Trick of the Dark (49 page)

'I've heard of them, yes.'

'Well, she used to know Jay years ago, when they were both undergraduates. Anyway, she said something about Jay's issues all going back to her mother. Nothing revelatory - if I'd thought about it, I'd have said exactly the same thing, it's basic. But in the context of what I'd been thinking about, it just clicked and I thought, "Of course. And if she is a killer, it's entirely possible her supposedly missing mother was the first victim." So I thought I'd take a look.'

'So do many of your clients kick off by murdering their mothers?'

It was Charlie's turn for the dark chuckle. 'I think it happens a lot more than we know about. Anyway, did you manage to find someone for me to talk to?'

'Like you said, it was twenty years ago. But that has an upside as well as the obvious downside that there's not likely to be any senior officers still serving.' He paused expectantly.

Charlie obliged. 'What's the upside?'

'It's been so long, there's not likely to be anything sensitive in there. And since you are an accredited Home Office expert witness--'

'You can't say that. I'm suspended,' Charlie protested.

'Damn, I knew there was something I forgot. It's OK, Charlie, they couldn't give a shit, not over case papers from 1990. If anybody calls you on it, tell them I've got the memory retention of a goldfish. Look, you'll be fine. It's not like you don't know how to behave in a cop shop.'

'So they're expecting me?'

'That's right. Because it's such an old case, the paperwork isn't held at the local office or at HQ. They've got a dedicated storage facility near force headquarters at Ponteland. I'll text you the address and the directions. The woman who runs it is a retired sergeant. Hester Langhope is her name. She wants you to give her an hour's notice. I'll text you her number as well.'

'Thanks, Nick. I owe you a big drink.'

'You do. By the way, how did it go with Corinna?'

'I took an executive decision to bullshit her. I told her there was no evidence because Jay hadn't done anything.'

There was a long pause, then Nick said, 'It's just as well you don't do this for a living. I don't think private investigators are meant to make it up as they go along. I thought we'd decided that she probably had done all of them? We just didn't have enough evidence?'

'We did. But "not proven" isn't a good verdict to deliver to someone who's already said she'd rather take the law into her own hands than sit quietly while her daughter shacks up with a woman she considers the lesbian equivalent of Hannibal Lecter. So until I get anything approaching solid evidence, the sane thing is to keep lying to Corinna.' Charlie slowed to let a white van cut in front of her as the three lanes narrowed to two.

'And you're comfortable with Magda Newsam under Jay's roof?'

'You sound like Corinna. I don't think Magda's at risk. It sounds like they're besotted with each other. Besides, Jay doesn't do crimes of passion. Her murders are strictly functional. They're about getting what she wants. And right now, she's got that. Come on, Nick, you allegedly did a degree in psychology, you should be as sure of this as I am.'

'I suppose,' he said. 'OK. I'm texting you that stuff now. Call me when you've done your digging.'

Charlie quickly understood how Hester Langhope had ended up spending her retirement running the evidence and records-storage facility for Northumbria Police. Within minutes of meeting her, it was obvious that she married terrifying efficiency with the sort of personal warmth that makes people want to sit down and unburden themselves of their woes. Not that she looked motherly. She was tall and rangy with the kind of haircut and make-up that require minimal commitment in the morning. Her jeans were clean and pressed, her Northumbria Police polo shirt spotless and her trainers gleamed in the fluorescent light. Though she was clearly in her late fifties, Langhope still moved like an athlete.

When Charlie arrived, Langhope was at the front counter to greet her. After inspecting her ID, she led Charlie into the bowels of a warehouse crammed with shelving jammed with file boxes. As they walked, Langhope asked about Charlie's journey, with every appearance of genuine interest. She led the way to a bare office at the far side of the warehouse. It contained a table, two chairs, a file box. Langhope opened the box and presented Charlie with the lid. For a moment she was baffled, till she realised that taped to the inside was a log of who had inspected it. 'You'll need to sign for it,' Langhope said. 'You'll see the history of reviews. After the investigation was mothballed, it had an annual review for the first five years. Then every two years for the next six. Now it's every five years. You'll see the last one was 2008.' She tapped it with her biro. 'NFA. No further action.'

'I'm not really expecting to find anything,' Charlie said.

'DS Nicolaides said you're looking for possible victims of a serial offender?'

'That's right. Jenna Stewart fits the profile. I want to see if there are any possible intersections. It's a long shot.'

Langhope smiled. 'But sometimes they're the ones that pay off. I'll leave you to it. I'm sorry, but I have to lock you in for security reasons.' She pointed to a button on the wall by the door. 'If you need anything - coffee, toilet, to go outside for a smoke - just press the bell and someone will come and fetch you.'

Charlie was impressed. Most of the evidence stores she had been in took the view that if you were in the building, you were trustworthy. Experience had shown how empty that confidence had too often been. But nobody was going to walk out the door with Hester Langhope's treasures. Not unless they'd signed for them first. With a sigh, Charlie withdrew the stack of papers that filled the box and set to work.

What it boiled down to was this. Everything had seemed normal in the Calder household on the morning of Friday, 11 October 1990. Howard Calder had left to catch the bus to work as usual at five past eight. Jay - or Jennifer, as she had been then - had dawdled over breakfast, complaining of toothache. Her mother had called the dentist at half past eight, arranging an emergency appointment for twenty past nine. Jenna had written a note for her daughter to hand in at school to account for her lateness, then given her bus fare to make sure she arrived at the dentist on time. That was the last Jay saw of her mother. After the dental appointment, Jay had returned home because she felt dizzy and sick. The house was empty, but she thought nothing of it because her mother had been working as a volunteer with a project doing up a block of old people's flats nearby. She'd gone to bed and slept the day away.

When Howard Calder returned from work, he was surprised to find only Jay at home. Jenna had never failed to be back from her volunteer work in time to prepare the family's evening meal. He and Jay waited till six, then Howard walked over to the restoration project. He found the building locked up and deserted. It took him the best part of an hour to track down the warden of the flats, who told him the work was now complete. Only a handful of volunteers had been there that day, putting the finishing touches to a couple of the flats. He recognised Jenna from Howard's description, but had no recollection of seeing her that day. She'd been working last on flat 4C, and he thought that had been finished the day before.

Howard returned home, but Jenna still hadn't turned up or phoned. He decided to call the police to report her missing. Charlie imagined the officer taking the call. Another wife who'd had enough of a husband who couldn't believe she'd have the cheek to walk out on him. The officer had suggested Howard should check to see if any of his wife's personal items were missing. At that point, it hadn't even occurred to Howard that Jenna might have left him.

It didn't take him long to work out what was missing. A small suitcase, some underwear and a couple of blouses, toothbrush and toiletries, her passport, birth certificate and a framed photograph of Jay, aged six. All you'd need to walk away from a life and start over, Charlie thought. It was amazing how little you could get away with.

The police weren't very interested, and Charlie couldn't blame them. But Howard was persistent. He tracked down the other volunteers at the project and learned that his wife had been friendly with the project manager, a Dutchman called Rinks van Leer. Van Leer had returned to Holland but was due to begin a new restoration scheme in York a week later. Howard went to York, expecting to find Jenna, but she wasn't there and van Leer denied that she had left Roker with him.

So Howard had gone back to the police. This time, they took a little more notice. It was unusual for a woman to abandon a child, even a sixteen-year-old, without a word and without any obvious boyfriend to go to. But their inquiries soon hit a brick wall. They spoke to their counterparts in Holland but there was no evidence that Jenna had ever been there and she'd certainly not been with van Leer, who had been staying with friends in Leyden for most of the week. None of the other volunteers admitted to having seen Jenna on the Friday she'd disappeared. Charlie had the distinct impression that Jenna Calder would soon have drifted off the police radar had it not been for Howard's weekly visits to the station demanding an update. He was adamant that while she might have gone away willingly, she must have been murdered because nothing else could explain her silence. After a year of this, the file noted tersely, 'Mr Calder was advised that the case was no longer a priority and that if there were any developments he would be contacted.' The case reviews had been thorough but routine. There were no developments.

The file also noted tersely that Calder's stepdaughter had moved out two weeks after her mother's departure to lodge with a teacher from her school. It noted Jay's belief that her mother had run away with a boyfriend because her stepfather was 'an oppressive bastard'. She believed her mother's silence arose from a determination not to give Calder the slightest clue as to her whereabouts. An officer had noted, 'Jennifer seems reconciled to the idea. She does not blame her mother and claims she would have done the same thing in her shoes.'

Charlie sat back, digesting what she'd read. From a police perspective, there was nothing suspicious about Jenna Calder's disappearance. Women and men walked out on their families all the time without warning. Books had been written about the impact of a parent or a partner cutting themselves adrift from their previous lives. Charlie had interviewed people on both sides of the divide - the abandoned and the abandoners - and she felt deep sympathy for both groups. It happened more often than most people liked to believe possible. So it wasn't surprising that it had been regarded as a relatively insignificant missing persons case.

But it you looked at it from the perspective of someone investigating Jay Stewart's past for possible murder victims, the case took on a different appearance. Because the one thing that leapt out from the pile of pages was that the version of that Friday morning that appeared in
Unrepentant
was very different from the one contained in the police records. According to what Charlie had read, Jay had gone to the flats to confront her mother and Rinks. But the building had been locked up and the caretaker had told her the work was finished. She'd gone home, convinced she and her mother would be leaving Roker behind for a new life with Rinks. But she hadn't found Jenna and she'd never seen her again.

Charlie recognised that Jay might have tweaked reality for a more dramatic narrative, though in this instance, it didn't seem to have improved the quality of the story. Relating the visit to the dentist might have slowed the pace, however. And of course, the great advantage of the version in the memoir was that it gave Jay a more dynamic role. Rather than going to the dentist and coming home, where her mother never returned, it inserted her into the narrative, taking her to the very site of her illicit meetings with Rinks.

The crucial point remained that Jay had no alibi for the day her mother disappeared. She'd gone to the dentist, but she hadn't carried on to school. She claimed she'd been in bed all day following her visit to the dentist, but there was no corroboration. Come to that, there was no evidence that she'd actually been to the dentist at all since nobody had thought to check. If you discounted Jay's evidence to the police or to her readership, there was no reason to believe that Jenna had ever left the house.

'Get a grip,' Charlie said aloud as she replaced the paperwork in the box. Even if Jay had killed her mother in the family home, it was beyond belief that a sixteen-year-old could have disposed of the body without a trace before Howard Calder got home from work. Charlie knew from her own experience of dealing with killers that getting rid of a corpse is far from simple, especially in a country as densely populated as the UK. Unless Charlie could come up with another scenario, Jay remained off the hook.

She rang the bell and waited for Hester Langhope to release her. There was only one other person who might have some insight to offer. But Charlie didn't hold out much hope of Howard Calder shedding light on the mysterious disappearance of his wife. If he'd had anything to say, he'd have said it years before to the police. But at least she had an address, thanks to the police files.