‘Paula, you take Mike with you and go back to the Samaritans. I’m going to talk again to Malcolm Burns and I’ll chase up Rashid Malik on possible sources for the guy’s niqab. Sarah, you’re getting onto The Scrubs about Karen’s visits to Doug Brody, and his phone calls. I’ll go and talk to him again tomorrow. You can come with me, Darren. You weren’t expecting the weekend off, were you? When we’ve got a double murder and a serious assault on our hands? Steve, check out Jamilleh Hamidi’s address and check out her neighbours for anyone known to us. Nothing new on Doug Brody’s associates, I suppose? No? Well keep on it. Sarah, go back to the hospital. See if Jamilleh Hamidi has anything more to say. Darren, go along to Acorns and find out if they’ve had any concerns about a man hanging around there. And mind your language. Cut out the paedo references. And everyone, the attack on Jamilleh has brought the media down on us again, as you’ll have seen. I made a statement yesterday and now they’ll have to wait until there are further developments. You don’t talk to anyone. Right? And bring me the developments.’
At 09.25, so instructed, the team dispersed. Sarah Shepherd went straight to the nearest phone and called Wormwood Scrubs prison. She was surprised at how quickly she was put through to a senior officer; calling from CID, she realised, gave her clout she had never had as a family liaison officer.
‘Douglas Brody,’ she said, striving for an authoritative tone. ‘His wife and child were murdered ten days ago. We’re anxious to establish what contact he had with his wife in the days before the murders – visits and phone calls, if possible.’
There was a silence and Sarah waited for the brush-off. The reply, when it came, though, was perfectly courteous.
‘I can get that information for you. We do monitor phone calls and keep a record of numbers called. I shall need to put you through to the wing officer. It is a busy time but I’m sure he can help you.’ There was another pause. ‘I’m just looking to see …’ he said, with the unmistakeable tone of someone who is scanning a screen, ‘… ah, yes. You know, I assume, that he was in the infirmary following an attack on an officer. He is back on the wing now, but we have him on suicide watch. He has taken the deaths very badly.’
‘It’s hardly a thing you could take well, is it?’ Sarah commented, and then regretted it. That was family liaison talk, wasn’t it, not CID? The response on the other end of the phone was brisk.
‘No. I’m putting you through to the wing if that’s all?’
‘Yes, thank you.’
The wing officer sounded harassed but not unhelpful. ‘Yes, DC Shepherd. You’re interested in Doug Brody, I gather?’
‘Yes. How is he?’
‘Quiet. The medics sedated him after he got violent. He’s off the medication now but he’s still quiet. Like a zombie. We’ve got him on a twenty-minute suicide watch.’
‘We’d like to know if his wife visited him in the days before her death. Between 1st and 16th July. And phone calls. How many he made and who he made them to.’
‘Visits are easy. She came regularly every two weeks. Never missed. Sometimes brought the little girl. He’d requested a transfer from Liverpool to be nearer for visiting.’
‘So what would the dates of those visits have been?’
‘I’m just looking now. Yes, Sundays. 1st July and 15th July.’
‘Did she bring the little girl to either of those?’
‘We don’t keep a record of that.’
‘How did he seem after the visits? Can you remember?’
‘Visits always shake people up.’
‘He didn’t seem more upset than usual?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘And phone calls? What about them?’
‘He’s allowed two calls a week.’
‘Can you tell me who he called?’
‘I can but it’ll take a bit of time. I’ll need to call you back later.’
Sarah, with That’ll be fine trembling on her lips, took a deep breath. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘we’re conducting a double murder inquiry and I’m afraid later won’t do. I’ll wait while you find the information.’
She got no reply and thought, at first, that he had put the phone down on her, but faint noises of activity told her otherwise and she waited, uncertain whether he would leave her hanging there, come back with the information or summon someone senior to bawl her out. She looked at her watch. She would give it ten minutes before giving up. After five, the wing officer was back, grudging but with the data. Doug Brody had called Karen on the Monday and Thursday evenings that were his allotted times. His last call was a fifteen-minute call on Monday 16th July at 20.45.
‘When you say you monitor calls,’ Sarah asked, ‘does that mean you listen in to them?’
‘We monitor the numbers. Calls are allowed only to approved numbers. We have the facility to listen in to calls and we do it if we suspect criminal activity. We had no concerns on that score about Brody.’
‘Right. Well, thank you.’
‘Just one thing, though. Monday 16th, Brody tried to make a call to an unregistered mobile. We automatically block those, for obvious reasons.’
‘Was that before or after his call to his wife?’
‘Before.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, and then added. ‘I’m sorry if I hassled you.’
‘Just doing your job, love,’ he said.
Paula would have had something to say about the love, she knew, but she let it go.
*
By 09.40, David Scott had a warrant application to search the Samaritans’ office ready to go to the magistrate. At 09.45 he phoned the university, asked for the chaplaincy and spoke to Rashid Malik.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Malik said, ‘but I really have very little to tell you. I’m aware of no family where the woman wears niqab and my wife confirms my belief that it is necessary to go to London to buy any kind of hijab. Or order online, of course.’
‘Would she be able to give me the names of online outlets?’
‘I imagine so.’
‘Can you email those to me today?’
‘If you like.’
Was it his imagination, Scott wondered, or did Malik sound cooler today, more defensive? If Paula’s enquiries in HR about niqab-wearing staff had caused resentment, no doubt that had been fed back to him. The university’s Muslim community would be closing ranks, if not putting up barricades. He thanked Malik for his help and rang off.
By 10.15, he had driven to the university, found a parking place and was tapping quietly on the door of Malcolm Burns’ office. The office was uncomfortably close to Gina’s and he had slipped past her door with care. Furtive, was what she would have called him; she would have been right and he was ashamed of it, but he needed to get Malcolm without the benefit of her beady-eyed protection. He tapped again.
‘Come,’ a voice called indistinctly, and he walked in to find Malcolm Burns with his head deep into a filing cabinet.
‘Something slipped down the back,’ he explained as he emerged red-faced. Then he registered Scott and laughed uneasily. ‘David! Back so soon?’
‘Records, Malcolm,’ Scott said, settling himself in the room’s one easy chair and opening his arms expansively. ‘Tell me everything you know about record-keeping in your branch of the Samaritans.’
Burns looked nervously at the door and then glanced at the window, for all the world, Scott thought, as if he expected Gina to come flying, caped and masked, to his rescue.
‘We don’t,’ he said, clearing his throat and moving to the protection of a seat behind his desk, ‘keep records as such. Some branches keep no notes of any kind but we do keep brief, very brief …’ he ran an anxious hand over his thinning, pale hair. ‘We don’t like it to get about – the fact that we keep notes. It could deter people from calling us.’
‘So why keep notes?’
‘People who are in trouble often ring several times and each time they speak to a different volunteer. They’ll tell different people different things. Once we realise that someone is calling regularly, we set up an index card. The cards help us to have a complete picture and decide how best to help the callers.’
‘So you don’t just listen to what people tell you?’
‘Yes. That is what we do.’ His voice rose in agitation. ‘Active listening is what we do, but we can do that better if we know what we’re dealing with. And then there are the hysterics.’
‘Hysterics?’
‘People don’t always tell us the truth. There are people who ring with a different tragedy each time: cancer, rape, multiple bereavements, near-fatal car accident, all in one week. The cards help us to spot that. We still listen to them, of course – they obviously need to talk – but knowing what they’re doing helps to save the volunteers from getting too distressed.’
‘Where do you keep these cards?’
‘In the phone room.’
‘In what?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘What do you keep the cards in?’
‘Well, boxes.’
‘And what do you keep the boxes in?’
‘I don’t see why—’
‘You don’t? You don’t see why I need to know where the boxes are kept? When last time my officers visited they had been somehow spirited away?’
‘It’s a matter of confidentiality.’
‘For a dead woman?’
Burns sat back in his chair. ‘They’re kept on a trolley,’ he said, ‘so they can be moved from one phone station to another.’
‘And so they can be wheeled away as soon as the police get anywhere near. Where do they get wheeled to, Malcolm?’
‘The kitchen. There’s a walk-in pantry in there.’
‘Thank you. Now, next question. Presumably you cull the cards from time to time. What’s the system?’
‘Once a year. We go through them. If someone hasn’t rung for a year we take the card out.’
‘And destroy it?’
Burns squirmed uncomfortably. ‘We used to but Estelle likes to keep everything.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s just how she is, I think.’
‘So where do those cards go?’
‘They’re archived.’
‘Come on, Malcolm, don’t make me drag it out of you. Where are the archives kept?’
He sighed. ‘In Estelle’s office.’
‘And a card for someone who has died, that would be archived too, I assume.’
‘We can hardly ever be sure that someone has died; even if people tell us they’ve taken an overdose, we can’t be sure, so—’
‘But you do know that Karen Brody is dead. Has her card been removed?’
Burns lifted his head and looked straight at Scott for the first time. ‘I really don’t know,’ he said. ‘I haven’t looked.’
*
At 10.30, Paula Powell parked again on a double yellow line round the corner from the Samaritans, walked with Mike Arthur to the front door and rang the doorbell. This time a young woman with piercings and pink hair opened the door.
‘Who are you?’ Paula asked.
‘I’m Greta,’ she said, startled.
‘Well, I’m Detective Sergeant Paula Powell,’ Paula said, waving her ID and breezing past her, heading straight for the phone room.
‘What the fuck?’ Greta protested. ‘You can’t just barge in there. There are confidential calls happening. It’s—’
‘—absolutely quiet,’ Paula said. ‘It’s a doddle, isn’t it, the morning slot? Your director told us so.’
‘I’m ringing Estelle,’ Greta said. ‘I’m not letting you in there without her say-so.’
‘That’s quite all right,’ Mike Arthur said. ‘These are what we’re looking for.’ He took hold of the metal trolley that stood in the middle of the room and started to wheel it out into the small room that appeared to be a sort of rest room for volunteers, leading off from the phone room. ‘If we just take these in here then we can have a look at them without disturbing anyone and we’ll be out of your hair in no time.’
Greta grabbed hold of the trolley. ‘I’m not letting you take them,’ she growled. ‘Estelle will be furious. I’ve gotta have her permission.’
She looked really scared, Paula thought, but she hardened her heart. ‘We have already talked to your director about this,’ she said. ‘We explained when we came in on Wednesday. My chief inspector has got a search warrant for these premises but a search warrant comes along with two or three police cars, a lot of sirens and police officers with big feet swarming all over the building, taking it apart. Really, taking it apart. You have no idea what a place looks like when that sort of search has happened.’
‘But if you agree to let us take a quick look through these,’ Mike Arthur put in, ‘then we’ll be in and out in no time. No problem.’
‘I can understand that you’re scared of Estelle,’ Paula said. ‘She’s a scary lady, I imagine, but you’ll be in more trouble if she finds we’ve ripped the place apart, won’t you?’
‘Why can’t you just wait till I ring?’ Greta asked plaintively.
‘Because this is a double murder inquiry we’re engaged in, Greta, and we haven’t got time to mess about.’
Greta looked at them, undecided. She didn’t ask what murder inquiry or look surprised, Paula noticed. The volunteers knew about Karen and they knew the police had already been in, she guessed. No doubt instructions were to ring Estelle if the police turned up again.
‘I don’t believe Estelle let you look before.’
‘She did,’ Paula said. ‘Only we didn’t find what we were looking for.’
‘What were you looking for?’
‘A card for Karen Brody.’
Greta looked at the cards on the trolley. ‘You better look, then,’ she said. ‘I’m calling Estelle.’
‘Estelle will be down here like a shot,’ Paula said to Mike as Greta left. ‘Which is just what we want. We’re not going to find Karen’s card here, are we? But they know more than they’re telling.’
Mike pulled the trolley towards him. ‘They’re alphabetical,’ he said. ‘So I’ll take A to F and look for Brody, and you can take G to L.’
After a minute, he said. ‘Not here. They don’t seem to use surnames anyway.’
‘And not here either, I think.’ Paula lifted out a few cards and fanned through them. ‘Katherine, Katy, Ken, Kirsty. No.’
‘So what now?’
‘We take a gentle look round while we wait for Estelle Campion to arrive and then put the fear of God into her.’
At that moment her phone rang.
‘David?’
‘How are you doing?’
‘Nothing in the card index on show here. We’re about to start a search. Estelle Campion’s been summoned. We’ll see what more we can squeeze out of her. Anything helpful from Gina’s friend?
‘Malcolm Burns? Yes. They hide records in the kitchen – in the pantry, apparently – when they don’t want them seen. And there’s an archive of past – and passed – callers, if you get my meaning.’
‘Any information that will save us time?’
‘The director’s office.’
‘Naturally.’
‘And she doesn’t throw anything away.’
‘OK.’
‘Keep me posted.’
He rang off.
In the kitchen, the pantry held only odd items of clothing: lost property or emergency hand-outs, Paula wondered. The other cupboards held mugs, coffee, biscuits and an extensive array of herb and fruit teas. On the first floor, they found a small room obviously designed for interviews, a bathroom and an office with a photocopier and an unlocked filing cabinet containing printer paper, ink cartridges and publicity leaflets of various kinds. Which left the director’s office, and this was, of course, locked.
*
Mike Arthur went back downstairs and heard Greta in the phone room talking to another woman who seemed to be in a fluster of apologies. Just blocked solid, he heard, all the way to the roundabout, and Greta’s grudging reply, Can’t be helped but I could really have done with someone else here with those two just swanning in. He put his head round the door and smiled cheerily.
‘Key to that room up at the top?’ he asked. ‘We’ll just take a quick look in there and then we can leave you in peace.’
Greta turned to glare at him. ‘That’s the director’s office. We don’t have a key.’
‘Then we shall have to trouble her to bring it in,’ he said.
The two women exchanged a look. ‘She’s coming in,’ Greta said.
‘Now?’
‘She lives out at Lower Shepton. She’ll be fifteen minutes. I suppose you can wait that long before you break the door down?’
‘Probably,’ he said, and gave her another smile.
*
Estelle Campion arrived ten minutes later and climbed, slightly breathless, to the second floor, where Paula and Mike were waiting outside the locked door. She was less perfectly groomed and less composed than on the previous day, Paula noted, though just as expensively dressed, in cream trousers and a blue jacket with a silk shirt under it.
‘So, you again,’ she said, with a tight little smile at Paula. ‘But without your sidekick.’ She coughed. ‘Too many fags,’ she said.
‘This is DC Mike Arthur,’ Paula said.
Estelle Campion gave him a brief, appraising glance and turned back to Paula.
‘And how can we help you today?’
‘We’d like to take a look in your office.’
‘What for?’
‘Information relating to Karen Brody.’
‘I don’t keep that sort of information up here. If you’re looking for the caller information—’
‘We found the cards, thank you, but nothing on Karen there.’
‘I told you, we destroyed it.’
Yes, you did. But there’s an archive, isn’t there? And it’s in your office and we’d like to see it.’
Estelle Campion’s face flushed under its screen of creamy foundation. ‘How do you know—’
‘We’re CID, Mrs Campion. We know all sorts of things.’ Paula allowed an edge to sour the sweet reasonableness of her tone. ‘And lying to the police is a criminal offence for anyone, Samaritan or not.’
‘I resent that, DS Powell.’
‘Just open the door, Mrs Campion.’
Estelle Campion made a theatrical gesture that was almost a flounce and took a bunch of keys from her pocket. She unlocked the door and flung it open, standing aside to let them in. ‘Be my guests,’ she said, ‘and if you don’t find anything I shall expect an apology. I didn’t want to mention it but my husband knows the chief constable.’ She turned to go. ‘I’m going downstairs for a coffee,’ she said.
‘A cigarette more like,’ Mike Arthur muttered as he closed the door and removed the keys she had left in the lock. Then a thought struck him. ‘Do you think she could be double-crossing us and destroying something downstairs?’ he asked.
‘David’s info is that the archive is up here. He got that from Malcolm Burns. We’ll go with that.’
They looked round the room. It had been built into the attic of the little house and had a steeply sloping roof under which sat a large, untidy desk. Under the window was the sofa Paula and Sarah had sat on during their previous visit, with a coffee table in front of it, and against one wall was a tall filing cabinet. In the opposite wall were two doors. Paula walked across and opened them. One led to a cupboard, empty except for a couple of cardigans hanging on a rail and a pair of velvet slippers. ‘Comfort clothes for when she’s not on show,’ she commented. The other door opened to a flash of gleaming ceramic walls. ‘And her own executive bathroom,’ she reported.
Mike Arthur was at the drawers of the filing cabinet, trying the keys on the key ring. He opened the bottom one first, to reveal a bottle of single malt whisky and four heavy, cut-glass tumblers. ‘Who do you think these are for?’ he asked.
‘For cosy chats with favoured volunteers?’ Paula suggested. ‘She strikes me as a woman who might play favourites.’
‘Or she drinks on her own and the other glasses are there so she can kid herself that she doesn’t really drink on her own.’
‘How cynical you are, DC Arthur.’
‘Just a student of human nature, ma’am.’
‘You can mock me with ma’am. Just you wait till I’m a DCI.’
‘Is that what you want?’
‘It is.’
She had pulled out the drawer above the bottom one and was running through the hanging files in it. ‘This seems to be all fundraising,’ she said. ‘Details of donors, copies of receipts, copies of letters of thanks, and some newspaper clippings, all relating to fundraising, I think.’
‘Being a DCI doesn’t seem to make our DCI Scott particularly happy,’ Mike Arthur commented as she pushed the drawer back in.
‘That’s because he’s got the wrong woman.’
‘This seems to be stuff about the volunteers,’ he said, scanning the contents of the next drawer. ‘What’s wrong with his woman?’
‘She doesn’t understand about police work.’
He turned to look at her. ‘And you do,’ he said.
‘I do,’ she said.
‘Is there—?’ he asked.
‘Might be,’ she said. ‘Are you sure it’s only volunteer stuff in that drawer?’
‘I think so.’ He opened the top drawer. ‘Ah. Here’s the archive.’
They looked into the contents of the drawer together. It contained neat stacks of cards, held together with rubber bands, each labelled with a year. Paula flicked through one or two.
‘There aren’t any for this year,’ Mike Arthur said.
‘There wouldn’t be, would there, if they go through the cards at the end of the year to decide which ones to archive?’
‘Then why isn’t Karen’s card still there downstairs. Because she died?’
‘Let’s get all of these out. Maybe there’s a separate group of dead ones.’
They carried the bundles in armfuls over to the coffee table by the sofa and spread them out in date order.
‘Realistically,’ Mike Arthur said, ‘how often do they know that someone who called them has actually gone ahead and killed themselves? ‘
‘Some suicides get reported in the Herald.’
‘I guess.’
Paula flicked through a set of cards, pulled one out and passed it to him. ‘Look at this one. Someone has written believed deceased on it. So the cards of callers who’ve died do go in with the others. So where is Karen’s?’
‘It ought still to be downstairs with the others, until the end of the year.’
‘It ought.’ She looked round the room. ‘Bring those keys over, Mike.’ She went to the desk and pulled open the left-hand drawer, which contained the usual litter of desk drawers – pens, staples, paper clips, a spare printer cartridge, a pack of tissues, a half-eaten Kit Kat, a couple of postcards, some paracetamols, a lipstick and a map of the Marlbury district. The other drawer was locked and none of the keys on the ring fitted. Paula and Mike Arthur looked at each other. ‘OK,’ she said.
He reached into his pocket; she moved away and headed for the door to the bathroom. ‘I’m going to the toilet,’ she said. ‘I never saw you.’
When she returned, he had the drawer open and was running a gloved hand round its interior. He picked up a card from the desk. ‘Archived all by itself,’ he said, and waved it at her.
‘Karen’s?’ she asked.
‘Yup.’
‘Anything else in the drawer?
‘Just these.’ He indicated half a dozen packs of cigarettes piled on the desk. ‘The card was hidden underneath.’
She pulled gloves out of her pocket and picked up the card. ‘Have you read this?’
‘Only glanced.’
She took the card over to the window to scrutinise it. In the top right-hand corner someone had written KAREN. Beneath that were five entries, dated between July 9th and July 17th. The entries were written in different hands, each signed, and the first four entries all said the same thing: Asked to speak to the director. Only Malcolm’s, the final entry on July 17th, gave any indication of what she had wanted to talk about: Initially asked for director (not available). Said she had info for the police. Has promised not to go to police herself but fears for her and her daughter’s safety. Asked if we would pass info to police. Sounded desperate. Call broken off.
She handed the card to Mike Arthur. ‘Why has no-one written anything else? You see all these cards – people write the sort of thing Malcolm wrote. Why nothing here?’
‘Could it be they wouldn’t pass her on to the director so she didn’t talk?’
‘No. Because we’ve got her phone records and she was on for between five and fifteen minutes each time.’
‘So they did pass her on to the director and she didn’t fill in the card?’
‘Looks like it. Why? And why is the card hidden here?’
‘We’d better ask her,’ he said, moving towards the door.
‘Hold on a minute.’ She took the card back from him and sat down with it. ‘Let’s see if there’s an innocent explanation – if only because that’s what she’ll come up with and we need to be ready for it.’
‘OK.’ He came and sat down beside her.
‘Suppose,’ she said, ‘that they did pass Karen on to Estelle Campion every time. Karen was desperate: she had this secret and it scared her. She was frightened for herself and for Lara, and she was sure that it could all be solved if Estelle would just pass her information to the police, but Estelle wouldn’t do it. So they had these conversations and no doubt Estelle would have been doing the right thing in refusing – it’s not what the Samaritans are about – but she felt bad about it. Did Karen tell her what the secret was? Who knows, but she wasn’t going to write on the card for all the volunteers to see, was she? And apart from that, some of the volunteers would have thought that she ought to help Karen, wouldn’t they? It might be against the rules but these are people who give up their time to help. They would think she ought to help.’
‘So she writes nothing on the card and then, when Karen dies, she feels bad and she hides the card. Why didn’t she destroy it like she said she had?’
‘People are funny about destroying evidence. They know that the cover-up is often worse than the offence – look at all the phone-hacking stuff.’
‘OK. So that’s the innocent explanation. What’s the guilty one?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Let’s go and find out.’ She took an evidence bag out of her pocket and slipped the card into it.
Estelle Campion went for a third way: denial. Fortified during their search by caffeine, nicotine and the application of more lipstick, she sat opposite them in the small interview room on the first floor and faced them wide-eyed and smiling in astonishment at the forensic precautions of gloves and evidence bag. She had hidden the card because she knew it would upset her volunteers to come across it; it was a very emotional business, the murder of a young woman and a child, and initially she had thought that Karen might have done it herself. No, she had never spoken to Karen; it was an absolute rule that callers could not pick or choose who they spoke to. Whoever picked up the phone was their Samaritan for that moment; that was the way it worked.
‘So why, then,’ Paula asked, ‘did none of the people who spoke to her write anything on the card? I’ve seen how the other cards are filled in. This one is odd, isn’t it?’
Estelle reached out a hand for the card but Paula held it back. ‘We can’t contaminate the evidence,’ she said, and held it for her to read.
‘You get patterns set up on these cards,’ Estelle said with an air of professional detachment. ‘The first person records in a particular way and everyone follows suit. Especially if they’re inexperienced.’ She squinted at the card. ‘These are all quite new volunteers.’
‘But the last entry – Malcolm’s – that’s different.’
‘Ah, Malcolm’s an old hand.’
‘But one of the other entries is Malcolm’s too, isn’t it?’
She glanced again at the card. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said casually.
‘And it’s just coincidence that on that last occasion you were unavailable?’
‘Just coincidence.’
‘And you never spoke to Karen?’
‘Never.’
‘You’re quite sure?’
‘Quite sure.’
‘Well, of course we shall need to talk to the volunteers who did speak to her.’
‘You try to do that,’ she said, leaning forward so that her face was very close, ‘and I shall speak to the chief constable.’
Paula leaned forward too. ‘You do that,’ she said.
She got up to leave, but Mike Arthur, getting to his feet, asked, as he took the card from her, ‘As a matter of interest, Mrs Campion, were you in the building when Karen made those calls and asked for you?’
‘Probably,’ she said. ‘They were daytime calls. I’m usually here.’
‘But you were unavailable at ten past five on 17th July, shortly before Karen was killed?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where were you, Mrs Campion?’
*
‘You don’t really think she could have killed Karen, do you, Mike?’ Paula asked as they walked back to the car.
‘Well, it’s a funny coincidence and she’s hiding something. I thought it would do no harm to rattle her cage a bit.’
‘Attending a reception for representatives of the voluntary sector at the town hall is a pretty decent alibi, though.’
‘So you think she couldn’t have slipped out and done it?’
She laughed. ‘Not without getting a lot of blood on some very expensive clothes.’
Her phone rang.
*
By 11.00 Scott was back from the university and heading to the canteen for a cup of coffee when he heard feet pounding behind him. Steve Boxer, in uncharacteristically animated mode, was pursuing him.
‘Have you got a moment?’ he panted.
‘Yes. Have you got something?’
‘I might have. Two things, actually.’
‘Tell me.’
He turned and followed Steve back to the incident room.
‘You asked me to find Jamilleh Hamidi’s address,’ Boxer said, sitting down at his computer. ‘She lives in Keswick Rise,’ he said, pointing to the screen.
‘And that sounds like Eastgate estate – whatever possessed the town planners to call those streets after Lake District beauty spots?’
‘A sense of humour? Anyway, Keswick Rise is a bit different. It’s on the edge of the estate, backing on to that bit of copse that runs between the estate and the university campus. The university owns several of those houses. Not many people took up ‘Right to Buy’ on Eastgate, but people in Keswick Rise did, and the university has bought them up as they’ve come on the market.’
‘OK. But it’s the other end of the estate from Karen Brody’s house in Windermere Road, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, but it’s just round the corner from Leanne Thomas’s flat in Kendal Way. A stone’s throw.’
‘Is it indeed?’
‘So, if the killer thought that both Karen and Jamilleh might recognise him, isn’t it likely that he lives somewhere nearby?’
‘Or regularly visits somewhere nearby. First thing is to talk to Leanne again. We were pretty sure she knew more than she was telling.’
‘She may be scared too.’
‘So we’ll need to make her scared of us. You said you had two things?’
‘Yes. The other one is pretty random and it may be just coincidence.’
‘Try me.’
‘Well, when I’d found this link between Jamilleh and Leanne I thought I’d just play around and see what I got, so I got the names of everyone we’ve interviewed so far in this case and I got all their addresses. What I found was that Estelle Campion, the Samaritan director, used to live next door to the Thomas family – Karen and Leanne and their parents – in Albert Road.’
‘That doesn’t fit Paula’s account of her. Dripping money, Paula said.’
‘That’s recent. She was Estelle Hodge in those days. She lived there first with her husband, Keith Hodge, and then after they got divorced, she lived there alone. She lived there from 1995 to 2008, and then in 2008 she married Bruce Campion and went up in the world, to The Gables, Lower Shepton.’
‘This is good stuff, Steve.’ Scott leaned over his shoulder to look at the screen. ‘So she was the Thomas family’s neighbour from the time Karen was eight until she left home. Does she have any children?’
‘No.’
‘So she could have been quite close to the girls – babysat for them, maybe. I wonder how long she’s been a Samaritan. No – no point in doing a search on that – that you won’t find on any database you have access to. I bet, though, that it was she who told Karen about the Samaritans passing on bomb warnings. Good work, Steve. Inspired.’
Steve bridled with pleasure at the commendation, like a small boy getting teacher approval. ‘What now?’ he asked.
‘Keep digging.’
He went to his office and phoned Paula. ‘Are you still at the Samaritans?’
‘We’ve just left,’ she said.
‘OK. Never mind. It can keep.’
‘What can?’
‘I’ll tell you in a bit. I need you to come with me to Leanne Thomas. Can you come back to the station?’
‘OK.’
She seemed to be waiting for something.
‘Did you get anything?’ he asked.
‘Karen’s index card.’
‘Good. Useful?’
‘I’ll tell you in a bit,’ she said.
*
At 11.35, Darren Floyd passed Scott and Paula as he drove to the university. An interview with nursery staff, he thought, was hardly his style, but one or two of them might be fit. He would see what he could make of it. The nursery staff, however, having experience of small boys rather too big for their boots, proved more than a match for him. Caroline, thirty-something and attractively maternal, looked at him with pitying amusement.
‘Do you really think, DC Floyd, that there are any circumstances under which we would not have reported to the police immediately any suspicion we had about a loiterer?’
‘People don’t always. You’d be surprised.’
‘But we’re not just people, are we? We’re childcare professionals, and the safety of the children is an absolute priority, above everything else. Hence the high fences, the locked gate, the safety bars, the soft flooring, the sand under the swings and the climbing frame, and so on and so on.’
She sat back and smiled patiently at him, reducing him to child size.
He got up and squared his shoulders. He’d left his jacket somewhere, he realised, the leather one. No wonder he had failed to impress this irritating woman. He felt a surge of spite.
‘Fences are all very well,’ he drawled, ‘but I suppose you realise that you let a man into your cosy little nest, disguised in a burqa.’
‘What?’ She stood up too.
‘Yes. The one who got attacked by a dog in your garden. Seems the dog was better at spotting a predator than you professionals were.’
He swaggered out, and it was only as he was getting into his shiny new car that it hit him that his gibe had been confidential information and he had probably set himself up for serious trouble.
*
At 11.45 Sarah Shepherd arrived at Marlbury Hospital and found her way to Jamilleh Hamidi’s room. She had been told, when she phoned, that Jamilleh would be going down for assessment that morning, and would not be back in her room until twelve, but she found a uniformed officer guarding her door who told her that she was in there.
It was not a good time, though, she realised. The nurse who was settling her back into bed looked disapproving. ‘She’s very tired,’ she said. ‘She’s been having tests. She really needs to sleep. Can’t you come back?’
Sarah hesitated. It was a perfectly reasonable request but it felt weak to give up on a job she had been sent to do. She gave the nurse a smile. ‘Just two minutes?’ she asked. ‘And then you can throw me out.’
‘Is that all right with you, Jamilleh?’ the nurse asked. ‘Just two minutes?’
Jamilleh nodded and Sarah seated herself by the bed. ‘I just wondered,’ she said quietly, ‘whether you have remembered anything more about the man who attacked you.’
Jamilleh’s head went from side to side on the pillow, ‘I didn’t see,’ she said.
‘But his eyes. You saw his eyes?’
Jamilleh’s eyes clouded. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No eyes.’
‘You didn’t see his eyes?’
‘No.’
‘But you said—’
‘Nothing. I saw nothing.’
She was trying to shake her head again and the nurse laid a restraining hand on her. ‘You need to keep your head still,’ she said, and glared at Sarah.
‘The person in the niqab, though,’ Sarah persisted. ‘You saw his eyes, didn’t you?’
‘No. I see nothing. Nothing.’ Tears seeped out from under her long, dark lashes.
‘Right. That’s enough,’ the nurse said. ‘You’re upsetting her. Enough.’ She ushered Sarah to the door.
‘We are actually trying to find out who attacked her,’ Sarah said as she was hustled out. ‘I’m not just doing this for fun.’
‘And we’re trying to make her better. Which do you think matters more?’
*
At 11.35, Scott picked Paula up from the station. As they drove through steady drizzle to Leanne Thomas’s block in Kendal Way, Paula asked, ‘So what have you got?’
‘It turns out Jamilleh lives in Keswick Rise, which is, as you might guess, just round the corner from Kendal Way.’
‘Which means we have a possible link between Jamilleh and Karen – other than the nursery.’
‘And if Jamilleh’s attacker thought she might recognise him then there’s a chance that he lives round there.’
‘So, are we doing a house-to-house?’
‘A job for you for this afternoon. For the moment we’re going to see what Leanne says about the coincidence and if she’d like to tell us more about what was worrying Karen.’
‘Not to mention all the security on her front door.’
‘Right.’ He paused and glanced at her. ‘What about you?’
‘I … we … got Karen’s card.’
‘So you said.’
‘Well, first of all, we found it on its own in a locked drawer in the director’s desk. Second, there’s what’s on it. They’re like file cards, these things. The Samaritan who takes the call writes the date and a brief sentence or two about the caller’s problem, and then signs it. Karen’s card has five entries. The last one is Malcolm’s but the other four just say Asked to speak to the director.’
‘And what does she say?’
‘That she never spoke to Karen.’
‘So, here’s my other piece of news. Estelle Campion was Karen and Leanne’s neighbour all the time they were growing up.’
‘No! I wouldn’t have put her in Albert Road.’
‘She married up a few years ago.’
‘Did Steve get all this?’
‘Yes.’
‘Bless his heart.’
‘So do we think Karen knew Estelle was the director when she asked to speak to her?’
‘Yeah. She’s high profile, Estelle – all that fundraising. Karen would have known.’
‘But she says she never spoke to Karen. Did she give a reason for hiding the card?’
‘Didn’t want to upset the volunteers.’
‘Where’s the card now?’
‘Back at the station.’
‘Good. This afternoon we tackle Estelle Campion again and talk about fingerprinting her volunteers.’
‘She threatened me with the chief constable if I tried to even talk to her volunteers.’
‘Hah!’
‘Her husband knows him.’
‘We’ll take the risk.’
The light from the sullen sky did the flats in Kendal Way no favours, Paula thought, taking in the concrete’s adornment of rusty streaks from blocked gutters before they pushed through the outer door into the scabby lobby.
Leanne Thomas took a long time to open the door, possibly because the belting music playing in the flat drowned out their hammering on the door, possibly because she was getting dressed. If the latter, she had made no more effort, Paula thought, than the last time she had seen her. Her unbrushed hair was scraped into a scrunchie, old mascara gave her pale face panda eyes, her feet were bare and she was wearing a T-shirt and shorts that might have been pyjamas. The sitting room, when they were eventually admitted to it, was much less tidy than when Paula had seen it previously – verging on the chaotic, in fact. Was this the effect of doing without Karen’s support, Paula wondered?
‘Is Liam at home, Leanne?’ she asked.
‘I thought you were police,’ Leanne muttered. ‘You social workers too, are you?’
‘Just taking an interest, Leanne,’ Paula said breezily, and stood watching her, eyebrows raised, waiting for a reply.
‘Well, he’s at nursery if you must know.’ She flung herself down on the sofa as though exhausted by a day’s work. ‘My … friend took him,’ she added as if feeling a need to explain in view of the bare feet and unbrushed hair.
Scott stood looking out of the window. ‘Do you know the Hamidi family?’ he asked.
‘You what?’
‘Jamilleh Hamidi. Young mother, four-year-old son. Lives just over there in Keswick Rise.’
‘The Arabs, you mean?’
‘She’s not Arabic, in fact. She’s from Iran,’ Paula put in.
‘Same difference.’
‘She’d tell you otherwise.’
‘Wears one of them burqa things, doesn’t she?’
Scott froze. ‘There’s a woman living over there who wears a burqa?’ he asked quietly. ‘What’s it like?’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘This burqa. What colour is it? What’s the face part like?’ Paula asked.
Leanne eyed her contemptuously. ‘There’s nothing over her face,’ she said. ‘It’s one of those headscarves, and the dressing gown thing.’
‘What colour?’
‘I dunno. Grey, I suppose.’
‘That’ll be Jamilleh,’ Scott said. ‘Have you spoken to her?’
‘Dah! I can’t speak Arab, can I?’
‘She speaks English.’
‘Huh!’
Scott walked over and stood looming over her. She shrank back into the sofa. Scared of men for all the bravado, Paula thought. She watched as Scott moved some clothes from the sofa and sat down beside her. He spoke quietly.
‘Did you hear that she got attacked – over at the university? She’d just dropped her little boy off at the nursery.’
She looked at him sideways but didn’t meet his eye. ‘I heard someone got attacked. I didn’t know it was her.’
‘The thing is,’ Scott said, ‘we think the same person may have attacked her as killed Karen and Lara.’
Her head came round and she stared at him. ‘What?’
‘We think Karen and Jamilleh both knew this guy and we need to find out who he is.’
Leanne turned away and Paula took a breath to speak but he gave her a warning look. ‘We know Karen was worried about something in the days before she was killed, Leanne. We think she had some information – knew something that worried and frightened her. She was your sister. You saw her most days. I think you know what frightened her. I think what frightened her is the reason why you have all those locks on your door.’
She looked at him, her face white and startled with its black-ringed eyes. Then she gave a wobbly little puff of ridicule. ‘Bollocks,’ she said. ‘That’s all bollocks.’
*
In the afternoon the investigation proceeded as follows:
Paula Powell and Sarah Shepherd went house-to-house up and down Kendal Way and Keswick Rise. Have you noticed any strangers lurking around? was their question, but they were picking up as much information as they could about youngish men living at these addresses. The responses they met at the door ranged from guarded to garrulous. They were all unhelpful.
*
Steve Boxer continued to trawl for connections but found that his luck had run out.
*
Darren Floyd picked up his jacket from his girlfriend’s flat, put it on, regained his swagger and took a circuitous route back to the station in order to give his brand new Audi TT Roadster a spin.
*
Steve Boxer learned that the Garda in Kilkenny had picked up an associate of Doug Brody’s, wanted by the Merseyside force, and were returning him to them.
*
David Scott paid a visit to Estelle Campion at her home, where she confessed, charmingly, to knowing Karen Brody and withholding that information from DS Powell. Under polite but relentless pressure, she admitted to having spoken to her on four occasions as a Samaritan caller but insisted that Karen had refused to divulge details of the information she wanted to have relayed to the police for her own safety. On the whole, Scott was inclined to believe her.
*
Sarah Shepherd reported to Scott Jamilleh Hamidi’s retreat into unhelpfulness and was puzzled at being told that this was actually very helpful, confirming as it did the view of this case that he had now arrived at.