‘Speculation,’ Bryant said.
‘Yeah, Ben had to admit he was pissing in the wind. Apart from any other consideration, Barrie was a strong, fit young man. Even if he’d stumbled across someone armed with an axe, he’d have had a good chance of showing him a clean pair of heels. But if Barrie was set up, we never came close to showing who did it, or how. We couldn’t argue against the decision to run down the inquiry.’
‘So what’s changed? Yesterday’s phone call doesn’t take us too far.’
Us. At least he was thinking as a team member, not a devil’s advocate whose first priority was to scoff at any fresh initiative. ‘All I’m doing is taking a second glance. Nothing more. I can’t justify devoting too much resource to something as nebulous as the message that Maggie took.’
Les Bryant leaned back in his chair. ‘Time to look at the case from a different angle, then?’
‘I think so.’ Hannah pointed to the photographs. ‘Starting with the victim.’
‘How much do you know about her?’
‘Not a lot.’ Hannah sighed. ‘Born and raised in the East End. Home a tower block, mother an occasional prostitute. She was one of four kids with three different dads. Before her tenth birthday, she was bunking off school. At fifteen she moved out and no one kept in touch. She seems to have followed a boyfriend up to Yorkshire.’
‘The Promised Land,’ Bryant said in his broadest West Riding accent.
‘If you say so. She modelled a bit, tried a little acting. She’d ditched the boyfriend early on and he went back to London. We checked and he died of a drugs overdose a year before Gabrielle was killed. She mixed in bad company. The old story, plenty of men were keen to take a pretty girl to bed in exchange for a slap-up dinner and a few quid to help with the rent.’
Les Bryant plucked at a hair growing from his nostril. ‘My daughter wanted to be an actress. Christ, the day she signed up with an agency, I hit the roof, but would she listen? They ripped her off something rotten. At least she finished up with an Oscar.’
‘Really?’ Hannah was startled.
‘Yeah,’ he said, deadpan, ‘while she was resting, she took a job as a dental hygienist in Batley. Finished up marrying the dentist. Oscar Padgett.’
She laughed. ‘There are worse fates.’
‘Obviously you’ve never been to Batley.’ He saw her glance at the post-mortem photographs. ‘Matter of fact, I spoke to Jenny on the phone only last night, but you know something? It’s six months since I last saw her face to face. Kids, bloody hell. You have any?’
His conversational swerves kept catching her on the back foot. She was starting to like the crusty old bugger, but she’d hate to be interrogated by him.
‘Never got round to it.’
He puffed out his cheeks. ‘Not bothered about the ticking clock?’
She shrugged and said, ‘Neither of us is exactly desperate to start a family.’
Bryant said, ‘Take it from me, there are more important things than the job.’
‘Actually, I worked that out a while back.’
‘Well, then.’ His dour features were expressionless. Challenging her to get uptight, but she wouldn’t be provoked.
‘We were talking about Gabrielle.’ She cleared her throat. ‘While she was in Leeds, she met up with Natasha Litvinov. Tash Litvinov, as she was known. They had plenty in common, both struggling for a break.’
‘Many are called, but few are chosen.’ Bryant grunted. ‘I told my Jenny, but would she listen?’
‘Both of them became disillusioned, they decided to start again. Tash came up to this neck of the woods, met a rich man and settled down. Gabrielle wanted to get right away. She fancied trying her luck in the States.’
‘Hollywood?’
‘She never seems to have made it beyond Las Vegas. For a couple of years she lived with a croupier from one of the casinos. Most of the time she spent as a waitress, serving free booze to gamblers to keep them at the tables or the slot machines. The pay was nothing special, but a pretty girl can make a good living out of tips from the punters.’
‘Why come back to England?’
‘According to Tash, her relationship had broken up and she was getting homesick. She’d earned a few quid and had this idea of travelling around Europe. Britain was her first stop.’
‘And her last.’
‘Uh-huh. She’d only been back a week when she turned up on her old mate’s doorstep. Tash had done well for herself, she’d married a property developer called Dumelow. He bought a mansion in Brackdale and played the local squire. After all those auditions, she finally landed the part of lady of the manor.’
‘How thrilled was Tash to see a face from the past? A reminder of the dark days, before she met her sugar daddy?’
‘She told us she was thrilled to have someone around she could gossip to about the past. She does her best, but the truth is, she doesn’t exactly have a lot in common with the good folk of Brackdale. Though she did introduce her friend to an odd-job man who worked on the estate.’
‘Don’t tell me. Barrie Gilpin.’
‘Got it in one. Barrie took a shine to Gabrielle from the moment he set eyes on her. He kept turning up at the pub in the village where she’d taken a room. According to the landlord, he was a bit of a nuisance. Constantly offering to buy her a drink, not taking no for an answer.’
‘Did she show him up in public? Take the piss?’
‘As far as we could establish, she humoured him, let him buy her the occasional orange juice.’
Bryant groaned. ‘You can’t help wondering if it would have been safer to be rude. He might have felt encouraged. Stalkers are like that. They take the slightest pleasantry as a sign of lust.’
‘Men are like that, never mind stalkers.’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘I don’t think he was stalking Gabrielle,’ she said. ‘He was just lonely and out of his depth. This glamorous woman with a Nevada tan had turned up out of nowhere and she didn’t make him feel small when he tried to make friends. Of course he was excited. That doesn’t make him a murderer.’
‘Easy for him to have become carried away. If he tried it on and she lost patience with him, who’s to say that he wouldn’t have snapped? He had access to the axe that killed her.’
‘There’s more. All the evidence pointed to the body having been moved. The Dumelows had a four-wheel drive that was stolen the day before Gabrielle’s murder. We found it burned out in a remote wooded area. Barrie could have killed her and then used the vehicle to transport her up the coffin trail, within spitting distance of the Sacrifice Stone. Headlights in the dark can be seen for miles in a valley like Brackdale, but we couldn’t find any witnesses. No big surprise, at that time of night, probably nobody was looking. Afterwards, so the official theory went, he hid the axe, dumped the four-by-four, and set off across the fell-side. In the dark, he slipped into the ravine. He broke his legs in the fall and in any event the sides were too steep for anyone to climb out if they weren’t kitted out with the proper gear. Death by exposure, everything neatly tied up.’
‘Why go back up the fell? Why not go home and tuck himself up like a good mummy’s boy? If Ma Gilpin was besotted by her only child, she might even have come up with an alibi.’
‘Not her. She was so honest it hurt to take her statement. Trust me, I interviewed her. From the word go, she admitted that he’d been out most of the evening.’
‘Do you think she was afraid he’d killed Gabrielle?’
‘No way. She was convinced of his innocence, she never wavered for an instant. He wasn’t capable of hurting anyone, she was adamant about that.’
‘Not exactly evidence to stake your reputation on,’ Bryant said with a weary sigh. ‘I can see why pinning the crime on Gilpin was the only game in town.’