She held up her hand to silence him.
‘Trisha, I’m sending through a business card for a Kevin Starkey who works for a company called Rowsys… Yes, I know. The same Starkey… Drop everything else and find out from them what he does and where he works. Tell Justin and Ryia I want as much information as I can get about Starkey. I’m on the way back but this is a priority. I want all this yesterday.’
Once again, they got into the car and Anna drove off. She spoke as she drove, not looking directly at Hawley.
‘The answer to your question is that this man is known to us. He came forward as a witness. He told us he’d seen a red van at a junction leading to the motorway in Clevedon the afternoon Rosie went missing. Other witnesses said they thought the van had white rear doors.’
Anna’s jaw clenched, not wanting to think about the wasted man hours his simple statement and colour change had caused.
Edinburgh’s number was in her phone book and she called it up now.
Danaher answered after six long rings.
‘Julie, it’s DI Gwynne, Avon and Somerset.’
‘Hello ma’am. Please tell me you’ve got some more news for us?’
‘You are going to be getting calls from my team over the next half hour. We have a suspect in the frame. A Kevin Starkey. He visits hospitals, repairs equipment. Can you find out which hospitals Blair has been seen at over the last year or so?’
‘Of course.’
‘My lot are already on the case. They’ll liaise. Stay near your phone.’
Hawley was looking at her, blinking, assimilating.
She put him out of his misery. ‘We believed him because he was a special constable, one of us. He was part of the crew that searched for Rosie when she was first abducted. He gave up because of his other job. A job servicing instruments and small bits of equipment that might take him to various parts of the country. Blair’s hearing aid might have been damaged in the abduction. Someone had to have repaired it. Someone who knew what he was doing. Someone who could watch unobserved, pick a victim, wait for an opportunity to pick up hospital notes that contained all sorts of information.’
How many more hospitals did Starkey visit? Every single one on Hawley’s victim list, she’d be willing to bet. And others? How many others where he watched and planned in plain sight?
Hawley sat back as if he’d collapsed, his face bearing a pained expression. Anna could only guess what he must be thinking. Horror? Relief possibly. Woakes, she knew, would undoubtedly have now tried to winkle out some sort of link between Hawley and Starkey but she knew there would be none. Starkey saw Rosie in Cheltenham’s A and E, had accessed her notes while the department ignored him, found out she lived in Clevedon. Lived near him. That might well have been the trigger. He’d started close to home, where he knew the lay of the land, the roads, the nooks and crannies. But then he’d found a way of going wide.
‘You want to catch the Pogo wannabe? Work out how he chooses which flowers to pick.’
The calls started coming in before they reached the motorway.
Forty-One
Starkey took the old crossing over the river on the M48. It always pissed him off to pay for the privilege of heading west. There was talk of scrapping the tolls soon. Too late for him. He’d probably paid for at least one of the steel suspension cables by now.
He clutched the steering wheel and let his mind wander along paths no normal people would ever stray down. Anticipation flickered along his spine. You could already use cryptocurrency to pay for flights. After this, he’d take a holiday. He’d already been a couple of times. Knew exactly where he wanted to go, even though the flights were expensive.
Thailand was too hot. Indonesia was by far the best place for now. For what he wanted. Easier pickings on the beaches there. Start in Bali and move on. He had safe addresses, knew from the forums the best spots. Half the population still earned less than $4 a day. What you would get for $10 was simply mind-blowing in the poverty-stricken towns and villages.
Starkey’s whole body trembled at the thought of it. But first there was Blair.
He paid the toll, music on loud, nodding at the toll booth operator who took the exact money and opened the barrier. It didn’t feel like a different country, not yet. But it was. The river stretched beneath him like a sleeping snake, its surface reflecting the sun in a rippling dazzle before he exited. He came off the M48 and headed north on the A466 towards St Arvans and the Devauden Road running through the Chepstow Park Wood. He pulled in to a spot about halfway along, avoiding the more obvious parking spaces, and got out.
A few miles to the north and east was Tintern with its twelfth-century abbey drawing tourists in like a honeypot. To the east of the abbey on a hill stood the ruined Church of St Mary the Virgin. He’d found several interesting gravestones hidden in the overgrown vegetation there. But more enlightening was the conversation he’d had with a man whose interests, though similar to his, were more inclined towards architecture than the dead. On holiday from Yorkshire, the man, who never introduced himself, bored Starkey with the history of the church and the others nearby. But in amongst the tedious monologue was a snippet that had lodged firmly in Starkey’s consciousness.
‘I’ve only today left and it’s going to rain this afternoon. I’ll not get over to Devauden and St Wystone’s. Now that’s one I’d like to see. Not easy to find, mind you, what’s left of it. I expect you’d find some interesting stones there as well.’
Starkey’d gone the following week. And it had been very difficult to find. A tiny chapel, hidden at the bottom of a valley next to a stream, abandoned and isolated, its graveyard virtually unrecognisable with the stones covered in ivy and hidden by coarse tussocks of grass. He’d spent the afternoon there, uncovering stones, reading dates as far back as the 1700s. But it was when he explored the tiny old building that late winter’s day that his world slipped and slid, and everything changed.
Now, at the height of summer, the foliage off the main path was exultant. He had to lean forwards to cope with the weight of the heavy backpack. Occasionally, what was contained within shifted and wriggled. Then he’d wait until it settled and move on. Tall nettles lined the way. The average walker strolling through the thick and matted patches of head-high cow parsley would have no idea what lay beyond. Starkey was careful not to cut a swathe through the vegetation, parting it carefully instead as he pushed his way along, first climbing to a ridge and then descending along a narrow path under the huge trees that had been here for centuries. No road led to the chapel. Whatever might have been here before had long been reclaimed by the forest. An old wooden walkway, rotted and unsafe, indicated the path. But the wet and clay-filled bank had eroded the way, with bramble and fern and blackthorn providing a barrier. Starkey walked through it, feeling the tendrils catch and pull at his clothes, as if they were trying to hold him back from his task. His destiny.
As if.
On the other side of the 4 metres of overgrowth, the path reappeared. There beneath him, hunkering in a dell, stood the chapel, and beyond it a pond, fed by the streams that surged and hissed in the winter but that were little more than trickles now in June.