‘Don’t fuss,’ says Elizabeth. She will tell Joyce about the kidnapping once she has worked out her plan to deal with the Viking. In the meantime, she is glad of the distraction of the murder of Bethany Waites.
‘I’m not fussing,’ says Joyce. ‘It’s just unusual. Is Stephen all right?’
‘We had a romantic evening in,’ says Elizabeth. ‘Candlelight in the bathroom, and an early night.’
Joyce doesn’t buy this, but Elizabeth thinks she has been fended off for now. She will have to tell her eventually. To business.
‘So what do you have for us, Mr Waghorn?’
Mike Waghorn and Pauline have joined them in the Jigsaw Room. Pauline is topping up Mike’s glass.
‘Just something I remembered,’ says Mike. ‘Someone was sending Bethany notes. Locker-room stuff, really, probably not important.
‘Bullying.’
‘I can’t stand a bully,’ says Ron.
‘And did you find out who sent them?’ asks Ibrahim.
‘No. Bethany just laughed them off,’ says Mike. ‘She sent me a few messages about them, but we never got to the bottom of it.’
‘Do you still have her messages?’ Elizabeth asks.
‘Of course,’ says Mike. ‘I’ll always keep her messages.’
‘I should think so too,’ says Joyce. ‘Gerry once had a letter in the Radio Times, and I’ve always kept it.’
Mike is scrolling through his phone.
‘It was about Cagney & Lacey,’ says Joyce. ‘Which wasn’t like him at all.’
Mike has found Bethany’s messages. ‘Another note today, skipper. Slipped into my bag. “If you don’t leave, I’ll make you leave.” It was always that sort of thing: “Get out. Everybody hates you.” Playground stuff, but you never know. And it was something I didn’t think to tell the police at the time.’
‘Could it have been Fiona Clemence?’ asks Joyce. ‘I do hope not.’
‘Pauline, any idea?’ asks Elizabeth.
‘Don’t even remember the notes,’ says Pauline.
Joyce puts her hand on Mike’s arm. ‘More wine, Mike?’
‘Yes, please,’ says Mike, and Joyce pours him another glass.
‘You reading the news later, Mikey boy?’ asks Ron.
‘You’ll have to do better than three glasses of wine to stop Mike presenting the news,’ says Pauline. ‘Do your trick, Mike.’
Mike sits up, ramrod straight, and looks Ron in the eye. ‘Meanwhile, military manoeuvres are continuing in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as the Serbian secessionist spokesperson initiated interventions with interested intermediaries.’
Ron raises his glass. ‘The lad can take a drink.’
‘Thank you, Ronald,’ says Mike.
‘I’ve trained him well,’ says Pauline.
‘Well, aren’t we all terrific,’ says Elizabeth. ‘But, if we could get on. Let’s go through exactly what we know.’
The Jigsaw Room has recently been repainted. Or one wall of it at least. They call it a ‘signature wall’, and it is duck-egg blue. It was Joyce’s idea: she had seen somebody do it on television, and had then raised it with the Amenities Committee. There had been objections, both in terms of cost and aesthetic, but Elizabeth could have told them to save their breath. If Joyce wants a signature wall, Joyce will have a signature wall.
The wall, which does actually look rather good, is currently covered in photographs and documents. There are pictures of Bethany Waites, and the wreck of a car at the foot of Shakespeare Cliff. There are grainy CCTV shots. The photos are surrounded by financial documents, and by timelines meticulously constructed, printed out and laminated by Ibrahim. They used to lay this sort of thing out on the jigsaw table itself, but Joyce has recently come across some sticky hooks you can peel on and off the wall without leaving any marks. Elizabeth much prefers it this way. It reminds her of a Serious Incident Room, the type of place where she has spent many happy hours.
‘For reasons known only to herself,’ says Elizabeth, ‘or to her killer, Bethany decides to leave her flat. CCTV in the lobby of her building captures her at ten fifteen p.m., and, minutes later, we see her car pass by the front of the building.’
‘The car then seems to disappear,’ says Ibrahim. ‘It goes missing for several hours, until it is finally captured again at two forty-seven a.m., approximately a mile from Shakespeare Cliff.’
‘Meaning it has taken her more than four hours to complete a forty-five-minute car journey,’ says Elizabeth.
‘Telling us,’ says Ibrahim, ‘that she must have stopped somewhere on the way. To meet someone, to do something, perhaps to die. And when the CCTV picks up the car again near the cliff, there appear to be two figures in it, not one.’
‘Very blurry though,’ says Pauline. ‘To be fair.’
‘The next morning,’ says Elizabeth, while registering Pauline’s intervention, ‘Bethany’s car is found at the bottom of the cliff. Her body is no longer in it, which is not altogether unsurprising. I once had to push a Jeep with a corpse sitting in the front seat into a quarry, and it popped out almost immediately.’
‘Why did you have to push a –’ says Mike.
‘No time, Mr Waghorn, sorry,’ says Elizabeth. ‘The Conversational French class will scream blue murder if we’re out of this room as much as a minute late. Traces of Bethany Waites’s blood, and fragments of the clothing she was last seen wearing, were found in the wreckage of the car. A houndstooth jacket, and yellow trousers.’
‘Well, that’s another thing,’ says Pauline. ‘Who wears a houndstooth jacket with yellow trousers?’
Elizabeth glances at Pauline. Two interventions now.
‘Her body has never been found,’ says Ibrahim. ‘Usually it would wash up at some point, but not always. Her bank cards and bank accounts have never been used since, nor was there significant activity in her accounts before this incident. She wasn’t squirrelling money away for a disappearance.’
‘The secret might lie in Heather Garbutt’s financial records,’ says Elizabeth. ‘We’ll know more as soon as we’ve spoken to our consultant.’
‘When she says “consultant”, she means my daughter,’ says Joyce.
‘And that’s pretty much where we are,’ finishes Elizabeth.
‘You heard back from Connie Johnson?’ Ron asks Ibrahim.
‘Nothing useful yet,’ says Ibrahim. ‘She said something about knitting, but her Wi-Fi is quite patchy. She has complained to the Home Office about it.’
There is a knock at the door. The Conversational French class which uses the Jigsaw Room after them is early. Elizabeth resolves to give them a piece of her mind.
18
Chris and Donna are looking at a map of Fairhaven on the wall in their Incident Room.
There is a pin in the map, showing Bethany’s apartment, and further pins showing the location of the CCTV cameras that had been checked on the night of her death. Her car hadn’t triggered a single one until she got to Shakespeare Cliff. They are trying to plot her route out of Fairhaven, to see where she might have stopped. Once she was out of Fairhaven, a camera-free route was pretty easy. Just take the back roads. But in the town itself? Much harder.
Where on earth had she been for those missing hours? And who had she met?
‘It’s impossible,’ says Chris. ‘There are so many cameras in Fairhaven, and she could only take Rotherfield Road or Churchill Road. No other way out of town that takes you towards Shakespeare Cliff.’
Strictly speaking, they are supposed to be investigating the death of the man in the burned-out minibus, but they are still waiting for a forensics report, so they thought they might spend the morning looking at the Bethany Waites case. Also, Elizabeth had asked them to. Elizabeth has access to many things, but not the exact position of every CCTV camera in Fairhaven.
Donna starts to plot a course from Bethany’s apartment, avoiding the cameras. At every corner she turns, there is a camera. It’s like a maze, with no way out. ‘And the cameras were all working?’
‘For once,’ says Chris.