Peter Robinson - Close To Home (aka The Summer That Never Was)

“What do you think of Miss Anderson?” he asked Rose.

“She’s all right, I suppose.”

“You just called her an ugly old bitch.”

“Well… I didn’t mean… I was angry… I mean, she’s okay as a teacher. All right?”

“Do you get on well with her in class?”

“Okay.”

“So if I ask any of the other pupils in the class, they’d tell me that you and Miss Anderson get along just fine?”

Rose reddened. “She picks on me sometimes. She put me in detention once.”

“What for?”

“Not reading some stupid Shakespeare play. So I was reading a magazine under the desk. So what? I can’t be bothered with all that boring English stuff.”

“So you had a few run-ins with her?”

“Yes. But that’s not why I’m here. That’s not why I’m telling you what I know.”

“I’m sure it’s not, Rose, but you have to admit it does give you a bit of a motive to cause trouble for Miss Anderson, especially if you also tried to get Luke to be your boyfriend.”

Rose jumped to her feet. “Why are you being so horrible to me? I come here to help you and give you important information and you treat me like a criminal. I’m going to tell my father about you.”

Banks couldn’t help smiling. “It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been reported to the head teacher,” he said.

Before Rose could respond, two things happened in quick succession. First, there came an urgent tap at his door and Annie Cabbot walked in, a handkerchief to her mouth covered with what looked like blood. But before Annie could speak, Kevin Templeton poked his head around the door behind her, his gaze resting on Rose for a few seconds too long for her comfort, and said to Banks, “Sorry to interrupt you, sir, but we think we’ve got a positive ID on you know who.”

Banks knew who he meant. The mystery girl. So she did exist.

“Better than that,” Templeton went on. “We’ve got an address.”

Michelle discovered from DC Collins that Shaw had gone home after lunch, complaining of a stomach upset. Collins’s tone was such as to suggest it might be more a matter of the number of whiskeys Shaw had downed at lunch. He had been taking quite a lot of time off lately. At least that left the coast clear for Michelle. She didn’t want to see Shaw, especially after what had happened in her flat on Saturday. Sometimes, when she let her guard down, it was him she saw in her imagination, going through her bedside drawers, cutting Melissa’s dress in half. It wasn’t such a stretch to imagine him driving the beige van that bore down on her as she crossed the road earlier, either; he had been out of the station at the time. And the whiskeys? Dutch courage?

It was time to stop idle speculation and follow up on what she had discovered from Mrs. Walker. Michelle picked up the telephone and an hour or so later, after a lot of false trails and time wasted on hold, she managed to reach one of the retired Carlisle police officers who had looked into Donald Bradford’s death: Ex-Detective Sergeant Raymond Scholes, now living out his retirement on the Cumbrian coast.

“I don’t know what I can tell you after all this time,” Scholes said. “Donald Bradford was just unlucky.”

“What happened?”

“Surprised a burglar. Someone broke into his house, and before Bradford could do anything he got beaten so badly he died of his injuries.”

Michelle felt a chill. The same thing might have happened to her on Saturday, if she’d been home earlier. “Ever catch the burglar?” she asked.

“No. He must have taken Bradford by surprise, though.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because he was a pretty tough customer himself. I wouldn’t have fancied tackling him. Way it looks is the burglar must have heard him coming and hid behind the door, then bashed the back of Bradford’s head in with a cosh of some kind.”

“You never found a weapon?”

“No.”

“No clues? No prints?”

“Nothing usable.”

“No witnesses?”

“None that we could find.”

“What was taken?”

“Wallet, a few knickknacks, by the looks of it. Place was a bit of a mess.”

“Did it appear as if someone had been looking for something?”

“I never really thought about that. As I say, though, it was a mess. Turned upside down. Why the sudden interest?”

Michelle told him a little bit about Graham Marshall.

“Yes, I’ve read about that. Terrible business. I hadn’t realized there was a connection.”

“Was Bradford married?”

“No. He lived alone.”

Michelle could sense him pause, as if he was going to add something. “What?” she asked.

“Oh, it’s nothing. Bit of a laugh, really.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“Well, afterward, you know, we had to have a look around the house and we found… well… at the time it seemed quite risqué, though by today’s standards…”

Out with it, man, Michelle found herself thinking. What are you talking about?

“What was it?” she asked.

“Pornographic magazines. A bundle of them. And some blue films. I won’t go into detail, but they covered quite the range of perversions.”

Michelle found herself gripping the receiver tighter. “Including pedophilia?”

“Well, there were some pretty young-looking models involved, I can tell you that. Male and female. Not kiddie-porn, though, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Michelle supposed there was a distinction to be made. In some ways, once you had pubic hair, breasts and all the rest, you didn’t qualify as “kiddie-porn,” but you still might only be fourteen years old. Gray area.

“What happened to all this stuff?”

“Destroyed.”

But not before you and your lads had a good look at it, I’ll bet, Michelle thought.

“We didn’t let anything slip at the time,” he went on, “because it didn’t seem… well, the bloke had just been killed, after all. There seemed no point in blackening his name with that sort of thing.”

“Understandable,” said Michelle. “Who claimed the body?”

“Nobody. Mr. Bradford had no immediate family. The local authorities took care of everything.”

“Thank you, Mr. Scholes,” she said. “You’ve been a great help.”

“Think nothing of it.”

Michelle hung up and nibbled the end of her pencil as she thought about what she’d heard. She hadn’t come to any conclusions yet, but she had a lot to discuss with Banks when he arrived.

PC Flaherty, who had tracked down the mystery girl’s address, had been asking around Eastvale College, thinking that a girl who looked like she did must be a student. As it turned out, she wasn’t, but her boyfriend was, and one of the people he spoke to remembered seeing her at a college dance. The boyfriend’s name was Ryan Milne and the girl was known as Elizabeth Palmer. They lived together in a flat above a hat shop on South Market Street, the direction in which Luke Armitage had been walking when he was last seen.

Annie insisted that she felt well enough to make the call. She was damned, she told Banks, if she was going to be excluded after all the footwork she’d done just because some over-testosteroned lout had punched her in the mouth. It was her pride that hurt more than anything. After she’d cleaned up the wound, it didn’t look too bad anyway. Some women, she went on to say, paid a fortune for collagen shots to make themselves look like she did. Banks decided he would make the call with her before setting off for Peterborough. He phoned and arranged to meet Michelle in a city center pub at nine o’clock, just to be on the safe side.