In Bitter Chill (20 page)

Rachel was feeling guilty about her conversation with Connie. Doolally indeed. Nancy’s faculties were all there, despite her great age. There was nothing wrong with either Nancy’s mind or her memory, but that policewoman wasn’t going to be the one who unpicked it. Nancy could hold her secrets too, though, and Rachel would need to approach her with caution. Nancy’s carefree manner was, in its own way, as protective a cloak as her own prickly exterior. She pushed open the doors of Bampton library and Sydney Markham looked up from behind the desk, her expression changing from mild interest to excitement.

‘Any news?’ Sydney’s eyes brimmed with barely suppressed curiosity.

Rachel was too tired to engage. ‘What about?’

Sydney picked up on her mood. ‘You should take some time out instead of staring at a screen all day. Go and read a book.’ She pointed at a sign that was encouraging people to do the same.

Sydney’s smile was infectious and Rachel found herself smiling back. ‘Got any recommendations?’

‘A bit of fiction perhaps, help you escape from wintry Bampton. What about a crime novel?’

Rachel shook her head. ‘I’ve got to work. Got anything on the history of the old Bampton hospital that I might not have seen yet?’

Sydney looked concerned. ‘You’re not doing some investigating yourself are you, Rachel? You need to leave that to the police.’

Rachel looked at the floor, unwilling to catch Sydney’s eye. The librarian relented. ‘I’m pretty sure we’ve got nothing new. You know more about that place’s history than anyone else. Why don’t you look at the archives in the town hall?’

A recent conversation flashed into Rachel’s mind. ‘The ones Penny Lander was interested in? Did you send her there too?’

‘Penny?’ shrieked Sydney. ‘Of course not. Why should she want to go there? It’s not a place she would have visited.’

‘I think she did, you know.’ A tall middle-aged man had stopped serving a patron and called over to them. ‘It was one of the days you weren’t here. I was rushed off my feet and a woman was asking me about the location of the old records for Bampton hospital. She looked like the woman they found in the woods. I saw her picture on TV.’

‘And you told her that they were in the town hall archives?’

‘It was fresh in my mind as we’d had a memo saying that all the files were being transferred to the County Records Office next year but in the meantime they would be remaining in Bampton.’

‘And you told Penny Lander that they were there?’

‘If that was the woman’s name. It’s not secret, is it?’ The man was on his defensive now. As Sydney turned to reassure him, Rachel slipped away.

The town hall had been built at the height of Bampton’s Victorian prosperity. Once, it must have been a gleaming white edifice with its graceful porticos and imposing front lobby. Most of the stone had turned to a dull grey colour but it was still an impressive building, reminiscent of Bampton’s merchant past. The archives, naturally, were where archives often could be found: in the very pit of the building. This wasn’t a problem. Rachel liked archives, where the smell of long-forgotten records was combined with the archivists’ natural sense of order and precision.

Rachel had once been friends with the head archivist at the town hall but the woman had married and moved on. Now a serious young man, the badge pinned to his shirt naming him as Tim Dowling, with piercings down one ear, was in charge of the records. He listened to her request with the gravity of a patient receiving bad news from his doctor, which was probably about right, given what she was asking for. Her first surprise was the amount of files that were available.

‘We’ve got patient records going up to 1993 when the hospital shut down.’

‘And up to what year can I get access to?’

‘Up to 1993 if you like. But between 1968 and 1993 the only information we have are the death registers. Which are effectively in the public domain anyway.’

‘And before 1968?’

‘We’ve computerised some of patient’s records. The bare bones, of course. We have to follow data protection rules. But what we can record is interesting enough. We’d like to do it all if possible but we have time and budget restraints. But for researchers into medical history, we’ve got a good cross-section of patient details from 1912 when the hospital opened until 1968.’

‘And after 1968?’

‘They’re not here.’

‘Did they go to the new hospital when it opened?’

‘I doubt it. That’s a hell of a lot of material. And anyway, as I said, all records are confidential post-1968.

‘Why 1968?’

‘Sorry, I’ve no idea. Is it important?’

Rachel shrugged. Only if it was important to Penny Lander, she wanted to say. ‘Do you remember a lady coming in and asking similar questions to me? She would have been in her early sixties and tall and thin.’

‘I remember someone like that. It might have been her. She said she was a teacher and needed access to the records. For a school project, I think.’

‘Did she ask the same questions as me?’

‘Almost identical and I sent her to where I’m about to send you.’

‘Do you know exactly what she was looking for?’

He looked at her and silently shook his head.

‘Do you think she found what she wanted?’

The archivist, with his cool eyes and shorn head, nodded.

Someone at the archives had made an impressive job of putting the records onto the system. The first thing Rachel did when she started looking through the files was to familiarise herself with what the records contained. It was fairly unusual for recent records to be in the public domain, and although Rachel was itching to start looking through the files, her professional instinct warned her to check out the entire catalogue first.

Idly flicking through budget and staffing records, statistics on admissions and discharges from the wards, Rachel was surprised how much work this little hospital had done in the community. With the exception of mental health and isolation wards that had come under the auspices of the local authority, the hospital had over the years, courtesy of benefactors and other local worthies, cared for the people of the community. When the National Health Service was created in 1948, the cottage hospital had attached itself to the new system and, instead of relying on charitable donations, had received money from central government.

Finally happy that she had an overview of what the records contained, Rachel opened up the search page. There were various criteria and she hesitated over date and surname. Penny Lander was originally from Somerset and there should be no reason for her to be looking in Bampton cottage hospital’s records. In any case, she didn’t know Mrs Lander’s maiden name, so there was no useful search she could do for her. She had a try at just putting the name ‘Penelope’ in the search box, but the system insisted on a last name too. She typed in 
‘
Lander
’. 
Nothing came up so she removed the name of Penelope and waited. Nothing. Either there were no records for any of the Lander family before 1968, or they had been lost or mistranscribed. To be sure, Rachel tried a number of variations of Lander but nothing came up. Rachel hesitated over the keys and then typed in Jenkins. There were over four hundred results. She added Yvonne into the filter and again, nothing. Before 1968, Mrs Jenkins didn’t seem to have used the hospital either.

Rachel was frustrated and her throat raspy. She craved a can of Diet Coke. She had seen people smuggle all sorts of things into records offices – food, drink, banned cameras – but her diligence and respect for the records had never allowed her to contemplate doing such a thing herself. The two obvious surnames connected to the case – Jenkins and Lander – had been entered to no effect, and she’d gone even further and tried Weiss and Needham. There was something for Daniel, Richard’s father. But it was a minor abdominal operation according to the notes. Surely Penny Lander hadn’t come away triumphant from that.

She would have given up if the man at the desk hadn’t been so positive that Penny Lander had gone home having discovered something. So she typed in her own surname and was unsurprised to find over 12,000 results. The name Jones – the genealogist’s curse. She typed her mother’s first name into the filter and managed to narrow down the search to 232 entries but this was still too many. Massaging her temples, Rachel began to click on the results. Her own birth in 1970 wouldn’t be there and as she opened up the images, she began to see the futility of what she was trying to do. Her mother had been born in 1946 and a Mary Jones, aged seven, had had her appendix removed in 1954. Was this her mother? It was in the days before unique patient numbers and all Rachel had to go on was the name and the date on the records. It was possible that her mother had had her appendix out in 1954 and it was entirely feasible that another Mary Jones had had the operation on that summer’s day.

She knew that her mother had been born in Bampton hospital. So she typed in her grandmother’s name. Hannah Jones, the official name never used by the family, who had always referred to her by the diminutive Nancy. And sure enough she was there. Hannah Jones who, on 29 December 1946, gave birth to a daughter. Weight, nine pounds and nine ounces. A whopper of a baby and foretelling the child’s robust attitude in later life.

But now, when she thought of her mother, the image that came to mind was not of that vigorous woman, but as she had been in 1978 after the misery of those first few days. Her mother had appeared so strong and yet about a week after the kidnapping, Rachel had chanced upon her looking miserable on the sofa of their small living room. Her red eyes looked like she had been crying. Rachel, not knowing what to do and not used to seeing her mother like that, had simply sat next to her and held her hand. This has seemed to give her mother strength and when she spoke, the question was the last thing Rachel had been expecting.

‘Was the man who took you tall?’

Rachel had sharply withdrawn her hand. ‘Mum, I remember nothing.’

It had been the last conversation that they had ever had about the event. Her mother had either accepted the truth of Rachel’s words or she had simply decided to move on anyway. And here, on the screen in front of her, were the details of Mary Jones’s birth. Daughter of Hannah, known as Nancy. The patient information was scant. It had her grandmother’s date of birth, 1925, which made her twenty-one at her daughter’s birth. Young but nothing unusual in those days. On the top right-hand corner, there was a number 2. Presumably that was an internal reference number, and Rachel was inclined to ignore it, but she should at least find out what it meant.

She came out of the records and looked at for the accompanying overview. Flicking back and forth between screens, she finally came to the explanation of patient records. But something must be wrong. Because according to the overview, the digit in the top right-hand corner identified the total number of children that the patient had borne. According to Nancy’s records, Mary was birth number two. Rachel knew from her own research that Nancy had married in 1945, at the end of the war. Could there be another child before her mother who hadn’t survived? A quick search said no. Hannah Jones had given birth to no other children at Bampton hospital. Rachel sucked her pen in concentration. Perhaps there had been a stillbirth at home. She had seen that before. One lost baby quickly replaced by another, often given the same Christian name too. That would explain why no one had ever mentioned it in their family. There was one thing she needed to check. She typed in her grandmother’s maiden name, Price. There was one record for Hannah Price, a baby born in 1942. She checked the woman’s date of birth and felt her temperature cool, the ice tingling its way through her body. Hannah Price, born in 1925, had 
had
 a baby boy on the 12 June 1942.

The garden outbuilding was a large, solid stone construction that reminded Sadler of the sheds of his childhood. Warm dried grass competing with darker peaty aromas. Every time he opened a Sunday supplement, he could see a range of outhouses that owed more to extended living spaces than somewhere to keep your garden implements. Penny Lander’s shed wasn’t one of these. It had presumably been built at the same time as the house, with a tiny window near the top to let 
in
 some meagre light.

The forensic team had, in fact, examined the shed. Sadler could see the whitish traces of fingerprint powder on the runner of pine shelves hanging on one wall. But the rest of the structure seemed to have been given only a cursory glance. Decaying garden implements, old flowerpots, some still containing matted earth but no plants and an assortment of bric-a-brac.

‘I’m surprised you were looking in here. It’s a big job to clear it out.’ It sounded like an accusation, and by the tone of her response it was clear that Justine Lander had taken it as such.

‘I didn’t know where to start so I decided to make a list of everything that needed doing.’ There was a large lined notebook resting on one of the shed’s shelves. ‘When I got here, I started to make a list of what I needed to do and I remembered that old safe in the corner. It’s years since I saw it and I wondered if it was still there.’

‘So you went to have a look?’

‘Exactly. I had to move a load of stuff to find it but most of it had only been superficially laid in it its way. Do you see what I mean?’

She was looking at him. Appealing for him to understand rather than explain. He helped her out. ‘You mean that you think someone had been accessing it recently.’

‘Yes.’ She sounded relieved. ‘It’s been there for years, that safe. Certainly when I was growing up here. I used to play with it as a kid.’

‘Was it used?’ asked Sadler crouching down to get a better look.

‘God knows. My father was paranoid about security. He would never have left anything valuable in an outhouse. But the key did used to turn in the lock. I used to shut the safe like that when I was a kid. It’s rusted stiff now.’

Sadler tried to turn the big metal key in the lock and it was stuck rigid. Instead he pulled on it and the safe opened easily. Inside was a plastic file containing what looked like a sheaf of papers. He looked up at Justine, who stared down at him with impassive blue eyes.

‘Open it, you’ll see what I mean.’

Sadler straightened and looked up at the dim light. ‘It would be easier inside with a cup of tea.’

He followed her into the house and, instead of opening the folder, watched as she made the brew. She seemed unperturbed by his presence and, once more, he was struck by how different she was from Christina. Where Christina was glamorous and vibrant with nervous tension, Justine was solid and calm. He forced his eyes away from her movements and opened the folder. There was very little dust covering the plastic cover and it had clearly been placed in the outhouse safe only recently. Inside the packet there was a sheaf of papers, as he had expected. He pulled them out and spread them on the kitchen table. Sadler saw Justine look over at him.

‘You’ve seen them already?’ he asked.

‘I looked at them in the shed but they make very little sense to me. Mum seems to have been doing some kind of research into the old hospital. I wondered if it was to do with medical negligence.’

Sadler glanced up at her. ‘Negligence? Why would you say that?’

Justine came over and stood next to him, her body giving off a floral scent. ‘Well, why else would she be prying into the work of a hospital that had shut down? It must have been to do with something that happened there.’

Sadler shuffled through the sheets of paper. There was a yellowing newspaper cutting with the familiar photo of Rachel from around the time of the kidnapping. Sadler put it to one side and instead focused on the notes. Penny Lander’s handwriting had been small and neat. It looked like she had meticulously researched the history of the hospital and the procedures that it had used to record its patients. But which patient had she been most interest in? Not herself, as her daughter clearly thought. Sadler skim read the notes and one name, a name that Penny Lander had been interested in, jumped out at him. Nancy Price.

Connie met Nick Oates again for an update in the cinema. He was waiting with a large carton of popcorn which he offered to Connie but she refused. It was tasteless whether you added salt or sugar to the mix and it always left her with the need to belch violently. The film this time was another children’s story and Connie didn’t even bother to find out the title. They sat together at the end of a row near the door at the back of the theatre, making it easier to leave once they had finished, Connie presumed. He was clearly pleased with himself.

‘Your first task was the hardest. Find out if there were any men in Rachel’s mother’s life. I can tell you I’ve had a nightmare trying to find that out. She seems to have kept herself to herself and all the old neighbours I’ve spoken to – the ones I’ve been able to find, that is – tell me that they never saw her with anyone.’

Connie looked at the large cinema screen. ‘There was someone. Audrey Frost, an old neighbour thinks there was a man in her life, long gone by 1978. Or so we think.’

Nick Oates shifted in his seat, clearly irritated. ‘I’m just telling you I couldn’t find anything.’

She felt him glance at her in the gloom but he carried in his mild, cultured voice. ‘You asked me about the records of Bampton cottage hospital. Well, that was easy enough. They’re kept in the basement of the town hall in Bampton. I spoke to the guy there on the phone this morning. And guess what he told me.’

‘Penny Lander visited there.’

He let out a sigh. ‘Certainly a woman fitting her description. But not only that. While I was telephoning, I managed to get out of the guy that Rachel Jones was there at that very moment, nosing about the records.’

Connie wasn’t surprised. Sadler had been correct in his prediction that Rachel would be doing a bit of research herself. ‘What do you think she was after?’

‘She’s a researcher, for God’s sake. Why do you think she was there? Looking at the records.’

Connie sat with her arms folded. They’d never catch up with her. Rachel was a professional. Whatever Penny Lander had found, Rachel was certainly likely to discover it too. The question was to what extent would it be putting her in danger?

‘And any luck with where the girls might have been stashed for a couple of hours before ending up in Truscott Woods?’

The children’s film had reached a frightening part, at least if you were eight years old, and a collective hush had gathered over the cinema. Nick and Connie dropped their voices, although strangely Nick found it easier to do so than Connie. A woman sitting in front of them kept looking round, clearly suspicious of a professional-looking couple watching a children’s film.

‘You’re right about the time gap,’ whispered Nick, moving closer to her. ‘The children were kidnapped around quarter to nine on the morning of January the twentieth and Rachel was found on the Bampton Road around midday. It’s unlikely that they were at Truscott Fields all that time.’

‘According to the weather reports, after a clear start it was drizzling from about eleven a.m. onwards. There wouldn’t have been many people in the fields or the woods.’

‘It’s got to have been a residential address. The whole area is full of houses. The driver wouldn’t have been able to go far without attracting attention. In my opinion, she must have driven them into a driveway and bundled them into a house. Most likely a detached house with a driveway or garage, where the girls could be removed from the car without anyone noticing.’

‘That narrows it down a bit, I suppose. The posher houses are mainly around the High Oaks area of the town. OK, so we’re agreed that the girls were taken to a holding address, probably a house. What about after that?’

He looked at her in the flickering gloom of the cinema.

‘It’s where Sophie must have been killed.’

They sat saying nothing for a moment, watching the screen in silence. The young mother in front of them clearly found their silence more suspicious and once more turned to look at them.

‘But we still don’t have a motive for why the girls were kidnapped in the first place. We’re agreed that it was Rachel who was the target, not Sophie,’ said Connie.

‘I think so. Sophie Jenkins has been missing since 1978, and although her mother killed herself only recently, there’s no evidence she was looking into anything to do with the girls’ disappearance.’ Nick was trying to peer at his notebook in the gloom. ‘Her death seems to have brought to a head Penny Lander’s investigations. Up until last year, she was a busy schoolteacher with a husband and grown-up child. Within the space of a year she lost her husband and retired from her job.’

‘And she started to look into something around the old hospitals. In all likelihood something had been bubbling away in her mind for a while and she decided to act on it.’

‘Oh no. I’ve found something much more concrete than that.’ He was struggling to keep the satisfaction out of his voice.

‘Go on.’

‘Penny Lander and Yvonne Jenkins met three days before Yvonne Jenkins committed suicide.’

She turned towards him. ‘You’re kidding.’

‘I’m not. They met in the foyer of the Wilton Hotel and had coffee. The waiter remembered her, Penny Lander, I mean, because he was another one of her ex-pupils. Or something like that. He certainly went to St Paul’s school. So I showed him a photograph of Yvonne Jenkins – which, incidentally, was bloody hard to get hold of.’

‘I’m surprised you found anything.’

‘Well, it was an old passport photo and, as I say, don’t ask me how I got hold of it.’

‘And the waiter recognised her from it?’

‘He recognised her as the woman Penny Lander had had coffee with a few days earlier before she died.’

‘So the two of them met.’

‘Yes, and what’s more, something was handed over.’

‘What? What was handed over?’

‘Well, I don’t know that. The guy couldn’t see that much. But it fit inside an envelope and it was handed over to Yvonne Jenkins.’

‘And you think that act might have tipped Yvonne Jenkins into killing herself?’

‘Well, it’s possible, don’t you think?’

Connie shuffled in her seat, the soft velveteen uncomfortable against her black trousers. ‘And then what do you think happened? That after Yvonne Jenkins killed herself, Penny Lander decided to confront the person who figured in her suspicions.’

Nick shut his notebook with a slap. ‘That’s my best guess.’

Connie paused for a second. ‘Any idea on identities?’

She felt Nick shrug beside her. ‘The girls were kidnapped by a woman but in her early statements Rachel also said she remembered a man. The people who were part of Penny’s life then, and that are still potential suspects, are her husband, his sister and her fellow schoolteachers.’

‘But James Lander is dead.’

‘So it’s not him then, is it?’

Sadler looked at the name, Nancy Price, written in capitals on Penny Lander’s notebook and surrounded by a circle made with a firm stroke of a pen. Sadler thought back to his conversation with Rachel. She had mentioned her mother, Mary Jones, and her grandmother Nancy, née Price. There had been mention of a great-grandmother too. But Nancy Price was the name written here. It would explain the continual clicking on the page on Rachel Jones’s website that contained her family tree. Penny Lander had been familiarising herself with the names in that family before her trip to the records office. And it was the name of Nancy Price, Rachel’s grandmother, that was the link Penny had been looking for.

‘Is it significant?’

Sadler turned to look at the woman standing at his side with a concerned look on her face. This was a bereaved daughter, he had to tell himself, and yet her expression conveyed sympathy to him. He moved his eyes back to the page.

‘Does it mean anything to you?’

She looked surprised at this. ‘Not at all. Should it? Who’s Nancy Price?’

Sadler was flicking through the remaining leaves of paper. It looked like background jottings, the notes that Penny had made leading up to his discovery of Nancy Price’s name.

‘She’s a connection,’ said Sadler, putting the notes down on the kitchen table.

‘To Mum’s murder?’

Sadler turned to look at her now. ‘Yes’. He could see her mouth trembling as she tried to contain the emotion.

‘Will you find her? This Nancy Price?’

Sadler wanted to reach out and touch her but instead put his hand in his pocket and pulled out his phone. ‘I already know where she is.’

He dialled Connie’s number and waited. There was no answer and the rings eventually switched onto voicemail. Damn. He scrolled down to Palmer’s number, then remembered that he was getting married that weekend. Tomorrow, in fact. Sadler had lost track of which day of the week it was. There was nothing for it. He would have to interview Rachel Jones himself. He looked up at the kitchen clock. It was half-past five on a Friday. A time when people were winding down in readiness for the weekend, although still early enough to conduct a friendly interview. But Rachel Jones wasn’t answering her mobile either.

In frustration he put his phone back in his pocket. His eyes fell on the newspaper cutting. He picked it up and looked at the photograph. It was a picture of both Rachel and her mother smiling at the camera. The caption at the bottom proclaimed, ‘Mary and Rachel Jones celebrating their tombola win.’ Mary Jones was holding in her arms a large doll that surely would have been too childish for the eight-year-old Rachel. Sadler frowned at the date on the clipping. August 1977. The picture had been reproduced by countless other newspapers reporting on the subsequent kidnapping. But this clipping was from the original event, a school fete in 1977. And it wasn’t a modern-day reproduction either. Its yellow crinkled texture gave away its thirty-seven years.