Who Dies Beneath

by L. J. Hutton

  “Sunbeam?” Bill mused aloud as he switched off the computer for the night, and decided to head to one of the pubs he was eating at during his stay. “Sunbeam? And what did the others describe their women as? Hair like midnight or moonlight, and eyes like stars. It’s worryingly alike. But this one’s golden haired, so is it the same woman who keeps dying her hair a different colour? If it is, then we’ve got a serial killer on our hands, but what made her go for Damien Farrah and maybe old Thomas Mulligrew? On the face of it there’s no commonality between either of them, or with Sanay Costa or Justin Pickersleigh.”

  Have either of these new two got something hidden away in their past that might make them look less of the innocent victim? he wondered as he sat down to enjoy the steak and ale pie he’d ordered. I think I might have to go and re-interview their families, if only to rule them out as connections to Sanay.

  Chapter 5

  DURING THE NEXT WEEK, Bill was kept busy with current cases, and by the time he’d driven what felt like the length and breadth of Shropshire during the day, he was too tired to do anything in the way of trawling through the old cases. Yet Justin Pickersleigh kept niggling away at him. What had he been doing all the way over at Kington, for a start off? Chesterton had said that Pickersleigh lived in Hereford and worked there too, so why would he have been more than twenty miles away in a remote location he could never have come across normally? Had he been a keen weekend hiker? It certainly hadn’t sounded like it from Chesterton’s description.

  In the end, Bill decided that the only thing for it was for him to go and visit the spot where Justin had been found. Maybe then it would shed some light on it for him, or perhaps even quell his assumptions of a connection. And having been on hand when Sanay had been found, he was in a better position than Chesterton to judge whether there was any similarity. In the light of which, he decided to go and take some photographs of Sanay’s site now that it wasn’t cluttered up with the paraphernalia of crime scene investigations. Being there all on his own would give him much more of a sense of how it would have felt to Sanay.

  And so on his next day off, he began by driving up to Ruggles Farm and tucking the Subaru out of the way within the orchard gateway, which was luckily still open. Getting out, he stood scenting the air like a hound on the trail. Around here the border between England and Wales ran along the river valley the farm lay in, though ‘farm’, he now realised, was probably being a bit optimistic. ‘Smallholding’ was probably a better description, although that didn’t preclude it having land on the steeply climbing hillside which rose in folds going away from the river. It was beautiful countryside, more stark than pretty, but it was the kind of country Bill enjoyed hiking over when he got the chance. But standing here in the entrance to the orchard, Bill couldn’t help but think that it wasn’t the most inviting of locations.

  Way over in the Vale of Evesham, where the orchards were plentiful, springtime could be an absolute picture. There was even a Blossom Trail which drivers could follow to see the profusion of flowers on the trees. But it wasn’t springtime, and this small plantation looked as though they were producing the small, hard apples used in cider making rather than the large, plump dessert varieties, which could still make for a show in the autumn elsewhere. A sort of yellow colour, these apples were rock hard and not the kind to tempt someone to pluck from the tree to try.

  So why had Sanay come out here? It certainly wouldn’t have been for the fruit. Bill had a suspicion that a raw fruit or vegetable had never passed beneath the pink portico of Costa Towers, and the concept of Sanay picking some for his dear old mum was so ridiculous as to have Bill chuckling to himself at the mere idea. No, the only thing which would have got Sanay out this far into the wilds would have been the promise of sex, and if Bill was any judge of character, pretty exotic sex at that. Because from everything they’d learned about Sanay this far, he’d not been short of women or opportunities to simply satiate his basic needs. So why would he trek all the way out here when he had women ‘on tap’ back in Walsall?

  Taking the time to imagine what this would have looked like at night, Bill then walked slowly across to the tree where they’d found Sanay. It wasn’t one of the trees directly in line with the gateway, he realised, but was a little downhill from there, going in the opposite direction to the cluster of farm buildings. When he got to the tree and turned around, he could see that the farm itself had not only vanished from sight, but also that the boundary to this field at the bottom was the river itself, although the trees didn’t go all the way down, probably because of the way the River Teme could surge with winter rains and flood. Only a mile or two from Bill’s home, the Teme completed its run from the Welsh hills down to meet the River Severn, and so from personal experience he knew just how quickly this river could rise, and to heights nobody would suspect seeing it quiet and calm right now. But that made him think that either the killer had struck lucky, or had had enough local knowledge to be aware that the river hadn’t been a threat right now, because in winter time, Bill was pretty sure that this tree would practically be on the waterline of a flood.

  It was a gnarled old specimen, positively ancient for an apple tree, which as a species don’t tend to live for long, and Bill ran his hand over its rough bark.

  “I bet you could tell a tale or two,” he said, getting the sense of being in touch with something primal as he did whenever he touched an old tree. He loved the ancient oaks around his home, but also the hawthorns and blackthorns, which could put on such a spring display. But it had been his encounter with the Finnish boy Tapio, at the end of last year and the beginning of this one, which had left him with a whole new sensitivity towards trees. It might have seemed fanciful to some, but since then he could almost feel the life within, and that sensitivity was now telling him that this old tree was something special. For a start off, he couldn’t be absolutely sure, but he thought it was a different variety to most of the other trees in here. And then he saw them – a row of little saplings.

  “Are those your offspring?” he wondered aloud. “Is that why you’re still here? They want more of whatever old variety you are?”

  “Hello?” a female voice came from behind him, making him jump. “Can I help you?” Then as Bill turned around, “Oh, It’s you, detective.”

  Bill recognised the farmer’s wife. “Hello again, Mrs Barnett. Sorry, I just wanted to see what the place was like without all of our vans and tents.”

  “Have you got any further with finding who did it?”

  “No, not a clue, I’m afraid – and that all by itself is strange. That’s why I wanted to get a sense of what the orchard was like when the victim came here. It’s not exactly a place for a romantic assignation is it?”

  Mrs Barnett laughed. “No, I’d have been a bit unimpressed if my husband had brought me to somewhere like this when we were courting – though having said that, with his passion for cider, it might have been slightly more forgivable.”

  “This is a venerable old tree,” Bill said, giving the bark another affectionate pat.

  “Ah yes, most of our trees are Bringewood Pippins, with a few Hagloe Crabs up at the top, but that old lady is a Foxwhelp. Those old varieties cost an arm and a leg to buy if you want to plant a whole orchard full of them, and Tom wanted to try some of them in his ciders. Luckily that old tree produces more apples than three of the others put together, but we’re trying to bring on some more from its seeds.”

  “That’s them?” and Bill pointed to the saplings.

  “Yes. We might even get lucky and get a few fruits off them next year, but it’ll be a while before they’re cropping like the old lady. It makes rather a bitter cider if you use just them, but they do help it to keep incredibly well, so it’s worth combining them in with other cider apples. Do you like cider, Detective?”

  Bill smiled. “I’m more of a real ale man, myself, but a pint of cider has been known to pass my lips on a hot summer’s day.”

  “Come on up to the fa
rm, then, and I’ll give you a couple of bottles to try.”

  If he’d felt slightly dismayed at the possibility of getting waylaid at the farm, Bill quickly revised that assumption when he found that Tom Barnett’s grandmother was living with them, and that she was a fount of information on the local area, having lived there all of her life. To Mrs Barnett’s dismay, the old lady promptly declared that she wasn’t surprised at all that a man would have been frightened out of his wits in their field.

  “There’s more goes on out here than townies would credit,” the old lady said knowingly. “Back when I were a girl, folks used to talk about the folk from the hills what would come down of a dark night.”

  “Oh Gran!” Mrs Barnett protested. “Not the elves and fairies again! You’ll be telling him about the black cat next.”

  But when Mrs Barnett vanished off into the farmyard to go across to where Tom kept the bottles, the old lady leaned in towards Bill and said,

  “She may scoff, but I tell you, old Morgan up on the hill had five of his sheep savaged by that thing. And it weren’t no dog, either! Morgan’s been a farmer for long enough to know a sheep what’s been worried by a dog, and this weren’t that. And they weren’t no little lambs. These was fully grown sheep, and it was autumn time, after the summer visitors leaves us alone. Two years running it happened, and then the beast went off. Morgan reckons it was covering a fair bit of ground, because he talked to another farmer over the hills towards Ludlow who’d had the same thing happen.”

  “So how long ago was this?”

  “About five year ago. Morgan reckoned it went deeper into Wales, into the wilder country, but that don’t mean it wouldn’t come back. If it got shot at a few times, it might think to come back to where it felt safe. And it must’ve been a big brute too, because you’re talking about bringing down a sheep what weighs around two hundred pounds.”

  Bill blinked, because it dawned on him that she was talking about a sheep which including its fleece weighed as much as a man, and not far off his own weight – and Bill was both tall and well-built.

  “Blimey! That’d take some doing,” he conceded.

  “So it do,” the old lady said, “and they weren’t just nibbled at, neither! Had their throats ripped out and their bellies torn open. That ain’t no domestic dog. No family pet out on the hills does that. Most of ’em don’t have a clue how to hunt, they does their damage chasing, not biting.”

  Bill was rapidly recalculating what this beast might be, and he was suddenly seeing how downright terrifying it might have been for Sanay to have confronted it. It didn’t have to be anything mystical that did the damage, just something utterly alien to a city bloke.

  “Thank you, so much,” he said to the grandmother, as Mrs Barnett came back with a bag clicking with bottles. “That’s actually very helpful.” He smiled at Mrs Barnett, who was looking slightly worriedly at him and the old lady, and then back again. “It’s easy to forget how strange the countryside might seem to someone like the man who was in your orchard. He’d spent his whole life living in a city, you know, and this was probably the first time he’d ever set foot in an orchard. Someone like that might have been already very off balance by seeing strange shadows and sounds. And he’d not been the most law-abiding of citizens, so if he’d had a few brushes with large police dogs, running into another big dog without a handler might have been downright terrifying.”

  He made sure he gave the old lady a covert wink as he said ‘big dog’, letting her know that he’d taken her seriously when she’d said it was something far more menacing. But he didn’t want her to be on the receiving end of a scolding from her granddaughter-in-law after he’d gone, and so had played to what Mrs Barnett would find more acceptable.

  By the time he’d got back down to his car, though, he was thinking seriously about what the old lady had said, and she was right, an experienced farmer would know what a dog could or couldn’t do. But what sort of animal could it be? Even in the wilder parts of the UK, there were no native big cats of the kind that could inflict that kind of damage. On the other hand, every so often there would be a report in the press of a sighting of a big cat out somewhere, and Bill was prepared to believe that following the fad in the sixties for the über-rich keeping big cats as pets, that some had escaped. Or even been dumped when it was realised that the kitten had turned into something very wild and dangerous. Forty years on, it was unlikely to be the same animals, but that didn’t preclude them having bred, especially if it had been something like a pair of lynx, which as a species managed to survive in places like the mountains of Europe, and would therefore cope with the Welsh winters.

  As he pulled away from the farm and headed south towards Kington, Bill had a mental image of an ultimate townie like Sanay coming face to face with a lynx. Those tufted ears and striped coat seen in the dark might look like something from a horror film to him, especially if it hissed and spat at him. And although Bill doubted whether a lynx would attack a human, that might have been different if had come upon him unexpectedly, and if Sanay was already on the ground and practically at eyeball level with it. Sanay wouldn’t have the sense to just keep quiet and let it go, and his screeching at it would have wound it up, too – certainly enough for it to snarl and swipe at him a few times, even if it hadn’t got close enough to actually claw him.

  And would the family have heard that up in the farm? It looked like the kind of place that would have plenty of owls around, and Bill knew from having them come into the big trees near his home that some owls could screech quite unnervingly, as could foxes. So had the Barnetts assumed it was just an owl taking down its prey? Something so normal for country folk as to not even be worth noticing?

  He found that reassuring, and if nothing else, it would give him something vaguely ‘normal’ to present as a possibility for this case which was going nowhere fast. It still didn’t explain what Sanay and this unidentified woman were doing coming out here, though. That was a motive which was still eluding Bill, and he didn’t like that, not least because he had the nasty feeling that they’d not yet found some other pie that the Costas were trying to dip their fingers into. And that meant something illegal and possibly dangerous to others.

  When he got down to Kington, he realised that the two places were closer than he’d realised. Travelling down the B-roads, it was barely ten miles between the two, and that set all of Bill’s internal radars jittering again. Ten miles was nothing. Damn it, he’d walked that far himself in a day, and by car it would be barely half an hour, even on a dark and rainy night.

  “Bugger it, you two still could be connected,” he muttered darkly as he fished his map out and checked just where Justin Pickersleigh had been found. It wasn’t that far off the B-road heading west from Presteigne, but as he pulled off the main road onto the country lane, Bill couldn’t help but give a bit of a shiver. This countryside was littered with prehistoric Iron Age hill forts, it was right by the huge ancient monument of Offa’s Dyke (which pretty well followed the border all the way and marked a fair length of its path), and there were even a few long-deserted motte and bailey castles from the couple of centuries after the Norman Conquest still scattered about the place. So if ever there was an area weighted with history and legend, then this was it, and Bill had had enough brushes with both of late not to dismiss that lightly.

  This other orchard ran back from the little road, longer than it was wide, and by the time his GPS told him he was at the spot, Bill realised that he was deep into the orchard and certainly not visible from the road. Looking at his 1:25,000 OS map, Bill realised that the dip ahead of him was just a brook, so at least this wasn’t on the Teme – that ruled out one possible common factor – and the brook was far from being of the Teme’s size as well. But as with the other orchard, as best Bill could tell these were old cider apples, not the modern varieties. It had probably been planted generations ago with the intention of simply providing the farmer and his workers with their own cider, and Bill had vision
s of the cloudy and very potent stuff he’d occasionally come across, which wouldn’t have passed any health and safety checks, but would get you drunk as a lord in five minutes if you weren’t used to it.

  Yet neither victim had been drunk, he belatedly reminded himself. So it wasn’t that they’d been sampling unaccustomed booze. On the other hand, these trees looked old. Ancient apple trees tended to look it, showing years of pruning and cutting back to keep them productive, some even shaggy with moss. Some of the fruits looked closer to crab apples, and Bill paused to do a quick search on his phone for cider apples, which if not an exhaustive list, at least reassured him that some varieties of crab apple were indeed used for cider making. And crab apples probably lived for longer than some of the regular apple varieties, Bill presumed, since they were closer to the native species.

  Quite where this got him, however, was another matter. Death by ancient apple tree was not one he’d care to try and convince his bosses of! Yet he couldn’t shake off the conviction that the location was significant in both cases. Both of them were so unlikely in the normal run of things that he couldn’t easily assign them as spots for romantic assignations or any other activity; not even something as innocent as an attractive picnic spot.

  “What the hell links you two?” he found himself asking of thin air, as he turned around, trying to find something – anything – which would give him a reason to link the two cases beyond the terrible twitching of his instinct. It was something indefinable, something about the whole atmosphere of both spots which said to him, ‘this is important to someone,’ though who that could be completely eluded him at the moment.

  If Justin Pickersleigh had been as into children as Chesterton had implied, then what on earth could there have been out here to drag him this far from what would have been his comfort zone? Surely he would have been hunting within the city limits, because if Hereford was hardly a huge city, it was still a lot more anonymous than out here, where strangers would stand out like sore thumbs. And it was at that point that Bill thought to Google for schools in the area, and to realise that up until Chesterton’s DS Cath-whatever-her-name-was had discovered the extra computer, they would have had no reason at all to look into that line of enquiry – certainly not at the time of Pickersleigh’s death. After that, their investigation had got swallowed up by the Serious Crime squad looking into child pornography, and Bill could see the point that in terms of resources, one dead paedophile was a lower priority than protecting the living children the dead man and the likes of him were preying on. But if Justin’s death was not related to the paedophile ring he was linked to, then the danger was that a serious killer could be overlooked because what he was was deflecting the other detectives’ focus away from how he had died.