Lynda La Plante - Backlash

‘I don’t think I’ve ever come across him, have you?’ asked Norman.

‘No. Looks like a boxer with that flattened nose.’

‘Does the name Henry Oates mean anything to either of you?’

Bill and Norman looked at each other and shook their heads while Anna took back the photograph.

‘Stephen Jordan mentioned that there had been a considerable amount of work clearing a section of the garden and patio before the extension was built.’

‘Yes, we had to dig down a few feet for the footings, move out a lot of shrubbery and a couple of deep-rooted trees. We had to remove the garden fence and come into their property from the street at the back of their house. We needed some extra hands and we brought in a mini digger.’

‘Were the rest of the workers your usual team?’

Bill scratched his head and then leaned over to take back the file he had passed to Anna. He thumbed through it. There were many receipts and invoices for the extension materials along with a letter of lawful development from the council.

‘It’s a long while back now, well over five years ago. In fact, looking at the invoice it was June 2006 when we first started the ground clearance.’

He flicked back and forth, finding the list of the people he had used on the job.

‘Do you recall using anyone not well known to you?’ Bill ran his teeth over his bottom lip and then wagged his finger. ‘There was the tree surgeon, remember, Norman? We didn’t know him well back then. One of the trees we needed to chop down hung over into next-door’s garden and the roots went under their fence.’

‘It was a wall, Bill, they got quite nasty about it, even when we explained to them that we’d rebuild the wall and to whatever specification they wanted.’

‘You’re right. You’d be surprised what aggravation we get. I remember having to sit and explain over and over that we were not taking any inches from their garden, just removing the roots of the blessed tree, and that the adjoining wall would be replaced and in a better condition than the one we needed to pull down.’

‘Right, it was buckled and quite dangerous because of the roots – the tree must have been sixty-odd years old. I think they even got a solicitor on it, you know; it’s a conservation area around there.’

‘This tree surgeon?’ Anna prompted.

‘Right, yes, young bloke, has a small company in Kingston, he’s quite posh. Upper-class type, qualified land scape gardener and tree surgeon who worked part-time at Kew Gardens, or he did,’ Norman said.

‘He’s not on the list, is he?’ Anna asked.

They both shook their heads. ‘Did you tell the police about him at the time?’

‘He had nothing to do with the extension, so I’m not sure. He just helped with the tree and then some of the clearance. I remember he took the old bricks away for us, probably to re-use them,’ Bill said as he flicked backwards and forwards through the paperwork file.

‘Ah, here we are, his invoice with a phone number and address near Cobham. He set up his own garden centre called Markham’s not far from his home. Good, he is, we’ve used him a few times since. I’ll give this number a ring for you.’

‘It’s okay, thanks, a copy of the invoice will be fine and I will ring him later,’ Anna said.

As it was almost seven, Anna had not bothered returning to the incident room as she needed to change and get ready to go to Euston Station to catch the sleeper train to Glasgow. She put in a call to Andrew Markham’s garden centre office when she got back to her flat, but was told that he was still on holiday in Thailand. She also rang Barolli and he had given her what little update they had on Fidelis Julia Flynn, which included interviewing her old flatmates. Although they had said she had left leaving rent unpaid, she had also left two suitcases of her belongings, which had been seized by the local detectives who initially investigated her disappearance. Barolli said that he had arranged for the cases to be brought over to the incident room so he could go through them.

In was another day without a result and Anna could understand Langton’s frustration. She was not too hopeful that her trip to Glasgow would be of any use, but without anything else it would at least give her more of an insight into Henry Oates’s background and possibly assist a behavioural investigator, should she persuade Langton to use one.

Anna had not expected to be met at Glasgow, but standing on the station platform as the train pulled in was a uniformed officer. The patrol car drove her to her hotel and the officer waited while she took a shower. It was not yet nine when she was driven to the Glasgow police station and again she was surprised to be met, by DCI Alex McBride, who had fresh coffee and oatcakes for her on a tray in his office. He was a very well built man with broad shoulders and a wide pleasant face, dotted with moles, and eyebrows so thick they were like an extension of his brown curly hair. When he shook her hand, her elbow jerked up and down, it was such a firm grip.

McBride filled her in with the details of the armed robbery case in which the security guard had died from gunshot wounds. Anna listened attentively, remembering that their main suspect was the boyfriend of Eileen Oates. As he had given Eileen as his alibi, she had been questioned and they had looked into her background. One daughter, Megan, aged sixteen, was pregnant and living at home and the other, Corinna, was a known heroin addict. Corinna had also been arrested for prostitution on two occasions, but the courts had deferred sentencing on the condition the young woman agreed to go into rehab. McBride informed Anna that he had contacted the centre this morning to check on her progress, only to discover that she had walked out after a week or so and her current whereabouts were not known. McBride suggested she was probably in a drug den somewhere and they’d no doubt find her in a gutter with a needle in her arm. But they had not had any sightings of Henry Oates or any reports of him ever visiting his ex-wife.

Their suspect for the bank robbery was a Donald McAleese. He had an extensive police record for assault, fencing stolen property and burglary. After finishing her coffee, Anna was taken to the incident room and shown McAleese’s details and photograph.

‘Do you suspect that Eileen is lying?’

‘We do, and we know that she and McAleese were cohabiting at one time. We had numerous call-outs from neighbours a few years ago. She would always drop charges for assault, but he is a very violent man and it’s possible she’s too scared to admit she’s lying.’

McBride took Anna through the statements taken from Eileen. She had claimed that McAleese had been with her the afternoon of the robbery and had spent the evening with her visiting a local pub and afterwards taking home fish and chips. The police were only able to verify that McAleese was with her in the pub during the evening and that they were later seen in the fish and chip shop. Eileen was his sole alibi for the afternoon of the robbery.

‘The robbery went down at two-thirty in the afternoon on a security van and the whole thing was recorded on CCTV. It was carried out by two masked men, one with a sawn-off shotgun and one with a hand gun. The man with the sawn-off pointed it at the driver’s head while the other demanded the money from the guard who had just come out of the bank. The guard turned to run so he shot him twice in the back of the head with the hand gun,’ McBride explained as he turned a computer screen towards Anna and played the CCTV of the robbery.

‘That defies belief. A life lost for what, a few thousand pounds,’ Anna said, taken aback by the gratuitous violence and the senseless death of the young security guard.