Bloodline-9 (25 page)

‘Did she tel you much about him?’ Kitson asked.

Miriam shook her head. ‘She told us he was a good few years older and I think she could tel we didn’t real y approve.’

‘Maybe if we’d been a bit more . . . liberal or what have you, things might have been different.’ Alec stared into space for a few seconds. ‘I just didn’t want her getting too attached to
anyone
, not with university and everything round the corner. As it turned out, she started talking about not going at al , about going travel ing with this Tony, or moving in with him.’

‘There were a lot of arguments,’ Miriam said.

Thorne said it was understandable, that he could see their first concern had been for their daughter. ‘But you never met him?’

It was a warm morning, but Miriam pul ed her cardigan a little tighter around her chest as she shook her head. ‘She got very secretive about it, told us that it was her life, al that kind of thing.’ Her smile was regretful, a tremble in her bottom lip. ‘I could see that in the end there was a danger we’d drive her away, so I asked her to bring him round.’

‘She told us it was too late for al that,’ Alec said. ‘That Tony knew how we felt and she didn’t want to put him through the whole trial-by-parents thing.’

‘It’s stupid, looking back,’ Miriam said. ‘It was only a few months, but she was completely smitten with him. One day she was talking to us about al the places she wanted to visit and the next thing we wouldn’t see her for days on end.’

Alec’s face darkened. ‘That’s why we didn’t even know anything had happened for a few days.’

‘Can you tel us . . . ?’ Thorne asked.

Alec cleared his throat, but it was his wife who spoke. ‘She’d taken to stopping over at his place more and more.’

‘Where was that?’ Kitson asked.

‘Hanwel , I think. At least Hanwel was somewhere she mentioned a few times, and I remember she needed to get a travel-card for Zone Four. We never had the address, though.

Obviously, we would have passed it on to the police.’ She picked at a loose thread on the arm of the sofa. ‘So, when she didn’t come home on the Thursday night, we just presumed, you know . . .’

‘We started to get worried by the Saturday morning,’ Alec said. ‘I mean, I know we’ve said there were arguments, but she’d always phone after a day or two. She knew we’d worry.’

Miriam tugged at the loose thread until it broke, then bal ed it up in her palm and closed her fist. ‘We cal ed the police on the Saturday,’ she said. ‘Then, three weeks later, we had the visit.’

‘There were two of them on the doorstep,’ Alec said. ‘I knew it, when the woman tried to smile and couldn’t quite manage it.’

‘Do you know
why
?’ Miriam asked suddenly. ‘I know you’ve got a name now, so maybe you’ve got some idea why he did what he did.’

Because Anthony Garvey already had a plan. Because he needed your daughter to get the money to fund it. And once she’d done what he wanted, he had to get her out of the way. He could not afford to have loose ends lying around once his grand scheme of kil ing was under way, so he stuffed your daughter behind a pile of rusted metal and dusty sacking, curled up among the shit and the silverfish with the back of her skul caved in and a plastic bag tied around her head.

Because he needed to practise on someone.

‘It’s a bit too early to say,’ Thorne said, hoping that it didn’t sound as piss-weak and pathetic as he felt while saying it.

Kitson glanced at him, but couldn’t meet his eye. ‘We’l come back to you as soon as we know any more.’

Thorne could see that the couple had had enough. He thanked them for their time and apologised for making them talk about something that was so painful. Miriam said that it was no trouble, that nothing was too much trouble if it might help find the man who had murdered her daughter. She said she was the one who should apologise for not being a better hostess.

‘Did Chloe have a diary?’

‘Yes, but only for appointments and things,’ Miriam said. ‘I looked through it afterwards . . . hoping she might have said something. The police had a good look, of course, but it’s just

“meeting T”, “having a drink with T”, that kind of thing. You’re welcome to take it, if you want.’

‘It might be useful for checking dates,’ Thorne said. ‘What about a mobile phone?’

‘Police looked at that, too,’ Alec said. ‘They found it in her bag.’

‘Do you stil have it?’

Miriam shook her head. ‘Once the police had returned al Chloe’s things, Alec took it to one of those recycling places.’

‘I can’t bear waste.’ Alec reached across and fumbled for his wife’s hand. ‘Can’t bear it.’

Thorne nodded and looked down for his briefcase. He knew the man was not talking about mobile phones any more.

Jenny Duggan, formerly Jenny Garvey, had not been comfortable with the idea of Carol Chamberlain visiting her at home, so they met outside a smal pub in the city centre. Chamberlain was the second to arrive, her train from Waterloo having got in fifteen minutes late, and once she had visited the toilet and got some drinks in, she walked back outside to join Duggan at a table in the sunshine. They were no more than a hundred yards from the Bargate, the ancient monument at the northern end of the old medieval wal . It had served as police headquarters during the Second World War and now housed a contemporary art gal ery, but eight hundred years earlier it had been the main gateway to the city of Southampton.

‘Al very nice,’ Duggan said, as Chamberlain drew back a chair. ‘But it’s stil rough as you like round here on a Friday night.’

Chamberlain took a pair of sunglasses from her bag, smal er than the rather oversized pair Jenny Duggan was wearing. Chamberlain found herself wondering if, even now, fifteen years on and in a different city, the woman worried about being recognised.

‘I didn’t think you were al owed to drink on duty,’ Duggan said. ‘Or is that just something they say on TV?’

‘I’m not on duty, strictly speaking,’ Chamberlain said. ‘I’m retired, actual y. Just helping with an inquiry.’

‘Like a cold-case thing? Like on
Waking the Dead
?’

‘I suppose.’

‘I’ve always quite fancied the main bloke in that,’ Duggan said. ‘Do you know any coppers like him?’

‘Not many,’ Chamberlain said.

They sat there for ten minutes or more, talking about television, the weather, the job doing the accounts for a local furniture firm that Duggan had recently found for herself. Chamberlain knew she was ten years or so older than her drinking companion, but guessed that an impartial observer would have put it closer to fifteen. Duggan had looked after herself, maintaining a good figure and with her hair kept in the kind of shaggy bob that women a lot younger seemed to favour. Chamberlain was a little ashamed at wondering if the sunglasses might also be hiding the signs of having a bit of work done.

Duggan was talkative and relaxed. Chamberlain knew that she ought to be steering the conversation towards Garvey, but she was reluctant to push it, and not only because it was always useful to establish a rapport. She was enjoying their chat about nothing in particular. The sun was warm and the wine wasn’t too bad, and any passer-by would have taken them for two friends having lunch or gearing up for an afternoon at the shops.

‘So, you didn’t get married again?’ Chamberlain asked.

‘Sorry?’

‘You’re stil using your maiden name.’

Duggan laughed. ‘It’s a bloody good job you retired. Married again
and
divorced again.’

‘Oh, right.’

‘Don’t worry, this one wasn’t a serial kil er or anything.’ She took a slug of wine, swal owed it fast. ‘Just a selfish pig.’

Chamberlain did not know how to react, so said nothing and they stared at the traffic and the shoppers for a minute or more until Duggan said, ‘Ray never laid a hand on me, do you know that?’

Once again, Chamberlain had no reply.

‘Surprising, isn’t it, considering what happened later? He was a good husband, more or less. Good at his job, too.’ She looked away. ‘Good at kil ing, as it turned out.’

Chamberlain thought about the tumour, about the notion that it had changed Raymond Garvey’s personality. Could she and Thorne be wrong in dismissing the possibility so easily?

‘So, would you say that what he did was out of character?’

‘Wel , I wasn’t . . . shocked,’ Duggan said. ‘When these things happen, they talk to people, neighbours, whatever, and they always say, “I’d never have believed it” and “He seemed like such a normal bloke” and al that stuff. But when they told me what Ray had done, I just nodded. I remember the coppers’ faces, how they looked at each other, and for a while I’m sure they thought I’d known what he was doing, you know? Looking back, I think there was just something in him . . . a dark side, which I knew was there but wasn’t wil ing to face up to. Not that I had any bloody idea where it would lead, mind you.’

‘You couldn’t have known that.’

Duggan smiled, grateful. ‘Like I said, there were plenty who thought I did, but how much do you ever real y know? I mean, you hear about these cases, horrible stuff, men hiding children underneath the house and what have you, and I’m as bad as anyone, thinking the wives must have known what was going on. No smoke without fire, you know?’

‘Did you know he had a son?’

It took Duggan a while to say anything. Chamberlain stared at her, saw an expression of surprise that was no more than fleeting, and knew she was seeing an echo of the reaction from fifteen years before, when Jenny Duggan had been told that her husband had brutal y murdered seven women. She could understand why officers at the time had been suspicious.

‘I knew there were always other women,’ Duggan said, final y. ‘I knew . . . but I pretended I didn’t. Told myself I was just being stupid.’ She removed her sunglasses and laid them on the table. ‘You can understand that, right?’

Chamberlain nodded.
The less than lovely lies they told themselves and each other.

‘He kept al that out of the house, at least. He always came home.’

‘We’re looking for someone who would have been born around thirty years ago,’ Chamberlain said. ‘So . . .’

‘Just after we got married.’

‘Yes.’

Duggan nodded, thinking back, staring down at the last of the wine in her glass. ‘When we were trying for kids ourselves.’

Chamberlain waited.

‘There was a group of women he worked with at British Telecom,’ Duggan said. ‘A couple of them were married themselves, but they were a right bunch of slags. I went to a few nights out early on, but it was obvious partners weren’t real y welcome. I wondered back then if he might be knocking around with any of them.’

‘Can you remember any names?’

Duggan said she couldn’t, even when Chamberlain pressed her. But she said that she knew someone who might be able to help and told Chamberlain about a friend of Raymond Garvey from when he’d first joined BT. ‘Malcolm Reece was a wanker,’ she said. ‘He used to come round and sit there while I waited on him and Ray, making sandwiches and fetching them beer from the fridge. Sometimes I’d catch him smirking, like he knew something I didn’t, and once I got so angry I deliberately spil ed tea in his lap.’ She smiled, enjoying the memory, but not for long. ‘Even then I told myself I was imagining it, you know, about there being other women. Convinced myself that it was only Malcolm who was up to that kind of thing. He real y fancied himself. I remember one time he grabbed my arse when Ray wasn’t looking.’

‘Sounds like a charmer,’ Chamberlain said.

Duggan nodded and drained her glass. ‘Malcolm never went short of female company, that’s for certain.’ She sat back, leaned back and let the sun wash over her face. ‘If anyone knows what Ray was up to back then, who
with
, I mean, he wil .’

Chamberlain wrote down the name, along with the name of the street where Malcolm Reece had been living in the 1980s. She thanked Duggan for her time, especial y as it had involved her taking the morning off work.

‘I told them I’d got someone coming round to fix the boiler,’ Duggan said. ‘I’ve got used to tel ing lies over the years.’

As she put her notebook back in her bag, Chamberlain said, ‘Why didn’t you and Ray have kids?’

‘We wanted to. I couldn’t.’ Duggan’s tone was matter of fact, but Chamberlain could see the pain slide into her eyes before she let her gaze drop to the tabletop. Even after so many years, hearing that Raymond Garvey had fathered a child with someone else had obviously hurt. Chamberlain neglected to say that others had paid a far higher price for her ex-husband’s infidelity.

‘Do you fancy getting some lunch?’ Duggan asked. She pointed across the road to a smal Italian restaurant. ‘I mean, you probably need to get back.’

‘Wel , I’m not in a
mad
rush.’ Chamberlain was hungry, and she had thought to buy an open return. And, insignificant as it was in the scheme of things, the pain had not quite left Jenny Duggan’s eyes.

Kitson had made an appointment to see Dave Spedding, the DCI on the Chloe Sinclair murder. He was now a superintendent based in Victoria, so after leaving the Sinclair house in Balham, Thorne dropped Kitson off, then carried on towards the Peel Centre.

Driving north through the centre of town, he could not stop thinking about the horribly mixed emotions with which Miriam and Alec Sinclair had discussed their daughter. He’d seen enough grief to know that time would eventual y tip the balance, that the good memories would one day outweigh the dreadful ones. Slow but steady, it had been like that - was
still
like that - with his father. There would come a day - though with the man responsible for her death stil at large, he had not felt able to tel her parents - when Chloe’s name need not be whispered and when mention of her would not drive the air from their lungs like a sucker punch.

When cardigans would not need to be pul ed tight on warm days.

In slow traffic on the Euston Road, Thorne flicked through the radio channels, looking for something that would not annoy him too much. He stopped at a classical station, let his finger hover above the button, then moved it away. He could barely tel Beethoven from Black Sabbath, but the music was pleasant, and, despite the car’s stop-start progress, his mind began to drift.