The Watcher (51 page)

‘Need not have anything to do with the crimes,’ said Christy. ‘Your theories are pretty wild, John. “Bizarre” would be an understatement. From what you yourself have said, Gillian Ward was planning to “find herself”, or something, in a secluded hotel.’

‘No, I didn’t say “find herself”. I felt like she was trying to hide from something.’

‘Whatever. So now you see her disappearance as dangerous – and at the same time you seriously think a public prosecutor is the likely serial killer?’

‘I’ve just pointed out that she is the first person we have found who knew all the victims. And I’m uneasy about the fact that she has disappeared without a trace. With Gillian. You too considered Gillian to be at risk. Fielder told me that himself.’

‘Well, I think—’ Christy started, but at that moment the phone on her desk rang. Christy listened and then said brusquely, ‘I’ll take the conversation in your room. Just a moment.’ She got up. ‘Excuse me for a minute. I’ll be right back.’

She left the room. John stood up and walked over to the window. He was buzzing with impatience. The police were starting to move, but much too slowly for his liking. And it was just like Fielder to give one of his most capable colleagues the job of questioning his arch-enemy. As if there were not more urgent tasks for Christy in these hours!

Five more minutes, he told himself. I’ll give this stupid meeting another five minutes, then I’ll go looking for Gillian myself.

Christy came back in when his five minutes were just up. She looked very tense. John understood immediately that she had been given some disturbing news. He moved towards her, but she walked past him and took her seat behind her desk. She did not seem to mind whether John sat or remained standing.

‘How did you come to suspect Caine?’ she asked.

John shook his head, astonished. ‘I explained this last night. She’s Gillian Ward’s friend. So she knew Thomas Ward well. And she heard about Carla Roberts and Anne Westley from Liza Stanford. She has a connection to all three victims. She asked to see the file on me but acted to Gillian as if she had been unaware of my past. I know that’s not enough, but something says to me that—’

‘Gillian Ward’s car is in her garage in Thorpe Bay,’ Christy interrupted him. ‘Tyre tracks in the drive indicate that another car was there recently. And that car wasn’t Gillian’s or her husband’s.’

John went pale. ‘You know that Caine drives a Jaguar.’

Christy nodded. It was clear that the police had already found that out. ‘Yes. And before you ask, it could be a Jaguar’s tyre tracks. We know that.’ She hesitated for a minute. ‘Our team has listened to Mrs Ward’s answering machine,’ she continued. ‘There was a very odd message on it.’

‘Did you enter the house?’ John knew that in the short space of time available, it was hardly likely they had obtained a warrant. Something had made the situation so precarious that they had overlooked that little slip in procedure. ‘What happened?’

‘DI Fielder’s orders.’ Christy hesitated again. ‘The police in Manchester called him. Caine’s mother, Lucy Caine-Roslin, was found dead in her flat. It looks like she was murdered.’

‘Fuck!’

‘Certain things indicate that it was done by the person who killed Roberts, Westley and Ward.’

A tea towel in her mouth?
John had it on the tip of his tongue but he managed to bite it back. If he had given that away, Christy would have known for sure that his informant was from the Yard. He should not put DC Linville at any greater risk than he already had done.

Instead he asked, ‘What about the message on Gillian’s answering machine?’

‘It’s from Samson Segal.’ Christy gave him a piercing look. ‘From the man we’re hunting.’

He did not bat an eyelid. ‘Really?’

‘Yes, really. He addresses Mrs Ward directly and warns her about Caine. He sees her as dangerous. And not just him. He says
we
. He and someone else, whom he doesn’t name, are worried about Mrs Ward. He asks her to be careful. Do you have any idea who this other person could be?’

‘No.’

She could see right through him. From working with her, he knew that she was clever and had real intuitive capabilities. ‘Where’s Samson Segal, John?’

‘How should I know?’

‘The police are looking for him. Anyone hiding him is culpable.’

‘I know. I was a policeman long enough.’

‘John . . .’

‘Christy!’ He went up to her desk and leant forward with his hands on the desktop. His face was close to hers. Around her eyes he could see the lines that had become noticeably deeper over the last few years. ‘Christy, don’t expect me to believe that you still seriously suspect Samson Segal! The man is harmless! He got carried away in his crush on Gillian Ward and crept around her house, but the only crime he’s committed is the odd unchaste thought or two. He’s odd, a strange man, a wretched case, but no more than that. Don’t waste your valuable time hunting him. Don’t you understand that?’ He stood up straight. ‘Gillian has disappeared. Tara Caine can’t be found either. Gillian had been living in her flat. So it’s possible that the two women left London together. In Tara’s car? For Thorpe Bay perhaps? After all, at Gillian’s house there are the tyre tracks that might come from Caine’s car. But where would they go next? Towards Manchester? Tara Caine’s home town. And something must have gone badly wrong there, because Tara Caine’s mother is dead now and—’

‘Mrs Caine-Roslin wasn’t killed recently,’ said Christy. ‘The coroner’s report isn’t in yet, but my colleagues in Manchester say that she had definitely been dead for a long time when she was found. At least eight weeks.’

He stared at her.
What happened? Why did it happen?

‘The motive,’ said Christy McMarrow. She seemed to be speaking more to herself than to John. ‘What is Caine’s motive for all of this? I just can’t see the thread running through it all!’ She rubbed her eyes. They were red and tired. ‘I can’t follow the thread,’ she repeated.

‘You have to find her!’ John urged her. ‘I’m afraid that Gillian’s life is in danger. I have just as little clue as you about Tara Caine’s motives, but we’ll have enough time later. Let’s assume that she killed Thomas Ward, and let’s also assume that Gillian was her real target. If so, Caine has got just what she wanted: she’s got Gillian in her power.’

‘We’ll put out a call to find Mrs Caine’s car,’ said Christy. ‘Maybe the women are travelling in it. And one other thing, John: I appreciate that you want to help with advice on what we should do, but believe me, we know. We aren’t looking for your help here any more.’ She looked at him coldly.

He could sense anger rising in him. Until this moment it was despair and exhaustion that he had felt. Despair because he feared he would not manage to save Gillian. Exhaustion because the last few days had sucked all his energy out of him. But now the two emotions turned to anger. He asked himself who Christy McMarrow thought she was. She’d given him a dressing-down, treated him with scorn, although he had provided Scotland Yard with everything they needed to know. He had used Kate Linville to obtain information from the police systems, but he had drawn the right conclusions, found out that Caine knew all the victims in the series of murders and so was just the person whom Detective Inspector Fielder had been searching for so desperately. He had done a good job and Christy knew it.

He pushed aside the wall that she had put up between them since they had met again yesterday for the first time in years.

‘Why, Christy?’ he asked quietly. ‘Why are you so hostile to me? What have I done to you?’

Now he had got through to her. She gave up her pretence of icy distance and stood up, came round the desk so that she was right in front of him. A tiny, plump, furious person. For the second time in minutes John could see clearly on her face the furrows from the constant strain of the job.

‘What did you do to me?’ she asked. ‘You disappointed me bitterly, John Burton, bitterly! You were one of the best policemen in the Met. You were brilliant. I loved working with you. We were a damn good team. You were my hero. I looked up to you. I thought we’d be a team for ever and solve more cases than anyone else in the Yard. My career plans were bound up with you. And then you go and do such a stupid, pointless thing. With an intern! You risk your whole career just because you can’t keep your hormones under control! When it happened, I just couldn’t grasp it. I still can’t!’

‘I wasn’t to guess the girl would go berserk.’

‘But you should have known you were playing with fire. You were her boss. She should have been off-limits for you. You normally understand what people are like, but you couldn’t see she was a real neurotic because you had the hots for her. Everyone else could see it. She was attractive and at the same time completely hysterical, but of course you just had eyes for her pretty face and big chest. You were blind to the rest. You
idiot
!’

She almost spat out the last word.

He knew that everything she said was right. That made him more angry.

‘Could it be,’ he replied coldly, ‘that the real reason for your anger is that someone else was the object of my uncontrolled hormones, as you put it? Someone who wasn’t you?’

He could see in her eyes how right he had been. Then her hand smacked into his face.

‘You arsehole,’ she said.

It took them over an hour to reach the hut. It was partly due to the snow, in which they sometimes sank up to their hips, making every single step a struggle. They had drunk almost all their water. Tara did not want to give her any more, although Gillian’s thirst seemed unquenchable. The physical exertion was drying her out. More than once she thought she would be unable to walk another step.

‘When were you last in the hut?’ she asked once. She was afraid that either there was no such hut or that Tara had lost her way long ago.

‘I must have been seventeen or eighteen,’ said Tara. After a moment’s thought, she added: ‘More like seventeen. I left home at eighteen and didn’t come back here for years.’

Seventeen! Tara was now in her late thirties.

‘Are you sure it’s still standing?’

‘Some of it must be. A hut like that doesn’t just evaporate into thin air.’

‘And you think you can find it?’

‘Just follow the path. It leads right to it.’

‘But we can’t see the path. We might have lost it long ago.’

‘Don’t worry yourself about that. I know just where we are. Now shut up. Spare your breath.’

After a while they reached the wood, which did not make their progress any quicker. The weight of the snow had broken many branches that had now fallen and blocked the path. Other branches hung down so low that you had to duck constantly to avoid them. However, soon the wood opened out again on to a wide field. There was still no human habitation in sight, as Gillian noted with frustration. But there at the edge of the field, sheltered by the trees, stood the hut.

‘There we go,’ said Tara.

It was larger and sturdier than Gillian had imagined it would be. It was nestled on the hillside below the wood that followed the crest of the hill. Below it the ground dropped steeply down to the valley, which seemed to stretch on and on for ever below them. Gillian knew that the Peak District, which she had once visited with her parents as a child, was a beautiful landscape. A never-ending succession of hills and valleys, woods and lakes, small stone walls and wind-bent hedges. There were dried-out stream beds on whose banks rare flowers grew, rugged rocks and meadows with tall grasses. Here and there charming remote villages hugged the hillsides. The roads from one village to the next were nearly all single-track. The sky was full of wild, fast, breathtaking cloud shapes.

Now, on this day, at this time of year, everything looked different. The snow and sky merged somewhere in the distance. The clouds had joined together into one single dark grey mass and the landscape was hidden under a deep blanket of snow. Gillian asked herself whether she should finally give up all hope of a village or farmstead, or whether she just could not see far enough because of the low clouds. Perhaps, when the weather cleared . . .

‘There’s a stream down there,’ said Tara. She looked down the hillside. ‘It’s probably frozen and snowed over. I used to play there for hours as a child. I built dams, things like that. And you could wade around barefoot in the stream in the summer. Or sit in it and cool off a bit.’

‘You used to come here as a child?’ Gillian tried to keep her talking. Tara looked more normal when she was reminiscing harmlessly about her childhood. Her eyes were lively and alert, not glassy like they had been the day before in Thorpe Bay, when Samson Segal’s call messed everything up. Gillian understood that a lot was dependent on her not letting Tara get into that strange state again.

Tara looked around. ‘Yes. My father built the hut. All on his own.’

‘He must have been good with his hands.’

‘He was very good at anything that needed manual dexterity,’ stated Tara. She had now fished a key from her bag and was trying to unlock the door. She did not manage immediately.

‘No one has been here for years,’ she murmured.

‘Your parents don’t come here often?’

‘My father died long ago, when I was eight.’

‘Oh . . . I’m sorry.’

Gillian watched Tara struggle with the lock. She felt so exhausted that she had to fight the urge to just fall down in the snow and never get up. Although Tara was distracted right now, she did not even consider fleeing. Exhausted, with her hands tied behind her back, it did not seem like a possibility.

In the end the key turned in the lock and the wooden door opened with a loud creak.

‘After you,’ said Tara ironically, gesturing for Gillian to step inside.

The musty, stale air had been sitting in the hut for years. It hit her like a cold wall. It was too murky to see anything clearly.

It was like walking into a tomb. That was Gillian’s first, disturbing impression. Tara switched on the torch she had brought and got to work trying to open the shutters at the two windows. They were as stiff as the lock. Gillian could see two sofas and in between them a wooden table. A wrought-iron stove. A small cupboard. And a door that seemed to lead to a further room.