Nish was still talking to Sarah when Murray returned home.
“That didn’t take long.”
“She wasn’t exactly hospitable.” Murray was trying to pinpoint what had been wrong with the scene at Oak View. Anna had been jumpy, certainly, but there had been something else.
“Did you ask her outright?”
Murray shook his head. “At this stage, we don’t know whether she’s only recently found out her parents are alive, or if she’s known from the start. If she’s guilty of conspiracy, she needs to be interviewed under caution by a warranted officer, not questioned in her kitchen by a has-been.”
Nish stood up. “Much as I’d like to stay, Gill will be sending out a search party if I don’t get back soon—we’re supposed to be going out later. Let me know if you turn anything up, won’t you?”
Murray walked her to the door, and joined her outside as she found her car keys in the depths of her bag.
“Sarah seems to be doing well.”
“You know what it’s like: two steps forward, one step back. Sometimes the other way around. But yes, today’s a good day.”
He watched Nish drive away, raising a hand as she turned the corner.
Back inside, Sarah had spread out Caroline Johnson’s bank statements. They had been examined at the time of Caroline’s apparent suicide, a summary note on file concluding they held nothing of interest. There had been no large payments or transfers immediately prior to Caroline’s apparent suicide, no activity abroad that might hint at a preplanned hideaway. Sarah moved her finger down the rows of figures, and Murray settled on the sofa with Caroline’s appointment book.
He marked with Post-it notes the period in the datebook between Tom’s disappearance and Caroline’s. Did the pair meet up? Make arrangements? Murray scoured the pages for coded reminders but found only appointments, lists of things to do, and scribbled reminders to buy milk or call solicitor.
“A hundred quid’s a lot to take out of a cashpoint, don’t you think?”
Murray looked up. Sarah was running a neon pink highlighter across a statement. She lifted the pen, moved it a couple of inches lower, and carefully highlighted a second line.
“Not for some people.”
“Every week, though.”
Interesting. “Housekeeping money?” It was a bit old-fashioned, but some people still budgeted that way, Murray supposed.
“Her spending’s more erratic than that. Look, she uses her card all the time—Sainsbury’s, Co-op, the petrol station—and takes out cash with no obvious pattern. Twenty quid here, thirty quid there. But on top of that, every seven days in August, she took out a hundred quid.”
Murray’s pulse quickened. It could be nothing. Then again, it could be something . . .
“What about the next month?”
Sarah found September’s statement. There, too, among ad hoc cash withdrawals and card payments, were weekly withdrawals—this time for a hundred and fifty pounds.
“How about October?”
“A hundred and fifty again . . . No, wait—it goes up halfway through the month. Two hundred quid.” Sarah rifled through the papers in front of her. “And now three hundred. From mid-November, right up to the day before she disappeared.” She dragged the tip of the highlighter across the last few lines and handed the sheaf of statements to Murray. “She was paying someone.”
“Or paying them off.”
“Anna?”
Murray shook his head. He was thinking about the 999 calls that had been made from Oak View; the pocket notebook entry describing Caroline Johnson as “emotional” following the report of a domestic from the next-door neighbor, Robert Drake.
The Johnsons’ marriage had been a tempestuous one. Possibly even a violent one.
Ever since Murray had realized the Johnsons had faked their deaths, he had been looking at Caroline as a suspect. But was she also a victim?
“I think Caroline was being blackmailed.”
“By Tom? Because she’d cashed in his life insurance?”
Murray didn’t answer. He was still trying to work through the possibilities. If Tom had been blackmailing Caroline, and she had been paying up, that meant she’d been scared.
Scared enough to fake her own death to get away?
Murray picked up her datebook. He had already been through it several times, but back then he had been looking for leads on why Caroline had been at Beachy Head, not where she’d gone afterward. He scoured the leaflets and scraps of paper tucked into the back, hoping he’d find a receipt, a train timetable, a scribbled note with an address. There was nothing.
“Where would you go if you wanted to disappear?”
Sarah thought. “Somewhere I knew, but where no one knew me. Somewhere I felt safe. Maybe a place I knew from way back.”
Murray’s mobile rang.
“Hi, Sean. What can I do for you?”
“It’s more what I can do for you. I’ve had the results back on a reverse IMEI search on that handset of yours.”
“Which tell us what, exactly?”
Sean laughed. “When you brought me the job, I checked the networks to see what handset that SIM card had been used in, right?”
“Right. And you traced it back to Fones4All, in Brighton.”
“Okay, so the same thing can happen in reverse; it just takes a bit longer. I asked the networks to tell me if that handset has appeared on their systems at any point since the witness call from Beachy Head.” He paused. “And it has.”
Murray felt a surge of excitement.
What is it? Sarah mouthed, but he couldn’t answer—he was listening to Sean.
“The offender put a new pay-as-you-go SIM card in it, and it popped up on Vodafone back in the spring.”
“I don’t suppose—”
“I know what calls were made? Come on, Murray—you know me better than that. You got a pen? Couple of mobiles, and a landline that might just give you a location for your man . . .”
Or woman, Murray thought. He wrote down the numbers, trying not to be distracted by Sarah, who was flapping her arms at him, demanding to know what had gotten him so excited. “Thanks, Sean. I owe you one.”
“You owe me more than one, mate.”
The call finished, and Murray grinned at Sarah and filled her in on what the High Tech Crime officer had told him. He spun his notebook around until the list of phone numbers faced Sarah, and he marked an asterisk beside the only landline.
“Do you want to do the honors?”
Then it was Murray’s turn to wait, while Sarah spoke to an inaudible voice on the other end of the line. When she’d finished, he held up his hands.
“Well?”
Sarah put on a posh voice. “Our Lady’s Preparatory.”
“A private school?” What did a prep school have to do with Tom and Caroline Johnson? Murray wondered if they were heading up a blind alley. The fake witness call, allegedly from Diane Brent-Taylor, had been made last May, ten months before the mobile had been used again with a different SIM card. It could have passed through any number of hands in the meantime. “Where’s the school?”
“Derbyshire.”
Murray thought for a moment. He turned over the datebook in his hands, remembering the photos that had fallen out from between the pages when Anna Johnson had handed it to him: a youthful Caroline, on holiday with an old school friend.
Mum said they had the best time.
They had been in a pub garden, a wagon and horses on the sign above them.
About as far from the sea as you can get.
He opened Safari on his phone and Googled “wagon and horses pubs UK.” Christ, there were pages of them. He tried a different tack, looking up “farthest point in UK from the sea.”
Coton in the Elms, Derbyshire.
Murray had never heard of it. But a final Google search—“wagon and horses Derbyshire”—gave him what he wanted. Tarted up since the photo, and with a new sign and hanging baskets, but undeniably the same pub that Caroline and her friend had visited all those years ago.
Luxury B&B . . . best breakfast in the Peak District . . . free Wi-Fi . . .
Murray looked at Sarah. “Fancy a holiday?’