Pewe frowned. Surely the Seaford sign had indicated straight on.
‘Who was that?’ Lucy asked.
‘The sat nav again,’ he replied. ‘Aren’t you going to ask me how my day was? My first day at Sussex CID?’
‘How was your day?’ she asked grudgingly.
‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I got a bit of a promotion!’
‘Already? I thought moving from the Met was a promotion. Going from a Detective Chief Inspector to a Detective Superintendent.’
‘It’s even better now. They’ve put me in charge of all cold cases – and that includes all unaccounted-for missing persons.’
She was silent.
He made the left turn.
The sat-nav display of the road ahead disappeared from the screen. Then the voice commanded, ‘Make a U-turn.’
‘Fuck,’ he said.
‘What’s going on?’ Lucy asked.
‘My sat nav doesn’t know where the hell I am.’
‘I have some sympathy with her,’ Lucy said.
‘I’ll have to call you back, my angel.’
‘Was that you or your sat nav speaking?’
‘Oh, very droll!’
‘I suggest you have a nice romantic dinner with her.’ Lucy hung up.
Ten minutes later, the sat nav had found its bearings again and delivered him to the address he was seeking in Seaford, a quiet, residential coastal town a few miles on from Newhaven. Peering through the darkness at the numbers on the front doors, he pulled up outside a small, nondescript pebbledashed semi. A Nissan Micra was parked on the drive.
He switched on the interior light, checked the knot of his tie, tidied his hair, climbed out of the car and locked it. A gust of wind immediately blew his hair into disarray as he hurried up the path of the neat garden to the front door, found the bell and pressed it, cursing that there was no porch. There was a single, rather funereal chime.
After a few moments the door opened a few inches and a woman – in her early sixties, he guessed – stared out at him suspiciously from behind rather stern glasses. Twenty years ago, with a better hairdo and the thick worry creases airbrushed from her face, she might have been quite attractive, he thought. Now, with her short, iron-grey hair, a baggy orange jumper that swamped her, brown polyester trousers and plimsolls, she looked to Pewe like one of those doughty, backbone-of-England ladies you find manning stalls at the church bazaar.
‘Mrs Margot Balkwill?’ he asked.
‘Yes?’ she said hesitantly and a little suspiciously.
He showed her his warrant card. ‘I’m Detective Superintendent Pewe of Sussex CID. I’m sorry to trouble you, but I wonder if I could have a word with you and your husband about your daughter, Sandy?’
Her small, round mouth fell open, revealing neat teeth that were yellow with age. ‘Sandy?’ she echoed, shocked.
‘Is your husband in?’
She considered the question for a moment, like a schoolmistress who had just been thrown a curve by a pupil. ‘Well, he is, yes.’ She hesitated for a moment, then indicated for him to come in.
Pewe stepped on to a mat which said WELCOME, and into a tiny, bare hall which smelled faintly of a roast dinner and more strongly of cats. He heard the sound of a television soap opera.
She closed the door behind him, then called out, a little timidly, ‘Derek! We have a visitor. A police officer. A detective.’
Tidying his hair again, Pewe followed her through into a small, spotlessly clean living room. There was a brown velour three-piece suite with a glass-topped coffee table in front, arranged around an elderly, square-screened television on which two vaguely familiar-looking actors were arguing in a pub. On top of the set was a framed photograph of an attractive blonde girl of about seventeen, unmistakably Sandy from the pictures Pewe had studied this afternoon in the files.
At the far end of the small room, next to what Pewe considered to be a rather ugly Victorian cabinet full of blue and white willow-pattern plates, a man was sitting at a small table covered in carefully folded sheets of newspaper, in the process of assembling a model aircraft. Strips of balsa wood, wheels and pieces of undercarriage, a gun turret and other small objects Pewe could not immediately identify were laid out on either side of the plane, which rested at an angle, as if climbing after take-off, on a small raised base. The room smelled of glue and paint.
Pewe made a quick scan of the rest of the room. A fake-coal electric fire, which was on. A music centre that looked like it played vinyl rather than CDs. And photographs everywhere of Sandy at different ages, from just a few years old through to her twenties. One, in pride of place on the mantelpiece above the fire, was a wedding photograph of Roy Grace and Sandy. She was in a long white dress, holding a bouquet. Grace, younger and with much longer hair than he had now, wore a dark grey suit and a silver tie.
Mr Balkwill was a big, broad-shouldered man who looked as if he’d once had a powerful physique before he let it go to seed. He had thin grey hair swept back on either side of a bald head and a flabby double chin that disappeared in the folds of a multicoloured roll-neck sweater that was similar to his wife’s – as if she had knitted both of them. He stood up, round-shouldered and stooping, like someone who had been defeated by life, and ambled to the front of the table. Below the sweater, which came almost to his knees, he wore baggy grey trousers and black sandals.
An overweight tabby cat, which looked as old as both of them, wandered out from under the table, took one look at Pewe, arched its back and stalked out of the room.
‘Derek Balkwill,’ he said, with a quiet, almost shy voice that seemed much smaller than his frame. He held out a big hand and gave Pewe a crushing shake that surprised and hurt him.
‘Detective Superintendent Pewe,’ he replied with a wince. ‘I wondered if I could have a word with you and your wife about Sandy?’
The man froze. What little colour he had drained from his already pallid face and Pewe saw a slight tremor in his hands. He wondered for a horrible moment if the man was having a heart attack.
‘I’ll just turn the oven down,’ Margot Balkwill said. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’
‘Tea would be perfect,’ Pewe said. ‘Lemon, if you have it.’
‘Working with Roy, are you?’ she asked.
‘Yes, absolutely.’ He continued to stare, concerned, at her husband.
‘How is he?’
‘Fine. Busy on a murder inquiry.’
‘He’s always busy,’ Derek Balkwill said, seeming to calm down a little. ‘He’s a hard worker.’
Margot Balkwill scurried out of the room.
Derek pointed at the aircraft. ‘Lancaster.’
‘Second World War?’ Pewe responded, trying to sound knowledgeable.
‘Got more upstairs.’
‘Yes?’
He gave a shy smile. ‘Got a Mustang P45. A Spit. A Hurricane. Mosquito. Wellington.’
There was an awkward silence. Two women were discussing a wedding dress on the television screen now. Then Derek pointed at the Lancaster. ‘My dad flew ’em. Seventy-five sorties. Know about the Dambusters? Ever see the film?’
Pewe nodded.
‘He was one of ’em. One of the ones that came back. One of the Few.’
‘Was he a pilot?’
‘Tail gunner. Tail End Charlie, they called ’em.’
‘Brave guy,’ Pewe said politely.
‘Not really. Just did his duty. He was a bitter man after the war.’ Then after some moments he added, ‘War buggers you up, you know that?’
‘I can imagine.’
Derek Balkwill shook his head. ‘No. No one can imagine. Been a police officer long?’
‘Nineteen years next January.’
‘Same as Roy.’
When his wife returned with a tray of tea and biscuits, Derek Balkwill fumbled with the remote control, then silenced the television but left the picture on. The three of them settled down, Pewe in one armchair, the Balkwills on the settee.