ously like an insulting gesture to a senior officer. ‘Graham Vernon was seen and identified. By Harry Dickinson. But, of course, Mr Vernon went out to look for Laura when she didn’t come back to the house for dinner. Perfectly natural. An innocent explanation. He looked around for a while, perhaps called her name a few times, then got worried when he couldn’t find her, went back
O ‘
to die house and phoned us. Just what we would expect from a concerned father.’
Tailby’s expression must have betrayed his feelings about Graham Vernon. ‘I know you didn’t like him, sir. But we can’t act on feelings, can we? We need evidence.’
O ‘
Hitchens was reallv warmin? up now. ‘Teaching your grand
; or o j o
mother to suck eggs’ was an expression that sprang to the DCI’s mind. He wanted to stop Hitchens, to take back control of the conversation, but he felt powerless to halt the flow. His words had an air of inevitability.
‘Harry Dickinson.’
‘Yes, Harry Dickinson. He was definitely there.’ Hitchens
348
looked at his fingers. He seemed to have lost count. He vas already holding up five fingers and was trying to find a sixth. ‘But was he there at the right time? Nobody can tell us so for definite. There’s no firm identification of him, not even from the bird-watcher.’
‘He did find die body, Paul.’
‘Well, strictly speaking —’
‘Yes, I know!’
Tailby knew he was losing his grip on the situation. He shouldn’t lose his temper. But how could he stand this waiting? What were the fingerprint people doing down there? Of course, he knew the difficulties of lifting latent prints from a leather surface, and it could take hours. They were praying that the suspect had handled the leather upper of the trainer, and that his hands had been sweaty. They were praying that he hadn’t handled the trainer by its laces, or by the cloth interior. They were praying he was someone they knew.
If they lifted a suspect print, the enquiry was back on track and they could start making comparisons for identification. If they lifted no prints, they had hit another brick wall.
‘We may have to start pulling in every youth in the Eden Valley for elimination,’ said Hitchens, with an air of too much satisfaction.
‘We might as well pull in all the foxes in those woods and identify the one that took a bite out of Laura Vernon’s leg. That’s about as useful as forensics have been to us so far.’
‘It could have been a fox,’ said Hitchens. ‘Or it could have been a dog.’
o
‘Oh yes,’ said Tailby. ‘That’s about the best we can do. It could have been a bloody dog.’
But did the Vernons have a dog? Jesus, had nobody found that A
out? As Diane Fry punched the buttons of her phone again, she ||
wondered how something so obvious could have been missed. i|
Had everybody been fixated on Harry Dickinson? She banged the !|!
dashboard of the car irritably. No answer from the Vernons. j|
What was she going to do now? She could, of course, try to If
O O ‘ ‘ J Tl
get hold of Mr Tailby or DI Hitchens and ask them what to do. ||
I 349 I
But what would Ben have suggested? The ansv, er came to her
oo
as if he had been there next to her: Sheila Kelk, the Vernons’ cleaner. Her address was on file back at the office. It only took
j
a call to the duty operator in the incident room to get the phone number of the house at Wve Close.
Mrs Kelk sounded terrified when Fry told her who she was, as if the council house she was speaking from might be full of guiltv secrets.
O ^
‘I just want to ask you something, Mrs Kelk. Do the Vernons have a dog?’
o
‘Oh, no. Mrs Vernon doesn’t like them.’
‘But there’s a photograph in the sitting room at the Mount showing Laura with a black and white collie. So they must have had one when that picture was taken?’
‘No, I think that was the gardener’s. Laura always loved animals. Dogs and horses and that. I think she did mention that dog to me once, when I was dusting round the knick-knacks on the cabinet. She told me its name too, but I can’t remember what it was.’
