Strange Affair (25 page)

“Jesus,” said Susan. “That’s terrible. Look, give him my condolences when you see him, will you?”

“Sure.”

“What happened?”

“Looks as if he was killed. Shot. Did you know him?”

“No. But that’s still terrible news. Poor Alan. Do tell him I’m sorry. My name was Susan Gay back then. He’ll remember. Browne’s my married name.”

There was something in her tone that stopped Templeton from making the obvious comment. Imagine going through life with a name like Gay, he thought. No wonder she changed it when she got married.

“And give my regards to Superintendent Gristhorpe and Jim Hatchley, if they’re still around.”

“Oh, they’re still around.”

“Right,” Susan waved a wasp away from the rim of her glass. “Down to business, then.”

“Claire Potter,” said Templeton. “Like anyone for it?”

“We’ve got no suspects at all. Except…”

“Yes?”

“Well, can you imagine how many times he must have done practice runs, how many times he must have followed someone, only for her to get home before he could strike? For something like this to work out you need so many things to go right. A woman turning off onto a dark country road late at night, nobody around, an unlocked driver’s door. Anyway, we checked around and it seems that a couple of months earlier, the twentieth of February to be exact, a woman turning off the M1 north of Sheffeld was attacked in a similar way, only she had her doors locked. Paula Chandler.”

“What happened?”

“She managed to start up and drive off. He didn’t pursue her.”

“Description?”

“Nothing useful. It was dark and she was scared. She didn’t really get a look at his face because she was desperately trying
to get the car started again while he was tugging at her door. He was wearing a dark suit, she said, and he had a wedding ring on. She saw his hand go to the door handle.”

“No gloves?”

“No. She said she could see the ring clearly.”

“Prints?”

“Nothing but blurs.”

“Make of car?”

“She couldn’t say. Only that it was dark in colour, blue or green. And compact. Maybe Japanese.”

Roger Cropley drove a dark green Honda, Templeton remembered, with a little shiver of excitement. And he wore a wedding ring. “Not a lot of use, is it?” he said.

“Very frustrating. And there are others, equally vague. One girl thought a car was following her, another reported someone giving her a funny look at a service station. That sort of thing. We followed them all up but got nowhere.”

“But you still think it’s the same man?”

“Yes. Like I said, he’d have to practise, and he’d need to get lucky. And Paula Chandler had stopped at Newport Pagnell services.”

“You think that’s where he trawls for his victims, the motorway cafés?”

“Yes. It makes sense. Find a woman alone, follow her and see if she turns off on a quiet stretch of road late at night. Both attacks we know about happened late on a Friday, and both happened after the victim had stopped at a service station.”

“Tell me about Claire Potter.”

“Her car was found in a ditch and the SOCOs found evidence that she’d been driven off the road.”

“Tire tracks?”

“Nothing we could use.”

“Where did the assault take place?”

“There was a wooded area nearby.”

“And nobody reported seeing the cars?”

“No. Either nobody passed them or someone just didn’t want to get involved. It wasn’t till the next morning when a chap driving a local delivery van got curious and reported the car in the ditch. When our blokes did a quick search of the area they found her.” DC Browne paused and sipped some water. “I was there. It was bad. One of the worst.”

“What did he do to her?”

Templeton noticed that DC Browne didn’t look him in the eye as she talked. “Everything. Clothes ripped off. Rape, both vaginal and anal. He also used some sort of sharp object for penetration. We found a bloody stick nearby. Then he stabbed her and she bled to death. Fifteen stab wounds. Breast, abdomen, pubic area. I’ve never seen such anger.”

“DNA?”

“No. Either he used a condom or he didn’t ejaculate.”

“Did the lab find any traces of lubricant?”

“No.”

“I take it they examined the earth around her.”

“Of course. No seminal fluid. No DNA. He’d also subdued her with chloroform so she couldn’t struggle or scratch.”

“No hair or skin, then?”

“No. He was very careful, this one, and it looks as if he cleaned up after himself.”

“They usually miss something.”

“Not this time. There was a stream nearby. He even washed the body and laid it out properly. Her torn clothes were found beside her. He’d covered her face with her own underwear.”

“For Christ’s sake. The knife?”

“Ordinary sheath knife. The kind you can buy just about anywhere.”

“Claire was last seen at Trowell services, right?”

“Right. She stopped for a coffee and a Penguin biscuit. The woman behind the counter at the café remembered her.”

“But nobody was taking any undue interest?”

“That’s the way it seems. And she didn’t need petrol, the tank was more than half full, so she didn’t stop at the pumps.”

“Any marks on the car? Paint scrapings, broken headlights, that sort of thing?”

“No. It was untouched. Whoever did it must have just pulled in front of her and she swerved into the ditch to avoid a collision.”

Their meals arrived and the day’s warmth had made them both thirsty, so Templeton went and got another fizzy water for Susan and another Coke for himself. “This case you’re working on,” Susan said when he got back, already halfway through her cheeseburger. “Do you seriously think there’s any connection?”

“I don’t know. It’s a strange one. Look, this might seem like an odd question, but do you think there’s any chance that there were two of them who killed Claire Potter?”

“It wasn’t a scenario we considered seriously. I mean, usually these things, the degree of rage, the location of the wounds, it all indicates a sexual predator, and they usually act alone.”

“What about Fred and Rose West?”

“I said usually. We’ve considered other possibilities but we’re pretty sure it was just one man. It must have happened quickly, like yours did, only Claire wasn’t shot. She suffered much more and for much longer.” Susan sipped some fizzy water. “It’s hard
to say whether the differences outnumber the similarities,” she said. “Probably, if you look at it realistically, they do. I mean, even if you can account for the difference between weapons, our killer went for overkill, showed a remarkable degree of anger. Your killer just coldly shot the victim and drove away. It sounds more like an execution than a botched sex crime to me.”

“You’re probably right,” said Templeton, “but we had to follow up on it. Don’t these sorts of killers usually strike more than once, though?”

“Sexual predators? Yes, sometimes. I mean, you can’t really predict, but it’s doubtful he’ll be satisfied for long. We’ve had the profilers in and run some pretty sharp computer programs and they all seem to indicate a strong likelihood of his striking again. After all, it’s been nearly two months since Claire Potter.” She paused. “There’s something that never made it to the papers.”

“What’s that?”

“He took a souvenir.”

“What?”

“A nipple. The left one, to be precise.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Templeton. He looked at his prawn sandwich and felt sick. He sipped some Coke.

“Sorry,” said Susan. “Just thought we should get it all out in the open. I don’t suppose that happened with Jennifer Clewes, did it?”

“No,” said Templeton.

Susan had finished her meal. She pushed her plate aside. “Is there anything else you want to tell me?”

Templeton thought of Sunday’s interview. “We did have a bloke who looked likely. For Jennifer Clewes, that is.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. Chap by the name of Cropley. Roger Cropley. Apparently he was paying her quite a bit of attention in the motorway café and at the petrol pumps, and he followed her back onto the motorway. Trouble is, he’s got an alibi.”

“Does it hold up?”

“Watertight. He was on the hard shoulder with a broken fan belt. Called the AA. They confirm the time. He couldn’t possibly have killed Jennifer Clewes.”

“Pity.”

“But it doesn’t mean he didn’t want to, does it? Thing is,” Templeton went on, “he’s a funny sort of chap. Thought it was all a bit of a game when we questioned him, then got really stroppy. Seems he works in London and commutes every week. Every Friday, as a matter of fact. And he usually stops for a break. Probably wears a dark suit. Drives a dark green Honda. Married. Wears a ring. Like I said, he’s on the M1 most Fridays. Not always that late, he told us, but sometimes. I was just thinking…you know.”

“Well, it wouldn’t do any harm to have another little chat with him, would it?” Susan said. “And if your suspicions continue, perhaps I could come up and have a word, too? I trust your SIO would okay it?”

“I should think so. It’s not a lot to go on, I admit,” said Templeton, “but there was something about him.”

“A hunch?”

“Call it that if you like. I happen to believe that hunches are made up of hundreds of little observations we’re not directly aware of. Body language. Tone of voice. Little things. They all add up to a hunch.”

“Maybe you’re right,” said Susan, smiling. “In my case they usually call it women’s intuition.” She looked at her watch. Nice gold band, Templeton noticed. Her husband must have
a bob or two. Probably not a policeman, then. “I’d better be off back,” she said. “Thanks for the tip. You’ll keep me posted about Cropley?”

“Absolutely,” said Templeton.

“And do give my best to everyone at the station, and my condolences to Alan Banks.”

“Of course.”

Templeton watched her walk away. Her legs weren’t bad at all. If only she could trim down that waistline a bit she might be worth a crack, husband or no. He swatted a fly away from his half-eaten prawn sandwich and it buzzed him a few times before zigzagging off into the trees. Time to head back to Eastvale, he thought, and see if anything new had turned up.

11

L
ate Monday afternoon, the rain came down again, out of nowhere, splashing against the windscreen of Dave Brooke’s Citroën as he drove Annie through the rush-hour traffic to Tower Hamlets, not exactly the kind of place you’d find in a tourist’s guide to London. They were in Bow, and the house they wanted stood in a row of rundown terraced houses that had survived both bombing and slum clearance. Across the street lay a couple of acres of tarmacked waste ground with weeds growing through the cracks, surrounded by a six-foot wire-mesh fence with barbed wire on the top. Who was protecting it, and from what, Annie had no idea. She guessed it was earmarked for development. On the other side of the waste ground, through the slanting rain, stood more grimy houses, slate roofs dark, and beyond them tower blocks rose bleak as monoliths against an iron-grey sky.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” said Brooke, as if reading her mind.

Annie laughed. “If you like that sort of thing.”

“It’s a piece of history,” said Brooke. “Enjoy it while you can. In a year or so it’ll probably be all new tower blocks or an entertainment complex.”

“You sound as if you’d be sorry to see it go.”

“Maybe I would. Here we are.” He pulled up at the curb and they looked at number forty-six. The front door, Annie thought, could definitely use another coat of paint to cover the cracks and gouges time and, perhaps, would-be burglars had inflicted.

Alf Seaton, a retired ships’ carpenter, had not only seen Wesley Hughes and Daryl Gooch drive away in the Mondeo, but he had also seen it arrive in the early hours of Sunday morning, and this was what interested Annie and Brooke. Annie was beginning to wonder if she would ever get home again, the way things were going. She had hoped to be off that afternoon after her visit to the Berger-Lennox Centre, but Brooke called. All roads seemed to lead to London.

Alf Seaton was expecting them, and Annie noticed the edge of the lace curtain twitch just a little when their car pulled up. Before they reached the door, it opened, and a plump, grey-haired man with a broken nose beckoned them in out of the rain.

“Miserable day, isn’t it?” he said, in an unmistakable Cockney accent. Well, Annie thought, he was in the right area, probably even within the sound of Bow Bells, come to think of it. “Make yourselves comfy. I’ll put the kettle on. Got some chocolate digestives, too, if you’re interested.”

Annie looked around the small living room while Alf Seaton busied himself in the kitchen. There was an old-fashioned look and feel to the place, she thought, visible in the ornate pipe rack, the dark wood bureau and the low bookcase under the window, filled mostly with nautical tales, she noticed: Alexander Kent, Douglas Reeman, Patrick O’Brian, some old Hornblower editions. On the wall above the fireplace was a romantic seascape depicting Lord Nelson’s fleet engaging the French in rough waters, cannons blazing. The armchairs were
old but still firm, and there wasn’t a speck of dust in sight. When Seaton came back in with the tea and biscuits, Annie complimented him on the house.

“I do my best,” he said. “Just because you’re poor doesn’t mean you have to be slovenly, does it? That’s what my mother always used to say.”

“Are you married?”

“Fran died a couple of years ago. Cancer.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No reason for you to be, love. Life goes on.” He looked around the room. “We had nearly fifty happy years, me and Fran. Moved here in 1954, our first home. Only one as it turned out. Course, I was just a young lad then, still wet behind the ears. And things have changed a lot. Not all for the best, either.”

“I’m sure not,” said Annie.

“Still, you won’t be wanting to hear an old man’s reminiscences, will you?” he said, winking at Annie. “You’ll be wanting to know what it was I saw.”

“That’s why we’re here, Mr. Seaton,” said Brooke.

“Alf, please.”

Alf was a name you didn’t hear much these days, Annie thought, and if you did you could guarantee it belonged to someone of Mr. Seaton’s generation.

“Alf, then.”

“I’m not sure I can tell you anything I didn’t already tell the uniformed bloke.”

“Let’s start with what you were doing.”

“Doing? I was sitting here in this very armchair reading. I don’t sleep very well, so I’ve taken to getting up, making myself a cup of tea and settling down for a good read. Beats lying there thinking about all your problems the way you do at that time of night.”

“Yes, it does,” said Annie. “So what was it that happened first? Did you see or hear the car?”

“Heard it first. I mean, we do get a bit of traffic down here throughout the night, but not that much. It’s not a main road, or even the quickest way to one. And as you can see, it doesn’t have a great deal of natural charm. Anyway, at three on a Sunday morning it does tend to be quiet apart from the odd group of kids stumbling home from a party.”

“Do you remember the exact time?” Annie asked.

Alf Seaton glanced at the solid, ancient clock on the mantelpiece. “Ten past three,” he said. “I remember looking. Anyway, first I heard it, then I saw the lights. It parked just across the street there, by the waste ground. Then another car pulled up behind it.”

“And you saw the driver?”

“Of the first car? Yes. Quite clearly. There’s a streetlight and my eyesight’s still pretty good for distances.”

“What can you tell us about him?” Annie asked, glancing at Brooke, who nodded, indicating that she should carry on asking the questions. Alf seemed comfortable talking with her.

“I was a bit nervous, I suppose,” said Seaton. “I mean, there’s been quite a lot of crime in the neighbourhood and when you’re old and frail in your health like I am, you do worry a bit, don’t you? Twenty years ago I’d have given anyone a good run for his money, armed or no, but these days…”

“I understand,” said Annie. “But you did get a look, didn’t you?”

“I wasn’t
that
scared. I like to know what’s going on in my street. Anyway, I didn’t want to draw attention to myself so I turned the light off. I’m glad I did because I saw him look over at the house for a moment and pause, as if he was trying to
decide whether there was anyone watching him. He seemed to look right at me, but he must have decided there wasn’t.”

“What did he look like?”

“He was a big fellow, hard-looking, as if he lifted weights. He was wearing a dark-coloured track suit, the sort with a white stripe down the arm and the outside leg. His hair was a bit long, tied in a ponytail at the back like a right poofter. Black, it was, and shiny, as if he’d sloshed axle grease on it. And he had a heavy gold chain around his neck.”

It sounded like a better description of the man Roger Cropley had seen in the back of the Mondeo at Watford Gap, and whom the neighbour had noticed on Jennifer’s street around the time she set off for Banks’s cottage. “What happened next?” Annie asked.

“That’s when I saw him get in the other car.”

“Can you remember anything more about the second car?”

“No, except it was lighter than the first one, maybe cream or silver, something like that. There wasn’t really enough light to show up the colour properly, everything was a sort of monochrome, but it was a bit more…I don’t really know cars…but it looked maybe more expensive, more flashy.”

“Did you notice any logos, ornaments, that sort of thing?”

“Sorry, no.”

“It’s okay. You’re doing fine. I don’t suppose you got the number, did you?

“No.”

“Did you get a good look at the driver?”

“Just a glimpse when the door opened and the inside light came on for a second. It was farther back, out of the range of the street lamp.”

“Can you describe him?”

“All I could really see was that he had short fair hair. Really short. Cropped. Then the door shut, the light went off and they drove away.”

“What direction?”

“South. Towards the river. Not long after that I heard the kids talking and the car door slam. I just caught a glimpse of them, then they were gone. I know I should have called the police right there and then. Maybe then that poor boy wouldn’t have died. But I didn’t know what was going on and it doesn’t pay to get too involved unless you really have to.”

“It’s not your fault,” said Annie.

“Even so, I feel badly.”

“Mr. Seaton – Alf.” Brooke cut in. “Do you think you would be able to work with a police artist on a sketch of the man you got a good look at?”

“I think so,” said Seaton. “I mean, I’ve got a fairly clear picture of him in my mind. It’s just a matter of getting it down.”

“That’s what the artist’s for. With a bit of luck, we might be able to get him here by tomorrow morning. Would that be all right?”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Good. I’ll make the arrangements. Is there anything else you can tell us?”

Seaton thought for a moment, then said, “No, I don’t think so. It all happened very quickly, and as I said, I didn’t know what was going on. Why would a man abandon a nice car like that in a neighbourhood like this unless he
wanted
it to be stolen?”

“Exactly,” said Annie.

Banks fetched fish and chips from the Chinese chippie over the road for lunch, but his father just picked at them. He didn’t even complain the way he usually did that they tasted of chop suey, his only notion of Chinese food. After a cup of tea Banks was seriously thinking of heading back to London, but he sensed that he should stay. Not that his father asked him, or ever would, but it seemed the thing to do. The family should be together, at least for now.

He felt restless, though, cooped up, so he drove into town and wandered aimlessly around Cathedral Square and the Queensgate Centre. While he was there he remembered that he had left his mobile back in Gratly and he had given Roy’s to Brooke. If he was planning on heading back to London, which he was, he might need one. He went into the first electronics shop he saw and bought a cheap pay-as-you-go mobile and a ten-pound card. Once he’d got the battery charged back at his parents’ house it would be ready to use.

It was a cloudy afternoon, holding the threat of rain. A group of buskers were playing jigs and reels in the square, a small crowd gathered around them. A steady stream of tourists entered the Cathedral precincts.

When Banks found himself wandering by the Rivergate Centre flats, he thought of Michelle Hart, who used to live there, on Viersen Platz. On the opposite side of the river was Charters Bar, an old iron barge moored near Town Bridge, and Banks remembered the blues music he’d heard issuing from it on weekends he had stayed with Michelle.

Banks stared into the murky water and wondered if he should have tried harder with Michelle. He had let her slip away far too easily. But what could he doff Her career was important to her, and when the opportunity in Bristol came
up he could hardly plead with her not to go. Besides, there had been problems with the relationship well before the move, so many that Banks had often thought the new job was at least partly an attempt to put more distance between them.

He walked back to his car and just sat there for a while with the windows open, smoking. How bloody ironic it was, he thought, that he had only come to know his brother after his disappearance. If Roy had died two, three years ago, Banks would have grieved, of course, but he wouldn’t have felt the loss in such a personal way. Now, though, it actually hurt, squeezed at his heart. Now there was someone to miss, not just a distant memory.

It wasn’t so much that he had revised his opinion of Roy as that he had put it in a larger context. Roy was a rogue, no doubt about it; he had about as much sense of business ethics as a flea and he was a bastard to women. That he’d made a fortune, driven a Porsche and had women falling over him was only a testament to one of those grim truths of life, that the bastards thrive. Maybe they get their just desserts in the afterlife, maybe they come back as cockroaches, but in this life, they thrive.

Roy’s crisis of conscience after witnessing the horror of 9/11, his turning to the church, had probably sharpened what moral instinct he had to some degree. Had he stumbled across something in that last week that offended his sense of right and wrong? Had he gone through a struggle of conscience before ringing his policeman brother? Or had it been business much as usual? Throughout his life Roy had probably stolen, cheated and lied without giving a damn for the consequences, or a moment to worry over those whom he had hurt in the process. Had he changed that much? Banks wouldn’t find out in Peterborough, he knew that, so tomorrow he would have to head back to London and start digging again.