Tailby considered it. ‘The whole question of Dickinson and Vernon being out on the Baulk at that time is very relevant.’
‘The bigger question is — what was Vernon doing?’ said Cooper.
‘The Vernon family have got some more questions to answer,
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I’m afraid. There’s clearly something not right about their account oi events just before Laura vanished. Yet they were very convincing during the appeal this morning. Graham Vernon will come over very well on TV.’
Ben Cooper felt distinctly unimpressed by the thought of Vernon’s television persona. In his own experience, anything that was said for the sake of the TV cameras was even less likely to approach the truth than the normal tangle of fabrications and evasions he had to deal with every working day. Lies told under a bright gloss of lights and cameras were lies just the same.
He watched Tailby fiddle with the knot of his tie like a man worried about his appearance, and he knew the DCI felt die same way.
‘What about Daniel Vernon?’ asked Cooper.
‘Oh, there are several reliable witnesses to place him in Exeter at the critical times. Seems he’s a member of some left-wing group with social consciences. I can’t imagine where he got ideas like those from. A shame, that, too — I had a feeling about young Daniel. In the end, 1 let DC Weenink call round at the Mount to ask him about his transport arrangements. It emerges that his father had offered to pay for his rail fare or even to drive down to Devon and collect him when Laura turned up dead on Monday. But Daniel preferred to hitchhike, and it took him all night and half the next morning. We traced the
o o
driver of a cattle transporter who dropped him at Junction 28 on the Ml in the early hours.’
‘Interesting.’
‘People aren’t so willing to pick up scruffy youths by the side of the road as they were in my day.’
‘I didn’t mean —’
The know what you meant, Cooper. And I agree. But it can wait for a while.’
Cooper wondered whether this was the signal for him to leave. But the DCI seemed to be in an amenable mood, so he decided to press on.
‘How is Lee Sherratt shaping up, sir?’
‘He’s denying everything. Says he had no relationship with Laura Vernon at all, that he hardly knew her, in fact. But the
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used condom shook him, all right. The DNA will pin him down on that. All we have to do is wait tor the results.’
‘Suggesting he had been indulging in some outdoors sex? But it won’t prove the sex was with Laura Vernon.’
‘It’ll be enough to put him under pressure. But we have
another alternative anvwav. DS Morgan has traced the boy
j j ^> }
friend.’
‘Ah.’
‘A lad by the name of Simeon Holmes. Aged seventeen. He lives on the Devonshire Estate in Edendale. Do you know it?’
Cooper knew it well. He had patrolled the beat there as a young bobby, watching out for stolen cars being raced round the streets or gadiering information on local drug dealers who
o o o
operated from the sprawl of prefabricated concrete houses mistakenly slung up in the 1960s.
The Devonshire Estate occupied lowlying land in the valley bottom which had once been wetlands and water meadows until they had been hastily drained for the housing scheme. For thirty-five years the damp had gradually been creeping back into the foundations of the houses, staining the walls with mould and rotting the doors and windows. Many of the houses had become virtually uninhabitable, with fungus growing through the floorboards and water pouring through the roofs. But there was almost nowhere else for the poor of Edendale to go. It was the closest thing the vallev had to an
o o ^
inner-city area.
‘How does he come to be Laura Vernon’s boyfriend? He sounds like entirely the wrong type.’
‘He’s not someone her parents would approve of, I don’t suppose,’ said Tailby. ‘Rides a motorbike for a start. He says he met Laura here in town one lunchtime when they should both have been at school. In fact, he says she initiated the relationship, and had been skipping school ever since to meet him in various convenient spots.’
‘Bunking off.’
‘Is that what they call it these days? 1 thought it was bonking, not blinking.’
‘Missing school, sir, not the other thing.’
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‘Oh. Well, by all accounts they were doing the other thing as well. Holmes says she told him she was sixteen.’
‘They always say that.’
‘It’s bloody difficult, though, isn’t it? I certainly couldn’t tell you whether one of these girls out there was fifteen or sixteen. Sometimes they look every bit of eighteen and turn out to be twelve. The GPS wouldn’t entertain a
