‘How could he manage that?’
‘He sweet-talks the WPCs into dropping him the word. Charm the knickers off a Carmelite nun. Anyway, he lived and breathed the story. Can’t be faulted for following it up either. Rings every week: any developments?’
‘The Jacksons think it might help to have a word with him.’
‘He went into the background of everyone involved with a toothcomb. What he doesn’t know about the Jackson killing isn’t worth knowing.’
‘I’ll look him up.’
‘All the best,’ Benson said flatly. ‘All you need to do is break Mahon’s alibi.’
Crane was to remember those words before very long with a wry smile.
TWO
The Standard’s library was both state-of-the-art and user friendly. There was a small room where people wanting to study back numbers could sit at a VDU undisturbed.
Crane was rapidly able to key to the relevant editions, scroll through the pages and bring up the reports on Donna’s death. He started with the front page splash, when Liam Patterson, the underwater swimmer, had touched first a plastic bag that seemed full of something hard and uneven, which was connected by a cord to something soft and smooth. ‘DONNA’S BODY FOUND’, the headline blared.
A body was discovered in the lower of the Tanglewood reservoirs, a well-known local beauty spot, and has been identified as that of Donna Jackson missing from home for three months. The discovery was made by an eleven-year-old boy swimming in the reservoir, despite being forbidden to do so on many occasions by rangers. The police, while taking a strong line on this dangerous practice, admit that in this case it has enabled them, however tragically, to bring their long, dedicated search for Donna to an end. They can reveal that they are to begin immediately re-interviewing everyone known to have been in contact with her, and are optimistic of being able to make an early arrest of the person responsible for the savage killing of this pretty and popular young woman …
There was a quarter-page photo of Donna Jackson’s face. The expert lighting and technique indicated professionalism. Maybe the man called Fletcher had taken it. She really had been incredibly attractive. Smooth, silky, shoulder-length hair in a highlighted honey colour, perfect regular teeth, a small, well-shaped nose, big round eyes that would have seemed luminous even without a key light. The eyes riveted. They seemed to hint at an odd soulful quality, a refinement, an innocence even, that seemed well out of synch with what Crane was beginning to learn about her. He held an old envelope over the left side of her face, then transferred it to the right. Each side seemed a perfect, near geometrical match for the other. He’d read that this precision of feature in an already attractive woman was an extra subliminal turn-on for men.
The man he kept hearing about, Geoff Anderson, was bylined at the head of the report, and on the ones that followed. They became briefer as the search for the killer went on, and though a man was reported to be ‘helping the police with their enquiries’, no other reference was made to him.
Earlier reports, those published when Donna had simply been missing, included interviews Anderson had had with the Jacksons, plus several with various of Donna’s friends and work mates. He’d described her more than once as a high-spirited and outgoing eighteen-year-old with dazzling looks, who was highly regarded at the Leaf and Petal garden centre, and quite possibly on the verge of a brilliant career as a fashion model. She liked to be out and about a lot, but had never been in any kind of trouble and had always been seen at home as an ideal and much-loved daughter and sister.
Crane sat back sceptically. It was all too anodyne. He’d been given the impression Anderson had his ear to the ground. The young woman he was writing about could have been any one of the bright kids you could see most nights in the city pubs and clubs. But there’d been a darker side to Donna Jackson. A Donna who was streetwise and needed no lessons in pulling the men. A Donna who seemed to have a dangerous fascination for being handed a bunch of fives. No hint of any of that in Anderson’s reports, though he was said to have researched her background intensively. Could that mean he’d taken Connie and Malc’s rose-tinted view of their younger daughter at face value? Acrime reporter supposed to have a hard nose?
‘I’d not read on. They never do get their man.’ Crane turned around. ‘Geoff Anderson, Mr Crane. I saw your name in the book. I’ve heard quite a bit about you.’
Crane gave a crooked smile. ‘None of it good, I daresay.’
‘Terry Jones always speaks very highly of you.’
‘Until my spot of trouble, yes, I know.’
Crane didn’t want to talk about it and Anderson could tell. He perched on the edge of a side table. He looked to be mid-twenties and had fair wavy hair, dark blue eyes, a bluntish nose and a full wide mouth. He was strongly built and near six foot but carried no extra weight. He wore a pale blue poplin shirt, open at the neck, fawn woollen trousers and brown loafers.
‘I don’t see a man in your line looking up the Donna Jackson story out of idle curiosity,’ Anderson said, smiling.
‘I was aiming to contact you, Geoff. Connie and Malc, you obviously know them well, have hired me and want me to see if I can turn up anything new about the killing.’
‘About Bobby Mahon?’
‘Everyone’s keen to write his name on the charge sheet.’
He shrugged. ‘He’s not helped himself. If he’s innocent why not admit where he really was the night she disappeared? He certainly wasn’t at home playing three-card brag. I had a go at them myself, Mahon’s pals. Were they really at his place that night? I had a go at the neighbours: brick wall. They said that if the Mahons said they were at home that night they were at home, wherever they really were. On the Willows no one messes with the Mahons. But if they weren’t at home where were they, especially master Bobby? Nowhere I could find out.’
‘You really have given it a lot of time,’ Crane said evenly, not wanting to give any hint of the frustration the case was already giving him.
‘The story had legs. A local cause célèbre. Just about everyone on the Willows knew her, because of those incredible looks. It was like someone had killed a rare butterfly. It got everyone worried about their own teenage daughters, in case the killer struck again.’
‘Knew her yourself?’
He shook his head. ‘I’d seen her around. I trawl the scene: the pubs, the clubs, the casinos. You couldn’t miss her, seemed to be everywhere. You should have seen her, strutting her stuff with the strobes flickering on her hair. Out of this world. Why do you ask?’
Crane gave him a steady look. ‘It seems to me you’ve written her up like the girl next door. I’ve already picked up that that wasn’t the case.’
He gave Crane a wry grin. ‘You’re right, it wasn’t. She had a taste for the wild side. Could have been doing flesh-market photos for Fletcher, if not worse, we’ll never know for sure. I’m pretty certain she was screwing around, probably for the loot, but no punter’s going to come forward and put his hand up. On top of that, she played her cards incredibly close, so close even her pals didn’t really know what she was up to, even if they had a bloody good idea.’
‘Why not write some of that up, or at least hint at it? She certainly wasn’t helping herself to stay out of trouble.’
Anderson watched him in a brief silence. ‘The wench was dead, Frank, and I’d spent a lot of time with Connie and Malc. They had such a shed-load of misery on their backs I felt it would finish them off if there was any hint their beautiful girl was less than perfect. I couldn’t prove anything, it was all hints and murmurs, after all, so I wrote her up as they wanted her to be seen. You’re looking cynical.’ He smiled in the engaging way he had. Crane guessed it must have got him across many a hostile doorstep.