Stuart Pawson - Chill Factor

“We could have had a cream tea in the Cotswolds,” Annette suggested.

“Or Bath buns in Bath,” I added. The music paused, hanging there like an eagle over the edge of a precipice, held by the wind. It’s moment, near the end of the adagio, when the silence grips you, forbidding even your breath to move. We sat quietly until the end of the piece, when I pressed the off button. Nothing could follow that.

“What will you do?” I asked, breaking the silence.

After a moment she said: “He wants to marry me.”

The rain on the windows had completely obscured the view and a gust of wind rocked the car. Who’d believe we were just into October? “Do you want to marry him?” I asked.

“Yes, I think so.”

“Will you leave the police?”

“Yes. If I go back to teaching we’d all have the same holidays. It would be an ideal situation.”

“You tried teaching, once.”

“I was twenty-two. I’ve learned a lot since then.”

“Like karate,” I said. “How to disarm an attacker, or use a firearm.”

She didn’t reply. I said: “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be trying to dissuade you.”

“What would you do, Charlie,” she asked, steering me away from the private stuff, “if you weren’t a policeman?”

“Same as you, I suppose,” I replied. “I was heading for a career in teaching. Physical education and art. Non- academic, looked down upon by all the others in the staff room, with their degrees in geography and…home economics. The police saved me from that.”

“What would you really like to do? If you could do anything in the world, what would it be?”

“Cor, I dunno,” I protested, my brain galloping through all the fantasies, searching for a respectable one.

“There must be something.”

“Yeah, I think there is.”

“What? Go on, tell me.”

“Swimming pool maintenance,” I announced.

“Swimming pool maintenance!” she laughed.

“That’s right. In Hollywood. I’d have a van — a big macho pickup — with Charlie’s Pool Maintenance painted on the side, and I’d fix all the stars’ pools.” I liked the sound of this and decided to embroider it. “When I’d finished checking the chlorine levels, cleaning the filters or whatever,” I continued, “the lady of the house would come out with iced lemonades on a tray, and she’d say: ‘Have you fixed it, Charlie?’ and I’d reply: ‘No problem, Ma’am.’ ‘What was the trouble?’ she’d ask, and I’d say: ‘Oh, nothing much, only your HRT patch stuck in the filter again.’”

Annette collapsed in a fit of giggling. When she’d nearly stopped she said: “Oh, Charlie, I do…” Then she did stop.

“You do what?” I asked, but she shook her head. I reached out, putting my arm across her shoulders and pulling her towards me, meeting no resistance. I buried my face in her mass of hair, smelling it that close for the first time. “You do what?” I insisted. “Tell me.”

“I…I…I do enjoy being with you,” I heard her muffled voice say.

“That counts for a lot,” I told her, and felt her nod in agreement. I tilted her chin upwards and kissed the lips I’d longed to kiss for a long time. A grown-up kiss, tonight, with no holding back. She broke off before I wanted to.

As I held her I said: “I’ve dreamed of that ever since I first saw you.”

She replied with a little “Uh” sound.

“It’s true. I’m not looking for a one-night stand, Annette, or a bit on the side. You know that, don’t you?”

“Aren’t you?” she replied.

“No. I want you to believe that.”

“Take me home, please.”

I started the engine and pulled my seatbelt back on. We drove most of the way to Heckley in silence. As we entered the town I said: “If luck’s on our side we’ll find something tomorrow to link Silkstone with other attacks in Somerset.”

“Do you think you will?” Annette asked.

“Depends whether he did them,” I replied. “And even then, it’s a long shot.” As we turned into her street I said: “I don’t know what to think. About anything. Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth bothering.” We came to a standstill outside the building which contains her flat. “Here we are,” I said. “Thank you for a pleasant evening, Annette. Sorry if I stepped out of line. It won’t happen again.”

She shook her head, the light from the street lamps giving her a copper halo that swayed and shimmered like one of van Gogh’s wind-blown cypress trees. “You didn’t step out of line, Charlie,” she told me.

“Honest?”

“Mmm. Honest.”

“Good. I’m glad about that.”

She reached for the door handle, like Sophie had done, then hesitated and turned to me in exactly the same way. “What do you have against one-night stands and a bit on the side?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I replied. “Nothing at all.”

I held her gaze until she said: “Would you like to come in?”

“Yes,” I told her. “I’d like that very much.”

I blamed the traffic for being late. Bob asked if I’d come down the Fosse Way or Akeman Street, but I said: “Oh, I don’t know,” rather brusquely and asked him what he had for me. I realised later that it was an office joke, probably imitating one of the traffic officers who always swore that the quickest way from A to B was via Q, M and Z.

Plenty was the answer. I wanted to see the basic stuff first and then move on to the specific. I asked myself, as I looked at the ten-by-eights of poor Caroline’s body, if this was necessary. Couldn’t I have gleaned the information I wanted from someone’s report? No doubt, but this way was quicker. Caroline had been strangled and raped, from the front and not necessarily in that order. Also, the deed was done outdoors. Serial rapists develop a style, like any other craftsman. Some, who often have a record for burglary, prefer to work indoors. Others, quicker on their feet, strike in parks and lonely lanes. If Silkstone was our man he’d changed his style. Caroline’s body was left in a shallow stream and not discovered for two days, hence the lack of forensic evidence.

Bob had extracted a list of statistics from the pile of information, to show how extensive the enquiry had been: fifteen thousand statements; twenty thousand tyre prints; eighteen thousand cars. He fetched me a sandwich and percolated some decent coffee while I read the statements made by the officers who had interviewed the Famous Four: Silkstone, Latham, Margaret, and Michelle Webster. What could they have said to differentiate themselves from all those thousands of others, short of: “I did it, guv, it’s a fair cop?”

But they didn’t, and were lost in the pile of names just like others before them and a few since.

“Cor, that’s good,” I said, taking a sip of the coffee. “Just what I need.”

“Late night?” Bob asked.

“Yeah,” I replied.

“Working?”

“No, er, no, not really. It was, um, a promotion bash. Went on a bit late.” I liked that. A promotion bash. He was a detective, so he could probably tell that I was smiling, inside.

There were twenty-one reported attacks on women in the previous ten years that may have been linked to Caroline’s death. Seventeen of them were unlikely, two looked highly suspicious. I started at the bottom of the pile, working towards the likeliest ones. Had I done it the other way round I might have become bogged down on numbers one and two. Some had descriptions, some didn’t. He was tall, average height — this was most common — or short. Take your pick. He wore a balaclava, was clean shaven and had a beard. There were three of them, two of them, he was alone. He spoke with a local accent, a strange accent, never said a word. He had a knife, a gun, just used brute force. He was on foot, rode a bike, in a car.