Loman hesitated.
Horton stepped forward and repeated firmly but more quietly. ‘Leave her, Ken. Ellie wouldn’t want this.’
Loman froze. He seemed to consider Horton’s words then he exhaled, the piping fell from his hand and clattered onto the barge. His body slumped. Horton could see he was close to collapse. Stepping forward he took his arm. ‘Let’s get away from here.’
Loman made no protest. As Horton steered him towards the quay he wondered if Patricia Harlow was still alive.
Climbing off the crane barge, Loman said, ‘It’s all right. I won’t run away. You’d better call the ambulance.’
The man was spent. Horton watched him ease his broken defeated body onto the giant cleat, where he stared across the black expanse of the water. Horton doubted he saw the lights across the harbour. It had stopped raining. He remained close, half afraid that Loman might throw himself in but then he guessed that Loman would want to see this thing through to the end.
He called first for an ambulance for Patricia Harlow. Ross Skelton was beyond help, and for all he knew Patricia could be too. Then he called Uckfield. While he waited for him to answer, Horton wondered if the cleat Loman was slumped on was the one that Ellie had fallen and struck her head against, if Patricia Harlow could be believed, and Horton wasn’t convinced by that given her track record.
Swiftly he gave Uckfield a potted version of what had happened and that they’d need SOCO and some patrol units here. They wouldn’t have far to come. He crouched down to face Loman; his wet hair was clinging to his dirty, exhausted face. ‘How much did you hear?’ he asked gently.
‘All of it. I was behind the crane.’
‘You saw her kill Ross Skelton?’
The image of Garvard’s gaunt, grey face on the hospital bed flashed before Horton’s eyes along with Geoff Kirby’s words. Garvard was cunning, clever, manipulative. He knew a man’s weakness and how to exploit it. Garvard had pulled the strings from his sick bed and had taken pleasure during his dying days in imagining how it might work out but had he ever imagined this?
Loman said, ‘When they let me go at the station I knew the boatyard wasn’t far away and I couldn’t go home. I just wanted to be where Ellie had last been alive. I heard them arrive and dodged out of sight. I didn’t know who they were, I just didn’t want to see or talk to anyone. I was angry and upset because I had wanted to be alone. I didn’t think they’d climb onto the crane barge but she did and he followed. Then she spun round and stuck a knife in him. I was shocked, confused. I didn’t know what to do. She hit him over the head and dropped the weapon and then almost immediately you showed up. Is it true what she said, that she killed Ellie?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then I hope she dies and I’m convicted for her murder. Prison can’t be much worse than the hell she’s put me through all these years.’
No, thought Horton, and it wasn’t over yet. There was still the matter of Sharon Piper’s murder.
TWENTY-TWO
‘Congratulations, sir,’ Eames said, knocking and entering his office an hour later. He cut her short.
‘Did you look up those statements?’
‘Yes.’ She seemed taken aback by his abruptness. Quickly recovering she said, ‘The mourners at Amelia Willard’s funeral you asked me to check. There was only one man who said he didn’t see the woman with the large black hat because he had to go to the toilet.’
Horton’s pulse quickened. ‘And he is?’
‘Lawrence Sanderling. Flat 1, King Charles Court, North End. Is it important?’
‘Oh, it’s important all right.’ Horton reached for his sailing jacket. He’d changed into a set of clothes he kept in his office: cargoes and a T-shirt, socks and shoes. He’d learnt over the years that they’d be needed on many occasions and not only because someone had thrown up over what he had been wearing but that they might end up covered in blood. This time it was because his other clothes were soaked through.
‘Let’s talk to Mr Sanderling.’
‘But what about the interview with Kenneth Loman?’ Eames asked, surprised.
‘Uckfield can get someone else to take Loman’s statement.’
Uckfield was reporting to Dean, who was at home. So too was Bliss because there was no sign of her at the station. But then it was nearly ten thirty.
‘You can always go home, Eames,’ Horton added, heading through the CID office.
‘No,’ she said quickly, plucking her jacket from the coat stand and following him.
He remained silent as Eames drove through the glistening wet streets to the north of the city. His thoughts took him back to Patricia Harlow. The initial prognosis was that she would recover but that she’d be permanently scarred and there was the possibility of brain damage. A car had been sent to take Connor Harlow to hospital. Soon he’d discover the extent of his birth mother’s and his adoptive mother’s crimes. He wasn’t sure how Connor was going to handle that but he knew there would be pain and bitterness. Ross Skelton’s two daughters, aged twenty- three and twenty-one, might feel the same along with shock when they discovered their father had murdered a man and was a crook. His estranged wife might gloat over it, though, or was that his view of how Catherine would react? DI Dennings had reported that he and the Border Agency had found six illegal immigrant workers in Coastline’s operations at the festival and now they and Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs would be trawling through Skelton’s business operations like a prospector looking for the smallest glint of a diamond that could change his fortunes.
A message on Horton’s desk and another on his voicemail from Sergeant Elkins had said that Ballard had left St Peter Port, they weren’t sure when. He must have slipped out. No one had seen him go.
Eames pulled up outside a shabby block of flats not far from the leisure centre in the north of the city, and close to where Woodley had lived. It also wasn’t far from the old boatyard. Eames pressed her well-manicured finger on the dirty intercom, while Horton noted the peeling and scuffed paintwork, the rubbish lying around in the forecourt and the rotten windows. She hadn’t asked why they were here and he could see that she had been rapidly trying to work it out. Perhaps she had by now.
A man’s wary and wavering voice answered. Eames quickly introduced them and added, ‘We are quite happy to wait here, Mr Sanderling, while you call the police station to verify who we are and to push our identity cards through your letter box or put them up against your window.’
‘No. Come in.’
The buzzer sounded and they stepped inside. Horton registered the dirty hallway, scratched paintwork and the smell of urine and rubbish.
A door to their right was opened by a grey-haired, well-built man in his late seventies dressed in a petrol-blue cardigan over a check shirt and grey trousers. Horton made to show his ID when the elderly man forestalled him. ‘I know who you are and why you’re here.’
They followed Lawrence Sanderling through the tiny vestibule into a small living room with old-fashioned furniture and a threadbare carpet. Seeing and interpreting his glance, Sanderling said, ‘Not much for a man who once used to run a company, live in a large house not far from Edgar and Amelia near the seafront, own a boat, privately educate his daughters, and was married to a lovely woman.’
‘Sharon Piper and Leo Garvard,’ said Horton sadly.
‘Yes.’ Sanderling waved Horton into an ancient chair with a sagging cushion in front of the electric fire. Sanderling drew up a hard-back chair and gestured Eames into it, before pulling up one for himself.
‘It was my own fault,’ Sanderling said, once settled. ‘I was stupid enough to believe them and greedy enough to fall for their lies, but I wasn’t the only one and I thought if it was good enough for Edgar then it was good enough for me. Sharon was his niece, for God’s sake.’
‘You saw her when you came out of the toilet at the crematorium.’ Because this was the man Horton had stepped aside for when he, Uckfield and Marsden had followed Woodley’s mourners to the front of the crematorium.
