Chapter Twenty-Eight

Joe was heading up the briefing because Vera was at Shirley Hewarth’s post-mortem. Everyone was scratchy and wired: lack of sleep, an overload of caffeine and the excitement that comes with a possible break in the case. An underlying sense of failure because they hadn’t caught the killer before another person had died. He’d been home to snatch a couple of hours’ rest and a shower, and now he stood in front of the team trying to order his thoughts. To wonder what Vera would do to get them to focus, if she was standing in his place. There was a mumble of chat as people got more coffee, found places to sit.

Holly slid up to him. He hadn’t seen her since she’d been sent to Shirley’s flat to notify any possible next of kin of the woman’s death. A thankless task. She looked cool and refreshed, though she’d probably had less sleep than him. She waved a clear plastic evidence bag in front of his nose.

‘What am I looking at?’

‘A shopping list. I found it in Hewarth’s house.’ Her hair was still damp from the shower. She turned over the plastic bag so that he could see Shirley’s address written on an envelope. ‘Look at the postmark.’

‘Herefordshire.’ Now his mind was racing.

‘Wychbold, Herefordshire. Where Alicia Randle lives.’

‘Could be a coincidence.’ But he didn’t really believe that.

‘It’s a very small town. I checked. So it’d be a very big coincidence.’

‘I don’t suppose you found the letter that was inside it?’ Because understanding why Patrick Randle, or his mother, had written to Shirley Hewarth would make all the difference to the investigation.

Holly shook her head. ‘I had a quick look, but the boss told me to leave it for the search team. They’re going in first thing today.’

‘So you told Vera?’ Of course she had, Joe thought. That’d be the first thing she’d do. Like a kid wanting a gold star. To be recognized as top of the class.

‘She said not to phone you, in case you were managing to get some sleep.’

He didn’t know what to say to that, so he just nodded and called the briefing to order.

‘Now we have another victim, and this has to stop before anyone else dies.’ He felt the need to say that, though Vera wouldn’t have bothered. She’d have taken it as read. ‘Of course this killing will be part of the Gilswick Valley investigation. Hewarth and Benton were obviously connected. She’d been his boss and, when his contract ended, he worked at the charity as a volunteer. Besides, Hewarth’s body was found only a mile or so from the first scene. Now I’d like to concentrate on Hope North-East. We need to find out everything there is to know about the organization. It’s run by a group of trustees. Who are they? Let’s get the forensic accountants to check out the finances. And we want a detailed list of the clients. Most of them will be known to us. Did anyone have a grievance? What was going on there, to make two of the workers so vulnerable? And why the time gap between the two murders? That doesn’t fit the profile of an offender with a grudge suddenly taking it into his head to wipe out the people who’d pissed him off and going on a killing spree.’ Joe paused for breath.

Charlie stuck up his hand. ‘Where does Randle fit in then? Are we saying that the intended targets were Benton and Hewarth all along, and Randle got in the way? That the moth-trapping connection was just a coincidence?’

‘The moth-trapping brought them together.’ It was a new young officer, cocky. ‘That’s why Benton was out at Gilswick. Like you said, Randle might just have got in the way. Bloody unlucky.’

Joe raised both hands to catch their attention. ‘We think this might be a bit more complicated than Randle being collateral damage. Last night Holly found a connection between him and Shirley Hewarth. Tell them, Hol.’

He listened while Holly explained about the envelope and the postmark. There was silence as they tried to take in the implication of the link.

‘Of course there are other connections between the victims.’ Joe had been leaning against his desk and now he pushed himself to his feet. ‘Shirley Hewarth was involved with the Redhead family, whose daughter Elizabeth will be released from prison this weekend. Hewarth’s body was found very close to the Redhead home. Also close to the big house where Randle was acting as house-sitter, so we have geographical proximity on all sorts of levels.’ He felt suddenly overwhelmed. There was too much information and too many complications. Vera might enjoy the challenge of a labyrinthine investigation, but he preferred things to be straightforward

Holly stood up. ‘Any idea how Shirley got to the valley at Gilswick?’

‘We found her car, tucked into a farm gateway close to where Randle’s body was found off the track. No idea whether she drove it there or if that was the work of the killer.’ Joe thought they had very few ideas about what might have happened the night before.

Holly was still on her feet. ‘Do we have a next of kin yet? When I looked round the flat I had the impression there was a man in Shirley’s life. A son?’

That gave Joe the chance to leave the speculation behind and to pass on the concrete details that had been gathered overnight. He stood in front of the whiteboard and pointed to a photograph of Shirley.

‘Shirley Hewarth, aged fifty-eight. She was divorced from Jack Hewarth ten years ago. He was a journo with The Journal in Newcastle until he was offered redundancy several years ago. He hasn’t worked since, but he’s older than her and now lives off his pension. There’s one grown-up son, Jonathan, now twenty-one. When the couple first divorced, Shirley stayed in the marital home, but when Jonathan went off to uni they sold it, split the profits and Shirley’s been living in the flat in Cullercoats ever since. At around the same time she left the probation service and started work for Hope North-East.’

‘Have we tracked down the ex and the son?’

‘Jack Hewarth still lives in Kimmerston with a new partner, who has her own business, that classy dress shop on Front Street. He seems to go in for younger women. Jonathan is a third-year student at Northumbria University. Doing drama and music. Living in a student flat in Heaton. They’ve both been informed of Shirley’s death.’ Joe paused for breath. ‘Obviously we’ll need to talk to them at some point today, because they could give useful background to the victim, but I don’t see either of them as potential suspects.’

The door banged open and Vera sailed in straight from the post-mortem, scarf trailing behind her like a pennant, bags in each hand.

‘We don’t talk about her as “the victim”,’ Vera said. On her high horse. ‘Her name’s Ms Hewarth. Or Mrs Hewarth. Or Shirley. She’s entitled to a bit of respect.’ A pause. ‘She was killed by stabbing, like Benton. Is that significant? Not killed where she was found, so we’re looking for yet another murder scene. Hol says there’s no sign of violence in the flat where she lived, but we’ve got the CSIs checking that now. There’s no weapon yet, but Paul Keating did go so far as to say it looked like another kitchen knife. How far have you got, Joe? Have you told them about the envelope? Which would indicate that all three of the deceased were connected. Find the connection and we’ve got the killer.’

Easy.


Joe drove to the Hope North-East office in Bebington. The visit had been at his suggestion, when Vera had planned the action for the day. Shirley’s name hadn’t been given to the media and he hoped word hadn’t got out yet. He wanted to tell the volunteers himself that their boss was dead. He wanted to see their reaction. ‘They run some sessions on a Saturday, so the volunteers might be around.’

He was surprised to find the office open; he’d assumed that Shirley would be the only key-holder and had expected to find people waiting for her on the pavement. Upstairs the skinny volunteer described by Holly was filling the kettle. She heard his footsteps on the stairs and sang out, ‘Just making a brew.’ She obviously hadn’t heard about Shirley’s death.

When she turned and saw him, she was thrown. Suddenly anxious about having to deal with a stranger. ‘Shirley’s not in yet. She shouldn’t be long. I thought you were her.’

‘I’m afraid she won’t be coming in.’ Joe was speaking to her as if she were a child. He’d grown up with women like her. Nervy and fragile, surviving on anti-depressants, afraid of the world.

‘Why? What’s happened?’ She was trembling. He thought anything out of the ordinary would scare her and that she’d known he was police from the moment she saw him.

‘I think you should sit down.’

She was used to doing what she was told and took the seat at her desk.

He pulled up another chair, so that he was on her level. ‘There was an incident last night. I’m afraid Shirley’s dead.’

‘No!’ It came out as a wail of grief. One thing was certain. This woman had had nothing to do with Hewarth’s murder. He’d seen people less upset by the death of a close relative or partner.

‘When did you last see her?’

‘Yesterday afternoon.’ Sharon was ripping a tissue into shreds. The pieces formed a small mound on the desk in front of her and she gathered them up in her palm, trying to roll them together like a snowball. ‘She asked me to lock up, because she had a meeting.’

‘You weren’t in when I came to chat to Shirley.’

‘No,’ she looked up at him. ‘Our bairn had a hospital appointment. He’s got terrible asthma. Usually his nana minds him, but I wanted to take him for the tests myself. I’m only a volunteer, so there’s never any problem about taking the time off. I came in later.’ Her voice tailed off as if she realized that, in the scheme of things, none of this was important.

‘What time did you get back?’

‘About three-thirty.’

‘And when did Shirley go out?’

‘Not long after. It was as if she’d been waiting for me to come in so that she could get off.’ Sharon looked up at him. ‘What happened to her? An accident in her car?’

Joe shook his head. ‘We’re treating her death as suspicious.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Where was she going?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Was that unusual?’ Still Joe kept his voice gentle. He had the sense that the woman was on the verge of an emotional meltdown, that Shirley and her work at Hope was all that was keeping her together. ‘I mean, did she usually tell you where she was going?’

‘She wrote down the addresses of all her visits in the big diary,’ Sharon said. ‘Health and safety. Some of our clients could be aggressive. I wanted to know where she was going. Just in case.’

Joe thought the volunteer might be emotionally frail, but she wasn’t stupid. ‘And did you have a system where she phoned in after the visits? So you’d know she was safe?’

‘She didn’t phone,’ Sharon said. ‘She’d always text. After each client. Visit over. Then the time.’

‘So she must have texted yesterday then. Because you didn’t panic and call us out.’ He gave a little smile to show it was almost a joke.

‘No!’ Sharon looked at him as if he was stupid now, as if he’d got hold of the wrong end of the stick altogether. ‘Shirley wasn’t going out on a work visit yesterday afternoon. It was personal. When she left, she said, “That’s me for today. I’m taking back a bit of lieu-time. See you tomorrow.” And she collected her coat and went out.’

‘You don’t know where she was going?’

‘We didn’t have time to chat.’ Sharon looked up at him and her narrow face seemed more pinched and grey than ever. ‘I was sorry about that. I’d wanted to tell her about Aidan and the asthma tests. She’s the only person I can talk to about stuff like that. My mam just says he’ll grow out of it and that I’m ruining him by fussing.’ A pause. ‘I don’t know what I’ll do without Shirley – what any of the folk at Hope will do without her.’

‘How did she seem last week?’

There was a long pause before Sharon replied. ‘Not herself.’ Joe didn’t say anything and at last she continued, ‘Before she was always such a laugh. I mean, she was serious about her work, but she could have run this place standing on her head, so she never stressed about it. She’d been a senior probation officer, managing a whole team. She’d worked in a prison with lifers, and had to stand up in court to give evidence about hard-core clients. Nothing threw her. Nothing worried her. Not usually.’

‘But recently she’d been worried?’

‘At first I thought she was just upset, like. With Martin dying. We all loved Martin. I mean he was a bit weird. A bit of a geek. But he had a good heart.’

‘But later you thought something else was troubling her?’

There was another silence as Sharon chose her words carefully. This was a witness who needed patient handling. ‘After Martin died she got snappy. The least thing and she’d fly into a temper. And that wasn’t like Shirley. Like I said, usually she was a laugh. Easy to get on with.’ She looked out of the window. A small group of teenagers had gathered for a smoke on the pavement. Presumably soon they’d try to come in for a session, expecting to find Shirley here to run the show.

‘And she didn’t give you any idea what was bothering her?’

‘I did ask her,’ Sharon said. ‘She said it wasn’t anything she couldn’t handle. “And nothing that’s not my own fault.”’

‘What did she mean by that?’ Joe was finding this conversation tantalizing. All second-hand. All the impression of a woman who had plenty of problems of her own.

‘I don’t know. She wouldn’t say.’

The crowd on the pavement was growing and he knew he’d soon have to go down and tell them that the centre would be shut for the day. The CSIs would want to come in for a search. The computers would be taken. Then Sharon would lose concentration and start telling herself stories about Shirley, trying to make sense of the woman’s death by forming a narrative. There’d be gossip all over the town. The first response to news of her death would be lost.

‘Any of her clients have a grudge against her?’

‘No!’ Sharon was on the verge of tears again. ‘We all loved her.’

You all loved Martin, and he’s dead too. What does that tell us?

‘Can I see the diary, the one where Shirley wrote down her appointments and the addresses of her visits?’

Sharon reached under the desk and pulled out a big hard-backed notebook. She was pushing it across to Joe when there was a sudden noise on the stairs, the clatter of boots, the door pushed open. Frank appeared; his face was red and his huge tattooed fists clenched, as if he was about to hit something or someone.

‘I’ve just heard that Shirley’s dead. That some bastard’s killed her.’

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