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  ‘Not everyone likes having a member of ‘the fuzz’ in their immediate family,’ the sergeant stated baldly, turning slightly red, and avoiding Falconer’s gaze.

  ‘’Nuff said, Carmichael. No further explanation needed or sought,’ Falconer added, hoping to dispel the younger man’s evident embarrassment, as he remembered the uncle who used to go out ‘lamping’ for rabbits. That was, no doubt, one of his more innocent pastimes. What he didn’t know couldn’t hurt him, and he’d pry no further. ‘What about your parents? How did they cope with such a large brood?’ ‘Dad’s a lot older than Ma. He’s retired now, but he used to be a bus driver, then a coach driver. He always said he liked the long continental coach trips, ’cos at least it gave him the security of knowing that he couldn’t get Ma in pod again while he was away. He swears that most of us kids were conceived just from him kissing her goodbye on the cheek when he went to work in the mornings.

  ‘Ma married him at sixteen, in a bit of a hurry, and she’s never had a proper, paid job. She said she always had too much to do just keeping house and home together, and preventing us kids from overthrowing western society, but I think she was joking about that last bit,’ he concluded.

  ‘I should hope so!’ exclaimed Falconer, trying to digest the plethora of facts he had just been offered. By crikey! He bet their Christmases were good, if Carmichael’s wedding had been anything to go by. He just hoped that he was never asked to join their celebrations.

  ‘Ma says that after six kids, her pelvic floor’s so riddled with woodworm, that if one more kid trod on it, they’d go right through,’ Carmichael added as an afterthought, and Falconer wrinkled his nose in disgust, determined to change the subject at all costs. He had no wish whatsoever to learn anything further about Mrs Carmichael senior’s insides, having just had an intimate encounter with those of Malcolm Standing that morning.

  ‘And how are the two little dogs you got last month? I’m sorry, I can’t remember their names offhand.’

  ‘Fang and Mr Knuckles,’ declaimed Carmichael with pride, suitably distracted. Fang was a Chihuahua puppy, and Mr Knuckles a miniature Yorkshire terrier. When Falconer had first seen them they were tiny balls of fluff, which looked ridiculous cradled by the enormous Carmichael.

  ‘They’re getting on great! The boys love them, and they get more walks than they can cope with, poor little things. They slot right into the family, as if a gap has been waiting for them for some time. You must come and visit them sometime, sir.’

  ‘We’ll see, Carmichael. Not when we’re in the middle of an investigation.’

  Later that afternoon, Bob Bryant came upstairs with a dog-eared buff folder for Falconer, this being the file on Malcolm Standing’s official caution. ‘There were, apparently, some newspaper cuttings supposed to be in here, too, but they seem to have gone missing. I know there was a bit of a fuss about it at the time.

  ‘We don’t know who leaked it to the press, but that’s the sort of thing that happens when it’s a case of interfering with little kids. People get upset and can’t bear to see it brushed under the carpet, even if there’s no court case or prosecution,’ he explained, having handed over the slim folder.

  ‘Thanks for that, Bob. I’ll have a little read of this, see if it throws any light on anything.’

  There was very little in the case notes to help, but there were references on a separate sheet of paper to local newspaper reports which sensationalised the caution, blowing it out of all proportion and demonising the young Malcolm Standing.

  It had all been five years ago now, and the dust must have settled, as Malcolm had been in the last job he was ever to hold for three years. It made him think of something someone had said when he was a child, and which had impressed itself on his memory, although he didn’t completely understand it at the time. ‘Good times, bad times, all times pass over.’

  This sensation of its time had also passed over, and allowed the younger Standing to get whatever it was that had driven him to it out of his system, and try to lead a more normal life thereafter.

  Many of Falconer’s dealings with the local press in the past had been with the Carsfold Gazette, but this had happened in Market Darley and, after checking the telephone number, he put through a call to the Market Darley Post – a local newspaper that was more likely to have carried the story – asking for the editor when his call was answered.

  ‘Good morning. I am Detective Inspector Falconer from Market Darley CID, and I was wondering if I could have a rummage through your archives for some information that may be pertinent to a case I’m working on at the moment?’ he asked.

  ‘Good morning, Chief Inspector Falconer. My name’s Garry Mathers – that’s two ‘r’s in Garry – and I should be delighted to be of assistance to the constabulary, provided, of course, that I get a scoop on whatever story is about to break.’

  ‘Typical press!’ thought Falconer, before replying, ‘There might not be any case to break, but whatever comes of it, I promise that you will be the first to know. Is it all right if I pop over now? Time is always rather pressing during an investigation.’

  ‘No problemo, squire! I am here to serve my community.’

  Oh boy! He had a feeling he wasn’t going to like this, but it had to be done.

  Half an hour later found Falconer sitting in a back room at the offices of the Market Darley Post, scrolling through records of back numbers of the newspaper. Garry Mathers had provided him with the relevant year, and he knew the date of the official caution, so he worked from that date onwards, scrutinising each issue with a view to identifying any and every paragraph about Malcolm Standing’s misdemeanour.

  It seemed that the local press had made rather a large meal of the event, and headlines proclaimed the presence in the streets of Market Darley of a young and dangerous paedophile, stalking his victims at will, and, as yet, not behind bars. There were follow-up articles about the public outcry, and a special double-page letters section, allowing the town’s residents to have their say, and it didn’t make pleasant reading.

  There was mention of another child being questioned about whether she had been assaulted or approached by Standing, but her (it was made obvious that this was a ‘she’) name was never mentioned. The identity of the child, concerning whom the caution had been issued, was also not published for legal reasons, so the articles were not a great deal of help to him. All they really did was to clarify the public hostility the young man must have endured at the time, and how difficult it must have been for him to live this down and start afresh, trying to live a more normal life after all the publicity had been superseded by more current events.

  He’d rather naively pinned his hopes on learning something from this outdated reportage, forgetting that the young victim of any sort of abuse was guaranteed anonymity, and he supposed he must have hoped that someone would have let a name ‘slip’ at the time. Even if they had, the newspaper had not had the temerity to print it, no doubt fearing prosecution should they have done so.

  Before he left, he even sought out Garry (with two ‘r’s!) in his office, to see if he could give him a name on the Q.T. but that was no-go, either. He’d only been there a year, and had no knowledge of events in Market Darley that long ago. ‘I moved down from Town,’ he explained. ‘Thought I’d rather be a big fish in a small pond, than a minnow in the shark-infested waters of the capital.’

  So, that was that! Dead end! What now? He decided to go back to Bob Bryant, and see what he could winkle out of the darker corners of his memory.

  ‘Anything you can drag up, Bob,’ he pleaded with the desk sergeant, as he entered the station, after his abortive treasure hunt.

  ‘Leave it with me, and I’ll give you a tinkle as soon as anything comes back to me,’ he promised, and Falconer had to be content with that.

  When he got back to his own office, he found a message to contact Dr Christmas, an activity he carried out without delay. He might have identified the substance that caused Standing’s
death, and that might give them a clue as to who had administered it. Although Chelsea Fairfield was the obvious choice, she had not struck him as a murderer, and Malcolm Standing had had a lot of enemies from the past.

  He was in luck, as Christmas answered on the third ring. ‘Hello there, Harry. I’ve got some news for you, my boy.’ Bingo! And the doctor sounded happy, so it looked like Falconer was finally going to learn something solid about the case.

  ‘The lab’s identified what that young chap ingested. You’ll never guess what it was.’

  ‘Don’t tease me, please. I can hardly stand the suspense,’ Falconer pleaded.

  ‘It was a whacking great dose of good old-fashioned valium. If that girl had called for help when he first started feeling strange, they could have saved him, but valium is a muscle relaxant, and it works on the chest muscles as well and suppresses breathing. If she’d have summoned an ambulance, they could have got him pumped out and stabilised him. As it was, he died of suffocation.’

  ‘I don’t really know that I want to tell her that,’ Falconer replied. ‘She’s worried enough about whether he would have been all right if she’d called a doctor the night before. This news would probably destroy her.’

  ‘I’ll leave that particular moral dilemma with you. My job is just to identify the cause of death, and pass on that information. Good luck!’

  ‘Thanks, Philip. Goodbye.’ Falconer put down the telephone, now faced with a new problem: to tell, or not to tell, that was the question.

  While he was mulling this over, the internal phone system trilled, and he found Bob Bryant on the other end of the line. ‘So soon?’ he queried, knowing that Bob would know what he was talking about.

  ‘I just remembered who administered the official caution, and you’re not going to believe this, but it was our very own darling Superintendent ‘Jelly’ Chivers. It was just before he was promoted from detective chief inspector, and he must have frightened seven shades of shite out of that young lad, for he never reoffended, as far as I know.’

  ‘Language, Bob!’

  ‘I know, but put yourself in the lad’s position. Yes, you’ve done something terrible, and now here you are in front of this terrifying monster while he roars the caution at you and delivers a hell-fire and brimstone lecture to you at the same time. I bet he wished the earth would open up and swallow him.’

  ‘That doesn’t detract from the seriousness of the matter, though, Bob,’ Falconer felt compelled to point out.

  ‘I realise that, but I bet if he was used on young offenders of any sort, he’d be a better deterrent than these soft Youth Detention Centres they put them in nowadays. I’d be willing to bet that anyone who’s ever been cautioned by old Jelly has never reoffended, nor even considered it.’ This was Bob Bryant’s personal opinion, and nothing would sway him from his belief.

  ‘You could be right, at that, Bob,’ agreed Falconer, imagining how he’d felt in the past, when Chivers had given him a good bawling-out over something.

  ‘So I’ve booked an appointment for you to see the great man himself, at 9.30 tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Thanks a bunch, Bob. Do I get a last request before I enter his office, like a man facing a firing squad?’

  ‘I should advise you to step warily. He’s going to a golf club dinner tonight, and he’s liable to have a sore head.’

  ‘Great! So, not long after I get in tomorrow, I have to enter the den of a bear with a sore head, and try to get him to think back to something that happened five years ago?’

  ‘That’s about the size of it, Harry. Good luck! And let me see the wounds afterwards, won’t you?’

  Falconer finished the call with just one word, ‘Rat!’ but he heard Bob Bryant’s chuckle. before the line went dead.

  Chapter Six

  16th February

  The next morning, having dressed and carried out his daily grooming with especial care, Falconer found himself outside Superintendent Chivers’ office with thirty seconds to spare. Counting them down conscientiously on his watch, he mouthed, ‘Three, two, one,’ and raised his hand to rap on the door when it unexpectedly opened, and he found himself apparently brandishing a fist in the superintendent’s face.

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ he mumbled in apology, letting his hand drop.

  ‘I was just coming out to see where the devil you’d got to,’ snapped Chivers, striding back into his office and throwing himself, like a large sack of potatoes, into his chair. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I need to talk to you about an official caution you delivered about five years ago,’ Falconer began, only to be nearly blasted out of his socks by the voice of a volcano.

  ‘Five years ago? How the devil am I supposed to remember something I did five years ago? Are you mad, man?’

  ‘I think you’ll remember this one, sir,’ Falconer suggested humbly, glad that he hadn’t been flattened in the blast. ‘It concerns a young man called Malcolm Standing, and you were dealing with a case of interfering with a little girl. The parents didn’t want to put their daughter through the trauma of a trial, I presume, but the press got hold of it somehow, and created a nine days’ sensation out of it.’

  Chivers sat in silence for a few seconds, then, it seemed, from his expression, that light had dawned. ‘I do remember that one. Nasty business, very nasty indeed. I gave the little toe-rag a right dressing down, and it left me feeling physically sick to think what he’d done.’

  ‘It’s just that I need to know as much as I can about who was involved, with reference to a case I’m working on now. Standing has been murdered, and I wondered if it could have been done by someone connected with his misdemeanour back then.’

  ‘I see,’ said Chivers, thoughtfully. ‘The child’s family name was, I seem to remember, Ifield. She was their only child, Eileen, who was sinned against. She was thirteen when it finally came out. I don’t know what the catalyst was, but she suddenly confessed to her mother, and it would seem that the abuse had been going on from when she was just seven years old until the previous year.’

  ‘Is it possible that you still have an address for the Ifields? I’d like to speak to them, and to Eileen, about Standing. I wouldn’t normally rake up something like this, but I need to catch whoever murdered him.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’re out of luck with all the members of the family. Mr and Mrs Ifield moved away from the area after their daughter committed suicide a couple of years ago.’

  ‘She killed herself?’ Falconer asked, aghast.

  ‘That’s right, and only sixteen years of age,’ replied Superintendent Chivers, a shadow passing across his expression, as he remembered the sad event.

  ‘How did she do it, sir?’

  ‘With tablets. Something the doctor had prescribed for her. It was all that little bastard’s doing, you know. She was never the same after that, her parents told me. I went to the funeral. Felt I had to; show some respect, and the support of the police.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you know what tablets she used, or who her doctor was at the time, sir?’ Falconer was determined that there was a connection, and he wanted to get to the bottom of it.

  ‘That I can’t recall, but it was reported in the local paper. It might be worth your while trawling through their back issues for 2008. I seem to remember that they made a bit of a song and dance about it. Poor little abused girl, couldn’t forget and get on with her life – you know the sort of melodramatic crap the media churn out. ‘Probably hoped to start off the same old witch hunt again, but the general opinion seemed to be to let the past rest in peace. Raking it all up again wouldn’t bring her back, or restore her innocence.

  ‘We had a few calls from members of the public, asking us why we hadn’t locked him up and thrown away the key, but I put out a press statement, informing them that the poor girl’s life would have been even more blighted by having to go through the trauma of a court case. That soon shut them up. Sorry I can’t be of more help, Harry.’

  ‘You’ve been very h
elpful indeed. I’ll drop in at the Market Darley Post offices, and have a look at 2008; see what they reported at the time of her suicide.’

  ‘Good man. And good luck!’

  Returning once more in the back room of the local newspaper offices, Falconer metaphorically shook himself free of the invisible slime that Garry Mathers had seemed to coat him in when he had first arrived, then set to work to hunt out the articles he was after.

  It didn’t take him long to find them, for the story had made the front page: the press, as usual, braying for someone’s blood, and not caring in this case whether it came from the local constabulary or Malcolm Standing himself.

  Reading the articles written at that time, and the statement issued by Chivers himself, he finally, just out of idle curiosity, began to hunt for the death notices of the young girl, or perhaps he should refer to her as a young woman, at sixteen years of age?

  These he found without difficulty. Many of her friends and relatives had put separate announcements in, and he scanned the column conscientiously, his eyes widening with surprise as he read the last announcement, hardly able to believe what he was seeing.

  With an expression of infinite sadness in his eyes, he packed up his notebook and left the building, towards the inevitable end of this case.

  Back at the office once more, he collected Carmichael and requested that PC Linda ‘Twinkle’ Starr accompany him on his mission. To neither of them did he say anything, just asking them to take their lead from him, and follow standard police procedure.

  He drove, and it wasn’t long before they stopped outside Coronation Terrace. Number twelve was their destination, and his steps were slow and heavy as he walked up the garden path. PC Starr accompanied him: Carmichael had been instructed to go round to the back of the property, in case there was a last-minute escape attempt.