‘Didn’t you like the horse?’ I asked, surprised at her outburst.
‘I had nothing against the horse, per se. I just wished I’d received half as much love and attention as it did. Bloody mollycoddled, it was.’
‘But the future of Ryan’s training business may have depended on it,’ I said.
‘Yeah, well, the horse has gone now so we’ll never know, will we?’
She didn’t sound especially sorry.
‘Did Oliver ever mention Zoe?’
‘Not recently, that’s for sure,’ Maria said. ‘A long time ago he told me that he no longer considered Zoe his daughter. He said she was not a part of his life and never would be again.’
‘Then why was he giving her five hundred pounds every month?’
27
Oliver returned from seeing the foal at the stud farm near Cheveley to be met by stony silence from his wife in the kitchen. I was there too.
‘What’s up?’ he asked, sensing the cool atmosphere.
Maria remained silent so I jumped right in to insert my first thunderflash. ‘Maria is wondering why you’ve been paying five hundred pounds a month to Zoe and Peter Robertson.’
If I thought he’d flinched when I’d asked him why Ryan had broken Declan’s nose, it was nothing compared to how he reacted now.
The blood drained out of his face and he stumbled slightly, grabbing hold of a chair to lean on.
But his mind was clearly still working.
‘For my grandchildren, of course,’ he said, recovering some of his composure. ‘I can’t penalise them just because their mother was a tramp.’
But Maria was not placated in the least.
‘You bastard,’ she shouted. ‘You’ve been telling me we’re so hard up that I can’t afford even to have my hair done, and all the while you’ve been giving away our cash. Are you saying those bloody children are more important than me?’
Oliver turned to me and, for the very first time, his veneer of politeness cracked.
‘Get out of my house,’ he said angrily.
I made what ASW would call a ‘tactical withdrawal’ back to the Bedford Lodge to take stock and determine my next move.
First I called DCI Eastwood.
‘Thank you for the medical records,’ I said. ‘But is there any more? They seem incomplete.’
‘That’s what we got from her doctor,’ he said.
‘Could you check if there’s anything else? What you sent doesn’t detail anything more than ten years old. There must be some records from before that.’
I could hear him sigh. ‘I have other things to do, you know. I thought you wanted to determine if there was any remote chance that she’d dropped down dead of natural causes. Surely you have enough for that?’
‘It would be negligent on my part if I didn’t check everything that was available.’ I said it in my best courtroom lawyer voice.
‘I’ll ask my sergeant,’ he said with resignation. ‘It was he who got them in the first place.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘I’ll wait.’
I don’t think he was expecting to have to ask his sergeant straight away but I gave him little choice.
‘Right,’ he said again, with more resignation. ‘I’ll go and ask him now and call you straight back.’
Reluctantly, I hung up but, true to his word, the chief inspector called back within ten minutes.
‘It appears we do have some paper records as well,’ he said.
‘Can they be scanned and sent over?’ I asked.
‘It would seem there are rather a lot. Could you not just come over and see them here? It would save a lot of time and effort, and we are short of both.’
Limited resources again, I thought.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Where is here?’
‘The Bury St Edmunds investigation centre. We’ve closed the temporary incident room at Newmarket.’
‘I’ll come right away.’
Better to do it now before he changed his mind.
‘Ask for DS Venables. He’ll be expecting you.’
I rustled up my driver and his Mercedes and we were soon on our way to Bury St Edmunds.
I don’t know why I thought that Zoe’s medical records were important. Perhaps it was because Yvonne had told Kate about Oliver having arranged for Zoe to be sectioned under the Mental Health Act, and that it was shown in her notes.
Had Oliver lied to get Zoe put away in a mental hospital? Was that what he was being blackmailed over? But would he really pay five hundred pounds a month to keep that a secret? Surely not, not after all the years that had passed since.
DS Venables took me down a windowless corridor and into a room with a round table and four chairs. On the table was a cardboard box containing a number of special envelopes standing up side by side with open tops.
‘Apparently they’re called Lloyd George envelopes,’ the DS said flatly. ‘After the politician that introduced them. According to the doctor that sent them to me, they’ve now been superseded by computers.’
He stood to one side, leaning on the wall with his hands in his pockets, while I sat down at the table and reached for the box.
‘I don’t approve,’ the sergeant said.
‘You don’t approve of what?’ I asked.
‘My boss letting you see these records.’
‘Why not?’
‘Stands to reason,’ he said. ‘Why should we be helping the defence?’
‘I thought we were both interested in justice.’
He sniffed his disagreement. He was clearly only interested in a conviction.
‘What are you looking for?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Not unless I find it.’
The box contained four of the Lloyd George envelopes, each one stuffed full of folded papers. They were marked 1 to 4 and were in date order. I started with envelope 1, emptying the contents onto the table.
‘There’s no need to stay,’ I said to DS Venables. ‘I’m not going to take anything. I just want to read it all.’ I took my mobile phone out of my pocket and put it down on the table. ‘I’ll just take photos of anything I want to look at again later.’
The detective reluctantly pushed himself off the wall by his elbows.
‘I’ll come back in half an hour.’
‘Make it an hour,’ I said. ‘There’s a lot here. I promise I won’t wander off.’
He left the room and closed the door.
I was surprised how much information was logged in our medical records, and how they obviously follow us around from one surgery to another as we move. There were even allocated spaces on the front of the first envelope to record any such changes and, for Zoe, three different addresses were listed along with five separate doctors, together with the date of each change.
I started reading from the beginning.
Zoe Chadwick had been fifty-one centimetres long and had weighed 3.8 kilograms at birth. Every visit she made to a doctor was logged, along with such things as dates of immunisations and her weight at each postnatal clinic visit.
In all, Zoe had been taken to see a doctor thirteen times in her first year of life and ten times in her second. I wondered if that was common or if she was a particularly sickly child. However, at no point had her doctor indicated in the plethora of his notes that it was unusual.
Her whooping cough infection aged three and a half was well documented as having been quite severe. There was even a record of the antibiotic drugs given to her at the time to prevent any secondary complications such as pneumonia.
Also in envelope 1 was a letter from a minor injuries unit in Cromer that had treated Zoe for a cut left foot during a holiday stay in the town when she’d been four. It stated that the wound had needed two stitches but no further treatment as Zoe’s mother had confirmed that the child’s tetanus vaccinations were up to date.