with her hair scraped back in a limp ponytail off her pinched unmade face, she looked as cool as though she’d just stepped out of a refrigerator. He stifled a groan.
‘Why did you attend Woodley’s funeral without clearing it with me?’ she snapped.
Horton wondered how she had heard. He didn’t think Walters had mentioned it, because Walters for all his faults would have forewarned him, and he was very good at acting dumb when asked questions by those on high. Probably because he was dumb.
‘I couldn’t find you, ma’am,’ Horton lied. He hadn’t even looked for her, because he’d known what she’d say; it wasn’t his case. ‘Detective Superintendent Uckfield thought it might be helpful to have me there as I’ve been working on the investigation.’
‘Not any more,’ she replied crisply. ‘We have enough of our own outstanding cases and I want an update now including what you are doing about these metal thefts.’
She plonked herself down opposite him. He sat and swiftly relayed where they were on several investigations, which clearly didn’t please her because they all seemed to be going nowhere, finishing off with what Walters had reported about the metal thefts. That drew a deeper frown from her and a pursing of thin lips. ‘That’s simply not good enough. Make it a top priority. I want whoever is responsible caught and I mean soon not within days or weeks.’
Didn’t she think that was what he also wanted?
‘And I want a full report on it by six o’clock this evening. I have a meeting tomorrow morning with Inspector Warren, Superintendent Reine and senior executives from British Telecom and the British Transport Police. Copper wiring and cabling thefts would mean a severe disruption to businesses.’
‘Ma’am.’ He watched her march out before he let out a sigh. Stuffing his tie in his desk drawer he turned his attention to his computer and located Clarke’s email. Clicking on the link, he began to play the video he’d shot at the crematorium.
Woodley’s mourners drove into the car park and congregated outside the waiting room. Cliff Wesley and Leanne Payne arrived separately. She moved among the mourners with her Dictaphone; Wesley with his camera. Horton had seen all this from his Harley. The hearse arrived. No other funeral car followed it. Woodley had no living relatives and none of his so-called friends had arranged the funeral or chipped in to pay for it, despite their flashy cars and gold jewellery and the latest gizmos in their homes. Woodley hadn’t owned anything of value, or left any savings, the state had taken care of him during his life and the state had buried him.
The mourners filed in to the chapel behind the coffin and he followed them. No one entered after him, and Clarke’s video showed no one hanging around outside or arriving soon after Woodley’s short service started. The next thing Horton saw was Uckfield’s BMW entering the car park and Uckfield and Marsden climbing out. They went to the rear of the crematorium. Nothing further happened. Clarke had kept the camera rolling but Horton fast- forwarded it until cars began to pull in for the next funeral. Then Woodley’s lot emerged from the rear of the chapel. They stood talking in the hot June sunshine for a while, the press photographer again snapping away. Where was Wesley while they were in the service? Horton hadn’t seen him go into the crematorium gardens so he guessed he’d probably sat in his car for a smoke. Leanne Payne broke into the Woodley crowd and then a few minutes later he, Uckfield and Marsden came into view.
Clarke’s video swung back to the Woodley mourners and to their right where Horton caught sight of the woman in the black dress and wide-brimmed black hat before the camera followed the Woodley crowd climbing into their cars and driving away. Then Uckfield’s BMW almost collided with the next hearse arriving. Next up was him leaving on his Harley, then Leanne Payne and Cliff Wesley.
Horton sat back letting the video play as Clarke swung the camera back to the chapel entrance and waiting room opposite it. The mourners for the next funeral, about fifteen of them, were going in. Horton looked for the woman in the black hat but there was no sign of her. Perhaps she’d answered a call of nature. Whoever she was and wherever she had gone, Horton thought, forwarding the video to Walters, she clearly had nothing to do with Daryl Woodley, and neither did he any more, Bliss had made that perfectly clear.
He switched his attention to the metal thefts, trawling through reports across the wider area looking for similar patterns, and paused when he came to a brass propeller stolen from an old boat being renovated in a boatyard in Fareham creek. That was about twelve miles from Portsmouth. Could it be the work of the same villains? It seemed a little off their patch. The theft had occurred last night and Sergeant Dai Elkins of the marine unit had filed the report. Horton rang him, but got his voicemail. He left a message asking Elkins to call him in the morning to discuss it. He then spent the remainder of the afternoon finishing the report for Bliss and attempting to clear the backlog of paperwork that had piled up while investigating Woodley’s murder. It was a couple of hours later when Walters knocked and entered.
‘The cars driven by Sholby and Hobbs are registered in their name and bought from the same source, a garage near Waterlooville.’
Which was six miles to the north of Portsmouth. ‘For cash?’ asked Horton.
‘Looks like it. Can’t find any finance on them.’
Horton wondered how they had got hold of so much money. Both had no formal occupation, they spent most of their lives claiming benefit and the remainder inside after being nicked for theft or receiving stolen goods. Did their newly acquired wealth have something to do with the robbery on Mason’s Electricals three weeks ago, which thankfully Bliss hadn’t mentioned? There had been no progress on that either. A black van had been recorded on the CCTV cameras pulling up outside the store but they hadn’t been able to get the vehicle licence number or any adequate footage of the two men seen like black shadows dressed in hoodies emerging from it. Their build could fit Sholby and Hobbs but equally it could fit a third of the male population of Portsmouth. One of the two security officers had been knocked out and tied up, the other had been in the toilet suffering from eating too much curry, though he claimed it was food poisoning and that he shouldn’t have been at work anyway. By the time he’d emerged, the black shadows and their dirty black van had vanished along with a quantity of televisions, hi-fis, computers and anything else that wasn’t screwed down.
Horton said, ‘Do we know this garage owner?’
‘No. Officers at the station close to it might.’
‘Talk to them tomorrow, find out all you can about the proprietor.’
Walters took that as a dismissal for the day. Horton decided to followed suit soon afterwards, noting that Bliss had already left. As he headed along the busy promenade towards the marina where he lived on his yacht, he wasn’t surprised to see that the pebbled beach was still packed with sunbathers. It was a glorious cloudless evening, still hot but not with the intensity of the earlier heat of the day, and he toyed with the idea of getting a couple of hours’ sailing in before sunset. He might have done except there was hardly a breath of wind. Instead he ate on deck, enjoying the quiet of the evening and watching the sun set, trying to shut out thoughts of Woodley and work. But as the lights came on in the houses on the hill slopes across Langstone Harbour to the north, Woodley refused to budge from his thoughts. Below the lights, and bordering the harbour, were the marshes where Woodley’s body had been found.
Something nudged at the back of Horton’s mind. Was it something one of Woodley’s mourners had said in the interviews during the investigation? Most of it was lies, including the fact that Sholby, Hobbs and Reggie Thomas had all given each other an alibi for the time of the attack on Woodley. They’d been drinking at Sholby’s house and watching football on the telly. Had thinking about Sholby and Hobbs jogged at an elusive fact tucked away, which they’d missed in the investigation? Or perhaps it was something the chaplain had said during Woodley’s short funeral service?
The thought of funerals took him back to another he’d attended four weeks ago, that of former PC Adrian Stanley. It had been very different to Woodley’s. Horton had recollected it while in the chapel but had pushed it aside to concentrate on Woodley. Now he focused his full attention on it, or rather on what Adrian Stanley, the copper who had investigated his mother’s disappearance just over thirty years ago,
Horton sipped his coffee, feeling the familiar jag of emptiness in the pit of his stomach which the memory
