Cambridge Blue Page 18

  By the time they arrived at their destination, the rain had stopped and Cambridge was in the process of drying out. The puddles in the car park weren’t muddy; they simply lay on the tarmac, reflecting the surrounding glass and concrete. A rainbow of oil floated here and there for the additional urban touch.

  Kincaide walked two yards in front, while Jackie Moran followed with her hands in her pockets and her head hung low. And – like owner, like dog – Bridy trotted behind the pair of them, looking as if she was heading for an unwelcome appointment with the vet. Mud caked the dog’s legs and similar splatters covered Jackie’s jodhpurs and jodhpur boots. Goodhew had already noticed that her hands were grubby. Her hair still lay flat from the pressure of her crash hat.

  He lengthened his stride and tapped her on the elbow.

  ‘If you want to take a few minutes to freshen up first, that’s fine.’

  She nodded gratefully and, once through the main door, he pointed her towards the ladies’ toilet. ‘I’ll wait here for you.’

  The spring door creaked shut behind her, making Kincaide turn and scowl. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘She’s on edge,’ Goodhew said lamely.

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘We’re not here to traumatize people.’

  ‘We are if they deserve it.’

  ‘Oh, right, and she’s obviously a career criminal, I suppose?’

  ‘She’s a potential suspect.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Because if it was that dog’s chain we found around Colin Willis’ neck, then she may have killed once already – and look how the Spence woman died.’

  ‘Drugged and asphyxiated, I recall?’

  ‘Neck, neck. That’s a bit of a coincidence.’

  ‘One strangled, one suffocated – yes, I see your point. But until we have proof that she was involved in one, let’s just keep an open mind about the other.’

  ‘Yeah, always.’

  Goodhew took a breath. ‘Look, I just prefer a different approach to you.’

  ‘It’s fine. You’ll learn, we were all new once.’

  Jackie re-emerged with clean hands, tidier hair and surrounded by a strong waft of anti-bacterial soap. She then followed Kincaide to the interview room, her heavy leather boots making loud hollow footsteps and Bridy’s claws clicking away like a midget tap dancer doing a warm-up routine. Apart from that, they remained silent.

  The only room available was small and chilly. It had one frosted window set up high in the wall; originally, this had been intended as a toilet. Condensation left the glass wet and the entire area smelling like damp paper. Goodhew would have thought that spending long days in the stables would have left Jackie acclimatized to the cold, but nevertheless she began to shiver as soon as she sat down and they settled into the two chairs facing her.

  Bridy slunk under the table, circling twice before lying down against her mistress’ feet.

  Kincaide spoke first. ‘Tell us what you know about the death of Colin Willis?’

  Again the mention of his name failed to startle her. ‘I thought you wanted to ask me about Lorna.’

  ‘Didn’t you realize they’re connected?’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t even know who this Colin Willis is.’

  ‘You must remember hearing about an unidentified body being pulled from the Cam back in March?’

  ‘Yes, vaguely.’ She blinked slowly, her eyelids swooping gracefully down and up. She still maintained an emotionless expression. ‘Was that his name, then?’

  Kincaide moved on. ‘He was strangled. Did Lorna mention him?’

  Goodhew cut in. ‘Along with the body we recovered a dog’s choke chain. That’s why we’d like to take a hair sample from Bridy.’

  ‘Fur,’ Kincaide corrected.

  ‘For purposes of elimination?’ she asked.

  Kincaide spoke again. ‘We will be forced to insist if you don’t agree to it.’

  ‘Really?’ She sighed. The interview was still only in the first twenty minutes, but each time she spoke she sounded increasingly weary. ‘On what grounds?’

  ‘Yes, for purposes of elimination,’ Kincaide conceded. His response was a deliberate echo of her own question, and that seemed to amuse him. He leant back in his chair as he waited for her to speak further.

  She turned her head towards Goodhew, but kept her eyes fixed on Kincaide for a beat longer, before slowly shifting her gaze too. If that was supposed to convey any kind of message, it didn’t reach him. As soon as she’d emerged from the ladies’ toilet, she’d seemed to switch into a partially catatonic state. Goodhew wondered whether she was inwardly reciting some deep-relaxation mantra, since her calmness was now bordering on the unnatural. She spoke only slowly, showing mild interest and zero anxiety. He wasn’t convinced. Either through strict self-control, or as an involuntary reaction to her situation, she had somehow deployed a huge and effective layer of emotional insulation; their questions didn’t appear to be making a dent.

  Goodhew decided to give her an opening. ‘Have you lost a choke chain at any point? Or could someone else have used it?’

  Again she blinked before replying. ‘I’m perfectly happy for you to take a sample.’

  ‘Thank you, Ms Moran. Colin Willis was a distinctive-looking man, I’d now like to show you a photograph.’

  ‘Of him dead?’ she asked bluntly.

  ‘We have a couple of previous shots. I can find one of those.’

  ‘I’d prefer it.’

  Goodhew flicked through until he found the two-year-old mug shot, and passed it across. He put the file back on the table, and Kincaide quickly picked it up. ‘I’ll find the other one,’ he explained.

  Jackie did the slow blink thing again, before raising the photograph into her line of sight. It was as if it took a couple of seconds before what she was now viewing connected with her brain. The change in her was minuscule: simply a dilation of the pupils. ‘He was a criminal, then?’

  Before, Goodhew had a chance to respond, Kincaide spoke. ‘Have you seen this yet?’

  She looked towards him, and so did Goodhew. Kincaide was holding up a morgue photo of Willis’ head and torso. It was one of those shots that gave a very good idea of how the morgue must have smelt, and it wasn’t pleasant.

  TWENTY-NINE

  DI Marks intercepted Goodhew as he walked back from the canteen with a sandwich. It had been the last one that looked vaguely edible: turkey salad, according to the label. The two slices of bread had already begun to curl, no sign of even a lettuce leaf, and the uniformly thin slice of too-pink filling looked more like a play mat for salmonella than anything that had ever boasted feathers.

  The sandwich failed to rouse Goodhew from his current vicinity of depressed/embarrassed: depressed because he’d failed to notice that his fledgling relationship, far from being just one-sided, actually didn’t exist, and embarrassed because it was now crystal clear to everyone concerned what an idiot he had been.

  He gingerly lifted the corner of one slice for further scrutiny. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast and, although he didn’t feel very hungry, he’d decided that missing lunch reeked too heavily of self-pity. He looked up as soon as he heard Marks’ voice.

  ‘Follow me.’

  Marks headed towards the stairs, and Goodhew hurried behind, risking a bite of the sandwich. It tasted of . . . bread. He decided to keep eating. Marks led the way down the stairs and across the car park towards his maroon Mazda. He pressed the remote and the doors clicked.

  ‘Are we going somewhere?’

  ‘I can now see how you made it to detective,’ Marks replied drily. He slid a folded sheet of paper from his pocket and passed it to Goodhew, who waited until he’d buckled himself into the passenger seat before opening it; the top was inscribed with the name ‘Martin Reed’, followed by a Bedford address. The remainder of the page just listed directions for the journey there from Cambridge.

  ‘We’re going to Bedford then?’

/>   ‘Is it your special day for stating the obvious? I thought I’d bring you along in the hope I’d receive some intelligent input. Is that going to be too much to ask?’

  Goodhew assumed the question was rhetorical, and so kept quiet.

  Marks reversed out of the parking space and simultaneously waved a hand in the general direction of the piece of paper. ‘That’s one of our possible Emma connections.’

  Goodhew was aware that some of the other officers working on the investigation had been dredging archives and various databases for any possible explanation of the words written on Lorna’s palms.

  ‘So they found something?’

  Marks raised one eyebrow slightly, in an are-you-taking-the-piss way, and managed to stop short of saying, ‘No, we’re off to Bedford just for fun.’ ‘DC Charles came across it: a missing girl called Joanne Reed, who called herself by her middle name, Emma.’

  ‘Doesn’t ring a bell. Was it considered suspicious?’

  ‘You won’t remember it because it was 1996. Martin Reed is her father. The nationals ran reports early on, but there were no clues and no sightings so it dropped out of the news pretty quickly.’

  ‘No body?’

  ‘Absolutely nothing.’

  ‘So why are we interested?’

  ‘You’ve spoken to Jackie Moran, and she claims she doesn’t know an Emma, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, Jackie and this Emma girl were in the same year at Northampton University. Jackie Moran was still a student there when Joanne Reed disappeared.’

  Within fifteen minutes they were on the slip-road joining the A14, and Goodhew knew they had a good hour’s drive ahead of them. The road was busy and Marks accelerated, then cruised at a steady 65mph. It was fast enough to overtake lorries, but slow enough to be overtaken by almost everyone else. And it gave Goodhew plenty of time to think about Jackie Moran.

  Martin Reed’s house was the right-hand door of a pair of ex-council semis. The exterior was cream, and saucer-sized bedding plants lined one side of a short driveway at the edge of a tightly cropped lawn. The front of the house had only three windows, two up and one down, made bright white by a set of matching nets. The front door itself was old-style, aluminium-framed with leaf-patterned frosted glass, and it too glinted with obsessive cleanliness.

  In normal circumstances Goodhew hated ringing door bells; you press the button and if you can’t hear the bell from the outside, you’re then left with the dilemma of whether to just wait or whether to knock. If you do knock, it seems almost guaranteed that the door will be opened by someone whose first words are ‘OK, OK, what’s the rush’. Goodhew pressed the bell once and the door was opened within seconds by a grey-haired woman in her early fifties. She somhow managed to look exasperated and welcoming at the same time.

  ‘Mrs Reed?’ Marks asked.

  ‘Yep, but not the first one, so I’m no good to you. It’s Martin you really want.’ She spoke slowly, as though reluctant to engage them in conversation. ‘He’s round the back,’ she explained. ‘Whatever you’re here about, I hope it’s worth it. He’s already gone into one of his moods. I’d rather you stayed away than stir everything up, especially if it’s going to be for nothing again.’

  They found him standing at the top of a stepladder cleaning the already spotless windows, working a cloth up into the top corners of the glass, making small, dedicated circles.

  His hand stopped moving and he turned his head, oh so slowly, to look over his left shoulder. His attention dwelt on Marks for a full thirty seconds and then, with a lethargic blink, he shifted his gaze and set it down again on Goodhew. No one spoke at first, and the effect was like a slo-mo moment in a movie where he read their faces and they read his.

  Martin Reed was a giant of a man, at least six four and weighing in the region of twenty stone. His hair had receded, leaving him with just a dark, wavy clump on top. The sides were clipped short, as though he’d once sported a flat-top and had never quite grown out of it. He’d been good-looking when he was younger, and he’d never quite grown out of that either.

  He stayed at the top of the ladder, clearly in no rush to invest any of his time in descending. ‘How can I help?’ His voice was deep but soft.

  ‘We’d like to ask you about Joanne,’ Marks replied.

  ‘Well, I realize that.’ There was no sarcasm there, just an acceptance that the police would only ever turn up to ask about his daughter. ‘You haven’t found her, have you?’

  ‘No, I’m sorry, we haven’t.’

  ‘OK.’ He came down from the ladder then, and led them into the house. They stood in the kitchen and waited while he put the window-cleaning cloths and sprays back in the cupboard under the sink. He put the items away one at a time, folding the chamois and placing it on the shelf, leaving the sponge squarely on top, then straightening the bottles on either side.

  Goodhew glanced around the kitchen: every surface was clean and devoid of clutter. The washing-up sponge was precisely located in the middle space between the two taps and a tea towel folded in quarters hung from a drawer. It looked ironed.

  A lone pen had been left on the windowsill, but he guessed it didn’t count as clutter, because it had been placed exactly parallel to the edge. There were good odds that the rest of the house would match. Martin Reed washed his hands and dried them on the tea towel, then replaced it in precisely the same position. Here the pristine and symmetrical ruled, as the big man struggled to keep control of his surroundings. He reminded Goodhew of a child on best behaviour, trying too hard, concentrating on every small task, and almost imploding with the strain. Instinctively, Goodhew knew that this was a man who rarely left home.

  They were led into the front room, where Mr Reed invited them to sit on the settee. ‘You met my wife, Mary?’

  They nodded.

  ‘She won’t be joining us unless you really need her to.’

  Marks replied. ‘No, that’s fine. She said you’d “gone into one of your moods”. What did she mean?’

  Reed did the slo-mo blinking thing again. ‘She knew what I was like when we married. She keeps me sane, I suppose. Even now I get keyed up whenever you turn up. I tell myself not to be disappointed, but I can’t help wondering if this time . . . I try to put the thought out of my head, but it still sneaks back in. I kid myself that I have no expectations left, but in the hour before you’re due to arrive, I’m counting down the minutes. It would be much easier for me if you could tell me the gist of the news by phone each time. Is that possible?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Reed, but we’re now working on a different case. There’s a slim possibility of a link, but that’s all. Just the name Emma.’

  ‘That’s it? The name Emma?’ Martin Reed shook his head, sagging as if the fresh disappointment had winded him.

  ‘The case notes state that Joanne was also known as Emma. Is that correct?’

  Martin Reed spread out his large hands, palms up. ‘It was nothing. She’d always preferred her middle name, and so decided to be known by it while she was at university. But Emma’s not a rare name, and it was never a big deal to Jo as far as I could tell. She used it briefly. To my mind, it seemed to be about . . .’ He paused to make the quotes sign with his fingers ‘. . . self-discovery. Some kids go spiky-haired or dabble with drugs. In her case, she changed her name. One of the detectives on the original team wondered if it was a pseudonym she used when undertaking something dodgy. As if. She was a very contented teenager, in fact. We waited for her to become the typical rebel, but it never happened.’ It sounded as though his words were practised – that he’d said them over and over in the last ten years – but that made them no less sincere.

  Marks plugged on. ‘We also have some photographs we’d like to show you. Just let me know if anyone in them looks familiar.’ Marks slid the photos from the file, then laid it on the cushion between himself and Goodhew. He handed the pictures to Mr Reed, one at a time.

  The five-by-sevens looked tiny in
the man’s huge hands. At each one he shook his head. ‘These are recent?’

  ‘Fairly.’

  ‘So I could be trying to recognize people I last knew ten years ago?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘No one looks familiar – but if I stare at them long enough, they all could. Do you have any idea how many people I’ve met since Jo vanished?’

  Goodhew lifted the front cover of the file. Plenty of sheets of paper inside. Words and more words. But hearing one person’s perceptions always had more resonance for him than a whole file of statements.

  He was aware that Marks was now mentioning names, and continuing to probe but getting nowhere. He showed signs of drawing their visit to a close, so Goodhew kept his eyes diverted from Marks, knowing that his next words would derail his boss’ line of questioning. He placed his hand firmly on Joanne’s file, like it was at risk of opening by itself. ‘We have all the details here, but would you be prepared to now tell us what happened – just as you remember it?’

  Mr Reed looked at him like he’d just noticed him for the very first time. ‘Why? This isn’t your current case.’

  Goodhew didn’t have an answer to that. Morbid curiosity or nosiness? Had he just asked an inappropriate question without thinking it through? So far, Joanne appeared to have zero connection to Lorna, and that made his intervention out of line.

  He continued to avoid Marks and simply replied honestly: ‘Just in case.’

  Whatever Martin Reed’s reservations, he started talking. ‘I used to fear the progression of old age and I was scared of dying. I imagined turning into first my dad, then my granddad, seeing that as the most depressing descent into oblivion. The thought of watching my children turn into adolescents, then adults, then become middle-aged – watching them peak and then decline – I used to feel repulsed by the idea. Now it seems to me like heaven. Joanne would be thirty this year, but I don’t do what-ifs about anything except her age. Annie, my first wife, did. She what-iffed until it killed her. She didn’t just mourn her daughter; she pined for the wedding Jo might have had, the children and the career, and on and on.’