Chapter Twenty-Four

JULIET WAS SEARCHING for information on Councillor Start. She could find no criminal records for Start himself. His son, Matthew Start, had been convicted of speeding a few years previously, but the endorsement on his licence had almost expired. He hadn’t been banned from driving. There were no other convictions. The cold case file said he’d been charged with rape, but there was no trace of this in the records. Destroyed after a time lapse, she guessed, if he’d been found not guilty.

A Google search brought up the website of Start Construction. Her trawl through it revealed a host of glossy pictures of newly-built houses and some aerial views of whole estates. There were internal shots of rooms in show houses, some pitifully small despite the benefit of a wide-angled lens. The company’s strap-line was Let Start’s Kick-Start Your Dreams. The Starts specialised in capitalising on the aspirations of young couples who could just about manage to raise the deposit for a mortgage.

She clicked a link on a sidebar marked ‘Renovations and Improvements’. These photographs depicted quite a different order of building project. The illustrations were of substantial conservatories added to old farmhouses, tasteful extensions that segued almost seamlessly into the matched brick of period homes and, displayed as the jewel in the crown, several shots of the cellar of a Victorian terrace house in Pinchbeck Road that had been converted into a leisure complex.

Other links provided advice on payment plans, insurance and how to obtain a quotation. The last page gave details, including mugshots, of the directors and key employees. Councillor Frederick Start was CEO of the company, Matthew Start its Managing Director. None of the other names or photos meant anything to Juliet except one: she noted with some curiosity that the Company Secretary was Mrs Veronica Start. Staring out at her was the pale and somewhat mournful face of someone whom she recognised but at first could not place. It came to her quite quickly: she’d seen the woman at the Fenland Folklore meeting she’d attended. She clicked on the biographical note against Mrs Start’s name and read that ‘Mrs Veronica Start teaches modern languages at Spalding High School and acts as part-time Company Secretary at Start Construction. She has been with Start’s for seventeen years.’

This was interesting but revealed nothing exceptional. Juliet would hazard a guess that most of the local businesses big enough to boast a board of directors provided as many sinecures as they could to family members. But perhaps Matthew Start’s wife really fulfilled the function of Company Secretary and was not the holder of a nominal role yielding a handsome salary. Veronica Start didn’t look like a sponger.

Disappointed with what she could glean from the website, Juliet paged back to the Google listings. Scrolling through them with her practised eye, she skipped one about Councillor Start’s support for the construction of a new wing at Oatfields , the council-run old people’s home (he would support that, wouldn’t he?) and another that praised him for being a generous sponsor of some of the runners in a half marathon designed to raise funds for the home. It was the fourth entry that caught her attention. It was a list of the governors of Spalding High School. Clicking on the link led directly to the school’s website and showed that Frederick Start was the chairman of the governors. He had occupied the role for so long that he must have first accepted it when Matthew was a schoolboy. Perhaps he also had a daughter: Juliet would check.

She’d like to know what Councillor Start got out of being a governor. Local kudos? He had that already, in spades. Respectability? A possible motive: there could be few more laudable pursuits than giving up your time to help the next generation. Nevertheless, she’d be on the look-out for any more tangible benefits the Councillor might be obtaining: feeding an unhealthy interest in young girls, for example.

None of the other first-page Google entries looked interesting. Most related to charities or local events supported by the Starts; one or two were legal notices posted by them about new building work they proposed to undertake. The second page contained more legal notices, most of them now several years old, and fewer reports of charity events.

Juliet enjoyed carrying out this kind of background search and she was extremely thorough. She looked at her watch. She had time to trawl through a few more pages. She’d worked almost to the bottom of the third page when her perseverance was rewarded. ‘Councillor Start to lead The Bricklayers’, she read. She clicked on the entry. It was a very short piece – little more than a caption – that had appeared in The Spalding Guardian about three years previously.

Councillor Frederick Start, the well-known local builder, has assumed the role of Master of The Bricklayers. Councillor Start is a founding member of The Bricklayers, a charitable organisation.

The article was accompanied by a small grainy photograph that could have been of almost anyone.

She hadn’t heard of The Bricklayers. A further Google search revealed nothing about them. Whoever they were, The Bricklayers certainly didn’t court publicity. Yet more intriguing was that, although a ‘charitable organisation’, they weren’t registered as a charity. She wondered if they acted as some kind of obscure trade association, but she was pretty sure that would make them eligible for charitable status. They seemed to model themselves on the Freemasons, but she knew Masons always registered their Lodges as charities. If The Bricklayers engaged in similar activities, you’d expect them to want to claim similar benefits; if they didn’t, the most likely reason would be a desire for secrecy. Charities had to publish their constitutions or Trust Deeds and also their accounts. Perhaps The Bricklayers didn’t need to eke out their funds and thought that refusing charitable status was a price worth paying for lack of transparency. From Juliet’s point of view, such secrecy suggested they sailed close to the law, if they weren’t actually breaking it. And since they were so secretive, why the casual little piece in the local press? Had this been an accident, or placed there for a specific reason?

Juliet was keen to investigate further, but knew she’d have to ask Tim to let her spend the time on it. As far as she could tell, The Bricklayers had nothing to do with Councillor Start’s interest in Philippa Grummett. Nothing would irritate Tim more than if she let herself get sidetracked, despite the lip-service he always paid to her hunches. The Starts’ connection with Spalding High School was possibly relevant, though still tenuous, given that Philippa didn’t attend the school. Juliet wondered if Verity Tandy’s conviction that Philippa had a double who was a pupil at the school could be significant, before swiftly berating herself for chasing hares. Still, the report that an undesirable had been seen hanging around the school had to be taken seriously and Verity’s account of the headmaster’s casual attitude to the sighting was unsettling. She herself hadn’t much liked Richard Lennard when she’d heard him speak at Fenland Folklore.

“Ah, Armstrong, I was hoping you’d be back,” said a familiar voice at her shoulder. “Can you give me a report on your progress with the cold case file? I need to feed something back pretty swiftly. As in ‘today’,” he added, gimlet-eyed, as Juliet turned to answer him.

Juliet swallowed uncomfortably.

“I’ve only been able to spend limited time on it so far, sir,” she replied. “I’ve been helping DI Yates with the Sutterton Dowdyke case.”

The Superintendent’s brow darkened.

“Indeed. I thought I’d made it clear . . .”

“But I’ve been through the file and selected the case I think I should work on,” she added quickly.

“Good, good. Write me a couple of paragraphs on it, will you?”

“It’s the one about the . . .”

“I don’t mind which one it is. Just write me a few sentences about why you think it should be reopened, including some estimate of our chances of solving it, and get it to me, will you? In, shall we say, half an hour?”