Her phone rang and Alex jumped hard enough to grind her teeth together. Looking across the pond, she answered, already seeing Tony’s number. ‘Hello,’ she said, shaking. ‘Tony?’
She was giving in to dread. ‘You never get used to shocks,’ she muttered.
‘Alex? What did you say?’
‘Nothing.’ She’d spoken aloud, darn it. ‘Just muttering to myself. I’m up in the hills behind Trap Lane. Behind Green Friday and Radhika’s place, actually. After Trap Lane completely peters out. We came up here as kids. Or I think I did.’
‘We did – you said you were shocked.’ When Tony dealt with trouble, his voice went flat. He was much tougher than he seemed.
‘Um … not really.’ That wouldn’t cut it and she was digging in deeper. ‘I came up here to look around for anything the police might have missed. I don’t think they’ve even been up here yet. They’re too busy with the obvious route for someone to go – down to the road. OK, I did say something. I think I said you never get used to shocks and I think I just had another one. But I’ll deal with it. I’m going to check something out, then I’ll meet you wherever you decide. There, you get to be the boss. I’m mellowing.’
‘Alex, I don’t get put off that easily. You’ve had a shock. What kind of shock?’
‘Probably nothing. Just let me get down the hill again and I’ll explain. I’m being stupid.’
He was silent for a moment. ‘The police are still at Green Friday. Can you see them from where you are?’
‘Yes.’ Alex cleared her throat. ‘What does it matter?’
‘I think I’ll give Bill Lamb a call and ask him to get someone up there with you.’
‘You will not!’
‘One more chance, Alex, and then I’m going to race up there. You matter too much to me to let you go off on a tangent doing things you shouldn’t be doing alone. Just tell me what’s going on?’
‘I feel ridiculous, that’s what’s going on. I scared myself over nothing and decided there could be a body in a pond up here. I vaguely remember it’s always been here – the pond that is. Fed by underground springs or something. Where shall I meet you?’
‘Right where you are. I know exactly where it is. We called that pond Dozemary like the Excalibur pool or some such thing. The older kids did. You were a bit younger. It’s damn deep so be careful.’ He rang off and wouldn’t answer when she tried to call back.
Hurrying at first, then slowing to a reluctant pace, Alex made her way to the edge of the pond again. The yellow ribbon, if that’s what it was, still flipped in the breeze and a log, a bag of rubbish, whatever, continued to roll, just showing above the water.
Tony would get here quickly. He knew the area and he was used to hiking over these hills with his dog, Katie – and with Bogie now. Hiking wasn’t Alex’s favorite pastime.
She kept her eyes averted from the yellow ribbon. What a fool she was going to feel.
Now. She would go and check it out immediately. Marching along, whacking shrubs and bushes aside as she got closer, Alex made up her mind to stand firm and unafraid, no matter what she found. She was glad that once between the shrubs and the pool, she was more-or-less hidden.
When she reached the right spot, she paused. Even through long, swaying grass she could see the yellow ribbon, and the loose knot that had slipped free from what she’d taken to be a mass of gray wool, not tangled hair. But it really was tangled hair pulled back behind a head. Her heart thundered; a whole percussion section of a large orchestra threatened to split open her chest and she felt so sick she slapped a hand over her mouth.
To the very edge she went and crouched. She took hold of a shoulder inside a multi-colored tapestry coat of some kind and heaved to try turning the body over. It was a body. And by now it was a very dead body.
Alex couldn’t roll it, but, reaching her hands into the water, she turned the head to the side and looked at the face. Nothing to do for this man now. Clouded eyes were sightless, covered with a gummy, pale substance. The face, slack, grey and marred by small, gaping wounds, had started to bloat up and pieces of weed together with crawling things, already clung to skin and flesh, turned thick by immersion.
Alex pushed backward, tried to stand, and vomited. Her head felt so light, so filled with skittering, scrabbling stuff. The field and sky spun before her. Again she tried to stand but fell flat on her back instead and stayed there.
‘Alex!’ She heard Tony’s voice – not too close – but she couldn’t respond yet. Her mouth tasted foul and she fancied she had drunk the water around the body. Perhaps she’d been trying to drain the pool to get him out.
She was losing her mind.
Retching repeatedly, struggling to clear away the horrible imaginings, Alex tried to call Tony’s name. She couldn’t.
‘Alex! Answer me, for God’s sake. Where are you?’
She struggled to her feet and saw him, breaking through the trees, then running when he sighted her. Even sick with disgust as she was, she registered how important she was to him.
Once more she flopped down, cracking the bottom of her spine on a rock. It didn’t matter. ‘Tony,’ she cried. ‘I’m over here. Come over here.’
He reached her and fell to his knees, took her face in his hands and stared at her. ‘You’re ill. Why didn’t you tell me?’ He held her against him so hard she could scarcely take a breath.
‘Listen to me,’ she told him, her voice a husky whisper. ‘He’s there in the water. Caught on roots at the bank. Look. We have to do something.’
Without letting her go, Tony turned aside, and Alex felt the moment when he saw the body. Then he did let her go, putting himself between her and the corpse.
In only moments, he looked at her over his shoulder. ‘I think it’s Percy Quillam, Sonia Quillam’s husband.’ He sat on the grass, hands hanging between his knees. ‘I’m pretty sure it’s him. Before I call Lamb, I want to ask you something. We need to get it straight. The police have a priority on tracing the Mercedes at Green Friday. LeJuan Harding told me. Only it was gone by the time the police searched the place this morning. And they didn’t find keys, or a phone or wallet. No personal stuff or ID. Is there any reason to question any of that?’
LeJuan was Detective Chief Inspector Dan O’Reilly’s very good-looking black sergeant. Good-looking, charming and too free with information among friends of which Tony and Alex were two.
‘Sam said the car was there when he got to the house,’ she said. ‘I had no reason to doubt him. He also said there were things scattered on the bed in that bedroom. Who knows what was among them? I didn’t see the car but I didn’t look for it. I assume it was on that gravel outside the kitchens. If there were keys on the bed when Sam was there and they weren’t there later, they must have been taken while we were sitting on the front steps, waiting. The police didn’t say anything. Not about the car or any keys, now I think about it.’ Alex couldn’t wrap her brain around this. ‘Things could have been taken between Sam leaving Green Friday and the three of us going up there together.’
‘LeJuan’s tracking down who dealt with the possessions on the bed,’ Tony said. ‘Not his job but he and Dan have been pulled into this in some way. He didn’t mention a car at all.’
‘You mean the car wasn’t there … when wasn’t it there? When was it taken?’
‘Like you just suggested, sweetheart, it may not have been there by the time the police arrived. Not the car or the keys. I don’t know how it could happen but it looks as if someone drove the car out of there.’
‘Do you think it was Percy Quillam’s car?’ Alex said, her eyes drawn in the direction of the pond. As far as she knew, Percy and Sonia were still married, even though their son, Elyan, the prodigy who had been their reason to live, was now in a mental institution – a prison for the mentally ill.
Tony shoved his hands in his pockets and shrugged. ‘Who knows? It would seem the Mercedes must have gone missing before the search. No one saw it driven away. Whoever too
k it knows their way around here. That’s assuming there ever was a vehicle there.’
‘Sam wouldn’t make it up,’ Alex insisted.
Tony frowned at her. ‘Is there another way out of the estate? If that car was driven down the drive this morning, it would have been seen. Are you sure it was still there when you and Hugh went back?’
Alex thought about it. ‘I just accepted that it was.’ Her heart thumped. ‘I don’t really know. I didn’t look for it. Tony, there is another way out. You can park by some outbuildings behind the house, on the far side of the swimming pool, I think, and use a track through the fields – in the opposite direction from Trap Lane. But not many people would know about it. I remembered it earlier while I was walking. It must be an overgrown mess by now.’
‘I can think of a few who definitely would know about it,’ Tony said.
Alex looked away. She still hadn’t told anyone except Tony, who hadn’t taken her very seriously, that she had seen Hugh at Green Friday, and that she doubted he had any idea he’d been seen, by her or Bill’s second, still anonymous witness.
‘The things left in that bedroom weren’t Percy’s,’ Alex said. ‘Lipstick and so on. It could be that Bill’s witness and the missing woman are the same person.’
SEVEN
SOCO had erected their white tent, and lamps that turned encroaching dusk into a murky curtain behind the pitiless lights. The technicians said little but worked intently gathering specimens Tony either couldn’t see or didn’t see as anything of importance. These they put into bags, labeled and dropped into brown paper sacks.
After reams of photos, and video film taken in situ, the crime scene manager ordered Percy’s body to be taken by stretcher into the luminous tent. Dark shapes moved inside, adjusting equipment, starting to photograph again. Tape wrapped around trees, bushes, or pegs driven into the ground where there was nothing else available, marked off the whole area.
Bill Lamb, with Jillian Miller and a group of other officers had arrived. Tony realized most had already been at Green Friday. They had gathered on the hillside quickly. Everyone was still watching for Molly Lewis, the forensic pathologist.
‘I don’t know why they don’t fire Dr Lewis,’ Miller said, supposedly quietly to Bill. ‘She wastes a lot of valuable time.’
He repeatedly pushed his fingers through his crewcut sandy hair. Tony admired how he kept his expression blank. ‘Because she’s damned good,’ he told Miller. ‘The best. Let’s chat about this later. In the meantime, keep schtum.’
Tony felt a spark of shameful satisfaction thinking that perhaps the upstart detective sergeant might get a tongue whipping.
The shame wouldn’t last …
A chill had crept in. Alex had accepted a SOCO suit to keep her warmer and looked even more diminutive in the white gear that was puffy all over and rucked around her ankles.
‘Bill,’ Tony said to his former enemy who had miraculously turned into a pleasant enough companion. ‘Could I ask you something?’
‘Sure, not much to do but wait anyway.’ He followed Tony but turned back when Jillian Miller tagged on behind. ‘Stick around here and watch for Dr Lewis, please, Miller. And give me a jingle on my mobile when you see her.’
Tony didn’t wait to see how that went down. A few yards away, the two men stood close together. ‘None of my business, but you know how we are around here – at least Alex and me. Bloody nuisance to you, I’m sure, but bear with me.’ He noted that Alex had not followed them. Finding Quillam had shocked her even more than he would have expected and she seemed disoriented.
‘Sometimes I wish I could totally agree with what you’ve just suggested,’ Bill said, ‘but I can’t. You two have been damned useful on too many occasions.’
Tony didn’t comment on the unexpected compliment – the change in Bill’s attitude could so easily reverse. ‘Sam Brock told Alex and Hugh about a Mercedes being parked at Green Friday when he was looking around. That was just before he went to the Black Dog to get Hugh. If the car was gone when you looked, that wasn’t much of a window of time.’
‘I’m very aware of that,’ Bill said and expelled a hard breath. ‘Information does get around here. By the way, since it’s starting to look as if there could be a connection to one of his old cases, Dan’s joining us with some psychologist who is worming his way into a lot of situations in the area. The man has some theory about copycat or linked murders. Been looking into unsolved cases. The volume of murders in this area has noses wiggling even though they’ve all been solved and there were different perpetrators in each one. Apparently he’s out to prove we’ve messed up somewhere. He’ll probably be a pain in the ass but the chief constable is enamored of him, so we have to put up with it. LeJuan Harding is Dan’s new sergeant – that’s just information in case you didn’t know. But this Dr Leon Wolf is likely to rub a few of us the wrong way. So try to keep you and Alex in the background.’
‘I had heard about LeJuan’s reassignment but nothing about this Dr Wolf,’ Tony said, suffering an overwhelming longing to grab Alex and leave this lot behind them.
‘Good. You’re right about the car. And if Sam Brock did see it there, we don’t have the faintest who took it. Tony, I don’t think Hugh’s been completely forthcoming. I don’t expect you to say more than you feel like saying.’ He paused, looking hopeful, and after an instant gave a one-sided smile. ‘We will have to take him in for questioning. It would be best if Alex didn’t raise any fuss about that.’
‘Damn, what a mess,’ Tony said. ‘But I get you and so will Alex. She’s a wise woman.’
Bill gave him a completely wide smile. ‘Not that you’re at all biased where Alex is concerned. Most of the time I agree with you, by the way. Here comes Molly Lewis. Someone will have driven her as far up as possible. She doesn’t like driving herself these days.’ He glanced away.
Even in poor light Tony recognized Molly Lewis’s short, bright, blond hair as she climbed toward them with a uniformed officer.
The next thing he had to do, Tony decided, was get Alex on her own and ask what she wanted to do about Hugh being at Green Friday the night she went to Radhika’s. She wouldn’t want to say anything that would add to police suspicion of Hugh, but if he continued to say nothing, Alex might have to tell them everything.
Bill took the lead, joining up with Miller on the way to meet Molly Lewis. She had gone directly toward the pond and Tony could see a powerful torch beam bobbing.
‘Wait up.’ Alex jogged beside him and they went on together. ‘I like Molly but if I never had to see her like this again it would be too soon. Why is she going to the pond?’
‘Probably to see where the body was found.’
‘Right.’ Alex sounded vague. ‘What did Bill say? He’s being too pleasant these days. I keep waiting for him to blow up and be his usual sarcastic self.’
‘I think it’s Radhika’s influence. She wouldn’t be impressed if he didn’t treat you well, and for Bill, she is the all-seeing sun.’ He put an arm around her shoulders. ‘Let’s go home if they’ll let us. It’s been a long, nasty day.’
‘I know. But I can’t just go. Tony, I’m so worried about Hugh I don’t know what to do. The police haven’t said anything else about him. I haven’t had a chance to tell you, but he was up here before I found the body. He didn’t see me but he was just staring around. Then he ran off. If I call and ask if he’s at the Dog they’ll figure out I don’t know where he is either. I don’t want to say or do anything that draws attention to what’s going on.’
‘We’d better talk but not here.’ There was nothing to gain by continuing to keep quiet and possibly a lot to lose. ‘I’m going to find out how long we have to stay.’
She slid her hand into his and they crossed the rough ground toward Bill who was now in the company of several officers and the crime scene manager, Werner Berg. They heard Dr Molly Lewis from yards away. She sounded furious.
‘What were you thinking of, Werner?’ Her voice gra
ted. ‘You know how I like to do things.’
‘Yes, marm,’ Werner said, dragging on a cigarette. ‘I thought it was best to get things moving given the cause of death.’
‘Which is?’ Molly said.
Werner smirked, accustomed to Molly’s little catch-out tricks. ‘I should have said, possible, of course.’ His German accent remained heavy. ‘With water there is so much that can interfere. And the body had clearly been there for hours. I knew you would consider every moment important.’
She narrowed her eyes at him, pinched her lips together and pushed past on her way to the tent. ‘Not as if I might like to see the position of the body when it was found, hm? I hope you have taken scrapings of everything it may have touched, and samples of the water. Tomorrow morning divers must go down.’
Tony shuddered at the thought. As kids, the potential depth of the pool had been a subject of much conjecture. The thing looked obsidian and bottomless.
‘Affirmative to the scrapings,’ Werner remarked. ‘It’s very deep in there, marm. Could have a couple of feet of mud on the bottom. Or a lot more. Perhaps we should wait and see if we really need divers. It would be too bad to lose a man for nothing.’
Without warning, Molly stumbled sideways and Werner caught her arm firmly. He said not a word but when Molly tried to pull away, he held on, transferred one arm across her back, and ushered her rapidly into the tent.
Bill looked back at Tony who frowned but said nothing. The pathologist seemed unsteady and he wasn’t sure he bought the rumor that she drank too much. He wondered if she had been checked by a doctor – this wasn’t the first time Tony had seen her appear shaky or even disoriented.
‘I don’t think Molly drinks too much,’ Alex said quietly. ‘She could be ill but doctors are the worst for looking after their own health.’
‘You stole my thoughts,’ he said. ‘And I think Werner knows something about it, not that he’s the type to share any information about a friend. She is a friend of his, I can tell that, despite the snarling she sends his way. Anyway, I say we see if we can get in there and listen. What about you?’
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