“What else do you know about him?”
“Precious little, and even that’s too much. He’s a student, isn’t he? A layabout.”
“Did you try to break it up?”
“I’m not that daft. No, I let her bring him to the house. Not in her room, mind. They’d go for walks round the grounds, that sort of thing. I hoped it was a phase. A crush. You know what teenage girls are like. Easily impressed.”
“Anything else you can tell us about him?”
“Look, do you think Kuiper — did this to her?”
“I’m not saying that, Mr. Stirrup. But Peter Kuiper still hasn’t returned to his digs. We don’t know why. So we need to see him, if only to eliminate him from our enquiries.”
“By Christ, if he — ”
Harry judged it was time to intervene. “What about The Beast, Inspector?”
“What about him, Mr. Devlin?”
“This is a sex killing of a teenage girl. You’ve a man on the loose who has been terrorising young women for months. Surely that’s no coincidence.”
“I don’t need you to teach me my job,” Bolus said. It was the first time he had been betrayed into even a hint of temper or impatience. “And you can rest assured that we are already taking steps to — what’s the phrase in that old film? — round up the usual suspects. Even so, we need to investigate whether there may have been a more personal link between the murderer and your client’s daughter.”
“Are you bothered because Claire didn’t have blonde hair?” Harry persisted. He wanted to provoke Bolus into showing more of his hand. “Worried simply that this crime doesn’t fit the nice little offender profile your people have built up?”
“No,” said the detective. “We think Claire knew her killer.”
“What makes you say that?” demanded Stirrup.
Bolus took off his glasses and slowly polished them with a bit of cloth he had pulled from his pocket. Taking time to think. Weighing up, Harry felt sure, the relative tactical advantages of frankness and concealment.
“It’s like this,” Bolus said eventually. “You’ll remember, Mr. Stirrup, that when we took a look at your daughter’s bedroom on Saturday we removed with your consent a number of personal items?”
“Odds and ends, that’s all.”
“One of them was your daughter’s personal organiser.”
Harry remembered. Expensive, in black leather, with Claire’s initials in gold on the front. A present from last Christmas, Stirrup had said.
“You’re barking up the wrong tree, Bolus. There wasn’t anything in the diary part for Saturday. I looked. She wasn’t much of a one for writing up a diary.”
“Yes, Mr. Stirrup. But a page of brief notes in the memo section caught our attention. A list of items. Things you might expect to appeal to a young girl. Like a bottle of perfume by Christian Dior. A gold ankle chain. All of them crossed out — except for the last.”
“I don’t follow you,” said Stirrup.
“What was last on the list, Inspector?” Harry asked.
“A dozen red roses.”
Stirrup said, “So bloody what?”
Bolus brushed an errant strand of hair from his eyes. Harry felt himself tensing, awaiting the revelation.
“When your daughter’s body was found,” the detective said, “scattered over it were a dozen red roses.”
Chapter Fourteen
“Imagine how the kids who found her must have felt,” said Jack Stirrup. He was gazing blindly out towards the Irish Sea and Harry guessed he was seeing Claire’s face in his mind. “Two young scallywags larking about. I bet their parents have something to say to them. Everyone knows those caves are dangerous.”
At last his control broke and his heavy body began to shake with the strain of suppressed emotion. Harry slipped an arm round his shoulder in mute support. He and Jack Stirrup would never be close friends, but Harry had not forgotten how it felt to have someone ripped out of his life by brutal murder.
“The bastard, the bastard, the bastard.” Stirrup spoke softly; he might have been uttering a prayer. Harry could sense the tension in the man as he made an effort to steady himself and took a lungful of air before speaking again.
“Whoever did that to her, I’ll find him. You wait and see. I’ll find him, no matter how long it takes. And when I do, I’ll kill him.”
Harry moved his arm away. “Leave it to the police.”
Even as he uttered the words, he had a clammy feeling of hypocrisy. After Liz’s death, he had experienced the same primitive urge for revenge. Nor did he regard that urge as unhealthy. To react less fiercely to the murder of the person whom one loved most in the world would surely be unnatural. And in the end, he hadn’t carried out his own threat. At least, not directly.
They were sitting on a bench overlooking the front at New Brighton. In different circumstances, it would be pleasant to be here instead of cooped up in the office at the end of another glorious afternoon. But this was one day when no sun could warm them.
Behind them, out of sight but at the forefront of their minds, bramble-covered cliffs marked the original line of the coast. At one time, waves had lapped where they were now sitting. A few hundred yards away, opposite the swimming pool, outcrops of brightly coloured sandstone stood out against the greenery. The Noses. Yes, Harry remembered, that was the silly name given to them. The Red Noses and the Yellow Noses. Caves ran beneath the rocks, caves where once, according to local legend, smugglers had hidden their contraband. In days gone by, wreckers had plied their trade here. Forget Frenchman’s Creek and all that Cornish crap, Harry could remember once telling Liz, after a glance at some local history book had aroused his interest in New Brighton’s discreditable past. This is where the action used to be.
And so it was again today. Stirrup had insisted on coming here, as soon as Bolus had finished with him. He wanted to see where his daughter had been found and, unable to dissuade him with anything short of physical restraint, Harry had agreed to drive him here. The police were still on the scene, combing it for forensic clues. They had succeeded where Harry had failed in preventing the bereaved father from entering the cave. At last, Stirrup yielded to the inevitable and agreed to leave the investigators to their work. Yet he refused to go far, and from their bench they could hear the sound of crackling walkie-talkies wafting through the air.
“Look at them,” Stirrup said after a short while. He jerked his thumb in the direction of the crowd of sightseers which had gathered by the edge of the cordon which the police had thrown round the caves. “Carrion crows. Feeding off the dead.”
It was good that he had chosen anger, thought Harry. A positive response. The alternative would be to surrender to the senselessness of it all. Let him start to work the rage out of his system now, with violent, cathartic words. But not deeds.
“They’ll be telling their mates about it in the pub tonight,” muttered Stirrup. “Trying to picture it. The body in that cold hole in the rocks. My daughter. My bloody daughter.”
Two ten-year-old boys had found Claire. The caves were supposed to be sealed and inaccessible to the public, but the kids had found an entrance to an old passageway at the bottom of the garden of Hasbrook Heights, a small guest house standing under the shelter of the cliffs. They had found a gap in the perimeter fence which was, Bolus said, visible from a nearby path. Any local person might be aware of how to gain access to that particular cave. It even had a nickname in the neighbourhood. The Mouse’s Hole.
And so the boys had trespassed through flower beds, broken into the cave through a trapdoor of rotting wood set in the lawn, squeezed down a narrow chimney-like shaft and discovered something that would haunt them the rest of their lives. Propped against the sandstone wall, the earthly remains of Claire Stirrup.
“Suppose I should be glad those kids found her when they did,” said Stirrup after a long silence. “At least the waiting’s over. Soon as she disappeared, I knew it meant trouble. And I knew I hadn’t killed her, despite what the police thought.”