Weirdo Read online

Eric held his tongue.

  “Now, my sister-in-law’s got a nice boy,” the DCI went on. “Dale, his name is. Same age as your Sammy.”

  Eric’s eyes narrowed as he rifled through the index folder of his mind for the reminder of that surname. “Smollet?” he said. “Ted’s nephew? Worked out front with him last season, on the arrows?”

  “That’s the one,” said Rivett.

  “I’ll tell you how nice he is,” said Eric. “One night last July, half my staff suddenly go missing. Turns out, they’re all up on the rollercoaster, getting a good look at your sister-in-law’s boy – with his bare arse going up and down on some tart in the dunes.”

  Rivett chuckled affectionately. “Well, he were a bit of a boy, that’s true,” he said. “Which is why she sent him to me over the Christmas holidays, to have a bit of a chat and that. Turns out, he fancy joining the Force, making a man of himself. With the right guidance, he could go far. Next time there’s a bit of a do on, I’ll introduce you.”

  “You’re joking, in’t you?” said Eric.

  “No I in’t,” said Rivett. “You know I only have your best intentions at heart, Eric. And a marriage between our families … Think what that could mean.”

  Eric opened his mouth and then shut it again.

  “Right, well,” Rivett continued cheerfully. “Now old Gina’s got you your jollies like I knew she would, I gotta go clean up the rest of her mess.” He winked as he headed for the door. “Got to catch me a mangy old Wolf – and you have put me right in the mood.”

  27

  She Sells Sanctuary

  March 2003

  Sean and Rivett stood under the creaking pub sign, looking into the open boot of the older man’s Rover, at an open cardboard box.

  “Two for you,” Rivett reached in and passed the sealed, labelled DNA swab kits over to Sean. “You still want me to look for the third?”

  Sean nodded. “Yeah. Does our Mr Prim strike you as the sort of bloke who’d sit up all night burning candles in a pillbox?” he asked.

  Rivett raised his eyebrows. “You ever been round a biker’s house?” he asked.

  “Can’t say I’ve had that particular pleasure,” said Sean.

  “But you’ve seen your fair share of dope dealers’ dives, though, in’t you?”

  Sean nodded.

  “Then you’ve seen the amount of candles them prats get through. That’s part of the mystical bollocks they all seem to believe in, that go along with their addled memories and poor personal hygiene.” Rivett grimaced. “And according to Einstein back there, we’re looking for someone clean and neat.”

  “Point taken,” said Sean, with a smile.

  “Still,” said Rivett, his expression brightening. “That won’t do no harm to bend his ear, though, will it? Oh, and here’s them clean ones you wanted.” He produced the remaining kits out of the same box.

  “Thanks,” said Sean.

  “Right,” said Rivett, slamming down the boot lid. “Happy hunting. See you back at the office.”

  Sean limped slowly back to the car, the effort of his reconnoitres across the dunes and the bitter wind having frozen the iron in his legs and rendered his fingers almost numb. Rivett, on the other hand, seemed keen to get away from the place. He exited the car park swiftly, honking his horn as he went.

  Sean watched the Rover crest the top of the bridge and disappear from view. Then, casting around to make sure he was alone, he retraced their footsteps back to the sea wall. At the bottom of the steps he found what he was looking for.

  The stub of Rivett’s cigar went into the first of the plastic bags.

  * * *

  “Hello?”

  Sean had stood on Sheila Alcott’s doorstep for ten minutes, ringing the bell and then, deciding it must be broken, rapping the brass knocker against the front door. He stood back, looking up at the diamond-patterned windows, as he shouted out a greeting.

  The windows returned a blank gaze.

  Sean shook his head and walked around to the back of the building, checking his watch. Ten minutes past three, it read, the second hand still gliding steadily around the face. He was on time and he was expected.

  “Hello?” he called again.

  The dull cawing of rooks was the only reply.

  The Alcott smallholding, optimistically named Greenfields Farm, comprised of a flint-clad farmhouse, clasped so deeply within the gnarled embrace of an old wisteria that it looked as if the plant was holding it upright, and a series of outbuildings clustered around a concreted yard. Behind lay acres of grazing, dotted with the distant, black-and-white bodies of Friesian cows.

  The buildings were surrounded by a copse, the bare upper branches of the trees thick with the nests of the rook parliament. The sun had given up its earlier attempts to break through the clouds, which had darkened to the point of a rainburst as Sean drove up the Acle Straight. Now clouds hung like a shroud over the humps of the buildings, droplets running along the telephone wires overhead.

  Sean’s eyes travelled around the yard. One of the barn doors was open, revealing an ancient tractor in shades of rust and mud, and various other pieces of machinery that seemed to Sean like an assembly of medieval torture implements – spikes and scythes, great rolls of chains on giant spindles. His mind drifted back to the book he’d bought in Farrer’s, the stories of the Swing mob.

  A pair of green eyes peered out of the gloom. For a split second, Sean’s heart jumped in his chest, before he realised what it was. Just a fat tabby cat, sitting on top of a hay bale. The creature opened its mouth, revealing sharp white teeth, and emitted a yowl. At the same time, a creaking noise and the crunching of feet made Sean jump, his head snapping around to see a short woman in a wax jacket, corduroys and Wellington boots, a headscarf barely containing her frizz of salt-and-pepper hair, come trundling into the yard, pushing a wheelbarrow.

  “Oh!” she looked at Sean aghast, plonked the handlebars of her wheelbarrow down and scrabbled up her sleeve to find her watch. “Is that the time?”

  Sean chuckled with relief. Sheila, with her lopsided headgear and Mother’s Union badge pinned to the front of her jacket, was a far cry from the sinister apparition of bloodthirsty nineteenth-century villagers his mind had conjured out of the gloomy farmyard.

  “I was just down at the compost heap,” she explained, picking up the handles again and manoeuvring the barrow into the open barn. “I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting. You must be Mr Ward?”

  “That’s right.” Sean followed her in. The cat roused itself onto its legs, stretching and yawning, then jumped down from the bale and made a beeline for Sean, rubbing its big, flat head against his legs and purring like a steam train.

  “Sheila Alcott.” She took her right hand out of a thick, yellow leather glove and offered it to shake. “You are honoured,” she glanced down at the cat. “She doesn’t normally talk to strangers, do you, Minnie dear?”

  Sean caught a trace of a Midlands accent as she spoke. She had been here a long time, but Sheila wasn’t local.

  “Come in,” she ushered him out of the barn, closing the door behind them, “and I’ll put kettle on. You look frozen.”

  “Yeah,” Sean admitted as he followed her out. “Does it take very long to acclimatise?”

  “Oh,” said Sheila, opening the back door, “only about thirty years.”

  Sean had to duck to get through the doorway, but inside the farmhouse was as full of colour as the outside was grey. In Sheila’s kitchen, wildflowers spilled from red and blue glass vases, dried herbs hung from the beams that ran up the walls and along the ceiling and cheery faces in photographs smiled out at Sean from every shelf and windowsill.

  “We might as well sit in here,” said Sheila, turning the dial on an old gas boiler, which responded with a foreboding rumble. “It’s the warmest room in the house.”

  Sean sat himself down at the pine kitchen table, watching Sheila put the kettle on and fetch down willow-patterned china from the Welsh dresser. The
cat slunk its way into its basket, turned three times and sank down onto a patchwork blanket, from where it maintained surveillance on Sean through half-closed eyes.

  “My husband’s out doing home visits,” Sheila brought a homemade fruitcake to the table, “he won’t be back for few hours yet.”

  Sean followed her glance to the smiling face of the man in the dog collar in some of the photographs, then back to the ornate, interlaced cross she wore around her neck. They were obviously a couple whose faith sustained them.

  Sean often wondered if he could have benefited from such conviction himself. But his vision of a just God had shattered when his dad had come back from Goose Green in a box. Even in the darkest hours of his hospitalisation, he had not groped to find Him since.

  Sheila sat down opposite him. She picked up a teaspoon and lifted the lid of the pot.

  “Stir up tea, stir up trouble.” Her accent thickened as she spoke and she shot him a grin that was the opposite of pious.

  “I’ve read the report you gave to Francesca Ryman,” Sean nodded. “And I have to say, it disturbs me that none of this got to come out at the original trial.”

  Sheila snapped down the lid on the teapot.

  “If I have one thing to thank God for today,” she said, “it’s that after all this time, someone’s finally investigating who isn’t part of the bloody Ernemouth police force.”

  * * *

  In the basement of The Ship Hotel, Damon Boone sat at a laptop, his fingers rattling across the keyboard as a series of windows opened on the screen.

  “Won’t be much longer now,” he said, flicking his long, greasy fringe out of his eyes.

  “All right, boy,” Rivett, sitting next to him, gave a smile that was more of a grimace, his eyes travelling around the landlady’s son’s room.

  There was nothing but computers in here, in various shapes and sizes, humming away from the racks of shelves, their innards connected by spaghetti junctions of thick grey wires and banks of blinking lights. Some of them had scrolls of numbers rolling up and down their monitors, others showed sequences of graphic images, lines folding into themselves, taking the eyes on a kind of fairground ride of optical illusion. It made Rivett feel uncomfortable, this Tomorrow’s World vision of the future come true – and what it had amounted to.

  Bloody boffins ran everything now. From Einstein with the forensics to Q sitting here next to him, talking “three-way-encrypted passwords” and other such voodoo.

  “Room four was the easiest one for me to set up,” Damon said. “The pelmet on the top of the bay window hides four spycams that just about cover each angle. There’s another one in the headboard and, of course, one in the light above the desk. Which is just as well,” he pointed towards the screen. “Your bloke don’t half move around a lot.”

  Rivett took in the series of images now being displayed in the windows on the screen. Each showed Sean Ward at work on his laptop in his hotel room from various angles, overhead and sideways. In some, he sat at the desk, in others he was lying across the bed, or leaning against the headboard with the computer across his lap. The most interesting one to Rivett so far showed him reading the case notes of a social worker.

  “This is the magic one,” Damon clicked onto the window that showed Sean sitting at the desk, so that it expanded to fill the screen. “Look, you can see him logging on.”

  Rivett peered at the grainy image.

  “It’s his fingers that are important,” Damon leant in a little too close for Rivett’s liking, tapping something else on his keyboard that made the image on the screen slow down.

  “By watching this carefully a few times, I could see exactly what he inputs on the keyboard to access his files.”

  The look Rivett exchanged with his companion was one that prompted the younger man to stop trying to show him how clever he had been, and instead, cut to the chase.

  “Which brings me to this,” Damon rapidly clicked all the windows closed, opened up another file instead. A page of emails spread out across the screen before them.

  “His inbox,” said Damon, leaning back in his seat and swivelling his chair to the side, a slight churning in his stomach. “He deletes them as he goes along, but I managed to retrieve them. It’s all yours.”

  Rivett’s eyes scanned down the screen. The most recent email had come in not five minutes ago, from FRANCESCA RYMAN entitled ORGAN GRINDER/MONKEY. It took him a beat to place the name as he clicked it open, and then rapidly dissemble the implications of Ward’s correspondence with the Ernemouth Mercury editor.

  Following the money, he read. Got an expert looking into R&S’s possible business dealings. If there’s something there, he will find it. About to call press office to set up interview with S now.

  Rivett whistled through his teeth. These two were sharper than he thought. Which just went to prove the wisdom of always having a contingency plan.

  “I always said you’d go far,” he told Damon. “Mind if I borrow your phone, while you go make us a cup of tea? Take a nice, long time about it, won’t you, boy?”

  “Course.” Damon virtually pushed the landline into Rivett’s lap as he got to his feet.

  Closing the door behind him, he heard Rivett say: “Hello, Pat?”

  * * *

  Out in the hall, a grandfather clock chimed five times. The fruitcake had been decimated over the past couple of hours, the remains of the third round of tea a mere dribble running out into Sheila’s cup.

  She put the pot down and rubbed her eyes, smudging pale blue shadow over one cheek as she did so. Tired now, from the effort of unloading all that had been bottled up for the past two decades.

  “Shall I make another?” she asked.

  Sean shook his head. “No, you’re all right,” he said, putting his hand down on the tape recorder. “I should be thinking about going, really, I’ve got another appointment at six. I’m sure we’ve covered everything. Oh,” he stopped short of turning the machine off, “but there’s just one more thing I wanted to ask you.”

  “Yes?” Resting her head in her right hand, Sheila gave a faint smile.

  “How did Francesca find you?”

  Sheila frowned. “Through her father, of course,” she said.

  “Her father?” it was Sean’s turn to look puzzled.

  “Philip,” said Sheila. “Philip Pearson. You know, he used to be Corrine’s form teacher.”

  Sean’s eyes widened. “She never said.”

  Sheila bit her lip. “Oh,” she said. “Then …”

  “But now it makes sense,” Sean cut her off. “Philip Pearson went to the nationals and told them some painful truths about Ernemouth, got hounded out of his job for his trouble. You tried the same with the local press and found yourself being shut down and slung out too. How old was Francesca when all this was going on – about ten, twelve?”

  “Something like that …” Sheila hesitated, a frown creasing her forehead.

  Sean pressed the stop button on the Dictaphone and forced a smile.

  “No need to look worried, Mrs Alcott,” he said. “I’m not …” he stopped himself short of saying “Len Rivett” and instead, changed tack. “I’m just trying to figure her out. Francesca’s been very helpful to me, and I wondered if she had some ulterior motive. This job I have, you see, it gives me a suspicious mind. So, that’s the reason she became a journalist …”

  “She was doing very well at it,” said Sheila, “until her mother got ill.”

  Sean spooled back to the morning’s conversation with Nora Linguard. “It’s terribly sad; she died quite recently, Mrs Pearson. She was only in her fifties. Cancer, you know …”

  “She came back to take care of her,” said Sheila, “only I think it was Philip who needed her help the most. That’s why she gave up her job in London and her marriage …”

  Sheila’s fingers flew up to her lips. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. It’s too personal.” Then a fierce expression came over her. “But that’s the thing abo
ut Francesca,” she said. “I wish I could ever have been as strong as she is. I thought it was fate when that Sid Hayles died and she ended up getting his job.”

  Her face softened again. “That’s why she didn’t tell you,” Sheila patted Sean’s hand. “She wouldn’t have wanted you to think she was doing this for any other reason but to get to the truth. None of us ever expected that this would ever get looked into again, you see. We thought it would die with us.”

  “But,” Sean stared into Sheila’s eyes, “what is the truth, Mrs Alcott? You and Francesca have done a good job of convincing me that Corrine Woodrow is not the murderer and it seems we have evidence to back that up. But if she isn’t, then who is?”

  The fear came into Sheila’s eyes again. She averted her gaze to the window where the grey gloom of the afternoon was darkening into night.

  “That,” she said, “is the one thing I can’t tell you.”

  * * *

  Rivett was still talking when Damon came back with the teas. He stood outside his room, straining for the sound of the back door closing, his mother’s footfall on the stair. The churning in his stomach had worsened as the long minutes of the afternoon ticked on and he wrestled with what he had done. The decades’ long string of favours that Rivett had spun out of him for one stupid teenage transgression.

  Up until yesterday, Damon had thought that the worst thing that could happen would be for Rivett to show his mother the videotape. But now, he felt with a sick certainty, he had gone and got himself embroiled in something much worse.

  “That’s right, Andy,” he heard Rivett say through the door. “Same as last time, that mad old fen famer Alcott … No, I don’t believe she has or ever will … Well, you know, all that rusty old machinery lying around out there. Accidents will happen …”

  Only when he heard the receiver being slammed down with characteristic grace did he dare nudge the door open.

  Rivett swivelled in his chair, smiling up at Damon. “Would you mind putting all this on one of them things for me?” he said. “Memory sticks, or whatever you call them.”

  “Sure,” said Damon, putting the teas down on the desk in front of Rivett, fighting down the bile that was rising up his throat as he walked over to the filing cabinet.