Uncle Andy, who could easily have gone that very morning to the house opposite Tesco’s and had a long and meaningful chat with Robbie, probably ending with a full statement and Robbie not having time to go to the castle that afternoon and therefore still being alive.
Had this not been the same Uncle Andy who just couldn’t face the thought of his old man formally welcoming him to the wonderful world of retirement.
Another time, another place, Andy was going to weep.
And he wasn’t stupid. Knew that what he was doing now was no substitute, was unlikely to make him feel any better.
But at least Uncle Andy was finally here for Robbie Walsh and all the other Robbie Walshes who would be hanged, cut, beaten by this scum who had every reason to think the useless, bureaucratic, CPS-constricted police service was never gonner touch him.
Mumford looked down at him.
‘This river, Jason, the Wye. When I was a boy, much younger than you, folks used to say the River Wye demanded a sacrifice every year. Used to say the mothers was always scared to let their kids go anywhere near the water till somebody somewhere had been pulled out dead. You yeard that one?’
Jason said nothing. There was drool all over his mouth, and his eyes were wet. His famous jacket, with all the zips, had split under an arm.
‘Some very old man was considered best,’ Mumford said. ‘Or a drunk. Or a tramp.’
Jason snuffled and rolled away from the water’s edge.
‘Or anybody that wouldn’t be missed,’ Mumford said, thinking how primitive and tribal this had been for the 1950s.
‘But we was told we better be good kiddies else we might be the ones wouldn’t be missed.’
A few minutes later, as he began a more formal interrogation of the suspect, the possibility that this would not end with Jason’s death and disposal in the River Wye had dwindled to a minuscule point of light at the end of a very long tunnel already fogged with a suffocating rage against a world that had no further use for the imperturbable Detective Sergeant Mumford.
42
Like Heat
SHE LOOKED SO lonely when he found her, this small figure hunched up in the fleece with the torn pocket. She’d been trying to get it over to a policewoman on the castle gate that the girl in the castle was linked with the last one, Jemima Pegler, and the policewoman had looked at her like she was just another voyeur determined to get in on the action.
‘Thank you,’ the policewoman said coldly. ‘They know.’
That was it, a blank snub: you are irrelevant to this, you’re as useless as the people with the power-of-God placard. You are wasting my valuable time.
Go.
Nobody else wanted to talk to her. She said she’d been looking for Belladonna, but there was no sign of her either.
This was Merrily Watkins: any responsibility going spare, she’d accept it.
Lol virtually dragged her into the Assembly Rooms. There was a café upstairs, with big windows from which you could see the edge of the square, and they sat close together like sad young lovers, watching the light beginning to fade, although it was still two hours to sunset.
‘You shouldn’t have come all this way.’
‘You shouldn’t have forgotten your mobile,’ Lol said. ‘Who poisoned the local cops against you? Saltash?’
He was watching her eat, guessing this was the first time today. She was forking up salad in a desultory way as though, if he turned away, she might empty her plate into a pot plant.
‘And where is Saltash?’
‘In the castle. Dispensing psychological wisdom.’
She’d explained about Jemima’s e-mails to the girl called Sam and told him a lot about Belladonna, as if she had to justify her continued presence here even to him.
When Merrily was starting to seem less fraught, Lol ordered some more tea and told her about Jonathan Scole and the killing of the Ghostours man’s parents.
She pushed her plate to one side, staring at him. Bombshell.
‘He said they’d died in their car. I was thinking, road accident…’
‘Don’t know where the car comes in. Unless they were shot getting into it after leaving the café.’
‘The police think Jon Scole killed his own parents?’
‘Couldn’t have done it himself – he had an alibi,’ Lol said. ‘But the proceeds of the robbery were so meagre, the shooting so professional, that the cops were thinking cut-price contract killing. He just seems to have been the only one likely to profit from having them dead.’
‘What about…’ She scrabbled around. ‘I dunno, protection. Maybe they refused to pay protection money. Or a rival café-owner with a grudge?’
‘Sure, or they were dealing drugs under the counter. But you’d expect the police up there to have checked all those angles, wouldn’t you? Do you like this Scole?’
‘He’s…’ Merrily was looking around – for ashtrays, he guessed, to see if it was OK to smoke in here; apparently not. ‘He’s driven. A lot of energy, enthusiasm. Yes, he’s likeable. Someone who could have both his parents killed? A monster? No.’
Lol said perhaps Scole had been forced to leave the area to escape the damaging gossip. Understandable, in that case, that he’d changed his name. Understandable, too, that he’d simply say that his parents had died rather than have to go into it all with strangers, over and over again.
‘I just thought you should know,’ Lol said, aware that, for Merrily, more knowledge was more responsibility.
But the main responsibility tonight was his.
He finished his tea. ‘What was the name of that other guy?’
‘What other guy?’
‘The guy who came to you with Saltash and the woman.’ Lol stood up. ‘Maybe I can get us into the castle.’
Merrily was disturbed. Yes, it felt so much better with Lol here, it always did, but there was something he wasn’t telling her. He had this almost startled air, like someone reanimated after a long time in hibernation, this sense of purpose coming off him like heat – a guy who normally felt safer in the shadows and who wasn’t, as far as she knew, familiar with this town.
She stood with her back to the castle wall, out of sight while Lol talked softly to the policewoman, Kelly. A big sign said: CASTLE CLOSED. Almost all the shops were shut by now, and the crowds had thinned and the busker had gone.
And cautious, low-key Lol was chatting up a policewoman in a futile bid to get inside the castle. It was not like him.
‘I don’t get this with you guys,’ Kelly said to Lol. ‘I don’t see it.’
‘Trust me,’ Lol said.
‘I don’t trust anybody outside my own family, and I wouldn’t trust them with any money,’ Kelly said. ‘Stay there.’
A man was walking quickly up to the top of Mill Street, something swinging by his side that reminded Merrily, at first, of Bell’s mandolin case, and then she saw it was a TV camera. Had to happen at some stage.
Lol came back to stand with Merrily. The day’s spring heat was spent, and he held one of her cold hands between both of his, as George Lackland strode up from the direction of Woolworths. George without his overalclass="underline" dark grey suit, tie, watch-chain, a newspaper under his arm. Mr Mayor. She saw the reporter, with a short boom-mike attached to the camera, homing in on him: Amanda Patel, of BBC Midlands Today.
‘That woman knows me.’ She pulled Lol behind the big cannon, as the cameraman positioned George with his back to the castle gate.
‘Rolling,’ the cameraman said to Amanda, and then George was telling her he didn’t know who the girl in there was, and it was beyond devastating that this should happen again.
‘We’re all praying they can talk her down. There are people in the church now, praying.’