CHAPTER EIGHT
I met Joan Maguire the first time outside the Houses of Parliament.
It was probably bound to happen given everything that had happened already.
My office is down the other end of Victoria Street near the station and about five minutes walk from New Scotland Yard, so I was close to her husband’s place of work. Then with the case being aired in the House of Commons and with the role played by Maguire and the interest I was taking in it, perhaps it was only a matter of time before we all came together. When we did it was on the pavement outside St Stephen’s entrance where the tourists queue to get in to watch the quaint British system of Government in practice.
I recognised Maguire from television so made myself known to him. He was with his wife. He said he knew of my writing vaguely but had nothing to say about the murders, repeating it in answer to the series of quick questions I put to him as we sidestepped our way through the gathering tourists who eyed us as though we might be someone they should remember in case our faces appeared in some local American newspaper in the future and they could point to it at their club or at the local PTA and state they had actually seen us, almost touched us.
“Mrs Maguire,” I then said, accepting that Maguire the police officer was not going to be drawn into feeding me any inside information. “What do you think about these killings, from a woman’s perspective, not necessarily as the wife of a detective who is intimately involved in the investigation?”
I did not expect any response. In fact, I popped the question because I wanted to study her a bit longer. Her green eyes and blemish-free skin. And her mouth with its perfectly bowed lips. I am a lips man and cannot stand women without any. She wore a smart black suit with style, and unfairly I was surprised that such an attractive woman who carried herself so well was married to a policeman and not some successful City stockbroker or perhaps a lawyer of some note.
“What I think Mr Tighe is that as a journalist you should listen more closely to those you put questions to.” Her eyes and those lips smiled as she gripped her husband’s arm more tightly. “What I think from any perspective is totally irrelevant. What my husband thinks is what is important, and he has already told you he is not going to tell you anything.” She sparkled as she continued: “So if you missed it the first time I am sure you’ve got it the second. Now, if you’ll excuse us we have to get inside. There is someone more important we have to see. Bye now.”
Where were those cracks in the pavement that we want to slip down into at such times? As they walked up the steps and disappeared past the uniformed policeman on duty I looked around to see if anyone had witnessed my embarrassment. To avoid any more I wheeled about and quickly headed back in the direction of my office.
Bloody hell. What a put down. What a woman. How on earth did he land her?
It took me fifteen minutes to briskly walk down Petty France past the old Home Office and former Passport Agency to my serviced room in Catherine Place near Buckingham Palace. Not for a minute did I stop thinking about Joan Maguire or allow her image out of my mind.
She had in an easy, devastating manner rubbed me out. She had erased me. But she had done it with class. I actually felt hurt. It did not worry me what Maguire thought but it did matter what his wife thought I realised. Her opinion was of consequence. I was momentarily shocked to realise that I wanted her to think better of me, to regard me as worth more than the reason for a wonderfully effective put down. The barb had penetrated deeply.
God, what a fool.
As I sat at my terminal trying to dredge a story from bleak mental depths onto the silver grey screen, I determined that if I was fortunate enough to find myself in eyeing distance of Mrs Joan Maguire again, I would redeem myself.
That chance would come sooner than I expected.
*
The police were getting nowhere with their enquiries.
Forensically they were filling pages and pages with information. Details of their own actions filled two drawers of a scarred metal filing cabinet which had been opened at the beginning of the year when the first body had been found.
Kay Roberts was a twenty-eight-year-old school teacher who lived in Earlsfield in south London. She and her friend, also a school teacher, had been at a friend’s house on the other side of the city in Finchley Central on Boxing Day when, early in the evening she had left to drive home, leaving her husband, sufficiently under the weather not to want to leave. He planned to crash on the sofa for the night.
It was the last anyone would see of Kay Roberts until Wednesday, January 14 when her body was found at the back of a riding school a few miles away in Mill Hill. The manager of the riding school, out walking with her dogs, had seen what she thought was a prosthetic limb or part of a store dummy protruding from the brush beside a narrow stream. When the dogs dashed over to it and began snuffling and refused to be called away, she went to investigate. What she found physically knocked her to her knees.
*
At thirty-two, Maxine Hughes was a housewife and mother of an eight-year-old son, Nicholas. She lived with her computer engineer husband John, three streets away from her parents in Hove, Brighton. Everyone who knew her described Maxine as a happy, fun loving blonde who regarded her home town as the best place on earth. You could have the big crowded cities, she often said. She was more than content with her little square of paradise on the coast. In fact, she had been to London no more than half a dozen times in her entire life.
The last time she travelled on the train to Euston station was Saturday, May 2. Then for three weeks all trace of her vanished.
On Sunday, May 24 police were called to a refuse dump on the outskirts of Milton Keynes. Two brothers, regular visitors to the dump, had driven in around seven o’clock in the morning with a van load of garden rubbish which they unloaded and then began searching the other bins for anything worth salvaging.
Instead they found Maxine Hughes.
*
Virginia, or Ginnie, Hughes, aged twenty-seven, was found right in the heart of swanky London, on Friday, July 31, only about four hundred yards from where she worked. No relation of Maxine Hughes, Virginia had been missing just one week.
She was a bright and cheerful office manager with a Malaysian corporation whose British operations were centred in Dover Street, Mayfair. She was hard working, appreciated by her employers, and a lesbian.
The Friday before she had joined colleagues across the road at the Duke of Albemarle pub to celebrate the birthday of one of the divisional managers who flew into London on average three times every two months from the headquarters in Kuala Lumpur.
Ginnie looked forward to Mark’s visits and enjoyed the occasional Chardonnay with him after work, usually on a Thursday. He generally flew back to Malaysia on the Friday so he could spend the weekend with his family. This latest visit though, he was due to stay on for two weeks, cooped up in one of the board rooms on the fifth floor as details of a Geneva-based bank purchase were thrashed out. The small celebration on the 24th had been a welcome break.
After the pub closed it was decided the remaining group of six would drop into the Churchill, a dark pickup club of sorts around the corner in Piccadilly. It was not the sort of place Ginnie would be seen in normally, but as it was Mark’s birthday she saw no harm. One glass of Champagne and a good deal of laughter later, around a quarter to one in the morning, she said her goodbyes and left to hail a taxi outside.
Her body was found by cleaners in the narrow lane off Berkley Square at ten past five two days later.
*
The police had no leads as to who was responsible for the deaths of Kay Roberts, Maxine Hughes, Ginnie Hughes and now Grazyna Litavincuk whose body was found at Gerrards Cross on Monday, November 2, nearly ten months after the first.
Yet they did know that whoever killed Kay had also killed Maxine, Ginnie and Grazyna.
That was without doubt.
The physical evidence was conclusive.
But there was no way they could explain it to the public.
Not yet.
Not until they had to.