Walk a Narrow Mile (8 page)

Specializing mainly in producing television adverts and news/documentary segments for local television, they had their offices not far from the BBC office building on the Banbury Road in Oxford.

Once they’d found it, this small slice of the so-called
glamorous
world of show biz turned out to be a rather nondescript yellow-brick, two-storey building with a small car-park and a view of a rather scrappy rugby field. But the grounds of the building itself were well maintained and the interior was clean, freshly painted in pale apricot and populated with helpful staff.

Within five minutes they were ushered into the office of the man himself.

Christopher Deakin was a touch over six feet tall, with very short blond hair and hazel eyes. He was lanky, but wore a good suit that did much to make him look elegant. He wore a plain watch and tie. He was good-looking in a Daniel Craig sort of way – with a touch of the rough-hewn about him that gave him a certain distinction. Hillary could see why Judy, his wife, and Ruth Coombs had all fallen for him.

He smiled at her a shade uncertainly however, and her first instinct was that here was a man made of straw, rather than steel.

‘Hello. You’re the police, Lizzie said?’ he asked, half-rising from behind his desk but then subsiding again as Hillary waved him back down. She flashed her ID, introduced herself and Jimmy and gave the usual spiel.

Christopher Deakin paled visibly at the mention of Judy’s name, and nervously readjusted his tie. Until then, Hillary thought that nobody ever did that, outside of bad television shows and old-fashioned crime novels.

Deakin managed to give them a shaky smile. ‘Please, sit down. I’ll make no bones about it, hearing Judy’s name again after all this time has shaken me up a bit.’

Hillary nodded, unimpressed. No doubt he was well aware that he’d given himself away, so becoming open and honest all of a sudden was probably a good move on his part.

‘You were having an affair with her, Mr Deakin?’ she asked, almost casually but stating it as a fact. She had the feeling that if she gave him just a little leeway he’d instantly start trying to justify himself or explain how nothing could possibly be his fault, and she just wasn’t in the mood for a whining display.

Christopher winced a little, then took a deep breath and nodded. ‘Yes,’ he confessed. ‘You’ve been speaking to Ruth, I imagine,’ he said, with a sad, small smile.

‘You were still seeing her when she went missing, in fact?’ Hillary clarified, not wanting to get to the Ruth Coombs
conundrum
just yet.

‘Yes.’

‘But you didn’t come forward.’

‘There wasn’t really an investigation, was there? I mean, nobody from the police called on me. And the first I heard about Judy being reported missing was when Ruth called, demanding to know where she was.’ Christopher sighed heavily and swung slightly to and fro on his black leather swivel chair. It was a subconsciously childish gesture that sat oddly on a grown man. ‘At first, I thought it was Ruth typically over-reacting. I kept expecting Judy to get in touch.’

‘But she never did,’ Hillary finished for him flatly.

‘No.’

‘And still you didn’t come forward.’

Christopher held out his hands, fingers widespread in the universally what-can-you-do gesture. Hillary noticed his hands were clean and well kept, and that he’d had a recent manicure. ‘What was the point? I didn’t know where she’d gone.’

‘Did your wife know about her, Mr Deakin?’

Again, the television producer went distinctly pale. ‘Portia? Good grief, no,’ he said fervently.

No bonuses for guessing who wore the trousers in that
relationship
, Hillary thought wryly. Then gave herself a quick admonishment. She was not here to score points off this man – just find out what he knew. She deliberately let her voice become softer and a shade more coaxing. This, she was sure, was the best way to handle the likes of Christopher Deakin.

‘Can you tell me how you and Judy met?’ she smiled gently.

‘We met at a party, actually,’ Deakin said, relaxing a little. ‘A friend of a friend was holding a big barbecue and Judy was helping out with the serving. She did odd jobs at weekends to get more money – she didn’t particularly like her job at the shoe shop; she didn’t particularly get on well with the manager and she was always complaining that she was on minimum wage. So she was always on the look out for ways to earn some extra cash.’

‘And you hit it off over the hot dogs, so to speak,’ Hillary said, with another encouraging smile. She felt a bit like a primary schoolteacher egging on a slightly backward pupil.

‘Yes. She was one of these people who seemed really sunny and friendly, you know? Uncomplicated. She was pretty too, and … my wife can be rather…. Oh hell, I’m not going to go into the whole my-wife-doesn’t-understand-me cliché. Let’s just say, we met at a time when I was feeling needy.’

Hillary nodded. Something told her that this man was always going to be needy. ‘You’d been seeing each other some time, I understand.’

‘Oh not so long.’

‘Ruth said it was nearly a year,’ Hillary said, with just a hint of reprimand in her voice. She was not surprised when he responded instantly.

Christopher blinked and quickly backtracked. ‘Was it really that long? Yes. I suppose it was, now that I think about it.’

Hillary smiled gently. ‘A year is a long time for a young
woman in love, Mr Deakin. After a year, they start to assume things. Did Judy ask you to leave your wife, for instance?’

‘No, never,’ Christopher said at once, looking truly alarmed now. ‘She knew the boys were too young and that they needed both their parents. Judy said that she knew what it was like not to have a good home life. She didn’t seem to have got on with her own family, and the last thing she wanted to do was split up mine.’ He was leaning forward in his chair now, his elbows on the table in his urgency to get his point across. ‘You don’t
understand
how it was between us at all if you think that’s the sort of relationship we had. It was nothing like that. She wasn’t some demanding bimbo or home wrecker. We were good together, honestly we were.’ His voice level had risen by both a decibel and an octave by the time he’d finished.

‘OK, OK, I understand,’ she said soothingly. ‘Did Judy ever mention having a stalker?’

Deakin hesitated for a fraction of a second, then said, ‘No.’

A lie. Interesting.

‘Did she ever give you the impression that she was in trouble? That she was feeling suicidal maybe?’

‘No!’ Deakin said, sounding honestly shocked now.

‘Do you have any idea where Judy might have gone? Did she mention friends, or people abroad maybe, anywhere she might go if she just wanted to get away for a while?’

‘No. I thought about it, of course I did. I thought of nothing else for weeks – well, both Ruth and I put our heads together to try and think where she might have gone, but neither of us could come up with anything.’

‘It sounds as if you and Miss Coombs were united in your worry for her.’

Christopher shifted uneasily on his chair. ‘Yes. We were.’

‘Are you still in contact with Ruth Coombs, Mr Deakin?’ she asked casually.

Christopher shot her a quick look. ‘Not really. Why do you ask?’

Hillary smiled neutrally. ‘When we talked to her, she seemed to find you a fascinating subject.’

Deakin again went pale. Hillary was beginning to find it a very interesting phenomenon with this excitable, weak but attractive man.

‘Oh, that’s just Ruth,’ he said, with a brief, somewhat pitifully false laugh.

‘I found her rather.…’ Hillary paused, let the silence
deliberately
lengthen just enough to get him nervous again, and finished quietly, ‘Well, let’s just say that I thought she had a forceful personality.’ She baited the hook carefully and waited to see if he’d bite.

‘Ruth?’ Deakin said casually. ‘Oh, Ruth’s all right. She was Judy’s best friend.’

‘So you had no trouble with her?’ Hillary asked curiously.

Again Deakin gave a brief laugh. ‘No. Why should I?’

Another lie. But why was he going out of his way to protect Ruth?

‘All right, Mr Deakin. If you can think of anything that can help, please contact us.’ She handed him one of her cards, and rose.

Christopher looked pathetically grateful to see the back of them and leapt off the chair eagerly to escort them to the door. Hillary said nothing until they were out of the building and heading across the car-park.

‘That guy made a cat on a hot tin roof look like positively laid back, guv,’ Jimmy snorted, the moment the electronic doors swooshed shut behind them.

‘He
was
all over the place, wasn’t he?’ Hillary agreed.

‘And he was lying nearly fifty per cent of the time,’ Jimmy added darkly.

‘Yes. But didn’t you find the lies far more interesting than the truth?’

Jimmy grunted. ‘He knew about the stalker.’

‘But why deny it? Surely if your girlfriend goes missing, and
you’re a married man and the police come a-calling, you would want to emphasize the fact that there were other suspects out there,’ Hillary said. ‘So either he’s got no sense of self-
preservation
– or something else scares him more than we do.’

‘That’d be Mrs Deakin, guv. If they divorce, she’d have the kids and take her dough with her.’

‘Hmm. Maybe. But that still doesn’t explain why he kept quiet about the stalker.’

‘I reckon he just wants the investigation to go away. I mean, the more we dig into Judy’s life the more likely it is something will come to the ears of his missus.’

‘Yes, it could be that. He struck me as the kind of man who’d do anything to avoid something unpleasant, rather than tackle it head on and get it over with. And he does seem to be the ostrich type anyway.’

‘Huh? Oh, burying his head in the sand, you mean? Yeah. He doesn’t have a lot of backbone does he?’ Jimmy said with a touch of contempt.

‘That might also explain why he wanted us to think that everything was hunky-dory between him and Ruth Coombs,’ Hillary mused out loud. ‘But he has to have known that Ruth suspected him in Judy’s disappearance. And a man would have to be blind and deaf not to pick up on the vibes she was giving out. He has to know Ruth’s got some serious hang-ups about him. What’s more, it wouldn’t surprise me if she hadn’t kept in touch all this time. Maybe even did a bit of stalking of her own.’

For a moment, as Jimmy searched his pockets for his car keys the two of them thought about that little scenario.

‘But he wouldn’t want to rock the boat, would he? If he complained about Ruth to us,’ Jimmy pointed out, ‘we’d be obliged to do something about it and again, the missus might get to hear about it, and wonder. And then there’s the chance that Ruth could go postal in which case the whole Judy/Christopher lovey-dovey connection comes to light and lover boy’s out on his ear.’

Hillary sighed. ‘You know, there’s something about Mr Deakin that makes my whiskers twitch. If it wasn’t for the fact that we know it’s the stalker we’re after, I’d set the kids on to delving into our Mr Deakin’s activities like a flash.’

‘He was twitchy all right,’ Jimmy agreed thoughtfully. Then he sighed. ‘Bloody hell, guv, you’ve got me doing it now.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Thinking that this case is going all screwy on us.’

He unlocked the doors and they slipped inside Jimmy’s car. Hillary felt her hand wandering up to caress the fading scars on her neck and abruptly snatched her hand back down and into her lap.

‘Back to HQ, Jimmy,’ she said flatly. ‘I need to re-read the notes and try to get an overview on this case before it runs away from me completely.’

Jimmy grinned. ‘It wouldn’t dare, guv,’ he said confidently.

Hillary only wished that she could feel the same amount of confidence.

It was nearly four o’clock, and Hillary was starting to see double. She’d read and reread all the case files until she was sure she could quote the damn things from memory.

But nothing was gelling. The stalker was still a phantom figure about as real as a handful of smoke. All three girls seemed so different in their personalities and background. Even the circumstances of their disappearances didn’t really seem to hang together. Gilly Tinkerton, a scatter-brained, hippy type who’s own loving mother wasn’t that particularly worried about her. Meg Vickary, ambitious, maybe a man-teaser with an eye to the main chance. And Judy, who’d grown up in a frigid family unit and had turned to a man of straw for comfort. As a group, they just made no sense. What was it about them that attracted the same stalker? Weren’t they supposed to go for a certain type – a look, or a commonly shared pathology?

Although she didn’t set much store by profilers and shrinks
in general, she supposed gloomily that at some point she was going to have to go to the man Geoff Rhumer was using and ask for his input. But that was for another day. Knowing shrinks, he’d take one look at her scars and start trying to get her to ‘emote’ about that day in the car park. And she wanted to do that about as much as she wanted to watch her toenails atrophy.

She sighed, and reached for Judy Yelland’s file again, reading the initial reports. The WPC who’d called on the Yellands had had her head screwed on right, and had nailed the atmosphere of the place perfectly. WPC Mandy Dern. Hillary stared down approvingly at her neatly written notes and suddenly realized that she’d seen that writing before. She quickly checked the other files. Not Meg Vickary – yes. She’d been the one to
investigate
the original Gillian Tinkerton case.

She re-read the WPC’s notes on Mrs Tinkerton and nodded in vindication. Once again, WPC Dern had hit the nail on the head. It might be a good idea to catch up with WPC Dern and see what she could remember about the two cases.

Reading between the lines, it was clear to Hillary that although WPC Dern hadn’t been surprised at Judy Yelland walking away from her old life, she’d been a little more worried over Gillian’s defection, although she’d been reassured by Mrs Tinkerton’s belief that she’d just gone ‘gad about’ as Deirdre Tinkerton had put it.