Beer wasn’t Tony’s drink of choice. He nursed a pint of local Ambler – which he could probably learn to love – afraid that if he drank the whiskey he preferred he’d go through too much, too fast. He could be sitting in the Black Dog a long time, repeatedly checking his watch and meeting Lily’s anxious glances.
Each time he looked in her direction, she stared back while she rubbed at the same area of the bar.
He needed his wits about him.
Alex had only been gone … thirty minutes. With the roads the way they were she wouldn’t be moving fast. But she’d promised to call and that could be at any moment.
It was too soon yet.
He took out his mobile and put it on the table.
Cathy Cummings arrived. She didn’t greet him, or seem to notice him, didn’t even greet Lily behind the bar, just got to work serving the straggle of customers making it in for lunch.
The noise level was rising and Lily remembered to put some music on. One of the customers whooped, ‘Dirty Hat Band, yeah.’
Lily was good at assessing a crowd.
The inn door opened and Bill Lamb came in with Constable Smith. The younger man sniffed appreciatively at the lunch smells and was obviously pleased to be out of the cold.
Lamb made straight for Tony but searched the whole room while he came. He nodded at Tony’s dad, who arrived and sat at the table.
‘Where’s Ms Bailey-Jones?’ Lamb asked, standing beside them. Smith got a little closer to the fire and Bogie got up to give him a sniff and a tail wag.
‘Not here at the moment,’ Tony said, chewing the side of a thumb, a nervous habit he’d forgotten years ago.
‘Where is she?’
For once, Lamb’s pushy approach raised more pit-of-the-stomach foreboding than irritation. The man expected him to know where Alex was?
‘You aren’t usually here if she’s not, or so I’m told. Why did you come now?’
‘To have a drink.’
‘Don’t be smart with me. Is Will Cummings here?’
Tony ran a hand around the back of his neck. Lily had brought his dad a coffee. ‘No, he isn’t. Alex said he was in a bit of a down mood and took off for the rest of the day. Cathy’s here.’ Although he couldn’t see her at the moment.
‘Damn.’
Tony raised his eyebrows but his heart started to do odd things. ‘Where are you going with this, Lamb?’
‘You haven’t seen Alex today? She isn’t at the lodge, or her mother’s cottage. And you don’t have a clue where she is? You expect me to believe that?’
Pushing his half-empty glass away, Tony struggled to keep his voice even. ‘I already said I saw her earlier. She isn’t here now, and I don’t know anything else.’
Lamb stared him down.
‘What’s going on?’ He’d promised not to tell anyone where Alex had gone but he wasn’t feeling secure about any of his decisions right now.
‘Come to the parish hall, please. Now.’ He gestured to Smith and said something to him that Tony couldn’t hear. The constable went to the bar.
Tony was instantly on his feet. ‘Something’s badly wrong, isn’t it?’ he said in a quiet voice, staring from his dad to Lamb. ‘You’re looking for Alex … and it sounds as if you’re looking for Will Cummings, too.’
‘I’ll come with you.’ The unmistakable loss of color in his father’s face did nothing for Tony’s confidence.
‘We’ll be back,’ Tony called to Lily, deliberately cheerful. ‘We aren’t done with those.’ He pointed to their glasses on his way to the door.
The tea towel she’d been polishing with was wadded between Lily’s clenched hands. ‘I’ll be waiting, Tony,’ she told him and, for the first time he remembered, there were tears in her eyes.
Getting to the parish hall on foot only took minutes.
Uncomfortable minutes.
Tony’s father strode along with his chin thrust forward, his hair a white halo in the sharp reflected light, and a silent attitude that didn’t invite conversation. Not that they were likely to say much with Lamb there.
Too many vehicles for comfort crammed the sides of the road outside the hall. Tony didn’t like the van with an aerial, or two others with locking compartments on the sides.
Lamb sprinted ahead. James Harrison kept pace with Tony running up the front steps and inside.
More trestle tables had been put into service and two officers worked over a map on the hanging boards. Each time an instruction was called out by one of a group gathered around a computer screen, several wearing headsets and mouthpieces, one of the two drew another line on the map.
The place was freezing and all the officers wore their greatcoats. The smell of old coffee permeated the air and sandwich wrappers overflowed two bins.
Lamb went to take up a place beside O’Reilly, and a man Tony recognized as Madden from an earlier encounter. Several constables concentrated on another screen. Lamb talked close beside his boss’s ear.
‘Has something else happened?’ Tony said. He made straight for O’Reilly and Lamb’s group.
The group fell silent, but continued to watch the screen.
‘Was Alex still at the Black Dog when Will Cummings left?’ O’Reilly asked.
Tony swallowed. ‘Yes. He’d already left when I got there. Is this significant?’
‘We wouldn’t be talking about it if it wasn’t,’ Lamb snapped, and got a quelling glance from his boss.
‘Come and look at this,’ O’Reilly said.
Tony’s father went with him to stand behind the computer. The men and women moved to make room for them. ‘What are we looking at?’ his dad wanted to know.
On the screen, a grainy video moved in a loop, repeating over and over again. A man walked from a building, paused to look in every direction and opened a folder file to check the contents, which looked to be scant.
‘Watch him walk,’ Lamb said. ‘Look at his face, or what you can see of it. Is he familiar?’
Crouching, Tony gripped the edge of the table and stared closely at the screen. ‘Any hints? What am I looking at?’
‘That’s the library on Brunswick Road. In Gloucester,’ O’Reilly said. ‘We’ve been tracing the obituary that was pinned – or darted – to Alex’s kitchen table.’
Tony turned to look at O’Reilly, ‘And?’
‘We think that man is leaving with the photocopy of that obituary. It’s from a magazine called Our Kind.’
Incredulous, Tony turned back to the screen. ‘You mean that could be the man who was in Lime Tree Lodge?’
Grunts were the only answers he got. His dad leaned over his shoulder. The hand he rested beside Tony’s turned white-knuckled. ‘Can you freeze the picture on the man and make him closer?’
‘Already done,’ O’Reilly said, hitting a key. ‘We had it isolated and they got rid of as much pixilation as they could.’
The close up was still blurred. A man in a woolen hat. Stocky. Angry.
‘Doctor Harrison?’ O’Reilly said, touching that white-knuckled hand. ‘Tony, is it him?’
‘Oh, yeah. It’s Will Cummings,’ James Harrison said before Tony could answer.
‘Getting Cummings, and fast, is a priority, but we need to make sure Alex is in a safe place,’ O’Reilly said. ‘Are you sure you don’t know where she might be, Tony?’
Protesting incoherently, Cathy Cummings was led in by Constable Smith, who looked more than gloomy at his task. He held Cathy’s upper arm as she tried to twist away.
‘Not back here,’ O’Reilly said and pointed to a chair in front of the table. ‘Hello, Mrs Cummings. Take a seat.’
‘I want to go home,’ she said quietly. ‘Please can I go home. I can’t help you with anything.’
‘She hasn’t so far, boss,’ Smith said unhappily. ‘Doesn’t know anything about anything.’
O’Reilly smiled kindly at the woman. ‘We meet again, Cathy. Twice in one day. You were upset at the Derwinters.’
Her expression changed, turned hard and angry. ‘Leonard said my boy meant nothing to him. Nothing to them. If it had been his boy who died in that river it would have meant something. Graham was a lovely little boy. Cornelius Derwinter tried to make it as right as he could but then …’ She looked startled and closed her mouth.
‘It’s all right,’ O’Reilly said. ‘Terrible thing, to lose your child.’
‘You can’t blame Will for feeling the way he does. The Black Dog has been his reason to get up in the morning. Cornelius couldn’t have meant the money to stop coming for us. He wanted us there. It was Leonard and Heather who interfered – but it was all going to be all right in the end if Alex would—’ Again the frightened, bewildered look.
‘Constable Smith is going to take you into the station, Cathy,’ O’Reilly said. ‘He’ll make sure you get to say your piece with a solicitor there. Always good to have a solicitor to guide you.’
‘I didn’t want anything to happen to Alex,’ Cathy muttered. ‘She’s kind, always was. If only she’d given up and gone away again.’ She let Smith guide her away.
Tony met his father’s eyes. ‘Alex got a call from St Mary’s Hospital in London. Supposedly Reverend Restrick is asking for her and Mrs Restrick had a nurse make a call to Alex. She’s on her way there now.’
By the time O’Reilly was on his feet he had car keys in one hand. ‘Do you know exactly what route she’d take?’ he asked Tony.
‘Yes.’ The shortest was obvious.
‘Do we have solid coordinates for her mobile yet?’ Lamb roared. ‘They’ve had long enough.’
‘Should do anytime now, Sarg,’ one of the line-drawers at the boards said.
Tony looked at the man over his shoulder. They were in crisis mode here and seriously searching for Alex.
‘Reverend Restrick is still in a coma,’ O’Reilly said, jogging for the door with Lamb behind him. ‘Absolutely no visitors. He’s had two surgeries to relieve the pressure on his brain. His wife can stand by his bed for five minutes at a time. If there had been any change in his condition, I’d know. There’s round-the-clock security on him. No one would call Alex and tell her to visit – no one who didn’t have another reason for wanting her on her own and away from here.’
They dashed down the steps outside.
‘You should have told us about the call Alex got right off,’ Lamb said through his teeth. ‘We’ve wasted time.’
‘I’m coming,’ Tony’s father said. ‘There are things you’ve got to know but we can’t hang around talking. I’ve been a fool. I didn’t think … Will … I just didn’t think it of him.’
‘We’re both coming,’ Tony said. He opened the back door of O’Reilly’s Volvo and got in. ‘Why not have me call her when you think the time’s right? If there’s someone with her who shouldn’t be, a call from the police could be dangerous.’
‘Why do you think we’re working on her location?’ Lamb said. ‘You don’t have to ring a mobile to find out where it is – if you’re lucky.’
They were triangulating or whatever they did. Using phone towers to try to find Alex. ‘You really think Will could be with her, don’t you?’
‘He might be,’ O’Reilly said, starting the car and swinging it in a tight circle before spitting snow and gravel from beneath racing wheels. ‘Now he’s our number one suspect for planting that obituary at Alex’s, it’s likely.’
‘Would he kill Edward because he blamed him for the accident that killed little Graham Cummings?’ Tony said. ‘If Edward went to the pub the night he died, Will might have recognized him and flipped out. Then, when Brother Percy showed up, he could have been afraid he’d let the cat out of the bag about Edward’s identity and the game would be over. I’m very sure he didn’t want that – I just can’t work out why. Not definitely.’
‘Cathy probably called Will after she was at the Derwinters’ this morning,’ Lamb said. ‘He’s already on the edge – make that over the edge. Hearing his boy’s death had been dismissed like that would be enough to finish it. I think he’s been trying to frighten Alex into leaving the village. Cathy backed that one up, sure.’
‘Leaving the pub he thinks should still be his, you mean,’ James Harrison said.