‘Oh Mam, I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I should have been here. I was so wrapped up in myself and she needed me. It’s like Luke all over again.’
‘We’ve really no time for this,’ Vera said. ‘You can save the tantrums for later, when we’ve got Laura back. I need information. The time of the bus. The names of the friends she travelled in with. Favourite teachers. Teachers she hated. Boyfriends past and present. You start making a list. I’m going to look at this card.’ She tore a sheet of paper from a notebook and gave Julie’s mother a pen. When she left them they were sitting side by side on the settee, both with tears drying unchecked on their cheeks, but working through the problem, coming up with names.
The envelope was lying in the centre of the kitchen table. From the moment she’d got Julie’s call Vera had tried to tell herself this might all be a waste of time. The woman was probably overreacting. It was a card from a friend or a relative or a teacher. Nothing sinister. But when she saw it, she recognized the capital letters at once. This time there was the correct address. It even had the postcode. The envelope hadn’t been sealed. The flap had been tucked into the paper at the back. No saliva. Nor on the stamp, which was of the ready-stick variety. Vera pulled tweezers and latex gloves from her bag, put on the gloves, lifted out the card. A pressed flower. Something small and blue which she didn’t recognize. The back was blank, just as the one which had been sent to Luke. No kisses.
She got on her phone to Holly at Kimmerston. ‘It’s definitely the same. I want it to the lab now and fast-tracked. And chase them up on the others.’
She phoned Ashworth, but heard immediately that he was surrounded by a gaggle of girls and couldn’t speak. ‘Call me,’ she said. ‘As soon as you have something.’ She knew he didn’t need telling that but it made her feel better to be dishing out orders.
She put on her calm, slightly daft face before going into the living room. She wrote down the direct-line number for Holly and gave it to Beryl Richardson. ‘She’s a nice lass. Give her a ring and give her all the names you’ve come up with. Julie, I’d like you to come with me. Show me the way Laura would walk to the bus stop. I’ve got my mobile on me and they’ll call as soon as there’s any news. We could both do with some fresh air.’
She had Julie on her feet and out of the house before either of the women could complain. At the gate, instead of turning left towards the centre of the village and the main road, Julie turned right. ‘Laura didn’t like waiting with the crowd at the bus stop by the pub. Specially since Luke died. She always felt awkward with lots of people anyway, but since then it’s been even worse. She walks along the cut here and gets on at the stop nearer town.’ She stopped, turned to Vera. ‘I should have given her a lift in. But I was such a mess myself. I couldn’t face it.’
‘This isn’t your fault,’ Vera said, slowly enunciating every word. ‘None of it.’
Julie led her down a narrow alley with allotments on one side and the backs of houses on the other and arrived at a stile. Vera heaved herself onto it and waited, perched on the top, panting for breath, looking out at the landscape beyond. The footpath followed the side of the field which had been cut the day before, along the edge of a patch of woodland towards the main road. Laura would have been visible from the upstairs windows in Julie’s street all the way. Vera thought she’d get a team to do a house-to-house. It was an outside possibility that the girl had been seen, but worth a shot. If Laura had been taken, this surely was where it had happened. Once on the bus, she’d be surrounded by other kids all the way to school. She lowered herself down the other side, pulled down her skirt so she was decent. Julie followed.
‘Who else would have known Laura took this path to get the bus?’ Vera stooped to pick a bit of straw from her sandal, tried not to make too much of the question.
‘I don’t know. The other kids, I suppose.’
‘Geoff? Kath?’
‘She might have mentioned it. I can’t see it, though. She hasn’t exactly been chatty lately.’
So it was planned, Vera thought. They knew that anyway because of the card, but this confirmed it. Someone had waited and watched, followed the family’s movements. Not from the street. That would have been noticed. Perhaps from here on the edge of the wood, where you had a view of the village. A good pair of binoculars and you’d see inside the houses.
Then she thought that whatever the reason had been for the first murder, the killer was now enjoying himself. Or herself. It had become a game, an obsession. A piece of theatre. Not just in the staging of the body, but in the events leading up to that. She hoped the killer would want to make the pleasure last. She hoped it meant that Laura was still alive.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The morning Laura Armstrong disappeared, Felicity Calvert walked back from dropping James at the school bus and tried to come to terms with the news that Peter had been Lily’s lover. She supposed she should feel betrayed. Not by Peter – what right did she have to judge him? But by Samuel. She was convinced that Samuel must have known about Peter’s affair with Lily Marsh. Probably all four of the men who were there when James found the body had known. Peter would have wanted to boast about the conquest. It was quite impossible that he would have kept something like that to himself and he confided in Samuel about everything. Perhaps that was why Samuel had seemed so weird lately, so wound up and tense.
Peter had told her about his relationship with Lily when he’d returned from the police station. He’d arrived back at the mill in a taxi, looking drained, rather vulnerable. By then James was in bed. The boy seemed to have accepted the story that the police needed to talk to his father as an expert witness and had gone to his room without a fuss. The house seemed remarkably quiet as she waited for Peter’s return. Usually she had the radio on or listened to music, but tonight she could face neither. She had opened the windows and could hear the water of the mill race, very distant.
Felicity had watched Peter climb from the taxi and gone out to meet him. He’d taken her hand, as if they were teenagers, and led her inside. Without saying a word he’d lifted a bottle of wine from the fridge and opened it. This quiet was so unlike him that she was scared. He should have been raging against the indignity of his imprisonment, the impudence of the police in carrying him off. She almost believed that he was going to admit to murder. But he was free, wasn’t he? It couldn’t be that.
He poured two glasses of wine and sat at the kitchen table. The kitchen was her space and he seldom sat there in the evening. He preferred the comfort of the sitting room or the privacy of his office. To sit with her was an apology in itself.
‘Are you hungry?’ she said. ‘Can I get you something?’
‘Perhaps later.’ He sipped his wine, met her eyes. There was another moment of silence, then he said, ‘I was having an affair with Lily Marsh.’
She didn’t say she’d worked that out. There was a more pressing question. ‘Did you kill her?’
‘No!’ Horrified. He reached out and took her hands. She found herself excited, thrilled by the touch. In their everyday routine – the family, the house, even the sex – they seemed to slide away from a real encounter. This had the charge of being touched by a stranger.
‘She was very beautiful,’ she said. ‘I can see how you might have been tempted.’
‘I was flattered.’ He paused, drank more wine. ‘Do you want me to tell you about it?’
She thought about that. Did she want all the details? How they’d met? Where they’d made love? She worried she might find that exciting too. ‘No,’ she said. ‘That’s your business.’
‘Would you like me to move out?’
‘I don’t know. No. It never even occurred to me.’