Peter Robinson - Wednesday's Child

“Thank you, Meg,” said Gristhorpe. “You can go now. You’ve been a great help.”

“I have? Thank you.” She went to the door and turned with her fingers touching the handle. “I’m not looking forward to this, sir,” she said. “Between you and me, I’m not looking forward to opening any doors in this hotel this morning.” And she left.

Gristhorpe reached into his side pocket, took out a pack of Rennies he carried for such emergencies as English breakfasts and southern fish and chips, and chewed two of them.

“All right?” Banks asked.

“Aye.” Gristhorpe pulled a face. “Just ought to watch my diet, that’s all.”

Next they saw the receptionist, Maureen, rather prickly at being called away from her domain. Gristhorpe basked in antacid relief and left Banks to do most of the questioning. She had very little to tell them save that the Barlows had checked in the evening of Wednesday, September 24, at about six o’clock with just one tan suitcase between them. She had told them about parking and got their car licence number, then he had signed the register Mr and Mrs Barlow and given an address in Lichfield. Loder had already checked this and found it didn’t exist. No, Maureen hadn’t asked for any identification. Why should she? And yes, of course he had skipped out on his bill. If you’d just murdered your lover, you’d hardly stop at the front desk and pay your hotel bill, would you? No, nobody had seen him leave. It wasn’t a prison camp or one of those Russian gulags, you know. What did she think of them? Just ordinary, no one you’d look twice at if you saw them in the street. Her, maybe, but he was just a nondescript bloke with a nice smile. In fact, Maureen remembered wondering what an attractive, if rather stuck-up, girl like her was doing with the likes of him.

And that was it. They talked briefly with Mr Ballard, who didn’t remember seeing the Barlows at all, and to the bellboy who had carried their suitcase to their room and remembered nothing but the pound tip the bloke had given him. Nobody knew what they did with their time. Went for walks, the cinema in the evening, or to a pub. Nothing unusual about them. Nothing much else to do in Weymouth.

By the time they had finished the interviews, it was eleven-thirty. DI Loder had said he would drop by that morning as soon as the autopsy results became available, and they met him walking into the lobby. He looked as if he had slept badly, too, Gristhorpe thought, with bags under his eyes and his long face pale and drawn. The three of them decided to take some fresh air on the prom while they discussed the results.

“Anything?” Gristhorpe asked as they leaned on the railings. A faint breeze ruffled his thick grey hair. The weather was overcast, but reasonably warm. Seagulls squawked overhead.

Loder shook his head slowly. “First, we’ve made enquiries at the ferry dock and no one remembers anyone of his description. We can’t really make too much of that, though, as it’s very busy down there. And the autopsy findings bear out what the doc suspected. She died of asphyxiation, and the pillow fibres in her lungs indicate that’s how it happened. No sign of drugs or anything, though it’ll be a while before all the test results come back. We’ve sent the tissue for DNA testing — it looks like our man’s Group O, by the way — but that’ll take some time. She did have sex prior to death, and there were no signs of sexual assault, so we assume it was by consent. Otherwise healthy. Poor woman, we don’t even know her name yet. Only one surprise: she was eight weeks pregnant.”

“Hmm,” said Gristhorpe. “I wonder if Chivers knew that.”

Loder shrugged. “Hardly a motive for murder.”

“I don’t think he needs much of a motive. It could have pushed him over the edge.”

“Or maybe it made her a liability,” Banks suggested. “Not so much just because she was pregnant but because it softened her, brought out the guilt over what they’d done? If she found out she was going to have a child of her own…”

“There’s no point in speculating,” said Gristhorpe. “It’s something we might never know. Anything else?”

“Nothing from the car,” Loder said. “A few partials… fibres and the like, but you know as well as I do most stuff’s mass-produced these days. Could have come from almost any blue cotton shirt. There’s not a lot else to say. We’ve got men asking around about him, if anyone saw him after he left the hotel. Nothing so far. Oh, and I informed Interpol and the authorities on the Channel Islands.”

“Good,” said Gristhorpe. “That seems to cover it all.”

“What next?” asked Loder.

“We can only wait, can’t we?”

“Looks like it. I’d better be off back to the station, keep on top of it.”

“Thanks.” Gristhorpe shook his hand. “Thanks a lot.”

They watched Loder walk off towards his car. “He’s got a point,” said Gristhorpe. “What do we do next?”

Banks shrugged. “I can only speculate.”

“Go ahead.”

Banks watched a ferry steam out of the dock. The flock of gulls swooped on a dead fish on the beach. “I’ve been thinking about Chivers,” he said, lighting a cigarette and looking out to sea. “Trying to fathom his thought processes.”

“And?”

“And I’m not sure, but… look, he must know we’re after him by now. Surely he’s seen the stuff in the newspapers. What does he do? He kills the woman, too much extra baggage, and he takes off. Now a normal criminal would certainly head for the continent and disappear. But we know Chivers isn’t normal.”

“I think I follow your train, Alan. I’ve had the same thought myself. He’s playing a game, isn’t he? Laughing at us.”

Banks nodded. “And he likes the attention. Jenny said he’s likely to be egocentric, but he’s also probably impulsive and irresponsible. I’ve thought about that a lot.”

“So where would he head, given the way he thinks?”

“Back to where it started, I think,” said Banks. “I’ll bet you a pound to a penny the bastard’s back in Eastvale.”

It was late that Saturday evening when Banks and Gristhorpe arrived back in Eastvale. They were delayed by a six-car pile-up into a jackknifed lorry on the M1 just south of Leicester, and as they passed by Pontefract and Castleford on the A1, the rain fell in buckets, slowing traffic to a crawl.

So it was that on Sunday morning, as the bells rang in the church and people crossed the market square in their Sunday best for the morning service, the members of Eastvale CID sat in the conference room around the large circular table drinking coffee and pooling their findings.

Richmond and Susan brought the others up to date on John Fairley’s information about Chivers and the fact that he owned a gun.

“Fairley seems the least involved of them all,” said Richmond. “We had a good long chat when we brought him in. He’s got no prior form. I’m sure he’s dealt with stuff that fell off the back of a lorry before, but the Fletcher’s warehouse job is his first big bit of fencing, we’re sure of that. Susan?”

“I agree,” said Susan Gay, looking up from the notes in front of her. “Seems it was Johnson’s idea, and he recruited Les Poole easily. They were mates of Fairley’s, genuinely helping out at the shop for a bit of under-the-counter pocket money. Chivers was the prime mover. Without him, I don’t reckon the others would have had the guts to go through with it. It was Chivers drugged the guard dogs and cut through the chain-link fence. Poole drove the van, backed it up to the loading bay and away they went. The back of Fairley’s shop is just a quiet backstreet, so they got unloaded without any trouble. It wasn’t too hard to make a few sales through their pub mates, word of mouth, and they’d already got rid of most of the stuff by the time we called.”