Bold Counsel (The Trials of Sarah Newby) (15 page)

We puzzled over that for hours, Terry remembered. But I’d hesitate to take them there now, with this pervert around. That’s what criminals do; limit other people’s freedom.

The third incident came a week later - a jogger, a young woman, was accosted by a cyclist who tried to get into conversation with her. At first it seemed innocuous, then he started to ask what she wore under her tights, what colour her underwear was, did it get sweaty ... She escaped into the house of a friend, and called the police, but the young man was gone. Terry had arranged for a photofit to appear in the Press, under the headline
Cycle Pest Strikes Again
. The letters column of the paper had featured urgent calls for the police to protect women, and householders with gardens backing onto cycletracks complained that their property was being devalued.

And now, here was another report. A woman called Sally McFee claimed to have come home from shopping in the afternoon to see a man climbing hurriedly over the fence at the end of her garden and pedalling away along the cycletrack. At first she’d wondered if she was imagining things, because of all the reports in the
Evening Press
, but then she’d found that the French windows, which she’d forgotten to lock, were wide open, and - more disturbing still - someone appeared to have been in her bedroom. Her underwear drawer was open, and the intruder seemed to have taken several pairs of knickers and an expensive necklace which she had worn to a party the previous night.

Terry sighed. Clearly the situation was getting worse. If this was the same man, he was getting bolder and more dangerous. But there were all these other demands on his attention.

He snatched a coffee from the machine, reached his desk, and sat down, wondering whether to refresh his memory about the drugs trial, or investigate this new report. Before he could decide, he saw his boss, Will Churchill, advancing on him across the floor. Coming towards him beside Churchill was a woman Terry had not seen before. She was tall, about five foot ten, with short brown hair and a mannish, confident way of walking. Her face was not ugly exactly, but somehow devoid of any suggestion of femininity. A snub nose, wide mouth, firm chin, cool, assertive grey eyes beneath a line of dark eyebrows. She wore a brown leather jacket and jeans which clung tightly around hips which, to Terry, looked more powerful than appealing.

He wondered what Churchill, whose office was festooned with photos of glamorous waterskiing blondes in wetsuits, was doing with such a woman. He soon found out.

The pair stopped in front of Terry’s desk, a sly ingratiating smile on the younger man’s face.

‘Terence, allow me to present Jane Carter - newly promoted Detective Sergeant and assigned to our team. I want you to look after her and show her the ropes.’

‘But - I’m up to my neck!’ Terry indicated the mess of papers on his desk.

‘Then Jane can give you a hand. She’s a smart cookie, Terence - highest arrest profile in Beverley this year! That’s why I brought her - thought she might help you with the Bishopthorpe flasher case - see it with a fresh pair of eyes. How’s that going anyway?’

‘It’s getting worse,’ Terry said. ‘There’s been a new report of a burglary, and I’m short-handed. Bill Jones is off sick, I’ve got a team chasing shoplifters round town, I’m due in court on Friday, and ...’

‘Always the same,’ Churchill said sympathetically. ‘Too many bad guys, not enough saints. I’d help you myself, only I’ve got a management training course later this week, and a report on a missing hand to look into. Still, my loss is your gain, eh? Keen young woman to take the weight off your shoulders. Just what you need, Terence - man of your age!’

With a broad wink, Will Churchill stepped back, made as if to slap Jane Carter on her rump, thought better of it, and strode smugly back towards his office. Terry sighed, got to his feet, and held out his hand. ‘Ok, well, nice to meet you.’

Her grip was firm, as strong as his own. ‘Good to be here.’ She glanced at his desk. ‘Busy day?’

‘Busy week, looks like.’ Terry sat down, waved her to a chair, and took a sip of the scalding coffee. It burned his throat. No, please, he thought. Don’t let me be coming down with what Esther’s got. That would be the last straw. ‘Come from Beverley, have you?’

‘Yes. It’s not as dramatic as he said, but ...’

‘I can imagine.’ Terry thought of Beverley, a quiet country town on the Yorkshire Wolds, halfway between York and Hull. Now that would be a quiet place to work. No Will Churchill, for a start. ‘Lot of cattle rustling, was there? Stolen tractors and lads buggering sheep?’

Jane Carter stiffened. ‘Agricultural crime is big business, you know. Some of those syndicates steal to order. By the time the farmer wakes up, his tractor’s halfway to Poland and he’s lost fifty grand.’

‘And you got them back?’

‘Some of them, yes.’

Terry looked at her, saw the determination in the woman’s face. A young woman, he realised slowly. Probably not thirty yet, and already a detective sergeant. That would take some doing, particularly in rural North Yorkshire. Progress might have led to a few token women being favoured with positive discrimination, but a greater number had probably been held back, or deterred from applying for promotion altogether. This girl didn’t look as though she’d received any special favours. For a start, her appearance was against her. If there was a casting couch in Northallerton, he doubted if she’d been laid on it.

‘What’s all this talk about a flasher near Bishopthorpe?’ she asked. ‘Sounds quite serious, in its way. Guys like that can cause a lot of fear in the community, if they aren’t caught straight away.’

Terry sat back, looking at her thoughtfully. Maybe she could offer some help after all. ‘That’s true, of course. And another report came in yesterday.’ He searched among the papers on his desk. ‘Here it is. Why don’t I fill you in? Someone stole knickers and a necklace, it seems. From a woman called Sally McFee.’

18. Mother and Son

‘Y
OU WERE aiming for his head, were you?’

‘I don’t know what I was doing, Simon. It was purely spontaneous. I threw it before I even knew I’d picked it up.’

‘Well, it’s head height here. You’d have laid him out flat if he hadn’t closed the door in time.’

Sarah’s son, Simon, stood in the hall with his mother, contemplating her ruined front door with interest. The pane that she’d smashed with the plant pot was small, about head height as Simon said. She’d taped a square of cardboard over it to keep out the wind, but was grateful that he’d come over with his bag of tools to fix it for her. She’d told him the bare bones of why it had happened - Bob’s decision to move out, his demand for a divorce - but it had shocked Simon less than Emily, at least on the surface. Despite all the photos Bob had taken with him - of himself playing football, making sandcastles, tobogganing with Simon as a young boy - Simon’s teenage years had been one long war of attrition with his stepfather.

As a man, Bob was gawky, clumsy, academic. His attempts to involve himself in boy’s games had always been well-meaning failures, distractions from the real business of childhood, which was schoolwork, academic success. Simon’s priorities had always been exactly the opposite: he loathed schoolwork, but everything physical or practical he understood immediately. He doesn’t inherit that from me, Sarah thought, watching him calmly assess the minor problem of the window; all these traits must have come from his natural father Kevin, the teenage tearaway who had seduced her at the age of fifteen, and given her the most tumultuous, passionate time of her life, before divorcing her 18 months later.

Simon seemed surprised but not hurt by the new situation. He’d given her a hug as soon as he’d arrived - an unusual demonstration of affection for him - and it seemed there was no question whose side he was likely to take in the divorce. ‘You’re better off without him, Mum,’ he said calmly, ‘if that’s how he behaves. He’s probably been cheating on you for years and you didn’t know.’

‘What,
Bob?
Not for years, surely, Simon, he’s not that kind of man,’ Sarah said, grateful but a little worried by Simon’s suggestion. ‘There was that secretary, Stephanie, sometime last year. But there wasn’t anyone else, was there, that you know of?’

Simon shook his head. ‘He wouldn’t have told me anyway, would he, Mum? I’m just guessing. But if he’s done it twice, he may have done it more often.’

‘I don’t want to think about it. That Stephanie was awful - how he could choose a woman like that ...’

‘Have you met her, this - what’s her name - teacher he’s moving in with?’

‘Sonya? No. And I don’t want to. If I liked her I’d be jealous and if I didn’t I’d just be humiliated. I’m humiliated anyway. I hope we never meet.’

‘You could do better, Mum,’ Simon said thoughtfully, rolling thin sausages of putty carefully into the rebate of the door. ‘There’s lots of guys out there who’d give their eye teeth to meet a woman like you.’

‘Thanks, Simon. A man with no teeth. Just what I need, at my time of life.’

He laughed. ‘You know what I mean.’ He picked up the pane of glass, pressed it carefully into place, and began to cut a thin wooden strip to go on top of it. Sarah watched, admiring his calm practical confidence.

‘Yes, and it’s kind of you, but right now I need a fish like a man on a bicycle. No, that’s wrong, I mean ...’

Simon put his tools down, amused but slightly offended. ‘If that’s how you feel, you can fix this door yourself.’

She laughed. ‘No, Simon, of course I don’t mean you. Please go on, don’t stop now. What I mean is, my main priority now is to work out how to live on my own. I’m not used to it. I’ve never been alone before, not since you were born.’

‘When you were what? Sixteen?’

‘Yes. And even then I’d run away from home to live with your father. When he left I was lost until Bob came along. I could never have managed on my own.’ She sighed, thinking how close she had come to putting Simon up for adoption, as her mother and the social worker had wanted. She’d never told him that, and now didn’t seem to be the time. ‘At least I’m a bit older. But it’s hard.’ She sighed. ‘I may have to sell this house, for a start. Either that or take out a massive loan which I can’t afford.’

Simon stood back from the door. ‘There, that should hold it. I’ll come back in a few days when it’s dry, to give it a lick of paint.’ He began to put his tools away in his toolbox. ‘What are you talking about, Mum, sell the house? Why? I thought you liked living here.’

‘I do, Simon, you know I do. But for a start, there’s only one salary coming in now instead of two. And more importantly, Bob wants his equity. He says so in that letter from his lawyers. Anyway, it’s too big for a woman on her own. Look, I can’t even shut the front door without smashing it.’

Simon smiled thoughtfully. ‘I could move in here for a bit, Mum, if you want.’

‘What? No - Simon, that’s sweet of you, but you’d hate it.’

Unlike Sarah and Emily, who loved it, Simon had loathed this house from the moment they’d moved in. He’d been sixteen at the time, in the middle of his teenage crisis. The luxurious, detached house, with its beautiful garden, trees, lawns, riverside views and country walks, had epitomised everything he wanted to rebel against. It was too far from town, for a start, where his friends were; and everything about it spoke of affluence, education, middle-class values - all things that Simon, a resentful failure at school, had been desperate to reject.

Bob, and Sarah too, had tried to persuade him to stay on at school, but Simon was having none of it. He was a working class lad like his dad; he wanted to use his hands, not books and paper. So he left home to live in a terraced house in town and work on building sites, where he’d got into the most awful trouble from which Sarah had had to rescue him. But now, surprisingly, here he was, three years later, a calm, confident young man, able to come to her aid when she needed him. Perhaps, she thought hopefully, he was even happy.

‘You wouldn’t want to live here. You’ve got Lorraine, haven’t you - your own life to lead?’ She was touched, but also a little apprehensive. This new relationship with her son might not survive actually sharing her home with him and his new girlfriend.

Simon pulled a crumpled newspaper out of his toolbag - yesterday’s
Press.
‘Look here, Mum, have you seen this?’

It was a report of a prowler spying on women near the Bishopthorpe cyclepath, and stealing underwear from their gardens.

‘You ought to think about that, Mum. Check your locks and alarm. Draw the curtains before you put the lights on.’

‘Why? You don’t think I’m in any danger, do you? I’m too old, for a start.’

‘Mum, don’t be silly. Perverts like this ... anyway you’re not old. And more to the point, every time this guy attacks, it’s some woman who lives alone in a house that backs onto some cycletrack or footpath. And what’s out the back of your house? A footpath along the river.’

‘Yes, I know Simon, but all this happened the other side of town. Anyway, not all these women were at home, look. One of them was actually walking along the cycle track.’

‘Yes, well, you do that too sometimes, don’t you, Mum - walk by the river? Not any more, Mum, please, not on your own. Not until this weirdo’s caught, at least.’

Sarah looked at him, touched by his concern. ‘Okay, Simon, I promise to look after myself. But ...’

Just then the telephone rang. ‘Make us some tea, Simon,’ she said, going to answer it. ‘I’ll be with you in a minute.’ A few minutes later she joined him in the kitchen, with a quizzical smile on her face. ‘Well, there you are. It seems you’re a prophet as well as my protector.’

Simon passed her a mug of tea. ‘Why? Who was that?’

‘A man I met on the train a couple of days ago. A property developer.’

‘And?’

Sarah drew a deep breath. ‘Well, his name is Michael Parker, and he’s about my age, quite good-looking, still has his teeth, and, er - he’s divorced, with a daughter at school in Cambridge.’

‘So?’ Simon stared at her, surprised. ‘Why are you telling me this?
Mum?’