Crisis

11

I was back in the Bedford Lodge Hotel in time to catch the end of breakfast.

Was it still only breakfast time? I felt that I’d been up for at least half a day.

I sat at a table for one and had scrambled eggs on toast with bacon. Living on my own meant that I very rarely had a cooked breakfast, or even any breakfast at all.

A middle-aged couple beat the ten o’clock curfew by a mere second or two and sat down at the table next to me, him with a copy of the Racing Post, her with a fashion magazine.

The man’s phone went beep-beep and he looked down at the screen. ‘They’ve identified the body in that fire at the Chadwick place. Someone called Zoe Robertson.’

Bad news travels fast, I thought.

‘Who’s she?’ the woman asked, looking up from her magazine.

‘His daughter.’

‘Ryan’s daughter?’

‘No. Oliver’s. From a previous marriage.’

‘Well, I never did,’ she said.

The man was still reading from his phone.

‘They’re implying she started it.’

‘Poor Oliver,’ the woman said. ‘Bad enough losing your best horses without then discovering it’s your own daughter that was the cause.’

‘That hasn’t been confirmed.’

‘But you say they imply it?’

‘Yeah, well, sort of. The police haven’t said so but, according to this, she’d been convicted before for arson. But they’re only going by what’s been posted on social media.’

Social media had much to answer for, I thought. It was a rumour-monger’s paradise.

The couple went back to their reading material while I finished my scrambled eggs, and then returned to my room.

I flicked on the BBC News Channel and it too was reporting the same social-media ‘fact’ that Zoe Robertson had started the fire, clearly working on the principle that one couldn’t slander the already dead. If Zoe had still been alive, the BBC wouldn’t have dared repeat such an allegation without good evidence to back it up.

I checked my emails.

There was one from the Simpson White Research Team with their preliminary findings on the Chadwicks. Someone had clearly been very busy overnight.

The report was broken down member-by-member of the Chadwick family with Oliver first. Some of the information I already knew, as it had been in Georgina’s brief on the day I’d first arrived at Newmarket. But there was plenty of new stuff and some of it was highly detailed. Good job, I thought, and, not for the first time, I wondered how the wizards in the office had found it all out.

Oliver had been born at the now-closed Mill Road Maternity Hospital in Cambridge in early 1950 and educated at the Leys School, also in Cambridge, from where he had failed to win a place at university. Hence he had joined his elder brother, James, in working for their father at the stables in Bury Road. His first marriage had been in May 1975 to Miss Audrey Parker, the daughter of another racehorse trainer in Newmarket, and they’d quickly had two sons — Ryan and Declan. Audrey had died of liver cancer in March 1982 when the boys had been just six and four, and Oliver had remarried to Yvonne Jefferies eighteen months later. Two more children followed — Tony and Zoe. That marriage had lasted almost thirty years but it was said to have been tempestuous and unhappy, and had finally ended in divorce when Oliver admitted his long-term and ongoing adultery with one Maria Webster, a former personal trainer from the local fitness and leisure centre. Oliver had then married Maria when it became known that she was pregnant with his child, but she had miscarried the baby only six days after the wedding ceremony.

No wonder she’d hit the bottle.

By comparison, Ryan and Declan had seemingly led exemplary lives. Both had left school at sixteen to ride as professional jockeys, and each had been married just the once, to Susan and Arabella respectively. The only visible stain on either of their characters was that Ryan had been officially cautioned by the police for causing a disturbance in a Doncaster hotel, where it was claimed he’d punched a man during an argument, breaking the man’s nose. Ryan had been arrested but there had been no ensuing court case, however, as the unnamed victim of the assault had apparently declined to press charges.

There was also a little about Tony but the bulk of the research team’s report concentrated, as I’d requested, on Oliver Chadwick’s only daughter — Zoe. And there was plenty to know about her.

She’d been born at the Rosie Maternity Hospital in Cambridge in early December 1988. At age four, she had been enrolled at St Louis Roman Catholic Primary, and then, at eleven, she went to Newmarket College, the local secondary school. She dropped out before taking her A levels and never returned to formal education.

The first time she was reported missing was two days after her eighteenth birthday when her mother had called the police to inform them that her daughter had failed to return home from an evening out with friends.

At the time of her disappearance, the killing of two young girls in nearby Soham was still fresh in local people’s minds, and there were some unsolved murders of young women in Ipswich, just forty miles away along the A14. Hence, it was widely believed that Zoe had been another victim of the man being labelled as the ‘Suffolk Strangler’. A huge police search had been initiated, with hundreds of volunteers scouring every corner of Newmarket and the surrounding heath looking for Zoe’s body.

Nothing had been found, of course, and she had finally been identified by the Metropolitan Police three weeks later on Christmas Eve, living under a railway arch in Croydon, south London, with a number of other homeless young people. Apparently, both her family and the police had been absolutely furious with her but she had claimed she was unaware of the massive publicity generated by her disappearance. She also announced that, as she was now legally an adult, she could do as she pleased, and had refused to go home.

Over the following years, she had not only come to the attention of the police on several occasions, but also to many other agencies, not least the local social services in Ealing who had twice briefly taken her children into care.

Arabella had disclosed to me that Zoe had had mental health problems, and she hadn’t been kidding.

The research team had somehow discovered that Zoe had been forcefully admitted to psychiatric hospitals on at least three separate occasions, the most recent being for a two-month stretch earlier in the current year.

Arabella had claimed that post-natal depression was the basis of Zoe’s problems but it appeared from the chronology in the report that her first hospital admission had been well before the birth of her eldest child, indeed it had been not long after she’d been found in Croydon.

There was also something about the arson conviction, including two local newspaper reports from the time. Two years previously, Zoe and two other women had set fire to the garden shed of a man who had admitted beating up his wife. The shed in question had been large and had housed the man’s treasured model-train layout. The whole lot had been completely consumed in the fire.

The three women had been neighbours of the victim and had seemingly extracted their own revenge after the man had been handed a community service order rather than the jail sentence they all felt he deserved.

The three had pleaded guilty to criminal damage at Ealing Magistrates’ Court and had been bound over for a year to keep the peace, with each ordered to pay a hundred pounds in compensation for the loss of the shed. The man, meanwhile, had claimed in vain that thousands of pounds’ worth of model railway had also been destroyed, but the lady chairman of the bench had referred to it as simply ‘a few toys’.

There was clearly little doubt about whose side she’d been on.

But it was hardly the crime of the year, and surely not worthy of being the reason why the TV news was blaming Zoe for the fire at Castleton House Stables. If the Simpson White research wizards could get the information, then unquestionably the BBC should have been able to do so as well.

However, there was one interesting additional detail at the bottom of the report that had not been available to the Ealing magistrates at the time the case had come before them: one of the other two women later revealed that it had been Zoe alone who had proposed setting fire to the shed, and that she had also snapped the door padlock shut first, wrongly believing the man to be still inside.

Maybe it could have been the crime of the year after all.

The last part of the Simpson White research report concerned Zoe’s husband, Peter Robertson.

As Georgina’s original brief had indicated, Peter was an estate agent, but that told only a fraction of his story.

Janie had said she thought Peter was older than Zoe, and he was — almost nine years older. He’d also been married twice before Zoe, and neither of those marriages had ended well. Now his third had gone the same way.

The wizards had attached scanned copies of all three of his marriage certificates, together with the death certificate of his first wife and the High Court judge’s divorce certificate that had unshackled him from his second. There were also copies of the official registration of births for his and Zoe’s two children.

They all made for interesting reading.

Peter Robertson had married his first wife, Kirsty Wright, at Croydon Register Office when they had each been twenty-one. Both bride and groom had had ‘no fixed abode’ recorded for their addresses, and ‘unemployed’ was written in the spaces for their professions.

Kirsty had survived a mere two months after her wedding day and it had clearly not been a happy marriage. The South London Coroner had recorded a verdict of suicide, deciding that Kirsty had killed herself by deliberately stepping off the platform at East Croydon Station, right into the path of the non-stopping Gatwick Express.

Peter had wed for a second time at the same venue two years later, this time to a Lorna Harris. This marriage had lasted longer, three years to be precise, but it too had ended badly with Lorna divorcing him for what was stated in the petition as his ‘unreasonable behaviour’.

Neither of these marriages appeared to have produced any children.

He married Zoe Chadwick two years after his divorce, once again at Croydon Register Office, and this time, not only did Peter have a fixed abode but also ‘estate agent’ was recorded as his profession on the certificate.

The birth of their first child, a daughter called Poppy, was registered at Croydon University Hospital just six weeks after the wedding, with a second daughter, Joanne, following twenty months later, by which time the Robertsons had apparently moved, Ealing Hospital now being recorded as the place of delivery.

Finally, there was a note from the wizards saying that their contact at the Disclosure and Barring Service had confirmed to them that Peter had twice been convicted of the possession of Class A drugs, and they were still searching for further details.

As a solicitor, I wondered just how legal that last enquiry had been. The registers of births, deaths and marriages were all in the public domain, as were the judgements of both the coroner and family courts, but an individual’s criminal record was subject to data-protection regulations, or at least it should have been.

But that was why we called them wizards. They were able to use their special magic to find out things that we lesser mortals couldn’t.

However, I decided I should keep that last piece of information very much to myself.

I sat for a while reading and rereading all the material until I was sure I had the various relationships understood and committed to memory. Not that any of it gave me any insight as to why Zoe Robertson had ended up alone and dead in her father’s burned-out stables, seventy miles away from her home.

I next spent some time thinking about Kate Logan and wondering if Janie had passed on my telephone number. Not that she would have needed my mobile number in order to contact me — she knew I was staying at the Bedford Lodge.

Had it really only been the previous evening that I had met her?

An awful lot seemed to have happened since then.

My phone rang and I grabbed it but, sadly and unexpectedly, it was not Kate but DCI Eastwood on the line.

‘Thank you, Mr Foster, for your direction concerning Zoe Robertson.’

‘You’re very welcome,’ I replied.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Most helpful, but we would have discovered her identity anyway. It is routine to scan the national DNA database whenever we have an unidentified sample.’

Then why are you calling me now, I thought.

I found out quickly enough.

‘Perhaps you could further help us with our enquiries?’ he asked.

‘Anything,’ I said.

‘You said yesterday that you were with Mr Declan Chadwick when Mr Robertson called to tell him that Zoe was missing.’

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Peter Robertson actually spoke to Mrs Chadwick. I was with Declan when his wife relayed the message.’

‘Did either of them indicate that they had recently been in contact with Zoe Robertson or her husband?’

‘Not exactly,’ I said slowly, thinking back to the way Declan had gone so pale at the news. ‘But...’ There was something else too. Something I’d considered slightly odd at the time. Now, what was it?

‘Yes?’ prompted the policeman.

‘I remember thinking it was slightly strange that Arabella announced that Zoe had gone missing again. As if she’d known Zoe had gone missing before.’

‘Mr Foster,’ replied the chief inspector, his tone full of irony. ‘Everyone in Newmarket knows that Zoe Chadwick had gone missing before. Police officers knocked on every door in the damn town during an intensive two-week search for her almost twelve years ago. What a complete waste of resources that was. I was a detective sergeant on the case at the time.’

So that is what he hadn’t been telling me during our meeting yesterday, and he sounded as if he was still angry about it.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but Arabella told me Zoe went missing regularly. And she also referred to Peter Robertson as Pete. One doesn’t do that unless you’ve been in fairly regular contact.’

‘Thank you, Mr Foster. That is most helpful.’

He was terminating the call.

‘Hold on a minute,’ I said quickly. ‘Don’t go. Have you found out anything more about how the fire started? Was it Zoe who started it?’

He hesitated, as if deciding whether to say anything or not.

‘After the results of the post-mortem, we now consider it unlikely that Mrs Robertson started the fire.’

There was a distinct pause while the magnitude of what he had just said sank into my brain.

‘Because she was already dead,’ I said slowly.

There was another pause. A much longer one.

‘There are clearly no flies on you, Mr Foster,’ the detective chief inspector said eventually. ‘I can see that I should have been more guarded. I’ll be drummed out of the force if I’m not careful.’ He cleared his throat as if emphasising the gravity of what was to follow. ‘That is highly confidential information, Mr Foster. You are not to pass it on to any member of the Chadwick family, or anyone else for that matter. That would be construed by me as obstructing a police officer in the course of his duty. Do you understand?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

I bet he was now wishing he’d said nothing at all. I had simply jumped to home plate from a throwaway comment way out in left field.

‘But how do you know?’ I asked him, not wanting to lose the opportunity.

He hesitated again but clearly decided that, having already inadvertently given me the treasure, there was no problem in also handing over the map.

‘In spite of the intensity of the fire, the core of the body was largely intact, in particular the chest cavity, and, according to the pathologist, no smoke residue or fire damage was detectable in the lungs.’

‘So she hadn’t been breathing,’ I said.

‘Exactly. Either she’d already been dead when the fire started or she died suddenly just as it did so, maybe from something like a heart attack. The pathologist is still investigating that remote possibility.’

‘So you believe she was murdered.’

It was more of a statement than a question and precipitated another long pause from the detective.

‘We cannot say that for sure at present.’ Such was his unease at giving me any more information that he almost whispered the response. ‘As yet, we have no definitive cause of death. Maybe we never will, such is the extent of fire damage to the head, neck and the other extremities of the body. But murder is definitely one of the possibilities. Perhaps the most likely. Maybe she was strangled or hit over the head or something. Someone then may have set the stables on fire in an attempt to cover up what they’d done.’

But who?

And why?