She checks over her shoulder to make sure Callum and Daisy are not in earshot. But they are both momentarily distracted by a squirrel sitting on the garden wall.
“That fall in the cellar could have killed you,” she says under her breath. “I got lucky last night. Who knows what they’re going to do next? Enough’s enough. Thishasto stop.”
“That’s the whole point,” I say. “It’s not as simple as that anymore. Whoever’s doing this, they’re not going to stop or leave us alone. Not unless we stop them first. And until thenwe have to protect ourselves, which means keeping strangers away.”
She stares at me a moment longer, frustration hardening her features. Then she simply shakes her head again and stalks into the house, Callum and Daisy trotting along close behind.
63
DC Tanya Rubin finally calls me back later that afternoon, while I’m trawling the internet for other unsolved murders from around the turn of the millennium. The detective is brisk and businesslike on the phone, as if she’s doing me a huge favor just making the call. But I feel a small bubble of hope when she tells me she has an update on the number plate that Jess had photographed as she followed the Volvo out of Wollaton Park on Monday evening.
“We sent an officer to the address,” she says. “That vehicle has been reported stolen.”
“Seriously?”
“According to the owner.”
“When exactly was it reported stolen?”
I can hear her flicking through notes, pages turning. “Monday afternoon, sometime between two and five p.m. The owner says they spent the evening at home and that’s corroborated by two witnesses.”
They had covered their tracks well: a bogus report backdated to a few hours before Jess had followed it from Wollaton Park. The bubble of hope bursts.
“And where do they live, the owner?”
“You know I’m not able to divulge information like that, sir.”
I try a different tack, telling her about a possible link between Edward Stiles and Adrian Parish, asking if she’d been able todiscover anything else about Parish since we last spoke. She tells me thereisa file on the system archive, that Parish was still listed as an outstanding missing person—but it was not currently an active investigation and had not been for a long time.
“Isn’t there a national database, a system, some way for you to access their case files? I found things that belonged to both men in an attic room of my house, hidden away in the same place.”
“In that case you should bring the items to us, and we’ll take a look. But it would need to be significant new evidence relating to either case for us to open a new line of inquiry.” Her voice is tight with impatience. “Now, is there anything else, sir?”
I can feel her interest, her attention, slipping away from me.
“I don’t suppose,” I say, “you’ve ever crossed paths with a detective named Gordon Webber? Became a civilian investigator after he retired, but he was on the murder squad from around 2001 onward.”
There is a short silence at the other end of the line.
“Doesn’t sound familiar.” Her tone tells me she’s about to ring off. “Then again, in 2001 I was still at primary school.”
My earlier argument with Jess smolders all evening, like glowing embers just waiting for a breath of wind to catch the bone-dry kindling all around. It’s only when we’ve put the younger two children to bed that I broach the subject again, going over the conversation with Webber and the cold case he had been investigating for so long, his theory about a pair of serial killers who had hunted together more than twenty years ago.
But before I’ve even finished, she’s already shaking her head at me in disbelief.
“You’ve got a nerve,” she says. “Having a go at me for getting a cleaner in for a couple of hours when you’re giving a house tour to a total stranger who just happens to knock on the front door this morning.”
I take a bottle of red wine from the rack and two glasses from the cupboard. It’s only Tuesday evening but it feels like it’s been a long week already.
“The point is,” I say, “it’s worse than we thought. Webber thinks there were two of them operating in the region back in the early 2000s and one of them was never caught. One of them is still free and it’s that person who is trying to recover the stuff from the hidden room. Because it’s evidence of what they did.”
“Right. There’s just one tiny flaw in his theory.”
“What?”
“The fact that there was never any serial killer on the loose back then, no string of unsolved murders in the city, no hue and cry in the media about a Yorkshire Ripper or a Fred West. We’d have known about it, wouldn’t we? We both grew up here, and that’s the sort of thing you remember.”
I fill both wine glasses and put one on the counter next to her.
