Luck and Judgement Page 7

‘Is not the number of the phone in the evidence room. Anything else?’

  ‘That number belongs to-’

  ‘Let me see, just a minute… Yes, it’s coming through now… An iPhone 5. Probably black…’

  She lowered the piece of paper and frowned.

  ‘Don’t worry. It’s a gift I have. But if you can tell me when it was last used, I will be impressed.’

  She picked up the paper again.

  ‘16.10 last Saturday, the 15th.’

  ‘Well done. No more details?’

  ‘They wouldn’t go any further over the phone.’

  ‘Not a problem – we can sort that if we have to. Banks?’

  Another piece of paper. Whatever was wrong with notebooks?

  ‘A Mr James Bell has a current account and a savings account at Lloyds in the market square. I checked the addresses on the personnel file, and it’s him.’

  ‘Good again. We’ll need access to that as well.’

  ‘The request is filled out, on your desk…’

  ‘Well, I hope DI Reeve has brought her best pen to work. Waters, can you even come close to this?’

  He hadn’t done badly, either. The digital personnel file had now appeared but it was only a scanned copy of the one that they already had on paper. Better was the result for the two satellite calls that Bell had made in his first tour; dates, times and the two mobile numbers had been handed over without protest. He copied them down, almost certain that one of them was the number that Lucy Bell had written onto the back of Reeve’s card. He needed to go and check to be sure.

  He called John Murray away from his screen – from a distance the dense blocks of text could have been a draft of ‘Crime and Punishment’ – and briefed the three of them on what they had discovered at Bell’s home that afternoon. When he mentioned the missing two days, he was pleased to see the level of interest rise a couple of notches. After a pause, he went round the table and asked for contributions.

  Waters said, ‘We really need to get into the phones. The call history on the Samsung will tell us a lot about his past movements. It might even be trackable.’

  John Murray said, ‘How much is an iPhone 5?’

  Waters – ‘The basic S, 16 gigabytes, is £549.’

  Smith, wistfully – ‘When I was a boy we collected train numbers…’

  Murray said, ‘How many people living in The Towers can afford five hundred and forty nine quid for a phone? Assuming he bought it. I know there’ll be plenty of nicked ones in there.’

  ‘Or rented it,’ Smith said, ‘but even then it would be?’ pointing at Waters.

  ‘Thirty or forty pounds a month.’

  Murray continued, ‘And he has a young kid, and he hasn’t had a decent job that we know of until a month ago. Iffy, DC.’

  Smith nodded. There was something reassuring about having your own thoughts confirmed by John Murray. He turned to Serena Butler.

  After a moment she said, ‘I don’t like the sound of James Bell.’

  The single, half-raised eyebrow seemed to say, ‘And neither do I’.

  What he actually said was, ‘Well, we have our orders. DI Reeve would like us to take a close look at him – upon which we have already made a good start. None of us is working this weekend?’ – with a quick look around to confirm it – ‘and there’s nothing here to justify any overtime. So we’ll all be on this, Monday morning. John, get your opus finished or as near as dammit this afternoon – two more hours. Chris, get back to your girlfriend on Elizabeth. Obviously she’s soon going to be thinking that you want to get serious but that’s the price you pay for your rugged good looks. I told you that broken nose would work wonders.’

  Waters touched it involuntarily, as he did every time Smith drew attention to it.

  ‘And see where we can find out when and how Bell got that job. You’ll need to get to someone in Marinor for that. I wonder who vets them… No, start with Marinor personnel. See if there are any recruitment policies in the public domain. What do they say about alcohol on the rigs? Drugs? In the back of my mind, I seem to remember that they used to be pretty fussy about people with any past problems and certain sorts of criminal record. So how does James Bell get around all that? But don’t ask those particular questions on the phone – just get us a name so we can pay them a visit. Preferably on dry land.’

  Waters and Murray were already back at their desks. The atmosphere in the room had changed; there was focus, a renewed sense of purpose, something was underway. Smith had felt it many times but still had the thrill, the rush, and he wondered then whether any number of nicely printed business cards could compensate for it.

  He turned to Serena Butler.

  ‘How well do you know Kings Lake?’

  ‘Not very. I’ve been shopping a few times, been to a couple of restaurants.’

  With whom, he wondered. With the others already busy, she looked alone again, and still uneasy when it was just the two of them.

  He said, ‘You have your own car?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Off you go, then. Have a ride round for a couple of hours before you go home. Start getting to know the place – you’ll need to if you’re going to do any detecting in it. Head out towards The Towers and have a wander – but don’t go out of sight of your car. Is it an expensive one?’

  ‘It was when I bought it.’

  ‘Definitely keep it in sight, then.’

  ‘The Towers are the apartment blocks east of here – five of them?’

  ‘Yes. Head out there and scout around. We’re going to be knocking on some doors there come Monday morning.’

  She went back to the table that had become hers in the past couple of days, and began to tidy up the papers and items on it. When he looked up a minute later, he saw her glance quickly away from him, a puzzled expression on her face. He waited until she looked at him again, and then he said, ‘Yes, just go. Start getting a feel for the place, if you’re intending to stay around.’

  When he looked up again, she had gone.

  Chapter Six

  Looking down from his bedroom window at six o’clock in the morning, Smith could see that the winds of the equinox were still blowing through the streets of Kings Lake. The yellow stars of the forsythia nodded and swayed down there in the gloom, and he thought, that shrub needs pruning – did I do it last year? Sheila used to cut that back every year, but when? After flowering, I suppose, give the new growth a chance to develop over the summer.

  He went to the bathroom and washed his face in cold water. Then back to his bedroom, where a small meditation bench was already in place at one end, facing the window. He opened the top pane a little so that fresh air could find its way in, and then sat, legs crossed in a half-lotus. After a minute or so, he closed his eyes and joined his hands, fingers interlaced in his lap.

  Thirty minutes later, he opened his eyes but continued sitting. He had not practised for some months yet it had taken only a few days before he was back into the routine and feeling the benefits of it – and then, of course, as with all the things that we know are good for us which we do not do, he wondered why he had ever stopped. At the worst of times, in the final weeks of her life, their GP had looked at Smith, taken him to one side and asked whether he needed something to help him through it. He had not said no then; he had researched the drug, considered it carefully and then said no. The GP was a wise man and told him that there were alternatives that sometimes helped. Had he ever considered mindfulness, the Westernised form of meditation? Even now, as he sat, Smith had to smile at what took place that Thursday evening. He went into the primary school hall for his first class and found that it was being led by Olive Markham – senior assistant to Dr Robinson at his very own police mortuary. She had looked at him and given no glimmer of recognition until he broached the subject when everyone else had left. Her first words to him had been, ‘About time, Chief Inspector Smith.’

  When he went to come out of the cross-legged position, he found that his kn
ee, the troublesome one, had frozen, and it took some seconds before he could begin to straighten it. Nothing remains the same and all things must pass – even flexible joints. Slowly the tide of the coming day’s events began to rise, and this was no ordinary Saturday. Her train would arrive at platform three, at a little after one o’clock this afternoon. He had promised to meet her there. They would drive back to his home, have some lunch, some coffee, probably some more coffee, but then, sooner or later, Jo Evison would begin to talk to him about her next book, the one that he had somehow agreed to cooperate with, about the Andretti case. The Ice-cream Murders. That was the title the publishers would want, if it got that far, but he, Smith, didn’t want it. It was cheap, tabloid and somehow disrespectful. He imagined the cover – someone paid to design something that would sell the book, and he could see only horrors. How much editorial control did she have? Does the writer have any?

  Sitting at the table with his breakfast, another thought loomed. Although the case was officially closed, had been for almost ten years, he would still, as a serving officer, need to tell his superiors what he was involved in. He had mentioned it to Charlie Hills, obviously, without going into any details; Charlie had just shrugged and said that he didn’t mind if she wanted a word with him, he could soon put her straight about Smith. But a senior officer would need to be informed, if only as a professional courtesy. Who? A DI was not enough in a situation like this, and slowly, inexorably, the face of Detective Superintendent Allen began to materialize above the last piece of toast on his plate.

  He dressed and went over the house again, making sure that it was tidy. From the door of the second bedroom, he looked round as if noting the position of every object in it, as if it was a crime scene itself. In a way it might be – he was becoming convinced that he had made a really bad decision. When she had said on the phone that she would book herself into a hotel rather than travel back late in the evening – so she was expecting it to be a long interview – his first thought had been, there aren’t any hotels in Lake that will do. He had said then, I have spare rooms, you’re welcome to stay over. There had been an excruciatingly long silence, and he did not know which of them had suffered the most during it. In the end, Jo Evison had broken it.

  ‘I’m sorry – you took me by surprise.’

  ‘No, I think it was shock. Anyway, if you-’

  ‘Sorry again. It’s nothing personal. In fact, it’s entirely professional. If I’m going to write this, there has to be some… A sort of distance, if that makes sense.’

  It did, she was right and all he needed was an unembarrassing way out for both of them.

  ‘Of course, I didn’t think. Currently it’s about fifty miles, so we’re safe at the moment.’

  ‘Fifty miles?’

  ‘The distance between us.’

  She laughed, and he noticed again, as he had on the beach when the snowstorm came, that unlike most women, most men even, her voice seemed to be lower when she was amused.

  ‘But that’s very kind of you. It would save me the bother of finding somewhere. If you are sure you have the room? And if your wife won’t mind…’

  He had looked down then and thought, she’s remembered the ring.

  He said, ‘No, sorry, I should have mentioned that. Sheila, my wife, she died a few years ago. I live on my own.’

  Going on to say ‘If that makes a difference’ seemed superfluous, even presumptuous, and so he had said nothing more, he had simply waited.

  She said, ‘OK. If you’re sure I won’t be putting you out.’

  Walking into the hardware store, which was conveniently close to the station, he remembered that on the beach she had said that writing such a book would be at least a year away. Had she changed her mind or was this the way it was done? He had no idea.

  Rampton’s is a delight, a throwback to an age before the virtual shop and the virtual customer. One can hardly turn around in the dusty, dimly-lit aisles between the rows of shelves that reach up to the ceiling, and every shelf is packed with little cardboard boxes and plastic trays, each labelled in Mr Rampton’s old-fashioned copperplate. When the bell on the door rings – it’s an old, mechanically sprung bell, saving on electricity – Mr Rampton appears in his long, brown warehouse coat, half-moon spectacles halfway down the long, Roman nose. Whether he knows you or not, you will always receive the politest of greetings, followed by the same inquiry.

  ‘Good afternoon – and I see that it is, just. How can I help you?’

  ‘Good afternoon, just, Mr Rampton. How are you keeping?’

  ‘Well, Mr Smith. And yourself?’

  ‘The same. Mrs Rampton?’

  ‘A little arthritis…’

  Smith had only recently seen her in a wheelchair at the supermarket.

  ‘We haven’t seen you for a while, Mr Smith. Is it time for some redecoration?’

  ‘Probably, yes. But not today. I came to see if you’ve got one of these or anything like it.’

  He held out his phone with the picture that Waters had sent to him the previous afternoon. Mr Rampton took it and shaded it with his other hand.

  ‘Mm, possibly. If you could enlarge it a little…’

  ‘Oh, I’m not sure about that. My technical department is having the weekend off.’

  Mr Rampton said, ‘I think if we do this,’ using two fingers to open out the image on the touch-screen.

  Smith said, ‘Ah, you mean enlarge it like that – I see.’

  ‘A Rebloy. We might not have the exact model but we have something very similar, just slightly smaller. Would that do, Mr Smith?’

  ‘That would do very nicely, Mr Rampton. I’ll take two of them, please. And I’ll have a receipt this time, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘So when Juliet Richardson was murdered, you were working in London?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Who was put in charge of the case?’

  ‘Robert Hannaford. He was a DCI at the old Lake HQ before it all moved to Central. There weren’t so many chiefs around then. He would have been the automatic choice, the senior officer in the field.’

  She wrote something else down on the notepad which was already onto its third page; writing that was small and not dissimilar to his but arranged more into conventional paragraphs than his own tendency to make lists and columns. She seemed to be taking a thorough and unhurried approach.

  ‘I had the impression that you had always worked in Norfolk. What were you doing in London?’

  He shrugged, raised an eyebrow and half-smiled.

  ‘I’d been seconded to the Met about six months earlier. I don’t know whether they needed me or someone at Kings Lake wanted to get rid of me.’

  ‘But you were already a DCI at that point?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What were you involved with at the Met?’

  ‘Mainly intelligence gathering.’

  ‘What sort of cases?’

  She knew that he was holding back a little, and he knew that she knew.

  ‘Only one case, which probably doesn’t need to be mentioned in the book.’

  ‘I’m trying to get a sense of why you were asked to go back to Norfolk to take over. Were you working on a relevant case, something similar?’

  ‘No, not even remotely.’

  She waited then, left it up to him.

  ‘I was part of a team, just one of the teams looking into Hutchinson and Cheney.’

  ‘Oh. Right. There’s another appeal, isn’t there?’

  ‘The money those people put away could buy one of the Inns of Court, never mind the top QCs. They’ll both get out eventually.’

  Her pen hesitated over the page, and then wrote nothing about that.

  ‘When Nicola Ellingham’s body, the second one, was found, what happened? How did you get involved?’

  ‘Norfolk had been making noises for a while about me going back. This just gave them a reason to push it, I think. Someone got a phone call and I was on the way back the next day.’


  In front of him on the coffee table were the black Alwych notebooks from those times but as yet he had not needed to open them. Jo Evison had been surprised when she first saw them – did her hand twitch towards them before she brought herself under control? Would she ask to see into them at some point, and would he allow her to do so?

  ‘You were put in charge of both murder investigations immediately?’

  ‘More or less. The afternoon of the day that I got back.’

  ‘How did that go down?’

  He knew what she meant; every detective who has ever seen a case taken away from the senior investigating officer would know what she meant.

  ‘Not well.’

  ‘How did you handle it?’

  ‘I went to see him personally.’

  ‘In his office?’

  ‘No, his home that night.’

  ‘He agreed to see you like that?’

  Smith could not see what bearing this could have on her book but he had not been over these memories in such detail for almost a decade. It was the usual thing – about it being easier sometimes to talk to a perfect stranger.

  ‘No. I just found out where he lived and went and knocked on his door.’

  ‘And he let you in?’

  ‘No – I had to kick it down in the end.’

  Just a smile, very relaxed and leaning back in the chair, as she did when she wanted to ease off a little. He had seen that a few times already during the afternoon.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He was as annoyed as you can imagine, talking about resigning. To be fair, he wasn’t blaming me personally. Anyway, we got past it.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘We discovered a mutual interest.’

  ‘Let me guess – football? Cricket? Not fishing?’

  ‘Single malts. He had quite a collection.’

  ‘You got drunk!’

  ‘Slightly. A bit. I got a taxi home and slept on the old couch, in this room. Didn’t want to wake her up and get in a row…’

  And she was very good at knowing when to say nothing.

  ‘Listen. When you write this, if you do, I’d like Bob Hannaford to get a mention. I went to him several times after that, just on the quiet, and he helped me out with those cases. A lot of smaller men would not have done so. He should have some of the credit.’