Michael Fowler - Heart of the Demon

“You will, but not just yet. I’m afraid we’ll need to hang on to Claire for some time yet until the Coroner gives permission.”

“I hope you don’t find that me being not so upset about the news that Claire is dead reflects on my relationship with my daughter. I can assure you we were very close as a family. But I’m also a realist. I suppose I’ve known that Claire has been dead for a long time. Even though I never said it openly to Beverley when she was alive, I’ve always felt that Claire was lying somewhere in a grave where she shouldn’t be. She’s always been in my thoughts. Every time I saw or heard of a body being found, no matter where, I waited for the call. I’ve been waiting over ten years. The Police came back to us on many occasions at first, and her disappearance was re-investigated on a couple of occasions, and both me and Beverley used to get so excited. But then when Beverley died and there was no fresh news I just accepted the reality of it all.” Derek Fisher raised himself from his seat and went to a nearby wall unit. From the cupboard he brought out a bulging photograph album and handed it to Grace.

She opened it to find the folder crammed with yellowing newspaper cuttings and scraps of paper filled with copious notes. She leafed through the folder quickly. It had been meticulously maintained. Every milestone had been recorded from day one to the present time and was interspersed here and there with happy family photographs of the Fishers. Their past was in this book.

“I don’t know if that will be of any help to you. It’s everything we collected over the years relating to Claire. Every newspaper report. The possible leads. Every glimmer of hope. Keep it as long as you need. I hope it’ll help.”

“It’ll certainly help us. Thanks, I’ll make sure it gets back to you safely.”

“Before we leave you in peace Mr Fisher” interposed Hunter, “can you just remind us of Claire’s movements the evening she went missing.”

Derek Fisher stroked the line of his jaw and chin, cleared his throat and seesawed his eyes between Hunter and Grace.

“Do you know I don’t even need to think about what I’m going to tell you. I’ve said the same thing so many times over the years. Claire left home at just gone six. She told us she was going to her friend’s Stacy’s and would be back to finish her homework about eight o’clock. At quarter to eight she phoned us from a payphone to say she was at the youth club and asked if she could stay whilst nine. We were a bit concerned because it was dark, but at the same time we were going through a bit of a rough patch with Claire and we wanted to allow her a bit more freedom, so we told her no later than nine. That was the last time we spoke. What we subsequently found out is that she was in fact seeing a fifteen-year-old boy called Gary Martin and that they were at the fair together. She had been dating him for two months without us knowing. Police told us that the pair rowed that night because he found out she had been just stringing him along as cover. It appears she had been seeing someone older. She confessed it to him and he apparently stormed off in a huff and left her. That was about half past nine. You’ll see from our own file that Gary was interviewed many times and was a suspect on several occasions but he was alibied by quite a number of people that night. I’ve spoken with him myself many times over the years and I’m confident he wasn’t involved in Claire’s disappearance.” He shifted in his chair and cleared his throat. “I’m guessing you’ll no doubt want to speak with him again. Gary’s married now with a family of his own. We still keep in touch. He’ll tell you things that are not in those folders I’ve given you.” He stared at Hunter and then Grace through unblinking eyes. “In the few months before Claire disappeared we went through some bad times with her. She seemed to have changed, and it wasn’t for the good.” He paused. “Do you have children?”

Both Hunter and Grace nodded.

“Oh I know all teenagers go through a phase, but Claire really put us through it. She came in drunk, smashed up her room once when we tried to keep her in, and we even found out from Gary that she was seeing other lads behind his back. She’d become a real rebel in her last days, and that’s what’s so sad about it. My last memories of Claire are not nice ones.”

Now where had he heard all this before, Hunter thought. A pattern’s emerging here.

“Let me just check this with you Mr Fisher,” enquired Grace. “Just back-tracking a little you said Claire was last seen at the fair by her then boyfriend Gary Martin?”

Derek Fisher nodded, “Yes, that’s right. He told me that when he left her he got the impression she was hanging about to meet up with an older guy”

“Which fair was that?”

“The local Feast Fair, that’s held on the Common Field every year. It still is.”

Alarm bells were ringing in Hunter’s head. This was the second time The Feast Fair had featured in their enquiries. Hadn’t Rebecca Morris’s best friend Kirsty Evans told them that someone older had been fancying Rebecca when she had been at that fair? This was their first real link.

* * * * *

“I’ve just had a very interesting conversation with Derek Fisher” said Hunter strolling into the office and spotting Barry Newstead hunched over a pile of paperwork. He dropped the Claire Fisher file onto his desk jotter, then slipped off his jacket and hooked it over the back of his chair.

Barry looked up from the sheaf of papers he had been reading, pushed himself back into his seat and rubbed the back of his neck. “Oh yes and what was that, as if you didn’t want me to ask?”

“He told us that his daughter Claire was last seen at the local Feast fairground by her then boyfriend Gary Martin on the evening she went missing back in ninety-nine. The boyfriend apparently left her in ‘a strop’ after she told him that an older guy was fancying her. I don’t know if you’ve managed to get up to date with the investigation yet Barry but that’s very similar to something which Rebecca Morris told her friend Kirsty Evans, after they had also visited the Feast fair a couple of months ago — that someone older was fancying her. Added to that do you remember what Karen Gardner told us about the guy she was seeing at the same time as she was seeing Paul Goodright, way back in ninety-three?”

“Crikey yes.” interjected Grace, teasing off her own jacket which was stuck to her blouse, a consequence of the muggy heat from the earlier thunderstorm. “She told me that she was being visited by a Billy Smith who travelled with the local fair. I checked his name against the database in the Intelligence Unit and although there was very little on him, an old conviction for drunk and disorderly, I did, however, discover from one of the beat officers that he didn’t just travel with the fair but his parents actually own it. He currently lives in a static caravan in a compound next to the canal.” She paused and her eyes widened. “Bloody hell. The compound where he lives is only about a mile from the Manvers site, where we found Carol and Claire’s bodies.”

“This is just too much of a coincidence” Hunter said. “Barry does that name ring any bells with you — Billy Smith?”

Barry pushed his reading glasses up onto his mop of tousled dark hair and fixed his gaze upon the ceiling as though the answer lay somewhere up there. He muttered the name ‘Billy Smith’ under his breath several times then shot his gaze back towards Hunter, slamming the flat of his hand on top of his pile of papers and jabbed an index finger towards him. “Billy Smith — Fairground Billy Smith, Of course, I’ve got him. He’s someone I came across way back in my really young CID days. It was from a job in the late eighties. We got a call to a shooting at the Barnwell Hotel — ‘The Drum’ as everyone referred to it. It’s been knocked down now but back then it was a real dive. One of our problem pubs. If a fight broke out there you knew you had to go in mob handed to sort it out. Anyway I can remember being radioed up one Friday night to attend there. Uniform had responded to an ambulance call and found a man in the back yard of the pub with shotgun wounds to the stomach. He wasn’t dead, but half his guts were hanging out and he was in a real bad way.” Barry paused for a moment taking in Hunter and Grace’s expressions. “The guy wouldn’t say a thing about what had gone on and the whole place had emptied by the time we had arrived. The pub was locked up at first but we eventually managed to rouse the Landlord. You could see he didn’t want us inside the place, and no wonder. When we got in the poolroom had been virtually demolished. Chairs, tables, and pool cues smashed up, glass everywhere, and someone had tried to clean up the blood. At first the landlord refused to say anything but after we threatened to lock him up for attempted murder he spilled the beans. He told us that earlier that night there had been a load of gipsy travellers in from a local site and that they had been playing pool for money. After squeezing him a bit more, particularly with the threat of losing his licence for allowing illegal gambling on the premises, he told us that there had been a thousand pound bet on the pool table and that one Billy Smith from the fairground had won the game, but then the gipsy who he’d been playing wouldn’t pay up. There’d been a bit of a scrap between him and Billy. Apparently Billy was very handy. We later found out that Billy was a bare-knuckle fighter who earned quite a bit of money from his illegal activities. Anyway Billy was getting topside of the gipsy and a few of his pals joined in so Billy had to get away quick. The landlord told us that whilst he was trying to get the gipsies out of his pub, because he was scared some of his locals might call the police, Billy Smith suddenly appeared back, and armed with a shotgun, demanding his money. There was a standoff at first and then some of the gipsies started goading Billy that it wasn’t loaded. So Billy shot off one barrel into the ceiling and again demanded his money. The guy who owed him the money responded by mouthing off and that’s when Billy shot the gipsy in the guts. Then he followed that up by smacking another couple of the guy’s mates with the butt of the gun, and then legged it.”