Echoes of Silence Page 6

  The wind in the chimney gusted the flames of the fire as though they were real. Another spatter of rain rattled against the panes, and the window shook in its frame. ‘Well, then, what’s made you come back, Tom? You’ve done well enough down south. I never thought to see you up here again,’ he repeated.

  Too ambitious for that, was obviously what he was thinking. It had taken a lifetime’s patient service for Charlie himself to achieve his final rank of Chief Inspector. But mention the name of Charlie Rawnsley to the lowliest rookie constable in the Steynton police force, even now, and he’d know who you meant. CI Rawnsley was a name that had gone down in history, a legend in his own lifetime. He’d ruled the local nick like a benevolent despot, blunt and broad-spoken. He’d been born and bred in Steynton and what he didn’t know about it, and the folks who lived in it, wasn’t worth knowing.

  He held up the teapot inquiringly, cosied in a knitted, brown-striped beehive Richmond remembered seeing on Connie’s needles, and pushed across the plate of ginger biscuits as he waited for Richmond’s answer.

  ‘No thanks, Charlie. To tell you the truth, I hardly know why I’ve come back here, myself. Must be the climate.’

  But joking wasn’t going to put Charlie off. Silence fell as he busied himself with pouring another liquid stream of pure caffeine into his own cup, sugaring it heavily.

  ‘Not got any daft ideas about trying to follow up the case? Because I’ll tell you summat for nowt. You won’t get anywhere going down that road. Don’t think I haven’t thought of it, myself.’ Briefly, his eyes rested on the school photograph of Beth, a wide smile and two front teeth missing, and on Isobel’s: a thin, anxious face and a cloud of dark hair. ‘Nearly ten years. Whoever it was must be thinking he’s got away with it. But I keep my eyes and ears open, and one day he might slip up. If he does, I hope I’ll be there, and the bugger’ll wish he’d never been born.’ Unspoken between them, no need for words to affirm it, was the tacit assumption of Isobel’s innocence. Then Charlie shook his head. ‘Naa, that’s wishful thinking, I’m too old for them sort of games. Me, I’d have nowt to lose, mind, but you keep out of it, lad. I wouldn’t blame you, wanting to, but don’t do it.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of it,’ Richmond said and knew Charlie knew he was lying. He’d been thinking of little else since his meeting with Mrs Austwick. In the last few days, anger had come and fuelled the slow-burning fire of resentment at the mishandling of the case. It would take very little for it to burst into flames. He found himself recounting to Charlie his meeting with Wyn Austwick, and reporting what she’d said, and his impressions of her.

  ‘Wyn Austwick? Never heard of her. Sounds a right piece of work. But we get all sorts of comers-in nowadays,’ Charlie said. ‘Only Austwicks I know of, one of ’em’s dead and his son’s doing a long time in Armley jail.’

  ‘It’s Mrs Austwick, Charlie.’

  ‘Mebbe that’ll be young Trevor’s wife, then. I heard tell he got married to some foreigner.’ Foreigner, Richmond knew, meant anyone from outside a five-mile radius of Steynton.

  ‘Young Trevor? Wyn Austwick’s all of forty.’

  ‘So’s Trevor.’ Charlie said nothing more for a while. ‘And she expects the case to be reopened on what she told you?’ he said at last. ‘Must be off her head.’ But there was a flicker of excitement in his eyes at the prospect of another lead after all this time, however tenuous. ‘Unless there’s summat else?’

  ‘She says there is.’

  ‘You believe her?’

  ‘I’m not sure. She’s grinding her own axe, that’s certain.’

  Charlie looked at the clock and said suddenly, ‘I’ve a meat-and-tatie pie in the oven. You used to like that.’

  ‘Still do.’

  ‘Going to stop and have some with me, then? There’s plenty. We can have a bit of a natter and I can bring you up-to-date with what’s been going on in Steynton since you left.’

  Suddenly, the prospect of venturing forth into the vile evening, and dining alone in solitary splendour at the Woolpack, even with the choice of fancy French dishes, stood no chance against a few hours eating meat and potato pie, and chinwag-ging with Charlie Rawnsley. ‘Thanks, Charlie, I’d be glad to.’

  The old boy’s delighted grin showed Richmond that it was no mere chance there was plenty food to share. He stood up, reaching into his trouser pocket for his key ring as he crossed to his desk, unlocked the bottom drawer and lifted out a thick file in a pink cardboard folder, which he put on the table in front of Richmond. ‘It’s all here. Go on, have a read while I see to the pastry, and you’ll see what I mean about getting nowhere.’

  But Richmond couldn’t bring himself to open the folder immediately. There wouldn’t be anything new in it, nothing that wasn’t engraved on his memory as if on tablets of stone, so what was the use? He sat there in the lamplit room, with the heat of the fire on his face and the photographs on the sideboard and the slow, deliberate tick of the old wall clock measuring out the seconds. But in the end, he opened it.

  There was plenty. It had been a big crime in a small town and it was all there, patiently collected by Charlie: newspaper clippings, with comments added in his big, forceful handwriting, his own thoughts and ideas. Press photographs, with ‘Have you seen Beth?’ above them. Photographs of Isobel, of Peter Denshaw, of Low Rigg Hall. And, not surprisingly, photographs and background gossip of Freya Cass, the once-famous fashion model. Descriptions of Beth.

  An eight-year-old girl, small for her age, blonde, shoulder-length hair, wearing dark blue trousers and a red anorak, and a blue and red striped scarf, red wellingtons. A happy, friendly child who talked easily with anyone … the subtext being, Richmond thought savagely, that she might have disregarded warnings not to talk to strangers.

  She’d been taken up to Low Rigg Hall that snowy, early January day by her mother, who’d left her there for her weekly piano lesson with Mr Philip Denshaw. She’d had her lesson, and afterwards, as it was Twelfth Night, had helped to dismantle the Christmas tree. She’d stayed for lunch, as she normally did after her lesson. At about half-past one, she’d gone out to play in the snow while she waited for her mother to pick her up and take her home. In the event, her mother, who, the paper reported, suffered ill health, had taken a sudden bad turn that had left her in no condition to drive, so it was Beth’s stepfather, the Rev. Peter Denshaw, who drove up to bring her home. When he arrived at approximately half-past two, Beth had already disappeared, an abandoned, half-made snowman and one small, scarlet woolly glove the only evidence that she had ever been there.

  A hue and cry was put out, teams of police and volunteers working round the clock searched the town and later the surrounding moors, a search that went on for days, despite atrocious weather conditions, until at last it had to be called off.

  Meanwhile, damningly, evidence of a quarrel between Beth and her mother at the vicarage that morning had emerged.

  Peter Denshaw, it seemed, was something of an amateur artist, and the morning she disappeared, Beth had been found messing around with his oil paints, something she’d been strictly forbidden to do – and indeed, when she was eventually found, her fingers were still stained with bright smears of viridian. Isobel Denshaw, her mother, knowing how angry her husband would be, had scolded the little girl, a scolding which was overheard by the church verger, Mr Dennis Roebuck, who’d been visiting the vicar to report that the central heating in the church wasn’t working properly.

  Events had taken a dramatic turn when, after the search had eventually been abandoned, Isobel had taken an overdose, leaving a suicide note addressed to her own father, Charlie Rawnsley, in which she wrote: ‘I shall soon be dead, in any case, so there’s no point in carrying on. I was responsible for Beth dying. It’s all my fault, Dad. I pray God will forgive me, and hope you will, too.’ She’d given no clue as to where the child was to be found, however, and Beth’s body wasn’t discovered until four months later by a park attendant, opening up the storage space benea
th the bandstand in East Park for the spring. She had wounds on the temple which, in the opinion of the pathologist, had been the cause of death.

  Afterwards, questions were to be asked. Why had the bandstand never been gone through in the original search? The answer was that it had been, but not thoroughly enough, by a PC who’d already been voluntarily on duty for sixteen hours, was bone weary and was also developing flu symptoms. Although it was understandable why his probing among the deck chairs stacked underneath the staging hadn’t been as diligent as it might otherwise have been, he’d been hauled over the coals, but whether Beth’s body had been there or not at the time, the question was academic. She must have been dead already by then.

  In charge of the investigation had been Detective Superintendent Brearley. Dan Brearley, thought Richmond grimly. A once-intelligent detective, by then a fat, hard-drinking, heavily smoking slob of a man who’d wanted nothing more than an easy life in the last few months before his retirement. To be fair, he’d pulled out all the stops to find Beth when she’d first gone missing, nobody could have done more. But he’d been only too happy to accept Isobel’s ‘confession’, when it came, had been smugly confirmed in his easy acceptance of it when the body had later been found behind the stack of deck chairs, wrapped carefully in a blanket and with her head resting on a pillow – surely a mother’s touch? Much good his retirement had done him. Within six months of leaving the service, he was dead of a massive coronary.

  The pie was as good as any Connie had ever made, the crust crisp and golden, the beef moist and succulent, plenty of onions in the gravy. A glass of Webster’s went down well with it.

  ‘You were wasted in the force, Charlie.’

  ‘Aye, but I’ve always liked my food. Connie wouldn’t have wanted to see me starve myself.’

  Connie had been a lovely lady, a great cook with a figure to prove it. A sensible, down-to-earth woman whose sudden death had shocked and saddened everyone who’d known her. Richmond had often wondered if Isobel would ever have contemplated divorce if her mother had still been alive. He somehow didn’t think so. Isobel was one of life’s frail creatures, a gentle person, easily defeated and overcome by the business of life. Everyday problems tended to assume gigantic proportions. She’d always run back to Connie when things became too much for her and usually received what Connie had called ‘a good talking-to’, robust advice that cleared the air and lifted the clouds of depression, so that things didn’t seem as bad to her afterwards.

  ‘I never did like the idea of our Isobel marrying him, that Peter Denshaw, too young and no backbone, and I told her so,’ Charlie said suddenly, picking up his thoughts. ‘Mebbe I should’ve kept my tongue between my teeth, but you know me. “He’s a good man, Dad,” she said. I told her that didn’t follow, just because he’s a vicar, but she wouldn’t hear owt against him. She should’ve stuck to the chapel, like her mam and dad. What did you think of that note she left?’

  ‘Ambiguous, as I told you at the time.’

  ‘It were that, all right.’

  In view of the reported quarrel between her and Beth, the manner in which the child’s body had been left, the note had seemed to be as neat a confession as could be that she herself had killed the child. After all, shocking as it was, it wasn’t unheard of for mothers to kill their own children, and Isobel had been known to be neurotic. An accident, maybe, a slap that had gone too far? Children could provoke a saint – even the best of them, and Beth at that time had not always been easy or amenable.

  The note seemed to be an admission of guilt. ‘All my fault’, Isobel had written. But to anyone who knew Isobel it could also have been interpreted otherwise … My fault that I messed up all our lives? My fault I married Peter Denshaw?

  Richmond knew that she’d genuinely believed their separation was giving Beth a better chance of a normal life, that marrying Denshaw would provide the child with a substitute father – one, moreover, who wasn’t always absent. The agonies she must have gone through when she found it wasn’t working out that way! Especially when she’d learned she was terminally ill. Richmond hadn’t known about this until he was told of her note, even though the divorce had been a so-called civilised affair and there was still good communication between them. For Beth’s sake, they’d made a pretence of smiles and even jokes when they met. With hindsight, it was possible to see that maybe this hadn’t made it any easier for the child to understand why they couldn’t all stay together, had created even more confusion in her mind, but at the time, it had seemed the best thing for her.

  There’d been more than one person willing to testify that the trouble at the vicarage had centred around Beth’s dislike of her stepfather. She’d made up her mind to hate him. He’d never been able to win her round, plenty thought he hadn’t tried overmuch and, for a while, Peter Denshaw had been Dan Brearley’s prime suspect.

  Around lunch time that Saturday, the day Beth disappeared, he’d gone across to the church to meet the verger and the plumber who’d been summoned to attend to the faulty central heating, wanting assurances that the church would be warm enough for the services on the following day. The plumber had just finished the job, and after some discussion, he and the verger had left to share a pub lunch. That had been around one o’clock, leaving a big time lapse between then and his own arrival at Low Rigg to pick Beth up. His explanation was that he’d stayed behind in the church after the other two men had left and then, after he’d returned home at twenty to two and found his wife prostrate, further time had been spent in ringing for the doctor and waiting until he arrived. Why had he stayed in the church so long? he was asked. To sort out his thoughts, to meditate and pray was the answer. Gruff embarrassment all round, because you didn’t want to cast doubts on a vicar when he said he was saying his prayers. Even from Dan Brearley, who wasn’t the man to have finer sensibilities about anything. As an alibi, it was useless, but as Denshaw pointed out, he didn’t need to provide an alibi, since he was innocent.

  ‘I see red every time I think about him,’ Charlie said. ‘For if he didn’t do it, who did?’

  There’d been suggestions of a random snatch, but as a credible theory, it had swiftly been abandoned, the idea of some unknown person driving up to the back of beyond and plucking Beth up out of the garden. The road which wound up through the houses below Low Rigg was clearly signposted as not being a through road. Only those on legitimate business used it, the Low Rigg cottagers were accustomed to the family at the big house driving through the hamlet and barely registered their comings and goings, but any strange car was bound to have been noticed with interest. Peter Denshaw’s familiar car had, as it happened, been seen on its way up to the Hall at half-past two, as he said, though there was no one prepared to swear that he hadn’t also driven up and away before that, taking Beth with him.

  There was no one to say that Isobel hadn’t similarly driven up, either, before then and taken the child away, that the quarrel with her daughter hadn’t been resumed … The doctor stated that Isobel’s collapse was genuine, but it could have been brought on by the stress of having lost her temper with the child and of having fatally injured her. It had never seemed a likely scenario to anyone who’d known her.

  ‘There were a lot of them up there at Low Rigg that day, you’ll have noticed that,’ Charlie said. ‘Family. It’s always been my belief that some of ’em must know a lot more than they let on about what happened. Stands to reason.’

  Richmond flicked the papers over, and scanned the names of those who’d given statements: Mrs Freya Denshaw. Her brother-in-law, Philip. Elvira Graham, a girl who lived with the Denshaws as one of the family – and the last person to see Beth, helping her to build her snowman … Eddie Nagle had been there and his wife, Dot. Leon Katz, who’d had business there earlier in the day with Philip, but not his wife Ginny, who had been expecting the birth of twins at any time. Nor the still unmarried Polly Denshaw, he noted, remembering a pair of warm brown eyes and an enchanting smile.

 
; ‘Katz says he left before lunch and I can’t see him lying. Too good a lawyer for that, too careful – unless he had to.’

  Richmond recalled Katz: a solicitor with a small firm of lawyers in Steynton. The only son of an immigrant tailor who’d ended up owning a chain of dresswear factories in Leeds, reputedly wealthy enough to have no need to work, he was nevertheless now a hard-working lawyer with a busy law firm in Bradford, so Charlie informed him. He was a well-liked man in the town, generous of his time and money to charities.

  It was after midnight when Richmond got ready to leave, and still raining.

  ‘Pity you’ve booked in at the Woolpack. You could’ve stopped here tonight if you’d wanted, there’s enough room, God knows,’ Charlie said, as Richmond at last regretfully stood up to go.

  It lay between them, the old man’s unspoken offer, and Richmond’s fervent hope that he wouldn’t put it into words. Much as he liked and respected Charlie, the very last thing he wanted, or needed, was temporary accommodation here, which might all too easily slide into permanency.

  ‘Thanks, Charlie, but I’d better get back. They’ll be reporting me missing, otherwise. I shall have to knock the night porter up as it is.’

  ‘Night porter! They’ve gone up in the world. Aye, well.’ After a moment, however, he added, ‘You won’t want to be stopping there long, mind. I’ll keep my eyes and ears open. Mebbe I’ll hear of summat to rent that’ll suit you.’

  ‘And I’ll have another word with Wyn Austwick – when I can get in touch with her.’

  Charlie looked at him over his spectacles. ‘You’re going on with it, then? All right, don’t answer that! Well, if you must, you can count on me.’

  ‘Charlie, I appreciate it, but I don’t want you involved – if there’s anything to get involved in, that is.’

  ‘You allus were a one-man band, Tom, but you’re too late. I am involved.’

  ‘One-man band? I prefer to call it being unorthodox.’