The Two Towns (The Lakeland Murders) (4 page)

‘Will he be there today?’

‘Her brother? No, don’t worry. Sally kicked him out months ago, for nicking her gear. Big mistake, that was. Anyhow, here we are.’

‘Will Sally be up yet?’

Dixon was still laughing when he knocked on the door.

Sally Graham came to the door after the third knock. The one that had finally brought out the neighbours on both sides of the Graham’s house.

‘Fuck off, Ray’ she said, but still stood back to let the two officers in. She knew that the alternative was a ride straight down to the station. The curtains were drawn in the living room, and it was very dark. Jane’s eyes were still adjusting when Sally turned on the TV, which lit the place up rather too well. Sally sat down, but she looked like she needed to.

‘Turn the sound down, Sal’ said Dixon. ‘We need to talk.’

‘What’s wrong with the phone? This is harassment, this is.’

‘You know what, you’re right. Come on Jane, let’s be off. We should leave this fine lady to her needlework, or her Bible study.’

Jane was about to turn, but sensed that Dixon hadn’t moved. She glanced across at him and saw that he wasn’t smiling at Sally. If Jane had known him better she might have even said that he looked angry.

‘We’re not going anywhere, because you lied to me, Sally. Made me look a right prat in front of the boss. Of course we’re not bloody going. Not until we get some proper answers, like.’

‘Oh, aye?’

‘Aye. You told me that your lad Johnny was at home when I phoned yesterday, you remember?’

‘I expect he was, then.’

‘So where is he now?’

‘How should I fucking know?’

‘Because you’re his mother.’

‘School then, I expect. He loves school, does Johnny. Never fucking stops going on about it.’

‘No, he’s not at school.’

‘He’s probably just bunking off then. You should tell the social.’

‘They told us, Sal.’

‘There you are then. So why have you come round here?’

‘Do you know where he might have gone to?’

‘No.’

‘What about one of his mates’ houses?’

‘Doubt it. They’ll be at school, like. Right little swots, all his mates are.’

Dixon sighed. ‘Come on Sal, don’t piss us about. Can we see his room?’

‘Why?’

‘We need to find him, Sally. That’s our job. We need to know that he’s safe and well.’

‘Don’t be daft. He’ll be fine. You know what lads his age are like.’

‘Can we see his room?’

‘If I say no you’ll be back, I’m expect?’

‘You know we will. And we’ll bring the big door knocker next time. The one that takes it clean off the hinges.’

‘I don’t care. I’ve complained about that front door loads of times. I could do with a new one anyway.’

‘Like I said, don’t piss us about, Sally.’

‘All right. Upstairs, the one at the back.’

The boy’s room was dirty, but tidy. There was a laptop on the desk, and a mobile next to it. Both officers saw it at the same moment.

‘Shit’ said Dixon.

‘Bollocks’ said Jane. ‘Shall I bag and tag these?’

‘Aye. Then we’d better turn this place over thoroughly. The boss is going to upgrade this investigation as soon as he knows that the kid’s phone is here. They don’t so much as take a piss without their phones, do they?’

The two officers worked methodically. First Dixon checked that Jane had been trained, and then the two searched in silence. The TV was on downstairs, loud, but at least Sally didn’t offer them a brew.

‘Anything?’ asked Dixon, when he’d finished going through the rickety wardrobe.

‘No, nowt. You?’

‘Sod all.’

‘Should we turn over the rest of the place?’

‘I’ll phone the boss. I expect he’ll want a full search team here. Sally will go fucking mental.’

‘Will you warn her about what to expect?’

‘No. It can be a surprise. Let’s get outside, and I’ll call Andy.’

Half an hour later the two officers watched as the van arrived, and Ray took the search warrant from the uniformed sergeant and knocked on Sally’s door. Thirty seconds later he was back in the car, smiling broadly.

‘She went absolutely fucking spare’ he said to Jane, as he fastened his seat belt. ‘You should have heard the names she called me. Quite imaginative, considering. I do love it when we get up their noses, like.’

‘So we’re away?’

‘Aye. Let’s get this computer and phone back to the nick, and hand them over to tech support. Andy will put a rocket under them, but it’ll do sod all good. They’ll have a bloody massive backlog, I expect.’

‘I could do it then. An initial scan, anyway.’

‘What if there are passwords and that?’

‘Then I’d be stuck.’

Dixon thought about it.

‘Tell you what. Why don’t we get these dusted for prints, and then, if the boss agrees, you could maybe take them home tonight and have a quick look, like.’

‘Great, thanks.’

‘All right. We’re late for our break, lass. Fancy grabbing a burger or something?’

‘No, thanks, Ray. I’ve arranged to meet Sandy Smith out at the Moorings caravan park. I need to be there in half an hour actually.’

‘Christ, I better get my foot down then, and get you back to the nick. Sandy does her nut if we’re late to meetings. You haven’t got any buns on you?’

‘Buns?’

‘Cakes, you know.’

‘No.’

‘Doesn’t matter, but a point for future reference. If you’re meeting Sandy then always take some buns. Any buns, it makes no odds.’ Jane nodded agreement, though she was still confused. ‘So the boss has got you looking at the Clark case, has he? Doesn’t surprise me. Usually he’s pretty good at letting the ones that get away go, but he’s had that file on his desk all this time. He reads through it, every week or two. I’ve seen him do it. The husband did it, of course he bloody did, but we never got close to charging him. The CPS made it very clear that the only way we’d get him in court was if he coughed to it, and that was never going to happen. I knew it the first time I met the man. He just stuck to his story, and that was that. No witnesses, no forensics, nothing to place him at the scene.’

‘What about her life insurance? He got a big payout, didn’t he?’

‘Aye. Quarter of a million. But they both bloody worked in insurance, the policy was years old, and he was insured for the same amount. He more or less gave Andy the full bloody sales spiel when he tried to press Clark on the subject. But they’d never rowed, the Clarks, at least not in public, and Clark didn’t have a bit on the side, no debts, nothing. He’s a totally boring bastard, truth be told. So don’t worry if you get nowhere with it, Jane. The boss won’t hold it against you, I promise you that.’

Ray dropped Jane off at her own car, and she used the sat-nav to locate the caravan park. She drove down the access road, stopped by the shop, and looked at the site plan in the file. The caravan she was after was down to the left. But she could have saved herself the stop, because the big white SOCO van just ahead of her was hard to miss. So Jane parked behind it and got out. The van door open and a small woman jumped down.

‘Dr. Smith, I presume?’

‘Call me Sandy, every other fucker does. Anyway, haven’t you got a PhD too?’

‘Yes, I have. How did you know that?’

‘Andy Hall told me, when you took the job. Delighted he was. Sets a lot of store by intelligence, does DI Hall. Not like most coppers. Thick as fucking pig dribble, most of them.’

Jane nodded cautiously. She had absolutely no idea if Sandy was being serious or not.

‘So this is the caravan?’

‘Aye. This one. That’s the flue for the gas fire, just there.’

‘Does it still belong to Clark?’

‘No idea. What do I look like, the fucking Land Registry?’

‘Sorry, just thinking aloud.’

‘Well at least you’re thinking. I bet he’s flogged it though, don’t you? But I doubt he mentioned that he gassed his wife in it, like.’

‘Yes, probably. He’s sold it, I mean. To tell you the truth I was a bit surprised that the fire didn’t cut out or something.’

Sandy looked up at Jane, who was more than a head taller, and nodded.

‘Aye, me too. But we had two different engineers look at it, all properly qualified, and they both said that the fire hadn’t been tampered with, it was just faulty. If we’d got one print or DNA from Clark anywhere but on the front of that fire we’d have had him. But we didn’t. If he fiddled with it then he was really careful. Unbelievably fucking careful.’

‘How about the spuds?’

‘Don’t you start. Andy was on at me about those fucking things for weeks. Nearly put me off chips for life, the bastard. But it’s all in the report. Like I said, the condition of the spuds found on all the outlet pipes suggested that they were put there earlier that same evening. But if they’d been heavily chilled previously it might have been the night before. But my money is on that night.’

‘He turned the fire on, didn’t he?’

‘Aye. His prints were on the starter thing. But he never denied that it was him.’

‘So, if he did do it, did he put the spud on the pipe before or after he turned the fire on?’

A hefty hand hit Jane in the middle of the back.

‘Good question. I can see you’re not just a pretty face, like. There’s nowt in the report to answer that one, is there?’

‘No. I couldn’t see anything.’

‘Well, don’t think I didn’t get asked, because I did. Andy asked it every bloody way he could think of. But I still can’t tell you. It might have been before it was turned on, and it might have been straight after, but before the exhaust gasses got hot, which takes a couple of minutes. I did a few experiments, because Andy was getting his knickers in such a bloody twist about the whole thing, but I still couldn’t tell.’

‘So it did became a bit of an obsession for the DI then?’

‘We’re here now, aren’t we? Both freezing our tits off for absolutely no good reason. Look, Clark was clever. He didn’t over elaborate, he didn’t fuck up, he stuck to his story and he’d previously established a pattern of behaviour that was consistent with his version of events. So Andy couldn’t catch him out in questioning, and I couldn’t come up with any meaningful forensic evidence either. It’s a fucking object lesson in murder, is this.’

‘If it was murder. It still could have been kids.’

‘Aye, exactly. Like I said, he’s a right clever bastard, is Clark. He knew that other people had reported petty vandalism and stuff, he admitted that, so it was a simple bit of misdirection. Like I say, a fucking case study. I wouldn’t worry if you get nowhere with it, love.’

‘So people keep telling me.’

Jane drove back to the office, and knocked on Hall’s door.

‘How did you get on with Sandy?’

‘Fine, thanks.’

‘Did it help?’

‘Not much, if I’m honest.’ Hall nodded. Jane was getting used to his neutral expression. ‘There was something else, if you’ve got a minute.’

‘Yes, Ray mentioned it. You want to have a look at young Johnny’s phone and laptop.’

‘That’s right. If tech support aren’t already working on it.’

‘They’re not. I’ve pulled all the strings I can, and upgraded the enquiry as far as the Super will let me, but they still can’t take it until later in the week. So you’re fine to have a go at it tomorrow. It’s all on your desk. No suspicious prints, just his. The notebook that you bagged gave us his prints for elimination.’

‘I was thinking about making a start at home, tonight. If that’s OK.’

Hall looked at her for a moment.

‘Haven’t you got stuff to do, Jane? Moving in type things. I don’t know, decorating, buying lampshades, all that.’

She laughed.

‘Lampshades? Who am I, Miss Marple? No, you’re all right. Nothing that can’t wait.’

Hall paused again.

‘It’s up to you, of course it is, and don’t think I’m not grateful. I don’t mind telling you that I’m anxious about this one. Especially when you found the kid’s phone. My two are joined to theirs by some kind of invisible gravity field. But there is life outside the job, Jane, and we do have other people to carry on the enquiry while you’re off duty. It’s not a crusade; it’s a job. And I don’t want any officers in my team feeling under pressure from me to put in too many hours. I hope that’s clear.’

‘It is, boss, yes.’

‘But you’re still going to be taking the stuff home, aren’t you?’

Jane smiled. ‘I am. Yes, I am.’

When Jane looked up at the old clock on the mantelpiece it was past midnight. She was hungry, stiff and tired. The fire was nothing but embers, and the room was already getting cold. She wondered if she could find her hot water bottle among the unpacked boxes. Just finding it might warm her up, she thought.

The lad’s laptop was old, heavy and slow, and it was protected by a four-number lock. But Jane had looked up Johnny’s date-of-birth and, sure enough, that got her in at the first attempt. She started with his browsing history, and wasn’t surprised by what she found. It was an insight into the mind of a fourteen year-old boy, and she was touched to see all the searches that, she guessed, he’d made while he was doing his homework. His email trail was modest, to say the least, but that wasn’t all that surprising either. She wasn’t sure how kids communicated with each other, but she knew that it wasn’t by email.

Then Jane had a look through the files on the laptop. She was immediately struck by how well organised they were, with a pleasingly logical and neat structure to the sub-folders. She would leave some searches running overnight, looking for words connected to drugs, criminality and fear, but for now she just opened a few documents and tried to get a feel for the boy. His biology homework caught her eye, and as she read his work she was reminded of herself at that age. The lad was bright, no doubt about that.

As far as Jane could tell there were no hidden files or folders, and she was just about to boot the old laptop down when she noticed a folder called ‘home.’ There was just one document in it, called ‘dad.’ Jane opened it, started reading, and then started crying. She heard the sound she was making, as if it was coming from someone else, and she wondered if the neighbours could hear it too. She forced herself to quieten down, and closed the document, half-read. But those few paragraphs took her back to the years after her own dad had died, and to the things she’d wanted to say to him, and to the way that she’d felt. To the the way that she still felt, come to that. Jane Francis wanted to find Johnny Graham. At that moment she wanted it more than anything.