'Yesterday.'
So she must have returned here last night because Cheryl wouldn't have been on duty until after six thirty.
He said, 'I'd like you to give the list to me.' But you're on holiday, said his small voice. He ignored it.
'Did anyone visit Irene over the years?'
'No.'
'Did you see her belongings?'
Cheryl looked confused at the question. Horton elaborated. 'Letters, photographs?'
'Oh. Yes. She had a couple of photographs of her son when he was a little boy. He was very good-looking. Fair, with bright blue eyes.'
'Any others?'
Cheryl thought hard. 'It's years since I've seen them, but, yes, there were others. Irene was in a swimsuit on holiday abroad.'
'How do you know it was abroad?'
'Well, it didn't look like Bognor.' She smiled. 'The sea was too blue. Irene must have been in her early thirties. She was beside a swimming pool at a villa and there were a number of people in the picture, but I can't remember what they looked like. Apart from that I don't remember seeing any other photos and there were no letters.'
The door opened and Marion Keynes glowered at him. 'I need Cheryl to help get our residents to bed. Mrs Kingsway's being difficult again.'
'Does she still think she saw an intruder in her bedroom?' Horton addressed Cheryl.
'I'm afraid so. It's why she doesn't want to go to bed. She's frightened that he'll come back and kill her.'
'There was no intruder,' Marion Keynes declared hotly.
Horton said, 'Then why say it?' He turned to Cheryl. 'She couldn't have seen Dr Eastwood because I believe you took Mrs Kingsway from the room before he arrived.'
'Yes. And she was sound asleep when Marion called me into the room.'
He rose, feeling frustrated. He was on the Intelligence Directorate's track, but how far behind them he didn't know. And he'd got no nearer to finding Cantelli.
'I'll show you out,' Cheryl said.
In the corridor Horton could hear an old lady protesting very loudly and forcefully and another person trying to reassure her without success.
'Mrs Kingsway,' Cheryl explained, with an anxious glance at Horton before hurrying to the aid of her colleague, leaving Horton to follow her into the residents' lounge.
Mrs Kingsway was a small and very frail elderly lady and clearly distressed. She was waving her arms about and shouting. Horton couldn't make out what she was saying. She wouldn't let Cheryl or the slight, fair-haired girl in her late twenties touch her. The television was blaring out, ironically he noticed, with a repeat of the Diving in Devon series and there was Nicholas Farnsworth's handsome face glistening with seawater, whilst behind him was the squat, sturdy and studious Jackson.
'It's her favourite programme,' Cheryl tossed over her shoulder at Horton. 'She can't bear it if it's not on the television. We've got a recording of it which we play, but we can't have it on twenty-four hours a day. Now, Marjorie, you're quite safe. No one's going to hurt you.'
Cheryl gently took her arm, but Marjorie Kingsway pulled away from her and at the same time managed to slip out of the sleeve of her cardigan.
Horton stared at an ugly purple stain on the top of Mrs Kingsway's frail arm. If he wasn't mistaken, then it was a bruise.
Following his gaze, Cheryl said, 'Elderly people's skin is very fragile. Mrs Kingsway's had quite a few falls lately.'
But a fall doesn't look like that, thought Horton, staring at what had clearly been inflicted by a hand. He could see where a thumb had pressed into the vulnerable paper thin skin. He wouldn't mind betting she had a matching one on the other arm. It looked as though someone had grabbed her forcibly. Was it the intruder she had told her son about or Marion Keynes perhaps? Maybe Angela Northwood? But it could be any member of staff, though he felt sure it hadn't been Cheryl.
Mrs Kingsway glanced at Horton, then sat down heavily on one of the upright chairs placed around the wall and stared at the television screen.
He asked the other care assistant to leave them for a moment, which she did with a curious backward glance. Turning to Cheryl, Horton said, 'I want you to call a doctor to examine her, but not Dr Eastwood.'
'You can't think any of us have harmed her?' Cheryl cried, horrified.
'Someone has.'
Cheryl looked worried. 'She's got a bruise on the other arm in the same place.'
As he'd guessed. 'Why didn't you report it?'
'I did, to the agency nurse, when I came on duty Monday night. I assumed she'd left a note or told Angela in the morning.'
'The bruises weren't there Sunday night?'
'No.'
And Marion Keynes was off sick then, so she couldn't be responsible for them. It could be this agency nurse, he supposed, or had the bruises been inflicted during Monday? He recalled Angela Northwood's harassed expression, but somehow he couldn't see her forcibly grabbing the old lady.
His phone rang. Hoping and praying it was Cantelli, he stepped into the hall to answer it. Again he was disappointed. It was Chalky White.
'Don't know if this is important, Mr Horton, but you said you wanted to know if Ian Keynes or his misses were passing off stuff.'
'What have you got?' Horton snapped impatiently.
'Ian Keynes was talking to some bloke in the gents' toilet of the Black Swan about an hour ago. I was in one of the traps and heard them. I peered over the top of the door, nearly broke my bleeding neck getting down off the pan.'
'For heaven's sake get on with it.'
'Keynes gave this bloke a piece of paper and said, 'Here's what you want. Take that to any chemist and you'll get your tablets.' This bloke gave him a wodge of money, couldn't see how much, but it looked like a bloody expensive prescription to me. Cheaper to get it on the NHS I would have thought.'
'Not the tablets he wanted I expect,' Horton said, ringing off after telling Chalky White he'd done his bit.
Certain pieces of the puzzle were finally dropping into place: Dr Eastwood's hostility when he and Cantelli had interviewed him in his consulting room; that photograph on Marion Keynes' mantelpiece of Ian Keynes in diving gear; Eastwood's eagerness to respond to an out of hours call taken on his mobile phone so early in the morning — and it wasn't out of duty to his patients.
Returning to Cheryl, he found Mrs Kingsway flinging her arms about.
'She thinks she's swimming,' Cheryl explained. 'She says she used to have a lovely big house in the country, in Surrey, with a swimming pool, but I don't think it's true, after all she wouldn't have been moved here by social services if she had had that much money. And her son's never mentioned it or so the daytime staff have told me. He's worked abroad for years. We didn't even know he existed until early December when he showed up here. I guess they didn't get on. Now he visits her regularly. Shame it's too late for her to recognize him. She does give him a hard time. She thinks more of that diver on the television than she does her poor son.'
Cheryl gazed sadly at the programme where Farnsworth's handsome smiling face filled the screen.
Several thoughts flashed through Horton's mind, but one shone brighter than the others. God, what an idiot he'd been! The outraged son, the alleged intruder story, the bruises on the old lady's arms…No one had spoken to Mrs Kingsway to get her version of the intruder story and even if they had done, she could have claimed that her son was the intruder because in her mind he was a stranger.
What kind of man could hurt his mother like that? Horton wondered. An evil bastard, came the answer, and one angry and frustrated because of his mother's continual rejection. Those bruises clearly weren't the first if Cheryl was to be believed, and he had no reason to doubt her. He hurried down the corridor to Marion Keynes' office.
'I thought you'd gone.' She looked up, annoyed.
