Stone Cold Red Hot - [47]

“Hopefully, she’ll be in on Monday and I’ll ring her first thing, tell her to make it a priority. I’ve still got the camera so if anything happens meanwhile let me know.”

“What’s this I hear about your car?”

“It went on Monday, just as I was ready for home and there was no sign of it.”

“How did you get back?”

“I got a taxi.”

“You should have woken me, you could have rung from here.”

“No. I had my mobile. Anyway, how did you hear about it?”

“The Brennans,” he said, “making cracks about it. Took me a while to cotton on.”

“They probably took it but I can’t prove anything.”

“Have they found it yet? They could fingerprint it.”

“No. No word. Besides I’d rather see them lose the tenancies or get bound over to keep the peace than done for nicking my car. Least I’m insured.”

My last call was to Mrs Clerkenwell. I arranged an appointment with her that afternoon.

The hire car was due back but I made use of it to get some shopping from the greengrocers and the small supermarket in Withington. I stocked up on some of the basics and bulky items as I didn’t know how long I’d be without a car and they were awkward to carry on the bike. I left the lot at home and took the car in. I walked back to the office enjoying the colours of the leaves which were brilliant in the sunshine. Frost still edged the foliage in shady corners and covered puddles with sheets of ice.

I had a cup of coffee and then worked solidly on my notes from the Records Office and my summary of the case so far. When I document a job I usually include a section which no-one ever sees where I jot down all the wild, implausible, outrageous notions that I have as to what may have happened. Now and then I hit on something and it’s a useful way for me to see things from another angle. It’s also a good way of getting any pet theories out of my system and of exposing them to the light. Once they are written down I find I can discount some of them. But I was reluctant to go through this process with Jennifer Pickering. There was some superstitious side of me that feared that if I committed my imaginings to paper they might come true. And I wanted to be wrong this time.

I collected my bike from home and cycled up to the baths to do my regular twenty lengths. One of the other swimmers reminded me of Stuart Bowker and I had a fierce impulse to run and hide. A second look told me it wasn’t him. I felt a flutter of embarrassment. I swam away from it. Did I want a relationship? My gut reaction was no. It all seemed too complicated, too much trouble. How could I start something like that without disrupting my life? How would Maddie take it? Did I want to meet Stuart again. Yes. Yes, I did. And the thought brought bubbles to my insides and made me kick my legs harder and spread my arms wider and swim that bit faster.

Mrs Clerkenwell put the dogs out before she let me in. She’d obviously been working; her hair was covered by a scarf and she wore a large calico smock which she removed to reveal the same dark trousers and woolly jumper as on my first visit.

“Any news?” She asked me once we had sat down.

“No, I’m afraid not. But I wanted to ask you about a couple of things, to try and make sense of what other people have told me. I can’t go into details, confidentiality, you see. And the questions may seem a bit strange.”

“I’m intrigued. Fire away.”

I thought back to Frances’s account of her last time with Jennifer. That moment when Jennifer had become so distressed. “OK. From your garden you can see a fair bit of the house behind and vice-versa.”

She bobbed up to refresh her memory. “Yes.”

“If you were out in the garden you’d have a clear view of the upstairs but not of the ground floor, because of the wall?”

“That’s right. If you wanted to see into their garden or their kitchen or whatever you’d have to be upstairs here.”

“Or on the wall.”

“Erm…yes.” She smiled enjoying the game we were playing.

“Now, suppose someone was on the wall at the bottom of the Pickerings garden. They’d have a good view across here but they wouldn’t see much of the Pickering’s or of the house on the other side.”

“The Kennedy’s,” she said.

“Yes, with the trees along the bottom and the big hedge down the side.”

“Hedge!” she snorted. “They’re a liability, those things, grow like Triffids. I said to Mr Kennedy when they planted them that they’d be up and down ladders trimming them every five minutes.”

My neck prickled. “They weren’t there when the Shuttles had the house?”

“Oh, no. They just had an ordinary fence and the sycamores at the end so they weren’t overlooked from the back anyway, not like I am.”

I walked over to the French windows and looked out.

She carried on talking. “Those things must be eight foot high. You could have seen over before.”

Bingo! I pictured Jennifer astride the wall, her father and Mrs Shuttle seen from her vantage point. “But the shed would have blocked the view.”

“Well, that wasn’t always there either. Frank put that up.”

I looked at her. “When?” My mouth was dry.

She screwed up her face. “Let’s see. It must have been before he got ill, he did it all himself. Yes, it was. I remember they thought that had brought on the angina, too much for him. So that must have been…” she calculated.