Chill Factor (35 page)

Annette collapsed in a fit of giggling. When she’d nearly stopped she said: “Oh, Charlie, I do…” Then she did stop.

“You do what?” I asked, but she shook her head. I reached out, putting my arm across her shoulders and pulling her towards me, meeting no resistance. I buried my
face in her mass of hair, smelling it that close for the first time. “You do what?” I insisted. “Tell me.”

“I…I…I do enjoy being with you,” I heard her muffled voice say.

“That counts for a lot,” I told her, and felt her nod in agreement. I tilted her chin upwards and kissed the lips I’d longed to kiss for a long time. A grown-up kiss, tonight, with no holding back. She broke off before I wanted to.

As I held her I said: “I’ve dreamed of that ever since I first saw you.”

She replied with a little “Uh” sound.

“It’s true. I’m not looking for a one-night stand, Annette,

or a bit on the side. You know that, don’t you?”

“Aren’t you?” she replied.

“No. I want you to believe that.”

“Take me home, please.”

I started the engine and pulled my seatbelt back on. We drove most of the way to Heckley in silence. As we entered the town I said: “If luck’s on our side we’ll find something tomorrow to link Silkstone with other attacks in Somerset.”

“Do you think you will?” Annette asked.

“Depends whether he did them,” I replied. “And even then, it’s a long shot.” As we turned into her street I said: “I don’t know what to think. About anything. Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth bothering.” We came to a standstill
outside
the building which contains her flat. “Here we are,” I said. “Thank you for a pleasant evening, Annette. Sorry if I stepped out of line. It won’t happen again.”

She shook her head, the light from the street lamps
giving
her a copper halo that swayed and shimmered like one of van Gogh’s wind-blown cypress trees. “You didn’t step out of line, Charlie,” she told me.

“Honest?”

“Mmm. Honest.”

“Good. I’m glad about that.”

She reached for the door handle, like Sophie had done,
then hesitated and turned to me in exactly the same way. “What do you have against one-night stands and a bit on the side?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I replied. “Nothing at all.”

I held her gaze until she said: “Would you like to come in?”

“Yes,” I told her. “I’d like that very much.”

I blamed the traffic for being late. Bob asked if I’d come down the Fosse Way or Akeman Street, but I said: “Oh, I don’t know,” rather brusquely and asked him what he had for me. I realised later that it was an office joke, probably imitating one of the traffic officers who always swore that the
quickest
way from A to B was via Q, M and Z.

Plenty was the answer. I wanted to see the basic stuff first and then move on to the specific. I asked myself, as I looked at the ten-by-eights of poor Caroline’s body, if this was
necessary
. Couldn’t I have gleaned the information I wanted from someone’s report? No doubt, but this way was
quicker
. Caroline had been strangled and raped, from the front and not necessarily in that order. Also, the deed was done outdoors. Serial rapists develop a style, like any other
craftsman
. Some, who often have a record for burglary, prefer to work indoors. Others, quicker on their feet, strike in parks and lonely lanes. If Silkstone was our man he’d changed his style. Caroline’s body was left in a shallow stream and not discovered for two days, hence the lack of forensic evidence.

Bob had extracted a list of statistics from the pile of information, to show how extensive the enquiry had been: fifteen thousand statements; twenty thousand tyre prints; eighteen thousand cars. He fetched me a sandwich and
percolated
some decent coffee while I read the statements made by the officers who had interviewed the Famous Four: Silkstone, Latham, Margaret, and Michelle Webster. What could they have said to differentiate themselves from all those thousands of others, short of: “I did it, guv, it’s a fair cop?”

But they didn’t, and were lost in the pile of names just like others before them and a few since.

“Cor, that’s good,” I said, taking a sip of the coffee. “Just what I need.”

“Late night?” Bob asked.

“Yeah,” I replied.

“Working?”

“No, er, no, not really. It was, um, a promotion bash. Went on a bit late.” I liked that. A promotion bash. He was a detective, so he could probably tell that I was smiling, inside.

There were twenty-one reported attacks on women in the previous ten years that may have been linked to Caroline’s death. Seventeen of them were unlikely, two looked highly suspicious. I started at the bottom of the pile, working towards the likeliest ones. Had I done it the other way round I might have become bogged down on numbers one and two. Some had descriptions, some didn’t. He was tall, average height – this was most common – or short. Take your pick. He wore a balaclava, was clean shaven and had a beard. There were three of them, two of them, he was alone. He spoke with a local accent, a strange accent, never said a word. He had a knife, a gun, just used brute force. He was on foot, rode a bike, in a car.

Which would the good people of Frome prefer, I
wondered
? A serial rapist in their midst or twenty-one men who’d tried it once, for a bit of fun? Most of the attacks occurred on the way home from a night out, after both
parties
had imbibed too much alcohol. Some of the reports appeared frivolous, some hid tragedies behind the stilted phrases of the police officers. This was fifteen plus years ago, when the courts believed that a too-short skirt and eye
contact
across a crowded room meant:
take me, I’m begging for it.

I’d placed the four favourites to one side. I untied the tape around the top one and started reading. She was a
barmaid
, walking home like she did every night. Someone struck her from behind, fracturing her skull, and dragged her into a field. She survived, after a December night in the open and three in intensive care, but never saw a thing of her attacker. One year, almost to the day, before Caroline.

Bob was busy at another desk. I raised an arm to attract
his attention and he came over. “He had full penetrative sex with this one,” I said. “Do we know if she became
pregnant
?”

Bob lifted the cover of the file to look at the name. “The barmaid,” he said. “On the Bristol Road. She nearly died. Of these four she was the last and the only one where he
managed
it. We’ve thought of that so she can’t have been.”

I didn’t curse. I felt like it, but I didn’t. It was good news for her. All the same, if he’d made her pregnant and she’d gone full term we could have done a DNA test, introduced someone to his or her daddy, perhaps.

The next one I looked at happened eighteen months
earlier
, in the summer of 1981, and he drove a Jaguar. “Bob!” I shouted across the office.

“What is it?” he asked, coming over.

“This one,” I told him, closing the folder to show the name on the front. “Eileen Kelly. In her statement she says that the car she accepted a lift in was a Jaguar. On the wall of Silkstone’s bedroom is a photograph of him posing
alongside
a Mk II Jag. You can read the number and it’s in the file somewhere.”

“I’ll get on to the DVLC,” Bob said. “When are we
talking
about?”

“She was attacked in August, ’81.”

He went back to his telephone and I read the Eileen Kelly story. She was sixteen, and had just started work at the local egg-packing factory. At the end of her second week the other girls invited her out with them to a disco. They met in a pub and Eileen was disappointed to discover that they stayed there, drinking, until closing time. As soon as they entered the disco the other girls split up, each appearing to have a regular boyfriend, and Eileen was left on her own. The last bus had gone and she didn’t have enough money for a taxi. The thought of rousing her parents from their bed to pay the fare didn’t appeal to her.

An apparent knight in shining armour appeared on the
scene and after a few dances offered her a lift home, which she gratefully accepted. Except he didn’t take her home. He drove almost thirty miles to a deserted place called Black Heath, on Salisbury plain, and dragged her from the car.

Eileen put up a fight and escaped. He chased her, but some headlights appeared and her attacker changed his mind and fled, leaving her to walk two miles down a dirt track in her stocking feet. She survived, and he graduated to the next level of his apprenticeship. He was on a learning curve.

The description she gave was fairly non-committal. It’s broad terms certainly included Silkstone, who would have been twenty-five at the time, but it could equally have been anyone that you see at a football match or leaning on a bar. She was certain about the car, though: it was Jaguar.

“Bad news,” Bob said, placing a sheet of paper in front of me. “Anthony Silkstone owned a Mk II Jag from September ’76 to December ’78, which is over two years too early for us.”

“Bugger!” I exclaimed.

“Steady,” Bob protested, “I’m a Methodist.”

“Well sod and damn, too.”

“Maybe…” Bob began.

“Go on.”

“He’d be what, in his early twenties?”

“When Eileen was attacked? Twenty-five, maybe
twenty-six
.”

“But he’d only be…what, twenty-one…when he bought the Jag?”

“That’s right.”

“A bit young, I’d say, for a car like that, expensive to run. Maybe he couldn’t afford it, and sold it to a friend, Latham perhaps, but still had access to it. And if you were up to
mischief
it would make sense to use somebody else’s car,
wouldn’t
it?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “I’m just a simple Yorkshire lad. Find out what happened to it, Bob, please. He may even have traded it in for another Jag. We need a rundown of every car
he and Latham have owned, and a full history of the Jag after he sold it. Let’s see if we can get some justice for Eileen, we owe her that much.”

I carried on with the file. Poor Eileen had been taken and seated in the passenger seat of every model that Jaguar,
formerly
Swallow Sidecars, had made. They changed their name at the outbreak of World War II, because SS, the abbreviated form, wasn’t good PR in 1939. Eileen couldn’t identify the actual model, but was adamant it was a Jag because it had the famous mascot on the bonnet and when she was little she’d seen a Walt Disney film about the animal.

I closed my eyes and leaned back in the chair. We were in the main CID office, but the place was deserted on a Saturday afternoon. I’d thanked Bob for his consideration but told him that I’d prefer to go home if we finished at a reasonable hour. Staying overnight would take another big chunk out of the weekend. Barber’s
Adagio
is one of those tunes that I can hear in my head but can’t reproduce with a whistle or hum. I imagined it now, with its long mournful descants and soaring chords. I saw a car, a Jag, revolving on a plinth. First it was sideways on, sleek and elegant; then it slowly turned to three-quarter view, radiating power and aggression with its rounded air intake and fat tyres; and then nose on, looking like it was coming at you from the barrel of a gun. People fall in love with their Jags, and I could
understand
why. Parting with it must have broken Silkstone’s heart.

I collected Bob’s mug and made us another coffee. He was talking on the phone and scribbling on a pad. I placed the replenished mug on his beer mat and tried to make sense of his notes.

“Thanks a lot,” he said. “You’ve been a big help. I’ll come back to you shortly.”

He pushed himself back and turned to me, throwing his pencil on the desk. “According to Swansea the Jag was written off,” Bob told me. “After that he owned an MGB, presumably
bought with the proceeds, but three years later that was
written
off, too.”

“Writing off one sports car is unfortunate,” I said. “Writing off two is downright careless. So he had an MGB at the time of the Eileen Kelly attack?”

“That’s right.”

“According to the file she was shown and seated in every Jag produced, but couldn’t recognise the precise model. I wonder if she was shown an MGB?”

“I don’t know,” Bob replied, “but we’ll be on to it, first thing Monday.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“We’ll find her.”

I pulled a chair closer to Bob’s desk and took a sip of
coffee
. He shoved a sheet of paper towards me, to stand my mug on. “I used to have a Jaguar,” I began. “An E-type. My dad restored it and it came to me when he died. It was a
fabulous
car, but wasted on me. I like one that starts first time, and that’s about it. We used to go to rallies, and I was amazed at the attention and devotion that some owners
lavished
on their vehicles. Love isn’t too strong a word.” I paused, remembering those good days, some of the best I’d ever had. “Imagine, if you can,” I continued, “that you are in your early twenties and you own your dream car. It’s fast and desirable, it turns heads and it pulls birds. What more could a young lad want? Then, one day, you write it off. It’s beyond repair, a heap of scrap. What would you do?”

“Look for another, I suppose,” Bob replied.

“There isn’t another. They’ve stopped making them and those who own ’em aren’t parting.”

“Look for something similar, then.”

“Yes, but what about the old car. How would you
remember
it?”

“Photographs?”

“Perhaps. What about something more substantial?”

“You mean, like a momento?”

“That’s right.”

“The jaguar!” he exclaimed. “The mascot off the bonnet. I’d save that.”

“Good idea,” I told him. “And if you just happened to own an MGB? It’s a very nice car, but not quite in the same class as the Jag you once had. Might you not be tempted to…you know…so you could relive your dreams…?”

“Put the mascot on the MG,” Bob suggested.

“Exactly. And Eileen Kelly said the car was a Jag because of the mascot on the bonnet.”

“Fuckin’ ’ell, Charlie,” he hissed. “It’s a bit far-fetched, don’t you think?”

“I thought you were a Methodist,” I reminded him.

“Only in leap years.” We drank our coffee, reading the notes he’d made. “A more likely explanation…” Bob began, “…is that it really was a Jaguar, driven by someone unknown to us.”

I nodded and placed my empty mug on his desk. “I know, Bob,” I agreed. “But humour me, please. We can either go back to the beginning and start all over again, which will take us nowhere all over again, or we can run it with Silkstone in the frame. So let’s do it, eh?”

“That’s fine by me, Chas.”

“Thanks. I’m going home.”

Sunday I stayed in bed until after ten, had a shower and went out for a full English breakfast. I brought a couple of
heavies
back in with me and spent the rest of the day catching up on the latest hot stories, a neverending supply of tea at my elbow. Heaven. Annette had said she might go to her
mother’s
, in Hebden Bridge, and I’d said that I might stay overnight with Bob, so there was no answer when I tried her number. Another communication breakdown. The weather system had swung right round and the day was warm again, with just enough threat of rain to put me off doing some gardening. A quick run-around downstairs with the vacuum
cleaner gave me sufficient Brownie points to justify an evening watching television and listening to music. I brought the Chinese painting in from the garage and propped it in a corner, where it caught the light, so I could study it. You are supposed to leave oil paint for about a year to dry before varnishing it, but a month or two is usually enough. A few touches of black contour, I thought, on some of the images, and that would be that. I can’t justify black contours, but they can transform a picture, and V. Gogh did it all the time so why shouldn’t C. Priest? I was pleased with the painting and it was good fun having a whole day to myself. At nine o’ clock I gave Annette’s number another try, and this time she answered.

“You were lucky to catch me,” she said. “I’ve only been in two minutes, and I’ve put my waterproof on to go straight out again.”

“Fate,” I told her. “Fate, working in sympathy with our circadian rhythms as part of some great master plan to bring us together. On the other hand, I could have tried your number every minute for the last two days.”