eight in the morning. The funeral wouldn’t have been until ten at the earliest.’
‘But he didn’t have to go in the car and fetch her,’ said Burton. ‘She was due to call at his house with the paper anyway.’
‘He was impatient,’ said Frost, stubbornly. ‘Burning for a bit of the other and couldn’t wait.’
‘So impatient,’ scoffed Gilmore, ‘that he gives her chicken pie, peas and chips at eight o’clock in the morning before he has it away with her and then trots off to his wife’s funeral.’
Frost sank down in the car seat and expelled smoke. ‘All right, so that’s shot that theory up the arse. But I’d still like to have a word with this schoolmaster. Do you know where he lives, Burton?’
Burton nodded.
‘Then take us there. Follow the route the girl went. Point out the houses where she delivered. Show me where her bike was found.’
Burton backed out of Medway Road and cut through some side streets. Gilmore tried to orientate himself, but soon got lost. And then, after a few minutes, the area looked familiar and the car was splashing through Merchant Street. He looked up as the house flashed by, noting that the bedroom curtains were still drawn. Liz would be sleeping, making sure she would be fully refreshed, ready to renew her moaning when he finished his shift. God, what a cynic he was becoming. How he hated this lousy little town.
The car juddered over cobbles as it negotiated a steep hill, then cut through the market place, empty of shoppers in the heavy rain. The houses they passed became fewer and further between and soon they were skirting the woods.
‘She made her first deliveries here,’ said Burton as they crawled past a small, walled estate of some forty houses and maisonettes built by the New Town Development Corporation. ‘You don’t want to see the individual houses, do you?’
‘No,’ replied Frost, ‘just a general outline of the route.’
They left the estate and drove on to the Forest View area where old Victorian properties had been converted into flats, then they headed away from the wood, along bumpy lanes flanked by hedges, past little clusters of old cottages. Burton slowed down and stopped outside a green-roofed bungalow. ‘She made her last delivery there – the Daily Telegraph and a photographic magazine. The lady of the house saw Paula pedalling away down the lane about a quarter past eight. That was the last time she was seen alive.’
Frost stared at the bungalow, then signalled for Burton to drive on. The car sloshed in and out of puddles and turned into an even narrower lane where overgrown branches on each side slashed spitefully at the car as it squeezed through. Burton braked. ‘This is where we found her bike and the abandoned newspapers.’
They climbed out and stood looking down at a deep ditch running beneath an overhanging hedge. The ditch was brimful and covered with a thick layer of emerald green scum, through which the wheels of an upturned supermarket trolley protruded.
‘The bastard must have been waiting for her just about here,’ said Burton.
Frost nodded glumly. He had hoped that visiting the actual locale would give him some magic flash of inspiration. He stood in the pouring rain, looking down into the green slimy water, and decorated it with his discarded cigarette end.
Back in the car he asked Burton where the girl’s bike was. ‘Locked up in the shed at the station. The two newspapers she didn’t deliver are in the exhibits cupboard.’
‘Only two more houses,’ said Burton, as the car bumped into an extra deep puddle which sent a spray of dirty water all over the windscreen.
‘Mind what you’re doing,’ barked Gilmore, who hadn’t had a chance to put Burton in his place for some time.
Burton’s knuckles whitened on the steering wheel, but he controlled his temper. He pointed up a small side lane which crawled up to a two-storeyed house standing on its own. ‘That’s called Brook Cottage. They would have had the Sun but she never made it.’
Brook Cottage looked a mite dilapidated. They could hear a dog barking as they passed.
The lane widened and passed through empty scrub land. After some minutes a red-bricked house lurched up in front of them. It was an old, solid-looking property and stood alone in extensive grounds. A shirt-sleeved man was working in the garden seemingly oblivious to the pouring rain. ‘She finished her round here,’ announced Burton as he switched off the engine. ‘The man in the