‘Well, if you think of anything else, you let me know,’ said Dixon, handing Rodwell a business card.
‘Acting detective superintendent? Bit young, aren’t you?’
‘I thought all police officers were supposed to look younger these days.’
‘Yeah, right.’
‘Look, there’s a strong possibility that revenge is the motive, Sean, and if that’s right then you’re at risk, so I have to advise you to remain in the halfway house at all times. It’s for your own safety, you understand, just until we’ve got this thing cleared up.’
‘And how long’s that likely to be?’
‘As long as it takes,’ replied Dixon. ‘I’ve arranged for the local lot to keep an eye on you, and don’t forget your curfew.’
Louise closed her notebook and headed for the door, Dixon close behind her.
‘There was something else,’ said Rodwell. ‘The woman who had been holding Patrick bent down and picked something up after she’d handed him over. She went to give it to the woman in the red coat, but she’d gone, so she put it in her pocket. I never saw what it was.’
‘It was the boy’s dummy, Sean. She’d kept it in the glovebox of her car.’
Chapter Twenty-Eight
‘Two things,’ said Jane, when Dixon appeared by her workstation at Express Park. ‘There’s a DNA match on the baby’s dummy. They managed to get some saliva off it, apparently, and it’s a match with Patrick. One in a billion. It’s definitely his.’
‘They had his DNA on the system?’
‘Off a hair brush. It was taken at the time for identification purposes, just in case.’ Jane stood up. ‘The other thing is there’s a DC from Torquay waiting to see you. She won’t talk to anyone else and she’s been here ages, so I put her in the canteen, the table in the corner.’
‘She looks like she’s hiding.’ Dixon was standing in the doorway of the canteen a few moments later.
‘Who from, I wonder.’
‘Let’s find out.’
The woman cut a crumpled figure, hunched over a mug of coffee, a ripped-open chocolate wrapper on the table in front of her; lunch, probably. She had her back to the door, the collar of her coat pulled as far up as it would go, greying hair tied back.
Jane pulled out the chair next to her. ‘He’s here,’ she said, smiling as she sat down.
‘Can I get you another drink?’ asked Dixon, to break the ice as much as anything; the woman looked as if she was about to burst into tears.
‘No, I’m fine, thank you.’
‘What can I do for you?’ he asked, sitting down opposite her.
Strong perfume, and too much of it, to mask the tobacco, the tell-tale lines in her top lip left by years of pulling on cigarettes. Fake tan, possibly. If it wasn’t, she’d spent too much time on a sunbed.
‘It’s more about what I can do for you,’ she said, hesitantly.
‘This is DC Tremayne from Torquay,’ said Jane.
‘Kaye, please.’
‘Kaye it is then.’ Whatever was coming, Dixon knew it was likely to be important enough for her to be terrified at the prospect of being found out.
‘I’m on my day off,’ she said. ‘If my guv’nor found out I was here, he’d string me up. Is there anywhere I can have a smoke?’
‘Top deck of the car park,’ replied Dixon. ‘This way. There are some Devon officers in the incident room, though. From Sidmouth.’
‘They won’t recognise me, that’s fine.’
Once through the security door, they squeezed down the side of Dixon’s Land Rover, trying to ignore the barking from inside.
‘Whose is that?’ asked Kaye, leaning back as far as she could, even in the narrow gap between the car and the wall.
‘Mine,’ replied Dixon. ‘He’s a pussycat, really.’
Bloodshot eyes were lit up by the flicker from Kaye’s lighter, the cigarette bouncing around in the flame as she tried to light it in the breeze whipping around the corner of the car park. Then she reached into a shopping bag and took out a bundle of papers. ‘I did a bit of photocopying,’ she said, handing the bundle to Dixon. ‘It might be connected, it might not, but I thought you ought to know about it. The powers that be decided it was unconnected to the original investigation and have kept it quiet for fear of opening old wounds. There was some early press coverage, but none since then. No press conferences, nothing.’
‘Press coverage of what?’ asked Jane.
Dixon would have asked himself, but he was trying to look at the documents in his hand in the dim glow from the fire exit sign over the security door. Not that he was having much luck.
‘Workmen on a building site in Wellswood uncovered the remains of a dead baby.’ Kaye flicked her ash over the wall into the darkness below. ‘It was scrubland behind the houses off Ilsham Marine Drive and they got planning permission for two houses. Builders were in, clearing the land, levelling it. It’s on the market now as two building plots. We made all the usual enquiries, but came up with nothing.’
‘Is there a pathologist’s report?’ asked Dixon.
‘A baby boy, not less than two months old, not more than four, buried between twenty and twenty-five years ago.’
‘Have you got DNA?’
