A Narrow Return (9 page)

‘Well, we’ll certainly try and track her down and talk to her,’ Hillary said. ‘Can you remember anything else she might have said?’

Hillary carefully talked through the encounter once again with Debbie, but she could add nothing more. After all, as the exasperated older woman pointed out, it had all happened twenty years ago. She could hardly be expected to remember it word for word, could she?

In her inadequate flat in Banbury, Lucy McRae sat on the sofa, with the phone in her lap. She could put it off no longer. With a brief nod of determination, she dialled a number from memory, and listened to the ringing tone, half hoping it would go unanswered.

‘Hello?’

‘Hello, it’s me,’ Lucy said.

‘Hello, you.’

‘Listen I need to talk to you. The cops have been to see me, and—’

‘Wait!’ the other voice interjected sharply, and Lucy felt her stomach clench in a small spasm of anxiety. ‘This is an open phone line. Anyone could be listening in. Be very careful what you say.’

‘I know that,’ Lucy lied huffily. She hadn’t, in fact, given the idea that they might accidentally be overhead a passing thought. ‘I’m not going to say anything stupid.’

‘Good. Now what did they want?’

‘What do you think?’ Lucy said smartly. ‘They’re reopening the case. What else? Do you think I regularly talk to the cops or something?’

‘Sarcasm doesn’t become you.’

‘Screw you.’

‘Charming as ever.’

Lucy sighed. ‘Look, I didn’t call just to argue. We need to get together. To talk about this.’

‘I don’t see why.’

‘Well I do!’ Lucy shot back, beginning to feel more confident. After all, she had the upper hand here. ‘Besides, I need to get out of this poky flat. Why don’t we meet somewhere nice. It’s been ages since you stood me lunch. What about that fancy restaurant we went to before – you know, the one run by that famous French cook – the one that’s been on the telly.’

The speaker on the other end of the line sighed heavily. ‘Fine. How about next week?’

‘How about lunch time today,’ Lucy countered.

‘I have plans.’

‘Cancel them.’

There was a rather ominous silence, and Lucy felt compelled to rush to fill it.

‘Come on, you know whatever it is, it can’t be more important than this,’ she wheedled.

The silence lengthened.

‘It is murder you know,’ she said flatly.

‘I thought you were going to be careful what you said,’ the other speaker reminded her grimly.

‘All the more reason to get together, then,’ Lucy pounced. ‘We can be sure we won’t be overheard then.’

A long-suffering sigh sounded over the telephone line. ‘OK. I’ll see you at 12.30 at the restaurant.’

‘You’ll have to pick me up from the bus station. My car failed its MOT and I had to sell it, virtually for the scrap.’

‘Ah,’ the voice said simply.

Lucy smiled grimly. ‘So I’m a bit cash-strapped.’

‘Yes. I thought it might be something like that.’

‘You always were quick.’

‘How much are you going to touch me for?’

This time it was Lucy’s turn to hesitate.

‘You might as well tell me now,’ the other speaker said. ‘If you want me to bring cash, I’ve got to take a trip to a cash machine. The restaurant might take a credit card, but I don’t suppose you’d like a cheque?’

Lucy laughed. ‘You know me so well.’

‘Yes,’ the other voice said grimly. ‘I do, don’t I?’

‘Well, there’s quite a few things I need, actually.’

‘Don’t push it.’

‘Well, I need more of a loan than just a few hundred in cash,’ Lucy said, careful to keep her voice nonchalant. ‘So actually, a cheque for, say, five thousand, would be nice.’

Silence.

When they got back to HQ, Jimmy set about trying to track down Diane Burgess. With only her name to go on, it might have been a bit of a pain, but the added knowledge that she’d worked in Tesco’s in Bicester at the time of the Anne McRae murder case would probably help.

The supermarket was his first port of call, and he rang the head office to get the permission needed to access personnel records.

If that failed, there were other avenues. The tax people, census, and various Records Offices. If Diane Burgess was local, he’d find her. Of course, she could have married a local boy, and come from Bognor Regis herself for all he knew.

Jimmy sighed as he was put on hold by a computer-generated voice, and then sighed again as he was given a list of buttons to press, depending on various options. He listened to the end of the spiel, but as he’d expected, there wasn’t an option for coppers who wanted to access data-protected files. He pressed the button to list the options again, and tried to pick out the one that would come closest to getting him to connected to someone who could actually help him.

As he listened to a machine talking to him, Jimmy Jessop wondered just what the world was coming to.

In her office, Hillary Greene – who had a fair idea of just what the world was coming to, and didn’t much approve – perused the updated file for ex-DI Andrew Squires’s current home phone number. She needed to speak to him at some point, and get his first-hand memories of the case, and his take on it. She could only hope that he wouldn’t take her being handed his old case as some sort of comment on his ability.

Some people could become very possessive about what they saw as ‘their’ cases – especially the ones that got away from you.

But when she called his number, he was out.

Ex-DI Andrew Squires, as it happened, wasn’t more than a quarter of a mile from where Hillary was sitting. The Black Bull had been his local for years when he’d been on the force. And since retiring, although there were several pubs closer, he still made his way there two or three times every week for a lunch time pint and a bit of a natter with any of the lads who were willing to pass the time of day with him.

So whilst Hillary was trying to contact him with a view to having just such a natter, he was watching his favourite pint of Hook Norton brew being pulled for him into a glass, and sorting out the change in his pocket.

The pub was filled with a mix of people on the job, and regular civilians. Andy Squires wasn’t quite sure which camp he belonged to now. As a retired gent of nearly seventy, he was hardly a copper any more, and yet he didn’t think of himself as being a civilian either. So when a couple of familiar faces came in, he raised his glass and his eyebrows, and was glad enough when they came up to him to greet him before ordering a pint for themselves.

One was a sergeant from traffic, Dave Olliphant, who was obviously clocking off from his shift. He was a good twenty years junior to Andy, but they’d been stationed in St Aldates for quite a few years before they both got transferred to HQ. The other man with him was a few years younger, and Andy vaguely remembered him as a green-behind-the-ears constable. He’d been seconded onto Andy’s team once or twice when they needed extra manpower.

Andy couldn’t quite remember his name. He wore a sergeant’s stripes now, though, and must be coming up to retirement age himself, if he wanted to take it early.

‘Bloody hell, where does the time go?’ he said out loud, as he offered to pay for the round.

‘Cheers, Andy,’ Dave Olliphant said, taking a quick gulp of the precious nectar. ‘I needed that. That bloody M40 will be the death of me yet.’

The man beside him grinned. ‘You’ve been saying that since they built the bloody thing, Dave. And it ain’t killed you yet.’

‘Give it time. You remember Andy Squires, right?’

‘Course I do. Will Hogg, sir. I was with you on the Burke case. Your final do, wasn’t it?’

Andy leaned against the bar and took a swallow of his beer. ‘Yeah. Got him for it too, I seem to remember. Aggravated assault. Got ten years. Should have got double that. Vicious little bastard.’

Dave sighed. ‘Bloody courts are always too soft.’ It was a familiar lament, and for the next ten minutes, the three men happily talked shop and slagged off solicitors they all knew and hated. The barman kept the pints topped up.

‘You must be glad to be out of it,’ Dave finally said, draining his second glass of beer, and waving off Fred’s attempt at giving him a third. ‘Driving,’ Dave said and laughed. ‘Wouldn’t do to get nicked for driving over the limit by one of my lot. And there’s one or two sods who’d be only too glad to do it, too.’

‘Nah, never,’ Will said laughing. ‘You’re universally loved and admired, you.’

‘Buggered if I ain’t,’ the traffic man said. Then he glanced curiously at Andy. ‘Still, I’m not the only one who has to watch his back, eh, Andy?’

Andy blinked. ‘Huh?’ Unlike Dave, he’d walked to the pub, and was well into his third pint.

‘You know. CRT.’

‘Huh?’ he said again. The CRT unit had been set up only after he’d gone, and he had no idea what Dave was getting at.

‘They’ve only gone and reopened one of yours, haven’t they?’ Dave said, who was well up on the current gossip at the station. ‘Given it to Hillary Greene, no less.’

Andy may have been retired for some time, but even he knew of Hillary Greene.

‘I heard she’d retired too,’ he said, puzzled.

‘She had. But she’s working for CRT now as a consultant. And Superintendent Crayle gave her one of your cases to start her off with.’

‘Which one?’ Andy asked quickly.

‘That housewife and mum who got it in her own kitchen. Bashed over the head,’ Dave snapped his fingers in an effort to remember the name.

‘Anne McRae,’ the retired man supplied it quietly.

Andy had no trouble at all in remembering her name. He might not have had quite as good a solve rate as Hillary Greene enjoyed, but he didn’t have that many failures either. So those few that had defeated him lingered on in his memory.

And few plagued him with more regrets than Anne McRae. A pretty young woman, and a mother of three kids, he’d badly wanted to give her justice. But that sister of hers had just been too damned lucky. No matter how hard he’d tried, he hadn’t been able to bring it home to her.

‘So, Hillary Greene’s reviewing the McRae case,’ Andy said slowly.

‘Rather you than me, mate,’ Dave said, slapping him on the back in commiseration. ‘They say that Commander Donleavy reckons she can solve anything. It’ll mean a bit of egg on your face, though, won’t it, if she gets a result after all this time.’

Jimmy Jessop grinned in triumph and quickly scribbled on his pad. He had the phone pressed against his right ear, his shoulder hunched up to keep it in place, and was rifling through the file in search of his notes from that morning. Although he could use a computer, he still preferred the feel of paper.

‘Right. And you say he’s still doing the same round?’ He listened to the voice on the other end of the line, and chipped in with the occasional ‘huh huh’ and ‘right’, before finally managing to get off the line.

He went straight through to Hillary’s office. She was sitting at her desk munching on a banana, which was making do as her lunch.

‘Guv, I’ve tracked down Diane Burgess. Well, actually, to be more accurate, I’ve tracked down her husband, Mark. And you’ll never guess what he does for a living.’

Hillary swallowed a mouthful of banana, and said cheerfully, ‘In that case, Jimmy, you’d better tell me.’

‘He does a butcher’s round. You know, in a van. I was just talking to his boss, who owns a chain of butchers’ shops. Apparently, Mark Burgess has been doing the same round for near enough the past twenty-five years. And guess what village he goes through, regular as clockwork, every Thursday afternoon?’

Hillary smiled. ‘Chesterton?’

‘Right. Which means he would have been doing so twenty years ago. You reckon our vic used to buy her steak and kidney off him?’

‘And more than that, if his wife is to be believed,’ Hillary said dryly. ‘You got an address for them?’

‘Yes, guv. But there’s no one answering the phone at the residence.’

‘Hmm. You got details of his round?’

Jimmy grinned. ‘Yes, guv. His boss was just giving me a right earful about him. A bit of a character it seems. I’ve got his schedule right here.’

He handed over his hastily scribbled list and Hillary looked at it and checked her watch.

‘Hmm. He’s due in Souldern in an hour,’ she mentioned a small village not far from the border with Northamptonshire. ‘What say we go over there and see for ourselves just how lean his minced beef is?’

Jimmy grinned.

S
ouldern was a small village nestled at the northern end of the Cherwell Valley, and at just gone three o’clock in the afternoon in the middle of the week, it seemed, like most traditional villages nowadays, all but deserted. With the majority of its residents away at work, it had an eerily abandoned air, and could almost have been the setting for some post-apocalyptic film noir.

But a fitful sun was trying to shine through the clouds, and innocuously cheerful birdsong filled the air. And when Hillary stepped from Jimmy’s car, the only thing on her mind was the more prosaic need to go second-hand car shopping at the weekend. She couldn’t keep relying on being chauffeur driven by her right-hand man.

In the centre of the village was a small pond, at the moment bereft of ducks, and parked up beside it was a white butcher’s van, with the back doors standing open. Two middle-aged women were standing between the doors, chatting and laughing with a tall, well-built man with salt-and-pepper hair and a wide, handsome but somewhat florid face. He was well over six feet and just running to seed, but so far the muscle was still winning out over the flab.

‘That would be our Lothario then,’ Jimmy said cheerfully beside her, and Hillary nodded.

‘We’ll wait until he’s got rid of his customers,’ she said, and then rued that decision as the trio spent the next good ten minutes indulging in mutual flirting and banter. Eventually, however, the two women moved away and Hillary and Jimmy approached the van, both of them with their IDs at the ready.

‘Mr Burgess?’ Hillary asked pleasantly.

Mark Burgess had his back to them, and visibly jumped at the unfamiliar voice coming from just over his left shoulder. He swung around, a silver weighing pan still in his hand. Beside her, she felt Jimmy tense, then relax, as the butcher smiled and hastily put the pan down.

Hillary noted the old soldier’s still-good reflexes, and felt reassured. Not that she’d expected any trouble, of course, but it was good to know that with Jimmy along, she could rely on his back-up. Now that she was no longer a fully fledged DI, and didn’t have sturdy constables at her beck and call whenever she might need one, it was good to know that Jimmy had his wits about him. She’d taken a few self-defence courses herself, and between the two of them, she was confident that they could cope with almost anything that her new job at the CRT might throw her way.

‘Yes, luv, what can I get you? Got on offer on best British steak at the moment.’

Hillary held up her ID.

‘We’re with the Thames Valley Police Service, sir,’ she smiled briefly. ‘But I might be interested in some of that steak anyway.’

Burgess looked surprised. ‘Police? What’s up? Been some burglaries about, have there? You know, come to think of it, I did hear about that from one of my customers over Fritwell way. But I’ve had this round for donkey’s years, luv you can check. There’s nothing dodgy about me.’

Hillary put her ID away in her bag. ‘We’d like to talk to you about the Anne McRae murder case, Mr Burgess,’ she said, still pleasantly, but getting straight to the point.

‘Bloody hell, that was, what, twenty years ago now. At least.’

His red-complexioned face went a shade paler, and his eyes, a pale shade of grey, swivelled from Hillary to Jimmy and then back again. He was obviously expecting the male in the team to take the lead, but Jimmy merely looked back at him mutely, giving him no help.

‘I understand she was a customer of yours, sir, back in the day?’ Hillary asked firmly, again giving him a brief smile when he reluctantly turned his eyes her way again.

Hillary had dealt with men like this before. He liked his women kept firmly in one category – sexual availability. She would have bet her last pay cheque that this man was a serial philanderer who needed easy sexual conquests to bolster up a chronic lack of self-esteem. Perhaps he felt professionally thwarted; that running a butcher’s van was a job for a butcher’s boy, and thus needed to prove his masculinity in other ways. She wasn’t a shrink, and didn’t much care, but it was clear that, to Mark Burgess, any woman in a position of authority would automatically be a threat to him.

And it made her wonder. Had Anne McRae threatened his self-image in some way? From what she’d learned of their murder victim so far, she was a strong-willed woman, and used to getting her own way. She could well see how two narcissistic personalities might clash, with potentially fatal consequences.

‘Well, yeah, she bought off me regular, like. I was well shocked, I can tell you, when I heard that someone had killed her,’ Burgess confirmed warily. ‘Why are you digging all that up again now anyway?’

‘We periodically review old cases, sir,’ Hillary said blandly. ‘What can you tell me about her?’

The older man’s eyes went back to Jimmy again, but the wily Jimmy Jessop was ostensibly studying a robin, which was singing its heart out in a just-greening weeping willow at the side of the pond.

‘Well, she liked her lamb and pork. Bought a lot of chicken too, not so much beef or offal though,’ Burgess said, being, Hillary was sure, deliberately obtuse.

Wearily, she smiled again. Smart alecs gave her a pain in the backside. ‘I wasn’t thinking so much of her dietary habits, sir, as her personal life. You and she were close, weren’t you?’ she added casually.

Burgess shifted from one foot to the other. ‘Huh? What do you mean?’ he asked nervously.

‘I mean that we have it on good authority that you and Anne McRae were on intimate terms, sir,’ she persisted doggedly.

‘Hey, you can’t go around saying things like that! I mean, it’s libellous.’

‘Slanderous sir,’ Hillary corrected him mildly. ‘Libel refers to written material. Slander is verbal.’

‘I don’t want a bloody grammar lesson,’ the discomfited butcher said, rather loudly, then glanced nervously around the deserted streets. ‘Who’s been telling lies then?’

Hillary cocked her head slightly to one side, allowing herself to look slightly incredulous. ‘Are you going to deny it then, sir?’ she asked, her voice slightly raised in disbelief.

As she knew it would, her amused surprise instantly made Burgess feel acutely unnerved and full of self-doubt. She could almost hear his mind working, trying to pick out where the pitfalls were. Was he being stupid? Would any other man simply boast about it and make out it was nothing, having been caught out doing the horizontal tango with some bird who later got murdered? Or should he already be denying it, and threatening to bring in his solicitor?

‘Well, I … What does it matter now anyway?’ he temporized. ‘It was all so long ago.’

‘Yes, sir. Perhaps you can tell me about her. Were you her only bit on the side?’ Hillary asked, letting the amusement grow. Then she shook her head. ‘Oh no, sorry, of course you weren’t. DI Squires, the SIO – sorry, that’s senior investigating officer – at the time established that Anne was also having an affair with her own brother-in-law, wasn’t she?’ Hillary continued blithely, thus lumping the butcher into being one of a crowd. And a not particularly discriminating crowd at that. His ego wouldn’t like that, she was sure.

‘Here, you’re making her sound like a right slag. But she wasn’t like that, Anne wasn’t. She was class. A real beauty, and everything,’ Burgess said defensively, his voice level once again rising. His point being, of course, that he was to be commended on his choice. And, naturally, to point out that he had his pick of beautiful, classy women.

Jimmy watched the robin fly away and then turned back to looking at Burgess, his face bland. He had to hand it to the guv – she’d already got him worked up good and proper. Now maybe they’d hear something interesting.

‘Oh, so you were in love with her?’ Hillary asked softly. ‘It wasn’t casual. Were you going to leave your wife for her then, sir?’

‘What? No, course I wasn’t. I’m a happily married man, me. Nearly thirty years now,’ Burgess contradicted.

‘But not so happily married that you’re above extra-marital affairs? Come on sir, you can’t have it both ways. Do you make a habit of sleeping around?’

‘No of course not!’ Burgess lied huffily.

‘So Anne McRae
was
special then, was she? Did you find out about Shane Gregg? Did that upset you, is that it?’ she pressed him hard now.

‘What, who?’

‘Her other paramour, Mr Burgess. Did it dent your ego to find out that you weren’t the only one? Did you quarrel with her? Perhaps things got out of hand. That can easily happen. The rolling pin was just lying there, to hand, and you picked it up and swung it before you even knew what was happening. Is that how it happened?’

Burgess staggered back, and sat down heavily on a tray of chicken fillets, lying in the back of the van. His face was now ashen.

‘You’re trying to say I did it?’ he squeaked, looking frantically to Jimmy, as if hoping he would deny it. ‘Me?’

He looked so astounded, his voice so comically squeaky, that Hillary felt the urge to laugh. She squashed it ruthlessly.

‘Someone killed her, Mr Burgess,’ Hillary pointed out calmly. ‘And at the time of her murder, you and she were having an affair, and yet you never came forward. You must have followed the case in the local papers, you must have seen and heard the many appeals for witnesses and information broadcast on the radio and the local news stations. Yet you never came forward. That makes us wonder why, you see. It makes us ask the question, “What is he trying to hide?” You can understand that, surely?’

Burgess ran a shaking hand across his mouth.

‘I’m not hiding nothing – honest! I just didn’t come forward because, well, I just didn’t have any information, see? I didn’t know who killed her. I still don’t.’

‘What were you doing on the afternoon that Anne McRae died, Mr Burgess?’

‘Eh? Well, I must have been working, mustn’t I. Doing my rounds like, as I always do.’

‘I need you to be a bit more specific than that, sir.’

‘How can I be? It was twenty years ago, for pity’s sake!’

Hillary smiled grimly. ‘Come now, sir, that won’t do. By your own admission you were having an affair with her. When you heard about her death you must have been shocked. Surprised. Stunned, even.’

‘Of course I was. I said so, didn’t I?’ Burgess said edgily.

‘And you must have followed the case keenly. Read all the newspaper reports, listened to the local gossip, all of that?’

‘Well, that’s only natural isn’t it?’

‘Of course it is, sir,’ Hillary said smoothly. ‘It’s only human nature. It’s also human nature to think about what it must have been like for her. To imagine her in her kitchen, cooking her family’s tea, maybe hearing the doorbell go, and perhaps letting someone in.’

‘I don’t have much imagination, not like that,’ Burgess denied flatly. ‘Besides, I didn’t like to dwell on it. On stuff like that, I mean. It makes me feel sick.’

Hillary nodded. ‘But the day she died must have burned itself onto your memory, sir,’ she carried on, not about to let it go. ‘You must have seen that her time of death had been put at between 2.30 and 3.30, on the afternoon of 6 June. When you heard that you must have wondered just what it was that you were doing at that time. Everybody does that, sir. You know how Americans say that they know exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard about Kennedy getting shot? Are you really telling me you didn’t do the same when you heard about the death of your lover?’

Once again, Hillary allowed herself to sound incredulous.

Burgess flushed, sensing reproof, and responding to it like Pavlov’s dog. ‘Course I did.’

‘So where were you?’

‘In Wendlebury. That day, that time, I’d have been in Wendlebury. One of my regular villages.’

Hillary nodded. ‘So you were working. Can you remember the names of the customers you served that day?’

‘Now you’re taking the piss,’ Burgess said, with a flash of defiance. ‘Course I don’t. How could I remember that? Nobody would.’

His eyes moved away from her, but this time didn’t seek help with Jimmy. Instead, his eyes settled on a group of daffodils by the pond. His lips tightened, and she knew what that meant. He’d made up his mind not to talk.

Hillary sighed. He was lying to her, of that she had no doubt. But it would be useless to press him on it now. Instead, she changed tack.

‘So, what was Anne like? How did you and she get started?’

Burgess took his eyes from the daffodils and thought about it for a second or two. ‘Well, she had regular orders, like, and after a bit, I got to know the sort of cuts she’d like best and I’d put them aside for her, so that she didn’t need to come to the van to choose them for herself. So after I’d finished serving from the van, I’d take the meat to her door. She started offering me cold drinks in the summer, and then, well, you know. It went on from there. There was no harm in it. That husband of hers was always away on that bloody coach of his, living the high life in Europe and what have you. And she was bored there on her own, what with the kids in school and nothing to do all day. It was just a bit of harmless fun. We never hurt or bothered anybody.’

Hillary nodded. ‘And did she ever tell you about any of her worries?’

‘Huh? No, she didn’t have any. I mean, what worries could she have?’ Burgess sounded genuinely surprised. ‘It’s us men who have to work, and pay the bills and fix the gutters and what have you. What do women have to do but a bit of housework and take care of the kids when they’re little?’

Hillary didn’t even blink at the sexism. ‘So she never said that there was someone bothering her, or that she was worried her husband had found out about you or anything of that sort?’

‘Nah. She said her hubby wouldn’t notice a mink in the sugar bowl unless it bit him.’

‘And while you were together, you never saw or noticed anything odd? She didn’t get phone calls that upset her, or anything like that?’

‘No, nothing like that. She was fine – honest. She wasn’t the jumpy or temperamental sort. And if some asshole had been stalking her, she’d get her hubby to sort him out, wouldn’t she?’

Because that’s what they were for, Hillary could have finished the thought for him.