Disordered Minds

Jonathan hunched his shoulders. 'I'll go with fifty-fifty.'

Clever girl, thought Andrew, staring at his hands.

'I know it's tempting to see linkage in synchronicity,' said Jonathan, 'but it's very dangerous. Coincidences happen. It's why PACE and CPIA were introduced, and why DNA has become the major plank in police investigations. Everyone's looking to eliminate malign chance.'

'But if Howard was innocent then malign chance is precisely what convicted him,' George protested. 'It was the hair in the bath that persuaded the jury, but the prosecution proved it could only have come from the murderer. Yet Howard wasn't the murderer.'

'All the more reason not to fixate on another ginger-haired suspect. A goodly percentage of the population carries the gene.' He smiled to take the sting from the words. 'Which isn't to say we'll ignore your rapist-he certainly fits the profile-just be wary. The real pity is that the only name William Burton remembers is Roy ... it was a popular name in the fifties and sixties so there were probably quite a few of them.'

'Not that popular,' said George. 'Surely it's Roy Trent?'

'Roy Rogers ... Roy Orbison ... Roy of the Rovers ... Roy Castle...'

'At least one of those was a comic-book character,' said Andrew.

'So? Bill Clinton and David Beckham named their children after places. All I'm saying is we can't assume Roy Trent from Roy.'

'It's a reasonable guess, though,' said Andrew. 'The man's an ape.'

'That doesn't make him a rapist. Or let me put it another way-which of you is willing to go in and suggest it to him with no evidence to back it up ... and what do you think his answer is going to be?' He glanced from one to the other. 'Right! We need to find Louise or, even better, the Burton parents. They might be able to give us a surname.'

'Assuming they'll talk to us,' said George doubtfully. 'I got the impression from William that they're extremely reluctant to be involved.'

Jonathan nicked to the end of the transcript. 'Did you tape these conversations or make notes?'

'I made notes in the car after the first one and used shorthand for the telephone call. I typed them up immediately afterward so I'm confident they're accurate.'

He read the description of William Burton that she'd added at the end. 'Forties, six foot approx, well-built, tattoos on his arms, thinning sandy hair, gray eyes, pleasant smiling face, fireman. Married with twin daughters.' 'You liked him,' he said more in statement than question.

'Yes. He was very upfront and friendly at the beginning. We talked about his daughters who were arguing inside the house, and he was very amusing. He only tightened up when I mentioned his sister. He kept saying he hadn't heard from her for years, but I didn't entirely believe him.'

'You say here that he 'looked troubled' after you asked him if Louise had had a baby when she was fourteen,' remarked Andrew, tapping a page of the transcript copy that she'd given him. 'He answered: 'Not that I'm aware of.' You've put 'evasive' with a question mark. Is that how it struck you at the time?'

George nodded. 'He went on to say he was a lot younger than she was and wouldn't have understood what was going on-it's a couple of lines down. I thought that was a very strange response ... as if something had happened and he didn't want to lie about it. I've also put a question mark beside the 'a lot younger.' Louise would be forty-five or forty-six now, and William looked a good forty plus.'

Jonathan drew her attention to some notes that came after William Burton's description. '(1) He wouldn't have phoned if he'd recognized Priscilla Fletcher as Louise. [Double bluff?] (2) Did he recognize her as Cill Trevelyan? (3) Why does he feel so 'connected' suddenly? [Because of Cill's photo? Because of his daughters? Because Priscilla F. is Cill and he knows it?]'

'What's the significance of his daughters?' he asked.

'It's at the beginning of the telephone transcript. He said his wife had asked him how he'd have felt if one of them had gone missing at thirteen. Also, he was very struck by how young Cill looked. He remembers her as quite adult and was shocked to see she still had her baby fat.' She paused. 'It's as if he saw her as a person for the first time ... and I'm wondering if that was because he recognized her in Priscilla Fletcher.'

'I should think it's more likely your first statement was correct. Thirty years after the event, he saw Cill for what she really was-a vulnerable child-and it shocked him.'

'He said his parents blamed her for everything that went wrong. They called her 'that bloody girl' and made out she was a tart.'

'What sort of things?'

She shrugged. 'The rape ... Louise becoming agoraphobic ... the police questioning. Those are the ones he mentioned, but he said it went on for months.'

'The agoraphobia?'

'Presumably.'

'Interesting,' Jonathan said slowly. 'What was she frightened of? The boys? Being raped herself?'

'He didn't say. There was a passing reference to her parents moving her to a different school so she wouldn't be reminded of Cill's disappearance, but that's all.'

Andrew clicked his fingers suddenly. 'Go back to the first paragraph where George has given a synopsis of the conversation about the girls,' he told Jonathan. 'Second line: 'Mr. Burton joked about his daughters' fiery hair and fiery tempers ... said he'd pay to be rid of them.' '

'And?'

'Red hair runs in families, but I'm damn sure the gene has to be on both sides to produce fiery red.'

Jonathan ran a thoughtful finger down his jawline. 'Go on.'