She walked along beside the railings, the shops opposite closed for the evening, a glow coming from the pubs and the two cafés still serving fish and chips. Vinegar and deep-frying fat mingled with the harbor smells. A group of Goths dressed in black, faces white, hung out smoking and talking by the sheds, near the “Dracula Experience,” and even so long before the holiday season, a few tourist couples walked hand in hand and families tried to control their unruly children. The large amusement arcade was doing plenty of business, Annie noticed, almost tempted to go in and lose a few coins on the one-armed bandits. But she resisted.
She was feeling excited because Les Ferris had phoned late in the afternoon and told her the hair and fibers expert, Famke Larsen, had matched Kirsten Farrow’s sample of eighteen years ago with a hair taken from Lucy Payne’s blanket last week. So it was Kirsten. Back and in action again. Annie’s long shot had paid off and she could trust her copper’s instincts again. It gave her the focus she needed, and it appeased Superintendent Brough for a while.
According to Famke, the similarities in color, diameter, medulla pattern and the intensity of pigment granules were enough to go on, but it wasn’t a match that would stand up in court. Annie didn’t care about that; she’d half expected it, anyway. Les Ferris had reminded her that hair was class evidence — that it was not possible to match a human hair to any single head — but for her purposes the identification was enough. Both samples were fine, Caucasian, with evenly distributed pigment and a slightly oval cross section.
An unexpected bonus was that the hair found on Lucy Payne’s blanket hadn’t been sheared off; it came complete with its root. The only drawback, Famke had explained to Liam and Les, was that it was in what she called the “telogen stage.” In other words, it hadn’t been pulled out, it had fallen out, and that meant there were no healthy root cells and attached matter. The best they could hope for, Les summed up, was mitochondrial DNA, which is material that comes from outside the nucleus of the cells, and from the mother. Even so, it could help them come up with a DNA profile of Kirsten Farrow, Lucy Payne’s killer.
The tide was out, so Annie went down the steps and on the beach. There was no one else around now, perhaps because of the late-March chill. As she walked, she wondered about Jack Grimley. Would a fall to the beach from the top of the cliffs have killed him? The beach wasn’t particularly rocky. She looked behind at the looming mass towering above her. It might have. But if he’d been lying on the sand for a while, wasn’t it likely that someone would have seen him? What if Kirsten had lured him down there, believing him to be her attacker, and killed him? There were some small caves in the bottom of the cliff face. Annie walked inside one. It was pitch-black and smelled of seaweed and stagnant rock pools. It wasn’t very deep, as far as she could tell, but you could hide a body there, behind a rock, at night especially, until the tide came and took it out to sea.
She left the beach and walked up the steps from Pier Road to the Cook statue. For a moment, she sat on the bench there and thought, This is where Keith and Kirsten sat, where he kissed her and got no response. Was she so preoccupied with her revenge that she had gone beyond the merely human? It was also near here that a woman had been seen with Jack Grimley, and though she hadn’t been identified as Kirsten, Annie was certain that was who it was. What had they talked about? Had she lured him to the beach with promises of sex and killed him? Was that also how she had got Keith McLaren into the woods?
Not too far away, Annie noticed lights and a pub sign. When she got up and walked closer, she saw that it was the Lucky Fisherman. Curious, she went inside. The door to her left opened on a small smoky public bar, where about five or six men stood around chatting, a couple of them smoking pipes. A football game played on a small television over the door, but nobody paid it much attention. When Annie walked in, they all stared at her, fell silent for a moment, then went back to their conversations. There were only a couple of tables, one of them occupied by an old woman and her dog, so Annie went out again and through the door on the right. This was the lounge, quite a bit bigger, but barely populated. Music played softly, a couple of kids were playing one of the machines and four people were clustered around the dartboard. It was warm, so Annie took her coat off and ordered a pint, taking it over to a table in the corner. Nobody paid her any attention.
So this was where Keith had met Kirsten that evening, and where she had seen Jack Grimley whom, Annie guessed, she had believed for some reason to be the man who had hurt her. She hadn’t approached him, as far as Keith remembered, so she must have come back another night and perhaps waited for him outside. It wasn’t hard to lead a man where you wanted him to go to if you were young and pretty. He wanted to go there, too.
Annie sat sipping her beer and thinking about the past while she flipped through the pages of the latest Hello magazine she had bought earlier and carried in her shoulder bag. After a few moments she became aware of someone standing over her. Slowly, she looked up to see a broad-shouldered man with a shaved head and a handlebar mustache, probably in his early fifties.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“Are you that there new policewoman?”
“I’m DI Cabbot, yes. Why?”
“Thought I saw your picture in the paper this morning. You’ll be after the person who killed that woman in the wheelchair, then, won’t you?”
“That would be one of my jobs, yes.” Annie put her magazine down. “Why? Do you know anything that could help?”
He gave her a questioning glance, and she noticed that he was asking if it was okay to join her for a moment. She nodded.
“No,” he said. “I don’t know owt. And the way I’ve heard it, I reckon she only got what she deserved. Still, it’s a terrible way to go, in a wheelchair and all, can’t defend yourself. I’d say it’s a coward’s work.”
“Perhaps,” said Annie, taking a swig of beer.
“But it was summat else I wanted to ask you about. I heard a rumor the police was asking questions about an old crime, something involving an old friend of mine.”
“Oh?” said Annie. “Who would that be?”
“Jack Grimley.”
“You knew Jack Grimley?”
“Best mates. Well, am I right?”
“I don’t know where you got your information from,” Annie said, “but we’ve taken an interest in the case, yes.”
“More than anyone could say at the time.”
“I wasn’t here then.”
He eyed her scornfully. “Aye, I can see that for myself.”
Annie laughed. “Mr….?”
“Kilbride.”
“Mr. Kilbride, much as I’d love to sit and chat with you, I have to get back to work. Is there anything you want to tell me?”
He scratched the comma of beard under his lower lip. “Just that what happened to Jack, like, it never sat well with me.”
“Did the police talk to you at the time?”
“Oh, aye. They talked to all his mates. Can I get you another drink?”
Annie had about a third of a pint left. She wasn’t having any more. “No, thanks,” she said. “I’ll stick with this.”
“Suit yourself.”
“You were saying. About Jack Grimley.”
“I was the one saw him with that there woman, standing by the railings near the Captain Cook statue.”