‘I can’t believe anyone’s that vague,’ Hannah Bird said with feeling, as she and Tartaglia started to walk back to the office after leaving Rosie. ‘She doesn’t even have her mobile switched on half the time. She said she lost it, which is why it took me so long to get hold of her. Then she found it in the fridge. Can you believe it?’
He smiled. ‘She does seem a bit daffy and some people just have better recall than others.’ He paused for a moment, taking refuge in a doorway to light a cigarette. Bird’s broad face was etched with tiredness and he sensed her frustration. They were all working flat out, sifting through whatever came in, however nonsensical, spurred on by the desperate hope of turning up the one thing that would prove to be pivotal. He knew from experience it was out there somewhere; it was just a matter of time. They were making good progress, he reminded himself. But Bird, being new to the roller coaster ride of a murder investigation, didn’t yet have that conviction.
He took a deep drag on his cigarette and started walking again, skirting around a group of shoppers who were gathered outside Barnes Bookshop, admiring the window display.
‘Look,’ he said after a minute, as they approached the pond. ‘If there was something material Smart was worried about, and he told Rosie, she’d have gone straight to whoever was running the Missing Person investigation. And the other daughter, Isobel, would’ve done the same. It could easily be just some little thing that he spotted somewhere when he was out and about and he poked his nose into the wrong place. Maybe he didn’t even realise something was wrong until it was too late.’
His breath plumed out on the air as he spoke. It was just beginning to get dark and the temperature had dropped. He turned up his collar and jammed his free hand into his pocket. As they passed the pond, he heard a loud quacking and flapping of wings. A group of small children and adults stood by the edge of the water feeding bread to the ducks.
‘But where, then?’ Bird asked.
‘Where what?’
‘Where do we start looking for whatever was troubling him? It wasn’t like he had an action-packed life.’
‘It could be something small and it could be anywhere. His photography certainly took him all around town. Maybe he was taking photos at the wrong time and somebody saw him. It could be something as simple as that.’
They walked on in silence along Station Road and had nearly reached the entrance to the office car park when he turned to her. ‘I know it feels like we’re going nowhere, at least as far as John Smart’s concerned, but we just have to keep plugging away. Something will come up. It always does.’
She gave him a wan smile, but said nothing. She clearly didn’t buy into the glass half full theory.
‘Look, once you’ve finished the paperwork, why don’t you go home and get an early night? You’ll feel much fresher in the morning.’
She was saying she might just do that when his phone rang. He dug it out of his pocket and saw it was Sharon Fuller.
‘What have you got?’ he asked, following Bird through the gates into the yard at the back.
‘I spoke to Dave Simpson’s parole officer,’ Fuller said. ‘He told me Simpson had some sort of a nervous breakdown in prison. When he came out, the address he gave for next of kin was his ex-wife’s.’
‘Was she the one who reported him missing?’
‘Yes. She’s no longer living at that address but Nick’s trying to trace her.’
‘OK. While he’s doing that, I want a full background report on Dave Simpson.’
He was sitting at his desk half an hour later, scanning his backlog of emails, when his desk phone buzzed. It was Hannah Bird’s extension.
‘I’ve got Rosie Smart on the phone, Sir,’ she said, as he picked up. ‘She wants to talk to you. She wouldn’t say what it was about.’
He sighed. ‘OK. You’d better put her through.’
A few seconds later he heard Rosie’s voice. ‘I’m at the Sun Inn and I’ve just thought of something Dad said. You told me to call, even if it’s something small . . .’
She sounded as though she’d had a few glasses of wine in the interim. ‘What is it you remember?’
She gave a long, heavy sigh. ‘It was what you were saying about Dad’s daily routine and his hobbies.’
‘His photography,’ he prompted.
‘That’s right. And his gardening. He used to help out at a house near here. It belonged to an old lady and he grew veg and stuff for her. He was really into it. I often used to meet him in here after he’d been working there. It’s only a few blocks away.’
‘Yes. We know where it is.’
‘That evening, after the film, he was telling me all about what he’d been doing that day and he said he was worried about the woman who owned the house and that he might not be able to go there for much longer.’
‘Worried? In what way?’
‘I think he said she was ill, or something had happened to her.’
‘But she was old.’
‘Yes, but she was still quite together, mentally I mean. She couldn’t do her garden any longer as she had really bad arthritis, but she used to bring him out coffee and homemade biscuits every time he went over. Then one day she wasn’t there any more, or if she was, she didn’t come and see him. The next day too, and the next.’
‘She may have gone to hospital,’ he said, thinking of the woman in the wheelchair that the neighbour had seen.
‘Maybe. All I know is he was worried about her. He said she always used to let him know if she was going away somewhere, so he could keep an eye on things. When she didn’t reappear, he didn’t know what to do.’ He could hear from her tone that she was disappointed. ‘You asked me to tell you if there was anything, however small,’ she added.
He thanked her and hung up. He pushed back in his chair, one foot up on his desk, staring at the computer screen for a moment. Maybe it was worth taking another look at the house. He called Minderedes but he wasn’t answering. He left a message saying where he would be and, grabbing his jacket, headed back out of the office.
Five minutes later he was standing in Castelnau, outside the house. It looked much the same as before, although the piles of leaves had been cleared away, an old, red VW Polo was now parked in the drive. He went up to the front door and rang the bell. He waited a minute before ringing again, but there was still no answer. As he stepped back onto the gravel and looked up, he thought he saw a shadow pass across one of the first floor windows. It might have been a trick of the fading light but he had the feeling somebody was at home. He rang again, this time pressing the bell for a good thirty seconds, but nobody came to the door. He looked through the ground floor window into the large sitting room. The newspaper and the mug had gone, but there was nothing much else to see.
He went over to the car and felt the bonnet. It was still warm. The car was nine years old but looked in good condition, the paintwork clean and shiny. Stickers for the RHS and the National Trust were fixed to the back window, along with the slogan ‘Save a Cow, Eat a Vegetarian’. He rang the office and got through to Dave Wightman. ‘I want to run a check on a vehicle.’ He gave the make and registration number and waited while Wightman called it through on another line. Inside, the car was equally clean and tidy. Apart from a few CDs in the driver’s seat pocket, the only visible contents were a couple of empty plastic shopping bags, neatly folded into squares, and a box of tissues on the back seat.
Wightman came back on the line. ‘The car’s registered to a Mrs Jane Waterman.’ He gave the Castelnau address, adding that the insurance was current. ‘Anything else you need, Sir?’
‘No. That’s all for now.’ He tucked his phone away in his pocket. It wasn’t a crime not to answer the door and there were certainly no grounds for a search warrant, but something niggled. And instinct told him that whoever was in the house was watching him. He went over to the garage and tried the door but it was locked, as was the side gate leading to the garden. It was about two metres high, with a row of trellis above, running between the wall of the garage and the boundary. Without a ladder, it was impossible to see over the top.
Something made him look up at the house again. This time he saw someone at one of the windows, looking down at him, then the face disappeared behind a curtain. In the evening gloom, it was impossible to tell if it was a man or a woman. He was wondering whether to call on one of the neighbours to see if he could look into the back garden from their house, when his phone rang again. It was Minderedes.
‘I’ve found Ellie Simpson. What do you want me to do?’
‘Keep her there. I’ll be over as quickly as I can.’
‘I don’t know where Dave is, or how he is, and I don’t bloody care,’ Ellie Simpson said with a toss of her curly brown hair.
Tartaglia studied her for a moment, wondering if she was so emphatic because she was hiding something or if it was just a defence mechanism. ‘But he came here straight after he got out of jail, didn’t he?’ he asked.
‘I took him back for Daisy’s sake. He said things would be different. More fool me.’
She compressed her lips into a line of disapproval. Yet he sensed there was more than simple bitterness running below the surface. They were sitting at the small kitchen table in her flat in Clapham. Her daughter Daisy was with a friend in the next room, watching one of the Harry Potter films, the sounds of which reverberated loudly through the thin wall. He’d had a quick nose around the flat when she went out for a minute to speak to a neighbour who’d rung the bell, but he couldn’t see any sign of a man’s things anywhere.
‘You reported him missing a couple of months later. What happened?’
‘He went out to the supermarket to get some stuff for dinner but he never came home.’
‘Had anything happened to make him go off ?’
She shrugged. ‘We’d had yet another row that morning before I went to work.’
‘What was it about?’
She sighed. ‘He’d got this idea in his head about opening a restaurant on his own, that one of his old clients was going to back him. But nothing seemed to be coming of it. I thought it was all pie in the sky and he needed to give it up and get a job.’
‘You mean as a chef ?’
‘Yes. I wanted him to go to Richard English, to ask for a second chance.’
‘Really?’ He looked at her sceptically. She had a pleasant, open face, the most striking feature being her eyes, which were an unusual greyish green. She didn’t look a fool, but sometimes emotion blinded people to the obvious. ‘After everything that had happened, you really thought that would’ve worked?’
‘I know it sounds daft, but someone told me they’d lost a chef at one of the hotels so there was a good job going begging. Chefs with Dave’s talent don’t grow on trees. Richard knew that what happened at Stoneleigh Park that night was as much his fault as Dave’s. He’d had his pound of flesh and Dave had more than paid for what he’d done, so . . .’
‘English doesn’t strike me as a man with much of a conscience, and I understand your husband had problems.’
‘Dave used to be an alcoholic, but he kicked the booze when he was inside. He was sober all the time he was living with us.’ She stared at him almost defiantly for a moment, then shrugged. ‘I thought it was worth a try, at any rate. Anything was worth a try from where I was standing, with the rent to pay and three of us to feed and Dave sitting on his arse all day while I went out to work.’
‘But your husband didn’t see it that way?’
‘No. He got really angry. He said he’d rather walk under a bus than go grovelling back to Richard. He said Richard was to blame for everything that’d gone wrong in his life. He was still seething about it all when I came home that night.’
‘Were you worried when he didn’t reappear?’
She looked him straight in the eye and shook her head. ‘Not to start with. I thought maybe he was trying to teach me a lesson, or maybe he’d gone out and got pissed, like old times. Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic, and they say it just takes one drink to tip you over the edge again. I thought if he’d fallen off the wagon, he’d be feeling too ashamed of himself to come home. Even so, I was sure he’d toddle back eventually, tail between his legs. But then a couple of days went by and I did start to get worried. I thought something must’ve happened, that maybe he’d had an accident, so I called the police. They weren’t much help, particularly when they found out he’d come out of prison only a few months back. They said he’d probably turn up again.’
She was still looking at him and he saw the emotion in her eyes. He decided she was telling the truth and that she did care what had happened to her husband. ‘So you have no idea what happened to him?’
‘No.’
‘His parole officer told us he’d had some sort of a breakdown in jail,’ he said.
‘He should never have been put inside in the first place. He needed help, not punishment. And something really horrible happened to him while he was in there.’
‘I know. I’ve seen the report.’
‘It sent him over the edge for a while. When he came out, he was a different person.’
‘How would you describe his character?’ Motive was one thing, but it didn’t sound as though Simpson was capable of the cold bloodedness and calculation required for the killings.
She sighed wearily. ‘What can I say? He was a bit of a loner. Although he liked to go out drinking with the other kitchen staff after they finished their shift, he didn’t have any really close mates. He was quite shy, quite inside himself, if you know what I mean. I never really knew what was going on with him, most of the time.’
‘He must have been pretty organised and disciplined to run a big kitchen and earn a Michelin star. Yet he sounds as though he was all over the place, even before he went to jail?’
‘When I first met Dave, he was full of energy and dreams. He wanted to be this great chef. He’d left school at sixteen and worked his way up from the bottom. He was so hungry for it. I’ve never seen anybody work so bloody hard . . .’
‘So what went wrong?’
‘Success, I suppose, and all the stuff that goes with it. If you’ve got one star, you then need to go for the second. What made it worse was that Richard had promised him shares in the business, but he kept delaying and delaying, stringing Dave along. It was almost sadistic. Dave couldn’t cope with the pressure.’
‘You said he was a different person when he came out of prison.’
She nodded. ‘He was very bitter, very angry. It was eating him up. Maybe being sober made him think about things, about his life and what he’d done, how he’d screwed up his chances. Seeing it all in the cold light of day, there was no escape I guess. I couldn’t blame him, but all the fun had gone out of him. When he was drinking he wasn’t great to be with, but I didn’t much like the new, sober, Dave either.’ She folded her small, plump hands on the table in front of her and looked down at them. ‘All I know is that something’d changed in him and then he disappeared.’
‘You said you didn’t care where he is or how he is, but you do think he’s still alive?’
Biting her lip, she looked up at him and wiped away a tear with the back of her hand. ‘A few months after he went missing, a friend of mine saw him at a petrol station. He blanked her, but she was sure it was Dave. I realised then that he’d just walked out on us. Couldn’t even be bothered to let me know he was OK.’
‘Does he have any family who might be putting him up?’
‘His parents split up when he was young. His dad died a few years back and he didn’t get on with his mum. He spent a couple of years in care and he said the people were really kind, but that’s as much as I know. He never talked about anyone else. What is it you want with him?’
‘What about mates?’
She shook her head, staring hard at him, then asked softly. ‘What’s Dave done, Inspector?’
‘Maybe nothing.’
Tears began running down her cheeks. ‘Please tell me. If he’s been involved in something, I need to know. I’m still his wife. Daisy’s his daughter.’
‘We need to find your husband. To talk to him. Hopefully, that will be all. Do you have any idea where he is?’
She took a tissue from her sleeve, blew her nose loudly, then slowly nodded. ‘There’s one place I’d try. When my friend saw him at the petrol station, he was with this woman. From the way my friend described her, I’m pretty sure she’s someone who used to work at the hotel. She used to hang around Dave like he was some sort of god. She caused no end of trouble.’
‘You mean Chantal Blomet?’ He failed to hide his surprise. Wondering why he hadn’t picked up on it, he tried to remember precisely what Chantal had said. It had been a brief interview, and what with learning that Simpson had beaten up Richard English and been sent to jail, his mind had been on other things.
‘You think he’s with her now?’
She looked up at him, curious. ‘You know her, then? If he’s spinning her stories about a new restaurant and all that stuff, she’ll probably still be hanging around. She’s like an effing limpet. He couldn’t get rid of her even if he wanted to.’
He thought again of how Price had described Chantal, and her words rang true. ‘Do you have any photos of your husband?’
‘I’ve got a few put away somewhere for Daisy. Give me a moment and I’ll take a look.’
She was gone a couple of minutes, finally returning with an A4 envelope. ‘Here you go,’ she said, sitting down and handing it to him.
He spread the small collection of photographs on the table. The majority were formal pictures from their wedding, and there were pictures of Simpson with his daughter as a baby. Simpson looked more or less the same as in his arrest photograph, an overweight, latter-day Billy Idol.
‘Do you have anything more recent?’ he asked, handing them back to her.
‘There’ll be something on my phone. I’ve got hundreds. I haven’t had time to go through them all and delete the ones of Dave.’
She went out of the room again, returning a moment later with her mobile. She stood beside him, tabbing through, until finally she said: ‘Here. This is him. It was at a friend’s housewarming, just a few days before he disappeared.’ She turned the screen towards him.
Ellie Simpson was in the middle of the image, wearing a silver spangled jumper, flanked by two much taller men. Neither of the men looked like the Dave Simpson from the file.
‘Which one is your husband?’ he asked.
‘The one on the left.’
‘He had blond hair in the other photos. May I take a closer look?’
‘He used to bleach his hair,’ she said, handing him the phone. ‘Getting beaten up in prison didn’t help either. He looks completely different, doesn’t he?’
He enlarged the image. The resolution wasn’t great but it was as though he was looking at a different man. The post-jail Dave Simpson was several stone thinner and much more wiry. The softness had gone and his face looked haggard, as though he’d aged twenty years.
‘I hated him with long hair like that,’ she said. ‘It suited him better when it was short.’
She said something else but he wasn’t listening any more. He realised where he had seen Simpson before and sat back in the chair, still staring at the screen. He suddenly felt awake for the first time that day, as though somebody had poured a bucket of ice-cold water over him. Automatically he handed her back the phone, put his hands flat on the table and pushed himself to his feet.
‘Can you email it to me at this address?’ He handed her his business card. ‘Can you do it right now?’
Outside in the street, as he ran towards where Minderedes was waiting in the BMW, he called Steele and explained.