Chapter Thirty-Three

It was the night of the Crimewatch appeal. The Crimewatch team had agreed to show again the 1990 reconstruction of Kathryn Sheppard’s last known movements, and follow the clip with the new information about the discovery of the skeleton and the scraps of cloth, the ring and the plastic Red Indian. It was the first time that this information had been made public. Some new details were also revealed about the circumstances of Kathryn’s disappearance, including the fact that she had called her office on that last Friday and asked to take the day as holiday.

The main programme had finished, and had precipitated a surprising number of calls. The Crimewatch researchers were trying to sift through all the responses they had received before the Crimewatch Update that followed the news. Despite requests made during the broadcast that people should not contact the police about where the friendship ring might have been purchased, or provide them with information about other owners of such a ring, many of the calls did relate to one or the other. Despite this, Andy’s swift run through all of the calls that had come in while the programme was still on air with had yielded two possibly exciting results.

The first was from a woman who sounded frightened. She asked for her anonymity to be respected, but she rang off without giving her name. It might have been true, as she claimed, that she might have been identifiable by the man who might have been Kathryn’s killer if all of the details that she had given were publicly disclosed. Despite her obvious fear, she said that she was unsure whether the information that she had would be valuable or whether it was just a red herring. She said that she had worked in Hedley Atkins’ office at the time when Kathryn Sheppard had also worked there, about thirty years ago. She remembered that Kathryn had exchanged a friendship ring with Hedley Atkins’ sister, Bryony, and wondered if that was significant. The Crimewatch broadcast had deliberately not mentioned Bryony, so Andy knew at this point that the woman’s call was genuine. She also said that she had continued working in Hedley’s office for some time after Kathryn had left, and that she was still there at the time of Doris Atkins’ death. Shortly after Dorothy Atkins’ arrest for Doris’s murder, Hedley had asked a favour of her. She had been dubious about agreeing even at the time, but the explanation that he had given for requesting it was very plausible, and although she had never met Bryony Atkins, she had wanted to help her. Hedley had said that his sister had been traumatised by her grandmother’s murder and the terrible invasion of privacy that the Atkins family had suffered. She had gone away to study at university under a false name, and could not face having anything to do with her family. There was a psychiatrist who wanted to interview Bryony about her mother’s state of mind prior to the murder. He had agreed to conduct the interview by telephone in order not to put undue pressure on Bryony, but she still could not face going through with it, even though the psychiatrist had prepared most of the questions in advance. Hedley wondered whether this woman would take the psychiatrist’s call instead, and pretend that she was Bryony. He would coach her in the answers to the questions. There would be no harm done, and it would help both Bryony and the rest of the Atkins family if she could smooth their path in this way. That was the exact expression he had used: ‘smooth our path’. She had thought that it was an odd request, but she had seen no real reason for not helping out at the time and, besides, Hedley was her boss. So she had agreed to do it. Almost immediately after the call with the psychiatrist had taken place, however, she had begun to think that getting involved had been a mistake. This was mainly because Hedley, who had always been a decent boss who had treated her courteously, now began to pick on her and victimise her on every possible occasion, so that she had become quite afraid of him and had eventually found another job. She had not thought much about him since, but she could still recollect the unsettling sense of fear that she had felt at the time. She couldn’t explain why she thought that the false call might have had something to do with Kathryn’s disappearance, but because Kathryn and Bryony had been friends, she thought that the police might be interested.

The second call was also made by a woman, but this time one who identified herself with some stridency. Immediately, Andy’s ears had pricked up, because the name was one that he recognised from conversations about the case that he had had with Tim and Juliet. The woman said that her name was Marjorie Needham. The call was a rambling one and at first the woman did not appear to be saying much, beyond that she had been trying to help the police with their enquiries and that it was a pity that they had not taken her into their confidence earlier, because then they would have found out how much she could help. It had been the same with the garden. You would have thought they would have learnt this time. Anyway, she was ringing about the plastic Red Indian. You would have thought that they would have put two and two together by now, but obviously they hadn’t. Colin Atkins had kept shop at the house in Westlode Street and one of the things that he had sold had, of course, been breakfast cereals. He was a tight old skinflint and rarely, if ever, gave anything away. That was why she remembered, quite clearly, that in the closing months of 1974 he had received a consignment of plastic Red Indians. She knew it was 1974, because her nephew had come to visit and he had emigrated to Australia with his parents shortly afterwards. The Red Indians were intended to be given away with Nubisk breakfast cereal, but Colin had received a double consignment by mistake, and even he had not had the brazen cheek to try to sell the surplus ones. He had therefore given some of them to local children who went into the shop on errands, including some of her own nephews and nieces who lived round and about. The nephew bound for Australia had come to visit and gone into the shop to see if Colin would give him one as well; but, when Colin had looked for the rest of the surplus bag of the models, it had disappeared. Only the other bag, from which he was taking the toys to give to purchasers of the breakfast cereal, remained. Colin had been very annoyed about this – unreasonably so, she had thought, but that was Colin for you. Of course, anyone but an old skinflint like him would have given the kid a toy from the other bag, rather than see him disappointed. There would surely have been people coming into the shop for cereal who didn’t want the gift. But that was typical of Colin, too. He had no sympathy or understanding for children. It was well-known that at Christmas all Bryony and Hedley ever received were packets of dolly mixtures past their sell-by date. Why, even Doris had had to pay for the biscuits that she ate with her elevenses. . . .

Andy barely listened to the rest of it. If she was right, Nubisk had actually distributed the Red Indians a year before they had said in the report that they had prepared for Juliet. If there had been a mistake on their part, it was likely to be genuine, but it was a crucially important mistake, nevertheless. He would go back to them and ask them to check their records again. There was something else about the appeal that nagged away at the back of his mind. He made up his mind to watch the reconstruction again.