Chapter 12
lane.
“Did you see that?” I ask.
“The guy getting in the taxi?”
He listens to where the guy came from.
“Not totally vacant then,” he says. “Let’s get back to the flat and I’ll look up the owner.”
At the end of the lane, we bypass Serpentine Crescent and head back to Punt Lane.
“Here’s a scenario,” he says on the way. “The owner has been trying to sell Number 24. Meanwhile he lives somewhere else but stays here when he’s in Exeter on business instead of paying for a hotel. Helena, as his long-term trusted neighbour, keeps an eye on it for him when he’s not there. She has a key. For some reason she wants to meet you in secret and his place is vacant on the weekends.”
“It fits the facts.”
Back at the flat, I put the leftover pizza in the oven while Rupert logs into a search site for estate agents.
“Wow. Guess the surname of the owner on Number 24.”
“How many names do I have to choose from?”
“One.”
That’s when I know. “Loxton.”
“Ambrose Loxton.”
Ambrose Loxton is the owner of ‘Rime ni Maison’, an estate agent selling French properties to British buyers. If he lives part-time in France, was he returning there tonight? It explains why Helena has access but what’s their relationship? In the dark lane and viewed from behind, my glimpse of him didn’t suggest an age but I’d guess at least fifty.
The Rime ni Maison website lists an office in the city of Dijon in the Bourgogne. The gallery is full of high-end properties with the occasional bargain under ‘Wild Card’. There’s a mugshot of Ambrose, his grey-haired good looks giving him the same distinguished appearance as Helena.
A further search for his name brings up a lot of references to his business, sales of the occasional chateau, customer reviews, appearances at charity events and the sporadic brush with a minor royal. Nothing about his family.
He must be related to Helena by birth because they share the same surname and look alike. But how? Frustration leads us to a breakthrough.
Our ‘tittle-tattle terrier’ Anita Blaine was the one who covered the opening night of Electra Loxton’s play ‘A Werewolf in Woolley Wood’. She’s a stickler for well-captioned photos. I know from personal experience at my own book launch that even if Anita knows who you are, you must repeat your name and spell it for every photo.
With both our laptops open, Rupert and I resort to scanning every image from the opening night, reading through the names underneath.
“Lots of local identities,” I say. “Here’s Ben Baker cosying up to the playwright. He looks good in a dinner jacket.”
We keep looking.
“Found him,” Rupert cries. “Ambrose Loxton clinks glasses with Electra, bathing in the reflected glory of his daughter’s success.”
Electra’s father. Helena was her aunt. Ambrose is Helena’s brother.
It’s getting late but we’re running on adrenalin.
We continue to find nothing more about his family. Nothing about Electra’s mother or any siblings. The Loxtons keep a tight lid on their private lives. Except Helena appeared to be prepared to share hers with me.
Why me? What does she want to tell me?
Do I want to know?
“Ambrose Loxton’s business life dominates his online background,” Rupert says. “If he’s got skeletons – it would explain the family secrecy – we’ll have to dig deeper. But not tonight. Your eyes are falling out of your head.”
That’s when we realise I’ve had too much to drink to drive to Lympstone, only a short drive but one I’m not yet used to making. Luckily there’s no romantic spark between Rupert and me and we’ve crashed on each other’s sofas before.
Tonight I insist he takes the bed, rather than try to sleep with his feet hanging over the end of the couch. The flat is warm, there are spare blankets and I have extra pyjamas and other clothes in the wardrobe. Raider usually sleeps on the end of my bed and as I settle on the couch, he side-eyes Rupert, considering his options. His favourite armchair wins.
I wake to the smells of a Saturday morning fry-up. Rupert lives on takeaways but he knows his way around bacon and eggs.
“What’s happening after breakfast?” he asks.
“I really don’t want to spend the day trying to find out more about Ambrose Loxton. Does he even matter? He could just be providing the empty house for Helena’s meeting. I’m on a roll with Death by Deception and I should focus on that. But before I meet Helena I want to go back to the flash drive and see if I can unravel the crime from the photos.”
“I was thinking about that in the middle of the night. Those ‘loose ends’ might be embedded in crimes that are similar to the secret one.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” I say. “Last night I said it was something about DNA, but that’s too broad. Helena is a forensic scientist so everything from fluff to saliva is a clue. And I hope the photos point to one crime, not three.”
He groans at the thought of that. “Let’s eat, then pull a few keywords out of the crimes on the flash drive. And put a deadline on any search so you can get back to Sim’s cottage and your book.”
Half an hour later we’re doing just that:
Pippa Pemberton
Three-year-old girl
Abduction
Murder
Shallow grave
Loose-end clue: footprint & sequins
Fiona Winters
Teenage girl
October & Halloween
Abducted
Murdered
Shallow grave
Tyre prints
Loose-end clue: partial number plate etched in victim’s watchband.
Pia Patel
Young woman
Raped and murdered at home
DNA at scene pointed to wrong culprit with alibi
Real culprit linked to other man’s presence at scene
Loose-end clue #1: alien hair in drop of victim’s blood under microscope
Loose-end clue #2: two samples of DNA from potential suspects matched
We read through the list and return to the three photos at the end of the hyperlinks, making a list of keywords for each image.
Urban courtyard
Brick paving
Child’s animal mask
Crime scene tape
Charity Shop Window
Costumes for Halloween
Skeleton
Dracula
Werewolf
Witch
Test Tubes of Human Samples
Twins, a false sample or a switch?
If Baxter was here we’d go much faster but we combine the keywords of the three images into a shortlist:
A child
Abduction from urban house
Dress-up costumes
Halloween
Confused identity
It’s not much and we’re feeling it’s been a waste of time even before we put them into the search engine. At the last minute, I get Rupert to add the name Loxton.
And there it is.
Abduction of Three-year-old in Werewolf Suit on Halloween
It’s not an original news report but a brief summary on a website listing a number of child murders over the last twenty-five years:
Alex Loxton (3) was abducted from the family’s front garden on the afternoon of 31 October twenty years ago. He was wearing a werewolf suit ahead of Halloween celebrations. The remains of the child were later found in a shallow grave disturbed by a fox in Woolley Wood. Forensic samples led the police to local paedophile Milton Faulks.
“This summary doesn’t tell us much,” I say, “but it must be the case that Helena’s photos are referring to. Could Alex be Electra’s brother? Twenty years ago she would have been about ten. A family obsession with werewolves sounds like a job for a psychotherapist. Or the loss of her young brother in a werewolf suit imprinted itself and she was attracted to stories about the mythical beast.”
“Possible,” Rupert murmurs. He’s looking at the photo of the courtyard. “It says Alex was abducted from the family’s front garden. Is this it?”
We’re both wondering the same thing. “Were they living at Number 24?”
I open the photos of the corner terrace I took last night but the details are too far away. Online photos are more recent than the crime scene photo and the courtyard has changed.
More searching brings up more reports that include Alex’s death but they’re all summaries of cases that share different elements. We’ll have to dig into the archives from twenty years ago to find original detailed reports.
But I’m going to meet Helena tomorrow afternoon. Surely she’s going to tell me what this is all about?