'Did Ebury leave a diary, any letters or notes?'
Anston shook his head. 'He could barely write and though he was offered literacy classes, he always turned them down.'
'How did he spend his recreation time?'
'He was a good footballer. If he wasn't playing or practising he just laid on his bed, staring at the ceiling, probably thinking up some cruel torment for one of his fellow inmates.'
There was nothing more to be seen here. Anston led him back to his office. Horton would have liked to have taken Ebury's belongings with him, but Anston wouldn't permit it. He let Horton view them though. There wasn't much, just a couple of photographs, a cigarette lighter, which Anston assured him didn't work, and a silver chain necklace.
'Is this it?' Horton asked incredulous.
'Apart from some girlie magazines, his clothes and toiletries, yes.'
Horton wasn't sure if he believed him, though Anston looked to be telling the truth.
'May I?' He asked, indicating the photographs. Anston nodded his approval.
Horton turned one over. There was nothing written on the reverse. Flicking it back, he found himself staring at a woman who looked to be in her early sixties. Her short silver hair framed a classically featured face with high cheekbones and fine eyes. She was very slim, perhaps a bit too thin, and she appeared tall against the young man beside her, whom he assumed was Peter Ebury. Anston confirmed it. Horton surmised therefore that the woman was Peter's mother, Irene.
She was smiling into the camera, though Horton sensed there was a sadness about her, or was that weary resignation that her son had already descended into a life of crime? This must have been taken not long before Peter Ebury had committed the armed robbery because he looked in his mid-twenties. He was good-looking and fit with a cocky smile. Horton knew from his earlier phone call to the station that by then Peter Ebury had served three terms in prison for theft, assault, and grievous bodily harm.
Horton tried to place where the photograph had been taken. Mother and son were standing outside a block of flats that Horton didn't recognize. Why hadn't anyone visited this woman when she was in the Rest Haven? Surely she must have some friends or relatives in Portsmouth. He wondered what his mother had thought of her when they'd worked together.
The other photograph was of Peter Ebury in a nightclub surrounded by a group of young, heavily made-up but attractive girls of between eighteen to twenty-five, one of whom was sitting on his lap. They all looked drunk, presumably from the champagne that was on the table in front of them. Horton judged it to have been taken about the same time as the picture with his mother.
'Any idea who they are?' He indicated the girls, wondering why Peter had kept this particular photograph.
Anston shook his head, then, as if reading Horton's mind, said, 'Perhaps Ebury wanted it to remind him of what he was missing and would be missing for a very long time. He got life.'
Which meant he would have been mid- to late-forties before he came out. 'Can I get photocopies of these?'
'I don't see why you should want them.'
'We are investigating his mother's death,' Horton said swiftly and with an edge to his voice.
'What's suspicious about it?'
Horton sensed there was more than idle curiosity in that question, but Anston's expression was a blank canvas.
OK, so let's give him something to chew over, Horton thought.
'An intruder was seen in her room and her belongings are missing.' He'd already told Anston more than he'd told Welton, but then Welton hadn't asked the question, which confirmed Horton's earlier thoughts that Welton had lost his grip.
'Could be something or nothing.' Anston shrugged.
'Precisely. And until I am satisfied that it's nothing, I'll keep investigating.' He held Anston's steely gaze.
After a moment, Anston raised his eyebrows in a gesture that said, please yourself.
'I'd also like a copy of his birth certificate.'
'It won't tell you much.' Anston opened a buff-coloured folder on his desk and handed the certificate to Horton.
The space where the father's details should have been entered was blank, or rather it said 'unknown'. Much the same as Horton's own birth certificate. Had Peter been the result of a five-minute screw in the back of a car in a lay-by or a shag under the pier after a boozy night out? Or was he the product of a regular relationship? Ebury had been born on 31 August 1974 and the birth had been registered in Portsmouth.
After he'd received the photocopies of the photographs and the birth certificate, Horton thanked Anston and stepped outside the prison, sucking down lungfuls of the petrol fumed air like a submariner unexpectedly saved from a suffocating death. He didn't mind the sheeting rain that now accompanied the blustery wind. It was a two-minute walk to the car, but Horton would gladly have walked all the way back to the station some four miles distant just to get the stench of prison from him.
In the car, Cantelli said, 'Ebury never took advantage of the listeners service, and he never applied for education either within the prison or a distance-learning course. He shunned the prison visitors, said they were a bunch of self-satisfied, egocentric pricks who could only get their jollies by seeing someone lower in the slime than themselves.'
'Ebury said that?' Horton asked, surprised.
'According to Staunton. I asked if those were Ebury's exact words and Staunton said more or less.'
Horton remained doubtful, but Anston had claimed that Ebury was clever. Though, not clever enough to evade the life of a criminal.
'I managed to have a brief chat with a couple of other officers in the staffroom,' Cantelli added. 'They all thought that Peter Ebury was a pain in the arse and no one's sorry he's gone.'
'Which bears out what Welton and Anston told me.' Horton quickly briefed Cantelli.
Cantelli pointed the car towards the station. 'I asked if someone could have pinched a set of keys to Ebury's cell, copied them and then put them back, but Staunton looked at me as if I should be carted off to the funny farm. He took great pains to run through the security procedure and the prisoners' routine, and, from what he said, I don't think anyone could have killed Ebury.'
Horton, reluctantly, had to agree that it was looking that way. But he still didn't like it. Unless Walters, Seaton and Somerfield came up with something from the nursing home, he would have to accept there was no case to answer.
This was exactly what DCI Bliss told him twenty minutes later. He found her in his office.
'This is where you should be, Inspector,' she said, eyeing him like he was a dung beetle. 'Not deploying uniformed resources without approval from the duty inspector and requesting staff from the scientific services department to take fingerprints and photographs without authorization from me. This amounts to nothing more than a whim.'
'It was hardly that,' Horton retorted, thinking why the hell doesn't she shift her narrow backside out of my chair, sitting there like she's the chief bloody constable. Less than two months ago she was a DI like him.
'A whim,' she insisted. 'An old lady died. It happens.'
'Her belongings are missing and a resident reported seeing someone suspicious in Mrs Ebury's room-'
'They're dementia patients, for heaven's sake. Everyone is suspicious.'
'Oh, I see. So we can forget it,' he said with heavy irony, stung by her supercilious tone. 'Irene Ebury had dementia and has no one left to care about her or her belongings, which don't amount to much anyway. Her dead son is a criminal so he won't be missed. It's obviously not as high profile as two ponced-up television presenters receiving threatening calls, which you will find are a publicity stunt.'