Walk a Narrow Mile (2 page)

She’d lost nearly two pints, the medics reckoned later, when they’d had a chance to assess her. She’d been semi-conscious, and going into shock. But, typical of Hillary, the next day she’d discharged herself from the hospital, and had been insisting ever since that she was fine.

She refused to have a psych-evaluation, pointing out that she was no longer a serving police office and could quite
legitimately
tell the trick cyclists just where to park their bikes. Donleavy had advised him to let it be, telling him that she’d work it at her own pace and in her own way, but Steven was not so sure.

She looked pale to him, and he knew that she wasn’t sleeping properly. And he was not at all convinced that she should be working this particular cold case – even if she was supposedly to be both under his personal supervision and liaising with Rhumer.

‘Steven?’ Hillary repeated his name sharply. ‘Have forensics come through yet on the … on my crime scene?’

Steven sat up straighter and shook his head, dragging his thoughts back to the matter in hand. ‘Not much. All the blood was yours so he hadn’t nicked himself. And there were no
fingerprints on your clothes or any of the other surfaces. A few fibres on your clothes were a match to a dark-blue thread common to many T-shirts, so no help there. There were no saliva traces on your ears or neck,’ – he paused as he saw that she had suddenly shuddered – ‘and it was too dry to get any good shoe prints or tyre tracks.’

Hillary nodded. ‘So, not much help for you there then, Geoff,’ she turned back to Rhumer.

‘Doesn’t look like it,’ he agreed sardonically. ‘Tell me how the stalking started.’

Hillary smiled grimly. ‘It’s been a while since I was on the receiving end of an official interview,’ she acknowledged grimly, then held up a hand as Rhumer looked about to demur. ‘No, no, it’s fine. Let’s see – it started off in the usual way, I suppose. Mysterious flowers and little notes and messages. I ignored it, hoping it was harmless and would go away. Then he became bolder – left his little gifts in places where he shouldn’t have been able to access – my office, my locker, my car, the
narrow-boat
where I live. In the end, I had to take it to Steven, and we tried to catch the little bastard ourselves. You know how that ended,’ she added with a thin smile.

Rhumer nodded. ‘The surveillance equipment you set up on your locker led to nothing.’

‘Which made us suspect that (a) he wasn’t new to this kind of thing,’ Steven took up the tale ‘and (b) that he was probably forewarned about our efforts to catch him, making him someone right here at HQ.’

‘Right. And then came the escalation,’ Geoff said. ‘Nasty, that.’

‘Yes,’ Hillary agreed softly. ‘He started sending texts,
threatening
messages, and finally the crosses.’

All three were silent for a moment, thinking about the crosses. Geoff Rhumer opened his file and took out the set of
photographs
of the roughly-made wooden crosses, three in all, and all bearing a set of three initials.

‘This was the first one he sent you right – the one with the letters JOY on it,’ he clarified.

‘Yes. Although I was very dim about it, and didn’t
immediately
twig that they were the initials of a person,’ Hillary admitted drily. ‘My first thought was that he was calling me a killjoy. Then I asked the computer nerds to run a programme on missing girls called Joy. Nothing came up. Then I finally got around to thinking of them as initials, and they came up with….’

She paused, giving him room to jump in.

‘Judith Olivia Yelland,’ Geoff Rhumer obliged.

‘Right. A little while later I was given the second cross, and the initials MJV, giving us Margaret, known as Meg, Jane Vickary. And the final cross, GGT for Gillian Gale Tinkerton. Known as Gilly.’

‘All of them missing, and two of them known to have complained about a stalker before they disappeared,’ Geoff said, reading from the notes. ‘Right, got it. Which is how you made the connection between the missing girls and your stalker.’

‘Which is when we went to Donleavy, and he called you in,’ Hillary said. ‘And here we all are. Ain’t that grand?’

Steven leaned forward on his desk. ‘Geoff, it goes without saying that we need to work hand in glove on this. As Hillary said, she will keep you apprised of any leads she gets tracking down the last known movements of our missing women, their backgrounds, and anything else she may come up with. But in return, we need to be kept in the loop about what your team come up with in tracking down Lol.’

‘Fine by me,’ DI Geoff Rhumer said firmly.

Hillary caught Steven’s eye and nodded reluctantly.

It all sounded clear enough. Even so, she could still see trouble ahead. Maybe DI Rhumer was only making the noises she wanted to hear in order to keep her pacified. Maybe Donleavy had secretly given him, and maybe even Steven for all she knew, a set of far different instructions.

Maybe they thought she was still traumatized by the attack on her and needed babysitting.

Whatever the true state of affairs, she would just have to smile and nod and play nice and, in the meantime, just get on with it. Because she had a job to do, and neither Donleavy, the oh-so-accommodating Geoff Rhumer, or even Steven, were going to stop her from doing it.

Once again she fought the impulse to stroke her still sore scars, and smiled briefly. ‘Right then, I’d better get started.’

Steven said nothing as he watched her get up and leave.

When she was gone, he was silent for a moment, then caught Geoff Rhumer watching him.

‘What?’ he demanded.

‘You and her an item then?’

Steven smiled reluctantly. ‘That obvious, is it?’

Rhumer shrugged and smiled. Then frowned. ‘You’re worried about her?’

Steven Crayle’s already grim smile became even grimmer. ‘Wouldn’t you be? In my place?’

‘Oh hell yes,’ Rhumer agreed.

Hillary glanced across at Jimmy, who was strumming his fingers idly against the steering wheel as they waited for a traffic light to turn green. They were in Jimmy’s modest little runabout on their way to Kingston Bagpuize where Judith Yelland’s parents still lived.

She had briefed Jimmy on what was happening back at the office, and the old man was obviously still thinking things over.

‘So this all comes from Donleavy, right?’ he asked eventually, as they pulled away from the lights and headed away from Oxford. ‘I’m surprised he let you anywhere near it, to be honest.’

Hillary smiled kindly. So that was what was puzzling him. ‘Oh, it comes with a lot of strings attached, believe me,’ she
reassured
him. ‘And it wasn’t easy convincing the commander to
see it my way, either. And if I were still a serving officer, you’re right, I wouldn’t have been let within even sniffing distance of the case, let alone given this much leeway.’ She sighed heavily. ‘As it is, they’re trying to keep me on a very short leash.’ And she explained the new working arrangement to her deputy.

‘So anything we come across that leads back to Lol, we have to hand over to this Rhumer bloke?’ Jimmy asked carefully, shooting her a quick, questioning look. Hillary knew why he was being so wary, of course. He was wondering just how far she was willing to play ball with the DI being foisted on her by the brass. And the fact that his loyalties clearly lay with her, made her feel both uneasily proud and at the same time
protective
of him. The last thing she wanted was to get Jimmy in trouble because he was listening to her, and not to Steven. She knew how much this job meant to him. She’d feel perpetually guilty if he were fired because of her.

‘Yes. But I’ll decide when, and I’ll do the telling. Everything we learn goes through me first,’ she said. ‘That way, anything ricocheting back is my problem. But that shouldn’t be hard – I’m not going to let the youngsters in on this for a start. They’re to know nothing about my stalker at all, and it’s going to be a purely need-to-know basis on the missing persons case as well. The less they’re in the loop, the better I’ll like it.’

Jimmy nodded quickly in agreement. ‘I’m with you there, guv. I think Sam would be able to handle it all right, but that young minx we’ve been lumbered with wouldn’t know how to keep her mouth shut if she had sewing lessons in buttoning lips.’

Hillary smiled briefly and stretched her arms over her head. She hadn’t realized how tense she’d felt, until now. It seemed as if she’d been waiting for months, instead of just a week, for Donleavy to give the go ahead for her to head up the cold case aspect of the assignment, and now that it was finally underway, she felt a trickle of unease.

Was she really up to it?

She caught Jimmy looking at her again, and wondered if he was thinking the same thing. Or was she just being paranoid now?

Oh, she knew she had a good rep for having guts and
gumption
at the station house. Being awarded a medal for bravery tended to do that for you. But Hillary knew, in reality, that it did, in fact, mean very little in any way that counted.

She’d been given the medal when a raid she’d been on had gone wrong, and her old friend and one-time superior, Mellow ‘Mel’ Mallow had found himself in the line of fire from a fleeing gunman. She’d had only a split second to react, and in that time had managed to shove him out of the way, and take the bullet instead. It all sounded very melodramatic and gung-ho when other people talked about it, but in reality, Hillary knew
differently
. For a start, the bullet wound had been anything but fatal – indeed, she’d come within a hair’s-breadth of being shot in the arse! And the flesh wound had quickly healed anyway.

More than that, though, the stress had been minimal. She’d reacted purely on instinct, and it had all been over – quite
literally
– in a flash. A few days in hospital, one or two bad dreams, and that had been that.

Nothing to it really. Anyone would have, and could have, done the same thing. It had required very little in the way of true grit or backbone.

What was happening now, though, was a totally different matter. Lol was subjecting her to a prolonged, sustained and nasty psychological attack. And she knew her nerves were beginning to tighten up like piano wires in response – as much as she tried to stop it from happening.

She wasn’t sleeping well either, which made her feel sluggish, as if she was constantly playing catch up with herself, and the world around her. Worse than that, she kept reliving that moment in the car-park when she felt the super-sharp blade of the knife slice into her neck. The blade had been so sharp, all she’d felt was the slightest of stings – and then the far more
terrifying
ooze of her own blood running down her neck and into the narrow valley between her breasts.

The lightest warm breeze on her skin reminded her of the feel of his breath on her neck. She would never forget his voice either. The moment she ever heard it again, she’d recognize it. Which was good, of course. But constantly hearing it repeated in her mind, when she was trying to concentrate, was far from good.

No wonder Jimmy looked at her and wondered.

If that was, in fact, what he was doing.

‘So, what do we know about the Yellands then, guv?’ Jimmy asked now, sounding very much the same, pragmatic assistant he’d always been.

She told herself that she had enough on her plate to start inventing problems that might not even exist, and shrugged briefly, focusing her mind on the case at hand.

‘Not much. At the time, very little follow-up was done on any of the three missing girls, because nobody thought it was a priority,’ she admitted.

‘So we’ve got very little to go on?’

‘That’s right,’ she agreed. ‘But in a way, that might be an advantage. We’re starting from scratch for a change, which means we won’t be going over old ground, or having to rely on an original investigation’s preconceptions.’

‘Fine by me,’ Jimmy said. And put his foot down to pass a trundling tractor.

The Yellands lived in a small bungalow just before you entered the village proper, and Jimmy parked beneath a pale pink
flowering
cherry tree. The sky was that bright azure of approaching summer, and the sun, approaching noon, was beginning to get that bake-you-dry edge to it.

Hillary removed her jacket and left it in the car. The bungalow was one of those neat, yellow-brick ones, set in a skimpy but well-maintained garden. A mat in front of the door bore the legend
WELCOME TO OUR HOME
.

The windows sparkled cleanly and the double-glazed pvc frames were snow-white. As she pressed the doorbell it set off a cacophony of excited yips from within. Beside her she heard Jimmy sigh.

‘I’ll bet they’re those little rat-on-rope things that like to show you their teeth and’ll have your ankles, given half a chance,’ he predicted dourly.

Hillary grinned, then quickly wiped the smile from her face as the door was opened. The woman looking back at them was in her late fifties, Hillary gauged, with a carefully dyed blonde perm, and was wearing a silvery-grey summer dress and matching sandals. She was free of make-up, but wore a nice gold watch and several rings with semi-precious stones set in them. Her face though, was tight and pinched, and she looked like one of life’s constant worriers.

‘Yes?’ she asked faintly.

Hillary introduced herself and Jimmy, and they both showed their IDs.

‘Are you Mrs Yelland? Frances Yelland?’ Hillary asked.

The woman, who was already looking a little bewildered, looked even more so. ‘Yes,’ she agreed uncertainly, as if she’d been asked a trick question.

‘We work for the Crime Review Team for the Thames Valley Police, madam. We’re here about your daughter. She is still on our files as a missing person. I don’t suppose she’s turned up, has she?’ Hillary asked. And then had one of those weird, almost Twilight Zone little moments, when she wondered what she’d do if the other woman smiled and said that yes, as a matter of fact, she had.

Probably faint, or start laughing and not be able to stop, she supposed.

Of course, Frances Yelland said nothing of the kind. Instead, she took a sharp breath, and then sighed. ‘You’d better come in then,’ she said, with a quick glance around to see if any
neighbours
were watching. None were. In this day and age, Hillary
could have assured her that most people were too busy working or trying to sort out their own dysfunctional lives, to care about their neighbours’ woes.