‘Is that it, then, Sarge? Are we done?’
PC Crawley stood beside Billy with folded arms, his eyes busy beneath his helmet as a trio of young girls dressed in light rayon frocks, their arms and legs bare, went strolling by. Downy about the cheeks himself, he hardly looked old enough to be wearing a policeman’s uniform.
‘Not yet, Constable.’ Billy didn’t need to recall Deacon’s smile to realize he’d been handed a lemon. Even by the standards of the Henley plod this young copper was a dim bulb.
He let his gaze wander along the river bank. Close by, on their left, was the flagged terrace of a pub, its tables overlooking the bronze-coloured Thames. Just beyond it a bridge spanned the river, and past that, further downstream, lay the straight patch of water where the famous regatta was held each summer. Billy had come to watch it once with some pals a few years ago. They had spent the day drinking beer in one of the marquees erected for the occasion and cheering with the rest of the crowd as the narrow boats, propelled by flashing oars, shot through the water like arrows.
Most of the holiday activity was centred there, he noted. The regatta was long over, but there were still a few campers in the fields lower down, their tents easy to pick out against the green meadowgrass, while the river, though no longer ‘chock-a-block’, remained busy with pleasure craft and other waterborne traffic.
Upstream, in the opposite direction, the view was different. They were close to the outskirts of the town, standing on a section of paved path that soon petered out into a dirt footway which continued along the tree-clad river bank. For several miles, according to PC Crawley. Billy had already got the constable to show him the spot where Susan Barlow’s body had been taken from the water. He’d been able to do that, though not much more.
‘I only got posted here six months ago, Sarge,’ Crawley had explained defensively when Billy tried to find out how the original search had been conducted. He’d had to turn to the file for more, and discovered that the searchers had concentrated their efforts on the stretch of river below the bridge, which made sense. That was the direction a floating object would take, after all. It was pure chance alone that had brought Susan Barlow’s body to rest on the bank upstream.
Billy had spent some time studying the site, a small cove on an outer bend of the river. The log beneath which the remains of Susan’s body had been found was still there, drawn up on the bank now, a piece of rotting tree trunk, stripped of its bark. It was possible to imagine how the current, swinging around at that point, might have carried the body, semi-submerged, into this shallow inlet. Trapped beneath the log, half-buried in the mud, it would have remained unaffected by the subsequent rise and fall of the river. A belt of undergrowth, separating the cove from the path, screened it from sight on the landward side, and its presence there had not been noted until some weeks ago when a couple in a rowing boat had pulled in to the bank and been greeted by the grisly spectacle of the girl’s arm, or what was left of it, protruding from the mud.
Assuming it was a case of murder, how had she got there?
Not the obvious way. Not by walking up the river on her own and encountering some stranger bent on rape and murder. Having examined the route carefully, Billy was certain of that now. Though hidden from the water by brush and overhanging branches, the path was mostly visible to the open fields it skirted on its inward side, and these all showed signs of having been used as camp sites during the summer. What was more, it was clearly a well-used footway. Even today, when the holiday season was over, they had encountered two families with small children and had passed a group of hikers camping out in one of the riverside meadows. Billy simply couldn’t picture the man – this careful killer – seizing hold of the girl in broad daylight, overpowering her and dragging her off to some secluded spot, all the while with the danger of discovery hanging over him.
No, it couldn’t have happened that way.
‘Come on, Crawley.’
Billy turned his back on the river and led the constable up a flight of shallow stone steps and across a small gravelled garden, bordered by flower beds, to the lane where he’d left his car. This was the same road Susan Barlow had taken when she’d walked into Henley to buy her packet of oranges; and the one she’d used to get home, too. Or so he believed now. Only she’d never got there.
He paused on the pavement, looking up and down the narrow lane. A picture was forming in his mind, and the image wasn’t pleasant. He saw the girl in her pink dress, with her brown paper packet clutched in her hand, walking in the shade along the grassed verge. He saw the car drawing up quietly behind her…
What words had he got prepared, the smooth-tongued stranger? What invitation had proved so irresistible that Susan Barlow had been persuaded to climb into the car and join him in the front seat? Billy scowled at the thought.
‘Are we going back to the station now?’ Crawley asked hopefully. ‘It’s getting on for lunch-time.’
An hour later the constable’s stomach was rumbling with hunger and Billy, too, was unsatisfied. He was beginning to think Deacon might be right. There was no way of proving that Susan Barlow’s death had resulted from murder.
Sinclair had warned him of the likelihood that his journey would be wasted. ‘These old cases have gone cold, I’m afraid. We’ll be lucky if we find anything new. But keep an eye open for any similiarities to the Brookham murder.’
Billy had started from the supposition that Susan Barlow had been a victim of opportunity. There was obviously no way the murderer could have known she would be walking into town that morning. But he must have been hunting, all the same, Billy felt, on the lookout for prey, and that argued he’d had somewhere in mind to take any child who fell into his hands. Given where the body was eventually found, it meant he’d already reconnoitred the river bank and found some spot upstream where he could park his car discreetly.
Returning to his own vehicle, Billy had spent the next sixty minutes with an increasingly unhappy Crawley exploring the winding, tree-shaded road that led to what the constable assured him had been Mrs Barlow’s cottage. He already knew that the bereaved mother had moved away, unable to bear the associations which the place held for her. Pausing only briefly, he’d continued driving along the lane, noting several spots where a car might have been driven off the road and parked under cover of trees and bushes, but none which seemed to offer the kind of privacy that the killer would surely have wanted.
Billy took it for granted that the girl must have been rendered unconscious, chloroformed perhaps soon after she’d got into the killer’s car (if that was what had happened). Her abductor could hardly have driven his passenger past her own house without provoking some reaction on her part. But where had he taken his captive?
As he pondered this question, Billy’s eyes kept flicking towards the mileage indicator. They had already covered two and a half miles since leaving the town centre.
Not back to Henley, certainly. So it must have been beyond the Barlow cottage. But while this fitted the facts, such as they were – the girl’s body could easily have floated some way down the river before coming to rest on the bank – Billy just couldn’t picture the killer taking her any great distance.
Quite apart from the urgency of his desire, he must have been aware of the danger she represented for him. It didn’t matter whether she was conscious or not, every moment she spent in his car placed him in dire peril and he would have wanted to do what he had to do as quickly as possible, so as to be rid of her damning presence.