Chapter Thirty-Two

Morning found me outside Frankie’s house, a three-storey block of blackened millstone, with large bay windows at the front and side, and double wooden front doors. The path from the gate curved between the two low walls that held back the flower beds. Except that there were no flowers. Brambles blocked the tarmac path and grass sprouted through in places. The gate creaked as I opened it, the latch stiff. My footsteps echoed between the walls and the overhanging rhododendron bushes, and I had to duck in places to make my way to the house.

As I got nearer, the garden opened out, and I saw that the lawns were long and sweeping, like those at the Gilbert house; but these were unkempt and overgrown, the green broken by the yellow speckles of buttercups. Rose bushes filled the beds in front of the windows, but the petals lay fallen on the soil, the heads brown.

I looked up at the house. There were no signs of life, the windows gloomy, grubby net curtains hanging in each one. I went to the doors and knocked but the sound came back as deadened thuds.

I stepped back and looked up at the windows again. I couldn’t see anyone, not so much as the twitch of a net curtain. I stepped forward to bang on the door again and then turned to look around me. As I looked back towards the road, I saw that Frankie’s house was more elevated than the Gilbert house; I reckoned I would be able to see into the garden if the bushes were trimmed back.

There was still no answer, so I scribbled ‘Call me’ onto the back of a business card and posted it through the letterbox.

I hadn’t gone too far down the path before I heard something behind me. When I turned around, I saw a man in the doorway, staring at me. He was tall, late thirties, with unkempt dark hair and bright rosy cheeks, as if he had been sitting in front of the fire all morning.

I started to walk back towards him. ‘Frankie?’ I asked.

He nodded, but looked nervous.

‘I’m Jack Garrett,’ I said, as I got to the door. ‘You were looking for me the other day.’

He nodded again.

‘So why didn’t you answer the door?’

He was still not saying anything.

I peered past him, along a dark hallway.

‘Shall we talk inside?’ I suggested. When he didn’t answer, I added, ‘It’s about Claude Gilbert,’ trying to nudge him into a conversation. ‘You can tell me about Claude Gilbert.’

He started to say something but stammered, and then he moved out of the way so I could go into the house.

As I walked past him, I put my sleeve to my nose as the smell from the house hit me, like old rotting rubbish. I heard the door close behind me.

As Laura walked into the briefing room, she saw Thomas in the corner, looking at some incident logs that related to an arrest she had been involved in the day before, where a husband had beaten his wife until she was left cowering in a corner, blood streaming from a nose that hadn’t looked straight. There had been numerous incidents before, but the victim had always refused to make a statement. Now she finally had, but the prisoner hadn’t got past the interview stage before his wife had arrived at the front desk to make a new one that exonerated him.

‘Hello, Laura,’ Thomas said, brighter than he had been earlier in the week. Maybe that nervousness was starting to fade. Laura remembered that transition from the early part of her career.

Laura smiled her greeting, but she knew that she appeared distracted, her conversation with Jack the night before still preying on her mind.

She went to a spare computer and logged on. Her fingers hovered nervously over the keys, scared to type in the name of Mike Dobson. Misusing a police computer would get Laura the sack, and maybe even a court appearance, and she knew it would look as if she was helping Jack with information. But she didn’t want to go to Joe Kinsella with half a story. If she was going to give up Jack’s findings, she wanted it to be with something reliable, and not the ramblings of some imposter whose address or pseudonym Jack wouldn’t disclose.

She closed her eyes. Everything told her not to get involved, to just pass on the name to Joe Kinsella, let him do the running, but Laura still wanted to stay loyal to Jack. There was no prospect of the London Met kicking in the door of a Belgravia apartment on the word of a reporter. Different force, different targets, with nothing to gain except more paperwork.

Laura let her fingers drift across the keys to find something on Mike Dobson. She wasn’t hopeful—he would be a middle-aged insurance salesman and probably led a blameless life.

The list was small, just three. One was a teenager, another one a serial burglar in his forties. The first was too young to be Nancy Gilbert’s lover, and the second maybe a rough edge too far—though people find love in strange places. The mistake Laura had made with her husband told her that, all muscles and bright smile, and too happy to share it around. He had given her Bobby and also a mistrust of men. Laura looked at the burglar again, but when she brought up his record she saw that he received two years for robbery in March 1988, a couple of months before Nancy died. That was back in the good old days, when prison was tough and people didn’t walk out of jail after just a few weeks just because there was no room at the inn. A bunch of crooks climbed onto the roof of Strangeways the year after and changed all that, but back then, in early 1988, Mike Dobson the burglar had the best alibi of all. He was behind bars.

But as Laura looked at the remaining Mike Dobson, she realised that he was about the right age, early fifties, and his life wasn’t blameless. He didn’t have a record, but the force monitored kerb-crawlers, just so that they could send out a few letters when the local residents complained, and his name came up as the owner of a vehicle that had been spotted patrolling the red light zone. He had avoided the warning letter so far, but by good fortune alone.

Laura smiled at that. If he was married, he would soon forget about the purpose of Laura’s visit once the door clicked closed and he was left alone to explain himself to his wife.

Laura looked over at Thomas. ‘Do you fancy a home visit to offer some community advice?’

Thomas nodded and then reached for his jacket and hat, both still pristine. It was too nice to stay indoors.

As they left the room and walked into the atrium, she glanced upwards and saw a figure on the top-floor balcony. It was Rachel Mason, the sunlight streaming in through the high windows, catching her hair and making it gleam. Laura looked away, but she could feel the woman’s eyes tracking her as she made her way to the station exit.