Heart of the Demon (D.S.Hunter Kerr) (9 page)

“A sad story Barry,” sighed Hunter.

“Very,” agreed Barry. “When you see Sue tomorrow, a little bit of warning, she’ll more than likely be in drink. I contacted you, Hunter because I can trust you to deal with her sympathetically. But I also have to tell you that during the initial enquiries when Carol was first reported missing, Sue told a few lies and I covered for her.”

- ooOoo –

DAY SIXTEEN: 21
st
July.

Before leaving for work that morning, nursing a thumping head, Hunter had telephoned Grace Marshall and given her the ‘heads-up’ of his meeting with Barry Newstead. When he gingerly sauntered into the MIT office Grace was already in, searching through a huge pile of missing-from-home files. He wasn’t surprised, she had already told him on the phone that she and Mike Sampson had decided that they could not spend another day in that dump of a store room and had got the van driver to transfer all the remaining folders to the office.

He found her beside her desk, sat crossed-legged on the floor, amongst foxed and yellowing folders, sliding report after report into separate piles.

Hunter eyed her carefully. He had known Grace a long time. In fact they had both joined the job on the same day and had trained together as new recruits. They had lost touch for a short time because she had chosen to take two career breaks to be with her two daughters’ during their pre-school years.

He had first been blessed with working alongside Grace when they had done their CID aide-ship together - she had worked hers at District CID, whilst he had done his at the smaller Barnwell CID department - they had been put together on a rape enquiry. The victim had been a woman with a history of sexual activity with many men in the area, and some of the older detectives on the case, had viewed the complaint as spurious. Yet Hunter had watched Grace approach it with such objectivity. At first, because he had wanted to impress the gaffer, he had tried to compete against her, but she had taught him a valuable lesson. A lesson he would never forget. She matched him for tenacity, flair, and enthusiasm and it had been she who had finally caught the perpetrator. The twenty-one year old offender had initially been a witness in the investigation. He had been drinking in the same pub as the victim. When she had left in a drunken state he had told detectives he had gone home in the opposite direction and used his mother to alibi him. Grace had been the one who had the ‘feeling’ about him, and she shared her cops’ instinct with Hunter. Between them they broke his mother down and she arrested the young man for rape. He was given an eight year sentence.

Since then, he had occasionally enquired of her, and when he had become a DS, covertly monitored her performance. Eighteen months ago, when he had learned he had secured one of the Sergeants posts in the newly formed Major Investigation Team, he hadn’t hesitated to call her up and suggest she should apply to join the squad.

She had walked the interview and since then they had been regular partners.

She glanced up from her work and fixed her brown eyes on him. She had a wide grin. She showed no signs of tiredness, unlike him.

The previous evening he’d had far too much to drink and had to get a taxi home. He’d apologised profusely as his wife Beth had driven him to pick up his car from the village pub that morning and he knew he’d overstepped the mark from the stern look
she’d given him and the deathly silence throughout the journey. When he’d tried to kiss her she turned only to offer her cheek. ‘I’ll phone for a table, somewhere nice, this weekend’ he thought to himself as he ambled towards the kettle.

“Fancy a brew?” he asked without looking at Grace. “How are you getting on?”

“I’m sure I’ve seen Carol Siddons’ folder amongst this lot it’s just a matter of putting my hand on it. Your meeting with Barry has certainly made the job easier. And yes I will have a coffee as you’re offering.”

“I want to keep where I got the info from just between us two at the moment. It’ll only complicate the enquiry. Let’s just let them think you found the link, okay?”

He poured the boiling water into two cups, adding a tea bag to his own and coffee granules to Grace’s. He slipped two paracetamols into his mouth.

“Feeling under the weather?” asked Grace.

“I feel absolutely shit. I’d forgotten just how much Barry could drink. It was a cracking night and I had a real good laugh with him but I’m paying for it this morning. To add to it, Beth isn’t speaking to me. I had to ask her to drop me off for my car this morning, which meant she would be rushing about sorting the boys out before she went into work. I’ll have to do some real sucking up for the next few days, but I’ll get round her. I always do.”

Grace rolled her eyes and raised her eyebrows at him.

She hadn’t said anything but that look of hers had said a thousand words.

Hunter returned a schoolboy pout. “Ouch.”

Just before nine am Hunter and Grace were driving out of the police station to meet Susan Siddons at her flat.

Hunter had not told the Senior Investigating Officer
anything of his previous night’s conversation with Barry Newstead, but had given him much of the background about Carol Siddons, who had been reported missing as a fifteen-year-old back in 1993.

Grace had sifted through the pile of reports she had recovered from her spell in the basement and had found a tattered file, containing the paperwork relating to Carol Siddons.

As Hunter drove he saw that she was now speed-reading the contents of the foxed dossier.

Despite a little too much foundation and make-up Hunter couldn’t help but notice that Susan Siddons was still quite youthful looking for someone pushing fifty. She was slim and petite and both Hunter and Grace had to glance downwards when she opened the door of her first floor flat. Her hair was bleached blonde and in a choppy, modern style, which softened her thin angular face.

‘She can’t be more than five foot’, thought Hunter and he recalled what Barry had recounted to him the previous night, trying to imagine what type of man would feel the need to batter someone so slight and slender. The prettiness was still there, despite the slight lump on the bridge of her nose, which he guessed was the result of the beating which had hospitalised her and she had a sort of easy smile, which was infectious. He could see why men fell for her, even though it was always the wrong type of men.

“I’ll just pop the kettle on,” she said softly and moved towards the kitchen on her left. Her South Yorkshire dialect was very broad.

Hunter had already mentioned Sue’s drink problem to Grace during the journey and as she spoke he couldn’t help but notice the combination of stale beer and fresh mouthwash on Sue’s breath.

As Sue disappeared into the kitchen Grace leaned towards Hunter almost planting her mouth on his ear. “Her breath smells like yours,” she whispered with a mischievous grin.

“Bollocks,” he retorted in a low voice between gritted teeth.

The flat was tidy and clean, but the furniture was old and worn and Hunter guessed it was the landlord’s choice rather than Sue’s.

Susan Siddons was chattering all the time she prepared the tea, her voice nervous and edgy, just making small talk, enquiring as to what Barry had already told them of her past.

Hunter responded with a small white lie. He didn’t want to bring up the incidents of Sue’s domestic battering, or anything relating to her term of imprisonment, to avoid any embarrassment or friction. Instead he dwelt mainly on the rose-tinted aspects of her life; her journalistic career, the birth of her daughter and the facts surrounding Carol’s disappearance all those years ago.

“You’ve found my baby now though, haven’t you?”
She said rhetorically and invited them to sit on a sofa, which sank on its springs a little too much for the detectives’ liking, and then placed two cups of strong tea onto a stained coffee table before them. “Sorry it’s so strong”, she said, looking at the dark brew “I’ve just run out of milk.” She sat opposite them in an armchair, which wasn’t a match to the settee, gripping a steaming mug of tea between her slightly shaky hands.

“I know this will be upsetting for you Sue but tell us why you think it’s your daughter’s body we’ve found,” opened Grace, glancing down at the information penned on the front sheet of the ‘missing from home’ folder.

“Is that her file?” Sue enquired nodding towards Grace’s archived records. “Look I’ve got to be honest with you, when all that was written back then I wasn’t being entirely honest.” She sniffed and they noticed tears beginning to form in the corners of her eyes. “Now that you’ve found her I need to be straight with you and make things right.”

“But how do you know it’s definitely her?” asked Grace again.

“The clothing you showed on Crimewatch last night. That was what she was wearing.”

“How do you know that?” enquired Grace, now scrolling a finger down the report, flicking over pages and speed-reading the handwritten manuscript. “The last time you saw her was three weeks previous to her going missing when you visited her at the care home with Social Services.”

“That’s just it. That wasn’t the last time I saw her.” Susan paused and gulped. “It was the night she went missing. And there were several other nights before that as well.” She blushed and tried to cover her face by drinking her tea and then shuffled uneasily in her chair

“I think you’d better tell us everything Sue, don’t you?”
interjected Hunter.

Susan Siddons began by recapping some of the background Barry Newstead had already given Hunter the previous evening. She gave depth and detail to the savage beatings she had suffered at the hands of her partner and they could hear real pain in her voice.

“It wasn’t just me he beat. Carol got some real hard slaps from him as well when he was that way out. He bruised her on more than one occasion and I had to keep her off nursery school on many an occasion. One night I came back from bingo and caught him urinating on her whilst she was in the bath. She was only four years old. Bloody hell, I flipped and just went berserk at him, and that’s when I got really badly beaten up, which Barry dealt with. You’re the only people I’ve ever told that to. I never even told Barry why Steve gave me that hiding.”

“Steve?” quizzed Hunter.

“Steve Paynton. You most probably will know him.”

Hunter and Grace looked at one another and nodded together. They knew him. There weren’t many local police officers that did not know the Paynton family. Most detectives either knew of, or had dealt with the many members of that brood. Generation after generation of the Paynton’s had been jailed at some time during their lifetime. In fact quite a few of them had convictions spanning each decade of their existence.

“That’s awful Sue,” said Grace. She laid aside the folder and picked up her mug of tea.

“When Steve went to prison Barry found me a place through his contacts and I started afresh. But I got lonely. I was only twenty-four years old. I needed company and I started going out. At first my mum and dad would look after Carol, but when they found out I was seeing different men every few months they lost patience with me and tried to stop me going out by refusing to baby-sit. I started to feel sorry for myself
, and I’m not proud of it, but a few times I tucked Carol up in bed and left her alone whilst I went to the pub. A neighbour must have phoned up and Social Services got involved. For years I had to put up with their pious interference for fear of losing Carol.”

She took another long sip of her drink. “Then as you probably know I got caught drugging that old guy. I used to get them to pay for my nights out. Many of them were far too old and also married, and although I felt cheap they were good payers. I couldn’t stand them to maul me at the end of the night so I’d just slip some of my sleeping pills into a whiskey and they’d go spark out. When they woke up on the sofa the next morning many of them couldn’t remember what had happened and didn’t give me a hard time in case I told their wives. Anyway I went to prison, by this time my parents had disowned me and so Carol was taken into care. When I got out I was only allowed to see her in the presence of a Social Worker, so she used to sneak out, or run away and stay with me. A couple of the times, after the police found her at my house, I was served with a notice threatening me with arrest for abduction:
Abduction of my own child – I ask you. And so we had to be even more secretive. That night she went missing she came to me straight from school. She was wearing that white shirt, which was her school blouse and those jeans you found her in were mine; we were the same size back then. She’d spilt some tomato sauce on her school skirt and she put my jeans on whilst I washed it. At half nine that night she said she’d better leave so that I didn’t get into trouble. The skirt was still wet and she said she’d be back the next day to collect it. That’s how I know it’s her. Those were my jeans.”

“Why didn’t you tell the police all this when she was reported missing?” asked Grace.

“Because I daren’t. I thought I’d get done for abduction. I didn’t want to go back to prison and lose Carol completely. I just thought she’d had a row at the home because she had got back late and had done a runner. It wasn’t until a few days later when she didn’t get in touch that I rung Barry. He covered up for me and did some enquiries without his bosses knowing. I started to pester them. I suppose I was a pain at times, but which mother wouldn’t be if their daughter went missing. Finally they agreed for me to make an appeal through the media. The press gave me such a hard time. I reacted badly to their questioning even though I’d been a journalist myself. I came over hard on the telly. They’d edited out much of my emotions and so the public slated me. I couldn’t win. For weeks if I cried I was accused of being over dramatic and if I didn’t I was a hard-faced bitch. I suppose my past caught up with me over those awful first few months of her going missing.”