didn’t really believe that the Krays had anything to do with Graham Marshall’s murder, no more than she believed Brady and Hindley had, and she could imagine how Shaw would laugh if he heard her suggest such a thing.
If Bill Marshall had any serious criminal aspirations, they hadn’t done him much good. He never got out of the council house, though the Marshalls had bought it for four thousand pounds in 1984.
Perhaps he swore off crime. Michelle had checked subsequent police records and found no further mention of him, so he had gone either straight or uncaught. She would guess at the former, given his standard of living. Graham’s disappearance must have shaken him, then. Maybe he sensed a connection to the world he had been involved in, so he severed all ties. She would have to find time to have an even closer look at the old crime reports, dig out old action books and the notebooks of the detectives involved. But that could wait until after the weekend.
She turned on her computer and tried to put her thoughts and theories into some kind of order, the way she usually did last thing at night, then she played a couple of games of Freecell and lost.
It got dark. Michelle turned off her computer, cleared away the detritus of her lonely dinner, found there wasn’t enough wine left in the bottle worth saving, so topped up her glass. As it so often did around bedtime, the depression seemed to close in on her like a dense fog. She sipped her wine and listened to rain tapping against her window. God, how she missed Melissa, even after all this time. She missed Ted, too, sometimes, but mostly she missed Melissa.
Her thoughts went back to the day it happened. It was a movie that ran in her mind, as if on a constant loop. She wasn’t there – that was a big part of the problem – but she could picture Melissa outside the school gates, her golden curls, little blue dress with the flowers on it, the other kids milling around, vigilant teachers nearby, then Melissa seeing what she thought was her father’s car pulling to a stop across the road, though they always picked her up on
Before getting into bed, she took Melissa’s dress, the same dress she had died in, from her bedside drawer, lay down, held it to her face and cried herself to sleep.
Chapter 10
As Annie waited outside ACC McLaughlin’s office at county headquarters the following morning, having been “summoned,” she felt the same way she had when her geography teacher sent her to the headmaster’s office for defacing a school atlas with her own cartographic designs: fantastic sea creatures and warnings that “Beyond this point be monsters.”
She had little fear of authority, and a person’s rank or status was something she rarely considered in her daily dealings, but somehow this summons made her nervous. Not “Red Ron” himself – he was known to be stern but fair and had a reputation for standing behind his team – but the situation she might find herself in.
It seemed that since she had decided to pursue her career again, she had made nothing but mistakes. First, sliding arse over tit down the side of Harkside reservoir in full view of several of her colleagues, and against the orders of the officer in charge; then the debacle of her excessive force investigation of probationary PC Janet Taylor during her brief (but not brief enough) spell with Complaints and Discipline; and now being blamed for the murder of Luke Armitage. Pretty soon everyone would be calling her Fuck-Up Annie, if they didn’t already. “Got a case you want fucking up, mate? Give it to Annie Cabbot, she’ll see you right.”
So much for a revitalized career. At least she was determined to go down with her middle finger high in the air.
It wasn’t bloody fair, though, Annie thought, as she paced. She was a damn good detective. Everything she had done in all those instances had been right; it was just the spin, the way it all added up, that made her look bad.
Red Ron’s secretary opened the door and ushered Annie into the presence. As befitted his rank, ACC McLaughlin had an even bigger office than Detective Superintendent Gristhorpe’s, and a carpet with much thicker pile. At least he didn’t have the books that intimidated her so in Gristhorpe’s office.
Red Ron had done a few things to personalize it since he first came to the job about eight months ago: a framed photo of his wife Carol stood on the desk, and a print of Constable’s
“DI Cabbot,” he greeted her, glancing over the top of his wire-rimmed glasses. “Please sit down. I’ll be with you in a moment.”
Annie sat. There was something different about him, she thought. Then she realized. Red Ron had shaved off his mustache since she had last seen him. She was surprised to find that he had an upper lip. She always thought men grew mustaches and beards to hide weak jaws and thin lips. He kept his receding silver hair cut short instead of growing one side long and trying to hide a bald center by combing it over the top of the skull, the way some men did. Annie didn’t understand that. What was so wrong with going bald? She thought some bald men were quite sexy. It was one of those ridiculous macho male things, she guessed, like the obsession with penis length. Were all men so bloody insecure? Well, she would never find out because none of them would ever talk about it. Not even Banks, though he did at least try more than most. Perhaps it was something they really
Annie brought herself back to the present. The ACC had just finished signing a stack of papers and after he had buzzed his secretary to come and take them away, he leaned back in his chair and linked his hands behind his head. “I suppose you know why you’re here?” he began.
“Yes, sir.”
“The chief constable got in touch with me last night – just as I was settling down to my dinner, by the way – and said he’d had a complaint about you from Martin Armitage. Would you care to explain what happened?”
Annie told him. As she spoke, she could tell he was listening intently, and every now and then he made a jotting on the pad in front of him. Nice fountain pen, she noticed. A maroon Waterman. Sometimes he frowned, but he didn’t interrupt her once. When she had finished, he paused for a while, then said, “Why did you decide to follow Mr. Armitage from his house that morning?”
“Because I thought his behavior was suspicious, sir. And I was looking for a missing boy.”
“A boy he had already told you was due back that very day.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You didn’t believe him?”
“I suppose not, sir.”
“Why not?”
Annie went over the Armitages’ behavior on the morning in question, the tension she had felt, the brusqueness of their response to her, the haste with which they wanted rid of her. “All I can say, sir,” she said, “is that I found their behavior to be out of sync with what I’d expect from parents who’d discovered that their son was all right and was coming home.”
“All very speculative on your part, DI Cabbot.”
Annie gripped the arms of the chair hard. “I used my judgment, sir. And I stand by it.”
“Hmm.” Red Ron took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “It’s a bad business,” he said. “We’ve had the press all over us, and needless to say they’re hot to trot with this idea of a simple kidnapping gone wrong. Add police cock-up to that, and they’d like nothing better.”
“With all due respect, sir, it wasn’t a simple kidnapping.” Annie gave her reasons why, as she had done before with Gristhorpe and Banks.
Red Ron stroked his chin as he listened, plucking at his upper lip as if he still expected to feel the mustache. When she had finished, he asked, as she had hoped he wouldn’t, “Didn’t it cross your mind just for one moment that the kidnapper might have been watching Mr. Armitage make the drop?”
“I… er…”
