“No,” he replied.
“Have you tried to?”
“A bit, but I can’t.”
“I’ve checked the families of every police officer at Heckley,” I told him, “and nobody has a daughter of that age who goes in the Aspidistra Lounge. Your girlfriend definitely wasn’t a cop’s daughter, so you have nothing to fear there. You are wrong about that, Jason, so who is she? Either you are lying to me or she was lying to you. Which is it?”
“Actually,” he could have said, “it’s you who are lying to me,” but he wasn’t to know that. Instead he coloured up and shrank into himself, like a child scolded by a grown-up.
I eventually broke the silence by saying: “Come on, Jason, start telling me about her. It can only help your case.”
“Tell the inspector what you know,” the solicitor urged.
“Let’s start with a description,” I suggested, rising to my feet. “How tall was she. You danced with her, so where did she come up to?” I took hold of his arm and helped him stand up. “Up to here?” I said. “Or here?”
“’Bout ’ere,” he told me, holding his hand, palm down, level with his Adam’s apple.
“About five feet four,” I said. “Well done, that’s a start. And what about her build? Was she slim, overweight, or in between?”
“She was a little bit fat.”
“Good. What colour was her hair?”
Simple questions that he could answer, that would have saved me a sleepless night if I’d asked them earlier. Sometimes even the toppest cops get the basics wrong. After they’d had sex he took her home, which was somewhere in the Sylvan Fields estate. Not right to the door, because she was afraid that her dad would see her coming home in a car and cause some grief. And he was glad to oblige because dad was a cop, wasn’t he?
We went through the whole sordid scene, and little flashes came back to him. She had a tattoo on her shoulder. He couldn’t see it properly in the dark, but she said it was a spider. Her favourite group was Boyzone and her previous boyfriend drove a Mazda, but it was stolen and he lost it. She didn’t go in pubs but went to the football, sometimes. Her mam and dad were always fighting and kept breaking up. She didn’t think he’d stay much longer. They did it twice, and she helped him the second time. He only had one condom with him, but it was OK because she had one. Everything but a name. I could have asked him what I wanted to know, what I really wanted to know, but it would sound better coming from someone else.
“So you sat and talked for a few minutes before she got out?” I repeated for the third time.
“Yeah, a bit.”
“What about?”
“Dunno. This and that. What I just told you, I s’pose.”
“Did you arrange to meet again?”
“I told you, yeah.”
“Tell me again.”
“At the club, I think.”
“You just left it loose. You had brilliant sex with this girl and then you said: ‘OK, perhaps I’ll see you again sometime.’ I don’t believe you Jason. I don’t believe that you are getting it so often that you can afford to be choosy. I think you desperately wanted to see her again, as soon as possible, and you arranged to do so. Maybe you promised to phone her. Was that it? Did she give you her phone number?”
Jason slowly straightened in the chair, his brow furrowed and his lips pursed. He had the looks of a film star, but he’d have needed a stuntman to do his dialogue. “Yeah,” he said, the light of remembrance lighting his countenance with all the illumination of a male glow-worm. (It’s the females that glow, wouldn’t you just know it.) “Yeah, that’s what she did, she gave me her phone number.”
“Great,” I said. “That’s great.” Now all I had to do was prise it from him. Given the choice, I’d have preferred trying to take a banana from a rabid baboon. “So did she write it down for you, or did you try to remember it?”
“We didn’t ’ave a pen,” he told me.
“Well you wouldn’t have, would you?” I replied with uncharacteristic understanding. With a combined IQ that was lower than the number of left legs at an amputees ball, it was unlikely that either of them would want to scribble down a sonnet, or even a haiku or two, after a moonlit shag in a Ford Fiesta. I waited for someone else to speak and wondered what to have for lunch.
“It wasn’t then…” Jason began.
“Wasn’t when?” I interrupted.
“Then. When I dropped her off. It was before that, at the brickyard, just after, you know…”
“Just after you’d had it?” My mind kept returning to the two of them bonking like a pair of ferrets in the front seat of his car. It was worrying.
“Yeah, then,” he confirmed. “She told me ’er number and I asked ’er to write it down, on a parking ticket. Not a parking ticket, one from a machine, you know.”
“A pay and display ticket,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s right. Pay an’ display. But she didn’t ’ave a pen.”
“And you didn’t, either.”
“No. So she wrote it on the win’screen, with ’er finger. Up at the top. It was steamed up, y’know. Then she pulled the sun flap down, ‘To protect it,’ she said. I’d forgotten all about it.”
“Alle-flippin’-luia,” I sighed, burying my head in my hand.
Chapter Twelve
Jason’s car was still in our garage at Halifax, emblazoned with stickers saying that it was evidence and not to be touched. Fingerprints had found the last three digits of the number on the windscreen when they gave it a good going-over, hoping to find evidence that Marie-Claire had been in there. The numbers were meaningless, so no action was taken on them. “It’s a phone number for someone who lives in the Sylvan Fields,” I told Les Isles, over a coffee in his office.
“So it probably starts with eight-three, followed by an unknown number,” he stated.
“Which narrows it down to ten possibilities.”
An hour later BT had furnished me with five names and addresses, and after fifteen minutes with the electoral roll I found myself drawing a big circle around 53, Bunyan Avenue; home of Edward and Vera Jackson, and their daughter Dionne.
I rang the number, but it was engaged. Les had left me to have a meeting with somebody, so I wrote him a note and headed for the exit. They have a visitors’ signing in and out book at HQ and a young man in a Gore-Tex waterproof was bent over it. He looked at his watch and entered his leaving time in the appropriate column.
“Could Mr Isles help you, Mr Hollingbrook?” the desk sergeant asked him.
“Not really,” he replied. “he was very kind, as always, but said that all he could do was have a word with the coroner. He has to make the decision.”
He slid the book towards me and I put ditto marks under the time he’d written.
“I’m afraid that’s always the case,” the desk sergeant stated. “But the coroner’s a reasonable man, and I’m sure he’ll do what he can. I’d have liked to organise a lift back for you, but everybody’s out at the moment.”
The visitor was Marie-Claire’s husband, I gathered, come in to ask about the release of his young wife’s body for burial. He only looked about twenty. I caught the sergeant’s eye and said: “I’ll give Mr Hollingbrook a lift, Arthur. No problem.”
“There you are, then,” he said, and introduced me to the visitor. We shook hands without smiling and I opened the door for him.
His first name was Angus. He was twenty-four years old and a student of civil engineering at Huddersfield University, sponsored by one of the large groups that specialise in motorways and bridges. Marie-Claire had died on the Saturday or Sunday of the holiday weekend, while he was seconded to Sunderland to help in the replacement of an old stone bridge over a railway line by a modern pre-stressed concrete structure. He’d come home on
