I stand there, reading. Re-reading. I can hear them all behind me. The murmurs, the trying to work out which way it’s going.
I turn back to face them. ‘What do we have on Walsh?’
‘Plenty, actually,’ says Quinn as the energy in the room shifts up a notch. ‘We’ve got his fingerprints on some of the boxes in the cellar, as well as in the kitchen and on some of the items in the shed –’
‘So how does Walsh explain that?’
Quinn shakes his head. ‘Nothing doing. Insisted he’s never been in the cellar and demanded to speak to his lawyer before he answered any more questions. We’re still waiting for her to arrive. But when she does, we’ll also be asking Walsh about a collection of netsuke Harper inherited from his first wife. You know, this sort of thing.’ He holds up a page of images. An ivory hare, two entwined frogs, a coiled snake, a crow curled round a skull. Beautiful and tiny and perfect.
‘Walsh wanted them back,’ continues Quinn, ‘but Harper refused. Only there’s no sign of them in the house. There’s a cupboard in the bedroom where Walsh says they were but it’s empty.’
‘So this collection – was it valuable?’
Quinn nods. ‘Could be. Walsh told us they were only worth a few hundred but I happen to know rare examples can fetch a hundred grand or more. Each.’ I see Somer glance across at him and the effort he makes to avoid her eye.
‘Actually, sir,’ says Somer, addressing herself rather pointedly to me, not Quinn, ‘I saw a display cabinet on the wall in Walsh’s house when we called there. It had quite a distinctive design – the sort of thing people buy for collections of netsuke.’
One thing I do know: her pronunciation is much better than Quinn’s.
‘My personal theory?’ Quinn continues as if the interruption never happened. ‘I reckon Walsh realized Harper was starting to lose it and took the opportunity to swipe the collection. Either all in one go, or gradually, so it wasn’t so obvious in case someone like Ross was snooping around. That could mean he’s been going to that house much more often than he’s letting on. So he could have been there that day – the day Vicky was abducted.’
‘But wouldn’t someone have seen him if he’d been going there a lot?’ says Baxter. ‘There was only one neighbour who said she saw him and that was a good while ago.’
‘I don’t think we should take that as conclusive. Not in that part of Oxford. And in any case, he could have come at night. I doubt anyone would have noticed him in the dark.’
‘Right,’ I say, addressing the whole room. ‘Gislingham – organize a search of Walsh’s house. And let’s remember, he only lives in Banbury. If he really is some sort of sexual psychopath, Frampton Road would have been the ultimate safe house – far enough away but not too far, only an old lady next door, a cellar with thick walls and no windows –’
‘Christ, even better than the Loony Lock-up,’ quips Gislingham to laughter that comes as a release of the tension. It’s a joke we have – ever since Prime Suspect every TV serial killer seems to have his own private torture chamber. As Alex once drily observed, clearly all that’s required to round up any currently operational serial killers is a systematic sweep of the nation’s railway arches.
‘And another thing,’ I continue. ‘When I interviewed Harper he said he doesn’t go down to the cellar any more – that he’d started to hear noises coming from it. “Wailing and scratching” were the actual words. He appeared to be genuinely frightened. And that could make sense, if Walsh had locked Vicky down there without Harper knowing. The old man’s getting confused, he drinks – it’s not inconceivable Walsh could have got the girl into the house without him knowing. After all, he probably has a key.’
‘Yeah,’ says Gislingham, ‘but isn’t Harper going to say something like that, even if it’s not true? He’s bound to claim he never knew anything about it.’
‘In theory, yes, but this came out towards the end of the interview, when Harper was starting to get more confused. I don’t think he was faking that. It could also explain something else that’s been bugging me about Harper. Kidnapping that girl, keeping her locked up – a crime like that doesn’t come out of a blue sky. There’s always something that leads up to it – some sort of escalation over time, even if that’s only obvious in retrospect. But with Harper, there’s nothing – or nothing we’ve found.’
‘There’s the porn in the house,’ says Baxter.
‘Yeah,’ says Quinn. ‘But what if that was actually Walsh’s stuff? Let’s face it, it’d be a safer place for a schoolteacher to stash it than in his own home.’
‘Right,’ I say. ‘So let’s get prints from it to be sure. And everything I said about escalation – that all applies to Walsh, just as much as to Harper. If it was him, there’ll be something that led up to it. Some trace we can find if we look hard enough.’
‘There was a kid in his room at the school,’ says Gislingham. ‘Poor little bastard looked terrified.’
Somer looks up. ‘It’s also the third school he’s taught at in the last ten years. I ran the records. It would be worth checking if there’s anything behind that.’
She’s good, that woman. She’s very good.
‘OK, Somer – can you pick up the Banbury end. Work with Gislingham to liaise with the local force at both the school and the house.’
I see Quinn look at her, then me, then away. He’s pissed off, but I don’t care.
‘Any news on the girl?’ says one of the DCs at the back.
‘She still hasn’t said anything,’ says Everett. ‘But I’ll be going back to the hospital in the morning.’
‘And the kid?’
Everett glances at me, then across at the DC. ‘He’s OK. Better.’
I nod briefly to Everett. A nod of thanks. For her discretion.
‘OK,’ I continue. ‘Now – Hannah Gardiner. Despite the appeal for witnesses, no one’s yet come forward with any new information about Hannah’s movements that morning –’
‘Apart from the usual nut-jobs,’ mutters the DC at the back.
‘– but we do have two significant new facts. The first is that she often parked her car in Frampton Road. So if we’re now looking at Walsh as a possible suspect we urgently need to check where he was that day – whether he could have met her on the street. Schools tend to keep pretty good records so we may get lucky.’
The noise level is rising and I raise my voice. ‘However – and there’s a big but coming here, people – we also have a second new fact that points in a completely different direction. Baxter’s spoken to Beth Dyer, who told him something that puts a rather different slant on the relationship between Hannah and Rob. Something Miss Dyer unfortunately didn’t see fit to share with us two years ago. And which could also explain why we still haven’t found any trace of a murder scene at Frampton Road.’
Baxter gets up and turns to face the group. ‘Beth says she saw Hannah a few weeks before she disappeared, with a bruise on her face. Hannah claimed it was an accident with Toby but Beth didn’t believe her. She thought it was Rob – that the two of them had been having problems. She skirted around that idea back in 2015 but she’s come right out with it now. And she did say one thing that struck me – whoever it was who killed Hannah, how did they know where to dump her car? There weren’t that many people who knew where she was going that day. Walsh wouldn’t have, and Harper wouldn’t either, for that matter. But Rob did. That’s why Beth thinks Rob did it. That and the bruises.’