Never Forget (29 page)

A
fitful Friday night’s sleep was followed by a working Saturday. Always a useful time for police officers to visit people who were unavailable during the week. I had tried to visit Charles Bruce with Pierre before going off duty the previous evening but we’d got no reply. Personally, I’d been grateful, as I’d wanted to get home, but I’d promised Pierre I would see to it first thing in the morning. It couldn’t be put off any longer.

In the office, I found the paperwork where I’d abandoned it next to my file. As Wingsy and I got into the Golf to drive to the location, I saw him throw a carrier bag on to the back seat.

‘That looked suspiciously like a bag of your five-a-day in there, mate,’ I said.

‘Yeah, Mel’s got me on that poxy diet again this week.’

‘Clearly it’s doing you good. Your mood’s improving. Shame it’s not making your hair grow back,’ I said.

The address we had for Charles Bruce was fifteen miles away, in a fairly decent part of the county, on another new estate in Woodford. As we drove along the main
through-road
for the estate, the sprawl of immaculate three-storey townhouses ran out somewhere near to the children’s play area, and the social housing began. This was where we pulled up to hear what Charlie had to tell us.

‘Before we go inside,’ said Wingsy, ‘tell me where you got this bloke’s number from again.’

‘OK. I’ll be upfront with you, you know that. It was given to me by an old acquaintance’s son. He won’t have anything to do with the police. Lifetime of mistrust won’t go away because I take his mum some biscuits now and again. He told me that this fella Charlie knew Daphne Headingly and said she was a pretty decent woman. Taught him to read when others had given up on him. He considered her to be a harmless old bird.’

Wingsy didn’t look bowled over by what I was telling him.

‘I’ve done the checks on him and this house,’ I said. ‘He only has a caution for possession of cannabis when he was a lad. I’d never walk us in here blind.’

‘Bloody hell, Nin, I trust you, girl. Let’s say hello.’

We stepped out of the car and made our way towards No. 27, our target address. We were barely a few feet from the kerbside when the front door opened to reveal a bald white male I could only describe as a man mountain. He stood on the doorstep, watching us walk towards him as he folded his arms across his chest, vest top begging for mercy across a gargantuan torso.

‘Fucking hell, Nin,’ said Wingsy in tones as low as he could muster, ‘the trust I have in you may just have been kicked in the nuts.’

Despite walking towards a pretty hacked-off-looking bare-knuckle fighter, I had to suppress a laugh.

‘Mr Charles Bruce?’ I began. This was my enquiry, after all. ‘I’m Detective Nina Foster, from the enquiry into Daphne Headingly’s death. Can we – ?’

I had rarely seen such an immediate shift in facial features. His cheeks sagged and his eyes lowered for a second. Then he was back.

‘Better come in, then, love. And your mate,’ he said, in Wingsy’s direction. ‘Don’t know what the world’s coming to, killing an old lady.’ He moved back to allow us in. He was surprisingly light on his feet when he moved.

In the kitchen, I watched Charlie glance at the water level on the electric kettle, switching it on to boil before turning and saying, ‘Take it you two want a brew?’

‘Yes, thanks,’ I said. ‘How did you know Daphne Headingly?’

‘Daphne was alright. Used to be that a kid like me – shit, useless family, filthy dirty all the time, getting into fights, didn’t want to be at school, picked on ’cos I was always trying to act hard – well, there was a time when kids like me dropped out of the system. Couldn’t read and write, so they called you thick.’ He reached towards the neatly lined-up row of mugs on the window sill behind the sink, stopped with his hand around one and said, ‘To be fair to the teachers, I was a right little fucker.’

‘And when did you meet Daphne?’ I asked.

‘I was about nine, or was it eight?’ He put three mugs on the work surface and dropped teabags into them while he considered this point. ‘Hadn’t long been at primary school anyway, when I was sent out of class, yet again, for fucking about.’ He poured hot water into the mugs, set the kettle back on its stand, and rubbed his hands over his bald head. ‘She was some sort of school governor, and she saw me standing in the corridor waiting to go see the head teacher, Mr Cuthbert, the miserable old bastard. Anyway, she asked what I was doing, I told her, and do you know what she said to me?’

Wingsy and I clearly didn’t or we’d have solved these murders by now with our fantastic insight into what conversations had previously taken place when we weren’t present. We shook our heads.

Charlie gave a small laugh and said, ‘She only fucking asked me why I’d been pissing about in class. And that wasn’t it. When I said, “’Cos I was bored shitless.” she said, “Why were you bored shitless?” No one had ever asked me why I couldn’t concentrate, do the work. I’d done everything under the sun to hide not being able to read. She saw straight
through that and said, “Can you read?” I’ll never forget her standing there in front of me. She bent down and said. “I’ll see you here at 3.30pm. I’ll let your mother know you’re helping me with something and we’ll get cracking. It’s a disgrace this school didn’t see this.” Bollocks, I’m out of milk. Hang on, I’ll nip to the shop. You two have a seat.’

As Charlie felt in his pocket for money, I said, ‘One of us can go and get the milk.’

‘No, you’re alright, love. It’s only up the road.’

And he was gone, leaving us alone in his house.

‘Well, he certainly has a lot of time for Daphne,’ Wingsy said. ‘I take it he lives here alone?’

‘Dunno,’ I said. ‘We never got that far, but the voters’ register only had him on it when I ran some checks. I’ll shout up the stairs in case we scare the living daylights out of someone in bed.’

I made my way back towards the front door and stood at the foot of the stairs, hollering up to the next floor just to be on the safe side. I got no reply, as I’d expected, and I turned to rejoin Wingsy. As I did so, though, something drew my attention in the front room. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw an old black and white photograph on a side table. It showed a Victorian two-storey building, complete with turrets and a water tower. In the foreground were a young smiling boy and an older woman. Walking towards it, I saw the similarities between Charlie Bruce and the young lad’s face. A full head of hair was throwing me off slightly but it was undoubtedly him. I continued to stare at the picture until Wingsy’s voice behind me brought me out of my reverie.

‘That looks like Charlie and Daphne Headingly. Where was it taken?’ said Wingsy.

‘This is Leithgate children’s home in Birmingham. But he’s got a family. Why was he there?’

‘Looks like he’s coming back. We can ask him,’ said Wingsy looking in the direction of the lounge window. The bulk of Charlie was crossing the road towards us, a two-pint
plastic milk carton hanging from his right hand. It looked tiny against his fingers, let alone the rest of him.

‘Big bastard, ain’t he?’ I said to Wingsy.

‘Yeah, he is. You ask him.’

Both of us stood in the living room facing the street. Charlie opened the door and, with one foot inside his house on the green carpet and one on the step, paused and said, ‘What the fuck’s wrong with you two?’

‘Charlie, can you tell us about this photo?’ I pointed vaguely to where the table housed the snapshot without taking my eyes off Charlie. I didn’t have a feel for him being a murderer, but with biceps bigger than my thighs – and I had some flank on me – I was taking no chances. I should have given my Pava Spray a shake while he was out of the house. Or was it CS gas you had to shake before use? I could never remember, as I’d never used the bloody thing; a biro and a smile usually stopped me getting a hiding. I hoped my luck wasn’t about to run out.

‘The picture of me and Daphne, do you mean?’ He walked towards the kitchen, unscrewing the green plastic cap from the milk. ‘Fucking tea’ll be brewed to bollocks now. Shit. I’ll put the kettle back on. Fucking waste of bastard teabags. Sorry about the language, love. It’s just that I hate waste.’

‘That’s OK. Even I swear sometimes,’ I said. I avoided Wingsy’s eye as I said it.

We had followed Charlie into the kitchen, where he set about making fresh tea. He explained as he busied himself with the drinks.

‘I found that picture in the back of a drawer. Almost forgot I had it but got it out again when I heard she’d been killed. When I met Daphne, she told me if I got to a certain level with my reading she’d take me on a day out. I’d never been to Birmingham and she was going for a job interview at some kids’ home.’ He waved the teaspoon in his hand in the direction of the photo. ‘It was only a day trip, nothing fancy, but my parents couldn’t have given a fuck what I was doing
so she took me with her. It was a great day. She tested my spelling, grammar, that sort of thing, all the way there and back.’

He added milk to the cups. ‘Come upstairs, I wanna show you something while the kettle’s boiling,’ he said. We glanced at each other, then followed him up the narrow staircase to the small box bedroom at the front of the house. The room was about six feet by eight and contained an armchair and lamp in one corner next to the window and about four hundred books. The walls were covered floor to ceiling with shelves and bookcases. Where there was no wall space remaining, Charlie had arranged the books on the floor in neat piles.

I watched Charlie pick up a hardback book from the grey seat of the chair. He held the book in one of his massive palms and ran the fingers of his other hand across the cover. ‘
Rebecca
by Daphne du Maurier. You read it? It’s fucking brilliant.’

Temporarily speechless, I regained my composure before replying, ‘No, I haven’t, Charlie. Have you read all of these?’

‘Most, yeah. My point is, I’m a carpenter. It’s a good job, pay’s OK and all that. If it weren’t for Daphne, I wouldn’t be able to read. Not only would not being able to read make life difficult, but I wouldn’t have got to read
The Great Gatsby, The Pickwick Papers, Jurassic Park
– way better than the film – anything by Stephen King. Get what I’m saying? Let’s have a cuppa and you tell me how we find this sick bastard.’

The whole time he was speaking, Charlie continued to caress the book, as his face grew darker and his frown deeper. He put the book back down, straightened it on the cushion and headed back to the staircase.

Settled in the front room with the children’s home photograph on the coffee table in front of us, we went back over the details with Charlie about when he went to Birmingham and how long he was there for. Very little new information was forthcoming beyond what he had already
told us. He had been a very young child at the time of the day trip. He could hardly have known that, decades later, his day out would become part of a murder investigation.

Every avenue of possibility was exhausted in relation to the Leithgate home when we changed tack to the mobile phone number we had for him.

‘Someone gave me your phone number, Charlie. The same person said it was a foreigner committing the murders,’ I said. ‘Who gave us your number isn’t important, but what you know is. Do you know anything about this foreigner? Did that information come from you?’

Charlie sat across from me, staring straight at me. His arms were resting on the sides of his chair, his fists clenched, legs still, knees at right angles to the rest of him. For some inexplicable reason, I thought of a bear hiding inside the skin of a bald, fat bloke. Bears don’t usually sit in recliners, I thought, but there you go.

He didn’t say anything for several seconds, simply stared unblinkingly at me. Then he leaned towards me, big bald head looming closer. He scratched his chin before placing his enormous hand on his thigh.

‘Truth be told, love, I wouldn’t have contacted the police direct to tell you that I knew Daphne years ago. It didn’t seem relevant but you’re here now. All I know is what I’ve told you.’

‘Was there anything else?’ I tried.

‘No, love. Nothing at all. Can’t be of much help, but find whoever’s killing these people, will you? She was an old lady,’ he said through his downturned mouth.

‘Whatever it takes, Charlie, whatever it takes,’ I told him as we gathered our paperwork together to walk out of his front door. I had no idea, at that time, just how much it would cost me.

B
ack at the Incident Room, I did my best to avoid Matt, who was still taking care of the telephone enquiries.

‘I’ve been told this is now a priority,’ said Matt, raising his eyebrows as I tried to make my way past him. ‘Like it wasn’t before. Don’t know what they thought I was going to do with it. Bloody fools. Of course I put the application in and of course I asked for it urgently.’ He walked away from me, still mumbling about how telephone enquiries took time, the results weren’t instant, he was working as fast as he could, it wasn’t the TV, he didn’t have direct access to all phone records in the country…

Pierre sidled up to me and said, ‘Ignore him. He’s always like that when he’s given phones to work on. It is a pig of a job. There’s endless applications and justifications to get the data. Come on, let’s grab a cuppa while we wait for instructions.’

As we made our way in the direction of the kitchen, Matt returned, still sporting an angry expression. He hurried towards me, so I steadied myself for another tirade on the subject of how hard done by he was, having to fill in telephone request forms to the Single Point of Contact for telephony work, or SPOC as it was shortened to. It never failed to make me smile at the thought of a fella with pointy ears sitting in an office somewhere reading all the applications. I might have mentioned before how it was always the little things in this job that amused me. Right now, I needed some light relief.

‘Nina, meant to say, been looking at your man Jake Lloyd’s phone work too. You any idea who’s been calling him from France? Somewhere down in the south, in the St Tropez region?’ said Matt.

Pierre and I paused while I took this in. ‘St Tropez, you say?’ said Pierre.

I shrugged, but said, ‘It was a foreigner, someone from Europe.’

‘But Adam Spencer and Tony Birdsall live in Spain,’ said Matt. ‘Still Europe, though…’

As I was thinking about what Matt had said, Eric Nottingham walked in with a satisfied look on his face. He stopped for a second and surveyed the room, cup in his right hand. He paused to take a sip, cleared his throat and, when he had the undivided attention of all of us in the room, seemed to take great pleasure in saying, ‘Fantastic news, everyone. Adam Spencer has just been stopped trying to buy a ticket for a flight to Spain with over £6,000 in cash on him.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I need to get Ray to call everyone who’s free into the Incident Room. It’s likely to be another long day. I’ll be back in a minute to let you all know what I know. For now the update is scant. Spencer made some comments on arrest but I don’t have them verbatim.’

Nottingham walked off towards his office while a buzz of excited conversation took over the room, as we carried on working. Those who needed to busied themselves tying up loose ends before we were sent off to respond to anything coming out of the operation’s latest arrest. I looked across at Wingsy, who was at a desk in the corner. He winked at me. I grinned back. We now had Spencer. Whatever he might have to say for himself, that only left Benjamin Makepeace.

My glowing inner thoughts were interrupted by another exasperated member of the investigation team making a fair amount of noise. Matt was back at his desk, shoulders hunched, banging the keyboard with his fingers. Preparing for another rant, I approached him to ask a question.

‘Matt, do you know how many calls were made to Lloyd from St Tropez?’

‘About twenty over a period of six weeks, starting just over a month before Amanda Bell’s body showed up,’ he said without looking up. ‘Oh, this bastard computer; it’s lost my application. I was almost done and it’s gone. If you want to check the results, the analyst’s done a spreadsheet. It’s saved on the shared drive.’

I left him shouting and threatening to kick the living daylights out of his computer and went over to Wingsy. He’d been listening to my conversation with Matt – it wasn’t too difficult to be alerted to Matt’s pain by the number of times he shouted ‘bollocks’ at the screen – and had already called up the spreadsheet. As we studied it, we muttered behind our screen about the newest arrest and what a relief it was that Spencer had been nicked. I kept my voice low as I said how comprehensive the telephone results were and how user-friendly the spreadsheet was. One of us pointed now and again at the length of a call or the same number appearing time and time again. We hadn’t realised that Matt was listening to us despite our hushed tones, until he called out, ‘That telephone number you’re looking at, the one that made several calls, has been identified as a telephone kiosk on the seafront at St Tropez. It’s marked up at the foot of the spreadsheet.’

I glanced down the list of times and dates. Something about them caused me to stop in my tracks. I wasn’t sure what it was, but some of them were so recent. I was trying hard to focus on what was niggling in my brain. I ran across the office to get my notebook which I’d left lying next to the office booking diary, almost colliding with Nottingham as he came through the door. I flicked through the pages until I got to the date I was after. Taking it back to Wingsy, I said, ‘Look at this. Do you think this is a coincidence? I’m not sure that I do.’

I showed him the time and date I’d recorded in my book when Pierre and I had gone to see Susan Newman, and the
subsequent phone calls we made to her daughter Josie in France. I pointed to the spreadsheet. The calls made from a St Tropez phone box to Jake Lloyd’s landline were five minutes either side of Pierre’s conversation with Josie Newman.

‘You have to allow for the hour’s time difference,’ I said, ‘but whoever made these calls made them minutes either side of our call.’

Nottingham had put his notebook down and walked around the desk to stand the other side of Wingsy. All three of us peered at the times and dates on the screen.

‘Sir,’ I said, ‘I know that this means little at this stage, but something has always bothered me about Jake Lloyd.’ Nottingham’s head turned from the direction of the screen to meet my eyes. ‘Apart from him being a total headcase who kept vintage children’s clothing and… well, you know the rest.’

He nodded.

‘What I mean is that, after all those years, he or someone else sent me photos in an envelope with his fingerprints on it. I know that he always admitted taking them but not sending them. The thing is, if Lloyd didn’t send them to me, who did?’

‘And why was someone in the South of France calling him?’ asked Wingsy.

An unpleasant thought occurred to me. I said, ‘Jake Lloyd took five grand out of his bank account. Boss, you said that on arrest Spencer had thousands on him. What if Spencer was blackmailing Lloyd?’

‘That’s one hypothesis,’ said the DCI. Inwardly, I smiled at the word. It was used to show the police had thought of everything by ‘hypothesising’ about likely scenarios. The bollocks we had to do. The public had no idea.

Nottingham’s phone began to ring. He read the caller’s name and said, ‘That’s Simon Patterson. We should be getting an update from Stansted.’ He took himself and his notebook and went back in the direction of his own office.

I moved an inch or two closer to Wingsy and said, ‘Thing is, mate, what’s worrying me quite a lot is why someone sent me those photos? The only thing I’ve come up with so far is, somebody wanted Jake Lloyd out of the way. And, again, I can only come up with one reason for that. Jake Lloyd was watching me; now he’s not because he’s in prison, awaiting trial. Terrible truth is, I was probably safer before Lloyd was locked up.’