Cold Revenge (Willis/Carter #6)(9)

‘Yeah, it could be at the bottom of the River Lea,’ said Carter. ‘We’ll search the river as soon as it’s safe, for now we’ll need to rely on the data from the company.’

Dermot saw the photo in Willis’s hand. ‘There are some other photos – she has a few of Douglas here, and the other people back in the day.’ Dermot handed her a pack of photos from a box of Millie’s belongings that were headed back to Fletcher House. ‘I’ve been looking at the case online, I mean, Jesus!’

‘He’s been Googling every sordid detail about Douglas,’ said Sandford, as he continued to swab down the kitchen door.

‘I have looked him up, I must admit, as I recognised him in some of the photos,’ said Dermot. ‘I bet no one’s ever seen these before.’ He handed them to Willis. ‘There’s ones from the farm.’

‘Better check his pockets, he’ll be selling them to the newspapers,’ joked Sandford. He was fond of his assistant even if he did talk too much.

Willis went through the photos, one by one, as Carter looked at them with her.

‘We have most of the disciples here, don’t you think?’ he asked Willis. She was busy scrutinising them. Sandford came to look at them too.

‘I recognise those faces from the past,’ said Sandford. ‘That was a horrible time in history – not only all the farm animals being killed because of the foot and mouth epidemic but then the disappearance of a schoolgirl caught up in some kind of debauchery. Wrong place, wrong time.’

‘Not wrong place, wrong time,’ said Carter. ‘How many paedophiles do we know who just happened to move in near a vulnerable child? They always know what they’re doing. Just like Douglas did.’

‘Here is one of Douglas with them all, left to right,’ said Willis. ‘Millie on the end of the sofa, Yvonne Coombes next to her, Douglas, Nicola Stone, Cathy Dwyer, Stephen Perry, there’s one missing.’

‘Where are they all now?’ asked Sandford.

‘Nicola Stone is the only one I know about,’ said Carter. ‘She was given a new identity, and the last I heard she was discovered living in Margate and moved on. But where, I don’t know.’

‘She was hated more than him,’ said Dermot.

‘Yes, the public can’t understand it when it’s a woman involved in violent crimes,’ said Sandford.

‘She was the only disciple who went to prison for crimes related to Douglas,’ said Carter. ‘She was done for lying about his whereabouts when he picked up and raped a university student in Bristol. We never got him for Heather Phillips.’

‘It just shows you what an important part of Millie’s life it was, doesn’t it?’ said Dermot. ‘She still kept all these photos. It seems sad, she looks no more than a child herself, none of them do, even Douglas.’

‘Douglas wasn’t a child,’ said Willis, ‘he was thirty-four when this was taken in 2000.’ She held up a photo of Douglas sitting in a sun lounger with a beer in his hand. ‘All of his disciples, except Nicola Stone, were under twenty-two. Douglas and Stone were parental figures of the wrong kind.’

‘Is this where Millie’s been since those days?’ asked Sandford. He didn’t usually make more than basic conversation with Carter. The two men were very different. They had worked together for the last ten years but they had never had a drink together. Sandford was a tall and quietly spoken man with a love for real ale, cricket and woolly jumpers. Carter liked his gold chains chunky, liked the polo ponies to be large when they galloped across his breast pocket.

‘She’s been in and out of rehab, back living with her dad sometimes,’ answered Carter. ‘He’s still got the same farm machinery business he has always had and she’s been sectioned a few times, spent three episodes in the nick for persistent reoffending: drugs, prostitution, shoplifting.’

‘I’m in touch with the cold case team who are investigating Heather Phillips’ disappearance,’ said Willis. ‘They say they approached Millie several times over the years in the hope that she might want to make a statement about Douglas and what happened at the time, but she always said “no comment”.’

‘They all did,’ said Carter. ‘It wasn’t just about Heather, there were other missing people who Douglas had contact with and who may have been seen at the bungalow. But none of his disciples ever talked about their time in the bungalow at Hawthorn Farm.’

Willis handed Carter the photo of Millie with her friend sitting outside a pub. ‘This is recent.’

‘I recognise that pub,’ said Carter. ‘It’s on Shacklewell Lane, just down the road from here.’

Millie was smiling broadly at the camera and trying to make her friend look up, but she was laughing and turning her face from the camera.

‘I think that’s Yvonne Coombes with her,’ Sandford said.





Chapter 6


Saturday 20 May 2000


Ash put Murphy’s rug on him, put him in the stable and then hung around before heading back to his home. In the pit of his stomach he dreaded seeing his mother at the van. They were allowed to stay in Douglas’s field. They’d been there nine months now and they were outstaying their welcome. If there was one thing that a life on the road, moving with the travellers, had taught him, it was to know when you’d outstayed your welcome and needed to move on. His mother was pissing everyone off with her rants and her demands and he couldn’t talk to her any more. She only had him in the world and now, at sixteen, he had found the roles reversed and he was having to look after his mother. He wasn’t so much a carer as a keeper. He’d written to his grandmother and asked her to help. His mother had been a free spirit in the 1980s, a traveller, an artist like her own mother. Her father had been a history professor and they had allowed her free rein in her life. There had been many good years but now things were getting difficult. When his gran replied he’d know what to do.