Almost a week went by. We were both of a mind that, despite her hostility in answering questions, Sarah Dutton was not involved with what we were working on. Nevertheless, everything had to be investigated properly. She was charged with receiving stolen property – at least fifteen items of gold jewellery – and released on police bail, the case referred to the Met as her brother’s crimes had been committed in London. Patrick went to interview Robin Williams again, who confirmed that Mrs Dutton had indeed given him the news that Sandra Stevens had told her that people from the National Crime Agency were going to speak to her. They had pondered what the reason for this might be. He denied utterly that he had spoken to anyone else about it, insisting that he knew no one who would be remotely interested. Patrick was inclined to believe him.
James Carrick had visited the scene of the shooting – everyone still waiting for DNA test results to come through – and Patrick ‘walked’ him through what had happened. There wasn’t a lot to see. The day before he had gone to have the stitches out of his forehead at the hospital. Hopefully the scar would fade with time. His arm, black and blue, was at least less painful and he could now drive, which was a relief to me as I had plenty of other things to do.
The next morning we went back to London and, as a courtesy, I called in to see Michael Greenway.
‘I simply can’t believe that you were in the same room as this man,’ he said. It might have crossed his mind to add, ‘And didn’t manage to arrest him,’ but to his credit, he didn’t. He did ask where Patrick was, though.
‘Weapons training,’ I told him. ‘Just shooting at targets – his arm was seriously bruised and he’s worried about it. We started off very early this morning so he should be here soon.’
‘All the man said was that mobsters burst in and shot the woman you were interviewing.’ He consulted a notepad before him. ‘A Mrs Sandra Stevens, and then did a runner, although you, Ingrid, got a good look at one of them. He’s since been identified as O’Connor and a warrant’s out for his arrest. The latest in a series of warrants, that is – he just seems to disappear into thin air.’
‘Patrick didn’t mention the bit about a light fitting being shot out and a large splinter of glass slicing across his forehead so he couldn’t see for blood?’
‘God, no.’
‘He must have phoned you from somewhere in the hospital when he went to have an X-ray on his arm. O’Connor slammed a handgun down on it to make him drop the Glock. I expect someone called him in just then and he couldn’t go into any more details.’
‘So that’s why he wanted a couple of days off. It does pay to keep me completely in the picture, you know.’
‘Sorry, but I didn’t think you were that interested,’ I countered. ‘This job was just something for Patrick to cut his teeth on.’
Greenway went a little pink, studying his notepad again, then cleared his throat and said, ‘I have been following this – out of interest, you understand. Patrick must know that it’s vital to discover the reason behind all these happenings. Several questions need answering. Has Frederick Judd been murdered, and if so, was the body cremated his? If it was, why did they go to all that trouble to get rid of him? How is the Peters woman involved and where is she now? There’s more we need to know, but that’ll do to start with.’
‘Judd was reputed to be off his head,’ I recollected.
‘Mad, bad and dangerous,’ Greenway mused. ‘Yes, and perhaps making a real nuisance of himself in certain criminal circles.’
‘Well, he certainly was to his neighbours. It would be worth talking to them if the Met haven’t done so already.’
The commander wrote ‘neighbours’ on his pad, got up and left the room to ask his secretary to fix us some coffee. He is not a man to shout and expect people to come running.
‘Would he have been a rival to O’Connor, I wonder?’ he said on his return.
‘Pass,’ I said. ‘The Met are working on it and we’ve heard nothing since his house was made safe from the explosives.’
‘Which were intended to kill and maim police, of course, never mind any kids who might have decided to have a look round.’
Patrick’s arrival coincided with our coffee arriving but he declined, saying that he had had some already. He didn’t look very happy.
‘The shooting practice?’ Greenway enquired.
‘Not good. Even picking up the weapon makes my hand shake.’
‘To be expected, surely,’ said the commander. ‘It’s not long since it happened.’
‘It’s possible to lose accuracy permanently.’
‘In that case, I think you ought to consider having treatment at one of those specialist clinics.’
Patrick shook his head. ‘I’ve had enough time off already. I’ll ask Dad to say a few words over it.’
Greenway did not laugh, or even smile, saying instead, ‘Please yourself.’
‘Just to keep you abreast of what I’m doing, I’m going to speak to Fred Judd’s immediate neighbours.’
The commander turned around his notepad and held it up for Patrick to see what he had written.
I supposed I had to let him take the credit for it.
I drove to give Patrick’s arm a rest, convinced that he should have more treatment. I really examined my motives, wondering whether it was because I was selfishly worrying about my own safety when there was a question mark over his ability to protect us should a dangerous situation arise, or it was just wifely concern. Ashamed, I could not decide, so settled for both. Nevertheless, I felt somehow naked and had to put it into words. ‘Frankly, I’m not too happy wandering around here after what happened at Judd’s house.’
‘Ingrid, I might be a bit under the weather but I can still put a few holes in a barn door,’ he retorted.
‘Sorry. But I didn’t really mean it like that,’ I lied. ‘It might jeopardize the case if someone sees us, that’s all.’
He leaned over and put his head on my shoulder for a few moments. ‘Sorry.’
‘Does your head hurt?’
‘A bit.’
I had an idea that his head, and his arm, were giving him hell.
We had reached a residential road near where we had left the car on our first visit, and I pulled in and parked just in time before bursting into tears.
Patrick put his arm around my shoulders. ‘What’s up?’
‘I don’t want to do this anymore,’ I sobbed. I had really lied to him for the first time, ever. ‘And you’re always getting hurt.’
‘Then let’s go home,’ Patrick said quietly.
‘But—’
‘Where we’ll have a think about whether we carry on or if I get a less hazardous job. It’s probably about time I did, anyway – it doesn’t mean that much to me, not now. Honestly.’
‘We can’t just walk away,’ I said, gazing at him with blurred eyes.
‘We can.’
‘You want O’Connor.’
‘I have the rest of my life to find him.’
‘And you promised your father you’d sort it out.’
‘He’ll understand that this has developed into something I have no choice but to hand over to others.’
I simply had to tell him. ‘I lied to you just now. I’m so scared.’ I wept afresh, just managing to get out, ‘And so sorry if it offends you.’
When I became aware that he had got out of the car, I thought my admission had been too much for him, but he came round to the driver’s side, opened the door, helped me out and then ensconced me in the passenger seat. We drove away. Not very far, though. Patrick parked in a vacant space reserved for the superintendent at the local police station, muttered something about ‘his lordship’s probably playing golf’ and went inside. Around twenty minutes later, when I had got myself back together and was feeling very small, he reappeared.
‘They are going to talk to Judd’s neighbours and those living nearby,’ he announced. ‘The DI I spoke to before agrees that the pair of us have too high a profile – finding the explosives in Judd’s house – to, as you put it, go wandering around that area. We’ve also recently come face-to-face with O’Connor. If he, or some of the cronies he was with in Bath, are somewhere here – according to her the neighbourhood where Judd lived is stiff with ex-cons and those helping with enquiries – house-to-house enquiries might find them. Obviously, there’s a full murder investigation taking place on account of Dougie’s body having been found in the building and they’ve carried out some local questioning already, but she’s prepared, in view of what I said, to divert a few more people to it.’
I looked at him and he smiled, then said, ‘Actually your freak-out made me remember what my promotion means – being able to involve other police forces. Lunch?’
Even I did not recognize at the time that nerves, evolving into something approaching a panic attack, had rather a lot to do with intuition, my ‘cats’ whiskers’ crashing in with a red alert. Rightly, as it turned out.
‘That is interesting,’ Patrick murmured.
During a quiet discussion – now postponed until the weekend – about my reservations I had received a call from Joanna, who, still working with terrier-like tenacity, had been to see the curate at Wellow, Kenneth Watson. With no mandate to investigate officially she had told him the truth: that she knew the Reverend and Mrs Gillard and was helping to get to the bottom of the puzzle of the whereabouts of Mrs Peters. Mentioning in passing that her husband was DCI in Bath had provided all the credentials she needed.
Recognizing that what the woman had told him could hardly be described as ‘confessional’ confidences, Watson had been delighted to talk to her, this of course having nothing to do with the fact that Joanna is a strikingly beautiful woman. He had recollected Mrs Peters’s concerns about her husband’s funeral and how upset she had been. He then spoke of experiences of his own as he had visited the couple in their home when he had first moved to the village to take up his post, a task that was part of his job. The couple, he recollected, had been daggers drawn and, seemingly, in the middle of an argument, a description he immediately amended to a ‘blazing row’ as he had heard them shouting at one another as he approached the front door. Things had simmered down a little on his arrival and, the woman disappearing, grudgingly, into the kitchen to make tea, Archie had bawled after her, ‘Silly old bat, you’ll have me in tears next. Perhaps you oughta have gone on the stage for real!’ Whereupon his wife had poked her head around the door to say, or perhaps, he thought, hiss, ‘I’ll have you know that the drama society relied on me at one time for female leads!’
‘Did he know what they were arguing about?’ I had asked Joanna.
‘Money. The old man muttered something about her always wanting more housekeeping money.’
‘Did Kenneth know where they had lived previously?’
‘I gather he hadn’t liked to ask.’
‘OK,’ Patrick said. ‘This does tend to fit in with your theory that she told tales about what happened, perhaps having threatened whoever worked the scam that she’d go to the police. As you said, she might not have been paid. We’ve just discovered that she can act. As I said, it’s interesting and useful, but that’s all. We’ve still no clue as to the connection between her and the mobsters who appear to be involved. Why didn’t they kill her? I can see that it was useful to get rid of evidence, that is, Archie’s corpse, by blowing up the bungalow, but why not dispose of her at the same time?’ He took a bite from his beef sandwich and chewed gloomily. ‘Come on, put that bloody wonderful imagination of yours to work.’
‘Look, we’re cops, or rather, you are. We’re not writing a crime novel here.’
‘So if you were writing a crime novel, what would the answer be?’
‘If I told you you’d have to verify loads of info, look up records, try to prove masses of things and it would probably come to absolutely nothing.’
Patrick slapped his lunch back on the plate and stared at me. ‘You’ve already worked it out!’
‘Only thought up the plot for a novel.’
‘When?’ he demanded to know.
‘Just now. When you asked why hadn’t they killed her.’
‘For God’s sake, put me out of my misery. Why didn’t they?’
‘Because they’re working for her.’
‘What?’
‘In the book I probably won’t write she was Judd’s wife, her first marriage.’
It isn’t often that my husband is rendered speechless.
‘He went round the bend,’ I continued, ‘perhaps due to some inherited mental problem and chucked her out, or she bailed out, at around the same time as all the staff left. There was loads of money stashed away somewhere, the proceeds of crime, but she had no access to it. As she was involved with his criminal activities, big time, she had to go into hiding because she no longer had protection. She changed her identity to that of ordinary housewife, moved to Somerset and hitched up with Archie Peters – do we know if they were ever actually married? – who was old, ill and loaded, and needed someone to look after him. It suited her to disappear into the countryside just then as she had no money of her own which she needed to get her own back on Judd, plus a share of his money. In other words, she needed the wherewithal to hire hitmen. She probably knew exactly who she needed: O’Connor.’
‘It might have been his idea to cremate Judd’s remains.’
‘Well, you said yourself that he was different.’
‘Which means the theory that she came to see Dad because she hadn’t been paid for services rendered is wrong.’
‘Yes, it is, but we’ve already had an alternative idea: she was covering herself if it all went pear-shaped. She’d go back to being poor little Mrs Peters in the sticks, leaving her mobsters to save themselves as well as they could. Who would a court believe if the whole thing crashed around their ears?’
‘She might even have hastened old Archie’s demise with a little weed killer in his cocoa. From what the curate said she was struggling to get the shopping.’
‘And Archie’s money could have been hidden in his mattress. And they might have tortured Judd to make him reveal where his was located before they murdered him. Patrick, please remember that this is only a bit of make-believe on my part.’
‘No harm in checking to try to discover her actual status and working carefully to see if there’s any truth in it.’ Patrick remembered his sandwich. ‘She might not be safe, though. Not if she’s now sitting on two piles of cash and possibly stolen property courtesy of her one-time husband. O’Connor’s going to want that.’
I wouldn’t lose any sleep over that possibility. Was any of it true or just a product of my imagination? The description circulated of Mrs Peters had been as she had appeared to us that day at the rectory: middle-aged, of medium height, straggly grey-brown hair, dark brown eyes and shabbily dressed, details that would fit thousands of women in London alone.
Uninvolved with house-to-house enquiries and not ‘wandering around’ that area did not mean that we could not engage in a little low-key investigating in the High Street. We already knew that Frederick Judd had owned at least three businesses: a restaurant, a nightclub and a hairdressers. These had been closed down when he and his cohorts were arrested and subsequently jailed, but they were likely now to be under new ownership, especially as the properties they were in were almost certainly rented.
Asking questions in a hairdressers – Google informed us that there were getting on for a dozen of them – being impractical for several reasons, we decided to forego those. There were around two dozen restaurants of all kinds so as we did not have a week to spare we decided to find the nightclub. Patrick has a notion that that is where you start when looking for low-life anyway. What we wanted more than anything was, of course, gossip.
The nightclubs, four of which were listed, would only be open from about six o’clock onwards. It was now well into the afternoon but we still had several hours to wait. Patrick is not good at waiting and rang his new contact, the DI at the police station, to discover which club it had been. Her name, I now gathered, was Janice, and he was obviously cosying up to her like a real scoundrel to get as much information as possible.
‘It was called The Dead Zone,’ he duly reported. ‘It closed down for good and the property is now a recently opened Chinese restaurant.’ He pointed. ‘That one over there, The Paradise Garden.’
‘Just as well you asked,’ I said.
He looked at his watch. ‘A beer. I need to think.’
We ended up at a nearby hotel, a new one, in order that I could have tea, but I was not expecting any cerebral miracles from my particular choice of beverage as we seemed to have hit the buffers.
‘In my view,’ Patrick murmured after a while when he was down to the last inch of his pint, ‘we ought to take a room so we can stay the night here and, later on, have a Chinese meal.’
‘At The Paradise Garden? What will they know about Judd and Co.?’ I asked.
‘Nothing, perhaps, but it means I can have another beer.’
Why not? I suggested he booked in and fetched the car first, adding that I had seen something about an underground car park for residents. Patrick went off and, as fast as you could say Fuller’s ‘London Pride’, he returned, carrying our overnight bags, which we always keep ready packed in the Range Rover. Dumping them on the floor, he went over to the bar. I had already ordered myself more tea.
‘Test results from Bath,’ he announced when he came back. ‘Carrick rang me just now. There are no DNA records for O’Connor as he committed his crimes before their use became widespread in the UK. Then he scarpered abroad, but we still know that he was there, and in charge, when Sandra Stevens was shot because you saw him. As far as the other two are concerned there are no matches. So all negative then.’
‘And they might have arranged to finish Judd off before Archie Peters had died,’ I mused. ‘You know, I’m sure Anne Peters knew Judd years ago. She might even have known O’Connor.’
‘One big happy family? Actually there are far too many ifs and buts around for my peace of mind.’
Patrick’s mobile rang and from what little I could hear it was James Carrick again. It was a short call.
‘A body’s been found in the River Avon,’ Patrick revealed. ‘White, male, with a bullet wound in the chest, so it could be the man I shot. The PM’s tomorrow afternoon. D’you think you’d recognize him?’
I didn’t, and said so.
‘I ought to take a look at him. And the ballistics people will want to examine my Glock. As you know they can usually work out if a weapon’s fired a certain bullet.’ He smiled to himself. ‘That’s if they can find it in him as they make a hell of a mess – unless it went right through him at that close range, in which Scenes of Crime will have found it. Are you getting hungry yet? I’m famished.’
I have known this man for almost ever and love him to bits, but his cold-bloodedness is sometimes hard to stomach.
I reasoned that the recently wounded should be permitted to have squid, of which I have an absolute horror – when cooked, that is. When they wiffle around the oceans changing colour they’re actually rather sweet; reduced to curly bits with suckers on a plate like a cross between a jellyfish and a spider I would rather not be around. Patrick – who loves it – understands this and normally, and kindly, avoids having it unless dining alone.
The place was very clean, opulent really, with subdued lighting, and like so many Chinese restaurants, ran like clockwork, a man in evening dress making sure that it did. He came over when we were eating and asked us if our meal was satisfactory.
Patrick told him that it was, adopting a slight Scottish accent and a somewhat superior manner. He had also combed his hair so that it flopped over his forehead, hiding the recent scar. ‘We were actually looking for a nightclub in this immediate area,’ he continued. ‘But obviously our directions were wrong. The Dead Zone?’
The man, who was not Chinese, shook his head. ‘No, sir, it was here but closed.’
‘There are quite a few clubs in the area already,’ Patrick observed in off-hand fashion. ‘I suppose the tenant decided a restaurant would be more profitable. I’m only mentioning this,’ he hastened to add, ‘because I’m in business myself and thinking of moving to this district.’
‘No, there’s a new tenant,’ the man replied. ‘But the place had been closed for quite some time while a new one was found. I understand there was a police investigation involving the previous business – nothing to do with us, of course.’
‘Is there a chance that I might be able to speak with whoever it is? Only I would value some opinions on this area from those in the position to know.’
‘I’m afraid the lady is abroad on holiday.’ He then excused himself, saying he had to get back to work and left us.
‘The lady,’ Patrick repeated thoughtfully. ‘I wonder who she might be?’
There was a huge gathering at the hotel when we returned, a company dinner dance by the look of it, the foyer packed with people, some in evening dress, others not. It occurred to me that we did not look out of place as I was wearing my black dress with twinkly bits, and Patrick a dark suit and tie. I took his hand and led him around the edge of the throng in the direction of the music, he probably thinking we were heading for the lifts or, more likely, the bar.
‘We can’t come in here,’ he protested in a loud whisper when we were almost on the dance floor, couples moving slowly to quiet, smoochy music.
‘You learned to dance again in order to reach full mobility,’ I said in his ear. ‘Please dance with me.’
Still, he hesitated. ‘The notice said it was some kind of engin-eering bash.’
‘OK, you’re the CEO of Balls and Balls for Hunky Rivets,’ I told him. ‘Dance.’
We danced.
I caught sight of us in one of the large wall mirrors – an attractive couple perhaps, he tall and dark, the woman also dark-haired, her head on a level with his shoulder – and found myself thinking that I would remember this always, a special moment to look back on when I was old and perhaps alone. I can’t bear to think of being alone before I’m old, but I know I have no choice in the matter.