Rope Enough (The Romney and Marsh Files Book 1) (16 page)

‘Where was that?’

‘At my girlfriend’s flat.’

Crow nodded. ‘Have you had any contact with her since then?’

Avery had been expecting this question. His face gave him away. ‘Yes, as a matter of fact I have. We spoke on the phone about her coming to collect Claire’s things from the flat.’

‘And when is she coming to do that?’

Avery clearly hadn’t thought that far ahead in his lie. ‘We haven’t decided, yet.’

‘Really? Four phone calls over the weekend and you haven’t managed to work out when she can collect her daughter’s effects. I hope that you’re a little more decisive in your business affairs.’ Avery’s nostrils flared slightly. ‘Is that all you discussed?’ said Crow, quickly.

‘We talked about Claire. We talked about our shared loss and when she could collect her things. That’s all.’

Crow said, ‘I imagine that you were a great comfort to her, Mr Avery.’ Avery stared maliciously at the policeman. ‘Where were you yesterday afternoon?’

Romney admired Crow’s method. The way he was toying with Avery, his thinly veiled insults, sarcasm and sudden pounces of pertinent enquiry all seemed practised to disorientate and bewilder the thinking of his prey.

‘Yesterday afternoon? I was here and at Claire’s flat and in between.’

‘I take it you have witnesses who will testify to that?’

‘I do for here, but I was alone at the flat. Someone might have seen me there. Why are you asking?’ Avery didn’t deliver it very well and Crow treated the false question with the contempt that it deserved by ignoring it.

‘Thank you for your time, Mr Avery,’ said Crow, abruptly concluding the interview and rising. ‘It’s been very revealing. I’m sure we’ll be seeing each other again soon. We’ll see ourselves out.’ Crow had finished with the man and turned for the door. When he reached it he turned back to Avery and gave him a deeply suspicious glare. ‘You should have asked me why I was questioning you about Helen Stamp. You didn’t. Sometimes it’s difficult to see the wood for the trees.’ Romney followed him out.

As they reached the bottom of the stairs, Avery exited his office and stood on the balcony looking down at them, his hands spread wide on the spindly railing – Lord of his grotty little fiefdom. ‘Show these gentlemen out, Lennie,’ he called down to the man behind the small bar. It was a pathetic show of misplaced bravado that was to backfire on him.

Crow turned back, not wanting to disappoint the captive audience. He acknowledged Avery with a small gesture and called out in crystal clear tones, ‘Goodbye, Simon, and thanks very much for the information. Much appreciated.’ He tapped the side of his nose conspiratorially. Romney noticed that all eyes looked up to where Avery stood, but, like Crow, he didn’t look back himself.

Outside on the street, Crow turned to Romney as he pulled his collar up to protect his neck from the elements. ‘If I had any doubts of his involvement in her death before I went in there, his performance didn’t dispel them. What we need now is proof. We should have test results back in a day or two of the paint samples taken from her clothing. Then we’ll have to find the vehicle that it belongs to. Unless we have any other evidence to rope him to it we’re going to be a bit screwed.’

‘Keep in touch about any developments, will you?’ said Romney.

‘Likewise, Tom. I like to think that Mr Avery’s world is going to come tumbling down around his ears in the near future.’

‘It will if I have anything to do with it.’

They shook hands and parted by Crow’s vehicle, Romney choosing to walk the short distance back to the station. Crow had shown himself a cool and smooth operator. Romney’s professional respect for the man had increased significantly.

Romney trudged off into the falling gloom of dusk. As he walked, he phoned Marsh and told her she could release the two men anytime she liked but separately.

Although Romney was pleased regarding the corner that Avery was being painted into, there was still no evidence to link him directly with Claire Stamp’s death. As he walked, this feeling weighed heavily on his mind. The most that his time consuming investigations could hope to show was that Avery might have had the opportunity. He wouldn’t get that past his superintendent; the Crown Prosecution Service would never entertain the idea of a prosecution on such flimsy ‘evidence’. Romney needed to find a motive and then something that tied Avery to the scene and time of death with a Gordian knot.

*

Returning to the station, cold and despondent, Romney returned the call made half an hour before by PC Harker when he had come on duty at Deal police station. Harker sounded young, articulate and alert. Romney explained the reason for his call and asked the PC to trawl his memory for the smallest recollection that he had of his arrest of Avery.

‘Yes, sir. I remember it quite clearly actually,’ said the constable. ‘By the time I arrived the incident had fizzled out. Arrests had been made and there was no continuation of the brawling. The man who I arrested, Simon Avery, sort of appeared from nowhere. He just walked out of the darkness towards me. I remember thinking at the time that it was very odd. Normally, as soon as we turn up most people run off, as you know. I could see that he’d been involved in the incident. His clothes were torn and there was blood on his shirt. I did wonder if he’d been concussed. I collared him and he came as meek as a lamb. No arguments, no fuss.’

Romney felt a cocktail of satisfaction and frustration seep through his thinking. On the one hand, this would bring further reliable testimony to his assertion that Avery was not even there for the fight until it was all over, but on the other, it didn’t necessarily lead to anything concrete. There was still a massive obstacle to overcome to enable him to put Avery in the frame for Stamp’s death. Even with what he had learned that day, he was still well short of being able to clear it.

Romney said, ‘How specific can you be about the time of arrest?’

‘Very, sir. I always make a note of the exact time that I make an arrest if it’s logistically possible. Just a moment please.’ Romney waited while the officer consulted his notebook. ‘Approximately, eleven-thirty, sir. A minute or two either side.’

Romney breathed out feeling that another small piece of the jigsaw that would net him Avery had just been placed on the table. He thanked the constable and requested that, at his earliest convenience, he write up in detail what he had just relayed, specifically mentioning the timings, and send the report to him at Dover.

DI Crow, naturally, was not particularly interested in the why? Why would Avery run the woman over and leave her for dead? Crow was interested only in proving that it was Avery, if indeed it was. Such were the pressures and workloads of modern-day police work. With that limited interest, he wouldn’t be concerning himself with whether Avery got back what was his, which Romney was as certain as he could be was behind everything. Romney on the other hand was.

As he rocked back in his chair, massaging his temples, Romney’s logical conclusions that he was unable to prevent himself from drawing only served to depress him further. He was now convinced that everything pointed towards Claire Stamp having given something – that probably belonged to Avery – to her mother for safe-keeping and that her mother had spoken with Avery about it – why else would she speak four times to a man who she had freely admitted a distaste for and whom the police had suggested at her home only the day before could be involved in her daughter’s death? It followed then, for Romney, that among the few remote reasons Helen Stamp would be in the position and location that she was on a winter’s Sunday afternoon – he checked the incident report again: not dressed for country walking – the only plausible one was that she was meeting someone. Romney didn’t know anything about her social life, but he would guess that she didn’t have much use for country lanes in the middle of winter. Who did apart from doggers and ramblers? and she didn’t strike him as either type, although one could never tell.

Romney’s thinking leant strongly towards the opinion that if she was meeting someone that someone could only be Avery, who, by his own testimony, spent much of Sunday afternoon alone, which provided him with ample opportunity to drive the fairly short distance to where Helen Stamp was killed. And the only reason Helen Stamp would meet Avery – a man implicated in the death of her daughter Romney reminded himself for clarification – would be to trade whatever it was that Claire Stamp had entrusted to her mother. Assuming that Helen Stamp had it for trade and that the appointment was kept by Avery, Romney must further assume that whatever it was was now back in Avery’s possession. And with that disheartening thought went any chance of tying Avery tighter to the death of Claire Stamp. What he had to hope for now was that DI Crow and his team would be able to make something of a case against Avery for Helen Stamp’s death.

He rubbed his tired eyes, looked at the clock and thought about going home. His phone rang. He snatched it up. ‘DI Romney.’

‘You sound tired,’ said Crow.

‘Sorry, Malcolm. I am.’

‘I know how you feel,’ said the older man. ‘But I don’t know how you’ll feel about this – Helen Stamp’s house was broken into this afternoon. It doesn’t appear to be a normal robbery. TV and such like are still there. Our boys reckon that whoever it was was looking for something. Thorough job, apparently. Sound familiar?’

‘Too familiar and the bastard has a strong alibi for it. I told you he wasn’t a complete idiot.’

‘They only have to be part idiot to get caught. Mr Avery definitely fits that bill.’

The two men spent the next ten minutes discussing Romney’s theories. Romney was glad to have an objective, wise and experienced officer to bounce it all off. Crow agreed with most of what he theorised. The events suggested – if all that went before was accurate – that Helen Stamp didn’t have whatever it was that Avery was looking for when she met him on Sunday afternoon.

‘So why kill her?’ said Romney.

‘Perhaps they traded something, but it wasn’t what he wanted.’

‘She duped him do you think?’

Crow laughed gently down the phone. ‘We could spend all night coming up with ideas, theories and counter theories. It wouldn’t get us anywhere. The one big question that remains, however, is, if everything is as you suggest so far, was, whatever he was looking for, recovered?’

*

By the time Romney had repeated it all to an attentive Marsh in the canteen over coffee, he had thought himself into a position where he couldn’t entertain any other scenario, despite the fact that virtually everything he had so far to link Avery with anything was a construct of his own biased and fertile imagination.

With his sharing of the conversation that he’d had with PC Harker, Romney could sense that Marsh, where she might have displayed a certain tepid reluctance to commit to Romney’s theory that Avery had something to do with Claire Stamp’s death, was beginning to warm to it.

When everyone else had gone home he sat in his office and brooded. He was overwhelmed with his lack of real progress and his irritation with the cases. To further darken his mood, on his desk he had found DC Harmer’s idea of what a definitive list of ways to get hold of someone’s mobile phone number looked like. The multitude of possibilities from the straight forward to the convoluted threatened to give the DI a slight headache. Despite, or in spite of, his weariness and gloomy mood, he left for his gym to give vent to some of his frustrations.

***

8

Julie Carpenter called a little after nine. Seeing her name illuminated on the screen of his phone did something childish to Romney’s insides. His exertions at the gym had invigorated him and, as it could sometimes do, awakened that animal instinct within him that craved physical contact with the opposite sex.

The teacher had not been far from his thoughts since they had spoken last. It had been almost a week since he and she had last lost themselves in each other and the promise of that as a more permanent part of his life, only to be snuffed out so suddenly and cruelly, had had its impact upon him. More than once, he’d been tempted since their last phone conversation to risk his pride and call her, but always he’d managed to suppress that inclination, knowing instinctively that to succumb to it could prove counterproductive in the long game. And, if it truly was over between them before it had really started, he didn’t want to know. He’d rather go on hopefully ignorant, until his emotional investment had been diluted by time – the architect of his own downfall.

‘I want to see you again,’ she said.

A sensation, warm and satisfying was released somewhere in his stomach to flood throughout him. ‘I want to see you too.’

‘I want to believe your explanation for the other night. Maybe you don’t feel that you should have to explain yourself to me?’

‘I understand why you need an explanation. I like you Julie. I can only say that I’m not the kind of man that would mess a woman about like that. It’s not in my nature.’

‘I hope so, Inspector. I really do. Come over, tonight?’

‘I can be there in half an hour.’

‘I’ll be waiting.’

Putting down the phone, Romney became acutely aware of the blood pumping hard through his system. Julie Carpenter’s words and the way that she had delivered them had left no part of him in any doubt that she wanted him physically.