Dying Fall Page 7

  "Have you seen your mother recently?" Rafferty asked, as they paused for a moment on the threshold, reluctant to pass from the coolness of the church into the glare of the sunshine beyond. Thackeray shook his head.

  "I'm not welcome there," he said. "She hasn't forgiven me either." Rafferty nodded, knowing the truth of that. If Thackeray was implacable in some things it was not difficult for anyone who knew his family to work out from whom he had inherited that iron will.

  "She's not well," the priest said quietly. "I took her the Sacrament a couple of weeks back and thought she was worse than I'd seen her. If you can find your way to go up there at all, I think it would be a kindness."

  "I'll call my father," Thackeray conceded. He pulled open the swing door with an angry gesture and Rafferty thought he intended to leave on that note, but at the last moment he hesitated and turned back, his expression softening slightly.

  "There's no help for it," he said. "There's not a day when I don't think of Ian. Time doesn't heal, it only blurs the edges a bit. But I get by."

  "I'll pray for you," Rafferty said, and both men knew that he meant precisely what he said. "Though I know you won't thank me for it."

  "Feel free." Thackeray strode back to his car without a backward glance.

  "Shut t'door or tha'll let t'bloody sheep in!" Jim Redding was sitting on the customers' side of his almost empty bar and had clearly decided that his role in life after the police force was to become a character landlord, a handy asset to his character pub. The Waggoners was a low stone building, indistinguishable, apart from its gently swinging sign, from the neighbouring cottages on the main street of Culham, a dales village which at this time of the year attracted its share of tourists.

  A few visitors were still ensconced to one side of the main bar finishing off late lunches provided by a plump and cheerful woman Thackeray assumed must be Mrs. Redding, who occasionally emerged from her steamy kitchen with another portion of cod, or chicken or steak pie and chips. Drinks were being desultorily served by a pale young girl in jeans and teeshirt behind the bar, leaving the landlord to entertain the punters from his tall stool in the corner of the room, where he could keep a weather eye on staff, customers and invading sheep alike.

  In spite of a comfortable corpulence, Redding had a sharp eye, which sized up the new-comer fast and efficiently and switched his expression from professional bonhomie to deep suspicion in an instant. He surveyed the world from within a luxuriant growth of gingery hair, a long back and sides which would have earned him short shrift on the beat, plus flourishing side-boards and a moustache of Dickensian proportions. But the blue eyes were icily watchful.

  "You must be Thackeray," he said. "D'you want owt to drink?" When Thackeray shook his head, Redding slid off his tall stool and gestured that he should follow him into a back room where he waved him into a battered arm-chair crammed into a corner beside an untidy desk from which he evidently conducted the administration of his business.

  "So what's up, then?" Redding demanded aggressively. "It must be summat serious to bring a DCI all this way out of Bradfield. Found a few skeletons rattling around in t'cupboards, have you?"

  "I hope not," Thackeray said, irritated by the ex-sergeant's manner. "And Jack Longley hopes not, too. Do you know different?" Longley's name gave Redding momentary pause. It was clearly not one he took lightly.

  "He ran a tight ship, did the super," Redding said. "Just promoted and not for standing any nonsense when I were coming up for retirement."

  "He still runs a tight ship. And so do I," Thackeray said.

  "So what's up then? There was nowt untoward going on when I were in Bradfield CID, nowt I was aware of, any road."

  "Some-one's trying to pick over the Tracy Miller murder," Thackeray said. "Looking for a miscarriage of justice, they say. You remember the case?" Redding's face darkened with anger.

  "You don't forget that sort," he said vehemently. "Poor little beggar, dumped like a sack of rubbish for t'bin men. I remember it. No-one who saw her's likely to forget it."

  "And you got the right lad? No mistakes there? No-one bullied that confession out of him? Thumped him till he said what you wanted him to say." There was an edge of anger to Thackeray's voice now and Redding hesitated for a moment, as if weighing his words, before he replied.

  "Bullied, no," he said at last. "No-one laid a finger on Stephen Webster to my knowledge, and I were with him most o't' time right up to when he went to court. Which isn't to say there weren't plenty around the station who'd have liked to have given him a good hiding. Or that Harry Huddleston were a soft touch. Nor me, for that matter. We pushed him hard, very hard. We knew he'd done it. He'd lied to us: statements were contradictory, we had eye-witnesses to say he wasn't where he said he was when he said he was – but we wanted an admission to charge him. You must have read the reports if you've taken the trouble to come all this way to ask. It were a long hot night. I can remember it as if it were yesterday. We ground him down, I dare say, and in the end he confessed. But bullied – no."

  "A lad of fifteen?" Thackeray said, a dangerous softness in his voice.

  "Just sixteen, as I recall," Reddingsaid, defensively. "Old enough."

  "Old enough to be ground down by you and Harry Huddleston?"

  "Not a kid. A big lad, not bright, but well capable of killing that child. Well capable."

  "Who wrote out his statement? It's not in his own hand?" Thackeray changed tack.

  "I think I did. I took the notes."

  "And it was a true and accurate record?"

  "Aye, it bloody were," Redding said vehemently. "Do you think we set him up, or summat? You must be bloody mad."

  "It wouldn't be the first time, or the last," Thackeray said. "Jack Longley would be pressing for an arrest. And the Press."

  "Aye, they're always pressing for summat, the Press," Redding said, bitterly. "They don't have to stand up in court and make the charge stick, do they. But Harry Huddleston wasn't a man to give in to that sort of hassle. Took his time, did Harry, played it by the book. You can dig around till you're blue in the face, Mr. Thackeray, but you'll not unstick Stephen Webster's conviction because the jury returned a true verdict. The little toe-rag did it and he got what he deserved. Personally I'd like to have seen him hang."

  June Webster had gone to ground ten miles away from the Heights like a frightened animal taking to its burrow. In an anonymous suburb of Eckersley she had metamorphosed into June Baker, mistress of an conspicuously respectable pebble-dashed semi with a neat patch of garden front and rear and a well-polished red Metro on the drive. She opened the door to Laura almost as soon as the chimes of the door-bell had stopped ringing and glanced anxiously up and down the road at the deserted pavements and net-curtained windows of her neighbours before waving her inside.

  She was a small woman, dressed in a cream blouse and blue skirt, as neat and characterless as a school uniform, her gray hair carefully waved around a face which had been delicately pretty before anxiety and grief had marked it with a mosaic of fine lines which no conventional make-up, however carefully applied, could disguise. June Baker put a brave face to the world, but Laura could see the fragility of her composure and sensed that here she must tread very carefully indeed.

  The house had that dustless, highly polished, sterile look only achieved in a home that is little used. Two coats hung on the pegs near the front door, a morning newspaper was neatly folded on the coffee table, the cushions on the settee remained as freshly plumped as they must have been since Mrs. Baker had tidied them that morning, the pale Wilton carpet was innocent of dog hairs and biscuit crumbs, a blank slate upon which Laura felt it would be rash to make any mark.

  "I think this was all a mistake," June Baker said, waving Laura towards an armchair placed at a precise angle towards the gas log fire, unlit but startlingly dust free on this mid-summer afternoon. "I shouldn't have done it really. I can't think what got into me. There's nothing to be done about Stephen now, is there? It's too l
ate. Too late altogether?" Her search for reassurance took on a hysterical edge as she perched herself opposite Laura, her hands clasped tightly between her knees, revealing an edge of white lace petticoat beneath her navy cotton skirt.

  "Too late to find out the truth or too late for it to make any difference to Stephen," Laura asked gently. Mrs. Baker looked at her visitor for a moment as if the question were too complicated for her to deal with. A single tear crept slowly down her cheek, leaving a rivulet in the heavy powder.

  "Both," she said at last. "It's ten years."

  "But you wrote to Case Re-opened," Laura said. "Did you have any fresh evidence that made you think that maybe Stephen could appeal after all this time?"

  "No, it wasn't that. It was all these other cases, people being let out after fifteen years or more, the police making up evidence and that. I never believed Stephen had done it, never. He was fond of Tracy, but fond like a brother, not the way they made it out to be at the trial. Not all that mucky stuff." The sheer helpless horror that Mrs. Baker must have felt all those years ago as her son was tried and convicted was etched now in her face as she strove to keep control. But that could be genuine, Laura thought, trying hard to be objective, whether or not Stephen Webster was guilty. Mother love could be famously blind.

  "So you don't know of any new avenue we could explore?" Laura persisted, her disappointment evident in her tone. Mrs. Baker shook her head.

  "It was the state Stephen's got into that made me write in," she said dully. "You know what they do with child murderers in jail, don't you? There's a thing called Rule 43. They lock them up in solitary for their own protection. He was in a youth custody place at first and he was always getting thumped there. Then when they transferred him to an adult jail they put him in a cell on his own. It's no life for a young lad. He's got more and more strange. He's all pale and withdrawn, hardly seems to recognise me when I visit sometimes. And now they're saying he'll have to go to a special hospital. But they've made him like that, haven't they? They've driven him mad. And I'm terrified they'll never let him out. He'll be in there for life."

  Tears streamed down June Baker's face as finally she gave vent to the sheer despair which had driven her against all her instincts out of her quiet suburban sanctuary into the public world of television programmes and prying reporters. Laura put an arm around her shoulder awkwardly.

  "Do you have any children?" Mrs. Baker asked fiercely through her tears. Laura shook her head.

  "If you haven't got children, you can't understand," the other woman said with a sort of rough contempt. Laura guessed that she was right and wondered how she could tell her that if there really was no fresh evidence of Stephen's innocence then it was very unlikely that the programme she represented would be willing or able to do anything at all to help her or her son.

  "Let's go back to the beginning," she said gently, switching on her tape-recorder. "Tell me what happened to you the day Tracy was killed. Where were you that afternoon? She disappeared at tea-time, didn't she?"

  "I was at work, wasn't I? I worked as a supervisor at Tesco in town – it was a good job. Paul hadn't worked since his wife left him with the kids. He went to a few interviews when I moved in, but no-one was interested in someone who hadn't worked for years. So he stopped at home and made sure they all got their tea when they came in from school, did the shopping - you know? He went on drawing the dole. We weren't married or anything so we reckoned he was entitled.

  "Anyway, that night was one of my late nights at work. I was meant to be working until eight, though in fact I got off about half six when Paul rang up and said Tracy was missing. She should have been home from school at half past three."

  "He didn't go to meet her?" Laura prompted.

  "She was ten. She said she didn't need meeting any more," Mrs. Baker said. "Very independent, was Tracy. Felt her nose pushed out of joint a bit with her dad, I think, when Stephen and I moved in. Kelly was still just at nursery in the mornings, so she was home all afternoon. Paul fetched her home about twelve. She was a nice kid. I think she liked having a new mum."

  "And Stephen?"

  "Stephen went to St. Mark's. Started there when we moved to Bronte House. He came home on the bus and didn't usually get in till about four. But that evening Paul said he didn't come in at all, at least not before he decided to take Kelly out and look for Tracy. Stephen said later that he did come home, and there was no-one there, so he watched television for a bit and then went out again down the rec to play football."

  "But no-one saw him there until much later?" Laura asked, recalling the summary of the evidence against Stephen that Case Re-opened had provided.

  "No-one," June Baker said dully. "Not until about six. They said Tracy must have been dead by five o'clock. They found her body about eight that evening. It wasn't even dark. The only witness who said he'd seen Stephen at all before six was the caretaker, Jerry Hurst, Fat Jerry the kids used to call him. I never liked him and Stephen hated him. Perhaps that's why he never budged over his story. He'd seen Steve going out of the building before five, he said, though Steve swore blind that wasn't true."

  "And at the police station he confessed," Laura said softly.

  "They questioned him for the best part of a day and a night," Mrs. Baker said, the look of pain distorting her features again. "That big bloke Huddleston, chief inspector Huddleston. Steve would never say what happened in all that time they had him at the station before he was charged, but it changed him. He wasn't my boy after that. He looked stunned. He's never been the same since. I lost him then."

  "You think they bullied the confession out of him?" Laura asked, a faint feeling of excitement returning as she broached the other way of approaching a programme about Stephen Webster. "Put words into his mouth?" She knew that there were ways of analysing both the written record and the language of a confession to discover whether it was in the actual words of the alleged writer or not. At Stephen Webster's trial much had been made of that damning statement, although the boy had denied its veracity later.

  "He wasn't bruised or anything," his mother said reluctantly. "They hadn't thumped him, if that's what you mean. But that Huddleston looks like a bully. He could scare me, so I don't like to think what he did to Stephen when he had him locked up all that time."

  "He didn't have a solicitor with him?"

  "Not till later, after he'd signed the confession statement. Then they got him a solicitor."

  "Did Stephen complain about the way he was treated?"

  "No, he never said much. Just that he never laid a finger on Tracy and why wouldn't anyone believe him. I think he lost heart, though, when he was on remand. He sort of gave up."

  "Did Stephen have a girl friend?" Laura asked, remembering what Kelly Miller had said about a girl.

  "Not that I know of," his mother said confidently. "Friends at school, but no-one special. Of course they made a lot of fuss about some copies of Playboy they found in his room when they arrested him, but I don't see that proved anything. I'd have given him a good talking to if I'd found them, mind, but I don't see that a few dirty pictures prove he was a murderer."

  "Given the high circulation of girlie mags and the very low murder rate I shouldn't think there's a very obvious connection," Laura said dryly. She switched the tape-recorder off and leaned back in her chair with a sigh.

  "There's not much to go on, Mrs. Baker, I have to be honest," she said. "I'll talk to one or two other people before I write a report for Case Re-opened, but I can't promise they'll take up the case."

  June Baker got up and stood looking out of her bay window at the sun-soaked suburban street outside, her face tear-streaked but calm now.

  "I suppose I'm clutching at straws," she said. "Anyway, I'm not sure I could take all the publicity all over again. And my husband would have a fit if he knew I'd been in touch with you."

  "You haven't told him?" Laura asked, surprised.

  "He travels for his job. I'm here on my own a lot," Mrs. Bake
r said dully. "He's been very good to me, has Tom, but I wouldn't say we're really close."

  "And you didn't have any more children?" Laura asked, knowing that was a superfluous question in this tidy house, as quiet and unsullied as a grave.

  "Oh, no," Mrs. Baker said. "I've lost one son. I couldn't risk another."

  CHAPTER SIX

  The small girl, thin, pale and tear-stained, sat on a sofa between her mother and a police-woman in the "soft" interview room at the central police station, a place reserved for the most vulnerable victims of violence. The child was wrapped in a towelling dressing gown too large for her and in spite of the still stifling heat at the end of another day of record-breaking temperatures, she was shivering slightly and kept glancing at Michael Thackeray with a look of sheer terror in her eyes. Her mother put a protective arm around the child and glared at the chief inspector.

  "How many attacks is this?" she asked angrily. "Where's it going to finish up?" She glanced at her daughter and bit her lip, unwilling to spell out the fear which now overwhelmed her and most parents on the Heights, but no-one in the room was in any doubt as to what she meant. Thackeray was sitting in shirt sleeves in a low chair, a small tape-recorder on the coffee table between them.

  "We're doing our best," he said quietly. "Believe me. We take it just as seriously as you do." The woman shrugged, rigid with shock and outraged disbelief.

  "What am I to tell her dad when he gets home?" she asked helplessly. "He'll do 'is nut." The child shuddered and began to sob quietly.

  "Mrs. Renton, we need to ask Josie some more questions, but if you think she'd be happier with a female detective, I can arrange that," Thackeray said, feeling the situation drifting away from him. He had only two women detectives on his team and one was on leave and the other off duty and so far all efforts had failed to find her.