Ann Cleeves - Harbour Street

Dee shrugged. ‘Don’t know. I didn’t really see him. I wasn’t looking. He just ran off when Margaret saw him.’

‘He was young, was he? If he ran fast?’

Dee thought again. ‘He was faster than Margaret, but she was an old lady. Most people would be faster than her.’

‘And you can’t tell me anything at all about him?’

‘Like I said, Margaret just ran across Northumberland Street, shouting for me to stay where I was. She wasn’t gone very long. I asked her who the guy was, but she wouldn’t tell me. I thought we might stay out for our tea, but she said it was time to go home.’ Dee looked at her. Panda eyes over the rim of her mug. ‘Margaret was out of breath after running. I thought for a minute she was going to die.’

Ashworth came back with a kitchen knife and Vera cut the cake into bite-sized pieces. Nobody spoke. Footsteps clattered down the stairs outside the flat. Below a door banged shut.

‘Where were you yesterday afternoon, Dee?’ Vera kept her voice quiet, almost uninterested. No pressure. ‘After Margaret left you.’

‘Out.’ Her mouth shut tight like a trap.

‘We just need to know, Dee.’ Vera leaned forward towards her. ‘No one’s going to be cross if you were in the Coble all afternoon. None of our business. But we need to know.’

‘I was in the Coble,’ Dee said. ‘Then I met someone.’

‘A man?’

She nodded.

‘Where did you go with him? Did you bring him back here?’

‘We went to his place.’

‘And where was that?’ Vera thought the woman was mad. A danger to herself. She allowed some of her anxiety through: ‘You shouldn’t go off with men you don’t know, pet. It’s not safe.’

‘I did know him. At least I’ve seen him about.’

‘And his name?’

‘Jason.’ Dee was behaving like a sulky child. ‘I’d never heard his second name. And I don’t know where his place was.’

‘Somewhere in Mardle?’

‘No. We went on the Metro. I can’t remember.’ She looked up and suddenly seemed very young. ‘I was a bit pissed.’ She paused for a beat. ‘He bought me a ticket!’ As if that made everything all right.

‘Where did you get out?’ Vera asked. ‘Which Metro station?’

‘I don’t know! Somewhere on the way to town.’ As if, once away from Mardle and its immediate surroundings, she was in alien territory. Vera realized that she probably couldn’t read.

‘And afterwards,’ Joe said, ‘what happened then?’ He’d pushed himself away from the door to join in the conversation. Dee looked at him properly for the first time and appeared to like what she saw. After that her replies were directed at him.

‘I came back. Spent some of the money he’d given me. Bought some chips and went back to the pub.’

‘Did he come back with you?’

‘Nah!’ She was indignant. ‘I thought that was the idea, that he’d spend the evening with me, but he just let me out of his flat and I had to find the Metro station myself. It was snowing. Fucking freezing.’

‘What time was that?’ Joe asked.

‘Dunno. It was dark, though.’

‘And you came all the way to Mardle on the Metro?’ Joe asked the question; Vera held her breath.

‘Nah, the train stopped at Partington. Because of the weather. We all had to get out and get the bus. It took ages to come. Total fucking waste of time for a few quid.’

‘Which carriage were you in, Dee?’

She looked at Joe as if he was mad. ‘What?’

‘On the Metro? Were you near the front or the back?’

‘I can’t remember! Why?’

‘Because that’s where Margaret was stabbed,’ Vera said quietly. ‘On the Metro that was stopped by the snow.’

‘I didn’t see her!’ Dee turned to her, horrified. ‘If I’d seen her I might have saved her.’

Holly tracked down Margaret’s GP to a practice in Gosforth. An efficient receptionist said that Margaret had visited a couple of times in the last month, but not on the afternoon of her death. If they wanted more details they’d have to make an appointment to come into the surgery and talk to the doctor. When Holly rang Vera to tell her, expecting at least to be thanked for her efforts, the boss only seemed disappointed.

‘Oh well, it can’t be helped, but I really need to know what the woman was doing in Gosforth yesterday.’ There was a pause before Vera added, ‘How’s it going there otherwise?’

‘I think the press conference went okay, but I’m going bog-eyed here, boss. It’s a nightmare trying to collate all the info we’ve got through so far, but I’m pretty well up to date. I don’t think we’ll get another surge of calls until after the six-thirty news.’

It was already late afternoon. After the buzz of the press conference Holly had spent the next couple of hours in the police station, plotting names onto large pieces of graph paper. She’d tried to map the location of passengers in the Metro carriage electronically, but in the end it worked best to spread the graph paper over a double desk, each large square marking either a seat or a space. Still there were gaps. Some of the people Joe had remembered – the smooching kids and the partying businessmen – had failed to come forward. Other passengers had seen Margaret get onto the train at Gosforth, but hadn’t noticed if she’d been followed onto the platform.

There was a moment of silence on the end of the line, so Holly wondered if she’d get a bollocking again for complaining. She felt every contact with Vera Stanhope was like an approach to a large and unpredictable dog. You never knew whether it would lick you to death or take a chunk out of your leg.

‘Do you want a break from the desk work?’

‘I wouldn’t mind!’ Holly regretted the words almost as soon as they were spoken. The trouble with Vera was that she took advantage. Holly might be sent off on a wild goose chase that had no relevance at all to the investigation.

‘Have a word with Professor Michael Craggs,’ Vera said. ‘I can’t see him as any sort of suspect, but he’s on the edge of the investigation. He stays regularly at the guest house where Margaret lived and worked, and he might be able to provide an alibi of sorts for Malcolm Kerr.’

‘And who’s Kerr?’ Again Holly wondered if she might have missed something, some detail of the briefing, and waited to be yelled at for not paying attention. Vera always made her feel like a school kid.

‘Sorry, Hol. I should have explained. Kerr’s a boatman. He has that scruffy yard close to the harbour and lives in Percy Street, just behind the Metro line. Margaret Krukowski worked for him when she was a young woman. Kerr turned up at Kate Dewar’s place this morning in a bit of a state. She had the impression that he and Margaret might have been lovers. Anyway, he claims to have been out collecting samples of the North Sea with Craggs when Margaret was stabbed. So check out the alibi, but see if Craggs can tell us anything new about our victim too. At the moment we still have no family and no close friends, and the professor has been a regular at the Harbour Street guest house for years.’

Holly replaced the receiver, shell-shocked, because she’d had an apology from the boss, and checked out the number for the university. She was told that the professor wasn’t in the building today, but was working with a group of undergraduates at the Dove Marine Laboratory in Cullercoats. She collected a pool car and set out for the seaside.

Cullercoats was on the coast south from Mardle, a pretty cove between the wide sweeps of beach at Tynemouth and Whitley Bay. On the front a couple of restaurants and a wine bar looked out to the sea. In the summer it was a place for eating and drinking at tables on the pavement, watching the kids play on the beach. Holly had spent happy evenings in the village with friends. Now, as the light was fading and cold rain blew in from the sea, it was grey and dismal. She parked in a side street and crossed the main road that followed the coast. A light marked the end of the pier. The occasional car splashed through the icy puddles, but nobody else was out.