The Dentist, page 11
‘Again, that happens.’
‘I know, but in this case lines of inquiry that even to my eye seemed fruitless and irrelevant were examined in exhaustive detail. I know that happens a lot, but here it was just so frequent. It felt like it was either inept or deliberate.’
‘Did you come to a conclusion either way?’ asked Cross.
‘Do you know the SIO in the case?’
‘Macdonald, yes.’
‘Then you’ll know my answer,’ she said.
‘Um, I don’t. You’ll have to tell me.’
‘Deliberate. No doubt in my mind. It just happened so often. The question was - why?’
‘Who were your suspects? You must’ve had a list,’ asked Mackenzie.
It was all Cross could do to stifle a sigh at this interjection.
‘No I didn’t. I don’t like making assumptions. Having a list of potential suspects seems to be a contradiction in terms. It means you’re making and relying on assumptions and trying to make those on your list conform to those assumptions. Coming at it the wrong way round,’ Cooke replied.
Cross approved of this, unsurprisingly, as it mirrored his approach completely.
‘How are the family?’ Cooke asked.
‘Divided,’ said Cross.
‘They always were. I thought their decision to declare Leonard dead was interesting.’
‘How so?’
‘It was bang on seven years. It was as if they’d been waiting for the deadline and couldn’t get it done quickly enough.’
‘From what I’ve gathered it was Catherine, or more accurately her husband Alan. He wanted to expand the business,’ said Cross.
‘Leonard didn’t trust him. In fact I’d go so far as to say he disliked him, Leonard and Hilary both.’
‘Will you be writing a piece about it?’
‘My editor’s not interested, I’m afraid. I had to take a day off to come down here, but I’m glad I did,’ she said.
‘And why is that?’ he asked.
‘Because meeting you makes me think maybe I was right. You have the wrong man in custody, Detective, and your being here means you are well aware of that.’
‘Indeed. I cannot help but think the two murders are linked. Two murders in one family…’
‘So many years apart...’
‘Too much of a coincidence. I’m going to re-examine the Hilary investigation. All that work, however irrelevant much of it may be, might give me a head start. If I can find Hilary’s killer…’
‘You’ll find Leonard’s,’ she said completing his sentence.
‘Exactly.’
Cross spent the next few days ploughing through the Hilary case files which he’d retrieved from the MCU storage unit near Frenchay. Nothing stood out as yet, though he could already see what Fiona meant about spurious lines of inquiry having disproportionate amounts of time allocated to them. He couldn’t see a pattern broken or any obvious mistakes. Yet. It just confirmed what he’d always felt about MacDonald – that he was lazy and careless, a relic from a bygone age. A man ticking off the days until his retirement. Some people inevitably joined the police for want of any better alternative presenting itself to them in their younger days. Maybe Mackenzie was one of them.
Cross, however, thought of police work as a vocation. If it wasn’t, how could you explain the acceptance of such anti-social hours and, in so many cases, the destruction of any semblance of a family life they thought they had, that officers made. The lack of any vocation at the start of their career inevitably led to a cynical, ‘just get through it’ mentality towards the end. MacDonald was a classic example of this, which was why Cross had given up going through Leonard’s archive for the time being. He felt his time was better spent finding holes in MacDonald’s original investigation. Having said that, the photograph of the footprint in the mud still puzzled him. Why was that the one item from his researches into his wife’s murder that he had taken? More pertinently, what was so important about it that he had gone back to the family home to look for it. Why would he risk being discovered? Did it contain an answer to the puzzle or was it like most of his archive, a red herring. A dead end.
Chapter 20
Cross was mulling over the photograph on Saturday morning in his head as he and Raymond sat on a bus, the number 75, indulging in one of their regular weekend outings. This week they were going to Bristol Aerospace in Filton, which housed Alpha Foxtrot, the Concorde which made the last ever passenger supersonic flight. It had been on their to-do list for some time, but as happens with things local to people, they had taken it for granted, because it would always be there, and places of interest miles away, often difficult to reach, somehow took precedence.
For Raymond it was a prospect redolent with mixed emotions. He had worked there for years and now he was about to see his beloved aircraft, a project he’d devoted a good deal of his working life to, reduced to a museum exhibit – much like himself he thought, although undoubtedly more visited. But on the bus he found himself enveloped in the warm comforting embrace of familiar nostalgia. He looked out of the window and said.
‘I could’ve driven this route with my eyes closed back in the day.’
If Cross was listening he didn’t give any indication of doing so. Raymond didn’t mind. He was used to it. He often talked to Cross, fully aware that his son’s mind was elsewhere and that he would not be furnished with a reply. He just liked to have the chance to talk to someone, which he seemed to have less and less as the years went by, and his small circle of acquaintances got smaller through either infirmity or death. He read somewhere that an old woman in Lincoln hadn’t talked to anyone for so long that when finally, months later, someone knocked on her door she couldn’t speak – she’d lost her voice through lack of use.
Mind you, the more he thought about it the more he doubted the veracity of the story. Surely she spoke to the people at the till in the supermarket, or if she didn’t go out shopping and had food delivered, to the delivery person. But with this story in mind, true or not, he did for a while talk to himself in the flat. He then thought that this was probably a slippery slope towards geriatric eccentricity and so he stopped. Opportunities to talk to his unresponsive son on mornings like this seemed to be a good compromise.
Cross helped his father off the bus. Raymond was on crutches with his foot still in the orthotic boot. This was, paradoxically, both a reason not to go out but also a good excuse to cross a local attraction off the list. Raymond stopped at the entrance of Filton Airfield; gates he’d walked through thousands of times. The museum was housed in three renovated, green, aircraft hangers.
‘People thought we were wizards working in here. And in some ways we were. Working on something mysterious, something out of science fiction. You can’t imagine,’ said Raymond.
They walked into the hangar and there it was. Raymond beamed from ear to ear. It was as wondrous as he remembered. Not diminished in any way.
‘Did you ever see anything more beautiful?’ Raymond sighed.
‘Did you ever fly in it?’ his son asked.
‘No, always wanted to. Never got the chance.’
There was a gantry and staircase on each side of the aircraft. It took a while for Raymond to negotiate the steps, but he didn’t seem to mind and did it patiently, every now and then glancing up at the plane and smiling in a reassuring way, as if to say “just give us a minute, I’ll be with you soon.” They walked into the narrow fuselage, just four seats across, two on each side of the aisle. They were grey leather and didn’t look particularly comfortable.
‘It’s much smaller than I imagined,’ said Cross.
‘People always say that,’ replied Raymond.
Just before the cockpit there was a sign in yellow lettering which said ‘MACH 2 55,000’, this used to light up when the plane broke the sound barrier. Raymond smiled as he remembered the time he first heard the loud bang audible on the ground, as the plane broke the sound barrier thousands of feet above them.
‘Do you know how remarkable that was in 1969?’ asked Raymond.
‘I do, by virtue of the many thousands of times you have told me so over the years.’
‘Elon Musk, eat your heart out. We were doing this before you were even born mate.’
They walked into the cockpit and a young female guide turned to them and asked innocently,
‘Hello. Are you familiar with the aircraft at all?’
Cross sighed, as he knew this was an invitation Raymond had been waiting for since they arrived.
‘I should hope so dear. I built her,’ the old man said.
It wasn’t for another full half hour that they were able to leave the plane. Raymond’s lecture to the young guide soon attracted a small crowd of enthusiasts who couldn’t believe their luck at hearing his story first-hand. His account was followed by a succession of questions, until a security manager brought it to a close, as they were causing a long queue behind them. As he finished, the crowd gave Raymond a spontaneous round of applause.
After this unexpected highlight Raymond was a little more reflective as he looked out at the disused airfield.
‘They’re going to build houses out there. Sad really. Sixteen-hour days we worked, regularly. I practically lived here. It was the most important thing in my life. Now it’s just filled with ghosts,’ he said.
‘More important than your family?’ asked Cross.
‘In a funny way, yes. But different.’
‘Do you think it had something to do with my mother leaving us?’
‘I don’t know. Why would you ask that all of a sudden?’
But Cross was looking at his watch.
‘There’s a bus in seventeen minutes,’ he said.
As they left Cross spotted the guide from the aircraft earlier, talking to a man in a suit and pointing towards them. He wondered if they were in trouble, then reflected that this was always his default position in a situation like this, and wondered where it came from. They had to walk past him to get through the exit. He held out an extended hand to Raymond who shook it. Cross, as usual, ignored it when offered.
‘Don’t worry about him - he doesn’t like to shake hands,’ explained Raymond.
‘My name is Peter Smith, I’m duty manager today. Carol tells me you worked on the Concorde project right at the beginning.’
‘That’s correct, yes,’ said Raymond looking at Cross to see if he was impressed at the man’s interest in him. He wasn’t.
‘Could I give you my card? I was wondering if we could speak to you about your work here. We’re building an archive of interviews on video and it’d be great, if you had time.’
‘I’d be delighted,’ Raymond replied giving him his number. Cross was pleased his father was pleased and thought his being interviewed would be a good thing. So much history is needlessly let go. In this digital age it was so easy to record and preserve history with first-hand accounts. He had been worried that Raymond’s going there might have made him sad in some way but, on the contrary, it had given him some sense of purpose. An unexpected plus.
As Raymond basked in the knowledge that someone wanted to interview him – no-one had ever asked him that before and they were going to send a car to pick him up – Cross’s thoughts had wandered back to Leonard. Bringing up his mother’s leaving them had made him think again about Leonard’s disappearing in the way he did. With no warning. No clues as to where he’d gone; whether he was alive or not. In so many ways it was a cruel and selfish act leaving his family, already grieving for their mother’s violent death, in some wretched limbo. Why would he do that? Had he simply lost his mind or was something else at play?
Chapter 21
Cross had turned his attention to the builder Wawryniec Wojtchak who had confessed to the murder while in prison. Polish, he’d been in the country for five years and had been working for a local building firm. They’d been working on the Carpenters’ house for five months, a year-and-a-half before the murder. He’d been seen in the vicinity of the house on the day of the murder - identified by several witnesses, including the owner of a café where he’d had coffee that afternoon, as he had very distinctive tattoos that went up his neck. It occurred to Cross that actually, even only fifteen years ago, tattoos weren’t as ubiquitous or accepted as they were now. Certainly not ones that crept up a person’s neck.
When he was young, tattoos seemed to be confined to either ex-servicemen or slightly unsavoury characters. They were often seen as obstacles to getting a job, whereas these days they seemed to be a prerequisite to gain employment. They also seemed to have developed from being single pieces to what people referred to as “sleeves”. This he didn’t understand because, although his choice of clothing was fairly limited, he couldn’t imagine wearing the same shirt for the rest of his life and never having the opportunity or choice to change it. (Yes, his literal response to a ‘sleeve tattoo’ inevitably led him to this analogy.) He found himself wondering whether the generation from now would be tattoo-free as a response to their parents’ body art and whether what looked a hip and contemporary body inscription on a twenty-six-year-old, would have quite the same allure on the body of a seventy-year-old.
He also noted that Fiona’s observation about the information line was completely accurate. It wasn’t so much the number of calls to the line - that seemed about average for such a situation - but the amount of time dedicated to looking into the most unlikely calls seemed disproportionately high. Was it that MacDonald was grossly inefficient and lazy or was something else going on? He made a few calls to some recently-retired detectives – well the handful that would take his call – and what became apparent was that, although not universally popular he was thought of as a good, thorough, if a little predictable cop. So was what Cross was reading out of character? Maybe there was something else going on in his life at the time, or politics at work – the bane of the modern detective. Cross knew that his wife had suffered from cancer at one point but had gone into remission. He just wasn’t sure when that was.
Ottey had come into Cross’ office telling herself that she was following Carson’s request to keep an eye on him, but in fact she was desperate to find out what he was up to. Although she’d never admit it, it was at these exact moments that her colleague was at his best, most interesting self. She had come to know that adverse circumstances – his superiors telling him that a case was closed and he was therefore to do no more work on it; the facts seemingly piling up in an inexhaustible mountain against any obvious possible injustice – brought out his obsessive, obstinate streak. She had also just learnt that Badger was now convinced of his innocence and would be entering a ‘not guilty’ plea at trial, which she knew would be as welcome news to Cross as it was unwelcome to Carson. He had persuaded himself that Badger was convinced to change his plea by Cross’ continued investigation of the case. As Cross would, quite rightly, say, Badger hadn’t changed anything of the sort. He had pleaded ‘not guilty’ all along, albeit more out of uncertainty as to what actually happened that night, than certain knowledge of his innocence.
Cross told Ottey that he wanted to visit Catherine’s husband Alan but not at his offices in Broadmead, where he would feel empowered and in charge. According to Gillian they were extravagant offices for a dental practice or ‘group’ as Alan insisted on referring to it. Ottey had pointed out that impressions are everything in that business, laughing at her unintended pun as she did so. But as Cross rightly retorted, patients never went there - they frequented the practices themselves. You didn’t need to go over the accounts to realise this business was over-stretched and the money spent on the offices amply demonstrated this. She was curious as to why he wanted to interview him, though. Did he suspect him?
‘I think we might get a different picture of the family from him,’ he replied.
‘Do you think he was capable of killing the parents?’
‘Anyone is capable of it.’
‘You know what I mean.’
He considered this for a moment.
‘I think it would take something extraordinary to make someone murder the two senior members of the family they were marrying into. Also, if you did, why wait till Leonard had returned to kill him? As yet I’ve found nothing extraordinary in his relations or dealings with the parents bar the fact that neither of them seemed particularly fond of him or thought of him as a suitable husband for their middle daughter. But then, as we know, the ordinary can be the extraordinary in a murder within a family.’
‘He did seem put out by Leonard’s return,’ Ottey pointed out.
‘Enough to kill him? It still begs the fundamental question – why both?’
‘And how would you face your wife every day for fifteen years knowing you’d killed her mother?
‘Oh, I think he’d have no problem with that. The man’s at best a fantasist and a terrible businessman as a consequence, or he’s a psychopathic conman perfectly capable of carrying out such a terrible deception on his wife.’ Mackenzie knocked on the door.
‘Wawryniec Wojtchak the builder,’ she said.
‘I’m aware who he is,’ Cross replied.
‘I’m not,’ interjected Ottey.
‘He confessed to Hilary’s murder while incarcerated for manslaughter, only to retract it shortly afterwards. He was known to the couple as he did work on their house,’ he explained.
Mackenzie waited her cue to speak again. He turned to her. ‘He was released four months ago,’ she said.
Cross thought for a moment, digesting this It was interesting, not just because he was free at the time of Leonard’s murder, but for the fact that Leonard had reappeared shortly after his release. Was there a link? Was Leonard aware of the Polish builder’s release? Alan would have to wait.
‘Do you have an address for him?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘So what exactly do you expect me to do with this information?’
‘You didn’t ask me to look for his address.’
