High Force: A DCI Ryan Mystery (The DCI Ryan Mysteries Book 5)

by LJ Ross

  “I never knew about him,” she said, with a faint air of surprise. “Not until he turned up with his wanton mother on my doorstep after Charles’ death, demanding that I support him through school and university otherwise he would go to the press and play the wronged party. He said he would be claiming his rightful inheritance as soon as he found the money to pay for lawyers but of course what the poor boy didn’t realise was that Charles had left everything to the trust and to his country. Not to his wife,” she said, with some bitterness, “and certainly not to his illegitimate son.”

  “You believed that he was Charles’ son?”

  Sophia smiled a private smile and rose on her precarious heels to retrieve a photograph from one of the small bureau desks. She handed it to them and sank back down on the delicate sofa, taking another deep drag on her menthol cigarette.

  Ryan showed the photograph to Lowerson and could see why she had smiled. Keir Edwards was the spitting image of his father, Charles Drewe.

  “You see now why I didn’t need to question it, chief inspector? There used to be an enormous portrait of Charles on the wall, just there, above the fireplace.”

  She gestured to a gilt-framed painting of the castle, dated sometime during the 1800s.

  “That portrait was one of the first things I had removed,” she said, with another smile. “He really was the most hideously conceited man.”

  Another hereditary characteristic, Ryan thought.

  “So you paid for his schooling to avoid a scandal?”

  “Seems silly to you, doesn’t it?” She stubbed out her cigarette with three vicious taps into a fine ceramic bowl. “Back then, I’d spent twenty years trying to maintain the impression of a happy marriage. We were patrons of the theatre, the races, the literary societies, the Farmers Guild…I could go on. I panicked, chief inspector. I didn’t want to lose everything I had worked so hard to build.”

  “What happened to your husband, Sophia?”

  Ryan thought that it had probably been quite some time since anybody had called her by her given name and not the pompous title she wore like a noose around her scraggy neck.

  “Charles used to tell me he was going walking or climbing or some such nonsense. We are all adept at self-deception and I’m no different. A part of me knew that he was seeing another woman and I looked the other way. He gave me no choice,” she said, and realised some of the hurt was still there, buried deep. “The night he died was a night like any other. He said he was going for a walk along the stretch between the two waterfalls—Low Force and High Force. It was one of his favourite routes, or so he told me.”

  She reached for another cigarette to calm her nerves. It felt cathartic, she realised, to offload the secrets she had held onto so tightly from the past. It was amazing how little they seemed to matter anymore.

  “It’s a stretch of about a mile and a half, if you follow the banks of the River Tees, but it’s rough terrain in parts. Charles was always complacent, bragging about how well he knew his own land but at night it can be treacherous. They found him at the bottom of High Force waterfall, his brains splattered all over the rocks.”

  She said it quietly, Ryan thought, but there was a thread of pity woven through her rounded tones and he realised this woman had lived through her own share of pain.

  “Do you know where Keir lived with his mother?” Lowerson piped up. It was the kind of information they could look up but it would take time they simply didn’t have. They needed an address, and fast.

  Sophia shook her head.

  “I didn’t want to know. I wanted as little contact as possible. But if I were to hazard a guess, I’d say it was somewhere within walking distance of those waterfalls. He went there every week and that’s where he was found.”

  Ryan nodded and looked across at Lowerson, who was trying to bring up a map of the area on his smartphone. Then he remembered that there had been no record of Keir’s mother, Jenny Adams, on the official radar. That meant it was likely someone had financed her home and living costs.

  “Did your husband own all the property in that area?”

  “Most of it,” she nodded. “There are several farms, cottages and outbuildings around that area.”

  “Can you tell us anything—anything at all—about Jenny Adams?”

  Sophia closed her eyes for a moment, remembering the first time she’d seen the woman who had stolen her husband, perhaps long before she’d ever married him. It was painful but only as a distant ache.

  “Jenny was lovely looking,” she admitted. “Young, considering she was mother to a sixteen-year-old boy. Long dark hair, big brown eyes like a helpless fawn, that sort of thing. I asked her how she’d met my husband and she told me they’d first met when she was seventeen and working behind the bar at The Lord Drewe, in Blanchland. It was one of the inns Charles owned and he used to pop in regularly, when he was doing the rounds of the estate. I don’t know what happened to her, after Keir left for school. He was still Charles back then but he wanted to be known as something different. As you may imagine, I was happy to accommodate his request.”

  Ryan searched her face and could see the signs of strain. He was also satisfied that she had told them the truth, as far as it went.

  “Thank you,” he said meaningfully.

  She blew out a ring of smoke and looked him dead in the eye.

  “Did he kill Charles?”

  Ryan considered giving her a meaningless reply but he decided to repay her openness in kind.

  “Yes, I think he did.”

  Her hand started to tremble and she stubbed out her second cigarette before linking her fingers together in a tight clutch on her lap.

  “Inspector, there’s—there’s something else you should know. It isn’t easy for me to tell you this. I haven’t spoken of it, not to another soul.”

  Ryan broke his own rule and sank down into a chair beside her, to create a sense of confidence between them.

  “Go on.”

  She needed another minute before she could speak of Charles and the real man he had been.

  “You’re Eve’s boy, aren’t you? I thought I recognised the name.”

  Ryan nodded.

  “Tell her—tell her she should be very proud of you.” She sucked in a long breath to stem an unexpected flow of tears. “I don’t mean to waste your time, chief inspector. I’m about to speak of things I’ve never uttered aloud, not even to my priest.”

  “We understand. Take your time,” he soothed, but his eyes strayed once again to the grandfather clock.

  Six-thirty.

  “Charles was—he was very proper, very courteous on the outside. He never raised a hand to me in all our years of marriage. But I saw him do things—things to the horses, or the dogs. Violent beatings, or a quick slash of a horse’s tendon. He’d starve the dogs so that they were ravenous, nearly out of their minds. One time, he went too far and attacked one of the stable boys. He paid him to keep his mouth shut about it, but you never forget a thing like that. Something wasn’t right,” she looked up at him and fear shone from her eyes, even though the man was dead and buried. “He wasn’t interested in me as anything other than a trophy and not a very good one at that. But some nights, when he was very drunk, he’d tell me what he imagined doing to me. Vile, repulsive things that gave me nightmares. I started locking my door at night. There was a darkness to him and I sensed it every single day.”

  Ryan felt compelled to take her hand and give it a quick, reassuring squeeze.

  “He’s gone now.”

  “But his son is still here,” she whispered.

  * * *

  Ryan and Lowerson left the grounds of Castle Drewe with a screech of tyres.

  “Jack, get me a list of every dwelling within a five-mile radius of those two waterfalls. Low Force is only a ten-minute drive from here and High Force is another five minutes further west. Edwards has to be using his mother’s old house somewhere in that area.”

  Lowerson made a humming sound of
frustration as he typed furiously into his smartphone but failed to get a signal.

  “I’ll have to radio through to the office for that. An e-mail came through from Faulkner while we were at the castle. He attached a full report but I can’t download it,” he grumbled. “I can still see what he said in his covering e-mail, though. Apparently, the soil on the tyres of both the Toyota and the Mercedes had an abnormally high lead content. He’s spoken with a geologist friend of his and they’ve also isolated elements of limestone, sandstone and dolerite.”

  Ryan pulled the car over to the side of the road and turned on the internal light. He reached under the seat to fish out an old A-Z of Great Britain, something he hadn’t needed to use since the advent of GPS technology.

  He flipped the pages until he could see their current location.

  “We’re here,” he muttered, tracing the road from Castle Drewe towards Low Force waterfall. “You can see several old lead mines and a museum marked nearby as points of interest, which would explain the lead content of the soil. They used to mine lead veins in the Victorian era and if there’s a property anywhere near the old mines, maybe along a dirt track where the cars would’ve picked up some soil, that’ll be the place.”

  “How’d you know all that?”

  “Until two days ago, I lived a few miles yonder with a beautiful historian who likes exploring the local terrain every chance she gets. I’ve been on more guided tours than you’ve had hot dinners,” Ryan replied, with the air of one who owned a National Heritage annual pass.

  Lowerson gave him a pitying look.

  “You’ve been suffering in silence.”

  “Yeah, but she’s promised me a hot tub at our next place,” Ryan reminded him, and picked up his radio to issue a series of urgent demands as the digital clock ticked onwards.

  CHAPTER 26

  Anna and Phillips approached the problem of finding The Hacker’s current location from a different angle. The sky was turning dusky when they crossed the street from the holiday cottage to The Lord Drewe but they weren’t intending to join in with the Wednesday night revelry. If Jenny Adams had once worked there as a young woman, there was a chance that somebody might remember her or where she had moved to. Memories were long in these parts and communities were close-knit.

  The main bar area comprised of a medieval vaulted room with a long, polished bar lit up by dozens of fat candles and a large, crackling fire. Locals huddled together and mingled with travellers passing through or staying in one of the inn’s bedrooms. All heads turned when Anna and Phillips entered, bringing a gust of cold night air with them.

  By unspoken agreement, they decided to try the bartender first.

  Alan Ingles was a thick-set man in his early sixties with a craggy complexion; whether from sampling too much of his own craft ale or from spending most of his free time enjoying the moorland walks, they couldn’t be sure. He gave them a ready smile, finished polishing the wine glass he had in his hand and crossed his arms on the top of the bar.

  “Evening, folks! What can I get you?”

  Neither of them felt remotely in the mood for alcohol but for appearance’s sake Anna ordered a small glass of the house white and Phillips automatically ordered the same, uncaring of the fact that he hadn’t drunk white wine since the eighties.

  “This one’s a nice choice,” Alan suggested, running through the options on the extensive wine list because business was slow and he was a sociable man.

  “Ah, I’ll just take your recommendation,” Anna said a bit impatiently, then chewed her lip to remind herself she was supposed to be snooping for information and nobody would be inclined to tell her anything if she came across like a grumpy tourist.

  Her eyes strayed to the fancy, Victoriana-style clock on the wall.

  Six-forty-five.

  Meanwhile, Alan studied the newcomers with a sharp eye. He was an observant man and could see straight away they were the people renting the middle cottage across the road. He also happened to recognise them from his wife’s description of the man and woman who had knocked on their door this morning asking about that runaway convict.

  He didn’t think they looked like police, although they both had the same watchful eyes about them. Maybe they were family of the victims, he mused, or of that missing woman. That would make more sense and he had a lot of sympathy for that.

  Not much he could tell them but he had a lot of sympathy all the same.

  “You were gaddin’ about this morning, weren’t you?” he said conversationally. “What’s your interest, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  He began to measure out two small glasses of wine.

  “The missing woman is very important to us,” Anna said, seeking out and holding his eyes to drive the point home. “Her name is Denise MacKenzie. She’s a very good friend of mine and she’s the woman Frank plans to marry.”

  Phillips started to smile at the thought of marrying Denise, because it wasn’t something they’d really talked about. She was so free-spirited and he didn’t need the formal paperwork to know that they loved each other. But things had shifted in his mind over the last seven days and the thought of being without her, of never seeing her standing beside him promising to be together always, was unthinkable. So, yes, he damn well wanted to marry her. Just as soon as he’d kicked Keir Edwards’ teeth down his throat.

  “Aye, that’s a shame,” Alan clucked, leaning his arms against the counter again. “I was sorry to hear about it on the news. But what brings you over to this neck of the woods?”

  “The man who’s taken her, Keir Edwards, wasn’t always known by that name. He was called Charles Adams.”

  “You don’t say?”

  “Yes. His mother was Jenny Adams and she used to work as a barmaid here, years ago, in the early seventies. Do you remember her at all? Do you know if she’s still living in the area?”

  The bartender frowned, as if thinking back.

  “Please,” Phillips put in. “It’s important.”

  Alan sighed heartily and shook his head.

  “I’m sorry I can’t help you,” he said in aggrieved tones. “I wish I could, and I hope you find your lady soon enough. That’ll be nine-fifty for the drinks.”

  With heavy hearts, Anna and Phillips paid their bill and asked the same questions of the groups of huddled locals who occupied the tables in the bar. Alan watched them from the corner of his eye and breathed a long sigh of relief after they’d left.

  He’d worked at The Lord Drewe for twenty-five years and had been in love with Lady Sophia Drewe for every one of them, ever since she’d come in one day with her sour-faced husband and asked him for an Aperol spritz. It had been lust at first sight for them, he remembered, and he’d enjoyed the lazy evenings they’d spent together when her husband was out and his wife was at her book club. It was the romance of a lifetime and he didn’t care whether she dyed her hair or injected Botox into her lips. She would always be his Sophia and anybody threatening to upset her, upset him.

  Those two would just have to go looking for gossip elsewhere.

  * * *

  It was fortunate for them that not everybody shared Alan’s staunch loyalty to the Drewe family. When Anna and Phillips headed out once again into the chilly night a voice called them back.

  “Wait! Hold on a minute!”

  A local woman hobbled towards them on arthritic hips.

  “I didn’t think of it before, when you asked,” she rasped, drawing air into her lungs like a dying person. “Did you say Jenny Adams?”

  “Yes, that’s her,” Anna said eagerly. “Do you know her?”

  “I know a Jenny Adamson,” she offered. “I met her while I was doing one of those holistic retreats at Minsteracres Retreat Centre last year. She works as one of the helpers and lives there all year round. A bit like a nun, except she’s never taken vows as far as I know. Anyway, I’m sure I remember her saying she once worked as a barmaid in Blanchland, when I mentioned that’s where I’m from. It just
strikes me as very similar, and she’s about the right age. I don’t want to send you off on a wild goose chase…” she trailed off.

  “No, no,” Anna said quickly, while Phillips simply turned to retrieve the car. “You’ve been very helpful. I can’t thank you enough.”

  “Don’t mention it!”

  The woman’s mouth hung open with a comical ‘o’ of surprise as Anna and Phillips dived into his car and reversed with more haste than precision, almost taking out one of the decorative bollards lining the street.

  * * *

  Minsteracres Retreat Centre was a fifteen-minute drive from Blanchland, back in the direction of the A68 leading north to the Styford Roundabout and skirting around the Derwent Reservoir. Originally a mansion house built in the middle of thick woodland, it had served variously as a Roman Catholic mission, a monastery, a novitiate centre and more recently as a retreat for religious and lay people. Its community adhered to Passionist beliefs, taking inspiration from St Paul on the Cross and dedicating their lives to a simple existence of prayer, solitude and penance.

  “What if she isn’t there or it’s the wrong woman?” Phillips asked, as he steered the car through winding roads towards the small brown-signposted turnoff that would take them to Minsteracres.

  “It’s all we’ve got,” Anna said bluntly, watching the passing fields as they sped along the road. “We have to hope it’s her.”

  Phillips braked and turned the car into an ungated road lined with colossal sequoia trees that must have been hundreds of years old. They grew tall and straight at perfect intervals, soaring into the night sky at over a hundred and fifty feet high. In the daytime, bluebells and daffodils carpeted the forest floor leading up to the eighteenth-century building at the end of the driveway but they were hidden in darkness. As they emerged from the avenue of trees, the road wound around to the main house, past a ‘peace garden’ and other areas used for quiet reflection and healing.

  It took a while for anybody to answer their knocking at the main doors, even after Phillips took to hammering against the wood.

  Eventually, they opened and a priest gave them a placid, inquiring stare.