Кара Хантер - In the Dark

He gets up to leave, so quickly that he is out of the door before Gislingham is even on his feet. And when Somer comes out into the corridor he takes her by the arm and pulls her to one side. Her smile chills when she sees the look on his face.

‘Don’t you ever fucking do that to me again,’ he hisses. ‘Do you understand?’

She pulls back from him. ‘Do what, exactly?’

‘Make me look like a bloody idiot in front of a suspect – in front of fucking Gislingham , for fuck’s sake.’

‘I’m sorry – I was trying to help –’

He brings his face closer to hers. ‘If that’s what you call helping, then forget it. In fact, forget it, full stop.’

‘Where’s all this come from?’

But he’s already gone.

***

The team meeting is at 6.30. And this time, I’m taking it. The room is packed and hot. But silent. Word has got around.

‘OK,’ I say, into the expectation. ‘You probably know that Challow’s team found something in one of the boxes in the cellar at Frampton Road. It’s a journal, written by Vicky during her captivity.’

I step forward and turn on the projector.

‘Some parts are missing or damaged but there’s still no doubt what happened to her. This is a transcript of the key pages. But I warn you, it’s painful reading.’

I’m silent as they read it. There are gasps, shakes of the head. Some of the women are really struggling, and I know the exact moment Gislingham gets to ‘Billy’. I won’t let myself look at him but I sense him stiffen, hear the intake of breath.

‘We’ll wait for the DNA,’ I say at last, ‘as formal proof, but I plan to charge William Harper with rape and false imprisonment by close of play today. We have enough now to make a case against him.’

There’s a silence.

‘Sir,’ says Somer tentatively, ‘I know I’m not CID and all that, but is it possible there’s another way to read this? I haven’t met Harper but I did meet Walsh, and I think he’s the one she’s talking about here. The man she talks about opening the door, that sounds more like Walsh to me.’

‘Actually, she’s got a point there,’ says Gislingham quickly. ‘The tie, the poncey way of talking. That’s Walsh bang to rights. Harper’s the one who goes out in the street in his vest.’

‘This was at least three years ago. Harper was a very different man then.’ But even as I’m saying it I’m starting to wonder.

‘Yes, sir, but look,’ says Somer, getting up and going to point at the transcript. ‘He calls her a “vicious bitch”. That’s exactly what Walsh called Priscilla. This afternoon, when we interviewed him.’

Harper called his wife an evil cow, but it’s Walsh who says vicious bitch. Words matter. Nuance matters. I walk towards the screen. Somer is standing in the light from the projector, Vicky’s words trailing eerily across her face.

‘This reference here,’ she says, still half apologetic, ‘to the doctor and Vicky being “in the right place”. Yes, that could be Harper talking about himself, but it could also be Walsh, talking about Harper. About him being a PhD doctor but not a real doctor.’

‘Either way, that’s a pretty sick joke,’ says Gislingham grimly. ‘To a girl about to give birth without medical help.’ He’s bound to feel it: a man whose son only survived because of state-of-the-art equipment and a whole team of neonatal specialists.

I stand there, reading. Re-reading. I can hear them all behind me. The murmurs, the trying to work out which way it’s going.

I turn back to face them. ‘What do we have on Walsh?’

‘Plenty, actually,’ says Quinn as the energy in the room shifts up a notch. ‘We’ve got his fingerprints on some of the boxes in the cellar, as well as in the kitchen and on some of the items in the shed –’

‘So how does Walsh explain that?’

Quinn shakes his head. ‘Nothing doing. Insisted he’s never been in the cellar and demanded to speak to his lawyer before he answered any more questions. We’re still waiting for her to arrive. But when she does, we’ll also be asking Walsh about a collection of netsuke Harper inherited from his first wife. You know, this sort of thing.’ He holds up a page of images. An ivory hare, two entwined frogs, a coiled snake, a crow curled round a skull. Beautiful and tiny and perfect.

‘Walsh wanted them back,’ continues Quinn, ‘but Harper refused. Only there’s no sign of them in the house. There’s a cupboard in the bedroom where Walsh says they were but it’s empty.’

‘So this collection – was it valuable?’

Quinn nods. ‘Could be. Walsh told us they were only worth a few hundred but I happen to know rare examples can fetch a hundred grand or more. Each.’ I see Somer glance across at him and the effort he makes to avoid her eye.

‘Actually, sir,’ says Somer, addressing herself rather pointedly to me, not Quinn, ‘I saw a display cabinet on the wall in Walsh’s house when we called there. It had quite a distinctive design – the sort of thing people buy for collections of netsuke. ’

One thing I do know: her pronunciation is much better than Quinn’s.

‘My personal theory?’ Quinn continues as if the interruption never happened. ‘I reckon Walsh realized Harper was starting to lose it and took the opportunity to swipe the collection. Either all in one go, or gradually, so it wasn’t so obvious in case someone like Ross was snooping around. That could mean he’s been going to that house much more often than he’s letting on. So he could have been there that day – the day Vicky was abducted.’

‘But wouldn’t someone have seen him if he’d been going there a lot?’ says Baxter. ‘There was only one neighbour who said she saw him and that was a good while ago.’

‘I don’t think we should take that as conclusive. Not in that part of Oxford. And in any case, he could have come at night. I doubt anyone would have noticed him in the dark.’

‘Right,’ I say, addressing the whole room. ‘Gislingham – organize a search of Walsh’s house. And let’s remember, he only lives in Banbury. If he really is some sort of sexual psychopath, Frampton Road would have been the ultimate safe house – far enough away but not too far, only an old lady next door, a cellar with thick walls and no windows –’

‘Christ, even better than the Loony Lock-up,’ quips Gislingham to laughter that comes as a release of the tension. It’s a joke we have – ever since Prime Suspect every TV serial killer seems to have his own private torture chamber. As Alex once drily observed, clearly all that’s required to round up any currently operational serial killers is a systematic sweep of the nation’s railway arches.

‘And another thing,’ I continue. ‘When I interviewed Harper he said he doesn’t go down to the cellar any more – that he’d started to hear noises coming from it. “Wailing and scratching” were the actual words. He appeared to be genuinely frightened. And that could make sense, if Walsh had locked Vicky down there without Harper knowing. The old man’s getting confused, he drinks – it’s not inconceivable Walsh could have got the girl into the house without him knowing. After all, he probably has a key.’

‘Yeah,’ says Gislingham, ‘but isn’t Harper going to say something like that, even if it’s not true? He’s bound to claim he never knew anything about it.’

‘In theory, yes, but this came out towards the end of the interview, when Harper was starting to get more confused. I don’t think he was faking that. It could also explain something else that’s been bugging me about Harper. Kidnapping that girl, keeping her locked up – a crime like that doesn’t come out of a blue sky. There’s always something that leads up to it – some sort of escalation over time, even if that’s only obvious in retrospect. But with Harper, there’s nothing – or nothing we’ve found.’