CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Even though she had only been drinking coke and tea, Millie still arrived outside Sally Frick’s house on Monday morning feeling as if she had partied the night before. She felt slightly queasy and shivery as if she might be going down with something.
Sally Frick lived with her elderly mother in a terraced house off Kings Heath High Street. The front door was in need of a coat of paint, and when Sally showed Millie in there was an odd smell, the smell of old age. She took Millie through a dim and narrow hall past a closed door behind which there were murmuring voices. The sitting room at the back of the house overlooked a narrow stone yard, and the interior of the house was decorated like something from the nineteen forties.
‘We have to sit in here as Mummy’s room is in the front,’ Sally explained. ‘She can’t manage the stairs any more. The nurse is here getting her up. Would you like a cup of tea?’
Millie declined. ‘How long have you been following the band?’ she asked.
‘Oh, ages, about four years. Since I first saw them at the Red Lion and fell in love with Will.’
‘And you go to all their gigs?’ Millie asked.
‘The ones in the Midlands, yes. Sometimes it takes me all afternoon to get there.’
‘You must have an understanding boss.’
‘Oh, I don’t work any more. Caring for Mummy is very demanding so I gave up work some time ago. My neighbour is very good, though. She comes and sits with Mummy when I want to go out.’ Her face creased to a frown. ‘I don’t really understand why you’re here. How can I help?’
‘We’re investigating some nuisance phone calls that Will Jarrett’s wife has been getting,’ Millie said.
‘Oh dear.’ She didn’t sound too put out by the idea.
‘Do you know anyone who might want to do that?’
‘No, I can’t think of anyone,’ Sally said straight away.
‘Could I use your bathroom?’ This time it wasn’t a ploy, Millie genuinely felt quite queasy. But it did give her the chance to peep into each of the three small bedrooms. On the bedside table in what appeared to be Sally’s room was a framed photograph that caught Millie’s attention. It was framed in the way that most people would a picture of a close family member, but within this frame was a picture, clearly printed from the Internet, of Will Jarrett. Disappointingly, however, unless Mummy had one in her room, Sally Frick did not appear to own a computer. Just to be sure, Millie asked anyway, when she returned to the sitting room.
‘Oh no,’ Sally said. ‘I wouldn’t really have the need for one, though I used to use one at Cullen’s, where I used to work, and they did once send me on a course for beginners. And I sometimes use my brother’s computer to keep up to date with what the band are doing.’
‘What about a mobile phone?’ Millie asked.
Sally chuckled. ‘Whatever use would I have for one of those?’
Back in the office, Millie was struggling to concentrate on what the young and eager IT technician, Max, was telling her about the Jarretts’ computer. She was distracted too by the array of studs in his ears and the elaborate sculpture of his jet-black hair. It must take him longer to get ready in the morning than it takes me, she was thinking.
‘There’s a lot of music on there, which I guess you’d expect,’ Max was saying. ‘The guy’s into some pretty obscure stuff; bands I’d never heard of.’
‘He plays in a folk-rock band,’ Millie enlightened him.
‘Right.’ Max nodded, understanding. ‘That explains it. And someone’s visited a few porn sites, but nothing hardcore and there’s nothing that’s been deliberately downloaded. This is a summary of the other sites that have been visited.’
As he said, there seemed nothing to arouse suspicion.
‘The only other thing is the emails,’ Max was saying.
‘Is there a way of working out who sent them?’ Millie asked.
‘We can trace them back as far as the IP but -’
‘IP?’ Millie queried.
‘Internet provider,’ Max helped her out. ‘After that it’s down to them. They have agreed to help, but they’ll have thousands of records to go through, so we’re going to have to be patient. It could take several days. If it’s any help we’ve run an analysis of the dates and times -’ he paused to pass Millie a further sheet of data ‘- and, as you can see, most of them have been sent in the late evening, for some reason a lot of them on a Wednesday.’
Millie was studying the list of sites again. ‘Someone has a big interest in Huntingdon,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that somewhere near Cambridge?’
‘John Major’s old constituency, for what it’s worth,’ Max added. ‘I thought that maybe the band played a gig there, or is due to.’ It seemed a reasonable explanation.
Before driving back to Granville Lane, Mariner sat in his car and put through a call to the address in Billy Hughes’ file. Unsurprisingly, Billy Hughes’ parents no longer lived at the house in Rubery, but helpfully the woman who inhabited it now had bought the house from them when they moved away from Birmingham to the south coast six years ago.
‘The daughter still lives around here,’ she said. ‘We had her address to forward any post to.’
‘Do you happen to still have that?’ Mariner asked.
It was a lot to ask, but she did remember that it was somewhere on Rea River Drive.
Mariner phoned Tony Knox. ‘It’s your lucky day,’ he said. ‘You’re going on a little outing.’ On the way Mariner filled Knox in with what he’d found out. ‘See if you can pinpoint the exact address of a Tracey Hughes, Rea River Drive, and I’ll pick you up in the car park in half an hour.’
Tracey Hughes located, they were driving away from Granville Lane towards Kingsmead.
‘Christ, so the gaffer was all set to testify against a CID colleague?’ Knox said.
‘What other choice did he have?’ Mariner pointed out. ‘All he was going to do was stand up and tell the truth. And all this time on, he still feels bad about, and still partly blames himself for, Silvero’s death, I could tell.’
Tracey Hughes’ house was a typical, boxy eighties detached, so narrow that it really should have been a semi - all Georgian windows and tiny box rooms. The front door was uPVC with an extravagant brass knocker.
Mariner rang the bell. ‘Tracey Hughes?’ he asked the thirty-something young woman, with spiky bleached-blonde hair who came to the door.
‘What do you want?’ she asked in response to Mariner’s warrant card, but the tone was wary rather than hostile.
‘Just to ask you a few questions,’ said Mariner.
‘Is it about that copper’s wife?’
So she kept up with the news. ‘Yes, it is. Can we come in?’
It wasn’t exactly a gracious welcome, but she showed them into a lounge where another young woman was overseeing a gaggle of pre-teen children.
‘It’s the police,’ Tracey said. ‘Can you take the kids outside for a bit, Shel?’
Shel regarded the two men with an added layer of suspicion. ‘Sure. Is everything all right?’
‘It’s fine,’ Tracey reassured her.
Politeness compelled her to invite them to sit, although Mariner sensed she would have preferred them not to contaminate the beige leather sofa.
‘You heard about Mrs Silvero then,’ Mariner said.
‘Couldn’t really miss it, could I?’ she said. ‘The name’s engraved on my brain.’
‘How did you feel when you heard about it?’
‘I just thought it’s a shame, like you do when you hear about anything like that.’ She reached for a pack of cigarettes and lit one, blowing smoke away from them, towards the window.
‘There wasn’t part of you that thought, ‘I’m glad she’s dead?’
She had no difficulty meeting Mariner’s gaze. ‘No. I might have thought that when her old man died. It was him was responsible for our Billy, and he went before justice could be done, but that wasn’t her fault. None of it was her fault. So I just felt sorry for her. It sounded nasty.’ There wasn’t much warmth to her sympathy.
‘What about the rest of your family? Have you seen your mum and dad lately?’
‘Yesterday afternoon.’
‘They’re back in Birmingham?’ Mariner was surprised, though of course there was a good explanation.
‘They always come back up here this time of year; they like to go to our Billy’s grave.’
‘For the anniversary.’
‘There’s no crime in that. It’s all they’ve got left.’
‘How long are they staying?’ Mariner asked.
‘About ten days. They came up a week last Saturday, go back the day after tomorrow.’
‘Quite a long visit then,’ Mariner observed.
‘They’ve got a lot of friends and family up here still,’ replied Tracey.
‘And where are they staying?’
‘With Auntie June, Mum’s sister. They always stay there.’ She recited the address and Knox wrote it down.
‘Have you ever been round to Nina Silvero’s house?’ Mariner asked.
‘Till I saw it in the papers I didn’t know where she lived.’ The response came out glibly, almost as if she’d rehearsed it.
A small child came running into the room. ‘Mum, Mum, can I have a lolly? Shel said we can have lollies.’
‘Are we finished?’ Tracey asked, absently stroking the child’s head.
Mariner got up to go, and Knox followed suit. ‘One more thing,’ Mariner added. ‘Where were you last Sunday evening, between seven thirty and midnight.’
‘We all went out for dinner; about twenty of us.’
‘Thanks,’ said Mariner. ‘We can see ourselves out.’
Back in the car Knox had doubts. ‘It doesn’t make sense, boss,’ he said. ‘Surely the last person Nina Silvero would let into her house is a member of the Hughes family.’
‘Unless they persuaded her that they wanted to bury the hatchet,’ Mariner said. ‘After all she’d suffered a loss too and, as Tracey said, what her husband might or might not have done wasn’t down to her. The twenty-year anniversary is a significant one. Maybe somehow they persuaded Nina Silvero that they wanted to put it all behind them. Nina might have even seen it as an opportunity to clear her late husband’s name. It might explain why they didn’t get any further than the kitchen, too. Nina Silvero could have been uneasy about the approach but not wanting to be impolite.’
‘But why now?’
‘Like I said, the anniversary for one thing, and perhaps someone in the family saw the announcement in the paper; Nina Silvero getting her MBE. It probably didn’t seem much like justice to them.’
‘Tracey Hughes doesn’t seem to bear any grudges,’ Knox pointed out.
‘She’d hardly let it show in front of us,’ Mariner countered. ‘And she’s not the only member of the family, is she?’
The address Tracey Hughes had given them was for a house in West Heath, just a mile away, but when Mariner and Knox arrived there was no one there.
‘We’ll come back later,’ Mariner said. ‘We’ve got a couple of days.’
After Max had gone, Millie sat quietly, glad of a few minutes to rest her aching eyes, when her phone rang.
It was a woman’s voice. ‘Hello, I don’t know if you’ll remember, but you came to talk to me the other day. I do some cleaning on the Manor Farm estate.’
The silver Honda driver. ‘Yes, of course,’ Millie said. ‘You’ve got a vacancy?’
The woman laughed. ‘No, sorry, it’s not that. It’s probably nothing at all, but the person at number nineteen getting these calls - her name wouldn’t be Lucy, would it?’
‘Why do you ask?’ Millie sat straighter in her chair.
‘When I parked my car as usual this morning at the top of Hill Crest, I had one of those
déjà vu
things that you get, and remembered a man who came up to me a couple of weeks ago. He wanted to know where Lucy somebody lived. I said I didn’t know, because, well, I didn’t. It may be nothing, of course, and I’m sorry I didn’t think of it before, but I thought I ought to let you know.’
Millie fought to suppress her excitement. ‘You’ve done the right thing -’
‘Pam.’
‘Pam. Thanks. Do you remember what this man looked like?’
‘Well, that was it,’ Pam said. ‘It’s why I should have thought of it before. He wasn’t at all the sort of man you generally see around here.’
‘In what way?’ Millie asked.
‘Well, he was a big man, tall I mean, not fat, and he was unshaven and quite scruffily dressed, one of those shirts without a collar. And his jacket, it was like a suit jacket, but well worn and not too clean. My first thought was that he was -’
‘What?’ Millie prompted gently.
‘Well, I was going to say “gypsy” but that’s not PC, is it? What’s the word we’re supposed to use now?’
This got better and better. ‘A traveller?’ Millie offered.
Or perhaps a man who travels a lot?
‘That’s right, a traveller. And he had some kind of brogue, Irish I think.’
Millie’s heart did a somersault. Most of Leigh Hawkins’ band were Irish, including, presumably, their roadies. She cast her mind back trying to remember anyone who might fit the description. There had been a couple of men tinkering about on stage before the show started, but neither had struck her as being particularly tall. ‘How sure can you be about that?’ she asked.
‘Well, I’m not very good at accents,’ Pam admitted. ‘But he sounded like my cousin Martha’s husband, Bill.’
‘Did you feel threatened by him?’
‘Oh, no, he was perfectly polite, although I suppose I did feel slightly intimidated, mostly because of his size, and because he looked a bit rough.’
‘And how long ago was this?’ Millie asked.
Pam thought for a moment. ‘A couple of weeks, maybe three.’
‘Can you remember the exact day or the time?’
A pause while there was further thought. ‘I think it was a Thursday because I was just about to go into Mr Coyle’s house, and it would have been at about nine thirty.’
‘Thank you,’ said Millie. ‘That’s been really helpful.’
So was someone doing Will’s dirty work for him?
Lucy Jarrett would be at work. Millie tried phoning but the line was permanently engaged, so she drove straight to the health centre. This couldn’t wait.