The Calling (9 page)

Charcoal-scuffed clouds churned above the Woodbridge skyline, threatening to top up the puddles left by estuary storms. Goodhew skirted the heart of the town as he followed the brown tourist signs for the Station and the Tide Mill, and eventually caught sight of the railway line curling its way into a parallel path alongside the road.

Everything about the day was damp and dirty. On the far side of that single strip of track lay the boat yards. Masts poked into the sky from immobile sailboats, laid up for the winter, with their rain-stained tarpaulins and unwashed windows.

Even the station itself, with its traditional tearoom and its roof capped with a cheery white picket fringe, couldn’t shake off the gloom. The centre of the building housed the tourist information office, its windows facing on to an apron of three car parks filled with commuters’ cars. Goodhew found himself a parking space in the furthest corner.

He unfolded a two-page fax from the tourist office and checked the name on it.
Contact Teresa Armitage
was written in black across an indistinct picture of swans swimming beside a pleasure boat.

He locked the driver’s door and skipped through an inch-deep puddle and on to the footpath. It was just a miserable day.

As Goodhew crossed the tarmac, the office door opened and a woman raised her hand in a curt salute.

‘Teresa Armitage?’ he called, but the wind had risen and snatched his words away. She held one hand in front of her lacquered black bob, to protect it from a rogue gust, and beckoned for him to move
faster with the other. Her hand signals and indestructible hair reminded him of an eighties air hostess.

‘Shut the door after you,’ she called out and turned away from the entrance. She had already crossed the gift shop by the time Goodhew stepped inside. He followed her navy-blue-suited rear end into the first room beyond the open-plan tourism section, closing the door behind himself before he took the chair opposite her desk.

She ran through the usual preliminaries and introductions: it was an unstoppable and overused monologue full of theoretically promising words like
communication
and
responsiveness
. It probably took less than two minutes for her to reach the end, but long enough to make him prickle with irritation.

‘Miss Armitage, as you know I’m here as part of our efforts to determine Kaye Whiting’s last movements—’

‘Yes, I know,’ she interrupted. ‘We had the police here all yesterday afternoon. I appreciate it’s important, and we’re quiet mid-week during term time so it doesn’t matter so much, but I must stress how important it is that we don’t have police visible everywhere at the weekend.’

‘Well, I’m not guaranteeing that and, if we do have a positive sighting, we’ll be questioning as many of the general public as we can this weekend.’

She slapped her manicured hand on to the table. ‘Mr Goodhew, I’m the manager of this office. Woodbridge is a centre for tourism. I’m not trying to damage your investigation but I must try to protect the local economy. Asking you to keep a low profile is just me doing my job.’ She rose to her feet and glowered down on him. ‘Coffee?’

‘No thanks.’

‘It may be off season, Mr Goodhew, but every visitor still counts. It’s vital that people know this is a safe place to visit.’

‘Even if it isn’t?’ he asked wryly.

She glared at him then turned away to switch on the percolator in the corner of the room. Gary let her brew alongside her fresh coffee. The rich smell of freshly ground beans smothered the stale odour of Kaye’s body that continued to linger in his nostrils.

‘I need to speak to the staff in as many local shops and restaurants as possible, Miss Armitage. Would your CCTV pick up all the
visitors passing through here?’ Gary smoothed the first page of the fax on the desk and indicated the layout of the station area. ‘Can you show me the position of all your cameras, internal and external?’

She stared at the sketch for a moment. ‘We only have one, situated at the back of the shop, and it catches everyone from the doorway. Once inside there’s a blind corner, around by the free leaflets, but that’s picked up by the station CCTV, which has external cameras fixed in three locations. Between us we pick up most of the public areas.’

‘What about other premises around the town?’

‘Well, I do know that most of the shops in the town itself and towards the Tide Mill have their own systems. You’re not planning on going through them all, surely?’

‘Absolutely,’ he replied.

‘There’ll be masses of footage,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he retorted, ‘but that’s just us doing our job.’

She stroked the patch of bare skin above her neckline and looked as though she was fighting the urge to make him come back later. She stepped up to her desk and rolled open a deep drawer designed to hold hanging files. She then reached down and pulled out a Sainsbury’s carrier bag and handed it to Goodhew.

‘Footage from here and from the station’s cameras. The station manager had them ready, just in case. Tell me, is there any chance that she was killed here, actually in Woodbridge? I mean, it wouldn’t be so bad if we could say she hadn’t died here.’

Goodhew checked the contents of the bag, ignoring her. ‘Is this all of them?’ he asked.

He stepped back into the dank car park, and crossed the main road towards the town centre. Staggered terraces of quaint shops climbed the hill on both sides. He passed the junction with the Thoroughfare, where one narrow trading lane crossed another. On the corner of the junction stood a café, its round tables and scoop-back chairs waiting in groups inside full-length windows.

All but one were empty, and this one was occupied by a forty-something, frothy-haired woman with a cappuccino and a
copy of the
Daily Mail
. She glanced up and Goodhew nodded through the window; but her gaze instantly dropped back to the front page of her newspaper.

Goodhew knew Kaye’s picture appeared on page seven. He also knew that last Saturday had been cold here and he couldn’t imagine that she’d lingered outside, with icy gusts slicing across the waterfront. If she’d been here in Woodbridge at all, she would have started promptly at the shops.

The Thoroughfare lay ahead of him, brimming with tourist treats: gift shops, clothes boutiques and antique-shop arcades.

The street, however, was almost deserted. Two women with pushchairs were in deep conversation outside the hair salon. Goodhew scanned the shopfronts: toys, sweets, pizza, coloured stones, and a shop called Fantasia selling gifts and cards.

He stepped in through its postcard-lined doorway, mobiles and light catchers twirling above him. He fished Kaye’s photo from his pocket and introduced himself to Mrs Murley, the proprietor, who pointed out that he was the third policeman since yesterday.

Goodhew nodded patiently. ‘I’m doing a follow-up.’ He placed the picture on the counter. ‘This is a different photo, for one thing.’

Mrs Murley lifted it by one edge and held it so it wouldn’t reflect the light. She passed it back with equal patience. ‘I don’t think so. Lots of people come in here but, as I said earlier, I didn’t serve her.’

Goodhew continued from shop to shop, noting the names of the Saturday staff and the names of all the staff that swore they hadn’t served Kaye Whiting. His next stop would be the museum that Doreen Kennedy had mentioned.

He passed the coffee shop again on the way back down the hill. He turned the corner into the Thoroughfare and noticed the
Daily Mail
lying open on page five. The frothy-haired woman was at the counter, her hair now subdued by a burgundy-striped waitress hat, and she was serving the two mums and their three toddlers. He’d come back to her later.

The lady dispensing tickets at the museum smiled apologetically. ‘I am very sorry, but I’m sure she wasn’t here. She’s the same age as my youngest granddaughter you see, and I’ve tried my hardest to remember. I was serving in the gift shop and I’m sure she didn’t
come in.’ She handed the photo back. ‘I’m afraid you may be on a wild-goose chase.’

Drizzle greeted Gary as he left the museum. Every building looked back at him blank and unhelpful, and only the coffee shop staff and the bag of video tapes seemed to stand between him and admitting that Kaye Whiting had never been in Woodbridge.

Of course he didn’t know then that the waitress had poured herself another coffee, returned to her paper and flicked to page seven.

She ripped the little hat from her head as she burst through the front door and galloped towards Goodhew with a mass of unruly curls and her ultra-small apron flapping in the wind. She seemed to know exactly who he was and bore down on him with remarkable speed.

He didn’t catch what she said at first. She was definitely yelling specifically at him though and, as she reached him, she grabbed his elbow and spun him back to face the museum. ‘She’s the Bile Beans girl,’ she repeated.

‘Kaye Whiting?’

‘That’s right. I’m Zal, and I work in the coffee shop, and she was here last Saturday. I served her first after she’d bought the last Bile Beans advert from the museum opposite.’

Gary felt the hairs prickle across the back of his neck; he knew a good witness when he saw one. ‘What are Bile Beans?’ he asked.

‘No idea, actually, but they’re bound to be foul. She had the advert out on the table and I joked that we can’t put those on the menu. Bile beans on toast? I don’t think so.’ She laughed then and it erupted as a dirty cackle. ‘Has anyone else here recognized her so far?’

‘No.’

‘You poor sod, bet you’ve been from pillar to post. And you asked in the museum gift shop?’

Goodhew nodded. Zal propelled him through the door of the museum and slapped her broad hand on the counter to attract the attention of the woman behind the desk.

‘Ruth, are you the dozy cow that just told this young man he was on a wild-goose chase?’ She steamrollered on without waiting for a reply. ‘Tell me this, then, if it wasn’t that poor dead girl who had you shinning up a ladder for the last decent Bile Beans advert?’

Ruth blinked, bewildered for a second, but then she obviously remembered, and Goodhew knew he had found a second witness. ‘Oh, God,’ she breathed.

‘Gawd? Is that the only bloody useful thing you can say? Is the display copy still up?’

‘Yes. I’ll take it down now and you can take it with you, Mr Goodhew.’

‘Thanks. I’ll get some details from Zal here and come back to you afterwards, is that OK?’ he asked, as she whipped a tissue from her sleeve and sniffed into it.

Zal led him through the museum, past a display of soap powder and chocolate wrappers, to the gift shop. ‘That’s the item,’ she announced, pointing to a reproduction tin advert showing a radiant blonde in a sunny-yellow, two-piece swimsuit, climbing up towards a diving board. ‘Bile Beans, the medically tested laxative, that gives you health, grace and vitality,’ she read. ‘Charming, eh?’

Gary lifted the advert off its hook. ‘Do you know whether she bought anything else in here?’

‘Sure. She bought a book,
Good Housekeeping in the 1940s,
and a birthday card from the main shopping centre. You’d better check with Ruth, though, in case she can remember anything else.’

‘I will, but I’d like to go back over to the café first.’

‘Good idea. I left it locked up and Adolf Armitage will be on my back if I’m not careful.’ Zal led the way back into the courtyard, ‘You met her at the tourist centre, I suppose?’

‘Teresa Armitage?’ queried Goodhew.

‘Goat dressed up as mutton.’ Zal pulled the waitress hat out of her pocket. ‘All 3-D make-up and up her own arse. Owns shares in the café, manages the tourism centre. She’s not the real manager; just covering for a long-term sick leave, and now she’s pissed off because he’s almost better. The only way she’d have cracked a smile was if she’d had the chance to donate to his funeral flowers.’ She
yanked the hat over her hair and tucked up the worst of the stray strands. ‘Right, what do you want to know?’

‘Firstly, where did Kaye Whiting sit?’

Zal pointed over to the windows. ‘She sat at the corner table, by the plants, and she kept looking out all the time.’

‘OK, let’s sit over there, then.’ Goodhew sat down in Kaye’s seat, with the windows on his right and the doorway straight ahead. ‘What did she order?’

‘Hot chocolate. We do it in glasses in holders, floating with fresh cream. I think she had two.’

‘At the same time?’ asked Goodhew sharply.

‘No, one after the other. Both for her, but she was thin enough to take it. Unlike some of us.’ She grabbed the excess flab on her stomach and wobbled it. ‘When diet food comes out of a packet as fast as a Mars Bar, that’s when I’ll lose weight.’

‘And how did she seem?’ Goodhew asked.

Zal paused and gazed into thin air, as if remembering. ‘Fine.’

‘Fine? Not at all ill at ease?’

Zal shook her head; again she was quite sure. ‘You don’t drink hot chocolate if you’re not in the mood to indulge yourself, do you? But I think she was waiting for someone.’

Gary’s gaze locked into hers. ‘Who?’

Zal smiled apologetically. ‘I didn’t see anyone, I’m afraid. I asked her if she wanted anything else, and she said she wouldn’t have time, but then she sat here another twenty minutes. Well, I
think
she was waiting for someone, and that someone was bloody late picking her up.’ She pointed back to the counter. ‘I was over there the next time I noticed her, but I think she spotted whoever it was, because she suddenly gathered up her bags and called thanks, and said she wasn’t stranded after all, or something like that, and she left.’

‘And when exactly did she show you what she’d bought?’ he asked.

‘Between hot chocolates. She got chatting when I cleared the next table, so I stopped with her for a couple of minutes. Adolf would say that’s idleness, but I think it’s part of customer care, don’t you?’

Gary nodded. ‘And is there anything else at all that you can remember?’

The woman shook her head.

Gary was now keen to leave for Cambridge but he still had a statement to take from Ruth Collette at the museum. He fought the desire to rush and scanned his notes in case any other questions jumped out at him. Nothing did, but he needed to be thorough, so he asked, ‘Do you mind if we run through it one more time?’

‘No problem, as long as it’s over some hot chocolate.’