A Species of Revenge (21 page)

‘But then,' Gemma said, licking her lips, ‘there was that piece on Radio Lavenstock about that man who'd been found dead there. And she began to be worried that she ought to tell someone.'

‘She didn't know who they were? Didn't describe them, or anything?'

‘No – but I think she might've known, really, after she'd thought about it. She kept saying she didn't know what to do. I think she was just too scared to say.'

Speculation ran like a buzz of adrenaline through the incident room where the team waited for the Superintendent. The ending of another frustrating day. Largely unproductive routine: legwork, telephoning, questioning, with sources beginning to run dry, a feeling that the inquiry was reaching stalemate. And now, with tidings of this new development filtering through, it was kiss goodbye to any thoughts of taking it easy. They revved up with cigarettes and coffee, in the circumstances not a man or a woman there begrudging the extra effort that would be needed.

Kite alone was bouncing around as if it were first thing in the morning. Keeping up with his high energy levels was other people's problem. He began opening more windows before Mayo had the chance to do it himself. It hardly made a dent in the atmosphere, since Inspector George Atkins had his pipe well away. He came back to the front desk and reread the information Gemma had given them, propping himself against a desk, arms folded, crossed legs stretched across the gangway. ‘Silly kids. If they'd simply come straight out with it –'

‘It's obvious why they didn't.' Abigail pressed the last drawing pin into the visual-aid board and laid down the black marker pen. ‘Patti thought at first that it was nothing more than a fight she'd seen. According to Gemma, it was only after she heard on the news on Sunday night that a man had been found dead down there on Sunday morning that she began to worry. She dithered about coming forward because she knew both she and Gemma would be in dead shtuck over her not taking a taxi home, not to mention compounding it by short-cutting through the allotments, that time of night.'

‘What devious lives adolescents lead!'

‘And the ones you'd least expect to. Gemma Townsend, of all people, and this Nige.'

‘Nigel Worsfield, a name not unknown to us down here.'

‘OK, I know, bunking off school, petty shoplifting when he was younger – but fair's fair, he's had a job down at Everett's garage since he left school and not been in trouble since. Hardly someone her mother's likely to approve of, though.'

‘Excuse me, Sarge.' A WPC, looking pointedly busy, with a file under her arm and balancing two styrofoam cups of coffee, was endeavouring to get past.

Kite amiably angled his long legs to one side. ‘Any mates Patti might have been pairing off with?' he asked.

‘Apparently not. Patti had been covering up for Gemma – you know, saying she was with her when Gemma was really with Nige and so on, but she doesn't seem to have had any particular boyfriend of her own. Don't think we shall get anywhere pursuing that line – the odds are that she saw Philip Ensor being murdered – and that makes it an entirely different ball game.'

Mayo evidently thought so as well. When he showed his face in the incident room, the buzz of talk died down in the expectation of what was to come, the cigarettes of the circumspect were put out as officers grouped themselves in front of him to hear what he had to say.

‘Firstly, thanks for staying on. You should all have made yourselves familiar with the new developments by now, but just to make sure everything's crystal clear ...'

He drew their attention to the diagrams Abigail had drawn on the board: the names of Philip Ensor and Patti Ryman, side by side, with details of the assaults on each circled and radiating from them. Lines from each circle were now joined together at the bottom.

‘None of you need me to spell out what this means. We now have a possible motive for Patti's murder – I say possible, we must keep an open mind, but at least it gives us something to work on, in both cases. It's beginning to look something like this: she takes a short cut home, via the path that runs along the back of the allotments, and sees this struggle going on between the two men. They're milling around on the road which runs through the centre of the allotments, but they're not so far away that she couldn't have recognized their faces – or the face of one of them, at least. There was a full moon that night and in any case, she must have passed fairly close. One of the men dies. Leaving aside the question of whether it was accidental or not, the other man panics, fearing this girl will tell what she saw.'

And that, Mayo was convinced, was why she'd died. He made a positive effort to sound unemotional about it, to control his own anger that Patti's life should have been forfeit – not to satisfy the urges of a random child killer, something quite outside the boundaries of comprehensible human behaviour – but worse, in a way, simply because the poor unfortunate child had stumbled upon an act of mindless violence against another person. And had been deemed expendable because of it.

‘Understood so far?'

The queries which followed were mostly routine, until Farrar asked keenly, ‘If it was the same perpetrator in both cases, why did he wait so long to kill her – more than a week later?'

‘Good question. Patti at first told Gemma Townsend she didn't know who the two men were, but it seems she might have had second thoughts about that. Presumably the killer didn't realize who she was, either. Not then. I believe it must have come to him later that she was the girl who'd passed them when they were fighting. And had reason to think she'd realized this, too.'

‘Wouldn't that rule out anybody who lives on her paper round? They'd have recognized her on the spot, wouldn't they?'

‘That may be so, Keith, but I still want every resident in the vicinity retargeting. I recognize how tedious this going over old ground is becoming, and I'm sorry. But we need to find out if there were any links at all, however tenuous they might seem, between any of them and Philip Ensor, and – it goes without saying – especially where they were on the Saturday night that Ensor died. And I particularly want to know what the hell he was doing in Lavenstock that night, OK? Try the hotels again, bed and breakfasts, see if someone's memory can be jogged. It's just possible he was staying under an assumed name.'

Though if he'd been staying overnight, why had his car been left out of sight behind Rodney Shepherd's premises, rather than in a hotel car park? Mayo frowned, studying his methodical notes for a moment. Ensor was where it all began, he was convinced, everything else was the after game. Find out what he'd been doing here and ...

‘As to why he chose the time and place he did to kill Patti, when he could so easily have been seen ...' Mayo paused. ‘It was a risk I don't think he did choose – in that particular sense.' This, he reminded them, was no psychopath they were looking for, but someone out to protect himself from the consequences of the original killing. Whatever the outcome, the intention had simply been to shut Patti up. It looked as if Ensor's murder fell into the same category, an impulse, or possibly accidental killing after a fight. ‘We seem to have come up with a profile of a spur-of-the-moment killer, someone who lands out unthinkingly when he's upset, but sharp enough to seize the opportunity when it offers – remember, in neither case did he go equipped, simply picked up what was lying around for a weapon.'

‘What about the cat, sir?' It was Farrar, once again.

‘I think we have to look on the cat as only incidental – important only in so far as it was the cause of Patti going into the wood. We know that Loates killed poor old Nero, but he's not, for my money, a credible suspect in Patti's murder – and it's even less likely that he could fight and overcome a man like Ensor, so much younger and fitter – just supposing he had cause. Unless whoever killed her was conveniently lurking inside the wood at the same time, which doesn't make much sense, we might line it up something like this: Patti hears the cries of the cat – not on his usual perch – and goes to investigate. The murderer – probably watching out for her – seizes his opportunity and follows her into the wood. He speaks to her, still not entirely sure whether she's recognized him as one of the men she saw fighting, but what they say to each other convinces him that she does. She turns away, perhaps having told him that she must tell the police – and he picks up the iron bar and kills her.'

There was a silence.

‘You want to say something else, Keith?'

‘Could've been someone who had legitimate business around the Close, like the postman or the milkman, somebody not likely to be regarded as a stranger.'

Mayo followed a rule that at these briefings no one was to feel they couldn't put forward a theory or a suggestion – but why was it always Farrar? It was a perfectly legitimate observation he'd put forward, but Farrar got up his nose, in the way he got up most people's noses. Maybe because he was always so damn right, but – There was always a but where Farrar was concerned. Mayo had had a hint from Kite that the DC was having domestic troubles. Not exactly unusual in the police service, as Mayo knew to his cost. Before Lynne had died, things had not gone smoothly in his own household, so he was even more inclined to make excuses for Keith Farrar, who was in any case a damned good police officer, and would have gone further, had it not been for his attitudes.

‘Oh, come on, Keith! Milkmen and postmen have already been accounted for, as you should know,' Abigail reminded him sharply. Too busy doing
The Times
crossword, were we?'

Somebody sniggered and Farrar looked at the inspector sourly, smarting at the quip about the crossword, which everyone who hadn't been at the South Pole lately must know he could do in under half an hour, but aware that he'd uncharacteristically slipped up. The first woman Chief Constable in Britain had recently been appointed. Moon was obviously hopeful of being on her way to becoming the second. And he was still a bloody DC, he couldn't think why. Life was a bugger, sometimes.

‘Worth repeating, ma'am,' he couldn't resist adding, but Abigail swallowed her irritation and didn't reply.

Mayo kept his eye on Farrar for several seconds. An exchange of good-humoured insults was as common currency in the CID room as anywhere else, but Abigail had been unwontedly sharp, and it showed how on edge they all were. He wondered if the public ever realized how much murder, in particular this sort of murder, affected the men and women inquiring into it.

He was ready to wind the meeting up. He himself had two people still to see – Dermot Voss, who was proving elusive, and Francis Kendrick. He thought it might be a good idea to take Abigail with him when he went to see the latter.

‘Right, that's about it. We work all out on this. Any extra hours, let Inspector Atkins know. OK, George?'

Atkins nodded, already relighting his pipe in the expectation of Mayo's departure, drawing his lists towards him.

Back in his office, he found a print-out on his desk concerning the motor thefts Abigail was investigating, plus the details he'd asked for about Dermot Voss's stolen car. He studied it for a while, swinging his glasses back and forth while he thought about it. The beginning of any murder investigation was always a time of frenzied activity – gathering statements, collating alibis. Mayo was quite happy to leave all that sort of thing to be worked out by the computers, after all the relevant names and times had been fed in – as far as he was concerned computers had definitely made a policeman's lot a happier one. They hadn't yet entirely replaced the human element, thank God, but meanwhile, a computer print-out beat pencilled lists on the backs of envelopes, any day. Now that both cases had opened up – or rather, come together – he looked at his list of possibles with a new eye. Excluding those residents in and around Ellington Close, eliminated for one reason and another, he was left with:

‘X'. The unknown factor, the mystery man who might exist but who hadn't yet appeared on the scene, whom nobody had ever seen.

Stanley Loates. Mayo couldn't for the life of him see Loates wielding a heavy iron bar on the girl, still less as being involved in a fight with Ensor – apart from the fact that Patti knew him well enough, and would have recognized his flabby form immediately. The same thing applied to Henry Pitt, who'd said he'd stayed at home all night listening to a concert of Viennese music on the radio and had in any case left home on the morning of the crime with Vic Baverstock, while Patti was still alive. Vic also appeared to have a watertight alibi for the Ensor murder, having been out practising with his male-voice choir.

Trevor Lawley had sworn Patti was already dead when he found her. It would be worth checking on him to see if there were any links between him and Ensor. It was believable – just – that he could have hit Patti hard enough to kill her, if he thought she'd done that to his precious cat, at least according to Kite, but Mayo was fed up with theories about that damned cat. Better to work on something with more substance, like his own conviction that Patti's murder had a direct connection with what she'd seen when she was walking home that night.

Which left Francis Kendrick, whom he still had to interview today, time permitting, and Dermot Voss, both of whom should prove interesting. He thought about that for some time, then, after several minutes, he added Hope Kendrick to his list, whom he could believe capable of doing anything to protect her brother. A little mischievously he listed Tina Baverstock, whom he could believe capable of doing anything.

After a moment, thoughtfully, he added Imogen Loxley.

They were talking about mildew, black spot and other esoteric subjects. They'd been going on in this vein for some time. It seemed that Kendrick had a sure-fire way of getting rid of aphids. Abigail passed on her father's hint for using soft soap as a spray. Mayo looked at his watch. He signalled with his eyes to Abigail that the preliminaries were over, and prepared for confrontation.