Those fingers slowed slightly.
‘I’ve had a chat with the police, though,’ Jill continued, ‘and now they’re curious. Very curious. They’re talking to owners of every boat in the area.’
Claire said nothing. For a full twenty minutes. When Jill spoke, she merely hummed tunelessly.
‘I can’t waste time here,’ Jill said pleasantly. ‘I’m on my way to Worcestershire to have a chat with your husband.’
Claire merely shrugged.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll let you know as soon as the police find anything.’
There was no response from Claire so Jill left her to her worries and headed down the M6 to Worcestershire.
Traffic was backed up where the M5 joined the M6 but, other than that, Jill’s journey went smoothly and she was soon sharing a room with a sullen Peter Lawrence. A young constable sat alongside Jill as they tried to get him to talk.
She wasn’t hopeful. Jill had assumed he’d been found trying to break into a specific narrowboat. He hadn’t. He’d been walking along the River Avon checking on half a dozen that were moored there. All six had been unoccupied but the owners of the last one had returned from an evening at the pub and called the police.
‘So what made you think of boats, Peter?’ she asked him.
‘Nothing really.’
‘It’s funny that. Something made me think along the same lines.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes. And do you know what, we both thought of boats for exactly the same reason. Because of something Claire said.’
He scuffed his feet back and forth on the floor.
‘She told me she’d like to live on one,’ Jill went on. ‘Something in the way she said it made me think that maybe, just maybe, she had experience of boats, that perhaps she knew someone who lived on one.’
He shrugged.
Unlike the interview suite at Harrington, this one was hot and stuffy. Peter Lawrence was sweating.
‘So we assume you were breaking into the narrowboat with the intention of stealing whatever you could find,’ the constable said. ‘That’s a serious matter, as you know. When we heard from Lancashire that you might be looking for someone, we thought maybe you had a valid reason to be there. It seems we were wrong.’
Lawrence thought about that.
‘Something has made you think of boats,’ Jill said. ‘As unlikely as it seems, Claire must have a friend who had access to one. Why don’t you save us all, you especially, a lot of time and tell us that friend’s name.’
‘I don’t know her name,’ he snapped.
Great.
‘But Claire mentioned someone?’
He nodded.
‘What did she say?’
‘I found a phone number scribbled on a fag packet in her coat,’ he said on a long sigh. ‘Ages ago it was. I thought it was some bloke. Anyway, according to her, the number belonged to her best mate.’
‘And she didn’t tell you a name?’
‘Not that I remember. She was sad, she said, because this mate was going off with some bloke she’d met.’
‘And he owned a boat?’
‘Yeah.’ He thought for a moment. ‘She won’t still be with him, though. This mate of Claire’s, I mean. She was a prostitute, same as Claire, but the bloke knew nothing about that.’
Even if the relationship
had
lasted, the couple could be living in Australia by now.
‘All I know,’ Lawrence went on, ‘was that he lived on a boat in Evesham. And Claire’s mate—she said she was the sort you could trust with your life.’
And with her daughter’s life.
This girl, whoever she was, must have been a rare find for a woman like Claire who didn’t trust enough to make friends easily …
The drive back to Lancashire took three and a half hours, and Jill went straight to headquarters where she was just in time for the evening briefing. The first person she saw was Grace, who was trying to get a coffee from the machine.
‘Anything?’ Jill asked her.
‘Damn thing. It’s taken me half an hour to get a cup.’
‘I meant anything from Worcestershire?’
‘Nothing. And don’t raise your hopes, Jill. It would be virtually impossible to hide a kid like Daisy for so long. We launched a massive search at the time. No, someone would have seen her long before now.’
Jill knew she had a point.
‘How confident are you that Daisy’s still alive?’ Grace asked.
She wouldn’t bet her cottage on it. ‘Seventy-five per cent,’ she answered and Grace whistled through her teeth.
‘If you’re wrong, you’re going to be in deep—’
‘I know,’ Jill cut her off, not wanting to consider the possibility of being wrong and the consequences for all concerned.
But she wasn’t alone. Peter Lawrence had been convinced enough to go to Worcestershire …
After the briefing, she went to her office, pushed aside all thoughts of rivers in Worcestershire, and checked her emails. She fired off quick answers to half a dozen and then picked up the sheet of paper on which she’d scribbled all suspects for the murder of Bradley Johnson. What bothered her most was that she knew every one of them. They were her neighbours.
Phoebe had a motive. Her husband had been sleeping around and might have been on the verge of leaving her for all they knew. She’d had opportunity, too. Yet why would she go to the trouble of killing him in Black’s Wood? It would be too risky. Why not do the deed at the manor and trot out the well-worn story of him disturbing a burglar?
But she didn’t think this was a family matter. The Johnsons were one of those close-knit families who, although they had a wide circle of acquaintances, were short on close friends. Phoebe kept to herself and the boys stuck together. They were a family who always thought they had to be on show. They wanted to stay private, to keep their petty arguments to themselves.
Damn it, it was always the same. Every case she worked on, the doubts plagued her. She’d got it wrong before, big style, and that mistake had been partly responsible for costing a man his life.
Was she wrong to dismiss Phoebe?
What about Hannah Brooks? She had a motive. Johnson was threatening to end her career and, with it, in all probability, her marriage. She had even admitted to seeing him on that fateful afternoon. Why the admission? Because someone had spotted her? Either way, it would have been easy enough for her to wait until Ella had continued walking, then follow him into the wood. Her grandfather had owned dogs all his life so Hannah would have walked through Black’s Wood countless times. Just like her grandfather, she would know every tree.
Gordon Brooks had an alibi. But so what? Just because work colleagues said he was at the office all day didn’t necessarily mean that he was. If he’d got wind of Hannah and Bradley’s relationship, he might have been driven to murder. But was he such an accomplished actor? Yesterday evening, he’d been genuinely shocked, angered, hurt and every other damn thing one might expect. Hadn’t he?
‘Yay!’ Grace burst into the room, completely abolishing Jill’s train of thought. ‘We’ve got John Barry!’
This was a real breakthrough as Tom McQueen’s minder—or driver—hadn’t been seen since his boss had been murdered.
‘You’ll never guess where,’ Grace said grinning. ‘Just down the road at Manchester airport. He was about to board a plane to Ireland. I’m going to have great fun with him,’ she added gleefully.
‘Me too, I hope.’
John Barry had taken over the role of chief suspect the second McQueen was found dead. He’d have killed Khalil. Possibly, no probably, on McQueen’s orders. Then, perhaps they argued. Perhaps McQueen didn’t recompense his hired guns highly enough. John Barry would have taken exception to that and decided to teach McQueen a lesson.
There was a flaw to that argument. With McQueen dead, Barry couldn’t expect a pay rise. And how the hell did Tessa fit into the picture?
If she really didn’t know the circumstances surrounding her boyfriend’s death, why leave her for dead on the back streets of Harrington?
They would worry about that later. Now that Barry had been found, they could, hopefully, arrange an identification parade and see if Claire would identify him as the man sent to rough her up, the same man sent to get Daisy.
Jill’s phone rang and she saw from the display that her mother was calling.
‘Hi, Mum!’ Even her mother had to make more sense than this tangled mess.
Max was getting annoyed, seriously annoyed, with John Barry, and he was a step away from strangling the bloke’s lawyer.
Joe Hale, defence lawyer to the lowlife, was doing no more to earn his money than advise his client not to answer Max’s questions.
‘On the evening in question, January the twentieth last year, Tom McQueen’s car was seen on Maltby Hill, less than five hundred yards from where Muhammed Khalil’s body was found. Were you driving the car?’
‘I was asked that same question a year ago.’ For once, Barry answered without consulting his lawyer.
‘Yes, and you told us then that you weren’t driving it. Perhaps you’ve had a rethink.’
‘Hey, look, I can’t be expected to remember that far back. If I told you I wasn’t, then I wasn’t. Perhaps Mr McQueen was. Hell, even Mrs McQueen drove the car occasionally.’
‘Muhammed Khalil worked for your boss. McQueen was dealing—crack, I gather—and Khalil tried to do the dirty on him. Khalil got greedy and pretended he’d been robbed of your boss’s precious crack. In reality, he sold the goods himself.’
‘Crack?’ Barry smiled at that. ‘That’s a very serious allegation.’
‘It is.’
‘You must be thinking of the wrong man. My boss knew nothing about drugs.’
‘Khalil panicked,’ Max went on. ‘He heard McQueen was after him so he packed a few belongings and walked out on his girlfriend. He was on the run from McQueen—or one of his sidekicks. The next thing, we find him with a bullet through his head.’
‘It’s not safe out there, is it? I’m always saying the government should put more coppers on the streets.’
‘As well as supplying the area with crack, McQueen had a penchant for prostitutes. Who drove him on those nights? You?’
‘Wrong man, Chief Inspector. My boss had a beautiful wife.’
‘He did, but he screwed prostitutes.’
‘Oh, I can’t believe that.’
‘Where exactly have you been since McQueen’s body was pumped full of bullets?’
‘I’ve told you time and time again,’ he said patiently. ‘I had a holiday booked in Scotland. It was booked six months ago. I go up there for Christmas and Hogmanay every year.’ He smiled slyly. ‘Don’t tell me you haven’t managed to check that out yet.’
They’d scrutinized every last detail and, sod it, it all checked out, just as John Barry claimed.
‘And you didn’t hear of your boss’s sudden demise? I can’t believe that.’
‘Not a whisper.’
Max’s patience had worn well beyond thin.
‘So you return from Scotland, and go home to unpack. Then, within twelve hours, you’re heading off to Ireland.’
‘That’s right.’ John Barry leaned back in his seat, massive arms crossed against bulging chest muscles, and eyes twinkling with devilment. He was confident they had nothing on him.
Max had the sinking feeling that he was right.
‘And you didn’t think to check in with your boss,’ he pushed on.
‘No. Why should I? I was on holiday.’
‘I believe my client is due a break,’ the oily little lawyer said.
‘Spinal cord preferably,’ Max muttered.
He suspended the interview and went to get himself a coffee while Barry was fed and watered. He got two coffees and took them along to Jill’s office.
‘Is that for me?’ She reached out for the plastic cup. ‘You must be a mind reader.’
‘God, I wish.’ He dragged a chair across the room and dropped on to it. ‘There’s no possibility that he’s telling the truth, is there?’
‘John Barry? Never in a million years.’
‘He was definitely in Scotland the night before and the night after McQueen was killed,’ he pointed out.
‘But you know as well as I do that, as soon as he knew what was going on, he’d have made sure he was a good distance away.’
‘Hm. But he made the booking six months ago.’
Jill frowned at him. ‘Surely you don’t believe his story.’
‘No, of course not.’ And yet—‘I can’t understand how he can have had anything to do with that sodding shooting.’
‘He wouldn’t have been working alone,’ Jill said easily. ‘We wouldn’t expect him to be. He was seen with McQueen too often. It had to look like an honest, working relationship.’
Max felt defeated. He was no closer to solving Khalil’s murder than he had been last year. Every lead they followed took them straight back to square one. They had nothing.
‘And now the lying bastard is having lunch courtesy of the taxpayer,’ he said darkly. ‘Bloody marvellous.’
His coffee finished, he tossed his empty cup in the waste-bin and got to his feet.
‘I’ll go and see how much more of his story we’ve managed to confirm.’
‘I’ll come with you. I need to stretch my legs.’
Several officers, Fletch and Grace included, were busy on their phones, but there was nothing new.
‘We’re missing something vital,’ Max said to no one in particular. ‘Something’s been bugging me about McQueen’s murder from the start.’
But what?
He thought back to that afternoon, to his meeting with Barbara McQueen, to their time in the coffee bar, to her calling the taxi’s office, to her stopping for those cases of wine …
‘Grace, have we got Barbara McQueen’s phone records yet?’ he asked.
‘The landline, yes. The last I heard, we were still waiting for her mobile details. Why?’
‘Just curious,’ he said, still not sure which direction his thoughts were taking. ‘Hurry it along, will you? Check the calls she made on her mobile the day he was killed.’
Why exactly had he gone into the house that day? If she’d managed to get a taxi, and if she hadn’t insisted on stopping for that wine …
Yet she couldn’t have known he would be in Harrington that afternoon. He’d only stopped the car and decided to go for a coffee on impulse. And she couldn’t have known he would be walking round that corner.
All the same, he’d made a damn good witness that day. Walking into the house with her like that, he’d seen her outpourings of shock and grief at first hand.