A night’s rest did not result in my changing my mind, although I was looking forward to a daylight search of the apartment for any further ideas. We were having a quick breakfast when Patrick’s mobile rang.
‘Terry?’ I queried at the end of the call, having heard Patrick promise to go somewhere immediately.
‘No, Christopher. He’s taken over walking the dogs early morning for Pamela. They both take them out late afternoon and spotted a car parked in a farm track near the southern boundary. He’s not absolutely sure but thinks the man in the front passenger seat was the same one who called at the castle the other day. They drove off at speed when they saw someone approaching.’
‘Whoever it was hasn’t been positively identified as Haldane,’ I observed.
‘I know but I’m a bit worried by their behaviour. He’s worried. He said Terry annoyed him a bit by making a joke of it and suggested loading the falconet and, as it’s quite small, running it out on the ramparts.’
‘That’s exactly the sort of thing Terry would say.’
Patrick finished his coffee. ‘Yes, God knows how he thought they’d get it up there and we know him better than Christopher does. I’ll go back. D’you want to do the proper flat search and let me know if you find anything? I’ve established that there are no hazards.’
I agreed. We arranged that he would stay if he thought it necessary and inform Barton with a request for an extended police presence, again if it was thought necessary.
It was decided that Patrick ought to have the Range Rover this time so I caught a taxi to the apartments where Lindersland lived, or had lived if she was indeed at the bottom of that pond. I felt a bit ashamed that I did not care one way or the other about this, but what had she ever done for me except seriously frighten an elderly friend and fail to prevent a subordinate from knocking my husband to the ground?
I was fully aware that people like Lindersland do not have address books that they leave lying around. That was the habit of previous generations before the days of smart phones or computers – those who weren’t spies and government agents, that is. These days a large proportion of older people do have mobile phones and devices like iPads – my mother-in-law does – but she still writes down people’s addresses. She doesn’t trust the modern electronic age and, frankly, I think she has a point. Hackers and viruses apart, these things can die on you.
Lindersland then would either commit important addresses – personal ones, that is – to memory or have them in her phone, neither of which was available to me right now. Sensitive work-related information would be stored in her computer at work or in paper files in a safe.
I wandered from room to room, my thoughts completely adrift. There was one largish living room that overlooked the rear of a hotel, a kitchen/diner of minuscule size, then two bedrooms and a bathroom in which one could not have even swung the proverbial cat. Like her office, there was nothing here that gave a hint of her character, no family photos, pictures of pets, nothing. It was as if this living space was merely a room in a hotel.
Looking at the same dreary view from the spare bedroom window I saw a row of garages. Did she have a garage? It seemed unlikely as there were only the two keys for the front door on the ring, one of which, the security man had wearily told us, also opened the main door of the building.
No, my mind sort of waffled, addresses weren’t kept in garages. Neither of the keys were the right sort for a garage anyway.
‘This is stupid,’ I said out loud. ‘I didn’t think she was with Lemotov yesterday, I still don’t today, so why am I wasting my time here?’
I had glanced at the keys that were in my hand and now looked again, this time at the writing on the red tally.
The Red Dragon, Teddington. The key rings had been for sale on the bar.
True to my mission, I had a last quick look through the piles of books on the floor and then, more carefully, at paperwork spread across the sofa. There were receipts from fashion shops locally, one from Shrewsbury – a family home or holiday cottage? Plus the usual council and income tax stuff that everyone has at home. Again, nothing useful.
By the time I got to the houseboat at Teddingon the Grindleys had just finished lunch. There was a certain tension in the air and they didn’t offer me anything. As I had bought myself a coffee and a sandwich and eaten it sitting on a seat on the riverside this was perfectly all right, but the situation was interesting.
Martin Grindley seemed agitated and his colour was rather high. His wife, June, on the other hand, appeared subdued and pale. They had had a row.
‘What can I do for you?’ Grindley snapped.
I decided to chuck petrol on their embers and produced the keys. ‘These are the keys to Marcia Lindersland’s flat,’ I said. ‘As you know, she’s disappeared.’
‘Where the hell did you get them from?’ he demanded to know.
‘The police gave them to me. It’s a spare set that’s kept in the security officer’s room where she lives.’
‘Oh – oh, sorry. I – I thought for a ghastly moment you meant they’d been found on her body.’
‘As you can see,’ I went on, ‘the tally’s from the pub up the road. Have you seen her there lately?’
‘I haven’t seen the woman at all!’ he exclaimed. ‘For years. There’s nothing to say she didn’t go there with someone and buy herself a key ring.’ He glanced frantically at June, who pursed her lips, gazing at him questioningly, but said nothing.
I wished Patrick was here to question him. I said, ‘It appears that she has a boyfriend. D’you know anything about him?’
‘No! Nothing! Why should I?’
‘I’m wondering if it’s where she might be, that’s all,’ I replied quietly. ‘With him.’
‘As far as I knew she was only going out with that confounded crook when she worked for me. God knows what she’s been up to since. And I have to say I think it’s damned bad manners to turn up here like this and interrogate me in front of my wife, making out I’m somehow involved with this woman and her disappearance.’
‘I don’t think I suggested that for one moment,’ I said. ‘Sorry to have bothered you.’
I left.
As my dear father used to say: if the cap fits, wear it.
It is not easy to watch someone who lives on the water and I did not dare to leave the area for the time required to go back to the hotel and change my clothes and appearance. His reaction to my questions had been interesting and I remembered what June had said about him being a bit odd lately. Previously, my own reservations about him had been more vague, together with the fact that I had got the impression he had shopped Lindersland to Daws for no better reason than that she appeared to be attracted to Lemotov. It was the kind of thing a woman might do out of pure bitchiness. This had prompted me to sow a little jealousy by mentioning the possible existence of a boyfriend.
Did this man know where she was?
I had seated myself on the same bench that I had used to eat my lunch, about eighty yards from the houseboat in the opposite direction to Grindley’s route to The Red Dragon. I positioned myself carefully so that a couple of lampposts prevented a clear view unless I moved my head slightly. It seemed unlikely that they would spot me. Luckily it was a warm and sunny afternoon, pleasant to wait around, the Thames sparkling in a very light breeze, a little traffic of the pleasure craft variety and people paddling canoes.
The Grindleys stayed on board for the next two hours and I began to get a crick in my neck from constantly glancing in that direction. Then, when it was almost four o’clock, June Grindley appeared on the afterdeck of the Alice May and sat down. I was too far away to see properly but I had an idea that she had been carrying something, perhaps a mug of tea, or a book. Her husband stayed out of sight.
The afternoon dragged on, the sky partly clouded over, and it began to feel as though it might rain. I was desperate for a mug of tea myself by this time. At four fifty-five, June having gone below, I was on the point of giving up when Martin Grindley stepped quickly off the boat on to the riverside path and headed away from me, towards the pub.
To avoid walking directly past their home and appear to be snooping in the event of June spotting me, I went down some steps and followed a path that bordered a small park. It was quiet – just a few people with dogs and mothers or nannies with small children in a play area. With a pang I thought of Carrie taking Vicky and Mark to the playgroup.
In order to remain out of sight of the houseboat I had lost visual contact with Grindley and, although I was fairly sure he was going to The Red Dragon, I hurried. Sure enough, he soon came into view and followed the exact route we had done, only this time entering the public bar. He had directed me into the lounge, perhaps thinking that might be more acceptable to a female strange to the area. He was a bit old fashioned like that. The thought went through my mind that I might be in for a long wait, as hadn’t June said that he usually stayed until dinnertime? It occurred to me that his strange behaviour might be due to drinking too much.
The pub was quite close to the river and nearby there were another couple of benches in a tiny square with a tree in the centre. I seated myself. A chilly breeze was now blowing off the river and I shivered. A spot of rain hit my hand and, a couple of minutes later, the rain rapidly working up to a downpour, I was forced to move into the shelter provided by a larger tree across the road. I began to yearn for a hot shower followed by a hot meal. My mobile rang.
‘All OK at this end, in case you were wondering,’ said Patrick’s voice. ‘I get the impression that Pamela’s engaged Terry to stay until Haldane’s arrested and made it worth his while as he has that kind of smile on his face. But one can’t ask. She actually begged me to stay for the weekend at least, and I can’t really refuse. If you want to come along I can pick you up at the station.’
I said I’d let him know.
‘Where are you?’
I told him.
‘Please don’t wander around there after dark. Even Teddington has its rougher element.’ He paused and then said, ‘For what it’s worth I don’t think Grindley’s a key player in all this.’
I promised him solemnly that I wouldn’t take any risks and he finally rang off, having given me the impression that he was rather fed up. Not with me, though. He too would have preferred to go home for a short break from this wretched case and all the to-ing and fro-ing it entailed.
Around fifteen minutes later when the rain had eased off somewhat, Grindley left the pub, turned a sharp left and walked quickly down a road that appeared from what I could see of it to be a residential area with just a few shops. There was purpose in his manner; this was not just a man trying to keep fit. I followed at a discreet distance but suddenly realized that he probably wouldn’t notice if I was driving a horse-drawn brewer’s dray.
After two hundred yards he turned left again and set off down a narrow side road that probably did date back to the horse and cart era. There were even a few sections of cobbles in the centre of it. I had to be careful here as we appeared to be the only people around and there were few places where I could conceal myself should he turn to look behind him.
The lane twisted and turned a little and finally came out on the riverside where there was a row of boatsheds-cum-garages. I paused, concealing myself as much as possible in a doorway. He did glance round once, but fleetingly and nervously, and then went down towards the far end of the row, rummaging in a pocket for something as he went. This proved to be a key of some kind with which he appeared to open a padlock rather than a lock in the door itself. Both doors were opened wide and he disappeared within.
I went a little closer, to the end of the row nearest to me. Then I heard a car door slam, an engine start and a small saloon car of some kind emerged. Grindley got out, refastened the doors and drove away. The lane obviously turned right at the end as the vehicle went from sight. Guessing that he would rejoin the road, I ran back the way I had come and was just in time to see him turn on to it around two hundred yards from me and head towards me. I ducked into a shop doorway just before he went by.
He wasn’t driving very fast and I tore after him, not caring if he saw me in his mirror. By massive good fortune a taxi approached from the opposite direction and my frantic body language of belting along waving worked: it swung round and drew alongside me.
‘Police,’ I snapped, or rather panted. ‘Please follow that grey car but not too closely.’
We drove roughly east and then I was relying on my somewhat sketchy knowledge of London. We turned and followed a seemingly convoluted route roughly in the direction of New Malden, finishing up on the A3.
‘What’s the bugger done?’ asked the taxi driver in a foreign accent.
‘Nothing yet,’ I replied.
We went on for another few miles, going through the smarter outskirts of the town and then through a seemingly endless area of high-density housing and what appeared to be dozens of South Korean restaurants. Still Grindley pottered along. Then, just past a huge supermarket, he turned left.
‘Careful, please,’ I urged. ‘I don’t want him to know he’s being followed.’
Ironically, we then almost lost him when we had to stop at traffic lights, but were just in time to see him turn again, right. By the time we arrived, having been forced to stop to let a lorry out of a side road, I saw that his car had been parked outside a house about a quarter of a mile along it. Of Grindley there was no sign. The taxi driver managed to find a space to park nearby, keeping the vehicle in view and, at my request, we waited for a couple of minutes.
When Grindley failed to emerge from either that house or another nearby, I asked the driver to wait and got out. The houses were clones of the countless semis in which a great proportion of Londoners live. My experience of those which are inhabited by people who, if not already helping the police with their enquiries, ought to be, told me that the one nearest to Grindley’s car definitely had a lot going for it – that is, dirty, scruffy and with foot-high grass and weeds in the front garden. There was a certain similarity between this place and where we had found Tracy Finch in Ilford.
This was no time for lurking around inconspicuously. I marched down the sideway, almost fell over a couple of full black rubbish bags dumped on the path and then hurled myself in through the back door of the house into a kitchen. Two things happened simultaneously: a man slouching against the frame of an inner doorway started so violently that the can of lager he was just about to drink out of shot upwards and hit him on the nose, sloshing liquid all over his face, and a woman standing near the sink dropped a largish stack of pots and pans she had been holding into it with an enormous crash.
Some of the lager must have gone into the man’s mouth and down the wrong way as he was bent over, coughing and spluttering. I barged past him, dashed into every room on the ground floor, found nobody else and then ran up the stairs to repeat the process.
Grindley was just exiting a bedroom looking furious but stopped dead when he saw me and tried to go back in and slam the door against me. I yanked him out of the way – since working with Patrick I’ve discovered that adrenaline is wonderful stuff – and he tottered off-balance and almost fell down the stairs.
‘I heard a rumour in the pub that a woman was being held against her will here,’ he shouted at me. ‘I decided to investigate. Don’t you remember who I am?’
‘Only too well,’ I replied, went into the bedroom and shut the door in his face. ‘You appear to need Mrs Gillard after all,’ I said to the woman who was sprawled on the bed as though she had just been violently shoved there.
Marcia Lindersland just gaped at me.
The Smith and Wesson in my hand had the effect of ensuring we met no resistance on the way out. This was helpful as I had great difficulty in getting the woman down the stairs – being imprisoned had seemingly rendered her legs temporarily reluctant to do anything. We left Martin Grindley still trying to collect his thoughts on the landing while no doubt working out a plausible story to give to the police.
‘He’s mad! Raving mad!’ Lindersland cried when I’d successfully got her into the taxi. ‘I can’t go home; he got my address from someone in the Met. Now he knows where I live he might come after me again if he’s not arrested!’
‘She has nothing, nothing whatsoever, to do with Haldane and the Americans,’ Patrick assured Pamela the next morning over breakfast. ‘Lindersland came here because she knew that something on your husband’s computer blackened her character. As we know, she went right over the top.’
I had taken her back to the hotel where I had rung Matherson. He was at home but had immediately organized transport to collect the woman to take her to a place of safety. This had arrived remarkably quickly. I had handed her over with the same kind of emotion that one might a parcel, having established that she would make a full report about what had happened and also made it perfectly clear to her that I would claim the very large taxi bill on expenses.
When she had calmed down she had given me some background information but there had not been one word of thanks from her – not one.
‘Her old boss in the Met had a fixation about her bordering on an obsession,’ Patrick continued for the benefit of Lady Rowallen. ‘And it would appear that out of jealousy he told his old friend Richard that he suspected her – this was in her early police career – of unprofessional behaviour because she was going out with a man initially thought to be a Russian anarchist, therefore possibly of interest to MI5, in order to gain the man’s trust so she could find out about his criminal activities.
‘Lindersland’s old boss appears to have completely lost the plot. Lindersland told Ingrid he tricked her into meeting him for a chat about old times and took her to a house that he said was his home, ostensibly for her to meet his wife. It wasn’t his house. He’d hired a couple living in New Malden, who someone in his local pub had said would do just about anything for money, to keep her prisoner and that’s all I know so far. Any idea what he wanted from her, Ingrid?’
‘Yes, her. He was going to divorce his wife and they were going to live on his houseboat happily ever after. He actually thought he could achieve that by force. Deluded, to say the least.’
‘Especially as the woman can hardly be described as a good catch,’ Pamela sniffed.
‘There’s more that I didn’t tell you last night,’ I said to Patrick. ‘While we waited for her transport to arrive she told me that she’s still keeping an eye on Dimitri Lemotov. As we’d thought, she regards him as a job she ought to finish. Quite recently, just before the Grindley business, she rang him – he hasn’t a clue who she really is – and he told her that he’d got rid of all his anarchist mob and is involved in what he called the big time.’
‘That’s very, very interesting,’ Patrick said.
‘He’d always bragged, Marcia said. She had managed to get several of them behind bars when she got to hear of anything that was planned but had to be very careful not to be suspected by them of supplying information to the police. I’m not quite sure how she got away with that.’
‘Stupidly naive,’ interposed Her Ladyship, somewhat unfairly.
‘This lot he’s got in with now,’ I continued, ‘and she understands it’s mainly in connection with supplying them with hitmen, is as a result of his, Lemotov’s, talking to a man who for some reason he thought she knew – Ronnie Shaddock, the trade unionist MI5 were watching. Shaddock, Lemotov said, had been fixed as he had threatened to go to the police when he realized that the men he had thought of as anarchists, keen to join violent demos and so forth, were actually a bunch of violent criminals in it purely for the money. As I said, he was fixed, but Lemotov didn’t say by whom, if it’s even true, and she didn’t like to jeopardize obtaining future information from him by asking.’
‘Did you ask her if the name Nicholas Haldane meant anything to her?’ Patrick enquired.
‘Yes, and it didn’t. I told her that he been seen in a wine bar with Shaddock but Lemotov hadn’t mentioned the name to her.’
‘Does she know where Lemotov lives?’
‘Only that he used to have a house in Tottenham. She’s no idea if he’s still there and didn’t like to ask that either.’
‘We still don’t know how she knew that Daws had information about her in his computer.’
‘I asked her about that too but all she said was that someone had dropped a hint to her at work. She wouldn’t say who it was and I got the impression that resentment at her promotion was involved.’
‘Better not stir that one up then,’ Patrick muttered.
‘I had a phone call yesterday from the Sussex Tourist Board,’ Pamela said, having fleetingly been in a world of her own. ‘A man asking when I felt I would be able to re-open the place to the public.’
‘It’s too soon and would be far too dangerous,’ Patrick said.
‘I did say I thought it unwise in the circumstances as the police hadn’t caught Richard’s killer and the motive was still unclear.’
‘Is this a person you’ve dealt with before?’
‘I’ve no idea. Every time they make contact it’s someone different.’
‘Then how do you know he represented what he said he did?’
‘Oh, dear.’
‘Did you tell him anything about the situation here?’
‘No – at least, only that I had plenty of support.’
‘That wouldn’t have done any harm. But please be careful in future. Do you still have that so-called attorney’s business card?’
‘Oh! I don’t know. I probably threw it away,’ Pamela said with a toss of her head, cross at being told off.
‘Please look for it.’
A few minutes earlier we had learned that the owners of the house where Lindersland had been taken had disappeared but neighbours had been most helpful – apparently the couple had at one time kept a dog that had bitten several people until the police had taken it away to be destroyed – and they were arrested at the woman’s mother’s house a couple of miles away. At the moment they were refusing to say anything about the person found at their house.
Martin Grindley had been released on police bail, having stuck to his story that he had heard a rumour in The Red Dragon that a woman was being held against her will in a house in New Malden and decided to investigate. Asked how he knew the address, he had said that he had approached a snout he knew of but hadn’t wanted to break the man’s cover by revealing his name. He had then tried to pull rank on the strength of his one-time career but still been charged with kidnap because of a statement made by Marcia Lindersland the previous night. Grindley had told the investigating officers that he was going back to his houseboat. It would serve him right, I thought, if June had meanwhile chugged off into the sunset with all his assets.
After quite a long search Pamela discovered the business card in the same drawer in which she kept the key to her late husband’s study but could not remember putting it there. Any plans Patrick might have made were then put on hold when he received a call from Superintendent Matherson asking if he would interview the manager of the wine bar in Ilford. The man was refusing to answer any more questions. A request had already been made, and granted, to hold him for longer but that was due to expire in ten hours’ time.
We promised Pamela that, if possible, we would both be back for the rest of the weekend.