“About ten to one.”
“What!” I exclaimed. “I didn’t realise it was so late.”
“She’s been in bed since just after the play ended. It’s her waterworks, you know.”
“Really. Well it won’t happen again.” I moved back into the garage and switched off the CD. He stepped into the vacant space in the doorway and his gaze settled on the nearly — finished picture. “It’s supposed to represent China,” I explained, as I wiped away the blob of cerulean blue that I’d accidentally dabbed on the Sony.
“China?” he repeated.
“Mmm.”
“China China?”
“That’s right.” As opposed to cup-and-saucer china, I think he meant. “That’s the Great Wall, and that’s a panda.” I pointed to the images, some strong, some barely hinted at, and read them off. “The Long March, Tiananmen Square, coolie hats, bonsai, typical scenery, Chairman Mao.”
“I don’t like this modern stuff,” he declared.
“This is hardly modern,” I told him. “I don’t like much of the really modern stuff.” I manoeuvred him outside and walked him towards the gate. “And apologise to your wife about the noise, please. It won’t happen again.”
“The wife? She’s stone deaf, like me. Neither of us ever hears a thing once we switch off.”
“Oh. You said, er, Elsie.”
“Elsie.” He tugged the dog’s lead. “This is Elsie.”
“Right. Er, right.”
Next morning at ten a.m. I rang Michelle Webster, provider of alibi for a child murderer, and arranged to see her in the afternoon. Don’t ask me why, but sometimes I feel more at ease when dealing with the criminally insane.
The rain started as soon as I passed over the tops and began the long descent into Lancashire. Having Annette with me would have been pleasant, but she was in York with her friend, and the thrill of the chase was more than I could resist. I was quite pleased about the rain — maybe it would keep the traffic down. It didn’t, and we had the usual stop-go on the M6. There’s this crackpot idea that the more roads you build, the more traffic you create. It all started after they opened the M25. Two million Londoners apparently said: “Ooh, good, they’ve built a new road. Let’s dash out and buy a car.” It’s now used as an argument for not making new roads or widening existing ones, and the M6 is doomed to permanent gridlock.
Michelle Webster had given me extremely detailed directions, which I hadn’t listened to, and sounded determined that I shouldn’t get lost. All I recorded was that she was on the south side, but not quite St Anne’s. There’s posh, I thought, as I looked at the map: they’ve retained the apostrophe.
When I was in the general vicinity I asked, and soon was creeping along a street of respectable, if slightly dilapidated, pre-war semis. They had shingled bay windows and mature trees in the gardens. I saw the number and parked between an ageing Range Rover and a Toyota Celica with a dented corner. Michelle Webster opened her front door before my finger was off the button, halfway through the second bar of Strangers in the Night.
She looked sixty, pushing nine. Little girls like to dress up in their mother’s clothes, I’m told. This was serious role reversal. She was wearing a pink micro skirt, black silk blouse, black tights and black suede boots that would have come well above her knees had not the tops been turned down, cavalier fashion. I remembered the joke about the woman who went to the doctors complaining of thrush. He gave her a prescription to take to the cobblers, to have two inches taken off the top of her boots.
“Mrs Michelle Webster?” I asked. I’d done a calculation on the way over and reckoned she’d be in her mid forties.
“It’s Miss Webster,” came the reply, as she stood to one side to let me through with hardly a glance at my ID. A little dog came yapping towards me out of the gloom of the hallway. Michelle said: “Hush, Trixie,” and picked it up. It had lots of hair, and looked as if it had just escaped from a serious accident with a tumble drier. “There- there darling, it’s only a nice policeman come to see Mummy,” she told it, planting a kiss into the middle of the ball of fur, and for a moment their hair merged like two clouds of noxious gasses after a chemical spillage.
“So what’s he done now?” Michelle asked with a touch of glee in her voice, when we were seated in her front room, which I suspected was called the parlour. She’d moved a menagerie of fluffy toys to make room for me, and straightened the antimacassars on the chair arms. There were pictures on the walls of various stars of stage and screen, with autographs scrawled across them by a girl with a rubber stamp in an office in Basingstoke.
“Who?” I asked.
“Greg, my ex. It’s about him. Isn’t it?”
It wasn’t, but I did some gentle probing. Greg was part owner of a club in town, and into all sorts of wheeling and dealing. She could tell me stuff that would make my hair curl. Mafia? Don’t talk to her about the Mafia.
So I didn’t. “You were in showbusiness?” I asked, flapping a hand towards the photos and recognising Roy Orbison in a central position amongst all the bouffant hair and gleaming teeth of the ones who didn’t make it to his level.
“Not on the performing side.” She smiled and crossed her legs, which was difficult with the footwear she had on. “Not enough talent, unfortunately,” she explained with a modest shrug. “No, Greg and I were more into management and promotions.”
“You were evidently successful at it.” The house was probably hers, and prices in Blackpool are no doubt above average.
“Oh, we were, we were. They were great days. And then the shit ran off with a dancer from the Tower whose cup size was as far as she ever made it through the alphabet. The fat little cow.”
“I haven’t come to talk about Greg,” I told her, anxious to steer the conversation back on course. “I want to talk to you about people you knew when you lived in Burdon, back in the Eighties.”
“Burdon? That was a long time ago.”
“1984, to be precise. Did you know a man called Peter Latham?”
She pretended she wasn’t sure — “There were so many, Inspector” — until she realised that I wasn’t going to be more forthcoming. Then she remembered him. I told her that he was dead, as was her friend Margaret Silkstone, nee Bates, under suspicious circumstances, and we’d be very grateful for any help she could give. After a little weep it all came out.
They were a foursome: she and Peter Latham; Margaret and Tony Silkstone. They met three nights a week at a pub near Frome — the Nelson — where there was music and dancing, and paired off when the alcohol and hormones started to work. Peter, she said, was kind and relaxed. Unlike Silkstone, who was a show-off, always wanting to have more, do better than anyone else. They were married to two sisters, which was why they knew each other. Peter’s wife, Michelle said, was a “hatchet-faced cow, and frigid with it.” I remembered the wedding photo I’d seen, of a tall brittle blonde who towered over him, and decided that the description could be accurate.
The affair came to an end when Latham was breathalysed and banned from driving. They struggled to meet for a while, playing gooseberry with Silkstone and Margaret, but Michelle came to Blackpool for a holiday and met Greg. End of a beautiful friendship.
“He was a lovely man,” she sobbed, for the tears had started again. “He knew the names of things. Birds and flowers an’ stuff like that. And poetry. He knew whole poems. Not the ones you did at school. Daft ones, that you can understand, by him from Liverpool. Paul McCartney’s brother.”
And had a penchant for sex with young girls, I thought.
“Not like Tony,” she continued. “All he knew was the price of cars.” She sniffed and dabbed her nose with a tissue. “I married Greg because he was a bit in-between, if you follow me. Except with him it was show-biz.”
I wasn’t sure I did follow, but I skipped asking for an explanation. “You were obviously fond of him,” I said. “I’m sorry I had to bring you bad news.” But now for the bad news. I said: “Do you remember when a girl called Caroline Poole went missing?”
She did. Nobody who lived in Burdon would ever forget it. “It was the biggest manhunt ever held in Somerset,” I told her. “Everybody was questioned, including Tony and Peter. According to the records they said they were with you and Margaret that night. Do you remember?”
She pursed her lips and shrugged, warily, and I imagined her growing pale under the makeup. Lipstick was beginning to bleed away from the corners of her mouth like aerial views of the Nile delta. “I never asked you if you’d
