‘I’m telling you, I’m telling you. Will you write it down properly, for God’s sake? I know a Labrador from a collie, see? And this was a Border collie. A black and white collie. Definite.’
Fry sighed. ‘We’d better see you and take another statement in the morning, hadn’t we, Mr Edwards?’
o’ ‘
‘Whatever you like. But we’ll have to make it quick. There’s been a pair of snipe sighted on Stanton Moor.’
As she finished the call to Edwards, a memory came back to Diane Fry, and she almost dropped the phone. The memory was of a photograph of Laura Vernon. It was the original photograph, the one from which her face had been enlarged for use in the murder enquiry. Fry had seen it only once. She had sneaked a look in the file when the girl was still officially just a missing person. It had been a photo of Laura taken in the garden at the Mount, at a time when she was laughing and happy in the sunshine. And at her feet in the picture had been a dog. A black and white Border collie.
Stewart Tailby called DI Hitchens into his office. It was late,
j j
but they were both too senior to qualify for overtime payments.
The two men were tired and tense. They were awaiting the
J O
results of fingerprint examination on a find made earlier in the evening. They hardly dared to say it to each other, but they knew the results could be crucial. Tailby had openly pinned his hopes on forensics so often during this enquiry that it seemed like tempting fate even to voice the hope that a set of prints other than Laura Vernon’s would be found on the second trainer. That second trainer they had spent so many expensive man-hours looking
346
for. The trainer which had now been found hv searchers, where it lay in the roots of a hedge inside the back wall of the garden
J O O
at the Mount.
Meanwhile, a tearful Andrew Milner had been sent home for the night, with the warning that they might want to talk to him again tomorrow — and the friendly advice that he should talk to his wife.
‘So Margaret Milner was right that he hadn’t been Charlotte Vernon’s lover,’ said Tailby.
‘But she didn’t know about the secretary.’
‘Mmm. Has it occurred to you, though, that Graham Vernon might well have known about the affair?’
O
Hitchens snapped his fingers. ‘Of course. The hold he had over Milner wasn’t just to do with his fear of losing his job. He knew Milner’s dirty secret.’
‘And he certainly made the most of it. The result was that Andrew Milner felt unable to act even when Vernon made a move on his own daughter.’
‘Are we discounting Milner, then?’
‘No. There’s enough hate there. Hate for Graham Vernon.
O ‘
but self-disgust too. It has to be directed somewhere.’
Tailby leaned wearily on his desk, his shoulders stooped. The air conditioning was still running, and his office was turning cold as the evening temperature dropped. ‘No, I’d like to eliminate Milner, but we can’t. Not without confirmation of his movements that night. Poor sod. He couldn’t even switch his story and claim he was with the mistress.’
Tailby glowered at Hitchens’s raised eyebrow, realizing the DI was amused either at his use of the old- fashioned term or his sympathy for the suspect. Perhaps both. Maybe he was getting too old for the job if his junior officers were laughing at him, thought Tailby. Maybe he ought to take that job in the Corporate Development Department at County Headquarters in Ripley. They needed a chief inspector to take charge of Process Development. Whatever that was.
‘We have no case against Andrew Milner,’ said Hitchens.
The know that, damn it.’
‘Of the other names on the list, Simeon Holmes is in the clear.
347
So
He was nearly twenty miles away at the time, and his storv is well supported.’
‘Bikers,’ said Tailby.
‘This lot weren’t exactly Hell’s Angels, sir. You’d be surprised at the types who gather at Matlock Bath in their best leathers on a weekend. Some of them that we talked to were married couples with kids. Some were in their fifties.’
Tailby decided he disliked Paul Hitchens. It was his youth and his condescending smile. He would probably go far. In fact, he would probably be DCI very soon. What did Process Development mean exactly? He recalled that the three other CIs in Corporate had sections called Strategic Planning, Policy Development and Quality Assurance. Not much help.
Hitchens was counting on his fingers, like a primary school teacher. ‘We know Lee Sherratt could have been there. He couWhave been the youth seen talking to Laura, but he’s sensibly keeping mum. Without forensics, we’ll not pin that one down. Nobody saw him who can identify him.’
‘OK. Take the father, Graham Vernon.’
‘Yes. sir.’ Hitchens held up another finger. It looked danger
‘ F O O
