A Narrow Return (11 page)

The door closed then opened again, and Jenny McRae stepped back to let them in. She was stick-thin, and had the pale pasty face of someone who didn’t get out much. Her long hair was lank, and a dirty-blonde in colour. Or maybe it was just dirty, and once washed, would show through in a much brighter shade, like that of her dead mother’s.

‘The kids are in school,’ she said defensively, in what, Hillary guessed, was a pure reflex. If she remembered rightly, Jenny had been prosecuted once before for allowing her children to be habitual truants.

‘Yes, I’m sure they are,’ she said soothingly.

The flat was tiny – there were, she suspected, only two bedrooms, meaning the children had to share one between them. The living room had enough room for one sofa and a single armchair. There was no television. A glaring omission, which probably meant that Jenny had sold it at some point in order to get a fix. The whole place smelt of faintly sour milk. The walls were painted an off-white, which had probably come courtesy of whoever had had the flat before her.

‘Please, sit down.’

Jimmy left the cleanest cushion seat on the sofa for Hillary and perched on one arm for himself.

‘So, what can I tell you, then? It can’t be much,’ Jenny said, sitting on the edge of the seat of the armchair, her hands twisting and turning in her lap. ‘I was at the swimming pool when it happened. I used to be one of the sporty set, believe it or not, when I was at school.’

‘And swimming was your favourite?’ Hillary asked, willing to ease her into it slowly. She knew she had to be careful, she wasn’t expecting the girl’s memory to be the best and this one looked as though she had all the emotional stability of a roller coaster.

‘Yeah. That and running fast. You know, sprints and stuff. Not that marathon or longer-distance stuff.’

‘And that day, you were at the pool? Was that a school thing or a private arrangement?’ Hillary asked, genuinely curious.

‘Oh, private. My best friend was a girl called Maddie Morrison, and her mum was a keen swimmer too. Maddie liked messing around in the water, you know, playing more than exercising, but her mum was teaching me how to time myself doing lengths. I was getting quite fast – the coach at the pool was beginning to notice me and everything. Anyway, she picked us up after school that day, and then took me back home.’

‘Your mother knew all about it, right?’

‘Oh yeah. Mum and Maddie’s mum were friends. Only that day, when Mrs Morrison took me home there were all these police cars there. And Mum was dead. I remember Lucy and Dad sitting with me in Mrs Morrison’s car. And Dad told me that Mum was dead.’

Jenny McRae had pale green eyes, and they were staring mostly out of the window. ‘Lucy said it would be all right. But it never was. All right I mean. It never was all right again, somehow.’

Jimmy Jessop shook his head with the barest movement of his neck, but Hillary saw it, and silently agreed with him. Looking at Jenny McRae, at the wasted life, the wasted body, the awful tiny flat, and the flat despair in her voice, it was enough to make anyone want to throw in the towel.

‘We went to a hotel. Peter had a room with Dad, and I had to share with Lucy. I wanted to have the room with Dad, but Peter did. Peter always got the best of everything,’ Jenny said resentfully, as if she was still eleven years old, instead of a woman in her thirties.

Hillary had to smile. ‘You don’t get on with your brother?’

‘Peter’s a piss artist. He always was, he always will be. It’s not fair – he always lands on his feet. Just look at where he is now – living in some swanky place in North Oxford. The best bloody address in town.’ Course, that old fag that he’s living with pays for it all – some sort of snooty academic. It’s typical of Peter to end up as some rich old man’s toy boy. He calls himself a landscape gardener. Hah! That’s a laugh. All he does is plant some roses and bushes for his old man’s cronies, and calls himself self-employed. It’s a joke. He’s just a tart. A male tart, that’s all he is.’

Hillary let her rant. She’d come across this type of behaviour before – normal as pie one minute, raving the next. She’d calm down and then be off on another tangent soon.

‘I’m hoping to speak to Lucy later on,’ she said, hoping to divert her before she got really started.

‘Lucy,’ Jenny said flatly, slumping back in the chair. ‘Lucy’s all right, I suppose.’ She didn’t sound particularly sure. She had a sheen of sweat on her face, and her fingers were beginning to walk along the edge of the chair arm. She was getting jittery. Hillary wondered when she’d last had a fix.

‘And I’ve already spoken to your father,’ Hillary continued, her expression totally bland. ‘He seems a nice man.’

For the first time, Jenny smiled. ‘He is.’

Hillary nodded. Ah, she got it now. Jenny was Daddy’s little girl, and she’d have bet the family jewels – if she had any – that Peter had been Anne’s favourite. It was often that way in families – Dads favouring the girls, and mothers favouring the boys.

Which left Lucy, the middle child, out in the cold, so to speak. Hillary wondered if she’d felt the draught. When she talked to her later on, she’d have to find out.

The more she knew about the way the McRae family had functioned, the better. Even though the killer obviously wasn’t part of the immediate circle, they were her best bet at finding the thread that might lead her to him. Or her.

‘He’s concerned about you,’ Hillary went on. ‘When he talked to us, he made it very clear that he didn’t want his children to be upset by all this.’

Jenny suddenly beamed. ‘That’s Dad all right. He’s always giving the kids pocket money, and if ever something breaks down around here, he comes and fixes it for me.’

And pays some of the bills too, Hillary would have bet. But wisely, didn’t say.

‘Did you know about your Mum and your uncle Shane?’ Hillary asked instead, and as casually as she could.

‘No! Bloody hell, no. None of us did,’ Jenny shot forward on her chair again, the agitation back with a vengeance. ‘Of course, I didn’t really understand it at the time. I kept asking why Auntie Debbie didn’t see us anymore.’

‘Did you realize that your aunt was a prime suspect for your mother’s death at the time?’

‘No. I was too little, I suppose. A lot of stuff was kept from me. But I found out, anyway. From the kids at school – they used to tease me, of course. They read the papers, see, and kept them and showed me the articles. They said that my mother was a tramp – something they’d heard their own parents say, I suppose.’ Jenny gave a sudden high-pitched yelp of laughter that made Jimmy visibly jump. ‘You know, that puzzled me for ages afterwards, because I didn’t know what it meant. I mean, to me, a tramp was an old man who couldn’t find work who tramped about the countryside looking for handouts. And what did that have to do with my mum?’

Jimmy winced. Kids could be heartless little buggers.

‘And thinking back to the days before it happened. Did your mum seem to change in any way?’ Hillary ploughed on doggedly.

‘No. I know what you mean, and I’ve thought about it a lot,’ Jenny said, surprising Hillary somewhat. Druggy types weren’t exactly known for their introspection. ‘I lay awake at night for ages, looking back to see if there were any clues that I’d missed, but I don’t think there were. She was just the same as usual. She was always pretty, that’s what I remember. She always looked prettier than the other mums. And she was cheerful and funny, but you didn’t backchat her. Of course, Peter was giving her grief – he always was. He thought he could get away with anything, and he was sulking about something, but Mum just laughed it off, the way she always did.’

Hillary nodded. It sounded right. Their victim might have favoured her only son, but she doubted he’d be allowed to get away with much.

‘But if she did have a problem, do you think you’d know about it?’ Hillary asked gently.

But Jenny merely snorted. ‘I can’t imagine anyone giving Mum a problem,’ she said with a suddenly savage grin. ‘She looked like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, but Mum was tough. Tougher than Dad, for sure. Tougher than Auntie Debbie too as it turns out. Nobody told Mum what to do, I can tell you that. She wouldn’t have cared if anybody had found out about her and Uncle Shane. She just did whatever she wanted to, and look out if you didn’t like it.’

Hillary nodded, feeling her antenna begin to twitch. ‘So if she had a problem with someone, she’d take the fight to them, you think?’

‘Oh yeah. She wouldn’t back off from anything,’ Jenny said instantly. ‘You can ask anyone who knows her, and they’d say the same thing.’

‘Yes, that’s the impression I’m gaining of your mother too,’ Hillary agreed softly. ‘Well, thank you, Jenny. May we come back if I can think of anything else that I might need to know?’

‘Oh yeah. Any time,’ Jenny said. She didn’t sound particularly enthusiastic about it, but Hillary put that down to an aversion to having cops about.

Driving back to HQ, Jimmy wound down a window. ‘Sorry about the draught, guv, but I’ve got to get the smell of that place out of my head.’

‘I know what you mean.’

‘Losing her mum really buggered her up, didn’t it?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘You thinking what I’m thinking? About what she said about her mum?’ Jimmy asked.

‘About her being the tough one in the family?’ Hillary shot back. ‘Yeah, it opens up possibilities doesn’t it? With her husband away for long spells, it makes sense that she was the one who took the reins, so to speak. And someone like that, someone so self-confident and used to taking charge might not be aware of the dangers in confronting someone.’

Jimmy nodded. ‘Just what I was thinking. If someone was threatening her or her family, she’d go at them no holds barred, not realizing that she might be walking right into something that she couldn’t handle.’

Hillary sighed. ‘Thing is, Jimmy, we’ve no idea what that might be – and there’s lots of possibilities. If someone was threatening her kids in some way, she’d be vicious. But let’s not forget she was playing the field – she had two lovers that we know about, and who’s to say there weren’t more? That’s a minefield all on it’s own. And if someone was trying to blackmail her, for instance, I can’t see her simply rolling over and taking it lying down.’

‘Then there’s her marriage,’ Jimmy said. ‘She might not have been the faithful type, but I get the feeling she wouldn’t have wanted to divorce her husband or upset the kids. If someone was threatening to tell Melvin about her, she’d have it out with them.’

‘That leaves the field well and truly wide open, doesn’t it?’ Hillary said grimly.

Jimmy sighed heavily. The guv was right. So far they had nothing. Still, it was early days yet, and nobody was expecting a miracle. After all, the case was twenty years old, and colder than a witch’s tits. The chances are it would have to go back into the unsolved pile when they were done, anyway.

But he doubted that anybody had told Hillary that. She wasn’t the sort of woman who ever admitted defeat, and like a terrier with a rat, he couldn’t see her letting this case go.

But she might have to. The sad fact was, that the majority of the cold cases that were looked at a second time, remained unsolved. And then you simply had to go on to the next one.

But he just couldn’t see Hillary taking kindly to having her case snatched away from her and being ordered to forget about it and get on with something else. And that might very well be what Steven Crayle would have to do at some point in the near future. That was part of his job, after all. Jimmy grinned as he drove. And he was welcome to it. He only hoped he’d be around – but at a safe distance – to watch the fireworks fly when it happened!

It was nearly lunchtime by the time she got back, and Sam and Vivienne were already back at the office, Vivienne looking damp and displeased.

‘No luck with Mark Burgess, guv,’ Sam reported, without being asked. ‘He still does the rounds there, and a lot of people have confirmed that he’s got an eye for the ladies all right, but no one’s willing to point the finger.’

‘I think it’s gross,’ Vivienne said with a shudder. ‘A middle-aged butcher, for Pete’s sake. Some women have no class.’

Hillary bit back a smile. No doubt to someone of Vivienne’s age and good looks, the thought of anyone over thirty and possessing a less than physically perfect body, having sex was the ultimate in bad taste.

Unless they looked like Steven Crayle of course, she corrected herself with an inner smile. She hadn’t missed the goo-goo eyes the youngster had been giving their boss. She wondered, briefly, if he secretly enjoyed being the object of a young and pretty girl’s desire, then abruptly cut the thought off.

He was a man. Of course he did.

‘Up for a pint at the Bull, guv?’ Jimmy asked, interrupting her suddenly sour thoughts.

‘Give me ten minutes,’ Hillary agreed readily. She went back to her stationery cupboard and picked up her bag and headed to the locker rooms. There she used the ladies next door and went to her locker. She noticed the scratches the moment she lifted the padlock into her hand and, with her own key paused a centimetre above it, blinked in surprise.

Slowly, she opened the locker and looked inside. Her spare coat was hanging just how she’d left it. Her holdhall, though still on the bottom shelf, had its flaps showing. But she had stashed it the other way around. Which meant that someone had moved it. Which meant it had almost certainly been gone through. Her eyes swept on, doing a rapid, mental inventory.

Her perfume bottle wasn’t in the same place either.

And her spare comb was gone.

She stood there for several moments, baffled.

There weren’t that many possibilities to explain it. The first and most likely, was that there was a thief about. Nothing new or surprising in that, of course. They were everywhere, just like rats. Seldom seen, but you knew they were there. And the fact that they were in a police station meant nothing at all.

She checked the padlocks on the lockers either side of hers, and then a few at random. Most of the padlocks were old and had their fair share of scratches, but none that looked new or recent.