Buried (DC Jack Warr #1) - Lynda La Plante Page 0,52

. . . but said nothing. He wondered what she wanted him to do – smile? Cry? Ask for a hug? Not knowing how else to get out of having an unwanted emotional exchange, Jack stood, scooping Mike’s diary up and moving away from Laura.

‘Is this all we’re taking?’ he asked.

He knew he’d been rude, but if he wanted a heart-to-heart about losing his dad, it would be with Maggie. He didn’t know how to explain that, so walking away was actually the most polite response he could think of.

Outside, the warden still sat on the stack of tyres with his head dipped and Jack couldn’t tell if he was sleeping until he heard, ‘Ready for off?’

Jack and Laura thanked him for his time, made sure that they could return if and when the identification of ‘Sheila’ was confirmed, and left Mike’s sparse office in the warden’s shaky, but otherwise very capable hands. By the time they had walked back to their car, the warden was still trying to get the key in the door of Mike’s Portakabin to lock it.

‘Sorry for making you feel uncomfortable,’ Laura said.

Jack didn’t know what she was talking about. He stared at her, racking his brain, before deciding that she must be referring to when she put her hand on his arm. He shrugged and smiled a tight, fake smile.

‘I wasn’t uncomfortable. I just thought we’d finished.’

*

When Anik returned to the station, the accompanying PC was carrying nine bagged and tagged pairs of shoes to compare to the footprints found at Rose Cottage. Five came from Mike’s flat, and a further four from Barry’s flat, which they’d also received permission to search.

Barry had not only been out, but his neighbours had confirmed that he hadn’t been seen for just over a week, approximately the same length of time as Mike.

Today had been hugely productive with regards to information about Mike and, although the DNA comparison between the bone marrow and the toothbrush would take between twelve and twenty-four hours to process, most of the officers on Ridley’s team now suspected that their murder victim from Rose Cottage was, in fact, Mike Withey. But Ridley knew that by answering the question of identity, a thousand more questions would need to be asked.

Why was Mike Withey in Rose Cottage? Did he know about, or was he involved in, the train robbery? Or did he stumble across the hidden money years later? Then the biggest of all the questions . . . who killed him? Ridley took Mike’s personnel file into his office and shut his door.

He pored over Mike’s file during this pause in the investigation, while they waited for DNA results. But he didn’t look at Mike’s case reports, as Jack and Laura had done. He looked at Craigh’s. Craigh had been Mike’s DI; therefore Ridley knew how his reports should have been written, so he was looking for anything out of the ordinary. Sure enough, around the time of the wrongful raid in search of weapons at The Grange, Craigh’s reports started to feel clumsy. They lacked detail or seemed incomplete and Mike’s name was often omitted altogether, making Ridley wonder if this was an attempt to distance him from the case. The information that led to the gun raid had come from Mike and was, after all, bogus. Maybe Craigh was protecting his own reputation by distancing himself from Mike? Mike’s personal vendetta against Dolly Rawlins certainly seemed to have influenced his actions and – in Ridley’s opinion – Craigh was covering his back.

The biggest alarm bell for Ridley was that Mike had retired from the police force eight months after the train robbery, spent some time in Spain and acquired enough money from the sale of a villa to buy a massive mansion in Weybridge. Or did he? Did Audrey’s villa sale make anywhere near enough for Mike to buy his £1.5 million house, or did he have money from some other source to make up the shortfall?

From his desk, Ridley could see the two crammed evidence boards in the squad room, and all the faces and names that had so far been connected to one or more crimes dating back as far as 1984.

Did Mike Withey know Norma Walker? And, regardless of Bill Thorn’s saintly opinion of her, was Norma the mounted rider who stopped the train on the night it was robbed? Did Mike help her? Did Barry? It certainly seemed far more likely that people with an inside knowledge of police procedure robbed