Stay Buried

Book 0: The DI Lockyer Mysteries

by Kate Webb

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals

Synopsis

The darkest truths should never surface . . .

A twisty and atmospheric Wiltshire-set crime novel from a brilliant new voice in the genre. Stay Buried will keep you guessing until the end.

'Your next must-read' LUCY FOLEY
'Absolutely brilliant plotting' ANN CLEEVES

Detective Inspector Matt Lockyer has been side-lined to working cold cases, following a bad decision he made in a recent investigation in order to support a friend. Lockyer isn't too bothered though, as it gives him the chance to review some of the cases that keep him up at night and to look into his own brother's senseless killing which still remains unsolved.

On a quiet afternoon Lockyer receives a phone call from prisoner Hedy Lambert - a woman he put inside for murder fourteen years ago. She informs him that the man she was originally accused of killing has turned up alive and well. She begs him to reopen her case.

All those years ago, Lockyer had been the one to pin down Hedy's motive, but deep down he'd never wanted to believe she was guilty. The thought that he might have sent an innocent woman down for life doesn't sit well with him and he agrees to reopen the investigation. But has it become too personal and is he being manipulated? Perhaps there are some cases that should just stay buried.

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Praise for Stay Buried

'Gloriously atmospheric' ELLY GRIFFITHS

'The twists were terrific' GYTHA LODGE

'A well-written deftly plotted whodunnit' GUARDIAN

'Remarkably assured' LITERARY REVIEW

'Accomplished, twisty' WOMAN AND HOME

Release date: October 27, 2022

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 416

Sample

1

Day One, Friday

‘DI Lockyer?’

A woman’s voice, hollow, oddly familiar. For a second Lockyer thought he recognized it. Then silence at the other end of the line, except for the faintest sound of an indrawn breath.

The back of Lockyer’s neck prickled. His blurred reflection watched him from the window – a tall, rangy figure, dark hair that needed cutting, a crooked nose and eyes with shadowed rings underneath them. He really needed a good night’s sleep.

‘Yep. Who’s this?’

‘It’s Hedy. Hedy Lambert.’

Lockyer was quiet for so long that Constable Broad looked up from her computer. Instinctively, he turned away from her curiosity.

‘H— Miss Lambert.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I . . . It’s been a while. I didn’t expect to hear from you.’ There were three empty mugs on his desk and he began to put them together, turning their handles inward so he’d be able to pick them up with one hand. Fiddling, like a nervous child. He made himself keep still.

‘No. Well.’ Hedy took a breath. ‘How are you?’

‘Why are you calling, Miss Lambert?’ Straight away, he regretted sounding so curt. There was another silence.

‘What – no time for a catch-up?’ Hedy’s tone was dry, but there was a tremor underneath it. Lockyer waited. He might have said more if Broad hadn’t been sitting right there, studiously pretending not to listen. ‘I need you to come and see me, Inspector Lockyer.’

‘What for?’

‘It’s important. It . . . it could be urgent. Maybe. It’s about what happened. It’s about Harry Ferris.’

‘Do you have new information about the case?’

‘Yes. But before you ask, I’m not going to tell you over the phone. I need you to come and see me. Please.’ The inflection on the please stopped short of begging, but only just.

Lockyer tried to keep his voice neutral. ‘I can’t promise anything . . .’ He searched for a pen among the papers and rubbish on his desk. ‘What’s your address?’

‘My address?’ That dry amusement again, with its undercurrent of something darker. ‘Eastwood Park.’

Lockyer clenched his teeth. DC Broad threw him a pen. Her Majesty’s Prison Eastwood Park. Fourteen years had gone by – fourteen years since he’d put Hedy Lambert away, and away she had stayed. Pointlessly, he wrote HMP E Park on a scrap of paper. Somehow, he’d thought she must have been paroled by now, but of course not – she’d been handed a twenty-year minimum term. That’s what you got for a cold, calculated murder.

‘Everything all right, Guv?’ Broad asked, once he’d hung up, putting her arms behind her head to stretch her shoulders.

Gemma Broad was short and stocky, which made some colleagues assume she must be out of shape when she was far from it. She did triathlons for fun in her spare time. At a charity obstacle race the Wiltshire force had taken part in the year before, she’d beaten most of the men on the team – though she’d needed help over the bigger walls. She was young, keen and very bright, and ought not to have been stuck on Major Crime Review with Lockyer. She was also naturally very curious, but Lockyer didn’t want to talk about Hedy Lambert or the Harry Ferris case – not until he had to.

‘Time you got home, Gem,’ he said. ‘That lot can wait till Monday.’

‘Something new for us?’

‘I doubt it.’ He shook his head. ‘Just someone from an old case of mine, probably bored or wanting attention, and . . .’ He trailed off, unable to bring himself to lie about Hedy. ‘It’s probably nothing. Have a good weekend, Gem.’

‘You not coming for a drink, Guv?’

‘No. Not in the mood.’

‘Doing anything exciting this weekend?’

‘Just the usual. Family dinner. Working on the house.’

‘Party, party, party, right?’

‘Non-stop. How about you?’

‘Off to Pete’s mum’s.’ Broad stopped just short of rolling her eyes. ‘Again.’

‘Isn’t that three weekends in a row?’

‘No.’ She stood up with a sigh. ‘But it feels like it. She’s pitching a fit because the builders have downed tools. God knows what she said to them. I wouldn’t mind except she won’t have Merry in the house. The poor thing has to sleep in the garage, and then she complains that his crying keeps her awake.’

‘Sounds to me like a good excuse to stay at home and let Pete go by himself.’

‘Yeah, but . . . Well. He likes me to go with him,’ she said, with a trace of embarrassment.

‘Have a good one, then.’

Lockyer had met Broad’s boyfriend a couple of times, and failed to understand what she could possibly see in him.

When she’d gone Lockyer sat for a while. He couldn’t imagine what Hedy Lambert had to say to him, unless it was to vent some anger. Or unless – finally – it was her confession. After a while he turned off the lights and headed across the CID suite, down the stairs and out of the station.

Wiltshire Police Headquarters was housed in an imposing 1960s brick building on the western edge of Devizes. The flag, bearing the police emblem and motto, hung limp and dripping from its pole. Primus et optimus. First and best – since it was the oldest county force, outside London. It could also have said minimus, smallest, if it hadn’t been for good old Warwickshire. Both employed fewer than a thousand officers.

Lockyer walked slowly to his car, parked round the back, thinking about everything he’d done during the past fourteen years – the places he’d been, the people he’d met, the cases he’d worked. And all that time Hedy Lambert had stayed in jail. He’d played a prominent role in the investigation that had put her there. Unease dragged at the back of his skull. It was the same unease he’d felt the year before, on the case that had seen him moved sideways off the Major Crime Investigation Team, to Major Crime Review. Cold cases. He thought he was starting to recognize the feeling – it came on when he was on the verge of doing the wrong thing.

But he already knew that he’d visit Hedy Lambert, just as she’d asked: he was curious to hear what she had to say, and he couldn’t shake the sense of owing her something. He’d never forgotten how hard she’d made him wrestle with himself – how he’d lurched from believing her to doubting her ten times a day. And he’d never been sure he’d jumped the right way, not even when she went down for murder.

 

Hedy Lambert followed Lockyer to his parents’ house. It’s important. It . . . it could be urgent. The case had been closed for so long, he couldn’t think how anything could be urgent about it.

Westdene Farm sat by itself, in a slight crease in Salisbury Plain, back from the main road that crossed the grassland from Melksham to Salisbury. Rain blew across the yard in fitful waves as he turned in and parked the car. Black plastic flapped, pulled loose from some discarded bales of haylage, and the wind hummed between the metal pillars of the new barn, which had been new thirty years ago. The air smelt of slurry and smoke, and the dogs started barking at the sound of an engine; the usual detritus lay scattered about – abandoned tyres and machine parts, empty plastic drums, tools and unchecked weeds. Beyond that the land rose up and away, vast and empty.

In the half-dark, in the rain, it was a desolate place. But it was home, the place where Lockyer had grown up. As familiar as it was now subtly depressing.

The farmhouse was square, brick-built, a couple of hundred years old. Lockyer’s father had been born within its walls, as had his father before him. Like many of the smaller farms that dotted the plain, Westdene had been in the same cash-strapped family for generations. Water pattered from the blocked gutters onto thick growths of moss below, and the upstairs windows were blank, dark and watchful. But yellow light was coming from the kitchen window, and Lockyer caught a glimpse of his mother inside, slim and short-haired, strapped into a faded apron and wreathed in steam from several pans on the stove. Thank God for her. When he opened the door two brindled grey collies rushed out to greet him, and he was enveloped by the smell of the place, which he’d known from birth – old carpet and smuts, unwashed dog beds, coffee and cooking. A gentle stink that unknotted his shoulders for a while.

Lockyer went for dinner with his parents two or three times a month. They rarely spoke on the phone – none of them liked to. Lockyer worried that Trudy and John were increasingly isolated, increasingly cut off, with only each other and old sorrows for company. He sometimes felt like their last conduit to the rest of the world, and woefully under-qualified for the job.

He called a greeting, then sat down on the hall bench to take off his shoes. The dogs buffeted against him, pushing their noses into his face, and as he straightened up again he caught sight of his younger brother, Christopher, jogging down the stairs in his baggy jeans, with one of his two good shirts buttoned up and tucked in, his blond hair gelled into short spikes. Eyes down, checking in his wallet for a tenner. It was Friday night, of course.

‘Off to the pub?’ Lockyer said, or thought he said. He blinked, startled, and the moment passed: he hadn’t spoken out loud because Chris wasn’t there. Of course he wasn’t. Lockyer sat still for a moment, waiting for the clench of his stomach muscles to ease.

His parents talked mostly about the farm as they ate, and none of it was very positive – yet more uncertainty due to the weather, falling prices, leaving the EU. John said very little about anything. He looked up from the shepherd’s pie only when Trudy badgered him to. It was often shepherd’s pie, when it wasn’t beef stew, or chicken and dumplings. It was the food they’d always eaten, and Lockyer didn’t have the heart to tell his mother that he didn’t eat meat any more. He hadn’t for years, but felt he’d rejected enough about their lifestyle already by leaving, going to university instead of staying on the farm, then joining the police. Though they’d come to understand about the police part, he thought.

He sometimes wondered why more farmers weren’t vegetarian. He remembered how nervous he’d been about attending his first post-mortem; queasy with anticipation of the controlled violence to come, the alien sight of the inside of a human being, and the very real possibility of humiliating himself in front of colleagues by turning ashen or green. Fainting or throwing up. In the end it had been a good deal less awful than many of the things he’d seen and heard on the farm, growing up. Sheep with fly strike, eaten alive by maggots; cows with bloat, their stomachs bursting; the desperate cries of the dairy cows when their calves were taken away to be slaughtered. He’d lost the ability to see a fundamental distinction between himself and the animals they raised.

‘What’s up, Matthew? You’re only half here,’ Trudy said. ‘Pass your plate. Have you been sleeping?’

‘Not so much last night,’ he admitted.

His father grunted. ‘Full moon,’ he said. John Lockyer didn’t sleep much either, and he kept a list of things he blamed for that, as though he needed to have a reason close at hand, at all times. Anything other than acknowledging the real reasons, which they all knew well enough.

Lockyer hated to see the slump of his shoulders, the distracted way his thick fingers roamed his clothes and the table top from time to time, as though searching for something. ‘Could have been that,’ he said.

‘It kept the dogs up,’ John said. ‘I heard ’em, fretting and pacing half the night.’

‘I got a phone call I wasn’t expecting just as I was leaving today, Mum, that’s all. About a case.’

The pause after his words was a familiar one, loaded with expectation. John’s gaze locked on his for the first time that evening, and Lockyer cursed himself.

‘Not Chris’s case,’ he added gently.

‘Of course not.’ Trudy smiled bravely. ‘We know you’ll tell us as soon as there’s anything.’

As soon as there’s anything. It was Lockyer’s fault. When he’d moved to cold cases he’d been the one to mention his brother to them; to say that he would be able to take a fresh look at it. The need to catch the guilty party gnawed like hunger, impossible to ignore. He hadn’t mentioned that, with his personal connection, he shouldn’t touch the case. He hadn’t mentioned that, when he had, he’d hit the same dead ends as the original investigation. He’d given them hope, when he shouldn’t have. He’d given himself hope, convinced himself he’d find something that had been missed. And he’d spent far longer than he should have done proving himself wrong.

Lockyer nodded. ‘It’s an old case of mine, in fact. One of my first as a DI.’

‘Unsolved?’

‘No, no. We got a result.’ He saw Trudy register his choice of words. Not the right result or a good result. ‘It’s probably nothing. The call I got. It’ll probably come to nothing. What’s for pudding?’

He didn’t want her to worry about him having messed up, or being in more trouble. He knew she did worry about him, in spite of all the other things she had to worry about. Sudden loss did that to people: it made them hold on tightly. He got up to clear the table because Hedy Lambert’s case stormed his head again – the memory of turning up to Professor Roland Ferris’s house in the glorious light of an early-summer morning. The smell of the jasmine flowering up the wall, and of damp, newly cut lawns. A tabby cat milling about his ankles as he’d thumped on the door. And then, moments later, standing next to Hedy over the body of a man lying dead on the herringbone brick floor of a small barn.

He remembered the way she’d stared at him, unblinking. The way she’d shaken. The way she’d held her bloodied hands away from her, as though they didn’t belong to her. Like she didn’t want to get blood on her clothes, when they were splashed and smeared with it already. He remembered that, for a minute, his training had gone out of the window and he’d felt every bit as lost as she’d looked.

Fourteen years had passed, but he even remembered that the cat’s name was Janus. Every detail. As though it had all been waiting at the back of his mind. As though some part of him had known it was unfinished business, and that, one day, he would have to go through it again.

Trudy followed him into the kitchen with the rest of the plates.

‘How’s he been?’ Lockyer asked her quietly.

‘Not too bad.’ Trudy pulled a face. ‘You know your dad. Everything’s doom and gloom, but we soldier on.’

‘Come on, Mum.’ Too often, she tried to be flippant about it.

‘Well.’ For a moment her face lost all trace of its habitual smile, and just looked old and forlorn. Lockyer hated to see it. ‘It’s always worse at this time of year. If only the bloody rain would ease up! Eastground and Flint are already flooded.’

‘I saw as I drove in.’ The two fields nearest the road, ­covered with shivering water.

It was on the tip of his tongue to mention selling the farm again. To suggest the two of them moving to some small, warm bungalow somewhere, where there was less mud and grief and work; maybe some neighbours to remind them they were part of a wider society, and that there was more to life than feeding livestock and shovelling out their muck, and the constant scrimping, fixing and teetering on the edge of ruin. Trudy might be persuaded, he thought. She’d grown up in a comfortable terraced house in the small town of Amesbury, not far from Stonehenge. But there had always been Lockyers at Westdene Farm, and the last time he’d suggested leaving, John had actually looked bewildered. Sell it? And do what?

And, of course, the farm was where Christopher was, if he was anywhere. They’d emptied his room, not kept it as a shrine, but he was still there. Still there, and at the same time so horribly not. An odd sock of his lurking in the fluff behind the drier; the jar of Marmite that only he had liked, sticky and inedible at the back of the cupboard. Lockyer wondered if his parents saw him around the place sometimes, like he did. A trick of the mind, a memory flaring too brightly, but still a moment, a fraction of a second, when everything felt all right again.

‘Will you not think about getting some help in, at least?’ he tried. ‘A labourer, or an apprentice, wouldn’t cost—’

‘He or she would cost more than we can afford, Matt.’ Trudy reached up into a high cupboard for a new bag of sugar. She winced, pressing her fingers into the thin muscles of her shoulder: the toll of years of farm work. Lockyer felt helpless, then the flicker of an old anger that had no direction to go in. Christopher should have been here to help, instead of cold in his grave. He’d been the one who’d wanted to stay on the farm, and build a career of it. He’d been the one with the talent for forging friendships, and making people laugh.

Trudy gripped Lockyer’s hand. ‘Don’t worry about us so much. We’re getting along.’

‘Mum—’

‘So, this call. Does it mean you’ll be looking at the case again?’

‘It depends on what she’s got to tell me.’

‘She?’

‘Hedy Lambert.’

‘Hedy? Like the film star? She was one of my dad’s favourites.’

‘I got her sent down for murder fourteen years ago.’ He couldn’t keep his tone light, however hard he tried.

Trudy glanced up at him, then patted his arm. ‘I’m sure it was whatever she did that got her sent down, love, not you. But you’re on the cold case squad. Who better to deal with it?’

‘Can two people be a “squad”?’

‘Of course they can! I like that girl Gemma. She’s got her head screwed on.’ Trudy stirred four sugars into John’s coffee. ‘I know, I know,’ she said, in response to Lockyer’s disapproving look. ‘But I have to pick my battles, Matthew.’

‘I’ll come back tomorrow and sort out the gutters. I’ve got nothing else on, and—’

‘Nothing else other than you need rest. And to get your own place sorted. And, oh, I don’t know, maybe think about a social life of some kind? Meeting someone . . .? We’ll be fine.’

‘I’ll come tomorrow and sort it. Don’t argue, Mum.’

 

Lockyer knew he wouldn’t sleep well that night either. He knew it as soon as he lay down, a little after midnight, with the wind loud against the walls of his small house and crashing in the bare trees behind it. It was a lonely sort of sound, and one he loved, even though it always made him restless. But it wasn’t only that, or the shepherd’s pie sitting heavily in his stomach.

His memories of Hedy Lambert kept coming. The dead body lying on the brick floor beside her, the blood on her hands, and the hollow sound of her voice down the phone today, fourteen years later. He wondered how she would look now; whether the years had been kind, or if prison life had taken its toll. When they’d first met he hadn’t been able to work out what was different about her. It was only later, once everything about the crime scene had been photographed and sampled and recorded, and she’d been allowed to wash off the blood and get changed, that he’d realized.

Her face had been completely naked. He couldn’t remember when he’d last seen a woman – a young one, in any case – without even the least trace of make-up. And her hair had been clean but not styled in any way. It didn’t look like it had been cut in a long time, and wasn’t dyed either. A mid-brown unremarkable colour, and she’d worn it parted in the middle and tucked behind her ears. Not a single item of jewellery. She’d done none of the things other women did to make themselves more acceptable to each other, to men, to themselves. Old jeans and a baggy T-shirt. Hedy Lambert had looked like a woman trying to be invisible, and she was by no means pretty, at first glance. Her face was slightly too long and narrow, her eyes more grey than blue. And yet Lockyer had found his gaze returning to her, again and again. Like the memory of her returned now.

It was pointless to lie there with sleep so far away, so Lockyer got up. Walking sometimes helped. He stamped his feet into his boots, pulled on a coat and set out. The rain had stopped and the clouds were breaking, showing glimpses of the moon’s pale face up in the racing sky; the wind roared in the trees, making a sound like the sea. The driveway outside his place was saturated, churned to mud; all the potholes were full of water. Lights were on in the cottage attached to his, the only neighbour for half a mile or more. It seemed that old Mrs Musprat wasn’t sleeping either. Lockyer’s life was filled with people who couldn’t sleep. He wondered if Hedy Lambert could.

 

Since he was going as a civvy, rather than a police officer, the prison visit had to be booked twenty-four hours in advance. It was Sunday afternoon when Lockyer set off, driving northwards, through villages strung along the road across the plain like beads on a string. He squinted into the pale sunshine and was careful not to think too much about whom he was going to see, or what she might say. Turning west onto the M4, then north onto the M5, not listening to the radio, keeping his eyes and his mind firmly on the road.

Eastwood Park sat just outside the village of Falfield in South Gloucestershire, a complex of low, unlovely blocks behind a green security fence. Lockyer had spent a while on the web that morning. A recent inspection had found three of the closed units unfit for purpose, with some of the inmates confined to their cells for most of the day. Of the four hundred or so women held there, over a third never had any visitors. There were problems with self-harm, drug use and mental illness, and a high percentage of them were homeless upon release. Lockyer had stopped reading.

He waited at a table in the visiting room, apprehensive, curious, knowing he probably shouldn’t be there. Some of it was the innate discomfort of being a policeman in a prison, but not all. And then there she was. She’d been twenty-five when she was sent down; Lockyer had been twenty-seven, a new, fast-tracked detective inspector. She was thirty-nine now, and thinner, her cheekbones more pronounced, her hair hanging unkempt to her elbows and still tucked behind her ears. The first strands of grey ran through it at her temples. Her clothes were as shapeless as they’d ever been – tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt – and her mouth twitched when she saw him. It was nowhere near a smile.

She sat down in silence, and Lockyer fought the instinct to lean back, away from her. As though she might strike. He wondered why his subconscious deemed that a possibility. She studied him with the same clear grey eyes he remembered.

‘Thanks for coming,’ she said eventually.

‘How’ve you been?’ Lockyer said, at a loss.

Now she smiled, with a touch of irony. ‘Oh, you know. Terrific. My cellmate took a massive dose of spice the night before last, so I’ve got a room of my own until she’s back on Planet Earth.’ She ran her eyes over his face again, and Lockyer remembered that she was clever. However broken she’d been back then, and however broken she might be now, she was clever. ‘Not lost your talent for small-talk, then,’ she said. ‘Do your colleagues still call you “Farmer Giles”?’

‘Not as much.’

‘I thought they were just taking the piss out of your accent. It took me a while to twig that it was rhyming slang for piles.’

‘A pain in the arse,’ he said evenly. ‘All in the spirit of fun.’

‘Really?’

‘What did you want to tell me, H— Miss Lambert?’

‘You might as well call me Hedy. We’re old friends, after all.’

‘I’m not here as a friend, Hedy.’

She flinched. ‘No. Thanks for that.’

‘I meant, you wanted to see me as a police officer, not a friend. Right?’

‘Yes. Because you’re the officer who put me in here.’

‘And you’re the person who taught me not to trust my gut. Ever.’

Hedy stared at him, her expression sad. There were tired lines around her eyes. Never beautiful, but still striking. Still something about her that drew him in.

‘What if your gut was right, Inspector Lockyer?’ she said.

‘What’s this about, Hedy?’

‘Harry Ferris is back.’

‘Harry Ferris?’

‘Yes. He’s come home.’

Lockyer blinked. His heart gave a single hard beat, as if in recognition of something significant. Something big. ‘Home where?’ he said carefully.

‘Home to his father. He’s back with Professor Ferris, at Longacres, in Stoke Lavington.’

Longacres, with the jasmine growing around the door, the cat called Janus, and the old barn at the back with the herringbone brick floor. Blood from the corpse had run into the mortar between the bricks, inching out with terrible, geometric precision. At first, they’d identified the dead man as Harry Ferris – Roland Ferris had insisted it was his long-lost son, Harry. But then Roland’s sister, Serena, claimed that it wasn’t Harry, that her brother was deluded, and for a while the dead man had had two identities – or none – and the investigation had floundered, tangled up in finding out who the victim was. Lockyer remembered the SIO’s face turning crimson when the first set of DNA samples got botched. In the end the fingerprints came back first, with a definitive answer. Not Harry, but a man named Michael Brown.

Later, it was Lockyer who’d worked out that Hedy Lambert had had a motive to kill them both.

‘How can you possibly know that Harry’s come back?’ he said now.

‘I still have a friend in the village,’ Hedy said. ‘It’s big news in a place like that. She phoned me.’

‘It doesn’t . . . it doesn’t change what you did. Or what happened.’

‘Of course it does!’ She spoke with quiet passion, putting her hands flat on the table, fingers splayed. Lockyer noticed scars on her arms that hadn’t been there before. Thin parallel pink and silver lines. ‘When you first arrested me it was for the murder of Harry Ferris. A man who’d walked out on his father – on his whole life – fifteen years before. Gone without a trace. How can it mean nothing that he’s come back now?’

‘You still killed a man, Hedy. It wasn’t Harry, but—’

‘I didn’t kill anybody!’

The warden looked over at them, and Hedy sank into herself, dropping her hands into her lap and staring down at them. She’d said as much all along. Protested her innocence without wavering, albeit in the strangely deadened, disconnected way she’d had back then. Her demeanour hadn’t helped her with the police, or the jury.

‘Who’s your friend in the village?’ Lockyer asked. Hedy brought one hand up to her mouth and chewed at the skin around her thumbnail. A nervous habit she’d never had before – back in 2005 she’d had a certain stillness that prison had clearly obliterated. There were scars on the inside of her wrist as well, and she saw him notice them. She dropped her hand again, frowning.

‘I gave it a go,’ she said quietly. ‘A few years back. But after I’d started it seemed as pointless as living. Dying, I mean. So I changed my mind and shouted for the screws. I got so much stick for it, you wouldn’t believe. A lot of people in here would pretty much rather be dead, but you only get respect if you have the courage of your convictions. A cry for help just makes you a laughing stock.’

‘You can’t have too long left to serve, now,’ Lockyer said.

‘Really?’ Hedy’s mouth twisted. ‘You think six years in here isn’t a long time?’

‘Well—’

‘It’s long enough to be sure I’ll never get the chance to have kids. I’ll never have a family of my own.’ The anger that hardened her eyes was laced with sorrow. ‘It’s long enough for this thing I didn’t do to destroy my last chance of a better life afterwards. A proper life.’

‘Who’s your friend in the village?’ Lockyer asked again.

‘Are you going to look into it? Are you going to go and talk to Harry Ferris? Are you going to ask him where he was all that time, and why his dad insisted some stranger was his son?’

‘Hedy . . .’

‘I know you’re on cold cases now. I was surprised when I heard. You were all up-and-coming, back then.’

‘Yes. Well.’ Lockyer looked away. Most pre-retirement officers would have seen it as a demotion, of sorts. As being sidelined, which of course he had been. Into a career cul-de-sac. But he didn’t mind nearly as much as people assumed he must. ‘It suits me better. I never was a good politician.’ He was saying too much to her, straying into the personal.

‘No. I can imagine that about you.’ She leant forwards again. ‘So treat this as a cold case. Reinvestigate.’

‘I look for unsolved cases where new evidence has come to light, or new forensic techniques might help move things forwards, or where I can identify a line of enquiry that was missed. This isn’t an unsolved case.’

‘Yes, it is.’ She stared at him. ‘Are you afraid to be wrong? Afraid to prove yourself wrong, I mean?’

‘The jury convicted you, Hedy. Not me.’

‘You gave them what they needed. But they were wrong, and so were you.’

‘I can’t just reopen a closed case. Not without good reason.’

‘Harry Ferris is a good reason!’ He heard her rising desperation. ‘Doesn’t him turning up constitute a new “line of enquiry”? My friend in the village is Cass Baker. She still works in the