“Was Christopher here before you?” Vera asked.
“Can’t have been. I’d have had to walk right past him to get to my Peg.”
“Did you see which way he came from?”
Michael only shook his head. The place seemed to have knocked all the spirit out of him. Vera stood looking about her for a moment. Beyond the dry stone wall there was open country on three sides, tussocky grass grazed by sheep. In a field there was something dead. It was too small for a sheep, probably a rabbit. It had been picked over by crows, and only bones and a scrap of fur remained. The wall was too high to be scrambled over without a fuss. Christopher Winter must have come through the gate.
“Show me where this road goes, then,” she said, opening it to let him out. “Can you drive all the way down?”
“Aye, some people keep boats there in the summer, and there’s a bit of a car park for folks who want a stroll along the riverbank. Do you want to go back for your car?”
“Is it far?”
“Half a mile at most.”
“We’ll walk it, then, shall we?” She was thinking she should warn Joe Ashworth that they’d be a while getting in to the station, but when she looked at her mobile there was no signal. The lane was straight, with a sparse hawthorn hedge on one side and a full ditch fringed with blackened reeds on the other. The hawthorn bushes had knotted trunks, smeared with green lichen and a scattering of berries. A small flock of redwing chased along the hedge, flipping occasionally into the field beyond. In the distance was a farmhouse surrounded by a graveyard of rotting machinery.
“Who lives there?” she asked.
“No one now. Cyril Moore died a month or so ago. Someone said it’s been sold. They’re going to turn it into a riding school. No money in farming these days.”
The tide was out when they arrived at the river. There were acres of ridged sand and mud, which seemed to stretch almost all the way to the Lincolnshire coast. A cloud of small wading birds, gathered like insects into a swarm, rose in a cyclone above them then settled back onto the mud. The hull of a clinker-built boat rotted upturned on the shore. There was a rough car park containing a red telephone box, a notice board, which might once have given details of how to contact the coast guard but which had faded into illegibility and a white wooden post with a life belt attached.
“Is this it?” Vera demanded. She was hungry and cold and thought she’d come on a wild goose chase.
“I did say I couldn’t think what could have brought him here.”
“So you did.” She tried her phone again. Still it refused to work.
They were back at the edge of the village when she realized how stupid she’d been. She recreated that morning in the cemetery in her head, trying to bring it to life. Christopher Winter had been at Emma’s. He’d sat up all night getting maudlin drunk, decided before it was even light that he needed to visit Abigail’s grave. Then what? He’d phoned someone. To accuse them of her murder? To demand an explanation? Support? Help? If he’d tried his mobile, it would probably be a number he’d kept in his head, or that he’d already saved on his phone. So it would be someone he knew well, or a number he’d checked in advance. But what if the phone hadn’t worked? Perhaps this was one of those black holes which swallowed mobile signals. It was possible that the angry words Michael had heard were the lad venting his frustration on the limitations of technology. What would he have done then? Surely he’d have found a phone box, used that. The nearest public phone was at the river car park. He’d have known it was there. He’d have played all round the shore when he was a boy.
Vera stopped abruptly and Michael considered her anxiously. “Are you all right?”
“Go back to your house and ring this number. It’s my sergeant Joe Ashworth. Direct him to the car park on the bank and tell him to meet me there immediately. Say it’s urgent.”
“What are you going to do?”
“None of your business,” she said, giving him a wink to soften the blow. What would she say even if she trusted him absolutely? I’m going to freeze my butt off standing guard over a stinking phone box in case a member of the public thinks to cover any fingerprints of Winter’s which might still be there. “Was that lad wearing gloves when you saw him in the cemetery?”
“No,” Michael said. “I thought at the time he’d be feeling the cold.”
When Ashworth arrived, Vera took his car and left him to wait for the crime scene examiner. She was sitting in the caff next to the bakery, full of sausage sandwich and chocolate eclair, when he arrived. The resident reporters must be following some other lead because she had the place to herself. It was warm in there and she could feel herself nodding off. She knew she’d be more use taking Michael into the station and getting his statement, but she was curious.
“Well?”
Ashworth waited until he’d sat opposite her, leaned forward so the staff couldn’t hear. “He got a couple of decent prints. One from the handset and one off the interior door handle. They’ll test for a match.”
“Could be anyone’s, though, couldn’t they? I mean, I can’t imagine people queuing to use the phone, but it could have been used once in the last couple of days. It’ll be worth seeing if there was a call from it the morning Winter died, though.”
“Not really,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s bust. Has been for at least a fortnight according to BT, but because it’s so little used this time of year the repair wasn’t a priority.”
“Bugger,” she said. Not angry. Resigned. It had been that sort of day.
“We’ll know from the prints if he tried to make a call. He didn’t have a mobile on him, by the way.”
She looked up at that. “Did he own one?”
“They’re trying to find out.”
“You’d better tell Mr. Holness,” she said, ‘that trying’s not good enough.”
Chapter Thirty-One
She caught up with Caroline Fletcher at an ugly house in Crill, the seaside town further up the coast where Keith Mantel had first made his money. The estate agency had given a list of addresses of the properties on her books and Vera had chased from one to another always just missing her.
To reach the town she had to drive past Spinney Fen, the prison. A ragged line of people were hurrying out of the gate. The end of afternoon visits. After the death of her mother Jeanie had received no visitors. She’d had to listen to the other inmates relive their conversations with loved ones, knowing that if she admitted her guilt she’d be moved to a less secure prison with more humane conditions, where there would be more contact with the outside world. Vera briefly stopped the car outside and thought about that, wondered if she’d be so principled or so stubborn. Maybe she would. She was known for her stubbornness after all. But she’d have promised anything to avoid the ministrations of Robert Winter, the preaching and the pity.
The house Caroline was trying to sell was a mock Tudor monstrosity in a road which ran along the edge of the cliff just outside the town. Another twenty years of erosion, Vera reckoned, and the garden would be crumbling into the sea. The prospective buyers didn’t seem impressed either. It was dark by then. They must have come straight from work and she could tell all they wanted was a strong drink and something mindless on the telly. Vera sat in her car and watched them make their escape, in too much of a hurry even to shake hands with the agent on the doorstep.
Caroline was still locking the door when Vera caught up with her. Vera could move quietly when she wanted. It was one of the skills she’d learned from her father. But Caroline didn’t seem startled by her approach. Maybe she thought it was the purchasers returning. Maybe she had a clear conscience.