Holly came in with a tray of coffee: four mugs of black liquid, a pile of plastic pots of milk on a chipped saucer. It was the first time ever Vera had seen her make drinks without being bullied into it.
Charlie finished the phone call and joined them. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Not yet. Some of the residents of the street are still out at work. I’ve told the team on the ground to get their phone numbers, call them at wherever they’re working to see if they saw Laura this morning.’
In any other circumstances Vera would have been pleased that they were pulling their fingers out, working together, showing a bit of nous.
‘I got the coroner’s report on Parr’s wife’s death,’ he went on. ‘It was definitely suicide. She slit her wrists. The paper’s on your desk.’
She nodded her thanks.
‘This puts the focus back on the Armstrong family,’ she said. ‘Perhaps all the business with Peter Calvert was a distraction. Perhaps Lily Marsh was never an intended victim at all. She saw something, got in the way. Are we any closer to knowing what she was doing the night Luke Armstrong was killed?’
‘The girls she shared the flat with were out that night. A trip to London to the ballet. Very classy. They stayed with friends in Richmond. They can’t tell if Lily was there Wednesday night or not.’ Holly had become an expert on Lily’s flatmates.
‘What would Lily Marsh have been doing in Seaton? An ex-pit village on the coast. I mean, it’s just not her sort of place, those clothes she wore. She’d have stuck out like a sore thumb. Nobody saw her. I did the house-to- house myself Charlie had worked that patch as a PC and still had friends who were community police officers. ‘There have been no strangers around at all.’
They sat, each of them trying to imagine Lily in her silk and her beads in the street where the kids played skipping games and the mothers sat on the steps watching them. All of them failing.
‘Where do you think Laura’s body is?’ Charlie asked. The question they’d all had at the backs of their minds, none of them wanting to speak it.
‘We don’t know yet that the girl is dead.’ Vera didn’t shout, she kept her voice calm and reasonable. It wasn’t the time for being showy. But she meant it. Or maybe she just wanted it to be true. For Julie and for herself. She wasn’t used to failing and another death, the death of someone young, who’d never had the chance yet to be happy, would be the worst sort of failure.
‘He didn’t keep the other victims alive,’ Joe said. ‘Not that we can tell. Certainly not the boy.’
‘This might be different.’ Vera knew it was irrational, the idea she’d formed walking along the footpath with Julie, that the killer was enjoying himself, the game, the spectacle. That he might want to prolong the pleasure by keeping his victim alive.
Charlie knew better than to argue.
‘In water,’ Holly said.
‘So where should we look? Every house in Tyne and Wear has a bath.’
‘No,’ Vera said. ‘He won’t use a bath again. Laura’s a striking young woman. Not beautiful like Lily, but big eyes, cheekbones you’d die for.’ She caught her breath at the phrase but nobody else seemed to notice and she continued, ‘She looks odd, exotic. He’ll want to turn her into a picture. It’ll be somewhere dramatic.’
‘Then he must be holding her,’ Joe said. ‘Either alive or dead. He won’t risk posing the body in broad daylight. Not again. He got away with it with Lily, but he’d never try it a second time.’
‘Did we ever hear back from Northumbria Water?’ Vera demanded. ‘Weren’t they supposed to have blokes working at the outfall by the lighthouse the afternoon Lily was killed? Has anyone spoken to them?’
‘That outfall hasn’t been used for five years,’ Joe said. ‘Some European directive on sewage and clean beaches. The guy I spoke to reckoned a team must have just parked up there to have a break.’
‘Well, talk to him again. Get the names of all the workers in the area that day. They’re the closest we’ve got to witnesses.’
There was a moment of silence, then Vera jumped up, stood in front of them. ‘I want ideas,’ she said. ‘Any ideas. Crazy as you like. Places to look. Places we can keep under surveillance.’
‘The Tyne. That’s where Tom Sharp died. That was flowers and water. The start of it.’ Charlie again. More animated than she’d ever known him.
‘Eh, man, that’ll be some surveillance, the whole of the Tyne.’ Joe looked around at them. Not being cruel, but demanding they be more specific. Joe was always the practical one.
‘He’s right, though,’ Vera said. ‘That’s where it started.’ She wondered if she could justify another trip to Acklington Prison to talk to Davy, wondered if by now he’d have something for her. She decided it would have to wait. She didn’t want to be too far from Julie if the worst should happen.
‘Where, then?’ Charlie was sitting on the edge of her desk, hunched forward. This had become personal for him too. Vera wondered if he had a daughter, realized she’d never asked him about kids. She didn’t like talking about other people’s children. It gave her an empty, jealous sort of feeling. ‘The Fish Quay at North Shields where Tom Sharp had the accident? There’s that sheltered bit of the water where the boats tie up.’
‘That’s busy until the early hours. Bars, restaurants. People living in those smart apartments they’ve put up.’
‘It would be some statement, though, if he could get away with it,’ Vera said.
‘Does it have to be a
‘Physically a woman could have done the strangling. Carrying Lily across the rocks to put her in that pool, that’s another question. Who were you thinking about?’
‘Kath Armstrong is the one person who links all the victims,’ Holly said. ‘She’s a nurse. They’re trained to carry, aren’t they?’
‘What motive could she have?’ In her head Vera was trying to find an answer to her own question. Perhaps it had something to do with perfect families. Lily, Luke and Laura had all intruded on the little family in the neat house in Wallsend. Were the crimes Kath’s warped attempt to protect her own little girl?
She was imagining the Tyne at North Shields late at night. The shadows thrown by the buildings, the harbour master’s office, the deserted fish market, the lights from the south bank. Within the dock the water was calm and oily. She pictured the dark shape of a girl, a silhouette against the reflected light on the water. But a body wouldn’t float. Not at first. Perhaps the murderer would find something for her to rest on. A pallet? A fish tray? A small dinghy? And cover her with flowers. What a picture that would make. She tried to clear her head and leave her mind open to other scenes, other places.
‘So, any other possible scenarios?’
‘What about Seaton Pool?’ Joe said. ‘It’s close to where the girl must have been abducted and isn’t there a hide there? The birdwatchers would know about it.’
‘The locals have looked there already,’ Charlie said. ‘It was one of the first places they tried because it was so near to her home, and they know some of the village kids hang out in the hide when they’ve bunked off school. They found a pile of empty lager cans and some graffiti. Otherwise nothing.’
But Vera thought it could very well provide the sort of setting that the killer would be looking for. Seaton Pool had been formed by the subsidence of mine workings, though there was no indication now of the industrial past. It lay between the footpath where Laura had walked to catch her bus and the sea.
When she was a girl, Vera had once sat in the Seaton Pool hide with Hector. There must have been some reason for him to have made a rare trip to the lowlands and it troubled her for a moment that she couldn’t think what it was. Then she remembered. An American coot. They’d waited for more than an hour for it to appear out of the reed bed. It had been a cold sunny day and the pool had been ringed with ice. She’d been bored and Hector had been characteristically offensive to the other birdwatchers. The bird had occasionally been disturbed by people passing along the footpath which followed the west side of the pool. It was a favourite place for dog walkers. During the day, Vera thought, it would be a risky place to set out the body. But the murderer seemed not to mind risk. He seemed not to care whether or not he was caught. And later in the evening there would be no danger at all.
‘Are they still searching along the footpath?’
‘They’ll be at it all day.’
