Wychwood Read online

“You were right. It made interesting listening. He sounds genuinely regretful about everything.”

  “You think he’s innocent?”

  She nodded. “Of the murders, yes. Like he said, what did he have to gain?”

  “Maybe she was threatening to tell his wife.”

  “And what if she had? You’ve seen the state of the relationship between those two. There’s little love lost there. Let’s face it: he was already looking elsewhere. I’m not condoning what he was doing with Lucy Adams, but I don’t believe he killed her because of it. And if he was responsible, why dress her up like that? That makes no sense, if his motive was simply to silence her. Then there’s Geoffrey Altman… I get the sense this goes beyond a lovers’ tiff.”

  Peter held up his hand. “I get it. And I agree. I can’t claim to like the man very much, but I don’t believe he’s a killer. I don’t think he’s got the balls for it, for a start. If he did he’d have left his wife years ago and there’d be no need for all that subterfuge in the first place.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” she said.

  “Anyway, we had to let him go this morning. There’s no way we could keep him in custody, not without any evidence. He’ll probably be on his way home now, working out what he’s going to say to his wife.”

  “I don’t know which of them to feel sorry for,” said Elspeth.

  “Neither.” He sipped his coffee, and then reached for a carrier bag under the table. From it, he produced a thick file filled with paper. It was yellowed and brittle, tied with string. “The file on the Thomas Stone case,” he said, handing it to her.

  “Thanks. Did they ever find him?”

  “No. Either he’s still out there somewhere, or something more sinister happened. Unfortunately, we’ll probably never know.”

  “Well, it’s got to be worth a look, just in case it sheds any light. You need this back tomorrow, too?”

  “Sorry…” He shrugged. “Before anyone realises it’s missing. You’re not the only one reading up on Patricia Graves, after what happened. We had the autopsy and forensic reports back yesterday, too.”

  “And?”

  “There’s very little to tell. No DNA evidence at the scene. Other than you and Patricia Graves herself, we can’t find any evidence that a third party had been in her bedroom in the recent past.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “No, the killer must have been extraordinarily careful. There’s something else, too – the pathologist says that the angle of the wounds suggests they were self-inflicted.” He took another sip of his coffee.

  “What, they think it was suicide?” said Elspeth. She found it hard to believe that the woman could have done that to herself.

  “We haven’t ruled it out,” said Peter, “although I grant you, it does seem a pretty extreme way to kill yourself. Toxicology suggests she wasn’t acting under the influence of alcohol or any substances – there was nothing but aspirin in her bloodstream. So we’re still assuming murder, for now. We’ve got uniforms doing another round of door-to-door enquiries to see if anyone in the area saw anything suspicious.”

  “Was anything missing from her house? Could it have been a botched robbery?”

  Peter shook his head. “I don’t think so. Nothing obvious had been taken. There was cash and jewellery that hadn’t been touched.”

  “Then it looks as though she was targeted,” said Elspeth. “Which would make sense, given the ferocity of the attack. I can’t stop thinking about the mess they’d made of her.”

  Peter offered her a sad smile. “I know. I guess it’s not the welcome home you were expecting.”

  Elspeth shrugged. “It’s not all bad,” she said.

  “Look, I’d better be going. There’s tons still to do at the station.” He put the lid back on his coffee. “Do you fancy a drink later? At The White Hart?”

  “Why not,” said Elspeth.

  “Great. I’ll give you a call this evening when I get done. What’s the rest of your day looking like?”

  Elspeth tapped the folder on the table. “I imagine this will keep me busy.”

  * * *

  Elspeth put the kettle on again, and dumped the uneaten remnants of her toast in the bin. Dorothy would be home from work soon, and she’d have to clear everything off the kitchen table.

  Murphy was snaking around her ankles, angling for a treat. She grabbed the packet from the cupboard and sprinkled a few in his bowl, then made her coffee and returned to her reading.

  So far, she’d learned little that she hadn’t already known or suspected. Thomas Stone had run away from the home of his foster carers, Patricia and James Graves, in late 1979. He’d been eight years old. He’d disappeared in the night, along with a sports bag full of his paltry belongings, and when the Graves had discovered him missing the next morning, they’d called the police immediately. A countywide call was put out, but there were no reported sightings. The following day his photograph was circulated to the national media, along with police forces up and down the country, but despite all of this, the boy had never been found.

  Patricia and James Graves had clearly been beside themselves – the transcripts in the folder talked of how Patricia blamed herself, bemoaning that she should have done a better job of looking after the boy, and how James had sat in stony silence throughout, distant and occasionally distraught.

  The thing that interested Elspeth most, however, was the response of the other foster child, George Baker, also eight years old. When questioned he’d first claimed that Thomas had had a disagreement with the Graves earlier that night, and that it was this that had led to his disappearance. He also said he was worried they were going to send him back to a care home with all the other rowdy kids, who would push him around and bully him.

  Within a couple of days, though, he’d altered his story, saying he must have been mistaken. The policeman in charge of the investigation – Detective Inspector Paul Somersby – had berated the child for telling tales and scratched his earlier testimony from the record. It had remained in the file all the same, however, and Elspeth found herself wondering what had caused the boy to lie. Had he really been that fearful that the Graves would give him back?

  She made a note of the boy’s name, along with his date of birth – 21 March 1971 – and a few pertinent details from his two conflicting statements.

  There was little else of note in the file, really: a description of Thomas Stone, along with two photographs, now yellowing with age; a handful of potential sightings from around the country, none of which had been substantiated; a statement by the constable who’d carried out door-to-door questioning of the Graves’s neighbours, during which no one had provided any useful information, and an official-looking form from the Thames Valley Police, reviewing the contents of the file ten years on from the boy’s disappearance, and declaring the case ‘unresolved’.

  The only other useful fact she’d managed to glean was that the social worker who had placed the boys in the care of the Graves had been called Millicent Brown. The forms gave an address in Chipping Norton. She jotted that down, too.

  The woman had probably retired now, maybe even moved house or area, but the address was worth a visit and Elspeth wondered if she might be encouraged to give an interview if she was still there. It had been a long time, and there was no reason to suspect she’d have anything new to add, but Elspeth was trying to construct a picture of Patricia’s life, and it was possible Brown had remained in contact with the family after Thomas had fled and the police had given up on the search. She might know what had become of George Baker, for a start, and whether the Graves really had been quite so terrifying as foster parents. But should she really go disturbing an old woman about something that happened nearly forty years ago?

  She heard a car pulling up on the driveway. Dorothy was home. Maybe she’d talk it through with her over dinner, before heading out for her drink with Peter that evening – assuming he managed to get away. Dorothy had always been a good so
unding board.

  She’d only just begun reassembling the file when her phone buzzed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The White Hart was busy and clamorous, the jukebox blaring out an eclectic mix of old Supergrass, Def Leppard and Rick Astley songs, but they found a small table close to the door, where they could sit opposite one another and just about hear each other over the din. Elspeth bought the first round, and decided to stick with the gin and tonic she’d sampled the other night.

  “So, you decided to stay in Wilsby-under-Wychwood?” she said, after she’d made herself comfortable on the rickety old chair. “Never thought about travelling the world, seeing the sights, living it up amongst the bright lights of the big city?”

  “I like it here,” said Peter. “It’s quiet, serene, and it’s nice to come home to.”

  She smiled. He had a point.

  “I know it must seem boring to you after all those years away, but I can’t imagine living anywhere else. Better the devil you know and all that.”

  When she’d lived here before, all Elspeth had wanted to do was get away, explore the world and meet new people, find adventure. Yet she was beginning to see the attraction of the place, now that she was appraising it with fresh eyes. It was sleepy, but it was beautiful. She supposed that at the moment it represented a kind of haven, a place to hide away from the distractions of her real life. From Andrew, and everything she was going to have to sort out when she eventually plucked up the courage to go back. “I can understand that.”

  “Will you miss London, you think? If you decide to stay.”

  “Of course, but probably not in the way you think. I love the bustle of people on the way to work each morning. There’s something about being surrounded by all those individuals that makes me feel alive.” She didn’t know how to explain it any other way. That had always been the attraction for her, the notion that she was living at the heart of things; that something momentous might happen at any moment.

  Peter shuddered. “For me it’s like being swallowed up and forgotten, like your identity is subsumed by the weight of people pressing in from all sides, and you’ve become just another face amongst the seething masses. I can’t stand that feeling of being lost. I need room to breathe.”

  “I’ve never thought of it like that,” she said. It was a melancholy notion, the idea of enforced anonymity, of somehow ceasing to exist.

  They lapsed into silence for a moment.

  “What about your friends? Have you got many down there?”

  Elspeth shrugged. “A few. Just now, though, I could do without the sympathy. I know that sounds cruel and unappreciative, but all they want to do is deconstruct what’s happened and offer me unsolicited advice.” She took a sip of her gin and tonic. It was strong, and on an empty stomach, she knew it would go straight to her head. “God, I sound like a heartless bitch. I don’t mean it like that. I just need a break, that’s all. A bit of time. They’ll understand.”

  Peter gulped at his pint, taking half of it down in one go.

  “What about you?” she said.

  “Me?”

  “No girlfriends, boyfriends?”

  He gave a crooked smile. “There have been a few. It’s hard work, though, going out with a copper. Things don’t tend to end well.”

  “The punishing hours?”

  “Not really. People can learn to live with that. It’s just… it’s hard to leave it behind sometimes, you know? You see all these things, the very worst of humanity, and then you’re expected to go home and smile and walk the dog and empty the bins. Sometimes it’s hard to go back to being normal again. Especially when you’re preoccupied with a case. People think policing is a job, but it’s not, really. It’s a life. It rules you. After a while, you only keep doing it because you can’t stop. That makes it sound like I’m unhappy, but I’m not.” He rubbed his chin. “I guess it must be a bit like being a writer, really.”

  Elspeth frowned. The door behind her opened and she felt a sudden draught as three young men came in, stamping their feet and laughing. She waited until they’d joined the queue for the bar before continuing.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Not the work, of course, but more what it does to you. Look at Michael Williams. When he’s working on a book, that’s all he’s doing. There’s no room for other people. He’s living down there in that summerhouse, thinking about nothing else. It’s like he’s on a train, hurtling through a tunnel, and he can’t get off until the end of the line. It’s a tortured metaphor, I know, but I can understand it, in a way. It’s like everything else just falls away, nothing else matters, and the world is on hold for a while, until it’s all over. That’s what it’s like when you’re working a case. Life stops. That can be hard for a person to live with. Look at Rebecca Williams. Look what it’s done to her.”

  “You sound as though you’re talking from experience.”

  Peter took another swig from his beer. “She was called Sarah. We lived together for nearly three years. She moved out just before Christmas.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Peter shrugged. “So am I. But that’s what it’s like. That’s what happens. I’ve seen it so many times. The job gets in the way.”

  “You sound so certain,” said Elspeth. “But nothing’s that black and white. You don’t have to make the choice between a life and a career.”

  “That’s just it,” said Peter. “That’s what I mean. There is no choice. It’s about who you are.”

  “Then it’s also about finding the right person,” said Elspeth. “Someone who understands, who appreciates you for who you are, and the time that you can spend with them.”

  “Ah,” said Peter, leaning back in his chair with a smirk on his lips. “You always did have a thing about the Holy Grail.”

  Elspeth grinned. “Anyway, that’s enough talk about lost love and misery.”

  Peter laughed. He downed the rest of his beer, and then glanced at the bar. The queue was three people deep, and the poor barmaid looked frantic as she hurriedly splashed beer into glasses and fetched packets of crisps from under the counter. “Listen, do you want to get out of here?”

  Elspeth nodded. “Yeah. I think I do.”

  “I was thinking we could grab some food. Maybe order a takeaway? I know it’s not particularly glamorous, but I’ve got a bottle of gin back at my place, and we could send for pizza or Chinese or something?” He looked awkward, embarrassed, as if he was worried she would take it the wrong way or reject him.

  “Sounds great,” she said. “Junk food is exactly what I need. It has to be pizza, though. Preferably with extra pepperoni.”

  He grinned. “Perfect.”

  * * *

  Peter’s house was just as she remembered it from childhood, as if his parents had simply upped and left, leaving all of their furniture and knick-knacks behind. Which, she supposed, was exactly what people probably did when they moved to a different country. They’d upped sticks to Portugal a few years ago, Peter had explained, signing the house over to him as they left. She wondered whether Peter got out there very often to visit.

  Peter had added a few touches of his own, of course – pop art on the walls in the living room, a model car on the mantelpiece, a widescreen TV and gaming console, a heap of old Top Gear DVDs, and a couple of bookcases filled with paperback crime novels and policing manuals. The dining room, too – once a small room reached from the hallway but long ago knocked through to form a single, larger space off the living room – had been given over to Peter’s belongings. Gone was the dining table, replaced instead by a series of squat self-assembly shelving units housing row upon row of identical cardboard boxes.

  While he put a call in to the pizza place in Heighton, she went through to the kitchen and poured them both another drink. He didn’t appear to have any tonic, so she searched around in the kitchen cupboards for an alternative, eventually settling on a bottle of still lemonade and a few ice cubes from the freezer. He seemed to keep the
place clean enough – the dishes were stacked neatly on the surface, ready to put away, and a pile of ironing sat folded in a laundry basket. There were three empty whisky bottles in the recycling.

  “Cheers,” she said, handing him a glass as she wandered back through to the living room.

  He clinked glasses with her, took a sip, and raised an appreciative eyebrow. “Pizza’s on the way,” he said.

  “Great.” She took a sip of her drink, and then walked through to the dining room. “I remember sitting here with your mum and dad, eating roast lamb on a Sunday afternoon after we’d finished playing in the paddling pool in the garden,” she said.

  “Your hair was all damp and spiky,” said Peter. “And Mum wrapped it up in a towel.”

  Elspeth laughed. “That’s right. And she gave us raspberry trifle for dessert.”

  “It was all a long time ago,” said Peter. “Another life.”

  “It doesn’t feel like that to me,” said Elspeth. “Long ago, yes, but not forgotten.”

  “You didn’t visit,” he said, and then looked immediately apologetic, as if he realised the undercurrent of accusation in the statement.

  “No, I didn’t,” she said. “I suppose I was trying to look forward, to focus on the future. I was happy to escape. I’d always wanted to get away. Now I feel foolish for ever wanting that. Look at what happened. None of it worked out as I’d planned.”

  “You shouldn’t feel foolish, Ellie. It’s not a bad thing to want to make something of yourself.”

  “I know. But I realise now what I left behind. I didn’t just move away. I moved on. People like you and Helen and Benedict – you were friends, and I let you drift away. I got too wrapped up in what I was doing that I didn’t stop to think about any of you until it was too late, and too much time had already passed.”

  “You’re too hard on yourself,” said Peter. “And you’re here now. You can’t change the past, any more than you can predict the future. The best thing you can do now is take some time, and be a little kinder to yourself. Things will work themselves out.”