Chapter 63
DC Tanya Rubin finally calls me back later that afternoon, while I’m trawling the internet for other unsolved murders from around the turn of the millennium.
The detective is brisk and businesslike on the phone, as if she’s doing me a huge favor just making the call.
But I feel a small bubble of hope when she tells me she has an update on the number plate that Jess had photographed as she followed the Volvo out of Wollaton Park on Monday evening.
“We sent an officer to the address,” she says. “That vehicle has been reported stolen.”
“Seriously?”
“According to the owner.”
“When exactly was it reported stolen?”
I can hear her flicking through notes, pages turning. “Monday afternoon, sometime between two and five p.m. The owner says they spent the evening at home and that’s corroborated by two witnesses.”
They had covered their tracks well: a bogus report backdated to a few hours before Jess had followed it from Wollaton Park. The bubble of hope bursts.
“And where do they live, the owner?”
“You know I’m not able to divulge information like that, sir.”
I try a different tack, telling her about a possible link between Edward Stiles and Adrian Parish, asking if she’d been able to discover anything else about Parish since we last spoke.
She tells me there is a file on the system archive, that Parish was still listed as an outstanding missing person—but it was not currently an active investigation and had not been for a long time.
“Isn’t there a national database, a system, some way for you to access their case files? I found things that belonged to both men in an attic room of my house, hidden away in the same place.”
“In that case you should bring the items to us, and we’ll take a look. But it would need to be significant new evidence relating to either case for us to open a new line of inquiry.” Her voice is tight with impatience. “Now, is there anything else, sir?”
I can feel her interest, her attention, slipping away from me.
“I don’t suppose,” I say, “you’ve ever crossed paths with a detective named Gordon Webber? Became a civilian investigator after he retired, but he was on the murder squad from around 2001 onward.”
There is a short silence at the other end of the line.
“Doesn’t sound familiar.” Her tone tells me she’s about to ring off. “Then again, in 2001 I was still at primary school.”
My earlier argument with Jess smolders all evening, like glowing embers just waiting for a breath of wind to catch the bone-dry kindling all around.
It’s only when we’ve put the younger two children to bed that I broach the subject again, going over the conversation with Webber and the cold case he had been investigating for so long, his theory about a pair of serial killers who had hunted together more than twenty years ago.
But before I’ve even finished, she’s already shaking her head at me in disbelief.
“You’ve got a nerve,” she says. “Having a go at me for getting a cleaner in for a couple of hours when you’re giving a house tour to a total stranger who just happens to knock on the front door this morning.”
I take a bottle of red wine from the rack and two glasses from the cupboard. It’s only Tuesday evening but it feels like it’s been a long week already.
“The point is,” I say, “it’s worse than we thought.
Webber thinks there were two of them operating in the region back in the early 2000s and one of them was never caught.
One of them is still free and it’s that person who is trying to recover the stuff from the hidden room.
Because it’s evidence of what they did.”
“Right. There’s just one tiny flaw in his theory.”
“What?”
“The fact that there was never any serial killer on the loose back then, no string of unsolved murders in the city, no hue and cry in the media about a Yorkshire Ripper or a Fred West. We’d have known about it, wouldn’t we? We both grew up here, and that’s the sort of thing you remember.”
I fill both wine glasses and put one on the counter next to her.
“But the police never linked them,” I say. “They were all treated as separate, individual cases.”
“OK,” she says. “Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that there are these unsolved crimes from goodness knows how long ago. Has it occurred to you that this supposed detective might be more involved than you think? That he might be implicated himself?”
“It’s possible, I suppose. But it doesn’t seem likely.”
“Because it seems to me that Helena is just a pleasant, efficient person who was recommended by our neighbors and who came here because I asked her to.”
“All I’m saying is we don’t know for sure about Webber or anyone else. We just need to be extra careful until we do know, so I was thinking we should probably cancel Helena for the next few weeks.”
“After you sent her away today, I’ll be surprised if she wants to come back at all.
Have you any idea how mad and paranoid you’re starting to sound?
And don’t imagine it’s not affecting the kids too, because they’ve definitely picked up on it.
Takes ages to get Daisy settled down at night now because she’s convinced that the bad man’s going to come back in the middle of the night.
Callum’s been a bit tearful too and I know it’s affecting Leah’s revision for her GCSEs. ”
I take a sip of my own red wine.
“We need to protect ourselves.”
“By cutting off all contact with everyone else?”
“Does it not seem like a coincidence that we get a gardener in last week, we have no real idea who he is, and he’s working out there unsupervised, right under our noses, and then we find a surveillance camera in the garden, spying on us?”
As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I wish I could pull them back.
Jess’s expression darkens. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“He could be anyone; he could have his own agenda for all we—”
“Just say it,” she says, cheeks flaring red. “This is just like what you said the other night, isn’t it? That it’s all my fault, all of this?”
“All I’m saying is that we need to be careful about who we invite to the house, who we give a key to.” I reach into my pocket for the kitchen door key. “This is the one you gave to Helena, right? Just hope she hasn’t made copies.”
My wife is shaking her head.
“Don’t you dare put this on me, don’t you dare!
” She’s shouting now. “You’re the one who started all of this with the bloody phone and the watch and all the other crap from that stupid room on the top floor.
If you’d bagged it up and taken it to the dumpster with everything else, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation! ”
She takes an angry swallow of wine and for a second I think she might throw the glass at me. But instead she slams the glass down on the counter so hard that Merlot sloshes over the counter.
“Jess—”
“This has got to stop, Adam! Do you hear me?”
I’m about to reply when I realize the kitchen doorway is pushed half open and Daisy is standing there in her pajamas, thumb clamped in her mouth, muslin cloth held tight to her cheek. Her blonde hair is tangled, her pale face streaked with tears.
“You shouted,” she says to me in a small voice. “You woke me up. Why are you being mean to Mummy?”
I have no idea how long she’s been standing there, how much of our row she has witnessed. Before I can reply, Jess holds out her hands and scoops our youngest into her arms.
“Sorry, baby,” she says, making for the door. “No more shouting. Come on now, it’s bedtime.”