Like This, for Ever

61




‘HAVE YOU FOUND my son yet?’

Each time Dana had seen Stewart Roberts this evening, he’d changed, and not for the better. The crisp, steel-grey of his hair seemed to have seeped down and stained his skin. His forehead and cheeks were more lined than before. His hands were shaking and, in spite of the heating in the room, he shivered continually. He might be a guilty man about to crack. Equally, he could be a normal parent terrified for the safety of his son.

Wreck or not, they hadn’t been able to break him yet. They’d talked to him twice. Both times he’d denied being at the boat at any time since the one-off day in January when he’d gone to deal with water damage.

‘We’re looking,’ she told him. ‘Sergeant, can I have a word?’

‘I don’t believe you,’ Stewart called after her as Anderson rose to follow Dana from the room. ‘You’re looking for that other kid. You’re not interested in mine.’

As Dana and Anderson left the room, Stewart’s solicitor put a hand on his client’s arm and spoke to him in a low voice. The door clanged shut.

‘How’s it going, Ma’am?’ asked Anderson, rubbing his eyes.

‘We’ve had the coroner’s report into the death of Karen Roberts, Stewart’s wife,’ she told him. ‘He’s off the hook for that, at any rate. She spoke to a relative on the phone after Stewart and Barney left the house, and she’d been dead at least an hour by the time they got back. He couldn’t have killed her.’

Anderson nodded, then shrugged. ‘We’re getting nowhere in there,’ he said, indicating the interview room. ‘He claims the internet research he’s been doing is background work for a lecture he’s got coming up. All the renewed interest in vampires gave him the idea, apparently. And Gothic literature is his specialist subject, so naturally he’s going to have all sorts of spooky books. He’s hiding something, but until he starts talking, we’ve got nothing other than the word of an hysterical – and missing – kid.’

‘Oh, we’ve got a bit more than that,’ said Dana, letting a small smile creep on to her face. ‘We’ve got a cabinet full of blood-clotting drugs and hypodermics, which don’t strike me as everyday toiletries, and we’ve got traces of blood on the houseboat.’

Anderson looked instantly awake again. ‘You’re kidding me?’

‘Too soon to say whose, of course. We’ve also got a magazine dated the first week in February. A woman’s magazine, interestingly, but it still puts the nail on his story about not being there recently. What do you say we have another word?’

‘After you, Ma’am.’

Dana picked up her case. This time, when they opened the door, the eyes of the solicitor met them. ‘Mr Roberts is ready to make a statement,’ he told them. ‘In return, he wants an assurance that you are doing everything possible to find his son.’

‘Of course,’ said Dana. She picked up the phone and requested that someone bring a progress report down to the interview room. If Stewart was about to tell them something valuable, she didn’t want it compromised down the line when he claimed undue stress as a result of worrying about his son. She took her seat and Anderson dropped heavily into the chair beside her.

‘What would you like to tell us, Mr Roberts?’ she said.

Stewart looked her straight in the eye. It was the first time he’d done so except when he’d been asking about his son. ‘I was at Deptford Creek on Saturday the sixteenth of February,’ he told her. ‘On my father-in-law’s old boat. I arrived at around seven in the evening. I left just after one in the morning, when I judged the police had finally left the site.’

Dana told herself to stay calm, not to react with anything more than polite interest.

‘I’ve also been going to the boat most Tuesday and Thursday evenings,’ he went on, ‘since the middle of November. There was a period over Christmas and the New Year when the keys went missing and I had to get the locks changed. I couldn’t use it then. And I haven’t been the last couple of weeks. With everything that’s going on, I haven’t liked to leave my son alone and he hates babysitters.’

‘Why do you go to the boat?’ asked Dana, with an odd urge to reach out and squeeze Anderson’s hand. If more had ever depended upon an answer to a question, she honestly couldn’t remember it.

Roberts looked down at the table, then at his solicitor, then back at her. ‘I go to meet my girlfriend,’ he told her. ‘I didn’t tell you earlier because I was trying to protect her. It’s become obvious that that isn’t going to be possible.’

Dana told herself not to panic. ‘Why the secrecy?’ she asked.

‘Because she’s married. But I imagine you already guessed that.’

It might not be true. It might be a delaying tactic. If he didn’t admit the girlfriend’s name straight away, that would be a sign that he was just playing with them.

‘We’re going to need her name,’ said Anderson.

Stewart nodded his head. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Her name is Gillian Green. She’s my son’s form teacher. Her husband is his games teacher. You can see now why I can’t entertain her at home.’

No. They could not have wasted the past three hours on a man who was guilty of nothing more than an affair with a married woman. She was going to kill Lacey Flint.

‘Was she with you at the boat on the sixteenth of February?’

‘She was. When we heard the fuss going on around us, and talk of the police being called, I told her to slip away quietly. I was going to follow when I’d locked the boat up. I didn’t get chance, so had to wait till it was all over. I sat on the dark boat and waited. Your people knocked at exactly 11.42. I ignored them.’

Dana could feel the tension building again in the back of her neck. He didn’t look as though he was lying.

‘Why do you meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays?’ she asked him.

‘Her husband coaches a football club till eight, then does his own circuit training at a local leisure centre. After that, he goes to the pub. He’s rarely home before midnight.’

Dana felt Anderson’s eyes on her. She turned. His eyebrows were raised. Daniel Green, he’d written on the pad in front of him. She nodded.

‘And the black glove you’ve been getting so excited about is hers, by the way,’ Stewart went on. ‘It’s not a child’s glove, it’s a one-size stretch glove. She uses them for playing tennis.’

He had an answer for everything. Did he? She reached into her case and pulled out an evidence bag. ‘Can you tell me what this is?’ she asked, putting the bag on the table in front of Stewart. He bent forward to look at the clear plastic vials inside.

‘It’s my medication,’ he said.

‘For what?’

He looked directly at her. ‘I’m a haemophiliac. I inject myself a couple of times a week as a preventative measure. Otherwise, if the knife slips when I’m chopping the carrots, I could bleed to death. Actually, I don’t use knives if I can avoid it. Hardly worth the risk.’

No, this was not all slipping away from her. ‘Your GP will confirm this?’

‘Of course. Would you like her name and number? I also made a point of telling your custody sergeant when he booked me in. Did he not mention it?’

An answer for everything.

‘So why was your son surprised to find it?’ asked Anderson, who seemed a lot more on the ball than she was. ‘Why did he mention it to one of our officers?’

‘Barney doesn’t know about my condition. Wisely or not, it’s one of several things I decided to keep from him.’

‘Why?’ asked Anderson. ‘Surely it would be a precaution for him to know. In case anything happens.’

‘Barney is terrified of blood. Probably because he found his dead mother in a bath of it when he was four. I’ve always taken the view that knowing I’m in danger of bleeding to death as well would be a bit too much for him to deal with.’

‘We’re going to have to talk to Mrs Green,’ said Dana.

‘I know. Is it worth my asking you to be discreet?’

Dana stood. ‘My godson could be in the hands of a killer,’ she said. ‘And you’ve already wasted enough of my time. Frankly, saving your girlfriend’s marriage isn’t high on my list of priorities.’

‘One second, Ma’am.’ Anderson’s hand was on her arm. ‘There’s another matter we need to ask Mr Roberts about.’

Was there? Christ, she really wasn’t up to this. Thank God for Neil.

‘Our crime-scene investigators found traces of blood on your boat,’ said Anderson, as Dana sat back down. ‘We can’t identify whose yet, but we will. Anything you want to say?’

Stewart glanced at his solicitor. ‘Where was the blood?’ he asked.

‘Why don’t you tell me?’ said Anderson.

Stewart sighed. ‘Gilly cut herself a few weeks ago,’ he said. ‘She bled quite a lot. On the bed and the cabin floor. I thought I’d cleaned it up.’

Anderson glanced at Dana. She nodded. The report had referred to traces of blood on the wooden floor of the boat and to a half-washed-out stain on bed-sheets that was almost certainly blood.

‘How did she cut herself ?’ asked Dana.

Stewart looked down at the tabletop. ‘She was trying to take the foil off a bottle of wine with a knife,’ he said. ‘It slipped. Can I go now? I want to look for my son.’

Dana got to her feet again. ‘You’re going to have to leave that to us for a while,’ she said. As she left the room, Stewart dropped his head into his hands. It could have been a gesture of guilt, but it looked an awful lot like grief and fear to her.

‘I’ll get someone to bring down information-release forms,’ she said to Anderson, once the door had closed. ‘We might as well check the haemophilia business with his GP.’

‘So Stewart Roberts’s girlfriend is married to Huck Joesbury’s football coach, whom we still haven’t managed to track down,’ said Anderson, as they made their way back up the steps to brief the team. ‘Is this starting to feel a bit incestuous to you, Ma’am?’

‘It’s starting to feel a bit beyond coincidence.’

‘Are you going to phone Mark?’ Anderson asked, bringing a picture into her head of Mark, alone at home, sitting in the dark, staring at the phone. Dana shook her head. She couldn’t do it. She simply couldn’t tell him they’d spent hours chasing a lead that was now slipping away.

Gilly Green had the sort of looks that other women rarely notice but that men find quietly intriguing. Dana, being a woman who habitually noticed other women, spotted her appeal immediately. She was slim, with clear, fair skin and a small, neat face that was pleasantly pretty rather than striking. Close to midnight, she was still dressed.

‘My husband isn’t back yet,’ she was saying as she led them to a small, snug sitting-room to one side of the hallway. ‘He’s not been answering his phone. Is there any news of Huck?’ She looked at the clock above the hearth and frowned.

A coal fire was burning in the grate and scent sticks in a jar gave off a smell of apples and cinnamon. The walls were a soft shade of mushroom and there was a lot of natural wood. It was the sort of room in which Dana felt instantly at home. There was a pile of exercise books by one armchair, one of them still open on the padded seat. Mrs Green had been marking class work, probably to take her mind off where her husband might be. ‘Has something happened to Daniel?’ she asked.

‘Not to my knowledge, Mrs Green,’ Dana replied. ‘And Huck Joesbury is still missing. Can I ask where you were on the evening of Saturday the sixteenth of February?’

Mrs Green stared at her for a second, glanced at Mizon, then seemed to shrink a little. She sat down, pushing the exercise book out of the way. To her credit, she made no attempt to look as though she were thinking about the question. She didn’t look puzzled, didn’t ask to see her diary, she just looked resigned. And rather sad.

‘I was on a boat at Deptford Creek,’ she said. ‘It belongs to a friend of mine. I left around eleven o’clock.’

Dana asked permission to sit down and then both she and Mizon perched on the edge of the sofa. ‘Were you aware the body of a young boy was found there that evening?’

Blue-grey eyes looked directly back at Dana. ‘Yes, of course. I saw it on the news the next day.’

‘And you didn’t think to let us know you’d been there? That you were a material witness in a murder inquiry?’

The woman’s head jerked back a fraction, registering the criticism. ‘If I’d seen or heard anything I would have been in touch with you immediately,’ she replied. ‘I teach children of that age. I teach Huck Joesbury. But I couldn’t have told you anything. I was below deck the whole time.’

‘Alone?’

Gilly shook her head. ‘I was with Stewart Roberts. He owns the boat.’

‘How long have you been having an affair with Stewart Roberts?’

Her chin lifted a little higher. ‘I don’t refer to it in those terms, but we’ve been seeing each other since last November. We meet at the boat, on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. Not so much recently.’

‘The sixteenth was a Saturday,’ said Dana.

‘My husband was out, Barney was at a sleepover. It was an opportunity.’

‘Mr Roberts told us there was a period when you couldn’t use the boat. Is that the case?’

Gilly nodded her head slowly. ‘We couldn’t get into it over Christmas,’ she said. ‘The keys went missing. We still met up, though, we just had dinner or a couple of drinks.’

So far, their stories matched perfectly.

Dana reached into her bag and pulled out an evidence bag containing the black glove Lacey had given them earlier. ‘Do you recognize this, Mrs Green?’ she asked her.

Gilly peered at it. ‘It looks like mine,’ she said. ‘I’ve been missing one for a couple of weeks now. How did you—’

‘This fits you?’ Dana asked. Gilly’s hands weren’t big, but the glove looked to be half their size.

‘It stretches. It’s a one-size-fits-all. I’ll show you, if you want.’

Dana looked at the glove again. She didn’t want it removed from the bag. She could Google the make when she got back, but she doubted Mrs Green was lying about that, at least. One more thing to try. Dana moved across the room to stand close to Gilly’s chair. ‘Can I see your hands?’ she asked her.

A puzzled frown. ‘My hands?’ Gilly Green was looking down at them herself now. They were slim, well-shaped, the nails painted a pale pink.

Dana held out her own hands, expectantly. Gilly stood up and, rather nervously, held her hands out for Dana’s inspection. Dana looked at the palms, then turned them over to see the backs. ‘Where was the scar?’ she asked her. ‘I’d have thought it might still be there.’

‘What scar?’

‘You cut yourself on the boat,’ Dana said, keeping up the pretence of looking at the other woman’s hands. ‘A bad cut, from what I’ve been told. You lost a lot of blood. I’d have thought there’d be some trace of it still. But there’s nothing I can see.’

‘I don’t remember cutting myself,’ Gilly said, hesitantly.

Dana felt a surge of excitement. This was a part of their story they hadn’t thought to agree on and it wasn’t matching up. She’d argued all along that a woman had to be involved. A woman and a man, working together. ‘Really? Not on the boat?’ she said. ‘Because we’ve been told that the blood we found is yours. If it’s not, we’ll know very quickly and then it really won’t look good for either of you.’

Gilly closed her eyes and sighed. She didn’t look nearly as frightened as Dana would have liked. ‘Stewart told you I cut myself ?’ she said.

‘Did you not?’

‘He was being delicate, Detective Inspector. The blood you found is almost certainly mine. But I didn’t cut myself.’

‘So what happened?’

Gilly’s small mouth twisted. ‘It wasn’t the most convenient time of the month for intimacy to take place,’ she said, looking slightly defiant. ‘But when your time together is limited, you tend not to be too particular. And it was Valentine’s Day. The sheets were a mess, Stewart had to take them home to wash them. I thought I’d cleaned the floor. Apparently not.’

Damn. All too feasible. And all too easily provable. If the blood turned out to be Gilly Green’s, they had nothing.

‘Do you have children, Mrs Green?’

A startled look. Then a shake of the head.

‘Then why the subterfuge? If you’ve met someone else, why can’t you just move on? Stewart Roberts isn’t married.’

Blue eyes glinted. ‘I do want to move on. And I want to be with Stewart. But leaving Daniel at the moment feels impossibly callous. We did have a son, you see. We lost him to meningitis just over two years ago. He was ten.’

‘What do you think, Ma’am? Misguided woman in love or coldblooded killer?’

Dana ran her hands across her face. ‘Can’t call it either way,’ she said.

The two officers were outside the Greens’ home. Before leaving for Lewisham police station to be interviewed formally, Mrs Green had given Dana permission to conduct a search of the house. Not having to wait for a warrant would save them valuable time. On the other hand, her cooperation almost certainly meant she didn’t believe there was anything to be found.

‘She looked guilty when we told her Barney was missing,’ said Mizon.

‘You think so? I thought she looked scared. I think she could be fond of him.’

‘So neither Mr nor Mrs Green are where they should be on Tuesday and Thursday evenings,’ said Mizon.

‘They can’t be working together,’ said Dana. ‘Mrs Green can be alibied by Mr Roberts.’

‘She and Roberts could be, though.’

Dana nodded. ‘We need to find something on that boat. A hair, a fingerprint, something. Anything.’

It was approaching midnight by the time Dana got to the lock-up yard that led to the houseboat community. She showed her ID to the constable at the gate and made her way gingerly across rubbish-strewn concrete and then down the steel ladder to the boats.

‘Oh, feel free,’ muttered a voice from the cockpit of the first boat she stepped down on to.

‘Sorry to disturb you, Sir,’ she replied, making her way around the bow of the boat, the way she’d seen Mark do several times in the past. ‘It’s more polite,’ he’d explained once. ‘Sort of like walking around the edge of someone’s garden rather than directly through their living room.’

‘Evening, DI Tulloch,’ the chief SOCO greeted her when she’d climbed down into the cabin of the yellow yacht.

She made herself smile. ‘Please tell me you have something.’

He shook his head. ‘It’s a bit of a love nest,’ he replied. ‘Certainly some evidence of sexual activity. Including a half-full packet of condoms in a cupboard in the heads. We’ve also got wine, candles, some nice glasses, olives.’

Dana looked round the cabin, surprised. She’d imagined it narrow, low and cramped, fitted out with plastic seats and hard edges. Instead, the main saloon was high enough even for the men to stand upright, and panelled in a warm-coloured wood – cherry or walnut. The wall-lamps were mock Edwardian, sumptuous and gleaming in the harsh lights the forensic team had brought on board. The chart table looked like a gentleman’s desk and the bookshelf above it held copies of Dickens, Trollope and Austen, instead of the maps and pilot books it had been built for. The upholstery was dark-red leather, and ornate brass handles shone everywhere. The cabin felt like the private study of an old London club.

To one side of the saloon was a fold-out dining table, which looked easily big enough to strap a young boy to, but …

‘If five boys had their throats cut in here, the place would be swimming with blood, wouldn’t it?’ she asked. ‘Even a good clean-up would leave traces.’

‘It would,’ the SOCO agreed. ‘Mind you, we’re finding traces of detergent and disinfectant, which would suggest recent cleaning. Another thing of interest is several small patches on the ceiling where the varnish on the wood has peeled away.’

Dana looked up to where police marking tape indicated the sites the SOCO was referring to. She could see nothing.

‘The sort of mark Sellotape leaves behind when it’s pulled off,’ the SOCO explained. ‘Could be nothing. Or it could be where he stuck up clear plastic sheeting to stop the blood staining the walls and ceiling.’

‘Which?’ said Dana. ‘I need to know which.’

The SOCO pulled an I understand, but there’s a limit to my powers face. ‘Tomorrow we can have the boat lifted and moved to where we can look at it properly,’ he said. ‘If a lot of blood has been washed away, there’ll be traces in the bilges, even if the cabin itself is clean.’

Tomorrow was no good to her. Tomorrow Huck could be lying dead on a beach somewhere. Dana’s phone started ringing again and she stepped back on deck to take the call. It was Anderson, calling from Lewisham.

‘Good news, Boss. You might want to get back here pronto.’

Funny, how you could be so keyed up that the expectation of good news felt as difficult to deal with as the bad. ‘What’s happened?’ Dana demanded, hardly daring to hope that Huck had been found.

‘We picked up Dan Green in the pub. The one several of the circuit trainers told us he might be in. Guess what we found tucked into the inner pocket of his gym bag?’

‘What?’

‘Huck’s mobile phone. Cheeky sod was carrying Huck’s phone with him.’

Dana looked up and closed her eyes; the fine drops of rain felt like starlight on her face. Oh God, they were close, they were going to find him. Just as long as he was still …

‘Are you sure? Are you sure it’s Huck’s?’

‘Definitely. It has his mum’s number programmed in, his dad’s, his best mate’s. Even yours.’

‘I’m on my way. Has anyone talked to him yet?’

‘Not yet. And Gayle found a fleece sweater in the Greens’ house. In one of the drawers in the bedroom. Black, J. Crew. Just like those fibres we found on Oliver Kennedy.’

Dana took a massive breath to clear her head and gave Anderson instructions to get the preliminaries in order: the background checks that would establish whether Green had any history with the police; details of property he owned; of relatives in and around the capital. As she climbed from one damp deck to the next she told herself that Green was a well-known sports coach. All the dead boys had played football or rugby and Green was involved with both. The boys might all have known him from football fixtures they’d taken part in. They wouldn’t know him well, but he would have been a familiar enough figure for them not to feel threatened if he approached them. And he’d lost a son of exactly the same age as the dead boys.

Dana got back to her car, put the blue light on top and set off towards Lewisham. And when the tiny voice at the back of her head tried to remind her that she’d never believed the killer to be a man, she ignored it.