Mourning the Little Dead Read online

  ‘It is still a cold case though, sir,’ Alec commented. ‘I can’t, in all conscience, give it the same priority as the Sarah Clarke investigation.’

  ‘I take it that’s a sentiment you didn’t share with Helen Jones’ family,’ Phillips chided him.

  ‘I’m sure Alec has more compassion than that, sir. But that aside, I have to agree. Sarah Clarke’s killer is still out there. If the confession is to be believed, the man who killed Helen Jones is cold in his grave and not exactly our direct concern.’ Travers said, siding with Alec.

  Alec’s ears pricked up. It rankled greatly that he had still not been gifted with information about this so-called confession. ‘You’re assuming it’s genuine then?’

  ‘We have to. Now more than ever. It pinpointed the burial place. We have to take the rest of it seriously.’

  ‘Rest of it? You’re suggesting this concerned more than Helen Jones?’

  Phillips shifted uncomfortably in his chair. ‘I’m not suggesting anything,’ he said.

  Travers crossed to the hot plate and fetched himself more coffee, gesturing to Alec with his mug to ask if he wanted more. Phillips’ office was the one place in the station where they could guarantee a half decent cup of coffee but Alec shook his head.

  ‘You can’t just sit on this,’ he said bluntly. ‘The rumour mill’s turning stories that are probably twice as bad as the truth. It’s bad for morale, you just holding back like this.’

  Phillips tipped back in his chair and regarded Alec thoughtfully over the edge of his mug. ‘Maybe, maybe not,’ he said quietly. ‘But trust us, Alec, for now this has to be kept under wraps, especially while the Sarah Clarke investigation is still ongoing. We give this free rein and you’d see morale sink through a crack in the ground and not make it back up again, believe me.’

  Alec absorbed this. ‘It was a copper,’ he said, ‘made the confession. It was one of us.’

  It had been in his mind that this might be so ever since he had discussed it briefly with Naomi, but it was not something he had wanted to admit, even as a possibility.

  Phillips set his mug on the table with a sharp crack. ‘You’ll keep your speculation to yourself,’ he said sharply. Then shook his head. Alec could feel from the change of mood what was coming next.

  ‘You already have a nice mess to deal with without finding another one.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘In hindsight, you would have handled Williams differently?’

  ‘In hindsight, no sir. He was uncooperative and arsy. He didn’t give a good account of himself and didn’t seem prepared to do so. I felt I had no option but to bring him in.’

  ‘And you didn’t think it prudent to speak with these friends of his first? Confirm his story about meeting them in Philby?’

  ‘No. With respect, sir, I thought it best not to give him the opportunity to do a runner. He gave me the impression that he didn’t like my questions and might not stick around for me to ask more.’

  Phillips regarded him with a cold stare and then he said, ‘So, let me get this right. You interview this man at his place of work, following on from some vague tip-off from a known troublemaker. And because he isn’t all polite and public school, you call in the cavalry. His story checked out, I suppose?’

  Travers replied, ‘The friends he claimed to have met backed his story. According to them, they were walking along the promenade when they saw the crowd and the cameras. They went to look. The reconstruction was half through by then.’

  ‘Either of you spoken to them?’

  ‘No,’ Alec told him. ‘Uniform out at Philby.’

  A video tape lay on Phillips’ desk. He picked it up and took it over to the combined TV and video recorder that stood against the wall. The paint was peeling, Alec noted absently. The green flaking off to reveal the dirty cream beneath.

  Phillips pressed play and the three of them watched in silence. The tape concentrated upon the little girl dressed like Sarah Clarke, walking down to the beach from the fish and chip shop. Alec noted Sarah’s mother standing beside a WPC. She was crying and gazing hungrily at the child as though, if she looked long enough, this little girl might be transformed. The camera panned left, tracking her progress towards the steps that led down on to the beach and then pulled back to reveal the crowd. The event had been well publicized and large numbers of people had turned up to watch, to lend support, just to be there in the hope that somehow they might recall something about the murdered child.

  ‘There he is,’ Alec said and pointed at a man elbowing through to the front of the crowd. He pushed so hard that a woman next to him turned around to object. Another, with a baby in her arms, was forced to shift out of his way. It was hardly the action, Alec thought, of a casual observer, merely curious to see what was going on. This was someone who wanted to be in the thick of it.

  ‘Watch him,’ Phillips said, all of his previous irritation dissipated. ‘If there’s nothing to find, fair enough, but if he so much as breathes too hard, bring him in again.’

  Thirteen

  Harry came to collect Naomi the following morning with Patrick in tow, the boy eager to see Napoleon. Naomi was getting quite used to being upstaged by her sleek, black, four-footed companion.

  The plan was that she and Harry would spend time in the newspaper archive; the news morgue would, she hoped, fill in some of the gaps that twenty-odd years of memory could not supply. Patrick was to take Napoleon to the nearby park; Naomi had armed herself with his ordinary lead, two frisbees and his favourite red ball. The dog recognized these off-duty signs and wriggled with excitement in the back of the car.

  ‘He loves frisbees,’ Naomi told Patrick. ‘Occasionally he even manages to catch one. I tried playing with him on the beach a couple of times till I nearly took someone’s head off. He’s trained to ignore the ducks and other dogs, but he does beg for ice cream if he hears the van. Tell him no, OK?’

  ‘OK,’ Patrick agreed, hut Naomi didn’t believe him. She was glad that Napoleon would have this chance to play. It never ceased to amaze her, the change that came over the dog when she had put his harness on him: suddenly, Napoleon the rake would become Napoleon the responsible adult; conversely, he was quick to understand the off-duty moments.

  ‘How is Mari?’ she asked quietly as Patrick chatted to the dog on the back seat.

  ‘Better this morning. I think she was glad that you were there yesterday. You know, we were talking about it last night and both of us thought it would have been good if Joe were here now. He’d have liked to see the job finished, as it were.’

  Naomi nodded. ‘It rankled,’ she agreed. ‘Even after he retired. I went to see him from time to time and he often said...I got the feeling he was still looking, you know, unofficially, long after he left the force.’

  She thought about it for a moment and then smiled, recalling Joe’s kindness to her both as a child and as a nervous young officer, terribly afraid of failing, trying too hard for the approval of her fellows. ‘You know, I miss him,’ she said. ‘It’s been three years now. I went to the funeral, but I didn’t stay. You should have seen how many turned up though, just to pay respects even if it was only for a few minutes.’

  ‘I finished Final Fantasy Nine last night,’ Patrick said unexpectedly, his voice cutting into the silence that had fallen between them.

  ‘What will you do now?’

  He shrugged. ‘Start again, I suppose. Do you play, Naomi...I mean, did you?’ He sounded embarrassed to have asked.

  Naomi laughed. ‘Not much, no. But I used to like the arcade games. There’s a Grand Prix one on the sea front and I regularly used to thrash Alec. He swore I could beat him even with my eyes closed.’ She laughed again, realizing what she’d just said.

  ‘Maybe you should try it?’ Patrick suggested.

  ‘Patrick, I hardly think...’ Harry began.

  ‘No, he’s right. Maybe we should. It’d be a laugh if nothing else. We’ll make a date, Patrick.’

  �
�OK. Bet ya I win.’

  They had reached the newspaper offices and found a place to park in the side street. Within a few minutes, Patrick and Napoleon had been dispatched to the park and Naomi had her hand slipped through Harry’s arm.

  ‘Something happened last night,’ she said. ‘Something really strange, Harry.’

  ‘Oh? What?’

  ‘I heard kids in the street and then someone banging on the door, but when I went down, there was no one there.’

  Harry snorted. ‘Little sods,’ he said. ‘Kids playing Knock Door Run, nothing strange in that.’

  ‘No, no, I know that, but they left something behind. On the doorstep.’ She slipped her hand into her pocket and withdrew the bangle. ‘They left this.’

  *

  Gary Williams had lived in Philby with his wife and kids and that was to be Alec’s first port of call that morning; his brief was to talk to the neighbours—ex-neighbours —and get some background. Last night had been quiet on the Radleigh. The police presence had been sporadic but high profile. Groups of youths had been reported hanging about on street corners and kids out late hanging around the flats, but nothing else.

  During the day, the media presence had been felt upon the estate, but evening had seen it dispatched to the nearest decent hotel. They had returned this morning, apparently, queuing up to mount the stairs to the Williams flat, but getting no reply had returned to the task of getting background comments from mothers taking their kids to school or young men on their way to sign on, most of the workers having left and been at work long before the press fraternity had left their beds. The Radleigh was just that kind of place.

  ‘Alec. Hold up there a minute.’

  Alec turned to see Travers coming down the steps with a blue folder in his hand.

  ‘The PM report?’

  Travers nodded. ‘They got the bone lady in,’ he said, referring to the forensic anthropologist called to advise on skeletal remains. ‘Not much we didn’t know from the preliminary report. She’s noted the crushing injuries that were probably post mortem, and so on, though they’ve managed to match a piece of the jaw to dental records, so we’ve got our positive ID.’ He paused, ‘Not that there was much doubt.’

  ‘Good to get, though. It would be embarrassing...’

  ‘Don’t,’ Travers told him. ‘We’ve enough bodies without you even thinking that. But we’ve got a cause of death. Fractured hyoid bone,’ he said, mentioning the little bone at the back of the tongue, and there was generally only the one cause of hyoid fracture. ‘Manual strangulation,’ Travers said.

  Alec was thoughtful as he drove the coast road to Philby. He was not surprised at the PM findings any more than he had really been surprised at Naomi’s conclusions—with or without a dream to help her. It was, as he had commented, an expected result. But Naomi’s insistence that her hunch had been, well, more than the result of experience, that disturbed him. He worried about her a great deal. Sometimes he thought that she was coping too well on the face of it and he often found himself wondering what was really going on in her mind. Alec knew, had their roles been reversed, that he would not have handled things anywhere near as well as Naomi seemed to be doing. He’d have joined Sarah Clarke’s father, hiding in the whisky bottle and probably not bothering to crawl out again.

  Thinking of Sarah, he realized that he had reached that point on the promenade closest to where her body had been found. He glanced sideways, out towards the scene, but even from the car could see nothing of the beach, just the line of grey water visible over the promenade railings.

  Kids were swimming and splashing about in the water. Some appeared to be alone, though he supposed that their parents must simply he out of his sight. It disturbed him though and he had to ask himself whether he would have taken his kids to play there, on that stretch of beach, knowing that another child had been assaulted and strangled so close by...

  Thinking about kids somehow led him back to thinking about Naomi again, and about himself. The clock is ticking, Alec old man, he told himself somewhat wryly. Thirty-eight and not even a single broken marriage yet. He wondered what Naomi would think if she found out just how she figured in his thoughts.

  Gary Williams’ previous address was a side street running at right angles to the beach and only half a mile from where Sarah Clarke had lived. Alec had not realized how close it was before and it got him thinking. It was possible that Gary Williams even knew the Clarkes—he’d been asked and denied this, but it was quite possible he had known them at least by sight. It was possible even that Sarah had attended the same school as the Williams kids. He made a mental note to chase that up.

  Term had begun a couple of weeks before and as Alec left his car, he could hear the voices of children carried on the wind. A glance at his watch told him it was lunchtime.

  Gary Williams and his family had lived at 23 Palmer Road. The street itself was unremarkable. Terraced rows which reminded Alec of Mari’s little house, though these had shallow bay windows giving shape to the front. Number 23 had an attic bedroom with a velux window, but was otherwise undistinguished. Shabby on the outside, but no more rundown than the rest of the row; houses close beside the sea but too small to be turned into B&Bs and not classy enough to capture the holiday market. And at number 23 there was no one home.

  Alec peered in through the front bay window. A piano occupied the alcove on one side of the fireplace and a stack of shelves could just be discerned on the other. The floor was stripped pine and the furniture dark blue and cozy looking, grouped around a deep red kilim spread on the wooden boards.

  He tried to imagine it in Gary Williams’ time and failed miserably. It was hard to get a handle on what the man might have been like before.

  ‘Can I help you? Didn’t anyone ever tell you it’s not right to stare through other people’s windows?’

  Alec turned. The speaker was an elderly woman with steel grey hair. She had a dog on a lead, some sort of terrier cross, Alec guessed.

  ‘Any idea when they’ll be home?’ Alec asked her.

  ‘I wouldn’t tell you if I had,’ she told him sternly. ‘Who are you anyway?’

  ‘Police,’ Alec said, pulling out his identity card. The woman glanced at it.

  ‘Police?’ she echoed. She stepped back to have a better look at this unwanted visitor. ‘I hope that nothing’s happened to the Roberts?’

  ‘The Roberts? No, nothing. I wanted to talk to them about the previous occupants. Do you live locally? Perhaps you knew them? Mr and Mrs Williams, the mother and children were—’

  ‘Killed in that pile-up, yes, I know. But I don’t think the Roberts would ever have met them. The house was repossessed, I believe. They bought long after Williams was gone.’ She looked thoughtfully at him for a moment longer and then moved to open the gate of the neighbouring house. ‘I’m going inside now,’ she said. ‘And I’m going to phone and check you are who you say you are. Then, I might talk to you.’

  Alec stared at her. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Do you want the number?’

  For that he got a withering look. ‘I’m quite capable, thank you. Such things as that, I keep beside the telephone.’

  It was ten minutes before she opened the door again and Alec had retreated to his car, not wanting to get in, in case she should think that he had gone, but feeling oddly conspicuous, leaning against the door.

  ‘You can come in now,’ she told him, holding the door. ‘I’m Phyllis Mole, Inspector Friedman. Mrs Phyllis Mole.’ And she stood back to allow Alec to come inside.

  Phyllis Mole’s living room might have stepped out of the pages of Homes and Gardens—circa 1945. Through the open door at the end of the hall Alec had glimpsed the kitchen and the middle reception room—she had resisted the temptation to knock the two into one—and these looked as though they had at least made it into the 1980s, but this front parlour, as she called it, probably hadn’t changed all that much since Mrs Mole, and the furniture, had been young.

  She sat oppo
site him to pour the tea, from a pot covered in roses into cups decorated with more of the same.

  ‘Now,’ she said, ‘you can tell me what you want with the Roberts.’

  ‘With the Roberts themselves, nothing. What I wanted to know is, if the Williams family maybe left anything behind? Next stop was to have been the neighbours.’

  ‘I heard it on the television,’ she said, ‘about a man being taken in for questioning about that little girl. And they said it was someone who lived on the Radleigh, but you weren’t giving out his name. Now, my neighbours on the other side have relations living on the Radleigh Estate. Decent people,’ she told him firmly. ‘Not everyone who lives in that dreadful place is a vandal or a drug dealer.’

  ‘No, Mrs Mole, I’m sure they’re not.’

  She nodded, peering at him thoughtfully, though it was clear that she gave no weight to his agreement. ‘They told my neighbours that the arrested man was none other than our Mr Williams.’ She fixed him with eyes that were as steely grey as her hair, daring him to deny it.

  Alec decided not to bother. ‘Did you know the Williams family well?’ he asked her.

  ‘The children and the mother, yes. Lucy and Emory. Have you noticed how all the old names are coming back? Lucy and Emory were pleasant children. Well behaved and always remembered their please and thank yous. Their mother, Sharon, she worked hard and always made sure they were well turned out. And Williams himself, when he was working, he was a pleasant enough neighbour to have. I sometimes had little things that I couldn’t manage myself. Gary Williams helped out a time or two. I paid him, of course, but it was convenient, knowing that there was someone close by that could be relied upon.’

  ‘What kind of things, Mrs Mole?’

  She frowned. ‘Small things really. I had a blocked sink and couldn’t get the U-bend off to clean it. Time was when I’d have done it myself, but as one gets older, one’s knees tend to fail.’