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Beneath the beauty
lurks something bad...
June, 1977
As night falls, seventeen-year-old Cassie Baker leaves Winchcombe and takes her usual short-cut down a moonlit country lane. She never makes it home. With no body, and no evidence, she’s just another teenage runaway.
December, 1999
A manhunt is launched for a missing girl, Bryony Motson. The search leads Cotswold police to an ancient burial site outside Winchcombe. Here, inside a stone chamber, are the remains of Cassie Baker. Bryony is never found.
June, 2018
Stella Darnell, cleaner and private detective, moves to the countryside to solve the long cold case. By now, evidence has decayed, gossip has become fact, and witnesses have forgotten what they saw. But, if there is a killer in this tranquil village, it is someone who has got away with murder for twenty years. Someone who will do anything to keep it that way...
Welcome Page
About The Death Chamber
Dedication
Map
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About Lesley Thomson
About The Detective’s Daughter Series
From the Editor of this Book
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
To Lisa Holloway and Juliet Eve with my love
In his opinion one of the chief defects in detective stories – for he was given to busmen’s holidays – was that authors made their ‘sleuths’ like unto the angels, watching for days without, so to speak, taking their eyes off the ball. It was not so in real life.
— JOHN GALSWORTHY Over the River
(The Forsyte Saga, volume nine)
I am the family face;
Flesh perishes, I live on,
Projecting trait and trace
Through time to times anon,
And leaping from place to place
Over oblivion.
The years-heired feature that can
In curve and voice and eye
Despise the human span
Of durance – that is I;
The eternal thing in man.
That heeds no call to die.
— THOMAS HARDY ‘Heredity’
Saturday 11 June 1977
Cassie Baker ducks into the back of Mick Spicer’s souped-up Ford Escort Mark 1. Her mum shouts from the gate, ‘Find your little sister and be in a taxi by ten!’ Lauren Spicer cranes around from the front seat and the friends exchange a look. By ten the party won’t be started.
Trudy Baker yells, ‘Don’t spend that taxi money on drink. Don’t drink!’ As Mick accelerates down the lane, she adds something about not making a racket when Cassie gets back. The girls laugh. Lauren Spicer’s tempted to shout, Cassie won’t be coming back. She says to Cassie, ‘Would we drink?’ Mick tells them, ‘Behave!’
In Cassie’s bead-encrusted clutch-bag is a bottle labelled Chucklin’ Cherry. It’s filled with Smirnoff vodka. She calls back to her mum, her words snatched into the night, ‘I’ll be good.’ Famous last words.
Cassie’s thinking just how good she’ll be. Juggling the vodka bottle she applies lipstick. Mick floors the accelerator on a bend, sending Cassie’s eye shadow compact under the seat.
Mick drops his sister and Cassie outside Winchcombe’s community centre. Later he’ll lie and say it took him twenty-five minutes to get to his party in Cheltenham from Winchcombe, although speeding fifty miles an hour most of the way, it was nearer fifteen.
Like the town’s main streets, the community centre is decked out with Silver Jubilee bunting for the Queen’s twenty-five-year-old reign. Fabric flags sodden by the rain that afternoon sag drunkenly from the shingles. From inside comes the muffled throb of ‘Tiger Feet’... Through steamed-up windows, red and yellow lights – strobing out of step with the beat – resemble flames of an inferno.
A banner is slung across the gable: ‘Winchcombe Youth Disco’. Tottering up to the entrance on their crepe-soled platform shoes, Cassie and Lauren take turns with the Smirnoff. They cling to each other, ostensibly for support, but neither girl wants the other to get there first. Cassie’s eighteen and Lauren’s sixteen, so in a sense Cassie’s always going to get there first. Lauren’s in a skimpy cotton skirt and sparkly tank-top. The shiny black dress Cassie’s borrowed from Lauren reveals jutting contours of a strip-thin figure. Tonight’s the night, Cassie hums to herself.
In the hallway Winchcombe’s youth bellow out Mud’s ‘Tiger Feet’, pushing and nudging in an unruly queue. A whiff of fresh paint in honour of the Queen deadens the summer air.
With vodka-fuelled impatience, Cassie laboriously tells the flinty-faced woman selling tickets (the bossy cow made her shifts at the Co-op a torture) that her ticket’s paid for. Mrs Glover, in Jubilee bowler hat and Union Jack cape, sternly rips a ticket off her reel and informs Cassie that no one has paid for her and waits in stolid silence until Cassie hands over twenty pence. The disco is kids’ stuff, she’s only come to keep an eye on Karen who was there as soon as the doors opened like the goody-two-shoes she is.
Lauren is pouting at her reflection in a glass-covered noticeboard. Amidst the usual business of Keep Fit Classes, Monthly Bring and Buy sale and Scout meetings, are announcements scattered with a riot of exclamation marks: ‘Exciting Events for the Jubilee!’ ‘Royal Coffee Morning! Share your memories of our Queen!!’ Cassie shoulders through double doors into the hall. Adjusting her cape, Mrs Glover doesn’t see Lauren slip in behind her.
Momentarily dazed by lights and the thundering bass of ‘Disco Inferno’, Cassie scours the crowd. She can’t make out faces. She pushes through the press of bodies and as the track melds into Stevie Wonder, she starts to dance. A group of boys huddled by the DJ’s desk, too sober or shy to hit the floor, are mesmerized by Cassie’s writhing moves. It’s as if she’s held by invisible arms. Lauren joins her and they move in unison.
The DJ, with Noddy Holder bushy sideboards and chequered jacket, is old enough to be the grandfather of everyone in the hall. It doesn’t stop him watching the girls watching the boys watching Lauren and Cassie.
Lauren whispers something in Cassie’s ear and Cassie gives a curt nod. She is dancing nonchalantly now, a bored expression on her cool even features. Half the girls in the hall want to be Cassie. Most of the boys, and some of the girls, know she’s out of their league.
An hour later Cassie retreats to the table of twiglets and plain crisps. She takes a pull on the cherry drink bottle. Heatwave’s ‘Boogie Nights’ is ‘their song’. She turns her nose up. The hall smells like the school gym, it’s not the place, this is only a rehearsal for the real thing. She smiles to herself as the vodka burns her throat.
Time moves slowly when you’re counting the minutes. An hour later, when the Sex Pistols rock the speakers and, in a frenzy of pogoing to ‘God Save the Queen’, Cassie is splashed by sparkling Corona and subterfuge Party Four, she leaves.
She is stumbling past St Peter’s church when the bells strike ten. Twice she veers off the kerb into the road. The second time a car hoots and the driver swears. Her vision blurred by vodka and with only one thing on her mind, Cassie is oblivious.
Cassie Baker has known Winchcombe all her life. Her ancestors are buried, headstones illegible, in the St Peter’s church graveyard. Numbered amongst these dead is Cassie’s great-grandmother who a century ago died of apoplexy in the doctor’s surgery, now the Lloyds Bank, on Abbey Terrace. Cassie’s not going to let that happen to her. Being Donna Summer, she sings in perfect tune as she lurches down Vineyard Street heading for her future.
She pauses by the bridge over the River Isbourne and briefly dizzied, leans on the parapet and gazes at the blackness below.
‘Night, gorgeous!’ a man with a Sid Vicious hairdo and complexion, his arm around a woman with punky blue hair, whoops at Cassie. His girlfriend elbows him and he gives an exaggerated groan.
Years later, divorced and with a paunch, Kelvin Finch will claim the distinction of being the last person, apart from the murderer, to speak to Cassie Baker.
Cassie wrenches off her shoes and carries them dangling by the straps. Making faster progress, she doesn’t care that tiny stones cut her bare feet as she passes the gates to the castle.
On the Old Brockhampton Road drifts of moonlight appear and disappear between clouds. Hawthorn hedges casts shadows so intense they might be chasms in the tarmac. Cassie’s used to the dark, but tonight a sudden fear prickles. Her dad drives home this way. What an idiot! If he sees her, where’s your baby sister and look at you... done up like a tart...
She passes the field where, as a kid, she saw Bambi nibbling moss, or so her dad said. Then the five-bar gate with the outline of the stand of trees that march like soldiers. She’ll take the short cut at the next gate. Although Winchcombe is in her bones, the morbid light presents dips and inclines that are foreign to her. She stops and looks back down the lane. Framed by branches is St Peter’s church, the view adorns crinkle-cut postcards of Winchcombe but now has the quality of a nightmare.
Something’s coming. Her dad’s van. Cassie flattens herself into the hedge. Headlights trace the twists and turns of the lane and rising from the ‘hidden dip’ they catch her in their glare.
Bright spots blind her. The van judders to a stop. One brake light glows red. ‘Boogie Nights’ is playing in Cassie’s head; it’s as if the figure coming towards her moves in time to the music.
June 2016
Four fifteen. Afternoon. Stella Darnell crossed the hospice car park and led Stanley into reception.
‘Thank goodness you’re here, Stella!’ Wendy the receptionist greeted her. ‘Mrs Hogan’s driving the nurses bonkers asking when you’re coming. She loves you!’
‘That’s good. I mean...’
‘I know what you mean! Patty’s still with us. Vicky reckons that’s down to you. She says you’re doing wonders for Patty. I can believe it!’
‘You OK?’ Wendy had been on Stella’s cleaning team before retiring and becoming part-time receptionist at the local hospice.
‘Mustn’t grumble.’ Wendy smiled. ‘Although I do! Can I give Stanley a little something?’
Stella watched her small apricot poodle sit, paw raised, eyes fixed on the approaching liver treat. Wendy’s home-made treats, sealed into bags with hearts on them, were a bestseller in the little display of sweets, crisps and greeting cards beside the desk.
Stella Darnell, MD of Clean Slate, a successful cleaning company in West London, had been volunteering as a hospice befriender for three months. She sat with patients, talking or just keeping them company while giving respite to friends and family. Stella’s friend had died there the previous year. Since then, Clean Slate had cleaned the hospice at a hefty discount, but Stella wanted to offer something personal. Jackie, her PA, keen to get Stella away from long days in the office, came up with the idea.
Emboldened by her chat with Wendy which had diffused Stella’s ever-present trepidation around the fact of death, Stella headed for the ward.
‘Given up on you!’ An elderly woman lying propped against a stack of pillows waved a hand. ‘Look at these two, snivelling like the babies they once were. Kids! Go and get a coffee!’
A man and a woman in their forties, tight white faces and combed dark hair fixing them as siblings, mumbled thanks to Stella and hastened from the room.
‘When you’re dying, you’re supposed to take stock of your achievements. Those two are mine. Lord help us. Wobbly lips, glum faces. I’ll be cremated. I don’t want them lamenting over my grave,’ she nodded emphatically. ‘They were the same with school journeys. At least this time when I go some teacher can’t ring for me to come back!’ She glowered at Stella, daring her to protest. ‘Stanley here!’ She gave the bed sheet a slap.
Without hesitation or need of a home-cooked treat, Stanley flew up onto the bed and flopped beside Patty, head on paws. He too was a volunteer. As a PAT dog (Pets As Therapy), he submitted to fuss on the laps of patients and their families. Patty Hogan might be insensitive with humans, but she was a dog-whisperer when it came to Stanley.
‘Off we go, Stella Darnell.’ Patty was dying of bowel cancer. In the two weeks since her admission, Patty had become Stella’s favourite patient.
‘Ignore her when she’s nasty about people, especially her children. Go with it,’ Vicky, one of the nurses – and Stella’s new friend – had advised before Stella’s first visit to Patty. ‘Best know her bark is as bad as her bite and you’ll both get on fine.’
Stella was used to cantankerous and exacting cleaning clients. When one such client had demanded Stella scrub behind the bath panel and wipe inside the light fittings (electricity off) Stella considered her day made. Befrienders didn’t clean and Patty Hogan’s eyes were tired; Stella must read to her.
That afternoon, Stella, whose own reading centred on hygiene equipment catalogues, was to finish the first volume of The Forsyte Saga. Stella had come round to thinking, despite the story not being true (Stella liked facts), it was quite realistic. She had clients like Soames Forsyte who wanted value for money. Patty Hogan called him a monster, as if she knew him personally.
‘I’m off.’ Vicky looked in on her patients – whether they were conscious or not – at the end of her shift. She’d told Stella, ‘I never know who’ll be there next time I’m in.’ Vicky left Patty until last because if Stella was there, Vicky said she too liked being read to. As she’d said to Stella, ‘Mum read stories to me when I was little, I read my kids my old faves: Worzel Gummidge, Narnia and Five Go Mad at the Hospice!’
‘Sit down, Vicky.’ Patty waggled a finger at the chair where her son had been sitting, then motioned for Stella to continue.
‘“...The thistledown no longer moved. The dog placed his chin over the sunlit foot. It did not stir. The dog withdrew his chin quickly, rose, and leaped on old Jolyon’s lap, looked in his face, whined; then, leaping down, sat on his haunches, gazing up. And suddenly he uttered a long, long howl.
‘But the thistledown was still as death, and the face of his old master.”’
Unlike the thistledown, the words on the page did move. Stella blinked and her voice cracked. A hand appeared. Vicky handed her a tissue.
‘Blow and carry on,’ Patty Hogan instructed with her eyes closed.
The last sentence was something about summer coming, but as she read it, Stella made no sense of it. She closed the tatty paperback and, wiping her nose, glanced at Vicky. Vicky didn’t look bothered. Stella guessed that as a nurse she was probably used to people dying in real life, never mind in books.
‘We’ll start In Chancery next week.’ Patty Hogan dismissed them and moments later she was asleep.
‘I didn’t know Old Jolyon was going to die,’ Stella said when they were standing by Vicky’s car in the hospice car park. ‘Maybe I should have missed out that bit.’
‘I’d guess Patty knows those novels by heart, it won’t have been a shock. Besides, she’s not scared of dying. Her children would pretend she’s going to get better if Patty didn’t keep giving them tasks for her funeral.’ Vicky jiggled her car key. ‘Saying that, whatever she says, I don’t see Patty being here for book two.’
‘She seemed fine.’ Stella was taken aback. When she’d realized there were eight more volumes in The Forsyte Saga, she’d taken this as insurance Patty would stay alive to hear them.
‘Her colour wasn’t great.’ Vicky flipped up her fob watch. ‘Speaking of offspring in denial, I must pick mine up from Roddy’s mum, they’ll be thinking they can watch TV all night. I meant to say, I love Clean Slate! Our house is a show-home after Anne’s been. You’re a life-saver, Stell!’
Stella had been reluctant to take out a cleaning contract with Vicky. On one of their dog walks (Vicky had a black cockapoo called Bing, named not after Crosby, but a rabbit on the BBC’s CBeebies channel), Vicky had asked Stella to break her ‘don’t clean for friends’ rule. When Stella scoped Vicky’s house to determine the requirements, she’d noted the large number of books. Books gathered dust, but she wouldn’t charge extra.
‘I saw that on telly.’ Stella had pointed at Worzel Gummidge next to paperbacks by C.S. Lewis. Vicky’s children were three and four years old. Stella hadn’t started reading until she was six and had stopped after passing A-level English.
‘Those are my old copies, I forgot they were there.’ Vicky had frowned. Stella knew it was because Stella had commented on personal items. A sternly underlined rule in Stella’s staff manual was that cleaning operatives refrained from remark or judgement of clients’ possessions or décor. Stella could have kicked herself.
As Vicky’s bright yellow Jeep Renegade left the car park, Stella’s eyebrows knitted at the memory. She sat in her van looking out at the River Thames. On the far bank was Mortlake Crematorium where they’d gone for her dad’s funeral. Like old Jolyon, there’d been no one with Terry when he died, not even a dog. She wondered if Stanley would howl when she died. She turned in her seat. Strapped onto his jump seat, Stanley was dozing. By the time she was old, Stanley would be dead. Unless she died young. Lucie May – her dad’s ex – would say it was too late for that.
Stella knew Vicky drew the line at murder, real or fictional. Soon after Stella started at the hospice, a doctor who’d read she’d solved cold cases asked her about them while they were making tea in the staffroom. Saying she ‘couldn’t talk about murder’, Vicky left the room. Stella understood; she too avoided talking about murder.
Six p.m. Stella was going to supper at Jackie’s. Jack would be there. Galvanized by this prospect, Stella reversed the van out of the bay.
*
Six thirty. Evening. The shadows of trees on Shepherd’s Bush Green lengthened. Sunlight reflected on the windows of a slow-moving bus sent a searchlight across Clean Slate’s two-roomed office. The windows, shut against the carbon monoxide fumes of idling rush-hour traffic, rendered the room stuffy with the accumulated heat of the day. It was a Hobson’s choice between poisoning and suffocation.
Jackie Makepeace was determined to have her report on potential office space ready for Stella the next morning. Resistant to change, Stella avoided the subject of ‘relocation’. However, their poky premises above the mini-mart were unsuitable to receive the growing number of corporate clients and they needed more staff to service them. As it was, there wasn’t space for Jackie, her assistant Beverly, Stella, and Stella’s mum Suzie Darnell, who worked part-time maintaining their database. Jackie would be firm. Clean Slate must move.
With the help of her brother-in-law Barry, Jackie had identified several buildings in West London and at that moment was pasting in a link to premises in Hammersmith – a converted 1930s furniture warehouse near Wormwood Scrubs prison. While Stella would like the gleaming décor and high-level security, she’d quibble at the need for the café with Wi-Fi on the ground floor ‘for exclusive use of tenants’.
Jackie pulled the report from the printer and took it into Stella’s office. It was usual for Stella to be at her desk at this hour, but she’d embraced befriending at the hospice and indeed had gone every day for the last fortnight. She’d also made a friend. Jackie liked the sound of Vicky, a specialist palliative-care nurse who had encouraged Stella out of the office for walks and lunches. Stella was circumspect about making friends, so Vicky was a good thing.
Stella was to be at Jackie’s for supper. Roast lamb and trimmings prepared by Nick, Jackie’s younger son. Despite it being spring, Stella wouldn’t be lured from her office-lair on the promise of a rocket salad. She was a meat and two veg woman. Actually, Jackie smiled to herself, Stella was a microwaved shepherd’s pie without veg woman. Jackie was working on that.
She caught the time on Stella’s wall clock. It was a plastic monstrosity in the shape of a vacuum cleaner Beverly had, as a joke, shown Stella in a catalogue, and which, taking an instant liking to it, Stella had ordered online. Jackie laid the paper on Stella’s keyboard. She did a sweep of the outer office. Kettle unplugged, milk in fridge, photocopier off. Beverly’s computer was glowing, the Clean Slate logo – underscored with the dash of a small-handled brush – floated about the screen. Jackie tutted and switched it off.
Jackie was startled by tapping. A face, half obscured by Clean Slate’s sign, was peering through the wired glass in the door. She felt a flicker of annoyance. No matter how often they were asked, the insurance brokers upstairs left the street door on the latch. Anyone could walk in. Clean Slate was on the first landing and couriers expecting signature invariably interrupted with parcels for the brokers. This explained Stella’s considering office security a priority. Jackie was thinking that at least she’d locked this door when it opened and the stranger walked in. Jackie sighed inwardly, she’d forgotten to take it off the latch after Bev had gone.
‘Stella Darnell?’ A woman in her early forties, bobbed hair tucked behind her ears, in a white denim jacket, tight black trousers and the sort of high heels that felled your arches scowled at Jackie as if they had already fallen out badly.
‘No, can I help you?’ Jackie adopted a bright smile. ‘Jackie Makepeace, I’m Stella’s PA.’
‘I have to see Stella Darnell.’ The woman flicked a look at Stella’s door on which was Beverly’s laminated notice, ‘Stella Darnell, Managing Director’.
‘She’s not here, I’m afraid. I wonder if I could help?’
‘It’s not cleaning.’ The woman gave a flick of her hair with red nail-polished fingers; sprayed into shape, it didn’t budge.
‘Is it a case?’ Jackie enquired softly. Another reason Clean Slate needed to move to a larger office was that, besides offering cleaning, Stella had decided to take the business of being a private detective seriously and offer it as a service.
‘Yes.’ Smoothing her hand over and over her flat stomach, the woman appeared suddenly indecisive. She darted glances about her as if concerned they could be overheard.
‘May I ask your name?’ Jackie posed a simple question to get the woman to open up.
‘Lisa Mercer. It’s not for me. It’s nothing to do with me.’
She fiddled with a silver pendant resting on her tanned chest. Her lips, matching the nails, were a pencil dash. Lisa Mercer took care of her good looks.
‘I see,’ Jackie said, although she didn’t.
‘Paul Mercer asked me to come. He’s my father.’
‘Do sit down, Ms Mercer.’ Jackie wheeled out Beverly’s chair from her desk.
Lisa Mercer remained standing. ‘It’s about... do you remember Charles Brice? He was arrested for the Bryony Motson and Cassandra Baker murders in—’
‘I remember.’ As if the windows had been blasted, air seemed to be sucked from the room. Jackie knew who the woman was. She gripped the sides of her keyboard. Lisa Mercer was the daughter of the detective.
New Year’s Eve 1999
The public toilets in Cheltenham had the look of a morgue. The Victorian urinals, pocked by cigarette burns, that lined the tiled walls were elegant masterpieces of waste design. Opposite two oak stalls were sinks big enough to bath a baby.
A man in a Harrington jacket, black T-shirt and baggy black and grey check trousers, his blonded hair styled to tip over ice-blue eyes, was using the corner urinal. Finishing, he stepped off the plate and moved to a sink. He massaged a cracked tablet of carbolic under a torrent of scalding water without generating suds. Fluorescent light revealed lines around the mouth and eyes that, despite the boyish hairstyle, put him in his forties.
He was still sluicing his hands when a middle-aged man strolled into the chamber. Tall and suited in black, he nevertheless lacked the sartorial care of the man at the sink. His jacket bulged with change, his hair needed a wash and a cut and his shirt was escaping from his waistband. He went to the cubicles and tipped each door wide with a forefinger. Ascertaining they were empty, he returned to the exit.
‘Nice to see you wash your hands after taking a piss, Charlie Brice!’ His voice was a low rumble.
‘This is a surprise.’ Clenching his bottom lip between his teeth, Brice smiled as if the surprise was a good one. He pulled at a grubby roller towel until he found a lighter grey section and, finger by finger, dried his hands. Without turning around he said, ‘Inspector Mercer. Happy millennium to you too!’
‘Detective Chief Inspector.’
‘Hanging out in toilets win you a stripe?’ Charlie Brice turned to Mercer. ‘Last time we met I think you were rescuing a cat from a tree? Or no, was it when you tried to do me for not having a cab licence? Bad luck there!’
‘Where is she?’ Mercer snarled.
‘Have we done with pleasantries?’ Brice made to leave, but Mercer was blocking the door. ‘If you don’t mind me saying, you’re looking jaded for the last night of the century—’
‘Where’s Bryony Motson? Tell me now, you little shit, or so help me...’ Mercer twisted a fistful of Brice’s T-shirt and pulled him close. ‘We got a witness saw you with Bryony in the Sun in Winchcombe. She left the pub in your taxi. Where’ve you got her?’ Knuckles white, Mercer jerked Brice until their faces were an inch apart.
‘I don’t keep track of my fares.’ Brice was laconic. ‘Eeeuch! Extra-strong mints, what habitual misdemeanour is that hiding, Chief Inspector?’
‘Where is she?’ Mercer’s shout bounced off the ceramic walls. He let go of Brice and kneaded his fist as if preparing for a punch.
‘I wish I could help.’ Brice was pleasant. ‘I haven’t seen Bryony Motson since I dropped her at her flat the night I had a drink with her. She didn’t want a second date. Mystery to me, I’ve a way with the ladies! Say lah vee!’ He exaggerated a London accent.
Thirteen days ago, on 18 December Bryony Motson, an eighteen-year-old Abbey National teller, had left a nightclub in Cheltenham. She bid her friends ‘Happy Christmas’ and went to catch the late ‘Bingo’ bus to her home in Winchcombe nine miles away. She hadn’t been seen since. The case passed the golden twenty-four hours, when evidence is intact and memories are fresh, with no solid lead. Then Mercer’s slot on Crimewatch yielded two nuggets. An elderly woman, walking her Pekinese in Pittville Park, had found the girl’s fake Fendi handbag in a bin. A matching Fendi purse contained fifty pounds cash. Mercer reckoned that the money lessened the possibility, slim as it was, that Bryony had gone off on her own accord. She had a good job and had just moved into a flat share. The cash suggested kidnap. But not for monetary gain. Mercer would not assume murder while there was a chance of life.
This investigation – Operation Banyan – was personal. Bryony Motson’s father Brian, manager at the Lloyds Bank in Winchcombe, had helped Mercer wisely invest his Gold Cup winnings a few years back. His money doubled, Mercer built a games room onto his house in Bishops Cleeve. Every detective needs an injection of emotion when long days and nights with no leads is crushing body and soul. Mercer was fuelled by the idea: suppose it happened to a daughter of his?
On Crimewatch, he’d told Nick Ross how, when Bryony Motson left the nightclub she’d been wearing stone-washed jeans, a black velvet top and, despite bitter cold, no coat. Mercer – who liked his wife in high heels – opined that the girl’s high heels would have prevented her running from an assailant.
The driver of the last bus to Winchcombe that night told police he’d passed the Pittville Park stop – a request – without being hailed. Nor had anyone fitting Bryony’s description got off outside the police station – Bryony’s stop – where the bus terminated at 23.06. Mercer’s team traced every passenger on the bus. The two men and a woman corroborated the driver’s story. When Bryony Motson said goodbye to her friends on 19 December, she might as well have walked off the planet.
Paul Mercer knew from experience and stats that a victim was likely to be dead within hours of going missing. Yet he kept faith. His gut told him that Bryony was alive. This was a ‘crime in action’.
Nugget number two: five thirty on 31 December, His head aching and reluctant to go home to change into his suit for the ball, Paul Mercer was at his desk in Cheltenham police station. He was brooding on how life was complicated when his phone rang. A woman in the foyer was asking for him.
Many times in his career Mercer had wished for the ‘Robinson Crusoe Witness’, who, cut off from news, doesn’t know they’re sitting on treasure. Lindsay Bennett, a pretty primary school teacher in her thirties, had been in bed with flu for over a week, too sick to watch TV or listen to the radio. ‘I thought I was dying!’ Mercer had his castaway.
On the evening of 13 December – a Monday – Bennett had done her marking in the Sun Inn on North Street. ‘You don’t meet people stuck at home.’ She’d noticed the man because she fancied him and had hoped, because of the obvious age difference, that the young woman with him – who she now knew was Bryony – was his daughter. Irked by this, Mercer was nevertheless grateful for her detailed description. ‘He had blue eyes like Malcolm McDowell, my Mum’s fantasy man!! I hoped he was her dad so I’d be in with a chance!’ She’d even noted a half-moon scar on the man’s cheek and – bless her – the telephone number on the taxi in which he and the girl had driven away. It was solid circumstantial. Mercer’s team identified the man as Charles Brice, a local taxi driver. Operation Banyan lit up.
Fifteen minutes later a patrol radioed in. Brice had stopped to pick up a chocolate bar from a shop opposite Cheltenham Library. Ten minutes after that, Mercer spotted Brice’s taxi outside the public toilets near the library. He’d told his police driver to wait and jumping out of the car, strolled into the toilets.
‘You’re coming to the station.’ Mercer’s voice rang in the tiled room.
‘You’re kidding. This is the best night in my life for fares!’ Now Brice was concerned. ‘Then I’ve got a party to go to. Unlike you. Or is the Gents your idea of a good time?’ Adjusting the crutch of his trousers, his gaze travelled over the officer’s face as a lover’s might.
Detective Chief Inspector Paul Mercer did have a party to go to. He’d promised his wife that this year he’d get to the police black-tie ball at the golf club. A new century and a new start to a marriage faltering because he was always missing, assumed working. Tomorrow they’d treat their twenty-three-year-old daughter Lisa to the Saturday Night Fever musical at London’s Palladium. Apparently, when she was little, Lisa loved the film. Mercer was confused: he couldn’t keep up with what the girls liked.
He led Brice out of the toilets to the squad car where a young WPC sat in the driver’s seat. A rough hand on the back of Brice’s head, Mercer pushed him into the back seat and slammed the door shut. He paused by the kerb and breathed in a lungful of night air. He had a Nominated Suspect. He’d locate Bryony Motson and return her to her dad. He’d do a press conference in a blaze of glory. He’d hit the golf club in time to dance to ‘The Lady in Red’ with his wife of thirty years as the bells rang out for 2000. He’d caught the perfect case to end 1999. Thank you, God!
Humming the Bee Gees’ ‘Staying Alive’, Mercer rested his palm on the car. He loved this bit, when pieces of the proverbial jigsaw fitted. Brice knew Bryony: opportunity. She’d jilted him: motive. A taxi gave Brice a legitimate reason to give Bryony a lift. Means. As a taxi driver Brice was trusted. Years in the force told the detective that, sharp, clever and plausible, Brice fitted the profile of a killer. Brice had kidnapped a young innocent girl. Mercer would make him pay.
‘What have you done with Bryony?’ Mercer got in the passenger seat beside the WPC. He put up a hand to pause her from starting the engine and addressed Brice’s silhouette in the rear mirror.
‘Why do you think I know anything?’ Charles Brice sounded curious.
‘Cut the crap. Tell me where she is!’ His fingers curling and uncurling on his lap, Mercer wanted to rip the man’s head off.
‘I met Bryony Motson in the Sun, like your witness said. We clocked each other. She let me buy her a drink. She took a few off me, but who’s counting. I kept to orange juice as I was driving. After that, I drove her to her flat where I left her. I gave her my number. She never rang. She was a nice girl, I’m as upset as you she’s gone missing.’
‘So upset you didn’t tell us you’d been for a drink with her? Christ, it’s been all over the news.’ Mercer told himself no daughter of his would chat up strangers in pubs.
‘What was the point? Bryony was at work the next day. How was me spending an hour in the pub with her going to help you?’ Brice sounded weary.
‘Where were you on the eighteenth of December?’
‘I had a Birmingham airport drop, then a pick-up from there to Tewkesbury.’ Brice gave a jaw-cracking yawn. ‘Can I go please, Mr Policeman? This is wasting time for us both.’
‘You answered promptly. Can you name every fare you’ve taken over the last fortnight?’
‘The eighteenth’s my Aunty Phyll’s birthday. I popped in on her. You’re a family man, you understand. She’s moved into that old people’s home your mum runs. I guess you’ll end up there one day!’
‘Can your aunt confirm that?’ Mercer snapped his head around, sure from his voice that Brice was smiling, but the man was looking out the side window, apparently unaware he’d touched a nerve.
‘I also remember that date because it’s when Bryony disappeared. It’s not like you think, I wasn’t busy hiding her in a drainage shaft!’
‘What the fuck does that mean?’ Mercer reached up and flicked on the interior light.
‘An expression, officer.’ Brice rested blue eyes on Mercer. It seemed to Mercer he was gazing right into his mind.
‘Why specify a drainage shaft?’ Mercer’s mind went to Cheltenham’s sewerage system. Christ!
Brice spoke so quietly Mercer didn’t catch it.
‘What?’ Every second was the difference between finding a terrified girl trapped in a dank cellar – or a drainage shaft – and a corpse. Brice must know Mercer had nothing concrete, that time was on his side.
Brice laughed again and in a Tommy Steele accent said, ‘Innocent till proved guilty, guv!’
‘If you don’t say where you’ve got Bryony the papers will make your life not worth living. They’ll camp outside your door and tail you wherever you go. They’ll harass your “Aunty Phyll”. They’ll make your family suffer. Tell me where she is, it’ll work for you in the long run.’
‘Sir, I think we should be at the station for this,’ the WPC muttered to him.
‘I know what I’m doing, Constable!’ Mercer snarled at her. Yet she was right. He wasn’t sailing close to the wind, he’d hit a hurricane. Yet what he’d told the girl was true, he knew exactly what he was doing.
‘You didn’t answer my question,’ Brice remarked as if he hadn’t heard the exchange.
‘What question?’
‘I asked if you wanted a New Year’s prezzie?’
Mercer’s skin prickled. He’d always been able to get suspects to confess. ‘Go on.’
‘I heard about a girl.’
‘Don’t play games, Brice!’
‘I can show you.’
Mercer could think on his feet. A kidnap demanded fancy footwork. He dismissed the WPC and eased his bulk behind the wheel. ‘Let’s go.’
Charles Brice directed Mercer along the dark road to Winchcombe. They drove in silence, passing Cleeve Hill and the golf club where Mercer should be right now. As they reached the lights of the town, Brice instructed Mercer to turn into Corndean Lane. After some minutes he directed him down a dirt track off to the left marked ‘Private’.
Thick woodland closed off the sky. Through gaps between trees of ash and oak Mercer glimpsed the distant lights of Corndean Hall. If Brice tried anything, no one would hear. Mercer dismissed this. The dank wooded tract was the perfect setting in which to hide Bryony Motson.
The car headlamps illuminated a sharp bend and to his right Mercer saw a sheer drop. He gripped the wheel. One jerk and the car would plunge down, the few bushes and saplings struggling to reach the sunlight wouldn’t halt the trajectory.
‘Stop here. We’ll have to walk the rest,’ Brice told him.
‘You stay in the car. I’m not stupid.’ Mercer pulled into a clearing by a stile and cut the engine.
‘You’ll never find it by yourself. I’m hardly going to run away!’ Brice might have been giving the advice of a friend.
Mercer saw the sense in that. He made Charles Brice climb the stile ahead of him and then stand still. He shone his torch in Brice’s face to blind him. Once he was over the stile, he shoved Brice onward and stumbled behind him along a muddied path. The cold weather had frozen the ground or walking would have been impossible. They came to another stile.
‘I know this place. This is Belas Knap!’ Mercer directed the torch past Brice to a grassy mound within a low stone wall. ‘It’s a bloody Neolithic long barrow. An ancient burial place. If this is a wind-up—’
‘A copper with historical know-how! No wonder they promoted you! Early Neolithic as it goes.’ Brice nimbly jumped over stones jutting from a wall to the other side. ‘No wind-up, but it may be a wild goose chase.’ He was halfway along a path that skirted a grassy mound rising above the wall.
Forgetting Brice could get away, Mercer knelt before one of the chambers in the long barrow and shone the beam around the interior. The sides were lined with flat, narrow stones interlocked along the same principle as the drystone walls dividing fields and gardens across Gloucestershire. At the back of the chamber was a huge stone. Mercer crawled into the mouth of the hole and touched the boulder. ‘This bloody thing’s granite, how could anyone be buried there?’
‘Sandstone, actually. If my source is to be believed, a body’s wedged behind that blocking stone. Frankly I reckon this is a waste of both our time.’
‘Blocking stone? What are you, an effing archaeologist? If this is where you’ve got Bryony, so help me I’ll—’ Mercer’s voice reverberated in the cadaverous dark.
‘I wanted to be an archaeologist when I was a kid, but you have to go to university and—’
‘Shut up and help move this bloody thing!’ Mercer rested the torch on the chamber floor and gripped an edge of the stone.
Brice crawled in beside Mercer. Using the weight of their bodies as leverage, they heaved on the boulder. It shifted centimetres.
‘Ouch!’ Mercer’s knee exploded in pain. He fell backwards, rubbing furiously at the cartilage.
‘You were kneeling on a shepherd’s crown.’ Brice was holding a small rounded stone to the torchlight. ‘See that hole in the centre?’
‘A crown?’ As the pain in his knee subsided, Mercer tried to attune to the slightest cry from deep within the mound. Yet even as he listened, he knew that the stone was wedged too close to the wall for more than a trickle of air to seep in. Bryony had been missing for thirteen days. He yelled, ‘Bryony!’
‘She’s not here!’ Brice was calm. Too calm. ‘A shepherd’s crown was left inside long barrows to send the dead on their next journey and—’
‘Shut it! Get here and pull when I say!’ Mercer got a hold on the stone slab again. When Brice was back in position he counted, ‘One, two, three!’
Brice was a younger, stronger man and his pull was more powerful than Mercer’s. Instead of to one side, this imbalance caused the stone to topple forward. The men scuffled backwards as the lump of sandstone crashed down, just missing them.
‘Oh!’ Charles Brice groaned as a rank smell of earth and decay wafted out. The stone had revealed a cavity the size of a travelling trunk. Mercer’s first thought was of a foetus curled in the womb. He didn’t need to be an archaeologist to conclude that the body interred in the cramped space wasn’t Neolithic, early or late. Neither was it Bryony Motson.
So it was that only hours into the twenty-first century, Detective Chief Inspector Paul Mercer, aged fifty-three, with an exemplary career in the force and a year until full pension, faced two kinds of abyss. One was literal: behind the ‘blocking stone’ was a deep hole within the ancient monument. As white-suited forensics worked in the glare of spotlights, Mercer stared at what the pathologist would call an ‘articulated skeleton’. The other was the vertiginous reality of his decision not to arrest Brice in the toilets and interview him under caution. A decision that some would say cost Paul Mercer his life.
The setting sun turned the spans on Hammersmith Bridge to spun gold and made jewels out of jagged glass and shards of plastic on the Thames foreshore. The tide was ebbing; as Jack teetered on a brick by the river’s edge, a strip of mud between his brick and the water broadened.
Jack meandered up to the retaining wall. The bricks were livid green up to the tidemark. He disliked this shade of green and looked away. Above were the gardens of Hammersmith Terrace. Iron mooring hoops and giant reinforcing bolts in the wall were mute witnesses of the crimes and misdemeanours of over a century.
Tall, wearing black trousers, black lace-ups, mussed dark hair falling onto his forehead, Jack Harmon might be a 1940s academic. He was actually a driver for London Underground’s District line. The dead late shift. Preferring the darkness of his cab, he seldom sought the sun. An exception to this was the odd cleaning shift he did for Stella.
His phone was ringing. It wouldn’t be Jackie wondering where he was. She’d never call. She let him be.
‘Hey, Bella!’ Jack affected nonchalance. Bella had dumped him months before. She’d told him he needed to get over his mother’s death. After that, if he wanted to, he could call. But when he had called, Bella hadn’t believed he was over it. Nor had he. Had she changed her mind? What did he feel about that? He found he was staring at the green slime. He blinked and transferred his gaze to the receding water.
‘Where are you?’ Bella always asked where he was. One of the problems in their relationship had been that he never wanted to tell her. Jack gazed out over the molten-flecked Thames. If he said he was by the Bell Steps, Bella would know he was there because of his mother and hang up. Jackie had suggested he tell Bella there are some things you never get over. There was no point trying to change him.
‘Out and about.’ He missed their nocturnal walks. He missed nestling in Bella’s studio watching her create intricate botanical drawings. But had he missed Bella? ‘How are you?’
‘I’m pregnant.’
A motorboat scuttered past in the direction of Barnes Bridge. The wash rippled over the mud. Jack covered the mouthpiece in case Bella guessed he was by the river.
‘Are you by the river?’
‘Yes!’ As if he’d got there inadvertently. ‘Pregnant? That’s great. Congratulations.’ He supposed he was pleased. Bella had never had steadfast love, children loved you whatever. Jack quelled irritation that she’d so quickly replaced him with another man. ‘Do I know him?’
‘Know who?’
‘Your partner. The father. It’s wonderful.’ Jack warmed to his theme. Bella was letting him know she’d moved on. A final twist of her scalpel. He’d seen early on in their relationship that it would be inadvisable to make an enemy of Bella. Then he’d gone and done exactly that.
‘Yes, you do know him,’ Bella breathed in his ear. ‘It’s you.’
The mud along the base of the retaining wall had dried to grey clay. Jack had read newspapers from that July day in 1981. It was likely his mother had cried for help, but by the Thames, in the middle of a Wednesday, no one heard. She was found by a man walking his dog. Minutes more and she’d have been washed away.
‘Jack, you there?’
‘Pregnant? How?’ Jack swept a hand down his face. ‘I mean I haven’t seen you for five months.’
‘Do I need to explain the facts of life?’ Bella sounded upset.
‘Of course not. But we took precautions.’ No they hadn’t. Bella was forty-nine, she’d be fifty next year. She’d stopped having periods. She’d said it was a liberation. He hadn’t needed condoms, another liberation. He’d noticed she’d put on weight, but assumed that their split had made Bella comfort eat.
‘It seems I can still conceive.’
‘That’s lovely. That is, if you think so?’ Idiot.
Without noticing Jack had returned to the shoreline. He picked up a flat stone and sent it skimming over the water. It bounced two, three, four, five times. He’d done that with his mummy, never with Hugh, his father. He imagined skimming stones with his own child.
‘Bit late if I don’t think it’s lovely. I’m due in a fortnight.’
‘In a fortnight?’ Jack whipped around. The beach was empty. As empty as it had been that July day. He’d never supposed he’d be someone’s dad. He wasn’t sure he had it in him. After his mother’s death, his father acted like Jack was in the way. Jack stopped being someone’s son. ‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner?’
‘I wouldn’t be telling you now, ’cept Emily said to. Now I’ve told you, I’ll go.’
‘Emily was right, I’m terribly glad to know. I’ll be there with you Bella, all the way.’ His heart swelled with the grandiosity of the moment.
‘You will not! I didn’t ring so you could be Wonderful Daddy. I don’t need you swooping in with lavish presents and swooping out like a Superhero. My own father did that before he got bored with me.’
‘I won’t be like that. I’ll be “hands on”.’ The sun sent last piercing rays across the ragged beach.
‘I don’t want you involved. It was a mistake to tell you, I knew you’d try to muscle in.’
‘You can’t do this on your own. I want to be there.’ If he said he loved Bella, she might relent. She’d once told him no one had ever said that to her. ‘I want to be there for the two of you.’
‘It’s not the “two of us”.’
‘What do you mean?’ Bella had a new partner. Jack felt a flash of pure jealousy. He didn’t want another man – or another woman – bringing up his child.
‘There’ll be a boy and a girl. I’m having twins.’
*
Jack sat on the Bell Steps and watched the tide turn. From the Ram pub came shouts of laughter. If he called for help no one would hear. If they did, they’d assume a hoax because he looked fine. He wasn’t fine. He was going to be a father, but his children would never know him. An hour earlier he’d got a text from Jackie. Three kisses. A sign she hoped he was all right and was welcome if he felt like it. Jackie always got it right. He couldn’t go. She wouldn’t give him advice, she wouldn’t say it would be all right. Jackie never said anything she didn’t mean or couldn’t know was true. He couldn’t face Stella. Jack felt a shot of anguish. Bella’s news cast him into a new darkness. He couldn’t tell Bella he loved her because he was in love with Stella. He couldn’t tell Stella he loved her because if it didn’t make her run screaming, that he was to be a father certainly would. At best, Stella was indifferent to children.
Jack stayed on the beach where, in 1981, his mother was murdered and where, in 2011, he’d first met Stella Darnell. An ending and a beginning.
It grew dark. A waning moon rose in the sky. From the road, a street lamp sent shadows down the river stairs. When the rising water reached Jack’s step he got up. The pub was closed. Rubber-soled, his shoes were soundless as he walked into the subway beneath the Great West Road.
In the bleakly lit tunnel, Jack Harmon stared at the blue tiled walls as if in a trance.