Killing Me Softly (27 page)

‘Which one of you is Jem?'

The short, swarthy boy was the little dark waiter at the Holly Tree: it was the surveillance photos Skellen had taken which had given her the idea she'd seen him before. He stood up as she came into the room, nudged his companion to do so. Nice manners, for all his gypsy appearance, his questionable lifestyle. Well brought up. What would his mother think of him, being here? ‘You wanted to see me?' she asked, motioning them to sit down.

He was nervous, and seemed to find it difficult to speak. She looked at the other one – Col, wasn't it? – who sat staring into space, as though he wasn't part of the scene. Another, stoned out of his mind? She didn't think so. Thin, gangling, his eyes behind his spectacles haunted, but intelligent and very much aware.

‘You're free to go. You're being released without charges, this time,' she told them. ‘On police bail. Do you understand what that means?'

Oh sure, they understood, Jem said. It had been explained to them. It wasn't that... He looked at his friend.

Col turned his gaze towards Abigail, and spoke.

‘The thing is, we're very worried about Luce ...'

‘Every
Saturday afternoon?' Farrar repeated.

He and Deeley were sitting drinking coffee and taking notes in the Fairmiles' sparkling farmhouse kitchen, which smelled of baking and floor wax, and a breath of White Linen every time Mrs Fairmile passed the table. ‘The van's been parked there every Saturday?'

‘For two or three weeks, anyway' Penny Fairmile asserted firmly. ‘Down there, behind that holly thicket, where it couldn't be seen from the road – or from the mill, either. Only from our bedroom window, because we're on higher ground, and I don't suppose whoever put it there would have thought of that.'

She was a forceful, pretty, plump young woman with a bright cap of straight golden hair that looked to Deeley's untutored eyes as though it had been cut round a basin. It suited her, though. ‘I told John there was something odd about it being there, but we didn't feel it was any of our business, not then.'

‘You're sure it was the Miller's Wife van?' Deeley asked, reducing the pile of home-made brandy snaps on the plate by two more.

Farrar cast him a pitying glance. Couldn't he see that Fairmile's wife was the last person likely to have made a mistake? She was capable and energetic, and very sure of herself. Anyone who could organize her time efficiently enough to make brandy snaps, as well as look after a couple of noisy lads, a farmer husband and a rambling farmhouse – and look so good, into the bargain – wasn't the type likely to waste anyone else's time, either. He should be so lucky, he thought, looking at the bright hair, envisaging his own once-lively, but now permanently discontented Sandra, who rarely cooked anything more ambitious than a microwave meal.

‘Couldn't mistake something like that,' Penny Fairmile said decidedly, ‘that white and honey colour, with the Wheatsheaf logo and the name all curly in dark green and gold.'

‘Oh, right.'

‘I saw it as well,' Fairmile said. ‘We both did. Our bedroom window overlooks the thicket, though it's a good way off, down the slope, other side of the river. We wouldn't have seen it even then, if it hadn't been for the evening sun glinting on the white paint.'

It was left to Deeley to ask the most pertinent question. Unimaginative, down-to-earth, he invariably said the most obvious thing, which everyone else declined to do, since it
was
so obvious, and thereby, very often, he hit the button. ‘Why didn't you just ask Mrs Wishart?'

‘We assumed Clare knew about it. I must say I thought it a bit of an odd place to leave a van, but you don't go around quizzing your neighbours about their peculiar parking arrangements, do you? Not when it's on their own land.'

‘It can't be coincidence, the way everything seems to lead back to Miller's Wife,' Abigail said, chewing over this new development with Mayo. ‘This business of the Rimington girl going missing – she's another who worked there.' Three of them, now, though it was true that Barbie Nelson had never really been missing at all, and Roz Spalding had only gone because she'd chosen to. She was back in circulation again, perhaps wishing she wasn't. And Luce – Luce was a free spirit, an impulsive young woman, accountable to no one but herself. Perhaps there was no reason to worry about her at all.

‘What does Morgan Finch know about it? Luce was his girlfriend, wasn't she?'

‘Nothing, he says, but he would say that, wouldn't he? Hasn't seen her since the Saturday morning, is what he says, when he went off for a few days. He
seems
genuinely worried about her – or worried as he can be about anyone but himself.'

‘Not enough to try and contact her, though.'

‘They'd had some sort of argument. Then the letter from her sister came after he'd left and he was huffed she'd gone off without leaving him a message.' She flipped through the pages of her neatly written notebook. ‘Seems he didn't know her mother's address or phone number, anyway. “When she goes there, she rings me” was what he actually said. “Her saintly mum doesn't approve of her friends, especially me.” Sounds a sensible woman!'

Still, when Luce had heard her mother was in trouble, she'd responded like a shot, according to Jem.

‘But the mother wasn't worried when Luce didn't turn up?'

‘They're not on the phone at the Bagots – and Mum assumed somebody there had been getting at Luce not to go home. She was more annoyed than worried, that her daughter couldn't be bothered to help her out when she needed her. She blames the whole thing on Luce's grandfather, leaving her that house.'

‘She's probably right,' Mayo said. Independence was all very well, but he knew what daughters were. His own daughter, far away on another continent, was still a source of needless worry to him. Probably would be, all her life.

He studied the report of the two detectives who'd interviewed the Fairmiles, succinctly presented by Farrar and neatly summed up. The inference about the van had seemed obvious to Farrar: the killer had been watching Wishart for some time, waiting for the right opportunity to shoot him. Not wanting to use his own car in case it was recognised, he had used the van, in the belief that if anyone had by any chance seen it parked there, they would have assumed it to be there legitimately.

‘Fair enough. But who'd leave it there for any other reason than they wanted to hide it? In the middle of that scrubland?'

‘It's good cover,' Abigail agreed, ‘that holly thicket, although to get to the woods across the river you'd have to fight your way through the jungle first. Still, less chance of being noticed than walking up the lane to the mill house and past it, then over the bridge on to the other side.' She thought a bit. ‘But of course, they wouldn't need to, they'd use the main road. Skirt round the mill altogether, there and back. I'll get Carmody to have a word with them all down at Miller's Wife. And have the security checked down there, see how easy it is for anybody other than the company personnel to get into the yard when the place is closed for the weekend.'

‘Hm.' Mayo twirled his glasses, cogitating. ‘You sure we're on the right tack with this? I don't want this case falling apart, going off at a tangent. You're thinking of Finch, I take it?'

‘Thinking of him, yes. Hoping. But we're not going to nail him with it until we find his grubby little traces all over the van. Which we won't.'

‘I want him, Abigail. Not just for the old woman's murder, and the drugs. For Spalding,
and
Wishart.'

‘For anything else we can get him for, as well. There's still a chance, the company he keeps, that somebody will talk. We all know that sort'd shop their mother if there was something in it for them.'

It was still worrying. ‘This Wishart business – it doesn't stack with Morgan. Why go about the job in such a roundabout way?'

‘I don't know – yet.'

A break was what they'd needed, and the van had given them that, but all it seemed to do was to rule out Morgan. As far as he was concerned, the van was probably an irrelevance. Why did he need to risk using the van – he or anyone else he might have hired to get rid of Wishart?

Abigail wasn't the possessor of an overheated imagination, though she could sometimes be impulsive, but Mayo trusted her intuitions, better than his own. He only allowed himself to have them in personal matters, nebulous and unreliable as they were, and even there he felt they often led him to wrong conclusions. She was going round to Miller's Wife, and he thought it was time he went to have a look at what was going on there himself, too.

As she'd predicted, they were open and working again. ‘We've a big order we can't afford to slip up on,' Clare explained. ‘A party scheduled for tonight. Mind waiting a few minutes?'

The way she was concentrating on piping mayonnaise on to that platter of salmon scaled with transparent slices of cucumber, Mayo could see how keeping up with her routine, coming in to work, could be a source of therapy to her. And perhaps the best way for the others to show sympathy was through solidarity, by carrying on as usual.

It was warm and well-lit in the kitchen, in contrast to the gloomy morning outside, and he was content, for the moment, to sip coffee and watch them working, until one or other of the women had finished what they were about. He was fascinated by the ordered bustle and harmony with which they dovetailed together, clever women's hands doing age-old tasks. Chopping, slicing, beating, kneading. Even the middle-aged woman who was fetching and carrying, stacking the cupboards with fresh supplies, had her own well-paced rhythm, not getting in anyone's way.

‘There now,' Clare said, putting the finished salmon into a fridge, ‘that's finished. Thanks for waiting. What can we do for you?'

She was mystified when asked about the van. ‘Certainly I never left it – where did they say, behind the holly thicket? How odd. Are they sure it was our van?'

‘Both Mr and Mrs Fairmile swore it was. Who normally drives it?'

‘Barbie Nelson – or she did. But any of us do, if we have a rush order and there's no one else available.'

‘Did she ever use it privately?'

‘Barbie? We all use it from time to time in an emergency.'

‘I used it myself last week when my car was being serviced,' Ellie Redvers offered, from the direction of the stove, where she was absorbed in stirring a savoury sauce. ‘But not on Saturday.'

‘Who holds keys, and to what?' asked Abigail, remembering Ellie taking the keys for Barbie's flat from the key-cupboard on the wall.

Ellie, Clare and David Neale all held keys to the main entrances. Others were kept in the locked key-cupboard, for which the same people each held a key. ‘Oh, and Barbie had a set of course, but she posted them through the letter-box when she left,' Ellie said.

Abigail wasn't impressed with the arrangements. For one thing, the key-cupboard hadn't been locked on her previous visit, she recalled. Practically anyone, at any time, could have gained access to whatever keys they'd wanted.

Ellie tasted her sauce and added redcurrant jelly, a dash of mustard, then brought the saucepan and a teaspoon over to Mayo. ‘Taste? An unbiased opinion?'

Sharp and piquant, the sauce stimulated his taste buds, reminding him he hadn't had lunch. ‘Absolutely delicious,' he said, but nothing else was forthcoming.

‘Good. Now I'll take you up to meet David.'

Neale wasn't able to enlighten them any more about the van than the rest of them, but patiently put aside his work to answer their questions.

His office was workmanlike, but there were indisputably feminine, softening touches in the subtle colours of the walls and the co-ordinated carpet and curtains. Green, thriving plants and a handsome set of bookshelves. Plus a couple of East Anglian watercolours – if original, likely to be his personal property rather than part of the office furniture.

Yet it was a room in which the tall, bespectacled man with the grey-blond hair and the pleasant smile didn't seem totally out of place. A good office to work in, but noisier than you'd have thought. Mayo, sitting by the window, saw that the road was very close, the traffic continuous and rather noisy. A double-decker cruised past and two big lorries in convoy rumbled down the road and turned towards the river. If they were starting on the demolition of the last of the old property, the consequent noise and mess and dust here would be unbearable for months. Shopkeepers in the area had already put in complaints, in fact, but starting meant the end was in sight, a relief to everyone.

Abigail was still questioning Neale about the van. The little runabout was at the moment parked in the yard below, drops of the moisture-laden morning dimming its white and honey-coloured paint, ‘Miller's Wife' lettered in dark green above the wheaten sheaf that conveyed a subliminal message, an image of good, country wholesomeness.

The yard was surrounded by high, chain-link fencing, and a break-in was unlikely not to have been noticed. It was conceivable, of course, that keys had been obtained – by Luce, for instance, while she'd been working here.

Mayo turned his attention back to Neale, to hear Abigail saying, ‘Maybe you can help us on another point. We're also inquiring into the disappearance of Lucinda Rimington, who used to work here. I believe you keep all the personnel records.'

‘Lucinda –? Oh, Luce, you mean! Disappeared, you say?' He tut-tutted but, interestingly, gave the impression that he was not altogether astonished.

‘She set off to see her mother on Saturday the tenth but never arrived. She hasn't been seen since ... You don't seem surprised, Mr Neale.'

‘Well, to be honest, I'm not, really. Her sort, you know ... here today, gone tomorrow ...'