Stick or Twist Read online

  The lad behind the tray – who was not exactly a lad, as he was approaching thirty – though some days this seemed very young indeed to the fast-approaching-retirement Ling – was Peter Betts. Graham Ling liked Bettsy, in spite of the daft haircut which made him look like Tin Tin, and his pretensions with an electric guitar. As if a copper in CID was ever going to have the time that you needed to put in to playing in a band. He rated Peter Betts a very good detective. A thinker, with the kind of mind which occasionally threw up sparks of sheer inspiration. The sort of guy who as well as being insatiably curious, stubborn and tenacious, was capable of looking beyond the obvious. One day he would end up leading a team of his own – always provided that the uncertain world of music didn’t seduce him first.

  Ling watched as Betts worked his way around the group, handing the first of the coffee cups to Hannah McMahon. Life in the old-style, macho constabulary would have been all but impossible for a woman with looks like that, he reflected. Even her obvious attempts to desexualize herself and be one of the lads – no obvious perfume, the willingness, nay enthusiasm for discussing football, and her figure always concealed beneath a smart, self-imposed uniform of trousers and jackets – could not hide the fact that Hannah could easily have been the pin-up of the entire force, if those girly calendars had still been allowed. If anything, Hannah’s modest dress sense and preference for being addressed by the androgynous appellation, McMahon, rendered her all the more desirable. ‘Touch me not’. Working with McMahon helped you to understand why Victorian males could get worked up over a glimpse of a shapely ankle. Speculation, suggestion, anticipation could be everything. Not, he told himself, that he would ever have been interested – even twenty years ago – not least because he suspected that in private, McMahon could turn out to be a right handful and too smart by half.

  All that aside, Hannah was a good girl, he thought. A safe pair of hands, who understood the proper way to do things, the budgetary constraints which bound them, and the methodical approach so vital in evidence gathering, if there was going to be a successful prosecution – but so far as Ling was concerned, she couldn’t touch young Bettsy when it came to those sudden moments of inspiration. He had never known Hannah to come up with an idea that everyone else had missed. She was essentially very good at all the painstaking, basically boring stuff, he thought: the CCTV footage which had to be collected and checked, the routine enquiries to be made, the following up of leads, but it was Bettsy who could think outside the box, as they liked to say these days. There was a lad whose thought processes were not tied hand and foot to the straight track – a man who looked around the corners, as it were.

  It had been Peter Betts whose comment that, ‘this bloke must know his train timetables back to front’, followed immediately by, ‘are any of our suspects connected to the railways?’ had directly led them to the satisfactory resolution of Operation March Hare. And it was that sort of unexpected inspiration which Ling had been hoping for when he decided to gather this small group together for what amounted to little more than an informal chat about the Thackeray kidnap. At its height there had been more than a hundred officers involved in the investigation in one way or another, but today Ling had focussed on just the core of this team: Hannah McMahon, Joel McPartland, Jerry Wilkins and Peter Betts; though it was Bettsy in whom the DI was investing particular hopes. He was aware that Peter Betts had taken a particularly keen interest in the Thackeray case (Hannah McMahon had once joked that it was because he fancied the victim).

  Though still officially open, the enquiry had effectively reached a dead end, with no fresh leads to follow, and all personnel gradually transferred to work on other cases They had, of course, spent many hours chewing it over already, but with his retirement less than a year away, it irked Graham Ling to leave any unfinished business. He had a good record – some would say a great record. True, the Tyler murder had never been officially put to bed, but with the death of his main suspect in an RTA, it was never likely to be. Fate occasionally dealt you an impossible hand and you had to take it. The Thackeray kidnap was different. There was no road traffic accident to blame – nor any suspect identified. The case had run up against one brick wall after another.

  So here they were, forgetting for an hour or so, those other major enquiries on their desks and chewing over the Thackeray case one more time.

  ‘I’ve never managed to get a handle on this bloke,’ Ling resumed the discussion as soon as the various coffees, pastries and sundry assortment of other goodies had been distributed, and everyone had settled down. ‘He’s not your usual run-of-the-mill offender.’

  ‘I don’t think the profiler came up with anything particularly concrete,’ put in Hannah McMahon.

  ‘Well he wouldn’t, would he? It was all the usual generalities and psychobabble.’ Joel McPartland took a dubious view of the supposed science of criminal profiling, and knew that his boss felt the same way.

  ‘It always struck me as kind of odd,’ Jerry Wilkins said, ‘that he never took the chance to have sex with her, one last time, before he finished her off.’

  ‘But he didn’t finish her off,’ Hannah objected. ‘She got away from him.’

  ‘So you reckon he was saving up for the moment, and might have had her just before he killed her. While she was tied up in the back of the van.’

  ‘Really, Jerry. You shouldn’t impute every suspect with your own perverted notions regarding sexual congress.’ Hannah took a sip of her drink and grinned, to show she meant nothing by the remark.

  ‘I’d guess that Laddo was way too smart to leave us his DNA by having sex with Jude Thackeray, just before murdering her,’ put in Joel, whose deep voice gave an air of finality to his pronouncements. Joel was a huge guy, with Afro-Caribbean origins, who had in the past proved a brilliant asset for plainclothes operations, because he looked far more like a night club bouncer than most people’s stereotypical idea of a copper. ‘From what the victim said, there had been plenty of consensual sex up until a couple of days before he took her prisoner.’

  ‘Perhaps he didn’t much fancy her, once he’d tied her up, tortured her and shoved her in that cupboard under the stairs for twenty-four hours,’ said Hannah, with a touch of sarcasm. ‘Presumably bondage isn’t every man’s dream.’

  ‘What I find odd,’ Peter Betts spoke for the first time since returning with the coffees, ‘is the way this guy was sometimes very smart, then sometimes really dumb.’

  Ling who had been listening to what was said, while consuming a bacon-filled croissant, now paused in the act of taking another bite and prompted, ‘Meaning?’

  ‘He covered his tracks in all sorts of ways, then stopped at the garage to buy some diesel and got picked up on their CCTV. It’s a clumsy mistake. He could easily have filled up the van any time beforehand, and used a garage several miles away – but he actually stopped at the garage closest to the crime scene, with Jude Thackeray tied up in the back. That’s got to be reckless. He must have known that pretty much all garage forecourts are covered by CCTV, and that we’re going to check the ones on the route between the house where she was held captive and the place where he intended to dispose of her.’

  ‘I’m not so sure …’ Hannah hesitated. ‘Don’t forget that she wasn’t meant to get away. He couldn’t have foreseen that she would escape, and therefore that we’d be looking for him so quickly. He intended to kill her and dump her body in the woods. If he’d managed to carry that through, it might have been weeks before anyone found her, with no guarantee that she would be reported missing right away. It could have been several days before the alarm was raised and a lot longer than that before we had a body.’

  ‘Anyway, as it turned out, it wasn’t that dumb,’ Jerry put in. ‘Because even when that footage was shown on national TV, no one recognized the guy.’

  ‘Something to do with the way he kept his head down and had a hoodie pulled down over his face,’ Joel put in, taking his own turn at sarcasm.

  ‘I
don’t understand how a girl like that was taken in so easily. Why didn’t she smell a rat when he kept making excuses not to meet her friends? The only person close to Jude Thackeray who ever set eyes on the bloke was her brother, and he wasn’t a lot of help.’

  ‘Perhaps she didn’t realize – I think she said they seemed like good excuses. “He always found some reason,” is what she said.’

  ‘Apart from the garage, he was pretty good at avoiding CCTV. He withdrew her money from cashpoints without getting caught on any CCTV, and he left his mobile off, so there was no chance of tracking his movements that way.’

  ‘That’s the sort of thing I mean,’ Peter Betts put in. ‘He’s savvy enough to be aware of phone tracking, so he gets himself a pay-as-you-go mobile, and the only time he uses it is when she calls him, or he calls her and those calls don’t happen very often and are all in random places which don’t form any sort of pattern and don’t lead us anywhere. Who the hell has a mobile phone that’s constantly switched off?’

  ‘My mother,’ said Jerry, with feeling.

  ‘Apart from Jerry’s mother. Basically this guy must be using some other phone that we don’t know about for all his other calls. He buys the pay-as-you-go mobile and activates it just days before he first makes contact with Jude Thackeray. He never calls anyone but her with it. He never receives any calls on it except from her. When he uses the phone to call her, he’s always in some nice out-of-the-way spot, which we can’t match up to any CCTV. It’s the same when she calls him. He really only has the phone switched on when he’s around her – in places where we already know that he is – her cottage, her car.’

  ‘You’d think she would have found it weird,’ Hannah mused. ‘Most people I know are on their mobiles all the time, texting and tweeting and checking Facebook.’

  ‘And he wasn’t into photographs either. No selfies. No images of him at all.’

  ‘And again, she never notices at the time, how unusual that is,’ said Joel.

  ‘According to Jude Thackeray, he wasn’t into social media and said that he thought Twitter was moronic.’

  ‘Some would say he has a point,’ Graham Ling said with feeling. ‘You know, there’s got to be something else. I want to run a mini-review. Shake up the bag and see if anything falls out.’ He winced at hearing himself use a hoist-it-up-the-flagpole-and-see-who-salutes type expression. ‘It’s been more than six months,’ he continued. ‘There must be something more that we can work on, other than that bloody CCTV from the garage forecourt. Everyone makes mistakes.’

  ‘He did,’ Hannah said quietly. ‘He let her get away.’

  FOUR

  ‘Jude … Jude …’ Mark repeated her name with increasing determination, trying to sound calm, even as she thrashed and fought beside him. ‘Jude, darling. It’s me. It’s Mark. Please … come on, you’re safe. I’m here. It’s me, Jude. It’s Mark.’

  It was her first night back from Spain, and he had arranged a candlelit dinner, before making love to her in his bed. He had attempted to gently probe for details of her mysterious errand in Spain, but when she remained tight-lipped about it – as she did regarding all financial matters – he had backed off at once. Overall he thought the evening had gone very well, but now, in the early hours of the morning, she had startled him out of a deep sleep, crying out and thrashing about, as if in the grip of some terrible demons. He continued to repeat her name, trying to calm her until she was fully awake. They had been here before and the nightmares were inevitably followed by a tearful, apologetic interlude.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.’ She was always apologizing, as if enduring the aftershocks of a past trauma were in some way a weakness – an indulgence like getting too drunk, or being caught out in another man’s bed.

  ‘Shall I switch on the lights? Get you something to drink?’

  ‘No, thank you. Just, please, hold me.’

  It wasn’t completely dark in the bedroom, because she always had to have a nightlight, to keep at bay the terrors which lurked in darkened rooms, but he couldn’t see her face, because she had nestled into his chest. He could, however, feel her trembling.

  ‘It was the same dream,’ she confided, uninvited. ‘I was in the back of the van, lying on the polythene sheet, and my hands were tied behind me, and I could feel the pain in my wrists, just like it was, so real, so real … and I could see the spare pairs of plastic gloves and the wire noose he was going to use to strangle me. Then he stopped the van and came round the back, just like it all happened in real life. He was wearing the black clothes and the mask, just the same as he did that night and I remember thinking how weird that was, because of course we both knew that I knew who he was and what he looked like. He opened the van door, then he said something under his breath and closed it again, and – this is hard to explain – although I didn’t exactly know that I was dreaming, I somehow knew that the van door shouldn’t be shut properly, because that was how I was going to manage to get away from him, but when I wriggled across to the door, it was closed, and I was trapped in the back of the van. I tried to scream and the gag cut into the sides of my mouth and then he came back …’

  She was sobbing now. Mark tried to silence her, hugging her close and repeating her name, but she continued regardless of him.

  ‘He dragged me out of the van and put the wire noose over my head.’ Her whole body was vibrating with sobs as she relived the moment. ‘He forced me to walk away from the van, into the trees with this thing around my neck and a knife in my back.’

  ‘Shush, shush. But that didn’t happen, did it? You got away. My brave, beautiful girl got away – and now you’re safe, with me.’

  FIVE

  ‘I hate to say this, Jude, but I’m not sure. One or two things about him just don’t stack up.’

  ‘You’re wrong, Rob. I know you’re wrong.’ Jude paused in the act of drinking her coffee and tousled Rob’s hair in an affectionate gesture. ‘He told me that you’d been to “interview him”, as he put it, and he took it really well, all things considered.’

  ‘And what constitutes “really well”?’

  ‘Well, obviously he didn’t like it. I mean, no one likes being checked up on by Big Brother, do they? But he wasn’t phased – not the way he would have been, if he had something to hide.’

  ‘It’s very easy to construct a plausible front.’

  ‘But why would he?’

  ‘Oh come on, Jude. Get with the programme, for God’s sake.’

  ‘I’m not clear what it has to do with God,’ she said.

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Look – he’s independently wealthy—’

  ‘How can you be absolutely sure about that?’

  ‘For heaven’s sake. He’s made it abundantly clear that he doesn’t need my money. He never lets me pay for anything. It’s positively retro the way he always insists on picking up the bills. And he’s completely fallen for me – head over heels. He’s so patient, when I suffer from flashbacks and things – honestly, you wouldn’t believe it.’

  ‘It’s all happened far too quickly.’ Rob continued to dissent. ‘A whirlwind romance. You only met him a couple of months ago and he’s talking about marrying you. Doesn’t that strike you as a bit sudden? Isn’t there even the tiniest bit of déjà vu about it?’

  ‘Actually it strikes me as a wonderful piece of luck. Who could have foreseen it?’

  There was a pause. He caught her eye but she stared him down.

  ‘He says he wants to protect me, and give me a sense of security.’

  ‘Well he would say that, wouldn’t he? If he’s a fake.’

  ‘He’s not a fake. I’m telling you, he’s the genuine article.’ She stood up and collected the now empty mugs from the table.

  ‘You’ve fallen for him, that’s the trouble.’ He couldn’t keep the anger out of his voice.

  ‘Rubbish.’ She laughed and bent down to kiss him on the top of the head in passing. ‘I promise you that I am not let
ting my feelings override my personal judgement. I’ve found the right man in Mark Medlicott. He’s the dream ticket.’

  ‘I’m going to do some more checking up – here and there – wherever I can.’

  ‘Rob—’ she walked around the sofa in order to face him – ‘please be careful. I don’t want you to mess this up.’

  He was not very good at suppressing his mood. ‘We have to be sure,’ he said, unconsciously clenching and unclenching a fist, as he spoke. ‘Remember he knew who you were right away.’

  ‘That could apply to anyone. The case was all over the newspapers. “Heiress kidnapped” was the headline in the Daily Mail. The Mirror called me a “spoiled little rich girl”, if I recall.’

  ‘They would. If the Socialist Worker covered the case, it was probably to demand that wealthy parasites like you be instantly rounded up and shot. But my point is that after nationwide publicity, you naturally became a target for conmen.’

  ‘We’ve been through all this before,’ she said wearily. ‘A conman would assume that I don’t make a good target second time around, because I’m wary. I’m on the police radar …’

  ‘But it won’t have taken him long to realize that you don’t have any personal security. There’s no bodyguard. No active police monitoring.’

  ‘You’re being too suspicious.’ Her tone was persuasive, almost pleading.