‘How would I know about his one-night stand? But he would never have gone. He is the most obstinate man I’ve ever met.’
‘So what made him?’
‘Pressure points. It’s knowing where to bring the pressure to bear.’
‘And?’
Simpson rested his hand lightly on her shoulder, ignoring her flinch.
‘Ask him about his father.’
TEN
I kept in shape. Swam or ran every day, worked out five days a week. But even so, some nights I just couldn’t sleep. Maybe living alone didn’t suit me. More often than not, on such nights I’d drive up to the Ditchling Beacon.
I’d been living in the area a couple of years before I realized that the Beacon had been an Iron Age fort, now pretty much obliterated. I used to be interested in stuff like that, and the site of this car park was such an obvious one for defence, I don’t know why I hadn’t realized it before.
Tonight, I’d been sitting dozing for a couple of hours when two cars of gangbangers had come up with some girls from Brighton. It was around three. They had noisy sex to booming music. One car took the girls home. The other stayed, and I was aware of three young guys standing smoking about ten yards away, discussing whether to smash my window and steal whatever was in my car or just set fire to it. I didn’t know if they realized I was in it, or whether that was the point.
I was in the passenger seat, reclined, so maybe they hadn’t seen me. Then again. I switched on the headlights and turned the stereo up high. I probably should have gone but I figured the Art Ensemble of Chicago at its most dissonant would do the trick.
I watched them watching the car – I was still in darkness. Eventually they wandered back to their car, pumped up the volume of their own stereo and screeched out of the car park.
I switched to a CD on which there were actual tunes. More or less. Tom Waits at his most industrial. Molly always said I had a tin ear so liked avant-garde stuff because I couldn’t tell the difference between music and noise. I don’t know where I’d got my taste for such stuff. When I was growing up, my dad was firmly stuck in the big band era, my mother liked only romantic classics.
I slept but woke at five when a man in a bright yellow jacket arrived and parked his estate car next to me. He sat for ten minutes, ignoring me, his diesel engine shuddering, before he drove away again.
It was a clear morning, the sky blue and pink, wisps of cloud hanging in the still air. I could see the line of the North Downs some thirty miles away. I fancied I could make out Box Hill. I could certainly see our home from here. I looked down at my past life laid out below me and thought about how I’d fucked up.
Maybe I came here so often because I felt an estrangement from where I longed to be. An outsider looking in – something I’ve always felt. Peering in through the window at my own life.
Two hours later, dog walkers, runners and cyclists turned up and parked around me. The cyclists brought out frames then wheels and handlebars and put their bikes together, tugging on them, aligning them, bouncing on them and testing the brakes. A woman on horseback suddenly reared up from the path below, hidden by the parked cars until her horse trotted between them.
Another woman got out of her car, walked over to the edge to look down at the plain, her hands tucked in her back pockets. She wore sunglasses. Her hair was roughly tied back. She walked along the shallow embankment and stopped to stare at the Burling Gap in the distance. She stood there for half an hour or so. Then she reversed out and drove away.
The Burling Gap. Something Sarah had said about her visit to the lighthouse pricked at me. I got out of my car and climbed up the shallow embankment.
I crossed the road and walked over to the dew pond. I looked south to Brighton and the sea. I kept my face from any dog walkers passing by – Molly always said I looked menacing when I was deep in thought.
I was thinking about Finch’s death and what it meant about the botched raid. Was it a revenge attack? Somebody tidying up loose ends? I smiled. It was a bit late in the day, given the position I’d achieved in the police force, but I was trying to learn how to investigate this crime that no one seemed able to make sense of.
When I went back into the car park a young couple nodded at me as a black flat-coat bounded out of their jeep. I nodded back and looked across at burn marks in the asphalt. A car had been torched there not long before I came upon my own burning car on the night I ran into the deer.
And then I realized what was nagging at me and I grinned. My God. Maybe I could be a real detective.
Tim was blathering as usual: ‘So collagen lip implants – luscious or loopy? And do they pass the kiss test or does it feel like kissing a pair of car tyres? If you know, or think you know, phone in now. And later we’ll be discussing Big Brother: is Too Far the new How Far?’
Kate thought about that for a moment then decided DJ blather was a discourse all of its own, in which the meaningless did not even attempt to masquerade as meaningful.
She’d gone to bed after her father had left. His visits always left her bothered. She thought he was probably trying to reach out to her but that he was simply inept where emotions were concerned.
When she was growing up, her father was a parliamentary correspondent for the Observer. He was politically committed. When she was a teenager, all her friends fancied him. She wasn’t quite sure how to deal with that.
Kate had hero-worshipped her father. That was probably why at university she’d had a long affair with her professor, a much older man. There was nothing she didn’t know about father figures and how bad they could be for a girl. Her professor shagged her and liked her to be around when his friends came by. However, the problem with the older man is that his friends are also older and usually uninteresting and staid.
Kate didn’t get on with her mother. It was one of those things. Well, actually, it wasn’t. Her mother was another journalist. It was all she did. She was obsessive – obsessed. (Kate never quite knew the difference.) She went into her newspaper every day, worked relentlessly. She had a sister who was a TV producer and both were seriously competitive.
Kate’s mother was not loving. For years Kate thought that was just the way mothers were. Only when she was older did she realize it was specific to her mother. She was remote, had a coldness that combined with excessive self-absorption to exclude Kate almost entirely.
Kate eventually came to realize that her mother wasn’t a particularly good writer but that that wasn’t the criterion for success in newspapers. All the editors cared about was getting copy of a reasonable standard to length, on time.
She sighed. She’d brought the next portion of the diary into work. It had jumped again. In between fielding phone calls she scanned through it.
Friday 22nd June
We abandoned the boarding house search today. The new theory is that for the killer to do his dastardly work he must have used an empty house. So we’re out and about searching every empty house in the area hoping we’ll discover bloodstains. Or a head.
Of course, there’s another theory that we’re wasting time in Brighton, that this bloke came down from London and the murder was committed up there – maybe King’s Cross way, where the legs were found.
Oh, we’re big on theories.
We’re following up the clue about ‘ford’ with Mrs Ford in Sheffield, then in Folkestone with her daughter and the mysterious German woman.
The inquest on the baby found in the parcel office revealed no connection to the trunk crime. Hardly a surprise.
These two knives were handed in by the dustbin people. One was a ham slicer, about fifteen inches long. The other, thirteen inches long, was a butcher’s cutting knife. They’d been left in an ash-bin somewhere in Hove. They would have been collected in the rubbish on either Tuesday or Wednesday. The council bin people found them in the refuse destructor on Wednesday and handed them in today.
The Chief Constable got very excited – had them photographed to put in tomorrow’s Brighton and Hove
