The Betrayal of Trust (8 page)

‘Too many unanswered questions. What are your thoughts?’

‘I don’t know if I have many yet. She was murdered and buried in a grave on
the Moor, by a person or persons unknown. I’ve taken all the files home. Maybe they’ll yield something. I’ll know more when I’ve gone through the lot. But after sixteen years? Long time.’ He hesitated. ‘The second skeleton complicates the picture considerably of course.’

Simon knew what he wanted to say. But he also knew it would be unprofessional and unfair. Yet he felt frustrated, his hands
tied and a job not being properly done.

‘What will it take?’

She knew. He knew.

He shrugged but remained silent.

‘My name’s still on the door, Simon. Tell me.’

‘I need a team. Not necessarily a big team but I’ve got to have a couple of people working on this. Especially on the second body. I’m not going to let that gather dust in a file because of Harriet, though obviously Harriet takes precedence.’

‘Has Brian formally authorised the case to be reopened and a new investigation for the second murder?’

‘Yes.’

‘Leave the rest with me. But you won’t get as many bods as you should have.’

‘Understood.’

Malcolm brought in the coffee and the conversation moved away from police business. But as Simon stood up to leave, the Chief said, ‘I wonder if you could do me a small favour? It would get me
out of a spot.’

Payback then.

‘Of course.’

‘The Lord Lieutenant is giving a dinner on Tuesday. It’s in the castle and I’d accepted of course, but I’m really not up to this sort of formal do yet. Would you go in my place? Brian can’t, he’s got an ACPO meeting in London, and there isn’t anyone else senior enough. Are you free?’

He was free.

‘Will I need a partner?’

‘The invitation is for two,
yes.’

‘Fine. It will be a pleasure.’

The Chief gave him a sharp look.

HARRIET LOWTHER HAD
been at a school twelve miles from Lafferton. She was popular and hard-working but not an academic high-flyer, played tennis for the school and at a local club where she was rated higher than average. She also played the piano very well and had lessons at school. She was near-sighted and wore glasses for reading the blackboard. She had recently had a brace fitted on
her teeth, about which her mother and several school friends said she was a bit embarrassed and self-conscious. She had signed up to take a Duke of Edinburgh’s Award.

Simon had half a dozen photographs of Harriet Lowther on the table. Harriet as a six-year-old with missing front teeth. Harriet at eleven, proud in her new school uniform, a shot taken in the garden of the Old Mill. Harriet with
the tennis team, holding a trophy. Harriet playing with a friend’s puppy.

Harriet. Normal. Cheerful. Neither pretty nor plain but certainly growing into prettiness. Harriet Lowther. So much like a thousand other middle-class girls at middle-class schools. So entirely herself.

Harriet Lowther.

Simon looked into her face, at each photograph but most of all at the last, taken six months before
she disappeared, as if she might tell him something. Might? Could? No. Just a cheerful, bright-faced girl. No secrets. He was as sure as he could be that she hid no secrets.

He got up and stretched, lay on the floor and did a couple of
dozen
press-ups, then rolled over with his knees bent up to his chest several times. His back had always caused him problems, partly because of his height, but
in the last few months it had become much worse. Cat had suggested he see an osteopath – ‘GPs are no good at backs’ – but he had not yet made the time.

‘Psychosomatic,’ his father had said, typically, without sympathy and without elaborating, which had annoyed his stepmother.

‘You have only to look at him to know he’d have back problems,’ Judith had said, ‘and even if they were psychosomatic,
what difference would that make? His back still hurts.’

One more reason to be pleased that Judith was now in their lives. She had recommended an osteopath. Simon had the name and number. Somewhere.

He got up carefully, swung himself to and fro, then went to make coffee. His father and Judith had bought him a Nespresso machine for his birthday, streamlined, smart, efficient. He thought it might
be the thing he would grab if the flat caught fire.

Harriet Lowther. One Friday afternoon sixteen years ago she had left a friend’s house for the bus stop less than a hundred yards away and, after turning round to wave at the corner, had walked out of sight for good. Now her skeleton had been found among earth washed down from the Moor in a storm.

In between, silence.

In between, sixteen years
of inquiries, interviews, searches, notes, files, sixteen years of anguish and hopes raised and dashed, parental grief and then death and, now, terrible shock. Sixteen years of unanswered questions.

It made Serrailler feel as if he were ageing himself as he went through everything carefully, painstakingly, as if he were doing a fingertip search of the ground, but it also roused something in him
which he recognised as the original passion he had felt for joining the force and moving to CID. It was difficult to pin down. Curiosity. Determination. The need for answers. The need to close ends. To make sense. To find not only solutions but explanations. The need to be ten steps ahead and several miles cleverer than those who committed appalling crimes. Day-to-day routine, too much desk time,
meant that inevitably he lost sight of it but it was still there, and now he had it again, the focused
passion
to discover what had happened and put the whole puzzle together from a thousand small pieces. It was a cool and rational determination – if it had not been it would not have been of any use. But there was a spark too. His feelings had to be engaged in some way. The first spark had been
lit when he had seen Harriet Lowther’s pathetic skeleton in the mortuary; the second, even fiercer one, when he had broken the news to her father. And now the third. Harriet was alive to him, in these old photographs and newspaper reports.

She would have been thirty-one, an adult with her growing up behind her, possibly married with her own family.

He made more coffee and a ham sandwich then
went back to stand at the window looking down on the close. People were walking about – lawyers and accountants going out to lunch, a couple with a pushchair, a woman carrying a pile of filing boxes. Cars driving slowly up and parking in front of various houses, some of which still belonged to the cathedral but were now mostly offices. It was odd to be here in the middle of a weekday.

Cat had
phoned to tell him how John Lowther had been at the trustees meeting.

‘He’s seems broken. He’s been living with it for all this time, not knowing. He must have felt in his heart that she was dead but there was always a thread of hope.’

‘And I cut that.’

‘In a way.’

‘Oh, don’t worry. I wouldn’t be where I am if I ever blamed myself for being the messenger.’

And yet he did. Some part of him
felt guilty.

He went back to the table and opened the file that contained the first interviews.

The mother of Harriet’s friend Katie Cadsden.

Katie herself.

A man who had been clipping a hedge a few houses down from theirs and remembered Harriet walking past – he had moved his ladder for her and had smiled.

A van driver on the main road who had seen her standing at the bus stop.

The bus
driver.

Passengers on the bus.

One of the passengers thought there had been two people at the stop, Harriet and a middle-aged woman. The bus driver did not remember.

The van driver a second time. The man clipping the hedge again.

Sir John Lowther. His wife.

Harriet’s teachers. Headmistress. Friends. The hairdresser.

It was the usual stuff.

He leaned back and finished his coffee.

‘Harriet often came over. We’re lucky enough to have a tennis court – it’s not in a very good state but they can get a game. She’d arranged to come that Friday and her mother dropped her off at about ten, I suppose. They went straight out to play. The dog was being a nuisance, chasing the ball, so Harriet brought him back into the house at some point. She had
a drink of water and they played again.

‘They had lunch. I made a cheese salad and there was some fruit cake and apples. Harriet was her usual self. Quite chatty. She’s always very helpful, you know, clears the plates, puts things away. I like having her – some of Katie’s other friends are pretty casual, never think of doing anything. Not Harriet. They went up to Katie’s room with cans of Coke.
Played music and so on. I could hear them talking. They had another game of tennis, and then Harriet had to go. She said she was catching the bus on Parkside Drive – they come about every half an hour – she’d done that before plenty of times. It’s a handy bus, takes you right into the square. She was meeting her mother at the hairdresser, and they were going to buy a couple of things for school
– I know she wanted a new cover for her tennis racket too, she was hoping they’d get that. But Harriet wasn’t spoiled. She didn’t just ask and get. I saw her off – stood and watched her go down the
road
… the man a few doors along was clipping his hedge and he moved his ladder for her to get by. She turned round and waved and then I went in. I didn’t see her reach the corner. Well, I didn’t need
to. She’s fifteen, they don’t want to be made to feel like little children again, do they? That’s all. She was fine, absolutely fine. Didn’t seem to have anything on her mind, or to be worried. But she never does. She’s just a normal girl. Like Katie. Just a lovely, normal girl.’

‘I remember it all right. I was taking up a bit of the pavement with my ladder
and I’d laid some tarpaulin on the ground to catch the hedge clippings. I was a bit in people’s way but I was trying to get a move on and it’s a quiet sort of road, not many walking by. Then she came along, been at the Cadsdens’. I’d seen her with their Katie. She had her tennis racket and bag – at least I think she had a bag. Wouldn’t like to swear to that – could be wrong. Fair-haired lass,
hair tied back. Nice sort of girl. Like Katie. I moved the ladder quickly so she didn’t have to step into the road. She didn’t say anything – I don’t remember that she did – but she gave me a lovely smile, you know, a thank-you smile. Then she went on down the road and I went back to my hedge. I hope she’s all right. Lovely girl. Hope nothing bad’s happened to her.’

‘I drive for Reynard’s Wholesale Greengrocer, Pitts Road, Bevham. I’ve been driving for them for about four years. I was in my van, taking a delivery of potatoes to Lafferton. I remember having to wait for a petrol lorry coming the other way down Parkside Drive and there was a post van at the kerb so I had to give way. I was near the bus stop opposite Lea Close. There was a
young girl waiting at the
stop
, I remember seeing her, I remember she had a tennis racket and a bag. I think she had her hair tied back. I’ve seen the photos and I think it was her. It looks like her. But definitely she had a tennis racket and a bag. The bus wasn’t there. I didn’t see it in my rear mirror but I wasn’t looking out for it. I just remember the girl. There was nobody else waiting
at the bus stop when I saw her.’

The interviews with the Lowthers were painful to read, but as he did so, Serrailler felt Harriet emerging as a distinct person, not just a fifteen-year-old girl with blonde hair and a tennis racket. They had been sad that she was an only child but after various problems Eve Lowther had been unable to have more and they seemed anxious not to stifle Harriet, or
to spoil her.

There were detailed photos of her room from every angle, full lists of her possessions down to the last hair clip, notes made by every officer who had talked to the Lowthers. The tension and strain mounted as every day went by without news. Simon could sense the strong thread of hope weakening. Then he came to the recordings of all the phone calls made to the special unit set up
after Harriet’s disappearance, those from people who were sure they had seen her in different parts of Lafferton, in a car, on a bus, on a train, in the town centre, with friends, with a man, with a group of men. The mad were there, and the vicious – easy to pick out, as were the sexual deviants. There were numerous friends of Harriet’s anxious to say something, anything, that might be useful. ‘She
said she wanted to meet Rod Stewart one day. Maybe she went to London? Just thought I ought to say.’ ‘She met a boy. He goes to Roddington. I’d better not say his name – but Alistair Foster knows. Ask Al.’

A couple of weeks after Harriet’s disappearance, the delivery driver, Neil Anthony Marshall, was interviewed again. There were discrepancies in his story, his van had been searched and a small
stash of cannabis resin found, plus two boxes of new electrical spares which were identified as having been stolen. His employer said that although it was true Marshall had taken
out
a potato delivery, that had been on the Thursday. He had had no deliveries on the Friday at all.

Forensics had crawled all over the van but found nothing else and nothing to link Marshall to Harriet Lowther, but,
probably because panic had started to creep in by then and the SIO, an Inspector David Clumber, wanted to show that they were being proactive, Marshall was again called to the station for questioning.

Simon pulled out the transcript of the interview.

But it was quarter to one and he had been reading the files since before nine.

Ten minutes later he had thrown on his running gear and was driving
towards the Moor.

IT COST A
lot of money. She had not expected it to be free but the amount was startling, and that was before she paid for her flight.

One-way ticket, Jocelyn thought, so that’s a saving.