Free Kennedy 01 - Into the Shadows by Shirley Wells Page B

her!’ Jill could remember the woman - short, plump, bleached blonde and very angry - screaming abuse at her as she’d left the court. ‘She might be a nasty piece of work, but she wouldn’t do this. What would be the point?
    And why now? Why wait all this time?’
    “I don’t know.’ Max put the card on the table and strode through to the kitchen. “I need some coffee.’
    He filled the kettle and switched it on, then leaned back against the sink.
    ‘Jill ‘
    ‘No.’
    ‘You don’t know what I was going to say.’
     
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    “I know exactly what you were going to say. You think I should go back on Valentine’s case and the answer is no.
    I can’t do it.’
    “I think I know how you feel, but you won’t rest, not properly, until he’s behind bars. He’s taken too much from you.’
    ‘No,’ she said briskly, ‘and I refuse to discuss it. Have you eaten?’ she asked, changing the subject. “I was going to have cereal but I’ve got some bacon and eggs if you fancy it.’
    ‘Yeah?’ He looked at his watch. ‘Thanks, I’ll have a bacon and egg butty. I’ll even make it myself. Do you want one?’
    ‘No, I’ll have cereal.’
    Conversation was desultory as they ate. Jill, trying to retain at least some of the good humour she’d woken with, gazed out at her garden. Like everything else about Lilac Cottage it was begging for some tender loving care, but it looked beautiful this morning. The grass was white with frost and an icy cobweb stretched from the old wooden seat to the remains of a clematis climbing the shed.
    ‘We’ll get someone watching your cottage,’ Max said as he put his plate in the sink. There was no hope of washing up; he’d never mastered that.
    ‘No resources,’ she reminded him.
    ‘With some crank playing postman,’ he muttered, ‘we’ve got resources. Have you seen anyone or anything? Have any cars driven by slowly? Has anyone been out walking and looked at this place? Have you seen someone with a dog?’
    “I haven’t seen anything,’ she told him, ‘but I rarely look out at the front.’
    ‘Get looking and make a note of everything. Get car registrations, descriptions of people walking dogs anything.’
     
    “I will.’
    ‘We’ll get that card checked out but I expect it’s clean,’
    he said.
    Jill was sure it would be.
    Could it be Valentine? Had he been lurking round her cottage? No, she was being paranoid.
    God, she wished they could catch him, though.
    Of course, if she were to help, they might catch him more quickly. But could she do it? Could she go through those files again, look at those grisly photographs again, and read Rodney Hill’s statement again?
    She honestly wasn’t sure she could.
    Anyway, today she wanted to check out Michael’s confession and read the reports. There wasn’t time for anything else. She could think about Valentine tomorrow …
     
    A couple of hours later, Jill was reading the transcript of Michael’s confession. It was a cold, clinical account telling how he’d come home from school, with the knife he’d bought from a chap selling them outside a shop in Rochdale, at least he thought it was Rochdale but it might have been Burnley, lost his temper with his mother and killed her in a fit of anger.
    He went into great detail about the new safety equipment at school, how the fire alarm had been going off at irregular intervals for days and how, on the day in question, the sprinklers had come on. Everyone able to go home had done so, and Michael had been lucky enough to get a lift with his friend’s mother. No, his friend’s mother didn’t drive a red vehicle, she drove a dark blue 4x4. No, he hadn’t seen any red vehicles near the vicarage.
    Only when he reached the end of his story did he break down.
    He insisted he walked through the front door and came face to face with his mother. Why was she naked? He couldn’t explain that. Why was she standing in the hall?
    He couldn’t explain that, either. What was she