He looked affronted. “Oh no, miss. I never been to Derbyshire.”
“But someone here may have been. On Tuesday night. And to be a party to protecting that someone … That never looks very good to the CPS.”
“Wha'? You think there's a murderer works here?” Dick glanced at the lifts as if expecting them to disgorge Jack the Ripper.
“Could be the case, Dick. Could very well be.”
He thought it over. Barbara let him think. He looked from the lift doors to Reception once again. He finally said, “As it's the police …” and joined Barbara behind the reception desk, where he opened what looked like a broom cupboard containing reams of paper and coffee supplies. He took from the top shelf a stapled sheaf of papers. He handed it over. “These're them,” he said.
Barbara thanked him fervently. He was making his mark for the cause of justice, she told him. She would need to take a copy of the document with her though. She was going to have to phone all of the employees listed, and she didn't expect that he wanted her to do so sitting in the empty lobby of the building.
Dick gave his reluctant permission and disappeared for five minutes to make a copy of the paperwork. When he returned, Barbara did her best to stride with dignity—and not dance with delight—out of the building. Maintaining her poise, she didn't take a look at the list until she rounded the corner into Carlisle Street. But once there, she dropped her gaze to it eagerly.
Her spirits plummeted. It was page after page. No fewer than two hundred names were printed.
She groaned at the thought of the job ahead of her.
Two hundred phone calls with no one to help her.
There had to be a more efficient way to serve up humble pie for Lynley's dining pleasure. And after a moment's thought, she decided what it might be.
CHAPTER 17
I Peter Hanken's plan was to carve an hour out of his Saturday to work on Bella's new swing set, a plan that he had to abandon not twenty minutes after his return from Manchester Airport. He'd got back home by midday, having used up his morning tracking down the Airport Hilton masseuse who had worked on Will Upman on the previous Tuesday night. She'd sounded sultry, sexy, and seductive over the phone when Hanken had spoken to her from the Hilton lobby. But she'd turned out to be a thirteen-stone Valkyrie in medical whites with the hands of a rugby player and hips the width of a lorry's front bumper.
She'd confirmed Upman's alibi for the night of the Maiden girl's murder. He had indeed been “seen to” by Miss Freda, as she was called, and he'd given her his usual generous tip when she'd finished tenderising his knotted tendons. “Tips just like a Yank,” she informed Hanken in a friendly fashion. “Has done from the first, so I'm always glad to see him.”
He was one of her regulars, Miss Freda explained. He made the drive twice a month, at least. “Lots of stress in his line of work,” she said. Upman's appointment had been for one hour only. She'd seen to the solicitor in his room, from half past seven.
That, Hanken reckoned, gave Upman plenty of time to trot from Manchester back to Calder Moor afterwards, to dispatch the Maiden girl and her companion easily by half past ten, and to scurry back to the Airport Hilton to resume his stay and firm up his alibi. All of which kept the solicitor in the game.
And a phone call from Lynley made Upman a principal player, at least to Hanken.
He got the call on his mobile at home, where he'd just laid out the pieces of Bella's swing set on the floor of the garage and was standing back to study them as he counted the number of screws and bolts that had been included in the package. Lynley reported that his officers had tracked down a young woman who was Nicola Maiden's new flatmate, and he himself had just completed an interview with her. She'd maintained that there was no lover in London—an assertion that Lynley appeared to dispute—and she'd also suggested that the police have another chat with Upman if they wanted to know why Nicola Maiden had decided to spend the summer in Derbyshire. To this, Hanken said, “We only have Upman's word for it that the girl had a lover in the South, Thomas.” To which Lynley replied, “But it doesn't make sense that she'd drop out of law college in May yet spend the summer working for Upman … unless the two of them had something going on together. Do you have time to wring more information from him, Peter?”
Hanken was happy—delighted, in fact—to wring away at the smarmy sod, but he sought some firm ground on which to base another interview with the Buxton solicitor, who so far hadn't called on his own lawyer to stand by his side during questioning but was likely to do so should he begin to believe that the investigation was tunneling in his direction.
“Nicola had a visitor just before she moved house from Islington to Fulham. This would have been on the ninth of May,” Lynley explained. “A man. They had an argument. They were overheard. The man said he'd see her dead before he let her do it.”