the summer holidays usually. He gets upset if our barbecues go on too late and comes around, making a fuss. We don’t want to do that back to him … he’d just think it was retaliation.’
‘And, you know …’ Alan Rodwell shrugged. ‘Complaining’s not really our thing.’
Lucy looked at them askance. ‘I didn’t mean knock on his door to complain, I mean to check if everything was all right.’
‘Oh …’ Their impish smiles faded.
They shuffled their feet awkwardly but didn’t look guilty or afraid. Hardened criminals often had the ability to brazen things out when they were under suspicion; they could put on a front that even a seasoned detective might find it difficult to penetrate. But when ordinary people like these two had done something wrong, there were usually clear signs. Not so on this occasion. It was as though it hadn’t even struck them yet that they might be in the frame.
‘You’ve been hearing his television play continuously since – when?’ Lucy said. ‘Could it have been as far back as last Tuesday?’
‘Around then, I suppose,’ Sam Rodwell replied. ‘Tuesday night was probably the first night we heard when it hadn’t been turned off.’
‘That’s right,’ her husband agreed. ‘We were in bed and I could hear gunfire – like movie gunfire, you know. And cowboy film music. I said to Sam, “Christ, Harry’s pulling a late one.”’
Lucy nodded, and scrawled some notes in her pocket-book, one of which was to check if there’d been a western on TV late on Tuesday night.
‘Is this going to take long?’ Sam Rodwell asked. ‘You see, we were just going to—’
‘It’ll take as long as it needs to, I’m afraid, Mrs Rodwell. We have a pensioner missing, and we’d like to get to the bottom of whatever’s happened to him. So, I’d like you both to throw your minds back to Tuesday. Not just the night, but during the daytime as well. Did anything unusual happen? Doesn’t have to be serious, but anything that seemed like a break from the norm, apart from the telly being left on?’
Their faces turned blank as they tried to think it through.
‘You didn’t hear any raised voices, perhaps?’ Lucy prompted them. ‘Any shouting or even laughing?’
They still looked blank.
‘Any vehicles coming and going? Maybe at the back of the house?’
‘Oh yes, wait …’ Sam Rodwell said. ‘There was something like that. Hell, I think this was on Tuesday night too. We heard like a screeching of tyres along the Backs.’
Lucy watched her carefully. ‘Definitely along the Backs?’
The young woman nodded. ‘Like a vehicle was tearing away, you know. It was quite unusual, because it’s very narrow back there.’
‘Yeah, I remember that now,’ her husband said. ‘Only lasted a second and then it was gone.’
‘What time would this have been?’ Lucy asked.
‘I don’t know.’ Sam thought about it again. ‘We weren’t in bed at that stage, so not too late. Half-past ten, something like that.’
‘You don’t really think something bad could have happened to Harry, do you?’ Alan asked, finally sounding concerned.
‘That, sir,’ Lucy replied, ‘is what I’m trying to discover.’
‘What do we think about the daughter?’ Stan Beardmore asked from Lucy’s laptop screen.
Lucy sat back in her office chair. ‘I think she’s genuine. She took a long time coming around to check, but she lives in Blackburn, plus she’s a radiographer at the hospital there, so she works shifts. Sounds like this morning was the first chance she had to visit.’
‘And the neighbours?’
‘There’s no one in No. 6. An old lady owns it, but she’s in long-term care. The Rodwells, the couple who reported the speeding vehicle, live at No. 10. I don’t get any particularly bad vibes about them. Typical young suburbanites. Bit self-centred maybe, but who wasn’t at that age?’
‘These were the ones Hopkins didn’t get on with?’
‘I don’t think it was a case of him not getting on with them. Sounds more like the odd disagreement. Plus, if they were involved, wouldn’t they just have turned his telly off, locked the house up, tried to make it look like he’d gone away?’
‘Not if they wanted to make it look like he’d been attacked by an intruder,’ Beardmore suggested.
‘Outside his house at the back?’ Lucy said. ‘Late at night? If you were making a story up, would you seriously expect someone to buy that?’
Detective Sergeant Kirsty Banks, who was sitting on the desk behind Lucy, now cut in. She was a hefty woman, with an unruly mop of blonde hair and a penchant for wearing big cardigans over her T-shirts and jeans, though as it was warm today and electric fans whirred in the otherwise empty CID office, the cardigan at least had come off.
‘I must be honest, Stan,’ she said, ‘if the Rodwells had done something to Harry Hopkins, and were trying to make it look like an intruder, surely they’d have wrecked the interior of his house … tried to make it look like a burglar had broken in?’
‘That’s your gut instinct, is it, Kirst?’
‘I think Lucy’s on the money. This needs further investigation.’
Beardmore thought about it. From his open-neck polo shirt, the garden chair he reclined in, the kids running around the lawn in the background and the muted conversation of friends and neighbours, he too was spending his Saturday at a barbecue.
‘Lucy,’ he eventually said. ‘What other work have you got on?’
‘Just bottoming off the paper from the dog-fighting arrests,’ she replied.
‘Get that done ASAP. Then you’re on this exclusively till we get some kind of result.’
‘No probs.’
‘Kirsty … how buried is Tessa Payne?’
Banks flicked through the crime log. ‘Not very. Plus, she’s on call today.’
‘Okay. Lucy … you’ve got Tessa.’
Lucy nodded. That would suit Tessa, she thought. The youngster had come into CID excitedly, and even more so on learning she’d be working with Lucy, whose recent results had caught the imagination of many young women in the job. Whether having an adoring student along for the ride was ideal for her, Lucy was less sure, but help was help.
‘Right … you all know what you’re doing.’ Beardmore reached forward to switch off his laptop. ‘If you need me, get on the blower.’
‘Oh, boss …?’ Lucy said.
‘Yeah?’
