“Look, something has come up on the Alice Irving case. Bit of a problem. Can we talk off the record?”
“’Course,” she said, brain on full alert. “Problem, Andy? What kind of problem? Is it the DNA tests?”
“No, no. The match is solid. But there is a major snag with the timeline.”
Kate pulled out her notebook. Off the record now but she wanted to get it all down for later. In case things changed.
“Go on,” she said.
“As we know, Alice was taken on March 20, 1970,” DI Sinclair said.
“Yes . . .”
“Well, she wasn’t buried in Howard Street until the 1980s. Couldn’t have been.”
“What? Why? How do you know?” Kate said.
“Forensics are telling us the paper wrapped round the body was from the eighties—something to do with the ink on the newsprint, haven’t got the details in front of me—and we’ve been looking at the history of the site. Should have done it earlier but the DNA match blindsided us. Anyway, the houses had tiny concrete yards, not gardens, until the end of the seventies. The yards backed onto a Boys’ Brigade hall and workshops. The buildings were only knocked down in 1979 when the houses were bought by a developer and the gardens extended. So the body couldn’t have been buried before then.”
Kate swallowed hard.
“Peter, the lad who found the body, said there were concrete foundations in the garden,” she recalled. “They were digging them up. Underneath where the urn was.”
“Did he? I’ll go back to him,” DI Sinclair said, making his own notes.
“So, what does this mean, Andy?” The million-dollar question.
“I suppose it means that Alice’s body must have been kept somewhere else for ten years.”
“Christ. This is all becoming pretty macabre.” Who else knows this? she thought.
“Indeed,” he said, adding as if reading her thoughts, “No one outside the team knows yet, Kate. I haven’t even told Angela. Want to be absolutely sure we’ve got everything right.”
“I’d love to write this, Andy.”
“Yes, I bet you would. Hold off until tomorrow, though, Kate. Then you can write as much as you like. I need your help getting this new timeline out there.”
“’Course. Whatever we can do to help.”
Her brain was racing. Who was living in Howard Street a decade later? Where would you keep a body?
“Thanks for telling me, Andy. I’ll sit on the info until you are ready. Let’s talk later,” she said.
“Okay,” he said.
? ? ?
She rang Bob Sparkes immediately. Her touchstone.
“Kate,” he said. “I’m driving. I’ll put you on loudspeaker.”
“Right. On your own?”
“Yes. Why? What’s happening?”
She told him the highlights of the conversation with DI Sinclair and he left her hanging while he thought it through.
“The body could have been kept anywhere in the country for ten years. Throws the whole investigation into the air again. Could have been someone already living in the house who needed to move the body, or someone who moved in and brought the body with them.”
“Or one of the workmen working on the demolition of the Boys’ Brigade hall?” Kate added.
“All possibilities. Poor Andy Sinclair. Does Angela know?”
“Not yet. Glad it’s not me telling her.”
“And me,” Sparkes said. “Keep in touch, Kate.” And gone.
Joe arrived as she put her phone down.
“You’re in early, Kate,” he said. “Have I missed anything?”
“You could say that, Joe. Sit down,” she said quietly. “Bit of a spanner in the works as far as Alice is concerned.”
“What, what?” Joe stuttered, wheeling his chair closer to Kate so he could hear. “What’s happened?”
“We’ve got to fast-forward to the 1980s, Joe. Alice was buried in Howard Street in the eighties, not the seventies. But no one else can know yet. Andy Sinclair told me this morning but it’s still unofficial.”
Joe rocked back in his chair. “But she wasn’t killed in the eighties . . .”
“No, or we’d have the body of a ten-year-old, wouldn’t we?”
“’Course, ’course,” he said. “Just thinking out loud. So where was the body for ten years?”
“Exactly,” Kate said. “And who buried it in Howard Street? Let’s concentrate on that.”
“Well, it couldn’t have been Marian Laidlaw,” Joe said. “I looked for her last night in the records and she died in 1977.”
“God, that was young. What a bugger,” Kate said. “Well, it was a long shot—Len Rigby said she had an alibi—but it would have been a great story if she’d confessed all these years later. So who was alive at the time?”
“Barbara,” Joe said. “She was living in one of the houses then.”
FORTY-SIX
Kate
THURSDAY, APRIL 12, 2012
Miss Walker’s flat was empty when they got there but a note on lined paper flapped on the front door, telling callers she was out shopping. Back by 3 p.m., she’d written.
“Good grief, she might as well have added ‘PS: Help yourselves,’” Kate said, pulling it off the door and stuffing it in her pocket.
It had begun to spit with rain and she led the way to the pub. “She’ll be back in twenty minutes,” Kate said.
Graham laughed when he saw them. “You can’t keep away, can you?”
He called through to the back: “Toni, the press is back.”
“Your wife?” Kate asked.
“Yes, that’s me,” she said, emerging from the back room. “Graham says you’re a reporter,” she added, as if it was some sort of guilty secret. A species apart. Kate waited, expecting the usual snide remark. Things had changed since the days when people thought being a reporter was glamorous. Now, journalists were down there with tax inspectors and traffic wardens.
It seemed everyone was jumping up and down about the press and their methods of getting information. But it was all about the technology nowadays. When Kate had been starting out, her ex–Fleet Street boss had told her how to disable a public phone box so no other reporter could use it—unscrew the receiver—and once ordered her to take a hidden camera into a hospital ward to photograph a famous patient.
She hadn’t done the sneaky hospital bed photographs. She’d been frightened enough of her boss—an alcoholic whose mood for the day could be gauged by the way the office door swung open in the morning—to do almost anything he ordered, but not that. She’d taken a photo of her coat and pretended the camera had gone wrong.
But her old boss sounded like a character out of an Ealing comedy in comparison with some of the new dark arts. Breaking into phone voicemails, bank accounts, and medical records had become the norm in some newsrooms, it was said, more and more loudly.
Some newsrooms. But it didn’t matter who’d done what anymore. They were all guilty as far as the public was concerned, and they all had to face the reckoning.
Kate’s paper had escaped a police investigation into hacking and paying officials for information—“It may happen yet,” Terry had said over a beer one evening, deep in a pit of despair.
“Don’t be daft,” she’d said. “I’ve never hacked anything—wouldn’t have known where to start.” But she knew it didn’t change the public opinion that all journalists were scum.
“Yes, but crème de la scum,” Mick the photographer had boasted.
? ? ?
The pub landlady kept quiet and looked at her expectantly.
“Er, yes, I’m Kate Waters from the Daily Post. Nice to meet you.”
“I’m Toni. You don’t look like a reporter,” she said.
Kate wasn’t sure what to say. She wondered what Toni thought reporters looked like. Men, probably. Men in dirty macs rummaging through dustbins, quite possibly. She tried not to sigh.
“Well, we come in all shapes and sizes,” she said and laughed.
Toni laughed, too. “I hear you’re asking about the baby in the garden. Incredible it’s that little girl . . .”
Kate nodded. “Incredible . . .” she echoed.
“Your husband was saying that you grew up in the street, that you might remember some of the people who were around in the seventies and eighties,” Kate said, shuffling round to give Toni room to sit.
“Yes, my mum and dad had the pub, and before that, they lived at number 57 for years.”