“Snot?”
“Um well, I was going to say fish and vinegar actually.”
“I’ll stick to cheesy chips … or curry sauce … or ketchup … I love a bit of ketchup, me – if it’s proper ketchup … Heinz.”
They sat there, comfortable together, eating the rest of their chips.
As they finished, and both screwed up their wrappers, Gayther sighed happily and passed his wrapper to Carrie.
“Tuck it down the side, Carrie, I’ll empty the car later. Did you get some water?”
She passed him one of the two bottles of water she had bought with the chips. Then waited as he took one, two and then three swigs of it.
“So …” said Carrie.
“So … oo …” echoed Gayther, mimicking her Suffolk accent.
“So, what next, what are we going to do this afternoon? Write up our notes, add them to the file?” asked Carrie, ignoring his impression.
“Okay, I want to spend some time on this case … the victim’s own words … the criss-cross scratches … the absence of a knife … it’s, well, let’s assume it’s murder and see where it takes us. It would be good to crack this, for a number of reasons.”
“What have we got so far then, guvnor? That’s useful.”
“Well, we have our timeline. We know exactly when Lodge died and that’s not something we’ve had with The Scribbler so far – rotted bodies, much later, for the most part. And where and how he died. So, when we have a suspect, we can narrow things down pretty quickly if he doesn’t have a solid alibi. DNA, of course. Is there CCTV footage from a camera where he stopped for petrol before or after the murder? Is there speed camera footage? Is there anything from the care home in his car? On the tyres? In the footwell? Remember Locard’s Principle, every contact leaves a trace.”
“Okay, yes, and …?”
“We need to follow all the leads we have. We’ll sort those this afternoon. You never know where they will take us. We know – we assume – that Lodge saw The Scribbler, possibly at the fete, and that he came back to silence him, to kill him. If we have a suspect, and can get a photo, it’s possible Mrs Coombes or Sally or Jen might look at it and say, ‘Ah yes, that’s the fellow who came in first, last or whenever that night. Asked directions, whatever’.”
“But Mr Coombes said …” Carrie queried.
“Don’t worry about that for now,” Gayther waved his hand in the air as if to say, ‘no matter’.
He went on, “We need to speak to this Karen, to talk about that visitor for … Miss Bright was it? Smith? … that’s a big flag to me … and this Elvis look-a-like singer; he’s less likely, someone would have recognised and remembered Elvis if he had turned up out of the blue swivelling his hips and thrusting his crotch in their faces … but I guess you never know.”
He then said, “And we have two other would-be victims who got away from before. Let’s track them down and have a word, see if we can turn up something new. And there are other leads from the original killings. The three suspects … where were they the night of this killing? We need to follow everything up, find the red herrings and the clues and decide which is which.”
“So,” asked Carrie, “what now?”
“For you? When we get back, I want you to find a quiet corner somewhere and start going over everything that’s in the files on The Scribbler, the notes, the witness statements, photos, everything. Just read it all through, nice and slowly, take it home if need be. See if you can find me the needle in the haystack … it’s there somewhere. You just have to spot it. There’s always a needle.”
Gayther paused and then added.
“My first case, years ago, when I was starting out like you, was a little boy … Christopher … he was eleven years old … he was killed. Strangled. We got the killer four months later, after he did the same again … another little boy, Alex, twelve. Thing is, when we went back through the files for the first boy, there was an interview with a neighbour who named various people she’d seen hanging about in the run-up to the murder. We interviewed them without success.”
He stopped for a moment, working through his thoughts.
“She also described but could not name another person who she had seen hanging about, who wore a distinctive hat. Like a Russian hat. What with one thing and another, he was never traced and interviewed … it slipped through the net … even though he lived just three streets away … and he turned out to be the killer. It was a throwaway remark, noted down properly, but not followed up correctly … well, not at all. If we had only … the line between success and failure is …”
He shrugged and then stopped again. Carrie could see that he was moved and was struggling to find the right words. A surprisingly emotional man.
“Fact is, Carrie, we now have, for The Scribbler, all of this information, lots of it from before and a little bit now and, well, when it’s murder, you can never have too much information. Not really. Thing is, we will almost certainly have the answer in there somewhere right in front of us. A clue. An overlooked lead. Once we see it for what it is, things will start to fall into place. We just haven’t seen it yet.”
He turned and smiled at her.
“And we have more on our side these days. The bits of evidence that we’ve kept all these
