In Bitter Chill (7 page)

Connie looked at him in surprise, swallowing her outrage. That was a new one on her. If they specified, it was usually that they wanted a woman. Llewellyn looked down at her.

‘She never came across as particularly traumatised as a child. She just seemed to pick up and carry on as though the incident never happened. Now I’m beginning to wonder if we didn’t underestimate the ordeal she went through.’

He looked at Sadler. ‘Anyway, she asked for a man and I’d prefer, Sadler, if it was you.’

Rachel wondered if they had sent the best-looking detective in Bampton on purpose. He wasn’t young, maybe five years older than her, but he was still attractive, although there was a wariness in his face. Don’t come too close, his expression shouted, which was fine by her. He was also very tall, filling her small living room, and she was relieved when he sat down in her armchair. She felt less claustrophobic with him like that. At least Llewellyn hadn’t sent a woman. However surprised he’d been by her request, he had listened to her. She remembered the young PC called Wendy who had been assigned to her in 1978. She’d insisted on treating Rachel like a five-year-old. She was eight at the time of her kidnapping and already used to looking after herself. Not like Sophie, who wanted to be mummied all the time. Wendy had gone down on her knees and tried to interest her in dolls and teddies, which had heightened Rachel’s sense of the unreality of the situation.

The detective refused tea and sat watching her. Llewellyn had been kind on the phone. She could still recall his kindness from before and it hadn’t disappeared in the intervening years. He had sent this policeman to her.

‘We’re going to assign a patrol car outside your house for the time being. It won’t be there all the time; we can’t afford the resources, I’m afraid. But it’ll pass by your house on a regular basis and it’ll park itself for a while across the road from you. As your front door opens straight onto the street, there isn’t a huge amount we can do. They can even peer in through your windows if they’re standing on the pavement.’

‘Am I not entitled to any privacy at all?’

‘Inside your house, of course. And if the press start being a nuisance we can try and get an order, restraining them from coming closer than a specific distance from your property. But if all they’ve done is knock on your door so far, then there’s not much we can do.’

‘They’ve left me alone all these years and now – after Mrs Jenkins chooses to take her own life – I’m being pestered again.’

She saw a look of distaste cross his face. It had probably been the wrong choice of words. But the woman had had a choice. More than she and Sophie had back then.

‘In my experience, the press move quickly when it comes to news. When Yvonne Jenkins’s suicide is confirmed, you’ll most likely be left alone.’

‘You’re sure it’s suicide?’

She noticed the detective looking at her shelf of books. ‘We need to wait for toxicology tests to come back but, yes, we’re fairly certain it was suicide.’

‘But why now?’ Rachel’s voice had risen a fraction and again she saw that look of distaste.

‘There’s been a lot of research into suicides. The reasons are rarely cut and dried. It may be that Mrs Jenkins simply decided to end her own life one day.’

‘And the Wilton Hotel?’

He looked at her now. ‘Suicides often choose a neutral space to kill themselves. It distances them from their actions. That’s probably all there is to it.’

Rachel stood up and crossed to the window. Through the sheer curtains she could see the huddle of reporters. It looked like Sadler was right. There were fewer of them then there had been that morning. Or perhaps it was simply lunchtime.

‘She never got in touch with me, you know,’ said Rachel, still staring out of the window.

‘What, after the abduction?’

Rachel swung round to face him.

‘Never. The last time I saw her was the morning that I knocked on Sophie’s house to pick her up for the walk to school. She never bothered to come round after that.’

Sadler was staring at her. ‘Not even to get your version of events?’

‘Nothing. It really upset my mother. And after about eight months we moved out to Clowton.’

Still he stared. ‘Rachel, she’d lost her daughter. The most shocking and unthinkable act that any mother should have to face. No chance to say goodbye; no idea where Sophie had disappeared to. And there was never any resolution. Her mind must have been turning over possible scenarios.’

Rachel could feel her head begin to pound.

‘And however traumatic your experience, and that of your mother, she at least got you back. Did 
your
mother visit Yvonne Jenkins?’

Rachel shook her head. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘And don’t you think that’s strange. That the mother who’d had her child returned to her didn’t go and see the woman who’d lost hers.’

His eyes were still on her. Beyond the compassion she could read something else. He was assessing her. She’d read him wrong at first glance, she realised now.

‘I do need to ask you, Rachel, if anything has come back to you over the intervening years. About what happened in 1978.’

She was relieved to get off the subject of her mother. ‘Nothing. I remember nothing beyond getting into the car and the woman making the wrong turn at the top of the road. Sophie was crying and I was banging on the windows, but no one could see us. She was driving fast, the woman, and she said nothing to us. Just kept her eyes on the road and kept driving. I remember thinking, I’m going to climb over and turn the wheel so she crashes the car. But there was no time even to do that.’

‘You ended up in Truscott Woods.’

‘Exactly, but I don’t remember getting there. I remember banging on the windows and then the next thing someone looking after me after I had been found on the road. I don’t even remember the car stopping. It’s all a complete blank.’

‘You don’t remember seeing something, another car for example, waiting for you at the woods. Or perhaps another place.’

Rachel looked across at him. ‘I remember nothing. Sometimes I think I can remember figures standing together in a group, but I’m never sure if that is my imagination. What I definitely do remember is being in a person’s car, with a dog blanket around my shoulders, and someone was telling me that my mum was on my way. And feeling really, really sick. A sickness that I’ve never felt before. The doctors thought it might have been the chloroform.’ She looked down. ‘The rest you know.’

‘And nothing has ever come back?’

‘I told you no. Nothing. Can you imagine how that feels? I’ve lain awake night after night trying to remember, but nothing comes back.’

Connie sidled up to Palmer and watched in amusement as he gave a small start when he noticed how close she was to him.

‘Jesus, Connie. You gave me a shock.’

‘You all right, Palmer? You looked a bit ill in the meeting.’

Now she was close up, Connie could see Palmer’s skin was veiled in a thin sheen of sweat. Palmer looked away but stepped closer to her. ‘Between you and me, Joanne’s being a complete nightmare. I’m getting married next month and I’m not sure I can stand it any more.’

How Palmer and Joanne had ever got together was a complete mystery to Connie. The only thing they seemed to have in common were groomed good looks, but perhaps that was enough. Joanne worked as a physiotherapist in one of the doctor’s surgeries in Bampton and, on the rare social events that she had turned up to, had shown little interest in the workings of the detective team. However, when Joanne had spotted her and Palmer one evening huddled together discussing the possible suspects in a recent hit-and-run accident, things had nearly turned nasty. A headache had been invented and a reluctant Palmer had been dragged off home with a martyred air. And now they were getting married. Connie stepped back. ‘Is it because of the body in the Wilton Hotel? Look—’

‘It’s not just that. It’s everything. Nothing I do is right. I’m seriously thinking I made a mistake ever agreeing to get married. We were happy as we were.’

‘Seriously?’

He looked at her in agony. ‘Are all women like this before they get married?’

‘No idea. Don’t ask me. I’ve got nowhere near the altar. Have you tried to have it out with her?’

‘She spends all her time with her mother. I can’t get near enough to have a proper chat.’

Connie considered. ‘Maybe talk to Sadler,’ she suggested finally.

Palmer gave her an affronted look and walked off.

She walked over to her desk and waited for the computer to boot up. The room was empty and she frowned, looking around. There should be more people than this coming in and out of the large open-plan office. When the archaic computer finally cranked to life she opened the Internet browser. A quick trawl online revealed what she already had suspected. That women were rarely the perpetrators of child abductions. Myra Hindley was the famous one of course, but there were people who thought that she was just an accomplice of Ian Brady, and if their paths had never crossed in that Hattersley housing estate, Hindley might had led a different life. Connie wasn’t so sure about this, but the tragic events to the west of Derbyshire over forty years ago were a distraction she didn’t need at the moment.

There were also plenty of news reports about the role Rose West had played in abducting the girls selected by her husband. She had allegedly been in the car with him when he’d picked up his victims, her presence reassuring the wary, which in Connie’s eyes was a heinous crime. Both had been accomplices of men though, so perhaps a man had been behind the 1978 kidnapping. The woman with the sunglasses in January an accessory to a more devilish personality. She wouldn’t get far looking at the Internet. Sadler was interviewing Rachel now – she needed help from another direction. Psychologists bored Connie. They would give her some waffle about women dominated by men and she’d be no nearer finding a solution. Connie preferred tangible facts to wishy-washy imaginings.

She went hunting for the tea chests that she’d found in Yvonne Jenkins’s attic. They’d been shoved into the corner of an empty office, a breach of procedure that cheered her up. It seemed that recently everything in this station was about adhering to correct policy and scrutinising your methods of working as part of the drive for standardisation. It made for dreary detective work. But, as Sadler had rightly pointed out, in 1978 with their more primitive policing the team had still done a half-decent job. They hadn’t solved the case, admittedly, but still, Connie envied the freedom the team must have had compared to today.

There were two large chests, with no lids, made of pale plywood with metal rims, going slightly rusty. Both were covered with tartan blankets which had been pushed around the contents. She felt for the one that she had rummaged through in the attic, with the child’s shoes on top. But the contents were disappointing. A collection of children’s clothes from the 1970s, including dresses that Sophie must have grown out of by the time she’d been kidnapped. Yvonne Jenkins had obviously kept some items for sentimental reasons.

The second chest initially looked as hopeless, filled at the top with soft toys and a doll with hard brittle limbs. But at the bottom were two photo frames, made from moulded wood with gilt edging. The photos inside showed a family of three people. Yvonne Jenkins, as Llewellyn had indicated, had been a very attractive woman, although her large eyes had stared confused at the camera in both shots. Then there was little Sophie Jenkins. In the first portrait she looked, to Connie’s inexperienced eyes, about two years old. She had been a chubby child, with her pale hair parted into two neat bunches. By the second photo, she had lost most of the baby fat and was a serious child, about school age, although Connie was now struggling to guess her exact age. But in any case, she was more interested in the man standing in both photographs, wearing the same beige suit. In the earliest photo, he looked resigned. In the second, angry. This, presumably, was Peter Jenkins.

She was about to put everything back when she noticed something screwed up in the corner. She reached into the chest and groped for it. What emerged was a grubby child’s sock, its shabbiness a startling contrast to the pristine neatness of the rest of the chest’s contents. It had been scrunched up and thrown into the corner of the box. Connie stuck her head into the chest to double-check she hadn’t missed its pair but the chest was completely empty. Slowly, Connie unfurled the sock. It would probably have been knee high on an eight-year-old child. She could remember wearing similar styles made out of knobbly white material with small flowers snaking down one side. Connie weighed it up in her hand and wondered.

Outside Rachel Jones’s cottage, Sadler’s mobile phone vibrated in his jacket pocket. He looked at the number. Christina. Plus five missed calls. She wasn’t going to be happy.

Christina was married to a Greek businessman who had decidedly traditional views on marriage. This meant that he dallied with the occasional lover while she was remunerated handsomely for her role as homemaker and mother. Christina, whose paternal grandmother had taught her a few things about how this arrangement worked in practice, had met Sadler at a party about six years ago and they had become lovers. He thought about ignoring the call but she seemed to have a sixth sense when it came to being given the brush off.

‘I’m in the middle of something.’

‘Morning to you too,’ said the voice and Sadler reluctantly smiled. ‘Are we still on for later?’ Christina’s deep, slightly masculine voice had been one of the first attractions for Sadler. Now that she was cross with him, it had lost that rich depth.

‘Yes, six o’clock,’ he said looking at his watch. ‘There’s no reason I should be delayed.’

‘Well, ring me if you are. I’m not sitting in that pub for half an hour like last time. If you’re going to be late, call me.’

‘Of course, Christina. Bye.’ He cut the connection and wondered. He’d heard the sounds of breakfast being eaten in the background. How much did her family know about their meetings?

Sadler looked at the group of reporters huddled together and went across to the patrol car that had recently drawn up outside the house. Inside were two uniformed officers he hadn’t seen before. They were both listening intently to the police radio. Sadler rapped on the window.

‘Sorry about this. You just need to keep an eye on the reporters. If you see them peering in the windows, warn them off. The woman inside needs to be able to go about her business.’

‘Of course.’ The officer in the passenger seat nodded at the car radio. 
‘Something’s going on over the other side of town. Any idea what that’s all about?’

Sadler frowned and listened to the disembodied voices coming across the airwaves. There was an urgency about the responses which the two professionals in the car had picked up on.

‘What was the initial call?’ he asked.

‘A hysterical woman dialled 999 saying she had found a body. The dispatcher couldn’t even get a location from her to begin with as the woman was in such as state.’

‘And now?’

‘They’re heading towards Truscott Fields, behind the woods.’

Sadler’s heart gave a lurch and yet his brain was struggling to make a connection. Body meant recent. Not the old bones they would be looking for. He reached for his phone that had been vibrating in his pocket during the interview with Rachel Jones and accessed his call log. Four of the five missed calls were from Palmer, the other from Connie.

‘And have they found someone?’

‘Body of a woman, apparently. First response is saying it looks like she was strangled. And recently.’

Sadler looked back at Rachel’s house. ‘I need to get down there. Can you stay here and keep an eye on things? Although, once the news gets out my guess is you’ll be watching an empty street.’

Truscott Woods was an ancient site, the remnants of a great forest that had once cut a swathe over the lower parts of the Derbyshire Peaks. The area that remained was about a square mile in size, and Sadler could remember his father being fascinated by the patch of woodland with its ancient history. He’d tried to instil the same awe in his young son and Sadler, anxious to please his usually unemotional parent, had accompanied him deep into the forest, along the overgrown pathways, to get a sense of what had once been.

But if he’d been given a choice, Sadler would have joined the thousands of visitors who ventured no further than thirty metres or so from the wood’s entrance in the car park off the Bampton Road. The outer pathways were well maintained by the council and regularly used by dog walkers and families at the weekend to lark about amongst the trees. But as you went deeper into the woods the paths, although still well kept, became boggy and the trees denser. The sense of claustrophobia was enhanced by the profusion in this area of birch trees, their thin silvery trunks masking the sturdy branches leaning towards each other to form a canopy. Next to the wood’s entrance stood Truscott Fields, common land enshrined in a charter dating back to 1415. Nothing was allowed to be done to change the nature of this piece of land. Over the years, groups of parents had petitioned the local authority for a play area to be erected near the car park but to no avail. An ancient edict was a law to be obeyed, however much time had changed, and no leeway was to be given, even to accommodate the voting public.

Few who came on a summer’s day to wander along the paths or to exercise their dogs knew the dark history of the place. As thirty miles to the west the regeneration of Hattersley was sweeping away traces of the material lives of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, in Truscott Woods emphasis was given to its ancient existence and mediaeval importance. The discovery of a shivering girl in 1978 had been eradicated from the wood’s history although the case had made Bampton infamous throughout the country. However, Truscott Woods was about to stake a claim for notoriety in the twenty-first century, judging by the hive of activity in the distance. Pulling up at the car park, Sadler glanced into the entrance of the woods. Perhaps, somewhere in that dense woodland, the body of Sophie Jenkins lay undisturbed.

Connie padded over to meet him in floral wellingtons, her face scrunched up against the cold. He’d spotted the boots in the back of the car but this was the first time she’d worn them. The crude red poppies dabbed gaudily on a white background seemed out of place in the bleak scrub of this setting. She was bursting to tell him something and pulled against his arm in a proprietorial manner.

‘You’re not going to believe this,’ she hissed, pulling him away from the entrance to Truscott Fields where he could see the familiar white tent erected. ‘The SOCOs are working there now. It’s going to be another couple of hours at least before we can get anywhere near it.’

‘Did you get to see anything?’

Connie leaned closer to him. ‘I arrived not long after the patrol car called it in. Either the death is very recent, I mean as in today, or the cold weather helped preservation. Because the victim isn’t in that bad a state, considering that she has been exposed to the elements.’

‘Any sign of cause of death?’

‘There
’s 
a kind of cord around her neck. A piece of thin rope, it looked like to me. Still left
in situ
.’

‘ID?’

‘It looks like her handbag had been slung over the fence from the field into the woods. It was easy to find. The killer obviously made an attempt to get rid of it. Probably couldn’t take the risk of being seen leaving with it.’

‘And any ID inside? Come on, Connie, answer the question.’ Sadler was looking at the white tent, where he noticed the pathologist Bill Shields heaving his body under the tape.

‘Credit cards in the name of Mrs Penny Lander. Didn’t mean anything to me. But the old boy in the patrol car says a Mrs Lander in St Paul’s primary school used to teach his daughter before she retired.’

‘St Pauls?’ asked Sadler. ‘Wasn’t that where . . .’

‘Yes, where Sophie and Rachel were pupils in 1978. We think we’re on the right track as there’s a car in the car park registered to a Mr James Lander. The blue BMW over there.’

Sadler looked at where Connie was pointing. A dirty dark blue BMW was parked at an angle in the car park. It looked like it had been put there in a hurry, taking up two spaces.

‘Hadn’t anyone noticed it sitting there?’ asked Sadler.

‘We’re checking now, but we don’t think there have been any reports of a missing car.’ She looked up at him. ‘You think there’s a connection to our case?’

Sadler thought back to Rachel Jones, whom he’d left sitting disconsolately on the sofa. First Yvonne Jenkins and now Penny Lander.

‘Do you believe in coincidence, Connie?’

She didn’t even pause to think. ‘In this job? Never.’