The Inspector Walter Darriteau Murder Mysteries - Books 1-4 by David Carter (best finance books of all time .txt) 📕

forget, we’ll be there as soon as we can,’ said Gibbons, hanging up. ‘Do you want me to go, Guv?’

‘No. You hang on here. I want you and Hector to keep going through that CCTV stuff looking for any leads on the drug running op. I’ll go. Karen, organise a car, and an unmarked one at that.’

‘On my way,’ said Karen, jumping up, grabbing her bottle of lemon and lime still water, and light waterproof jacket and heading for the lift.

Walter reached under the desk and put his heavy black shoes back on and tied them up. Stood up, limped across the office and tapped on his boss’s door.

‘Could be something ma’am,’ he muttered. ‘Woman reporting her daughter’s caravan has burnt down, and she’s worried her daughter might have been inside it.’

‘Where?’ said Mrs West, glancing up and over the top of her new pink spectacles.

‘By the river, somewhere down off the Farndon road.’

‘Okey-doke. Go and sort it, Walter.’

Walter pursed his lips and nodded and headed back across the office, grabbed his raincoat from the hooks, and headed towards the lift.

‘Hope all goes well,’ said Gibbons. ‘She sounded mighty agitated.’

‘Wouldn’t we all be agitated at that news?’ said Walter, heaving open the double doors.

‘Yeah, I guess.’

KAREN HAD HEARD THEY were due for a delivery of a new Volvo V40 that day, and lo and behold there it was, a beautiful silver-grey hatchback with just seventy-two miles on the clock. She looked like a kid with the best new present on Christmas morning.

‘Fab car,’ she said.

‘Indeed, and an expensive one. Try not to prang it.’

‘Me, Guv? When did I ever prang a car?’

Walter thought about that. She was a very quick driver, and a very good one too, and often drove at way above the speed limit, when on operations, but it was true, he could never remember her actually pranging one of the force’s best high-powered beasts.

‘There’s always a first time.’

‘Hope not,’ said Karen, grinning across at him, as they sped south from Chester, heading for Farndon.

Marigold Lane was almost the last turnoff on the right hand side before entering the small and cute riverside town of Farndon. Just after lunchtime on a brightish November day, amid light traffic, as Karen turned into Marigold.

For the first hundred yards or so the road surface was made up in some kind of light coloured concrete, with small detached low build bungalows on either side, but once the bungalows came to an end, so did the made up road. The lane became nothing more than a track, and a pitted and rutted and narrow one at that.

Two distinct blackish tracts where the vehicles’ wheels ran, tough grass and weeds in the centre, and no room for passing anywhere, so it was just as well that nothing came up from the river. Lots of standing water everywhere too, evidence of the recent heavy rainfall, and the further down the lane they went, the worse the craters and ravines in the track became.

Despite Karen’s careful driving the new Volvo was bucking and jumping and swaying and creaking all over the place. A big test for a hardy new car, and the Volvo would handle it well, though they both wondered if it was doing the new suspension much good.

‘Steady!’ said Walter. ‘Slower!’

‘I am going dead slow now, Guv,’ and she was too, which meant progress down that long and twisty lane was tortuous, where one mile seemed like twenty.

A moment later, through the spindly trees, they could see a small blue Ford hatchback parked away to the right, and after one more turn to the left, another similar Ford, red this time, with a short buxom woman standing beside it, her hands crossed before her chest, and what looked like a large redbrick barbeque behind her.

‘Stop here,’ said Walter, and Karen did that, and they both got out and walked over towards Dorothy Wright.

‘Thought you weren’t coming,’ said Dot.

‘We’re here now,’ said Walter, as Karen completed the introductions.

The redbrick barbeque was nothing of the kind, but the old foundations where the caravan had once stood. It must have been partly hollow, for the crunched and crashed wreckage had mainly fallen and settled inside.

‘Have you touched anything?’ asked Walter.

‘Just this,’ she said, showing them a large diamond, the one she imagined had come from Ellie’s precious ring. ‘She never took it off, she couldn’t take it off.’

‘We’ll need to take that for examination,’ said Karen. ‘You’ll get it back.’

‘Okay,’ she said, as Walter held out a small plastic bag, and Dot dropped it inside. ‘I’m really really worried about her.’

‘Course you are, we’ll do everything to find out what’s gone on.’

‘Ta,’ she said, holding back tears.

‘Call SOCO,’ said Walter, and Karen jumped on her mobile.

‘So,’ said Walter, ‘tell me about your daughter.’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘Everything.’

‘It’s a bit embarrassing.’

‘In what way?’

‘She wasn’t always a very good girl.’

‘The more you tell us the better, let’s go and sit in the car,’ and they did, in the front of her little Ford. Karen stayed outside, walking round the redbrick base, peering inside, sniffing, a slight but definite aroma of spirit, petrol or paraffin, wondering what had really happened, as Dorothy Wright poured her heart out to Walter in the car, about how Ellie had gone off the rails when her dad had left that day, never to be seen or heard of since, of how she’d flunked college, hated menial shop serving jobs, had fallen in with the wrong crowd, had taken up drinking and dabbling in drugs, and to pay for it, well, she’d started doing tricks for men, and women too, if the demand was there, anything to earn a handful of gold.

It wasn’t a pretty story, though not an unusual one in twenty-first century Britain, where a certain segment of society always appeared to slip through the gaps in the floor, and into hard times. But that wasn’t anything new either, as Walter was all too aware. It had been going on