Authors: Elizabeth Corley
Nightingale was working laboriously through the Joneses when a vague memory started to stir in her mind. Her subconscious was doing its best to tell her something which the tedium of the current job held at bay. In exasperation, and with a slight curse to all DCIs and DSs who could go traipsing around doing interviews, following up leads, anything other than sitting in the stuffy, overheated incident room, she went and made herself a cup of tea.
Standing, staring at the tea-bag as it begrudgingly gave up its flavour, her memory finally broke through. Tea forgotten, she literally ran back to her desk to pick up her car keys and notes, then left the incident room for the station.
Fenwick convened a review meeting on the case for Monday evening. There were still no more reported sightings of the killer. The detectives’ ideas were that:
Four days into the case and all they had were options and no facts to discount any of them.
The bottom line was no motive, no suspects, no leads.
General consensus favoured the second hypothesis. It was obvious Fenwick had no real enthusiasm for it but as the majority of murders are committed or arranged by a person known to the victim, he deployed the majority of the team, under Cooper, to following up any connections in an attempt to establish a motive.
WDC Nightingale arrived late towards the end of the meeting and was greeted by an array of sarcastic comments. In her rush to follow up her idea, she had left no note of where she had gone – a cardinal sin, as Cooper intended to point out.
‘We’ll have a word after the meeting, Nightingale.’ Cooper never joked on matters of discipline.
‘Yes, sir. I’m sorry, sir, only something came up.’
‘Of such importance that you clear off and then waltz in late? Then spit it out now.’
‘Yes, sir, at least I think so, sir.’
Cooper let the silence continue.
‘I was checking on the class of 1980, sir, and noticed a possible connection. Katherine Johnstone was at school with Deborah Waite, who married Derek Fearnside. She went missing in April and has never been found.’
Fenwick felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise and his mouth go dry. He stared hard at Nightingale in absolute silence as everyone else in the incident room waited expectantly, sensing his immediate interest and excitement. The Fearnside investigation had gone nowhere despite extraordinary efforts by Fenwick and Cooper to break it open. It had fallen by the wayside as other priorities took over. Lack of resources and other pressures had meant that the loose ends still remained untied. Now the victim of a grisly, premeditated, yet so far motiveless murder had been linked to Deborah Fearnside. His instincts screamed at him as his team sat and stared at his distracted face. It was not unheard of, in a small town like Harlden, for tragedy to befall two school friends within months
of each other, but he felt it was more than that. The connection was too close to his own intuition, and he still lived with his feelings of guilt about the unresolved Fearnside case. However oblique the connection – and merely being at school together proved nothing – Fenwick immediately decided to follow it up.
He assigned Taylor and Nightingale to find all the old schoolgirls and interview those associated with the anniversary performance whilst he personally took on the twin task of reviewing the Fearnside file and persuading the Superintendent to leave the full team on the case. The latter would be the most difficult, but he reckoned that he would have at least another week before he came under real pressure.
Fenwick sat at home in front of the fire and thought back over an extraordinary and disturbing day. He had been true to his word and had returned home in time to take his mother and son to the specialist, despite an extended visit to the incident room to review the reports and leave instructions for Cooper. They had travelled in silence, he and his mother, because they could find no words of comfort for each other, and Christopher because he now seemed incapable of speaking at all.
The consultant they were due to meet asked to talk to Fenwick first, alone, a long probing interview he had found difficult and embarrassing. By the end of it, although the doctor has been at great pains to appear neutral throughout, Fenwick felt a complete failure as a parent. Next his mother had gone in alone, for even longer. Then finally Christopher. At the end of two hours they had been told that the little boy was seriously disturbed but there were no obvious signs of mental illness. More appointments were made – with behavioural psychologists, specialists on autism, post-traumatic stress disorders – the list was endless. And still Christopher remained totally withdrawn into his own world.
As Fenwick escaped from the uncomfortable silence at home into the Fearnside papers he tried not to think about the next few weeks. The specialist had offered little hope of immediate improvement. He had added the appointment dates his mother had given him to his diary but resolutely refused to discuss the matter in the absence of facts.
Instead he turned to the comfort of the ageing missing person’s file like an old friend. He found his notations in margins, blunt comments on the scrappiness of the original investigation and a checklist of follow-up actions that had barely been started before resources had been withdrawn from the case. He read them all with new eyes, alert for links to Katherine Johnstone’s murder.
By the time he went to bed, he was frustrated with his lack of new thinking but secretly reassured by the quality of his original work. His checklist of questions was resurrected with only a few adjustments, made relevant by the recent murder. He lay in bed watching the headlights of occasional passing cars send parallel beams across the ceiling. There were no obvious patterns in this case. A classroom connection was all that linked the two, and in the dark solitude he had to admit it was a tenuous link, attractive because of the lack of other leads. He decided to forget the Johnstone case for a moment and focus again on Deborah Fearnside, not the facts of her disappearance but the reasons for it.
Had she run off, lost her memory, been abducted, traded in white slavery, been killed accidentally and hidden, been murdered? Or had she been abducted and then murdered? For each of the reasons he had a question – why now? Supposing there was a link to her school days, what could be enough to kill her? There were rarely more than six reasons for murder: greed, love, hate, revenge, jealousy, fear – was there a legacy from an old school teacher or friend and one of the legatees was killing the others? Unlikely, but still worth adding a question to the interview checklist.
Love or hate – had someone had a desperate love affair that had gone wrong and for some reason waited all these years to kill the person/people that had spurned them? It didn’t stack up. And why the interest in Octavia Anderson’s letter about the concert? Still, questions on old boyfriends would go on the list for the morning.
Fear – was there a guilty secret? For some reason, had someone lost their nerve and decided to kill off all parties to it
rather than risk disclosure? He couldn’t dismiss the idea as easily as the others but it seemed far-fetched. All three women, Deborah, Kate, Octavia (assuming she was involved at all), seemed to have had normal schooling and successful lives – but then he had met too many well-brought-up, urbane wife beaters, friendly rapists and polite murderers to allow a collective display of good upbringing to deflect him.
As a motive, fear remained, linked to the guilty secret theory perhaps? Which brought his wandering mind smoothly to revenge. In all his years as a policeman he had only come across three cases where a criminal act had been motivated by revenge, and all had involved so-called neighbours ‘getting their own back’ on each other. One had been wilful damage (an offending fence taken down and destroyed); one a public nuisance charge (three pit bulls allowed to roam and defecate on a village cricket field were poisoned and died – a member of the second XI had been charged), and one grievous bodily harm (a brick, used as a missile had struck a convicted dangerous driver at an all-night summer barbecue, breaking his nose and fracturing his skull).
He remembered each case in detail. As a boy he had devoured Agatha Christie’s books and in every other plot it had appeared that smouldering revenge lay at the heart of violent crime. Consequently, from the early days of his police career he had looked for the vengeful culprit – and had only ever succeeded in finding these three.
So he circled around the revenge motive suspiciously. It fitted neatly in with the guilty secret but he found it hard to believe that Deborah Fearnside and Katherine Johnstone had done anything worthy of their execution. He was shocked at the word his drifting mind provided, dramatic and threatening. Had the women
really
been executed for something judged by the murderer to be a crime? The idea was compelling but highly unlikely. In the dark grey hours of the early morning Fenwick finally drifted into a dream-filled, restive sleep.
Tuesday opened, a glorious sunny day; light winds and low
humidity made the heat bearable. From before breakfast everyone on the Johnstone case, with the exception of Fenwick, was calculating what time they would finish that evening and escape into summer.
The sight of DS Cooper, white-board marker in hand, awaiting their arrival, lowered everyone’s spirits. The officers charged with interviewing close friends and relatives were summarily dispatched, bemused by additional questions on legacies, boyfriends and dark secrets from the past. Fenwick personally described the further tasks he had in mind for investigating the class of 1980.
DC Nightingale had arranged to meet her fiancé at the local pub and then go on for dinner with friends. It had been a slightly risky promise to make, given that she was working on a murder but there were so few developments apart from the possible link with Deborah Fearnside that she had been pretty confident her work would be finished by six at the latest. Jeff had been away on business for ten days and she was dying to see him again. But once Sergeant Cooper had finished briefing them, she had to give up any idea of meeting him early after all.
She tried unsuccessfully to call him at work and ended up leaving an apologetic message on his voicemail. Personal life reordered, she committed herself willingly to her share of the work. It had, after all, been her observation that had given this side of the investigation new life and she felt an obscure ownership. Fenwick wanted them to report back at five and decide what to do next; the day already seemed too short.
Fenwick commandeered Cooper to help him find out more about the anniversary concert. The list of organisers and participants was awesome. In addition to the school orchestra and singers, there were the county choir and orchestra and three local choirs – in total 175 names. Most interviews could be dealt with by phone. Fenwick selected the key people for himself and left the rest to Cooper to sort out.
Nine hours later hot, sweaty, dispirited members of the Sussex constabulary reconvened.
‘Nothing.’ Cooper’s voice was flat, hoarse.
‘Constables?’
‘Not a lot really, sir.’ DC Nightingale spoke on their behalf. She was bitterly disappointed. ‘None of the school friends we’ve contacted so far could shed any light on the disappearance of Deborah Fearnside and the murder of her classmate. One, Leslie Smith, was a friend of Deborah Fearnside when she went missing. She had been due to go with her on the day she disappeared, in fact. She’s convinced the modelling opportunity was real – she said they went through too much to be selected for it to be anything else. Oh and, sir, she says can we stop bothering her. We’ve apparently already called her about the choir and about Kate Johnstone so she was pretty upset.’
‘I don’t care what Mrs Smith thinks, I want you to chase up
all
the loose ends as soon as you’ve finished with the school friends.’
‘Sergeant?’
Cooper was already flicking through his notes.
‘Smith’s a member of the county choir. Not surprising really, given the—’
‘Musical tradition of the school. Yes, Sergeant – thank you.’
‘And you, sir?’
‘Nothing really. The various choirs and orchestras appear to rehearse separately until about three weeks before the day. Then they practice together three or four times before a dress rehearsal and the Mass itself. It’s an important event for the school and county and they’re delighted that Octavia Anderson will be there – because of her the other soloists they’ve managed to get are much better than they expected and it looks as if the city mayor is going to be there. No one’s received any threats. Nothing strange has happened – except for the unfortunate murder of Katherine Johnstone – and I got the impression that her death, and my line of questioning, were an embarrassment they could do without. Oh and by the way, apparently the ACC’s wife is chairwoman of the fund-raising committee. All the proceeds of the concern will go to charity. The top ticket price is going to be £100 including the reception, if you can believe it. They’ve raised the price because of Anderson. And I was told
most have already been sold to the great and the good.’
Fenwick looked at him glumly. More politics to cope with.
‘So where does that leave us?’ It was almost a rhetorical question.
‘Well, we’ve got the interviews to finish off; the disappearance of Deborah Fearnside to investigate and … that’s about it. Oh, apart from checking Anderson’s alibi, and you said you would do that.’ Cooper sounded tired but there was no trace of scepticism in his voice. He still might not believe that Fenwick’s primary line of enquiry was the right one but that was a conversation the two of them would have again privately – not in front of the other ranks.