The Bodies at Westgrave Hall

by Nick Louth

  ‘So what was thought number two?’

  ‘Well, the DNA analysis is probably fairly approximate when not examining our own species. Something in the weasel family, but not actually a weasel.’

  ‘Ferret or a stoat?’

  ‘Mink. I think this bullet passed through a fur coat before burying itself in a wooden bookshelf.’

  ‘Ah, of course. It can only be Yelena’s.’

  ‘Exactly. If so, she was standing right by Maxim when the bullet was fired – that’s more than thirty yards from the panic room. Her claim to have only had a glimpse of the assailant must be false. She would have had to run for safety.’

  ‘There’s only one snag to this,’ Claire said. ‘I don’t have it to hand, but the photograph Zoe Butterfield took of Yelena when she first emerged from the panic room showed she was wearing a red dress, not a fur coat. I can check tomorrow, but that’s my recollection.’

  ‘Okay, so maybe I’m wrong. I’m just about all-in for tonight.’ Gillard could see that the bus was at the stop near his car park. ‘We can deal with the rest in the morning. Good night.’ He hung up, then rang Sam to say he’d be home in forty minutes.

  * * *

  Sam met her husband at the door and gave him a huge embrace. ‘I’ve really missed you,’ she said. Gillard made his way in and greeted Sam’s parents John and Carol, who had come down to be with her while he was deluged with unseasonal work. He was impressed that they had stayed up beyond midnight to greet him.

  ‘So good to see you, Craig,’ Carol said. She was a bubbly woman in her early sixties, with wavy grey hair and glasses. John, a retired accountant with twinkly grey eyes, passed him a glass with a good shot of smoky liquid in it.

  ‘Glenfiddich. Happy Christmas,’ he said, clinking his own glass against Gillard’s. Sam’s parents’ dog Boris, now quite elderly, wagged his tail from the basket by the fire. Gillard ruffled the animal’s ears.

  He had barely sat down when his mobile rang. The caller ID showed it was Alison Rigby. ‘I’m sorry, I have to take this. It’s the chief constable.’

  There were indulgent looks from Sam’s parents. Gillard went out into the hall to take the call.

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘How did it go in Geneva?’

  ‘I had a late breakthrough. Ms Yalinsky admitted that she had seen the shooter, who was on the far side of the balcony, with his back to the windows.’

  ‘That’s quite a discovery. I wonder why she didn’t admit it before.’

  ‘I still don’t think we’ve got the full story by a long chalk. When she was with her lawyers and officials she stuck to her previous version.’

  ‘So no murder weapon, no fingerprints, footprints or DNA from the killer?’

  ‘No ma’am, I’m afraid not. I’m particularly puzzled by the lack of footprints. Of course, we do have latent prints from the three witnesses: Westgrave Hall’s head of security, Sophie Cawkwell and our own PC Butterfield. It’s possible they have covered over earlier latent prints from the killer. Butterfield was quite adamant, however, that no one apart from Wolf, the head of security, had been on the window-side balcony from which most shots appear to have been fired.’

  ‘So is it not possible that the Russians killed each other?’

  ‘It doesn’t accord with the ballistics evidence: neither in terms of direction of shooting, nor the absence of the weapon from which most shots were fired. Volkov was not killed by bullets from Talin’s gun. If Talin was killed by Volkov, then Volkov also shot himself or somehow gave his weapon to a third party to do it. And someone somehow managed to spirit the weapon away.’

  ‘It’s a bit of a Gordian knot,’ Rigby observed.

  ‘Yes. Ms Yalinsky’s admission helps in some ways, but still leaves us with unanswered questions.’

  ‘Well, help may be at hand. The reason I am ringing is to tell you is that MI5 is willing to brief you, tomorrow at ten o’clock.’ She gave him the address of hotel just off the M25. ‘Corrigan will be with them too.’

  ‘I’m surprised they haven’t briefed you directly.’

  ‘Are you? I’m afraid it’s all above even my paygrade.’

  * * *

  Next morning, Friday, was two days after Christmas Day. It felt like a month. Gillard was up before seven, attended to the dog, and got the kettle on. The garden showed a hard frost, the first hint of Christmassy weather this year that he’d seen outside of Westgrave Hall. Boris followed him inquisitively as he tiptoed into his home office and picked up scissors, sticky tape and some gift wrapping that he had hidden in with his cycle gear. The dog bounded beside him as he made his way downstairs to the garage and from an old kit bag dug out the Christmas gifts for Sam that he had bought back in September. Every year he tried to be ready at least three months early, knowing that fate had a way of landing him with a huge case in the run-up to the festive season. It was an old canard in CID that detectives would end up rooting about in petrol stations late on Christmas Eve in a frantic attempt to buy something for loved ones. His old boss Paddy Kincaid had once admitted to buying his own daughter a road atlas of the British Isles, a compass and a woolly hat. The girl was only four years old at the time.

  Gillard had bought Sam a voucher for a day-long pampering at a posh spa and a white-water kayaking course in North Wales for them both. After her kidnap ordeal in March, he felt that those two gifts covered both the pessimistic and optimistic ends of her mental recovery trajectory. The more immediate gifts were a bottle of her favourite liqueur and an expensive Italian coffee machine. The labrador always became excited when wrapping paper was being used, and his unhelpful interventions at the garage table ended up with him getting sticky tape on his ears. As a result, Gillard hadn’t quite finished wrapping the coffee machine when his mobile rang. It was not yet eight o’clock.

  It was Claire Mulholland, calling from home.

  ‘Craig, some good news. I got Vikram Singh to dig up the picture of Yelena in the red dress. There are actually some narrow fur cuffs on it.’

  ‘So that could be the origin of the mink fibres. I’d like to get a look at that, but I suppose it’s with her in Geneva.’

  ‘But she’s definitely been lying to us,’ Claire said.

  ‘Not for the first time. In her revised testimony she claims to have had only a glimpse of the shooter, but that can’t be true. The bullet map shows shot nineteen was embedded in a bookshelf in roughly the middle of the north balcony, nearly thirty yards from the panic room.’

  ‘So she must have made quite a dash for it once the shooting started, to have got inside there in time, without being hit,’ Claire said.

  ‘Except the shot through the cuff, which presumably missed her wrist.’

  ‘There’s something else,’ Claire said. ‘Yelena ran to save her life, rather than pick up and use the gun that Maxim Talin had. Even though she’s a good shot, she abandoned him, supposedly the only man she ever loved, in a huge gory puddle.’

  ‘That’s an interesting point. But here’s a cold hard fact. If she was so far from the panic room when the shooting started, how come there is only one bloody footprint from her shoes, the one by the panic room door?’

  ‘Maybe it was Volkov’s blood, acquired as she got there?’

  ‘No. The lab tests show unequivocally that the blood from that female footprint is Talin’s, not Volkov’s. The significance of that was lost on me, up until now.’

  ‘So, if she was with Talin at the time he was shot, as bullet nineteen seems to show, and trod in his blood there, why isn’t there a trail of it across the balcony as she fled to safety? It doesn’t add up,’ Claire said.

  ‘Correct. It’s almost as if she flew from his body to the end of the balcony,’ Gillard said. ‘It’s nearly thirty yards.’ For a few seconds neither of them said anything. Still puzzled, he thanked her, ended the call and made his way back from the garage into the kitchen. In this mental reconstruction of the shooting, he knew he was missing something, but what?

>   * * *

  The early morning sun glinted off the spires and gables of Westgrave Hall as DI Claire Mulholland drove down the winding lane through Steeple Risby. It was just after 8:45, and she and DC Rainy Macintosh had cooked up a plan to round off the search by midday, tackling storerooms, garages and vehicles. She hoped most of the volunteer uniforms could be home before the weekend.

  ‘It’s surprising not to have found anything of significance,’ Claire said. ‘Forty-five bedrooms done so far, and the stable block.’

  ‘Let’s face it, ma’am, if someone wanted to hide a key piece of evidence, a gun for example, we wouldnae find it.’ Rainy stared out of the window as the unmarked Ford negotiated the icy and un-gritted side road. There was a thick hoarfrost in the shadows of the hedgerows, and motes of light glistened on the higher twigs, the ice already caressed to melting by the first rays of sunshine.

  Claire turned right into the main drive of Westgrave Hall, a better-quality road than the public lane they had just left, and drove up the avenue of immense lime trees towards the grand columned frontage of the hall. ‘We’ve still got twenty officers at the bunkhouse in the village hall, so perhaps you’d like to get to grips with searching the vehicles first. They are the most likely pieces of evidence we may lose control of. Then the garages, the workshops, greenhouses and tool sheds. I’ll come and join you later, once I’ve finished my trip into the crypt.’ She grinned.

  ‘Make sure you take some bulbs of garlic and a crucifix with yer.’

  ‘Oh, there she is,’ Claire said. Mary Hill was standing on the steps of the hall, dressed in quilted jacket, grey slacks and wellingtons. As she spotted the approaching car, Mary sternly lifted her wrist to check the time.

  ‘Och, five minutes late, you’ll be in detention,’ Rainy said as Claire slid the vehicle into a parking space.

  ‘Do you know she originally wanted to meet at six a.m.?’ Claire whispered. ‘Six o’clock in the bloody morning!’

  ‘Stands to reason. She has to be safely hanging upside down in the belfry before first light.’

  Suppressing a smirk, Claire emerged from the car to greet Mary. The elderly lady looked even frostier than the surrounding countryside, and wordlessly led the detective inspector at a brisk pace to the left, across the frontage of the hall, and then turned right to head north along its western side. Claire had to hurry to keep up with the woman’s pace as she went through a gate into a walled garden, and threaded her way past largely bare flowerbeds, through another gate and across the staff car park towards a squat flint-built church.

  ‘That building you see ahead of you is the Westgrave chapel. This is effectively the new chapel, Norman design, built in 1016 A.D. by John de Westgrave. It replaced one damaged by fire in 943, although there is considerable evidence of a much earlier place of worship on the site. The remains of wooden corner posts have been dated to 315 A.D.’ Mary continued in tour guide mode, producing a fat bunch of borrowed keys from her pocket. Claire followed her into the chapel porch, and waited while she dealt with the padlock. Once it was unlocked, Mary put her shoulder to the heavy wooden door, and it creaked open. She then began to describe various architectural features, until Claire stopped her.

  ‘I’m sure this is very interesting, but I really just need to see the tunnel.’

  ‘St John’s Easement,’ she corrected. ‘We’re not sure of the date of construction, though it probably connected many rather older vaults. You see, many of the great houses of England had escape tunnels built during Elizabethan times. This one is much more extensive than most, and clearly includes a number of priest holes for the clergy to hide from royal persecution.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ Claire said.

  Mary Hill looked at Claire for signs of sarcasm. She didn’t find any. ‘All right, follow me. It’s below the western edge of the transept.’ She led the detective along the worn flagstone floor past a collection of box pews, and through a curtained-off passageway, which was barely head height. ‘The old sacristy was on this side, but it was moved in 1714 and is now behind the rood screen.’ Mary reached into an alcove and flicked a heavy switch. It remained gloomy.

  ‘You see, this is the problem when I’ve not been allowed in to do my job. The bulb has given up the ghost, and someone’s moved the spare!’ She made it sound as momentous as the collapse of Western civilisation. Claire used her phone to illuminate the passageway, while Mary found a large candle on a grimy saucer and lit it from a box of matches. She then knelt by an ornate round grating in the floor.

  ‘We need to get this off,’ she said, easing her fingers under a flange on one side. Claire knelt to grip the other side. The metal was cold and worn smooth, and cast into an ornate design of devilish heads, the finger gaps being mouths.

  ‘French, fourteenth century, quite rare. Cast in Rheims, attributed to Robert de Adelour, or possibly his son,’ Mary announced.

  The two women heaved off the heavy grating and slid it across the flagstones. Claire’s light showed the shaft was barely two feet wide. A rusty iron ladder led down a good fifteen feet into the abyss. Drippings and gurgling could be heard from beneath.

  ‘I take it you’re not claustrophobic?’ Mary asked. ‘Or is that not one of the tests for new officers?’

  ‘I’m okay,’ Claire said, feeling anything but. She took some pictures, anything to delay the prospect of descending into that pit. She’d been afraid of the dark since she was a little girl. ‘But I’m beginning to doubt that anyone could have got into the library if it meant negotiating this passageway. It doesn’t look like this grating has been moved for a long time.’

  ‘Agreed. But best be sure. That’s what my CO used to say.’ Mary Hill began to descend the ladder one-handed, the other grasping her candle.

  ‘Were you in the forces?’

  ‘Nine years in the WRAC. Mainly in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Searching female shoppers, mainly in Belfast. Are you coming along, or should I just do it myself?’

  Stung by the retort, Claire followed, grasping her phone in her left hand. At the bottom, the shaft broadened out to a rough whitewashed stone passageway that split into three. Mary held up the candle and gestured with it. ‘This one is just sixty yards and heads south-east, emerging into what is now the kitchen area of Westgrave Hall. In the other direction, this leads about two hundred yards into the woods where charcoal pits were identified in the 1870s. They were extensively used in the Middle Ages but are now overgrown.’ She then turned to the lowest of the three passageways, less than five feet high, with a flagstone floor six feet wide and cambered towards a central gully. A cold breeze moaned from it. ‘This is St John’s Easement. I’m afraid you’re going to have to crouch. It’s damp and, I warn you, there are rats.’

  The two women shuffled along into the darkness, Mary with a guttering candle in hand and Claire grasping her mobile phone, photographing as she went. Water dripped on their heads from above, and scurrying could be heard from many tiny fissures in the walls on either side. When Claire swivelled her phone towards the sound she momentarily caught the reflection of tiny eyes.

  ‘Don’t worry, they won’t come near you. Not unless we get trapped down here,’ Mary said with a chuckle. ‘I’m not sure what it is they do eat. Not much flesh left on the plague victims, I should say.’ After about thirty yards the passageway expanded into a vaulted chamber with a higher roof. To either side were what looked like stone tombs, with a layer of rubble on top.

  ‘Behold, the ossuary,’ Mary said. It was only when she held the candle over the layer of rubble that Claire realised what she was looking at were bones. Thousands of bone fragments, and plenty of entire skulls.

  ‘Who were these people?’ she asked.

  ‘Plague victims from the deserted mediaeval village, mostly. Some of the Iron Age bodies uncovered when the fort was first excavated in the early eighteenth century are here too. Frankly it is something of a mess, but old Lady Westgrave, the mother of the last one, was a bit superstitious
and wouldn’t have archaeologists down here.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Her eldest son Oliver died down here as an eight-year-old while playing hide and seek.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Not exactly sure. Supposedly head injuries, but the only documents I could find from 1934 about the post-mortem make no mention. Hypothermia was given as the cause of death on the death certificate.’

  ‘Well, that’s too cold a case even for us.’

  ‘Very droll.’ Mary lifted something into the light. It was a skull, minus jawbone. ‘This is an interesting one. Possibly from the hill fort. Ceremonial death. See the neat hole in the back?’

  Claire retreated from the hideous object, which still had strands of pale, wiry hair attached.

  ‘Oh, come on, it won’t bite. Not unless I put his teeth back in.’ She gestured to the shelf from which she’d found it, and then carefully replaced the skull.

  Claire gazed at the ongoing tunnel, from which a ghostly keening emanated. It was even lower than the passage they had previously negotiated, and blackened with grime. It would be like entering a fireplace. ‘How far away are we from the hill fort at this point?’

  ‘Still several hundred yards, obviously. The village antiquarian society has a leaflet from the 1920s from Dr Hilding, who was I suppose what you would call an enthusiastic amateur archaeologist. He claimed to have found evidence of an escape tunnel from the hill fort, leading west north-west towards the hall. However, subsequent digs have failed to find any evidence of it. If it did exist, it would connect to this passageway about a hundred yards further on.’ She gestured into the darkness.

  ‘Have you been down there?’ Claire asked.

  ‘Yes, but not for twenty years. I’m not so supple as I used to be, since the bomb.’

  ‘Were you caught in a bomb blast?’

  ‘Yes. May 13th 1982, my third wedding anniversary. While off duty to celebrate with my first husband, near Newry. He was a captain in the Royal Engineers. A fine man.’ She paused for only a couple of seconds. ‘Now, it’s a wet and muddy crawl for the last thirty yards, through what was a medieval midden, and then ends in a padlocked door, installed in Victorian days. I’m game if you are.’