Walk a Narrow Mile (5 page)

‘Hello? Whatever is you’re selling, I don’t want it.’

The man who answered needed a shave, and was wearing an open-topped white shirt with grubby collar, and black, shiny trousers. With a mop of brown hair and large grey eyes, he was though unequivocally a handsome man.

The whiff of beer coming off him at not even ten o’clock in the morning wasn’t quite so attractive.

‘Mr Vickary?’ Hillary showed her ID. ‘We’re here about your wife, sir. Can we have a few moments?’

‘Don’t have a wife,’ Brian Vickary shot back at once. ‘Got an ex-wife though. I suppose you mean her?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I heard she went missing. Wanna dig up the back garden? Help yourself.’

Hillary smiled pleasantly. ‘Thank you, sir, but I think we’ll give the cadaver dogs a miss for now. Just a few questions, like I said.’

Brian’s grey eyes regarded her steadily for a moment, and then he gave a reluctant grin, exposing white, even teeth. His smile was attractive too, and Hillary could understand why a woman with good looks of her own might have chosen him for a partner.

‘OK, fair enough I suppose,’ Brian said mildly. ‘Come on in. Mind the mess. But you’re wasting your time. Meg will just have found herself some other mug to feed off. She’s probably living it up on the Costa del Sol somewhere with a big, fat, ugly sugar daddy. Or do people still go to Spain now the bubble’s
burst?’ he asked, with probably automatic and inconsequential charm.

Hillary smiled obligingly.

As he was talking, he led them through into a tiny living room – which was indeed messy. The floorboards underneath her had an oddly spongy feeling, and she half expected to put her foot through one of them. Two of the walls were badly affected by damp, and the wallpaper was peeling off.

‘Welcome to Casa Vickary. My other home’s a chateau in Bordeaux.’ Brian grinned, then abruptly sobered. ‘We used to go there you know. France. And Florida, and places like that. Twice a year, when the business was good.’

Hillary nodded, but didn’t want to give him time to start getting maudlin.

‘I take it the break up wasn’t amicable, Mr Vickary,’ she said, sitting somewhat gingerly on a couch. Whilst it didn’t actively have broken springs digging into her backside, it wasn’t exactly welcoming either.

‘No,’ Brian said succinctly. Then, ‘Do you want a beer? I’d offer you tea, but I don’t have any milk. Or sugar. Or teabags, probably.’

‘Thank you, sir, we’re fine,’ she said. ‘Can you tell me why you broke up? Was there another man? You seemed to think your ex-wife wouldn’t be lacking for male companionship.’

‘What? Oh no. No, it wasn’t a man that broke us up, I’ll say that for Meg. She played fair. I met her when I was twenty-five, and I thought she was the most gorgeous thing on earth. I’d just got the business up and running, and she fancied me, and thought my prospects were good, as they say in the old-
fashioned
novels. So …’ He shrugged. ‘We got spliced.’

‘Sounds reasonable,’ Hillary said.

‘So it was. For a while. Quite a while, actually. It was good. Like I said, the company took off, we went on holiday twice a year, had a house on the outskirts of Banbury in the green belt, with a bit of a view. Two nice top-of-the-range cars.’

‘Again, it all sounds very reasonable.’

‘Right. Till it all went tits up and I lost the firm. Bloody bankers. ’Course, in a recession, the first things that are cut back are the non-essentials. People who’d been thinking of getting double-glazing, or adding value to their properties with
conservatories
and patios, suddenly realized that putting food on the table and petrol in the car are higher priorities. I lost two of my fitters, then one of the girls in the office. Started taking on more and more of the admin myself. Working crazy hours to try and keep it afloat. Meg started complaining how she never saw me, how the money wasn’t there anymore to do the Town and take in a show and have a meal, blah, blah blah. And as the money got tighter and tighter, so did the expression on my dear wife’s face.’

Brian had wandered over the window and was staring outside. Now he turned back and gave them a savage grin. ‘And when the firm finally went, so did she.’

‘You lost the house?’ Hillary guessed.

‘Mortgage providers took it back, the bastards.’

‘The cars?’

‘Had to sell one of them. Hers, obviously, since I needed mine. And lo and behold, I come back one day from a particularly vicious interview with the bank manager, and no more wife. She moved out to live with a friend. Female, before you ask. I got a nice solicitor’s letter serving divorce papers about a week later, and that was it.’

‘You never tried to see her? Talk her into coming back? No sending her flowers, or letters begging her to return?’ Hillary asked casually. ‘Most men try to save their marriages, if possible.’

Brian Vickary cast a bleary, attractive eye her way. ‘Are you kidding? Me, beg? No way. Besides, I considered myself well rid of her. If she couldn’t stick by me through the bad times, who’d want her?’

He cast a look around at the ramshackle bungalow and gave a sudden burst of laughter. ‘You know, when I heard she’d gone
missing, I was seriously pissed off. I had this fantasy, I guess, about starting up a new business after coming up with the big new idea that was going to make me millions. Then I’d buy a top-of-the-range Porsche – her favourite car by the way – and I’d drive it by her house wearing a load of bling and with an even better-looking girl in the passenger seat.’

Brian Vickary laughed again. ‘I’m going to get another beer. Sure you don’t want one?’

Hillary shook her head. ‘Just a few more questions first, sir,’ she said firmly. She had a feeling Brian was working himself up to a binge, and she needed him sober for just a little while longer.

‘You weren’t at all worried, then, when you heard she’d disappeared. You didn’t think, perhaps, that she was a victim of foul play?’ she asked curiously.

‘Meg?’ Brian snorted incredulously. ‘Nah. She was nobody’s victim, Meg, believe me. She had a way of getting what she wanted. When I heard she was working in some posh office I knew damned well what her game was.’

‘You think?’ Hillary asked, deadpan.

‘Sure. Getting into the boss’s trousers. Mind you, I did bump into her once, just the once, in some trendy bar. About a year after the divorce it would be. It was a mate’s thirtieth, and he was buying. She just came swanning over, as if nothing had happened, and began chatting. Said she was working for a
solicitor
or some such. Bragged a bit about her salary, her nice flat in Oxford. My mate was well up for it, I could see, though I tried to warn him off. She hooked him like a prize carp, flirting, showing off the cleavage, giving it with the chat.’ Brian mimed with his fingers the universal symbol for gabbing. ‘She could really talk, could Meg. Wind men around her finger. She had my mate panting about her tales from the office. A boring bloody solicitor’s office, I ask you! But even that she could make into a tale. She told my mate she knew no end of West End villains, men who made the Kray twins look like cissies, who’d been got
off by one or other of the QCs her bosses hooked them up with. Had my mate believing that she visited them in their Spanish villas and South American hideaways for freebie holidays all the time. And he was lapping it up, poor sod. I could see she was laughing up her sleeve at him. She only did it to rile me, I suppose. Show me what I’d been missing.’

Brian suddenly realized what he was saying, and who he was saying it to. For a moment he looked nonplussed, but then he laughed again. ‘Honestly, straight up, I didn’t lay a finger on her. That was the only time I saw her – and if you still want to dig up the garden, the offer still stands. It’ll be a way of getting some free gardening done anyway. It’s a bit of a jungle out there.’

Hillary smiled. ‘I’ll keep it in mind, sir. In the meantime, if you think of anything else…’ She handed him one of her cards.

Brian Vickary saluted her with it, and walked them to the door.

Hillary let him get back to his beer.

If Brian Vickary was her stalker she’d eat her hat.

If she had a hat.

T
om Warrington took his lunch hour early. Since he’d
volunteered
to be posted back to admin he had more flexibility with his working hours than he had when he’d been on the beat, provided he could keep on the good side of the dragon, a civilian clerk who thought she owned the records office.

He left HQ and drove through Kidlington, which was either one of the country’s largest villages, or a small town, depending on who you spoke to, and headed to the nearest Park and Ride. He didn’t like using it, since he always felt vulnerable without instant access to his car, but since parking in the city was about as easy to do as win the Lottery, he had little option.

Getting off the bus in St Giles, he made his way to the covered market, just off Cornmarket Street. He felt more anonymous here than in a jewellery store in town, where
CCTV
tended to proliferate too much for his liking. He felt a stab of conscience for the lack of taste implicit in his choice, but he knew that Hillary would understand. He couldn’t make things too easy for her after all! Besides, she knew how much he cherished and rated her.

And despite the rather dark, smelly and less-than-salubrious surroundings, the large, cosmopolitan market was quite capable of producing some very good quality items if you were prepared to put in the time and effort to look for them.

And Tom was. He’d been on the look out for such an item every day this week, and he felt his heart rate quicken as he
prowled the aisles of the last remaining jewellery booths he’d yet to inspect. Most was tat and he avoided that fastidiously. He didn’t like the bright, the brash and the costume stuff; that would be an insult to his Hillary, although he might pick up something to keep that stupid cow Vivienne Tyrell happy.

He quickly pushed thoughts of the wearisome girl aside and concentrated on his task.

Since he wasn’t sure what Hillary’s favourite gemstones were, he’d decided to stick with something classic and simple in gold. The high-quality stuff, naturally. He eyed lockets of all kind, and was sorely tempted by some of the antique silver ones especially. Although not gold, they had the quality and
uniqueness
associated with artisans long gone, and he thought that she would appreciate both the workmanship and the class.

But lockets, by their nature, needed something inside them – a photograph of a loved one, or a lock of hair.

Tom grinned at the impossibility of either of those: she’d be on to him like a lioness on an impala.

So he skirted the lockets, rejected the gems, and finally found what he was looking for in a dimly lit booth almost at the back near one of the many exits from the market. The stallholder was a foreigner of East European extraction by the sound of his accent, a middle-aged man with a cadaverous face and blank blue eyes.

The item was made of a beguiling mixture of old gold, white gold, and gleaming buttery yellow gold: two love-hearts, one in solid white gold, the other in lattice-worked yellow, both joined by a finely moulded old gold arrow.

It was perfect. On a simple but substantial, good quality
box-style
chain, it was understated and chic, obviously old and perfectly made.

And the message couldn’t be clearer.

Beaming with delight, he paid out the £200+ for it without a flicker of protest. He’d made sure that the booth owner wouldn’t be able to pick him up out of any line up easily by
wearing sunglasses, and a baseball cap pulled well down over his forehead. He paid in cash, obviously, and spoke as little as possible.

If the stallholder had any suspicions, his blank eyes hid them well. He counted the money fast, and without being asked, retrieved an old leather, velvet-lined jewellery box from under the table and carefully arranged the pendant inside.

Although it clearly wasn’t the original box for the piece, it had faded writing on it in gold, and Tom liked the way it added a touch of class to the whole enterprise. Perhaps the booth owner had sensed that the young man buying such a love token was well and truly smitten and was a romantic at heart. Or perhaps his radar for danger had just insisted that he wanted Tom gone quickly – and perfectly satisfied with the transaction.

Either way, Tom left Oxford smiling.

Back at HQ, he donned a pair of fine leather gloves and used plain A5 paper and one of the record office’s computers to type and print out a message.

He read it and smiled. Lol was what he’d told her to call him when she’d asked him his name, that glorious day in the
car-park
in Thrupp, when he had finally been able to put his arms around her and could breathe in the wonderful perfume of her hair, and luxuriate in the fast beat of her pulse under the forearm that he had draped around her throat.

Lol, short for Love of your Life.

He whistled as he popped both the note and the jewellery case into a plain brown envelope. He used water to seal it, so there would be no chance of lifting his DNA from the saliva, and resisted the urge to write her name on the front, even using
plain capitals. She was just too good to give her any leeway at all.

He was sure that the jewellery booth owner had collected a vast range of old jewellery cases over the years, and any attempt by his bright and beautiful girl to trace the origin of the locket from that was doomed to failure. And if he’d read the body language of the foreigner correctly, even if some uniformed plod did do the rounds of the jewellery stalls with a picture of the pendant, he was unlikely to admit ever having seen it before. Let alone selling it. His sort liked to avoid having anything to do with the police.

It was an irony that wasn’t lost on Tom.

Hillary spent her lunch hour in the canteen, which was hardly fine dining with Jimmy and Sam, whilst contemplating the paperwork in front of her.

The last of the three missing girls, Gilly Tinkerton had, in some ways, the slimmest file of them all. ‘She’s a bit of a cipher, our Gilly,’ Hillary said, tapping the folder, the contents of which were, once again, the result of Sam’s handiwork. ‘You weren’t able to come up with much,’ she added without censure, and looked across at the young lad with a questioning smile.

‘Sorry, guv, there simply wasn’t much to be had. All the regular stuff was there, but…’ He shrugged.

‘Right. Just the easily verifiable,’ Hillary nodded, eating a ham and tomato sandwich whilst studying the data. ‘Aged
twenty-nine
, two years ago when she was first reported missing. About five feet six, plumpish build, red hair and freckles. Big blue eyes according to her old school photos.’ Hillary grinned, shoving the file around so that Jimmy could see.

‘She must be about twelve there,’ the old man guffawed, nodding down at the file’s one and only photograph.

Sam flushed.

‘Sorry, guv, I just couldn’t find anything more recent. None of her family and friends seemed to have any. She was a bit camera
shy they all said, on account of her being fat, I reckon,’ he added carelessly.

Jimmy snorted a laugh. ‘Not interested in political correctness then, sonny? I thought that’s what you modern lot all went in for like good little boys and girls. And if you want to impress the brass you should stick to it, that’s my advice. What is it called
nowadays
? Corpulently challenged, is it? Or rotundly handicapped?’

Hillary laughed and took back the file. ‘You couldn’t find anything more official even?’ she asked Sam. ‘Driver’s licence?’

‘She’s never driven, as far as I can see. Never took any lessons or passed a test – officially, at any rate. So she never had a driver’s licence issued. Mind you, that doesn’t necessarily mean that she wasn’t out and about driving around in a car anyway. From what people said, I don’t think she had much interest in observing the law, guv.’

‘Oh, a criminal record?’ Jimmy said, perking up. ‘She’s bound to have official ID then.’

‘No, Jimmy, I don’t mean it like that,’ Sam said, spearing a chip and chewing vigorously. ‘She’s not a villain. Just one of these so called “free-spirits” you get nowadays. Someone who’s not all that interested in living by the rules.’

‘Oh right. New Age clap trap,’ Jimmy grumbled. ‘In my day they were called hippies, and were always stoned at rock
festivals
.’

Sam and Hillary exchanged more grins. Jimmy pretended not to notice.

‘Right, Jimmy,’ Sam said kindly.

‘Well, perhaps her family can help us out in other ways, even if they don’t have a decent photograph of her. They still live in Brill?’ she asked, naming a village that sat atop a high and, locally famous, hill.

‘Yeah guv, the address is recent,’ Sam promised.

Jimmy, sensing his boss was impatient for the off, quickly gobbled up the last of his fried-egg sandwich and reached for his mug of tea.

Twenty minutes later they were headed for the other side of the market town of Bicester, where they hoped to put some flesh on the bones – so to speak – of the third of the stalker’s victims.

Deirdre Tinkerton turned out to be one of those roly-poly women with red cheeks and a naturally cheerful disposition that you expect to see playing as an extra on The Darling Buds of May. She had salt-and-pepper hair rolled back in an untidy bun and big blue eyes. She also had a rolling Oxonian country burr in her voice, and seemed determined to reinforce the stereotype yet further by answering the door dressed in a
flowered
apron, and with flour sprinkled up her arms to her elbows.

She looked at Hillary’s ID card without touching it, waving margarine-smeared fingers as a mute explanation and looked at Hillary with a trace of fear.

‘Is it our Gilly? Lumme, you ain’t found no body, have you? Don’t tell me it’s my little girl?’

Hillary hastily reassured her that that wasn’t the case, and gave her the same standard line as she was giving to all the witnesses. ‘Nothing like that, Mrs Tinkerton. We’re just looking at Gillian’s case again.’ She gave a brief description of what the Crime Review Team did, and of her role in it as an ex-copper.

‘Oh right. Like with those three old men on New Tricks,’ she said, mentioning the name of the popular television programme that showcased the solving of cold crimes. Hillary and Jimmy smiled and agreed that they were indeed, just like that.

‘Come on through then. I’m just doing the baking for the month,’ she said, as she led them through to the kitchen, her usual bonhomie quickly restored. ‘I does a freezerful at a time, see. Right now it’s rhubarb – coming up a treat it is, and Les has got an allotment full of it. Good thing we likes rhubarb, I say! You want one?’ she added, pointing to one of six already made and waiting to be baked pies, lining one of the work surfaces.

The Tinkertons lived in what had once been a council house but was now obviously privately owned as a large kitchen extension had been built. Hillary smiled and declined the offer
with real regret. Just how long was it since she’d tasted a
homemade
fruit pie?

‘Ah right. Can’t be having bribes, I ’spect it is,’ Deirdre said, but with her eyes twinkling at Hillary as she reached for her rolling pin and began rolling out a roughly circular shape of pastry.

Hillary noticed Jimmy watch her carefully when she reached for the rolling pin, and then slowly relax, and silently approved of his caution, which spoke of years of experience and instinct. Although it was almost impossible to regard this woman
seriously
as a threat, no doubt Jimmy had, in the past, had equally unlikely women come at him with a rolling pin! All beat bobbies were called out to domestics, after all, which were notoriously unpredictable.

‘So how can I help then, my love?’ Deirdre asked comfortably. ‘Would you mind giving that pan a stir and stop it from sticking? Has this got anything to do with that nice, young,
red-headed
boy who come round asking about Gilly and wanting a photo of her? He reminded me a bit of that other nice young constable who came the very first time, asking about our Gilly. Good looking lad he was too.’

Hillary, obligingly stirring a vast pan of pink and green stalks with a wooden spoon, nodded with a smile. Sam would be chuffed to be regarded as ‘good-looking’ she had no doubt, even by a woman old enough to be his grandmother. ‘My colleague, Sam Pickles. Yes. He told us you weren’t able to find a recent photograph of Gillian.’

‘No. We don’t go in for cameras much in our family. Never could get the hang of ’em myself, and Les is no good with one either. And Gilly never was the sort to primp and preen much and want her picture took.’

‘You haven’t heard from Gilly recently, have you, Mrs Tinkerton?’ Hillary asked cautiously, feeling strangely
wrong-footed
by the woman’s easy-going manner.

Deirdre frowned. ‘No. But you know I’m not that worried about
it, to be honest. Our Gilly never was much good at writing – I was the same at school myself. Never could spell worth a damn.’

Hillary nodded. ‘But she never phones?’ she prompted persistently. She was puzzled by Deirdre Tinkerton’s distinct lack of worry. Her home was clean and cosy and had a nice atmosphere about it. And in direct contrast to the impression that she’d got from the Yellands, she was sure that Gilly Tinkerton had been well loved and reared with generosity. And had been very much a wanted and valued child.

‘You have other children, Mrs Tinkerton?’ she asked
curiously
.

‘Lumme, yes, my love. Three of each – three girls, three boys. Gilly is second youngest.’

‘You don’t seem to be all that worried about her, Mrs Tinkerton,’ Hillary said at last, keeping her voice bland. Even so the woman stopped rolling out her pastry and cocked an
intelligent
eye her way.

‘That’s because you don’t know our Gilly, and never did know her, whereas I know that girl like the back of me ’and. Not hearing from her is just her way. She probably don’t even realize how much time has gone by. Always a dreamer. Never had no sense of time, or thought for what other people might be thinking neither.’ She suddenly laughed. ‘To be honest, she often has no sense, full stop. She went off with a band of them gyppos in caravans and camper vans or what have you a while back, even. You know about that, right?’