Walk a Narrow Mile (12 page)

She looked a very well-preserved twenty, which meant she was probably already well into her forties, Hillary gauged. Her make-up was light, but applied with an expert and experienced hand.

‘Yes.’ Hillary held out her ID, did her usual spiel about who she was and what the CRT did, and ended, ‘We’re currently looking into a missing persons case.’

‘Ah. I take it that you’re talking about that tart who used to work for Marcus, my husband?’ the lady said, turning her
attention
, and a pair of secateurs, back to a wilting peach-tinted bloom. With a quick, vicious snip, the flower was beheaded, and fell to the wet floor.

Beside her, she felt Jimmy stir nervously. No doubt he was picking up on the subtext too, because Hillary had no doubts herself that the thing the lady was actually snipping off had more – subliminally – to do with her husband’s dangly bits, than it had to do with good horticultural practice.

‘It’s about Margaret Vickary, yes,’ Hillary confirmed cautiously. ‘You referred to her as a tart, Mrs Kane. Did you have any specific reason for doing so?’

‘Apart from her sleeping with my husband, you mean? After having divorced whatever poor slob she was married to before? No, not really.’ The other woman gave a nonchalant shrug, then frowned at something on a stem that needed a spritz of
something
chemical from a spray bottle.

Hillary watched this studied performance of indifference, and nodded. So much for Marcus Kane wanting to keep the truth from the little woman. But the fact that he was unaware that his wife already knew about his fling with Meg meant that Pricilla had been careful to keep her knowledge to herself. Which was interesting. Most women liked to confront cheating spouses and were perpetually throwing the truth in their faces.

Obviously, Mrs Kane had a different approach. Was it one she had learned to use over many years of his infidelity, or was it a one-off tactic though?

‘Does your husband often, er, play away?’ she asked
curiously
.

Pricilla Kane eyed a black-spotted leaf and moved in with the clippers again. ‘Not often, no. And never with someone from the office before. That’s just so tacky.’ She gave a grim little smile and a fake shiver. ‘To be honest, I was surprised that he dared try it on, being right under Daddy’s nose and all that.’

Hillary gave a small sigh. Ah. ‘You were worried that Meg Vickary might be serious competition, then?’ she asked, and was instantly the centre of Mrs Kane’s attention once more. ‘I mean, if he was prepared to take such a risk, perhaps Mrs Vickary was someone special? Not like all the others, but an actual threat to your marriage?’ she baited gently.

Pricilla Kane smiled. ‘Hardly. Marcus understands who wields the power at the firm.’

‘Daddy,’ Hillary said flatly.

‘Exactly. And he knows what would happen if he should step out of line too far.’

Again Hillary nodded. ‘I’m curious. Tell me, how did you feel when Meg disappeared? Didn’t it make you wonder what had happened to her and where she’d gone?’ And, she added silently, did you not wonder if your husband might not just up and disappear to join her one fine day?

Pricilla shrugged one thin, green-clad silk shoulder. ‘When she ceased to be a problem, I ceased to think about her.’

‘You weren’t worried at all?’

‘Why should I be worried?’

‘That something might have happened to her? After all, if a woman disappears, that has to be cause for some concern, surely?’ Hillary kept her voice level. ‘Didn’t you even think that perhaps your husband might have done something to her?’

Once again, Pricilla’s laser-like gaze fastened on hers.

‘Why on earth should Marcus have “done something” to her?’ she demanded sharply.

‘As you said – he knew who had the real power in your
relationship
. And at his place of work. What if Meg Vickary became a problem for him: demanding things – maybe insisting that he leave you and marry her. That would put Marcus in a very precarious position indeed, wouldn’t it?’ Hillary pointed out, careful to keep her voice calm and purely logical.

Pricilla’s eyes narrowed for a moment, and then she gave another of her now trademark, uninterested shrugs. ‘Marcus is
a clever man. And he’d think of using the law, first and
foremost
, to solve his problems. That’s his forte after all, and he likes to stick to his comfort zones.’ Pricilla gave a mean little smile. ‘He’d probably sue her for libel, or who knows, maybe at a pinch, get one of those gangster louts he likes to represent to warn her off.’ Suddenly, the other woman laughed sourly. ‘Not that he’d have much luck with that, I think. From what I heard on the grapevine – Daddy’s secretaries do so like to gossip – Mrs Vickary had a penchant for the bad boys, and had most of them wrapped around her little finger.’

She slowly put down the secateurs and looked at Hillary thoughtfully. ‘You don’t really think Marcus had anything to do with her going off, do you? Seriously, I mean?’

Hillary gave a small shrug of her own. ‘The thought
obviously
didn’t occur to you,’ she said. ‘Did
you
have anything to do with her disappearance, Mrs Kane?’ she asked casually.

Pricilla Kane blinked, then gave a slow, wide smile. ‘Do I need to call Daddy to come over and represent me, do you think?’ She laughed, a braying sound of seemingly genuine amusement. ‘For all the years that Daddy’s been practising criminal law, I’ve never had to call upon him professionally. Wouldn’t it be amusing if the first time I had to do so, it was because I was a murder suspect?’

Hillary cocked her head slightly to one side. ‘I never mentioned murder, Mrs Kane.’

‘Oh please! All these dark hints you’ve been dropping about “something happening to her” and “her disappearance”and what have you. You said you were a former DI, before you became a civilian consultant, so you’re obviously not an average flat-foot. It’s obvious that you think something dire has happened to the tart. Why else have you come here with all these questions?’

Hillary nodded. ‘Well, thank you for your time, Mrs Kane,’ she said pleasantly, and saw that she had managed to surprise the other woman at last. ‘If you should happen to think of
anything that might help us locate or find out what happened to Mrs Vickary, perhaps you could call me?’

She handed over her card, gave the orchids a final,
unimpressed
look and left.

Jimmy, who hadn’t said a word throughout, waited until they were back in the gravel forecourt before taking a long deep breath. ‘I pity the poor sod married to her, guv,’ he said with a grin.

‘Don’t bother – it’s a wasted effort,’ Hillary said shortly. ‘Believe me, that pair deserve each other.’

On the way back to HQ Hillary pondered on what she’d learned. It wasn’t all that much really. Except that there was definitely no chance of the waspish Pricilla being their stalker in drag!

That lunchtime, Tom Warrington sat in the HQ’s local pub and waited for Vivienne Tyrell. He was still replaying that wonderful moment in the works’ car park when he’d watched Hillary walk by him, pretending not to notice him.

He loved it when she teased him like that. But it also made his blood boil. Having found ‘the one’ at last, he’d always known that she was going to be a handful – someone of Hillary’s calibre needed to test him to make sure he was a real man after all – so being her lover would always represent something of a
challenge
. But she had to learn that, play delicious games together as they might, he was still the alpha male. It would never do to let her think that she had the upper hand.

He wondered what she’d thought about his letter. She would have had to show it to the others eventually, but she must have kept it to herself for a little while. Smiled over the words, hugged to herself that wonderful feeling of—

‘Hi. Bloody hell, it’s getting hot out there. They say we’re in for another heatwave.’ The cheerful voice, crashing as it did through his pleasant daydreams, made him want to explode out of the padded booth and throttle her.

Instead he forced himself to smile. ‘Hello, beautiful. What are you having to drink?’ After she’d taken an age to make up her mind, he went to the bar and returned with the drinks, having ordered salads for them both. ‘I’ve ordered you the Parmesan and cress. All right?’

Vivienne nodded. In truth, she’d rather have had the pizza, but she wasn’t about to say so. ‘So, when are we going to go somewhere for the weekend then?’ she asked, taking a sip of her drink and giving him her best, pansy brown-eyed come-hither smile.

She knew that Tom still lived with his parents, and
sympathized
, up to a point. She too had to share a flat with two others, and knew just how impossible it was on a copper’s wages to get a mortgage for a place of your own. She’d already decided that she wouldn’t be applying to join the police force once her stint at the CRT was over. But she was getting
impatient
to move things along. It was ridiculous: having no place they could get together seriously was beginning to get on her nerves.

She moved closer and pressed her thigh against his, loving the hard clenching of his muscles against hers. He was so damned fit and buff, and yet they hadn’t done the horizontal tango yet, and it wasn’t as if she hadn’t put out enough signals, she thought angrily.

His excuse that he couldn’t take her home, that her place was too crowded was wearing a bit thin now. In fact, she was
beginning
to wonder if he might be in the closet. Didn’t all her friends say that really good-looking guys into body-building were nearly all gay?

Yet she didn’t really get that vibe off him. She put her hand on his knee and squeezed, and heard him catch his breath, and gave a small mental crow of triumph. Yes! No way was he gay.

Tom, still thinking of Hillary, tried to pretend that it was her hand touching him, under the table, out of sight, deliberately tormenting him. It worked for a moment, but then he had to
turn his head and look at her, and it was Vivienne’s stupid, vapid face looking back at him.

He swallowed back the bile and reached down to squeeze her hand, surreptitiously lifting it away from him as he did so. ‘I’ll have to see about booking us in somewhere nice, then, won’t I? How about the Cotswolds, or do you fancy somewhere in the Chilterns? Nowhere too far away at any rate – we don’t want to waste our time travelling.’

As her pretty face lit up, he took a sip of his half of shandy. He had no intention of spending money on a hotel. ‘I’ve been thinking about getting a caravan. I know a farmer who lets me use a part of his field, in a nice quiet little spot out of the way.’

Vivienne screwed up her face. ‘A caravan? A bit naff, isn’t it?’

‘It’ll be a nice one,’ Tom said. ‘It’ll be all right in the summer. At least it’ll be somewhere we can go in private.’

And the more he talked about it, the more he realized that it might actually be quite a good idea. A little caravan, hidden away in the trees and off the radar could come in very useful indeed. He needn’t tell anybody and he could always buy it for cash, on the QT. Give a false name and fake details, and nobody would ever know about it, or be able to trace it. Only the farmer would know, and who was he going to tell? So long as he gave the old sod no cause for complaint, there shouldn’t be any problem. And the farmer rarely came near the little copse. Yes, it might be just what he needed.

‘I suppose so,’ Vivienne said, then cheered up suddenly, and nudged closer. At least if he was making plans for a shag-pad, she reasoned, things had to be looking up.

Tom Warrington smelt her cheap perfume and felt the snake of rage in his belly tighten and twist. She disgusted him. She had no class and no quality. The one time he’d been close enough to smell Hillary’s perfume – his heart thudded at the memory of holding her close, his arm around her collarbone, a knife to her throat – he could tell at once it was one of those expensive, designer French fragrances. Something light and citrus-based,
but with an undercurrent of sensual power. He could still smell it now whenever he closed his eyes and thought back to that day in the car-park.

He had to have that again soon. To actually feel her, to have her talking to him, to feel the adrenaline rush as he wondered exactly what she was thinking and planning. How she would react.

He was going mad. He just had to have that again – he couldn’t stand this dull, boring, void without her.

‘Just hurry up and get that caravan, yeah?’ Vivienne’s voice and her coarse words once again cut ruthlessly across his
delicious
thoughts.

Tom’s patience snapped. It was no good. Whether she was his eyes and ears on Hillary’s team or not, he was going to have to kill her.

And perhaps it was time that he made a spectacular move anyway. Hillary would be waiting for him to do something outrageous, and this would certainly fit the bill. She’d be furious with him! And that would teach her to pretend to ignore him, the little minx.

He smiled across at Vivienne and pulled her closer. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll get onto it the moment I’ve got some spare time. I can’t wait either.’

Vivienne sighed happily and reached for her drink. At last.

As she began to contemplate the upswing in her love life, Tom began to fantasize about Hillary’s reaction on hearing that he’d taken one of her own.

V
ivienne returned to the rabbit warren in the basement of Kidlington’s HQ with a spring in her step and a sparkle in her eye that was short-lived, mainly because when she went into the tiny cramped, shared office where she had to work, the first person she saw, talking to her number one crony, was Hillary Greene.

Try as she might, Vivienne couldn’t see why everyone seemed to be such a Hillary Greene fan. Right now, the old geezer Jimmy Jessop was hanging on to her every word as if it had been carved in stone, and Sam was listening and nodding like a
frenzied
muppet. Anyone would think she was a queen bee deigning to notice a few drones in her colony. Not that either of those two losers counted for much, of course, Vivienne thought with a sniff. One was too old to tie his own shoe laces, and Sam Pickles was just a kid barely out of nappies.

But how had she managed to snare the scrumptious Steven Crayle? He outranked her, was younger, gorgeous and clever. Why did he want to get hooked up with a wrinkly like Hillary? It was not only Crayle who seemed to rate her, but people like Marcus Donleavy too. OK, so she had a medal for bravery – big whoopdee-do – but she also had bad marks against her too, right? Being married to a crooked cop, and being investigated herself by internal complaints just for starters. And everyone knew something iffy had happened with one of her old sergeants. Everyone suspected Hillary had
covered up for her, or done something dodgy. Something that had made her quit being a DI, anyhow. So why hadn’t she just gone and stayed away for good? Why the hell had she had to come back?

Vivienne gave a mental shrug, and hung up her bag behind her chair. She’d been well on the way to reeling in the sexy superintendent for herself, before Hillary Greene arrived and stuck her big fat nose in. Still, Steven had lost his chance, so it was his loss. Besides, she had Tom now – he was almost as good looking, younger and had more muscle than Steven. Although he didn’t have that certain something that Steven—

‘Ah, you’re back. Vivienne, I want you and Sam to do some background research for me.’

The queen bee’s voice broke into her thoughts and Vivienne rolled her eyes. More boring paperwork. It’s all they ever seemed to do, her and Sam. And this case was turning out to be even worse than the others – at least those had been murder cases, and Hillary had let them do some of the field work and the interviews.

But this was just missing persons, and for some reason it made no sense to her, she was beginning to feel as if she and Sam were being deliberately kept out of the loop. Why was an active DI like Geoff Rhumer involved? It didn’t add up to Vivienne, but no-one bothered about what she thought.

‘Don’t worry – you’ll find this interesting,’ Hillary said with a smile, not having missed the theatricals and correctly guessing the reason behind the latest display of discontent. ‘I want you to go through the client base of Marcus Kane’s company and pick out all the costa villains from the usual run-of-the-mill. You know the sort – professional gangsters, the kind who never get arrested for anything unless it’s income tax fraud. I want you to start nosing around, perhaps chat to some of them if you can reach them through the barrage of solicitors they hide behind, and see if you can find out if Meg Vickary was ever … shall we say, over-friendly with any of them.’

Vivienne, as expected, perked up on hearing this. Talking to real criminals was more like it. At least it would be a bit of excitement; something interesting for a change.

‘Guv?’ Sam said, uncertainly. ‘You think she might have been knocked off by one of them?’

‘No, I don’t,’ Hillary said shortly. If she had, she’d hardly have sent these two youngsters to sniff out what they could. ‘I want you to start with the law firm’s other admin staff. See if you can glean the gossip about Meg with regard to these specific clients. Was she flirtatious with any of them in particular; did she seem cosy with any of them, maybe have asked favours of them, or did the odd favour in return?’

‘I get it, guv,’ Vivienne said smugly. ‘You want to know if she was a groupie for costa villains, right? Like, some women get off on getting together with men in uniform, or some silly cows like writing to prisoners and starting relationships with them behind bars. That sort of mad stuff, right?’

‘Something along those lines,’ Hillary agreed slowly. ‘But be careful. If you do find any of them still living in this country willing to talk to you, be polite, and stick to questions strictly about their dealings with Meg. You’ll find a lot of the men, especially the fat, middle-aged ones, will want to boast about any hot totty they can still attract. But they might turn nasty if they think you’re sticking your nose into their financial
business
. So don’t. There are whole squads whose job it is to do that, so don’t go standing on their toes, either.’ The last thing she wanted was for the CRT to get raked over the coals because they’d inadvertently jeopardized someone else’s undercover operation.

Sam looked a little happier. Like Vivienne, he found doing nothing but paperwork boring, and this sounded exciting, but he was far more sensible than his female colleague, and had a more innate caution. So he was relieved to find that what Hillary was asking for wasn’t too risky. When all was said and done, professional criminals were hardly likely to bother
putting the boot in with the likes of himself and Vivienne: they were far too insignificant on the pecking order to bother with.

Besides, Hillary had already taught him that men such as these liked to think of themselves as businessmen. And it was bad business to rile the cops and bring themselves to their
attention
when they didn’t have to.

After the two excited youngsters had left to start nosing around the solicitor’s office in Summertown, Jimmy looked at Hillary with a raised eyebrow.

‘What was all that about?’ he asked curiously.

‘They’ve got to start getting their hands dirty sometime,’ Hillary said philosophically. ‘Besides, most of the costa villains are under constant surveillance by either one of our lot or the Customs people anyway. They’re not likely to get themselves into any dangerous territory.’

‘No, I know that,’ Jimmy said. ‘I mean, why do you want to know if Meg Vickary
was
a wannabe gangster’s moll? It can’t be relevant, can it?’

Hillary shrugged helplessly. The truth was, she couldn’t really have said why she wanted to know. ‘Let’s just say, we can’t have too much information about these three women, and leave it at that.’

‘You think our stalker might be bent, as well as warped?’ Jimmy mused. ‘That he might be on the payroll of one of the villains, and is, or was, passing on information to them, and that’s how he came across Meg Vickary in the first place?’ Jimmy’s tone of voice said that he thought that it was a bit of a stretch. On the other hand, something had to connect these three women. Something they had done, or people they had in common, had somehow brought them to the attention of their stalker and killer. Who was to say that Marcas Kane’s office didn’t hold the key to that common factor somehow?

Again, Hillary shrugged. ‘I’m just making sure that we don’t leave any stone unturned,’ she said, somewhat lamely. In the
back of her mind, she was beginning to get that feeling that she’d caught the scent of something, but she was damned if she could yet figure out what it was. So she was operating almost entirely on gut instinct, something that was never a good idea at the best of times, as any copper worth their salt could have told her.

Perhaps it was just as well that she had Geoff Rhumer working the case as well. The way things were going, it was looking far more likely that he would be the one to solve it anyway.

She told herself off for being so negative and forced herself free from a growing sense of inertia. ‘OK, what’s next on the
to-do
list.’ She reached for her notebook and checked her notes. Nothing stood out as being any more important than anything else. She heaved a sigh. ‘It’s all so damned nebulous.’

She considered the three victims again and wondered why she kept going back to Judy Yelland. Was it because she was the first to go missing? Or had she somehow seemed more like a victim to Hillary than the others?

That thought made her scowl.

From what they knew about Meg Vickary, she was probably the most thick-skinned and tough of the three missing women. She had been a beautiful woman who hadn’t been above using her looks to get her way, was ambitious and probably had more than her fair share of savvy. Did that make any difference? It didn’t to Hillary, but had it annoyed her stalker?

But then, why wasn’t she more concerned about Gilly Tinkerton? She was obviously a gentle soul, restless, and seeking some way of life that would suit her. To think that she’d had all that curiosity and potential snuffed out of her by some selfish bastard to suit his own hideous needs was appalling.

And yet it was still Judy Yelland, for some reason, that Hillary found herself thinking about first whenever her mind went to the missing girls. Why was that? Did she just feel more sorry for
her than the others? Having met her parents, and the sterile home in which she had grown up, did it just feel as if her case was somehow more pathetic than the others? Did she matter more than the others?

Hillary gave a mental head shake. No, that wasn’t it. She never made distinctions between victims of crime. It was one of the staples that she’d drummed into all of the young officers whom she’d mentored over the years. You stood for the victim – always and only. It didn’t matter if that victim was a young helpless child, or a six foot, twenty stone man. It didn’t matter whether the victim was sympathetic or got your back up. It made no difference.

And with the dead, it made less difference than ever – because a dead victim only had you to fight their side – and it wasn’t your place to judge them.

So why did Judy Yelland seem to be calling to her in a way the others didn’t? Or maybe she was just losing it. Perhaps the attack on her had actually severed some vital part of her that let her be a cop. Maybe she’d become a victim herself in some way and now couldn’t do her job.

‘Guv?’ She heard Jimmy’s sharp voice and gave herself a mental shake. ‘Sorry Jimmy – just wool gathering.’

To cover up her slip, and the sudden sense of panic she felt at where her thoughts were leading her, she wandered over to Sam’s desk and went through his in-tray.

‘He’s been going through Rebecca Frost’s list of Gilly Tinkerton’s friends,’ she said with forced casualness. ‘We might as well interview some of them – if I can find someone still local.’ She ran through the boy’s notes, and nodded. ‘OK, this looks promising. Grab your coat, Jimmy.’

At least action was better than contemplating the fluff in her navel.

Naomi Clarkson lived in a caravan site in the former RAF village of Upper Heyford. The place turned out to be a park with
the kind of mobile homes that looked like miniature houses built in one big but attractive unit, and set down on breeze blocks in a semi-permanent state. Laid out in neat rows, they had something pleasantly nostalgic about them.

The park was on the very outskirts of the village, facing a small fallow field which ran downwards to a brook running through one boundary. The lower area was free of homes, and it had a slightly boggy look to it, and Hillary sensed that it might be prone to flooding in the winter. As Jimmy parked up beside a row of homes painted in various pastel shades, Hillary thought how charming it all looked. Most of the homes were pristine, clean, and surrounded by flowers. It had a sort of olde worlde look to it – like an archetypal village you might have found back in the fifties – the sort of place where Agatha Christie had liked to set her novels. There was even a shack of a ‘village’ post office-cum-grocery store.

As she climbed out of the car, she half-expected to see a postman bicycle past, or some rustic farmer chewing a blade of grass, lean across a gate into the field and ask them if they were lost.

Then she noticed all the satellite dishes, and the parked cars, and wondered what the place looked like in the dead of a wet winter. She shook her head at her own whimsy, and glanced around, setting out to find Crooked Spindle Cottage.

It turned out to be one that was painted a pale mint green with large tubs of scarlet geraniums standing sentinel beside a white-painted front door. She went up the three wooden steps that led to it and knocked. Inside, a frenzied yelping chorus started up, and Jimmy glanced down automatically at his ankles. They looked rather vulnerable under his trouser legs.

The door opened, and a young, plump woman stood there. Around her, three Yorkshire terriers danced and yelped, but more in excitement than in any apparent zeal to guard their pack leader.

‘Miss Clarkson? Naomi Clarkson?’ Hillary asked.

‘Yes?’ The woman had long, slightly curly mouse-brown hair and rather muddy-looking greyish eyes. She looked nervously from Hillary to Jimmy. ‘You’re not tax people, are you? I thought I got all that sorted out last year.’

Hillary smiled and held out her ID. ‘No cause for alarm, Miss Clarkson. We were given your name by Gillian Tinkerton’s sister. She said you were a friend of Gillian’s? As you know, she’s listed as a missing person, and we were wondering if you might be able to help us.’

‘Oh, Gilly! Yes, of course, come on in.’

She opened the door, and the Yorkies bounded ahead, ushering them through with a waggy-tailed escort to a small but neat front room, overlooking the field and brook.

‘Please sit down. The last time I saw Gilly was, what, must have been three years ago. Maybe more. So I don’t know if I can help, but I’ll do what I can. Drink?’

A few minutes later, they were all sitting in comfortable chairs, a dog on each lap, and a mug of tea in hand.

Hillary stroked her own canine friend’s silky ginger head and looked across at their hostess. ‘Gilly’s mother is sure that her daughter has found some temporary place of refuge where she’s probably trying out some alternative lifestyle and will show up eventually. Her sister thinks much the same. How about you?’