Blaylock shrugged, puzzled, and did as Delaney asked. The detective strode forward and went to a box near the front of the garage. It was the one that Blaylock had been loading up when he and Sally had been in the pub a few days earlier. He moved a couple of items aside and pulled out a photo. He looked at it for a moment. ‘Delaney, you absolute feckin’ idiot!’ he said softly.
‘What is it, sir?’ asked Sally.
Delaney handed her the photo and, puzzled, Sally looked at it for a moment.
‘Look at the man on the left, Sally. Picture him without the beard and the moustache and the full head of quiffed hair. Picture that and then look who is standing next to him.’
Sally peered a bit more closely at the photo. ‘Oh my God!’ she said in a low whisper as recognition dawned on her.
*
Jennifer Hickling came out of the HSBC bank on Camden High Street in a foul mood. She had planned to withdraw her savings that morning, get her sister from school at lunchtime, take the Tube to Liverpool Street and take a mainline train out of London for good. She had an older friend called Kelly who had just turned sixteen and had a one-year-old baby. Kelly lived with her boyfriend, a nineteen-year-old apprentice car mechanic called Lloyd who absolutely doted on her. They had a house on a council estate in a small town just outside Norwich. But it was an estate as different from the Waterhill where Jenny lived that it might as well have been in another country. In a lot of ways it was.
The only trouble was that because of her age Jenny had opened the account with some false ID, including a driving licence which she had left back at the flat. Due to the large amount of money she was withdrawing – five thousand pounds – the manager had asked to see the driving licence again. Jenny had arranged an appointment with the woman for two o’clock. It meant an hour or so’s delay but her train tickets were valid up to four o’clock and it was only a two-hour journey to Norwich, where her friend and her friend’s partner had agreed to meet them.
She ran up the road to catch her bus, showing her real ID to a sceptical bus driver who reckoned she was at least three years older than she claimed but didn’t have the energy to argue the matter.
Jenny walked down the length of the bus to sit on her own on the back seat by the window.
She looked out of the grimy window at the brilliant blue sky, the streaks of pale red trailing through it like ink in water. She pulled her coat tighter around her and snuggled into the corner. She put her hand in her pocket, pulled out the two one-way tickets to Norwich and smiled to herself. Time to make a new life for herself and her sister. Time to start again. Time to heal.
Way past time.
She never did make the train.
*
It was a small lounge and Jack Delaney, Sergeant Halliday and Terry Blaylock pretty much filled it. Sally Cartwright stood by the door.
Delaney looked at the woman sitting on the sofa. She seemed to be overwhelmed by their presence. He remembered her as a larger-than-life woman. Big in every sense of the word. The years since he had last seen her had seemed to diminish her somehow. He guessed she was probably in her sixties, with grey hair that had once been a magnificent auburn. She looked up at him quizzically and then smiled.
‘I remember you. You were the Irish copper, weren’t you?’
‘I still am, ma’am,’ said Delaney.
‘You used to come into the pub for your lunch back in that dreadful time.’
‘I did.’
She clicked her fingers. ‘The fisherman’s platter. Better than your Aunty Nora’s, you used to say.’
‘You have a good memory, Mrs Blaylock.’
‘Only thing I do have nowadays,’ she grunted.
‘But it was me Aunty Noreen.’
‘We don’t do food any more.’
‘I know.’
‘Stopped doing it when my husband died. Didn’t have the heart for it any more.’ She looked at the picture that Delaney was holding. ‘Is that the photo?’
Delaney nodded and held the photo out to her. She took it and looked at it without saying anything for a moment or two. And then she nodded. ‘Yes, that’s the sick pervert. To think he had been drinking in my pub all those years.’
‘He moved away after the children disappeared?’ asked Sergeant Halliday.
‘That’s right. To Ruislip. Where they got him eventually.’
‘And that’s your brother with him?’
The woman nodded sadly. ‘Yeah, that’s Graham.’
Delaney picked up on the bitterness in her voice. ‘I understand you had a falling-out, hadn’t spoken to him in years.’
‘That’s right. And, quite frankly, when I heard he’d topped himself I didn’t even shed a tear.’
‘What was the argument about?’
The woman shook her head. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
