In the Family Read online

  He called the number that the Law Society had supplied and was surprised when Charles Heward himself answered. He had been expecting to have to get past a secretary.

  “Mr. Heward? This is DC Andrew Carstairs, of South Lincolnshire Police. I wonder if it would be possible to make an appointment to see you. I believe that you may be able to help me with some enquiries that I am making.”

  “Certainly.” The voice at the other end of the line was both confident and ebullient. If, as the child of immigrants, the young Charles Heward had not exactly been a member of the Establishment, his tone certainly proclaimed that he was one now. “Corporate fraud case, is it? I’ve been asked to help the police with several of those lately. Not usually in your neck of the woods, though.”

  “No, it isn’t a fraud case. I’m investigating a suspected murder. I believe that you knew the victim? Her name was Kathryn Sheppard.”

  There was a long pause. The next time that Charles Heward spoke, he sounded less confident but angry at the same time.

  “The police decided many years ago that I had nothing to do with Kathryn’s disappearance. They should never have let it get into the papers that they – absurdly – regarded me as a suspect, even for a short time. It could have ruined my career. I see no point in revisiting all of that now. It was a very distressing period in my life. I know that you police are keen on ‘cold cases’ these days, but this whole thing has already been resurrected once, and then it got no further than the first time round. There was never even proof that she was murdered, though taking into account the balance of probabilities I’d say that it was likely. She wasn’t the kind of girl to just ‘disappear’, and she had no reason to. But re-opening the case again isn’t going to help anyone, least of all her parents, if they’re still alive. It’s time to let it go.”

  “I understand how you must be feeling, sir, but we have a good reason for re-opening the case. You see, we have found Kathryn’s remains.”

  There was an even longer pause. When Charles Heward spoke again, he sounded upset.

  “Oh, God. Where? And when? How can you be sure that it’s her?”

  “As I think you may know, her mother insisted that the police had her DNA analysed some years after she disappeared, when DNA results became reliable enough to use for identification purposes. That was when the case was reopened for a second time, as you just mentioned. The police didn’t get much further then, in 1990, but the DNA was kept on record. Some workmen found a skeleton by the side of the A1 a few days ago, and we have the DNA match results now. There can be no doubt that the remains are Kathryn’s.”

  “I saw something about the skeleton in the news – I read the article because I knew the area in which it was found, as you will realise – but I didn’t make the connection with Kathryn. That puts a different complexion on your request, of course. I will help if I can – though you should know that I co-operated to the best of my ability with the police at the time. Everything that I could contribute then was presumably recorded, and there is little that I can add to it now. In fact, my recollections now are much less likely to be accurate than they were then.”

  “I understand that, sir, but I’d still like to talk to you about it. There may just be something that you remember now that didn’t seem important then.”

  Charles Heward agreed to see him the next day. Andy caught the train to King’s Cross, and then took the tube to Holborn. As he walked round the enclosed square of Gray’s Inn, where the raised flowerbeds were being carefully tended by a troop of gardeners dressed in leather aprons, and climbed the corkscrew stairs to Charles Heward’s office, he felt as if he’d entered another era. Charles Heward’s office itself confirmed the impression. It was the sort of room that he imagined James Boswell had practised from before he gave up the law to become the eighteenth century’s foremost literary groupie.

  There was no ante-room to the office, and no secretary in evidence, so he knocked on the door which stood ajar to the right of the first landing of the staircase and waited, not sure whether he should enter the room or not. He could hear Charles’s deep voice booming from inside, presumably talking to someone on the telephone. However, Charles cut short the conversation in which he was engaged – almost, it seemed, in mid-sentence – when he heard the knock, and shouted ‘Come!’ The word seemed to reverberate around the walls after it was uttered. Andy smiled. He had seen actors playing the part of public school headmasters use the same curt command, but he had not thought that it had any place in real life, not, at least, in this century.

  He pushed open the door. By the time that he had entered the room, Charles Heward had risen to his feet. He came round the side of his desk and extended a huge hand, shooting a snow-white cuff embellished with a heavy gold cufflink as he did so.

  “DC Carstairs? I thought it would be you. Sit down, please.” He gestured at a spindly Queen Anne sofa that had been placed in front of his desk, and returned to his own massive wooden chair. Andy took in the scene before him and saw that Charles Heward was a tall, bulky black man who was looking very prosperous in his immaculate black suit. The chair creaked under his weight. There was a floor-to-ceiling bookcase fastened to the wall behind him, crammed with outsize legal tomes. For the second time in the space of five minutes, Andy felt that he had walked on to a film set. There was something about the whole room that suggested that Charles Heward had surrounded himself with the grander appurtenances of his profession because they looked right, rather than because he actually needed or had chosen them.

  “If you would like tea, we will visit the tea-room eventually. I don’t have a secretary. I used to employ one, but I found her more trouble than she was worth. We don’t need them now in these days of computers and spell-checkers, do we?” His manner was affable and expansive. As he spoke to Andy, he removed a gold signet ring from his right hand, and rolled it in his palm. It seemed to be a characteristic habit of his – a small outlet, perhaps, for his obviously abundant, restless energy.

  “Now,” he regarded Andy with sharp eyes. “You say that you have found Kathryn’s skeleton. Does it give you any clue about how she died?”

  Andy realised that he was trying to take lead in the interview and determined to wrest it back quietly.

  “We don’t have the results of the tests yet, sir. But you’ll realise that I wouldn’t have been able to let you know them, anyway. Now, I’d like to go back to the beginning, if you don’t mind. Where you were when you first met Kathryn, how you became engaged, that sort of thing.”

  “I met her on a train. She had been visiting her mother in Derby and she sat next to me when she boarded the train. I’d been at Manchester University for a couple of days at a lawyers’ symposium and, instead of travelling straight back to London, I’d decided to make the journey to Peterborough to see a client. The train was held up for some reason – a signalling problem, I think – so we were able to spend a couple of hours talking to each other. I know it sounds corny in a terribly Brief Encounter sort of way, but by the end of the journey, we knew that we wanted to be together. We sat in the station café at Peterborough, discussing what we should do. She had a boyfriend and I was actually engaged, but we agreed that we would extricate ourselves from our respective relationships as soon as we could. Kathryn told her boyfriend the next time that she saw him and ended their relationship immediately.” He paused, and his face contorted with some emotion: Andy could not decide what. “She was considerably braver about it than I was; it took me a few days to screw up the courage to face my fiancée and her parents. My fiancée was in pupillage in the same law firm that I worked for and her father was a judge. I don’t deny that I was worried about the effect that it might have on my career.”

  “But you went ahead with it?”

  “Yes. It turned out to be both easier and harder than I had thought. Easier because Veronica and her family behaved in such a civilised way. Harder because it was ob
vious how very hurt Veronica was. I’d never quite believed in her love for me up until that moment.”

  He paused and replaced the ring on his finger.

  “After Kathryn’s disappearance, I returned to Veronica. I was grateful that she would take me back; and I’ve never regretted it. We’ve been married for almost thirty years.”

  Andy thought that the way in which Charles Heward delivered this final sentence – almost eulogistically, or in the tone of a parson concluding a sermon – seemed artificial and contrived. He was not surprised that Charles had been a suspect during the original enquiry. There was something about the way he spoke of Kathryn Sheppard that did not convince that he was telling the truth.

  “Indeed. As you say, most of the facts that you’ve been so kind to recount are recorded in the original case notes. Tell me, did you ever meet Hedley Atkins, Kathryn’s former boyfriend?”

  “Yes – once. Kathryn continued to see his sister – they had become friends, and in fact I met the sister, Bryony, on several occasions. She called round at Kathryn’s flat one day when I was there. She didn’t stay long and she left when Hedley showed up to collect her. I remember thinking at the time that this was strange: Bryony was a fully-grown adult leaving a friend’s flat in a small market town in broad daylight. She hardly needed a chaperone. I thought that she must be in cahoots with Hedley, trying to help him to meet Kathryn again, though I’ve no idea why either of them might think that this would be useful. Kathryn had just changed jobs – she had been working in the same office as Hedley when she was going out with him, and of course found that hard to bear after their split – so he could no longer see her at work. Anyway, she was civil to him and asked him in for a few moments, so that was when she introduced him to me.”

  “Did you form an opinion of him?”

  “I thought he was weird, to be honest. He was quite a bit younger than Kathryn, though that wasn’t obvious: he seemed older than his years. He tried to introduce a few in-jokes to the conversation that included Kathryn and Bryony but excluded me and he clearly resented my presence. That was only to be expected, of course; but I also had the feeling that he wasn’t all that concerned about Kathryn, anyway. He seemed much more interested in Bryony – fixated on her, almost.”

  “Thank you, that’s interesting. Is there anything else that you’d like to tell me, that might help this new enquiry?”

  Charles Heward had taken off his ring again, and was rolling it around his palm with such fierce energy that he dropped it and it rolled across the floor, coming to rest against the elaborately-carved foot of one of his bookcases. He rose from his chair and bent to retrieve it, surprisingly nimble for such a bulky man. He was still squatting on his haunches, looking up at Andy, when he spoke.

  “It probably won’t help your enquiry, but there is something that I’d like to tell you. I’ve had it on my conscience ever since Kathryn vanished, and my wife has had it on hers, too. It seemed vital then to – well, not exactly to deceive, but not to tell the whole story; but the truth seems so much more important now.”

  Andy held his gaze. “Please continue, sir. May I switch on my tape recorder?”

  “I’d rather you didn’t; I’d like the information that I’m about to give you to be kept confidential, unless you find later that making it public would help you.” He swallowed. “Some time before Kathryn went missing, not afterwards as I told you earlier, and as I maintained at the time, Veronica and I got back together again. I realised that the whole episode with Kathryn had been a mistake, the result of a kind of momentary madness – precipitated, if I am honest, by getting caught up in the glamour of the sort of romantic adventure I had never had before and, I suppose, simple lust. At least, that was true on my side. I think that Kathryn really believed that she had found her soul-mate when she met me.” He swallowed again. “Just as when I had left Veronica for Kathryn, now that I was leaving Kathryn for Veronica, I found myself unable to tell Kathryn as soon as I had decided. I don’t know why I thought that prolonging the relationship would do any good; I suppose I was just too cowardly to face up to a scene. But she began to get suspicious – our meetings were becoming less and less frequent – and after some weeks I had to tell her. I didn’t see her again after I told her. It was a Thursday evening, and she’d just got in from work. She was pretty upset. I didn’t contact her over the weekend. As you know, she didn’t turn up for work on the Friday after I saw her, or the Monday after that, and eventually her father reported her missing to the police. I told the police that I had last seen her on the Thursday – which was the truth – and of course I had to tell Veronica that as well. Veronica had thought – I suppose I mean, I had led her to believe – that I had broken off with Kathryn some weeks before. When Kathryn disappeared, I told her the truth, and she promised to keep it a secret. Although she was very unhappy about it – she is an extremely honest person – she agreed with me that if it became public knowledge that I had just ditched Kathryn, it would make the police case against me much stronger and, even if I was not charged, that it would affect my career. As you know, I suffered too much adverse publicity as it was.”

  He stood up slowly and sat down in his chair again. His shoulders sagged, and all the nervy energy that he had exhibited earlier seemed to have drained out of him.

  “Poor Kathryn, though. I was truly fond of her. I’ve never been able to get the idea out of my head that she came to grief because I finished with her.”

  “I see. Do you mean that you suspect that she had killed herself?”

  “Possibly – though I meant it when I said that the balance of probabilities suggested that she was murdered. I think that it is more likely that she either went somewhere that compromised her safety, or sought help from someone who intended her harm.”

  “Thank you for telling me the truth now, sir. I appreciate it. I will treat the information that you have given me confidentially for the time being, but you will appreciate that I may have to ask you for a formal statement eventually.”

  Charles Heward nodded. He had taken the ring off again.

  As Andy walked away from Gray’s Inn later, he wondered if Charles Heward’s latest version of his part in the events leading up to Kathryn Sheppard’s disappearance was ‘the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’. On the whole, he thought that Charles’s story was plausible; but the man was a consummate actor, so how could he tell for sure?

  Chapter Eight

  Tim Yates did not know why he had himself decided to interview Hedley Atkins, rather than sending Andy Carstairs, as he had for the interview with Charles Heward. Perhaps it was because Hedley was Dorothy Atkins’ son. Tim had now read a great deal about the murder of Doris Atkins and Dorothy’s conviction for it, and he found the case both fascinating and unsatisfactory, in about equal measures. If he were entirely honest, he did not think that either the police who had handled it or the judge who had presided over the trial had done a particularly good job. There were too many loose ends left untied, too many questions left unresolved. No-one had been able to find a motive for the murder, for one thing, and Dorothy Atkins had never confessed to it, for another. The judge had explained away these untidy facts by describing Dorothy as a ‘psychopath’, but medical opinion was divided on whether or not she was insane. It was also odd that her husband, Ronald Atkins, had been one of the chief witnesses at the trial, even though he had not been in the house at the time of the murder; but others who had certainly been present had barely been questioned at all. These included Colin Atkins, who was the householder as well as the shopkeeper, and Doris Atkins’ younger brother; Eliza Atkins, their aged mother; and Hedley Atkins. There was also a daughter, Bryony Atkins, who gave no statements and did not appear in court. She had apparently left to take up a place at Reading University shortly before the murder.

  Tim had also read the transcripts of the police interviews that had taken place with Hedley Atkins afte
r the disappearance of Kathryn Sheppard and again when the case was reopened in 1990. Hedley seemed to have been unexceptionably polite and co-operative on these occasions. Tim did not sense from the notes that he had had anything to hide about his relationship with Kathryn. He gave straightforward accounts of the year or so that they had been together and their split. Hedley had described his anger and dismay when Kathryn had left him abruptly for Charles Heward – but these were natural reactions. Tim would have been more suspicious if Hedley had claimed to have taken the break-up calmly. Furthermore, it had happened almost a year before Kathryn’s disappearance and there was no record of Hedley having annoyed or intimidated her afterwards. He had said that Kathryn had left the office where they both had worked shortly after she had terminated the relationship and that after that he had only seen her on a handful of occasions. Charles Heward’s statements, by contrast, were notably more defensive.

  Nevertheless, Hedley would have to be questioned again, now that they had found the skeleton. As far as Tim could deduce, Kathryn Sheppard had only had two serious relationships with men since leaving university, with Hedley Atkins and Charles Heward, and de facto they were both therefore potential suspects. He did not know whether Hedley still lived in Spalding, or had moved away after his mother’s imprisonment and his parents’ divorce. He could discover no Hedley Atkins in the telephone directory, but examination of the electoral roll revealed someone of that name living in one of the blocks of mansion flats in London Road. This was where Hedley had been living when the case was reopened in 1990. It was an outside chance, but Tim wondered if he still worked for the same employer as well, Maschler’s farm machinery. He decided to give it a try.

  The voice at the other end of the phone confirmed that Mr. Atkins did still work for the company, but said that he had left for the day. Employees were allowed to work flexi-time and Mr. Atkins usually came in to work at about 8 a.m. and left at 4.30 p.m. Tim asked for his telephone number.