Maxwell's Return (12 page)

Jacquie felt more sorry for the child now than she had before. It sounded as though her life was like a prison with everyone snooping and spying, suspecting her before, during and after the fact.

‘She was always quite sporty and she liked dance. She did theatre club on a Saturday. She sang in the church choir on a Sunday and of course there was practice on a Friday night. She had her tutoring sessions as well – well, you know about
those
.’

‘With Mr Ryan?’ Jacquie checked.

‘Bernard, yes,’ Brian Blakemore said. ‘We know him socially. Friends of friends, you know the kind of thing.’

‘Yes,’ Jacquie said and left them to carry on. Cynthia Blakemore had narrowed her eyes at her husband. Jacquie had seen it written down
before but had never actually seen it done. ‘Is there something, Mrs Blakemore?’

‘Bernard Ryan,’ she said. ‘He had no alibi, I understand.’

‘I don’t know why you might understand that, Mrs Blakemore,’ Jacquie said, perhaps a little more frostily that she intended. ‘Mr Ryan’s alibi has been thoroughly checked and we know he could not have hurt Josie.’

The woman looked at Jacquie like a basilisk. ‘And now there’s been another one,’ she said.

‘We are looking at a similar death, yes,’ Jacquie said blandly. With a pair of blank glasses, she and Henry Hall could pass for twins in some lights.

For a moment, the room rang with the silence, then Cynthia Blakemore took up her monologue again. ‘As April went on, she went very quiet. She started to lock the bathroom door as well and she wasn’t so… cuddly. She wouldn’t kiss us goodbye in the morning, or goodnight at bedtime. She was very…’ she seemed to be searching for the word, ‘reserved. That’s it. She got very reserved.’

‘Mr Ryan suggested that perhaps she was having problems with someone in the family circle. Or a family friend, perhaps.’ Jacquie put the fact out there to see who took it up and ran with it. Inevitably, it was Josie’s mother.

‘Rubbish!’ she shouted. ‘Who would it be? We don’t have a large
extended family, there’s only us and her grandmothers left. No uncles. No cousins. Just us. And now…’ her voice raised itself to a howl, ‘and now there isn’t even Josie!’ She scrubbed at her nose again. ‘So, Ryan is talking nonsense. He just said it to be spiteful.’

Jacquie could see why they had had solicitors’ letters. ‘What about the parents of her friends?’ she asked, carefully. ‘Perhaps she would have referred to them as family friends to Mr Ryan.’

‘You’ve got their names in there,’ Brian Blakemore pointed at the file. ‘I assume you’ve checked them out?’

‘Yes,’ Jacquie said. ‘Everyone has been carefully checked. I was wondering if perhaps you might have thought of anyone else.’

‘No.’ The woman’s mouth snapped shut like a turtle’s. It was definitely not a good look.

Brian Blakemore edged a little way away from his wife on the sofa. Peter Maxwell would have rubbed his hands with delight had he been there. The body language was superb and Jacquie noted it on her pad. Then, in a voice that sounded unlike his own, he said, ‘There is a name that isn’t in your file.’

Jacquie raised an eyebrow and looked expectant but he said no more. ‘May I ask whose?’ he said.

‘Ask her,’ he said, with a toss of the head at his wife.

‘How do I know whose name is missing?’ she said but there was an odd note to her speech. ‘Everyone is missing, if you look at it like that.’

‘True,’ her husband agreed. ‘But more precisely, the name of your fancy man is missing. The one that Josie knew about and told me about just before she died.’

The room went so still that for a moment Jacquie thought she had gone deaf. Then, it exploded with sound.

‘My
fancy man
?’ the woman screamed. ‘How
dare
you? My daughter is dead and you accuse me of having a
fancy man
?’

Here it comes, Jacquie thought. The straw that was going to break this marriage’s back had just started to float down through the air. In a moment, you would hear the first crack. Brian Blakemore was quiet, almost too quiet. This was a man who had been carrying a load for a while and had chosen here, chosen now to put it down. Jacquie heard her husband’s voice in her head, quoting Kipling as he did from time to time. ‘They have cast their burden upon the Lord, and – the Lord, He lays it on Martha’s Sons!’ She had never felt more like a Martha’s son than she did at that moment.

‘Detective Inspector,’ he said, ‘I want you to know that I don’t think my wife hurt our daughter. If she had known that Josie had told me about her bit of rough, she would have brazened it out. Just like she always has done in the past. That’s not what I’m saying.’ He didn’t look at his wife at all, who had turned in her seat so her back was to him and was screwing her handkerchief round and round. ‘No, I mean that this
man
might well know something about Josie’s death. No, Cynthia is right, let’s keep
calling it murder.’ He swallowed hard and went on. ‘Usually Cynthia’s little peccadilloes have been with her friend’s husbands. That’s why we have such a very small social circle. Even the friend who introduced us to Bernard Ryan has gone, driven away by Cynthia’s constant need for validation, if that is what I can call her screwing every man who so much as looks at her.’

Cynthia Blakemore reacted to this by turning and thumping her husband on the chest, but in a very ineffectual way, designed to make herself look like the little woman, sore oppressed. Jacquie was not convinced and gestured with her pen for Blakemore to continue.

‘But this time, she reached outside the family circle. To the builder working on the house, no less. A cliché, I know, but one she has avoided thus far.’

The woman dropped her head into her hands.

He looked at her with a sneer. ‘She does that,’ he said to Jacquie, ‘because she knows what’s coming next. One day, back in March, Josie was sent home from school. There was a bug going round and any day girl feeling poorly was sent home by taxi. Josie came in and assumed that her mother was out as the house seemed empty, but it seems as though this was not the case.’

Jacquie spoke to the woman, ‘Do you have anything to add, Mrs Blakemore?’ but she just shook her head.

‘I will keep the details to the point and brief,’ Brian Blakemore said,
‘and you can decide how to interpret them, Detective Inspector. When Josie went up to her room, she heard noises from our bedroom so she poked her head round the door. Who should be in there but my wife and Michael Harrison, Bespoke Builder, No Job Too Small.’

‘She must have found that very upsetting.’ Jacquie found that she was addressing the room in general.

‘Upsetting.’ Brian Blakemore repeated the word without inflexion. ‘Yes, that’s right. Upsetting. They were quite engrossed and they didn’t notice her. Did you, Cynthia?’ he turned to his wife who shook her head. ‘What were you doing, Cynthia?’ he asked. ‘No, we don’t need to know that. What were you wearing, Cynthia?’

The woman mumbled into her hands.

‘Sorry,’ her husband shouted, leaning down so he was yelling into her face. ‘I don’t think the Detective Inspector quite caught that. What were you
wearing
, Cynthia?’

She stood up, making him jump back to avoid being nutted in the face and then she ran to the door. She wrenched it open and then turned in the doorway. As a histrionic gesture, it was second to none, but for keeping the story just between the three of them, it was not the best plan as the door opened out into the corridor of the Nick and was full of people about their business, who all stopped to listen. ‘I was wearing her school uniform,’ she shouted. ‘Her spare one. Her knickers, her blouse, her tie, her socks. Okay. He liked me to dress like a schoolgirl. Satisfied now?’
and she stormed out. One by one and in stilted movements, the corridor came to life again in a snapshot as the door swung shut behind her, leaving Jacquie and her husband looking at each other across the coffee table that suddenly seemed as big as a continent.

Before the silence could get so long that it was embarrassing, Jacquie spoke. ‘Why did you not tell us this before?’ she said.

Blakemore shrugged. ‘I was ashamed to, if I am to tell the truth, Detective Inspector. I have got used to being laughed at behind my back by everyone who knows what she’s like. If she wasn’t having knee tremblers between courses at formal dinners, she was at it like a weasel on the golf course. I thought it was the thrill of discovery that turned her on. Then this builder came along and she seemed to go into overdrive. This dressing up thing is new for her as far as I know, but in her own daughter’s clothes… it has made me sick just to think of it. But when Josie was found dressed, if anything, like someone years older than her years, I put it aside. But I can’t. I can’t put it aside. As far as I know, Cynthia is still seeing this Harrison person, but obviously, what with… what’s happened, she has lost a lot of her sparkle. He’s still around. Perhaps he loves her.’ He sounded incredulous. ‘Perhaps he is keeping her close, so she doesn’t speak out.’

‘We’ll need his name and address, Mr Blakemore,’ Jacquie said, poising her pen.

He got out his wallet and riffled through some business cards and
handed one across.

‘Thank you.’ Jacquie wondered briefly how many men carried the card of their wife’s lover and their daughter’s possible killer in their wallet and thought that it was likely to be very few. ‘Would you like to stay here for a while? A cup of tea?’

The man nodded, sagging back on the sofa, his chin on his chest. As she went out to arrange the drink and to write up her notes, she paused behind him for a second, then patted him on the shoulder. As she closed the door, she heard him sob. Just once, but it had all the sorrow in the world in it. Another Martha’s son, if ever there was one.

CHAPTER EIGHT

After she had seen Brian Blakemore off the premises, Jacquie went along the corridor and up the stairs to Henry Hall’s office. Cynthia Blakemore seemed to have disappeared without trace and she was rather concerned by that because she might be a witness. Other than that, she didn’t care if Cynthia Blakemore was abducted by aliens.

Henry Hall looked up as she stuck her head around his door. ‘Jacquie,’ he said. ‘Come in and tell me all about it. That was some show she put on, wasn’t it? The WI on their yearly look at how their tax penny is spent will dine out on that for ever, if I’m any judge.’

‘Tell me you’re joking,’ Jacquie said, plonking heavily into a chair.

‘Do I ever joke?’ he asked, with a straight face.

‘No… but I hope there’s a first time for everything,’ she said.

‘Yes, as it happens,’ he said. ‘It was only police personnel and if it hadn’t been, she had no one but herself to blame. We’ll need to interview her later.’

‘I don’t know where she went,’ Jacquie started to explain.

‘Don’t worry,’ Hall comforted her. ‘Jason took her home. I gather she wanted to collect some things and then she was going to the
boyfriend’s place. I hope he knows what he’s in for.’

‘We’ll need to speak to him, of course.’

‘Yes, indeed. I gather Jason was hoping to kill two birds with one stone. He’s rather stuck for a number one suspect now that Ryan’s alibi has panned out.’

‘Is that confirmed for definite?’ Jacquie heard herself and winced. Maxwell had been known to hang kids up by their earlobes for lesser crimes against grammar than that.

‘Yes. We rang the private number on the card you got from Ryan – good work on that, by the way.’

She gave him a tight-lipped nod and in doing so confirmed his suspicion that the hand of Peter Maxwell was in the mix.

‘Yes, we caught him on his own, so he was able to speak freely. Obviously, we would have kept trying if necessary, but we got it all with one call.’

‘Are we following it up?’ Jacquie asked. It wasn’t like Henry Hall to cut any corners.

‘We have his address now and we’ll check up if we have to, but I never had Ryan in the frame from the beginning. I know you came to this late, but there was just something about his story which rang true. And we had a quick word with Sylvia Matthews up at the school…’

‘Sylvia couldn’t tell a lie to save her life,’ Jacquie said.

‘That’s the impression we got. So, although we had to go through
the motions, I never really had any doubts. But now we have at least one more lead.’

‘Harrison?’

Hall nodded. ‘It’s possible that Josie would refer to him as a family friend for lack of another phrase,’ he said. ‘And he clearly has a thing for schoolgirls.’

‘Does that really gel, though?’ Jacquie asked. ‘Cynthia Blakemore is a very skinny woman but she is a
woman
. Having her dress up as a schoolgirl isn’t the same as an
actual
girl, surely?’

Hall shrugged. ‘Best he could get, perhaps?’

‘Are we going to pull in his previous partners? Wife? Blakemore didn’t know much about him.’

‘He’s been married twice. Two divorces. One we’ve tracked down, the other seems to have disappeared. She isn’t in Brighton or here, but that leaves a lot of the country unaccounted for.’

Jacquie went quiet and the icy feeling in her diaphragm that meant that two pieces of information were about to come together struck her and took her breath away. She went white.

Hall looked across his desk at her, concern etched on his face. ‘Jacquie? Are you all right? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

‘I’m not sure what it is,’ she said. ‘Just listen and tell me what you think. Mollie Adamson’s half sister’s mother was married to a man named Mike, who she divorced.’

Hall’s glasses flashed as he nodded his head.

‘Mike is the only one of several of Caroline Morton’s stepfathers who keeps in touch. So…’

‘If Michael Harrison is that same Mike…?’

‘He would have known Mollie, yes.’

Hall set his mouth in a grim line. ‘Lots of people called Mike, Jacquie.’

‘Two girls dead,’ she riposted. ‘And we don’t believe in coincidence, do we, guv?’

Hall tapped his pen on the desk. ‘No, we don’t. Can you ring Caroline Morton? Find out a bit more about this stepfather. Let me get this straight, though – he isn’t
Mollie’s
stepfather?’