had been on the envelope.
He didn’t call it straight away. He wasn’t stupid.
He went across London, to a busy and impoverished area where he found a cramped internet café full of Chinese students playing games, headsets on. He chose a seat where no one would be able to see his screen. First he looked up the number and found nothing: it was a mobile but not connected to any business or named individual.
Then he tried searching every variant on ‘body in swimming pool’ he could think of. There were high-profile cases, celebrities, rumours. Nothing that matched what had happened to him. No mystery twenty-something with blue eyes, fair hair, a tattoo that covered one arm. No missing person appeal. It would have helped if he’d had a name to search for but they hadn’t swapped names, had they? They hadn’t said much.
We don’t have to
I want to
Say if you want to stop
He leaned back in his chair and pressed his hands against his face. I want to stop. Make it stop.
The voice at the other end of the phone was cool, female and neutral.
‘I’m pleased to inform you that situation has been resolved.’
‘What do you want from me? Is this blackmail? Because I don’t have money.’ The cheap pay-as-you-go phone slipped in his hand. He was sweating as if he was in a sauna. He turned in a circle, checking that no one was within a few hundred yards of the spot he’d chosen on Hampstead Heath, with all of London spread out in the distance and the illusion of privacy.
At the other end of the line the woman laughed, and told him who she worked for, and everything made a horrible kind of sense.
‘So what do you want?’
‘Think of this as a mutually beneficial arrangement.’
‘What does that mean?’
There might have been a hint of pity in her voice, or condescension. ‘When we need your assistance we’ll let you know.’
18
I was braced for impending doom but when my phone rang at ten past eleven I didn’t realise the moment had arrived.
‘Is that DS Maeve Kerrigan?’
‘Speaking.’
‘My name is Paul Varley. I’m a police constable in Swindon. I believe you’re investigating the murder of Paige Hargreaves.’
I sat bolt upright. ‘I am. What can I do for you?’
‘Well, I hope it’s what I can do for you.’ He had a mellow, measured voice with a pleasant country burr, and sounded as if retirement couldn’t be too far off. ‘I don’t know if it’s any use to you but I thought I should get in touch regarding a conversation I had with this Miss Hargreaves about two weeks before her body was found, regarding an investigation she was doing into some private club in London.’
I pulled my notebook towards me, hope tingling down my spine. ‘That could be very useful. What did she want to know?’
‘Well, it was a backwards kind of conversation. Miss Hargreaves was convinced that there’d been a murder near a village called Standen Fitzallen coming up on two years ago. She wasn’t sure of the address where this crime had taken place or who had been killed, but she knew the date – the night of the twenty-second of July.’
‘She didn’t know much, did she?’
‘Very little. She said someone had told her they’d picked up a friend from the middle of Standen Fitzallen on the twenty-third of July, about four p.m., and he’d been hysterical. He said something about a dead body in a big old country house, in the swimming pool. He’d walked to the village from the house. Miss Hargreaves was wondering if she could match it up with a murder investigation in that general area, around that time.’
‘Could you?’
‘Absolutely not.’ I heard the smile in his voice. ‘You probably deal with murders all the time but it’s not the kind of thing we’d forget. There was nothing of that sort within thirty miles of Standen Fitzallen in July or August that year. And nothing since, either.’
‘But she was sure about the location where the car picked up this person who claimed there’d been a murder?’
‘She was. And I did recall one thing: on that Saturday we had a few phone calls from concerned residents about a young man who was behaving strangely in the village. It’s the sort of place where you can’t cough without someone noticing. Quiet little spot.’
‘What sort of strange behaviour did they notice?’
‘He was barefoot and dishevelled. One or two people tried to talk to him but got no sense out of him.