An Unfinished Murder

by An Unfinished Murder (retail) (epub)

  He saw her face light up again, as it had when she’d recognised him, and he knew he’d given her an angle for her article. ‘You think she died elsewhere and was brought here by her killer to hide the body?’ she asked eagerly.

  ‘I’m not giving any interviews,’ he said firmly, ‘and contrary to what you might think, I am not a party to any line the investigating officers might be following.’

  He wasn’t fibbing, he told himself. As far as he knew, Trevor Barker didn’t have any theories or lines of enquiry. Probably, he would not have told Markby, even if he had. He didn’t blame Barker for guarding his turf. In his shoes, Markby would no doubt have done the same.

  Ms Morris didn’t buy it, however. ‘But you’re here,’ she pointed out, not unreasonably, ‘at the scene. Why come here, if you don’t have anything to do with the investigation now?’

  ‘Call it idle curiosity.’

  ‘Don’t think so!’ she retorted, grinning. ‘You’re on to something. You’ve got a theory!’

  ‘You, on the other hand,’ he snapped, ‘apparently have a crystal ball! I have no fresh thoughts on the matter at all!’ Now he was fibbing and, what was worse, he suspected she knew. She had a smug grin on her face.

  ‘Good day to you!’ he said. He turned and strode back towards his car as confidently as he could while trying to stay upright and praying he didn’t plunge ignominiously, face first, into a puddle. Ms Morris would love that.

  When he got home, he rang Trevor Barker and warned him a reporter with some local knowledge was in the area and keen for a story.

  ‘She says she’s a stringer for three national dailies.’

  ‘Great!’ came Barker’s voice, gloomily, in his ear. ‘Now she’ll tell the world and its wife! Did she get any pictures?’

  Oh hell! thought Markby. She probably did take a couple of snaps of me on her smartphone before I spotted her.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he told Barker. ‘It’s possible. She’ll have taken some of the grave, at least.’ But he wasn’t worried about that. ‘I’m not wasting any more time,’ he said to Barker. ‘I’m calling ahead to the prison to let them know I’m on my way. I understand the ACC is getting me clearance.’

  * * *

  Troubles come in threes, they say, and sometimes, memories arrive in groups. Firstly, the encounter with Tania Morris had sparked recall of those old books of his mother’s. Now, hard on its heels, came another image from childhood. When Markby had been five years of age, he had innocently been the cause of a permanent rift in relations between his maternal grandmother and a paternal aunt. In a nutshell, his grandmother had declared that the infant Alan took entirely after her side of the family. He bore a remarkable resemblance to her brother Wilfred at the same age. She had produced a snapshot of said Wilfred, aged five, sitting on a bench with a belligerent-looking terrier for company.

  This had been at a Christmas gathering when assorted members of both sides of the family had been gathered. His father’s sister, Emerald by name, had taken one look at the snapshot and declared robustly that it was nonsense. Wilfred looked nothing like Alan – and Alan, therefore, did not resemble Wilfred. On the contrary, the young Alan looked exactly like her brother, his father, at five years of age. Both women had taken offence, and never spoke again. They were given few opportunities to do so, because his mother had so arranged things that they were rarely invited again at the same time.

  So much, thought Markby, for genes. Over the centuries, and in many families, inherited facial traits or other peculiarities (or absence of them) had caused no end of trouble. So there was no reason why he should have supposed that because Josh was tall, red-headed and somewhat shambling in build and manner, his sister Dilys should be made in similar style. Moreover, although they had unquestionably shared a mother, it was quite possible that they had had different fathers. At any rate, Dilys proved to be small, compact and muscular in build, with hair trimmed so short it was difficult to be sure what colour it might be if allowed to grow. The stubble was dark. She had a heart-shaped face, small nose, glittering brown eyes, shaved lines in her eyebrows, studs in her ear lobes and tattoos on both arms. Without the tattoos, studs and belligerent expression, thought Markby sadly, Dilys would have been pretty. As it was, he recalled to mind the squabble between his grandmother and Aunt Emerald, all those years ago – perhaps because Dilys reminded him of the terrier seated by young Wilfred on that bench.

  Before being permitted to meet her, he’d had an in-depth chat with the governor.

  ‘We have not had any trouble with Dilys here,’ said the governor, a brisk, middle-aged blonde in a business suit. ‘It is an open prison, and she has stuck to all the rules. She knows, of course, that if she didn’t, she’d be sent straight back to her former prison and her release might be delayed.’ The governor smiled cheerfully at him. ‘I’m afraid, though, we feel a member of the staff here should be present when you talk to Dilys. The thing is, you mean to talk to her about something very personal, as I understand it. That might set her off. That wouldn’t be good for you, and it certainly would be a black mark against her. We don’t want that, do we?’

  ‘She might take a swing at me, you mean?’

  ‘Quite possibly.’ The governor added quickly, ‘We hope not. But your visit is a rather unusual one. And we have a responsibility towards Dilys, too.’

  ‘Has she had any counselling? Anger management? Dealing with unresolved issues dating from her childhood?’ he asked.

  ‘We’re a prison, not a psychiatric ward!’ said the governor. ‘But yes, she was offered anger management classes at the previous place. She knew that if she accepted them, it would bring forward her release date, so she agreed. She went to a course of six meetings with the therapist.’ The governor shook her neatly coiffed head. ‘Sadly, she felt she’d failed.’

  ‘Dilys felt she was a failure?’

  ‘No, the therapist thought she’d failed. It seems Dilys sat through all six sessions without saying a word, and hardly moving a muscle. But she did stare – never took her eyes from the therapist’s face – and her eyes held such a look of scorn. It unsettled the therapist considerably. She got rather discouraged. However, on the other hand, Dilys didn’t fly into a rage at any time when the therapist was with her, so it was marked down as progress, of a sort.’

  Thus when, shortly after that conversation, Markby found himself in an interview room, and the door opened to admit Dilys Browning and a prison officer, he half expected to be given the same silent, unmoving treatment that Dilys had used to demolish the anger management therapist.

  He could not have been more wrong. She bounced in, fizzing with energy, with the officer scuttling along behind. He had been thinking of the terrier in the photo and now this whole initial scene almost made him laugh. Dilys and the officer were like a dog owner with an excitable and untrained pet, and this terrier was longing for a scrap.

  ‘Oy!’ snapped Dilys, as soon as she set eyes on him. ‘What have you done with my bracelet? I want it back. Josh had no right giving it to you. It’s mine!’

  Her direct question was in tune with the manner of her entry. Markby felt he was the one summoned and she was the interviewer.

  ‘The bracelet is an important piece of evidence and it’s in the hands of the police at Bamford. I’m afraid that has nothing to do with me,’ he said apologetically. It was a stuffy, official sort of reply and he didn’t expect it to go down well with Dilys. It was also not how he’d wanted to start the conversation.

  Dilys sniffed and glowered at him. ‘I found it!’ she said stubbornly.

  ‘Well, I’m not here to argue about that.’

  ‘So what are you here for, then?’

  ‘Just an informal chat,’ said Markby firmly. ‘Why don’t you tell me about the day you and Josh went to the spinney and the bracelet came into your possession.’

  Dilys studied him carefully. ‘Josh and I went to the spinney,’ she said simply. ‘And there was a dead woman there. But you
know that, don’t you? Josh told you, the daft sod.’

  ‘How did you know she was dead? Josh says he wasn’t sure.’

  ‘Josh was scared of her!’ retorted Dilys. ‘He couldn’t get away fast enough. I stopped to get a better look at her.’

  ‘Why?’

  This simple question successfully threw Dilys into a moment’s confusion. She lowered her head and glowered at him. ‘I dunno, do I? I was eight years old, wasn’t I? You don’t think about things when you’re eight, you just do ’em.’

  ‘You weren’t scared?’

  ‘I don’t scare easy!’ She fixed him with a challenging eye. ‘You don’t scare me, neither. You’re not a copper, you’re an old guy, and I don’t know why they bothered sending you!’

  ‘True, I’m not a policeman any longer, but I was for a long time,’ Markby returned mildly. ‘I was in charge of looking for that girl in the Bamford area, twenty years ago when she went missing. I really did look hard for her, Dilys, and I found no sign of her.’

  ‘Not hard enough, then,’ she retorted. ‘Or you’d have found her.’

  ‘Not if someone buried her.’

  Dilys bounced on her chair in indignation. ‘Oy! Josh and me didn’t bury her, did we? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘No, of course not. It would have been difficult for two young children to do that. But someone did. Whoever it was had to move her a short distance to find the right spot. Then he, or they, dug a good deep hole and put her in it. Then the gravediggers covered the disturbed soil with leaves, bits and pieces of twigs and so on – anything they could find, I guess. They must have disguised it well. When Josh returned two days later, and found the body gone, he didn’t immediately think she might have been buried there. Or even that the earth had been disturbed. It was an unexplained mystery to him. Naturally, he thought, well, perhaps she had only been sleeping.’

  Dilys sniffed again, possibly to suggest that was stupidity on her brother’s part. Otherwise she only pressed her lips together and fixed him with a look that suggested she thought he wasn’t too bright, either.

  Markby refused to be discouraged. ‘What I’d really like to know, Dilys, is whether you noticed anyone else in the spinney, or any sign at all of any other presence.’

  ‘What’s it like now?’ asked Dilys unexpectedly, ignoring his request.

  ‘What is what like?’

  She drew a deep breath and asked, impatiently, ‘The spinney, of course! What’s it like now?’

  ‘In a bit of a mess. Because of the digging.’

  ‘I used to like it there,’ said Dilys. ‘When we were kids.’

  ‘I know you did, Dilys.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Dilys asked suspiciously.

  ‘Josh told me. You used to make camps in the bushes.’

  ‘Seems to me,’ muttered Dilys, ‘that Josh has been gabbing away about everything.’

  Markby persevered. ‘Josh believes you and he were there alone when you found the dead girl. But I think perhaps someone else was nearby. I suspect that person saw you and your brother and hid, waiting for you both to leave. But you hung back to take the bracelet…’

  Dilys glowered at him.

  ‘So, what I’m wondering is, whether you noticed anything else, something Josh might have missed, because he was anxious to get out of there, as you said.’

  Dilys made no reply, but she fixed him with such a steady and scornful look that he wondered if he was now about to receive the silent treatment Dilys had apparently perfected for demoralising well-meaning professionals.

  ‘Because I think you were a very observant little girl,’ he added artfully.

  Mollified, Dilys nodded and some of the scorn faded from her gaze. To his relief, she spoke. But it didn’t help. ‘I didn’t see anyone,’ she said.

  Markby sighed. It had only been an outside chance.

  ‘But I smelled him,’ added Dilys, unexpectedly. She frowned. ‘It might have been more than one person but I think, if there were two of them, I might have heard them. Anyway, I smelled at least one of ’em. He’d been smoking – fags, the ordinary sort. You know, not pot. It wasn’t that sort of smell. It was just ordinary cigarettes, and he was still there – or he might have only just gone – but the smell of the ciggies was still really strong…’ She paused. ‘That was because of all the trees around, I expect. Smoke got trapped in the air under the trees, you know, like it does in a room.’

  Markby leaned forward. ‘Thank you, Dilys. Now then, when you went back later—’

  ‘I didn’t!’ interrupted Dilys. ‘Josh wouldn’t let me go near the spinney for ages after that.’

  ‘I know you didn’t go back to the actual spinney for a few days afterwards. But you did go back to the spot where you threw away the bracelet, when Josh insisted. You went back secretly that same night and found it again.’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ said Dilys with a shrug. ‘I went and got it back. It was mine. Josh had no right to make me throw it away. And she was dead. I don’t care what Josh says. When I took it off her wrist, her skin was really cold and felt odd. And her fingers – I had to pull it over her fingers, because the clasp was awkward. I didn’t have time to fiddle with it or Josh would have spotted me. I had to just pull it off as quick as I could. It still caught in her fingers, because they were bent.’

  Dilys held up her right hand and made it into a claw shape. ‘A bit like that. They were difficult to move, just like they were made out of wood. You go stiff when you die. You don’t stay like it. After a while you go all floppy again. Well, I knew that, didn’t I? So she was going stiff. She hadn’t gone really rigid. If she had, I might not have got the bracelet off at all without breaking it…’ She paused again. ‘I didn’t want to break it,’ she explained, ‘because it was beautiful.’

  He must have looked surprised, because Dilys flushed a deep red at having been caught in a moment of weakness, and the belligerent look returned. ‘Well, I’d never had nothing like that, had I?’

  ‘You knew about rigor mortis?’ Markby couldn’t disguise his astonishment. ‘At the tender age of eight?’

  Dilys nodded and even gave a brief grin. ‘Old guy died in the house next door to my mum’s. This was before the Social took us away and Josh and I still lived with her. Anyway, the old man’s name was Mr Milton and he died sitting in his chair. He’d been watching telly. No one would have known he was a goner; but his daughter came over to see him and she couldn’t get in, so she called the police. They came and broke down the door. He’d gone stiff as a board and they couldn’t lie him out flat. They had to carry him out like he was still in his chair. They’d thrown a blanket over him but they couldn’t straighten him out. It looked funny. I was watching from my bedroom window upstairs, with Jezza. He was my mum’s boyfriend at the time and he’d run upstairs when the cops turned up to break in, next door, because he didn’t want them to see him, I suppose. Generally, our mum’s boyfriends kept away from the police. Anyhow, Jezza told me why it was, how the body had gone stiff and that’s what happens when you die.’

  Now Dilys gave him a smug look, because she knew she’d successfully thrown him off his planned line of enquiry about their activities in the spinney.

  Markby managed to gather his thoughts. He who hesitates is lost; and he’d be lost if he didn’t take control of the conversation fast.

  ‘So,’ he began briskly, ‘when you went back to the lane later, to retrieve the bracelet from where you’d thrown it, was anyone around – in the lane, perhaps?’

  Dilys thought for a moment. ‘Only Mr Stokes. He lived in the end house with his mum. He saw me and he asked me, “What are you doing there, Dilys?” So, I said I was picking the pink flowers for Auntie Nina. Because I’d thrown the bracelet into a patch of ragged robin. Auntie Nina called ’em that. Fred Stokes said, “That’s nice, Dilys.” Then he walked on with his hands in his pockets, whistling. He was going to the pub, most likely. He went every evening.’ Dilys smiled. ‘Sometimes, when he came back
late, we’d hear him singing; if we looked out, we’d see him staggering about all over the road. Anyway, after he’d walked off, I found the bracelet. I took it back and hid it.’

  ‘Thank you, Dilys,’ Markby told her. ‘I appreciate you telling me all this.’

  ‘Don’t know why,’ said Dilys. ‘You won’t forget my bracelet, will you? You tell whoever has it now, I want it back!’

  * * *

  As Markby drove home, the image of childhood birthday parties, evoked during the ACC’s lunch, came back to mind. He recalled the jelly in little bowls, with pieces of fruit in it, and the birthday cake with its candles. He remembered it being sunny, and running around the garden playing tag, or if they were indoors, it would be hunt the thimble or pin the tail on the donkey. He remembered the brightly coloured balloons and the party favours. And then he thought of little Dilys Browning, leaning from her bedroom window in the company of a petty criminal who was her mother’s current boyfriend, to watch the stiffened body of the next-door neighbour being carried out, frozen in sitting position, with a blanket over it. It made him feel very sad.

  He called at the police station on his way home, and was ushered straight into Trevor Barker’s office. He wasn’t surprised to find the inspector still at his desk.

  ‘We’ve learned something,’ he reported, taking a seat opposite Barker. ‘Allowing for ambient temperature, we can assume that Rebecca had been dead six to eight hours when the children found her. They came across the body in the late afternoon and she was stiffening – so we can work on the probability she died earlier that day or just possibly in the early hours of that morning. But by the time whoever buried her returned, possibly rigor was wearing off, or had worn off. She had been laid out very neatly, with her body straight.’

  He paused and Barker said, ‘Easier to dig a trench than a big pit to take a curled-up body. We’re not talking some prehistoric burial site, foetal position and all that.’