The Moth Catcher

Chapter Thirty-One

Joe went straight from the Hope office in Bebington to the valley in Gilswick. Less than a dozen miles in distance, but as far removed from the ex-pit-village as it was possible to be. Vera had phoned him from the car just before she arrived at Alicia Randle’s house.

‘Go and talk to the retired hedonists! I don’t want them dismissed as possible suspects because they read books, keep hens and make jam.’ Shouting to make her point, although he could hear her perfectly. He thought she’d always be in charge, even though she was at the other end of the country.

It was just after midday and he’d already decided that would be a good time to catch the residents at home. After the fuss of the night before they might have slept in, but it wouldn’t be unreasonable now to expect them to be ready for interview. He sat for a moment in the car planning his strategy; and because he was nervous. He might have been brought up to believe that all men were equal, but he found himself awestruck by people with degrees who used long words. Up until now Vera had been the point of contact with the Valley Farm residents. She didn’t think anyone was cleverer than her. Joe hadn’t even met them and he felt slightly daunted.

He went to the Redhead house first. Shirley Hewarth had visited their daughter in prison, and the police knew that there’d been contact between her and Annie Redhead. A man opened the door. Joe recognized him from the photo pinned on the whiteboard in the operations room. Sam Redhead. Big, balding and a bit tongue-tied. Joe introduced himself. ‘Could I come in? I know you talked to officers early this morning, but everything was a bit rushed then. You’ll have had time to gather your thoughts.’

Sam showed him into a living room. The original barn walls had been whitewashed and the curtains were white and blue, patterned with small flower prints. Joe wished Sal could see it. She loved all the makeover programmes on daytime telly. A woman, Annie Redhead, sat on a small sofa covered with the same material as the curtains and grasped a mug of coffee. She was plump too, with a very pretty face. Heart-shaped. She might have just got up, but she looked as if she hadn’t slept at all.

‘This is a detective,’ Sam said. ‘He wants to talk to us.’

‘Of course.’ The woman turned and managed a smile. ‘Can we get you anything, Sergeant? Tea? Coffee? We don’t have a fancy machine like Nigel next door, but you’d be very welcome.’ She must have realized she was rambling because she fell suddenly silent.

Joe thought her grief seemed too personal for the death of a stranger, however shocking it must have been to see the slashes on the body. ‘You knew Shirley Hewarth?’

‘I only met her once. Yesterday morning. She asked me to see her in her office.’ A pause, and then a kind of confession. ‘She’d been visiting our daughter Lizzie in prison.’ Annie turned to face him. ‘She had plans for helping her. I’m not sure what will happen about that now. It seems very selfish, but that’s all I can think about: that we’ll be left to deal with Lizzie coming home, without any help or support. I trusted Shirley. It’s crazy, but I almost feel that she’s let us down by dying.’

Sam sat awkwardly beside his wife. As he put his arm around her shoulder, Joe was reminded of himself as a teenager; the party when he’d got it together with Sal, sliding his arm around her back, the very first physical contact. There was something innocent about this couple. They could have been teenagers too.

‘Was that why Shirley was in the valley yesterday?’ Joe thought this might be a breakthrough; it could explain the victim’s presence in Gilswick. ‘To talk to you about Lizzie?’

‘No!’ Annie sounded impatient. ‘I told you, I went to her office in the morning. She wasn’t going to do a home visit until next Monday. Lizzie will be released from prison tomorrow, and Shirley said she’d give us a day to get settled. If Shirley had wanted to talk to me before that, she had both my phone numbers. She wouldn’t have dragged herself all the way out here.’

‘How did she seem at the meeting?’

‘Professional,’ Annie said. ‘Efficient. Kind. I thought she had Lizzie’s best interests at heart.’ There was a pause. ‘You don’t think about people like that having personal problems, do you? I mean doctors and social workers. I can’t imagine their lives away from work. I just think they’re there to provide a service.’

Like the police. We’re not supposed to have personal lives, either.

‘What did you do after you’d seen Shirley?’ Joe thought none of this was helping.

‘I came straight back here. Had lunch with Sam. Then I thought I’d better tell our friends here in Valley Farm that Lizzie would be coming to stay with us for a bit.’ There was another pause, then an attempt at humour that didn’t quite come off. ‘That we’d have a convicted offender in our midst.’

‘And was everyone at home when you went to call?’ Joe found he was speaking gently, as if to an invalid.

‘Yes. I didn’t see John O’Kane. He was working in his office upstairs, but he was there.’ Annie set her mug carefully on the floor beside her. ‘Janet was lovely. So kind. Then I went next door to tell the Lucases…’

Her voice tailed off and Joe had to prompt her. ‘How did they react to the news of Lizzie’s release?’

‘Nigel was fine.’ A hesitation. ‘They’ve never had children. It’s easy to judge, isn’t it, if you’ve never had any? You think the parents must be to blame if a child goes off the rails. I used to do it myself.’

‘And what about his wife?’ For a moment Joe struggled to remember the name of the Lucas woman. ‘Lorraine?’

‘She found it harder to accept. She worked in prisons at one time. Education. She taught art and crafts. Maybe you’re used to all the sob-stories if you work with offenders every day. You become less sympathetic.’

Not me, Joe thought. I’m still a soft touch. According to Vera, at least.

Annie was still talking, trying to explain her friend’s reaction. ‘I suppose she moved to the valley to escape screwed-up kids, and the last thing she’d want would be to have one turn up here. This is their idea of paradise.’

‘What time was that?’ Best stick to facts. He was more comfortable with those.

‘Oh, I’m not sure.’ She frowned. ‘I don’t wear a watch. We don’t need to, out here. Mid-afternoon sometime.’

‘Did you see or hear anything unusual while you were out visiting?’ Joe knew he was clutching at straws now. If Annie had seen a stranger she’d have mentioned it by now.

She shook her head.

‘Mrs Hewarth drove a black Golf. Did you see that along the track at any time yesterday?’

Another shake of her head before she turned to her husband for confirmation. Joe turned to him too.

‘Where were you all afternoon, Mr Redhead?’

‘Here, in the house. In the kitchen. Listening to a play on the radio. Then I pottered in the garden for a while.’ The man shrugged. ‘Time seems to pass without me noticing, and some days I wonder what on earth I’m doing with my life.’

‘And later you all went round to the Lucas house?’ Joe found himself overtaken by the same lethargy as the people he was questioning. He’d always envied people who could afford to retire early, but now he wondered what he’d do with his time all day if he wasn’t at work. He’d always been crap at DIY. ‘Was it a special celebration? A birthday?’

‘I think we were all feeling a bit strange,’ Annie said. ‘It was those two killings at the big house. Right on our doorstep. The fat detective poking into our business. I suppose we thought a bit of a party would be a way to relieve the tension. Besides, it was Friday night. We always get together on Friday night.’

‘Can you talk me through the evening?’ Joe thought it was pretty weird, these three couples living on top of each other. If they’d wanted to escape the horror of what had happened in the big house, wouldn’t Sam and Annie have chosen to get away from Gilswick altogether? The pictures in town followed by a nice meal perhaps. By themselves, so they had a bit of privacy before Lizzie landed up. The last thing he’d want, in their position, would be to spend the night with the same people he’d see every day.

‘It turned into a bit of a session,’ Sam said. ‘Nigel had made one of his lethal cocktails and the evening went downhill from there.’

Joe couldn’t imagine the man enjoying a party. A play on the radio seemed much more his sort of thing.

‘Did anyone leave the house during the evening?’

They looked at each other. Joe wondered now if their pallor and confusion were the result of a hangover rather than distress at another killing.

‘I can’t be certain,’ Annie said. ‘People came and went all evening. At one point Nigel came in and said how beautiful the stars were. I knew then that he must be seriously pissed. John might have gone out for a couple of sneaky fags. He pretends he doesn’t smoke, but we all know that’s not true. What I do remember very clearly is Janet leaving later, to take out the dogs. She told us to send out a search party if she was gone longer than a quarter of an hour. I was watching the clock then. And suddenly she was screaming.’

‘You could hear her from that distance?’ Joe tried to picture where the body had been lying. ‘Over the noise of a party?’

‘We were all quiet by then. There wasn’t any music and the windows were open.’ Annie must have sensed that Joe still wasn’t convinced, because she added, ‘It was definitely Janet screaming. We all heard it and ran outside. Perhaps she’d come down the track towards the house to call out to us.’

Joe made a mental note to ask Janet O’Kane, but let the subject go for now. ‘What time was that?’

‘A quarter past midnight. As I said, I was watching the clock.’

Joe tried to picture the scene. The five adults at the end of the day, sitting in companionable silence. The scream coming from a long way off. ‘You must have panicked.’

‘We all ran outside. Almost tripping over each other. It was dark. No street lights, all the way up here.’ Annie shut her eyes briefly.

‘You had no sense that anyone else was about?’ Joe thought it unlikely that the pathologist would pin down the time of death with any real accuracy. Paul Keating was scathing about theories that suggested such a thing was feasible. It was possible that the murder had been committed not long before the body was found, and that the killer had still been in the area while the party-goers were looking for Janet O’Kane.

The Redheads looked at each other. ‘It was just confusing,’ Annie said at last. ‘I have no sense where any of us were. I caught a glimpse of Nigel at one point, and I think Sam was right beside me all the way down the track. Other than that…’

‘Did you hear anything? A car in the distance?’

This time Sam answered. ‘All I could hear was screaming and the dogs barking, people slipping on the grass in the dark. It was like a nightmare.’

‘But you grew up round here.’ Joe remembered the details written in black marker pen on the whiteboard in the operations room. ‘Your family farmed the land. You must be able to find your way around the valley blindfolded.’

There was a moment of silence. Joe could feel the hostility coming from both people on the sofa. They stared at him.

‘What are you saying?’ Sam’s voice was very quiet. ‘That I’m telling lies? Our farm was on the other side of the valley. And besides, last night the shouting and the dogs and that poor woman lying there covered in blood – it was my idea of hell.’