Workman nodded. She did know how it was. Jodie Trigg’s murder would precipitate an overdrive of wagging tongues. The residents of this tidy suburban street’s connection to the Reynolds, however tenuous, would give them a macabre celebrity in the office, at the school gate and in the local coffee shops, which many would, no doubt, exploit with gusto. But she wasn’t going to add fuel to the fire by providing information. She held out her business card to the woman.
‘Thank you for your time. Please do get in touch if anything occurs to you. The card has both my office and mobile numbers.’
With a final nod of thanks, she turned and clack-clacked her way back down the tiled path to the gate. Onwards and upwards. Or onwards at least: another sixteen front doors to knock on.
The clog of rush-hour traffic reminded Workman why she had never felt any desire to live in London or work for the Met.
‘Do you mind if we pay another quick visit, Darren?’
Cara shook his head. ‘Where to, ma’am.’
‘Lambeth Cemetery, please. Blackshaw Road, Tooting.’
He glanced across.
‘Zoe,’ she said simply. ‘Zoe Reynolds is buried there. I’d like to …’ She tailed off. Like to what? Pay my respects? Apologize? Seek inspiration at the grave of a long-dead little girl who hasn’t received justice?
Tilting her head back, she closed her eyes, as much to avoid the searching glances Cara was casting at her as anything else, letting the rev of idling engines, the hoot of frustrated horns fade into the background.
Cara had worked in Traffic for four years before transferring to Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes and so, unlike when Marilyn drove her in that heap of rust and Blu-Tack he called a car – one hand holding the wheel, the other a cigarette, his mind ruminating on some issue that didn’t involve getting them from A to B in one piece – Workman felt no need to direct Cara to a cemetery he had never been to or to ask him to keep his eyes on the road.
They’d had no luck with any of the Reynolds’ old neighbours. The couple seemed to have successfully disappeared off the face of the earth. Before her daughter’s murder, Carolynn Reynolds had been the assistant director of Children’s Specialist Services at Wandsworth London Borough Council, had been for years. And after – nothing. Just the investigation and trial, every aspect of her old life in smithereens.
What had her husband, Roger, worked as? A surveyor? An architect? Something to do with buildings, property, interiors. No, not interiors, she remembered suddenly, exteriors. A landscape architect, of course. Workman remembered Marilyn muttering at the time about how ridiculous a name it was for a glorified gardener. Like calling a cleaner a ‘hygiene specialist’, or a bus driver a ‘transportation facilitator’.
What was important though, was that it could be a ‘cash-in-hand’ job, the civilized end of the British black market. The Reynolds could disappear entirely from the radar and still earn a living. So how on earth were they going to find them?
24
Callan fetched himself a bottle of beer from the fridge and went into the garden, slumping down at Jessie’s garden table and hefting over a second chair to rest his feet on. It was a warm evening, the sun hovering halfway between sky and land, washing the field at the end of the garden with a mellow orange glow.
He took a swig of beer, his mind tracing back over his phone conversation with Jessie. It hadn’t gone as he had planned, not that he’d given much thought as to how to handle the discussion before he’d called her, to be fair. His mistake. He was worried about her and not just because of that woman, Carolynn Reynolds. Since she’d been invalided out of the army, she had developed an armoured carapace of aggression that shielded the hurt and vulnerability underneath. He didn’t know how to handle her these days, felt as if he was treading on eggshells, and breaking the majority of them, despite his best efforts.
As he raised the beer bottle to his lips, he caught movement, a shadow, from the corner of his eye: Ahmose, Jessie’s elderly next-door neighbour, looking over the adjoining fence. Jessie had told him that she’d bought this cottage, down a single-track lane in the Surrey Hills, surrounded by fields, precisely to avoid unwanted human contact, and that her heart had plummeted when Ahmose had arrived on her doorstep the morning she moved in, proffering a miniature rose, full of advice on how to keep it flowering. But in their three years as neighbours, Jessie had grown to love and rely on this old Egyptian man more than her own parents – certainly more than her father, who she blamed for her brother Jamie’s suicide.
Callan and Ahmose had settled into a comfortable relationship of nods, smiles and exchanged pleasantries, since he had as good as moved in with Jessie, the occasional evening spent, the three of them, chatting over dinner and a bottle of wine. But mostly he had left Jessie and Ahmose to it, recognized the depth of their relationship and his spare part in it.
‘Do you want some company?’ the old man asked.
Callan didn’t. He was happy alone, wallowing in morose thoughts.
‘That’d be, great. I’ll let you in the front.’
He poured Ahmose a glass of red wine, and they returned to the garden together, Callan pulling out a chair, running his sleeve over the seat to brush off the moss before Ahmose sat down.
Ahmose indicated his gardening trousers. ‘Wonderful service, but unnecessary.’
‘Only the best for Jessie’s surrogate family.’
They sat down and drank for a moment in silence. They had never been alone in each other’s company and Callan wasn’t in the mood for small talk. His dulled brain fished around for a benign, chatty opener.
‘How’s the garden?’
‘Dry,’ Ahmose said. ‘It’s looking forward to the onset of autumn even if
