Crisis

29

My phone rang as I was walking back to the hotel.

‘It seems your boy may be off the hook,’ DCI Eastwood said when I answered. ‘At least for now.’

‘How come?’

‘The CCTV cameras at Newmarket Station weren’t operational on that day so we have no pictures from them, but we have now received some footage from an on-train camera. It shows Zoe Robertson boarding a train at Newmarket bound for Cambridge on the day she died.’

‘But...’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t make sense. How come she turns up dead in Newmarket when she’d already taken the train home?’

‘Well, she obviously didn’t get home,’ I said. ‘Did any cameras spot her at Cambridge?’

‘The ones outside definitely didn’t, but we’re still searching through the tapes from those inside the station and we’ve extended the search to later in the day because it seems she caught the train after the one that Declan Chadwick said she did. We’re also checking the CCTV from the London-bound trains, although I can’t think why she would go all the way down there and then come back again.’

‘Zoe Robertson did a lot stranger things than that in her life.’

‘She certainly seemed to vanish. The on-board camera had quite a narrow field of view. It only showed her getting on the train, not where she sat in the carriage, or her getting off. But we’ll keep looking.’

‘Thanks for letting me know,’ I said. ‘I’ll pass on the good news to Declan.’

‘Did you find anything in the medical records?’ the chief inspector asked.

‘Your sergeant didn’t agree with you letting me see them,’ I said, neatly sidestepping the question. ‘He thinks it’s a mistake to help the defence.’

‘He’s very old-school,’ said the DCI. ‘He doesn’t approve of the police graduate-entry fast-track scheme either. I may be different from most coppers but I prefer to work with people rather than against them. That way, I tend to get more help in return.’

I wondered if he was purposefully making me feel bad.

But I could hardly apprise him of my half-baked theories just yet. I would be no worse than those on social media or in the tabloid press who scatter accusations around at the slightest hint of wrongdoing, without a care in the world for the reputations they are destroying in the process.

I was in the ‘reputation keeping’ business, not the other way round.

Would he even believe me anyway? DS Venables must have seen the letter from the psychotherapist about abuse and he had obviously dismissed it, just as Zoe’s GP had done at the time — fantasist.

Now, that was one reputation it was difficult to lose.

And I certainly wasn’t going to reveal what I knew about any blackmail money because I doubted that the wizards had been acting within the law when they’d obtained copies of Peter’s bank statements from the finance company.

No, the DCI would have to wait for some reaction to my thunderflashes in order to confirm my suspicions before I’d mention anything to him.

The answer to my easy request from the research team was waiting for me in my email inbox when I got back to the hotel. They reported that they were still working on the difficult one.

I called up the driver and his Mercedes, and then went into the hotel dining room to have a quick breakfast while I waited for them to arrive. I even found myself glancing through the hotel’s copy of the Racing Post.

I wanted to check where the racing was today and whether Ryan or Declan had any runners, or Tony any rides.

Ayr, Nottingham and Chepstow were the meetings for racing on the flat, with two additional steeplechase fixtures at Hexham and Huntingdon.

I skimmed through the races looking for the name Chadwick and found it only once. Trainer D. Chadwick had a runner in the three o’clock race at Nottingham. If he were true to form, Declan would have sent Joe, his travelling head lad, with the horse. So all the Chadwicks were likely to be at home.

I was just closing the paper when a headline on the opposite page caught my eye: ‘DERBY WIDE OPEN AFTER LOSS OF PRINCE OF TROY’.

With my forty-pound wager in mind, I read the article beneath from start to finish but Orion’s Glory wasn’t mentioned once as being among the favourites.

Ah well, I thought, perhaps I could sneak the forty pounds through with my expenses — a necessary outlay in order to get acquainted with the system.

Or maybe not.

However, it was the last paragraph of the article that was the real interest.

Ensuring that none of the waiters were watching, I tore the piece out of the paper, folded it up and put it in my trouser pocket.

‘Dullingham, please,’ I said to the driver as he held the door open for me.

‘The village or the station?’ he replied.

‘Aren’t they at the same place?’ I asked.

‘Oh no,’ he said with a smile. ‘That catches lots of people out. The station is almost a mile outside the village. I know it well. My in-laws live there.’

‘Well, I want Eagle Lane, number three.’

‘Right you are,’ he said, and off we went.

Number 3, Eagle Lane, was a small, neat, modern detached house that looked somewhat out of place, sitting as it did alongside a chocolate-box-pretty thatched cottage.

I rang the doorbell, hoping I’d been given the right address.

I had.

Yvonne Chadwick opened the front door in her bedroom slippers, and she instantly recognised me.

‘What do you want?’ she asked gruffly.

‘Is Tony in?’ I asked.

‘No. He’s riding out in town.’

I’d hoped he was. That’s why I’d chosen this time.

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Because it’s you I’ve come to see. I want to ask you some questions about Zoe.’

‘I’m not interested,’ she said, and she started to close the door again.

‘Don’t you want to know why your daughter died?’ I said quickly.

‘She died a long time ago.’

The door was almost shut and, short of putting my foot in it, I was almost out of options.

‘Why did Zoe have an abortion?’ I shouted through the last few inches.

The door stopped closing, and then opened a fraction.

‘Who told you?’ she demanded through the gap.

‘Then it’s true,’ I said. ‘You made your thirteen-year-old daughter have an abortion and yet you never reported the matter to the police. Why was that, Yvonne?’

She opened the door wide and looked nervously past me both sides to check that no one else was listening.

‘You’d better come in.’

I followed her down the hallway into the kitchen. Why was it always the kitchen?

‘I didn’t make Zoe have an abortion,’ Yvonne said. ‘She arranged it on her own.’

‘I find that difficult to believe.’

‘Well, it’s true. She skipped off school and went on her own to a clinic in Cambridge. And, it appears, they were under no obligation to tell either her parents or the police.’

‘But she was only a child herself.’

‘It doesn’t matter. The stupid law says that doctors don’t have to tell if a thirteen-year-old doesn’t want them to. And Zoe didn’t. Some guff or other to do with medical confidentiality.’

‘So how did you find out?’

‘She told me, but not till about a year later. We were having a huge row about something else and she just blurted it out. Of course, I didn’t believe her, but she had some paperwork hidden in her room. She showed me. As you can imagine, I was horrified.’

‘But who paid for it?’ I asked.

‘The taxpayer,’ Yvonne said. ‘Seems it was done on the NHS.’

‘Did you ask her who the father was?’

‘Of course I did, over and over again, but she wouldn’t say. She was furious with herself for revealing anything to me in the first place. She claimed that she never meant to tell anyone, ever. I expect the father was some bloody boy from school taking advantage of her.’

I looked at Yvonne closely and wondered if she really believed that, or she was just saying it for my benefit.

‘Why did you say that she died a long time ago?’ I asked.

‘Might as well have done. I grieved for her when she first went missing. Prepared myself over those dreadful weeks for her to be found raped, strangled and dumped naked in a hedge. Then, when they found her alive in London, she refused to see or even speak to me. So I just went on thinking of her as being dead. It was easier somehow.’

‘But you’ve seen her since?’

‘Only once. She came here about five years ago with that damn husband of hers. They brought their children with them too. But I think she only did it to make me feel bad. To goad me. That and to accuse me of having had her sectioned. I told her it wasn’t true but I don’t think she believed me. They didn’t even come in. They just drove off again.’

‘But you knew where to go last week,’ I said. ‘I saw you at their home.’

‘Tony got the address for me. From Oliver. So I went. I don’t know why. It wasn’t a good idea. I had to sleep on the sofa. He didn’t want me there and the children didn’t even know who I was.’

There were tears in her eyes.

‘But why did you tell Catherine Logan that the Chadwick men had killed Zoe from a very young age?’

‘Did I really say that?’ She said it in a most unconvincing manner.

‘You know you did.’

‘Just that it wasn’t easy for Zoe growing up with three highly competitive older brothers, plus a domineering father. Particularly as she didn’t like horses.’

There’s nothing wrong with that, I thought.

I waited for Yvonne to go on.

‘Ryan was eleven when Zoe was born, Declan was nine, and I think they were jealous of their baby sister.’

‘Jealous?’

‘She was the apple of my eye. I’d always wanted a daughter. Perhaps I spoilt her too much. And I wasn’t the older two’s real mother, something they’ve never let me forget. They always called me Yvonne, not Mum. They still do. It’s as if they somehow blame me for their own mother’s death, which is nonsense, of course. She died of cancer before I even met Oliver.’

‘So they transferred their resentment of you onto Zoe?’

‘Yes,’ she said with realisation, as if it was perhaps the first time she’d appreciated it in that way. ‘That is exactly what happened.’

‘How about Tony?’ I said. ‘Didn’t he stick up for his sister?’

‘I think he was influenced by his brothers. It was difficult for him.’

Another thunderflash time.

‘So when did you first realise that the boys were sexually abusing her?’

A look of shock came over Yvonne’s face, but it didn’t quite wash. There was something about her eyes that gave her away.

‘Sexual abuse?’ She spat out the words as if they were somehow unclean and contaminated. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘And Oliver was doing it too, wasn’t he?’

Now the shock did reach her eyes.

‘No, of course not.’

Perhaps that bit wasn’t true, or maybe she just didn’t know.

‘But Oliver definitely knew what was happening and kept quiet about it, which is almost as bad. And you did too. Why was that, Yvonne?’

‘It was our family,’ she said, almost crying.

‘And family always came first?’

‘Of course.’

‘How about Zoe?’ I said. ‘She was your family too and you betrayed her. What must she have thought when her parents did nothing to protect her?’

‘We didn’t do nothing,’ she said indignantly. ‘We spoke to them all.’

‘Was that before or after you found out about the abortion?’

‘Before. Long before. And Zoe was as much to blame as the boys. She would always be climbing into their beds. She’d done it ever since she was able to walk. She was simply trying to make them like her.’

Yet all they were doing was using and abusing her, taking advantage, and damaging her for life in the process.

‘Oh no,’ I said to Yvonne. ‘I’ll not let you absolve yourself of guilt by blaming the victim. You and Oliver were Zoe’s parents. You could and should have stopped it. And Ryan is eleven years older than her. He, at least, must have known that it was wrong.’

Yvonne was visibly upset and, at this point, our discussion was interrupted by the arrival of Tony, back from riding out. He came in through the front door, slamming it shut behind him with a bang.

‘Whose is that black Mercedes outside?’ he called out as he walked down to the kitchen. Then he saw me. ‘What the bloody hell do you want?’ he asked with a high degree of aggression in his tone.

In spite of me being a good six inches taller than him, the last thing I wanted was a fight.

I knew jockeys were small but they were also strong and wiry. I was no pushover myself. I was a regular at the Neasden gym and prided myself on keeping fairly fit. Perhaps we’d be evenly matched, but I still didn’t fancy putting it to the test.

‘Your mother and I have been having a little chat.’ I said it with a smile but it didn’t seem to help, mostly because Yvonne was still clearly very distressed.

‘Have you been upsetting my mother?’ he asked angrily.

I felt like saying that it wasn’t my doing — facing the truth had been the cause — but I thought better of it.

‘So it would appear,’ I said.

‘What have you been saying to her?’ he asked.

‘You’d better ask her that.’

Yvonne now really did burst into full-blown tears.

‘Get out!’ Tony shouted at me, taking a step forward.

‘Okay, okay,’ I said, taking one back. ‘I’m going.’

I edged past him without ever taking my eyes off his hands, then I walked down the hall and out of the front door, closing it behind me.

I sighed.

I had inserted all my thunderflashes.

I’d now just have to wait for any fallout from the explosions.