JENNY ENTERED THE COURT AND took her seat at a minute past ten. It was an intimate gathering consisting of the usher, Anthony Burden, DI Ballantyne and Clara Lawson, the young lawyer keeping a watching brief for the Home Office. Ballantyne wore a look of quiet satisfaction, but Anthony Burden appeared gravely troubled in a way he hadn’t the previous day. Jenny wished there was more she could have done for him, but every avenue had been choked off.
Earlier that morning she had received two emails. The first confirmed that both Louis Falco and Tomasz Zaleski had been charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, and that in due course Jenny would be contacted as a witness. The second was from Daniel Burden’s superior, Gordon Kenyon, stating that Burden had indeed approved a passport in the name of Lech Weil, but that all the supporting documents were in order. The discrepancies between the photograph of Mr Weil on his previous passport and on the photograph submitted had been judged ‘within acceptable tolerances’. That being so, no evidence existed that Burden had been criminally involved with Rozek.
Jenny didn’t trust Kenyon’s assurance, and she found it hard to believe that Burden hadn’t been abusing his position to make money on the side, but all she had was circumstantial evidence that proved nothing.
Jenny addressed Anthony Burden: ‘Mr Burden, before I deliver my findings is there anything you would like to say?’
He shook his head in a way which told Jenny he’d had enough of looking into the murky corners of his brother’s life.
‘Very well. I have considered the evidence we heard yesterday and have arrived at the conclusion that there is insufficient evidence available to precisely determine the cause of and circumstances of Daniel Burden’s death. With some reluctance, I am therefore obliged to return an open verdict.’
She offered Anthony Burden a look of sympathy, but all she read on his face was relief that the ordeal was over. As soon as she rose from her chair, he turned and headed out of the courtroom. DI Ballantyne cast him a philosophical glance: ‘You wouldn’t want to know if I told you,’ it seemed to say. And Jenny thought he would probably be right.
It was a long shot, but Jenny needed to try, if only to convince herself that she had exhausted every avenue. Loose ends left her feeling listless and dissatisfied, and worse – as if she had failed in her job.
She called him from her office as soon as she arrived back from court. Ryan answered his phone against the sound of fast-moving traffic.
‘Jenny, hi.’ He sounded awkward.
‘Not a good moment?’
‘I’m at Gordano service station. Someone thought they spotted a white male with Robbie Morgan. It’s bullshit, but it doesn’t save us from having to trawl through hours of CCTV footage.’
‘Any chance we could meet later? I’d like to sound you out over a couple of things.’
He lowered his voice. ‘I’m here with colleagues. Then I’ve a meeting with the Chief back at Gloucester. I’m tied up till mid-afternoon.’
Jenny looked at the files stacking up on her desk. There were ten or more awaiting her urgent attention, but she knew she wouldn’t be able to concentrate on any of them until she had shared her fears with Ryan.
‘What if I were to come over, meet you in Gloucester?’
‘Hold on a moment.’ Jenny heard him press his hand over the phone, while one of the others in his team talked about uploading camera footage to a laptop. ‘Sorry about that,’ Ryan said after a lengthy exchange. She could hear that he was walking away from his colleagues now. ‘Do you know a place called Vinings at Gloucester docks? I can be there at four.’
‘I’ll find it.’
‘I heard about Falco,’ Ryan said. ‘I can’t say I was surprised.’
‘I’m not sure I know what to believe.’
‘You can tell me all about it later,’ Ryan said. He paused. ‘Hey, it’ll all be fine. I promise.’
Jenny wished she could believe him.
She rang off and stared across the empty room at the closed door, feeling shocked at herself. Her exchange with Ryan had been so casual, so natural, so intimate. How had that happened? She placed a hand instinctively over her belly, as if to remind herself there was another life in there, one that had nothing to do with him. Was she really so frightened of being alone that she couldn’t even go days without the reassurance of there being a man somewhere close by she could lean on? She was forced to accept there was more than a grain of truth in that, and being pregnant only made it worse. Whatever was happening with her hormones was making her feel permanently exposed and unnaturally sensitive. These were just the sort of feminine weaknesses she had spent her entire career privately despising in other women – the kind who would sob in the Ladies’ after a difficult meeting – but here she was, feeling tearful and lonely and wishing someone could make it all go away.
Pull out of it, Jenny. What are you thinking? She tried, but it was no good. Her erratic emotions were winning. She brushed away angry tears and went to fetch some coffee.
Jenny arrived outside the restaurant at Gloucester docks to find it closed. A handwritten sign in the window said it wouldn’t open again until the evening. The slender trade on a freezing January afternoon clearly wasn’t worth the candle. Jenny huddled into the doorway, sheltering from the cutting wind, and tried to stay warm by stamping her feet. Dim lights flickered in the windows of several barges tethered in what until a fortnight ago would have been the still waters of the dock. Now it was an open expanse of snow-covered ice inches thick, and the inhabitants of the boats were marooned. The unrelenting cold was beginning to feel like a curse that would never lift.
It was nearly a quarter past before Ryan jogged towards her along the narrow path cleared in the snow, a briefcase under his arm and breathing clouds of steam.
‘Sorry, Jenny – the meeting ran on.’ He caught his breath and looked at the unlit windows of the restaurant. ‘They’re closed? What’s wrong with them?’
‘Looks like the whole place is,’ Jenny said. ‘I saw a pub around the corner that didn’t look too rough.’
‘It is. Trust me.’ He scanned up and down the docks but there was little sign of life. ‘My flat’s just across there. It’s not pretty, but it’s warm.’ He pointed across to the far side of the docks at a modern apartment building.
‘Fine. Let’s go.’ She was desperate to get inside and out of the cold.
‘I heard your friend Mr Falco got bail this afternoon,’ Ryan said, as they set off across the cobbles, ‘but the Polish guy’s still in custody. Judge didn’t trust him not to disappear.’
‘Is that canteen gossip or did you make a call?’
‘Jack Ballantyne’s an old friend. I did a favour for him once.’
‘Sounds mysterious.’
Ryan smiled. ‘Got to have a little mystery in this job. There’s not much glamour in it, that’s for sure.’
They arrived at the brightly lit entrance to an apartment building on the far side of the frozen dock. Ryan punched in an access code and the door clicked open. Stepping through into a stark white hallway that still smelt of paint and fresh plaster, Jenny abandoned any fantasies she had harboured about leaving her home in the country. Even the potted palm was plastic. The building had all the charm of a shopping mall. They travelled up four floors in a shiny, slow-moving lift that felt as if it wasn’t moving at all. In the confined space, Jenny became acutely aware of the scent of Ryan’s clothes, his hair, his skin; being pregnant was sharpening her sense of smell to an almost painful degree. Her senses, like her emotions, felt overloaded.
‘Are you claustrophobic?’ Ryan said as they crept upwards.
‘Horribly.’
‘Me, too. Any second now.’
They came to a gentle halt. The doors opened, bringing more smells: new carpet and varnished skirting boards. Jenny followed Ryan along the passage to a door at the end of the corridor. He unlocked it and stepped inside. The lights came on without him having to flick a switch, revealing a spacious studio room with floor-to-ceiling French doors that opened onto a balcony overlooking the docks. It was minimalist, but pleasant: two large tan sofas and a TV at one end, and a fitted kitchen in light-coloured wood at the other. An open staircase led up to a mezzanine, shielded from view by panels of smoked glass, that served as a bedroom.
Ryan shrugged off his coat and took Jenny’s to hang in the closet behind the door. ‘More of a hotel room than a home, but it does me. Can I get you something to drink?’
‘Tea, if you’ve got it.’
‘You’re in luck.’
Jenny went to look at the view over the city while Ryan fetched their drinks. The illuminated spire of Gloucester Cathedral rose over the rooftops. In the far distance, traffic wound up the hill to the Birdlip Ridge and the Cotswolds beyond. The street-level Gloucester she knew was one of scuffed and neglected Victorian buildings interspersed with 1960s concrete; rustic accents alongside Punjabi, Latvian and Jamaican patois; a once-charming place that was losing the war against becoming another down-at-heel provincial city. But viewed from this vantage point it came close to being beautiful, the streets melding together into something that made coherent sense.
‘I spend hours doing that,’ Ryan said. ‘I call it my eagle’s nest. Milk?’
‘Just a drop.’
He came alongside and handed her a cup.
‘How did you get on at the service station?’ Jenny asked.
‘Didn’t amount to anything,’ Ryan said dismissively. ‘A small blond boy with a man in the corner of the car park – could have been anyone. Picked something up on one of the cameras, but Kelly was adamant it wasn’t her boy.’
‘Mind if I have a look?’
‘If you like.’ From his briefcase Ryan pulled a laptop, which he proceeded to set up on the coffee table between the two sofas. ‘Are you going to tell me what’s on your mind?’
‘Falco’s story was all about two undercover detectives. He said they were originally from Poland, drafted in to penetrate the Polish criminal gangs in Bristol. Does that sound far-fetched to you?’
‘I remember the Met tried something similar with the Jamaican Yardies back in the nineties. As I recall, it all went swimmingly, until they forgot whose side they were on and started to kill people.’
‘Do you think it could have happened again, or was it just where Falco got the idea?’
‘I’ve not heard anything along those lines.’
‘And if you had?’ Jenny challenged.
‘Good question. Would I tell you?’ He gave her a playfully enigmatic look. ‘I shouldn’t, but I probably would. Off the record, of course.’
‘Can these sorts of operations remain entirely confidential, even within the police?’
‘All sorts of things remain confidential inside the police. Detectives aren’t even allowed their own informers any more – they’re all handled by the source unit.’
‘And those kind of secrets really hold?’
‘We’re detectives. We like secrets. They make us feel powerful.’
‘I can’t tell if you’re joking.’
‘Tell you what – give me these guys’ names and I’ll check them out for you.’
‘How?’
Ryan smiled. ‘You’ll have to trust me.’
Jenny sighed. His flippancy wasn’t helping. ‘Tomasz Zaleski said he thought the bodies of the criminals who’ve disappeared might have ended up at Fairmeadows Farm. He was hinting that Ed Morgan had witnessed something, or even got involved. Look, I’ll admit it – what he said frightened me. What if it’s true? What if Ed was murdered by these people and they were the ones who dumped a pig’s head outside my house?’ Her voice rose half an octave. ‘What then? Are they going to stop there? How crazy are they? And if any of this is true, why the hell would the police protect them?’
‘They wouldn’t,’ Ryan replied calmly. ‘If these two have anything to do with CID, they won’t be walking the streets any longer than it takes to pick them up.’ He started tapping on the computer as he logged on to the police intranet. ‘What are their names?’
‘Aron Janick and Danek Mazur.’ She spelled them out letter by letter as he typed.
Ryan waited a moment for results to scroll up. He shook his head. ‘No sign of them on our database, but that’s not saying a lot. I’ll dig a bit deeper in the morning for you. But if you want my opinion, undercover detectives, even stupid ones, would have more nous than to intimidate a coroner. Think about it, Jenny – you’re undercover, you’ve gone rogue, you’ve killed a man. You’re going to make damn sure someone else takes the blame and you keep a low profile. You do nothing to draw attention to yourself.’
‘You’re assuming rationality,’ Jenny said.
‘Even psychopaths have a certain amount.’
Jenny was still far from convinced.
Ryan remained patient. ‘It’s not a convincing story, Jenny. It sounds like something a lawyer would make up. They’re so proud of their own supposed intelligence, they never credit criminals with any. It takes real brains to make a living breaking the law, believe me.’
Jenny sat on the corner of the sofa, deep feelings of unease refusing to leave her.
‘You let yourself get frightened, Jenny. I’m not surprised.’
‘With good reason. My officer’s been suspended. There were inappropriate messages on her Facebook account. She claims it was hacked.’
‘Now you’re looking for evidence to fuel your irrational fears. You’re letting yourself get trapped inside it – you’ve got to step back.’
Jenny looked at him, hardly noticing that he had his hand on her arm.
‘I spent yesterday evening being told to be rational. I’m trying, but my problem is there is a rational explanation that sits with Falco’s story: Janick and Mazur did exactly what he said; the police figured that out, and they’re working like crazy to cover their tracks.’
‘And that would make me part of it. I don’t enjoy seeing you like this. To be honest, it’s painful.’ He squeezed her arm, then took his hand away. ‘Do you want to see this footage?’
Jenny nodded and moved a little closer to him so that she could see the screen.
Ryan opened a video file. The picture was in colour but low resolution. The field of view covered an area of car park away from the service-station building, close to an area with picnic tables that in normal weather would have been grass.
‘This is it now.’ He pointed to a vehicle that partially entered the frame and pulled into a space at the lower-left corner of the screen. A man dressed in a black ski jacket and baseball cap climbed out of the driver’s door and took a small child dressed in a red coat from the back seat. He carried the child to the gutter and leant over from the waist. It wasn’t altogether clear what was happening, but Jenny assumed the child was having a pee. The man stood for a long moment, gazing away from the camera, then leant over again, before helping the child back into the car.
‘Looks like the kid was taking a leak,’ Ryan said.
Jenny kept watching as the car reversed out of the space. It was blue and only the rear half of it was visible, but something about it – or was it something about the man? – troubled her.
‘I want to see it again,’ Jenny said.
Ryan played the footage a second time. The man’s face remained frustratingly obscured beneath the rim of his cap. Jenny briefly convinced herself that nevertheless there was something familiar about him – the motion of his arm as he wiped the back of his hand across his mouth while he waited for the boy, perhaps – but just as quickly she told herself she was imagining things. Seeing ghosts again.
‘It’s a phenomenon,’ Ryan said. ‘People will be sighting him up and down the country for the next six months, then they’ll forget about it. If it was female child, it would last twelve months, or so the experts tell me.’
He brought down the lid of his laptop and slowly pressed it shut. ‘So, is that what you needed – reassurance that Polish undercover cops aren’t going to murder you in your bed?’
‘Something like that.’
She was quiet for a moment, and aware of Ryan’s body only inches from hers. Close enough that she could feel his heat. Both of them responded to the same instinct to let the silence continue; to see what might emerge from it. As five seconds moved towards ten, Jenny felt the tension rise; neither making a move, both staring straight ahead, both of them old and self-aware enough to be thinking of consequences. Ryan broke the spell and touched his leg against hers.
‘Are you all right? You’re quiet.’
Jenny looked at him and wondered if she had imagined the last half-minute. She thought he looked rather beautiful. Young and untravelled. Skin taut across his jaw; deep eyes that were soulful despite his efforts to remain businesslike. She silently chided herself for even entertaining the idea that they might – She stopped herself from even having the thought. The moment of temptation was over, and she had emerged unscathed. They had both done the right and decent thing. She was able to trust herself.
‘I’m OK,’ Jenny said purposefully. ‘I’m going to try to take on board what you said. See if it helps.’
For a brief moment Ryan looked as if he were hovering on the edge of moving forward to kiss her, but he pulled back from the brink. ‘I hope so.’ He stood up from the sofa, placing himself outside touching distance. But as he stepped away Jenny felt the tug of an invisible force field that was pulling them back together.
‘I ought to go,’ Jenny said.
She moved towards the cupboard where Ryan had hung her coat, passing close by him.
‘Hey,’ he said softly.
She glanced back. He took a step towards her and folded his arms around her, embracing her in a hug.
‘I’m here, all right?’ he said. ‘It may be unprofessional of me, but I care about you – I mean, I care about you.’
‘That’s kind,’ Jenny said, not knowing how else to respond, and felt her hands come up from her sides and loop around his upper back. From there it felt only natural to rest her cheek against his shoulder as he stroked the back of her head. Jenny stepped back from their gentle embrace with a warm smile, letting him know that he had given her something precious.
Jenny fetched out her coat and pulled it on, telling herself it was time to change the mood. There was still an outside possibility she might have to call Ryan as a witness to her resumed inquest the following week, which was another very good reason she was glad to have held back.
‘I’m starting again Monday morning,’ Jenny said. ‘You’ll let me know if anything more turns up at your end.’
‘Apart from my team that’s still meant to be looking for Robbie, we’re all done,’ Ryan said. ‘My boss is more than satisfied that Nicky Brooks took her own life, so that’s another file you’ll find on your desk tomorrow morning.’
She had tried not to think about Nicky. Four days on from her death, Jenny was feeling the tragedy of it more acutely, not less, as if she were somehow bound up with her. ‘What do you think Ed did with Robbie?’ Jenny asked. ‘He didn’t have a lot of time that evening. He couldn’t have taken him far.’
‘He planned it,’ Ryan said. ‘He’d have had something worked out.’
A thought jumped into Jenny’s mind for the first time, and in the same instant, she realized that she had hardly thought about Robbie in isolation from his half-sisters. ‘It’s almost as if in making him disappear he was mirroring what happened to Susie Ashton – the idea that not knowing is worse than knowing.’
Ryan seemed taken with the thought. ‘That has a certain logic. He’d seen it all play out for the last ten years.’
Jenny’s mind raced on. ‘What if Ed did have a hand in Susie’s disappearance? And what if the rumours about a paedophile ring were right and he wasn’t acting alone? Robbie might even still be alive.’
‘You know what you’ve just done?’ Ryan said. ‘You’ve displaced all that anxiety you came with onto something else. You’ve got to check this tendency, Jenny. You’ll drive yourself crazy.’
She felt a rush of energy as some mental blockage seemed to fall away. Half-formed thoughts and ideas that had subconsciously disturbed her for days burst into fullness. ‘No. Listen. Ed knew Layla and Mandy carried the baggage of the past. He knew Kelly would get over them somehow. But Robbie was theirs. He was pure; born into happiness. The only pure thing Kelly had ever had. So what’s the worst he could do? It’s not killing him. It’s allowing him to live, but a life of horror; a life that’ll make him inhuman and pervert everything he was to her.’
Ryan raised his eyebrows. ‘You’ve got a dark imagination.’
‘Or what if Ed knew what happened to Susie Ashton and was on the brink of revealing it as his own child approached that age? You should be trawling his history for all his associates, not just following leads from the public.’
‘I’ll pass on your thoughts. Meanwhile, I recommend a large drink when you get home.’
‘Damn!’
‘What now?’
‘The car on the video you just showed me – could it have been a VW?’
‘Possibly. Why?’
‘A VW Polo belonging to Emma Grant was stolen from her house last November.’
‘Now you really are losing it.’
‘I’d like to check,’ Jenny said. ‘And maybe you could get me a copy of that footage and of any pictures of Robbie you might have.’
‘He’s dead, Jenny.’
‘You can believe that if you like, but I’ve seen no evidence to prove it. And part of a coroner’s job – the bit that most people forget about – is to try to keep more people from dying.’
He looked at her with concern. ‘You seem a little manic.’
‘It feels like waking up. Call me. I’ll be waiting.’ She gave Ryan another brief hug and let herself out.
Jenny allowed herself one drink, but it did little to calm her frenetic thoughts. It wasn’t until late in the evening, after she had been working for several hours in her study, that her lids finally started to droop and she began to think about hauling herself upstairs to bed.
She had tidied her notes and was about to switch off the hall light and turn in when she heard heavy footsteps approach the front door. There were three evenly spaced knocks, a signal that it was the constable who had been posted outside in a squad car.
Jenny opened the door to the young man in uniform who looked suspiciously as if he had just been roused from a deep sleep.
‘You’ve got a visitor, Mrs Cooper. A Mrs Trent. I told her to stay in her car.’ He nodded towards a small hatchback parked in the lane.
Jenny glanced at her watch: it was a quarter to midnight. ‘All right. Tell her to come in.’
As the policeman turned and went back down the path to fetch her, Jenny asked herself what on earth Alison could want that couldn’t wait until the morning. But when she appeared it was clear that the time was the last thing on her mind. She marched up the path clutching a briefcase, filled with a sense of purpose.
‘I’ve got something for you, Mrs Cooper. I thought you’d want to know immediately.’
Jenny didn’t bother protesting. She took Alison through to the kitchen – the only room in the house that was still warm this late in the evening – and tried her best to remain patient.
Alison was bursting with excitement as she emptied papers and iPad onto the kitchen table. ‘You know I’m actually grateful to Simon Moreton,’ Alison said. ‘I wouldn’t have had time to do any of this if I’d been caught up with other things.’
Jenny surveyed the unpromising mess between them. ‘Is this about your Facebook account?’
‘Oh, far better than that, Mrs Cooper. Much more significant.’ She could hardly contain herself. ‘You remember Reverend Medway’s evidence about the man watching Kelly Hart’s house? I think I’ve found out who it is.’
‘You have?’ Jenny said sceptically.
‘Daniel Burden.’ Alison’s eyes gleamed as she revelled in Jenny’s surprise. ‘I’ve been going through his bank statements and credit-card bills and wondering how the police could have failed to be interested.’ From amongst the papers she extracted a printout. ‘Last September he bought a camera online – state of the art, along with a tripod. Eight hundred and fifty-three pounds. I don’t suppose you saw any sign of it at his flat?’
‘No, but it doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. Is this important?’
‘Not by itself. But when you look at this –’ She brought out a credit-card bill and pointed to an item she had double underlined in red.
Jenny looked at the item. It was a single purchase of a little over £3,000. ‘Idenco Ltd. What’s that?’
‘They make software. Very clever software that they sell to the Home Office and Border Agency. In fact, they sell it all around the world.’ Alison was enjoying holding her in suspense. ‘Can you guess what kind?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘Facial recognition!’ She grabbed another document from amidst the heap and handed it across to Jenny. ‘That’s the spec. Not only can you use it to identify faces from your own database, it’ll also trawl the entire internet and look for any photograph that resembles a picture of someone you’ve uploaded. Read what it says – if I were to ask it to look at a picture of you taken today, it claims it could pick you out from a 1980 school photograph.’
‘How?’
‘It measures the distance between various features and then it does some clever maths. Oh, and there’s something about 3D in there too. It’s not perfect, but governments wouldn’t be buying it unless it was some use.’
Jenny skimmed through the explanation of the technical wizardry that allowed a computer program to compare every photograph on the internet with a template. Illustrated examples showed photographs of a range of current celebrities alongside recovered photographs of them going back to their late teens: entire pictorial histories assembled in minutes, listed alongside the web addresses of the sites from which each image was harvested.
‘When did you find all this out?’ Jenny asked, still trying to piece together what it could mean.
‘Over the last few days,’ Alison said. ‘But then when I sat in court and heard that fellow Kenyon talking it really got me thinking.’ Alison leaned forward over the table, invading her space. She looked a little unhinged: she hadn’t brushed her hair for a long while and it had fallen away from her temple, revealing the flattened area of skin covering the titanium plate at her temple. Jenny reminded herself to treat what she said carefully. ‘All that business about checking newly approved passports at random with software like this. Like I said, it isn’t 100 per cent accurate, so if you can get a picture which is sufficiently close, or manipulate one so that it’s close enough to pass the test, then you’ve something valuable. You see, most passport officials are more interested in what their computers say than the evidence of their own eyes. As long as you look roughly like your picture and the passport scans OK, you’re home free.’
Jenny tried to follow her logic. ‘So Burden could have used all this equipment and software to help him create passports for criminal customers?’
‘You’re not as dim as you look, Mrs Cooper.’ Alison grinned. ‘Oh, did I mention that you need a powerful computer to run this software? – you won’t do it on your home PC. That’s why he had something bespoke, and the separate hard drive to keep it tucked away out of sight. Come to think of it, he would most likely have kept it all in a cubbyhole somewhere. I wonder . . .’
Jenny scanned the growing pile of evidence in front of her. She had to give Alison credit, it was mounting up to proof that Burden really was in the forgery business. Just a pity she hadn’t had it twenty-four hours earlier at court. Something still jarred with her. Then she realized what it was: the dates.
‘He’d been banking money for more than two years, but he only assembled all this early last autumn—’
‘See? I told you!’ Alison smiled with a glee Jenny hadn’t seen since before her accident. ‘I wondered that, too. He spent over five thousand – that’s a serious investment. So I checked all his statements again. I found something that got me excited.’ She turned to a second item underlined on the credit-card statement. ‘Twenty-five pounds, seventy-five pence, to Europcar. The only time you get charged such a small amount by a car-rental company is when they claw it back for fuel or a stain on the upholstery. There’s no other payment to Europcar, so I guessed he might have settled in cash.’ From the bottom of the assorted papers, Alison produced three sheets clipped together. ‘You have a very old friend of mine from Bristol CID to thank for this,’ Alison said. ‘He came with me to their office. Daniel Burden hired the cheapest car on their list for three separate weekends last September and October. A Kia Picanto. I took a picture of it.’ Alison produced her phone and called up an image of a small, unremarkable car in a sickly colour somewhere between green and very dark yellow. ‘The colour’s called Lemongrass. I’d call it bile.’
Jenny stared at the rental documents with a growing sense of disbelief. It was there in black and white: Daniel Burden had hired the vehicle in his own name and given his address at 15 Janus Avenue, Henleaze.
‘I told you I wasn’t a complete fruitcake,’ Alison said. ‘True, I sometimes forget to stop myself breaking wind in polite company, but I figure if you can train a toddler not to, I’m not beyond all hope.’
Jenny looked up from the papers that were trembling slightly in her hands and had the disconcerting feeling that she was looking at the world through distorting mirrors. Her mind was churning but not gaining any traction, like wheels spinning fruitlessly on ice. She had no idea what any of this meant.
‘I can see you’re confused. I was, until I drove there on my way over,’ Alison said confidently. ‘Reverend Medway said he parked just along the church on the verge. True, you could have seen Kelly’s place from there, but if you were to turn around and look out of the back window – or point a camera that way – you’re looking straight at the Ashtons’ cottage. And that would be the clever thing to do, wouldn’t it – park the opposite way to the direction you’re looking in?’
‘Why the Ashtons’?’ Part of the answer arrived in Jenny’s mind before Alison delivered it. ‘The £100,000 reward.’
‘There’s a motive for a man who needs money. But he must have suspected Philip Ashton for some reason, and maybe had a photograph somewhere that he was trying to get a comparison with.’
Jenny was struggling to keep up.
‘Look,’ Alison said impatiently. ‘I remember how attractive Clare Ashton was. You wouldn’t see it now, but she was beautiful. Doll-like. Innocent, as if she couldn’t see the bad in people. He always seemed so rigid and awkward next to her. He had this sort of pent-up-ness you knew was there even before it all happened. You know the kind.’
Jenny thought of her ex-husband, a man who was capable of losing his temper at a stray crumb on the kitchen counter. ‘I know.’
‘It came back to me – one of the theories in the canteen was that Philip Ashton was the culprit. All that tension came from his being a paedophile posing as a concerned school teacher. His alibi was always that he’d been at work when his daughter went missing. But what if he had come home early? He’d have known how to get to the house without being seen.’
‘How could Burden hope to prove any of that?’
‘What would a guilty, intelligent man like Ashton do to give himself an escape route? What if he’d got himself a passport in a false name, planning to do a bunk if the heat ever got too much? Who would know? No one, not until this technology comes along and you can pick a face out from a virtual line-up of several billion.’
‘That’s a lot of theory and not much evidence.’
‘Well, think about this. What if Burden was building a circumstantial case? What if he got just enough evidence that he thought he could squeeze Ashton’s balls without involving the police? See where I’m going?’ Alison held Jenny in an unblinking gaze. ‘Then he’s cornered. Burden knows the house has got to be worth four hundred thousand and Clare’s not long for this world, so he holds all the cards – he’s going to be rich. What does Ashton do about it? He kills Burden and sets up Ed Morgan. Tries to solve it all at once.’
‘And hacks into Morgan’s Facebook account while he’s at it?’
‘It’s not hard to extract a man’s password when you’ve got a shotgun in his face.’
Jenny shook her head. Now she was hopelessly confused by yet another plausible theory that had never occurred to her. ‘I don’t know . . .’
‘Two tragedies, ten years and fifty yards apart, and one dodgy suicide sitting halfway between them. You tell me which is the coincidence.’ Alison scooped up the papers scattered across the desk. ‘Either you go to the police with all this or I do. Personally, I think it would be more convincing coming from you, seeing as your brain hasn’t got a chunk out of it.’ She fetched one more item from a side pocket of her briefcase – a DVD in a blank cover. ‘I promised you I’d stitch together the footage of people filling fuel cans. There’s about thirty of them. None of them looks like Ed, though, or Ashton for that matter. Probably had a stash in the shed.’ Alison got up from the table. ‘I’ll bet that bugger hacked into my account as well. And he manages to look so respectable.’ She gave a contemptuous grunt and headed for the door. ‘I’ll leave you to it, Mrs Cooper. Sleep tight, mind the bugs don’t bite.’
Jenny called after her. ‘Alison – you’ll promise me you won’t do anything rash?’
She turned at the door. ‘I keep telling you, Mrs Cooper – I’m as rational as you are.’ Then she smiled again. ‘So God help us both.’