He pulled out his pay-as-you-go phone and dialed.
“Hi,” he growled, and cleared his throat.
“Have you heard anything?” Toby croaked at the other end.
“No. You?”
“Nothing. How are you feeling?”
“What sort of question is that? Look, Toby, all you’ve got to do is hold your nerve. You’ll be on a plane tomorrow.”
“I’m trying.” But the wobble in his voice told another story.
“You need to try harder,” Kevin said, and ended the call.
Toby Greene was cracking up. Kevin wasn’t going to stick around for that.
Fifty-three
FRIDAY, AUGUST 30, 2019
Elise
I feel like we’re just pulling at loose threads here,” Caro said as she fastened her seat belt. “Where is this leading?”
“To Charlie. He was clearly bent. The people he scammed carried on looking for him for years. ‘His old tricks,’ Pauline called them, but he’d been at it before he even met her. But how does this tie in to the burglary? You heard the neighbor—there was something off about the whole thing. Could he have been involved? Who would know? There are no witnesses now. Birdie’s memory was wiped by the attack and the boyfriend is dead.”
“There’s always the killer,” Caro muttered, and swung the car into the traffic.
Elise slammed her hand on the dashboard and Caro did an emergency stop, shooting everything off the backseat and the dregs of a cold cup of coffee onto her feet.
“What the hell is it?” she shouted.
“Sorry,” Elise said, feeling ridiculous. “I’ve just had a thought.”
“A thought? You’ve ruined my new shoes. What?”
“It’s eighteen years since Stuart Bennett went inside. He could be out. He could have been the man loitering in Addison Gardens.”
Caro parked and pulled up the information on her tablet. “Okay, good call. He was released on license, December fourteenth, 2018,” she said. “His current address is a hostel in Paddington, a couple of streets away.”
* * *
—
“You’d better come through to the office,” the duty manager said when they announced themselves and were buzzed in.
“Is there a problem?” Elise said.
“We haven’t seen Stuart Bennett for a week. There’s been no contact since he left here last Friday. He was supposed to see his probation officer but he didn’t turn up.”
Elise could feel her heart pick up the pace. That was the first night of the festival. The night Charlie went into hiding.
“Any family addresses? Do any of his mates know why he’s disappeared?”
“He doesn’t have any family listed—or mates. Bit of a lonely boy. He’s had only one visitor since he came here.”
“Was it an elderly man?” Has Charlie been here? Elise felt her fingers crossing.
“No—a young woman. She came a couple of weeks ago. She didn’t stay long.”
“Where is he? Where would he go?” Elise said when they got outside. “We need to talk to someone from the case.”
One of the senior officers in the Addison Gardens case was still on the force, just. “I retire in three months—can’t wait. The job isn’t the same,” he complained when Elise tracked him down.
“I just want a chat—I’ll buy you a late breakfast if you like,” she said. “I’m in the neighborhood.”
DI Wicks had already ordered a full English before they got there—Caro said she’d have one too, and Elise whispered to the woman at the counter that she’d have wholemeal toast with avocado and a poached egg. When it arrived, Wicks looked at it as if someone had vomited on the table.
“What is that muck?” he said as he shoveled a whole fried egg into his mouth.
“It’s good for you—eating this muck means I’ll live longer than you.” She laughed. But she didn’t know that anymore. “Anyway . . . like I said on the phone, we’re investigating the death of Charlie Perry—Charles Williams, you knew him as—and I’d like to find out a bit more about the attack on his daughter and her boyfriend.”
“Horrible case,” he said, wiping his mouth with a tiny serviette. “That Bennett was an animal.”
“He’s out,” Caro said.
“Is he?”
“Yes, and missing,” Elise said. “He went AWOL from his hostel over the bank holiday weekend.”
“Well, he’ll be straight back inside where he belongs when they find him.”