Jennifer decided to hint that she might not be going back to The Globe. Mrs Stone was unmoved.
‘Huh, I knew there was something up,’ she said.
Jennifer smiled. She never had been able to pull the wool over her mother’s eyes as much as she thought she could. She might as well confess the rest of it.
‘Actually I’m thinking of buying a cottage by the sea here in North Devon and giving up London and newspapers for good,’ Jennifer announced.
Her mother did not have to say how much that would please her, but she knew her daughter well.
‘Are you sure you can do that, maid?’ she asked.
‘No, I’m not sure — but I think I may be soon,’ replied Jennifer honestly. ‘There’s something I have to do before I can finally make any big decisions.’
‘Nothing to do with that old man and they murders?’ Mrs Stone queried.
Once again Jennifer was surprised by her astuteness. She shouldn’t be, but there it was. She knew her mother would worry herself sick if she thought Jenny was getting mixed up in it all again, so she decided to lie.
‘No, of course not,’ she said coolly.
But she wasn’t quite sure how convincing she was being. She changed the subject.
‘I tell you what, how about if we go to Oz together again to see Steve and the family?’
Mrs Stone’s face lit up. She’d love that. Jenny didn’t need to ask, did she?
‘In the autumn,’ said Jennifer. ‘Their spring. Stay three months if you like — and I’ll stay three months with you. Why the hell not?’
‘Don’t swear,’ said her mother. In some ways nothing changed.
And so, chatting comfortably with her mother, the time passed more quickly than Jennifer had expected. Suddenly it was nine-thirty, and she set off to drive to the operations centre in Pelham Bay. She arrived fifteen minutes early. But Todd was already prepared for her, as she had guessed he would be. A young constable showed her into the private office he had set up in a small storeroom. It was an airless little room with one tiny high-up window, but at least it gave him some privacy. A temporary phone line had been installed. The furniture comprised a desk covered in papers and two straight-backed chairs.
The constable closed the door, and Jennifer sat down opposite Todd across the desk. She was aware of his face softening as he looked at her, then, with a slight shrug of his burly shoulders, he became the police chief again.
He took several clear plastic bags from the box by his feet, cleared a space on his cluttered desk and spread them out. Each bag contained a piece of the evidence found in Bill’s cottage.
‘Can I look at the notebook, can I take it out of the bag?’ Jennifer asked.
‘No,’ said Todd. ‘But we’ve copied it. Hang on.’
He got up and headed for the operations room set up in the main body of the village hall. While he was gone, Jennifer studied the items of jewellery laid out before her. Irene’s cheap little silver-plated watch stood out like a sore thumb — well, she assumed it was Irene’s. It had indeed tarnished badly.
When Todd returned, she asked him if the body had now definitely been identified as Irene. He replied that it had. The dental records checked out, and his next job was to tell Irene’s parents. The police had already warned them of the possibility before the news had been announced that a long-dead body had been found. Todd hadn’t wanted them to put two and two together from a news bulletin.
Jennifer shuddered. She sympathised with Todd on the rotten job he was about to do.
‘I’ve done worse,’ he replied flatly. ‘They always believed Irene was dead anyway. Said there was no way she would have gone anywhere without telling them.’
Jennifer reached out a hand for the copies of the notebook. There were jottings on several pages. Groups of numbers and letters, disjointed words, nothing that made any sense. Yet she had seen something like it before. She knew she had.
‘Are these what you think are codes?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ Todd replied. ‘But so far they are not a lot of good to us. As I told you, Bill Turpin had this super-advanced computer system but no software. If there was anything already on the hard disc, we have yet to break into it. God knows what he was planning to use the thing for, but it seems as if it had been programmed by somebody else and Bill had barely handled it. He was obviously a lot more sophisticated than anybody would have guessed, and pretty clever on the stock market, so maybe he aimed to use the computer to play the market. Who knows? When we checked the keyboard for his finger prints there were hardly any, so he may have tried to move into the computer age and not quite made it.
‘At the Penny Parade there is a basic Amstrad that they use for their accounts and stock-taking and so on, but, according to Johnny Cooke who does all that sort of stuff, Bill rarely even went near that.’
Todd paused. He was watching Jennifer’s face. He didn’t know quite what to make of her.
‘If you know anything, Jenny, suspect anything, have the slightest clue about anything...’ he began quietly. ‘Why don’t you tell me — and then let me do my job?’
‘I’m just interested,’ she replied.
‘That’s one word for it.’
‘Yes. Maybe I’ll write a book.’
‘Maybe you will,’ he said. ‘But that’s not it, either, is it?’
She put the copy of the notebook in her pocket and took one last look at the forlorn collection of jewellery.
‘Thanks Todd,’ she said.
She left her car parked outside the village hall and walked along Old Bay Road to the amusement arcade which she knew was now run by Johnny Cooke. Pelham Bay was something of a time warp. There were video games in the Penny Parade now instead of table football machines, yet surprisingly little else had changed. The resort was perhaps a bit more fish and chippy, but maybe her memory played tricks on her. It always had been a ropy place, the tattiest side of the seaside industry. The deckchairs were still for hire from the same stand, and a new breed of indolent young men had succeeded Johnny Cooke and all the others since. They were clones — immaculately tanned, shirtless in faded jeans, arrogant in the certainty of their youth. Only their hair was different. These lads had short-back-and-sides haircuts, the pudding basin shaven-around-the-edges look that was once again in fashion. Twenty-five years ago Johnny’s hair had been long and luxuriant, spreading onto his shoulders in true sixties and early seventies style.