Echoes of the Past (16 page)

“Listening
to you, it sounds as though your sister was a cautious woman.”

“Oh
yeah, she was very responsible. There is no doubt in my mind that if she was not forcibly abducted then she was with someone she trusted the night she disappeared.”

The
waiter arrived and served a large portion of chips and chicken to Clair and a steak and ale pie with all the trimmings to Tom. Tom swapped the wine for coke, but Clair opted for the wine. Tom enjoyed the light conversation over lunch; it had been a long time since he had sat with a woman and ate a meal. Not counting Lee of course, who in Tom’s mind was not a woman, but his sister-in-law.

As
it was starting to get dark outside, the conversation drew back round to Jenny.

“I
don’t know what your beliefs are, but for me, I have gone to mediums etcetera to try and find out what happened.”

“I
don’t really believe in that sort of thing, I like to work with hard facts, evidence. Things that can’t be questioned,” Tom said.

Clair
laughed. “Yeah, most men are the same. If they cannot explain it, then they forget it. Most men walk about oblivious to the things around them. Anyway I won’t hold it against you. As I said over the years I have tried to speak with Jenny, a couple of times she has come through and I got the usual crap about her being happy and at peace, but I didn’t get anything concrete until I saw a medium in Glasgow. He was only a young man but he was red hot. He told me that she was dead, that I knew. However, he said that she had made a new friend that night and that it was a fatal error on her part. Anyway to cut to the chase, he said she had been speaking to a young man that had been on the train before and that he had walked her to her hotel.”

Tom
listened to what she was saying, for some reason he was not as keen to dismiss Clair as easily as he was Lee. He felt a slight confusion as to why such an intelligent woman would buy into all that sort of thing. He noticed she was staring silently at him. “What else did he say?”

“That
was it. Jenny wanted me to stop looking and live my life; everything will turn out as it is meant to be.”

“So
if this psychic is to be believed, she befriended someone on the train and he killed her. So where do you think her body is?”

Clair
thought for a moment. “Well, if you didn’t want a body to be found what would you do with it.”

Immediately
an answer popped into Tom’s head followed by another option. The lochs were deep enough to hide a body, they were definitely large enough for one to go unnoticed provided it never surfaced. The other option was the farms in Coppersfield. They afforded the owner a certain amount of privacy and if you were to bury someone on your land, the chances of anyone ever stumbling across it would be slim to none.

“I
can see your brain working, what are you thinking?” Clair said.

“I
was just realizing that if this was someone who had just recently befriended your sister and there were no real connections leading back to them, then why go to such lengths to hide the body; unless this is something they have done before and plan on doing again.”

A
chill ran up Clair’s spine. “So you think there may be other women out there that went missing that met with this person?”

“Oh,
I know there is.” Tom was starting to mentally note the best locations in Coppersfield to hide a body. The list was a lot longer than he liked.

*****

He watched silently as the woman climbed from her blue mini. She was tall and slender with long blond hair. Just the way he liked them. He had been watching her for over 20 years. He drew a deep breath and tried to imagine the smell of her hair, the silky touch of her skin. He could imagine the stark deep red of her blood against her pale complexion.

With
a sigh, he regained his control. He hated it when he could not have what he wanted. But deep down he knew that she was too close to home, he had learned that lesson the hard way with Angela Harrison. His mind wandered back to the beating he had been given for the choice in his first victim.
Never
choose
someone
you
know
!
Never
take
someone
that
can
be
traced
back
to
you
! Yes, that had stayed with him, and had served him well. It also, unfortunately, meant he could never have this one. She had been next on his bucket list all those years ago.

He
watched as the wind whipped her blond waves around as she entered the café, the only consolation he could offer himself, was the fact that she was now too old to truly satisfy his hunger, but oh, it would have been nice to try.

*****

Lee entered the café. It was much busier than usual for this hour in the morning.

“Gosh,
Elsie, what you doing, given out free food?”

Elsie
smiled. “No, it’s the hint of spring in the air, dear; brings them all out with full appetites.”

Jim
Watt and his friend sat by the window chatting over coffee. Dr Styles, who didn’t talk to anyone before 9am, sat at the other window devouring a cooked breakfast oblivious to the fact that his practice was due to open three minutes ago. Matt was waiting in line for coffee to go as he was heading down to Glasgow on business.

“Don’t
worry; I will be back in plenty of time for the girls coming up today.” He assured Lee as he headed out the door.

Lee
felt a pang of guilt that Elsie had been run ragged since the shop opened at 8am that morning.

“You
sit down and have a coffee and I will deal with the rest,” said Lee. She continued to clear another five tables that had been in use, she gave out some takeaway orders and then as things quietened down she began to clear the kitchen.

Elsie
giggled in the corner.

“What’s
so funny?”

“Oh,
just Dr Styles. He always forgets to pay in the morning. I would be scared to death if I were his first appointment in the morning. He will come in here at tea time all apologetic, you know, offering a big tip for running out on his bill this morning.”

Lee
smiled at the absent-minded old man.

“Sorry
you were left to it this morning. Tom didn’t get back from Glasgow until really late so I dropped Jess at school.”

“Don’t
give it another thought, dear, I like to keep busy. You know the old saying, the devil makes work.”

“I
saw John Caulder this morning on my way in, Elsie. He said all the tickets for his psychic night are already sold out.”

“Yes,
I’m looking forward to it, are you?”

Lee
avoided answering. “You know, Elsie, you have lived here forever, if I were to ask you about some of the men in the village, the ones over say sixty-five, who would you say were the strangest?”

“Define
strange.”

“You
know, just a funny vibe.”

Elsie
thought about it as she looked round the room. “You see Jim over there. Now he is a sweet enough man, but I think.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “He and his little friend there are into cupboards.”

“Cupboards?
You mean like joinery, or antiques?”

“No.”
Elsie rolled her eyes. “
In
the
cupboard
!” she whispered, over pronouncing the words.

Lee
swallowed her laughter trying not to offend the older woman.

“I
see.” She felt there was probably no point in following this line of conversation any further. Anyway, part of her felt that Tom for once had it wrong. Coppersfield was too small a place for someone to get away with anything like what Tom was suggesting without someone noticing.

*****

At 11am, Tom woke to the phone ringing. An over excited Danny was on the other end. Tom wanted to spend the day reading over his wife’s files, he felt as though fate was pulling him away from it and he was sure that there were answers buried in it somewhere. Reluctantly he dressed and headed down to the station house to see what his prodigy had found.

Danny
was sitting at the computer, the printer was spitting out sheet after sheet.

Tom
handed him a paper cup from the café. “What have you got?”

Danny
gathered up the papers and handed them to him. Tom read through them.

“This
doesn’t make sense, Danny. This one is 2007, if this is our guy, then taking it from Susanna Wheeling in 1968, that would mean there is forty years between the first and the last, that’s a long time to be active and go unnoticed. Supposing he was in his twenties to early thirties when he started that would mean he was in his sixties maybe seventies now. That would take a fit man of that age to over power a young woman in her twenties.”

“Not
common, but certainly not impossible. And if you are right about him being from around here, farmers are strong men.”

“IF,
he’s a farmer. That’s all supposition,” Tom said.

Danny
leaned forward and handed Tom a picture of the girl. “You can’t deny the resemblance, she is his type.”

Tom
sat back in the easy chair and rubbed his hand over his unshaven chin. She certainly did look like the others.

“So,
what else have you got that makes you convinced that she is one of ours?” Tom asked.

Danny
picked up a note pad beside the computer and flicked the pages back to the beginning. “Firstly, her name is Chloe Davis. She was twenty-four when she vanished. She was in the service industry, part-time bar work. She was training to be a lawyer at Glasgow University.”

“So
she was smart.”

“On
the morning of August 16th, she left her home to meet with some friends. Her car was parked in Glasgow and there is some CCTV footage of her walking toward the bar where she worked in, but it was closed at that time. She turns the corner and just vanishes.”

“Let
me guess, her car was left behind, no one has seen her since, and no one reported a disturbance in the area at that time.”

“On
the money, Sarge. I think she is most defiantly one of ours.”

“Has
anyone checked to see if she is on any other CCTV footage anywhere else in the city?”

“Yes,
there was no sign of her. This was in 2007; the importance of a young girl disappearing was taken far more seriously. She was on the news for some time. Her family tried to keep the story alive, but there was simply nothing new to report.”

“You
said she turned a corner and vanished. Were the cameras down in that street?”

“No,
there are no cameras, just a black spot.”

“What
about her friends, did they say where they were to meet?”

“That’s
the thing, there isn’t anything in here about her friends, I don’t know if the statements are missing or what. Something defiantly worth looking into.”

“Did
they recover anything from her, a bag or purse or anything?”

“Nothing,
Sarge.”

“What’s
the status of her file?”

“Open
abduction case. They did not even consider the possibility that she ran off. The difference forty years can make to the force, ehh. If they had taken Susanna Wheeling as seriously, you and I might not have been having this conversation.”

“You
could say the same about anyone of these women.” Tom sighed and rubbed his face. “Like everything else, Danny, the force learns from its mistakes.”

Danny
handed Tom the completed file he had compiled. He sat silently as Tom looked over the pages.

“I
think I will go down and speak to the family, I also think its time we spoke to the DI.”

“You
can, but he told me to leave off Angela Harrison. He said it was beyond cold and not to look in to things unless there was new evidence.”

“I
know, they’re all on this new drive of closing cases, if they can be done cheaply and easily with little man power. Well, there is not anything here to take to the CPS, but we have to show him what we have so far. If nothing else, we really need to inform the intelligence officer in case someone else is looking into something similar.”

“Did
you get anything new on Jenny Phillips?” Danny asked.

“A
couple of papers and a shift diary. She was studying economics, so it looks as though he likes them smart. If you can set me up an appointment with Chloe’s family, I will try to match it with the DI. Kill two birds with one stone. I promised to go with Lee to see her Dad at the home today, so call me if you can get hold of the family.”