Rufus chews on his cheek, thinking hard. ‘His connection to the missing teens,’ he says, softly. ‘Ben said they were all of a similar profile?’
Ruth nods. ‘All relative innocents, if there is such a thing. Clever, insightful, talented – not necessarily beautiful but certainly not tearaways.’
‘And how did they come into contact with Cox?’
‘In Bronwen’s case, she took part in a junior music contest he was present at. Something of a Renaissance man, as I told you. His furniture company sponsored the trophy so he was on the panel of judges. According to the family, that was around the time somebody started to send her presents. Wrote letters. Sent her a nightingale in a cage, if you’ll credit it …’
Rufus points at Ruth’s pocket. Says nothing until he has another cigarette. ‘And when she vanished?’
‘They told the police about it. Police at the time were looking for a student – maybe a local boy she might have fallen for. It was a long time before anybody made the connection to the nice quiet man who’d met her at the recital. She was a flautist, you see. Cox too. Played as a child and kept it up through university. Even won a couple of scholarships to study in Italy under one of the greats. I think he’d hoped to go in that direction, but then his mother died and he lost the enthusiasm for it. Took a job with a family friend and rather drifted after that. But each of the cases that Cox has been questioned about involved somebody with a particular skill. Singer. Writer. Melanie Grazia, the girl from the boarding school – she was a dancer and we know he was at the school for a prize-giving at the same time she was involved in a rehearsal for a school production and could well have seen her. But it’s all circumstantial. Hence the need for something solid. Forensics. A witness. A confession.’
‘How did she die?’ asks Rufus, turning his back on the bleak farm and beginning to head back towards the car. Ruth falls into step beside him. ‘His mum.’
‘She’d suffered a stroke about a year before she popped her clogs,’ says Ruth, tactlessly. ‘Wheelchair bound. Needed lots of help, apparently. He came home from Italy to care for her. She suffered a nasty tumble: wheelchair went down the steps out the back of the house. Lay there for hours in the fancy garden she loved: statues and sundials and stuff. Nobody could see her from the house. Died of exposure and head trauma.’
‘And Cox?’
‘The people who remember the funeral say he sang. Tried to, anyway. Broke down. Wept like it was a Greek tragedy, poor bastard. And then, like I say, he drifted.’
‘I can see why the police like him as a suspect,’ says Rufus, thoughtful. He shakes his head. ‘But that’s only because I’m viewing it through the filter of the notion that he’s guilty of abducting and killing a load of teenagers. I mean, as you said, it’s circumstantial.’
Ruth shrugs. ‘Your mate Miss Harris would know better than me, wouldn’t she? What’s her name? What’s her name again? Lillyanna, or Arrabella, or something, wasn’t it?’
‘Annabeth,’ he corrects her, then pauses, one hand on the car door. Could it be that easy? Could Fellowes simply have remembered the unusual name? Mentioned it to his pad-mate in conversation. He can picture Cox, filing the name away. Seeing it in the prison mag. Setting his big old mind whirring. Would that be around the time Wilson last visited him? Could he have been telling him that he was ill? That he was going to clear his conscience and tell the police? Cox had requested the transfer, after all. Begged to be on Annabeth’s course.
He throws the cigarette away and opens the car door. Is about to ask another question of Ruth when he realizes she’s stopped, just in front of the gate. She’s studying her phone intently, her lips twitching. She glances up: sees him watching.
‘Can you drop me back?’ she asks, urgently.
‘Sure. Why? What’s—’
‘Cox,’ she says, breathlessly. ‘Cox has escaped.’
THIRTY-TWO
At the same moment that Rufus was taking his third bite of a sausage and egg McMuffin and wondering whether to throw himself in the Humber, Annabeth Harris was rushing from the medical wing at HMP Holderness to find Dr Lechmere. Griffin Cox had started fitting; his body convulsing; blood running from his mouth as his teeth mashed down upon his tongue.
In the absence of the doctor – stuck in traffic on Hedon Road and listening to an operatic CD that drowned out the sound of her mobile phone – she located the resident nurse practitioner: an ex-Army staff sergeant named Matthew Keighley whose CV described a man of great experience with a commendable history of remaining cool in high pressure situations. His online employment history called him a ‘robust and capable clinical thinker’ and painted a glorious pen-portrait of the kind of individual tailor-made for dealing with such a set of circumstances as these. Nowhere on his application for the job did the word ‘fraud’ appear. Nor did ‘chancer’. The phrase ‘kept his head down and lucked his way through twenty-two years of service’ was notably absent.
When confronted with the unnerving sight of Officer Annabeth Harris running into his little cubicle office and demanding he come and tend to a bona fide emergency, Keighley did what he had been trained to do in times of extreme crisis, and excused himself from performing any function that could carry even the slightest whiff of negative repercussions. He followed the rule book. He did what he had been told. He called an ambulance, registered the incident, amended the inmate’s prison file. He didn’t move from his chair: just stayed at his desk eating a multi-pack of donuts. It was left to Annabeth and PO Barry Lambert to wheel the gurney carrying the wide-eyed, trembling Cox down the sloping floors
