He looked at his watch. ‘Right, Doyle should have got things organized next door by now. We’ll see what they’ve got to say for themselves and then have a debrief back at the station.’ He kept his face impassive. ‘No doubt DCI Sidney will need updating too.’
The DS looked as though something — not necessarily the bacon buttie — violently disagreed with him. With a last sour look at the biblical homicide, he followed Markham through the revolving door.
* * *
Bromgrove Central Library, by contrast with its neighbour, was blindingly bright, modern and airy. No dark corners or blind alleys. Just acres of freshly polished chrome, carrels and computers.
They headed up the escalator past the Costa Coffee franchise to the first floor where DC Doyle had been instructed to commandeer two meeting rooms.
The young detective was ready and waiting, clipboard in hand. Trying hard not to boggle at Noakes’s attire — fuchsia shirt clashing horribly with grease-spotted regimental tie and straining brown flannels — he self-consciously smoothed the lapels of his sharply tailored jacket and cleared his throat.
‘Key personnel are all here, sir. I believe you saw Mr Carstone and Mr Traherne briefly yesterday?’
‘That’s right,’ the DI confirmed, recalling the gentlemanly head of Conservation and his distinctly less prepossessing counterpart in Craft and Design. ‘Who else have we got?’
‘There’s Mr Benedict Bramwell. He’s the gallery director — and Helen Melville’s ex . . . though looks like they hadn’t got round to divorcing. He was at a meeting in Birmingham most of yesterday, finished up around two. It all checks out.’
‘Hmm . . . doesn’t necessarily give him an alibi, though we won’t know for sure until the PM gives us a time of death.’
‘Oh, Dimples called earlier, sir.’ Doyle was clearly pleased to be the bearer of intelligence from the pathologist. ‘He said to tell you, unofficially, that she died sometime between four and seven o’clock on Saturday evening. Cause of death was myocardial infarction through shock. There was a pre-existing heart condition too, though no one had cottoned on to it.’
‘So she died on Saturday evening,’ Markham said slowly. ‘Time enough for Bramwell to have caught up with her.’
‘Same goes for the rest of them,’ Doyle put in ruefully. ‘Carstone and Traherne were holed up in their offices. Mr Daniel Westbrook — that’s Mr Carstone’s deputy — was here in the library doing some research in the fine arts section. He had a coffee in Costa with Helen Melville’s boyfriend, Charles Randall.’ He shrugged. ‘Gives them an alibi of sorts.’
‘Hardly.’ Markham frowned. ‘Either of them could easily have slipped over to the gallery at some point in the afternoon. It closes at five on a Saturday, right?’
‘Yes, sir.’ Doyle consulted his notes. ‘They split up at closing time. Westbrook says he went for a jog on Bromgrove Rise while Randall just went back to his flat in Medway and watched telly.’
‘Anyone else?’
The DC grimaced. ‘Well, there’re two trustees in there . . . so far up themselves it’s a wonder they haven’t disappeared up their own backsides.’ He came to an abrupt halt and blushed. ‘Sorry, sir, but they’re a proper snotty pair. I heard the bloke saying he wanted to speak to the organ grinder not the monkey.’
‘Did he indeed.’ Markham’s voice was deadly. ‘We’ll leave him till last.’
‘I think that’s pretty much the main players, sir, apart from the facilities manager, Ms Summerson, and her PA. They showed up a few minutes ago . . . said they were over at the gallery with you.’
‘Correct,’ Markham said in a ruminating tone. ‘Did anyone stand out from the crowd, Constable?’
‘Well, Mr Randall looked downright ill . . . Twitchy too, now I come to think about it.’
‘Twitchy?’
‘Sort of jittery and excited.’
‘Prob’ly on drugs,’ Noakes intoned. ‘You know what them students are like.’
‘No, I don’t think it was drugs, sarge.’ Doyle struggled to put his finger on the cause. ‘He was just kind of watchful and frightened at the same time. Like he’d been hypnotized or something . . . like there was a snake charmer in the room.’ He laughed as though somewhat embarrassed by this flight of fancy.
‘Randall’s the boyfriend.’ Noakes was having no truck with this tarradiddle about snake charmers. ‘He’s gotta know that makes him Suspect Numero Uno. Bound to freak him out.’
Unless there’s something else, thought Markham. Unless he knows something.
Suddenly the DI felt a deep sense of misgiving. A sense of something in train that he was powerless to stop.
As though to mirror his mood, he saw through the library’s vast glass frontage a raft of dark clouds scudding towards the building. Fat drops of rain began to fall, and soon the whole complex echoed to an ominous rhythmic tattoo.
He turned back to the DC. ‘Where’s Kate?’
‘On her way back from checking out the victim’s flat, sir. Nothing significant to report ’cept lots of art books.’ The glance Doyle flashed at Noakes was eloquent in its conviction that they were due an educational blitzkrieg.
Markham ignored the subtext, aware that his colleagues had their own resources when it came to self-medicating against the infliction of too much culture.
‘Right, you can wheel them in now, Doyle. When Kate gets here, I want the two of you to re-interview everyone on the admin side — cleaners, café staff, security guards, students, cloakroom people and all the rest of it. See if they’ve remembered anything new since yesterday.’
‘What about the demonstrators from the university, sir?’
‘Kate’s bailiwick, wouldn’t you say?’ The DI’s expression was deadpan. ‘I believe you’ll be happy to leave her to it, Sergeant?’
‘Ecstatic, guv.’
‘Hmm.’
* * *
It was still pelting down outside, and the darkness of an hour seemed to have gathered in an instant. As though the elements warned of further wickedness, Markham thought uneasily. Then, squaring his shoulders, he gave Doyle the signal.
Time to meet a killer.
4. For Whom the Bell Tolls
Benedict Bramwell was what Noakes would doubtless call a cold fish, Markham concluded as he studied the gallery director.
Tall and shaven-headed with the build of a useful scrum half, Bramwell gave very little away, though the DI detected a dull deep light somewhere within his gaze like that which reddened the eyes of a wild creature with its back to the wall.
The split from Helen Melville had been handled without rancour, he insisted, though a vein pulsing at the corner of his mouth was a giveaway.
‘It had to have hurt, mate.’ Noakes leaned in conspiratorially, his tone one of leering insinuation. ‘I mean . . . leaving you for a woman . . .’ Left hanging in the air was the implied slur on Bramwell’s manhood.
Bramwell coloured, an ugly painful flush which subsided as quickly as it came, leaving his complexion a livid white.
But he had himself well under control, his expression one of chill distaste, his voice betraying no sign that Noakes’s words had sent venomous suckers into his soul.
‘We were separated before Helen took up with Rebecca Summerson.’
The DS looked at him pityingly as though to say, ‘There’s none so blind as those who will not see.’
And yet Helen Melville’s ex-husband refused to rise to the bait. In any disclosure of disappointment or sorrow over his romantic past, Benedict Bramwell would see nothing but a humiliation which would have been vinegar to his wounds. He was therefore well garrisoned against Noakes’s barbs, maintaining an air of apparent indifference which made it impossible to fathom whether his one-time love for Helen Melville had curdled to embittered hatred.
‘An’ now she’d taken up with this student fella.’
Noakes managed to make it sound as though Charles Randall was some sort of toy boy and the dead woman none too scrupulous about where sh
e took her sexual pleasure.
‘Naturally Helen was free to live her own life. Mr Randall is a postgraduate student close to completing his PhD,’ came the repressive rejoinder.
‘Indeed.’ Markham decided it was time to turn the conversation along other channels.
Bramwell confirmed that he had spent Saturday evening alone at his hotel in Birmingham, though since it would have been perfectly possible for him to have slipped away unobserved, this meant he was without an alibi for the time of the murder.
‘Can you recall anything unusual . . . anything out of the ordinary in your dealings with Ms Melville over the last few days?’
‘Well, she was very taken up with this project on aediculae . . . suggested the gallery might do something on secret spaces as a tie-in . . .’
‘Secret spaces?’
‘Hidden rooms . . . the iconography of concealment.’
Noakes looked as though the gallery director was speaking Hindustani.
‘What . . . like paintings of prisons?’
Bramwell smiled condescendingly, clearly pleased to have the upper hand in this exchange.
‘More like places with haunted histories. There’s quite a lot of mileage in that kind of thing, Sergeant. The Princes in the Tower, for example. I believe Helen fancied the idea of doing something with their story.’
‘Ah yes,’ Markham interposed suavely seeing that Noakes appeared none the wiser for this information. ‘The two princes Richard the Third allegedly murdered and buried within the Tower of London . . . I seem to recall a picture of two wavy-haired little blond boys in hose and doublet near the head of the main stairs in the gallery.’
‘That’s right,’ Bramwell said approvingly. ‘It’s a copy of Paul Delaroche’s painting. The original’s in the Louvre.’
Noakes had rallied.
‘Murdered kiddies,’ he said speculatively. ‘Didn’t you have one of ’em right here in the gallery back in the day?’
‘The Carter case.’ Bramwell’s tone was weary. ‘Mere coincidence I’m sure.’
But was it?
Was the dead woman’s vaunted secret — the one she told Rebecca Summerson she had uncovered in the gallery archives — somehow connected with that long-vanished child? Was it because Helen Melville’s thoughts were running on a modern-day abduction that she developed a sudden passion for medieval child murder? Could she have been sending someone a coded message, and was that someone working at the gallery?
The DI became aware that their interviewee was clearing his throat.
‘Was there something else, Mr Bramwell?’
‘I’m not sure to be honest . . . something and nothing most probably . . .’
‘You let us be the judge of that, sir.’
‘It was just a throwaway remark . . . something she said when we met for a coffee in the café.’ He gave a rueful smile. ‘I can’t remember how we got on to the subject, but Helen was talking about some true crime documentary or other — she was always very keen on that kind of stuff, though I found it morbid.’
Markham had the gift of patience. He smiled encouragingly and the gallery director seemed to take heart.
‘It was something about the Moors murderers . . . Hindley and Brady. She said . . .’ He screwed up his eyes in an effort to remember, ‘something like they were only caught because of a doodle.’
‘A doodle?’ Noakes was nonplussed, his features creased like a grumpy bullfrog’s.
‘Well, some scribble really. Apparently the police were searching Brady’s house as part of an investigation into the murder of a local teenager, when they came across a lost luggage ticket in the back of a prayer book. It led them to suitcases that had been left at a railway station. In one of the suitcases was a notebook in Brady’s handwriting . . . on one page they noticed the name “John Kilbride.”’
‘That was one of the kids who went missing.’ Noakes’s eyes were alert with interest. ‘But they hadn’t linked the lad to Hindley and Brady till then.’
‘That’s right.’ Bramwell sounded relieved to have been thrown a lifeline. ‘Helen said something about the breakthrough being a bit of a fluke . . . that John Kilbride might never have been found but for Brady’s slip up.’ A shrug of the shoulders. ‘For some reason it tickled her. As I say, she had a bit of a morbid streak.’
After the gallery director had left them, the two policemen pondered over the interview.
‘D’you think he was trying to send us on a wild goose chase with that Moors murders stuff?’
‘Difficult to say, Sergeant. But he sounded genuinely puzzled.’
‘So Helen Melville might’ve come across summat like that . . . like a doodle or graffiti . . . which put her on the trail of little Alex Carter’s killer.’ Noakes scowled. ‘Sounds a bit far-fetched if you ask me.’
Markham pinched his temples, a sure sign of perplexity.
‘I can’t help feeling there’s a connection with the Carter case, Noakes.’ The keen grey eyes were suddenly remote. ‘Remember when we were standing in that corridor outside the archives room? It felt as though it was imprinted with the child’s final moments.’
Perhaps, he reflected, the souls of the murdered dead could never quite separate themselves from the place of their demise. Maybe they experienced for it an unbreakable attachment, like the love that captives were supposed to feel for the cell in which they had been long confined.
Cells, prisons, secret spaces . . .
Noakes sensed they were on dangerous ground. The last thing he needed was the DI going all psychic on him.
‘Of course, there could be no connection at all,’ Markham said crisply, as though he knew exactly what his subordinate was thinking. ‘But it sounds as though Helen Melville was preoccupied with thoughts of child murder accidentally brought into the light of day.’
‘Jus’ say she had found out something about the Carter case, boss.’ Perversely, Noakes now sounded willing to be convinced. ‘Which of ’em would’ve been around in the gallery when the kid went missing? I mean, it’s only the older gent Aubrey Carstone an’ that Miss Crocker who’ve been here for donkey’s years . . . an’ I don’t honestly see either of them two clobbering a child.’
‘No, that’s true,’ Markham said slowly. ‘But I think you’ll find most of the senior personnel will have been in and out of the gallery as students or for research purposes in their early careers. And then there are people like Cathy Hignett who’ve been attached to the place all their working life. So no reason we should just be looking at the oldsters.’
‘If it was the Carter case, why wouldn’t Helen Melville have told the police about it? I mean, a child killer for Chrissake!’
‘You said it yourself when we were talking it over with Rebecca Summerson. You said it sounded like Ms Melville enjoyed playing Miss Marple, that she was excited by it.’
‘Yeah, but you reckon she’d have twigged how serious it was.’
‘Maybe she hadn’t got that far, Noakes. Remember, she said “she wasn’t going to tell a soul until she’d fitted all the pieces together.”’
‘You mean she might not have been sure, guv?’
‘That’s one possibility. Or perhaps she felt a strong affinity with whoever it was . . . wanted to understand what had happened . . . hear the killer’s side of it . . .’
Noakes whistled. ‘Silly cow.’ Markham shot him a look. ‘I mean, she was asking for trouble, boss.’
‘Hindsight’s a wonderful thing, Sergeant.’ The DI was pensive.
Noakes revolved the possibilities. ‘Hey, maybe it wasn’t the killer she’d tracked down but someone close to him . . . or an accomplice.’
‘Or maybe the crime she uncovered had nothing to do with Alex Carter at all. But one thing’s for certain,’ Markham exhaled heavily, ‘she didn’t see the danger she was in till it was too late. I imagine her affair with Charles Randall threw her off-kilter too.’
‘Talking of which,’ Noakes heaved himself to his feet, ‘I’d better get
lover boy in here.’
At that moment, the bell of St Chad’s rang out the hour with a mournful sound, as if it had grown sad from too much communing with the dead and unheeded warning to the living.
Hear it not . . . For it is a knell that summons thee to heaven or to hell.
* * *
Charles Randall was a dark-haired softly spoken man of Mediterranean good looks who looked to be in his late thirties.
But he was pale under his tan, and Markham recalled DC Doyle saying the researcher had appeared frightened.
He answered their questions readily enough, however, speaking with infectious enthusiasm of his work on funerary art including a forthcoming study of the famous aedicula which housed the remains of St Peter in Rome.
‘It was a complete accident how St Peter’s bones were discovered,’ he said with breathless reverence. ‘They’d been excavating the catacombs under the basilica when some bones turned up in a box stored in the Vatican Grottoes. Apparently they’d been removed from a burial niche in what was called the graffiti wall — where all the ancient Christians had carved their secret codes and symbols — without the archaeologists knowing.’
There it was again, thought Markham. Secret spaces. Mysteries, codes, symbols . . . and a missing body discovered by chance.
Randall had moved on to the Evelyn De Morgan picture in the gallery. ‘There aren’t many aedicular paintings, you see.’
Noakes looked as though he could happily dispense with further historical exegesis. The researcher had a slight lisp which was getting on his nerves.
‘Never mind about all that,’ he interrupted rudely. ‘How did you cope with your girlfriend swinging both ways . . . keeping you an’ that facilities manager dangling . . . playing you off against each other?’
Randall looked somewhat blankly at his interlocutor.
‘Helen was a free spirit,’ he said, not without a certain dignity. ‘It was an open relationship. I’d never have tried to restrict her. But I think we had something special.’
‘So special she never told you about her secret discovery,’ the DS fired back with undiminished truculence.
‘What secret discovery?’
Detective Markham Mysteries Box Set Page 107