A Species of Revenge (20 page)

‘If Grandma hadn't been there we couldn't have interviewed her, at her age, could we? Not without breaking all the rules in the book.'

A man known to Mayo, Chief Inspector Uttley of the Hurstfield Division, a colleague of long-standing, was in charge of the investigation there into the murders of the two little girls, and the disappearance of the third, all of which had fallen within his jurisdiction.

They'd made arrangements to see him and went in Mayo's car, which he allowed Abigail to drive. Mindful of the honour, she reciprocated by not talking, leaving him to enjoy the music he preferred when driving but which, truth to tell, sometimes got on her nerves. Hers not to reason why. Twenty miles, and a good deal of Shostakovich's Ninth later, they arrived at Hurstfield Police Station, where Uttley was waiting for them with coffee and sandwiches.

‘A right bugger, all this,' he greeted them, shaking his head, waving a hand like a ham in the direction of the several fat files in readiness on his desk. Fred Uttley was an old sparring partner of Mayo's, a big, solid man whose belly strained the waistband of his trousers, a tough copper of the old school. But, handing the bulging folders over, knowing what they contained, his usually genial face took on a greyness. ‘Help yourself to what you want from them, but I warn you, it won't be much.'

They leafed through the material while they drank the coffee, but what they read choked the bread in their mouths, and in the end the sandwiches were left uneaten and curling up at the edges.

It was seven months, in January, since the first child, Nicola Marchant, aged eleven, had been found, raped and brutally battered, lying in the snow. She'd been out tobogganing one Saturday afternoon with her friends, on a hill not a hundred yards from her home, and had left them at three-thirty, as instructed, before the winter afternoon began to get dark. She had never reached home. Her body, with her long blonde hair cut off at the roots, had later been found tossed into the ditch by the roadside, her sledge thrown on top of her. Snow had fallen intermittently all that day, until well into the evening, obliterating any tracks or traces the killer might have left.

Rachel Williams, thirteen the day before she disappeared in April, was on her way home from school when she was killed. She'd waved goodbye to her friends on the school bus, turned down the country road on which she lived and was never seen alive again. She hadn't been found for six weeks, when council workers using a mechanical hedge-flail had come across her, dumped like discarded rubbish in the ditch below, six miles from her home, and, like Nicola, her fair hair had been hacked off. She too had been raped and repeatedly bludgeoned with a heavy instrument.

‘A hammer,' Uttley said. ‘Same bloody hammer in both cases, or identical ones. The bastard probably saved it to use again.'

The MO had been similar in all respects. DNA tests confirmed it was the same man responsible in both cases. There had as yet been no trace of the third missing child, Tracey Betteridge. A few weeks ago, she'd gone to visit her grandmother who lived just around the corner from her own suburban road, and hadn't been seen since. Her disappearance might, or might not, be connected to the other two.

A lifetime of police work had rendered Uttley not insensitive, but not easily upset, either, yet these events had shaken him to the core. He had grandchildren of his own and obscurely and needlessly blamed himself for not yet having got to grips with the situation. ‘I shan't sleep at nights, and that's a fact, until we've put the scumbag that's responsible where he can't do any more harm. Preferably pinned to the floor by his balls.'

But his turned-down mouth suggested his hopes weren't high, snatched at random as the children appeared to have been, with nothing at all to give a clue as to their abductor, not a shred of evidence, anywhere. Appeals, reconstructions on
Crimewatch,
miles of foot slogging, knocking on doors, hundreds of hours of tireless questioning, thousands of witnesses, yards of computer print-outs, nothing had come of it.

If Patti's death had indeed been linked to these other murders, it was a depressing prognosis for the apprehension of her killer.

Uttley was bitter. ‘The only way we're going to catch him is if little Tracey turns up and he's made some mistake.' His eyes boded no good for whoever was found to be responsible. ‘Or if it turns out he's made one with your Patti.'

‘But they've nothing to do with Patti, have they?' Abigail remarked in an unusually dispirited voice on the way home. During the last couple of hours, she seemed to have lost some of her resilience. ‘If we're looking for a pattern, we're not going to find it there.'

Mayo, chin sunk into his collar, thinking over the last depressing session, didn't think so either. Serial killers were creatures of habit, apt to keep to more or less the same modus operandi, and Patti's murder was unlike the ones they'd been reading about, in almost every respect. The full autopsy report on her body had confirmed Timpson-Ludgate's original opinion that she hadn't been raped, for one thing, and for another, it had been a single blow which had killed her – wielded with enough savagery and strength to shatter her skull, to be sure, but she hadn't been senselessly and repeatedly battered, as the other two girls had been. It wasn't a hammer belonging to the assailant which had been used, either, but the first weapon that had come conveniently to hand. Nor had she been abducted and taken somewhere else to be killed. All the victims had in common, in fact, was their fair hair – hardly conclusive proof of any connection. And Patti's hair hadn't been cut off.

He sat back with his eyes closed, the radio switched off, his thoughts grim. Like Uttley, he promised himself no rest until they'd found the killer. The burden was heavy, but it was his responsibility. The third day after the murder, and the bastard still free. Yet he knew that the search could go on for months, years even. If you didn't find them fast, often you didn't find them at all.

As the tree-crowned Kennet Edge flashed by on their left, and they entered the outskirts of Lavenstock, children were coming home from school, humping the oversize bags they all seemed to find necessary to carry their school kit around in. There'd been nothing in Patti's school bag to excite attention – her school books, plus gym kit, towel, a hairbrush, deodorant and a small leather purse containing less than a pound. The newsagent she'd worked for, Surinder Patel, had been worried that she hadn't returned to leave the empty delivery bag and to pick up her school bag and hat, which she always left with him before cycling off to school for half past eight. He blamed himself for not raising the alarm earlier, but his corner shop, as well as being a newsagent's, was also a sub-post office and general grocery store, and that was his busiest time of day, when people were coming in for papers and cigarettes, and bread and groceries were being delivered. Long before he'd had the chance to do something about it, Patti was dead.

Just why had Gemma been pulling the wool over their eyes? Farrar had been detailed to canvass all the local taxi firms, and, knowing Farrar, it would be done thoroughly, but Mayo was damn sure none of them would have received any call on Saturday evening for a taxi to take a young schoolgirl home. Narrowing his eyes, he visualized the town map which occupied most of one wall in his office.

‘Turn off and drive round the ring road,' he said suddenly to Abigail as the Kublai Khan glass domes of the new shopping centre at the top of the town came into view.

She obeyed without so much as raising an eyebrow. They followed the road as it skirted the main thoroughfares and swung round into Colley Street. At the stop by the Punch Bowl they had to wait until a number 12 bus pulled out, which lumbered in front of them all the way to Milford Road, where Mayo instructed Abigail to abandon the ring road and drive into the police-station car park.

Back in his office, he traced the same bus route on the map with the arm of his spectacles. It went along the ring road, then made a detour into the town centre. Past the Saracen's Head and across to join Albert Road and thus into Colley Street. Past the police station, and eventually round to the end of Mailer Street, where Patti lived.

‘But – have a look at this – from the bus stop in Colley Street –'

‘The quickest way to Mailer Street is the path across the back of the allotments.' It hadn't taken Abigail long to pick up his reasoning. Her eyes took on a gleam of realization. ‘And you think –?'

‘It's a possible hypothesis,' Mayo said slowly.

‘More than that, surely? It was the same Saturday night Ensor was killed there, wasn't it? So it's not out of the way to think that she might have seen something!' The idea had re-energized her. ‘I think I should go and see Gemma again. And this time get the truth out of her. I'll go carefully,' she promised, pre-empting any warning he might see fit to give. ‘After what happened to Patti, no wonder she didn't want to talk, poor kid.'

Abigail would have preferred to speak to Gemma on her own, but since Gemma was in the eyes of the law still a juvenile, it was necessary to go by the book and have an appropriate person present. In this case, Gemma's mother, not the grandmother. The evasions didn't trip quite so easily from Gemma's tongue in her presence.

Amanda Townsend was several inches shorter than her daughter, a pretty, dark, energetic-looking woman in her mid-forties, but one whose every gesture indicated that she wasn't one to stand any nonsense. She sat next to Gemma on the sofa, looking expectantly at Abigail, wearing a beige cotton skirt and a plain white shirt, no make-up. Too busy, perhaps too self-fulfilled in her career to feel the need to bother about her appearance. Maybe it was the grandmother who'd chosen Gemma's clothes.

‘I just want to go over what you said again. Gemma,' Abigail began. ‘About the taxi on Saturday night. We haven't been able to trace a taxi firm that came here to pick anyone up.'

Gemma, this time dressed in jeans, albeit carefully pressed ones, and worn with a neat print blouse, gave a choked sort of gasp and then burst into tears.

Her mother let an arm rest across her daughter's shoulders for a few seconds, gave a squeeze, then announced briskly, ‘That's enough of that, Gemma. Dry your eyes and tell Inspector Moon what she wants to know. She's not going to bite.'

It seemed as though that might be the least of what Gemma feared. In a rush, scrubbing at her eyes at the same time with a tissue, she gulped, ‘She didn't take a taxi home.'

‘Well!' Her mother eyed her speculatively. ‘How is it you were able to give me the correct change, three pounds fifty?'

‘We just guessed that's what it might have come to, about six fifty. Patti put that, apart from her bus fare, into the RSPCA box, so it wasn't really dishonest. It wasn't her fault about the taxi, anyway – it was me! She only did it because I asked her to. Mum!'

‘Did she, indeed?' The tone was not encouraging, but Gemma knew now there was no going back.

There was, as Abigail had known there would be all along, a boyfriend in the picture. Not Patti's, however, but Gemma's. ‘What boyfriend's this?' Dr Townsend interrupted sharply.

‘His name's Nige.' Gemma's chin went up, a small act of defiance, but she skated on hurriedly with the rest of the story, twisting the little brass ring with the skull and cross-bones on it around on her finger. Gemma had known, she said, that if she went down to the amusement arcade by the market he'd be there, it was where he spent his evenings -

‘Hm,' was her mother's only comment.

Hearing the tone of it, and as familiar as Gemma's mother evidently was with the arcade and the sort who hung around there, Abigail saw immediately why this Nige hadn't been introduced into the Townsend family. She wondered briefly where Gemma's father was. Divorced, as Patti's had been? One could see that drawing the two girls together. Orphans of the marital storm, perhaps.

They'd all had a coffee together, Gemma was saying, when Patti had caught the bus and – Abigail listened impassively – Nige had brought Gemma home on the back of his motorbike. Her grandmother was still in bed and hadn't known a thing. Not even that Gemma had been out.

In view of all this, looking at Amanda Townsend's determinedly noncommittal face, Abigail had it in her heart to feel sorry for Gemma. Threats of wasting police time, which had been in her mind when she arrived, she pushed away as unnecessary.

‘I'm sorry, Mum,' Gemma apologized tearfully, swallowing hard, and turning to Abigail. ‘I suppose I should've told you before, but I – There's something else.'

‘More?' repeated her mother ominously.

‘Patti got off the bus at Colley Street and took a short cut across the allotments. She could've stayed on and ridden round to the end of Mailer Street but it would've taken ages and she was already a bit late.'

Bingo! Even the fact that the idea had been Mayo's, and not hers, couldn't lessen Abigail's small surge of triumph. ‘And?'

‘She was halfway along the path at the back of the allotments when she saw two people struggling. One of them seemed to knock the other flat to the ground. She wondered if she ought to have gone to fetch help or something, but it would have made her even later, and, well – you don't interfere in anything like that if you've any sense, do you?'

‘That's right, Gemma, you don't.'

Abigail visualized the allotment site, the small green huts amid the neat rows of vegetables, here and there a vivid patch of flowers for cutting, beans climbing up their supports. The colour would have been leached out by the moonlight, but the same moonlight and residual light from the sodium streetlamps in Colley Street would have cast enough light for Patti to see clearly as she took the path towards the Leasowes, giving her a good view of the central road, the place where Ensor had been found, and possibly even a good view of their faces.