‘But why? It’s not as if you’ve been commissioned to write up the case for an academic journal.’
He laid the painting on the table and gave her his full attention. ‘I want to know if Barrie Gilpin really was guilty.’
‘Does it matter?’
‘Hey, I thought you always took the side of the underdog.’
‘Yes, but…’
‘Well, then. I’ve explained why it matters.’
‘Oh yes, I understand about your dad and everything. But it was such a long time ago.’
‘It’s what I do, looking into what happened a long time ago,’ he said patiently. ‘I’m a historian, remember?’
Tears were forming in her eyes. ‘You came here to get away from all that.’
‘No.’ He hated to see her cry, but she wasn’t thinking straight. Why didn’t she understand? ‘Sorry, darling, but we discussed this endlessly before we even put the deposit down on the cottage. I wanted to escape from all the stuff that surrounded me in Oxford, and in the media. As well as the business with Aimee. Just like you wanted to get away from problems at work and your affair with Richard. But you weren’t escaping from writing, any more than I was escaping from history. I couldn’t do that.’
‘So,’ she said wearily. ‘Are you going to keep on upsetting people?’
‘You mean, am I going to keep asking questions?’ he said. ‘Well, yes. I can’t stop now. Not until I start getting answers.’
Chapter Ten
Hannah was on the phone, trying to unravel the mystery of why her computer had crashed for the fourth time since lunch, when Nick Lowther strode into her room, flourishing a sheet of paper. Later, she mouthed, but he stood his ground. Drumming her fingers on the desk as she listened to a jargon-freighted explanation as unfathomable as it was unconvincing, she found another outlet for her frustration by glaring at her sergeant and shaking her head.
‘You’ll want to see this,’ he murmured. ‘Promise.’
At last the technical guru surrendered with a grudging promise to look into the problem. Hannah hung up and said, ‘What have you got?’
He handed over the sheet and she saw it was a typed note of a telephone conversation. A dedicated telephone hotline had been set up with some fanfare, as part of the awareness campaign surrounding the launch of the cold case review unit. Members of the public with information about any unsolved serious crimes in Cumbria had been urged to call. Predictable as rain on a bank holiday, the response had been a deluge of crank messages and hoaxes. Baseless hints, malicious allegations and wildly improbable confessions to felonies both known and hitherto unimagined had flooded in. The team had anticipated this in discussion before the media conference. The tedious task of sifting out time-wasters was the price to be paid for soliciting the community’s help. Infinite patience was essential when panning for gold. The hotline was a direct dial-in straight to the Cold Case
Review Team’s office. The only snag was that the team wasn’t big enough to man the phone 24/7, so anyone calling outside normal working hours found themselves talking to an answering machine. Each morning the tape was studied and calls returned by one of the DCs. If the phone rang during the day, it would be picked up by whoever was nearest. Because the calls didn’t go to the main station control room, routine taping was out of the question. Too much grief under the human rights legislation. The DC had to scribble notes during the conversation and then decide whether they deserved to be written up.
‘So Maggie took this call,’ Hannah said to herself as she scanned the notes.
‘And she decided it was worth a further look, even though the woman didn’t give her name.’
Typical Maggie, Hannah thought. Of all the DCs in the team, she was the most painstaking. So much so that Bob Swindell regarded her as a pain. Even her typing, every comma in the right place, was so meticulous that it put full-time secretaries to shame. Whereas Linz and the two men tended to rely on instinct, Maggie Eyre didn’t believe in taking chances. She was a hoarder by nature: rumour had it that she’d never thrown away a school exercise book, recipe, or knitting pattern. In the course of an inquiry, she never discarded any scrap of information until she could be sure that it wasn’t viable as evidence. Better safe than sorry, she argued, although Hannah feared that if everyone were equally cautious, the investigation would become even more cluttered than Marc’s book-stuffed attic room.
According to the note, a redial established the call as having been made from a phone box in the square at Brack.
Caller: I read in the paper about those…cold cases. Something has been on my conscience all these years, although I never said a word to a living soul. Not even…well, I was just afraid of what would happen and besides, I didn’t want to believe…maybe I’m wrong anyway, wrong in what I think. There could be an innocent explanation for what I saw. I’ve always hoped so. All the same, it’s been weighing on my mind.
Eyre: Take your time.
Caller: Thank you. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be doing this.
Eyre: There’s no need to worry. You’re doing the right thing. I’m not going to hang up on you. This is all in strict confidence.
Caller: Well, you say that, and I’m sure you’re trained about confidentiality. But how can I be sure? This is serious. I don’t even think I ought to be talking to you at all. It’s not right. Oh God, all this time and worry and I’m still not thinking straight.
Eyre: One thing at a time. Can you just give me a few details? If you could just tell me who you are…
Caller: I can’t give my name. I’m sorry, I really am, but I don’t want to get involved, not any more than I am already. I shouldn’t even be making this call.
Eyre: You have some information about a crime, a crime that wasn’t solved?
Caller: Yes, a girl was killed here in Brackdale. Murdered. Her name was Gabrielle.
Eyre: When was this?
Caller: Seven years ago, it must be. You’ll have the records, anyway. The papers were full of it. The thing is, your people thought they knew who did it.
Eyre: Someone was arrested?
Caller: No, he died. An accident, I think, but some folk say he killed himself out of shame. Couldn’t live with the guilt.
Eyre: What was his name?
Caller: Barrie, Barrie Gilpin.
Eyre: And you say that Barrie Gilpin…
Caller: Everyone blamed him, said he’d murdered her because he was a pervert. But he wasn’t, he was kind, he just had problems, that’s all. It was so — so unfair. What I saw…oh God, I felt so terrible when I…
Eyre: Please don’t upset yourself. It’s all right, it’s not…
Caller: I’m sorry. I just can’t do this.
Eyre: Don’t cry, madam. You can take a break, we could speak later on, when you’ve had a chance to calm down. Please, would you just tell me this. How can I get back to you?
Call terminated.
‘Now you see why I thought you’d want to know straight away?’ Nick asked. ‘I remember you telling me how Ben Kind obsessed about the case. He didn’t buy the official line, that Gilpin was responsible.’
Hannah nodded. ‘He always said that our job in a murder case is to see justice done for the victim. It plagued him like an ulcer, the thought that he’d failed her.’
‘He was waiting for a call like that.’
‘One piece of information, that’s what he reckoned, we just need one little titbit of evidence to show that Barrie Gilpin couldn’t have been the culprit. Marc and I were talking about Barrie only the other night. And now a call has come, but Ben wasn’t here to take it. Question is — is this the call? Or just a red herring?’
‘What do you make of what the woman has to tell us? She doesn’t exactly give much away.’
‘She says here in Brackdale, which suggests she lives there. If Maggie’s note is accurate.’
‘It will be. And we’re told that the woman saw something.’
‘Which she may have misinterpreted. Or invented.’