‘What’s the form?’

‘Knows his rights, you bet. Won’t admit to anything. But he will.’

‘How’s the leg?’

‘Uncomplicated flesh wound; she was spot on. Pity she didn’t let her finger slip and blow the sod away. Save the taxpayer another load of moolah.’ Benson lit a new cigarette. ‘Anyway, we can nail him for being at the Raven with her the actual night she disappeared. We’ve had sight of a Barclay-card docket signed by him. And one of the waitresses recognized Donna from a photo as being with him around that time. It wasn’t a face you forgot. She doesn’t read the Standard or she might have picked up on it before.’

‘The sod had incredible luck, apart from anything else,’ Crane said. ‘Just managing to be in a Leaf and Petal vehicle Kirsty Hellewell had lent him the night Julia followed Donna and took the number of the Scenic. It seemed it had to be Hellewell then. And with him and Anderson having a bit of a resemblance.’

‘Ollie Stringer will be our star witness,’ Benson told him. ‘He still can’t speak, but we showed him a picture of Anderson and told him we’d got him banged up and would he identify him? He was nodding so hard fit to make his bloody head drop off. And if Ollie identifies him in court I reckon we’re home and dry.’ He ground out the cigarette angrily. ‘Christ, the last person in the frame was always going to be the Standard’s sodding crime reporter!’

‘His luck kicked in from day one,’ said Crane. ‘You lot were certain Mahon had killed her. Me too. At the start I just felt it was my job to try and prove he’d killed her. Anderson’s off the hook, even though he was never really on it. He knows perfectly well Mahon must have had some other reason to stick with the story he was home that night. He gets so confident Mahon will always stick to it that he can even take me to the Goose and Guinea and pretend to ruffle his feathers a bit.

‘But he loathes Mahon personally, like all the men Donna had known, and makes his only real mistake. He feeds Mahon the stuff about the Willows pointing the bone. That blew the door open. Mahon confesses but you could clear him. I reckon that’s got to be Anderson’s worst hour. And then I get Adrian’s name from Ollie and he knows that if I get through to Adrian and put you on to him it’ll be Bobby Mahon all over again, in fact anyone I can turn up who just might have done it. He’s shitting bricks by now and terrified that sooner or later I might get through to him. He knows I don’t give in too easily and I bring a fresh mind. But then the luck’s with him again. Kirsty tells him Joe Hellewell is also known as Adrian. And Adrian’s dodgy lifestyle makes him seem so guilty as to almost rule out anyone else. So he makes Hellewell appear to leg it, which means he’s virtually admitting his guilt. Anderson’s home and dry. Except that now I’d turned up Julia Gregson.’

Crane drank some of his G and T. ‘Julia was the wild card and this really spooks him. She keeps a proper diary and he’s terrified his name might crop up in it, in the parts she’d not wanted me to read.’

‘And it’s him who breaks into Patsy’s?’

‘He’s got a good fix on the way my mind works now and he gambles on me spotting the flip chart’s been tampered with. He’s certain I’ll decide it must have been Hellewell. Hellewell reads the chart, realizes he’s the chief suspect, and he too believes he has to get his hands on that diary. So he tries to steal it, only Julia surprises him, and in the struggle he accidentally kills her. He has to leg it for good then, because if he’s not nailed for one killing he’ll be nailed for another. That’s what we’re meant to think when Julia’s body’s found. What Anderson didn’t bargain for was me picking up on how crucial the diary could be before he’d managed to see off Julia. Well, you can’t think of everything, not even Anderson, who can have few equals for tying up loose ends. I was certain Julia might be in danger, and she was, but not from Hellewell.’

Benson lit another cigarette, inhaled deeply. ‘What we can’t figure is why Hellewell went off with Anderson the night he disappeared. We’ve enhanced the CCTV footage. Still can’t get the number but know it’s definitely a Honda Accord.’

‘I’ve not stopped kicking it around. We know why Anderson and Donna ended up at Tanglewood that night. He’d bought her a fancy meal, she’d be staying the night at his flat probably, but he wanted a neutral place in between where he could read her the riot act about sleeping around. Well, that’s where he lost it, throttled the poor kid and bunged her in the reservoir, where she’d be now if it hadn’t been for the youngster finding her. Well, I’m certain it was a crime of passion, but quick thinker that he is he knew how to make sure the body was weighted before he dumped it. But it must have struck him later that reservoirs make handy burial grounds. I began to wonder if maybe he took Hellewell to the next reservoir along the line. That would be Scamworth. It’s very, very quiet and too far out for kids to get there on foot and use as a swimming pool.’

Benson’s mouth went down sceptically at the corners. ‘Can’t see it myself. Hellewell was a tough bloke, like Anderson. How’s he going to let himself be lured from Leaf and Petal?’

‘Lure’s a good word. It took me a while to get there, but we have to remember that Hellewell was a fiver each way, and that Anderson’s tall and good looking with a well made body. What if he told Hellewell he’d always fancied him, couldn’t get him off his mind, how did he feel about going somewhere quiet and doing something about it? Like a beauty spot with a reservoir attached? That’s only a theory, I’m trying to think like Anderson might have done.’

‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ Benson said grudgingly. Crane knew he would and if the theory was acted on Benson would quietly claim it as his own, touchy as he was about Crane’s superior deductive skills, about his way of obsessively worrying at a problem till something gave. He knew Benson often felt exposed since he’d left the force, though would never admit it. It was very sad. They’d been a good team together, apart from their close friendship, as Benson had solid police skills of his own. It was just that a few things had gone adrift in Benson’s mind this past two or three years.

‘You’re right about his luck though,’ Benson said dourly.

‘Even with his car. I never even knew he drove a Honda. For one reason or another he was in a pool car or in my car or parked out of sight. And he made his own luck with the flip chart. The sod simply sets it up, says it’ll keep us all in the picture. Keep him in the picture! It just meant he never lost track of what I was up to, not for a minute, because I was writing it all down even when he wasn’t there. It was a game he couldn’t lose.’

Benson shook his head. ‘Why did he go on like that? Pretending he’d never give in on the case till someone put their hand up?’

‘I think he saw it as a good way of drawing the fire well away from himself. Like those blokes who go on the telly now and then, tears in their eyes, appealing for information about a wife or a partner who’s bought it. And then it turns out that the guy who’s doing the appealing did the business.

‘I also think, in some part of his mind, once she was dead, he knew it was just about the best story he’d ever had. Apart from all the reports and articles he could write about it he was planning this big feature about the innocent victim he was going to make her out to be of a Willows going to the dogs. He was aiming to syndicate it and use it as a crucial part of his CV when he made his bid for a London job.’

‘Why did he write her up as such an innocent? He could maybe have shown the Willows in a worse light still if he’d said it had turned her into a tom.’

‘I don’t honestly think he could ever stop seeing her the way she was when he first got to know her, when she seemed innocent. A bit of a chatterbox, a bit empty-headed, but that was because of the Willows and poor schooling. And he could take her away from all that, make her over into a fit companion for a college man. Like Svengali, he’d soon have her singing in tune. But he twigged very quickly about the whoring and the dodgy men and the vicious tongue, and yet in his mind I think he always wanted her to be the sweet little kid he’d seen in the clubs with the strobes flashing on her hair.’