less than warm.

‘I’ve told you, Max, you’ll have my report later today. Believe it or not, I have other things to do.’

‘I know, I know.’ He put on his grovelling voice. ‘Is there nothing you can tell me? Nothing at all?’

There was a long pause, followed by a sigh. ‘I can tell you that he was already dead before that cable went round his neck. Something heavy to the back to the head.’

Bingo!

‘If a victim falls several feet, the noose will fracture his neck, bringing a fairly quick death,’ she said. ‘If the fall is short, as in this case, death is through strangulation, which is slow and painful. The victim’s eyes would protrude and his face would be engorged with blood. This definitely wasn’t suicide, Max.’