Leading her team in their cold-case work had added new weapons to Carol Jordan’s detective arsenal. She’d always been good at digging into the backgrounds of victims and suspects, but now she’d learned how to direct her archaeological skills backwards to a time when there were no computerised records or mobile phone bills to speed the plough. Like the years when Edmund Arthur Blythe had been living and presumably working in Halifax. Libraries were the most fruitful source, often leading to living experts who could fill in remarkable details. But there were also obscure electronic gateways to information. And Carol had access to the best of those.
Stacey was surrounded by a battery of screens. She’d now built a barricade of information between herself and the rest of the team. She’d started with two, expanded to three, and now there were six monitors arrayed in front of her, each of them showing different processes in action. Even though she was currently concentrating on filtering the city-centre CCTV footage through the face-recognition software, other applications were running, whose function was a mystery to Carol. Stacey glanced up as her boss approached. ‘No luck yet,’ she said. ‘The trouble with these CCTV cameras is that they’re still not very high res.’
‘We’ll just have to keep plugging away,’ Carol said. ‘Stacey, is there somewhere online where I can access old telephone directories?’ She made a mental bet with herself that Stacey would show no signs of surprise at the request.
‘Yes,’ she said, her eyes returning to the screens. Her fingers flew over the keyboard and one of the screens changed to display a map with a flashing cursor.
‘And that would be?’
‘Depends how far back you want to go.’
‘The early 1960s.’
Stacey’s hands paused above the keys for a moment. Then they started typing again. ‘Your best bet is one of the genealogy sites. They’ve digitised a lot of public domain social information: phone books, street directories, electoral rolls. They’re also really user friendly because they’re aimed at—’
‘Idiots like me?’ Carol said sweetly.
Stacey allowed herself half a smile. ‘Non-ICT professionals, I was going to say. Just google “old phone books” and “ancestors” and you might find something. Don’t forget, back in the 1960s, most people didn’t have phones, so you might not get lucky.’
‘I can only hope,’ Carol said. She was pinning her hopes to the fact that Blythe had re-emerged in Worcester as an entrepreneur. Perhaps he’d started in business back when he’d been courting Vanessa.
Half an hour later, she was thrilled to be proved right. It was there, on the screen, in black and white in the 1964 directory. Blythe & Co., Specialist Metal Finishers. Carol checked the years either side and discovered the company was listed for only three years. So when Blythe left, the company ended. It looked like a dead end. What were the chances of tracking down anyone who had worked there forty-five years before, never mind someone who had known him well enough to remember anything useful?
Still, she’d faced more hopeless pursuits. Now it really was time for the library. A quick online search and she had the number of the local reference library. When she got through, she explained that she was looking for a local history expert who might know about small businesses in the 1960s. The librarian um-ed and ah-ed for a moment, had a muffled conversation with someone else and finally said, ‘We think you need to talk to a man called Alan Miles. He’s a retired woodwork teacher, but he’s always been very keen on the industrial history of the area. Hang on a mo, I’ll get you his number.’
It took Alan Miles almost a dozen rings to answer his phone. Carol was about to give up when a suspicious voice said, ‘Hello?’
‘Mr Miles? Alan Miles?’
‘Who wants to know?’ He sounded old and cross. Great, just what I need.
‘My name is Carol Jordan. I’m a detective chief inspector with Bradfield Police.’
‘Police?’ Now she could hear anxiety in his voice. Like most people, talking to the police provoked worry, even for those who had nothing to worry about.
‘I was given your number by one of the staff at the central library. She thought you might be able to help me with some background research.’
‘What sort of background research? I know nowt about crime.’ He sounded eager to be gone.
‘I’m trying to find out anything I can about a man called Edmund Arthur Blythe who ran a company of specialist metal finishers in Halifax in the early 1960s. The librarian thought you were the best person to talk to.’ Carol tried to sound as flattering as she could.
‘Why? I mean, why do you want to know about that?’
God preserve me from suspicious old men. ‘I’m not at liberty to say. But my team specialises in cold cases.’ Which was nothing less than the truth, if not the whole truth.
‘I don’t like the phone,’ Miles said. ‘You can’t get the measure of a person over the phone. If you want to come over to Halifax, I’ll talk to you face to face.’
Carol rolled her eyes and suppressed a sigh. ‘Does that mean you can help me with information about Blythe and Co?’
‘Happen I can. There’ll be stuff I can show an’ all.’
Carol considered. Everything here was under control. They were nowhere near arrest or interview on anything. Unless something very unusual happened at the post mortem, she could easily disappear for a couple of hours in the evening. ‘How are you fixed this evening?’ she asked.
‘This evening? Seven o’clock. Meet me outside Halifax station. I’ll be wearing a fawn anorak and a tweed cap.’
The line went dead. Carol glared at the phone, then saw the funny side and smiled to herself. If it took her further forward on her quest for Tony’s not-father, dealing with grumpy Alan Miles would be more than worth it.
When Ambrose arrived to take him to meet Jennifer Maidment’s parents, Tony could barely hide his relief. After the estate agent’s tour, he’d struggled to focus his thoughts on the crime scene he’d visited earlier. He knew something was nagging at him about this killer, but he wasn’t sure what it was, and the more he tried to think about it, the more his mind’s eye was invaded by images of Arthur Blythe’s home. Tony was seldom influenced by his immediate surroundings. The notion of interior design had never planted itself in his consciousness. So he was all the more bemused by the inescapable fact that he envied Arthur Blythe this house. It went beyond mere comfort. It felt like a home, a place that had grown organically round one man’s idea of what mattered to him. And although he hated to admit it, it pierced Tony that Arthur Blythe had cast him off and gone on to make a home that felt so complete in itself. Nobody would ever feel like that about his house. He certainly didn’t. He didn’t have that absolute sense of himself that had clearly invested the man he never got to call his father.
So Ambrose’s arrival felt like a liberation from his troublesome thoughts. It wasn’t a relief that lasted for long. ‘Did you bring the RigMarole print-outs?’ Tony asked as soon as he’d settled into the car. When he’d heard about ZZ, he’d asked Ambrose to bring copies of whatever they’d salvaged from the sessions so he could study them.
Ambrose stared straight ahead. ‘The boss doesn’t want them to leave the office. He’s happy for you to read them, but he wants you to do it in-house.’
‘What? He doesn’t trust me? What does he think I’m going to do with them?’
‘I don’t know. I’m just telling you what he said.’ Ambrose’s hands were tight on the steering wheel. His discomfort was like a vibration in the air.
‘It’s not because he’s worried I’m going to sell them to the Daily Mail,’ Tony said, irritated out of proportion to the offence. ‘It’s about control. He’s afraid of losing control of his investigation.’ He threw his hands in the air. ‘I can’t work like this. It’s a waste of my energy to get caught up in this sort of pettiness. Look, Alvin, I work the way I work. I can’t concentrate the way I need to if I’ve got somebody looking over my shoulder. I need to be away from the bustle, the running around. I need to study this stuff and I need to do it on my terms.’