‘Well, I’ll still have someone check down the staff list. It’s no use getting sentimental: they may be caring for old folk, but someone’s killing those old folk one by one, and no one’s better placed to do so than the staff.’
Rose shuffled the papers back into order, ‘You’ll call me the moment you’ve spoken to the girls Stella was tutoring?’
‘Will do.’ Grey got up and left.
A mysterious outsider… was that the best they could come up with, asked Grey to himself as he walked back to his office… and one presumably concluding some sixteen-years-delayed vendetta? It might as well have been Jack the Ripper back from the dead. Meanwhile every one of them left in that building was terrified.
Back at the library, Sarah waited till she had the certificate in her hands before quietly calling Cori over. She had found reference to the birth on the system almost as soon as she’d begun looking, choosing in the end to start not at the green filing cabinet but at the nearby computer terminals (as she could have from the station), favouring this method to ploughing through the drawers of date-ordered papers. Had she more to go on than, ‘A boy, mid- Sixties’ then she may well have started with the physical records, but a product of the computer age, information flowed easiest for her through a screen.
‘“Patrick Mars”,’ read Sarah from the document as she handed it to the Sergeant, ‘“Father: Samuel Mars, Mother: Stella Mars”, and born in Sixty-seven, so forty-five now.’
Cori was impressed, ‘Call the boss and let him know, won’t you. Oh, and can you give him the names we’ve found for the schoolgirls.’
Going out through the fire escape to make her call, Sarah passed on the information to the Inspector, who responded,
‘Good work, then get back here and put him through our computer and the DVLA. Oh, and did Cori have any luck tracing the two girls?’
Reading from the details scratched down in her notebook, Grey listened then noted,
‘The Kehoes live on Coalville Lane, you say? That’s the Hills estates. I wonder… I’ll see you back here.’
‘Catch up then, sir,’ she said, before returning to the quiet building to pick up her things.
Cori, since arriving at the library had moved to another area in the basement, one she and colleagues had less call to visit in their police researches. Given the lack of assistance from the now rather rubbed-up Senior Librarian, she had been left to her own resources to locate what she was looking for.
‘Can I help you?’ asked a man already sat in that neglected corner. Apart from the brightly lit desks it was hard to see anything in a room where the thin, pavement-level windows that ran along the seam of the ceiling were of little use on even such a bright morning.
‘Do you work here?’ she asked.
‘No, though it can feel like it sometimes. What are you looking for?’
‘Sergeant Smith,’ she produced her badge, ‘I need the records of two past Town Councillors.’
‘Tim Hart, historian.’ His stuck his hand out and they shook. ‘Engaged in purely academic researches.’
A kind of panic at learning a person was police officer was a common reaction amongst people who’d never have dreamt of committing a crime, and always left Cori reassured.
‘I have accreditation from the University of East Anglia here somewhere,’ he continued.
‘Oh, don’t worry, I’m sure you’ve every right to be here. Now, you were going to help me find these Councillors?’
‘Well, you’ve two options,’ he said getting up from his desk to demonstrate. ‘These cabinets here are the records of debates and decisions, so useful if you know the dates of when your Councillors spoke; but if it’s an overview you’re looking for then you could do worse than finding the Councillors’ Directory for the year you think they left and reading what will either be a resignation, final speech, hagiography or eulogy.’
‘One left in Seventy-four, the other Ninety-six or — seven maybe, both in ast… ’
‘ In absentia, eh? They didn’t die or resign, just never came back?’
‘That’s right: one was having a tough time at home; the other you’d call ill health I suppose.’
‘What a pair. Well, here’s your first book; and here’s the second. Happy reading.’
Thanking him, and taking her books to a desk she thought a polite distance away, Cori lost herself in images of coiffured men in gowns and tweeded ladies from the pages of Country Life. The Councillors’ Directory was a kind of yearbook, issued after each election and offering little more than a photo beside a thumbnail portrait of each current Councillor — important for anyone at the Council or elsewhere involved, when there were local elections each year and all would need to bid for re-election every three years. Most importantly for her purposes though was a section in tribute to those Councillors who’d that year died or left or were otherwise of note… and sure enough in the Directory of Nineteen Ninety-seven was a piece, written by his ‘dear friend’, as he described himself, ‘Councillor Campbell Leigh (Coleville Lane Ward)’ on the recently withdrawn from public service ‘Councillor Charles Prove (retired) MBE’.
Looking from the window of a nearby vacant office, his own looking out only onto neighbouring buildings, Grey was taking these last moments to think as he watched eagerly for the return of his Administrative Assistant across the town square. They would then begin their search for Stella’s son, this new and unknown player, or potential player, in their drama. At he watched from his office eyrie overlooking the civic gardens, he saw Sarah emerge from her expected corner of the square to walk diagonally across the green toward the police station; as from the opposite side another figure approached in a direction that made it seem likely he would enter the Station reception area just ahead of her.
In the moments before he went down to meet Sarah Grey watched this man, something about him commanding his attention: perhaps the fact that he didn’t know him, yet in his determined walking he clearly had important business to conduct here today.
Grey left the office and went down the stairs to enter the mess room, as they called it, where their back- office staff mingled with officers fresh off the beat and writing their reports. By the key-coded doors that led to reception Grey waited for Sarah; yet she didn’t come through, he instead seeing her through the doors’ inset strengthened glass panels waiting at the other side, as if observing something going on in there. Eventually she appeared to greet him,
‘Patrick Mars,’ she said.
‘Yes, you found his birth certificate. Thank you.’
‘No, I mean he’s already here.’
Chapter 12 — Patrick Mars
The Inspector passed through the doors to where the man was talking with the Desk Sergeant in reception, his frame imposing the room. Grey never had a worry of losing initiative in situations, of allowing others to dominate or gain any upper hand. Naturally taciturn when tense, and quite happy to let another talk till they were dry, he knew — simply knew, there was no psychological training behind it — that his personality was strong enough to bear any influence and still be as diamond-tough the moment he had chance to speak himself. And so he had no concern that it was the man who introduced himself, who put his hand out to shake, though on the Inspector’s patch.
‘Patrick Mars.’
‘Inspector Rase. Mr Mars, you have our deepest sympathy.’
‘So you know, I’m the son of Stella Mars.’
‘Dunbar,’ corrected Grey as neutrally as possible.
‘That was her maiden name.’
‘She divorced your father, I believe.’
‘He divorced her.’
‘Why don’t we move this to one of the interview rooms.’
‘Oh, I’m not here to be interviewed.’
‘I only mean as a witness to your mother’s life. Unless an appointment later is more convenient?’
He threw open his hands in a gesture of unavoidable contrition, ‘I knew you’d want to talk to me. That’s why I came.’
