Hilary Bonner: When the Dead Cry Out

John Kelly preferred to focus all of his energy on Parkview, going over and over in his head what may have happened there.

He removed a cigarette packet from the pocket of his jacket, which he carefully smoothed down as he did so, lit up and then passed the packet to the photographer accompanying him. It looked as though he might be on the biggest story Torquay had ever known, and thanks to a tip from a police contact Kelly was on the scene first, before the national boys or the local evening and morning papers.

Kelly knew the story behind all this police activity better than most. He had written it enough times for the TT , but most of it had ended up on the spike as he supposed he’d known it must. For legal reasons. Now the police had finally taken action all that would change, and what had merely been a ferocious chain of gossip throughout Torquay could, he hoped, finally be printed.

Richard Marshall and his wife Clara had run the Parkview Hotel for several years. They had two small daughters, Lorraine, aged six, and five-year-old Janine. Marshall was a big, handsome, personable man with a quick wit and an easy way with people. He had been well enough liked until a year previously.

Then, suddenly, Clara Marshall and her daughters had disappeared. Their absence caused little comment at first. Marriages broke up all the time, even in the seventies. Most mothers leaving the marital home would want to take their children with them, and Richard Marshall had always had a plausible explanation for everything, as was his wont. The gossip had grown only gradually, gaining momentum, of course, when Marshall had moved another woman into his hotel home with what his neighbours considered to be quite indecent haste. By the time the police finally began to investigate, the level of gossip was such that there could be nobody in Torquay who did not at least suspect some kind of mystery concerning the disappearance of Clara Marshall and her children. And for many suspicion had grown into a horrible sense of certainty about their fate.

Kelly, whose mother was the head teacher of the primary school the Marshall children had attended, was one of those who had come to believe that murder had been committed. Kelly’s own enquiries over the past few months had revealed no sign of Clara or the girls. He was a local paper reporter whose resources and time were both very limited. But he knew that the police had now checked bank, social security and national health records to no avail. Clara Marshall and her daughters appeared to have vanished off the face of the earth. The finger of suspicion pointed firmly at Clara’s husband, Richard. But gossip, conjecture and assumption were not evidence. They did not solve a crime, nor indeed did they even prove that one had been committed.

And one way and another it had been a whole long year before the police had made their move. Now Kelly had been told that the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary was about to launch the biggest missing-persons enquiry the West of England had ever known. Now. A year later, when the trail was surely cold. Kelly took several short fast puffs on his cigarette. He feared that it may already be too late. Too late not only for Clara Marshall and her girls, but too late to prove anything against anybody.

Kelly didn’t like that. The whole thing was a mess. And his mother, whom he adored, was deeply upset by it. She had reasons for feeling that she could have saved the Marshall girls from whatever had happened to them. Kelly thought she was wrong to blame herself in any way. Nonetheless this story was personal to him. If Clara Marshall and her daughters had indeed been murdered, then he wanted their killer brought to justice every bit as much as the police did.

Impatiently he threw his half-smoked cigarette to the ground, and extinguished it with the toe of one shoe.

“C’mon, Micky,” he said to his photographer companion. “I don’t see any more mileage here. We know they’ve taken the bastard to the nick. Let’s take a trip down there, shall we?”

Meanwhile, at Torquay Police Station, Detective Chief Inspector Bill Talbot strode into the interview room wearing a confident expression, which did not reflect his inner feelings at all. This case was already the most frustrating he had experienced in his career.

Squeezed behind the little wooden table in the centre of the small bare room sat Richard Marshall, totally impassive, features in repose, his disconcertingly clear pale-blue eyes alert but giving nothing away. This was far from Talbot’s first confrontation with Marshall. Nonetheless he was once again struck by the man’s immense physical presence. It wasn’t just his size, although Marshall — six foot three or four, and seventeen or eighteen stone, Talbot reckoned — was indeed an extremely big man which was evident even when he was sitting down. His shoulders were huge, stretching the fine fabric of his well-tailored navy-blue blazer. Even his head, with its shock of thick dark-brown curly hair, was big. And his face, although Talbot had to reluctantly accept that Marshall was a good-looking man, was broad and fleshy. He had a big nose, a bulky forehead, and lips so full that although there was nothing remotely effeminate about him, his mouth would almost have been better suited to a woman were it not quite so wide. But it was more than all of that. Marshall had a way of filling a room and dominating those in it. He returned Talbot’s gaze steadily, unflinching, confident. Even if that wasn’t how he felt it was the way he came across. He looked every bit as if he might be about to conduct an interview with the policeman rather than the other way round. The muscles at the back of Talbot’s neck had tightened quite painfully. Indeed, he was aware of every fibre in his body tensing up in anticipation of the task ahead.

Marshall was good, very good. He also had experience of police investigations. He had a criminal record. He had served six months in jail for his part in a time-share scam concerning property in Spain. Marshall had been the front man, and Talbot had no doubt he would have been very good at it too. He was so smooth. A number of people, mostly elderly folk, had lost a lot of money, in some cases their life’s savings, because of that unpleasant little operation. Marshall had also been suspected over the years of being involved in other cons and always seemed to be somehow or other skimming along on the edge of the law. Talbot considered him an unsavoury character in every way. It was, however, a quantum leap from anything the Detective Chief Inspector knew about Richard Marshall to murder. Nonetheless, Talbot firmly believed that Marshall was capable of such a deed and that he also had both the gall and the ability to stand up to the most ferocious of police investigations.

Marshall had been arrested in connection with the disappearance of his wife and children, but he had yet to be charged. There was not enough evidence for that. In fact there was no evidence at all worth mentioning. Talbot was hoping to God that either Marshall would break, which as it happened the man gave no indication at all of doing, or that some hard evidence would turn up — like a body. And fast, too. Clara Marshall and the girls had been missing for just a week less than a year exactly, and Talbot knew that there was going to be criticism of the police for not acting sooner. In fact there would still have been no operation in place had not Clara Marshall’s partially estranged father finally arrived in the town two weeks earlier in search of his daughter.

The Detective Chief Inspector’s big fear was that even now there was little or nothing to act on and that he was going to have to let Marshall go. Talbot’s divisional commander, Chief Superintendent Raymond Parish, was notoriously cautious when it came to detaining suspects without their having been charged, allegedly because he had been involved in an incident as a young officer when a man had died in custody during what was later ruled by the court to have been an illegal period of detention. In 1976 there was no statutory protocol governing the length of time for which you could lock people up while still trying to finalize a case against them, but there were rules of thumb consistent with the ancient laws of habeas corpus. And DCI Talbot was well aware that Parish would not want to let him keep Marshall without charge for very much more than twenty-four hours. Talbot, who was pretty good at working the system, might be able to stretch that a bit, but he certainly would not be able to detain the man for more than one night without formalizing his arrest.