The door proved as easy to open as Gerry had expected, and when she switched on the light she found herself inside a cramped but cosy room. The single bed was made, the top sheet tight enough to bounce a coin off, and there were no dirty socks or underpants on view. Mark Vincent certainly knew how to take care of himself. It must be his army training, Gerry thought. But the place looked lived in, nevertheless. There were dirty dishes in the sink, for a start. Not disgusting old mouldy dishes, but recently used ones, probably left out that morning after breakfast. It indicated that Vincent probably planned on coming back before too long.
Gerry started her search slowly and methodically, from the end where the bed was. There was nothing of interest on the small bedside table, only a cheap clock radio, and in the one top drawer was the usual jumble of small change, blank notepad, pens and pencil stubs, a few rubber bands and a post office savings book that showed Vincent with a balance of £52.40. The bottom drawer was reserved for socks and underwear.
Gerry could find no correspondence in the small writing desk in the living area, not even a bill or a circular. A few clothes hung in the wardrobe, but not the black anorak and waterproof trousers he had been wearing during the shooting. Gerry guessed he was wearing them again now, along with the black woolly hat. There were several shirts, jeans, a couple of pairs of worn trainers and a sports jacket.
In the recycling box beside the door were newspapers, neatly folded and piled, that morning’s on top. Gerry bent and picked it out. It was open at the crossword, which Vincent seemed to have completed in ink without corrections. Gerry was impressed. It was one of those difficult cryptic ones filled with anagrams and synonyms and the names of plants she’d never heard of.
In the tiny fridge she found milk, margarine, some cheese slices and a loaf of white bread. A box of bran flakes stood on top, along with teabags and a jar of instant coffee. The cutlery was in a drawer below the hot plate, along with a plate and a bowl. Frugal, indeed. Gerry looked in vain for any traces of Maureen Tindall, but there were no signs of a struggle.
Rain beat down on the flimsy roof as she searched, and she noticed a leak above the door. Water was trickling slowly down the inside wall. Outside, car headlights flashed by the windows now and then, and engines whined as wheels spun uselessly in the soft mud. Occasionally she could hear someone shout above the hammering of the rain.
At the opposite end to the bed was a breakfast nook, and beside it a small armchair with the stuffing leaking out, a reading light angled beside it. There was no TV, nor any kind of entertainment device, unless you counted the clock radio. A row of second-hand paperbacks stood on the single bookshelf over the desk. Old thrillers: Ken Follett, Robert Ludlum, Jack Higgins, Alistair MacLean. Well, she wouldn’t have expected Vincent to have a taste for Jane Austen or Zadie Smith.
Gerry noticed something else on the bookshelf and pulled it towards her. It was an old WH Smith wide-ruled exercise book, battered and dog-eared. She sat down carefully in the chair and opened it up. The first thing that caught her attention was a newspaper cutting that slipped on to her lap, a photograph of Maureen Tindall cut from a larger group shot. Across it, someone — Mark Vincent, most likely — had written ‘GRAINGER’ in angry pen strokes.
Gerry shivered and flipped through the pages. She saw a list of names, three of which had been crossed out, and the second one, Martin Edgeworth, ringed in ink. She recognised the other names from the list of shooting-club members Doug Wilson had interviewed. Over the page were Edgeworth’s personal details — his address, telephone number, date of birth, bank, estimate of height and weight. Later came a list of places, including the White Rose, a pub called the Moorcock in Eastvale, and the names of several local restaurants and country inns, presumably places where Edgeworth liked to dine. There was also a list of all the Walkers’ Wearhouse branches in the dale.
Over the page was yet another list, this time of books: The Making of the British Landscape, The Pennine Dales, High Dale Country, Yorkshire Villages, Walks in Swaledale and Wensleydale, A History of Cricket, along with books on military history by Antony Beevor, Ian Kershaw, John Keegan and others.
Gerry put the exercise book down and leaned back in the chair. So Vincent had been grooming Martin Edgeworth. He had staked out the shooting club and spied on several members, finally deciding on Edgeworth, no doubt because he lived alone in an isolated house. After that, he must have made it his business to meet Edgeworth, get chatting, probably on long walks so they were less likely to be seen together. He had found out about the guns Edgeworth owned, which suited his purposes, and the more he learned about Edgeworth’s tastes and interests, the more he could read up on and feign an interest of his own; hence the books on local history and geography, military history, rambling and cricket.
There were no signs of any of the books in the caravan, so Gerry assumed he must have either borrowed them from a local library or perhaps skimmed them in the library. There were pages of notes about the various subjects covered by the books, so he had clearly done his homework and turned himself into someone who had a lot in common with Martin Edgeworth. And he had done it all fairly quickly. The longer Edgeworth remained alive, the greater the possibility of something going wrong. It was a cruel and calculating thing to do to get revenge, a dish served very cold indeed. Gazing down the length of the caravan to the neat bed, she could see nothing out of place. She would bring in a team of experts to take the place apart, and they might find something else. But that would take time. Besides, she thought what she had found was incriminating enough, though it didn’t tell her where he had taken Maureen Tindall. On a whim, she nipped outside and bent to check underneath the caravan. Nothing there, either, except the water rising.
There wasn’t much she could do now but wait for Banks and Annie to arrive, and that could take a while, given the worsening state of the roads. Gerry lay the newspaper on the table before her and noticed something interesting. The way it was folded highlighted an article about local flood danger spots in the weather section above the crossword puzzle. Mark Vincent could have been reading this before or after he had worked on the crossword. The report showed a map of the River Swain’s course, with attention drawn to potential flood trouble spots, places in danger when the Leas, a wide swathe of meadowland on both sides of the river just west of Eastvale, became waterlogged. The closest one marked on the map was Swainsford Bridge and there was a circle of ink around it. It could just be coincidence, of course, Gerry told herself, or a pointless doodle he’d done when filling in the crossword. But it chimed with something in her memory, something she couldn’t quite grasp immediately. It was there, she knew, and it would come.
Gerry also knew from previous experience that the Leas wouldn’t hold out much longer. The water would then spread further north and south, over and beyond the meadowland towards some of the houses that faced the riverside beauty spot. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The water was rushing down from becks and streams high up in the hills at an alarming rate, all of it joining the Swain and swelling its already bursting banks. There were certain spots where the river narrowed and became shallower for a stretch, and as the water couldn’t soak into the waterlogged swathe of the Leas, it would back up and overflow at those narrow points with some force, creating flash floods as unpredictable and as certain to burst as aneurysms. One of those spots, marked in a newspaper Vincent had been reading, was Swainsford Bridge.