Walk a Narrow Mile Page 5

  He left HQ and drove through Kidlington, which was either one of the country’s largest villages, or a small town, depending on who you spoke to, and headed to the nearest Park and Ride. He didn’t like using it, since he always felt vulnerable without instant access to his car, but since parking in the city was about as easy to do as win the Lottery, he had little option.

  Getting off the bus in St Giles, he made his way to the covered market, just off Cornmarket Street. He felt more anonymous here than in a jewellery store in town, where CCTV tended to proliferate too much for his liking. He felt a stab of conscience for the lack of taste implicit in his choice, but he knew that Hillary would understand. He couldn’t make things too easy for her after all! Besides, she knew how much he cherished and rated her.

  And despite the rather dark, smelly and less-than-salubrious surroundings, the large, cosmopolitan market was quite capable of producing some very good quality items if you were prepared to put in the time and effort to look for them.

  And Tom was. He’d been on the look out for such an item every day this week, and he felt his heart rate quicken as he prowled the aisles of the last remaining jewellery booths he’d yet to inspect. Most was tat and he avoided that fastidiously. He didn’t like the bright, the brash and the costume stuff; that would be an insult to his Hillary, although he might pick up something to keep that stupid cow Vivienne Tyrell happy.

  He quickly pushed thoughts of the wearisome girl aside and concentrated on his task.

  Since he wasn’t sure what Hillary’s favourite gemstones were, he’d decided to stick with something classic and simple in gold. The high-quality stuff, naturally. He eyed lockets of all kind, and was sorely tempted by some of the antique silver ones especially. Although not gold, they had the quality and uniqueness associated with artisans long gone, and he thought that she would appreciate both the workmanship and the class.

  But lockets, by their nature, needed something inside them – a photograph of a loved one, or a lock of hair.

  Tom grinned at the impossibility of either of those: she’d be on to him like a lioness on an impala.

  So he skirted the lockets, rejected the gems, and finally found what he was looking for in a dimly lit booth almost at the back near one of the many exits from the market. The stallholder was a foreigner of East European extraction by the sound of his accent, a middle-aged man with a cadaverous face and blank blue eyes.

  The item was made of a beguiling mixture of old gold, white gold, and gleaming buttery yellow gold: two love-hearts, one in solid white gold, the other in lattice-worked yellow, both joined by a finely moulded old gold arrow.

  It was perfect. On a simple but substantial, good quality box-style chain, it was understated and chic, obviously old and perfectly made.

  And the message couldn’t be clearer.

  Beaming with delight, he paid out the £200+ for it without a flicker of protest. He’d made sure that the booth owner wouldn’t be able to pick him up out of any line up easily by wearing sunglasses, and a baseball cap pulled well down over his forehead. He paid in cash, obviously, and spoke as little as possible.

  If the stallholder had any suspicions, his blank eyes hid them well. He counted the money fast, and without being asked, retrieved an old leather, velvet-lined jewellery box from under the table and carefully arranged the pendant inside.

  Although it clearly wasn’t the original box for the piece, it had faded writing on it in gold, and Tom liked the way it added a touch of class to the whole enterprise. Perhaps the booth owner had sensed that the young man buying such a love token was well and truly smitten and was a romantic at heart. Or perhaps his radar for danger had just insisted that he wanted Tom gone quickly – and perfectly satisfied with the transaction.

  Either way, Tom left Oxford smiling.

  Back at HQ, he donned a pair of fine leather gloves and used plain A5 paper and one of the record office’s computers to type and print out a message.

  MY DEAREST HILLARY

  A GIFT FROM THE HEART. PLEASE WEAR IT AND THINK OF ME. I CAN’T WAIT UNTIL WE MEET AGAIN.

  LOL.

  He read it and smiled. Lol was what he’d told her to call him when she’d asked him his name, that glorious day in the car-park in Thrupp, when he had finally been able to put his arms around her and could breathe in the wonderful perfume of her hair, and luxuriate in the fast beat of her pulse under the forearm that he had draped around her throat.

  Lol, short for Love of your Life.

  He whistled as he popped both the note and the jewellery case into a plain brown envelope. He used water to seal it, so there would be no chance of lifting his DNA from the saliva, and resisted the urge to write her name on the front, even using plain capitals. She was just too good to give her any leeway at all.

  He was sure that the jewellery booth owner had collected a vast range of old jewellery cases over the years, and any attempt by his bright and beautiful girl to trace the origin of the locket from that was doomed to failure. And if he’d read the body language of the foreigner correctly, even if some uniformed plod did do the rounds of the jewellery stalls with a picture of the pendant, he was unlikely to admit ever having seen it before. Let alone selling it. His sort liked to avoid having anything to do with the police.

  It was an irony that wasn’t lost on Tom.

  Hillary spent her lunch hour in the canteen, which was hardly fine dining with Jimmy and Sam, whilst contemplating the paperwork in front of her.

  The last of the three missing girls, Gilly Tinkerton had, in some ways, the slimmest file of them all. ‘She’s a bit of a cipher, our Gilly,’ Hillary said, tapping the folder, the contents of which were, once again, the result of Sam’s handiwork. ‘You weren’t able to come up with much,’ she added without censure, and looked across at the young lad with a questioning smile.

  ‘Sorry, guv, there simply wasn’t much to be had. All the regular stuff was there, but…’ He shrugged.

  ‘Right. Just the easily verifiable,’ Hillary nodded, eating a ham and tomato sandwich whilst studying the data. ‘Aged twenty-nine, two years ago when she was first reported missing. About five feet six, plumpish build, red hair and freckles. Big blue eyes according to her old school photos.’ Hillary grinned, shoving the file around so that Jimmy could see.

  ‘She must be about twelve there,’ the old man guffawed, nodding down at the file’s one and only photograph.

  Sam flushed.

  ‘Sorry, guv, I just couldn’t find anything more recent. None of her family and friends seemed to have any. She was a bit camera shy they all said, on account of her being fat, I reckon,’ he added carelessly.

  Jimmy snorted a laugh. ‘Not interested in political correctness then, sonny? I thought that’s what you modern lot all went in for like good little boys and girls. And if you want to impress the brass you should stick to it, that’s my advice. What is it called nowadays? Corpulently challenged, is it? Or rotundly handicapped?’

  Hillary laughed and took back the file. ‘You couldn’t find anything more official even?’ she asked Sam. ‘Driver’s licence?’

  ‘She’s never driven, as far as I can see. Never took any lessons or passed a test – officially, at any rate. So she never had a driver’s licence issued. Mind you, that doesn’t necessarily mean that she wasn’t out and about driving around in a car anyway. From what people said, I don’t think she had much interest in observing the law, guv.’

  ‘Oh, a criminal record?’ Jimmy said, perking up. ‘She’s bound to have official ID then.’

  ‘No, Jimmy, I don’t mean it like that,’ Sam said, spearing a chip and chewing vigorously. ‘She’s not a villain. Just one of these so called “free-spirits” you get nowadays. Someone who’s not all that interested in living by the rules.’

  ‘Oh right. New Age clap trap,’ Jimmy grumbled. ‘In my day they were called hippies, and were always stoned at rock festivals.’

  Sam and Hillary exchanged more grins. Jimmy pretended not to n
otice.

  ‘Right, Jimmy,’ Sam said kindly.

  ‘Well, perhaps her family can help us out in other ways, even if they don’t have a decent photograph of her. They still live in Brill?’ she asked, naming a village that sat atop a high and, locally famous, hill.

  ‘Yeah guv, the address is recent,’ Sam promised.

  Jimmy, sensing his boss was impatient for the off, quickly gobbled up the last of his fried-egg sandwich and reached for his mug of tea.

  Twenty minutes later they were headed for the other side of the market town of Bicester, where they hoped to put some flesh on the bones – so to speak – of the third of the stalker’s victims.

  Deirdre Tinkerton turned out to be one of those roly-poly women with red cheeks and a naturally cheerful disposition that you expect to see playing as an extra on The Darling Buds of May. She had salt-and-pepper hair rolled back in an untidy bun and big blue eyes. She also had a rolling Oxonian country burr in her voice, and seemed determined to reinforce the stereotype yet further by answering the door dressed in a flowered apron, and with flour sprinkled up her arms to her elbows.

  She looked at Hillary’s ID card without touching it, waving margarine-smeared fingers as a mute explanation and looked at Hillary with a trace of fear.

  ‘Is it our Gilly? Lumme, you ain’t found no body, have you? Don’t tell me it’s my little girl?’

  Hillary hastily reassured her that that wasn’t the case, and gave her the same standard line as she was giving to all the witnesses. ‘Nothing like that, Mrs Tinkerton. We’re just looking at Gillian’s case again.’ She gave a brief description of what the Crime Review Team did, and of her role in it as an ex-copper.

  ‘Oh right. Like with those three old men on New Tricks,’ she said, mentioning the name of the popular television programme that showcased the solving of cold crimes. Hillary and Jimmy smiled and agreed that they were indeed, just like that.

  ‘Come on through then. I’m just doing the baking for the month,’ she said, as she led them through to the kitchen, her usual bonhomie quickly restored. ‘I does a freezerful at a time, see. Right now it’s rhubarb – coming up a treat it is, and Les has got an allotment full of it. Good thing we likes rhubarb, I say! You want one?’ she added, pointing to one of six already made and waiting to be baked pies, lining one of the work surfaces.

  The Tinkertons lived in what had once been a council house but was now obviously privately owned as a large kitchen extension had been built. Hillary smiled and declined the offer with real regret. Just how long was it since she’d tasted a homemade fruit pie?

  ‘Ah right. Can’t be having bribes, I ’spect it is,’ Deirdre said, but with her eyes twinkling at Hillary as she reached for her rolling pin and began rolling out a roughly circular shape of pastry.

  Hillary noticed Jimmy watch her carefully when she reached for the rolling pin, and then slowly relax, and silently approved of his caution, which spoke of years of experience and instinct. Although it was almost impossible to regard this woman seriously as a threat, no doubt Jimmy had, in the past, had equally unlikely women come at him with a rolling pin! All beat bobbies were called out to domestics, after all, which were notoriously unpredictable.

  ‘So how can I help then, my love?’ Deirdre asked comfortably. ‘Would you mind giving that pan a stir and stop it from sticking? Has this got anything to do with that nice, young, red-headed boy who come round asking about Gilly and wanting a photo of her? He reminded me a bit of that other nice young constable who came the very first time, asking about our Gilly. Good looking lad he was too.’

  Hillary, obligingly stirring a vast pan of pink and green stalks with a wooden spoon, nodded with a smile. Sam would be chuffed to be regarded as ‘good-looking’ she had no doubt, even by a woman old enough to be his grandmother. ‘My colleague, Sam Pickles. Yes. He told us you weren’t able to find a recent photograph of Gillian.’

  ‘No. We don’t go in for cameras much in our family. Never could get the hang of ’em myself, and Les is no good with one either. And Gilly never was the sort to primp and preen much and want her picture took.’

  ‘You haven’t heard from Gilly recently, have you, Mrs Tinkerton?’ Hillary asked cautiously, feeling strangely wrong-footed by the woman’s easy-going manner.

  Deirdre frowned. ‘No. But you know I’m not that worried about it, to be honest. Our Gilly never was much good at writing – I was the same at school myself. Never could spell worth a damn.’

  Hillary nodded. ‘But she never phones?’ she prompted persistently. She was puzzled by Deirdre Tinkerton’s distinct lack of worry. Her home was clean and cosy and had a nice atmosphere about it. And in direct contrast to the impression that she’d got from the Yellands, she was sure that Gilly Tinkerton had been well loved and reared with generosity. And had been very much a wanted and valued child.

  ‘You have other children, Mrs Tinkerton?’ she asked curiously.

  ‘Lumme, yes, my love. Three of each – three girls, three boys. Gilly is second youngest.’

  ‘You don’t seem to be all that worried about her, Mrs Tinkerton,’ Hillary said at last, keeping her voice bland. Even so the woman stopped rolling out her pastry and cocked an intelligent eye her way.

  ‘That’s because you don’t know our Gilly, and never did know her, whereas I know that girl like the back of me ’and. Not hearing from her is just her way. She probably don’t even realize how much time has gone by. Always a dreamer. Never had no sense of time, or thought for what other people might be thinking neither.’ She suddenly laughed. ‘To be honest, she often has no sense, full stop. She went off with a band of them gyppos in caravans and camper vans or what have you a while back, even. You know about that, right?’

  Hillary did. ‘A little. She spent a few years travelling, I think?’

  ‘Right. I reckon she thought it was as close as she was gonna get to running off and joining the circus. That’s what she wanted to do when she was little, you know,’ Deirdre said, with an indulgent chuckle. She gently nudged Hillary away from the stove and nodded in satisfaction at the softening fruit. ‘Ah, just need to cool down a bit.’ She took the pan off the stove and set it to rest to one side.

  ‘I blame them books she read as a kid. About some elephant packing its trunk and what not. You ask any of my other kids what they wanted to be when they was nippers, and they’d have said that they wanted to be astronauts, or train drivers, or actresses or nurses or whatever. Gilly always wanted to run away and join the circus.’ Deirdre Tinkerton sighed and carried on somewhat pragmatically. ‘’Course, there ain’t any circuses any more, can’t afford to keep runnin’ I reckon, and even if there had’a been, our Gilly wouldn’t have been any use to ’em, Lord love her. She couldn’t ride a horse, and she was built too much like me to swing from a wire. She didn’t have no beard neither, and her dad threatened to wallop her backside if she came home with so much as a single tattoo.’

  By now she was openly laughing, and Jimmy was also holding a hand over his mouth as he pretended to take notes. ‘So when she upped and left just after her eighteenth birthday with this band of gyppos none of us was surprised. We were just glad and relieved when she came back. Les was half-expecting her to come back with a nipper or two, but she didn’t. ’Course, that never surprised me so much. For all she’s got her head in the clouds half the time, she’s also got it screwed right on her shoulders. If’n you see what I mean.’

  Hillary smiled, thinking that she knew very well what Deirdre meant. ‘She was well able to take care of herself, you mean. She might not have had book-learning, but she was canny, like a fox.’

  ‘That’s it, my love,’ Deirdre said approvingly, and reached for some battered tin plates and started laying out pastry in them, carefully trimming the excess from around the edges. ‘So now she’s gone off again, I ain’t worried this time neither.’

  Well, that explained her easy manner, Hillary thought. And instantly felt guilty. For this mother truly believed that h
er daughter was all right. But was now the time to tell her differently? Would it be needlessly cruel to shatter her convictions? Hillary thought that it was – especially since they didn’t have any concrete evidence to go on.

  ‘When she left the first time, did you hear from her then?’ Hillary asked carefully.

  ‘Not for ages, no, love. Gilly don’t like modern technology stuff – not computer mad, see, like all her little nieces and nephews. I swear, some of the gadgets they use make my ’ead swim.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Gilly was always good with her hands, see,’ Deirdre swept on, anxious to make her understand. ‘But not so good with living in the everyday world, like. She was shy as a kid, something terrible. She could knit a treat by the time she was ten though. Crochet too, and embroidery. And when she got older she took up painting – lovely little country scenes and what ’ave you. There’s one over there.’

  She nodded her head towards an uninspired and not very good watercolour of weeping willows surrounding a small pond full of ducks. But the composition showed the artist had at least some eye for form. And the colours showed a hearty verve.

  ‘Very nice,’ Hillary said. ‘Before she left, was she acting jittery at all?’

  ‘Oh, yes, love, I knew she was getting itchy feet. I said to Les, “you just wait and see. Our Gilly’s gonna be off again soon”. And she was.’

  ‘Did she ever mention being bothered by anyone?’

  ‘Whaddya mean, love?’ Deirdre asked, retrieving the saucepan and smoothing in a good dollop of cooling rhubarb into one of the pie cases.

  ‘I mean was a man pestering her?’ Hillary asked.

  ‘Oh, him. Yeah, Gilly did say someone fancied her. She got a bit giggly about it. Flowers and Valentine cards came for her, and all that sort of thing.’

  ‘Did they frighten her?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I think it pleased her. And I thought it did her self-confidence a bit of good, having a lad take a fancy to her, like. But she got sort of impatient with him for not coming forward. She said it was all very well having a secret and anonymous admirer and what have you, but you couldn’t hug and kiss a love letter, could you?’