From Devon With Death

by Stephanie Austin

  But Dean obviously decided he’d already told me more than he should. There was a moment of silence while the official police shutter came down on our conversation. I heard it click into place. ‘Get some sleep, Juno,’ he recommended. ‘You must be tired.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I took the Tribe for a walk across open fields next morning. I didn’t want to be in the woods or by the river. I didn’t want to be reminded of Verbena lying in the water, her dead eyes staring at the trees. The river was too melancholy, the trees too sad. And although it didn’t usually bother me, I didn’t want to feel closed in,

  At least the rain had stopped. The wide sky was washed, insipid and pale, and a bleary-eyed sun shone weakly through rags of wrung-out cloud. I launched balls for the dogs to chase and they raced around, tumbling over one another in an effort to grab them first. Schnitzel wasn’t wearing his raincoat, but EB sported a new jacket with Emotional Support Dog embroidered on it. His mum, Val, had begun taking him into Oakdene and other local care homes to be petted and made a fuss of by elderly residents. It cheered them up apparently. I could understand that. As he skipped joyously around my feet, I stooped and hugged him hard, drawing comfort from his warm, furry body until he wriggled away to play, and when Nookie the huskie came close to me, I grabbed her and buried my face in her mane. There’s something in the innocence of animals that consoles and reassures, gives solace in a way no human contact can. I thought suddenly of Daniel Thorncroft and little Lottie and understood why he couldn’t bear to be parted from her.

  I hadn’t felt like breakfast when I dragged myself from my bed earlier, still tired after unsatisfying hours of shallow dozing. But by the time I’d walked the dogs and returned them to their homes I realised that if I was going to get through the rest of the day I needed a decent coffee, and not the cheap stuff we keep in the kitchen of Old Nick’s. I took myself into Sunflowers, where I stood at the counter, bringing Kate up to date on all the latest before she gave me a coffee and told me to sit down. She wanted to fix me a veggie breakfast, but I couldn’t face it.

  There was only one other customer in the cafe. Daniel Thorncroft was white-faced and hollow-eyed, his dark hair tangled. His laptop was open on the table in front of him, but he was staring vacantly, his specs abandoned on the table. At a guess, I’d say he hadn’t slept too well either.

  ‘May I join you?’ I asked, putting my coffee down as Lottie began wagging her tail and nuzzling her head against my knee.

  He looked up, his eyes haunted. Then he saw it was me and his taut features relaxed. ‘Oh, Juno, please, sit down!’

  It was the first time he had called me by my name without all that Miss Browne with an ‘e’ nonsense.

  ‘This is a bloody awful business,’ he sighed, rubbing his face, ‘about Verbena.’

  ‘It’s terrible,’ I agreed, taking a seat while trying to settle Lottie who, blissfully ignorant of any talk of murder, was determined to give me the greeting she felt I deserved.

  ‘I keep wondering if her killer was waiting for her inside her house, in the dark,’ he went on. ‘If only I’d gone in with her perhaps she might still be alive.’ He shook his head in sorrow. ‘She wanted me to.’

  ‘She wanted you to?’ I repeated. This was not what Dean had told me.

  ‘She wanted me to go in for a nightcap.’ He gave a rueful smile. ‘I didn’t think it was a good idea.’

  ‘No,’ I agreed.

  ‘I haven’t mentioned it to Meredith.’

  Nor the police, it seemed. ‘How is Meredith?’ I asked.

  ‘She’s shattered, obviously. Poor girl, she suffers from these annihilating migraines – they really lay her out. She had one coming on during the ball the other night, which was why we took her home. Verbena and I wanted to stay with her, but she said there was nothing we could do. When she gets these blinders, she’s best left lying in a darkened room, usually for a good twenty-four hours. And then with the shock of what happened to Verbena and the police turning up asking questions, well …’ he shrugged helplessly, ‘she’s really in a bad way. She’s not opening the gallery for a day or two. I want her to go to the doctor, but she says drugs don’t help.’

  He looked up as Kate, with an air of great determination, deposited a plate of buttered toast and a pot of honey in front of me. ‘Eat!’ she commanded simply and walked away.

  I offered the plate to Mr Thorncroft but he waved it away with a grimace. ‘No, thanks. Verbena said that you used to work for her,’ he added, watching me drizzle honey onto my toast.

  ‘Until she sacked me.’ I licked a sticky finger. ‘She offered me my job back later, but I declined. Ever since, relations between us have been …’ I paused, searching for the right word ‘… strained.’

  He smiled. ‘I gathered you weren’t close.’

  ‘Er … no.’ I took a sip of coffee. ‘I still don’t know why anyone would want to kill her, though.’ She was a sad soul, really, beautiful but unhappily married to her rock-star husband, unhappily divorced when he dumped her for a newer model, and no one seemed to like her much. She told me once even her own children didn’t like her. She might have found a soulmate in Meredith, but frankly I doubted if even a business relationship between them would have lasted long. I suspected they were too much alike.

  I finished my coffee and pushed the toast away from me, uneaten. I had clients to get to. I said goodbye to Lottie, thanked Kate and left my companion lost in thoughtful silence – Mr Thorncroft, the last person to see Verbena Clarke alive.

  I was booked to clean the Brownlows’ kitchen that morning, which at its best is an Augean-stables kind of experience, but this week I had promised to clean inside the cooker as well. In fact, scraping through the accretion of blackened, crusted crud welded to the floor of the oven was just the activity I needed. It required energy and focus, and for just a short while, stopped me thinking about Verbena. But my gloom returned as soon as I called in at the shop, to find a moping Sophie and no Pat.

  ‘She was supposed to take over from me an hour ago,’ Sophie complained. ‘I’m meant to be somewhere else. I don’t mind,’ she added hastily, holding up defensive palms, ‘but I’m worried about her. I tried phoning Honeysuckle Farm, but no one answered.’

  I cursed silently. It was to make sure Pat and Luke had survived their interviews with the police yesterday that I had called in myself. ‘Right, I’m going to go up there, see if they’re OK.’ I told Sophie to ring Elizabeth and ask if she could cover for the afternoon. ‘If she can’t, just close up,’ I said. ‘Stick a note on the door, regretting any inconvenience.’

  I drove up the hill and turned off along the rutted track that led to Honeysuckle Farm Animal Sanctuary. As White Van bumped over the potholes, I wondered how many visitors, eager to see and perhaps give a home to a needy animal, had given up the idea and turned back, unwilling to risk their vehicle’s suspension. The farm came into sight at last, the brightly painted sign on the gate doing little to dispel the general air of desperate financial need shouting from tumbledown outbuildings and sagging fences. Once through the gate, the view opened up revealing animal enclosures that were clean, secure and well cared for, just like the animals themselves. Unfortunately, not all the visitors got that far.

  I parked in the cobbled yard and looked about. I could see the white shapes of portly geese moving about in an orchard, hear their honking cries. A few sheep grazed in a paddock nearby, together with a solitary llama, and two donkeys watched me over a wire fence. But there was no sign of any humans anywhere. As I knocked on the door of the ugly concrete bungalow that had replaced the original farmhouse, I heard dogs barking somewhere. There was no reply, so I walked around the side of the building, passing hutches and low, wire-fenced runs housing an assortment of rabbits and guinea pigs, and a pair of ducks floating contentedly in an old tin bath.

  Then a dog appeared. Samdog had been brought in as a rescue in need of a new home, but no one looking for a dog ever wanted him. He always l
ost out to more appealing-looking canines, to dogs who were handsome or fluffy and cuddly. He was a very plain, very ordinary brown Staffordshire bull terrier and had been at Honeysuckle Farm for years. And despite having the heart of a lion and a soul full of love, was always likely to remain there. When he saw me, he ran towards me, chortling, and I crouched down so we could have a properly rapturous greeting. Pat came around the corner in her overalls and wellington boots, broom and bucket in hand. At the sight of me she dropped the bucket, a hand to her open mouth. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Juno. I forgot all about the shop!’

  ‘Oh, bugger the shop!’ I told her, reaching out to give her a hug. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘No, no, we’re not!’ She put down the bucket and broom, her head moving from side to side in agitation. ‘Let’s go inside.’

  I followed her through the back door into the farmhouse where she scuffed off her wellies and slipped her feet into a pair of old shoes. She shut the door on Samdog’s snout, making him stay outside.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked, but she just shook her head as if she couldn’t speak and went to fill the kettle. The kitchen was warm and smelt of an odd mixture of shepherd’s pie and wood shavings. A small creature scuffled in a cardboard box on the sideboard and from the next room some kind of caged bird shrieked and whistled.

  ‘It’s Luke,’ she said, turning to me at last.

  ‘He hasn’t been arrested?’

  ‘No, no. Sit down,’ she insisted, shifting a plastic bucket of bird feed from one chair and a pile of newspapers from another, displacing the elderly cat that had been dozing on the top. ‘It’s worse than that.’

  ‘What?’ I breathed. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘The police had him in for questioning again yesterday,’ she said. ‘And me. I was only there an hour or so. That Cruella woman asked me a lot of damn fool questions,’ she went on indignantly, ‘mostly about that painting. Could I describe the man who delivered it? Were there any witnesses to him bringing it in? Well, there was, as it happened. I was serving a customer …’

  I nodded. ‘I remember you telling me that.’

  ‘It was old Peggy Carter. She bought one o’ my knitted toys for her grandson’s birthday, a duck it was … And then,’ she went on, and I could see tears welling up in her pale blue eyes, ‘she was asking me about Jessie Mole. When was the last time I talked with her, she wanted to know. Well, I’m not stupid, she must ’ave known I’d quarrelled with her, or she wouldn’t have asked, would she?’ She fished in the pocket of her cardigan, drew out a crumpled tissue and blew her nose. ‘So I told her about it – Jessie telling tales about Luke – “and I smacked her,” I said, “and I’d ’ave smacked her a bloody sight harder if I could, and you can make what you want out of that!”’ She sniffed, stuffing the tissue back in her pocket. ‘She did that nasty thing she does with her mouth − you know, a sort of smirk − then she wrote it all down and let me go.’

  ‘And Luke?’ I asked.

  She gave a long, shuddering sigh. ‘They kept him for hours, asking him the same questions over and over. How did he know Verbena Clarke? Well, he’s never even met her! Could he account for how she was found dead at his place of work? Pale as a ghost he was when he came home.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  She bit her lip and I could see she was on the edge of tears again. ‘That’s just it, we don’t know.’

  I tried to take her hand across the table, but she turned away to look out of the window, fishing again for the tissue in her pocket. ‘He said he’d rather die than go back to prison,’ she told me in a shaking voice. ‘And then this morning, he’d gone. He left a note, said he’d gone up on the moor, to be by himself, to think. Oh, Juno.’ She turned to look at me again, her face wretched. ‘We don’t know what to do. We’re frightened he’s going to do something stupid. He didn’t take the truck, but his tent and his rucksack are gone … He thinks the police are trying to frame him for killing Bryant and those two women.’

  ‘We must call them.’

  ‘No!’ Pat cried in a broken voice. ‘They told him he mustn’t leave Ashburton. If they find out he’s disappeared, it’ll make it all the worse for him, don’t you see?’

  ‘But he’s alone on the moor …’

  She shook her head, subsiding into sobs.

  I took her by the shoulders. ‘You don’t know where he might have gone?’

  ‘Ken and Sue have taken their cars, gone looking for him. They’ve gone up all around Haytor, round the quarry – places we know he likes – Hound Tor and Burrator, see if they can find him. We’ve got to talk to him, bring him home before the police find out he’s gone.’

  No chance, I thought silently, of finding anyone who didn’t want to be found. In two hundred square miles of rugged rock and peatbog, abandoned mines and ruins. It would take an army to find him. He couldn’t have got far if he was on foot, but if he’d thumbed a lift or bought a ride on the bus and been dropped off, he could be anywhere in that lonely wilderness. I glanced at my watch. If I started out now, I had a few hours of daylight left.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Before I left Ashburton, I loaded up with supplies: rolling tobacco, cigarette papers, cider, sweets and doggy treats. I also took some cough medicine and first-aid supplies, just in case.

  By late afternoon I was driving from Two Bridges towards Princetown, heading for Combeshead Tor, one of Micky’s favourite wintering places. If anyone could find Luke it would be Mick, who had spent his life roaming the wilderness and sleeping rough on the moor. Before I left I’d phoned Pat to check if Ken and Sue had reported back. She said they’d searched an area of moor to the north and east of Ashburton but they’d had no luck.

  Late in the afternoon I turned off the Princetown road along a track that led to an abandoned tin mine where only the ruined cottages of workers remained. I left the van in the small car park there, changing into my walking boots, and shouldered my rucksack before I set off. It was an easy track for most of the way, popular with hikers in the summer, but deserted now on a late winter afternoon. Despite the recent rains, the ground was dry underfoot. Parched for so long, the moor had sucked up surface water and would take a lot more before its thirst was quenched; the scattered clumps of spiky moorland grass were still dry, bleached white to the tips.

  The path led south towards Nun’s Cross Farm and more deserted mine workings at Eylesbarrow, but I turned off the track and climbed the hill. From the top I got a view of the winter sun burnishing the water of Burrator Reservoir to the west. It was a fine sight but I didn’t have time to linger, the sun already low, and carried on down the hill, splashing my way through the shallows of Narrator Brook before I climbed again, up towards Cuckoo Rock and Combeshead Tor.

  At the foot of the tor stood the ruins of Combeshead farm, just a few tumbled walls of blotched granite now and one square aperture that had once been a window. They were melancholy, haunting, these ruins roundabout, the mines, the farms, the cottages, reminders of people who had worked the moor for centuries and whose way of life was now forgotten.

  I carried on upward, picking my way through scattered granite boulders that stood out pale against the darker grass. A deep, raw bark echoed around the tor, and I smiled. Duke was giving me fair warning that he knew of my approach. I saw him then, on a bare rock up ahead of me, his huge shape black against a sky smeared with amber. I called his name and his great head swung towards me. He uttered another deep bark, but he had recognised my voice and it was a round-muzzled bark of welcome. He began to bound down the rocks towards me in long, loping strides, landing on pads as big as a lion’s. I braced myself. Before now he’d greeted me by leaping up, his paws on my shoulders, and knocked me over beneath his colossal weight. I decided to crouch down, then I wouldn’t have far to fall. He came towards me with his head low, his torn ears swinging, nudging me with his grizzled muzzle and panting hot breath as I circled my arms about his neck. The Hound of the Baskervilles let me enfold him in a hug. ‘Hell
o, old friend,’ I whispered into his ear, rubbing the fur around his neck. I slipped a dog treat from my pocket and he snuffled it from my hand. ‘Where’s Mick, eh?’ I asked. ‘Let’s find him.’

  Mick had set up camp in an old potato cave, a cavern hollowed out of the rock many years ago for storing vegetables. The cave had been dug deep into the earth, sloping towards the back, and roofed with a massive slab of granite that felt too low over my head, too heavy. I felt as if I was entering an ancient tomb. But it was here that Mick had unrolled his bed, lit his campfire and set up his tea kettle. I was lucky to catch him so near to civilisation. As winter turned to spring, he would move himself away from the hikers and the holidaymakers, deeper into the wilds. He lounged on his bed on one side like a pasha prepared to give visiting dignitaries an audience. I smelt him before I could see him. I usually tried to stay downwind of Mick, but it wasn’t possible on this occasion. He nodded his woolly hat in greeting as I sat cross-legged by the fire.

  ‘Maid,’ he acknowledged me. That was quite a speech for Mick.

  Duke flopped down by my side, leaning his weight against me and I shook out more dog treats for him.

  ‘How are you, Mick?’ I asked, gradually unpacking my rucksack. ‘Are you keeping well?’

  He didn’t answer. Very little of his face was visible between the woolly hat rammed low over his shaggy shelf of eyebrow and the bushy beard that reached to his cheekbones. What skin was visible was raw red and weathered as rock, deeply fissured and pitted. But his eyes were bright and alert, and danced as I handed over the tobacco, sweets, cough medicine and cider. He poured me a tin mug of tea straight from the kettle, scalding hot and black as bog-water – hospitality impossible to refuse without giving offence. He sat in silence while I drank it, waiting to learn what I’d come for, what I wanted in trade. I pulled out a photo Pat had given me, and he took it wordlessly, his meaty red fingers wrapped in ragged mittens, his blackened nails thick as horn.