Jill sat on a stool at the bar in The Weaver’s Retreat. It was just after nine o’clock and the place was packed with regulars who called there after their evening meal.
Liz and Tony Hutchinson came in and, after the usual greetings and moans about the weather, the three of them sat at the table nearest the fire.
‘I wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t have snow soon,’ Tony remarked.
‘It feels cold enough.’ Jill held her hands out to the burning logs.
Inevitably, talk turned to Martin Hayden.
‘Tony told me that Sarah does your hair, Liz,’ Jill remarked.
‘Occasionally.’ Liz nodded. ‘She’s good with colour,’ she explained, ‘although I prefer Jon to do it when I’m having anything more drastic than a quick trim.’
‘What’s she like?’ Jill asked. ‘Does she talk of her family much?’
‘No. She’s one of those rare beings a hairdresser who doesn’t insist on (a) knowing your business and (b) telling you hers.’
‘I heard something yesterday,’ Tony put in. ‘I’m not sure if it’s true or if it’s idle gossip, but someone said Andy Hayden was spending a lot of time in Benedict’s.’ He took a swig of beer. ‘That takes a bit of believing, doesn’t it?’ He grimaced. ‘God knows what would happen if George found out about it.’
Benedict’s was Harrington’s lively gay club, and Tony was right. It took some believing.
George had made his thoughts known to Martin about what he called sissy poetry books. Why was George thinking along those lines? George and Andy were father and son, both working the farm, but they weren’t close. Was Andy gay? Was that why George was so hostile towards him?
‘It could be nonsense,’ Tony added. ‘It was Glen, the mechanic at the garage, who told me.’
‘Andy Hayden isn’t gay,’ Liz told them with certainty. ‘For a while, at least a year, he was seeing Lucy Rodgers.’
At Jill’s frown, she explained, ‘She’s a nurse at the vet’s in Harrington. I know her because we had to take Tony’s mother’s cat there quite often.’
‘And they’ve split up?’ Jill asked. ‘Recently?’
‘Yes. She had a whirlwind romance with a new vet at the practice and they’re due to be married at Easter.’
‘I wonder how Andy took that.’
‘I don’t know, but badly, I imagine. He used to worship her.’
‘Really?’
Before Jill could comment further, her phone rang. It was Max.
‘Where are you?’ he asked.
‘At the pub. You?’
‘Shivering outside your cottage. I need to talk to you.’
‘OK, I’ll walk up. Let yourself in. There’s a spare key under the pot on the right-hand side of the door the one with the winter pansies in it.’
‘Bloody hell, Jill. Why in hell’s name don’t you erect a sign all burglars, rapists and murderers welcome?’
She chose to ignore that. ‘Put the kettle on,’ she told him ‘and I’ll be there in five minutes.’
‘What I need doesn’t come out of a kettle,’ he said grimly, and she could hear him unlocking her door.
Jill cut the connection, said a hasty goodbye to Tony and Liz, left her unfinished drink on the table and stepped out into the cold.
It didn’t take long to walk the half-mile home, and she found Max in the sitting room nursing a glass which held a generous measure of whisky. She knew, just by looking at him, that something was very wrong.
‘What’s up?’
‘Josie Hayden’s dead,’ he said flatly.
Jill dropped on to the sofa, still wearing her coat and scarf.
‘Dead?’ The heating had been on all day and her cottage was warm, but she shivered and thought her teeth were about to start chattering. ‘Suicide?’
Max shook his head.
‘Murdered?’ She couldn’t believe it.
‘Do you want a drink?’ he asked, and she nodded.
Max went to the kitchen for a glass and poured her an equally generous measure from a bottle he must have brought with him. She was sure she had no whisky in the house.
‘Thanks.’ She took it from him, had a swallow and felt the warmth in her throat.
After a few moments, she took off her coat and scarf, and sat on the floor in front of the gas fire with her drink cradled in her hands.
‘Your friend found her,’ Max said quietly. ‘Ella Gardner.’
‘Oh, no!’ Ella had said she planned to call and offer her condolences. ‘What happened?’
‘Josie was at the farm alone. George and Andy were at a sale of farm machinery in Cumbria, and Sarah had gone back to work for the first time. It seems Josie let someone in –’
‘Someone she knew?’
‘We don’t know. Possibly. Anyway, they slit her throat.’
‘No!’ Jill was starting to shiver all over again.
‘We’ll know more tomorrow after the autopsy, but it seems she was cut badly after she was dead.’
‘Cut where?’
‘Everywhere. Face, arms, legs, breasts, genitalia.’
‘Dear God.’ No wonder Max looked wiped out. ‘Poor Sarah. Poor Ella, too. What a shock. Is she OK?’
‘Ella’s fine very calm considering. Sarah’s not so good. Understandably.’
‘Poor kid.’
They talked some more, and had another drink.
‘What about Brian Taylor?’ Jill asked. ‘You saw him today, yes?’
‘Yes, and he seemed a damn sight more forthcoming than Josie.’ But they both knew that meant nothing. ‘I suppose it’s just possible he drove straight to the farm before we saw him and killed her. I can’t see it, but it’s possible. We’re taking him in for questioning. We’ll keep him overnight and I’ll see him in the morning. Actually, I’d like
us
to see him in the morning.’
She nodded. ‘OK.’
‘George and Andy Hayden have a shed load of witnesses so we can discount them.’
‘You can’t discount George Hayden, Max!’ Jill didn’t care how many witnesses the man had. ‘His brother dies and, bingo, George inherits a farm that meant everything to him. He discovers his wife’s been unfaithful and that he’s brought up someone else’s son and, bingo, they’re both wiped out.’
Max was shaking his head.
‘He may not have done it himself,’ she allowed, ‘but he could easily have paid someone else to do it.’
‘I don’t think so.’
Jill didn’t know what to think. ‘At least we know the answer’s at the farm and not the school.’
‘Not necessarily, Jill. You see, that’s not all.’
‘Oh?’
‘No.’ He rubbed his hands across his face in a gesture of weariness. ‘Another pupil from Harrington High has been reported missing.’
‘No!’
‘Yes. A James Murphy.’
‘James? But I know him. And his parents.’
‘I thought you might.’
It was only the fourth of December but Jill’s first Christmas card had been delivered that very morning. It was from Emma, Gerald and James Murphy.
‘He stayed late at school for football practice,’ Max explained, ‘but he should have been home by five thirty.
His parents were planning to take him and a friend to the cinema. James hasn’t turned up.’
Dear God. What were they dealing with?
Jill could have slaughtered Max. Technically, it wasn’t his fault she felt like this, but she had to blame someone. If he hadn’t called at her cottage last night, she wouldn’t have had a drink. And if he hadn’t coaxed her into letting him sleep in her spare room, she wouldn’t have had another drink. And another.
This morning, she had the hangover from hell. He, on the other hand, looked as fresh as the morning dew.
It was hot and stuffy in Phil Meredith’s office and a lot of the conversation was going over Jill’s head. She needed water lots of it and fresh air.
She’d been at the morning’s briefing, and that had been depressing. They had a huge tangled mess to unravel. Millions of questions and no answers.
But it was always that way.
‘I’ve had the headmaster of Harrington High on the phone,’ Phil snapped, ‘saying he wants some answers. He’s not the only one. The school will be deserted today.
We’ll have a major panic on our hands if we don’t move quickly.’
‘All suggestions gratefully received,’ Max said pleasantly.
‘Don’t get bloody funny with me!’
‘I’m not,’ Max said, taking a breath. ‘My kids are at Harrington High so I know how the parents are feeling.’
A reminder that Harry and Ben attended the school seemed to calm Phil slightly. It didn’t do much for Jill. It didn’t look as if it had done much for Max either.
‘The answer is at Lower Crags Farm,’ Jill said quietly. She couldn’t talk any louder; her head hurt too much. ‘It has to be.’
‘There’s no link between the Haydens and James Murphy,’ Phil scoffed, dismissing that.
‘There has to be. We just haven’t found it yet.’
‘Jill.’ Phil spoke as if he were addressing a five-year-old. ‘A schoolboy is murdered. His mother is murdered. Another schoolboy is ’
‘He’s missing,’ she said. ‘That’s all. Missing. He’s not necessarily dead.’ Although she guessed that the three of them feared the worst. She hoped not, for Gerald and Emma Murphy’s sakes. ‘The answer has to be at Lower Crags Farm.’
‘We can’t afford to waste time on the farm, Jill!’
‘Grace is going to the school after she’s been to the postmortem,’ Max told Phil, speaking calmly, ‘to see if we can establish a link between Martin Hayden and James Murphy.’
‘And Brian Taylor was brought in last night so we’ll go to town on him,’ Jill said.
‘We’ve got divers in the canal, just in case,’ Max went on, ‘and we’ve got people talking to parents. They might supply that link.’
‘He vanished straight after football practice at the school,’ Jill put in, ‘and he’s another good-looking boy so it may be sexual. That puts Geoff Morrison high up the list.’
Phil shook his head in despair. ‘A forty-four-year-old woman has been butchered. That wasn’t some bloke with a liking for boys, was it?’
‘She might have found out who the killer was,’ Max pointed out.
‘Then it’s a pity she wasn’t working in this bloody place!’ Phil glared at them both. ‘I want some answers and bloody soon,’ he snapped, waving in the direction of the door.
Max looked at Jill, and she shrugged. Presumably, Phil had finished with them for the moment.
‘Oh, I’ve told everyone that overtime payments have been authorized,’ Max remarked casually. ‘That’s OK, isn’t it?’
‘Just get on with it!’ Meredith snapped.
He was a pain. First, he didn’t want Jill on the case; then he decides he not only wants her on the case, he wants her to have all the answers yesterday.
‘I need a coffee,’ she said as she closed Meredith’s door behind them.
Max grinned at her. ‘You wanna go easy on the booze in future, kiddo.’
‘Yes, well. I don’t get as much practice as you.’
He glanced at his watch. ‘You get a coffee, and I’ll see if Taylor’s been given another brew. It’ll do his nerves good to wait around a bit.’
‘Does he have a brief with him?’
‘He hadn’t the last I heard. Why? Are you hoping to see the boyfriend?’
The boyfriend? Her love life, or lack thereof, was the last thing on her mind right now.
‘No.’ She refused to rise to it. There was no need to tell him that Scott was in the States . . .
Her second coffee helped, and she gazed at the photographs they’d been given of James Murphy. She didn’t need photographs, she knew him too well, but they interested her. Unlike Martin Hayden, there was nothing posed about James. One photo showed him standing by his father’s car pointing to the L-plates. It had been taken three months ago on his seventeenth birthday. He hadn’t got the looks of Martin Hayden, but he was an attractive boy all the same. Tall, and dark-haired. He might appeal to Geoff Morrison, and he was good at sport. He was in the school’s football team.
She knew he was a typical seventeen-year-old. He was destined for university, but did only the minimum to get there. He was planning on a gap year first.
He didn’t have the same teachers as Martin Hayden. Apart from Bill Hicks who taught Maths, Donna Lord who taught English, and Geoff Morrison who looked after the football team, their teachers were different.
He played the guitar which was interesting. Apparently, he’d taught himself from an early age and he’d just formed a band with three other schoolboys. At least it was some sort of link. It wasn’t a great one, as dozens of boys played the guitar, but it was a link. It was the best they had so far.
George and Andy Hayden both had watertight alibis. But Jill, like everyone else on the force, had seen watertight alibis before. Those alibis were being checked, double-checked and checked again.
Was the answer at the farm? At times, she was convinced it was.
She’d been wrong before, though. Rodney Hill had reminded her of that when he’d been found hanged in his prison cell . . .
Brian Taylor had been given bacon sandwiches and cups of tea, and was chain-smoking when Jill and Max arrived to interview him. Having been assured that he wasn’t being charged as yet, he had waived his rights to a lawyer.
He looked shaken and very nervous. Nervous because he had something to hide? Or nervous because he’d been waiting for hours in this interview room?
He’d emptied one packet of cigarettes and went to his pocket for another while Max went through the necessary procedures and made sure the tapes were running.
‘Sorry, do you mind if I smoke?’ he asked, addressing Jill.
‘Not at all.’ Being stuck in a smoke-filled room always reminded her of home. Her mother might have quit smoking recently, but all Jill’s memories of her mother included the obligatory cigarette in her mouth. Which was why she’d just had an operation on her lung.
‘Yesterday morning, Mr Taylor, can you tell us where you were?’ Max began.
‘Yesterday? Well’ he took a huge drag on his cigarette ‘I was talking to you, wasn’t I?’
‘Before that,’ Max said patiently.
‘At home. My flight landed just after eight o’clock the night before, as you know. I drove straight home and I was there until you arrived to see me.’
‘You didn’t go anywhere before I called?’ Max asked.
‘No. Why?’
Max ignored that. ‘So you’ve no witnesses?’
‘None. Oh, the postman delivered a letter I had to sign for. He might remember. Well, whether he remembers or not, my signature and the time will be on the form at the post office. That was about eight thirty.’
‘You hadn’t seen or spoken to Mrs Hayden since you returned to England?’ Max asked.
‘No.’ He stubbed out his cigarette with hands that were shaking. ‘I filled the car with diesel when I got off the plane,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a fuel card so have to provide the current mileage figure when I fill up. If you check that, you’ll see that I drove home and haven’t used up any more miles.’
‘We’ll check it.’
‘Look,’ Taylor said, ‘I know it looks a bit coincidental, me trying to see Martin and then this happening, but I didn’t do anything. Why would I? I wanted to see him, that’s all.
Why would I kill him? My own son?’
‘It is very coincidental,’ Max agreed. ‘You remain silent for seventeen years and within a short time of you contacting the boy’s mother, he’s brutally murdered.’
‘It has nothing to do with me. I swear it.’ He frowned. ‘And why do you care what I was doing yesterday morning?’
‘Mrs Hayden was murdered,’ Max said simply.
Either Brian Taylor was an actor worthy of an Oscar, Jill thought, or he hadn’t known that.
‘Murdered?’ He fumbled for another cigarette. ‘I had no idea.’
Jill and Max watched him.
‘Really,’ he said, squirming. ‘I honestly didn’t know.’
‘Are you sure you don’t want a lawyer?’ Max asked him.
He considered it for a moment.
‘Well, no. I mean, if it happened yesterday morning, I’ve got proof that I was at home. All you need to do is check with the post office and check my car’s mileage. What time did you arrive? I was on the phone to Sue in the office. The time of the call will be on my mobile. And I sent some faxes and emails,’ he added, talking quickly, ‘so the time will be on those. I spoke to a lot of people.’
Jill and Max said nothing.
‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘How did she die? Oh, I suppose you can’t say.’ Brian Taylor shook his head. He looked dazed, confused and frightened. Jill, however, had seen killers look like that before. Just as she’d seen watertight alibis.
‘Mr Taylor,’ she began, ‘tell me about your affair with Mrs Hayden.’
He sat back in his seat slightly, sweat on his brow and his fingers hanging on to his cigarette like grim death.
‘I was a salesman I still am covering the Lancashire area,’ he explained, ‘and I was taking a short-cut home one day when my car broke down. I walked about half a mile and came to the farm. I called and asked if I might use their phone to call the AA.’
‘Mrs Hayden was alone?’
‘Yes. She made me a cup of tea while I waited for the breakdown man to appear and we chatted.’
‘About what?’ Jill asked.
‘Just trivia, I seem to recall. The weather, the farm, parking in Harrington, her family, my family – that sort of thing.’
‘You were married to your first wife at the time, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘Was it a happy marriage?’
‘Not really, no. To be honest, we’d talked about a divorce.’
‘And then what happened? The AA arrived?’
‘Yes. The chap couldn’t fix the car, so he took me home and dropped the car off at a garage.’
‘And when did you next see Mrs Hayden?’‘
A week or so later,’ he explained. ‘I was doing the same short-cut and stopped off at the farm to thank her.’
And he just happened to have red roses in the car? No. He was lying.
‘A spur of the moment thing?’
‘Yes.’
‘You took her flowers, I believe? Do you always drive around with flowers in your car?’
He frowned for a moment. ‘Did I take her flowers? I honestly don’t remember that.’
‘Red roses and white gypsophila,’ Jill told him. ‘Strange that she can remember and you can’t.’
‘Then I must have stopped somewhere to buy them,’ he said. ‘It’s a long time ago,’ he added.
‘So with or without flowers you called at the farm to thank her. Then what?’
‘We chatted. I suggested we meet in town one day. She was quite eager, I recall, although terrified of her husband finding out. A week or so after that, I phoned her and we met in town.’
‘Where?’
‘At the Harrington Hotel. I booked a room so that she’d feel safer.’
‘You made love?’
He nodded, which would mean nothing to people listening to the tape afterwards.
‘Was that a yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘Was she in love with you?’ Jill asked.
‘She said she was, but . . .’ He shook his head. ‘I think she was more in love with my lifestyle. I travelled around a bit, went to parties, socialized she was stuck on the farm with a man who seemed to ignore her for the most part.’
‘What happened when you realized she was pregnant?’
He had the grace to look ashamed.
‘I’m afraid I was angry,’ he admitted. ‘I thought she was lying. We’d been so careful, you see. I thought she wanted me to leave my wife and set up home with her. I didn’t believe her.’
‘How did she take that?’
‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘We were at the hotel. We had a row, and I stormed off.’
‘So how did you know the child was yours?’
‘I saw her in town about eighteen months later,’ he explained. ‘She had the boy in a pushchair. Even at that age, he was the image of me.’ His hands were shaking even more now. ‘She was different proud and angry. She’d always been a quiet thing, but she was angry. She went her way, and I went mine.’
‘How did you feel, knowing you had a child of your own?’
‘Strange,’ he admitted. ‘I kept thinking I should do something about it financially, if nothing else. But I didn’t want to wreck the boy’s home life. And if I’m honest, I didn’t want to get involved with Josie Mrs Hayden. She was fun for a while, but I’m afraid that’s all she meant to me.’
Jill gave him a pleasant smile. ‘Do you have any more children scattered across the country?’
‘No.’
‘Just Martin?’
‘Yes.’
‘How often did you see him?’
‘I told you.’ He frowned. ‘I didn’t.’
‘What? You’re telling me that you weren’t curious about him? You didn’t hang around his school, watching out for him? Come on, I’m sure you did. You will have parked opposite the gates, waiting for him to walk down the drive, watching to see if he still looked like you, to see if he was a handsome boy.’
‘I might have seen him a couple of times,’ he admitted at last.
‘A couple? Is that twice?’
‘Maybe a few more times.’
‘So is that what you did? Hung around the school gates waiting for him to appear?’
‘Yes.’
‘He was a good-looking boy, wasn’t he? You must have been proud of him.’
‘I wouldn’t say proud,’ he answered. ‘Apart from giving him his looks, I never did anything for him.’
‘Were you spotted when you hung around outside the school? Did any of the other children see you? Anyone ask you what you were doing?’
‘No. I wasn’t there that often.’
‘Are you sure? You must have been easy enough to spot. Wouldn’t some of Martin’s friends be curious about the man who looked just like him?’