‘No, we don’t think anything,’ said Novello firmly. ‘This is just one of several vehicles we need to check out for elimination purposes. This vehicle was a Land Rover Discovery, you say?’
‘That’s right. Green. Local, it had the Mid-Yorkshire letters, and this year’s registration, and one of the numbers was a six, I think, but I’m sorry, I can’t recall the others.’
‘You’ve done very well,’ said Novello, making notes. ‘But you said “again”. It was there again. What did you mean?’
‘Oh, I’ve seen it four or five times in the past couple of weeks. That’s how I remember as much as I do about the number, I suppose; I’m so scatter-brained, if I’d just seen it once, I’d likely have told you it was a yellow Porsche with an 007 number plate. What will you do now? Put out some kind of alert?’
‘Nothing as dramatic as that, Mrs Dickens,’ said Novello.
It took a couple of minutes to persuade Mrs Dickens that she wasn’t about to conjure up the Flying Squad and a pack of bloodhounds. Finally, assurances that as they’d missed her yesterday, the house-to-house team would probably be on her doorstep this very moment, got her on her way.
Novello returned to the Hall. Wield was nowhere to be seen, so she passed her information to Control and asked for a list of possibilities. Then, with one down, and feeling hot for hunches, she went in pursuit of another.
The two people reporting the white car at the edge of Ligg Common had been vague and contradictory. One described it as small, another as quite big. The first opined it might have been a Ford Escort, the second was certain it was some sort of Vauxhall but couldn’t say which.
But there’d been a third sighting even vaguer, picked up during house-to-house, Mrs Joy Kendrick who’d been driving by the common early and thought she’d noticed a car and it could’ve been white, but she wasn’t absolutely sure as the kids were being fractious in the back because they didn’t like being left with their gran for the day, which was the purpose of the journey.
Novello had noticed children beginning to arrive for school as she went out to the Corpse Road. On her return, the numbers had grown considerably. Because of the constant coming and going of police vehicles from the incident centre next door, a line of crowd-control barriers had been set up to reinforce the low wall which divided the playground from the hall forecourt, and the naturally curious kids were pressing thick against them. There were a lot of adults there too. After yesterday’s news, parents who’d normally just drop their kids off, or even let them walk there under their own steam, were taking extra precautions.
As Novello re-emerged from the Centre, a couple of teachers were going along the barrier urging the children to go into the school. Novello entered the playground and approached one of them showing her warrant card.
‘I’m Dora Shimmings, head teacher,’ said the woman. ‘Look, I arranged with Mr Pascoe yesterday that any general questioning of the children in Lorraine’s class wouldn’t be done until we’d got the school day under way in as normal a fashion as possible.’
She spoke with a quiet authority that made Novello glad she wasn’t about to contradict her.
‘It’s not that,’ she said reassuringly. ‘I just wanted to know if Joy Kendrick was one of your parents.’
‘Very much so. We have all three of hers. But none of them is in Lorraine’s class.’
‘What age are they?’
‘The twins are six and Simon’s eight. There they are now.’
Novello turned. A harassed-looking woman with loose blonde hair bobbing around her shoulders with all the vigour but none of the gloss of a shampoo ad was shepherding a trio of children through the gate – twin girls who, contrary to the usual image of close love and special understanding, seemed each ambitious to achieve uniqueness by kicking shit out of the other, and an older boy, Simon, looking as bored and aloof as only an eight-year-old with twin sisters can.
‘I’d like to meet them. It’ll only take a few seconds,’ promised Novello.
Unlike most police promises, this one was just about kept.
After the introduction, Novello said, ‘Mrs Kendrick, when you talked to the officer who called at your house yesterday, did he talk to the children?’
‘No. They weren’t there, were they? I didn’t pick them up till seven.’
‘Of course not. Simon, your mum says there was a white car parked by the common as you drove past yesterday morning. You didn’t happen to notice it, did you?’
‘Yeah,’ he said. It wasn’t an uninterested or ill-mannered monosyllable. Children, Novello recalled, tended to answer questions asked them, unlike adults who were always reaching for your reasons for asking.
‘So what kind was it?’
‘Saab 900 cabriolet.’
‘Did you notice the number?’
‘No, but it was the latest model.’
That was that. She thanked the boy and his mother, who had been holding the twins apart like a pair of over-psyched contenders in a title fight, and now she continued dragging them towards the school entrance.
‘Clever,’ said Mrs Shimmings.
‘Lucky,’ said Novello. ‘I could have got a boy whose sole obsession was football. So why did Mrs K dump the kids on Gran all day yesterday, I wonder? Nothing to do with the case, just idle curiosity.’
‘Boyfriend,’ said Mrs Shimmings laconically. ‘Kendrick took off last year. Joy’s got herself a man, but Simon hates him. And you can’t have good sex with a protest meeting going on outside your bedroom door, can you?’
‘Never tried it,’ said Novello with a grin.
She went back to the Hall. Still no sign of Wield. No reply yet from Control to her query about the Discovery. She ought to give someone what she’d got, but she couldn’t see anyone she altogether trusted to make sure the credit stayed with herself. Many of her male colleagues, even those not quite so chauvinist as to think a woman’s place was in the kitchen, had no problem with thinking it was in the background. What man, complimented on his appearance, says, ‘My wife chose the tie, ironed the suit, washed the shirt and starched the collar and cuffs?’
Anyway, she was hot, she was on a roll. Two down, one to go.
She went in search of Geoff Draycott of Wornock Farm who’d seen the blue estate speeding up the Highcross Moor road.
There were two men scrubbing away at the BENNY’S BACK! graffiti on the railway bridge as Pascoe drove beneath it.
They didn’t seem to be making much progress. Perhaps they would scrub and scrub till finally they wore out the solid stonework and nothing remained but the red letters hanging in the air.
An idle fancy, or a symptom? Reading the Dendale file earlier that morning, before his mind took refuge in sleep, he had found himself reluctant to engage with the facts as presented, or indeed any facts as presented, preferring to slip sideways into surreal imaginings. There had been a time when life seemed a smooth learning curve, a steady progress from childish frivolity through youthful impetuosity to mature certainty, which would occur somewhere in early middle age, whenever that was, but you’d recognize it by waking one morning and being aware that you’d stopped feeling nervous about making after-dinner speeches, you really believed the political opinions you aired at dinner parties, you no longer felt impelled to tie your left shoelace before your right to avoid bad luck, and you didn’t have to read the instruction book every time you programmed the