got ill. I haven’t seen them for so long, I don’t know. I’m sorry but I’m really not much help.’
He turned to Charlie. ‘What about you, Mr Jones? You knew her – where do you think she might have gone?’
Charlie shrugged. ‘Don’t ask me. I haven’t set eyes on her for thirty years. Neither did I want to. Sorry, Rach, but you know it’s true.’ Ratcliffe knew it was true too. The last time Charlie Jones had clapped eyes on Stella Baxter was the day she had given evidence against him in court.
He sighed. Why the hell did none of these people know anything? ‘Rachel, do you have a photograph of her?’
Rachel laughed as if surprised by the request. ‘No. We didn’t do photos, unless Frances has one. There are pictures of her wedding, I think.’
Ratcliffe nodded. Typical. ‘OK. Now can you tell us anything about the body that you found yesterday, the child?’
It was the first time that Rachel had shown any real emotion in front of him. Her eyes began to fill with tears as she shook her head. ‘I don’t know, I really don’t. I didn’t even know that there was a cupboard there until yesterday. Oh my God, I can’t believe that someone would do that to a baby!’ she said, her voice trembling.
Ratcliffe noticed Charlie’s body stiffen at Rachel’s words. ‘People are capable of some terrible things,’ he said, looking straight at Charlie.
Charlie looked away.
He asked a few more generic questions and got no further forward. Whatever these two were hiding, he wasn’t going to get it out of them in the casual confines of a hotel room. Sooner or later he’d have to call them both in for a formal interview, put them under a bit more pressure. For now they’d at least given him a few hints as to which direction those formal interviews would take. In Ratcliffe’s mind nothing was ever wasted.
As he drove back to the station he figured that there was no alternative but to get a picture of Stella and give it to the press as soon as possible. Someone would have seen her recently. All they had to do was pick her up when that someone came forward, and they would – they always did. Whatever had gone on in that house over the years, Stella was the one who would know; Ratcliffe was convinced of it.
Strangely, it still bugged him that Charlie had been in Rachel’s room. The air between them had been crackling with tension when he had walked in and whatever their agenda was, it was surely loaded with something more than curiousity.
It hadn’t taken him long to work out that there was more between Charlie Jones and Rachel Porter than met the eye – Charlie’s links to the Porter house went further than his past criminal record. The fact that his mother owned a photograph of a girl who was the spit of Rachel had sparked Ratcliffe’s instincts and he’d been more than a little smug when the team had turned up a marriage certificate and a birth certificate.
Maybe Rachel and Charlie assumed that he already knew that they were married, but neither of them had volunteered it and there had been no mention of their child. Though Jones had balked when Rachel got upset about the dead baby. If Rachel was telling the truth about having left years before and having no contact, she had left her kid too.
She came across as a nice woman – shy, worried, but nice. Could a woman who’d left her own child be called nice? It depended on the circumstances he supposed, but Charlie Jones had been convicted of murder and quite frankly Ratcliffe wouldn’t have left Delia Jones in charge of his dog. To leave a baby with those two would be a determinedly odd thing to choose. Rachel Porter needled him. She wasn’t what she appeared to be and there was far more to that situation than met the eye. And he was going to find out what it was.
***
Back in the incident room, he picked up a message to call Ferris. News was in on the bodies. All he wanted at that point was a decent cuppa and time to think, not a visit to the morgue.
Why couldn’t these forensic people just send a report? He never had understood the necessity of having to be shown the gruesome evidence in all its glory laid out on a slab. What was he supposed to do with the mental images? Chat about them to his wife over dinner? Although it might make an interesting change to Maria Ratcliffe’s usual moaning. Not that he could blame her for getting hacked off. She was a good woman who’d had to put up with a lot from him over the years.
Ferris had completed a basic exam on both victims. Her initial conclusions were that Baxter, whose identity she had confirmed by discovering his wallet still intact inside his rotting clothes, had still been alive when he was placed in the trunk. She showed the detective the feeble scratch marks that scarred the underside of the lid.
‘I don’t think he was alive for long, and I don’t think he had much strength left when he made these marks. There is some considerable damage to the skull; I suspect that he was hit repeatedly with something heavy and hard. He would have died from a combination of those injuries and suffocation. There was a substantial amount of sand in his throat. Now that he is out of the sand, and out of an airtight box, he’s going to deteriorate rapidly so I needed to find out as much as I could as soon as I could. I also found something clutched in his hand.’ She held up a bag containing a small gold earring, shaped like a teardrop. ‘My guess is that it belongs to whoever killed him.’
Ratcliffe took the bag and examined the earring. It wasn’t an uncommon design, nothing special at all. Still, if someone could identify it as belonging to Stella, it might strengthen his thoughts on the case. ‘What about the baby? Anything there?’
Ferris sighed. Hardened as they both were to the nature of their jobs, kids were always a tough call on everyone. ‘I think he was dead before he was put in the box. It looks like he was stillborn. To be honest it’s difficult to tell. From the skeleton, the size of the skull, and the length of the long bones, it looks like he had congenital problems. We did manage to salvage this though.’ She passed him another bag containing several thin strips of material. ‘It was what he was dressed in.’
Through the clear plastic Ratcliffe could see a name embroidered on the fabric. ‘Daniel,’ he said aloud. ‘At least the poor little thing had a name.’
‘Anyway, I still have tests to do, and should be getting more results in soon. I’ll let you know as soon as anything comes in,’ Ferris said, bristling. As if she was far too busy to indulge in such mawkish sentiments.
***
Ratcliffe was relieved to be outside and breathing air that didn’t have the rancid aftertaste of decay. No matter how scrupulously clean Ferris’s staff tried to be in there, the whole place still stank of death as far as he was concerned.
He was puzzled by the assertion that Baxter had been alive when he had been stashed in the trunk. From what they did know about Stella, she was a tiny little thing. Baxter had been six foot tall so how had such a small woman managed to manhandle someone that size into a great big trunk? His only conclusion was that she must have had help, which meant that someone else had known that the body was there. His money was on the mother, the dead and therefore perpetually silent Valerie.
They had to find Stella, which meant he had a very good excuse to pay Frances’s husband, Peter Haines, another visit.
In Rachel’s room, the atmosphere was thick with negativity. Waves of tension were washing across the room, fixing them both into the moment and forcing an uneasy silence.
