by L. J. Hutton
And then he saw them, a thick bed of rushes on the downward slope side of the pool. That had to be where the water drained away when heavy rain took the water level above the well-planted sides, and it would always be damp except in the warmest of summers. So what were the chances that that had been where Damien had dumped her?
Bill soon found his way around to the side, but then found his way blocked by the very same boggy ground which would have helped Damien.
How did you get back into the hotel if you were covered in mud? You couldn’t walk in dripping slimy mud all over the place, so what did you do? Thinking hard about it, Bill decided that Damien might well have stripped off his trousers, socks and shoes, leaving them somewhere dry, and then wading out into the mud with his burden. They’d have been filthy on the insides when he put them back on to walk back into the hotel, but if he’d avoided contact with anyone else, he could then have bundled them into a plastic bag and taken them away to dispose of.
You’d have had to carry her through the first rushes, Bill decided, if only because you wouldn’t want to leave a drag trail. But after that I think you’d have had to put her down and pull her, if only because the extra weight would have made you sink into the mud too. The rushes were certainly luxuriant, but then Bill looked again and was sure that one patch was rather taller and greener than the others. The kind of extra growth which might well come from the additional nutrients a decomposing body might provide.
What the hell do I do? he wondered. How can I call this one in? And what if there isn’t a body under there after all? I’m going to look a right idiot getting a police dive team out here. Bugger! I need to find something more against Damien before I can do that.
“Are you alright?” a voice said from behind him, and Bill turned around to see a man who had to be the gardener for the hotel standing behind him with a wheelbarrow.
“I’m fine,” Bill said, sliding into his most affable manner with the ease that came with years of practice on the job. He produced his warrant card. “I’m seriously off-duty,” he confessed straightaway, “but I’ve been covering for a colleague over here in Shropshire, and I came across the case of the man who died from the sword wound back in the spring.”
“Hmphf! Nasty one that,” the gardener said, but then shocked Bill by carrying on with, “He was a nasty piece of work, I tell you. Whenever he came here, if he was on his own with some poor woman rather than with his rotten family, she was always leaving in a hurry. Or if he came with that bloody horrible father of his, there’d be one of the young lasses from here running out to my sheds to cry her eyes out after what had been said to her. Takes a real shit to do that every time.”
“Can you think of anything specific that would help me to get him looked into harder?” Bill asked hopefully. “Only I think his death links to one I was looking at, and the one thing they have in common is that they were both predators who met their match.”
“Bloody good thing too!” the gardener said with surprising vehemence.
“Did you know one of those girls?” Bill asked, thinking that this sounded as though it had hit a bit close to home.
“My niece. Lovely girl, wouldn’t say boo to a goose, but one night of working here when that bastard was staying, and she’s refused to work in a hotel or bar since. Good job she got another job in a shop in Presteigne. Her dad was all for coming up here and decking him one, but I had to tell him the shit had already left. Didn’t stop me from complaining to the manager, and he had a word with the father the next time they came to stay. But the trouble is, this place is now owned by some finance company, so even the manager can’t risk upsetting a wealthy customer like him when he’s got the contacts to complain back and much further up the tree. We lost two managers because of that bloody family! Thank God they’ve vowed never to set foot in the place ever again, that’s all I can say.”
“God, that’s rough on you all,” Bill sympathised, then realised that here was someone who might be willing to help him on the side. “Look, I haven’t got any proof of this at all, but we’ve had a right game trying to track down the women who he brought here.” That was actually true. “They seem to have been registered under false names, because not one of them has turned out to be real.”
“Don’t surprise me. He struck me as the sort who’d do that. And Kerry on reception told me that he always checked in for them. Those women never saw what he wrote on their behalf.”
Bill nodded, having read Kerry’s statement already. “But that to me says that he was practiced at this. He was too pat at it all. And what really worries me is this: did all of those women actually leave? That’s what got me wondering where he could have hidden someone, and I was looking at the pond with that in mind when you came up. Do you often dredge the pond?”
“Never been known to in the ten years I’ve been here. Mind you, them rushes behind you have been spreading further into the pond, and the boss wants them hacked right back this autumn. They started overwhelming the water lilies this year, so he says they need a good cut.”
Bill took a deep breath, crossed his fingers where the gardener couldn’t see him, and then said, “Would you mind hacking back that rather luxuriant bunch over there, then?”
“Why them?”
“Well don’t they look as though they might have had some extra ...ahem... fertiliser, shall we say? You know, blood and bone?”
The gardener went a little pale. “Oh bloody hell! Now you say it, yes they do look abnormally bushy.”
“Well like I said, I’m technically on leave, so I can’t tell you what to do. But if you do start hacking into them and find anything suspect, I’d appreciate you calling it in. If I’m still here, I’ll gladly stay and supervise, but I can’t order a proper police search because I haven’t any reason to.”
“I’ll go and get the rowing boat I use to get out to the lilies with, and my waders,” the gardener said, and trundled his wheelbarrow away at speed.
Hold on lass, Bill thought, as the squeaking of the wheelbarrow’s wheel receded. It might not be me, but somebody’s going to find you.
Chapter 12
DESPITE WANTING VERY much to stay and see what the gardener unearthed, Bill knew he had to make a move for two reasons. The first was that he was painfully aware of how bad it would look if he was the one to find another body in such a short time. Suzanne might just about accept him being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but Superintendent Williams was perennially suspicious of Bill at the best of times, believing him to be in some sort of conspiracy to make him look a fool. Not that Williams needed any help with that, and Bill couldn’t wait for the approaching time when he would retire. But Bill’s other reason for going and getting into his car was his awareness of how little time he had between now and the new moon tomorrow. If he was going to find some connection, then he really needed to start chasing down the few leads that he had.
He could have stayed here and gone and spoken to the farmer whose saplings had been damaged by Damien, but if the gardener dug up a body faster than Bill expected, then that would still put him too close to the scene. Bloody hell, he thought, did you ever think you’d be running away from a crime scene for fear of being implicated? But Internal Affairs would have a field day with you after finding the girls, and if you’re under suspicion, there’s no way you can help anyone else, is there? And he was more convinced than ever that there was more to find.
So he drove around into Presteigne and then took the road up to Knighton to head for Thomas Mulligrew’s farm. Whichever way he went, he had to make something of a circuit because of the hills, and going this way took him towards where Sanay had been found, too. The drive certainly confirmed his suspicions that these bodies were all too close for comfort. Someone, or several someones, knew this area, and by the time he’d had to turn around twice to even find the track to the Mulligrew farm, he was even surer. There was no name sign to hint that an actual house lay up the extremely rough track, and even with the Suba
ru’s four-wheeled drive, Bill took it at a very slow pace.
The gate into the farmyard had once had a substantial chain around it, but that now draped in a rusty tangle around the post, and the gate itself was so dilapidated it would only have taken a good shove to knock it over. So it currently stood propped open, leaning at a wonky angle to its post as if ready to faint at any moment. Nor was the house much better. Getting out and walking up to it, Bill could see that whatever paint had once been on the windows had long since flaked away except for on the most sheltered ones, and when he gave a tentative push at one of them, he was sure it moved in its frame.
“What a Godforsaken hole!” he muttered, as he walked up to the front door. That was locked, but the kitchen door around the back easily sprang open on its ancient catch when Bill leaned on it. Even allowing for the fact that it had been deserted for the best part of this year, the kitchen looked filthy. The pans were old and thick with the remains of meals long gone, and the ancient range had its own encrustations of spillages which were possibly the only things still holding it together.
Going into the hallway, Bill looked in through the two doors which opened off it towards the front door end. One was what passed for a lounge, and Bill’s instincts prickled as he saw two small armchairs to one side of the antiquated grate, and a much more substantial old chair of the kind porters once used to have in the days when hotels would stay open long hours until all the guests had come in for the night. They didn’t need any labels for Bill to know that the faded red leather porter’s chair must have been Thomas’, and the smaller, low backed ones his daughters’. They, poor girls, had sat with their backs to the window, and judging by the way the wind was whistling in around the rickety frame even today, they must have had permanent stiff necks from the drafts.
“What a place to grow up in,” Bill sighed. There wasn’t a single thing beside the chairs to hint that two young women had ever lived here. No magazines, no chick lit’, not even a fancy cushion or two, or a vase for flowers.
Glad to leave the utterly depressing sight, Bill went across the hall and found that what had probably been the best room a century ago had since become Thomas’ bedroom. That didn’t surprise Bill. From the description of the body, Thomas had been vast, and someone of his size would have never got up the cramped and twisting stairs that clung to the wall back beside the kitchen.
Wondering whether to trust the stairs to hold his weight, Bill finally decided that his colleagues would have taped them off if they’d been a danger, and so with great care, he slowly made his way upwards. Immediately he got up here he could tell that he had to be in the daughters’ world, and deduced that it had to have been many a long year since Thomas had made it up the stairs to check on them. Old farm sacks had been stitched together to make thicker curtains in the room they had obviously shared, and there had been a childlike attempt to embroider them with old bits of wool. The daisy flowers were crude and clumsy, but something about them brought a lump into Bill’s throat. Had it been Grace or Hannah who had done this to try and make the place pretty? Whichever it was, it was pathetic in the literal sense, inciting in Bill both pity and grief.
A couple of reused jam jars held the dead remains of flowers on the mantelpiece, and Bill could see that the girls had stuffed sacks up the chimney to stop the draft. But that meant that they must never have been allowed a fire up here, and when Bill ran his fingers over the grate, there was dust but no soot. How cold must this hellhole have been in the winter, he wondered? The beds had been searched, and in doing so revealed how many old blankets the girls had slept under, making Bill wonder how often they might have come upstairs under the pretext of going to bed, but really just to get under the blankets to get warm.
He went to the old-fashioned wardrobe and looked through the clothes still hanging there. Going by the sizes, neither had been a big woman, but then had Thomas kept the majority of the food for himself? You didn’t get past twenty stone nibbling on the occasional crackers. The fashions were very dated, and everything was heavily worn, some dresses counting as downright threadbare. It appeared as though they couldn’t have had the chance to go and do any shopping for themselves, because nothing matched, and Bill had the horrible feeling that Thomas might have been the sort to scour the charity shops when it came to clothing, because none of it looked the kind of thing a young woman in her thirties would normally have ever chosen for herself. Had they left this stuff behind when they made a run for it? That could be one explanation. But Bill still thought it more likely that the girls were somewhere in a shallow grave here on the property.
Unable to stand looking at these tragic tatters of two lives, he gladly escaped down the stairs and went to look at the layout of the farm. And immediately he could see why it was taking so long to sell. The fields ran more or less evenly up the tiny narrow valley the farmhouse was in, which was towered over by the scarp side of the hill which was topped by Caer Caradoc hill fort, but none of them could have had soil deep enough to take a plough over. All you could ever do here was put sheep out to graze, with just the land around the farmhouse useful for growing crops in, and even then, Bill guessed it would be vegetables to eat or for fodder, not a cash crop like wheat. As he walked up the valley towards the woods, Bill could see the snaked coils of barbed wire over the tops of the fences – proof had he needed it, of just how much Thomas Mulligrew had wanted to keep people out of his land. No hiker coming down off the hill-fort away from the main tracks would have any joy in getting back to the road this way.
But the more he walked, the more Bill couldn’t see anywhere which might have allowed Thomas to bury two bodies, or at least not without them being exposed whenever the next heavy rains had come. Up in the woodland, which was more of a long strip of trees than a clump, Bill finally came across something interesting. Someone, and he guessed it had to have been the wife, the girls, or both, had made a small shrine. It was at the base of a gnarled oak tree, and what had probably been nothing more than a boggy patch had been worked on so that it formed the smallest of pools. Ivy had been entwined to form circles, and two old broken teacups had been glued back together and set up on a plank as though they were the most precious of chalices, along with a couple of jam jars which had the stumps of candles still in them. In the bark, something vaguely face-like had been chipped away at to make to even more recognisable, and the crumbling remains of what might have been a circlet of old desiccated roses had been hung from a twig above it.
“Whoever you were praying to, it wasn’t to someone or something you’d learned about in church, I’ll be bound,” Bill said thoughtfully, going to sit on another plank which had been set up for a seat across two large lumps of stone. He couldn’t remember anything in the reports he’d read which talked of the Mulligrews being regular attendees at any of the local churches. But living the deprived life the two girls had done, it was hardly surprising that they had found some outlet for their need to believe that someone somewhere cared about them. And again his thoughts turned to the odd case he’d gone to when he’d first been in Shropshire, just across the big valley from here. What had these girls seen out here? Was it just imaginations uncluttered by any modern living? Or had they actually seen something akin to what he’d encountered? Something spiritually primal?
It was at this point that Bill realised that the one thing he hadn’t spotted yet was an apple tree. Had the report got it wrong? After all, Thomas had died in the depths of winter, so aside from conifers, all the other trees would have long since lost their leaves. Yet he had the feeling that whatever Wally’s other shortcomings as a detective were, he was enough of a countryman to know his oaks from his apples, even when leafless.
And so Bill worked his way back down the valley after taking some photographs of the little shrine, and it was coming back that he now saw the fruit trees. There were only four of them, two pears and two apples, and they stood behind the sway-roofed wreck of a barn. When he got down there, he could still see the imprint
of the heavy coal truck’s tyres where the driver had reversed up to try and turn around. Yes, if Thomas had been against the first apple tree, then the driver would have just caught a glimpse of him, especially if the rooks from the nearby rookery lower down the valley had decided to start pecking away at him. Moreover, this was another cider apple tree, going by the remaining windfalls scattered at its base, and the pears were the hard sort that even pigs wouldn’t eat, but which made excellent perry. Thomas had no doubt brewed up his own potent cider and perry in the barn, and Bill was equally sure that the girls wouldn’t have got so much as a sip to numb their suffering with.
This was different to the other sites in that the trees were much closer to the house in terms of distance, though not visible from any window. But then any fool could have seen that there was hardly going to be anyone else around to come and chase them off. They’d only have had to watch the place for a day or two to realise that Thomas was alone. Or had he been? Had the girls seen him die and only then made a run for it? Wally and Lucinda hadn’t thought so, but Bill believed it would be short-sighted not to at least consider the possibility.
“Where did you get too?” he asked of nobody but the wind. “How do two women, with no money and no experience of the modern world, vanish like that?”
Getting cold out here where there wasn’t a scrap of shelter from the wind, and with his stomach now reminding him that it was lunchtime, Bill decided to go into Knighton and find somewhere to eat. Luckily he found a pub more to his usual tastes, and sat down to something far less fancy but considerably more wholesome while he had a think. Looking at his large-scale map again, there was no footpath, public or private, up to the top of Caer Caradoc, and that meant that unlike British Camp on the Malvern Hills, it would not be regularly tramped over by hordes of people. And yet somehow Bill thought that there was something relevant about Caer Caradoc. Thomas Mulligrew was the first of the list of victims, and having seen the shrine up in the woods on his land, Bill was getting that twitchy feeling again that was telling him that this was where it had all started, or at least it was deeply relevant.