‘To do with the schoolgirl? After all, she wasn’t meant to be there so late.’
‘Maybe, maybe. What do I know? We know nothing about the victim yet, and less about her friends. Where is that Holmesian logic when you need it?’
Cori started the engine.
‘And I’ll tell you another person we’ve seen today,’ continued Grey, ‘with the strength to hold a person still and throttle them.’
‘Not Ellie, the orderly?’
‘You said yourself, Cori, it’s our job to doubt people.’
‘But I spoke to her, sir; and had you had a chance to have done properly then you’d know she loves those people like a mother, she couldn’t do a thing to harm them.’
‘Fair enough. As you say, too early to plum for just one theory.’
Cori moved the car off along the empty afternoon roads.
‘These trees are wonderful, aren’t they?’ suggested Grey for not the first time that afternoon, as they moved along Cedars Avenue.
‘I don’t know why you don’t move in, sir. I’m sure they’d have you; and Stella was only in her forties when she came here.’
‘Well you can mock — you’ll have your kids to look after you. Who’ve I got? I’m sure I wouldn’t mind a woman like Rachel Sowton having my wellbeing in mind.’
‘You’re barking up the wrong tree there, sir,’ answered Cori; but Grey was too distracted to question her meaning, and she didn’t elaborate.
Chapter 6 — Raine Rossiter
Arriving at their station squeezed around the rim of a gardened square between the library and the town’s civic buildings, they pulled in beside the squad cars and vans in the yard behind. Grey looked up at the window he knew his Superintendent could often be found peering out from, though he was not there that afternoon, gone home early to whatever it was he had asked Grey to interrupt him in with news that evening. With his Sergeant the Inspector went straight through to the main office, where their administrative support was already working through the materials sent through earlier.
‘Hello, sir,’ chirped Sarah Cobb. ‘We were expecting you back earlier, your drinks have gone cold.’
‘Lovely, thanks,’ said Cori through gulping lukewarm tea.
‘That poor old lady,’ continued Sarah.
‘Did you know her?’ asked her boss, suddenly concerned.
‘Oh no, but one of my Nan’s friends was there, it’s a lovely place.’
‘It is that,’ agreed Grey to a smile from Cori.
‘Have you found anything yet, sir?’
‘Not much, just a lot of character stuff. We’re relying on you.’
‘Okay, well I haven’t got the whole way back yet but I’ve found out a few little pieces: Stella Dunbar is on the electoral role and the tax system going back to the mid-Seventies, everything consistent with her being seventy-one years old and having paid her way for several decades. She’s not showing as ever being on our police records, even the digitised archives.’
‘Sounds a blameless life.’
‘Tracing forward from her Certificate In Education, I called the teaching unions, one of whom had her listed as a member working at the Tudor Oak Independent School from Seventy-four to Ninety-five.
‘That’s where Brough wants for Connor,’ started Cori. ‘Brooke too if her brother likes it.’
‘Best in the area, I hear,’ said Grey diplomatically.
‘I believe it’s quite expensive,’ was all Sarah added, knowing her boss shared her social outlook; but Grey was thinking,
‘The kind of place, do you reckon, that might award an employee an engraved silver watch?’
‘” For All The Help You’ve Given Us ”,’ recalled Cori.
‘Twenty-one years service might deserve it.’
‘Anyway,’ continued Sarah, ‘this also fits with the Tax Office, who record a change of status around that time to self-employed.’
‘When she became a private tutor,’ noted Cori.
‘And I found something else out there — I called the Property Registry…’
‘You’ve done so much!’
‘Not really, sir, I’ve had most of the day and it’s all very easy these nowadays. Anyway, she’s had two flats within the building.’
‘Yes, Derek Waldron told me she’d moved to the top floor for more privacy.’
‘Well, the Registry told me that she didn’t buy the first flat, but that it was willed to her.’
‘Who by?’
‘Another Dunbar, though they had no more than a name. However, the will was handled by a firm of solicitors in town: Rossiter’s — you pass the office in the High Street.’
‘And now the Trust’s solicitors.’
‘Yes, they confirmed it when I called them — there’ll be someone at the office all afternoon.’
‘Then we must get over there.’ Grey was as usual agog at their assistant’s efficiency. ‘In the sixteen years of the Trust has their been any trouble at the Cedars? Tax evasion, dodgy accounting? Anything on our books?’
‘None I can find, sir.’
‘Then please find me some impropriety somewhere, Sarah.’
‘I’ll try my best. Oh yes, and there’s one other lead: the teaching union I spoke to had Stella listed as a Mrs S Mars for her first term at Tudor Oak.’
‘A marriage?’
‘I’ve found nothing else out yet, though this would also be about the time she appears on the electoral role as Dunbar.’
‘But her certificate read Dunbar in Sixty-three.’
‘She must have married and then reverted,’ suggested Cori.
‘I haven’t got to the records of that yet.’
‘At last we find your limit, Sarah,’ said Grey in a way he knew she’d read the humour of. He slapped his hands on his knees,
‘Then we have places to get to before they close — Cori, get to the Southney School and ask if they have the names of students seeing private tutors; otherwise ask for girls with long dark hair, initials EN or SK.’
‘Right oh.’
‘Meanwhile, Sarah, there’s something we didn’t know earlier to ask you about: one of those who found the victim, Charlie Prove, had a daughter who may have been killed, possibly around the time the Trust was formed and certainly before he moved in. I know no more than that. As soon as you know all you can about Stella, please move onto him. Oh, and get the rest of the office on Derek Waldron and Rachel Sowton, I want to trust them and I can’t until we’ve checked them out.’
‘What about you, sir?’ asked Cori.
I’m off to Rossiter’s solicitors; and if we’re all back in time, which we should be, then on to Tudor Oak School.’
‘But it’s a school, sir. They won’t be open much longer today.’
‘Well we’re not going to get there by three thirty even if we leave now, and the other sites are closer and as important. Could you call them this moment, Sarah, and have someone who remembers those days stay and wait for us. This is all too important — we have to go to the only place we knew she ever was before the Cedars.’
Two schools in one afternoon, thought Cori, who like many an adult had taken years of being a parent to approach their child’s house of learning without the ghosts of her own education being also in attendance. It was all there though as she entered the front door of the modern Combined Administration Building and followed the sign along the corridor for the office: the metal chairs, the naive art, the scuffs along the skirting boards from cleaning machines.
‘Can we help you?’
Cori thought she knew why the Inspector has assigned himself the solicitor’s office, as an unknown man would rouse even more suspicion in a school secretary than that which she was under now. The woman was maybe fifty and seemed effortlessly stern — perhaps set so, Cori imagined, from a thousand ‘ Come back here! ’s.
She had her badge ready,
‘Sergeant Smith, Southney Station. I wonder, could I have a word?’
Her identification as a police officer, while reassuring to the secretary in one way seemed alarming in another,