Murder Club (23 page)

‘What kind of affairs?’

‘The usual. Banking, investments. Like I say, it was more of a holiday and he didn’t ever stop long. We didn’t see much of him.’

‘Your husband had had a falling-out with him?’

‘Not at all. Why do you ask that?’

‘The way you say you didn’t see much of him.’

‘They are both busy men. And some families … well they are not all the same, are they, Inspector.’

‘Certainly not.’

‘Do you have any siblings?’

‘I have a sister.’

‘And do you see much of her?’

‘Sadly not. She lives in America. In Pennsylvania.’

‘Once a very religious part of the world.’

‘Not these days. My sister’s married to a cop. Seems he is kept pretty busy.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘So the last time you spoke to Jeremy …’

‘He had come back from Africa. Twenty years ago. He had phoned us.’

‘Did he speak to you or your husband?’

‘He spoke to me, Inspector.’

‘And what did he say?’

‘Very little. He said he’d come to attend to some matters of pressing urgency and arranged to come to the vicarage for dinner a couple of nights later.’

‘Did he say what the matters were?’

‘No. But he did say that he had left the missionary society that he was working for.’

‘Was that a surprise?’

‘I really couldn’t say, Detective. He didn’t really say much.’

‘Not even at dinner?’

‘He never turned up, Inspector Delaney. And we never saw him again.’

‘And you have no idea what happened to him?’

‘One phone call, a message left on our answer-phone to say he was fine and would be in touch. But that was the last we heard.’

‘He just vanished?’

‘We prayed every night for him. But, no. That was it. We never did find out what happened.’

Delaney made a note in his small, black notebook. ‘Do you know if your husband’s brother had any enemies, Mrs Hunt?’

‘Enemies? What do you mean?’

‘Anyone who may have wanted to do him harm?’

‘No. Why would they?’ She took a sip of water and blinked back some tears. ‘Please, if there is nothing else. I am not up to this at the moment.’

‘Of course.’ Delaney closed his notebook and stood up. ‘I’m sorry to have troubled you.’

‘Inspector,’ she said, as he walked over to the door. ‘Don’t give up on your prayers.’

KATE WALKER APPROACHED
Dave Matthews, who was back in his usual spot behind the desk.

‘Doctor,’ he said with a smile and a nod.

‘Hello, Slimline,’ Kate responded. ‘Just to let you know I’m expecting a package couriered over to me sometime soon, I hope. Let me know when it gets here, will you?’

‘Of course I will.’

Kate smiled, but made no attempt to move away.

‘Was there anything else?’

Kate leaned on the desk, keeping her voice neutral, but low. ‘Dr Laura Chilvers,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘Friday night – how did she seem to you?’

The desk sergeant shrugged. ‘Much as she ever is, I suppose.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Kate. ‘She seemed a bit … I’m not so sure. Can’t put my finger on it.’

‘She was in a hurry to get out. Some kind of date, I think. A club opening. She didn’t say where. Why do you ask?’

‘Because if she dropped the ball on Bible Steve, that could come back to bite the station. Particularly her.’

‘He seemed all right to me.’

‘And have you studied for seven years, and then worked in the field for years more, to make that kind of qualified judgement?’ Kate asked, but not unkindly.

‘Maybe not.’ The sergeant smiled ruefully. ‘But I’ve done over twenty years dealing with drunks.’

‘The point is that Bible Steve, or whatever his name is, had a fall before he came in, didn’t he?’

‘He collapsed outside the restaurant. Not sure how.’

‘As I understand it, he was found in a cruciform position?’

‘Come again.’

Kate demonstrated. ‘His feet together, his hands outstretched like this.’

‘Yes, like that.’

‘Which suggests to me that he toppled over backwards, his arms outstretched for balance. Rather than crumpling in on himself, to land in a kind of foetal position.’

‘I guess so.’

‘Which means that he could have slapped his head hard on the pavement when he fell. He could have suffered some kind of subdural haematoma.’

‘Which means?’

‘That we shouldn’t have released him unless we were very sure he hadn’t.’

‘Laura Chilvers did ask if we could keep him in overnight.’

‘Why?’

‘Because of the cold, she said.’

‘If she was worried that Bible Steve had suffered a
serious
head injury then she should have called an ambulance.’

‘Which she didn’t.’

‘No.’

‘But yet she wanted you to keep him in, even though in your opinion he was fit to be released?’

‘Yes, but you know what it is like on a Friday night here, Kate, at the best of times. Friday night a week before Christmas, it was like the biblical Bethlehem.’

‘No room at the inn?’

‘Exactly. And she knows that. I’m surprised she even asked. She knows we would have taken Bible to the homeless shelter anyway.’

‘Not that he stayed there.’

‘No.’

‘What if we released him when we shouldn’t, and he really did go out and murder someone?’

‘If he has, then we’re missing a corpse.’

‘Maybe we should have kept him in?’

‘If
if and ans
, as my granny used to say,’ said the desk sergeant, ‘
were pots and pans
, we could set up a bloody department store.’

Kate chewed at her thumbnail. ‘I don’t know. Laura did seem distracted. She got that call, do you remember? Seemed very snappy after it. Not herself.’

‘Like I say, Kate. It was a very busy night.’

‘Too busy, it seems.’

‘It’s not going to get any quieter this side of the silly season,’ said Matthews.

‘Never does,’ said Kate.

‘Never does,’ agreed the sergeant.

‘I wonder who it was that called Laura,’ said Kate,
not
really intending to voice the thought to the large man behind the desk, but he answered it for her anyway.

‘I guess only Dr Chilvers can tell you that.’

DELANEY SAT IN
his car with the engine running, an unlit cigarette between his lips as he looked out of the window.

The heavy precipitation promised by forecasters and amateur pundits all day was yet to materialise. Delaney watched the glistening snowflakes crystallising like pieces of coral fusing together on the ground. An ice carpet built up of millions and millions of flakes, no one of them alike, each unique and yet coming together.

Delaney wished he could manage that with the various elements of the cases he was working on. Fit the disparate particles together and make some sense.

Patricia Hunt had lied to him. He knew that much. Or if she had not lied exactly, had not told him the entire truth. A sin of omission rather than commission, as the brothers and sisters back at Ballydehob would have told him. The kind of brothers and sisters who don’t tease you on your birthday or give you home-made Christmas presents. The kind of brothers and sisters who would put the fear of God in you and made sure it stayed there.

Delaney didn’t read the Holy Book much any more. But what he did read, and could read very well,
was
people. Not just the old body-language trick of people looking up and to the left if they remembered something when asked a question, or up and to the right if they were making up the answer. No, Delaney knew intuitively. Maybe the story he had told his daughter Siobhan the other night was true, he thought to himself as he dragged his thumb across the wheel of his lighter, scratching against the flint and flaring it into flame. He lit his cigarette and took a drag. Not long to go to New Year’s Eve and he was making a conscious effort to cut down. It wasn’t so much Kate’s wafting of her fingers when he came in from having one, or the fact he didn’t want to smoke around his newborn baby when he or she was born. Well, perhaps it was. But it was mainly Siobhan’s critical eyes that spurred him on. Family, he thought to himself, what a powerful thing it is. How it makes people and breaks people. Nearly broke him, and he wasn’t going to let that happen again.

But what was happening in the Hunt family? Patricia Hunt was not being honest with him. And, in his experience, people who were not honest with the police usually had a very good reason not to be so.

Kate Walker fished the herbal teabag from the mug it had been sitting in, white china with the words ‘I’d rather be in Ballydehob’ written on the front. She had ordered it for Jack online, but somehow appropriated it for herself. Crystal Mountain organic Himalayan green tea. Blended with four botanical herbs, she discovered from the packet: peppermint, angelica, lemon verbena and ginseng. It was supposed to create a deliciously refreshing infusion that would awaken
the
mind and revitalise the body. Kate blew on the surface, took a cautious sip then added a squirt of honey from a squeezy bottle she kept on her desk. She liked the drink and found it worked for her. Maybe it was a combination of a sense of well-being from being pregnant and giving up the alcohol. Maybe it wasn’t. One thing she did know for sure, though, was that it wasn’t a few glasses of ice-chilled Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc after a hard day’s work that she missed. It was the jolt in the morning that the espresso machine in her kitchen gave her. Coffee was her secret vice. In that respect, she empathised with Jack’s senior boss Superintendent George Napier, if with little else. She took a sip of her tea and permitted herself a small smile. Actually she empathised with the man in one other major way. He had to deal with Detective Inspector Jack Delaney and that could drive any man, or woman, to stronger stimulants than freshly ground Jamaican Blue.

She pulled out the folder she had recently liberated from the courier’s padded envelope and started reading the medical files on the missing man. The Reverend Jeremy Hunt. Last seen in the parish some twenty years previously. She pulled her notepad towards her and started to make notes, correcting herself as she did so. According to the conversation she had just had with Jack, he hadn’t actually been seen twenty years ago. Just made a phone call and never turned up. Jack had put a call though to immigration to chase up entry and exit visas, but, as she well knew, the wheels of that particular bureaucratic engine could turn very slowly, and neither of them had access to the kind of grease
required
to speed up their progress. Kate made a few jottings as she turned the pages of the various reports and papers, not just Jeremy Hunt’s medical record but his history of service through Africa in the Seventies onwards. Her cup of tea grew cool.

After a while, she picked up her phone and punched a speed-dial button.

‘Hey, Jack,’ she said as the call was answered. ‘Whoever we dug up yesterday from St Luke’s church …’

‘Go on,’ said the familiar voice.

‘Are you smoking?’

‘Never mind that.’ Delaney adopted a professional tone that didn’t fool Kate for one second. ‘What do you want to tell me, Doctor Walker?’

‘Well,
Detective Inspector Delaney
, I can tell you for a fact that whoever it was we dug up … it wasn’t Jeremy Hunt!’

PC DANNY VINEM
and PC Bob Wilkinson were out on foot and none too happy about it.

‘Jeez, Bob,’ said Danny. ‘Why couldn’t they give us a car? My plates are freezing here.’

‘Feet are a part of the job. You know that, Danny.’

‘I think I’m going to go into CID,’ he continued as the two of them walked to the top end of Oxford Street. ‘Yeah, lookit …’

Bob Wilkinson stopped and stared at him. ‘Did you just say “lookit” to me?’

The younger constable shrugged. ‘What about it?’

‘I’ll tell you what about it, Danny Vine. You ever use the expression, “lookit”, “innit” or “knowwhat-imean”, and I will stamp on your size-ten plates of meat, and then you will really know what chilblains are.’

‘You going racist on me, Bob?’

‘I’ll go racist with my asp up your arse in a minute.’

‘Seriously though, why not?’ Danny persisted as they passed the only pub genuinely to be found on Oxford Street, The Tottenham.

‘Did you know, Danny, that in 1852 there were thirty-eight pubs in Oxford Street and now there is only one?’ Bob jerked his thumb sideways as they
passed
it. ‘Now, if that ain’t a sign of the times, I don’t know what is.’

‘Seriously though, Bob, what do you reckon? Should I go for CID?’

‘Get to work a bit closer with the lovely Sally Cartwright. Is that the idea?’

Danny Vine shook his head, a little flustered. ‘No. Not at all.’

‘You don’t have to be coy with me, son. I’ve worn out enough shoe leather in this game to know a thing or two or the mating dance of the lesser spotted constable.’

They turned left at the intersection and walked up Tottenham Court Road. The snow underfoot had turned to mush although the temperature was definitely dropping again.

‘Don’t get me wrong, Bob. She’s an attractive woman.’

‘She’s gorgeous. Clever. Personable,’ Bob Wilkinson agreed. ‘If I was sixty-eight years younger, I might be giving you a run for your money.’

‘But she’s made it quite clear she’s not interested in me. Can’t say I blame her after what happened.’

‘The guy got what was coming to him, that’s for sure.’

‘Jack Delaney sure don’t take no prisoners, does he?’ said Danny.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘First Michael Hill and now Michael Robinson. Both taken out. You’ve heard the gossip.’

‘What, he don’t like people with the name Michael?’

‘Couldn’t blame him if he did. I was just saying …’

‘Well, don’t.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘Seriously, Danny, DI Jack Delaney may have a lot of enemies on the force, but he’s got a lot of friends too.’

‘Yeah I know. Jeez, Bob! I didn’t mean anything by anything.’

‘Good. That’s that then.’