Fleur Madsen pointed to a fresco on the wall showing a bearded ancient, complete with halo and beatific smile, and bearing the legend St Herbert of Derwent Water. Beneath it hung a mahogany board on which the Venerable Bede’s remarks about Herbert’s spiritual bond with St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne were recorded in gilt letters.
‘Funny, isn’t it?’ she murmured. ‘A library taking its name from a seventh-century hermit who spent years cut off from the world on a tiny island in the middle of a lake.’
‘I am sure,’ the principal said, ‘we still cherish St Herbert’s ideal of thoughtful contemplation, far removed from material concerns.’
‘Of course, Micah, but we need more than thoughtful reflection if we’re going to patch up the black hole in the staff pension fund, let alone refurbish the dining room and make sure all the windows fit their frames.’
Daniel winced. Sounded like a debate in which there could only be one winner. ‘I have to admit, I’d barely heard of St Herbert’s before I moved up here. The library is a hidden gem.’
‘Exactly! Hence why we need to bang the drum more loudly.’ The principal cringed. ‘I was saying so to Micah five minutes ago when he took me up to the gallery. The lighting needs to be rewired, and I daren’t guess at the cost. We can’t put up the prices of our accommodation, there’s too much competition from bed-and-breakfast places around Keswick. Our being the Lake District’s best-kept secret doesn’t pay the bills. The auditors insist we keep a closer eye on cash flow.’
The principal sucked in his cheeks. He had more in common with the anchorite of Derwent Water than with any accountant. Micah Bridge lived for books, and his worst nightmare probably involved St Herbert’s Residential Library metamorphosing into a literary theme park for caravan dwellers.
‘Our communications strategy is almost finalised.’ The principal cleared his throat, as if in distaste at having to embrace such a tawdry concept. ‘I shall let you have it as soon as Orla is back in harness, and we’re able to tidy it up.’
‘Orla, yes.’ A frown disrupted Fleur’s features. ‘Do we know what is the matter with her?’
‘I’m afraid she hasn’t done us the courtesy of letting us know.’
‘If that girl doesn’t watch out,’ Fleur said, ‘she’ll go down the same slippery slope as her mother.’
She spoke loudly, and Daniel noticed heads turn up on the gallery, in wordless disapproval. There was a blunt edge to her voice that the pricey education hadn’t smoothed away. That resemblance to Audrey Hepburn was no more than skin-deep.
The principal stepped back through the doorway, leading them away from the literary temple. ‘I shall ask Sham to enquire when we can expect her back.’
‘Good plan.’ Fleur closed the door behind them and turned back to Daniel. ‘Marvellous to meet you in the flesh. I can’t wait to tell my husband that I’ve met a television star.’
Exactly the sort of reaction he’d come up to the Lake District to escape. ‘I gather yours is one of the biggest parks in the area?’
‘Oh, several have more pitches, but size isn’t everything, is it?’ A sleek smile. ‘My father-in-law always drummed into Bryan and his brother that quality counts. You need to understand people’s expectations, and then exceed them. Which is why I’m so glad my family home is about to enjoy a new lease of life as part of the park.’
The principal struggled to suppress a cough of disapproval at the prospect. It didn’t faze Fleur Madsen.
‘Buildings can’t stay the same, Micah, just as people can’t. It’s true of St Herbert’s, and it’s true of Mockbeggar Hall. My family couldn’t afford to invest on upkeep after the Second World War, and it went to rack and ruin. How much better, Gareth said, if we reinvented the place as part of the park. It seemed like one of my brother-in-law’s more hare-brained ideas, but really it’s turned out to be a stroke of genius. The project has taken five years to complete, but believe me, it will be worth it. We’ve not only refurbished the entire building, we’ve built a new link road from the main park, across the beck. Planning permission was a nightmare, of course, always is in the National Park, but nobody’s as persuasive as Gareth, and my husband has some political clout.’
And so the rich keep getting richer, Daniel thought. He gave an ambiguous smile.
‘I wonder,’ Fleur said, ‘are you free to come over for dinner with us at the Hall? We would be honoured to have you as our guest. Together with your wife, or partner, of course.’
‘I live with my sister.’
‘Ah, shades of the Wordsworths!’
The teasing smile returned. Somehow she’d created a moment of intimacy. It was as if the principal had ceased to exist.
‘Not exactly. I bought a cottage in Brackdale with my ex. We split up, and then Louise’s own relationship came to a sudden end, shortly after she moved up to the Lakes. We decided to share until she found a place of her own. Six months on, she’s still looking.’ ‘I don’t blame her for staying on. Brackdale is lovely.
Though the Northern Lakes are even further from the madding crowd. Now, do say you’ll come!’
‘Thanks …’ Daniel was about to mutter something about checking Louise’s availability, but Fleur was too quick.
‘Splendid! Shall we say Friday evening?’
Before he could reply, the crash of heels along the parquet floor of the corridor made them all turn round. Sham Madsen was running towards them at full pelt, her cheeks pale, strands of hair flapping over her face.
‘Professor Bridge!’
The principal stretched out a hand. ‘What is it, my dear girl?’
‘The police are on the phone!’
‘What do they want?’ Fleur demanded.
‘It’s about Orla. Oh my God, it’s so awful!’
‘What about her, Sham?’
The girl stared, wide-eyed, as if unable to credit what she had been told.
‘They say she’s dead. Her father found her body.’
‘Oh my God!’
‘It’s horrific,’ the girl mumbled.
Fleur’s face was ashen. ‘How did she die?’
‘She suffocated in a tower of grain.’
CHAPTER FOUR
‘Suffocated?’
Hannah’s heart jolted. She grabbed the arm of her swivel chair, as if to check that she wasn’t dreaming and this wasn’t some nightmarish hoax. The walls of her tiny new office seemed to be closing in on her. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine sinking head first into the clammy embrace of tons of thick beery grain.
‘In the farm silo,’ Linz Waller repeated. ‘Like I say, she must have climbed up and jumped in.’
So Orla Payne had given up on life.
Shit.
Opening her eyes, Hannah glared at her surroundings. No pictures on the walls, only a year planner, charts, and a list of phone numbers. She kept forgetting to bring in potted plants, and no way was she putting up a photograph of Marc. A fortnight in her new domain, and the smell of paint still lingered. The team had been shifted without a fig leaf of consultation to the other side of the Divisional HQ building. Lauren sold it as a change for the better, on the basis that the windows gave a view of the fells rather than the car park, but the true rationale was workspace planning. By trimming the Cold Case Review Team’s head count, and cramming those who remained into half as many square feet as part of a package of dextrous manoeuvres, Lauren had kept office overheads below budget for the current financial year. Despite the cutbacks, Hannah had heard the ACC singing in the corridor first thing that morning. An off-key rendering of ‘I’m a Believer’. No wonder she was pleased with herself. Keep the politicians and the accountants happy, and the sky was the limit. The smart money said that if she carried on like this, she might even become the first woman commissioner of the Met. Give her two years in charge in London, Les Bryant maintained, and the capital’s police force would boast the highest number of PR apparatchiks in Europe, and the fewest front-line officers.
She wrenched h
er thoughts back to Linz’s bad tidings. ‘Tell me about the call you took from Orla yesterday.’
‘Listen to the tape, if you like.’
‘Later. First, you take me through it.’
Beneath her expertly applied make-up, Linz’s cheeks were pallid. She’d rung a mate in the Keswick neighbourhood police team to fix a night out. Her friend had just come back from Lane End Farm to make a start on the paperwork about the death of a woman whose corpse had been discovered by a farmer that morning. The body was buried in the grain. The farmer, Mike Hinds, had identified the deceased as his daughter, Orla Payne. She didn’t live on the farm, and he claimed he had no idea why she would have come there to die. They hadn’t spoken to each other since a brief telephone conversation a couple of days before had ended in a quarrel. He said she was drunk.
‘The woman must have been an alcoholic.’ Linz cast her eyes to the heavens. ‘I only took the call because Chantal was on her break.’
Hannah leant across her desk. ‘We’re not playing a blame game.’
‘Will the IPCC need to be involved?’
Every police officer dreaded becoming the subject of an investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission. Once the IPCC started to crawl over your career, even the best CV could turn into a train wreck.
‘One step at a time, huh? What did Orla have to say?’
‘She was pissed out of her brain, you can hear it for yourself on the tape.’ Linz folded her arms tight across her chest, hugging herself for comfort. ‘All I could make out was that she had to speak to you, and nobody else would do. When it finally sank in that you weren’t around, she rang off.’
‘All right.’ Hannah exhaled. ‘How did they find the body?’
‘While Hinds was out in his fields, he caught sight of the top of a car parked in a lane at the back of his land. It was so unusual, he went to investigate, only to see it was Orla’s motor. On the way he spotted a brightly coloured headscarf, caught on a bramble. He recognised it as Orla’s. She wore headscarves all the time.
Hannah blinked. ‘Even in the height of summer?’
‘Yeah, seems she’d lost all her hair. Stress-related, apparently.’
‘She suffered from alopecia?’
‘I guess.’ Linz shrugged, a healthy young woman who didn’t know much about illness. ‘When he found her mobile in a drinking trough, panic set in. He and a couple of his men started searching the farm. It was Hinds himself who looked inside the grain tower.’
‘And there she was?’
‘Yeah.’ Linz’s face twisted as she pictured the scene. ‘God, what a way to go. And his own daughter, too …’
‘Suicide?’
‘Or accident.’
‘Strange accident. What else do we know?’
Linz’s expression said Isn’t that enough to be going on with?
‘All right, make sure the tape of the phone call is on my desk in five minutes. Once I’ve listened to it, I’ll decide if we need to make a report to the PSD. Chances are, we will.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ Linz bowed her head. The Professional Standards Department would liaise with the IPCC. ‘I suppose I may have been the last person she spoke to before she died.’
‘You weren’t to know.’
As Linz scuttled out, Hannah slumped back in her chair. If only, if only – her life sometimes seemed full to bursting with ‘if onlys’. If only she could have persuaded Orla to talk sense to her, the woman might be alive now. Allowing her a chance to answer that contemptuous question, ‘Don’t you care about justice?’
‘I must talk to Hannah Scarlett,’ Orla Payne said, ‘it’s a matter of life and death.’
The muffled voice of a woman about to die. DC Maggie Eyre paled, listening in silence until Orla rang off, and Hannah stopped the tape machine.
‘She may not have intended to kill herself, ma’am,’ Maggie said. ‘Jumping into a grain silo isn’t a sure-fire way of killing yourself, and if she’d grown up on a farm, she’d know that.’
Maggie, a member of the Cold Case Review Team since its inception, was the same age as Linz, but they had little else in common. Square-jawed and down to earth, she came from a family which had farmed in the county for generations, while Linz was a townie to the tips of her painted fingernails. Linz came up with flashes of insight that Maggie, for all her sturdy common sense, could never match, but the combination of their talents helped to make the team effective despite being starved of resources. This afternoon, Hannah wanted to pick Maggie’s brains. Investigating Orla’s death was miles outside her bailiwick, but she couldn’t bear to wait for information to seep out from Keswick.
‘No?’ Hannah raised her eyebrows. ‘Haven’t I heard stories about farm workers being asphyxiated by grain?’
‘It can happen, but if you’re hell-bent on committing suicide on a farm, plenty of methods guarantee the right result, no messing.’ Maggie looked as though she was about to mount a soapbox. ‘More than one farmer I’ve known has killed himself. Call it an occupational hazard. The work is stressful and tough, the financial pressures can be horrific.’
‘From what I’ve read, the average farm is a death trap. All that dangerous machinery, countless heavy vehicles roaming the fields.’
‘People on the outside don’t have the faintest idea how many farmers take their lives in their hands seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. It’s the nature of the job.’
Maggie’s scrubbed cheeks turned pink whenever she spoke from the heart. Hannah knew her joining the police hadn’t gone down well with her parents, and guessed Maggie still felt a pinprick of guilt for turning her back on their way of life.
‘So if Orla Payne chose to die on her father’s farm, she picked an odd way to set about it?’
‘It wouldn’t be my choice. But the cushioning effect of the grain would break her fall. It’s not quicksand, ma’am. More like ordinary sand. You can walk on it, or lie on it. It’s only if you find yourself deeply buried in it that you’re likely to have a serious problem.’
‘So she wouldn’t necessarily be buried in the stuff?’
‘No, though she’d probably find it difficult to haul herself out of the silo, even if she tried to climb up by way of the bolts holding the steel sheets together. She might be able to make her way up to the top by treading through the loads of grain whilst the silo was being filled. Not so easy if she was drunk. If she couldn’t get out, she’d run the risk of dying of thirst. Definitely not a nice way to go.’
‘What if she banged on the walls of the silo and called for help?’
‘Depends. If the silo was being filled, the noise from the machinery would drown her cries. And she might not have been conscious, and able to make herself heard, if she hit her head on the way down and knocked herself out.’
‘Is that likely?’
‘Absolutely. If it didn’t, do you know how far the silo is from the farm buildings, and the spot where the grain is loaded on to the conveyor?’
Hannah shook her head. ‘I’m just trying to get an idea of what might have happened before I break the news to the ACC that the dead woman called us twice before she died.’
‘On the day of the awards dinner?’
‘Mmmm. Not ideal timing.’
‘Rather you than me, ma’am.’ Maggie was no fan of the ACC.
‘You said it.’
‘I can put out feelers if you like. In the farming world, everybody knows everybody else. You say this farm belongs to a man called Hinds? I bet my dad has come across him.’
‘Would you mind having a word? It’s not our case, but I’d like to learn more about Orla’s background. In particular, any feedback on this story about the brother who disappeared twenty years ago.’
‘Will do.’ Maggie nodded. ‘So the farmer lost both his children?’
‘Yes.’ Hannah could not comprehend what it must be like to have both your kids die young. ‘Unlucky man, Michael Hinds.’
Gaby Malcolm, in the PSD, was one
of Hannah’s favourite people in the Cumbria Constabulary. The keepers of the force’s conscience were never likely winners of any popularity contest, but nobody could dislike this small birdlike woman from Bermuda. Her manner was so calm that ten minutes in her company felt as soothing as a session with a skilled hypnotherapist.
‘I’ll talk to the IPCC, but there’s really no need for Linz Waller to get her knickers in a twist,’ Gaby paused. ‘Or you, come to that. Ten to one, they won’t want to get involved. You know the drill. As long as nothing improper seems to have occurred, and there’s no hint of the force sweeping the crap under the carpet, they will pass it back and tell us to decide what to do for ourselves. I doubt there will be a need for a local investigation, so we can make a short report to stick in a file, and everything will be sorted.’
‘And if they insist on a local investigation?’
‘Whatever happened to looking on the bright side, Hannah?’ Gaby smiled. ‘Look, you’ve acted immediately, and from the tapes of the two conversations, there’s nothing much more that could have been done. The woman was obviously drunk. There’s no way the IPCC will want to investigate themselves, that’s only if the shit really hits the fan with a bang. Local enquiry? I’d be very surprised.’
Back in her room, Hannah told herself Gaby was right. She needed to lighten up. The clock never stopped ticking, no time to waste in wondering what might go wrong. Time to make the most of life.
Which led, inevitably, to Daniel Kind. He’d encouraged Orla to call Hannah about her brother’s disappearance. He ought to be told what had happened.
Hannah’s hand hovered over the telephone on her desk. She didn’t need to double-check the number of his mobile. By a bizarre trick of memory, it had lodged itself in her mind.
Just do it.
The phone rang out for twenty seconds and then Daniel’s disembodied voice asked her to leave a message.
But what could she say? ‘Sorry, the friend you put in touch with me is dead’?
The Hanging Wood Page 4