for a club or a meeting, if she was going to the library or to Lynn’s house. Karen always got off the bus by Overmead Wood, a few yards from the junction of the main road with the side road.
‘Did you ever give her a lift home?’ Kelsey asked Ian.
‘No, never.’
‘Did she ever get a lift home from anyone else?’
She had never mentioned a lift to either of them.
‘What would she normally do if she missed her bus? Would she set off to walk home?’
Ian shook his head. ‘It’s a fair distance, especially when you’re carrying books. There’s a good hour between buses, so she couldn’t expect the next one to come along and pick her up on the way. And she’d think walking home would be a waste of time–especially on a cold, wet evening like yesterday–when she could be getting on with her homework in comfort, at the college or in the public library.’
‘I’m positive she wouldn’t try to thumb a lift,’ Christine said with energy. ‘She was well aware of the dangers, we’d warned her about it more than once, and she always agreed it would be a very foolish thing to do.’
‘If she did miss her bus,’ Kelsey persisted, ‘and she did decide to set off walking home, and someone she knew, or knew slightly, pulled up beside her and offered her a lift, someone living in Overmead, perhaps, maybe someone she knew only by sight, do you think she’d be likely to accept the lift?’
‘Yes, I think she probably would,’ Christine answered after a moment.
‘Then again,’ Kelsey said to Ian in an easy tone, ‘if she’d set off walking and you happened to come along, on your way home, and you pulled up beside her, she’d naturally get in.’
Ian frowned. ‘Yes, of course she would, but that never happened. I never gave her a lift home, ever, and I certainly didn’t give her a lift home yesterday.’
‘How did you spend yesterday afternoon?’ Kelsey asked.
‘I was out on site visits all afternoon–that’s how I normally spend Friday afternoon. I drove home from the last site. I had a bath, changed, had something to eat and then went along to the meeting. It started at seven-thirty.’
‘Is that your car outside?’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘Did you use it yesterday to go to work?’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘We’d like to take a look at it.’
‘Certainly.’ Ian led the way outside. Christine followed the Chief and Sergeant Lambert. ‘My wife used the car this morning when she went out on her rounds,’ Ian told them.
Kelsey surveyed the vehicle, a smallish family saloon, claret-red in colour, some four years old. He opened the door and glanced round, opened the boot and looked inside. He returned to the interior of the car and scrutinized it with greater care, being particularly scrupulous in his examination of the pedals, the carpet by the driver’s seat.
‘The sites you visited yesterday,’ he said to Ian. ‘Were they muddy?’
‘Yes. One or two were very muddy.’
The chief peered down again. ‘There’s no sign of any mud here.’
‘I cleaned the car this morning, ready for Christine to take it out.’
‘You gave it a pretty good going over.’
‘It needs a good going over after I’ve been out on the sites, that’s why I clean it on a Saturday morning. I’ve got one of those cordless electric dustettes I use on it, they’re very thorough. I always give the pedals a scrub when I wash the car.’
The Chief straightened up. ‘I’d like to see the shoes you were wearing yesterday when you drove home.’
Ian stuck out one foot. ‘I was wearing these.’ Brown leather slip-ons, bearing evidence now of his morning stint in the garden. ‘I never wear good shoes on a Friday because of going over the sites. These are old but they’re still fairly reasonable. They’re strong and waterproof, they clean up well enough.’
‘The clothes you wore yesterday on your way home, I’d like to see those too. Not just the outdoor garments, everything: socks, underwear, handkerchief, tie, gloves, the lot.’
‘Yes, certainly.’ Ian led them back into the house, taking them first into the front hall. He opened the door of a wardrobe and showed them a jacket, oldish but still respectable, made of close-woven, proofed gaberdine, medium grey, with a hood, a quilted lining. ‘That’s my Friday jacket,’ he said. ‘It keeps the wind out.’ He took a pair of leather driving gloves from a shelf in the wardrobe. Newish, in good condition.
‘May I see your hands?’ Kelsey asked.
Ian held them out, turned them over. Very well cared for, the skin smooth, the nails neatly trimmed. ‘You look after your hands,’ the Chief observed.
Ian moved his shoulders. ‘I have to, in my job. Can’t go to the office looking like a navvy.’
He took them upstairs into a large double bedroom. He opened a wardrobe and took out a hanger with a pair of dark grey trousers, spotlessly clean, undamaged, carefully pressed. He pulled open drawers in a chest and showed them a set of underwear, socks, a shirt, a polo-necked sweater, all immaculately laundered. From a pile of handkerchiefs, carefully ironed, folded in four, he picked up the top handkerchief. ‘That’s everything,’ he said. ‘Bar the tie.’ He crossed again to the wardrobe and lifted a tie from a rack inside the door. ‘That’s the one I wore yesterday to the office, but I took it off and put it in my pocket when I got into the car to go round the sites. I slipped the sweater on over my shirt. I usually take a sweater to wear on the sites, it can be pretty chilly. I can’t wear it in the office, of course, it’s always a collar and tie in there.’
‘Everything’s been washed,’ Kelsey pointed out.
‘That’s right, everything except the tie. I put it all in the machine this morning, as soon as I got up. It’s no bother, it’s all automatic, it looks after itself while I get on with other jobs.’
‘Do you usually do a load of washing on a Saturday morning?’
‘Yes, I do. Not just my own things, Christine’s, or any household stuff that’s in the basket.’ He raised no objection when the Chief looked carefully through all the rest of his outdoor clothing: suits, jackets, trousers, shoes.
Kelsey then asked if he could see Karen’s room and Ian took them across the landing. He stood in the doorway, beside Christine, watching as the two policemen made a rapid search. Within a short time they came across the snapshot inside the back cover of the maths textbook.
The Chief studied it in silence. It showed a tall, lean, good-looking man in early middle age, standing beside a small saloon car in a deserted country lay-by. He held himself in a relaxed stance, smiling out at the camera.
The Chief held out the snapshot for the Wilmots to see. Neither of them had seen it before, neither could identify the man,
